Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1483: Baseball in the 2020s

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and a slightly light-headed Sam Miller banter about baseball and vomit and 2019 World Series Game 7 losing pitcher Will Harris signing with the Nationals, then attempt to predict what baseball will look like in the 2020s, touching on the most celebrated retirements, how high the strikeout rate will rise, how many games […]

🎵 Good morning and welcome to episode 1483 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg, the ringer. Hi, Ben. Hi, happy new year. Thanks. Happy new year to you too. How are you doing? I'm doing well. All right, good. I have the flu, and so I just want to warn you and everybody that I'm perceiving the words I say about a quarter second after I say them. So everything's a little funky right now. I just, I apologize in advance. That's all. Would you describe that as a flu-like symptom?

You know, I've been thinking a lot today in the last couple of days about your article that we've talked about before, about what pitchers throwing up on the mound. Yeah, players playing and excelling when they're sick. Yeah, and I have come to believe that it's not that impressive. I think I might have, I don't know if I've already had come to believe this or not, but I think that

they, you know, they're all just doing the best they can. And if they can play well with the flu, that just means they can play well with the flu. I don't think that any, like nothing we see is ever impossible. Like no one's actually ever doing anything that's impossible. So they think that, I mean, they're sick, right? But I think if you're as sick as I was yesterday, you wouldn't be playing. I don't think anybody has ever gone out and scored 35 points with the flu that I had yesterday. I just don't think it happens. And so if they go out and score 35 points with the flu, to me, that just means they

weren't that sick. I just don't believe it. I don't believe that I'm seeing anything that is not realistic. And what the flu-like symptoms story wants us to believe is that we are seeing something unrealistic. But it's just not like, it's like everything we're seeing is just real. And I'm sorry if that makes it less fun. But I just think they're not that sick.

Maybe. There are players who will throw up on the mound or during the game. And yeah, maybe that's from the exertion. Like maybe they didn't realize that they were as sick as they were. They started feeling that sick during the game or they would have scratched themselves. I don't know. If you did a study somehow, I would think that you would find that ballplayers take a lot fewer sick days than the average American worker. It just seems that way, which may not be accurate, but really, how often does a player

miss games due to illness in a course of a typical season, at least, that gets reported as such? Not all that often. It's sort of surprising when it happens, unless it's like one of those things where something is spreading around a whole team and it's just in the clubhouse and everyone's catching it. But you would think, I mean, partly that's because these are healthy, strong young people and because they have great medical care and all that and they get an off season to recuperate and they have a lot of incentive to go to work and presumably they like being at work, which you could not say for every American worker. So between that and the pressure and the compensation and all of that, I suppose it makes sense that they would not take a lot of sick days, whereas most people will take sick days even if they're not all that sick just because they get a couple in their contract or whatever.

Yeah, I guess the point that I'm maybe trying to make is that if a if a I don't know why I've been saying 35 points. So say it's a pitcher with a who has a three ERA in his life and he goes out with, you know, what we are told is the flu and he allows one run in seven innings. To me, that is less impressive than if he goes out with what we're told is the flu and he allows 14 in two innings because in the latter case i believe you that guy had the flu and he pitched anyway and if i had you know managed to work yesterday or even record this podcast i would have been pretty impressed with myself even though the product would have been garbage i could not have pulled off a podcast yesterday it would not be the performance of the podcast exceptionally that would have made it an exceptional achievement. It would have just been doing the podcast that would have been exceptional. And if I had pulled

off an exceptional podcast, I think everybody would rightly go, oh, you weren't that sick. I will also say that we basically have two ways of knowing that a person is sick. One is they tell us, which, you know, first of all, the flu is a process. It's three or four days. You might be terrible at night and fine in the morning. So who knows? That's subjective. But the other is they throw up and sometimes even on the mound. And I have come to understand that different people throw up differently. We're going to talk about throw up for a little bit here. So if you don't like that, maybe probably 45 seconds ahead. My wife loves throwing up.

It always makes her feel good when she throws up. She feels better afterward. She does. She does feel better afterward. And I mean, I'm not saying she throws up a lot, but she throws up a few times a year. It's very, it's painless for her, frictionless. And she feels better. I die every time I throw up. It hurts me so bad. It inevitably comes through

my nose entirely. And it hurts my ribs so bad. It feels like I'm being squeezed to death. And it causes me to cry every time. And I went 13 years without throwing up before two days ago. And so when I see a person on the mound throwing up, it is very easy for me to think that they're on the mound throwing up. That is superhuman. My wife would go, I would do, to my wife throwing up on the mound would be like Madison Bumgarner blowing a snot rocket. It should be like, well, that's part of the process. That's how you get good. Uh-huh. Yeah. Some people, some athletes will throw up just as a result of pressure, just regularly. I've had friends who used to throw up before games or something, which is not healthy, I guess, but is not all that abnormal. So I think you're right.

I mean, it's different, obviously, to write and podcast with the flu than it is to go out and play in a major league baseball game because one is sitting down and just having to think straight, whereas the other is having to be active and perform physically. But yes, if someone is well enough to go out there and play, then maybe we should update our prior to believe that they weren't actually so sick, because if they were, then they would have been absolutely incapable of being out there. But I share your sentiments about throwing up in general. And it's been years for me. I'm on a good run. I've had great luck. And I look forward to that continuing because it is a terrible thing. Yeah, appreciate every day that you don't throw up. We're so fragile. Our bodies are so fragile, they could just start throwing up any second.

Well, hopefully not during this podcast. All right. We've got a topic today. Do you have anything you want to talk about before we get to that? Yeah, just one thing. Of all the signings that have happened since we last spoke, most of them minor, none tickled me more than the Nationals signing Will Harris to a three-year $24 million deal. I just love this. It was so narratively satisfying for him to go to the team that beat him somewhat spectacularly in the World Series because I just felt so sad for Will Harris. I felt terrible for him because I think as we discussed during one of our Patreon playoff live streams, he's been such a reliable pitcher for so long.

Minimum 200 innings since 2015. He has the third lowest ERA of any pitcher behind Zach Britton and enrolled as Chapman. He's really been great. Not really a workhorse, but elite when he has been on the mound. And yet he's never really been the guy who has been entrusted with the highest leverage situations. He's rarely been the designated closer. It's happened from time to time, but he's never really been the capital C closer. and he's never really been the last guy out of the pen in high leverage moments. And he got there this postseason, and it was really nice to see him get that exposure. And he did great his first 10 games that he pitched in the playoffs. He pitched nine squirrels innings. He was just great. He had answered the call completely. squirrels innings. He was just great. He had answered the call completely. And then, of course, he gave up the backbreaking home runs in both game six and game seven. And that just had to feel horrible. He was crying after the game seven home run to Howie Kendrick. And it was particularly

painful because he really didn't deserve either of those home runs, especially the Kendrick homer. But the game six one, that was Anthony Rendon, obviously a great hitter. And it was a Crawford Boxes home run. And it was hit at a combination of speed and angle that had almost never produced a home run before. And it had like an expected batting average of 10, I think, 0-1-0. Wow. Yeah. You're kidding me. I believe so.

That was what it said in an MLB.com article at the time. And granted, it wasn't a great pitch in that case, and he acknowledged that he had missed a spot and caught too much of the plate with a cutter. So it was understandable in that sense. But between the fact that it was a great hitter, it was not hit hard at a speed and angle combination that usually produces a home run. And, of course, he also had to deal with that, like, 10-minute break when he came on because then there was the interference call and then the non-replay review replay review. And he was just standing around there for a while. And perhaps that affected him, though there's no way to know.

And then, of course, in Game 7 with Kendrick, that pitch was a good pitch. It was a low and away cutter. It looked perfectly placed, like 98 times out of 100, it probably would have been fine. Ben Clemens wrote an article about that for Fangraphs at the time, just about how unlikely that was, how Harris had thrown this many cutters there, and they'd all led to great results and Kendrick had had a lot of trouble driving pitches in that particular spot and of course that was not crushed either and it just barely was fair it hit the foul pole so that was the bottom of the foul pole yeah so it so easily could have gone another way and he could have been the hero, and it could have been a nice moment for him, and instead it was a terrible moment for him. And so even though he had started the playoffs

pitching so well, he ended up with by far the worst championship win probability added of anyone in the 2019 postseason, and in fact the 31st worst CWPA total of any player in any postseason. So really, he was kind of the goat, even though he hadn't done much to actually deserve that status. And I don't know whether he was down on himself, whether he felt like he had choked or been unclutched. And I don't know whether people were saying that about him. But if there was any doubt whatsoever about his ability to perform in those situations, I would think it would be somewhat set to rest by the fact that the team that victimized him there, the team that benefited from those home runs he allowed, decided, yeah, we want to be in the Will Harris business. We want to sign Will Harris for the next three years. We trust him to be out there in those moments. And I would think that for him, that has to be somewhat gratifying. I mean, maybe awkward when

he goes into the clubhouse and Howie Kendrick is there, when he makes his first pitching appearance for the Nationals, and I don't know what kind of reception he would get. But still, it has to feel good. I would think that the team that beat you on the biggest stage said, this doesn't decrease our confidence in you at all, that you've been so effective for so long, that you're a righty who gets lefties out, that you've been as dependable as almost any relief pitcher, and we want more of that, even though we won the World Series in part because of you. I think that's just a satisfying conclusion to that sad saga. I love Will Harris, and that was all very well said. Another thing I like about Will Harris, I don't know if I like this about him,

but worth noting now that he's switching teams, is that my kind of recollection is, so the Astros were terrible for, you know, obviously for like a four-year period, and really, really wretched for that three-year period, and then bad in 2014. And they were just kind of starting to add players, and Harris was basically stolen from the Diamondbacks. I don't remember the circumstances of why the Diamondbacks made him freely available

and the Astros were able to just pluck him. But even at the time, it was seen as kind of a steal for Houston. And so in a way, there aren't that many players who have been there from the beginning for Houston all five years. And Harris was one, and he was one of the first kind of good major moves, major league moves, I guess, that they made. And it was a small one. It was a very quiet start of their competitive window,

but he was a significant part of that first competitive season and was phenomenal. And at the time, I think we were all really, there was a lot of appetite to see the Astros playing well instead of bad. I think we were, we were very exhausted by the story of the Astros rebuild and it was kind of exciting to see them win 86 games or whatever that year. And, uh, Will Harris was, uh, was a nice stable part of of that that I believe came at the expense of Dave Stewart, who at the time was a convenient foil. And it all just kind of seemed to work out at the time that Will Harris was a quiet, smart little pickup

that we all celebrated and that made good. I guess with anyone who was with the Astros during that period of time, you kind of have to label them as someone who knew about the cheating and didn't say anything, right? If they didn't benefit from it directly, which as a pitcher, one would think he didn't. So I don't know if that just colors your perception of every Astro from that period, even the ones we like, even the Jose Altuves of the world. So I don't know if you can't like an Astro from those teams

because of what those teams did and the fact that one would think he must have known about it. That's understandable, I guess. But from an on-field perspective and just the saga of being the GOAT and then signing with the team that made you the GOAT, I think that's a really nice conclusion to that story. All right. All right. Well, I don't know. Have you recorded any episodes since we recorded last? Well, not regular episodes. All right. Yeah. Sabermetrics of other sports episodes.

Okay. Good. I wasn't sure if you and Meg had already done this, but it was the end of the decade just happened. And so this is the start of the decade. And we always talk about decades in review. And I thought we could maybe talk about the decade to come and what we expect from it. We have been recording this podcast for less than a decade. And I was thinking about what, I mean, there was a lot of talk in the last couple weeks, including Brad Doolittle and I did a long retrospective for ESPN about what happened over the decade. And it's a nice roundup of like sort of the most pivotal moments and the most memorable moments and all that. But if you really just lay side by side what 2010 was like

and what 2019 was like, in some ways very similar and in some ways very different. And particularly if you look down at the individual level and, you know, like my life was very different in 2010 and Garrett Cole's life was very different in 2010 and everybody's life was very different in 2010. And so thinking through another decade now forward, there will be big changes. There will be unpredictable changes.

Things will be very different. And so I thought we would just kind of go into the future a little bit and talk about what we expect from these next 10 years. Okay. So I have a bunch of questions here for you, Ben. And some of them will give us an excuse to talk about the past decade too, which we never really did do a full retrospective of the decade, which is now long gone. Nobody cares. In fact, I was out of town when my piece with Brad Doolittle ran. And so I couldn't tweet it. And then I got back and then almost immediately got sick. But I thought, should I tweet it now

or is everybody like really sick? And it was like, we were like, it was January 3rd. I thought somehow it feels so old to tweet about the 20 teens in January 3rd. All right, Ben, who will be the biggest retirement in the 2020s? So this, in retrospect, I hadn't really, I don't know,

you wrote about it a little bit, but pretty big decade for retirements because we had David Ortiz and Ichiro and Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter, four players who were certain Hall of Famers and also very different from each other and all pretty beloved. And in the case of Ortiz and Mariano Rivera, still very good when they retired. And we also had Chipper Jones' retirement and Bruce Bochy's retirement, which are lesser retirements. But it was a big decade for retirement tours, for retirement gifts, for retirement announcements

ahead of time. That's a big deal. So just saying goodbye to these great players was a big part of a lot of the years in the previous decade. And I wonder who you think is in line to get the same sort of treatment in the decade to come. And partly that's a question of who you think will retire in the next decade from from baseball so that would be players but also maybe managers front office personnel i don't know i don't know who would get an announcement oh by the way i didn't say this but vince scully also huge retirement one of the big retirements

of of the century of my baseball lifetime happened this decade and there probably isn't another vince scully ahead of us so who's who's going to be the biggest retirement in this decade? The most emotional? Obviously, I think that the answer of who the most acclaimed player who will retire is pretty clearly Albert Pujols. But I don't know at this point what you think a retirement tour for Albert Pujols would look like. I don't know if you think that it would be a big deal or if it would feel necessary, but also just sort of obligatory more than emotional. Yeah, I tend to think that the retirement tour seems more significant when the player has continued to perform somewhere close to his old level. If it's a case like Pujols, where we've been watching the decline for years and years, and you almost at times have wished he would retire when he was unable to run at all

and just kind of a shadow of his former self. I don't know that at this point we would have the energy really to muster a full retirement tour. Maybe we will because he does keep climbing leaderboards and hitting significant numerical milestones. But I think when it's a case like Ortiz, who is still at the peak of his powers, Rivera, who was still essentially at the peak of his powers, Chipper Jones, who was still playing at a really high level. And Jeter, I think crucially with Jeter, he was really high level until he got injured

in 2013. So he wasn't struggling for a long time. He announced his retirement essentially after one injury ruined his 2013 season. And then he played through a bad 2014 season. But when the tour began, his last full season had been an MVP caliber season, one of his finest, in fact, at age 38. Yeah, right. So I don't know who really fits into that category. I guess it would probably be pitchers, right? Because one thing that you mentioned in your piece with Brad was just how great the great pitchers of this last decade were.

And you noted Kershaw, Scherzer, Verlander, even Scherzer, who had the third most war by a pitcher in that decade would have led all starting pitchers in the 2000s the 1980s the 1960s and the 1940s which I guess is pretty impressive considering that innings totals have continued to decline and yet he was still so good that that trio was still so great and Scherzer and Verlander essentially haven't declined at all and Scherzer and Verlander essentially haven't declined at all, and Kershaw is still quite good, and you figure that all of them will be retiring at some point this decade.

I don't necessarily figure that. Well, Verlander and Scherzer, right, for sure. Well, probably, but Verlander said a little while ago he thought he'd go to 45, but even that would be this decade. That would this decade but 46 would not be okay well i think the odds are in favor of all those guys retiring probably uh you know not in the immediate future but at some point this decade and so probably their their high performance levels will be recent enough memory at that point that it'll still feel like a real loss as opposed to just nostalgia or something so i could see that have we really seen the the retirement tour for starting pitchers so much i i can't think of it i mean when clemens retired he kept coming out of

retirement yeah it was hard to know when he was actually going to be done. And yeah, like, I don't know when other guys retired, like Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Greg Maddox, did they have real tours? I don't really recall. They were kind of nearing the end for a while. And I don't know if they actually announced it until after the fact. So maybe we haven't really had an opportunity to do that. And you'd think it would be good for a starting pitcher because you know when they're getting the ball, if they're still starting at that point, you can plan around it. You know which days they'll be pitching. You know when they'll be pitching in that game, which you couldn't know with Rivera. You couldn't know

if he'd pitch in the game at all. And you never know what a hitter will do or if he'll get a day off or something. So that would kind of be a convenient retirement tour. So I think probably that, right? Because otherwise, I'm looking at the list and it's like, you know, Posey, McCutcheon, Cano, Miguel Cabrera. I just, I don't know that Votto even, I'm not sure that they will have been at that elite level for a while. I guess one other possibility is probably Yadier Molina would get that kind of retirement tour. Yeah, the three names I was thinking of were Votto, Posey, and Molina, potentially. Yeah, I don't know. It depends how long Posey sticks around, because it may have been a while since he was really great, depending on how things go.

But yeah, Molina, for sure. Yeah. Again, depending on how much it requires you to have still been good, it would require a bounce back. But Miguel Cabrera feels like he could theoretically still. He's only had one bad season, you know, like he's had two of the last three were bad but he did hit in a in a short period of time in 2018 if you just imagine hypothetically he comes back in 2020 and he's you know he manages to put up three or four solid years as a hitter i don't know uh it could be him he's he's fun he does the thing where he like you know points down to the

first base ump to call his own appeal and stuff like that. Won the Triple Crown. Remember that? So I have another one, though. Here's my dark horse. Here's my answer, in fact. I think it requires that he win a World Series in the next five years,

but I'm going Joe Maddon. Hmm. Okay. Do managers get, well, I guess they do. Like Bruce Bochy kind of got a retirement tour of sorts. I mean,

I just feel like Madden is, so he'd be 75 at the end of the decade. So even if he has success, you'd think there's a pretty good chance that he would retire by the end of the next decade. If he wins a world series with the angels, then he would be, I think probably that would make him a Hall of Famer.

Yeah. And it would make him beloved to three franchises. He would basically have taken- That's not likely that he'll win a World Series with the Angels. No, that's true. But if he, well, I don't, in that case, he won't. Yeah, I don't think he will then.

But he would be, he would have basically taken three franchises through maybe arguably, you know, golden eras of the team. And I don't know. He is the most famous manager, I think, of the last 15, 20 years. Yeah. And so I could see that he's, you know, he's colorful.

He does. He brings zebras in and stuff. So I could see it being being possibly Joe Maddon. Yeah, it's tough because the i mean i think about ken griffey jr who at his peak was as popular as any baseball player of my lifetime the last truly the last truly kind of crossover baseball player probably and yet other than cheater i mean he was much bigger than cheater though cheater was was not a crossover to the extent that griffey was like griffey you could i don't know. Griffey was one of the two or three biggest athletes

in the world, right? Yeah, I guess. Jeter in terms of fame. I don't know. Anyway. Yeah. And yet just a, you know, a decade of, of decline kind of took so much of the momentum out of that, that he didn't really have a Jeter-esque farewell tour at all. So I think that if you look at the active war leaderboards, you just see a lot of players who are in decline and have been in decline for a while. Yeah, right. Granke, I guess. Yeah, Granke's an interesting one.

I was actually going to ask, of Granke, Scherzer, and Verlander, so Granke's 35, Verlander's 36, and Scherzer's 34, which one would you bet on pitching in 2029? Probably Verlander. You think Verlander, not Granke? Yeah, I think so. Just Verlander, he hasn't even lost much stuff yet, whereas Granke has and has compensated for it well, but that doesn't work forever. Whereas Verlander conceivably could have almost like a Grinke-esque adjustment coming where he somehow manages to be good with a 90-mile-per-hour fastball. I would give Grinke a retirement tour.

Yeah, sure. Grinke, he's beloved in a lot of ways. Maybe not so much by players. I think a big part of it is how beloved you are by other players right so like david ortiz was beloved by players yadier molina is beloved by players i don't know if cranky is beloved by players he's he's beloved by baseball twitter but that doesn't get you a retirement tour necessarily oh that's a great point although cranky is isn't cranky generally pretty well liked by teammates i think so who find him so. Who find his quirks more endearing and non-threatening once they've played with him?

Yeah, probably. I'm struggling to think of any sort of non-player, non-uniformed personnel who would get that sort of send-off that Vin Scully got. I mean, there's only one Vin Scully. I don't know if there's any broadcaster that's close to that level. I guess John Miller, maybe, if John Miller were to retire at some point this decade, maybe. Yeah. Get that kind of farewell. It could be.

He's been off the national scene for so long. True. He's just kind of—he probably has just become a regional broadcaster to most people since he left ESPN 20 years ago but yeah John Miller's he's an all-time great but I mean nobody talks about John Miller the same way that you talk about Vince Scully ultimately being a broadcaster is is is not just about the mechanics of doing the job well I think John Miller does it as well as anybody's ever done it uh but there's a certain kind of magic that happens to some some people and for vince gully it's part of uh partly it's a matter of timing partly it's a matter of who he

was and and how people related to his personality over the course of many decades how about bob euchre yeah bob euchre is an interesting one yeah bob euchre is an interesting one yeah yeah no that's a good one yeah because he's got got the national fame from being a celebrity of sorts, which was decades ago, but he's been doing it for so long that he has that beloved status. Again, maybe more of a regional guy at this point, but then so was Scully by the end. So I think he probably has that sort of status. All right. Let's see here. What will the record for league-wide strikeout rate be at the end of 2029?

Yeah. I think I would bet that this is the decade where the increase reverses, at least temporarily reverses. Reverses? Yeah. Reverses. You think it'll go down? I think so because at some point, like if, what are we at?

13, 14 consecutive years of increasing now? I think something like that. And the one this year, the leap this year was the second biggest leap in history. Right. this year was the second biggest leap in history. Right. And there's so much scrutiny, so much attention surrounding that. I think it's generally cited as one of the big problems about baseball, whether fans agree with that or not, I don't know, but certainly by media members who are maybe missing an earlier era of baseball when strikeouts weren't so prevalent. And so it's probably pretty rare in baseball history for any league-wide trend to sustain itself for, it would be almost a quarter century by the time this decade is over, if it continues to increase year after year. like that, maybe size of players or velocity or something like that. But I would think that at some point this decade, like if it keeps increasing at the rate that it has in the past few years,

what was the increase in 2019 from 2018? From 8.5 to 8.9 per nine. Okay. So I don't know what that is in terms of percentage. It was something like 23% of plate appearances ended in strikeouts in 2019, and that was up from 22.3%, so almost a percentage point on average each year. Then you're talking another five percentage points on top of where we are. So we'd be at 28% of plate appearances by the end of the decade, ending in strikeouts. And then plus the home runs, maybe the home runs will recede a little, but home runs, walks, hit by pitches are up. So you'd be pushing what, like 40% of play appearances ending in no ball in play and i just don't know if we can go another decade of constantly talking about this without mlb intervening in some way and again i don't think it would be that difficult to reverse this or halt this at least if mlb really decided that that was a priority. There are so many things you could do with the strike zone or the mound or whatever

that I have to think at some point if things keep climbing at the same rate, this will be the decade when MLB says, okay, that's enough. Let's take at least some small measure to curb this and maybe it'll go backward. I'm not saying it'll go way backward, but it'll at least stop climbing and maybe not continually increase. it'll go backward. I'm not saying it'll go way backward, but it'll at least stop climbing and maybe not continually increase. So I would guess that by the end of the decade, it will be higher than it is now, but not as high as it would be if it were to keep increasing at the same pace. So if it's at 23% now, I'll say 25%. 25%. Now you've switched percentage and I need a per nine.

So what did you say it was this year? It was 8.9 per nine this year. Okay. So I don't know, per nine, I'll say 9.5. Is that too much? It's hard for me to do the translation here. Yeah, I mean, that would be equivalent to the increase of the past two years okay the rate the rate of increase over the past two years

would be what you would be projecting it to max out at over the next 10 i mean i think we we know that strikeouts have been kind of going up in a general sense for forever right since the old days but until you look at these these rates over the decades it's it really is incredible how slow the changes have always gone yeah and for long periods it would plateau or it would plateau sometimes it would go down yeah because mlb would do something about it and then temporarily it's like the the history of baseball is like finding ways to stop pitchers from getting too good i guess maybe yeah but even when it would go so okay so they would change something and it would go down so 68 they they change the the rules regarding standardized

mound heights and it starts going down so it's at six in 1967 5.9 and 68 and then it starts declining and it declines until the early 80s and then in the late 70s early 80s it starts to climb again so it's climbing up from about five it reaches six again in 1987 okay so we're back to six at 1987 and at this point it's it's a basically in a growth mode it dips a little after that so maybe you could say 1994 is when it reaches six again and it never goes under six again. All right. So 1994 is six. From 1994, it takes 15 years to go to seven.

And then it takes one, two, three, four, five, six, seven to get to six or to get to eight. So 15 years to get to seven, seven years to get to eight. And this year it was at 8.9. It only took four, three years to get to 8.9. And we should almost certainly pass nine next year. So in four years. So the rate is, is actually increasing, which shouldn't theoretically, if it takes, I don't know if it takes more energy to accelerate, then it should be harder to, I don't know, what am I talking about? No one knows less about how much energy it takes to accelerate than me. I was, I got way too deep here. I'm just saying that nine happened fast. I don't, yeah, I don't, on the other hand though, it feels like we're kind of in a place I feel like

where the league is a little bit more open-minded the league is not nearly as bound to tradition as they used to be yeah however the league also has less kind of power to do things however they want then than they ever have i mean there's the the there's the collective bargaining issue for one thing and so that is a actual tangible check on their ability to do things. But also, like institutions just simply aren't as powerful anymore. And the league itself does not have nearly as strong of a monopoly on the public attention span as it used to. And you could imagine that they would feel a little bit more risk averse than they ever would before, because they're no longer like the kings who can do whatever you know they want with this sport and so i have

wondered why it has taken them so long to to do something already and it might just be that they don't really have the power to do it anymore that they sense that they can't just come out and say we're changing baseball on the other, maybe that's exactly the opposite. Maybe they have all the power in the world. Yeah, they've certainly started talking about it more and testing things in the Atlantic League and having some small rule changes and at least bringing it up. in the direction of being a little less precious and protective about tradition and maybe intervening to make baseball look like it's perceived that we want it to look like. So yeah, I would think left unchecked, the strikeout rate will keep increasing, but I just kind of doubt that it can be left unchecked for another decade. All right. There are 2,430 baseball games scheduled for next year.

If you prorate that over 10 years, that would be 24,300. How many baseball games will be played in the majors? So is this, okay, so you're asking me to- This is like a three-part question. So you're asking me,

will there be a work stoppage, essentially? That's one of them. And then will the schedule change? Will the schedule change? Will the schedule change? Two. And will there be expansion? Three. Boy, that's a lot to answer with one question, especially because some of these things cancel each other out. So I would guess that the schedule length will not change, or if it does change, it'll be a very slight change. It just seems difficult to do. I

think that because of the decreased revenue that you would get from fewer games, presumably, unless you could compensate with greater attendance and higher ratings in the remaining games, which I guess is possible, it's still a lot of inertia to overcome. We've been playing 162 games for a long time, and there are obvious reasons not to change that. And unlike basketball, say, where I think the number of games has rendered large parts of the regular season almost meaningless and an afterthought because of the way basketball works, I don't think that's true in baseball because you just need so many more games to get to a team's true talent in baseball that even 162 is not giving us more information than we need about which are the best teams, I would say. So I'm going to say that that stays pretty stable and more or less rule that out. And expansion, gosh. So, I mean, we're past 20 years now since the last round of expansion. And, I mean, what's the longest?

This is the longest already that we've gone, right, since expansion started. Oh, yeah, they had, so 61, 62, 69, 70. I think it's 72 right? And then 77 and then 93 and then 98 So yeah it's already been a very long time

And granted there aren't As many markets left out there That are viable hosts for baseball teams But I think they're probably Enough that at some point This decade we will see movement There because we've certainly seen a lot of smoke, a lot of discussion. Now, will it happen soon enough that games will actually begin to be played in a new city this decade? I don't know because it takes time. out all the legal stuff and find a place to put the ballpark and build the ballpark and do the expansion draft and figure out how that works and then have the team start so that's like a period of years even once you know that it's going to happen and we're not really near the point where

we know that it's going to happen so if it does happen you'd have to think that it won't happen until the end of the decade and so i don't know that it would make that meaningful a difference. 14, by the way, four teams in 69, none in 70. Okay. Right. And it was 61 in 62. Okay. So I think, yeah, I'd bet on that happening, but let's say that that increases the number of games by, gosh, I don't know, like 300 or something. Well, it'd have to be more than that, I guess, but a few hundred. And then the work stoppage, I mean, that's the big question. That would be the projected biggest story of this decade, right? Because probably what will turn out to be the biggest stories of this decade, right? Because probably what will turn out to be the biggest stories of this decade,

most of them will not have been predictable or foreseeable, but that's one that we can foresee. We know that there's either going to be a new CBA or there's going to be a work stoppage, or I guess two CBAs, right? Because the next one will expire before the end of this decade too. And we know that this next one is going to be a big one. It's going to be contentious. It's going to be one where the players are more dug in than they have been in some time. Maybe tensions are higher than they have been in, oh, at least the last 15 years or so. So the potential for a work stoppage seems to be higher than it has been for quite a while, certainly than it was

at any point in this last decade. And so if you're talking about the potential for a full season to be wiped out, I mean, that's 2,430 games that would go off the board right then and there. I think it's unlikely, I guess, that we would lose the whole season just because both sides have incentive to play baseball and because you might avert a work stoppage still. So if it happens, I would bet on it being less than a full season. And I don't know, maybe the games that we lose from that would be balanced out by the added games from expansion. So when you boil it all together, I sort of expect there to be the same number of games

that there were in this past decade. I can't believe that there hasn't been expansion in so long. It feels like the game is totally out of whack right now. So I think that there will be, like you say, the fact that there is not, like those things don't happen overnight.

And so the fact that it's 2020 and we're not talking about which two cities it's going to be. Well, we about it but not in any yeah not right it does push the clock or push the whatever starting point wherever it so but i just can't imagine that we'd go another 10 years without expansion yeah and so although it is possible that teams will relocate instead of adding new teams, if, you know, if Tampa Bay just isn't viable, if Oakland's ballpark situation falls apart again, something like that, then you might end up with teams moving instead of new teams. But but yes, I would expect new teams. I'd expect 32 teams by the end of the decade. But yes, I would expect new teams.

I'd expect 32 teams by the end of the decade. And I, with no real reason for thinking this, I'm optimistic that there will not be a work stoppage. And so I'm going to say that there will be more than 2,400, 24,300. I don't think they'll change the length of the season. I would like them to, but I don't think they will. Yeah, it is two rounds of bargaining, though, that will happen, which means two big chances for a work stoppage. So even if in this next round, the players decide, okay, we're not going to hold out for everything we want, and the owners don't give in and give the players what they want,

and everyone just decides, well, we're making enough money that even if uh we the players think we should be getting a bigger piece of the pie the piece that we're getting is is big enough that we don't want to go to war over this so we'll we'll kick the can down the road and we'll see what happens next time and then who knows maybe the next time it all comes to a head so there are two chances for there to be a work stoppage this decade and hopefully neither one will happen but there's a chances for there to be a work stoppage this decade, and hopefully neither one will happen. But there's a significant chance there because the things that the players want this time around, the owners really will not want to give them. And there just doesn't seem to be that much that the players can kind of concede to get what they want. So it's sort of hard to envision how this all gets resolved to everyone's

satisfaction, or I guess that's not how negotiating works. No one is satisfied, but I don't know that it will be easy to solve this thing. So hoping for the best, but to me, because we're talking about expansion not happening for several years at least and probably only two teams then and that's not that many new games that combined with the two rounds of of cba negotiations that could potentially lead to a work stoppage i think it kind of evens out but if i had to bet on more games or fewer games i would also bet on more games yeah yeah i said i'm optimistic there won't be a work stoppage. I think that the, my somewhat more pessimistic take on that is I think that it's more likely that the players

union will just get weaker than that. They will actually go on strike. And so I don't know that that's a great outcome either, but it feels like, I don't know, it feels to me like the most valuable thing to a player in 2020 on an individual level is their ability to go out and play while they're in their performative peak. And I don't know that I feel it. I know that there is a lot of energy out there, more energy now than there had been three or four years ago, to speak collectively and to criticize management and to bring these issues up again. For a long time, it felt like we didn't even hear employment issues talked about by players, and they're a lot more open about discussing it nowadays.

But I don't know if I see the energy to actually stop playing when they have what they see as a very rare opportunity to do so. We'll see. I don't know that I see a great outcome either way. to do so. We'll see. I don't know that I see a great outcome either way. So back in 2012, one of the pet quirky ideas that people at Baseball Perspectives or Fangraphs or on this podcast would talk about was something like the opener. And it came to pass. The opener is a thing. Maybe you could say that before the decade or at the start of the decade, the shift was also in that realm, although it wasn't quite as rare. But the shift also went from something that, you know, other than with a very occasional player like Barry Bonds, was being done practically never and expanded to become almost the default

defensive alignment and expanded to various ways in the outfield and relocating players between infield and outfield. What is the, what is the weird idea that people talk about today that will come to pass in the next decade strategy? The mid plate appearance pitching change. I think that'll happen at some point this decade, but I don't think it will become prevalent or take over, but I do expect it to happen at some point.

starters and relievers, which is not very exciting to talk about, but basically more bullpen games and even shorter starting rotation outings and fewer designated starters and just kind of a big mix of various pitchers in indistinguishable roles, which I think probably 2019 was sort of a step away from that relative to previous seasons just because bullpens didn't perform that well during the regular season on the whole and then the postseason was kind of dominated by starting pitchers. obvious candidate and something like, I mean, the opener, that wasn't necessarily something that we were talking about in 2010 or 2009, right? That's, uh, Brian Grosnick blogged about that in, I forget what year it was, like 2013 or something was when he proposed that idea. Yeah. I'm sure it happened. Probably not the opener. I think that, my guess is that the idea of bullpen games was out there. Yeah, right.

But yeah, not the opener. Yeah. I wrote back in July about some of the trends that one team at least was doing a lot this year that maybe in the future could become the norm. Like the fact that a couple teams this year shifted on more than half of pitches, and so maybe that's the way that baseball is going. And one of the things that I wrote about in there was the trend toward fewer fastballs and maybe more breaking balls than fastballs overall. I don't know whether we'll ever get to that point where it actually flips completely like that, but it's possible 58.5% was the league-wide fastball rate. And compared to 2008, that was like seven and a half fewer fastballs per hundred pitches. So if

we had another decline of roughly that magnitude in the rest of this decade, then we would be at basically 50-50. So I think that's possible. I don't know if that would be the optimal distribution. At some point, you're going to want to throw fastballs. They are good pitches in moderation. So I don't know where exactly that breakeven point is, but that would be one of them. We have seen teams like, I think, the Angels

through fewer fastballs than other types of pitches in 2019. And so maybe that. And the Angels and the Rays have also had more bullpen innings than rotation innings. Again, kind of a boring just extension of a trend we've already seen. So I don't know what else it could be other than like maybe two-way players come back in a big way or something spurred by Otani and Lorenzen and McKay and this little wave we've seen if Otani is actually successful if he completely fulfills his promise then maybe there would be some some copycats there but I don't know that still seems like something that would be a rarity to me we've talked about using edgertronic cameras to design knuckleballs and create knuckleball pitchers better i could imagine

a team cracking the knuckleball yeah and basically being able to turn not any person off the street but many many pitchers into league average pitchers for free so maybe something like that i could imagine maybe there being a pitch that doesn't exist now that exists in 10 years and the team makes the most of that basically invents a pitch do you the angels last year were nearly the first team to not have a pitcher throw 100 innings right season and that was partly because of the tyler skaggs death and they and and they ultimately did have a pitcher throw 100 innings and so it still has not happened do you think that by 2029 it will be a will will some team have have done that and b will it be common will some team do

that every year i don't think it should be common so i don't think so i think it it's getting likelier and likelier to happen but most teams i think have a starter or multiple starters who should be throwing more innings than that just because you want more innings concentrated with your best arms. So with the Angels, it was this confluence of circumstances, skags, of course, and then other injuries and just not having a good pitching staff to begin with, or at least a good starting rotation. And just sort of everything went wrong for them them and they still just managed to do it so as the upper end continues to fall and maybe it will slightly it does get more likely but I doubt it like could I envision like a

raise pitching staff or something that was just all 90 inning guys yeah i guess that could happen but even then i think it would probably take some bad luck and injuries because there's always going to be one guy who you want pitching more than that so you'd need those guys not to be able to go more than that i don't think that would be the blueprint for a team if you had to start writing a book right now to run at the end of the decade about, well, because you just wrote a book about basically the last decades through line of player development. Do you have a sort of a big idea that you think in 10 years will seem like a book topic that right now nobody is thinking about? Would you give it away if you did? Probably not. But no, I don't't i don't have one

so uh i mean i i wouldn't have thought of the last one i wrote at the beginning of last decade so i doubt i could think of it now if i could think of it now then i don't know that it would even be the defining story by the end of the decade because too much would have changed by then like i guess the obvious one would be like if this is the decade that we solve injuries you know like we we fix pitchers they don't hurt their elbows anymore i don't know how that would happen but let's say this is the decade when i don't know mlB allows some sort of implant that strengthens your UCL so that it doesn't snap or whatever, some form of prevention, there's some legal supplement you can take to strengthen that weak point, and suddenly pitchers don't break anymore, at least not in such a catastrophic way. That would be probably one of the biggest stories of the decade. And the story of how that happened would be sort of like the sequel to The Arm.

That was the big problem, one of the big problems of the previous decade and really all preceding decades. And so if that were solved, that would be big. Or even if one team just managed to crack injuries somehow and just had such a healthy roster all decade that they were great. And that was because people have been saying that's the new money ball for like the last 10 or 15 years, right? Figuring out injuries, preventing or treating injuries better than anyone else. And that seems like an advantage that if someone got it, it wouldn't last that long because people move from team to team and players move from team to team. And that seems like it would be a pretty tough secret to keep, which is probably for the best that one team not have that knowledge to itself for very long. So I think that would probably be the most obvious pick for something that we could foresee. I suspect that there have been way bigger increases in injury prevention than we tally because they allow players to just

play much much harder and so the injury rate stays constant but the level of the level of effort that is given and the kind of force that players use in their course of play continuously goes up it just feels to me that players do everything so much harder than they used to 15 or 20 years ago and so much better and yet we don't see more injuries exactly although there are there have been periods including in the past decade where with pitchers particularly we did but for the most part they've stayed fairly steady and in the last few years have actually shown some progress right yeah at least when it comes to Tommy John. And if you look at like shoulder injuries for pitchers,

there's been a lot of progress there where you don't see a lot of career-ending rotator cuff injuries anymore. I mean, those things happen from time to time, but I think the shoulder regimens and the treatments have really improved to the point that, yes, maybe now the weak point in the chain is the elbow. And so pitchers hurt their elbows instead of their shoulders. But still, we sort of addressed one thing that historically has been a death knell for many promising pitchers. All right. Last question. And this is two part because we first have to answer the first one. The question is, will baseball be better in 2029 than it is in

2019? And before we answer that, I want to know if for our complaints or also for the things that we rave about, you think collectively in the whole as an experience, baseball is better in 2019 than it was in 2009. Hmm. Well, I think the players are better than they were then. I think the level of play is higher, and also there is this really unprecedented crop of young, extremely talented, fun, watchable, charismatic, young players, particularly hitters, who have come along. And so in that sense, I think there are more players that I would

change the channel to see now than there were then, or at least new players. So yes, I think it's probably better in that way. It's better in the coverage, I think. There's probably just more coverage of baseball, better coverage of baseball than there was 10 years ago. It's just easier to follow. MLB TV is better than it used to be. Twitter has made baseball better, I think, to follow, at least for people who consume the game that way. The stats, of course, have become better and better and more and more widely available. So if you care about all of that better and better and more and more widely available. So if you care about all of that ancillary stuff, all that stuff that affects sort of how you be a fan, I think it's better now than it was. Is it better in terms of the actual style of play? No, maybe not. I mean, I don't know. I

think we tend to care less about the strikeout rate increase than the typical fan does, or at least is perceived to. But fewer balls in play, fewer steals, fewer fielding opportunities. I think it's probably hard to argue that that's a net positive. So in that sense, things have gotten worse. But overall, I think there's more to enjoy about baseball now than there was then, probably. I don't know if that would be a widely shared opinion, but I think that's true. Yeah, I think the playoff format that they have right now that was a development of this past decade was a huge improvement, has been a huge success. I don't remember if we were skeptical of it or not, but I love it.

And I think that it has made the regular season better and it has made the postseason better. So I would say that that's been net positive. I think that, I mean, this is not baseball. So although I guess in a sense, it was baseball, because MLB advanced media is partly responsible for it. But the quality and accessibility of broadcasts across the country is amazing. I know it also causes frustration because some games are blacked out and maybe it is more painful to have a game blacked out than to have 29 games available if the one you want to watch is the one that is blacked out.

But I mean, this is not exactly 2010 or 20... I guess by 2009, I think we had mlb tv but for most of that decade i mean i remember going for that and but it didn't work as well okay yeah i remember going to a parking lot in orange county and sitting there in the dark parking lot and listening to the fuzzy radio broadcast of the San Diego Padres games 150 miles away, who I could barely make out. And I hated their broadcast team at the time, just so that I could follow a baseball game in the evening, like in the early 2000s, mid 2000s. And I mean, the accessibility that we have now is really miraculous. I mean, it would have shocked me as a 20-year-old to know that my life would be this. And so I want to be grateful for that.

I think that, like you say, talented, fun, charismatic hitters. And I've made the argument that young hitters are more dynamic. And if you could, you would want your best players to be young because they play a more dynamic style of play so i think that's been a net positive uh and uh and so all that has been good i think that there's a positive development of the last decade is that we engage with the dark parts of the game in a more um honest robust and critical way. And I mean, it is, I don't know if shocking is the right word, probably shameful is the right word, how we overlooked the sins of players and managers when we were growing up, and when we were also young adults, and that probably goes into the 2010s. And so it becomes a harder sport to follow

when you're grappling with all those things. And so in that way, it's not as enjoyable. That's obviously not the important part of that, but it is a truthful part of that. And I think that those things, while we talk about them more, I think they are rarer than they were. And so that is a positive.

Right. There weren't even domestic violence suspensions in 2009. So we might talk about them not being long enough or them not being applied perfectly now, but they exist, which is progress. So, yeah, I guess you could say that the Astros led tanking fad and the way that the league was very imbalanced this year, historically so, and you had the super teams and the terrible teams. I don't know that that's affected my

enjoyment of baseball particularly because I'm not really a fan of any one team. And so I'm consuming the product as a whole and the super teams are pretty fun. It's pretty fun to watch teams that are really great at baseball. And no, it's not fun to watch the teams that are terrible at the time, but you know, I'm, I'm usually not watching much of the teams that are terrible at the time, whether they win 55 games or 65 games. So it's really bad if you're a fan of those teams. And I guess maybe also if you're playing those teams and maybe a lower percentage of games in general are competitive or have playoff implications, as I think Rob Arthur has shown.

So that's bad. But, you know, I don't know if this will be a permanent state of affairs. I would expect it to be temporary. Yeah, I don't know if it's temporary. You're right. You say it's really bad if you're a fan of those teams, and you and I are largely national observers at this point. It is a regional sport.

It is maybe more than ever a regional sport. And if you're a fan of one of those teams, it's inescapable. sport. And if you're a fan of one of those teams, it's inescapable that you don't really have most in most cases, a second team that you care almost as much about or, you know, a national story that you care almost as much about. You might have things that you do care about. You might be a fan of the Blue Jays and also care about what happens in the other 29 cities. But you care far most deeply about what's happening to the Blue Jays. And you get sort of trapped in this prison where the season doesn't matter from day one. And I think that is an aspect of it that you and I can probably overlook a little bit because

we don't have the sort of feeling of hopelessness that this season is going to be, you know, nothing but waiting until it gets good again sometime down the road. For us, extremes are interesting. Right, exactly. In either direction. I like writing about bad teams. Yeah. So we sort of have skewed incentives, I guess.

That's true. All right. So then will it be better in 2029 than it is now? That's true. All right. So then will it be better in 2029 than it is now? Well, I would guess that the level of play will continue to increase because it has basically since the beginning now. So I think players will be better than they are now. But it's hard to say whether the product will be more compelling. Obviously, the ability to follow baseball and the stats that we have will get better and better.

I don't know whether they'll ever get to the point where they're so good that we feel like all the answers are there, like there are no more mysteries, like we have no more questions because stat cast war or whatever is just so all-encompassing that everything is laid out there for us and there's nothing to wonder about anymore. But I don't think we'll really get to that point because baseball and sports are just inherently unpredictable and there's so much randomness that you can never perfectly anticipate what will happen. So again, there's so much uncertainty around the CBA and what the economic structure of baseball will look like. And if there are work stoppages,

then that could be very damaging to public perception of the sport and interest in the sport as it was in 94. Probably baseball will occupy a lower percentage of the national mindshare in 2029, just as it does now relative to 20 you know, 20 years ago, because, I mean, that's kind of true of everything, right? I mean, there are just so many entertainment options out there, and there will continue to be more and more, presumably, that no one cares about any one thing as much as they did when there were three TV channels or whatever, you know? So I guess relative to other interests, maybe you could say that baseball will thrive just because there will be, you know, 100 streaming services and no one will be watching the same TV shows and no one will be listening to the same music or seeing the same movies. And so sports will continue to be something of a unifier, you know, because it's something that people still want to watch live. And baseball may be more regional than national, but still a lot of people care about it.

And it will be harder for, say, any one TV show, let's say, to have the same number of people care about it. So I don't know, hard to project, but I would guess that baseball will continue to be less of a national pastime than it once was. But again, that's sort of true of everything. So I don't know if baseball's decline in that area will be worse than anything else. So I would guess that I will enjoy baseball just as much 10 years from now and maybe more in some ways. But in terms of just how much it sort of stops the presses when something happens in baseball,

that will probably continue to decrease. And as you've said in the past, you've speculated that maybe one reason that we care about things is because we perceive that other people care about them. And so if we sense that fewer people care about baseball, maybe we will be less inclined to care about baseball. Not you and not me, maybe, but a new generation of people. A new generation, yeah. I think I'm stuck with it.

At this point, I'm going to have to see how it ends. And as long as they're playing games and as long as I'm alive, I don't even know if it matters whether it's good or not. I'm in it until the end. So it's really hard for me to even answer the question of whether it will be better in 10 years. Cause I don't even know what I want from it. I want it to make me happy. Like emotionally, I would like them to do everything I would like to see, but as an actual lived experience, I think just having it on is, is, is what I need. It's, it's crucial to my life. It's crucial to my life.

It's crucial to my health. And so I think as long as it keeps going in 2029, I'm going to look back at the decade and feel pretty good that it existed. Yep, I think so too. It's very, very rare that it makes me sad, you know? It breaks my heart, but it's very rare that it makes me sad. Even if it got bad in some way, I would keep paying attention. I think that it's kind of like when you watch five seasons of a TV show and it's not that great anymore, but you watch season six anyway just because you have so much time invested and maybe it's a sunk cost,

but you just kind of want to see what happens to the characters, even if the show isn't actually that good anymore. I hope that won't be the case with baseball. Baseball is still good, but even if it were the case, we would probably keep watching. I mean, it's possible that like a lower percentage of my professional life will involve baseball at the end of the decade than it does now, which is true now compared to a decade ago, but I would think that my affection for it won't change in any significant way. All right. Have you thrown up? We made it through. No throw up. All right. Good job. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks for listening. I look forward to finding out how wrong

we were about the decade to come. We talked about Will Harris signing with the Nationals. While the Nationals have been busy in the last week or so, they also brought back Estrubal Cabrera and Daniel Hudson, and they signed Starlin Castro. And most recently, they signed Eric Thames, which gives me an opportunity to relay a fun fact that was sent to us by listener Ryan. Eric Thames' most similar player on Baseball Reference is Marcus Thames, and Marcus Thames' most similar player is Eric Thames. Same spelling, different pronunciation. Fun fact. If you're just back at work and back to podcast listening after the holidays, you may notice that the Effectively Wild feed was full over the break. I hosted a seven-episode multi-sport sabermetrics exchange series

where I had experts from a dozen different sports on to talk about the state of advanced analysis in those sports. I found it fascinating. Seems like a lot of you have liked it. So if you missed it and you're catching up, I hope that you will Seems like a lot of you have liked it. So if you missed it and you're catching up, I hope that you will give it a chance and dive into that backlog. In the outro to one of those episodes, I mentioned an old system called ESPN Bat Track that used to display bat speeds in real time on ESPN baseball broadcasts in the late 90s, early 2000s, which was

something I had completely forgotten about and we haven't really seen on baseball broadcasts since. And I emailed one of the people who used to work at Sport Vision and worked on that system and provided a few details about it. Since then, I have corresponded with Phil Orleans, who's been working on baseball broadcasts at ESPN for decades, and I brought it up with him. And he said, the short answer is that it was something we tried because Joe Morgan said it would be great for him to use on the air. and then not surprisingly the numbers didn't tell the story he was expecting. When he lost interest, we didn't have much else to do with it at that time. It's always bothered me that we just let it go away. I guess we moved our focus on to K-Zone and PitchFX, then when StatCast came along, ExitVelo became the hot new thing, and I think Batspeed just lost some of its allure. I

think they both have value, and if I was scouting, I'd want to know bat speed as much as exit velo. Bat speed to me is an indicator of potential, much like spin rate is for pitchers. Spin rate doesn't inherently give you the best movement, but it shows you the potential for great movement if you master spin efficiency. He continues, for some reason, StatCast can't see the bat movement in their data.

I think they are working on some limb tracking now that may include the bat in the next year or two. I've heard the same because StatCast switched from TrackMan to Hawkeye, which is an optical system that should do a better job of limb tracking. And Phil says, as an aside, our numbers seemed high compared to what I've seen from the Blast or Zep type of devices. I'm not sure why. We used a system of six radar guns on the backstop. Obviously, it was not a device on the bat like Blast or Zep. Perhaps we were measuring the end of the Obviously, it was not a device on the bat like Blaster Zep. Perhaps we were measuring the end of the bat, which is probably moving faster than the sweet spot.

As you can see, our numbers seem in line with the players you would expect. The leaders were quite interesting. And he sent me a little bit of data on bat speed from players back in the late 90s and in 2000, which he gave me permission to share, so I will link to a Google Doc with that info. But according to this, the fastest swing that was tracked was Sammy Sosa on August 8th, 1999, who swung 99 miles per hour. Then Mike Piazza, Juan Gonzalez, Richie Saxon were all at 98. Fun list of names. So that's the story on ESPN Bat Track. Maybe someday soon we will start to see that show up on baseball broadcasts again,

as it has now started to show up on cricket broadcasts. But technologically speaking, evidently it's been feasible for 20 years or so now. I don't know for sure how accurate it was, but I think it's useful data, and I would want to see it on a broadcast at least sometimes. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Robert Guretta, Paul Bellows, Michael Hunter, Matt Fogelson, and Chad Post. 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. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastandfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. We will likely get to some emails next time. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance

and we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. You don't want to talk, I know it's off tonight And if you say it's true, I guess I saw it coming