Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1515: The Waiting Game

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about life during self-isolation and delayed media consumption and explore some of the long-considered and ultimately rejected article ideas in Sam’s tickler file, including Ken Griffey Jr.’s rap career, an undiscovered baseball star in Yosemite, an advance-scouting conspiracy theory, an unorthodox solution to extra-inning games, and a complaint about […]

Just a boy and a little girl Tryin' to change the whole wide world I-I-I Salation The world is just a little town Everybody tryin' to pull us down I-I-I Everybody trying to pull us down I, I, I Solation

Good morning and welcome to episode 1515 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hey, Ben. Hello. How are you? Well, like you, I think I'm isolating and yet a little less isolated than usual because my wife is also working from home. So on the one hand,

it's harder to find a quiet time to record a podcast, but on the other hand, maybe she'll treat us to a live rendition of the Stat Blast song sometime. Okay. All right. So that's how you are. The other day I was, yesterday in fact, I was looking for something else and while looking for something else, I found an article from March 3rd, March 3rd, less than two weeks ago, March 3rd. This was at the time, this was an article about how baseball was reacting to the COVID-19 and what steps were being taken to reflect the risk. And again, this is less than two weeks ago, less than two weeks ago. And at that point, the plan was that players would quit using pens that fans had given them. That was it. That was

the step. Yeah. Right. It was that players would avoid taking balls and pens directly from fans to sign autographs, a suggestion that will be fleshed out in training materials. So it was really just to come up with a plan to help players avoid taking balls and pens. That was less than two weeks ago. That didn't stop the pandemic, oddly. No. Yeah. Well, all right. I have to say I am going to be a little distracted mentally because we are in kind of a nightmare. Our good friends are in Peru right now, and Peru just shut down their airports abruptly and they're going to be away from their kids for 15 days. And so I've been on hold with Delta, which didn't get very far and I'm sort of shaken right now. So I'm just going to warn you

that that's the case. And then I'm going to somewhat abruptly change to trying to be frivolous about baseball things. Okay. So let's get ready for that transition. Okay. All right. Everybody ready? All right. So Ben, we laugh. Yes.

As you noted, we're home. We're all home. My wife and my daughter are also home. And one of the things in preparation, I think probably a lot of people are going through this, but in preparation of a long period contained, confined within a space, is you start to look at the clutter in your life. And you think, let's get some of this clutter off the counters. We tidied up a lot yesterday and tried to make more space so that we wouldn't feel too claustrophobic in our own homes. And I don't know if it was inspired by that, but I think it kind of was as I started again, trying to clean up my computer

desktop, my like, not my actual desk, but the virtual desktop on my laptop, and my notes files, and, and my tickler file. And I have referred to clear file. Exactly exactly i have referred here and i have referred elsewhere to my process of of keeping story ideas and the most common thing is i will have a flash of inspiration that there is enough room to develop a concept into an article someday but rather than doing the work or even having a vision of how it's going to happen i just write that concept down and then i think i'm going to get to it and every so often I'll go through and pick those things that I want to develop that season or that month or that week. But a lot of times they just get left behind and I work on whatever the last thing I came up with was. And so I'm going to be trying to declutter

my tickler file a little bit. And so I am going to, in this episode, I am going to burn some ideas by just talking about them so that I never, like, I feel like once I talk about them, I can consider them done and never have to think about how to develop that into an article ever again. We're just going to do it. We're just going to go through some article ideas that I have had over the course of eight or nine years. Okay, yeah. If anything ever happens to you,

I hope that you will bequeath the tickler file to me just so the remaining ideas don't go to waste. I want to get a video weeks after your demise that's just you saying, if you're watching this, it means something happened to me. And check your email because my executor has sent you my tickler file and you are welcome to all the ideas. Don't want them to go to waste. ideas don't want them to go to waste i'm sure i wouldn't understand what half of them were because as i understand that you don't understand what some of them are because they've been in there so long that you've forgotten what you meant when you wrote them down but that's right still it'd be a nice gift from beyond to just have a bunch of topics and not have to think of one for a while

i would be very grateful to you i have a I have a friend who like me, I'm gonna this is gonna be like a triple tangent. I feel a lot of stress sometimes about not being able to consume all the media. And it's not so much that I even want to consume the media. If there's a TV show I want to watch or a book I want to read, then that that's pretty great, because then you have something you're excited to watch or read. But if you give me a hundred of those things, then it's not somehow that doesn't make it better. That makes it worse because now I feel that I'll never complete the to-do list. Like when you add, when you, when you put stack two things or more on top of each other, it becomes a list. And for me, all lists are to-do

lists. And then I feel pressure to do all of them. And so for years of my adult life, I've felt this perverse anxiety about how many books there are and how I'll never read them all or how many things there are to consume and I'll never get them all. And the last few years, a lot of my energy has been reframing my relationship to those things so that I don't feel stress about them. And so, so like one year, my reading project, my actually it was like my everything project was I could only consume TV seasons or series that I had already seen so that I would get myself out of the mindset of, of, of constantly pursuing all the new stuff. And it was like taking myself out of that expansive timeline. And it was a really healthy thing. And I felt good about it. And so I was talking to a friend who has a similar stress about these things. And he says that his vision, like, or his, his dream is that one year, or maybe even

forever, he would quit picking what he was going to read, that he would essentially have a friend who would curate or maybe not curate, but would tell him what he was going to read next. And he would only read books that had been, you know, provided to him by, you know, this person who was assigned to do it. And so he couldn't possibly like he didn't ever need to think about like, what was the the strategic next best book to read, it would just be presented to him. And he could either read it, or he could not read it. But that's his life. And anyway, I was thinking that I would like to have that happen. And I'm thinking about proposing to my friend that we do this for each other, that we each take on the responsibility

for each other. But anyway. Yeah, that sounds nice. A few years ago, I don't remember what it was that prompted it, but you brought up on the show your philosophy of just waiting for things, because eventually they will be free or cheap. If you wait long enough, you can just get anything. You can get it from the library or it'll just be widely available or something. And I think about that a lot because often I will get to things long after they've already sort of left the zeitgeist, but now they're there and they're so easily available and they're just as good as they always were. And sometimes it's even more pleasurable to just binge something instead of having to watch it week to week.

And obviously I've been thinking about that now, given that so much new stuff is going to disappear or production is ceasing or sports have gone away. And there are many terrible things about what's happening now, obviously. obviously, but I can't say I'm personally worried about, say, not having enough to consume in terms of my own entertainment for the foreseeable future, because I think they could stop making culture for the next 10 years, and I'd still be catching up on video games or books or movies or shows that I never had time to watch, which doesn't mean that I wouldn't miss certain things, and certainly sports and baseball. But just saying there's a big backlog out there and we probably pay too much attention to the new stuff and ignore all the excellent stuff that once was new stuff.

It's just not new anymore, but it's new to you. It can't be. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, I also found that the rereading things was very rich, that going deeper instead of broader in my consumption was great and after 10 years if you have actually caught up to everything you've forgotten enough and about everything that you had previously watched that you can just start

again at the beginning yeah 1500 old episodes of effectively wild out there they all you know a lot of them hold up like i would say that a good 900 of them hold up. So anyway, with the plan about having somebody else pick everything you read, we could just switch tickler files one day and you could be limited to only writing about the things that I have previously written as good topics. And then I could write only the things that you had previously thought would be good topics. And then we can each be free of our undone stuff and uh just take take what everybody else could i think i would win that exchange because i don't have a very long one i'm sort of flying by the seat of my pants of all times and when i think of something i want to do i just do

it if i can and then it's off the list so on the other hand wait until you hear what i have all right okay so, okay. I don't know how many we'll get through. A couple, a few. So are you familiar with the time Ken Griffey Jr. rapped on an album? Remind me of the specifics. All right.

This seems like something I know, but I couldn't tell you what it was. This was in 19, I believe 1992. And there was a rapper Named Kid Sensation Who had I'm reading from his Wikipedia page now Had made his debut as a guest Rapper featured on Sir Mix-a-Lot's

Album Swass Where he appeared on the Or maybe Swass I guess with Sir Mix-a-Lot it's probably going to end with It's probably going to be Swass Swass? It's probably A to be Swass. Swass? Sure. It's probably a portmanteau.

It's Sir Mix-a-Lot. It's got to be Swass. Anyway, where he appeared on the tracks Rippin' and Square Dance Rap, sold over one million units during his hip-hop career. And in, I believe, 1992, he released his second album called The Power of Rhyme. And one of the albums is called The Way I Swing. And it is a duet between him and Ken Griffey Jr. And this is not like novelty rap.

Yeah, there are a lot of bad baseball raps. Right, there are. 1986 Mets baseball rapper, Trevor Bowers rapper. Exactly. This is not even a cameo. This is they trade verses, and Ken Griffey Jr. raps four verses. They're fairly short. I'm going to send you a link right now,

and then I'm going to pause while you listen to this song. Okay. That's the way we swing in Seattle. Check it out. In the Cherokee G. I didn't come alone this time. Ken Griffey swing the crowd to one rhyme. Ken Griffey is a swinger, not a singer. A death rhyme bringer. A home run hitter, but I'm not a dope slinger. For those who try to flex, I'm a quick neck ringer.

For those who think the rhyme is wiggity whack, I'm a stingier. The G, the R, the I, the F, the F, the E, the Y. See, I'm 6'3 and rough, so why try to step to number 24? Cooling in the flat, you get cracked with a baseball bat. Yeah, one likes to bat and the other likes to battle One from Cincinnati and the other from Seattle Griffey's batting average is 3-0-0 And the kid is undefeated with a dozen KOs

We swing for a hobby to keep your head bobby A bust a couple of rhymes in the hotel lobby I'm stepping away from the mic, the ECP is in the house Turning it over to Griff, go ahead and run your mouth Goes two for the base and one for the trouble Griffey's gonna take the party to another level when i swing a ring bass like an earthquake i either make the home run or make the house shake writing the kind of rhymes that you just can't get with my homie hit making the beat as funky as an armpit take the beat and get dope but not crack i mean the

kind of dope that's far from whack Listen to the way I swing Listen to the way I swing Listen to the way I The beat is a pit The beat is a pit Swing Listen to the way I swing Listen to the way I swing Listen to the way I

The beat is a pit Let's swing Aw yeah, I'm ready to swing to the beat, kid Well go ahead, kid, and grab the mic and swing again This rhyme I dedicate to the dope dealers Killing our youth so I call you future stealers Selling the poison to the girls and boys And it's all for the love of money

Sonny, look how we live large and legally Me and Griff making it swift easily Enough of that Griff, take it back And swing like a monkey cause the beat is fun If I see a fire, then I pull the fire alarm But if I see a girl I like, then I pull her by the arm And start throwing that game like a pitcher But if I see a girl I like, then I pull her by the arm. And start throwing that game like a pitcher.

But if the attitude is rude, I switch her for another. Cause I'm the type of brother. Or else take a home and rap to a mother. Girls with attitude jokes don't even say that. Forget about her, because Griffey don't play that. Music is the language of all people. I make music for the brothers and others. I ain't Asiatic but lyrically acrobatic and ready for the stiffs who rip to start static.

I get swift to kick a rhyme like Pele and stack on strong jams until it's payday. Pass the mic to Ken and letting him get rowdy. Peace like a light at night, the kid is out. Yo, I'm about to wrap it up, no pun intended. Just wave your hands and that will be splendid. You wanna see me at action at home or just turn on

the TV and visit the kingdom. That's the place where I swing the most. Not to brag or bust, but I swing coast to coast. No one can swing like my homie Sensation. Kick the bunkies up when the bass vibrates. Okay. All right. So, I mean, you know, first of all, I would just like to say that it is not, well, I have a fair amount to say, but not enough for an article.

He does not have the delivery I expected. I mean, you think of Griffey as a ball player and the aesthetic is one of smoothness. He was an incredibly smooth player. He's not the smoothest flow I've ever heard. He's not the smoothest rapper and it's not even a smooth voice it's not even he's it's kind of a nasally voice um not not not bad he just doesn't have a smooth voice he's not the smooth voice guy but i mean i would say that the first verse is pretty good so the first verse yeah gr Griff is a swinger, not a singer. A deaf rhyme bringer.

That's good because it kind of lowers expectations for the rest of the song. A home run hitter, but I'm not a dope slinger. He's not a, he doesn't sling dope. For those who try to flex, I'm a quick neck ringer.

And then with the last, for those who think the rhymes will give you whack, I'm going to sting you. So pretty good, pretty good verse. I think that's a pretty good verse it's a little you know it's a little hokey but it's i think it's solidly delivered from there i think he the second third and fourth verses are worse i think his first verse was his best but consistent anti-drug message yeah in the second

verse taste the beat and get dope but not crack i mean the kind of dope that's far from whack so i mean there's that line is definitely in the my name is griffian i'm here to say i love to rap in a major way kind of genre of rap but for the most part, it's not. This is all like pretty credible. And I really do respect that this is a sincere effort. He did not, like this is not ironic. He's not being, he didn't say, well, I'm not going to be. He was the best player in the world, you know. He was the best, well, he wasn't quite the best player in the world at that point. A year later, he would be arguably the best baseball player in the world.

And he was a world at that point. A year later, he would be arguably the best baseball player in the world. And he was a star at that point. And he could have very easily said, well, look, I'm not going to go out and do something that I'm going to fail at. And so he could have distanced himself from this by being really half-hearted and ironic. And he didn't. He went and did a very sincere effort at a professional rap song on a professional rap album. And I thought he handled it. If you didn't know that was Ken Griffey Jr., you would not immediately identify him as a non-professional, I don't think, on that album.

Like, I think you'd go, go well that's a week but that's that's a pretty weak verse but i don't think you would immediately spot him as a as a fraud so i think pretty good yeah replacement level bars i guess yeah they are they're they're short verses too like i don't know if he i don't know help you think he? I don't think he wrote any of those words. I don't think he wrote any of those words, but. Okay. But that's okay. I mean, Dr. Dre doesn't write his words either.

It's okay. Well, yeah. I think Griffey is a production genius. Probably not, but. Kid Sensation. He did bat 300, as the song says. He did bat 300, yeah. He bat 300 in 1990.

Kid Sensation has since re-recorded and re-released all of his albums without profanity. Oh, okay. A lot of demand in the year 2019 or 2020 for clean Kid Sensation. That's the place where I swing the most, not to brag or boast, but I swing from coast to coast. I'd have cut that. There was a line about the kingdom in there. I don't remember exactly what it was. I guess you've transcribed this. I couldn't find the lyrics online, not surprisingly. I didn't transcribe all of it just there. So pretty good. I thought pretty good. Okay. Generous, but yeah, didn't totally embarrass himself.

All right. So I'm going to cross that off this list. All right. The next one. All right. All right. Do you remember that guy, Tim, who emailed us talking about how good he was at baseball? Oh, yeah.

I'm going to tell people the story of Timoteo, California. Okay. All right. So this is a guy named Tim who in 2016, very early in 2016, emailed Ben and I. Dear Ben and Sam, I was born in Yosemite National Park and still live here. I truly believe I am one of the most talented baseball players alive but undiscovered due to my isolated location what can i do to get the attention of a major league club thanks tim now i immediately had we had just done the stompers thing we were writing the book

we were writing it at that point and i immediately had thoughts that like this was Toe Nash. Like we had discovered, maybe we had discovered the next great ballplayer playing. I mean, he says raised in Yosemite National Park. It's a big park, you know, like he could be miles and miles in like living. Like what was that movie that came out a couple of years ago about the dad and the daughter? Oh, yes. I saw that. But yeah. Great movie.

Yeah. Great premise for a ballplayer who nobody's discovered. And I thought at the very least, probably not the most talented baseball player alive, but maybe just maybe good enough to dominate the Pacific Association. Now, that was the email. And then there's so that's a pretty pretty tempting email but leave no trace leave no trace thank you but then the ps's begin all right ps trust me i know how insane this sounds pps i'm a genuine five tool player six one center field attributes elite hand-eye coordination athletic frame extremely flexible

great bat control natural pop strong glove good speed high baseball iq which is impressive because in the scenario i'm envisioning he's never even met another person and so to have high baseball iq without having ever been in a game would be something broad shoulders elite throw outfield throwing arm weaknesses upper body strength which you pointed out in an email to me his weakness is upper body strength but he has listed broad shoulders and elite outfield throwing arm right among his attributes pps in my summer rec league so he has played this is not he he has some civilization in my summer rec league i had a 1085 slugging percentage and nine home runs in 27 at bats that's a home run every three at bats yeah although now that i think about it that's that

right there would be 36 total bases in 27 at bats, which would be a higher than 1,085 slugging percentage. So just the home runs. Even if he had gone hitless in the others, he would have had a 1,333 slugging percentage. So that's a red flag I missed. PPS, I generally find this kind of self-confidence off-putting, but it seemed necessary given the context. All right.

So I assumed that Tim was probably, I didn't even know. I thought that probably this was a joke, but it wasn't clear that it was a joke. And I was a little bit optimistic. And so I envisioned getting him to go out to the pacific association tryouts which were coming up and then i would write about the dream of an isolated ball player trying out for an indie league and maybe he'd be really good so uh you told him that about the tryout that was about a month away and then the tryout got rained out and rescheduled and so i pitched him to a different tryout later that

spring i believe but okay so i told him about this tryout he replies planning on going okay good so this is how this gets on my tickler file and then he adds in retrospect after watching some tryouts on youtube i should have contacted you with a more humble approach. Now if I stink up the joint, you'll have written proof of my self-delusion. I may have exaggerated a few things. All right. If he hadn't exaggerated, we probably wouldn't have paid much attention though, because we were coming off a summer where we were privy to many emails from ballplayers who were trying to get a job in the Pacific Association. So

not really the cream of the crop when it comes to professional baseball, but almost every player sort of bragged about his abilities as you would when you're trying to sell yourself. But, you know, every pitcher through 90-something and every hitter had great tools and great stats in high school or college or whatever it was like none of them was like hey i'm just a fringy ball player just trying to hang on for one more year at the lowest rung of the professional ladder how about giving me a shot they were all like responded to that my coach didn't like me and therefore i didn't get as much playing time as i should have and i was hurt when the scout came you know there was a story every time

and maybe some of them were legitimate, but there were so many of them and we had so little time that eventually we just started to tune them out. All right. So then I tell him about the rescheduled tryout. He says, thanks for the heads up, but I'm starting to think this was all a crazy idea.

I'm no spring chicken, 26, and I've never seen a breaking ball in my life i'll head to some batting cages and see how that goes yeah and then i reply it makes me sick to hear a person who once hit nine home runs in 27 at bats give up without even a tryout and then i reply the weekend of the tryout you going and you're really trying to goad him into this yeah and then he didn't go and then a year passes and i reach out to him again and he says the truth is i was delusional when i wrote that so keep in mind delusional not not joking, not just telling a story. This wasn't like my short story that I was writing in a strange format.

Like he says delusional. So he did believe it at the beginning. I was basically describing Willie Mays. In reality, I'm a bad need, need, wannabe Martine Prado. I must have been drinking too much coffee back then or something. I bought a pitching machine though for fun. for four hours today no fences so it's hard to get a feel for the pop i'm probably topping out at about 330 to 340 feet max also got jammed by the machine and snapped my bat and then he after that he declared himself timoteo california that is his name and he

every once in a while sends us videos of him swinging in the middle of nowhere trees and mountains all around him uh and he tends to do a lot of spins before he swings yeah spinning yeah and that's it he sends the last emails he sent us were, what, I think February 2019, the legend grows and the legend continues. And so that's Tim. Yeah. Do you think he would mind sharing this if any scouts are out there? I guess we may have to

ask if he's okay with that. But just in case, if he wants to reach a wider audience, I do enjoy watching those videos because it looks like this very idyllic location. It's just this, it's in the middle of the woods. He doesn't seem to have been exaggerating that part. It looks like it's in the middle of nowhere and he's just kind of playing baseball in the forest by himself. Yeah, all alone. Yeah. It's really, it is amazing oh i see now his last video was actually

him hitting it into a lake uh-huh it looks like he's hitting uh into a lake yeah quite a life i i've told him after every one of these videos i just tell him how envious i am of him for his his life if not his baseball skills probably the perfect place to be during self-isolation and self-distancing. He can go out and hit to his heart's content. But yeah, the second time he emailed us probably would have been his age 27 season. So that was the time if he was going to try to make a go of it. It was probably then. Now he must be, what, 29 or something.

So I don't know if he could get a scout to bite all right well i am officially never going to write about tim i'm gonna cross that out okay sorry tim all right this one i really did want to write about i think it would have been a great article i never got to it and then the one of the main subjects of it died which would have made it i would have liked to have talked to him but also it felt kind of maybe more disrespectful to write an article about it after the fact although i think it's still okay i don't think it's disrespectful to tell the story on a podcast so this is the story of let me see let have a, this one, I actually have a whole document with that, like thousands of words of research that I did on it at some point. So, you know, in 1988, when

Kirk Gibson hit the home run against Dennis Eckersley, part of the story, part of the legend in that story, I mean, the main legend is Kirk Gibson, you know, goes up there and can't swing and manages to hit the home run. But the secondary legend that grew out of that is that an advanced scout for the Dodgers had been sitting on the A's for a while and had noticed that Dennis Eckersley on 3-2 counts to lefties always threw a slider. Right. So before the World Series, he told Kirk Gibson, if he gets you 3-2, he's going to threw a slider right so before the world series he told kirk gibson if he gets you three two he's going to throw a slider so here's kirk gibson telling that story we had a scout mel didier and he watched dennis eckersley for many years he came up to me before the series in his southern drawl and said partner as sure as i'm standing here breathing you're going to see a

three two backdoor slider you can watch it on the video. As soon as Eckersley comes set at 3-2, I call timeout and I step out the box and I'm looking at him and hearing, partner, as sure as I'm standing here breathing, you're going to see a 3-2 backdoor slider. And sure enough, Eckersley throws a 3-2 slider, Gibson hits the home run, and it is maybe the most famous moment of advanced scouting in baseball history. I mean, you don't hear a lot of advanced scouting stories that make it into the public. You have the Royals with John Lester's pickoff move in the 2014 wildcard game. And you have various advanced scout stories for sign stealing over the course of the decades. There might be others that are slipping my mind, but for the most part, advanced scouts,

they do their work. They provide this very kind of minute benefit that over the course of thousands and thousands of pitches, arguably helped teams win, but you rarely hear them credited. And so this was an example though where the advanced scout was credited and it is my belief that the story is probably mostly a lie isn't it valdidier might have told kirk gibson something about that but that he had never seen dennis accurately throw a three-two slider now i'm exaggerating a little bit there but i mean the story the gibson tells the story he had watched eckersley for many years but the story has been told different ways

different times and so when didier told the story i think he said that okay so here's his words it was broken down more than that i said that if ek faces a left-handed batter only on a 3-2 pitch with the tying or winning run on second and or third, I'll bet you're going to get a backdoor slider. I had seen Ek do this, not all the time, but in big games with great hitters in crucial situations. I'd seen the A's play 25 or 30 times. And at the end of the season, I followed them closely. And he actually talks about how the Dodgers had been, you know,

preparing to face the A's in the World Series. And so they had assigned him to the A's at the end of the season. Now, the Dodgers were not like a runaway division champ. So it's I don't know when they would start advanced scouting a possible world series opponent but i don't know maybe it's august 1st so maybe he watched a bunch of a's games after august 1st how many games were there really where quote a left-handed batter on a 3-2 pitch with the tying or winning run on second and or third were there. Probably not a lot. I can expand it, though, to be more generous and say 3-2 counts against lefties overall.

There were only 10 in that whole season, 3-2 counts against lefties overall. If we set the advanced scouting range at, say, August 1st, then there were only five in total. I don't know if five is enough that you could really draw a conclusion that he's going to always do it. I mean, I'll pause right here and say, well, maybe he'd seen him for years. But the tricky thing about that is that Dennis Eckersley had not been not been dennis eckersley for years dennis eckersley had been a starter he had only been a reliever for two seasons he'd only been a one inning reliever for one season and he'd only

been a dominant ace reliever for that one season and so anything that you saw him do for, say, the Red Sox in 1978 or the Cubs in 1985 or even in 1986, probably worthless for scouting him. I mean, he was a different pitcher in 1988 than he had ever been before. So I have a hard time crediting anything that he had seen before 88, maybe 87. Yeah, you probably even wouldn't want to place too much stock in that even if it hadn't been a dramatic change in the player like one of the points of advanced scouting is that you're finding out what the player the team is doing now right recent trends and you would think that these things change because if eckersley had always thrown that pitch on that count then maybe it would have been predictable at some point and he would have had to switch it up and so if he had been doing that three years ago it doesn't mean he's still doing

it now and in fact maybe he shouldn't still be doing it now so it's either small sample advanced scouting or probably being too reliant on big sample old information it's a fantastic point yeah so okay so then if we look at just the August 1st cutoff, he faced four of these players, four lefties with full counts in the regular season. Now you have Jim Eisenreich, who at that point had a career OPS plus of 75. You have Spike Owen, who at that point had a career OPS plus of 74. You had Thad Bosley, who at that point was in decline and over the previous three seasons had an OPS plus of 83. And then you had Eddie Murray, who was an MVP candidate every year.

So are those, if you're talking about Kirk Gibson, are you even drawing conclusions about what he always throws to a player like Kirk Gibson based on what he threw Spike Owen and Jim Eisenreich do you even lump Jim Eisenreich and Eddie Murray into the same bucket when you're talking about game strategy it's hard to imagine that even as a sample size of five you would consider that to be one sample, one group of predictive simulations. They're very different. I mean, Eddie Murphy is maybe the only one who would be comparable to a player like Kirk Gibson, who was the National League MVP that year. So I don't know what he threw Eddie Murray,

but now we're down to one in the three months before this plate appearance happened. And the fifth one actually came in the postseason. So I do believe that, I have no doubt that an advanced scout was watching that game. So this was Dennis Eckersley against Rich Gedman in the ALCS with a runner on second and two outs and a one-run lead. Huge moment. Rich Gedman, 3-2 count. Wade Boggs on deck, so a superstar on deck. And Dennis Eckersley threw him a fast run lead. Huge moment. Rich Gedman, three, two count. Wade Boggs on deck. So a superstar on deck. And Dennis actually threw him a fastball outside.

It wasn't a back foot slider. It was a fastball outside. So that's the only one where I could find in the game story, the description of what the pitch actually was. And it wasn't even the thing that it was supposed to have been. Dennis Eckersley himself is on the record as being kind of baffled by this story he says first of all i didn't get to 3-2 on too many hitters so if gibson wants to give credit to the scout that's okay but i'm the idiot who threw the crappy slider

okay this is somebody else who i don't remember who is talking here but somebody close to eckersley or somebody on the A's or something. He had two pitches as a closer that were so effective you couldn't look for one or the other. There was no pattern to what he would throw you. You could see four sliders in a row on Tuesday and on Wednesday you'd never see a slider. So anyway, it doesn't seem like Eckersley was familiar with this supposed tendency that he had. So my hunch is that Mel Didier did tell Kirk Gibson this, and that Kirk Gibson did look slider, and that he was right, but that there was not actually a...

I don't think that Mel... How do I want to put this? When we were doing the Stompers thing, sometimes you think you have an insight into what is going to get thrown or what the other team is going to do, but the player doesn't necessarily listen to you, and so you want to really represent yourself

as quite confident in your data. There's a tendency to maybe want to present the most confident case you can, and so I think that he did think that Eckersley was going, was likely to throw a slider or he wanted to somehow convey that you have to look slider on three ball counts and that this is a thing he had noticed and he thought he had noticed. But that maybe he was, he represented his confidence level a lot higher than he had any reason to. And he did that for a good reason. He did it because he was right.

He did it because he knew he was right, but that he couldn't just say, I have a hunch based on wanted bat I saw against Eddie Murray. That wasn't going to fly. And so maybe he told a tall tale. Maybe he exaggerated a little bit. And he got Kirk Gibson to listen. And he was right.

And it helped Kirk Gibson hit a home run and win the game. So that's what I think the story is. I think this is actually a story about, in a way, it's a lot like the story of the scout who found Mike Trout, Greg Morehart, who the story goes that he wanted the Angels to draft Mike Trout and had kind of had like a casual conversation a few weeks earlier about whether Trout would sign for slot. And Trout was kind of like, yeah, at that point. But then things started to change and people were convincing Trout and his family that he could ask for a lot more. And so the angels had heard this rumor and they said,

well, go back and find out if he's still going to sign for Slott. And so he calls up Trout, talks to Trout's dad, who was his friend, and says, like, are you still going to sign for Slott? And he couldn't really get that commitment. It was sort of like, well, maybe we'll see. And so then he called, Greg Morehart calls back his bosses and he's like yep everything's good to go and the angels draft him and then he suddenly is like i mean i could get fired like i lied to my boss but he did what he had to do and he was right and i think that that's maybe the story of this uh slider is that he lied to kirk gibson did what he had to do to get Kirk Gibson to look slider,

and he was right. And he's really lucky that he was right. Yeah, I like that interpretation. It's not entirely false, but there was a little bit of tall tale to it. But that's what teams want, I guess, or at least what they did want at the time was for scouts to share their intuition. If they thought they sensed something then that was the value that they provided i guess back then you didn't really have data on a lot of

things so maybe just knowing what a guy through was something that a scout could tell you that now you wouldn't necessarily need a scout for but if they had some inkling that someone was going to do something then maybe there's value there. Although there may have been 10 other stories like that where some scout said something that turned out not to be true. And the guy just swung and missed and we never heard about it. Yeah, I think that that probably happens a lot and you're probably safe. a lot and you're probably safe the potential upside to getting it right as a scout i think probably is greater than the potential downside to getting it wrong because everybody knows it's hard to guess what pitch is going to come next and everybody knows yeah and everybody knows that

it's hard to get a all-time hall of fame superstar with the 25th pick in the draft and so you you have a lot you know everybody i talk about this all the time i mean various ways but that saying about you know baseball is a game of failure because you fail x amount of time and you still make the hall of fame people always talk about that as though that's why baseball is so hard but to me that's why baseball is so easy that you get to fail and nobody it's not like an existential crisis because you failed once no failure is unforgivable it's just expected that you're going to fail a ton and that's totally okay and so it becomes a very safe place to fail it's much harder for a pitcher because a pitcher's got to get the batter out like a lot you have to

get the batter out seven times out of ten or else you're out of the league. And so for the pitcher, the default assumption is that you're going to get him out. And so in that way, it is really a much more difficult game. You have to be successful so much more often. And so with the scout, with the advanced scout, if he gets it right, a it's a story that he gets to tell for 30 years and if he gets it wrong no one really remembers because who's going to be able to tell kirk gibson what pitch is coming four days in advance that's an impossible task and who's going to be able to blame the angels for you know drafting somebody who's not a superstar with the 25th pick so yeah shoot for the moon. Tell your lies.

Do what you got to do. It does bother me when people still trot out that saying and say that the best hitters succeed 30% of the time or three out of 10 times or something sort of based on the pre-on-base percentage understanding of what a success in a plate appearance was, I think. So if you actually only succeed three out of 10 times, you're not a very good player

so if success is not making it out or reaching base or whatever then you know you better do it more often than that yeah yeah all right this one not a full idea not a full article idea but i'll just preface it by noting that you and I both are perfectly happy with long extra inning games. We don't think that any steps need to be taken to avoid long extra inning games for our personal tastes. But if baseball decides that long extra inning games are in fact bad for the business, and if players decide that they're dangerous and they don't want to play them, and if all the people really are committed to not having any extra inning games go super long then you get into the question of what you should do to avoid them and a lot of these solutions seem really

unsatisfying because i don't know for various reasons well here's my here's here's an idea that i thought we could develop if you really don't want extra innings here's an idea and then i'm going to cross it off okay i can't wait to cross it off all right there are no ties after nine innings you can't have a tie after nine innings because every run is worth slightly more than one run so the first run scored actually the first run scored in a game is worth one the second run scored is worth 1.00001 the second point run scored is worth 1.00002 and so whoever in the course of a tie game probably whoever scored last probably would end up with a lead to the millionth or you could do 1.1 runs or 1.2 runs or whatever you don't have to go to the millionth power

but you just make runs slightly off and so like in nature there are no ties because you just keep drilling down until you get to the inexactness. So you could also have, instead of having the runs predictably go up, you could have a random number generator decide how many millionths of an extra run it would be. And so you never actually would have a tie, is what I'm saying. Unless it was 0-0, you would never have a tie. I think I like that better than the starting extra innings with a runner on second base idea. All right. Good. All right. Crossed off.

Done. Oh, I had no idea how I was going to turn that into 1300 words or why. All right. Last one. Okay. Do you know the poem, Mr. Smeds and Mr. Smats? Don't think so. This is a Shel Silverstein poem. It is by far my favorite Shel Silverstein poem.

And you will not have the benefit of the image, the wonderful image that goes with it. But I'm not going to. Okay. So I'm going gonna read it mr spatz had 21 hats and none of them were the same and mr smeds had 21 heads and only one hat to his name now when mr smeds met mr spatz they talked of the buying and selling of hats. And Mr. Spatz bought Mr. Smed's hat. Did you ever hear anything crazier than that? The guy with one head, he bought the last hat too.

And the guy with all the heads and only one hat. So I always have thought that there is definitely an article on this poem as applied to baseball roster building. But I couldn't figure out how. And it was basically one of two angles, which are A, the angle that it is very rare that you actually see a team with so much surplus of anything that they would trade it away for surplus reasons. Like for the most part, baseball players are interchangeable enough that you would rarely have too many at one position. You can always move someone to a new position.

And the positions are all similar enough that you don't even really lose that much it's like you put a center fielder in left field and maybe it's a little bit of a waste of his leg but there's a lot of ground to cover and the left fielder will just be like extremely good at left field and that's fine you could have a situation where you have two starting catchers starting caliber catchers and so maybe that would be a situation where you would have surplus but that almost never happens you could have a situation where you had two players who could only play first base and literally nothing else but that almost never happens and if it were in the al it wouldn't even be a problem and usually one can play left field and then you know with pitching there's just

so much more pitching need than there are good pitchers available that you never see a team that's like, well, we just have way too much pitching. Let's trade a bunch of it away. And I find this to be a little bit of a dissatisfying part of baseball. I almost wish that baseball positions were all a little bit more specialized and that you couldn't so easily move from one to the other. And so they would create a little bit more complicated roster building game.

As it is now it's like you're just kind of picking up good cards wherever you can and then they all fit nicely into your hand it's like playing a game of like gin except for instead of getting three of a kind or three in a row you just have to get like the aces like the whole game of gin was like who can get the aces that'd be kind of boring you just like, who can get the aces? That'd be kind of boring. You just would pick up the ace and then put down the cards that aren't the ace. So anyway, the idea of having rosters that have great scarcity at places and great surplus at others is appealing to me, but baseball hardly ever has that. The other, but anyway, that's probably not

an article that requires bringing Shel Silverstein into into it the other concept is i wanted to maybe see whether gms actually do collect lots of the same thing if you see gms that have very clear uh desires to just keep on getting the same thing over and over and over again you know if there are if there are gms who are in fact mr spats who just can't quit getting hats no matter how often they acquire the same players they do yeah that uh you've written about that right or someone has yeah i think i wrote about gms acquiring gms at new jobs gms who go to new jobs reacquiring the players from their old one. Yes. So anyway, though, again, though, baseball players aren't specific enough as category types that I don't, I don't really think that I have a good, for the most part, I don't really have a sense of like, who is, you know, a Neil Huntington player or who is an Alex Anthopoulos player? Like, who's the player that any gm tends to get there's there are little hints of it like i feel like kevin towers had a profile of a reliever type

that he liked when at his peak i know that particularly in the angels years jerry depoto seemed to have a real type that he liked for pitchers, but for like kind of like scrap heap pitchers, the type of waiver pickups that he would get. But for the most part, again, it just goes back to GMs are all out there looking for aces, looking for, you know, the high card, and then they figure out how they all fit together. And that's nothing serious. That's just the way that baseball is.

But I kind of wish that, again, there was a little bit more specific variations from category to category. And that we didn't see baseball players in such a simplistic good or bad way. But that there were categories that were more useful. I don't know. I'm kind of rambling now. Mr. Smits, Mr. Spatz, greatest poem ever. Okay. Did you read the Timoteo, California email from 2019 or any portion of it,

which was two years after he decided that he had been deluded previously and was not actually that good at baseball? Two years after that, I guess two years after that i guess he was back to believing that he was great again because he said never seen a fastball i couldn't catch up to struck out maybe eight total times through little league in high school twice from the same guy cody martin who went on to the pros was the best i faced he blew a first pitch fastball by me and i remember thinking wow that's the best velocity I've ever seen. I should swing quicker. Next pitch, laced a line drive single the other way. So in a way, I've hit big league pitching. Unfortunately, you can't take a brain scan of someone's baseball

brain the way they prepare for a fastball, the way they instinctively adopted the yes-yes-no hitting philosophy from a young age, the way their brain is so synced with their body. Fly balls have no chance of dying in center. The confidence to think think i don't care if this huge pitcher was half as close to the plate i'd still have a quick enough bat to hit him selling yourself sucks though it feels wrong huh sad to say that i did not i might have given up on tim's Well, if so, you missed some testimonials that were included in this email, which is one from a Little League coach and former Royals pitching prospect who said, you are the most natural player I've ever seen. The you are is in brackets.

Wait, what is you are? What would the you are have been replacing? I don't know. Maybe he just left out. He is? This other person I saw was the most natural player I've ever seen. And let's see. What else?

Tony, National Park Service worker and summer rec league player, said, you have a gift, man. Seriously, you have a gift. And there's some others that go on like that the uh a former high school teammate who was the mvp of the high school team who went on to be a d1 college football player said in a facebook comment that is pasted here you had the most natural power in your swing i ever saw so yeah there's a whole bio here that says he's blessed with Trey Turner-like Twitch and Larry Bird-esque hand-eye coordination, etc., etc. So, I don't know. I guess he believes again.

All right. I got to go update my tickler file to have none of this on him. Yeah. Well, I hope you've still got some ideas left. I do. We could do 10 episodes like this. Okay, well, we might have to because as we were speaking and emptying out your tickler file, MLB announced that it will be abiding

by the recent CDC recommendation about not having more than 50 people congregate for the next eight weeks, which means that opening day at the very earliest, I guess that would be May 11th, but then you need probably a couple

weeks for players to have a second spring training, which basically takes you to Memorial Day as the most optimistic beginning of the baseball season. So if we are already resorting to using out the ideas that we're not

good enough for articles, I don't know where we'll be by mid-May, but we'll be talking about something. All right. Well, Ben, I'll talk to you in a couple days, but be well. Yes, you too. All right.

All right. I did, by the way, find a few public YouTube videos of Timoteo California, so I will link on the show page if you're interested in scouting him or signing him yourself. So at the end of these episodes, I may do a brief COVID-19 update for baseball-specific coronavirus news if we have not

discussed it previously on the episode. So as noted there at the end, MLB has pushed back opening day to at the very earliest, seemingly late May. Even that may be optimistic. MLB said in its announcement that the clubs remain committed to playing as many games as possible when the season begins. Of course, if we're getting into June or even July and we're talking about a half season at most, then you start wondering whether maybe you just toss out the regular season entirely and do some sort of tournament, which we will probably discuss on an upcoming episode. Turns out we have some time to do that. But as noted, the CDC recommended that groups of 50 or more people not get together for at least eight weeks. And I think some people were hoping, well, baseball teams are only 52 people combined. And then you have coaches and managers and umpires.

But maybe it's fewer than 100 if you play in an empty ballpark. And maybe if you test everyone before you play. And given the extenuating circumstances, you know, it's important to the national morale that baseball be played. Perhaps it could happen, but MLB is erring on the side of caution here, and obviously we will see how the situation develops. It's pretty tough to project how things will look a few days from now, let alone several weeks, but it would appear that the best case scenario is pretty bad. Of course, there's some potential to push the season back, have the regular season go into October,

have the postseason played in November, maybe hit some neutral domed parks, but we are certainly looking at a shortened season at best here, it appears. And as many of you probably saw, there was a Yankees minor leaguer who tested positive for coronavirus, the first confirmed professional player to have it, and MLP has closed camps to some extent, has sent minor leaguers and non-roster players home, another thing that we may talk about on an upcoming episode, and has discouraged or outright banned group activities and group training and scrimmages

and that sort of thing, although players who are on the 40-man still have access to camps and can train on their own if they decide to stay at spring training and don't go home. But because that makes it very difficult to practice game skills and stay in game-ready shape, this virtually guarantees that there would have to be another couple weeks at least, let's say, to get ready for the season, and that pushes the start date back even further. One player who is headed home from camp according to Peter Gammons is effectively wild favorite Rich Hill. On Monday Gammons tweeted the drive from Fort Myers Florida to Milton Massachusetts requires a stop and precautions. The wise Rich Hill stopped at a Bass Pro Shop to get some bear mace in case his car should break down in the hinterlands. So pro tip for any other players who may be making

that drive. Bears are the least of our worries these days. So things look pretty bleak baseball wise. Because of that, I'm going to give you a daily baseball thing to watch or pay attention to while we're trying to get through this baseball deprived time. And we may devote entire episodes to this. But for today, my pick to click, it's sort of a bittersweet one. Over the weekend, episodes to this. But for today, my pick to click, it's sort of a bittersweet one. Over the weekend, the Saber Analytics Conference in Arizona did go ahead as scheduled, sort of. The events were live streamed, so people weren't really in the audience, but the presentations are online. And there's one in particular by MLB's StatCast team, some of the technical people and analysts who process the StatCast information, and they were presenting on what the StatCast

system will look like or would have looked like this season. And it is pretty interesting stuff for those who haven't been following this. StatCast switched from a system that combined TrackMan, Radar, and Chiron Higo video to just being Hawkeye video. Some of you may be familiar with the Hawkeye system from Tennis, but this new system, based only on video and post-processing, and uses a system of 12 cameras arranged around the ballpark, will not only allow for far greater accuracy, so pitches

now should be tracked to within a quarter inch or so, and balls in play are now tracked supposedly to within a foot or so instead of plus or minus 15 feet as it was before when the entire trajectory of batted balls wasn't tracked and things had to be extrapolated. Now seemingly almost everything is tracked and some of the pitches that were missed before will not be missed. Many of the batted balls that were missed before will not be missed now, in particular bunts and fouls and pop-ups, weird batted balls that the old system didn't track very reliably the new system does. And that's nice. It's more and better information, but it's not necessarily a different type of information.

However, this new system also has the ability to track players' individual limbs, which means that it can measure mechanics in an interesting way. It can track bats, so you can get a good idea of a player's swing plane. You can see exactly where the ball impacted the bat. You can see the distance by which the bat missed a pitch on a swing and miss. And you get real-time sort of 3D or 4D tracking of players so that potentially you could have real-time representations of player movement on the field that are not just dots moving around. just dots moving around. You can measure the entire spin of a pitch and calculate the gyrospin and the sidespin and the backspin and all these things that previously had to be inferred or estimated. And there are a lot of implications here for reaction time of runners and fielders,

quantifying mechanics, preventing injuries, swing analysis. You could potentially even use this as a resource for instant replay to get an automated sense of, say, whether a tag was applied before a runner touched the base. So this is pretty cool and exciting, and I will link to the video. It's about 53 minutes, so if you're nerdy enough to sit through it, that'll get you 53 minutes closer to whenever baseball is back. I should note, though, that a lot of these exciting, intriguing enhancements will not be available publicly, at least initially, so a lot of these exciting, intriguing enhancements will not be available publicly, at least initially. So a lot of this fancy stuff will only be available to teams. And so it's very tantalizing to hear about, but we in the public may not have it. And of course, it's contingent

on, you know, baseball games being played, which right now is not the case. But hey, it's something to look forward to at some unspecified point in the future. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Colby Bogey, Reed DeWolf, Matt Muzia, Aaron Schaefer, and Joel Gillespie. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. Its ranks have swelled slightly in the last few days as people have needed an outlet to

talk about baseball. It's always a good place to do it in a nice community. You can also contact us via email at podcast at fan graphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. If you are a supporter, we will likely do emails next time. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. If you're looking to pick up some reading material to survive the Spaceball dry spell, the paperback edition of my book, The MVP Machine, comes out on April 7th. So go pre-order it now if you're interested. It does have a long new afterword with new material that was not in the hardcover and we will be back with

another episode a little later this week talk to you then keep washing those hands August, now you wait for May You wait, you wait You wait to get there Now you wait to play You wait, you wait for something That will make the waiting work away