Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1531: His Double-Airness

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the Effectively Wild community’s least-disliked MLB teams and two unjust Cy Young/MVP snubs, then discuss what Michael Jordan’s brief baseball career taught us about Jordan and about baseball. Audio intro: Willie Nelson, "Why Do I Have to Choose" Audio outro: Emmylou Harris, "Jordan" Link to EW MLB Survivor game recap […]

Why do I have to choose, to see everybody lose, and walk around and sing the blues? Well, darling, I have refused. Good morning and welcome to episode 1531 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast on Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hi, Ben. Hi. Ah, you got anything? I wonder what percentage of people hear you say good morning in the morning these days. We used to say good morning because we would record at midnight Eastern, and so when I put them up, it was morning.

Now, it's sometimes morning and sometimes late at night and sometimes the middle of the afternoon. There's really no predicting it. And especially now when everyone's stuck at home and not actually commuting, I don't know if morning is really a meaningful podcast time for people. No one's commuting, really, or most people aren't. So it may not be morning when you hear Sam say good morning, but I hope that's not disorienting. a meaningful podcast time for people. No one's commuting, really, or most people aren't. So may not be morning when you hear Sam say good morning, but I hope that's not disorienting.

Hope you take it in the spirit in which it's intended. Yeah, I mean, truly, genuinely, who cares? Yeah. So one thing I did want to mention quickly is that one of our listeners, Jonathan Mishori, did a kind of fun exercise in our Facebook group over the past month. He did an Effectively Wild Survivor game where he tried to determine the least hated baseball team according to the Effectively Wild community or at least the Effectively Wild Facebook community. And he did it sort of Survivor style.

So he did a series of 30 polls and he basically had people vote someone off the island, whichever team they liked least got voted off. Wait, the team that they liked least or the team that disliked most? Least favorite team is I believe how he phrased it. So the one that you would like to vote out. Then he did all these polls and someone survived. And, well, I want to ask you to guess. Yeah. And there is a write-up of this by Ben Van Winkle at Banished to the Pen. Our blog started by Effectively Wild listeners.

So it's kind of interesting. I guess it makes sense. What do you think, least hated team? Brewers. No, not brewers. Actually, brewers were just middle of the pack.

And, you know, sometimes it was like a separation of two votes or something. There were hundreds of people who voted on these things, but it was sometimes

very close and it could have gone the other way. Mariners. Mariners were runner up. Oh, my goodness. Ugh.

I don't know that I can, I, any guess I make is probably gonna move me further away from right than the mayor i'm gonna declare victory okay yeah mariners is a good guess and in fact reddit did an equivalent of this like three years ago and the mariners won that one and they were the second to last team standing here but the champion was the Oakland A's, not hated. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I guess it makes sense.

Maybe people feel some sympathy for the A's because they haven't won. They've lost in fairly heartbreaking fashion over and over, over the past 20 years. Maybe people still sort of like that because of Moneyball, at least in our Facebook group. They play in a stadium that's constantly overflowing with sewage. So maybe that makes people feel bad for them. And you don't want to be the least hated team. That is not something any fan base should aspire to. You know, if you are the least hated team, it probably means that you haven't been very

successful. Basically, you haven't annoyed anyone. You haven't signed their players away. You haven't beaten them in the playoffs. You haven't had a dynasty. You haven't won World Series. That's why the Mariners do well in this, because they haven't made the playoffs in forever, and they have never won a World Series. And I guess they've had some very likable players, and they have a nice ballpark and all that, but really you don't want to win this competition. And so it seems like the AL West is a pretty likable division, or at least it was before the Astros became as hated as they are less than a year ago, really. But the Angels also did well. They were number eight in this exercise.

So, yeah, how can you hate the A's? How can you hate the Mariners? The A's have a bunch of really likable players and they don't really do much to annoy anyone. association there'd be this like immediate word association negative response that i would i would you know feel for each team that i imagined other people had maybe that i had but more that i kind of imagined other people had and it would be interesting for both of us to make a list of the 28 teams that are not the mariners or the a's and then just like write down what we think the person who votes against that team was was thinking what made them hate that team more than they hate the Mariners or than they hate the A's, and see how different our lists were, if we would actually tap into it. In some cases, I think it's obvious we would tap into the same things,

but we probably have some really radically different speculations for why a person might hate the Rangers, for instance, or any other team, the Angels. are still the most hated or least liked or whatever, even with all the Astros have done in the past several months. Astros were the runner-up here and still seed the crown of most hated to the Yankees. And there's actually someone in the Facebook group who looked for the correlation between popularity and hateability. So this was Jacob in the Facebook group. And there was a pretty significant correlation, like a 0.56, I think it was, between how popular you are and how hateable you are. some reason to, or you're just a big market team like the Yankees and the Cubs and the Dodgers and the Red Sox. They're all pretty hated here and also pretty popular. So it makes sense that those things would go together. And that's another reason why you would not want to win this thing,

because you probably want to be popular. So Cardinals also up there, I guess, because they're always good and because of the best fans in baseball thing, which seems sort of distorted, but they've been stuck with that label. All right. Okay. Good. Good exercise. Fun exercise. It would have been a good article, but now it's been done. Yeah, it's been written. All right. Anything else? I should also mention the third least hateable team was the Padres, which makes total sense.

Who could hate the Padres? I thought about picking them. That was one of my first thoughts for sure. I wonder if there's a West Coast bias element to it. Like if most of the voters, or proportionally speaking, are East Coasters and they just don't see these teams. Like the Padres did well. The A's and Mariners did well. The Angels did well. I think

the Diamondbacks were in the top 10. If you just don't see a team, if they're sort of playing after you've already gone to bed, then maybe you can't really develop an animosity toward them. So maybe that's part of it. But I think it's also just the Padres' decades and decades of mediocrity just makes you sort of sympathetic to them. Before we get to the topic today, I have been thinking a lot about an old Cy Young race and an old MVP race or results. I don't even know if you'd call them races, but just results that have been stuck in my mind. And so I'm going to ask you to look at these results and pick your... I'm going to send you some stats and then you can pick your ballot, okay? Okay.

And so here's what I'm going to do. One is a Cy Young and one is an MVP. And you can just tell me for the Cy Young, what you would... I've got seven pitchers here. And you can ask me... I'm not going to tell you what they have in each thing. You're going to tell me what you would look at

and then I'm going to send you a spreadsheet with that on it, with those columns on it. So it's a Cy Young race. You've got a ballot. You've got seven qualified candidates. What are you looking at? Tell me what you want in this spreadsheet. Can I just ask for war or is that cheating? No, you could ask for war. Of course you could ask for war. Okay. Well, I would take war or I guess multiple wars. Can I take two? Yeah. Which ones?

I'll take fan graphs and baseball reference war just to keep things simple. Sure. Then I will take innings pitched, I guess. And maybe ERA minus. Okay. Would you accept ERA plus? Yeah, sure. Okay.

And maybe I was going to ask for a park-adjusted FIP or something, but if that's too complicated, maybe just regular FIP. Regular FIP, no problem. Okay. And maybe a strikeout rate of some sort. Okay. Would you rather have strikeout rate or, since this is not the year 2019, would you rather have a strikeout rate compared to league average? Yeah, sure. That's fine.

I'll take that. Okay. What am I, up to five or something you're up to one two three four six with both wars okay and i get another one you can have as many as you want oh well you can stop there you can keep going all right i'll take uh strikeout to walk or strikeouts minus walks or whatever all right so a minus walk that's like a percentage you want the percentage or or yeah if you have it but yeah i do and maybe babbitt babbitt i can't give you babbitt okay all right and yeah that's enough i think all right let me delete all these other columns here

and uh so you don't care about uh whip you don't care about unadjusted era you didn't ask about wins or losses and uh okay you've got your uh you've got your pitchers now what about for for the mvp okay well same wars i suppose and an ops plus or wrc plus or something. Maybe I will take triple slash if you've got it and home runs and stolen bases. Okay. That's probably sufficient. Okay. I will just tell you.

Plate appearances or games or something. Plate appearances. Okay. I'll tell you that stolen bases is a non-factor, so you're not going to get that going. Okay. All right. Well, defense.

Can I get some sort of defense? Yeah, of course. What do you want to know? Can I get position? Of course. And whatever is available for this time period. Okay. I'll give you position.

I'll give you fielding runs at baseball reference. All right. Okay. You're not interested in that. Yeah, okay. Since you asked for steals, but I don't have it, I'll give you base running runs for war as well. And you don't care about how the team did, apparently.

Well, I don't. I'm sure the MVP voters did. Fair enough. And you don't care about clutch, score, win probability added, nothing like that. Nah. Okay. All right.

I'm going to send you this spreadsheet ben okay and you first you have seven psy young candidates and just give me your maybe your top three in the order that you want them and then with the mvp that'll be slightly different all right you should have it all right so these have been uh ordered randomly and the identities have been disguised but you can look at them and decide what you how you feel about this grouping okay let's see all right i'm going to take pitcher k so pitcher k is the clear leader in both of the wars pitcher k has the second best FIP and the second best ERA+, and clearly the highest war on both models. But the person who's ahead of him in ERA+, and FIP, has far fewer innings.

And so he's way ahead. Right. So the pitcher D has a 188 ERA+, and he blows everyone away in everything else on a rate basis. But he only has 117 innings so just to be clear he is a starter he is a starter okay that's what i was gonna ask yeah that's just not enough innings for me sorry pitcher d let's see who else we got here guess i'll take pitchers g and r okay and uh so they are basically uh the same they're basically exactly the same except that one of them has a ton of strikeouts and the other doesn't but their fips are the same their era

pluses are the same their innings are the same their baseball reference war are the same their fan graphs war are the same so ben you basically just went straight down the list on war right you took the highest war first the second and and third highest war, second and third, and everything else was irrelevant to you. More or less. I guess I could have asked about their team and their clutchness and all that. But I think in general, yeah, I want to know the value and this is our best estimate of it. Okay. So I will give you, this is the 2001 Cy Young voting and pitcher K who you picked is is Mike Messina and Mike Messina clearly number one by uh by the wars and by the ERA plus and by the but did not

win 20 games and finished fifth with two third place votes and nothing else barely got mentioned on a ballot despite being in a vacuum the clear number one for you. Pitchers GNR, who you picked, were Roger Clemens and Mark Mulder, and they actually were the top two finishers in this Cy Young race. Roger Clemens won. It wasn't that close, but he won and Mark Mulder finished second, and they each won 20 games, and they won. The reason that it's been sticking in my mind is that pitcher d who you threw out because he didn't have enough innings that's pedro martinez and pedro martinez i in my head like i know that the pedro martinez years were okay so montreal he breaks out in his final year in montreal has this outrageously good season wins wins the Cy Young Award, then ends up going to Boston,

where he is outrageously good for a five-year, six-year period, the best run that any pitcher has ever had, the best seven-year stretch any pitcher has ever had. And his Cy Young results go one, two, one, one. And then he's injured in 2001 and doesn't get named on a ballot. And then he finishes second and third in the last two years. And I knew he was injured, and I also knew he was good, but it wasn't until this week that I looked at how good he was when he was injured, and how much better he was than the Cy Young contenders that year. And I now consider it a real, personally, just a travesty that he didn't get at least a Cy Young vote. He started 18 games, which is not a full season. It's a little bit more than a half a season.

He had started 29 the year before when he won the Cy Young award. So he started two thirds of a full season. Well, not two thirds, but 60% of a full season. And he was so much better than everybody else. He had a FIP of 1.61 that year. The next best FIP was Mussina at 2.92. His FIP was less than half of the winner, Roger Clemens. He threw more than half of the innings of Roger Clemens and he had less than half of the FIP. In slightly more than half as many innings, he had almost the same war as Roger Clemensmens he hit clemens the winner had 5.6

war at fan graphs pedro had 5.5 so is it i don't know i i get hung up on this in cy young voting all the time to me the award is not a value award it's who was the best pitcher and clearly you can't be a great pitcher when you're not pitching, but it feels like the accumulation of value that is undeniable in an MVP ballot is less important on a Cy Young ballot because Pedro was clearly the best pitcher, probably didn't pitch enough to be the Cy Young that year or in the average year. But if ever there was a year where he pitched enough, where 117 innings was enough to beat the winner, I think it's this one. He had the same war in 100 fewer innings.

He was miles better. His strikeout rate was more than double the league average. The next best person on this list was only 40% better than league average. Pedro was 120%, 115% better than league average. His walk rate was way better than league average. Pedro was 120%, 115% better than league average. His walk rate was way better than league average. Everything was way better than league average. His strikeout minus walk rate is almost double anybody else's, almost double Roger Clemens's. And I'm not saying he should have won, but there's this gap in the Pedro Martinez run where Cy Young finished 1-2-1-1 blank 2-3 and it

shouldn't be blank it should be like 1-2-1-1-4-2-3 something like that just like how Mike Trout when Mike Trout was injured for a big part of 2017 and he was clearly the best player in baseball that year but he didn't play enough to be the MVP. He still finished fourth. It's his lowest finish ever. It's the only time he ever finished lower than second, but he did finish fourth. I feel like the Pedro precedent would have said, ah, well, we're not going to vote for Trout. He only played two-thirds of a season, so just throw him out entirely. They didn't do that. They were smart. They let Trout in, and they should have given Pedro some votes. right yeah no I agree with that and that's you were just describing how much better Pedro was than everyone else and that was

his worst year in a five-year stretch so he was amazing I'm not going to say people don't appreciate Pete Pedro but they still may not properly appreciate just how unimaginably better he was than just about everyone else. When you account for the league environment and pitching in Fenway and facing good offenses and all of that, it was just, he was a higher level. And I agree that he certainly should have gotten votes, but I'll be very aggrieved on behalf of Mike Messina, maybe my favorite pitcher of all time, who should have had that award. Jamie Moyer finished fourth in Cy Young voting that year, and Pedro, in again, 100 fewer innings, had almost twice the war that Jamie Moyer had. So there's some inefficiencies

in this voting that I think penalized Pedro Martinez. All right, can you flip to the MVP tab at the bottom of that spreadsheet? Yes. Okay. So this is a different one. And you can see these are three very similar seasons at the plate. Yeah. Well, not everyone can see this, obviously. So I will make it quick. I'll take player one. I don't see, based on the stats that I have, what argument anyone else has.

He has the highest wars, both of them. He has the highest WRC plus. He's a third baseman. The others are also corner infielders. So yeah, I don't have a reason not to pick number one. Yeah. So these are three players that are almost identical offensively. Like their slugging percentages are within 15 points of each other. Their on-base percentages are all within 15 points of each other. Their on-base percentages are all within 15 points of each other. Their WRC pluses are all within five points of each other. Their batting runs in baseball reference war, if you had chosen those, are like within two runs of each other.

Their playing time was all within 25 plate appearances of each other. My guy's got the good fielding stats. Similar homers, but right, exactly. other. My guy's got the good fielding stats. Similar homers, but right, exactly. So one of them is the only thing that separates them basically is that one is a first baseman while the other two are third baseman. And one of the third baseman was a good defensive third baseman while the other was merely an average defensive third baseman. So the first one is Mike Schmidt in 1984, and he finished seventh in MVP voting. He was very good. The third one is Mike Schmidt in 1986, and he won the MVP. And, you know, you can sort of appreciate that to a voter in 1984, 1986, they wouldn't have had the same defensive metrics that we had.

And, you know, Schmidt was essentially the same player offensively those two years. You assume probably he was, you know, roughly the same defensive player those two years. He won the gold glove both times, for instance. So a voter could, you know, could recognize him in both of those years. Just so happened the Phillies were a little bit better in the 86 season, which is not the one you picked. You picked the 84 season, but the Phillies were a little bit better. And Schmidt got, had a bunch more runners in scoring position and ended up

with some more RBIs. And so he won the MVP award. And I think both of those are fine. Like the, there's not a big difference between those two seasons and they're both fine. The one in the middle, which is again, almost identical, that's schmidt in 1985 the year in between and he got no votes not one vote not a 10th place vote on the ballot now the reason why and the reason you also didn't pick him is because rather than being a gold defensive first baseman. So what happened is the Phillies, after 83, Pete Rose left as a free agent. So the Phillies went and got a platoon, a couple of platoon guys to play first base in 1984.

They were both terrible, and the Phillies were an 81-81 win team, not a good team. And so then early in the 85 season, not. And so then in early in the 85 season, not not before the season, but early in the 85 season, they thought, well, this is just not going to work. So they asked Mike Schmidt, gold glove third baseman to move over to first base a position he had not played before. And they moved Rick shoe into third base. So, you know, they could have moved Shue to first and kept Schmidt at third, but they decided that for whatever reason, maybe Shue wasn't as comfortable at first as Schmidt was,

and so they decided to move Schmidt to first and Shue to third. Now, Schmidt was exactly the superstar player he always was, had exactly the year that he had the year before and the year after, but because of the team's needs, the gold glove winner, the in fact, the defending gold glove third baseman of the previous 10 seasons was asked to move to first base, a new position where he was just average. That is all it took for his perceived value to plummet. And his war took a hit, but even at the time, I'm sure that people realized that his numbers as a first baseman were not as impressive as they were as a third baseman,

and that his defense at first base was not as good as it was at third base. And instead of a gold glove superstar third base slugger, he was a really good hitting average defensive first baseman, and he got not one single vote. And then they moved him back to third the next year. Again, not because he had like suddenly remembered how to play third base, but because they had Vaughn Hayes to play first base. They moved him back to third.

He was just going where they told him to go. And he won the gold glove told him to go and he won the gold glove again and this time he won the mvp award now i would say to me that i understand what the voters were doing there is a logic to saying mike schmidt as a first baseman was not the most valuable player in baseball that year and there is also a real illogic to it. It doesn't make any sense in a sense, right? Schmidt was still the same exact player. The only reason he wasn't playing third base is because his team decided he was more valuable at first than he would have been at third. Now, we know how valuable he would have been at third. We can see it in 84 and in 86. If he'd been playing third,

he would have been an MVP candidate. The decision makers of his team with their own team's self interest at stake said, you know what? It's counterintuitive. But to us, he's actually more valuable at first. And he got hammered by voters for that. He was either more valuable at first, and he should have been the MVP, or he was less valuable at first, and we should be pointing and laughing at the Phillies front office for making that decision all the time. I choose the former. I think that that was a strange decision, and yet I also understand it, to not give Mike Schmidt any MVP love in 1985. or underappreciated, mis-evaluated, and so his career really got going later than it should. So there are a lot of examples like that, or even like recently, you know, Mookie Betts is a very capable center fielder, but he was playing right field in Boston, and granted, maybe that's partly because Fenway's a big and tough right field to play, but also because Jackie Bradley was in center, and I don't know that that actually affects his war, really, because he was such a great right fielder that maybe it all evened out more or less. But if he had been with probably almost any other team, he would have been playing center field, and maybe that changes the perception of him as a player. And that's just the least extreme example because everyone already knows that Mookie Betts is great.

example because everyone already knows that Mookie Betts is great. But if you happen to be in the wrong ballpark for your skills at a certain point in your career, or someone else is stuck in front of you, or the manager doesn't like you, or the GM decides you're no good, there are a lot of examples of that in baseball history of careers that you wonder how much better might that guy have been, or would he have gotten a chance with some other team at some other time? So fortunately, everyone knows that Mike Schmidt is great and was great, but you're right. That does seem unjust. But if you went through the MVP and Cy Young voting results for pretty much every year from the 80s, you could probably come up with something that seems horrendous. You know, Ben, I don't know that much about the oil market, but I'm watching right now a barrel of oil right now. A barrel of oil is a dollar. That sounds cheap. I don't really know what the typical going rate for oil is.

Well, it's 300 pounds of oil. Yeah, that sounds like a steal. I don't know what I would do with a barrel of oil. I guess I could just stash it in the closet until someone would pay me more than a dollar for it. All right, so here's the topic today. The topic is the time that Michael Jordan played baseball. I watched the Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance, on Sunday night, and it had me thinking about Michael Jordan. on Sunday night and it had me thinking about Michael Jordan. And I had previously been thinking about Michael Jordan because it, you know, it's just been, it is not the first time I've thought this, but isn't that crazy that Michael Jordan played baseball for a year?

Yeah. So when you're a kid, when you're a kid, you, you don't really have any sense of how long history is or how long it has been that a thing hasn't really happened so you you i think you tend to be impressed by almost everything new like you're really impressed when like snickers comes out with a snickers almond you're like wow snickers that's a new snickers entirely but then you're also like you're also impressed when the greatest basketball player in history quits playing basketball, retires so that he can go play minor league baseball. You're like, wow, Michael Jordan's playing baseball. And you, in a sense, don't have any idea about scale, historical scale.

So at the time, it was definitely cool that Michael Jordan was playing baseball and that you could collect Michael Jordan baseball cards and that this odd novel thing was happening. But in retrospect, it's the weirdest thing that's ever happened in the sport. And it's just blowing my mind thinking about the fact that the most famous person in the world, like somebody put it this way in the documentary last night, but Michael Jordan was, they said something like Michael Jordan was arguably better at his job than any person in any job was during his career at the time.

And he stopped it so that he could go do a thing, a very public thing that he wasn't good at, that like that he wasn't very good at, that he was obviously better than an average human, but much worse than the people he was playing against. And that's a crazy thing. And so I've just been thinking about it. And I wondered, I wanted to talk about it a little bit, and then we'll move on to the next episode. But how old were you? And what did you think about Michael Jordan playing baseball at the time? Not much, frankly, because I was, what, this was 94, so I was seven. And I was not really much of a sports fan yet. I certainly was not a basketball fan.

And really, my first memory of even watching baseball is the 93 World Series. So I'm sure I was aware of it. It was big news. Everyone knew who Michael Jordan was, but I don't remember particularly caring or paying close attention. Yeah. I remember it being just one of the many, like I said, one of the many stories, sports stories that all felt huge because it was the first time I was living through them. When you're 13, you have a tremendous enthusiasm for all sports things that are happening. And so this was one of the many things that was on the cover of Sports

Illustrated and I was into, but I didn't realize how crazy it was. I think at the time I had his baseball card, everybody had his baseball card, baseball cards were everywhere and they weren't rare, but still you thought that they were going to be worth something. And so I remember rooting for him because I wanted his baseball card to be worth even more if he became a good baseball player. And I remember him being, you know, better than expected. And everybody talked about how he was fast and played good defense. And then the strike happened and it all ended. It does, though, I feel like it's a lot different than,

well, let me ask you, how would you cover it, do you think, if it happened today? Oh, gosh, I mean. Because you're a baseball writer. Do you think that it's more a baseball story or is it more a basketball story? I think it's probably more a basketball story, why the best player in the league just departed. And I know there is still discussion of why that happened and various conspiracy theories. I don't know if they got into that in the documentary. I. Right. So I think that it would be a bigger basketball story if he were an amazing baseball player and he made the majors, then maybe it becomes a bigger baseball story.

But until he does that and he didn't get to, I think it's, you know, if the best player of all time in your sport walks away at the peak of his powers to co-play an entirely different sport, that's the biggest story in the world for every basketball person. Yeah, it occurs to me that the world has changed a lot since then. So in these days, you know, we have the closest thing we have to a comparable situation is Tim Tebow, which is very different for a lot of reasons. Of course, Tebow was not an active football player. He was not a superstar football player. He was not a

superstar football player and other things. But another crucial thing is that the world is different. So in the modern times, in our era right here, it's almost expected that if you're a star, a celebrity, that you will end up doing, well, not that all celebrities will do this, that you will end up doing, well, not that all celebrities will do this, but that a lot of celebrities will end up doing, you know, a dance competition, right? Like if you're, oh, you're the press secretary for the White House, why not do a dance competition? Oh, you're a football player, why not do a dance competition or a singing competition or a reality show where you try to sell bottled water on the streets of New York to prove that you're a good business person.

There's a way that like everybody who becomes famous just becomes a potential reality TV star and we will put them in an uncomfortable situation or challenge them in a skill that is not their own and they'll be a little awkward and embarrassing. And that's it. That's like the second stage of your celebrity. And so it makes total sense that Tim Tebow, after his football career is over, would go do what is kind of a reality show of trying to make

it in baseball. It's not a reality show where he's competing with 11 other B-list celebrities, but that's kind of what it is, right? He's on camera. He's in front of everybody. He's doing interviews. Some people are polling for him, and some people are rooting against him, and it makes sense. It fits modern celebrity.

I don't feel like that existed at all during Michael Jordan's time. Michael Jordan is also not a T-Bowl-level celebrity. It would be like if Beyonce were on The Masked Singer right now, that would be really weird still. But you know, even putting aside the difference in celebrity scale, at the time, you didn't have the expectation that a celebrity was going to go do something else. In fact, you didn't even have like, well, other than having like an actor would become a director sort of a thing, you would sometimes have an actor who would become a singer and it was usually, it didn't really work very well. But that was the closest thing.

You'd have, you'd have, you know, Kevin Bacon in a band sort of, or Eddie Murphy releasing a single. And so. Singers becoming actors. Singers becoming actors, right. Madonna doing a movie. Exactly. But not something like Michael Jordan going and becoming a baseball player. So it was weird. It was odd at the time. And I think it was also odd because I still don't feel like it's clear what the motivation was. I think that at the time when it happened, there was a real kind of judgmentalism about it.

It didn't seem, I don't know, it didn't seem sincere or maybe it felt like it wasn't earned. Michael Jordan had not earned the chance to do that. But at the time, it wasn't really clear what the motivation was. And I think now we still don't really know whether he played baseball because he thought he'd be good at it or because he just wanted to do it and he didn't care that he'd be bad at it. Like he definitely tried really hard. There's lots of stories about how hard he tried and how his hands would bleed because he was taking so much batting practice and how he was outworking everybody and how he showed so much improvement. And there's all sorts of testimony about how seriously he took it. a man who was so good at basketball that he deluded himself into thinking that he would be

good at baseball, or if it's about a man who was so good at basketball that he felt like he needed to go do something that he would be bad at, that he had to live through a humbling experience, or that he actually had to sort of drop out of the ambition race that he had been on for so long and do something where he knew that he wasn't going to be the greatest ever. And so it's kind of hard to even judge what he hoped to get out of baseball and what baseball was doing for him. Like you say, it feels more like you would cover it as a basketball writer more than

you would cover it as a basketball writer more than you would cover it as a baseball writer. And so in some ways, in a lot of ways, it feels like that whole foray was not a baseball story at all, that it was a basketball story that just took place in baseball. So I don't even know if it has anything to do with the history of baseball. But yeah, it was weird. Yeah, I think it's still a baseball story, I think, because we have that weird example of something that's really never happened. And because it is still so confounding, as you were just saying, why someone would do this. And I think that's why there are conspiracy theories about gambling. And was he secretly suspended or exiled? Or was it a psychological thing? His dad had been killed. Maybe he felt that he was honoring his dad and what his dad wanted him to do. And so there are all these motivations that people ascribe to him. And maybe it will become clear. Maybe he'll speak about it. I don't know. But I few years ago about Michael Jordan's baseball career. And Jeff and I had him on the podcast. That was episode 1043, I think. And we talked about Rob's story and all the people he spoke to.

And as you were saying, some of them thought that he would have made it, that if there hadn't been a strike or if he had kept going, then he could have gotten better because he did work so hard. And it's the whole Michael Jordan mythos of when someone told him he couldn't do something or wasn't good at something, then he immediately became good at that thing. And he just worked and worked at that thing until he was the best. And he obviously wasn't going to be the best baseball player. he was the best and he obviously wasn't going to be the best baseball player. He was in his 30s already, but it's sort of hard to bet against him when you hear those stories of how single-minded and driven he was to be great at everything and that he did really make some improvements and that his stats improved somewhat and he was evidently taking much better BP, and his arm was way better. And maybe there's some myth-making there where people remember what he did in that light because he was Michael Jordan, and they want to have an interesting what-if about what would have happened and could he have made it.

But I do believe that he probably got better. It certainly stands to reason that focusing on baseball for the first time in years, he would have improved pretty quickly. Not enough, I'm sure, but could he have made it if he had wanted to hang around for the rest of his career and would have been okay with a bench roll or just making a cameo or something? Of course, he could have potentially made it because he was super famous and he was playing for the White Sox. And imagine what sort of draw he would have been. But, I mean, just legitimately as a player based on talent alone, I wouldn't say it was impossible.

So it is a fascinating scenario. In fact, Rob writes, if he'd stuck with baseball, would he eventually have earned a real job in the majors? It's difficult to find someone who was around him back then who says no. So everybody, essentially everybody who was around him says he would have made it. Now, a lot of people who were around the game say that he wouldn't have, but the people who were around him that year say he would have. And I have to say, I greatly prefer, I'm not, I couldn't say whether that's true or not. I couldn't say whether he would have made it or not.

I greatly prefer to think of it as a project where he wouldn't have though. And where I actually really like imagining this as a story of Michael Jordan stepping away from something that he felt hyper competitive about and could be a bit more relaxed. There is a, like you say, there's a, a lot of quotes about how competitive he was about everything, including during this time,

Terry Francona talks about teaching him Yahtzee. And then quote, we played the rest of the season because Michael Jordan was so obsessed with trying to like win at Yahtzee. He was incredibly competitive at Yahtzee. Kenny Coleman, a teammate, says that he thinks that he cheated when they would play cards because he was so competitive. There's all sorts of examples of how the opposite, which was that Michael Jordan was learning how to live at a different pace and how to value himself and what he was doing a lot differently. So for instance, this is a quote from him back then. I need to learn patience, he said. Maybe

I need to learn how to fish. Everybody here fishes or hunts and that takes patience. And it's kind of fun to think about Michael Jordan having to learn to sit still and wait for, you know, a deer to come to him. And that in a metaphorical sense, that's what baseball was. He had to just sort of learn to do the bus and to do the failure and that he couldn't, he couldn't possibly, let's, again, I can't say that the people who say he would have made it are right or wrong, but he couldn't possibly have made it, right? Like it feels, it feels just so unrealistic that he could have made it. I do not, I, I, I know that factually, I cannot say that those people are wrong, but my gut tells me there is no way Michael Jordan had no chance of making it as a major

leaguer learning how to play at 32 while, play at 32 while in AA and not being that good. I do not believe it. And if I think of it as being Michael Jordan really obsessively trying to become a great baseball player, that's not that fun for me. And whether he made it or not, it wouldn't be that fun to me. If I think about it as Michael Jordan taking a summer off to relax and to fail and to do something where he knew that he was hopeless. That's, I guess, the main thing is if he had hope that he was going to make the majors, it's not fun for me. If he knew how hopeless it was, that's very fun for me.

And there is this quote from Michael Jordan in 1998. How would I describe my baseball experience? I would describe it now the same way I described it then. Every moment was a warm one. I remember looking up in the sky from time to time and being amazed at how much my life had changed. I had no fear, just a warm feeling. I can't describe the sense exactly, but now it seems like I was living in a dream.

And do you know what that reminds me of? That quote reminds me of my wife's interpretation of Field of Dreams. Basically, all the Birmingham Barons in 1994 were the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, and they were putting on this dream baseball game so that Michael Jordan could work out his psychological needs. And it was, you know, he was just out there having a catch. And it was peaceful. And it was not real. And because it wasn't real, you know, he could be at peace and deal with what he needed to deal with. And you know, maybe that's literally like dealing with his father's death. Or maybe it was dealing with the expectations of a world that continually demanded he get better and better, or that he himself had demanded he get better and better.

But one way or another, to him would have been kind of fake sports, because that wasn't his sport, would be a place where he could enact the work that takes place in a dream where you can kind of like live in metaphor for a while. And so I like the idea of baseball serving that purpose for Michael Jordan and serving that purpose for Kevin Costner and maybe serving that purpose in some way for everybody on the field and for all of us at some time or another, if I just think of it as another race for him to try to win, then it just feels kind of bleak and a little bit exhausting. Yeah. Well, it seems like it would be inconsistent with his character or my conception of his character for him to have that. But that's the point. Right. Exactly.

Right. And so it would seem strange. I mean, if this were a fictional character, a TV character, But that's the point, right? Exactly. mental health break, that just doesn't really seem possible. It doesn't seem like Michael Jordan should be the sort of person who ever wanted a mental health break. Everything you ever hear about Michael Jordan is that whatever he tried to do, he wanted to be the best at, and he thought he was the best at. And so it would seemingly be inconsistent for him to say, you know what, this is just a diversion. Just going to enjoy my summer, see how it goes, take some batting practice. But people act in inconsistent ways all the time in reality. And in some ways, I think we're harsher on fictional characters than we are on real people, because real people often do contradictory things, and they say one thing and do another, or they say things that seem to be diametrically opposed, or they do things that seem to be diametrically opposed. And I think probably all of us have things that we care about being good at and other things that we don't really, that we say, this is just our diversion. casual thing like Jeff Sullivan for instance is a great baseball analyst and cares about all the numbers and wants to dive into the stats and everything but for him he never wanted to look

at hockey that way and he always said he just wanted to watch hockey and experience hockey as a fan he didn't want to know the advanced numbers he didn't want to be burdened with that knowledge he just kind of wanted to watch hockey the way he had always watched hockey and not be enlightened, you know, not have the red pill, blue pill discussion where suddenly your eyes are opened and you see things differently. And so it's possible that Michael Jordan, in theory, could have wanted to be the best basketball player ever and the best Yahtzee player ever, but not really have cared whether he was the best baseball player ever. I agree that it's a better story. It's a more satisfying, more nuanced story that way. That said, I don't really buy it. I think he probably did think he was going to be good at

baseball and maybe still believes he could have been good at baseball and was, I don't know, disappointed by how he played, regardless of what he said. But I agree that I like your interpretation better. I do believe my interpretation. So you and I, I'm glad you and I are coming out of this with different views about what he hoped to accomplish from it. Does the fact that he came back to spring training in 1995, if there had not been a strike, then he probably would have played in 1995 again. He had gone back to spring training and according to the reports, the stories, he didn't want to get involved in playing when there was a labor stoppage going on. So he thought, all right, I guess I'll go back to winning titles in the NBA. Does that to you seem more like evidence that he believed in his abilities and that he was going to make it? Or does it seem more like evidence that he didn't care? Because he had been bad in 1994. But on the other hand, people were saying he was getting better. He had hit three home runs late, and then he did a little bit better in the fall league.

getting better he had hit he had hit three home runs late and then he did a little bit better in the fall league and you could easily fit it into either narrative about michael jordan one that he he's not ever going to give up that he will never admit defeat and that he could have it he could have it oh 40 in 1994 and he still would have gone to spring training to prove everybody wrong you know he's got to just constantly prove everybody everybody wrong and accomplish the thing that he set out to accomplish. Or you could look at it in a different way in the sort of non-traditional way of assessing Jordan, which is to say that he must have known that baseball was very hard and that he was not thriving at it in the way that, you know, professional baseball players thrive at it. And yet he didn't get discouraged. He didn't quit when the season ended. He kept on playing. He was having a good time. I guess he was having a good time, enough of a good time that he

went back for year two. So which way do you take him showing up for spring training as, as pointing? I take it the first way, I guess, maybe because that's how I perceived the whole story. But if you said that he just needed a break and he had accomplished everything he wanted to in basketball and he just wanted to not really be low profile, he wasn't really low profile, but relatively, I guess. And he was just burned out and he'd been competing so hard and he'd been on the dream team and he was a super celebrity and he just wanted to try something different. Then you could say, well, he had a year and he did it and that was the break. And so therefore, it must mean that he really wanted to be a great baseball player or else why would he have come back? Or you could say, well, he just liked it so much that he never wanted to go back. But then he did go back and he did play for years more and competed very

strenuously and even had an additional comeback after that, which just shows how much he wanted to keep playing basketball and being great at basketball. So I have to think that he kind of conceded that the baseball thing wasn't going to end up the way that he wanted it to. But I don't know, it's possible that he was just enjoying the relatively slow-paced, low-pressure activity so much that it was hard for him to give up. And we should say, yes, he was bad, but it was pretty impressive that he was as good competitive high level baseball and he had not played baseball for what 14 15 years and had not played above high school right so he quit early in his senior year yeah so to walk onto the field and be at all competent and you look at some of his stats and you know he stole 30 bases and yes he got caught a lot as you would expect maybe for someone who didn't have the baseball instincts and he had a like two to one strike out to walk ratio or a little worse than that but really it wasn't like he was totally overmatched i mean he struck out 114 times and 436 at bats that's that's not good obviously but he also walked 51 times which i don't know if guys were pitching around him or afraid of him. You'd think they would probably be challenging him. If anything, I get to pitch against Michael Jordan, I'm going to come right at him. I would think a double-A player would be thinking.

He had some sense of the strike zone, and that maybe makes me more optimistic about his possible baseball future than anything, because it wasn't like he had no idea what he was doing. He seemed to have some shocking, but it's still pretty impressive that he was as not completely incompetent as he was. Yeah. There's a quote here from George Brett, who was at the time an executive says, I know a lot of players don't want to see him make it because it will be a slap in the face to them. And I guess one way of, of reading that is that he's saying he didn't put in the time. He didn't serve his dues. He didn't earn his spot on the Barons. And if he makes it to the majors, he's taking a roster spot. The first time I read it, I read it more like if Michael Jordan makes it,

it's a slap in your face because he just makes it look so much easier than it ever felt like to you as the player. Like for you, baseball is hard. You struggled for decades to learn how to hit, to get to the majors. And here's this guy who quit in high school and he just shows up and he's good. Like if he got to where he was good and he's good. And what does that tell you about, you know, yourself that it's hard for you, but it's actually can be easy for Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan's performance, you're right. It's incredible that he could do that with all that you said. I mean, it is really an extraordinary act of athleticism that he learned on the fly to hit. And by the way, I will also note that all

the stories about him at the time and also Rob's oral history and also other stories that I've read from, from later years, they all talk about how hard he worked in spring training and they all talk about how hard he worked in when the season began. And they all talk about how he took hours and hours of flips from his hitting coach. So many that his hands bled and blistered.

And there's a quote about how, if you haven't swung a bat in 15 years then when you start swinging it for even 15 minutes here it is here's from rob's oral history if you haven't swung a baseball bat in a while and decided to pick one up and swing it for 15 minutes your hands would have blisters his hands were so raw from taking flips that the calluses would rip open every day etc etc the none of them say that he did any work before spring training and the fact that he got the blisters suggests that he might have shown up to spring training without having prepped like he just he not only did he learn to play on the fly but it's not like he had like you know woodshedded

for you know a year on his own before he brought his talents into the public. He just showed up and was like immediately did it all in public. That's an incredible thing. It's incredible growth, even though like I would say the trajectory of his his season is not quite as tidily upward as I think it is sometimes remembered in retrospect. But here's my question. Reading the George Brett quote the alternate way where his success would make baseball as a sport look easy if he were successful, do you consider Michael Jordan's success to show how hard baseball is because the greatest athlete of all time tried it for a year and couldn't do any better than you know 202 with um you know kind of bad fundamentals or does it show how easy baseball is because michael jordan could take 15 years off show up with with hardly any preparation and get immediately passable i'm

not sure it's either really for me like it's kind of in the middle ground. Like if you could somehow rerun Michael Jordan's life and have him play baseball from the start, and it turns out that he's not actually any good, then I think that shows you, oh, wow, baseball is actually really hard because this is such an incredible athlete. He was the best at this other sport and he never made it in baseball. That's how high the bar is. And yet it's not that. It's that he walked on with no real preparation and hardly any experience in a long layoff and wasn't that good. And so to me, that doesn't really make a case that baseball is hard. I mean, it tells you baseball is not easy, but I don't think anyone thought it was easy. But the fact that he was as bad as he was,

again, it shows you that there's more to it than just being a great athlete, obviously. But I think that seems fairly obvious to me. So if he had walked on from basketball and his skills had just transferred to the extent that he was immediately a great baseball player, then I think that might make baseball look a little too easy. On the other hand, it's Michael Jordan, and he's just sort of this singular athlete. He's the greatest of all time in

basketball, and he has this incredibly driven mentality. So I don't know that it would make me feel that bad as a baseball player if Michael Jordan came and took my job, even though I had devoted my career to it, because he's Michael Jordan. You just sort of expect him to do that. So to me, if he had had a longer, more serious go at it and had failed, then that would teach me something about baseball. That would be an illustrative example. See, Michael Jordan couldn't even make it, but it wasn't really a good enough test case for me to say that it actually teaches us anything. And yet, he was bad enough that I don't think you can say, oh, see, it's actually easy. You know, it's impressive that he was as good as he was, but he wasn't anywhere near a major league quality

player. It does surprise me that there are not more hitchers that can maintain a certain level of hitting deep into their career. Almost no pitchers put up offensive numbers as good as Michael Jordan did in AA. I know that they don't put the emphasis on it the way that Michael Jordan does, But sometimes we get asked, should a team have their pitchers work on hitting more so that they're not punting one ninth of the lineup? Could you really improve your pitchers hitting? And we always say, no, probably not. They're not selected for it and it would take a lot of work and it's not realistic. And you can see the downward trends and all that. But then you look at Michael Jordan with a 556 OPS with no baseball experience,

and you think, is it really that implausible that with a bit more work, you could get your starting rotation to have a 556 OPS? Maybe. I don't know. Maybe it's still not worth it. I mean, Jordan had blisters all over his hands. You don't want your pitchers to have blisters. Well, to you, the blisters and the bleeding, that doesn't change your interpretation of what his motivation was for this experiment? Because if it really was just about sort of having warm, fuzzy feelings about baseball and doing something different and getting a bit of a break from burnout in basketball, would he still have dedicated to baseball in such a way that he was bleeding all the time and coming back for more? It's very hard to know because a lot of times people are more passionate about their hobbies than they are their work.

And they will put a lot more effort and energy into something that they love, even if it is not the thing that is, you know, their legacy or giving them a financial reward. And so if you think if something's I mean, I when I was in high school, I was obsessed with golfing for a little while. And my hands were constantly bleeding and blistering. And it was because playing golf was my peaceful thing. It was the thing that I wanted to spend every hour of my Saturday afternoon at the driving range hitting bucket after bucket of chip shots. It wasn't because I was incredibly driven. It was because that made me feel good. And so I couldn't say one way or another how the blisters would

point. Again, it fits very easily into either narrative that you have. Yeah. Okay. I would also recommend an article Neil Payne wrote for FiveThirtyEight this week about Michael Jordan's status as the greatest of all time and taking a look at it through modern statistical lens. I know there's a LeBron versus Jordan argument and that LeBron has a somewhat convincing case too, but Neil made a pretty good case for Jordan. And it's kind of interesting. I was trying to think of a baseball equivalent because he was just so efficient at everything. He was a really efficient scorer. He was a really efficient defender. He was good at getting turnovers. He was good at not turning over. So he just kind of did everything well. But in basketball, when you do that sort of adjustment and you talk about who is the best of all time, I don't know whether it's harder or easier in basketball than it is in baseball, because in baseball, you need to adjust for so many factors, too. And yet, unless you're going back to like pre-Babe Ruth days, you don't really need to adjust the way that you do in basketball with the three-point shooting percentage and attempt rate, which sort of came after Jordan. And so it's impressive that Jordan shows up as great as he does because he was playing in this much less efficient scoring era. And that's not quite the same with baseball, really. I mean, things have changed in a lot of ways, but the way that you

score hasn't really dramatically changed or the way that players try to score, at least since Babe Ruth in the modern era of baseball. So I don't know that players try to score, at least since Babe Ruth in the modern era of baseball. So I don't know that you need to do the same adjustment and say, oh, well, this guy played before the time when players were doing the thing that helps them score well. I guess you could say like swing changes or something, or yes, guys were sack bunting and there wasn't the same emphasis on walks and everything but i don't know if it's quite as dramatic but it's almost trout-esque in that he was really good at everything in ways that maybe it wasn't even so obvious to the naked eye although everyone

knew he was the best but in some ways he was just so efficient in a less flashy way than some players some of the the big men of his era. So interesting article. All right. Well, I thought this discussion started quite slow and then got pretty good. So sorry to everyone for the first few minutes. It took a little while. Okay. And check out Rob's oral history and our interview with him. I will link to it. Okay. One more reading recommendation while I'm at it. Baseball America's Matt Eddy did a ranking in honor of what would have been the beginning of the minor league baseball season of the most significant, astonishing, and outstanding minor league

achievements of the past 40 seasons. We devoted this episode to one significant, astonishing, and outstanding minor league season, but these are the really impressive statistical accomplishments. And it's a fun mix of really great legendary players who were just on the precipice of the majors and they were just utterly dominating the minors. And some guys who just never really panned out, never turned into much, or were just kind of mediocre minor leaguers that never had the same excellence in the big leagues. You have some stories, obviously, of players who are sort of known for not panning out. Brandon Woods, 101 extra base hits in 2005. Of course, he didn't have much of a major league career. He struggled with anxiety. Then you've got some fun ones like Francisco Mejia's 50-game hitting streak in 2016, which was something that we were talking about at

the time. Justin Verlander has the lowest ERA for a full season qualifying minor league pitcher in this sample, which goes back to the early 80s, his 1.29 ERA in 2005 in A-ball. Some of these are fascinating because they show you how player development has changed. For instance, number one on the list is Dwight Gooden's 300 strikeouts in 1983. And as Matt notes, only two pitchers since the mid-60s have struck out 300 minor league batters. It's rare in the majors, but of course it's rare in the minors where you usually don't pitch as many innings, shorter season, innings limits, etc. So Nolan Ryan struck out 307 batters in 1966 in his first full year after the draft. And then Dwight Gooden struck out 300 Carolina

League batters in 191 innings as an 18-year-old in 1983. He absolutely laid waste to the league, and that's notable because they let him pitch 191 innings at age 18. And a big part of Gooden's story in the big leagues, obviously, is that he was worked so hard at an early age in ways that you would never see today. And so the fact that they unleashed him the way that they did in 1983 seems somewhat irresponsible in retrospect, and yet pretty fun when you look at the stat line. He was striking out 14 guys per nine, and this is, again, the 80s. A couple other good ones here. Only one minor league player has hit 400 in a full season since 1963. That's Rubio Durazo in 1999. He hit 404. That's an example of a guy who everyone expected a lot of because of his minor league stats, but he got kind of a late start and he was still a very good above average player in

the big leagues, just not for a very long time. Then there's Billy Hamilton's 155 stolen bases in 2012. That was something Sam and I talked about in the first year of this podcast. That was extremely exciting and even more exciting because we forecasted 100-something steals for Billy Hamilton in the big leagues in the short-term future, and unfortunately, that never happened. So that's one of these seasons that's just kind of tantalizing. We wanted him to do this at the highest level, and he was never good enough to. He never got on base enough to do that, and he wasn't as great to. He never got on base enough to do that,

and he wasn't as great a base dealer on an efficiency basis as we all hoped he would be. When he came up, it was like, no one will ever catch Billy Hamilton. And then it turned out, no, he could be caught. That was sort of sad. Then there's one that I wasn't even really aware of, even though it happened in 2019. Kevin Krohn, Diamondbacks minor leaguer for AAA, who did make it to the majors, 777 slugging percentage last year. He led the minor leagues with 39 homers, but he did it in 82 games. So that 777 slugging is the highest of the past 40 years. Granted, the ball was extremely lively. He was in the Pacific Coast League.

Everything was in his favor power-wise, but it's still pretty extraordinary. And he homered six times in 78 plate appearances for the Diamondbacks in the big leagues, and he hit the ball very hard. So I'll be curious to see how he does, if and when we get baseball back. The last one I'll mention, one of my favorite minor league seasons of all time, Nick Johnson's 1999 and his 525 on base percentage. Nick Johnson is just one of my all-time, if I could snap my fingers and make this guy healthy for his whole career, it would be Nick Johnson. I loved Nick Johnson. He was always injured, and yet he still finished his big league career with a.399 OPP because he just got on base everywhere, no25, 548, 123 walks, and 88 strikeouts. I loved Nick Johnson. It was so much fun to watch him hit or to watch him take pitches and to play defense.

He was good at that too. Good player, but I would have loved to see what he could do with a full healthy career. I'll link to the article. Check it out. It's fun. You can also support Effectively Wild on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild the following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and help keep the podcast going while getting themselves access to some perks

ryan adam scheid ben young russell hull and michael ortman thanks to all of you and thanks to everyone who has supported us during what is a difficult financial time for many people. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system.

If you are a supporter, thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can pick up a paperback copy of my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. It includes a new afterword, and according to my publisher, the digital Kindle version of my book now includes that afterword also. So if you're partial to digital editions, evidently you can get it that way too. We'll be back with another episode a little later this week.

Talk to you then. True companion for a sure without him That you never will make it home Oh, what you gonna do? Oh, what you gonna say? Oh, how you gonna feel When you come to the end of the way.