Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1493: Getting Dusty in Here

Episode Date: January 30, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the “vibrathrob” episode, the Astros hiring Dusty Baker, Kris Bryant reportedly losing his service-time grievance, and Delmon Young raking in Australia, then answer listener emails about a disrespectful intro for Isiah Kiner-Falefa, teams patenting tactics, and the enduring legacy of Carlos Beltrán’s NLCS-ending strikeout, plus Stat Blasts about […]

My brain's, my brain's higher. Every boy and girl wants that demand. When you feel you've done about the best you can. Motherfuck the wagon, come join the band. My brain's, my brain's higher Again, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hi. I know the official position of this podcast is that the banging scheme is a good name for a cheating scandal. But I've been reading Paul Dixon's book, The Hidden Language of Baseball, about the history of, among other things, signs and sign stealing, which we talked to Paul Dixon about. But now I'm reading it with a more, more careful eye. And so this is going to go back to the name of the banging scheme,

just so you know. You know about the scheme in the early 1900s where a little used member of the team was out in the outfield or, you know, various places where he could pick up the signs from the catcher and then he would buzz, he would send a buzz to the third base coach who could feel the buzzer in a special spot in the field where a buzzer had been installed he could feel it through his foot and then he could relay the sign to the battery you know this one yep all right 1900 phillies right yeah exactly and so uh the name of that scheme according to paul According to Paul Dixon, is the vibra-throb episode.

No. Yes, vibra-throb. According to who labeled it the vibra-throb episode. Well, I'm going to tell you, Ben, this word vibra-throb only exists three places in the entire world one is in the hidden language of baseball where there's not a citation for this word and where it only appears once and where i'm assuming paul dixon didn't make it up he says rather than deter others the quote vibra throb episode seemed to encourage them that is the only use in the book the vibra throb episode wow the only other two places in the world according to google where vibra throb exists as a

word at all one of them is a message board on speed development for athletes under a thread on vibration training. So that's one. This is a message board from 2003. The other is from a blog post, a WordPress blog in 2012, in which some sort of, I don't know, music. I think this is music criticism, where the phrase, the second movement features a slower riff,

which is swiftly overtaken and swamped by a tidal wave of vibra throb so that's it and so uh i would have been afraid to google vibra throb but not much there no not much there so that's it vibra throb the vibra throb episode all right gosh i'm forced to conclude that sign stealing is good if it gives us the Vibra Throb episode and the banging scheme. That was when the rumors were flying around about the buzzers that the Astros were supposedly using, which has not been substantiated. The upside of that was that I thought we could add a vibratory element to the name for the scheme. It would be the vibrating banging scheme or something, which would have only enhanced it. But yeah, I think Vibrothrob episode

may be even better than Banging Scheme. All right. Do you have anything you want to talk about? Actually, you should just take over this episode. I guess I started it, but now you're leading it. All right. Well, we're going to do some emails and presumably a stat blast,

but a bit of banter and news before that. So the Astros officially picked their straight arrow Gennaro, and it is as expected in the past few days, Dusty Baker, which is just a fascinating fit in many ways. It's something that would have been inconceivable just a few months ago that Dusty Baker could be managing the Astros. Even if you had told me that something had happened to AJ Hinch and the Astros had to hire a new manager, I never would have come up with Dusty Baker. No, whatever happened to A.J. Hinch would have also had to have happened to 400 other managers. It would have had to have been a manager pandemic to make it make sense, given what we thought we knew. Which is exactly why the Astras have hired Dusty Baker,

because they want to distance themselves from their previous reputation. And really, there's no better way to do that than hiring Dusty Baker, whose reputation as this dinosaur, I think, is certainly exaggerated. People remember him and still cite overworking Carrie Wood and Mark Pryor and complaining about guys clogging the bases. And that was 2003 and 2004. So it's time to update our references here. Yet, I would not say that Dusty Baker is on the cutting edge of managerial trends for better or for worse. I don't think that the Astros will not be issuing an intentional walk through the duration of the regular season again. So I wouldn't say that Dusty is a great in-game manager, but clearly he has been a successful

manager over a long period. He's managed for 22 years in the majors. He has a career 540 winning percentage and say what you will about how much managers impact team performance, but you probably can't be a terrible manager if your teams have been that successful. And I know he hasn't won a World Series. Maybe he will now, but it's really a fascinating decision because it's a one-year deal with a club option. So the Astros could just do this for one year, kind of, you know, it's a band-aid, it's restoring their their reputation and then they can go in a completely different direction they can rehire aj hinch if they want to in 2021 not that

they ever would but it's sort of a short-term stopgap just okay let's uh let's be the astros who everyone doesn't hate for a year and we'll bring in a guy who's respected and he has some gravitas and he has some standing in the game and there's a perception that he will right the ship and i guess the idea is that a he might be a perfectly fine manager b it's a good veteran team which seems like the ideal situation for dusty it's just you know you bring him in to manage the clubhouse and it's not like you need the manager necessarily to eke out extra wins from this roster although you wouldn't want the manager to cost you wins in the playoffs but it will really be interesting to see how he fits in with the Astros front office which we don't even

know what that will really look like once the season starts but will he be a conduit as many managers are expected to be now or walking into this situation where really he has the power because he's the one the Astros are bringing him in to make them look better? And so if he wants to be the old school manager and just rule the World Series and we're all like sort of torn between rooting for Dusty Baker and rooting against the Astros. I mean, it really is going to create a difficult conflict. I guess trolling isn't the right behavior. More like what do you call that when you, a human shield. Dusty Baker is like a postseason human shield for them, where I think we're all going to be stuck rooting for Dusty Baker to win that World Series.

Yeah, yeah, right. And his recent track record, like he looked great after his stint with the Nationals because Nationals were disappointing in both of the seasons surrounding his two seasons, 10th there, 2015 and 2018. They were pretty lousy. They were right around 500. They had clubhouse dysfunction,

both years with Matt Williams and then David Martinez. And then dusty in his two years, everything was great. And obviously they didn't succeed in the playoffs, but there was clubhouse harmony, and they did just fine. And then they got rid of him, and he was almost the martyr where they and Pryor and said the thing about clogging the bases, but he has not really worked with an innovative sabermetrically oriented organization because he was with the Reds who were kind of backward. They were behind the trends. And then he was with the Nationals who were a successful team, but known as sort of an old school oriented kind of organization. And obviously they just won the World Series without Dusty.

They're doing just fine, but they are not, I guess, on the same side of the spectrum that the Astros have been. And so I wonder how he will adjust or how the Astros will adjust to him. Will he just be passing along information or will he be sort of ruling the roost the way that he did 10 years ago? I don't know, but he can kind of do what he wants to do in this situation. Yeah, no, it's the best pick for, well, it's a great pick for a number of reasons can't think of a pick that I would have more interest in seeing throughout the year. feisty and he's known for laying down the law or being a stickler or something and dusty is very popular with players because he's known as a player's manager right and it's not as if nothing untoward ever went on in a dusty baker clubhouse i mean he managed barry bonds throughout barry

bonds's explosion so it's not as if he was uh laying down the law at that time when it came to pdu so that was a star who maybe had different rules for him than other people on that team but It's not as if he was laying down the law at that time when it came to PDU. So that was a star who maybe had different rules for him than other people on that team. But Bonds kind of had his own rules in a lot of ways. And so it's kind of curious because it's not like they're bringing in, you know, Kennesaw Mountain Landis here because he's known as a stern stickler who's just going to, you know, ban people from the game or something and restore the game's integrity in that sense. It's a popular guy, a guy players like. Like, if Dusty had been in A.J. Hinch's shoes, would he have stopped the sign stealing? I don't know. Maybe. But I don't know that that's a given necessarily.

Yeah. Dusty Baker's first year as a manager of the Cubs was also the year that Sammy Sosa got caught corking. True, true. Yeah, so it's not like he has a spotless reputation when it comes to the rules, but he does have respect and a certain standing, and he's just kind of diametrically opposed to what the Astros have been of late, and so that made him the perfect person. as to what the Astros have been of late. And so that made him the perfect person. So I look forward to seeing what that will be like. It's really going to be a fun storyline this season.

And in the other big news of the day, Chris Bryant lost his grievance. He was protesting service time manipulation on the part of the Cubs, which dates back almost five years now. It was 2015 when he made his major league debut, and the arbitrator just got around to a ruling, according to Jeff Passon. It's not even public yet, and Bryant seemed to be the perfect person to lodge a grievance here because if anyone was ever going to come down against service time manipulation and say that what teams are doing is not above board, it would be Bryant because he was coming off this fantastic 2014 minor league season. He totally tore it up in spring training in 2015. And it was very clear that he was major league ready. And of course, the Cubs said he wasn't, that he had to work on his defense. And then they brought him up just one day short of when he would have needed to come up to qualify for a full year of service time.

And so that extended the Cubs' control of him through 2021 and essentially turned six years of pre-free agency control into seven years, and Bryant was very well aggrieved about this, and it seemed like with good reason, and for whatever reason, it took years and years for this even to be heard, and then many months more for the arbitrator to reach a ruling, but it seems like the ruling is status quo. Teams can keep doing what they've been doing to a handful of promising prospects every year, which essentially means that if the players ever want to prevent this behavior, it just has to be explicitly prohibited in the CBA, because as long as it is not, teams will keep doing it, and clearly no one's going to stop them. Total shame. Yeah, it is. And I know that people will say, well, it's permissible. There's a loophole there or it's not expressly prevented. And so teams, it's a competitive business. And I know Cheryl Ring and others have written about that,

and I'll link to that argument basically, that it violates the expectation that when you have a CBA, there's some expectation of good faith and fair dealing, and that what teams are doing by keeping players down, not because they aren't ready or because they won't help the team, but just because they want to get an extra year of control, violates that covenant of good faith and fair dealing. So that could have been an argument that maybe Bryant's representation used in this case, but if so, it clearly didn't work. So we haven't seen the text. We haven't

seen the ruling. It's possible that an arbitrator will say something about how they shouldn't do this in the future. There's just no precedent for punishing it now. But this means that the Cubs have two more years of Bryant or whichever team employs Bryant because I guess the Cubs may have even more interest in trading him now. I don't know whether this makes it more or less likely that he'll be traded, although it probably wasn't likely to begin with. Obviously, at the time, it was ridiculous that he was held down. Everybody knew that he was one of their best players already, and they didn't even really put up a convincing facade about it. Like you say, the timing was so obvious, and they were a competitive team that year, and it was gross. I wrote a piece about how we should shame them, that the only real weapon that we have as fans is to shame the team and to not let them get away with saying, well, it's it's efficient and therefore we're smart, but that we should we should, you know, point and and and scorn them every chance we get when they do these uncompetitive things. The thing that is sort of interesting, I guess more interesting now than it was at the time is that Bryant was 23. He wasn't even like

a 20 year old like Tatis was this year or like Vladimir Gouraud Jr. was, or he certainly wasn't like 19 like Juan Soto was when he came up. And at the time, we still had this notion that like 25 to 29 was your peak and that a 23 year old is probably getting better. And that was around the time that I think we started to be aware that the aging curve seemed to be changing. And in the last few years, we've really come to see that there's a pretty good case to be made that you're in this moment of time, you might be as good at 23 as you're going to get and if you just look around at the stars of the game a lot of them are 20 to 25 these days and 20 to 25 year olds are better than they've ever been and they're playing more than they've ever played and i wonder if bryant as a 23 year old if it would have been seen as even more inconceivable at the time given what we know now about 23 year olds if that would have made it even harder for them to get away with that or whether, I mean, really, there wasine fracture or something, and he went on what was then called the disabled list. And that was when Bryant made his debut. Otherwise, maybe the Cubs would have waited another week or something just to make it look a little less suspicious. So I

guess the Cubs could have argued that they brought him up when they did, not because it happened to be the perfect time to bring him up so that they could get the maximum value out of him that year without surrendering a year of control, but because they had a need and because old got hurt. Not that that would fool anyone, really. They said that he had to work on his defense, and they almost said it with a smile. No one really took it seriously, and he didn't get much defensive work before they promoted him, but maybe that could have been one argument that they advanced that defensive work before they promoted him. But maybe that could have been one argument that they advanced that that's why they brought him up then. I don't know. Maybe we'll know more when the ruling comes out. They'll never feel bad about this decision,

unfortunately. However, I will say that there are two tiny little bits of justice in this situation. One is that by deciding to leave Chris Bryant down, the Cubs really arguably did cost themselves the home field in the wildcard game. They lost that race. They were a wildcard team one game behind the first wildcard team. So they had to go on the road. And if you look, I mean, you wouldn't think that eight games or whatever it was that they left Bryant down would make a difference. But Mike Holt turned out to just be like a real bust.

And in those eight games, I guess he played six. He went two for 15. He had a win probability added of about minus half a win in just those six games. And Chris Bryant, of course, was rookie of the year and got MVP votes. And so you can make a pretty good case that having Chris Bryant instead of Mike Galt for that first week would have actually made the difference of a game and given them home field advantage in that wildcard game, which is not inconsequential. Of course, they ended up winning that game anyway.

And so in that sense, it was inconsequential, but all the same, they did pay a tiny price. And then five years later, when they decided they wanted to try to trade Chris Bryant, this was all still hanging over them. And I don't know if they're going to trade Chris Bryant now. I don't know how seriously they would have been shopping him. You know, I don't know how seriously they are shopping him, presumably somewhat. But you might be able to, if you could ask some omniscient being, you might be able to find out that their inability to trade Chris Bryant this offseason when they perhaps wanted to was due in part to the uncertainty about him and that by having this arbitration case hanging over them even five years later, it affected their flexibility

and their ability to do what they wanted. So maybe there's a tiny little bit of justice in that as well. Yeah, and I guess it's conceivable that they cost themselves a shot at extending Bryant at some low rate because he was upset about this. Well, and also maybe because he didn't know what, how are you going to sign an extension if you don't even know what you're, if you can't agree with the team about what your service time is likely to be. If he thinks he's going to win this grievance, perhaps he's not going to want to sign an extension most cases, certainly not all, but in most cases, when you think that a team has done a player wrong and that he'll never sign an extension now, they often do. That gets put behind. But in this specific case, there was actually

ambiguity for this whole time. And particularly in those first years when an extension might have been signed. So I think it's more plausible than in any other case. to follow. We communicate with the Cubs constantly. Our doors are open, etc. So it's not like they said we're never signing because we're holding a grudge about this. I mean, it'd be bad business to say that even if you felt it, I guess. But yes, I think you're right. So a lot of people have suggested potential solutions to the service time manipulation issue. We could spend a whole episode on those. Maybe we have, but I will link on the show page to a couple pieces that summarize some of the ideas that the players could pursue in the upcoming round of bargaining. season there, which I think is fun because Delman Young, obviously, I wouldn't call him a bust because I think if you have a 10-year career in the majors, you've done enough not to be a bust, even if you have a career two wins above replacement at the end of that 10 years.

But when you've been the number one draft pick and the number one prospect in baseball and the rookie of the year runner up, And then you go on to a very undistinguished career after that, and you're out of the big leagues by 30. It's certainly a disappointing career, and he could have called it quits. He made more than $20 million in his major league career, but he just keeps playing, and he's playing all over the world. And he played in Mexico, and he played in Venezuela, and now he's playing in Australia. Last winter, he actually won the Venezuelan Winter League MVP award, just edging out Williams-Astadillo. And this year, he appears to be a leading contender

for the Australian Baseball League MVP award too. I think there are a few games left in the season. He's on the Melbourne Aces and right now he he is hitting.345,.394,.662. Granted, as a full-time DH, I believe, but that is leading the league, that slugging percentage. He's leading the league with 13 homers in 40 games. That's three more homers than anyone else has, and you would expect him to be pretty good, but I don't know that you'd expect him to be the best in any league right now, given that he was kind of a bad hitter when last we saw him in the majors, or at least not a good one. And he is now 34 years old, and he was never really known for conditioning, and you'd think that he might not be highly motivated at this point in his career.

And yet he is. It's just the traveling delman young road show every year he goes to some other country and he completely tears up the league and then he takes his talent as such as it is to another league it sounds like a fun life yeah he i he also played in the dominican winter league by the way uh since his last major league game. Yeah, I'm looking at this. So you've got Pete Cosma playing in the same league, hitting.224,.277,.303. So you know these numbers are legit. Yeah, well, it's not like you have any major leaguer

and is just automatically a superstar there. I expected these numbers to be better. You had me prepped for more outrageous numbers than that. Good. I'm glad he's thriving. I agree with you. It is fun to see Delman Young succeed. But I was expecting something that could only exist in a different hemisphere.

And so a little disappointed that it's only 345, 394, 662, but still pretty good. So a little disappointed that it's only 345, 394, 662, but still pretty good. There's an assumption if you're a professional athlete that your number one priority is to play at the highest level that will have you. That no matter how good you could be at some level, if you have a chance to play at a higher level, that's what you're going to do. That is rational. I don't think that there's anything weird about that. It is probably more lucrative, more prestigious, more comfortable. And also, you know, you want to look yourself in the mirror and say that you pushed yourself to play against the very best. However, it seems like there would be some subset of the population that rather than doing that, would just want to be places where they could dominate.

They could just constantly put up huge numbers against lesser, but still good, still professional competition. I mean, I think that I might be the type, if I woke up with incredible skills at pickup basketball I don't think I'd go looking for another game I think I'd keep going to my regular Saturday game and just dominate every week I think that would be more fulfilling to me like how you like me now Marlon yeah yeah I think Jeff and I talked about that once or twice that every now and then you read about an ex-big leaguer who now is just like in some semi-competitive softball league or something or a semi-pro league near the town

that they live in and they're just unbelievably good and no one can get them out and it just it sounds like fun i guess there'd be some level of low competition where it just wouldn't even be a challenge and you might as well be hitting off a tee and i guess you you wouldn't want to be so good that you just ruin everyone else's fun because it's just uh it's not even competitive anymore if you're on the team but boy after all the struggle of making the majors and then having to face the best competition and always feeling like you're at the point of falling behind just to go back and completely walk all over everyone. Yeah. That sounds like a lot of fun.

It really does. And there are some sports and some competitive pursuits where it wouldn't work. You know, it is as unfun to play ping pong against someone who's three standard deviations better than you as it is to play against someone who's three standard deviations worse right you don't want to play ping pong against somebody much much much worse than you and i would say that's true of chess and that's probably true of like regular tennis and it's probably true of soccer and you know truthfully it's probably true of basketball too but it's not true of baseball with baseball just rearing back and hitting dingers against batting practice pitching

in a game situation, I would think would still be a thrill all the time. And firing perfect games against high school level competition, if you were a double-A pitcher, I would think would still make you feel good about yourself at the end of each of those games. Yeah, I think so too, because someone could get a fluky hit off you, even if you're way, way better than they are. So yeah, I agree.

All right, let's take some emails. So this one, I believe you already answered, but I liked your answer. It's from our Patreon supporter, Henry, who says, on Monday night, the Dallas Stars invited the Rangers' Willie Calhoun and Isaiah Kiner-Falefa to drop the opening puck before their game against Tampa Bay Lightning. He links to the video.

I was surprised by how they chose to introduce Kiner-Falefa. The PA welcomed him to the rink by explaining, Isaiah Kiner-Falefa had a.238 batting average with 21 runs batted in along with three stolen paces. That seems extremely unflattering to him. No, even a hockey fan who never watches baseball must hear those numbers and think, this guy stinks. If you were trying to introduce him to a neutral audience, what stats could you highlight to make him seem more worthy of dropping the opening puck and less like Willie Calhoun's much, much, much less talented sidekick? In 2019, Willie Calhoun had 83 hits, 21 home runs with a 269 batting average.

Isaiah Kiner-Falefa had a 238 batting average with 23 runs, 21 runs batted in, 238 batting average with 23 runs, 21 runs batted in, along with three stolen bases. Stars fans, let's hear it again for Willie Calhoun and Isaiah Kainer-Falefa. It's even weird, even if Isaiah Kainer-Falefa were really good, it would still be really weird to say his RBI total in part-time play because at best your your audience is not going to have any context to know what that is and at worst they're going to know that 21 is a small number for rbis so like nick solak hit 293 393 491 for the rangers last year he was quite good in his 33 games and if you were to introduce him as having 17 rbis for the te last year. He was quite good in his 33 games. And if you were to introduce him as having 17 RBIs for the Texas Rangers,

people would not know that that was good. They wouldn't realize that he was driving in 100 RBI pace in limited time. So you really do have to, unless they have played a full season, you really do have to stick to the to the rate stats or else find some way to put it in context right yeah this person must just not have known anything about baseball i can't imagine that you would introduce someone like that if you know

anything about the significance of stats just to highlight a 238 batting average that that just must mean that they don't know what a good batting average is i would guess that in fact the person who wrote this didn't write this at all that this came from that this is the first line of the texas rangers media guide that maybe texas put out a press release saying like you know a couple of our players are gonna because like if the i sometimes i i only get one team's press releases but i am always amused when they sign some player who was bad last year and then they put his stats with like a straight face they just say like this person hit 224 with you know seven home runs and 18 rbis and you realize that in those press releases they're not doing propaganda exactly they're just giving you some facts and maybe there's a little bit of a thumb on the scale

when it's a team representing its own players but for the most part they're just giving you some facts and so i would guess that there is a bio somewhere that the texas rangers give out anytime isaiah kinder falafel shows up at an event or something. And so they just took it straight from that rather than thinking that they were hyping him up. But look, you take a professional baseball player. That's the whole point. Like, that's it. That's all you need. It does not matter to the average hockey fan whether it's the 12th best player on the Rangers or the 40th best player on the 40 man.

It's a professional baseball player. So you really just want to emphasize that this is a professional baseball player. And we got him. He's here. This person knows Adrian Beltre personally, and we have him here. So that's it. knows Adrian Beltre personally, and we have him here. So that's it.

So you kind of don't want to ruin it by getting too into the batting averages. Right, unless it's a star, and then you might, but then they might know who it is anyway. Unless it's a star, but if you're not talking about one of the, I would say three, maybe as low as three, maybe as high as ten best players on a team, though you probably don't want to get into their traditional stats. Yeah. All right. But that's not what I put. I wrote, here was my suggestion. So my suggestion for what you would write in an Isaiah Kiner-Falefa bio to hype the crowd up a little bit is this. Isaiah Kiner falefa is the only texas ranger who had multiple walk-off hits last season during his two years in the majors he's the only player in either

league to start games at catcher and both middle infield positions please welcome one of three active hawaiian born players to homer in the major leagues. Isaiah, kinder, belepper. I think that the last line, I thought I might have been losing sincerity. But the first two, I think, are quality lines, quality achievements. You had me hyped up there. Yeah, because you had two onlys in there. He's the only. That sounds pretty impressive.

And walk-off hits. It doesn't matter how bad you are at baseball, which I'm not even saying he is, but it doesn't matter how bad you are at baseball, which I'm not even saying he is, but it doesn't matter how bad you are at baseball. If you're delivering walk-off hits, your team needs you. Yeah. I mean, the combination of positions that he has played, that's legitimately impressive.

We've talked about that before. So you're not even cheating to mention that. That's worth some hype. Yeah. All right. Step last? Yeah. Okay.

They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's today day still past. I have three. That's okay. Okay, sure. All right. Okay. I have three. They're all quite small. And so one of them, I don't have an order

in mind. So i'll just go with this one first because it's the link that i have in front of me so uh this is actually in response to a post on the facebook group from sean who i will read his post the the full post at the end of the stat blast but the start of his post is you ever in the process of researching something find something else way more interesting i would not researching something, find something else way more interesting. I would not say that I found something else way more interesting, but in the process of researching Sean's interesting thing that he found in the process of researching something else, I also found something that was interesting. So the pretend that I had not been looking for something else, pretend that I had just got to thinking about leadoff intentional

walks. So there probably have not been that many intentional leadoff walks in major league history, right? It would not make a lot of sense to intentionally walk the leadoff hitter of an inning. It's probably better just to pitch to that person, really, no matter how good they are, except in maybe some really extreme circumstances or because you're bad at managing so in fact extremely rare did a play index search at baseball reference looking for batters who drew an intentional walk while leading off an inning and five of them five of them to barry bonds uh which uh was of course during the the frenzy that happened around Barry Bonds in which everybody lost their cool and did things that were really fairly irrational, including many intentional walks

of this variety or closely related to it. So Barry Bonds intentionally walked five times leading off an inning, and then all of Major League history put together added up, according to Play Index, league history put together added up according to play index also five so now those five require some uh discussion one of them ryan howard bottom of the ninth inning in a tie game makes a little bit of sense i don't remember who was batting behind him but this was ryan howard in 2006 i think he was like mvp or close at that point and someone was a little scaredy pants and decided that they didn't want to lose on a walk-off home run to ryan howard he's not the fastest batter again maybe maybe the maybe the players behind him had already been swapped out and so maybe the pitcher spot was coming up sometime in the inning or something like that you might cover this

but are any of these instances cases where the pitcher say fell behind 3-0 or something do you know and then just issued the extra ball i can tell you that only one of them took place in the count tracking era okay and so uh that's the ryan howard one and he was not ahead in the count this was a this was issued from the start four fingers from the start got it all right so ryan howard's that's one so now we've got four more that we've gotta find one was al simmons And I looked that one up and in fact, not an intentional walk. Totally. I don't know. I don't know how the baseball record has recorded that as an intentional walk. I'm pretty confident that it was not an intentional walk because this was

the bottom of the sixth inning and his team was trailing by four runs. That would not make any sense at all. Jimmy Fox was batting behind him. I don't know what really happened in that game. I'm pretty confident saying Al Simmons did not get intentionally walked leading off the bottom of the sixth inning trailing by four. So now we're down to four non-Bonds ones. One was Ryan Howard.

One is Babe Ruth. Maybe that was five years before the Al Simmons one. We already know that the records for intentional walks in that time period are very sketchy. In fact, they're incomplete in the first place. Intentional walk records are incomplete. And in addition to that, maybe there's some false positives. But could it be Babe Ruth in the second inning of a game in 1926 against the St. Louis Browns? Plausibly, he had homered three times in the previous two games against the St. Louis Browns. Plausibly, he had homered three times in the previous two games

against the St. Louis Browns in that series, and they had walked him unintentionally after those three homers. And then after this so-called intentional walk, they walked him unintentionally two more times that game. So maybe they really were genuinely so frightened of him that they were just giving him the Bonds treatment before Bonds. bonds i don't know but let's call that one a real one so that leaves two more and both of those two came to frank howard now frank howard not to be confused with ryan howard was a big slugger in the 1960s and 70s and he was intentionally walked with the bases loaded uh not with the bases he was very huge six foot seven and nine thousand pounds he was intentionally walked leading off an inning i should say not with the bases loaded uh not with the bases he was very huge six foot seven and nine thousand pounds he was intentionally walked leading off an inning i should say not with

the base loaded leading off an inning two times by cleveland in the same game so both of these other two times happened in the same game so he's the only person in history intentionally walked leading off an inning twice in his career except bar Barry Bonds, and they came in the same game. Now, I'm going to read the rest of Sean's Facebook post, because this is what he discovered, which I have now added on to. Anyway, Sean writes, in 1970, Frank Howard went four for seven against Sam McDowell with eight walks, four intentional. Beyond that, McDowell's manager twice pulled a Waxahachie swap to avoid having McDowell pitch to Howard, but keep him in the game. Both times he was swapped, Howard put the ball in play and McDowell was involved in the action. That's a really good fun fact. It's not technically true. One of the times McDowell was not involved in the

action because Howard was intentionally walked. So he was involved in the action of the next batter. So in both cases, McDowell did have to touch the ball while he was fielding the position, but not because Howard put the ball in play. But yeah, they had Sam McDowell's manager went crazy and just started doing anything possible to avoid letting Sam McDowell face Frank Howard. And so he, like this says, twice Waxahachie swapped him, twice intentionally walked him to lead off innings. And overall, it was just like this complete paranoia about what Frank Howard was going to do to Sam McDowell, which is weird because it is true that Frank Howard hit Sam McDowell well, but it's not like he had some unprecedented line. It's not like he's the best

I've ever seen a hitter do against a pitcher. Over the course of six years, he faced him 60 times. He had a 1350 OPS, which is very good, but it's A, propped up by a lot of these walks, and B, not outrageous. I think if you pick any slugger and look at his career stats against pitchers, you will find examples of 1350 OPSs scattered in among them. But something about this matchup just seemed so one-sided that Cleveland just quit. They quit

letting it happen. They quit trying. And so that was the end of the 1970 season. They would face each other in 1971, and they would face each other in 1971 and they would face each other in 1973 and howard would go one for eight in those plate appearances so whatever cleveland thought was going to happen didn't happen when they actually pitched to him so that is an interesting story that gets more interesting the more people look at it i guess at least i would like to think so all right. Second stat blast. This is in response to a question that somebody asked regarding last week's stat blast. Last week's stat blast was looking at how many Hall of Famers have appeared in at least one game on every team. was let's see that it was kind of interesting how the yankees were what not even first and it was pretty closely clustered and there didn't seem to be a big difference depending you know if you were in the league a long time you had a bunch of hall of famers and then you had the expansion teams had very few and the marlins and the rockies and i forget who else well i wondered what the uh

breakdown would be if you did plate appearances. Actually, I didn't wonder this. Somebody asked me this. Somebody asked if it would be more interesting to look at plate appearances by Hall of Famers with each team. And I think so. Yeah, the gap between teams really starts to spread and the Yankees run away with it. The Yankees have had about, if you include plate appearances by hitters or batters faced by

pitchers, the Yankees are closing in on 200,000 of these. And I think maybe Andy Pettit would even put them over if he makes it over 200,000. Whereas the Red Sox are at 100,000, only half of what the Yankees have had. Cleveland's 103,000. The Cubs are 108,000. So these are teams that have existed for just as long. The Tigers, 96,000. Teams that have existed for just as long, but have had half of the playing time by Hall of Famers the Yankees have had, which is not surprising if you know the Yankees history, and I'm glad that this is a more accurate way to show that. On the other side, the Rockies are no longer at the bottom. The Rockies, of course, inspired the stat blast by getting their first Hall of Fame appearance commemorated

when Larry Walker was inducted or will be inducted. They now have 4,795 plate appearances by Hall of Famers, all of them by Larry Walker. By contrast, the Marlins only have 1,200, and the Rays, with their Wade Boggs gambit, are at 824, including seven batters faced by Wade Boggs. He is their only Hall of Fame pitcher. And so, yes, the gap between the Yankees at, you know, 34 and the, say, the Marlins at

four seems surprisingly small. But when you look at plate appearances and playing time, it's about 200 times as many for the Yankees, which I think is more appropriate. And so if you took any random year, I did this per year too, because some of these teams have existed longer than others. random year, I did this per year too, because some of these teams have existed longer than others. If you look at any given year that the Yankees have played in the last century, on average, they would have given 2,100 plate appearances or batters faced to future Hall of Famers. So basically they have had on average four full-time Hall of Famers per year, which is

pretty cool. You turn on a Yankees game and you're probably seeing four Hall of Famers per year, which is pretty cool. You turn on a Yankees game and you're probably seeing four Hall of Famers. Yeah. You reminded me of the Wade Boggs knuckleball. Good knuckler. You never see, I guess by the time that he was getting into games as a pitcher, he was no longer a star level player, but you rarely see a very good all-round player or hitter actually take the mound, position player i mean these days i don't know if you've seen that since well obviously it used to be less common period but there was the time canseco did it and hurt himself and maybe that made teams even less likely to do it yeah that's true yeah for a long time that was you just assumed that a star would not be

allowed to do it because Jose Canseco. You heard Jose Canseco all the time. Yeah. All right. The last thing, I can't even find this, but it doesn't even matter because I can just tell you what the conclusions were. I had a hypothesis. I wanted to test it.

I found it. All right. The hypothesis was that managers would challenge more plays if they were on a competitive team than they would if they were on a terrible team. And last year gave us, I would say, a great group of teams to test this on because you had these teams that were so far out of it. I mean, not just a little out of it, but 50 games out of it and that were out of it from within, you know, within a couple of weeks. The teams that were out of it were known to be bad teams in the beginning. There weren't a lot of surprises.

And so within a week or two, it was clear that the Orioles and the Tigers and the Marlins were not playing any games that actually mattered for them. So I thought, oh, I wonder if their managers are less likely to slow the game down or to challenge an umpire to publicly, to his face, criticize an umpire's decision by challenging. So I took all of the challenges. I actually broadened this to all the managers that have managed during the replay years, which are going back to 2014. I looked at their rate of challenges per 162 games, and then also their rate of successful challenges per 162 games. And then I compared those to their seasonal winning percentages. So these are, each manager gets a separate line for each season that they manage, I think. I forget how I did this. It doesn't really matter. And then I looked at the correlations.

And so the answer, the final conclusion is that in fact, there's no correlation between team winning percentage and number of challenges issued. So no, the Orioles in August, 45 games behind, are just as likely to issue a challenge as a team in a wildcard race or a team in a division race or a team that's good. Zero correlation. It's actually 0.01 correlation for challenges and negative 0.01 correlation for successful challenges. So either way you look at it, it's zero. There's zero correlation between whether your team is good and whether you are likely to issue a challenge, slow the game down, do all of that. Also, just for fun, I looked to see whether either success rate on challenges or total successes, which is probably a better measure for how well a manager uses the replays,

total successes, total overturned calls, whether either of those correlates to manager success on the chance that good managers, that managers that manage good teams might also be better, that they might be more successful at challenging, not just more aggressive, but more successful. And there was no correlation there either. So essentially all managers are the same. I would not have guessed that. That's interesting. I guess that's good. It's nice that they're all doing their jobs, even if there isn't as much at stake, because there's always something at stake for the players. And so the players appreciate it, I would think. Just if you have a pitcher on the mound who's going to get an out removed from his line,

or you have a hitter who just made an out and doesn't want to make an out, it's the manager's job to stand up for that player. So I would appreciate that if my team was way behind and the leverage was really low, but the manager was still putting some priority on improving my stats. That's kind of nice yeah it is i i agree i think that the what has helped us to survive the tanking era which has its obvious downsides and i think many people would like to see us not be in anymore but what has helped survive is the faith that no matter what the front office is doing once the game starts

all the players want their stats. They all want to win. They all want to have their walk-off hit, and they and their managers play just as hard as they would in any other situation. And so at the very least, you have a sense of confidence in what you are seeing on the field, that there is no tanking as we think of it, of actually trying to lose a game uh and that that doesn't you know that doesn't totally absolve the league obviously of what it has you know kind of trended toward in the last few years there's definitely shame in having a whole bunch of 110 lost teams that are established as 110 lost teams in the previous offseason but at the very least it does give you the confidence that you can turn on a game and see baseball players running hard.

Yeah. Trying to win, not tanking, not trying to lose. All right. Let's see if we can finish with a couple questions here. This one is from Tim. He says, my question relates to intellectual property. Obviously, each team has a certain amount of brain drain and no amount of secrecy can hide what teams are doing on the field

But how valuable from a wins perspective Would various recent innovations be worth If no other team was allowed to copy you For example, if only one team can shift or use the opener What type of impact would that have? So essentially in this scenario Teams can copyright innovations in strategy. So they come up with some new tactic, the Waxahachie swap or the opener or the shift or whatever, and they can call dibs you or they can't do it? Like if you were playing in some sort of like cloak of secrecy where nobody saw what you were doing,

but another team could develop the same strategy independently of you, would that be allowed? Or do you get a patent? Do you get to monopolize this development? Is this like creating a new... In the question, you get a patent because how could you develop something without everyone seeing it unless it's so subtle that it's just secret?

But if it's something with positioning or player usage or whatever, then it's out there in the open. Well, I would be interested in... I don't know. I feel like maybe we should answer this question in a draft where we draft develop we basically pretend that we're 30 teams and that we are drafting strategic

developments throughout baseball history and you get one and then it's off the board no one else can do that huh yeah that that might be a. So like maybe each of us gets 10 teams. Yeah. All right. Should we do that? I guess we could do that. All right. Maybe we should just save our answer then.

Yeah, save our answer and people can start emailing us their answers when polluting our draft. Short answer is I think it would help a lot, right, if you could patent certain tactics. I guess we'll have to decide when we do that what qualifies as copyrightable. You know, you can't take a patent out on anything, right, can you? You can't say,

oh, I'm going to bat my best hitter second or something. I'm patenting that. First of all, I guess you'd have a hard time. Wait, why can't you bat? I mean, you know, why not? One problem is that so many things have happened at some point in baseball history. We'll need a judge.

Yes, if you were truly the first person to do something like this, because, you know, you could go look at a lineup from 1904 or whatever and find a lineup where the best hitter is batting second probably maybe they didn't even realize that the best hitter was the best hitter at the time but that's what they did or you know whatever someone was hurt or they were just randomly drawing the lineup so it's not like you'd be the first team ever to do it unless it depends you know why you're doing it If you could establish that I'm doing this because I have this statistical model that tells me that it's the best way, whereas my predecessors were not basing it on that, I don't know, it'd be hard. But even with things like four-man outfield or

shifts or whatever, you can often go back and find early history predecessors or isolated examples of those things. And it didn't really catch on, but it happened once somewhere. So it'd be tough, I think, to demonstrate that the thing that you're doing has never been done before. Yeah, no, it's true. The other day I was listening to an old radio broadcast of a game from like 1958 or something like that and uh this was during the height of willie maize's career it's you know it was when he was winning mvp awards and he was batting second and it's not like they made a deal of it like he just they're the best hitter in baseball was batting second and they didn't even comment on that fact that's just what he did back then so yeah yeah you would have to decide what is a strategy so we would need to have

uh we would need to have an umpire someone who could rule on each pick and say whether it counts and we probably would need to uh each bring more than 10 on the presumption that one or two or more of our picks will be disqualified yeah Yeah, and I'd say that in general, the advantages that teams derive from improvements in player evaluation and player development are more meaningful than the advantages they derive from advances in in-game tactics.

So, you know, you can only gain so much by stopping your sacrifice bunting or, you know, issuing fewer intentional walks or something. That'll help you. But generally, you're talking about, you know, a handful of runs per season or something. And when you're talking about being better at acquiring good players or projecting players or developing players, those are huge advantages. So with the possible exception of, say, in-game pitching staff management, and I guess you could lump in, you know, overworking pitchers and preserving their health or just, you know, bringing in relievers instead of trying to

pitch complete games every time, that'd be a pretty big advantage. But the other stuff, you know, pitch outs, hit and runs, intentional walks, sack bunts, that's, it's marginal. It's, it's something, you know, considering how often teams used to do those things, but I don't know that it would turn you from a average team to a great team. No, probably not. I was, uh, there's a line in Dixon's book, uh, the hidden language of baseball that says, that says there are enough that bad teams give away enough runs on missed signs that they would be winning teams otherwise. That most losing teams would be winning teams except for missed signs. That's what it was.

This was not a line from Dixon. This was a quote from like 1910. And so somebody was crediting missed signs with being the difference between most losing teams and being over 500. Well, that's like those great quotes you go back and read like before there was war or win shares or anything. And people will say,

oh, that guy he he stopped so many balls it's worth 20 wins a season or something it's like no like two mike trouts is worth 20 wins but this guy's defense is not all right all right last one yeah okay last one this is from alex with carl's beltron in the news again and the cheeky tweets flying, I was struck by how resonant his strikeout to end the 2006 NLCS seems to remain. As a specific baseball play, not

a moment like the Cubs winning the World Series, but the outcome of an at-bat, is anything remotely recently ahead of the strikeout in the very scientific category of like baseball play you'll see someone randomly referencing on Twitter. I think it's well ahead of the strikeout in the very scientific category of, like, baseball play you'll see someone randomly referencing on Twitter. I think it's well ahead of its inverse, a walk-off hit to reach the World Series. We don't talk about Travis Ishikawa like this,

and even the Aaron Boone homer feels mitigated by the Red Sox comeback the next season, and even strikes me as ahead of Edgar Renteria or Luis Gonzalez on that, again, very nebulous, we think about this a lot scale. Is it the Metsiness? Is there something uniquely baseball about inaction being the defining part of the play? Does the looming Donald Trump in the background make it even more haunting? Or am I just completely off and follow too many Mets fans? For the record, I'm neither a Mets nor a Cardinals fan. It's interesting, too, because Miguel Cabrera struck out looking to end the World Series,

and you don't hear that cited constantly. Yeah. Yeah, I think that Beltran, to the specifics of the questioner, I think that actually a lot of it is the people this person follows on twitter and just the fact that this person is on twitter because beltron has been a twitter meme for the whole time that baseball twitter has existed right there was the there was the whole blame beltron thing where beltron was was always being criticized for weird things. And therefore, Twitter was always defending Beltran by mocking the concept that Beltran can do no right.

And so I feel like part of the reason that I know about the Beltran strikeout so much is that I know that that's kind of one of the origins of the blame Beltran thing and so just for the people that are online right now that that particular play has been referenced a lot or is thought about a lot I don't know if it would be to someone who's not online I don't know if it has staying power in the same way that Luis Gonzalez does. It's really Luis Gonzalez hit. That seems like it gets talked about much more, right? It's pretty huge. I see the highlight more often, I would say. I don't totally understand the distinction between a baseball play and a moment like the Cubs winning the World Series because

Beltran's strikeout was a moment too. That was a playoff series ending strikeout. So that was a moment as well as a play. So I'm not sure I get the difference there or that I could accurately apply it. I do think there's something about the walk-off strikeout looking and the series ending walk-off strikeout looking that resonates and you just gave the example of the Cabrera case which is a good counterexample because you don't really see that cited very often but that is kind of like the old stigma that surrounds strikeouts which has mostly gone away but still probably exists on some level. Like if you're a kid in Little League, you still probably feel bad when you swing and miss. And I think in that specific situation, the image of someone not even taking the bat off their shoulders,

that's kind of burned into your mind if you're a Mets fan. And yes, I think there kind of has been a pushback to that. And I always felt aggrieved on Beltran's behalf that people kept bringing up the strikeout looking because, again, it was a really good pitch and it was kind of an unhittable pitch. And if he had swung at it, maybe he would have missed anyway, or he just would have tapped it weakly like the the outcomes of swinging at that pitch would also be pretty bad and honestly it might have been an okay call on that count and with that pitch and that combination of circumstances to take that pitch and if you're never striking out looking you're probably doing something wrong you should strike out looking every now and then if you're a selective and good hitter

as carl's beltron was so i did feel sort of you know offended on his behalf that everyone acted as if that was so obviously a glaring failure on his part yeah i mean ryan howard also struck out looking to end the nlcs in 2010 and you never hear about that one i sometimes hear about the miguel cabrera one or see references to it but but never the ryan howard one so i think that it's i honestly think it's like it's true that there is something about not swinging and you know that has always been hated by by baseball men and um and it just feels different than swinging through it but i think that all that pales in significance to the fact that it was beltron and that there was a long period of talking about whether beltron was blamed for things that he shouldn't be blamed for and that

that gave it life or maybe it's not maybe it's the new york factor yeah who knows i don't know it's hard for me to say but it's not like it's not only not an unprecedented thing but it has happened at the same or bigger uh stages by players who are as good or or you know roughly as good as beltron since that happened not just in the same kind of era but since that happened happened. And neither one has the lasting-ness of the Beltran one. Yeah, maybe it is the Mets-iness. I've kind of ribbed Mets fans sometimes about the fact that, yes, the Mets in many ways have been an inept organization with an owner who has not served the team's best interests. And it's been very frustrating and they've been bad at PR and they have had bad luck

at certain times. But on the other hand, a lot of teams have to deal with those things. And a lot of teams have been less successful than the Mets. And yes, I know the Mets are a big market team and maybe they should have higher expectations, but there is sort of a, I don't know, a persecution complex with the Mets, I feel like, where it's just, you know, when anything bad happens to the Mets, it's like, oh, here we go again. This is the Mets Metsing again, whereas with another team, the same thing happens to them and there just isn't really this organizational reputation that it just gets added to a long list of injustices and indignities so i do think there is an element of that it's like mets suffering this is just another example of the mets kind of failing in the clutch so i think it probably is blown out of proportion it's definitely way bigger than those other kind of equivalent examples you just gave.

But I disagree with the premise. I think that is actually the most cited play or moment. Yeah, I do too. Okay. And by the way, I will link to an article that Russell Carlton wrote in 2017 for Baseball Perspectives about how quickly ideas spread. He did a thing about when a team does discover shifts or some other advantage, then how long does it actually take? And he found that it doesn't take all that long for these things to spread. But of course, in that case, it's not patentable. It's not copyrightable.

It's just out there in the open and everyone can copy it. That'll do it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount to the podcast and help keep us going and get themselves access to some perks. Justin Leck, Andrew Patrick, Frank Crandall, Peter Mazziak, and Benji Riches. Thanks for putting some of your riches toward us. 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 coming for me and sam and meg via podcast at damgraphs.com or via the patreon messaging system if you are a supporter thanks to dylan higgins for his editing assistance meg and i have a couple good guests lined up for our next episode so we will be back tomorrow with the third and final episode of the week talk to you then. It's cold, it's cold and dusty in here Someone you knew Is watching you

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