Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1480: What We’ll Remember About Baseball in 2019

Episode Date: December 31, 2019

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley banter about Kohl Stewart signing with the Orioles, another convoluted Scott Boras quote, and a few of the things Sam learned in 2019 (including Candlestick Park’s “Cardiac Hill,” the sound of Hideki Matsui’s swing, and the disturbing story of “Toothpick” Sam Jones), then discuss what the most defining/enduring […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1480 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought Sometimes it's okay Oh, happy. Why? I just am. Well, I'm happy because the Orioles signed Cole Stewart to a major league deal. Oh, get out of here. It's huge. Huge. He could be a mainstay in that Orioles rotation. He's going to get a shot to compete for a spot in the rotation. Dang it. As you'll discover, Meg, one of the great things about the minor league free agent draft is that you suddenly have a stake in transactions and players that you otherwise would not even notice

my day has been made because the Orioles signed Cole Stewart which normally I would immediately forget I think what what I definitely need in my life is to feel more anxiety on behalf of strangers. That doesn't occupy enough of my emotional bandwidth. Yeah. So that's pretty exciting. I was hoping some bad team would give him a shot, and that has happened. I almost didn't take Cole Stewart just because he was so bad with the Twins, and he got shots with them, which is the other thing. So I figured, well, the team that drafted him,

they'll be the ones to give him a shot if there's anything there. Although I guess he was drafted under a different regime, and you never know, change of scenery or something. But they have had success improving pitchers. So I don't know what it means that they cut him loose. Anyway, trying to avoid any Cole in my stocking jokes, but going to the Orioles, that is about as promising an assignment as I could have asked for. I'm looking at their depth chart right now. And as it is now, before Cole Stewart has been added to it, because this transaction only happened two hours ago, their rotation has fewer members than left field. Also first base, they have more people at first base than rotation.

Yeah, they have quite a log jam at first. Wow. Well, great. I mean, great pick. Thank you. This might be the last year I do this free agent draft. I don't know if I can handle just being crushed from day one. It's a long season.

Yeah. Can I also bring up a Scott Boras quote? Yes. season. Yeah. Can I also bring up a Scott Boras quote that didn't get quite as much play as most of the Scott Boras analogies or metaphors, but now whenever he says anything, we all get notified. At least I do. I get tagged. And it's just one of those things where it just says like, at Penlinburg, and I just know that someone's tagging me so that I'll see something. And I figure, oh, Scott Boris must have said something. So this was a Blue Jays-related quote.

So quoting Alexis Brudnicki here, from Hyunjin's point of view, so he's talking about Hyunjin Ryu, I mean, it's kind of like Canada has its Royal Canadian Mounties, while the Blue Jays have their Royal Youth Uprising, an RYU for a Ryuu if you will what he said if you will again which is something that he he said uh pretty recently and i was surprised that he said if you will because usually he doesn't give us a choice about whether we will or not he just puts it out there yeah i don't think

i will it's uh well royal youth uprising Uprising is a very kind of scary. Yeah, it sounds like it. Fascistic or something. Yes, it really does. Plus Ryu's not part of the Royal Youth Uprising. He's going to turn 33. Yeah, he's an oldie like I am. Yeah, right.

I just turned 33, so we're not part of the Royal Youth Uprising anymore. So I don't know. They do have exciting young players but most of them debuted this past year and this is pretty labored i appreciate the effort to personalize it and make it canadian somehow but this is by i i have a couple just saying the word royal right well the mount, he's trying to bring in a Canadian tradition, Canadian iconography. They do have the queen on their money. As far as you know, Ben, the royal youth uprising does not predate his construction of this joke.

I don't think so. I don't think that was something people said about the Blue Jays before. And it's also not a thing in Canada. There's not an actual Royal Youth Uprising in Canada. I'm afraid to Google it. I don't want to end up on a list. Yeah, there's a Roto-Wear t-shirt. I saw that, yeah.

But it doesn't say when it became available. I think they just created that in response to the Boris quote, hoping that this would catch on and be something that Blue Jays are and their lineage as human persons, that they are the descendants of baseball royalty, perhaps. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's still, I still don't care for it. It feels post-apocalyptic in a way. Yeah.

Well, it just feels like an attempt to create an acronym that is the same as the last name of scott boris's client which uh i don't care for this it's not very organic i don't know no i don't feel like the the offspring of royals are the ones likely to be leading an uprising either normally it's true the usually you're you're you're on one side of the revolution or the other and usually the king's children are on the wrong side of the revolution right they're the ones being overthrown by someone else who's rising up i don't want to ascribe that sort of i i don't like ascribing that to the the scions of the youth in Toronto. I don't want to ascribe fetishistic. That's not the right word.

Leave it in, Dylan. Don't you dare take it out. I've only had one cup of coffee. I'm working on my second. So here we go. Anyway, I don't want to assume that of Vlad. Don't care to do that. Could work for the Blue Jays, like overthrowing the Yankees or the Red Sox or something.

But no, I don't know. I don't know. It's not like anything that Scott Borer says that we ever talk about is like, oh, yeah, that was good. That was clever, really. We're usually just bringing it up on it to just kind of dump on it. And that's what we're doing here. But this isn't even at the level of like the bird analogy from the winter meetings.

That was elaborate and at least made you think this one. I don't know. No, right. They tend to be dad joke level humor crossed with three times through a Google translator level grammar. Can I read Ian, a reader named Ian, when we were talking about the fake Boris quote game long ago? He actually offered a suggestion to include in the game,

and I thought it would have been good, and I wonder if Ben would have been fooled by it. But we didn't end up using it. But it does, I think, need to be appreciated. So I'm just going to read it, and y'all can tell me if you think it's a good one. This is Ian's fake Scott Boris. I've got a chicken, a fox, and a bag of corn here, and I can only take one of them across the river at a time. If you're not careful, the chicken could get into the corn or worse, but I think we've got a big

enough boat this year. We'll see how the current is running. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's the thing. When I saw this Ryu one, I had to double check and make sure that it was coming from multiple sources because it's kind of become a Twitter thing to make up fake Boris quotes. Like a friend of the show, Kazuto Yamazaki, he's been making up fake Boris quotes, and I've seen people quote tweet them and take them seriously. So it's easy to get fooled out there now. Lots of Boris imposters, but this is genuine. All right. So we're here to talk about the defining, enduring

memory of 2019 as best we can, given that it is still 2019. And Sam, you wrote about this. You also wrote about several things that you learned this year, and we've talked about a couple of them on the show, but the others all would have been good banter material. So you've been holding out on us and saving them for this end of the year column. And I wanted to just bring up one or two of them, maybe. I don't know how you came across these, but the Candlestick Park, cross these, but the Candlestick Park, can't call it a fun fact. Many people died. Many people died at Candlestick Park because in its first few years before they had an escalator, I don't know if this was just before escalators period or just before there was an escalator there, there was a long incline that you had to walk up as you were going, I guess,

from public transit or from the parking lot to the stadium. And people just were dropping like flies as they were walking up the staircase. And you mentioned here that as many as 19 people had fatal heart attacks trying to go to Giants games at Kindlestick Park in a period of, what, attacks tried to go to Giants games at Kindlestick Park in a period of what just a few years right yeah in three years there were uh sometimes I see 18 sometimes I see 19 documented fatal heart attacks uh that came after uh fans walked up Cardiac Hill including uh and this was quickly identified there were six in the first 19 games including a sheriff's deputy and after that uh it became a you know broadly talked about and so this was not you think they like post the park or something six and 19 that's a right it did not take an epidemiologist 12 years later to to figure out

this pattern it was like oh wow like someone dies every third day and Candlestick Park. Oh, no. It was a different era. Ben, the first escalator dates back to the 1890s. I think there were escalators. I can't swear to this. I think that there was originally a plan for the escalator, but it didn't end up getting built. It's just in the first phase of construction.

I think they had the idea. the escalator but it didn't end up getting built it just in the first phase of construction so i think they had the idea i think uh i think also they intended to have a drop-off point up near the near the top and law enforcement said that you couldn't do that it would have been a problem and so there were maybe some plans in the works to have had it be less fatal at the time that just didn't get brought into it quite right away. It took some years for them to fix that. Did you know that Candlestick Park was home to the first ever Kids' Choice

Awards in 1988? I'm just learning stuff on Wikipedia. No, I know one of the producers of the Kids' Choice Awards though. I've heard some interesting stories about the Kids' Choice Awards. It was the year've heard some interesting stories about the Kids' Choice Awards. It was the year after John Paul II celebrated a papal mass at Candlestick

during his tour of America. There were an estimated 70,000 people in attendance. Man, communion must have taken forever. So do you have the whole rundown of non-sports Candlestick Park events? No, but there's a... I'm not being a good helper on the podcast so far, you guys. I just dropped in my having known the producer

who told me interesting things about it, and then I refused to say even one interesting thing about it. So I think I'm being very unhelpful. It was home to the Beatles' final concert. Sure. Famously, yeah. Famously, that we knew. The Rolling Stones performed there in 1981 there's

a notable events section in the wikipedia jimmy buffett makes this list for reasons yeah van halen metallica and then justin timberlake and jc jc and then paul mccartney performed there in 2014 uh that was the stadium's final concert that's why it makes the list because otherwise you're like yeah well i'm glad they all made it up cardiac hill i guess they took the escalator but you read about this in a book that's entirely devoted to people dying at ballparks right it's death at the ballpark right i sourced it further with that book i think that originally i think i read about it in james hirsch's book about about Willie Mays, which is also the source, I think, for at least one other of these details. And I mentioned while reading that book that every single page has three things that you want to write down and then tell someone else later.

So that was one of them. Yeah. So people die at all sorts of ballparks. at all sorts of ballparks. And I guess the death rate for cardiac events at probably all ballparks are maybe higher than, I don't know, people doing whatever they would do on a normal day, because you've got to go out and you've got to exert yourself to get to the park, and then you're cheering. And as you mentioned, in that same book, there is a story about someone who died. This was pre-Candlestick, right? This was pre. This was Seal Stadium. one who died that was this was pre-candlestick right this was seal stadium right so 1958 this was this was a double header between the giants and the dodgers and there was a close play at

the plate during the 15th inning in the second game score was tied and the bases were loaded etc and there was a man the police chief actually who who died. Yeah, the police chief. He was the chief of police in San Francisco. And yeah, he got, I'll just take over the story from here. He got so excited by a rally and a close play at the plate in which I think the potential winning run was, I think, called out at the plate. He had a heart attack and he died right there in the stands behind home plate with his wife alongside him. A priest came and read him his, did I say this? I think a priest actually came and read him his final rites. Is that what the phrase is?

In the stands. And then the Giants won the next inning in the 16th inning. And this was, the police chief is himself very interesting and probably could have, you know, could, I don't know if there is a book about him, but there could be a book about him. He was a, he was a reformer. He had, his climb up the ranks had been slowed because he refused to go along with some police corruption. And the first thing he did when he came in was basically reassign every buddy of rank in the whole department. And like just a few months later, he had the heart attack. It was, it was a

shame because it, if not for that You don't know him I mean he might be the sort of police chief Who would have streets named after him In San Francisco today It's not a bad way to go really If you have to go somewhere If you have to have a heart attack at some point

It's not so bad to have it In an extra inning game When someone just did something good And is rounding third and heading for home. Although I guess if you even have time to think about it, it's probably frustrating not to know how the play turned out or because the runner was called out. Game was still tied. So he never even found out that the Giants won the next inning. Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. All right. So that happened in in 1958 yeah so i'm gonna ask a totally unrelated question which is what's the like period of time one has to to wait before one can make jokes about something like this um probably like i would say like 35 years so then you're just venturing into what kind of taste you want to publicly admit to, right? That's the territory you're scooching up on?

It sort of depends on what the joke is. You, an unnamed you, not a specific Meg, but a general you. Do you want to try it on us on Gchat and we'll let you know? No, because what if the- Sounds like you were thinking of something, though. What do you go? on your mind man i was just gonna say i i don't even have a joke this is one i'd have to workshop in gchat but if it strikes me as uh there being a bad pace of play joke oh yeah yeah it's pretty bad you know i had a joke the a couple joke the last day of the season a couple years ago. I tweeted something like over the – what was it?

Something like over the course of three hours, over the course of a three-hour game, like 18,000 people will die worldwide. Over the course of a four-hour game, 24,000 people will die. And so it's pretty important that Major League Baseball shorten games. And then I tweeted it and then I panicked and thought, I don't know if this is nice. And so I deleted it right away. And I said, I'm deleting this, but I'm probably going to tweet it again someday. Or say it in a podcast. I've just said it.

Yeah. All right. So a couple other things you mentioned. Hideki Matsui asked his hitting coach to listen to his swing over the phone and diagnose his swing from Tokyo based on the whoosh that his bat made going through the air. I love that one. Based on the whoosh that that made going through the air. I couldn't decide whether to do this as like 50 things I learned this year and not give think that I could squeeze it into the nine because what else are you going to say about that? But that was the main reason I was thinking of hanging on to the 50 format just so that I could say that sentence.

Yeah. Yeah. I could understand that maybe a swing, if you were in person, because we've swing is slower than usual because your mechanics are screwed up or something, then maybe it could make some actual qualitatively different sound. But I doubt you could diagnose it on the phone. International call, it just doesn't seem like the resolution of the audio would be high enough for you to tell one whoosh from another.

I also like that it's not, did it make a loud enough whoosh, but was it the proper whoosh? The proper whoosh, yeah. Did this whoosh have the right kind of topography to it? Yeah. I think we have to talk about Toothpick Sam. This one killed me. I'm shocked it didn't kill Toothpick Sam. Killed me. I'm shocked it didn't kill Toothpick Sam. I mean, probably a lot of people

are aware that there was a player named Sam Toothpick Jones, who was a pitcher in the 50s. And presumably he got his nickname because he often had a toothpick. And that is true. And I was just imagining a person who had a toothpick a lot, like more than the normal person. It never occurred to me that this pitcher pitched had a toothpick a lot, like more than the normal person. It never occurred to me that this pitcher pitched with a toothpick. In his mouth. Pitched with a toothpick in his mouth. Yep. And so when I learned that, I went through sort of a month-long process of trying to figure out how this was not as anxiety-inducing as I thought. So like everybody, any time I would like be talking to someone who was in their 60s or 70s, I'd say,

so, like, tell me about toothpicks back in the day. They were really soft, right? Like, they were soft and flimsy. People back then would have had toothpicks, and they would have been, like, non-dangerous, right? And they'd go, no, they were just like they are now. And I'd say— I love that you emailed a toothpick scholar. I did. A toothpick historian.

I did. I had to check this out. Yeah. And so this toothpick expert, Henry Petrosky, told me that if anything, probably toothpicks were more dangerous back then. But they were, some people just had them when they were pitching. So I doubted whether he actually pitched with this. And a couple, you know, again, asking people in their 60s and 70s,

they said, no, that seems in character with somebody in the 1950s. They could buy it. There are all these little bits of evidence that yes, he did. And it all added up to, yes, he always had a toothpick, even when he was pitching or generally did.

And thanks to the author of his Sabre bio, Rory Costello, who wrote a nice biography of Toothpick Jones. He mentioned, of course, that he got the nickname for always having a toothpick, but did not specify whether he pitched with it. And so I emailed him and said, did you not specify because you don't think he did? He said, no, he did. He definitely did. And then he dug up an extra anecdote for me that's a bonus anecdote, not even in the bio, which is, blah, 1959 against Milwaukee, Hank Aaron's blooper dropped into short left field.

Jim Davenport and Ed Brousseau collided. Aaron motored for third and Jones covered. Aaron came in hard, spiking the pitcher's right knee and driving Sam's toothpick into his throat. How did spiking his knee drive the toothpick into his throat? The whole point is a toothpick is balanced precariously. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to have been driven in with a hammer. You're running and the toothpick is bobbing.

It's a bobbing implement. It's all squishy in there. Everything except your teeth, it's all squishy. Oh, my gosh. I'm cringing here. I'm like almost sick to my stomach thinking about this. Yeah, the back of his throat. That sounds so painful.

And then he kept pitching. Well, okay, but so here is the really important question that we have to ask Rory. Did he then put another toothpick in his mouth when he went back out? Right. So the trainer took the pick out and then Jones pitched a complete game. Yeah, he looked at it and he was like, this is still good because it's made of titanium.

I hate it. I hate it. Oh, boy. Yeah. All right. Okay. I hate it. each of those times. So going back to 2017, which I guess was the first time you wrote about it, and also we discussed it, that just sort of hammers home how hard it is to do this exercise and tell what will be the thing that is remembered about the current year. Because of course, the defining memory of 2017 most likely is something that we found out about just a couple

months ago, right? That's going to be the year that the Astros banged on the trash can for all time. And we didn't know that they banged on the trash can at that time. So there may be something else we don't know about 2019 that we will find out about in the future that will render this entire discussion irrelevant. You went back in another article and found a defining memory of each year. You went back in another article and found a defining memory of each year. And how many of them would you say were things that were known right away? I mean, were they all big stories for the most part other than like, you know, the Black Sox scandal you mentioned in this article is another example of something that came to light later. But that's the exception, right? Hmm. That's a great question. Yeah, I mean, the Black Sox scandal actually came to light later. And so it wasn't even known at the end of that year. But then you also have the in-between, which I think is very common,

which is that you know the thing happened, but you don't yet know that it's historically significant. You don't know, for instance, that it's going to be the last time that that happens. Obviously, 1908, Cubs win their last World Series for a century. It was not big news at the time. That was just a team won the World Series. You would never have guessed that 1908 would be remembered for that purpose. And then sometimes you just, I don't know, things age. A lot of this is things aging nicely. The weirdness of it, as I put in the article, the weirdness ferments. And over the course of decades, it becomes a story that gets retold and retold, whereas other stories, for who knows what reason, just don't get retold or they lose their mystery. So I don't know. I mean, I'm looking at just, I don't know,

there's like nine on my screen right now. And I don't know if any of these would have been considered at the time to be something that would be memorialized for 100 years. Well, maybe they would be. I don't know. Like Hack Wilson driving in 190 runs, later known to be 191. Probably yes. But Jackie Mitchell, the teenage girl who struck out babe ruth and lou garrigan in the exhibition i don't know if that would have been babe ruth calling his shot i don't think was a big

deal at the time if i'm remembering this correctly i think i wrote about this later that it seems that it took some years before the mystery of that made it such a huge deal that there were other Babe Ruth anecdotes at the time that were covered a lot more in newspapers in the moment than the called shot was. And we mostly have forgotten some of those Babe Ruth anecdotes. Carl Hubble striking out the Hall of Famers. Yes, but you wouldn't have known they were Hall of Famers at the time. There was no Hall of Fame for one thing. But also like was Joe Cronin like a, you know, a bankable name at the time? I'm not sure if he was. So who knows if that would have been the first night game was played would have been big. The first Hall of Fame? Yes. Joe Medwick winning the last NL Triple

Crown? No one would have thought that would be the last NL Triple Crown. Consecutive no hitters? Yes. Lou Gehrig retired? Yes. Bob Feller's fastball being timed with a motorcycle would not have been so I don't know it's hard to say I would guess that most are known but only about half are appreciated the billy goat curse probably was not known nor appreciated yeah well all right so how should we do this are we we're going to try to decide what will be the defining memory of 2019? And you've already written about this. And so you have a framework that you use for this. So I don't know if we should just go one by one, your categories of things that could

be the most enduring memory or whether you want to approach this some other way. I'm your guest. Okay. your guest okay so i i mostly agree with uh what you said in the article there are a few other possibilities that i might bring up but i guess we can just uh do it the way that that you did with the categories that's a nice way to organize things so your first category is just an incredible achievement. So some really fun facts, some big number, some historic accomplishment that a player had. And as we've talked about, this is kind of a down era for records, at least for individual player records that we care about. And that continued to be true this year with as you mentioned Pete Alonso's rookie home run

record being probably the most memorable one but even that is just a two-year-old record that it broke and it's kind of part of the whole juiced ball year which maybe that just gets subsumed by that larger thing so you did bring up Steven Strasburg's postseason run. I don't know if that could do it. Mariano Rivera being unanimously elected to the Hall of Fame. If he is the only one who ever gets unanimously elected, that will be something that we bring up forever, but that might just open the floodgates.

And I guess we'll remember it as the thing that opened the floodgates too. Although technically, I guess that happened in 2018, right? That the actual votes were cast, but he was then inducted this year. Wait, announced in 2019 though. Yeah. It's announced in January. Yes, right. Yeah, but you're correct that the votes were cast.

Famously have to be in before the postmarked by the 31st. Yeah, so presume that in the next 50 years, there are maybe 10 more players that go in unanimously. How much do you think that being the first will be remembered? I think it will be remembered because it was such a longstanding, it was just such a longstanding bit of fussiness. And being the first one to break the seal on that fussiness, especially for someone who was a reliever,

I think the confluence of those things will make it a thing that we remember, particularly if Jeter is the second unanimous selection because then you also have this Yankees core four dynasty component to it so i think that it'll be a piece of of trivia that we remember for a long long time i think we'll remember it because we remember the era when that was an unattainable thing but we will yeah when you go decades into the future if it's just the norm at that point then no one will know it was ever not the norm and so no one will care. under, oh, well, what percentage did Willie Mays get? And they see that it was less than 100. That requires the explanation that, well, until 2019, there was this weird thing where voters would refuse to do it.

And so then there is, you will have to tell that story of, well, they purged some of the voters, and then there was more transparency, and gradually the old norms began to fall away and in 2019 everything came together with this player that was you know fairly uncontroversial and everybody you know loved him and and there it was and then from that point on it became normal so yeah probably Mariano Rivera in 2019 will still get talked about as the the curse breakers in a in a way okay And what else did you mention? The contracts,

the big record contracts, Trout's extension, Garrett Cole's free agent contract. Those, as you mentioned, they could be the big contracts on the block for years to come, but I don't know that any contract really has the staying power to be the defining memory of a year, unless, I don't know, unless it turns out to be the biggest ever because something changes with the currency and inflation reverses itself and the numbers get smaller instead of bigger. But because they just inexorably get bigger, your record contracts always get topped by something else. Yeah, and we're bad at inflation. Right, yes. So I totally agree with that.

I also, though, was stuck on the fact that I do know that Babe Ruth got paid more than the president. And I do know that Joe DiMaggio was the first $100,000 player. And those things are obviously dwarfed by later contracts as well and weren't even nearly as big, relatively speaking as as contracts would become and yet they have survived for decades somehow i think that the fact that they were that they were actually that they were not just more zeros on numbers that i can't possibly relate to probably is is one of the reasons why they did survive longer and this was the the story

of babe Ruth getting paid more than the president. You don't even know what the dollar figure was there. It's the fact is what makes it memorable. Whereas, you know, Mike Trout being the first $400 million player is not going to be interesting to somebody who has seen $500 and $ 700 million dollar players so i think that those are very unlikely unless as you say they for some reason persist much much longer a rods is pretty a rods 252 million dollar contract i noted is the one modern contract that seems like it has generational staying power and i'm not exactly sure why partly because i think partly it's that what it wasn't topped for more than a decade.

Yeah, it just blew away everything else, right, by a lot, which you could also say about these contracts, too. Yeah, you could. They raised the bar quite a bit. Yeah, yeah, you could. I think A-Rod's deal is the reason we might remember Trout, but it'll be sort of an inverse thing. So part of why I think we remember A-Rod's Steel was because of how long it was a record, right? Part of it is the eventual team switch and then the subsequent large contract after the team switch. And then the other reason we remember is because A-Rod had the year-long suspension and became something of a jerk in the public imagination.

And I think that the flip of that might be why we end up remembering Trout's as a number that's very big, but in hindsight ends up looking kind of small compared to Trout as Trout, right? Because the way we'll remember it is the greatest baseball player of his generation and potentially of any generation only made how much? much so that possibility seems you know non-zero to me in part because we are bad at inflation and keeping in mind when we compare numbers over decades and so when someone who is less good than trout which seems likely gets more money than trout which also seems likely we're going to look back and be like that my trout sure was a bargain so that might happen but that also might be one that you know people like us remember but general fans don't so i'm going to concede that possibility also yeah the other thing too is that a rod's deal was if you do adjust for inflation was was still much larger than mike trout yes so probably for those 10 years he was not just paid more than anybody else but but really his contract still could shock you in a way 10 years later it shocked

a lot of people and then that also then introduced the debate where a rod was getting paid all this and was still the best player in baseball he was not remembered for being highly paid and a flop no highly paid and the best player in baseball and, because the number was so big, people had a hard time figuring out whether he was a bargain. Yes. Or, which, I mean, a lot of the evidence suggests he was. And I think that the baseball prospectus position around that time was that he was. Or whether he was a curse. And whether you couldn't possibly win with a player making that much, which was the decision that the Rangers ultimately made.

Probably the wrong decision that the Rangers ultimately made, probably the wrong decision that the Rangers ultimately made. So it had, in a way, it sort of stood in for one. You mentioned Jelich and Trout and Garrett Cole. Cole's probably the closest just because he had that run where he was just getting double-digit strikeout totals for, I don't remember, was it 15, 16 starts in a row, something like that. It was a record and it extended into the postseason. Again, that's the kind of thing that if strikeout rates continue to rise, that might not seem as remarkable in retrospect. But he had one of those runs that really is not equaled or surpassed all that often. But, you know, it's like maybe that turns into like the

Jake Arrieta run or something, which is certainly memorable, but I don't know if it is the defining memory of that year. So kind of depends what happens with Garrett Cole and with strikeout rates in general in the future. Yeah. He could very easily end up being the last 300 strikeout pitcher, which might end up mattering to history more than his strikeout rate, which will, I think, almost certainly be topped or at least nearly equaled many times in the next couple decades. All right. And your category 1B is incredible team. And this is, I guess, where we start talking about the Astros, not just for being a really good at baseball team, but being really bad at everything else.

I would just like to interrupt and correct myself. I sort of didn't really realize that the 300 strikeout pitcher is actually now normal. So from 2002 to 2014, there were none. And, of course, innings were going down even as strikeout rates went up. Did you know that Clayton Kershaw struck out 301 batters four years ago? No. I didn't either. Probably did at the time.

I mean, exactly, but I had forgotten. And then Chris Sale did two years ago. And then Max Scherzer did last in 2018. And then, of course, Verlander and Cole both did. So that's five in the last five years. Interesting. All right, go ahead. Astros.

Yeah, so Astros. So up until the World Series, we were talking about the Astros as perhaps one of the greatest and most talented teams of all time. And they do stand out according to some stats. But obviously that then got dwarfed by the Brendan Taubman story, in the headlines the most, whether it was for being innovative in positive ways, being innovative in negative ways, and just generally being villains in a way that teams often aren't. They were villains not just for being good, but for being bad in a lot of ways too. And so I don't know whether we can say that's a 2019 story or whether it's just one of the decades stories or the second half of the decade was certainly the Astros. So I just I don't know whether it will be localized enough in 2019. I guess the best argument is that this is the year that they really broke bad. This is the year that we learned, I guess, the depths of the evil that

lurked inside the hearts of the Astros. And even though the sign stealing that we found out about was localized in 2017, as far as we know now, although we may very well learn different in the next couple months, this is the year that it became the biggest story in baseball and was exposed. So that's the question, I guess. Do you remember when it happened or do you remember when you found out that it had happened or do we just remember them because they were on our lips and on our keyboards for weeks and months at a time for various reasons yeah so there's definitely going to be books written about this era of astros baseball

and the question is whether there's already been one but yes yeah there will be there will be books written about them for 100 years because of how much they represented the changes in baseball in this decade and because of how talented they were and because of just narratively to go from 2012 to 2019 it's just i mean for a writer it's a got a great arc and so the question is whether the book is primarily focused around what they did in 2017 when they had their most success or in 2019 which is when they kind of reached their peak plot. They were both as talented as they ever were, arguably their best team. Game seven of the World Series, everything. I mean, if you were making a plot, it was incredible, along with all the ways that they, like you say, broke bad this year. And so in that case, you could very easily imagine 2019 being remembered as,

as I put it, kind of the year that they reached peak Astros-ness and maybe also being in some ways the end of this little dynasty. We don't know how good they'll be next year, but if they were to win, say, 96 games and get knocked out in the ALDS, then we might see that as just sort of the beginning of the decline where the arrow runs from 2011 to 2019 like when they reach their their low to when they reached their high so it's I mean it's such a significant season but I yeah like you say like I say I don't know if we'll remember this season specifically I think we will though I know if we'll remember this season specifically. I think we will, though.

I think 2019 is a pretty memorable season in this storyline. And I definitely think that this team is the team that will get remembered from the decade. Not from the decade. This team will be remembered of the decade, many decades from now. I think it'll be the 2019 squad. And I think that for two reasons. The first of which is I don't think that, and we've talked about this at various points on the pod, like, it is very difficult for the Astros to season, although we might get different and more clear insight in the coming months as the investigation progresses. But everybody is sitting there thinking that they figured out another way to do something along these lines, right?

So I think that people will just kind of assume that it was a continued course of action, even if there isn't hard evidence to support that at this moment. And here's the other thing, and this might just be my brain being kind of squishy in the offseason. So a thing that happened to the 2019 Astros is that they were able to boast both the AL Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young. And I didn't remember until like five minutes ago. I didn't remember that. They went two for three and were almost three for three. Yeah, if they had gone three for three, they would have been the first team to remember that. They went two for three and were almost three for three. Yeah, if they had gone three for three,

they would have been the first team to do that, and that might have added to the case here. Yeah, but in a weird way, it just was so overshadowed by all the rest of it, and we all sat there and were a little relieved that Bregman didn't win because we didn't want to have to litigate that nonsense forever. We didn't want to. We didn't want to do it. We we were relieved so i think the thing that we will remember about this team is

the break bad the moment where we thought haha yeah and where we saw that the rest of baseball was like very keen to pile on a bit yeah well i wonder how much this depends on the punishment and what is revealed in this investigation because if it it comes out that, let's say, MLB concludes, well, it was only the Astros and it was only in three of these years and by the way while we were investigating the Astros we turned up all these other teams that were doing something along similar lines and so maybe it then becomes like the story of baseball right now is just sign stealing all the teams are sign stealing or if there's some kind of really harsh punishment that we can't even imagine like you know if if the title were vacated or something which i don't think there's a chance of that happening but if that happened or or even if like jeff luno is banned from the game forever or or players are suspended or aj hinge if there's

just some you know really unprecedented draconian punishment here that we can't even see coming maybe that makes it even even bigger story or you know it gets bigger instead of smaller yeah I just think that it is part of a you know the end of this season was a really big bummer for baseball sort of generally and this was the most dominant story amongst all the bummer stories and I think that vibe will persist for a while although I don't know if other people will still be sad about it the way that we all were at the end of the season. But if they are, I think they remember it first and foremost for the Astros. So I think it'll be a 2019 kind of deal. Yeah.

All right. And we'll get to the Nationals a little later on in this discussion. So 1C is incredible single play or sequence of plays often aided by iconic photo or video images. And you mentioned Howie Kendrick here. So when The Ringer did its annual post on best sports memories or favorite sports memories or whatever from this year, I wrote about Howie Kendrick. And I think Howie Kendrick's Homer has a solid case, which you lay out here. It is one of the biggest home runs or hits of all time, just by championship win probability added. It has a good story associated with it because it's Howie Kendrick. It was so momentous, and it sort of slew the Astros, who we were just talking about being the villain.

If that was one of the big stories of the year, then slaying the villain should be one of the big stories of the year, too. So there is some potential here, given how exciting the Nationals win was. And maybe that's the story. Maybe it's just the Nationals won. But if you want to pick one moment, it's the Kendrick Homer. And the Kendrick Homer was really exciting. Yeah, I just don't feel it. No. Sam, I think you were right that it being on the road really undercuts it. I think if he were at home, there'd be a little monument to that. Like they would paint the screen a special color in that spot they'd they'd commemorate it in a way

that was physical and lasting and sort of tactile but because it happened at minute made they're going to be very keen to forget and uh it didn't even like he said it didn't hit the pole itself which i think changes it i don't think we'll i think we'll remember the nationals winning and we'll remember them having to come from behind at sort of each stage, but I don't think that this specifically will persist in the way that other World Series stuff has. Yeah, being on the road, I don't know how much it hurts. It feels to me like it really hurts a lot

just because the highlight is home run and then just a silent crowd. Yeah. And you might get a crowd shot as he rounds the bases of somebody looking sad but it's not like the just explosion that happens when you do this at home where it's so loud and you could cut to any part of the stadium and see pandemonium and it feels like you are there and that you're in it so i do think that hurts it and also i don't know i just don't feel it i don't feel like it it was the seventh inning not the ninth which i i think if you had if if it hadn't been howie kendrick but

it had been anthony rendon in the seventh then maybe and if it hadn't been the seventh but it had been howie kendrick in the ninth then maybe but howie kendrick in the seventh it just i don't feel it and i i i feel a little sad how rajai davis home run in 2016 is already kind of falling out of the public memory which i think is probably the greatest home run moment of my lifetime. Well, at least since Kirk Gibson and other people will, of course, say David Fries was better. And I think in an end of the decade wrap, I think I acknowledge that as well. But Rajai Davis against Geraldo Chapman, to me, is like the most shocking and incredibly turnaround home run of the last, you know, 25 years. But it was Rajai Davis and it was the eighth.

It was the eighth. That one was the eighth. And then they lost anyway. And so all these things kind of go against Rajai Davis. Two of the things go against Howie Kendrick, but not the third. Still, though, I think that it just, it's going to get lost like how Smith got lost. Yeah, I think that that seems right to me, I guess, which is a shame because that was a really great moment.

So I guess maybe it has to be like a legendary player to be a legendary play. Do you think that's true? Well, or a walk-off. Or a walk-off. Yeah, I guess. Like Mazeroski's a Hall of Famer. He probably wouldn't be a Hall of Famer without that hit. But he is one.

Or, you know, you mentioned Carlton Fisk, and he's a legendary player even without that home run and that iconic image. And it actually hit the pole. Right. Yeah. And he waved. He had to wave. Yeah. Kirk Gibson, though, not a legend.

I mean, Kirk Gibson's a legend because of the home run, but it was a walk-off. And Joe Carter is only a legend because of, to the degree that he is, is only a legend because of the home run, but it was a walk-off. And Joe Carter is only a legend because of, to the degree that he is, is only a legend because of the home run and it was a walk-off. So I think that it needs to be a walk-off, kind of. David Fries, of course, that was a walk-off. And it's probably, I don't know. Some people remember the triple. Some people remember the home run.

But the home run was the walk-off. So anyway, that fits, walk-off. What's the biggest home run was the walk-off. So anyway, that fits, walk-off. What's the biggest home run? Obviously, Bobby Thompson was a walk-off, not a legendary player. What's the biggest home run in history that wasn't a walk-off? What's the first one you can think of? And let's say that it has to be before 2000. Can we go back to the first thing?

Part of the triple, though, isn't just what it did. It was the gaffe. Right, it was the Nelson Cruz. Right, that's part of why. I mean, we'd probably still remember it, but it really got seared in there because in addition to being happy for him, we were mortified for Cruz, right?

We just had that moment where we're like, oh, no, I would rather disappear into dust. Yeah, probably the biggest non-walk-off homers would be like milestone homers, record homers, right? Like Hank Aaron's 715th or something. Let's not count those. Not counting those. Yeah, let's talk.

Just for the stakes of the game, what's the biggest stakes of the game home run that wasn't a walk-off? Oh, jeez. I don't know. Yeah, they don't come to mind the way that even like francisco cabrera's walk-off single and kirby pocket's walk-off home run come to mind i don't even know i don't know yeah well hal smith hal smith and which nobody remembers yeah no it's the biggest hit in history yeah and

i have probably seen it at the top of that leaderboard 50 times. And even this time, I went, oh, that's right. Hal Smith. When was that? And I don't think most people remember it unless they lived through it. I will say that Kirk Gibson was the MVP that year when he hit that home run. And Joe Carter, not a Hall of Famer, and his reputation as a player has suffered in retrospect as we've evaluated him in different ways than they did at the time.

But he was a perennial all-star and an MVP contender in a few years and always a 100 RBI guy. So they were perceived as great players at the time that they hit those home runs, I think, which you can't really say about Howie Kendrick. So I think they still support the idea that legendary players have legendary hits, but maybe that's just because, I don't know, there aren't that many legendary hits and usually good players get the hits. So that could be why, but I'm trying to think of like a truly,

I guess Bobby Thompson, as you said is is the best by like a good player but not really great player who had a an all-time great hit all right so the next category is uh the moment the timeline begins or the moment modern baseball begins so like a watershed moment that marks a change in eras let's. And so you proposed here your home run derby scenario where home run derby becomes the breakout sport that surpasses baseball. This was the year that would mark the beginning of that because of the big $1 million prize pool. I still love that you, a person who has fiercely advocated for home runs being boring highlights,

wrote this take. It is one of my favorite things. I don't even know what my take was though you thought they were boring you thought no no i remember i remember that i don't remember what my take is about the derby like i never did figure out what what my position on that was like i have had people i have had people who both thought oh wonderful what a scathing what a scatathing piece about how easily baseball can be commercialized to be ruined or whatever. And then others were like, I love it. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not sure.

I don't remember. I didn't have an opinion while I was writing it. But I like the Derby, though. I do like the Derby. And then you also mentioned that this could be like a year that we remember because of the shift. Because as I noted at some time this year, this was the year when some teams first went over 50% with shifting. So shifting became the norm and the standard alignment,

in a sense, became the shift. But I don't know. I don't know. I wasn't. Neither of those got much. What if we introduce a smaller moment, which is that I don't know if they were the... They have to have been the first one.

I don't know this for a fact, but it seems impossible that it would not be true. The Astros didn't intentionally walk a single batter during the regular season. Yeah, true. And it's very small. It's a small thing, but you know, I don't know. It's the thing that happened in this year.

In this calendar year, that's one of the things that happened and had never happened before so yeah yeah it might never happen again who knows i know yeah i'll propose a few here what if this is the year that we remember as sort of the the genesis of robot umps like this is the year when robot umps became inevitable which i think in my mind maybe it already was but the introduction to the atlantic league this year and then the arizona fall league and then the announcement that it would be used at some level of the minor leagues next year which i don't know if that's been confirmed or not but that was floated at least. So this is kind of the year. The umpires union said that they would cooperate in some way.

Yeah, right. So I think the problem with this is that the first year that robot umps are actually used in Major League Baseball will probably be the year that, I mean, that will probably be the defining memory of that year and the year that we associate with robot umps. that will probably be the defining memory of that year and the year that we associate with Robotoms. But this year, like this year kind of did the harder task maybe of laying the groundwork and showing that it was workable in high-level professional games and even affiliated games. So this kind of was a real momentum-changing year when it came to Robotoms, I think. It'll be the year that I, whatever year it actually think it'll be the year that i whatever year it actually happens will be the year i reveal myself as a crank yeah it could happen too that will be the year when y'all stop fighting this fight yeah so i guess it could be the year of

expanded netting yeah that was that was suggested to me uh before this i thought that was a good one that's good it was the netting was also expanded last year yeah in 2018 was the year that a fan died when they were hit by a ball and that was the first time that had happened in you know in like decades and so and to be honest i had already kind of forgotten both of those facts when I started to write about how 2019 could be the year of the expanded netting. So I ended up thinking that it probably won't be, but yeah, I think it's a good suggestion. Yeah. It doesn't change the game on the field that much, but. Well, this was the year that it all, like every team though, did it, right? So now we're going to have universal compliance going into 2020 as a result of because this year didn't it wasn't this the year that a

little girl got beamed in the head in houston yeah uh yeah was it in houston but yeah yeah a little girl did get beamed in the head yeah and i guess maybe this could also be like the year of youth the year of young players i don't know if it's localized enough in 2019 to be the story of 2019 but if you were talking about the biggest stories of this era in baseball that seems like one of them like this year was uh the the average batter age this year joshua noted was 27.9 weighted by plate appearances and that's the lowest since 1978 which was the first season following an expansion so that might turn out to be like a low a local low perhaps a low for a long time we'll see or maybe it will mark the beginning of that being the norm I don't know

so we've certainly talked about that a lot this year and all the young player seasons that we saw. So I just, I don't know if it's clear enough that it's a 2019 story, but this was a year I think when it reached greater heights and became a big part of the story of the sport. Good ones. All right, moving along, bloopers and or extraordinary failures so you mentioned here yasiel puig's post-trade brawl which is a good one and you mentioned chris davis's hit list streak i don't know if there are any others were there any like amazing gifts that will be shared forever nothing's coming to mind right away how how i would like to ask a clarifying definitional

question which is how tight a time frame how small a moment do bloopers and or extraordinary failures have to transpire over because we could and this might be i might be succumbing to some categorical confusion here just based on where this might otherwise fit but i feel like the overall competitive landscape yeah could potentially be its own extraordinary failure and i'm not just saying that because when you load sam's piece the little insert that is next to this is about the tigers and then you sit there and you're like well well, they were very bad. I could say extraordinarily so. Yeah. At one point, I did wonder whether I would write about the 403 or whatever lost teams and basically the worst group of worst teams that we've ever had.

Yeah. And I decided that there wasn't enough to write about. In the original, what I identified as bloopers and extraordinary failures, which generated this category from the list of determined most memorable things, were specific events like Snodgrass Muff and Merkel's Boner. That's right. Bill Buckner having the ball go through his legs, and Bartman getting the foul ball.

But I think you could definitely also have included, if I had gone back to 1899, I think it is, for instance, definitely the Cleveland Spiders would have been the most memorable of that year. And while they were not the most memorable, as I determined it from 1962, I think that the 1962 Mets losing 120 games would also have qualified in many years.

Oh, in fact, it was. That is the year that I determined was the expansion Mets lost 120 games would also have qualified in many years. Oh, in fact, it was. That is the year that I determined was the expansion Mets lost 120 games. So I think that it's doable, but we had the Tigers losing 119 a few years ago. So I don't think an individual team got there this year, got to that same level of failure. And in a way, there was a little bit of safety in numbers for all of them. So unless it gets remembered as a trend, which I don't think it will, because I think that peak tank is also going to go down as the Astros and Cubs in the early first half of this decade. Ben, what team did you end up deciding was your team of the decade when you wrote about

it? Was it the Astros? I didn't pick the Astros, which was that was before the sign stealing story surfaced. And so in a way that made their case weaker in that maybe they were less deserving of their success. On the other hand, maybe it made that a better selection. I think it made it stronger. Yeah, as I mentioned in that piece, I wasn't picking them solely because they were the best or most successful team of the decade, but just because they were kind of the defining team of the decade. or most successful team of the decade, but just because they were kind of the defining team of the decade. And if anything, that whole scandal made them even more associated with this decade.

So yeah, but you raise a good point. Maybe it is just the lopsidedness, the fact that there were 800 plus win or loss teams, which was a record. And as Craig Edwards noted, this was just the most, I don't know, stratified year when it comes to the standings and the standard deviation of winning percentage was higher than it had been, I think, at any point, I guess, in the expansion era. So that is something that was a big story this year. And maybe it will then recede and it won't be as big a story or maybe we'll remember it as really weird, a strange time in baseball when there were a lot of great teams and terrible teams so i think that's that's possible it's a contender when puig fought the pirates on the deadline when that happened i uh i couldn't write about it because i was very busy editing some things about that because it happened on the deadline and i think that it is the the story i didn't get to write in 2019 that i am the saddest about because how did we talk about anything else this year except for puig deciding to fight a team while he had been traded

and didn't know it's the best thing that happened in baseball this year. And I didn't get to write about it because I had to edit. Dumb old deadline. All right. Next category is pathos. So you mentioned Tyler Skaggs here. Of course, Skaggs' death and then the no-hitter that his teammates threw when it was his turn in the rotation again. Certainly one of the most memorable stories of this season for bad and good reasons, and one that will cause some change and that we're going to get opioid testing will be part of

baseball, and perhaps that will be a story of baseball in this decade. It's not really clear how pervasive that is, but it could be, hopefully not. But that was certainly one of the biggest and saddest stories of this season yeah so i i don't know if uh i mean are there previous player deaths that were the defining story of that year um i don't think there were in baseball but if you were to do this in basketball then you definitely would definitely have Len Bias's death. All right. Category five, disruption of baseball's equilibrium. This is where you put the ball, and this is where you discuss the ball in 2017. And as you said at the time, kind of depends

whether this ends up being the high watermark or not. So we know now that 2017 is not and was surpassed by 2019. And this was the year when it became an even bigger part of the discourse than it had been before because we have ways to study these things and it was reported in real time and the ball change in the postseason was a big story and throughout the year it was a big story. So again, this depends on what will happen in 2020 and thereafter. But if this is the peak of the high home run rate era, then maybe that's the story of the season. Yeah, I mean, I feel a lot more strongly about this than I did in 2017. And again, it depends on it not going up even more as it did in 2017.

And in 2017, I thought, well, it's probably going to go up more or it's going to hang out. At the time, I think maybe I thought it was just going to hang out at that level for like six years. And so 2017 would just be part of that general juiced ball era and then maybe 2015 would be remembered more as the moment that the spike first began. But I, having no, now that we know how much it fluctuates and how chaotic this whole thing is,

I feel more like it could go anywhere from here. It's not going to hang around like this for six years and that it probably will go down next year and that 2019 will forever live as this weird crazy outlier year well and i think as you noted this this was the year where you know a casual fan watching a broadcast was going to hear about the ball being different right it seemed to permeate the broader discourse around the game in a way that was still only partially true in prior seasons, even though I think a lot of people were noting the spike in home runs. I think we had a plausible, even though we have learned the degree to which it influenced

the spike in home runs relative to other things, namely the ball itself. But there were these other plausible sounding explanations, right? Batters are changing their approach. We like launch angle and so people were i think the explanations were more spread out and so it hadn't broken through but now like you watch a you know you watch a baseball game just a random baseball game on a tuesday and the odds are you're going to hear it mentioned on the broadcast at least one time um so i i think that 2019 might be the year where we're like, no, really, it was the ball's funky,

especially because they own the league owns a partial stake in Rawlings now. So I think that not only is the explanation of the ball itself more sort of cohesive in people's mind, but the inclination to sort of point a finger and say, well, hey, why aren't you doing something about this, guys, is also more sort of prevalent so i think 2019 might end up being the the year it was such an educational year for us for all of us to learn about the ball to learn about the manufacturing to learn about what changed in 2015 what changed this year to to learn as it's happening to learn within weeks or days that it's happening to be almost keeping score of the ball through rob arthur's tweets before this a juiced ball felt like a lot closer

to like the theory that the lottery the in the nba lottery they froze the cards or whatever you know like sort of like we all have these sort of conspiracy theories that we choose to believe or not believe based on whether we think it's more fun to believe them or not believe them and it was something funky was happening with the ball in in 2017 we sort of knew that but we didn't know enough to really discuss it like adults and now we do it's just such a part of the game right now we discuss what the ball is doing today and what it meant for a particular play in a particular game it's it's all out in the open we're having this discussion more than mlb seems to be having this discussion and i i do think that in a in a way way, the variation that we now know about from ball to ball, from batch to batch, will never again leave our consciousness.

And that this will be the year that our relationship with baseball changed. And I thought Zach Cram's article, which was headlined, The Year That Baseball Became an Unreliable Narrator, that was the most jealous of a phrase I've been this year. I wanted to have written that phrase in that article so badly. Yeah, Zach did well with that. Can I ask a sort of related question that you don't have to answer? And in fact, I just want to put in both of your brains and then we can try to return to like six months from now, even though I will probably not remember. Sure.

So this is related to conspiracy theories. So I don't know if the two of you have had this experience when talking to people who work for teams. I will not betray any specific people nor the specific conspiracy theories to which they ascribe, but I've heard just a really wild range of things that the Astros are supposedly doing. And I would like to state for the record that all of them sound completely ludicrous to me. And I don't think any of them are true, but I want you to think about over the course of the season, the craziest,

most, the most wild thing that you hear about the Astros where you for a moment think, I wonder if that's true. I want you to think about it the whole year. I want it to be in the back of your noggin when you're talking to people and they bring up the Astros and they're like, it's,

it's the men who speak with goats. And you're like, yeah, man, they're doing that. That's a thing they're doing. This is just I want it to be in your noggin because I think that the goalpost is going to move in an appreciable way. And I just I think that we think a lot of things about the ball that may or may not be true, they seem more plausible now regardless of their veracity because of all the rigmarole and uncertainty and variation so i just have a have a little astro thought in the back of your brain every single day for the rest of the off season and season okay i could believe that the astros were actually flooding the zone with all of this so

that we aren't able to pick out which ones are real that's a great answer that's a great answer yeah yeah okay so i just and i i want to make clear i'm not i'm not saying any of them are true i think that a lot of them are probably wrong and i think that the ones that are true are probably not the sole province of the houston astros like a lot of teams are doing a lot of weird squishy stuff but we're we're going to be inclined to believe some wild stuff. I just want you to think about it. I've officially had my second cup of coffee, so we're cooking with gas now, you guys.

We're up to the last two categories here. The second to last one is when the larger world intersects with baseball or vice versa. You mentioned Baby Shark here, and you mentioned the Major League Baseball versus Minor League Baseball story and Bernie Sanders getting involved in that. But as you also note, that is probably more of a 2020 story and perhaps will turn out to be not as big a story as the leaking of the initial position was if MLB does walk that back, which it seems

like it's attempting to do now, if that turns out to have been a negotiating tactic or at least an initial position that hugely backfired in the public realm and we don't actually get a ton of teams contracted, then maybe that won't be a big story. But it could be. But it seems like if it is, then maybe that won't be a big story, but it could be, but it seems like if it is, it'll be a bigger story next year. So yeah, I the public consciousness of the power dynamics that are present in baseball. And there has always been an adversarial relationship between labor and ownership. And there has often been an adversarial relationship, say, between teams and the municipalities that house them and give them physical homes, often at taxpayer expense. And so these dynamics are not new, but it felt as if there was a calcifying of that dynamic as both

adversarial and likely to come to a really disruptive, potentially disruptive end around maybe the CBA negotiations, possibly before that. And I think that this fits in the minor league contraction thing fits into that our understanding of labor from last offseason fits into that. And I wonder how, if at all, the fact that this offseason has so far been much faster moving and pretty lucrative on the free agent side might temper some of that stuff for this year? Or does it just kick the ball down, you know, advance the ball further? What's the expression I'm looking for? Kicking the can down the road. There we go. Yeah. Oh, no, the second cup of coffee. Very fickle. I'm going to answer just by reading what Zachary Levine wrote to me when I asked him for

his thoughts on this topic, because he put it very well. And I think before I read that, I think that it is true that it is a major story, maybe one of the major stories of the season, but it is so squishy that it's hard to imagine that it will be able to be summed up in a sentence 50 years from now, nor that people will remember it for lack of that sentence. But this is what Zach wrote. There's another one that felt like it defined this season more but it won't be remembered specifically with 2019 because it's been gradually building and might continue to it might be a bad sample of people that i follow that's creating this feeling but it seems like 2019 was an unending year of mlb

being at odds with fans brandon taubman, the fight against minor league baseball, the record gap of 100 win-loss teams associated with non-competitive behavior by front offices, the ball that everyone hated and MLB lied to us about, etc. It was a year of things that people hated, not to mention the Skaggs tragedy and a team's likely involvement in that.

Again, could be the fallacy of being too engrossed in baseball Twitter, but it seemed like the game didn't love people back this year more than ever in my adult life. The counterargument is that none of this is all that 21st century. Teams were always non-competitive. Teams were much worse to players back in the day. We had strikes as recently as 1995. This may be a relative low for our adult memories, but not an absolute low. I think that's very well put. I'm satisfied with that as an answer. Thank you, Zachary, and also Sam. All right, and the last category is something weird, something almost literally unbelievable or inexplicable, and this is where

you put the Nationals because of their 19-31 start, because of their many comebacks in every round of the playoffs almost, and because of whom they overcame, their opponents in the playoffs. It was one of the great playoff runs and comebacks by a team that started the season slow. And because of the road games. Right. And because of, yes, the road team winning every game in that World Series. That will be cited for a long time probably. So when you put together everything they overcame,

the fact that it was the first World Series for the franchise, at least in Washington, you kind of mentioned Strasburg's postseason run and then Baby Shark and Kendrick's home run, all of that together. I mean, maybe you can't just lump all of that together, but the Nationals could potentially be the story of 2019. Yeah, it could be. Two people tried to convince me that it was

the Nationals as a whole, and with all these kind of disparate elements to it, that the Nationals will be remembered. I always tend to really resist saying at the end of the year that it's going to be the team that won the World Series. I don't find that that many world series champions are memorable after maybe 30 or 40 years and so i really resist that i know that there's going to be a bias to me remembering the team that just won the world series a month ago but that it's probably not going to be them and uh i did kind of get talked into the nationals as having a bunch of things that will all sort of be remembered separately from each other. But their name will keep coming up. And I could buy it.

I didn't ultimately pick them, but I could buy it. And I was comfortable making the case for it. Yeah. I can buy it because I think there's, like you said, there are a lot of different little snippets. And all of those snippets are the kinds of snippets you hear on broadcasts a lot and i think that's key yeah and i think they can coalesce into one larger narrative about that team you know you have all these great players you have the you have the best pitching prospect in baseball who had this you know horrible absence define his postseason run until until this year when Strasburg was so good you have the road wins you got the comebacks

you you had a team that made us all not hate baby shark and I thought that was impossible and I'm not even a parent yeah Juan S Juan Soto. Juan Soto. Yeah. We all got introduced. I mean, we all knew Juan Soto, but like Juan Soto had his like national, you know, arrival party. He is now one of the guys that people are going to know. And you had all that goodwill.

Then you had some of that goodwill squandered with some of the post. Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that that's right there was that was that briefly crossed my mind as a uh intersecting with the world at large yeah option and then i forgot to write about it yeah the white house visit yeah uncomfortable for those of us who completely forgot about that yeah that's a yeah uh politicians and athletes those those little anecdotes i have found in my reading of old baseball books those little anecdotes do tend to to make it for a long time because for one thing you know presidents stay famous for a very long time presidents of among of that is the only

person that no matter what stays famous for a very long time yeah and people write a lot of baseball books and people write a lot of baseball books and people write a lot of books about presidents and for those two reasons anecdotes that involve them both tend to get repeated so yeah that was another detail i forgot about it thanks for reminding me yeah all right well i think can i make one what happens to the ball i think it'll be the ball but i think it'll be the ball yeah i concluded that it was the ball meg what did you conclude i think it'll be the astros because i think that we will get fuzzy with some of the exact sequencing and we will tend to lump the entirety of their decade story into this year especially if they don't have another world series run with this core

i think this will be like the, you know, we'll view this as the end to that particular era of Astros baseball. I'm not saying that's going to happen. Everyone relax. But like, I think it could end up being the Astros just because they embody so many things about this era of baseball, good and bad. And we'll be fascinated by that in hindsight, especially because the after effects

of some of that stuff i think will still be manifesting themselves in the years to come i don't think we'll remember pete alonso i i have no idea whether we'll remember pete alonso and the reason that i ultimately concluded that it was the number three most likely is that i still remember that al rosen had the record before mart still remember that Al Rosen had the record before Mark McGuire, who had the record before Aaron Judge, who had the record before Pete Alonzo. So it is not obviously the number one record in the game, but I would say that the rookie home run record is probably one of the 25 most prestigious records that there is. Sure.

And, you know, it could very easily survive 50 more years, particularly if there are any changes at all to the ball that go the other way. And if baseball becomes less of a home runs and strikeouts game in the future. And if, you know, if he turns out to be a Hall of Famer, if Pete Alonzo is a Hall of Famer, and that's part of his Hall of Fame career, it seems very plausible to me. I mean, Al Rosen, why do I remember that? Why do I remember Al Rosen? I was seven when he lost that record. Yeah.

The only thing I remember from being seven is how to read. I mean, that's not true, but that's the most enduring. I have a hot take. I think that we will misremember it and think that Aaron Judge still holds this record. I think you might be right. Actually, I think you might be right about that. I think we will misremember it and think that Aaron Judge still holds this record. I think you might be right. Actually, I think you might be right about that. I think we will misremember because I think Aaron Judge is more memorable.

Yeah. And so we will misremember it and be like, it feels like he, that feels like a thing he did because he's 27 feet tall. He's on the Yankees. And he'll still have the AL record. Right. And so he'll still get, people will always be saying he has the al home run rookie winner record and you'll just kind of like lose the al part just know that you heard something

about the rookie home runner that's a great point and they're probably it will be it will probably be said 10 times more often about aaron judge than it is said about pito lonzo yeah i have one that it did not get there it is not going to be it But I would just like to note that I think we came very close to this year being remembered for a single baseball game, a single regular season baseball game, which I didn't even think about this until a couple days ago when I was writing an article in This was an email from April and it was about, let's see. So this was from Sivan who writes toward the end of a wild 12, 11 White Sox Tigers game, Jason Benetti commented on how confusing it would be if you went to the ballpark with someone who had never been to a baseball game before. And you had to give them an idea of what the sport is like while watching that game. Do any games come to mind as the worst possible to watch to give someone an accurate picture of what baseball is actually like so uh the article hasn't run yet but this week i i tackled that question and uh the benetti one

is is a very good one uh partly because it involved a huge home run that ended up being a single because jose abreu crossed uh one of the base runners and that's already just one of the hardest possible plays to explain like the ball is dead how do you not get a home run how do you not get credit for the ball there is no live action it would be very hard to explain that specific play but i concluded i think i concluded certainly one of the games that i concluded would be hardest to explain was the 1713 game between the Yankees and the Red Sox in London. And this game was very, very, very nutty in all sorts of ways. I don't know how much either you remember this, but one team went ahead 6-0 in the first. The other team tied it 6-6 in the first.

The first inning took an hour. The game took almost five hours. And it ended up being, it was 17 to six at one point. And then the Red Sox started coming back. And the Yankees ended up having to bring in Chapman to get the save. And if the Red Sox had completed that comeback and won a game 18-17, or even if either team had won with an even higher score, I think that game would have made it 100 years. I think that game would have been remembered forever and ever and ever. But it didn't happen. So I think if I had thought about it earlier, I might have had a one sentence mention in this actual article, but we didn't get there. I'll just end by mentioning that because we started this by piling on another Boris quote,

and I said that the only time we talked about Boris quotes was to point out how terrible they are. He also said something about Ryu that I think is actually pretty good, which someone asked, I think, Boris or maybe Ryu about the significance of his wearing number 99 with the Blue Jays. And Boris said Canada lent number 99 to LA. So with Hyunjin, we thought we would return it back to Canada, which I think is a pretty good line, a reference to Gretzky going to the Kings. I think that's pretty good. Canadians will like it. Not impressed.

Is that actually why he chose number 99? He already wore number 99, right? Okay. So then it's just a dad joke. Basically, yeah. Okay. It makes sense. The thing I remember about that Boston Yankee,

that New York-Boston game, was that it started in the morning. I went to the gym. I had a whole workout at the gym, and then I went and met a friend for lunch and drank a beer and had a sandwich. And that game was still happening. It happened that whole time.

I ran like five miles and did light weights and had a beer. And that game was my constant friend throughout. It was just there. And there was a moment where I was like, oh, I want this game to go to extras like nothing I've ever wanted before ever in my life. Both pitchers, both starters knocked out in the first. Yeah.

I don't know if that's ever happened. Yeah. Wild. Truly a wild time. All right. Well, we've done it. We've decided the defining memory of 2019 unless we haven't

and we completely missed it, which is entirely possible. And we'll look forward to making more memories in 2020. Okay. Personally, I think Rich Hill being arrested

for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest might be my defining memory of 2019, but that probably won't be true for everyone. This is the last Effectively Wild episode

of 2019 so thank you very much for listening this year. We couldn't do it without you both financially speaking but also motivationally. It's the feedback that we get from the listeners and the community that sprung up around the podcast that makes this so worthwhile.

So thank you for the continued support and interaction and we hope that you will stick with us next year. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Anthony Robleski, John Sagal, David Myers, Danny Madden, and Stephen Tidings. 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. And you can keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcastofvanagraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. We will do an email episode eventually. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. This was a brief break in the middle of the Multisport Sabermetrics Exchange series. We're through the first five episodes of that series, and we'll have the remaining two up by the end of the week. Next episode will be on NASCAR and cycling, so stay tuned for that. I'll be back to talk to you very soon. Give me back that cheer Good or bad Give me back something

That I Never knew I had Well I said, watch it go by I said, watch it go by Go by