Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1525: Hey All You Cool Sacks and Chickens

Episode Date: April 9, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about a possible banter shortage, a mysterious sack of flour from 1971, the kinds of baseball stories being published in the absence of baseball, the greatness (and eye-popping pitcher usage) of the 2001 World Series, the October travails of Charlie Leibrandt, and how MLB should approach planning for the […]

Then you burst like a bubble, facing trouble Oh dear, I didn't come down here to give up Come down here to give up I'll stay until you've had it all Hello and welcome to episode 1525 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hey, Ben.

How are you? Well, I'm a little nervous because I just realized that I didn't take off my vest before we started. Noisy vest? I mean, all vests are noisy. I'm going to try it. Tell me if you hear this. Okay. How's that?

I heard it, but if you hadn't warned me first can everybody been able to slip it off you you you vent you vamp and i'm gonna just undress all right fully go ahead ben well i was just gonna say that so far i don't feel like my ability to do this podcast or my enjoyment of doing this podcast or the quality of the conversations that we have had have suffered. That may change as we go longer and longer without baseball. But in general, there are still people I want to talk to and books that come out whose authors we want to have on and emails we want to answer. All of that is just sort of humming along as usual almost. But for me, at least, the banter is what I've

been missing. I've been kind of running on fumes when it comes to banter because I'm just not interacting with baseball as part of my day the way that I normally would at this time of year. And so I'm not really writing about baseball right now, so I'm not thinking about it as much as I normally would be. I'm obviously not watching it, and so the little observations that I might make or things I might hear on a broadcast that spark something that I might want to say in the podcast, not getting those anymore. Probably reading a little things that I want to say, want to get off my chest. So the main topics still got them, but just the sort of casual stuff that always comes up when baseball is going on is not really there for me anymore. Yeah, no, I feel you. I can dig up some banter. If you have banter, that's great.

All right, well, let's see. I'll just off the cuff, I'll throw some banter. If you have banter, that's great. All right, well, let's see. I'll just, off the cuff, I'll throw some banter at you. Because I have been consuming, I would say, a roughly normal amount of baseball. So let me just say, first of all, that I wrote an article that ran late last week on every team, every major league franchise's most social media ready moment in franchise history. And so going back to 1900, I'd sort of told the story of baseball history through these moments, through these events, through these scandals, whatever they may be, that I thought would have been huge if they had happened in the modern world. But of course, most of them happened before the modern world. And so some of them were small deals. Some of them were huge deals at the time, but there was no way to tweet

about them. And as I was doing it, I mean, I was continually thinking that you don't really know, like you think you know that something would be big on Twitter, but you don't really know until if it doesn't happen. And I mentioned it at one point that like most franchises, particularly the original franchises have like many possibilities that would have cleared the bar here that I picked the one that was not necessarily the most social media friendly, but that I wanted to write about or that I thought would introduce some novelty or that, you know, I wanted to kind of have a balance and all those sorts of things. And I gave as an example a list of things that I did not write about the Dodgers that

I could have written about the Dodgers and listed among them was sack of flour falling from the sky. And when I wrote that line, I thought, does that really qualify? Should I include that in this list of things that meet the bar? And I thought about it and I said, yes, sack of flour falling from the sky in the middle of a game would definitely be a, you know, like an awesome time on social media today if it happened today. But I didn't know. It couldn't be tested. We would never know if it really would have been, except then today, Pedro Moura actually wrote about

the sack of flour falling from the sky at Dodgers Stadium in 1971. He talked to people who were there. He dug through the archives. He did a deep dive on this. And I feel like it did. It was a pretty, I mean, you saw that this was a thing. I saw multiple references to it throughout the day from various people. I got off of my butt and retweeted it.

And in fact, I think that it justified the thing. And, you know, this was a great story, not just, I mean, really what made it amazing. And I think this is the power of social media a lot of times is that what made it amazing is not that a sack of flour fell from the sky, which I already knew. And to be honest, I was somewhat interested in the details of the sack of flour coming from the sky, but not that interested because I know that it had never been solved. And I know that the hypothesis has always been that it was a low flying plane. And I mean, I learned a lot of good details about like how it wasn't investigated fully and what they think happened and how it happened on the same day as a major plane crash. And maybe the FAA was distracted and all these things.

But really what I learned was the twist, this incredible twist that Pedro just drops in the middle of it that I had never heard and that it took Pedro digging up all the archives to discover. And that, should I give the twist? Yeah, I don't know the twist. I haven't read the story yet. The twist is that when the sack of flour fell from the sky, people at the stadium were also distracted by a chicken on the field. But that's not even the twist, okay? There was a chicken on the field. Pedro knows this because it was in the next day's newspapers but the twist is that none of the

people who were at the game who remember the flower remember the chicken the chicken has been completely erased from everybody's memory the chicken is the sinbad genie movie like or no i guess the opposite because it did exist but no one remembers it, who was there. And he asked everybody and they don't know it. They don't remember the chicken. But at the time, at the time, the chicken and the flour basically shared the headline. Like over the course of 50 years, our priorities, what we thought mattered, what our memories, I guess, culled from, not mine,

but what their memories culled from the experience left the chicken out and held the flour tight. And so, I mean, it was amazing. I feel like this has been a, there's two kinds of sports articles right now. One is the newsy things where people are trying to figure out like, when are we going to play again? And who's streaming their video games where and things like that. What's happening, right? The new stuff. But then also you've just got a ton of writers who are just empty in those tickler files and it has been like a golden age for tracking down some little note

that you had wanted to track down, I think. And there's been a bunch of good articles of that nature, I think. Yeah, I think most editors' instructions everywhere are basically just like, whatever your weird idea is, let's do that because we got nothing else. So yeah, all the routine stories about so-and-so's elbow is barking or whatever. No one's writing those right now, really. Well, unless it's about Noah Sinder Carter, Chris Sale or someone. And so, yeah, you have time to do a deep dive into the newspaper archive and discover the chicken.

This was a 1971 incident, I should say, just for anyone who's wondering if they somehow missed a sack of flour falling from the sky within a few recent seasons. It was a while ago. Yeah. Hat tip to Hang Up and Listen who did an afterball on the sack of flour about five years ago. Yeah. One problem is that I think it's hard to predict what would be big on social media because for one thing, some things that were mysteries then and remain mysteries now might just have been solved.

You know, like someone might have had their cell phone out and was taping something from the upper deck and caught someone i don't know throwing the flower or caught it falling from the sky from the plane everything is caught on camera somehow or who knows stat cast could attract the sack of flower now i don't know how it would have been different but it seems like it's harder to have these sorts of flour now. I don't know how it would have been different, but it seems like it's harder to have these sorts of mysteries maybe now. I don't know. And you can just replay everything

in a way that you couldn't then. But that is funny about the chicken kind of getting lost to history because you see that so many times with players' recollections of things that happen in games where they'll say something 30 years after the fact that completely contradicts what they said like on the day that it happened or the day after or what the

beat writers who were covering that game said at the time and it's always i think more reliable to go with the fresh memory when it just happened than what they remember years later after they've retold the story 10 times and somehow erased the chicken from it. But glad Pedro resurrected that. Quick fact check on, we're going to do a two-person fact check on this. Totally speculative. But Woody Woodward was the shortstop who nearly got hit by the flower and like quite plausibly

could have died if the flower had hit him. I mean, it was a very dangerous thing. But Woodward said this, and I just wanted to know if you agree with this. Woodward said that it was lucky that it fell where it was because, according to Pedro, he remembers telling teammate Tony Perez, the flower could have killed three or four tightly packed fans in the stands. Could a single sack of flour kill three or four fans at once? I can't imagine. No. How big could the sack be? How small are those fans? Yeah. Yeah. I got a 50 pound sack of flour today. Oh my gosh, Ben, we've been baking so much in our house. Like that is my daughter's big quarantine thing is baking and she she is like taken over. She's just baking all day on her own. It's amazing.

Fantastic. I am expecting a delivery of cookies in the middle of this podcast. And we've run out of flour and we couldn't bake anymore. And we happened to be delivering some cake pops to a friend and said, well, this is probably it. This is probably this is the last flour we have for a while. And she said, oh, well, my husband's at Costco right now. She texted, buy Sam flour. And a 50-pound sack of flour is now in my house.

I didn't know flour came in sacks that big. No, it's bigger than her. Be careful. Don't drop it on anyone. I can't understand why the chicken would be phased out of the story over time because sometimes it makes a story worse when you have two weird things. So when you want to say this incredibly strange unexplained thing happened, then you want to focus on the sack of flour. Whereas if you're also saying, and there was a chicken, then it just almost makes it like a farce and less like a UFO. And also wildlife on the field is not that unusual.

A chicken on the field is unusual, but we're used to cats and squirrels and other types of birds. And so the chicken, I don't know how it got there, but I can imagine people do have chickens as pets, right? I've seen that from time to time. So that's a little less inconceivable than the sack of flour. Yeah. All right.

Before I move on from that, do me a favor, everybody, and go read my article because I have an arbitrary number that I wanted to hit in our internal metrics. Everybody just go do me a favor. Read that article. I'll link to it. All right. I have one more thing I can tell you which is the 2001 world series you remember that was the yankees and the diamondbacks i remember it very well

and for me and i mean these are things that i knew i'm sure at i'm sure i knew multiple times but i got to discover them anew today while i was going over that World Series. Of course, everybody knows that Byunghyun Kim blew two games in a row. And you might even remember that he had thrown a lot of pitches in the first one. Well, so the first game, game four, which is the one where he gave up a two-run game-tying homer in the ninth. And then he gave up the Mr. November home run to Derek Jeter the next inning. The home run to Derek Jeter came on his 61st pitch as a closer and then the next day he blew the the game by allowing a 200 home run the next day ben yeah kim was pitching the next day after throwing 61 pitches. And so he gave up the game tying home run on the 15th pitch. So they had him throw 61 pitches in a day, and then he came back the next day.

All right. But then the more famous pitcher coming back on no rest on the Diamondbacks in that series was Randy Johnson. And I wonder how big a deal this was at the time. I have not watched that game. And so I don't know if they were talking about it throughout the game. I don't know if this was controversial, but Randy Johnson pitched game six. He started game six and presumably Bob Brenly had no intention whatsoever of using him in game seven because the Diamondbacks were winning 12, nothing after three and they kept randy johnson in and then they were winning 15 to nothing after four and they let him go seven innings and

throw 108 pitches and so the next day 104 pitches so the next day when he comes back on no day's rest which is so incredible and like one of the great moments in in modern baseball postseason history and he gets four outs and he's fantastic and he gets the win and he wins the MVP. It's not just that he had thrown 104 pitches the day before. It's that he had thrown 70 entirely go seven innings if there was... Do you know what I'm saying? Either they had some inkling that there was even a 1% chance they would go to him in game seven, in which case it is incredible that they would let him throw seven innings and 104 pitches. They should have pulled him after 33 pitches in the third inning with a 12-run lead. At the very worst, after 47 pitches with a 15-run lead in the fourth. run lead at the very worst after 47 pitches with a 15 run lead in the fourth. So then the only conclusion is that they had 0% chance of going to him in game seven. And yet they somehow did

anyway, like one way or the other, an incredible decision was made. So the 2001 World Series, I have really taken to the 2001 World Series. That was a great one. series i have uh i have really taken to the 2001 world series that was a great one yeah it was incredible it didn't end the way that i wanted it to as a 14 year old or whatever at the time but the heights of elation and the depths of despair that i experienced during that series was like the wildest swing in any series i think and the aftermath of of September 11th and that whole aspect to it too. And just those dramatic endings to all of those games, all the walk-offs. What a series. That was just amazing. I'd like to go back and watch that entire series. Maybe not game six, but every other game was something. The Kim thing fits into a theme that every World Series, I've been going over these,

like I said, like I just said, and like I previously have said, I'm going over the World Series for a project. And the thing that keeps jumping out to me is in every series is the poor pitcher who pitched really well and then was left in longer than he should have been in. And then through no fault of his own, other than that he he threw the pitches his manager just trusted him a little too much and he was out there when he probably shouldn't have been and then he gives up the thing and is the goat and so we talked about this with charlie lebrant when we were going over old manager world series decisions last week maybe two weeks ago and so to recap lebrant takes a shutout into the ninth inning, up 2-0 in a World Series game.

His closer, the ace closer, Cy Young candidate closer is warm in the bullpen, but his manager leaves him out there to allow a whopping four runs, blow the game, take the loss. And then the next start, he has a shutout through seven. It's tied 0-0, and his manager makes the unfortunate decision to let Liebrandt hit for himself with two on, and he makes an out, and then he comes back out and gives up the go-ahead run. And so again, poor Charlie Liebrandt pitches amazingly, and all you have to do is take him out in the eighth in the first game and pinch hit for him in the bottom of the seventh and the second,

and he is like an all-time postseason hero, but instead he loses both of them. And so I kept on going with the Charlie, Charlie Liebrand keeps showing up. If you keep moving into the future, Charlie Liebrand does too. And so, so in the 1991 world series, Liebrand starts game one instead of ace Tom Glavin, his manager. I mean, again, this is the story of managers loving Charlie Liebrandt. So Tom Glavin was their ace, but Charlie Liebrandt had postseason experience. So they let him start game one. He pitches very well until he allows basically one three run homer in the fifth. Yeah, he loses, they lose. And so then the next time his spot comes up, this time they let Tommy Glavin pitch instead of him him and then lebrant is there in relief and so they bring him into the 11th inning in game six and he's the guy who faces kirby puckett and kirby

puckett hits the home run to send this to game seven so again poor charlie lebrant is the is the goat he's humiliated that that one really stung him like he was he was wearing that one for a year they were writing profiles of him going into the world series like will lebron get his his moment to redeem himself and all that and so 1992 the braves get there again and in game six again he gets the chance to be a hero the game is tied and their closer at the time was jeff reardon famous closer but reardon had blown a game earlier in the series and And so Bobby Cox goes to Charlie Liebrandt and he throws a perfect scoreless 10th inning. He is the hero.

He'd be the winner if the Braves can just score in the bottom of the 10th or pull Charlie Liebrandt from the game, but they do not. They send them back out for the 11th. A whole bunch of things happen after that. And then he allows the winning run, and they lose that one too. Anyway, that's a long way of getting to this incredible stat. Charlie LeBrant, career postseason ERA, 3.77. Jack Morris, career postseason ERA, 3.80. LeBrant, Jack Morris, essentially the same. Jack Morris' postseason innings got him into the Hall of Fame. Charlie LeBrant's have him the 14th worst championship win probability added in history.

Oh. So, right? The fifth worst ever for a pitcher. And so, like, it sounds like he's this horrible choker but he wasn't he was he pitched really well in those innings and consistently he was there pitching awesomely ready to be the hero and his teammates couldn't score a run or his manager couldn't get him out of there fast enough or the game went just a little farther. Even the Kirby Puckett home run. Kirby Puckett, he wanted to bunt.

Kirby Puckett wanted to bunt in that game, and his teammates talked him out of it. And so if Kirby Puckett had just kept his secret plan to himself instead of telling a teammate, he would have just bunted, and Charlie Lee Brandt would have been a hero. The 92 World Series, when he blew that one, I watched that. He was really good for most of it.

He threw a bunch of really good pitches. The winning run got on when a fastball just very narrowly clipped Devon White's thigh and Devon White kind of like stuck his leg out. I mean, he was fine. There was a ball that was misplayed in the outfield. I mean, just poor Charlie Lee Brandt, that's all. There I was thinking we wouldn't have and you just brought out 10 minutes of Charlie Liebrand. We can do this forever. All right. Let's go.

Andy Johnson from 1999 to 2002 out through anyone else in the majors by 111 innings. 2002, out through anyone else in the majors by 111 innings. And that's just in the regular season. He had 56 extra innings in the postseason too. So his low innings total in a season during that span was like 248. He was just a machine. In that postseason, Schilling and Johnson just seemed to pitch every inning, at least. It seemed to me that way at the time.

They were just superheroes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there have been a couple of postseasons since then that you could maybe make this case, but that was sort of one of the last hurrahs of the era of starting pitching dominant game where you have two starting pitchers, and if they're the right two you're invincible and i know that the nationals just won where scherzer and strasburg

won every postseason game that they pitched and the same sort of thing happened but scherzer wasn't unfortunately scherzer wasn't really quite himself for that postseason and so it didn't quite show up and you had the bum garner postseason in, but that was more of a one guy thing. Anyway, yeah, Schilling and Johnson, that World Series was a keeper. Can I just say, I don't want to talk about the baseball bubble biodome Arizona plan because everyone has talked about that ad nauseum. And it seems like it was just sort of a trial balloon that was floated and immediately popped and then was walked back quickly. But I will say that aside from the specifics of this particular plan, which didn't seem all that well thought out or seemed implausible or ill-advised

even, I do think that baseball should be thinking of things like this. It's kind of like when Rob Manfred says that he's considering some rule change or something, or it's reported that Rob Manfred is considering some rule change, and everyone says Rob Manfred hates baseball, and this is the dumbest idea, and how could he even consider this? And first of all, who knows how serious it ever was in the first place? But also, it should be the commissioner's job to think of things like that. Some of the ideas are dumb, and they never go anywhere, and everyone skewers them. And that's that, and you move on. talked about on this podcast. And I think there is something to the idea that the commissioner's role or the office of the commissioner should be thinking of contingency plans, and particularly in this case, where obviously baseball wants baseball to come back, and the top priority has to be the health of the players and the health of everyone else. And maybe this plan put the

players at risk or put other people at risk, and therefore it's a bad plan. But if you want to think about how baseball could conceivably come back, if you don't want to just issue a do not resuscitate order and say, that's it, we're spiking the season, you have to think of ways that it could conceivably come back under weird conditions. And you have to try to project what the world might be like at that point. Because we sit here now when we're all stuck inside our houses or apartments and we say, how could we ever imagine someone doing something outdoors again? And yes, if that situation doesn't change for the next couple months, then baseball won't be back and that's that. But I think if you're MLB, you have to imagine a world where those restrictions have relaxed

a little bit to the point that maybe you can't have fans in the stands, but you could put players together. Again, I'm not saying that the specifics of this plan made sense, but you do have to, I think, consider some plans that sound silly in the moment because two or three months down the road when you would actually be putting those plans into action, maybe they will be a little bit more plausible, or at least through thinking of those things, you might come up with something that is workable. So I feel like you have to go through some dumb ideas if you are determined to bring baseball back safely, if that can be accomplished, if the pandemic actually

proceeds in a way that will allow that to happen. So this plan, I understand all the criticism and think it's justified, but I'm kind of happy at least that baseball is thinking about these things. Maybe the mistake was letting it be leaked or letting it get to the point that it was serious enough to be reported. But just the idea of how could baseball come back? What would that look like? I don't really begrudge them that. Yeah, I don't begrudge them that. That seems very fair. You've got to be talking. If you want to have any hope as situation changes, as windows open, it helps to have laid some groundwork for things so that you can be a little nimble i mean it reminds me on a much as an analogy and and only as an analogy it's like the idea of uh of of

manufacturing all seven vaccine possibilities in bulk now so that when we know which one is gonna work we have already ramped up production you wouldn't go, oh, well, you know, six of those vaccines are dumb. Right. You got to be moving now. So it's, yeah, I'm happy that people are working. I'm happy that Rob Manfred is presumably working from home and trying to do something. I mean, you have to look. It just kind of comes down to how much faith you have that they're not going to do something

like really extremely misguided. Right. If it gets to the point where they're putting this into practice tomorrow or something. If you don't trust the institution to stop a dreadfully bad idea once it picks up momentum, then I think you could say, I don't even want to hear the start of your bad idea. Like, I don't, I don't even want to hear you start that sentence, because I know that I'm not going to be able to shut you up in the middle of it. And so if you don't have that sort of trust in the institution to be, you know, prudent and responsible, then it's true, like any move toward a possibly dangerous situation might seem scary. If you think that, you know, there's a lot of veto

points and that there's a lot of people who would presumably be trying their very best to keep everybody safe, then we're just talking here or they're just talking here. And I would lean toward toward that interpretation of it for sure. Agreed. Okay. Speaking of the season starting, Josh asks, this is by the the way nominally a listener email show We'll get through a few at least Josh says the question is In response to the recent conversation on the show About a possibly shortened season

And how that would make the outcomes Even more noisy than usual relative to true talent If there were temporary rule changes Put in place in a much abbreviated season To try to better reward the good teams, what would they be? This is assuming that anyone would want to reduce the chaos. I don't think I would, but back to the question. I think you all recently discussed a question about restarting the batting order every inning, but wouldn't that just reward star players more than talent throughout the roster, it seems like most rule changes would disproportionately benefit certain segments of a roster, that is, the top three hitters or starting pitchers or

relief pitchers, so that instead of rewarding the better all-around team, it would just benefit teams strong in that particular area. Would we then need to put in a suite of rules to reward the best teams, or are there some rules you all could think of that would have a broader impact? In general, I'm a fan of chaos in baseball and wouldn't even mind a little more of it. But I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. So do you have an idea? I offered him an idea that I thought wouldn't be popular and that I thought would have some particularly unpopular side effects on top of that. But that would probably be the best thing.

And I can say what that is in a minute, but did you have anything? I don't have anything better than your idea. I thought your idea was pretty good. If you actually do want to do this thing, which I don't know that I would want to do, and Josh doesn't know if he wants to do. Yeah. So I said that the most obvious answer, if all you cared about was stripping out as much luck as you could in a short season, you would divorce the standings from wins and losses and instead use run differentials, which are a little bit, I mean, that's the presumption of run differentials as a metric in the first place is that they are a more reliable gauge

of true talent, particularly in smaller samples. And you could even go further and have, uh, replace the run differential with a third order winning percentage. Now, I think everybody would hate that. I think that people, there is some precedent for that, right? Like the, the world cup uses run different goal differential for, for, um, advancing in rounds and so other sports like the

wbc uses it as a tiebreaker or something there's some baseball application of it i know because we've answered the question before i think of whether baseball would be different or better or whatever if they used run differential we have definitely talked about whether it would be better particularly with the side effect which i will now, the side effect being that you would give teams a incentive to run up the score in every game. And so I think that would be exhausting, to be honest. I think having, having a, there's something kind of nice about having a 11-1 game that you can treat like an 11-1 game and not have to bring your closer out to keep it an 11-1 game because you're protecting the run differential and not having to bring your closer out to keep the other team from coming back from 10 because it's only run differential. Like there's something nice

about the game on the field being all that you're thinking about. Like it's just kind of a little more relaxing. And if you had that going on, like I'm not even sure how much it could be. As it is now, record can distort things. Because if you win two games, one to nothing, and then lose a game 29 to zero, you're probably not a very good team, but you have a 2-1 record. And that's distorting. And if that sort of pattern manages to keep going for a season, then you've got a distorted record. And that sort of thing. And if that sort of pattern manages to keep going for a season, then you've got a distorted record. And that sort of thing probably happens.

Teams sometimes are five or 10 wins better or worse than their record actually says. But if you were going by run differential, now one game, the 29 to nothing game might be extremely distorting because you've really only had one good game like you're probably not actually the greatest team in history either just because you want to blow out and so the amount that a a single game can distort the standings as it is now is is finite it's limited to one win but a run differential based system where you could essentially theoretically in theory, win the entire season with one game. If you could win 480 to nothing, uh, what would you'd have a much, I don't know if this is the right use of this term, but you'd have a longer tail.

Does that seem right? Or it is a tail. Is this a tail? Are we talking about a graphing thing here? Hockey stick? Is there a hockey stick involved? I'm not sure. So anyway, my ultimate compromise, which I offered to Joshua is this. You go with records as we do now, but a one run win or an extra inning win only counts for half. So if you win a close game, which we tend to think that one run games are kind of coin flips between two teams, and that even good teams don't do much better than 500 on one run games. And so if they are, it's a matter of luck. We're going to strip that out by saying all one run games only count for half anyway. And all your two plus win games count for more.

Yeah, I like that. That's good. I got nothing better than that. All right. Let's take a question from Marty, who says during this pandemic, my son, who's 13, and I decided to go old school and make our own team names, the Minnesota Duplicates, for example, and draft rosters based on the baseball cards of my youth, the 70s mostly. some interesting conversations and laughs. I mean, we found guys named Boots and Bombo, for example. There were guys with horrible stats and goofy-looking pictures.

One we ran across was the infamous Mario Mendoza, whom I promptly told Parker, that's the guy. I was named after him. The Mendoza line. Parker was immediately interested and promptly flipped the card over to be disappointed that Mario actually was a 215 lifetime hitter ben did you read did you read that as i was named after him yes it was named after him i got really excited thinking that marty had been named after mario mendoza yeah it was named after him yes i misread it says it was named after okay there's probably someone out there

named after mario mendoza if you're listening there's a line there's a line in the in um lords of the realm that uh one of the players says these owners don't understand half the league's sons are going to have the middle name marvin he was talking about how loyal everybody was to marvin miller and i wanted to go through and see if any of them actually named their kids Marvin. All right, continuing with this question, which I will try to read correctly. Mario Mendoza was a 215 lifetime hitter. It seemed to be all a lie.

I mean, it's not 201 or 202. He actually hit 15 points higher than the thing he is known for. I tried to reassure my son when a few cards later I found Luis Gomez, who at the time the card was printed, was a 199 lifetime hitter. I immediately told Parker from this point forward it shall be known as the Gomez line in this household. That lasted three minutes until I found out Gomez actually batted 210 by the end of his career, closer than Mendoza to the Mendoza line, but still significantly ahead of the alleged number. I really have two questions of the utmost importance.

One, should the Mendoza line be officially moved to 215? After all, that was the average of the guy the thing was named for. The Gettysburg address is not called the Philadelphia address because they were relatively close. You get my drift. Two, how many players hit exactly 200 with some minimum requirements, maybe 500 plate appearances, for example. And should this honor be renamed after one of those players?

No, I mean, no. Focusing on the final career batting average of Mario Mendoza is completely the wrong way to thinking about it. It would be like if Gettysburg, Pennsylvania had been renamed 100 years later as a city, and they wanted to name it the whatever the new town name is address you wouldn't do that it was gettysburg at the time you don't go you don't change the name because the the name on the map changed and so the history of the mendoza line is that mario mendoza in through 1978 was a 205 career hitter and then in 1979 he started out well and then he had a really bad slump and his numbers dropped and his season batting average dropped down to the 170s and the 180s and he spent most of the year just under 200. It lowered his career batting

average through 1979 to 201. I imagine there were times even in 1979 when his career batting average through 1979 to 201. I imagine there were times even in 1979 when his career batting average was 200. And so it was perfectly on the nose at that point. And the fact that Mendoza hit 245 the next year, it was unknown to the namer of the Mendoza line. And the fact that he hit 231 the year after that, and that those two seasons raised his career average to 215 is inconsequential. The Mendoza line was named for Mario Mendoza in 1979 when it was, in fact, the line that Mario Mendoza was fighting with. And I think also, even if it, so it's good.

It's set in stone at that point. It shouldn't be renamed. It shouldn't be adjusted. be renamed it shouldn't be adjusted but even if mario mendoza was like it was a 215 hitter i still think it would be okay to call the mendoza line 200 because the point of the name was to insult mario mendoza their teammate their pal they were ribbing their pal and so you got you actually would want to set it a little lower so that it's meaner right like don't you think that was the point they were teasing mendoza yeah and it's a round number. So if it were 215, then we probably wouldn't have even gotten a line at all. So I think that was key to that.

You can't divorce the line from the 200. And 215 is not as pathetic. It's not as good an insult or a joke. So no, it has to be 200. But I guess we could come up with someone who has hit closer to 200 as long as they didn't deviate from it for large portions of their career like mendoza finished strong as the question indicates so he batted 245 in his second to last substantial season and then 231 in his real last substantial season and that pulled up his average

but yeah to his contemporaries it was a fair thing to say and like you i mean you just noted that you don't want to deviate too much from it and mendoza is perfect for this because he didn't it's not like it's not like he hit 281 year and and won 112 the next year and it averaged out to 200 these are his batting averages in the six years of his career up to that point 221 180 185 198 218 198 so he was he was definitely around 200 he wasn't just a 200 hitter he was always around 200 yeah and there's a historical association with mendoza now so if we were to go back and try to award this to someone more deserving, it just wouldn't have the same resonance. All the decades of baseball books that have been written with references to the Mendoza line, we'd all wonder what those people were talking about. So that won't work. However, I guess Drew Butera is the modern Mendoza, right? Because he's 200 lifetime right now. He's 200 on the nose.

But if you set it between 195 and 205 and sort by plate appearances, the all-time leader in plate appearances is our pal Jeff Mathis. He's at 195 and he has about 3,000 plate appearances. Mike Zunino is fourth on that list and could definitely catch Mathis. He's eight years younger than Jeff Mathis and is only 550 plate appearances behind. So if Zunino's batting average doesn't change much, then he should take that over. He's at 202. Butera is on 200 on the nose. But of course, that'll change with the next five games

he plays one way or the other. And he's only got he's got fewer than half the plate appearances that Mathis has. Steve Carlton is fifth on this list. He is the other all the other names are between Mathis and Zanino are two pitchers and then Carlton is fifth. And so it's Mathis and Zanino. It's a two-man race, I think. Okay. Do you have a stat blast or will that be what it was? Oh, no, I do. Okay.

Then let's do a stat blast. And today's cover, this week's cover of the stat blast theme song comes courtesy of Michael Mountain, who has been on the podcast before for visiting all the ballparks in a very short span of time. And he also made a barbershop quartet style statplast cover. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA minus or OPS plus. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to days at last. Everybody got to hear that but me. I'll send it to you. Okay. This question comes from CJ.

Something that crosses my mind every once in a while is how the Major League Baseball is unique from the other big four sports in that there are two winners of each award, one for the AL and one for the NL, while the others award one winner for the entire league. So if the same thing happened in the NBA, they'd have one winner for the Eastern Conference and one for the Western. This notably crossed my mind midway through last season when there was such a talented crop of rookies in the National League, but no one really standing out in the AL before Yordan Alvarez burst onto the scene. At a certain point, there were probably three or four rookies in the NL who were better than the AL's best.

It got me thinking about the greatest discrepancies in war between the award winners in each league. I understand that this could cause some difficulties since the war leader doesn't necessarily win the award, but I guess I'm mostly wondering if there was a year when one league's top players were far more valuable than the others, such as how many players in one league had a war that was higher than the other league's top total. Actually, I didn't expect this to be a stat blast. I did not see there to be much potential here, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed looking it up and finding it. I replied to CJ right away that just two years ago, 2018, there were, let's see, there were, my recollection is that Christian Yellich was the NL's war leader, and he was tied with Alex Bregman, who was seventh in the American

League. So you don't have to go that far back to find this, but there's a better answer than that. That's not even close to the best answer. The best answer is 1926 when Paul Wainer, the rookie Paul Wainer, first year made his Major League debut, and he led the National League in war with 5.4. Now, that is a very, like this, you don't have to be, like, Christian Jelic's war was definitely high enough to lead a league. There was nothing about Christian Jelic's war that looked low. It just so happened that there were a ton of amazing MVP candidates in the American League that year. Paul Wehner, though, his 5.4 is very low. So that's the lowest war that has ever led a league. In fact, it's the only one under six that ever led a league, including in the strike-shortened seasons,

which were only two-thirds of full seasons. And the next lowest is Brooks Robinson, who had 6.1 war in 1962. Wehner, remember, had 5.4. The next lowest after that, John Carlos Stanton, who had 6.5 in 2014. So Wehner is more than a full win worse than the third lowest person on this list. But that's just raw lowness.

We're looking for comparison to the opposite league, and that's really where Wehner takes the crown. So he finished, he would have been eighth in the American League. He finished, he would have been eighth in the American League. And more impressively, he would have had 47% of the war as the American League leader. The American League leader was Babe Ruth. And Babe Ruth that year, oh my goodness, what a year. He had many incredible years. This was not anywhere close to his best year.

In fact, it wasn't his best war. It wasn't even close to his best war. It wasn't his best war it wasn't even close to his best war it wasn't his best ops plus but like he had a 1253 ops 1253 that's 1.253 no other player in the majors was in four digits so he's that far ahead of everybody else and And so he had 11.4 war. Paul Wehner had 5.4. He was six full wins behind the American League leader. 47% of the American League total. And eighth in the majors.

Brooks Robinson, meanwhile, he had a lowish war, but he finished just fourth in the majors. And he was behind, I guess, Willie Mays at 10.5. So he was like a little bit more than 60%. And Stanton was fourth, and he was only barely behind the American league leader. Mike Trout had 7.7. So Stanton and Trout were basically within the margin of error. The only other year that I would maybe consider a contender here is 1923, which was Babe Ruth's best year by war he had 14.1 wins above replacement that year and the NL leader Frankie Frisch finished what would have been sixth overall

and had seven more and so that's a little bit just slightly under half of Ruth's and 7.1 behind Ruth so further back in raw numbers but but slightly higher percentage and just higher. Like he had a more credible war and did not finish behind as many players in the other league. And Frisch and Wainer both, they basically had this title because those were the two years that Rogers Hornsby was injured or ailing.

So every other year, the gap between the NL and the AL, even during Babe Ruth's seasons, wasn't that big because Rogers Hornsby was a absolute war monster. So Hornsby had the seven highest NL wars in the decade of the 1920s. He didn't lead the league seven times.

He had the seven highest. And he also had the ninth, which like we're used to Mike Trout being outrageously better than everybody else. But Trout in the 2010s, his wars were only second, third, fourth, fifth, and ninth in the top 10. So not even close to what Hornsby did. The top seven. Let's see. Okay, so that's the answer to that.

I thought it's a fine answer, okay? But really what I was excited that it led me to is that in 1926, in the American League, we're ditching this question now entirely. We're going over to the American League. In the American League that year, there were 23 hitters who got MVP votes, okay. 23 hitters. So there are eight teams, figure three per team. Okay. But more than their share, the St. Louis Browns had five. Okay. 23 St. Louis Browns had five. Okay. One of them was Harry Rice. Harry Rice had 3.1 more. He was a right fielder with an 112 OPS plus. Okay. That's a MVP caliber. You know, you throw him a vote. Sure.

And then one was Marty McManus. 2.4 war. Getting pretty low there. Third baseman with a 98 OPS plus. Okay. All right. One was Baby Doll Jacobson, who had 1.2 war. Okay.

One was Ski Malillo. Ski malilo was negative point one war he only played 99 games he was a rookie second baseman with a 67 ops plus in 99 games his season started late and it ended early because of a well turned out to be a kidney ailment we're going to get into that in a minute but at the time they said it was uh i think like an ear infection or something like that but he only played 99 games he was below replacement level he had a 67 ops plus he finished 12th in mvp voting and one of them was wally gerber who had negative 0.4 war he was a short stop who slugged 290 and had no ps plus of 62 so they had five mvp vote getters way more than their share they finished seventh that year out of eight teams it's not like they were a winning team and they had to find

heart and soul to reward in the MVP voting. The Browns were horrible. And they just, like people were throwing votes at everybody who put their jersey on. I don't understand this. But now finally, to cap this off, you have to hear about Ski Malillo that year, that very year. This is his very first line from his Saber bio. It might be my favorite first line from a Saber bio. It sounds like a parody of Popeye, but the doctor was deadly serious when he told Oscar Malillo in 1926 that if he wanted to live, he could eat nothing but spinach and so he did he did

here's a quote they told me to eat nothing but spinach for the next few months if I wanted to live I tried to talk them into letting me have a steak spaghetti ravioli or goulash once in a while but they said nothing doing when I told them I couldn't stand the monotony of spinach

three times a day they told me I could have some variety by boiling it for breakfast, making a salad of it for lunch, and baking it for dinner. There is some speculation that Popeye is actually inspired by Ski Malillo. He kind of looks like Popeye. He predated, his spinach thing predated Popeye by a few years. Well, it worked.

He didn't die. He didn't die. He was an MVP contender. Finished 12th in MVP voting. Huh. Spinach is healthy in moderation. Maybe not exclusively, but I guess they had the right idea.

Yeah, he hit one home run. Huh. I bet I know what he ate before he hit it. Wow, I want to know the story of the 1926 Browns now. What was so valuable about them? They must have just had a bunch of Homer writers. I don't know. Someone will write

and tell us the secret story of the 1926 Browns and their MVP votes. I look forward to reading it. All right. This should be quick. I think Corey says question for the podcast. Caveat,ely Homer question but Maybe weird enough for effectively wild

Given that two of the three maybe Most promising White Sox seasons in My lifetime the last 30 years were Cancelled or delayed for some reason 1994 2005 Or 2020 Are the White Sox the most cursed team In Major League Baseball

Extra points never made a wild Card haven't been in the postseason, in consecutive seasons, are owned by Jerry Reinsdorf. He hasn't even mentioned the Black Sox, which seems like major extra points if you're talking about cursed franchises. But I think there might actually be some merit to this because of the franchises that had notably long World Series droughts, the White Sox don't get nearly the credit of the Red Sox or the Cubs. They don't get any of the identity that the Red Sox and Cubs derived from their long droughts. The White Sox World Series drought was longer than the Red Sox drought, right? I think that's true. I forget the math, the arithmetic, but that's true, I think. And yet, whoever talks about the White Sox breaking that streak and whoever really talked about the White Sox as lovable losers or, in a way,

if you're known as the cursed team, at least you have something to hang your hat on. You're the cursed team that all the fans can say, oh, we're the long-suffering Red Sox fans or Cubs fans. And the White Sox don't even have that or didn't even have that. And so I feel for them. And I don't know if it's because they didn't have as many close calls and heartbreaking, memorable moments where they came close and didn't make it, or because they weren't quite as terribly consistently mismanaged as the Cubs for decades and decades. Or maybe it's just that they were overshadowed by the Cubs because they were in the same city as this other team with a super long

World Series drought. But it seems to me that if you're going to not win the World Series for decades and decades, you better at least get a real team identity and some fame out of it. And the White Sox just didn't even get that. So I say Corey is onto something here. Yeah. I'm going to just though point out that the reason that they aren't as famous, that their droughts weren't as famous as the Cubs and the Red Sox is that the Cubs and the Red Sox had curses. They were perceived as cursed. The White Sox didn't get as much attention for their drought because they were not seen as being cursed. And so how can you say that they're the most cursed franchise? In a way, that's the worst curse of all. You don't even have lore to go with it. You don't even have a story. It's just, yeah, we're bad. We never win, and we can't even romanticize it. At least you get the curse of the babe or the billy goat or whatever. It's sort of silly, but it's something that people know about your franchise. If you're just losing and you don't even have a good story to go with it, then what did you even get out of all that losing nothing i can tell you that

white socks fans feel a great sense of grievance that they don't get they should that they don't get more attention for their curse breaking world series there's a real sense that the 2005 world series was not given was not a national healing moment the way the other two were that it is not remembered as all-time classic world series that uh nobody can you know really like remember where they were the night that the white socks won and that they don't replay their those games on like classic tv and things like that yeah so yeah and that's because it was just an unspectacular series right right? I mean, it was a sweep, and it wasn't the classic 2016 World Series when the Cubs won. And the 2004 Red Sox series, that was a sweep too.

No one really remembers the series, but you had the classic all-time ALCS comeback. So everyone thinks of those things, and no one really thinks of, oh, yeah, the 2005 White Sox. They had the same five guys start every game or whatever, or they just walked over the Astros. They lost one game in that entire playoff run, which that's why no one remembers it. They they didn't make it interesting. So I think that's the worst of all worlds. You get the losing without the story and without the cathartic triumphant moment. commentators after the fact who would say, you know, Cubs fans and Red Sox fans, congratulations, and you're going to find yourself missing the feeling that you used to have. And I always wondered whether Cubs and Red Sox fans appreciated that, or if they just thought, just like, shut up like that. I don't want to be cursed. Don't assume I wanted to be cursed. It's not like a, some like noble thing to be the cursed team. We didn't, we didn't want it be cursed. Don't assume I wanted to be cursed. It's not like some noble thing to be the cursed team. We didn't want it.

It wasn't fun. It might have looked fun. You guys might have all been having a fun time with it out there. But to us, it was just nothing but pain. I don't know how they felt about that or how they feel about people saying that you'll miss it when it's gone, basically. I miss it now that it's gone, but i could understand if they didn't miss it yeah i miss baseball having that sort of streak i mean cleveland's getting up there but yeah i i do kind of miss that although it was tiresome to see the same highlight packages every postseason and to

hear about the curse at a certain point the curse becomes so cliched and played out that you're just sick of the curse if you're that team at least and everywhere you go you have to point, the curse becomes so cliched and played out that you're just sick of the curse. If you're that team, at least, and everywhere you go, you have to hear about the curse. But it was kind of fun for the rest of us. All right. Do you have a couple more minutes? I've got one more here. Go ahead. Hit me with one more. All right. This is from our friend Dario in Canberra, Australia. I've been meaning to read his email for like three weeks. There are many questions in it. I'm just going to pluck out one here.

But Dario, as many of you will remember, he was our pal who did not pay any attention to baseball over the previous offseason. And then came back to baseball and just watched a Mets game and experienced it all in real time, just caught up on everything that had happened all winter, and he streamed it, and it was kind of fun to see these epiphanies down on him. I guess he picked the wrong offseason to do that. He should have done it this offseason, and he just could have kept going and never had to learn anything. One of his questions, though, is—

Oh, though, imagine if if he had and he turned on the opening day he sets his alarm he turns on opening day and it's judge judy yeah well he would have had to be paying attention to nothing at all i don't know why they don't play judge judy on mlb network at the sbn what what why do I think all baseball is played on TBS still? If they get desperate enough, we'll see. Dario says, with major rule changes, should they be agreed to but not implemented in the majors for

eight years or so in advance? The idea being that you implement them in the low minors immediately and then gradually at higher levels. I know we always want reform to happen instantly, but this would allow young players to get used to the rules. Older players would not need to worry about them, and we can work out the kinks along the way. It also helps to bring along the skeptics like me. And the reason I thought this might work or be appealing, at least for some rule changes, is that it's sort

of like when the Players Association sort of sells out minor leaguers or amateur players because it's not their problem. And so they get the concession they want right now. And the players who have to pay for that in the long run, well, they're not in the big leagues. They're not in the union right now. So it's not the current union members' problem. And it would be sort of similar if Rob Manfred just had some very sticky thing that he was never going to get past that the players were going to revolt about. But he really thought it was imperative that baseball implement this rule change. What if he just said, well,

it'll be eight years from now or 10 years from now or whatever, and we'll make some concession to you right now. You get something today. You get your extra seat next to you on the bus in spring training or whatever it is that you want right now, and you won't even have to worry about this rule unless you're a rookie maybe, and a rookie, maybe they aren't able to speak up anyway. They don't have the power in the Players Association. So the veterans, the ones who would really whine about this, they won't have to worry about it because they'll be out of the league by then. And they'll say, sure, whatever, it'll be

the next generation's problem. I, you know, I think I suspect it would go the opposite way. And that a rule change that began at, you know, the low minors or even lower would be seen as being, you know, kid play. You know, it's how they, it's how like, it's not, it's not major league baseball until it's played in major league baseball. And if you just introduce it in major league baseball, well, you do have to get the buy in. It's true. And that can be tough.

But once it's there, then it has full credibility throughout the entire sport, right? Like at every level of, you know, at least in, in American baseball, at every level, all the way down to, to the youngest little league, it is credible to play the way that they're playing in the majors. And if you do it the other way, then you can't assume that it will ever be seen as credible by the major leaguers. They might always think of it as, as Bush, as gimmicky, as amateur ball and not buy it. And, you know, you're saying, well, in eight years, all the veterans are going to be gone. But I think veteran is a state of mind and people are just constantly churning into it.

And that they're the veterans eight years from now are still going to be veterany and they're not going to, they're not going to be any more open to a change that they wouldn't be today, that their equivalent wouldn't be today. So I think it depends on the rule, because there have been certain things. I mean, clearly, we've seen that certain aspects of player development and strategy have been more easily accepted at the major league level, because minor leaguers were essentially forced by the player development system to adopt these things. And then by the time they get to the majors, this is all very common to them. And so there's evidence there for your point of view,

and it might work. So I'm not ruling it out. But I feel like if we're talking about rules, as opposed to strategy, like with strategy, it's like it works or it doesn't. And a player can see if it's working for his career or not and by the time he gets the majors and it becomes something that he's comfortable with and trust that it's working well then of course it makes sense to that to continue to be open to it when he's in the majors but if you're talking about a rule and you're playing your whole minor league career under these rules that you think are gimmicky and fake because the major leagues don't play that way you might just think i can't wait to get to the majors that i can play real

ball yeah like it's not a matter of if it works or not rules aren't to a player rules aren't do they work or not the rules are the rules and it's whether like you think that they dignify the sport that you play yeah i mean if you had enough years to get used to the idea, then players would come to the majors maybe knowing that this was coming, if players are even paying attention to that. And so it would just be hanging over their heads and maybe they'd be sort of annoyed about it when it actually happened, but they would have been emotionally and mentally prepared for it. Although maybe they'd be mad that they then had to abide by the agreement that some earlier generation of players made. And by that point, who knows, maybe Rob Manfred isn't even commissioner anymore. And so it'll be like all of the stakeholders in this decision are not actually present anymore. are Rob Manfred, if you're the commissioner, you want things to happen now. You want to say that you did something and you want to be around when that change happens. And sometimes if you feel

it's urgent, then you don't want to say in 10 years because that's not soon enough. But this does sort of seem to be what Manfred is doing more or less without saying it, without saying that we're going to make this change in the majors in 2027 or whatever. He is sort of slipping these things in the minors, and it remains to be seen whether they can make that leap. But, you know, the automated strike zone is going that way now. The extra innings rules, the pitch clock, for instance, all that stuff is getting up there in age now,

and maybe after a certain number of years, no one would really even care because every major leaguer would have played under those conditions in the minors. On the other hand, you don't really have big leaguers coming up and saying, boy, I missed the pitch clock. How are they even playing without a pitch clock? We've been doing it in the minors. It's much better baseball. I never really hear anyone say that. Maybe the young players are just afraid to speak up about it because they don't have that standing in the clubhouse. But you'd think that they'd get used to the idea unless they think, well, that was the minors, as you were just saying. They associate it with their minor league bus sitting experience. experience i was just gonna say you literally like it would you it might be no different to them than actually the experience of riding a bus where they ride a bus for seven years and then they get to the majors and they're like boy this plane doesn't feel right i missed the

bus you know i mean they think of the major leagues as plainville and you know the minors is bus town and it might you might very easily marginalize some of these now again i don't know i mean manfred is trying this thing partly i think he's trying this thing because the technology needs to be worked out at lower stakes and to see how something plays is a good is a good strategy i don't know if it's deliberately the i'll wait until eight years when it's popular by um you know by the saturation of prospects in the majors or not. Maybe, and also I can't, maybe that is what he's doing and maybe it will work. And so I can't say that it won't work. And also maybe that is what he's doing and maybe it would work.

And also maybe even if it does work, it would have worked perfectly fine to do it the other way and just declare by fiat, we're doing new rules now Now these are them, the majors. So we're never going to really know what the right and what the best way to implement these things are. And I'm open to your argument. I'm also unsurprisingly open to my own. All right. Well, Dario, if you take the next eight years off and you come back to baseball and pay attention again, I bet there will be some new rules that you won't know about. For you, it'll be like it just happened. All right, so we can end there. That will do it for today. Thank you for listening as always, and thank you as always for supporting the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have signed up already

to pledge some small monthly amount, help keep the podcast going, and get themselves access to some perks. Adam Halpin, Fran Dolan, Jacqueline, Josh Throckmorton, and Justin Luckenbaugh. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild listener. Paul Moorhead stat blast covers competition is still going on. I've linked to it in the show page for this episode. You can also replenish our mailbag by emailing me and Meg and Sam at podcast at fan crafts.com or by messaging us through the Patreon messaging

system. If you are a supporter, thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. As noted on our last episode, the paperback edition of my book with Travis Sochik, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, is now available. It includes a new afterword with the latest player development developments.

And we will be back with one more show this week. Talk to you soon. Help the agent. One time they were just like you. Drinking, smoking, sex and sniffing glue. Help the agent. Don't just put them in a hole Can't have much fun when they're all on their own