Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1516: The Odds of an Odd Season

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller follow up on a previous discussion of advance scouting’s contribution to Kirk Gibson’s legendary 1988 home run and banter about the strangeness of not having a date for Opening Day, then answer listener emails about how to get into baseball for the first time, how a shortened season could affect […]

I was waiting in line, and I was waiting for something that was years ago. I was pretending I knew, but you should never wait. Shorter, shorter, no time to spare. It'll soon disappear, but You can never be sure Shorter, shorter So hard to tell It's caught all around I can never be sure

Hello and welcome to episode 1516 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. I have an update about Mel Didier, the scout who told Kirk Gibson to look slider on 3-2 against Dennis Eckersley. Friend Eddie emailed to let us know that he met him at the last two spring trainings that Mel went to. His dad's best friend played for him in college. And so Eddie got to hang out with him.

And Eddie says, I am envisioning the death stare he would give you saying that his Gibson story was exaggerated. And I'm delighted to think of getting this death stare. I told Eddie that I was imagining being that guy that Buzz Aldrin decked when he accused Buzz of faking the moon landing. I think that would be a fair response to me if I tried to confront Mel with my conspiracy theory. So Eddie says, I got the death stare from him once. I forget what exactly I said, but it was misconstrued.

He derided Ivy League types. And Eddie says he did tell the Eckersley-Gibson story. Okay, so he didn't come clean to Eddie about the truth. No, he was still telling it to people he just met 30 years ago. This was a central part of his understanding of baseball and his baseball life. was a central part of his understanding of baseball and his baseball life. And so just like Buzz Aldrin, I think he would consider this to have been a key part of his career and would not have appreciated somebody doing a play index. And Eddie says at one point talking to him, he had to take a call and said, sorry, it's Kirk Gibson.

Yeah, I mean, if I were Mel and I had done that or believed that I had done that, I would tell that story too. And I'd be pretty proud of it because how many people who are not actually players can claim to have materially affected the outcome of not just a game or just any action in a Major League Baseball game, but that one, one of the most memorable, historic moments of all time. So, of course, I would brag about it if I thought I had played a role. Oh, unbelievable. Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the five biggest home runs in history, and he wasn't even on the field, and he gets to claim credit for it. It's amazing. All right. Well, we are going to do some emails today and i imagine we may be doing a lot of emails in the coming weeks and months so please do keep sending them

in can i i'll just jump in here and just note that uh zachary levine uh emailed us with us more vault question suggestions the vault being uh predictions for who will lead major league baseball in various categories over the next decade. So he had some more categories that he says that we could we could answer. And I don't know if we're going to answer those or not. But I will make a vow right here and right now that as long as we're in lockdown, as long as we're all in our own homes like this, I will predict anything that I am asked to predict. OK, you asked me to predict a baseball thing, and I will not vouch for it being any better

than the non-predictions that I would previously have refused to make because it's irresponsible to try to predict baseball. But I will throw caution to the wind. I will irresponsibly make bad predictions about anything you want. Is this because that's the little contribution you can make to making everyone's day better or is it because you're going stir crazy cooped up inside yeah i think is it because we don't even know if there's going to be a season so you can feel free to predict

anything i do sort of feel like none of this is real and that yeah that like nothing that happens in my house is part of society so if i say it here it doesn't like it does not it will it will just be it will no longer exist in six months when we when historians look back on this time period they are not going to be dwelling on my on what happened in my house yeah yeah it has been a weird unreality feeling when i think about doing anything with baseball, even doing this podcast. I think, oh, we're still doing that, right? Because they're not actually playing and we don't know when they're going to be playing, but we're going to keep podcasting. But will people care? And I know they'll care. Lots of people have written in to say, yes, please keep making podcasts. And we will. Of course we will. But it is such a strange time. And as I was just looking at our mailbag to pick out some questions for today, you can tell when everything changed just by looking at the emails that people have sent us. Because one day it was Astros, Astros, Astros. And will Astros hitters get hit?

And what will happen to the Astros? And then suddenly it's like, will there be a season? What happens if there's not a season? And suddenly it's like, oh, all that sign stealing stuff. Boy, we were really worked up about that for a while. And now it just seems to pale in comparison to the fact that we don't even know when or if there will be a baseball season. So I would imagine that hopefully when, not if, baseball comes back, will anyone muster any outrage anymore about the Astros? I mean, I assume that Astros hitters would still get booed whenever opening day is, but it seems like if we go through a couple months of this at least, that everyone's rage will have subsided and everyone will just be so grateful

that baseball is back and that they can leave their houses again, that compared to coronavirus, what is stealing signs really in the weeks or two weeks right before and during the opening week. And, you know, most of them will just hold. And then at some point in August, we'll run them when it's appropriate to run season preview stories. But the opening day article about the Astros just like draw a black line through it. I don't think it's news anymore. I don't think it will be news. I mean, it'll be news, but the specific angle that I had, I think it's just done. It's probably not worth thinking that deeply about responses to the Astros, because I agree. I think it's going to be very, very tepid.

Yeah, it has made me sort of rethink the conversation that we had. Was it us, I think, that we had on this podcast about how long baseball writing would continue to happen if there were no baseball. And I don't remember exactly what we estimated. And obviously, it depends on if you think baseball is coming back. If it's not just, well, that's it. Because then I think you'd lose a lot of your interest in doing it and people wouldn't want to consume it anymore, even though there's more than a century of baseball to look back on, and you could conceivably mine that for new material for a while. But I think once everyone

realized, oh, this is over, then I think we'd all just kind of collectively abandon it and we'd miss it. But still, I don't know that people would want to just keep chewing over what had already happened. And so we're less than a week into this thing, and baseball's not going away forever. It will be back at some point. And yet already I'm kind of revising down whatever estimate we made about how long it would keep going. Because it's weird because compared to a week ago,

there was no meaningful baseball being played a week ago either. There's been no meaningful baseball, played a week ago either. There's been no meaningful baseball, at least major league baseball, being played since last October. And yet when you have that goal in mind, when you know when opening day is and you're counting down to that day, then those months, you might miss it, but you don't feel like, well, why am I even doing this? You have an end date. You know that this suspension is going to end. And the strange thing about this now is not just that it has been delayed, but that we don't know when it really has been delayed until we know when it's not going to

be back, but we don't know how long it might take. And there's something, I guess, even more unsettling about that. Like if they just told me, hey, the season's take. And there's something, I guess, even more unsettling about that. Like if they just told me, hey, the season's starting August 1st or something, that's a really long time from now. And hopefully baseball will be back before then. But if I had a concrete date in my mind, then it would seem more real to me. And I think the gap or the absence of it, I would just sort of reset my off-season clock and I'd be back in off-season mode. And, oh, I don't know what happened. We just lost three or four months there.

But all right, we're counting down to opening day. Whereas now we can't start the countdown clock. And that's a very strange feeling. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I mean, you know, my annual cabin trip would be coming up and I would be doing that two person draft. And we canceled it for various reasons. But if I knew that there was a I think if I knew the season was starting on June 15, I would still want to do that draft now just because like,

I was very eager to do it. You know, like, don't want to wait. People are doing fantasy drafts now. Yeah, I don't want to wait until June to do it. So even though it's months away, I had been looking forward to that weekend and that time of year. And I was excited to do it. And I would want to like kind of keep life a little bit normal. And so I think I would do it even if it were June 15th. But the fact that it's not there's not a date at all, it feels totally wrong to do it. There's not a date at all. It feels totally wrong to do it.

So even though there's a decent chance that the date will be earlier than June 15th, but the uncertainty, it's the uncertainty about it all. Yes. Nothing feels real. This whole thing, the challenge in these past few days, there have been a lot of challenges, but one of the challenges in these past few days has actually surprised me has been kind of keeping a grip on reality all the time. There are mostly I have a grip on reality, mostly everything is normal. And you know, we're going about life and cooking dinner and cleaning dishes and playing board games. But there will just be these flashes where I just feel disconnected from reality, because're stuck in here and there's this world out there that you know is in turmoil and grief and you're not

connected to it and it starts to feel like like you just sort of recede into this daydreamy world where you're not quite connected to reality and I don't remember where that was going well I had the same feeling just going out briefly for groceries and things because, you know, you see a few masks maybe on faces. But other than that, it looks pretty much like the world, except now and then you see some sign like one of the shelves with the cans is really depleted. And I've never seen that in the store. It's always been fully stocked no matter when I've gone. And now it's not. Or I'll see a mask now and then.

And you might rarely see that under normal circumstances. But it just sort of reminds you because you can go out and walk around and it is still allowable to do that for the time being at least as we speak. as we speak but you could kind of convince yourself that the world looks almost more normal once you go out in it than it does when you're sitting at home reading twitter and looking at all the news and everything and then you go outside and it's not like you're looking left and right and they're sick people all over the place and so you could almost convince yourself that oh boy it's more real out here and inside it's unreal yeah and yet you know that all that stuff is actually happening so it's very strange yeah all right so this might be a good time to answer this question from keith in folsom california who says i'm writing this email because frankly i've

never really been into baseball my bay area born dad is a diehard San Francisco Giants fan, and as Los Angeles natives, he would always take us to Dodgers games but have us cheer on the Giants. For some reason, the game never really stuck for me, and I ended up a huge basketball fan, a predilection I have to this day. The only baseball I regularly take in is re-watching Moneyball over and over again, so this is what you're dealing with here. Fast forward to 2019, and for whatever reason, I got super into the Nats Astros World Series. I had heard all about the Astros and Taubman, and so I basically started watching the series to cheer

against them. I found the series to be incredibly thrilling, with the Nats of course winning back-to- back elimination games to win the series. Keith, it gets better than that series. That series wasn't even that great, at least early on. It gets better than that. It was during this time that I started subscribing to your excellent podcast and have continued listening as the Astro's self-inflicted woes continue. My question for you is this. I find myself a little overwhelmed by all the different positions and all the advanced stats used to measure the different positions and all the different coaches and managers and their roles, etc. ad infinitum. Where do I get started?

Is there a book I should read prior to the upcoming season, which you now have a lot of time to do? Should I just start watching games and listen to your podcast and Google unfamiliar terms? I'd love to have a sport to follow when the NBA ends, which I guess has already happened, but all the sports are over for now. So any help would be deeply appreciated. So how do we get Keith into baseball when baseball comes back? than this will resolve itself very easily. I think that baseball is such a, I don't know, it's a huge, humongous sport with, like he says, so many hundreds of players and so many games playing at various times that it's really inconceivable that anybody

except for a writer or a very, very, very small percentage of fans is going to be the completest when it comes to baseball or even attempt that idea. And one of the things that's great about baseball is that if you have a team, you don't need to. It is not a sport for completists at all. All you have to do if you have a team is A, you just check that team's scores at least once a day. So you can watch the games, that's great, or you cannot. You can just check, but you get that daily

feedback of, like, did a good thing happen or a bad thing happen? And you can look forward to finding that out. And then as for following the rest of the league, the rest of the league doesn't really matter. Like, they're just stormtroopers basically. They're just, they can all be the Star Wars stormtroopers where they're just, they can just,

if you need them to if you're overwhelmed by how many there are you can just think of them as all the undifferentiated other like they're just all not your team and uh you don't really need to know who the fourth reliever out of the your that day's opponent's bullpen is let alone who the fourth reliever is in games that your team's not even playing against. And so I think like I know baseball fans, fans, we'll just say the Angels because I'm in the Angels territory. And people are always talking to me about the Angels when I go out in public. And I know people who are Angels fans who know more about the Angels than I do,

who knew more about the Angels than i did when i was covering them as a semi beat writer for the angels and then i know angels fans who care just as much about the angels and maybe even consume just as much angels baseball watch as much angels baseball you know don't even don't really even know all the rules of baseball certainly don't know a lot of the baseball players who are not angels. They just know their team. And those two types of fans, I think, are equally devoted to the team and get equally as much reward and satisfaction out of their fandom. I was thinking, I was telling someone the other day that my dad is one of the biggest baseball

fans I know. If you measure it on an emotional level, on who's emotionally committed to the routine of baseball, the rhythm of baseball, and to cheering for a team, I know very few people who get as much out of baseball and put as much emotional energy into baseball and anticipate a game every day. And my dad, I'm pretty sure, doesn't know who Francisco Lindor is. And so you can do that. You can be just as devoted a fan emotionally

and not know who one of the best players in the game is if they're in the other league and you never see him so if i were keith i would just really be very disciplined about not feeling like the things that you're missing matter focus on the things that do matter which are how your team is doing and what's happening in the game right in front of you. And if you do that, you will enjoy it. And if you enjoy it, you'll watch it. And if you watch it, you will, through osmosis, pick up tons of this stuff until it is now no longer a foreign language to you, but a native one. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Just go for the immersion course, basically. You could just try the book learning approach. And I can't really personally recommend a good intro to baseball book. I'm sure that there are many

excellent ones, but I don't think I ever really sat down, at least certainly as an adult, and said, okay, baseball, tell me more about this. I want to learn what this thing is. So I didn't really approach it that way. And so you're almost asking the wrong people because I think we picked it up and got into it so early that it's like asking me how I learned English or something. I don't know. I don't remember how I did that. It just sort of happened. But I think if you just pick a team, if you do have a team, a local team, or if you need

help picking a team, maybe we could help you come up with criteria, things that you're looking for in a potential team. And if you just watch them every day, then I think you would pick it up pretty quickly because, you know, if you watch the game every day throughout a season, then you're going to understand the pitcher batter confrontation and you'll understand pretty quickly which way people run around the bases and force outs and tags and all that. And depending on the broadcast crew of your team, you may have some broadcasters who hold

your hand a little bit more. There are some broadcasters who pitch their commentary toward more of a casual fan, I think, and don't necessarily assume that you know all this stuff already and will walk you through a plays. It might be even beneficial if there's a broadcast crew that has, you know, like a former player on the team and maybe a former pitcher and a former batter, as a lot of broadcast crews do, and they'll say, what was he thinking on that play? What was he doing on that play?

And those of us who've seen a million games already are thinking, crews do and they'll say what was he thinking on that play what was he doing on that play and those of us who've seen a million games already are thinking yeah we know we we know what he's going to say we know how this play works but for keith that might be very helpful and i think it will kind of rub off on you and wash over you and you'll start to hear the names of the famous players around the league and in baseball history and maybe you'll get curious about them and then you can go read more about them and so i think that probably is the best way to do it now when it comes to advanced stats he was asking about we get that question a lot i wouldn't start there yeah no i wouldn't start there and if you do i mean moneyball is just such a moneyball is an accessible book, even if you don't have any interest in getting into baseball.

Like, it's not a tutorial, but it is written for a non-baseball audience in a lot of ways. I mean, it was a smash among non-baseball fans. And so that's a good way to, like, kind of get the philosophy behind, you know, even thinking about baseball in that way. Because I wouldn't want him to learn the wrong things and then have to unlearn them. We're doing that constantly, though. You and I are doing that constantly. It's okay.

Yeah, I mean, I guess he's already listening to this podcast, so he's not hearing us say that you should evaluate players based on RBI or whatever, and then suddenly he'll get all those habits ingrained, and then he'll realize that he'll have to learn something else. We went through that ourselves, so you can do it. We didn't come out of the womb or become baseball fans knowing about sabermetrics. So most people, I think, at least in earlier generations and eras, certainly came to it through the traditional stats and numbers and then maybe had some sort of sabermetric awakening at some point. But yeah, just watch it, see if you like it. Maybe you won't even like it, and then you you decide you really like it, then you can supplement

your knowledge. You can go read some history books or some sabermetrics books, some of the really formative ones that we've talked about before and that we could recommend via email if you follow up. But yeah, I'd say don't stress about it. Don't worry about learning it the right way or having the exact perfect book that you need to have introduce you to the sport. Just watch it. That's how most of us get into it. I guess it helps, though, if you're coming to it as a kid and you're playing in school or in Little League or whatever, then that is sort of a natural introduction to it because, you know, coaches are telling you how to play the game and that

informs you as a fan and as a baseball watcher. And maybe that deepens your appreciation for the sport in a way that may not be as accessible to Keith. So that is one obstacle, picking it up at a more advanced stage, I suppose. I might suggest that if Keith hasn't played, has never played, which I'm not assuming that that's the case, but in case he has actually never played, I would recommend getting a glove, getting a ball and playing catch with somebody until it feels natural. Because I long believed that a big part of the joy of watching a baseball game is actually that you can relate to the

sensation of catching and throwing and that those are good feelings. And I think that when you see a player do it subconsciously, you are identifying with the experience, your kind of subconscious memory of how good it feels to feel a ball land cleanly in your glove and how good it feels to see a ball soar off into the distance right where you attempted to throw it. It's also great if you can go out and hit, but it probably takes a little bit more effort to learn how to hit well enough that you get that good, clean, solid contact. So at the very least, they'll catch. And if we are recommending starter books,

I would say that Roger Angel books, besides being incredible on every level, he does slow down quite often to explain what is happening to actually explain. Because he's writing for New Yorker readers. Not all of them are baseball fans. And so a lot of times he actually will explain what the rule is in the play that he's describing or what the action means. And in a more textbook-y way. It's been a long time since I've read it. in the play that he's describing or what the action means and in a more textbooky way it's been a long time since i've read it but i remember leonard coppett's the thinking fans guide to

baseball being a very good read and both fundamental and a place that you can start but also like it takes you it doesn't just give you the first like this is not baseball for dummies it will take you from the first step of a concept uh to like the seventh step of a concept right all right question from mike if the mlb season is shortened by any number of games how will this be factored into the careers of players today one thing you never hear about is how the strikes shorten the careers of players like bonds mcguire sosa and mcgriff ultimately this impacted the final career totals and might have been the difference between them making the Hall of Fame and being on the outside

looking in. What if Ripken had not made it to Gehrig? The strike might have been blamed because of the missed time, but no one seems to care that McGriff likely gets to 500 homers without the strike. So when it comes to reflecting on any missed games during this time, will anyone be saying that Trout would have reached Bonds, for for example would we need to also consider that bonds himself lost out on a few homers when we look back at it 30 years later you will be able to find some milestones that were not made because of 20 or 30 games that are missing and if you tried to project out 20 or 30 years based on those 30 20 or 30 games then you can find the potential in almost any player for them to not reach something but most of those things will not come back to matter

and in addition to that pretty much every generation has something like this that you know you had the wars you had the work stoppages you have like life is life is not smooth and so for that reason it's very hard to put together 20 or 30 straight seasons of 162 games and i just don't think it i don't think it really is worth dwelling on too much and i think honestly i don't think fred mcgriff's a hall of famer if he hits 500 homers. And I think if Fred McGriff were a Hall of Famer at 500 homers, I don't think that being at 493 would have kept him out. It feels like the sort of thing that doesn't end up mattering much. It might cost us a record chase, but to be honest, there are very few record chases and it probably won't cost us a record chase. people had cracked that club and had huge home run totals that I don't really know that that had the

same cachet to it anymore. But I have heard it suggested certainly that if he had gotten those seven more homers just because he was close enough, you know, respectable borderline candidate that perhaps that would have pushed him over the edge. But really, it shouldn't push many or any players over the edge. If we're just talking about missing a matter of weeks or months, then that's very rarely going to make the difference between a deserving Hall of Famer and a non-deserving Hall of Famer. And if we're just talking about, will it make the difference between someone getting to an arbitrary milestone and getting in because of that, I don't particularly care because I don't know that that's

really the best way to decide these things. And as we've talked about, I don't know that that is the way that these things are really decided anymore or will be decided in the future. So if this ends up costing, I don't know, you know, Justin Verlander, Zach Greinke, a run at 300 wins or something like that, or Altuve, 3,000 hits or whatever. Miguel Cabrera, someone was tweeting at me about this earlier, Miguel Cabrera and 500 homers. At this point, I don't know that anyone would really hold it against them anymore. It doesn't really matter how many wins Verlander ends up with anymore. I think everyone sort of accepts that he is a Hall of Famer or will be by the time he's done, and I couldn't even tell you how many wins he has right now. And by the time those players are

eligible, I would think that those stats would have receded even further. So I doubt that will be that big a deal. That said, I'm still sad that we may be missing out on the chance for Trout to have some incredible season, his best season ever, the best season ever. Maybe I'll be sad when it comes to the end of his career that he missed out on some portion of the season if he's giving players a run for like highest war of all time or something. We've talked about the difficulty with advanced stats and milestones and how they're always changing and getting updated. And so it's hard to have these magic numbers.

But that might bother me a bit because I delight in Trout's successes. And so I want him to have the best resume he could possibly have. And yet, as you said, it's not like every other player in the past had a full 162 game season or, for that matter, 154 game season. Players didn't even used to play 16, they're the ones who are getting jobbed here because they're missing some time. No, missing time is kind of the norm. You know, if you had a whole career that was uninterrupted by anything, you'd probably be pretty lucky. And on top of that, there are injuries, you know, fluky injuries that come out of nowhere that lead to giant differences in playing time. So I won't be dwelling on that too much i don't think although you know if we had a whole season wiped out when

trout was at his peak or something i would mourn that and lament that yeah i mean i agree with you that it's it sucks i mean it's definitely disappointing it's i think it's baked into all these discussions that like this is this is bad it's it's really disappointing in in a lot of ways and this is one of the ways that in some small way it affects these long-term storylines that we had invested in but you know if a sport is going to sacrifice a month or two of its season baseball i would say in the losing the important stuff contest baseball got up pretty easy compared to what basketball and you know ncaa basketball both are gonna lose you much more significant to lose i would say that it is considerably more significant to lose the

final two months of the season from a historic perspective like like by a factor of like 20 than to lose the first two months yeah i would so. Even if you just look at 94 and people still talk about the 94 Expos, you know, now you won't get that. Assuming there is some sort of season played, I guess you might have people say, well, if they had played a full season, then this team that was actually better, they may have had the better record by the end of the season, or they might have made the playoffs or something. And that I think would be a little easier to swallow than just having, say, a first place team just get cut off, you know, when they were already on the way. I guess it's not really that different because if you think that, well,

this team's true talent was better and they didn't get a chance to show it, you know, that could be unsatisfying in its own way. But it's like, well, this is how long the season was and it ended. So whoever was in first at the end, they got their chance. They got to make their playoff run. So that'd be much more satisfying or more fulfilling. And people do talk about Jeff Bagwell's 94 season or Tony Gwynn's 94 season, you know, people who were on pace for certain milestones or were having really great years and didn't get to finish them. And that is a shame. Matt Williams, another one. But as you said, it's probably less likely that you would get those record chases in this environment. You're probably not going to have someone making a run at 400, for instance.

So it may be less likely to actually cost us something. People who are 10 years older than me will know this, of course. They will be slapping their forehead at how I could think this is new and novel. But are you aware of what happened in the 81 season? So they had a first half champion and a second half champion in each division because a work stoppage in the middle of it knocked out about two months of the season. And so if you won the first half,

then you played the winner of your division second half in a playoff. And then that determined who was going to play in the league championship series. And so did you know that in the National League, both of the teams that had the best overall records missed the playoffs? bug me, I think, if I were a fan of those teams. And not just that, but you had this weird system where a team had already qualified for the playoffs when the second half started, and so it didn't really even have to try to win. And so you had teams that really didn't have much incentive to perform. So the split season is very strange. And yes, that's another cost of it, is that you might be the best team for the full season and not the best team in either half and not be a playoff team so not advocating a return of the

split season no matter what happens here of this here stat blast. So one of the, there was a very fun little throwaway line in Lords of the Realm, which, as you know, I just reread, or I just read. You just reread. I just read. And this was a part of the book where he's talking about how owners had made it extremely difficult on expansion teams. They like to really stick it to the expansion teams and make it almost impossible for them to do anything.

And so he's talking about the 62 Mets. And he says that draft produced the 1962 Mets. This was the team of Casey Stangle, Marvelous Marv Throneberry, Choo Choo Coleman, and two pitchers named Bob Miller, who went a combined three and 14. So two Bob Millers on one team. Choo Choo Coleman and two pitchers named Bob Miller, who went a combined three and 14. So two Bob Millers on one team. Now, in my opinion, a team should not acquire two players of the same name.

I mean, you got to do what you got to do to win. But I think it would be really unpleasant as a fan to have two players of the same name. I think that you would constantly be confusing them and trying to like, you'd have to be spending a lot of mental energy, always trying to sort out which one you're thinking of at any given time, turn on the radio, and they say Bob Miller's in the game, and you're trying to figure out which Bob Miller it is. So if you can avoid it, you should avoid it. But you know, it didn't happen that time they had they got to Bob Miller's the Mets had to Bob Miller's. And so I wondered how common it is. And so I emailed Dan Hirsch, a baseball reference, to ask him. And so Dan points out that we have to decide what the rules are going to be here. If Bob Miller, number two, had gone by Robert, then would we count that?

Or would we not count that? Or if he'd gone by Bobby, would we count it? And so the answer I said on is no. We're talking about the same name but they have to be the same you have to be confused they cannot have unique identifiers so if even one letter is different than they each have a unique identifier and the whole premise doesn't apply because now you're not confused if you hear Bobby Miller you're not like I wonder if he means Bob you know Bob and Bobby one's one's Bobby. So we are only looking for players who share the same

common name, the name they are commonly known by, okay? It's not even the only time that the Mets have had two. What? Ben! Okay. Back up. I'll let you have the big reveal. We're gonna, so we're also going to exclude the Ken Griffey's

and the Tim Raines's because they've got junior and senior in their names. And so I consider those to be unique identifiers. And so once we have eliminated them, we have five pairs of players, including the Bob's Miller. So we're going to go over four of them quickly, and then we're going to linger a little bit on the fifth. So the first thing, the four that we're going to go over briefly are all variants of Robert. So we've been over the Bobs in New York, the Bobs Miller. Both of them were pitchers. Bob two didn't actually join the club until July 24th. So they were not confused the whole year.

They were only confused a couple of months. They pitched in the same game four times, but Bob two never relieved Bob one directly, so they never touched. They did pitch in the same inning once, but Bob 1's runners had already scored by the time Bob 2 entered. So they didn't even have, he didn't even have, he didn't even inherit. Their stats never overlapped, basically. But they did pitch in the same inning. They had a combined war that season of negative 0.1, and Bob, too, retired after that season, and so the Bob Miller situation was resolved. Fast forward 40 years, still on the Mets, and we get the next pair, also a starting pitcher

and a relief pitcher, and these were the Bobbies Jones. Bobby Jones, the starter, and Bobby Jones, the reliever. Very important to Ben's life. You can hear how excited he was when I brought this topic up. Ben spent, I remember you spent two and a half hours one time waiting in line to get an autograph at a card shop on a Saturday.

You had your mom drive you down to Rock Something Beach. What's that beach? Rockaway. Rockaway Beach. It's a card shop. And then you got there and it was the wrong Bobby Jones. You brought the wrong card.

And you had Bobby Jones 2 sign Bobby Jones 1's card. I bet that happened. It was Bobby J. Jones. I thought it was Bobby M. Jones. I bet they always had that. I bet you they didn't even do card shop signings anymore because it was just too many of the wrong guy's cards. signings anymore because it was just too many of the wrong guys cards those two combined to go 11 and 7 with 0.8 war bobby 2 spent most of the year in triple a so again not too much confusion

but in this case bobby 2 did replace bobby 1 directly three times arguably so i don't know if we're going to count this as three or not. Twice a pinch hitter intervened. So technically Bobby one was replaced by a pinch hitter and Bobby to replace the pinch hitter. Are we counting that? Yeah, I don't think we credit. I don't think I don't like it. Yeah.

No. However, on September 6th, 2010, Bobby one got knocked out of the third inning with two on and nobody out. Bobby two came in, stranded his runners, helped his ERA and helped Bobby one's ERA, helped two Bobby Jones ERAs in one inning. And everybody on the news had a laugh that night. Safe to say. All right. The third pair comes two years later and it's Bobby Jones again. Bobby Jones is following each other around. So Bobby Jones went to San Diego and Bobby Jones joined him. They're doing an act. They got a little bit going. There's like traveling vaudeville. Bobby Jones is everywhere. first so once again not together all year and right after that bobby one retired they were under replacement level that year combined with a combined negative 0.5 war and a 5.58 era the

fourth pair oh we're gonna have to get another ruling on the fourth pair so the fourth pair was the roberto's hernandez okay roberto hernandez one was the great reliever roberto hernandez two was at that point fausto carmona so his common name later became known as roberto hernandez but when they were in the same clubhouse only one person knew he had a secret yeah i believe it's too fun not to count though so i counted it so we should count it but it wasn't fun for the people of the time it's like the opposite of when we talk about stripping a World Series

championship from the Astros and it's like well it's taking away some fun from them now but you can't take away the joy that they had then this is the opposite you can't retroactively give people the joy of a double Roberto Hernandez well do you think that it do you I mean okay so This is the opposite. You can't retroactively give people the joy of a double Roberto Hernandez. Well, do you think that it – I mean, okay.

So sometimes in a piece of fiction, like in the movie Gone Girl, that she's living under an assumed identity. And so she's got – one of the things that she has – I think she maybe even writes this in her diary. She writes that she has to, like, get really good at responding to the other name and so you have to do that like that's a key part of living in disguise is getting used to responding to your fake name your assumed name think how hard that would be if people were constantly saying your real name around you yeah like every time fausto went to work he's like fausto fausto fausto you gotta remember fausto and then someone's like it's roberto hernandez, he's like, Fausto, Fausto, Fausto. You gotta remember Fausto. And then someone's like, it's Roberto Hernandez! And he's like, don't

look. That would be very hard. It's the hardest way to live under an assumed name is with somebody who has the exact same name. Alright, the fifth, the only non-Babos, the only pair that included a hitter, these

are the Dixies Howell. So in 1949, the Reds had two players named Howell and both went by Dixie. These are two of the 13 major leaguers in history who went commonly by Dixie. So the catcher's real name was Homer.

The pitcher's real name was Millard. But they both went by Dixie. It's on their baseball cards. It's on their Sabre bio. It would be on their Hall of Fame plaque if either one was any good. They are both commonly known as Dixie. And three times, Dixie Howell, the catcher, caught Dixie Howell, the pitcher. And you just know that somebody turned to the camera and said,

How will we tell these Dixies apart? All right. So it seems like an extraordinary coincidence that there were two Dixie Howells at the same time. But I think it's suggested by Dixie Howell, the pitcher's Saber bio, that they might have actually both been named after a third Howell who went by Dixie

and who was more famous. Both born in Kentucky in the same year. They were both born in Kentucky in the same year. That's the second line in the Sabre bio, isn't it? Oh, I don't know. I just looked at their baseball reference pages. They are of the 13 Dixies in Major League history, only three were from Kentucky.

So it's not like a common Kentucky thing. It is a common Southern thing. There's only one Dixie from Pennsylvania. Anyway, Dixie Howell, the third Dixie Howell, was a football star in college. He was a quadruple threat halfback for an undefeated Alabama team. I think he's in like the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame or something like that. He was also one of the nation's best punters. I'm paraphrasing all this from his Wikipedia page. And after that, he joined the NFL. And after that,

he became a college football coach. And in the meantime, not after that, but in the meantime, he was also a minor league baseball player for a number of years. So he was a star football player, a famous star football player, college football player who also played minor league baseball, not as well and was extremely famous. So he was basically doing a Tebow thing. league baseball not as well and was extremely famous so he was basically doing a tebow thing in to kill a mockingbird he is actually named in chapter 11 scout is trying to encourage gem change his mood around and she says i picked up a football magazine found a picture of dixie howell showed it to gem and said this looks like you so uh so the theory is that that might be why people called them dixie basically there was another Howell who was famous.

And so when people in the minors, because they got these nicknames in the minors, when people in the minors saw people named Howell, they went Dixie Howell, which is about how creative a lot of nicknames are. Both of these Howells were also from the South, so it would fit. I don't know. Maybe. It all seems fine. The Catcher, Dixie the catcher,

had a pretty uneventful career. The highlight of his career is that he was a teammate of Jackie Robinson in Montreal, which was the first year that Jackie played in the Dodgers organization. And he was also a teammate of Jackie Robinson. After wandering around for a while, he became his teammate also in Brooklyn in his final year. So bookended Jackie Robinson's pro, you know, affiliated career. Howell the pitcher, and he was more kind of unusual, his life and his career. He is credited with a very obscure and kind of mixed record, which is that it took him 16 years from his major league debut to get his first win. That is a record, his major league debut to get his first win that is a record 16 years from debut to first win he threw 226 major league innings across six seasons spread across 19 years and at the end of it he was a pretty good reliever a close to a star reliever for a year or two in his late 30s but in the middle of all that he spent most of his time in the minor leagues and also some of his time in a nazi prisoner of war

camp from his saber bio dixie and 150 other infantry men had been crossing the moose river in belgium in boats when a large force of germans suddenly appeared on a bluff above them and took them prisoner howell and the other prisoners did not know how the war was going until may 1945 when the camp was liberated by allied forces not quite a year about nine months the other thing about him get ready he died when he was 40 uh he had a heart attack in spring training uh during or maybe right after a workout and he died and that was the end of his career and his life so those are the dixie howells dixie's howell haven't decided decided which one I'm going with there. I have nothing else to say. Okay. Well, he's buried in Pennsylvania, so there's another Dixie

in Pennsylvania, although I guess he wasn't born there. All right. Cool. Yeah. The Bobby Joneses are emblazoned on my mind. That was a very confusing thing as I was kind of coming of age as a baseball fan in New York at that time and was having to keep them straight in my mind. By the way, I will just note that I did not see, I saw references to Bobby Jones's being the first pitcher to relieve, you know, whatever that thing was, but I did not see any, I only saw one reference to the possibility that the Dixies were the only battery, the only same named battery, which seems like it would be a bigger deal. But maybe baseball historians decided nicknames don't count, even if they're common names. I saw one place that speculated that that because they had been on the same team the same summer, they might have been a battery at some point.

But this is not apparently a uh commonly repeated baseball trivia bit so now you can repeat it common okay i'm sure i will all right this question comes from someone named real sassy apples or not named that but going by that like the dixies went by dixie yeah i assume will be updated odds, but with fewer games to pull way ahead, I assume the field is now in more of a crapshoot with some of the presumed heavy favorites he's talking about if the season comes back and is shortened. So does that mean that the Rays and A's have a better chance to hang with the Yankees for the division title, for instance, or Yankees and Astros? And the answer is yes. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of what I was just saying about how if you have a shortened season that's shortened on the front end instead of the back end, then you might have fans of, say, a better or more talented team that feel cheated because their team didn't get to make the playoffs, even though perhaps over a longer complete schedule,

they would have pulled ahead. But there was an article at Fangraphs just on Tuesday where Craig Edwards looked at what last season, I think, would have looked like if the season had been shortened. And there's always that exercise that people do, like what if it'll be the middle of the season, and they'll say, what if the season had started in may or something and it'll be completely different standings because some team had a terrible april or whatever and that would happen and in fact

dan simborski did an article also at fangraphs where he tried to quantify this So he did like a 81 game season versus 162 game season. And he tried to figure out how the playoff odds for the favorites and the underdogs would shift. And there is a pretty significant difference, especially if you look at the top teams, the teams that are essentially shoe-ins over 162 games. You almost can't imagine them not making the playoffs over 81 games it is more conceivable so the dodgers for instance according to dan wait yeah can i i just would like i know you're gonna reveal a bunch of them but i just want to blow everybody's mind here can i just blow everybody's mind here sure 162 game season zips playoff probabilities for the Miami Marlins, 0.1%. 81 games?

Yeah. 10%! Yeah. They go from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10. Yeah, that's something. Oddly, the Orioles barely touched, though. The Orioles go from 0.0 to 1.9 that's a hard zero yeah i guess that's a product of the fact that the orioles are in a not a tougher division necessarily but a more

top heavy division i guess it's just harder to imagine them whereas the the marlins are like well the marlins have the the hardest strength of schedule in baseball, I believe, according to the Fangraph's playoff odds. And so, therefore, I guess if you take away half of their schedule, then they gain more maybe. I mean, I would guess that the Marlins have a tough strength of schedule, but the winner of the NL East currently projects to win like 88 or 89 games. The winner of the AL East projects to win 102 games. And also the Orioles are simply a worse team, projects to be a worse team. So probably in a 162-game season,

the Orioles project to finish 45 or 50 games out of first, whereas the Marlins probably project to finish 25 games out of first. And this is playoff odds, but not division title odds. So yeah, I think not all of the differences are as striking, but if you take the top teams like the Dodgers, they lose about 27.3 percentage points of playoff odds. So they're almost a lock right now. They're like 99%. And according to Dan's calculations, they would go down to 71% in a half season. And the Yankees go from about 90% to 63%. So no one underdog team gains as much as the favorites lose, as you would expect. So for instance the the team that gets the biggest boost is the texas

rangers who go from 1.6 percent to 19.3 percent this is the biggest boost in terms of percentage points in terms of percentage i guess the marlins would be a bigger boost than that even probably i forget what you said they they were originally 0.1%, right? So yeah, bigger boost relatively. But yeah, I guess if you want parity and competitive balance and a bit of a break from last year where we had these historically stratified standings, then maybe you wouldn't really mind having some luck injected into the equation because really if you're going to have playoffs anyway there's so much luck on that end of things that we've already sort of de-emphasized the regular season so in a way maybe it'd be even more entertaining i'm not advocating that we go to 81 i think the season could stand to be a little bit shorter but 81 that's a little too much because i think for my taste at least you're injecting too much luck and and randomness into the process i like a regular season that tells you something about the team's true talent even if you then say and now play a single game

elimination or best of five or whatever it's it's there's some cognitive dissonance there this would definitely be the year though to have a season that makes no sense. Yes. To just completely, yeah, let it go. Just let the freak flag fly. The Royals go from 0.2% to 14.6%, which is 73 times higher. Yeah. I mean, someone asked us.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I mean, someone asked us, there's another question we got about, you know, basically with the stipulation that you don't want to be insensitive and imply that this coronavirus-related break is benefiting anyone, but in terms of relatively comparing baseball teams and which baseball team would benefit if baseball comes back. And yeah, essentially the favorites kind of lose out. So, you know, the Dodgers go and get Mookie Betts, and then maybe they'll have less time with Mookie Betts. We'd have to figure out exactly what will happen to service time if there's a shortened season. We did get some questions about that, and we'll probably tackle that another time. But I guess you could say in the Dodgers case, they are really going and getting Mookie bets for the playoffs for the World Series because they know they're going to make the playoffs anyway. But they don't necessarily know if the season is dramatically shortened, then there is considerably more uncertainty there. uncertainty there and so there are teams that relative to other teams stand to benefit in the sense that you know maybe they have a bunch of injured players right now like the yankees have

a bunch of walking wounded and so maybe they'll be healthy by the time the season comes back or we were talking earlier in this episode about justin verlander and i threw out the possibility that justin verlander might miss out on a milestone. Well, he has taken advantage, as opposed of this delay to start the season, by having groin surgery, which maybe he would have had anyway. Maybe he would have tried to play through it. Maybe he would have just missed time. And as it is, he should be, in theory, fully recovered from the surgery by the time the season starts. So there are players and teams that, you know, if you had to miss a big chunk of the season,

then it hurts them a little less than it hurts other teams. So in general, teams that had less of a chance to make the playoffs now will have more of a chance in theory. Yeah. You know, I was just thinking, Fred McGriff's going to make the Hall Hall of Fame Eventually too now that I think about it Maybe yeah once he is eligible Or has he already been I don't know

But once he can get in the Harold Baines way Yeah Alright one more let's see I've got one more Here from Patreon supporter Doug Who says would professional Baseball be better if every half inning teams started at the top of the batting order?

By saying professional baseball, I'm hoping to exclude this rule from Little League because it's far too sad to imagine a little kid gulping down tears as they realize they probably won't be batting today because they're at the bottom of the order. Yeah, I think it would be. batting today because they're at the bottom of the order. Yeah, I think it would be. I think in the same way that most people look, I mean, if I'm not careful, this is going to turn into an argument about whether it's better to have the DH or the pitcher batting. And I just don't want to have that argument or even state an opinion on it. But I think that generally speaking, you'd have a lot livelier game, you'd have a lot more focus on your stars, your stars would be able to be a lot more prominent.

And the freedom to have your say number eight hitter essentially never bat, or if he did bat, it would be in a game that you're probably going to win anyway, because you've already reached the eighth spot in your lineup at least once in an inning would allow you to perhaps punt that position offensively a position offensively and carry a defense only shortstop for instance uh and there might be i don't know but there might be a class of baseball player out there who with the right incentives could be andrelton simmons like defense but could never hit enough to play in the majors in this world not only would that player be raising the level of defensive performance at key positions but because his bat wouldn't be a detriment he wouldn't suffer that negative offensive value that great defenders sometimes have he could be a star

he could be uh he could be an all defense player with none of the defenders sometimes have, he could be a star. He could be an all-defense player with none of the negative offense, and he could be a star too. So I think, you know, probably, yeah. I think, yeah. There's a philosophical thing about baseball where you can't pick when you're going to come up, right? Like, there's something unforgiving about baseball's Right. that it would be a different philosophy where it would be much more like what we think of as a basketball or a football philosophy where you can give the ball to your star when the the moment demands it and maybe people don't like that philosophy as much remember maybe they like that baseball has the other one where it might be the biggest i mean when you think about it like the biggest moment of baseball in my lifetime is probably the 10th inning of the seventh game of the 2016 World Series when the tying run was up and Michael Martinez was hitting. And I mean, there's something that's

just really like fun about that from a narrative standpoint. But objectively speaking, if you were designing the sport, you would probably say that it would be better if he wasn't. And so while I like baseball the way it was, I'm not advocating for a change now. I think that now that we've got what we've got, it takes more than that to make me want to do drastic changes.

But yeah, I think if you were designing it, it would be more fun if you could have the best hitters batting at the start of every inning. flow of a lineup going into an inning knowing that you have the heart of the order coming up, for instance, or being able to look ahead and say, oh, we better do some damage now before the bottom of the order is up, or the pleasant surprise that comes from the beginning that you have when, say, your seven hitter is leading off. You're right. The quality of play would unquestionably be higher. You'd have better hitters hitting hitting and you'd have better fielders fielding. And it seems like that can't be a bad thing. And yet, wouldn't you lose something from

the scarcity? Could you even appreciate how good the good hitters were if they're all good hitters? You'd still have some separation there, but if you have like the Top five hitters are pretty much The only ones hitting most of the time Could you even appreciate How good the best hitters were If they weren't contrasted to Michael Martinez there'd be A lot less variation

Between hitters and Players in general right because Just the caliber of play would be Higher across the board, but it might be harder to appreciate that. So two things about it. One is that that might be true, but those hitters would also bat twice as often

or maybe three times as often in a season. And so while the difference between your number two hitter and another team's number two hitter might be smaller because of that, because so much of the action is focused on a smaller pool of players. They would get so many more chances that those differences would be would have more time to to grow. It'd be like it'd be like playing with six decks of cards rather than one deck of cards. If you're a card counter, I'm not going to finish that analogy.

But the other thing is that not the other, I'm going to ask you to imagine. Do you, the same is true of baseball players generally today relative to baseball players generally 100 years ago. The variation of talent among major leaguers now is much smaller than it was in the 1910s. Just mathematically speaking, that's easy to envision. Do you find that baseball is weaker for that fact? No. I mean, I wasn't following baseball then, so hard for me to say, but no, not really. It is hard to divorce this from the pitcher DH debate. I'm dancing around it because I have expressed an opinion on that myself.

I have come out in favor Of Universal DH and I've said I don't like watching pitchers Hit anymore and I've written about that And after I've wrote about it and Probably talked about it here people Came up with decent counter arguments That sort of swayed me Which were basically well

Why not have the variety Who's it hurting really if Some people like it this way and other people like it that way, maybe it's better to have two different ways than to have everything the same. Eh, maybe, I guess. If you think that one way is better, then I don't know that the variety is worse doing something that's actively worse. But then the other thing that I would be sort of sorry to lose, and I don't know if this

is worth having someone who is unqualified to hit. But I do like the fact that we can track how much players are getting over time because we have this sort of standard candle. We have this one thing that is mostly unchanging, right? The pitcher offensive skill, which is something that pitchers aren't really working on and aren't really recruited for. And so pitcher hitters just get worse and worse and worse and worse. And that's the thing that we can sort of use. That's the yardstick that we can say,

see, this is how much better hitters are today than they were a century ago, because the pitchers are kind of constant in a way. And so I do like that. That's kind of a feature in what I sort of see as a bug overall. And yet people then make the slippery slope argument like, well, if we're replacing pitchers because pitchers can't hit, then why don't we just replace the shortstops and replace the catchers, which is sort of what you're saying would probably happen in this scenario. You'd just have designated glove guys and those guys would never have to hit. And I think that's sort of a disingenuous argument, because really, you can't compare pitcher hitters to the weakest hitting real hitters. You know, you can compare, but the

comparison is that they are very different, and that shortstops or catchers or whoever the worst hitters are at any given time, they're real hitters and pitchers are not real hitters. And so they're kind of in a different class altogether. So I'm not so worried about the slippery slope. But in this case, I do kind of like the idea that you have to do both jobs, that you have to be an all-around player, which for me doesn't apply to pitching and hitting because those are just so dramatically different. Those are entirely different jobs, different skills. Those people who do one or the other, they don't even pretend to try to do the other. And so to me, those don't

have to go together. There's no reason for them to go together anymore. Whereas hitting and fielding and just sort of being a position player i do kind of like the idea that you have to do both and if that means that you're not good enough to cut it on one end well then you're not good enough you have to meet some minimum standards and so i think i would actually dislike the degree of specialization that would happen here and i don't know if that's entirely consistent but that's what I'm going with right now. Okay. All right.

That will do it. Be well. I hope to. All right. While we're at it, I'll answer one more that Sam already answered via email. It's sort of a statplasty question. It's from Jonathan, who says,

Last year, Yusei Kikuchi started five games against the Angels, in which he went one and three. The Angels had Kikuchi started five games against the Angels, in which he went 1-3. The Angels had Kikuchi figure it out, though, because their batter slashed an absurd 408-469-786 over 113 plate appearances. Kikuchi pitched 20-2 innings over the five games and gave up 40 hits and 27 runs, 26 earned, important clarification, to give him an ERA of 11.32. How historically bad is Kikuchi's performance against one team in a single season, given the amount of games he pitched in? Or, to put a more positive spin, how historically great were the Angels against a single pitcher?

Sam did the research, and he says, Among starters who started against a single opponent at least five times in a season, which isn't all that common, 76 times last year, Kikuchi against the Angels produced the eighth worst ERA in the past 100 years and the fourth worst since 1950. The OPS allowed was second worst, though. George Caster pitched six times against Boston in 1940, started five of those times, and allowed a 15.93 ERA, 40, started five of those times, and allowed a 15.93 ERA, a 3.05 whip, and a 13.90 OPS in 20 and a third innings, and unlike Kikuchi, didn't manage to get a win. So Kikuchi against the Angels, that was bad, but not George Castor against Boston bad. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already pitched in and signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Bobby Pape, Dan Anderson, Rob Maines, Dan Hirsch.

Not only is he running queries for us and doing stat blasts, but he is a Patreon supporter and Daryl Purpose. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms, and you can join our bustling Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. The conversation in there never stops, even if baseball temporarily does.

You can contact us, send us your questions and comments via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thank you to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. I hope you're all finding time to listen to podcasts without commutes. You may have more time on your hands, but perhaps not ideal podcast listening time. Nevertheless, we will be back with one more show this week, so we will talk to you then. A necessity To be free So disappointing

First I put it all down to luck