Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1534: The Stay-at-Home Run Derby

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Johnny Vander Meer’s ear boils and the surprisingly ancient origins of the phrase, “A walk is as good as a hit,” then answer listener emails about why some players prove to be flashes in the pan, whether a home run derby would work under current conditions, whether the […]

When the fight went out and the life was best For the night of the junior champion's quest As our hero, Adam Parker, touched his toes But as almost everybody guessed The judges found him second best Put a huge unsightly ball up on his nose Well, he had a boil crisis Boil crisis Well, he had a boil crisis, boil crisis

Once again, it rears its ugly head Once again, it rears its ugly head Good morning, and welcome to episode 1534 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. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you?

Doing okay. Johnny Vandermeer. So we, you know, this is quick, but we were talking about Ski Malillo and his all spinach diet. So I have today come across another old timey health issue. This one involving Johnny Vandermeer threw two consecutive no-hitters, he missed about a month of the season with a medical ailment. You want to guess what that medical ailment was, Ben? Was it the one that Meg and I discussed with Wes Farrell, getting stung by bees many times to try to fix your arm? Oh, wow. No, that's great. So that was the intent, like he was actually trying to... Yeah, that was the remedy, sore arm. They stung him by bees many times hoping that that would help like it would like like cause

blood flow to the arm which would then that's my theory evidently it's still a treatment that is sometimes tried although not one with any real scientific backing that i could see wow well okay no johnny vandermeer missed a month of his best season because he had ear boils oh no yeah so i saw this reference somewhere and it linked to an interview that he did in baseball digest in the 1980s baseball digest i don't know if you've mentioned it but baseball digest has temporarily made all of its archives free and available to everyone as a as a gift to shut in people during uh the coronavirus and so i was able to go read the 1985 interview with johnny vandermeer who says that i could have had a lot better year than 15 and 10 had i not been lying in the hospital for a month? I was out for a month and I lost 15 pounds.

I didn't know much about treating boils inside the ear then. And all I could do was put heat lamps on them. Today they have antibiotics, but there weren't any antibiotics before the war. So somehow he had boils in his ear. Somehow he had boils in his ear and they were so bad that he lost 15 pounds and couldn't leave a hospital. So I don't even know how to envision this. I don't know where in the ear they were, how they got there, what it felt like, what other, I don't know, what he did with his time. But I guess you couldn't lance an ear boil inside your ear inside your ear yeah he had a break in your drum or something he had i believe

he had seven boils in one ear and six boils in the other ear how does that happen? I don't know. How it happens is it's 1939. So much earwax build up or something. Yeah, I don't know. No Q-tips. Boy, that sounds painful. I wouldn't have described it as an ear boil, but like an ear pimple or something. I guess it's a boil. But like on the outside, maybe on the lobe or something, That has happened to me, I think, at some point.

But inside the ear and several of them at once, boy, maybe it's genetic. I don't know. Sorry he had to go through that. Yeah. Yuck. All right. So that's my banter. Okay. Well, mine is not about ear boils. I was recently rereading the classic account of the 1954 World Series Game 1 by Arnold Haino, A Day in the Bleachers, which may be featured on an upcoming episode. And I came across the phrase, a walk is as good as a hit. And it kind of caught my eye because this book was written in 1954. That's 50 years before Moneyball approximately. And people were already just casually saying a walk is as good as a hit

And so I wondered how far back does that phrase go? How long have people in baseball been saying that? And I was going to do a newspaper archive deep dive But then I came across a blog post where someone had already done that And had discovered that a walk is as good as a hit goes back at least to the 1910s And that when they were saying it to the 1910s, and that when they were saying it in the 1910s in these references, they were saying it as if it was already an old saying then. And then this person also came up with references from the 1890s when it was a base

on balls is as good as a hit. So the terminology for a walk had changed, but not the saying itself. And even then it was seen as sort of old wisdom, like in this 1898 reference, one frequently hears a coacher cry, wait it out, a base on balls is as good as a hit. And it's just kind of taken for granted. And so I wondered how it was possible for this to be common wisdom going back seemingly almost to the beginning of professional baseball that a walk is as good as a hit. And yet for people not really to believe that walking was as good as hitting or that players who walked were as good as players who hit and didn't walk up until really this century because Russell Carlton has written about this at Baseball Perspectives and has found that really up until 2004 or so, like the decade after Moneyball, that

was the first time that having a high on-base percentage predicted whether a player would return to his team more reliably than having a high batting average. So how do you think it is that this was kind of taken for granted, this was something everyone said, and yet when it came to actually valuing players, walking was not really seen as good as hitting. You know, it's hard to answer that in a way that extends any generosity whatsoever to the people who were making the decisions at the time.

I mean, any answer that I give is just going to make it seem like I think that they were really, really, really dumb. And so I, I mean, and like, I maybe that is the correct position. But that thinking that maybe that's the correct position is also not very generous. I mean, you should assume that people are doing things for for rational reasons that they're doing things at least in their own self-interest if they can. So I hesitate to just be, well, it's just because they were bad at making decisions.

I mean, I certainly think I can understand why. By the way, I would have sworn up and down that walks as good as a hit was invented by one of my Little League teammates. All right, so I can totally understand why a walk could be seen as as good as a hit, and yet a player who draws walks would not be broadly seen as being as good

or as admirable. I could see why it would not be a skill that was accepted by the public as being on the same level as a hit. It feels like you're not doing anything. It feels like you're just receiving another player's failure rather than earning it. Of course, we now know that's not true, but I could see how for a long time, a walk would look passive and kind of almost lucky and not requiring skill. I mean, I wrote, there was a period of time where I was tracking Ian Kennedy's walk rate against Albert Pujols walk rate, because for

early into a season, Ian Kennedy was basically never, ever, ever swinging. And he was drawing more walks than Albert Pujols. And that is an example. You can walk if you never swing, you can't get a hit, not only if you never swing you can't get a hit not only if you never swing but if you're not one of the greatest players in the world and so is there then a sequence by which not getting public recognition for the walks for the skill of drawing walks leads to the decision makers themselves being swayed by that. And so the tail is wagging the dog, I guess, in a sense. And so they just, it creates a little bit of a logical blind spot. And the GMs overlook it because they're not reading about it in the newspaper.

They're not seeing it listed in the box score. It is not accepted as a, maybe as even a repeatable skill so i guess some combination of all of that yeah it's funny that the belief that walks weren't really that valuable a skill persisted for so long because when walks happen in games fans respond appropriately right or they respond in the way that they would if a walk were valuable for one team and hurtful for the other team. So, like, I don't know if you could go back in time and assess the crowd reaction somehow before and after Moneyball when a batter draws a walk and see if there's, like, more applause now because people recognize that it was partially batter skill that he drew that walk. I don't

know whether that would be the case or not, but going back to the beginning of baseball, or at least as soon as you could conceivably walk, people on the team of the player who walked or people who rooted for the team of the player that walked were happy when the walk happened, right? Hey, we've got a base runner. And people who were rooting for the pitcher's team were unhappy. Oh no, they've got a base runner and our pitcher is wild and he just wasted all those pitches. So the reaction itself, it's not like people were sitting there in 1950 and no one realized that a walk was good. No, but like you said, though, our pitcher is wild. Yes, right.

It's who you're giving agency to in that and what you think the significance of the event is. to in that and what you think the significance of the event is. Part of the significance of the event of a walk is specifically that you actually start to feel worried about the pitcher. Yeah. If a pitcher gives up a hit, you don't think, ah, he's fallen apart. The walls are crumbling down now. If he gives up three hits, you might think that. Yeah.

But if he gives up a hit, you just think he gave up a hit. If he gives up a walk, you start very quickly thinking, oh, well, this pitcher's, you know, he's off a little bit. Yeah, I would think that's probably it. It's that the understanding of how much is the batter skill has sort of swung toward the batter. But it's also not that great a saying. I mean, it's not literally true, or at least it comes with a couple caveats. Well, it is in a lot of cases. In a lot of cases it is, yeah. So when you say it, and maybe you only say it in those cases or it's just understood that it only applies. In my dugout, walks as good as a hit was in Little League

when we invented it, was specifically when there was nobody on and you needed base runners. So you would yell it when you're down four and leading off in the ninth inning. All right, here we go, Sammy. Walks as good as a a hit, right? Wouldn't do it with a runner on third. That would be better than a walk. And right, it doesn't take into account that a single is maybe advancing base runners sometimes more than a walk would. But even allowing for all of that, it still does apply that there's some value to a walk.

I guess it's just like, I kind of think of the other piece of kind of contradictory advice that was part of baseball for a long time was that pitchers were encouraged to get ground balls and yet batters were also encouraged to get ground balls which you know doesn't really make any sense because if ground balls are a good thing for pitchers to get then how can that be an advantageous thing for hitters to get i mean that's just completely inconsistent

right great point and yet those things were both taught simultaneously for decades and decades, if not more than a century. And so if you can hold those two things in your head at the same time. Well, we currently hold two things in our head at the same time about strikeouts, though, right? Sort of. Sort of. Well, and it's true for strikeouts, right? Yeah, right. Strikeouts are very beneficial for pitchers.

There is indeed a strikeout paradox. Yes. So maybe there was a strikeout paradox yes so maybe there was a ground ball paradox maybe there wasn't there wasn't but to be clear but but we are capable of holding paradoxes in our minds without like our brains exploding yeah it is hard to understand how they could have thought that batters were just passively drawing walks or just being the beneficiaries of pitch's wildness. You could understand it in any given plate appearance because you're just standing there and you're not swinging and the pitcher misses the strike zone. So clearly that's more the

pitcher's fault than the batter's or so you would conclude based on that small sample. But I mean, before there were advanced stats, I think people still had a sense that some guys were very patient and some guys were very aggressive and some hitters walked a lot and some hitters never walked. And so that right there tells you that it has to be dependent on the batter and that therefore it's at least partly a batter skill that should be valued when batters have it. And so it doesn't really make sense that you wouldn't credit them for that. So it probably is just kind of myopia or inconsistency, but clearly people recognize that at least at certain times in certain situations, a walk was as good as a hit and you just sort of had to generalize from there. But I guess that took a hundred years or so.

You mentioned that you and Meg might be talking to arnold hayno and at one point in my life i had i also had arnold hayno's phone number uh on my tickler file of things to do was to to go down and and meet him because he lives he lives like 20 miles from me yeah exactly i would uh i just want to say that i loved that book a day in the Bleachers, which is one of the original kind of like focus on one game narrative books. And when I read a book, whenever I get to a part of the book, a sentence, a paragraph, a passage in a book where I read it and I want to just save that, I want to remember that passage, I write it on an index card and then I use that index card for my bookmark

for the rest of the book. And then when I'm done with the book, I file an index card, and then I use that index card for my bookmark for the rest of the book. And then when I'm done with the book, I file the index card away. And so then if I ever try to remember what I thought of a book, I can go back and I can see what the passages that I chose to save. And so I have pulled my Arnold Haino index card here. So here's what I saved from that book. So Sal Magli is the pitcher of the game, and so he's batting, and he grounds out,

and is thrown at it first. So here it goes. Magley stopped running halfway to first. I said, attaboy, Sal. That's, oh, you see, all right. Now I'm going to go. I dug your text message, too. That was really good.

Here I go. Magley stopped running going to go. I dug your death passage too. That was really good. Here I go. Magli stopped running halfway to first. I said, attaboy, Sal. That's saving the old wind. Had Magli chosen to run, like all get out down the first baseline, I would have undoubtedly yelled, attaboy, Sal. That's the old spirit.

Yep. Speaking of holding two ideas in your head at one time. Yes, exactly. Very funny book. Very good book, but very funny book. Yes. All right. So let's answer some emails. This is a question from Ryan in Toronto. With rumors of Yasiel Puig's potential deal with the Giants in the works, I have been wondering about players with similar career arcs to Puig's. There have been a few instances over the past decade where position players

have burst onto the scene and produced at Hall of Fame levels early only to regress mightily following the first year or two due possibly to an overexposed weakness or long-term injury. Puig started his career with the Dodgers looking like a Bo Jackson-esque athlete and accumulated

9.6 fangraphs war over the course of his first few seasons, only to accumulate 9.3 fangraphs war over the next five seasons. Brett Laurie had a similar path with 7.8 fangraphs war over his first 168 games, and despite favorable comparisons to George Brett, and he links to an article that favorably compares him to George Brett. over first two years versus remainder of career, excluding pitchers because I assume most of those examples would be injury related. He was very kind to not include a link to the ESPN franchise draft from 2013. Yes. Or 2014.

I took Puig pretty high. Yeah, like ninth or tenth, I think. Yeah. All right. Yeah, you know, anytime i think about players like this puig is the exception i think uh but anytime i think about players like this and then i go back and i look at their performance as a rookie i'm always surprised by either how much less impressive it was than i remembered yeah or how much smaller the sample was than I remembered.

So like Laurie, for instance, he had a lot of war in his second year because he had humongous defensive numbers. At the time there was a lot of controversy because he was getting, what my recollection is that the controversy was that he was basically playing, he was listed as a third baseman, but they were moving him to the second base position as part of a shift. And so then when he would field a ball there, he would get like kind of bonkers defensive credit for some of those plays. Is that, am I kind of remembering that? That sounds familiar.

Yeah. But anyway, he was a good defender. It is true, but he really only had one good offensive season, which is where the hype really came from. We were not excited because Brett Lowery was going to be a plus defensive third baseman. It was that when he was a rookie, he had a 953 OPS. He had a 153 OPS plus, and that's like really crazy good numbers for a 21 year old who's also a plus defensive infielder, but it was only in 150 at bats.

And in my head, I kind of forgot that it was only in 150 at bats. And Gordonckham is another player i think of as like i thought the sky was the limit going into his second year after he had played 100 games in his first year and then i go back and i look and he had a you know 106 ops plus i don't know i mean it was a combination of he arrived with huge prospect fanfare and then he seemed to have a very good rookie year and you just kind of like start doubling everything exponentially out into the future and you're like well by the time he's 26 he's going to be the greatest player of all time so Puig is a little different though

Puig I think Puig was genuine like that the the performance was was there The sample was large and the physicality was outrageous. And it had the benefit of having defied expectations. So like Beckham and Laurie were elite prospects who came up and basically played like pretty good rookies or good rookies. Puig showed up very controversial already. There was a sense that he had been overrated by the Dodgers. And then he dominated in the minors, dominated in spring training and dominated in his debut. And we had essentially never seen him not dominating completely. So the question about Puig's career arc is, yes, kind of unanswerably mysterious, right? Yeah. And there was even, I think when I drafted him that high, I mean, I was a believer in the physical skills, but also I was encouraged by the fact that it seemed like he was improving some ways.

Like I remember there was a Jeff Sullivan post at Fangraph's Meet the Disciplined Yasiel Puig, and it was all about how Yasiel Puig's sense of the strike zone seemed to be improving, and he seemed to be maturing as a player while still being incredibly gifted physically. And so, yes, it is sort of strange that he is tailed off the way he has. So who else comes to mind here? I'm looking at highest war through the first two seasons of players since 2006. And yeah, the first 10, Puig is kind of the only one who tailed off. Maybe Austin Jackson would be one too but Austin Jackson was a a very good player for more years than two although I guess I'm looking and yeah he tailed off pretty quick too yeah Oduble Herrera is one but never really wasn't really a

star even when he was when he was doing well there wasn't a ton of hype about him even when he was doing well wow we might have pretty much named him we might have named the people who fit into this well i'm sure there are many we could come up with with some time to think and research from earlier in baseball history dustin ackley dustin ackley was yeah quite good when he debuted he he was i remember tracking his war against Strasburg's war because Strasburg had been the first overall pick. And for a while, Ackley was ahead of him because he had a great rookie year. And then he collapsed in his second year, but still had good defensive numbers. I don't know. Maybe Ackley is one. Yeah. So I would think that in general, I was going to say what you said, which is often it's just a misperception or it's an inflated sense of how good the guy actually was.

And you go back and you see, oh, well, actually, it's not so surprising that he didn't turn out to be great. But I think in the cases where maybe it was that way, it could be some flaw that was exposed. could be some flaw that was exposed. I don't know how many guys are really great for a year or two, and it turns out that they just can't hit a curveball or they can't hit an inside pitch or something, and then suddenly the league discovers that and they're helpless. I don't know how many guys that actually applies to. I'm sure it applies to many who get weeded out along the way, but not sure how many actually star in the majors with some glaringly obvious flaw there, but that probably happens. And then I would guess that sometimes, of course, there are injuries and they're not always catastrophic, obvious injuries, but it could even be something that

you're not aware of, or someone misses time and he comes back from it and you think he's okay, but he's not actually fully recovered, or maybe concussion symptoms, or maybe you adjust your mechanics a little bit because you're compensating for some nagging injury. And so you're never the same. I think there are players like that. And then there are also players who just don't stay motivated and maybe the stardom goes to their heads. Maybe their conditioning slips a little bit. Maybe they get complacent and take it for granted and they just kind of coast on what they've already accomplished and they don't keep pushing forward and don't keep up with the rest of the league. So I would think all of those are reasons why it could potentially happen. And I guess there are some people who probably just peak physically very early and don't keep it up and decline more quickly than others.

I don't know if that would happen in a year or two, but it could be something like that. It could be their eyesight goes in a way that's not diagnosed immediately. Probably a million explanations, and I don't know how many players actually fit this mold, but I'm sure people will write and tweet to mention the ones who come to their minds. All right. Question from Jeremy. I remember last year, Sam making a comment. Actually, it was a whole episode maybe, or a lot of banter speculating on the future of baseball in which he said, who knows in a hundred years, baseball might look more like home run derby. years, baseball might look more like home run derby. Just toss that one off as an aside.

Wrote 4,700 words about it. Yeah, just casual mention. If that may be the only kind of baseball available to us early this summer, why not give it a try, at least in the earlier phase of restrictions being lifted? I'm not much older than you all, but when I was a kid, I used to watch reruns of the old black and white Home Run Derby show that was filmed back in 1960, and that included two players competing against each other in nine-inning home run hitting contests while a host interviewed each contestant and broadcast the action.

It was dated, but I still loved it. My question is this. If the NBA can give horse a try, why can't MLB try Home Run Derby? Not the modern version with lots of contestants and thousands of fans, but the old kind of one player against another for nine innings in an empty stadium. Each derby episode could be held with a minimum of people, all socially distanced, a pitcher and two hitters, perhaps all from the same team who lived near

their home park, and some camera operators. You could use a robot ump and some kind of net for a catcher. A host could interview each player remotely. I operators. You could use a robot ump and some kind of net for a catcher. A host could interview each player remotely. I guess you could even use a pitching machine. Which of us wouldn't watch this? Before we answer that, I want to throw out an idea that I've been wondering about. This one is just tossed off casually, so I won't promise that it's not a total disaster or even awful.

So the idea of having play limited to Arizona this summer to keep everybody kind of in the same area so there's no need to travel. One of the obviously the challenges of that is that Arizona in the summer is extremely, extremely hot. You have limited facilities that are indoors and it could be, you know, a real challenge just physically to be out in this. I mean, you just my understanding is challenge just physically to be out in the sun. I mean, you just, my understanding is that you don't go outside in Arizona in the summer, let alone play 100 games in 100 days under the Arizona heat. And so I was thinking, though, since you don't have, there won't be crowds,

there won't be fans at all. Is it conceivable that they could play all these games at night and not just at night, but in the middle of the night? So you basically have the first pitch of a game at eight o'clock. You have that ends at something like 11 and then two new teams take over at 11 and play till two and two new teams take over at two and play till five and two new teams take over at maybe even at five and play until eight and then you have since it's broadcast only you don't have them broadcast live you play them throughout the the day when people are actually awake and you

basically embargo the results so that we're all watching them on tape delay in our daytime hours but they're being played in relatively moderate climate. And you can also get, you know, say four games a day or three games a day inside Bank One Ballpark or Chase Field instead of only the one game. Or, well, I mean, with Chase, theoretically, you could even have, you could fit seven games a day into Chase Field because you could do that. You could play continuously. You could just have baseball going a day into Chase Field because you could do that. You could play continuously.

You could just have baseball going all day in Chase Field. I was excited at first. I thought you were talking about just nocturnal live baseball, which would really suit my schedule. But I think, well, one problem is you would have to have the players on strange schedules. It would be like the people who are running mars missions at jpl or something and they have to be on mars time yeah and so that's hard on their families and everything it is hard if they're quarantining they may not even be with their families so at that point if they're just sitting in a hotel room who even cares what time of day it is but

i don't know how disruptive it is for your sleep cycle and how how kind of if it might just be like really unpleasant i don't know if it's more unpleasant though than for instance traveling across the country a couple of times a month and playing games the same day while you're constantly jet lagged and so it might actually not be that disruptive for for players it might be if it is then forget i said it but it might not be and they're already on pretty strange schedules yeah that they do very often work and day work yeah exactly and also they have to go from day games to night games which can probably be pretty jarring so they're used to making some accommodations to the schedule there so they sometimes play games that don't end until midnight naturally and and if they're east coasters and they're on the west coast and they just flew in that game's not ending until three in the morning on their body clock.

Yeah and it can be tough on your sleep cycle and on your alertness and performance if you are switching back and forth or if you're not used to doing it but if you're adapted to doing it maybe maybe it could work. I mean, I know there are some maybe long-term health problems associated with like being an overnight worker and not getting to sleep in the nighttime and in the dark and get the melatonin and everything. I think that's been associated with some negative health outcomes if you do it for a long time, but maybe for a summer you could get away with it. I don't know. I guess the question is then would fans like it knowing that it was not live? And we've talked before about, well, is it actually satisfying to go back and watch old games when you know that this has happened already? And you maybe know how the season ended or who won the World Series, or you are aware at any moment that you could look up the outcome of this game if you wanted to. Now, in your scenario, you cannot. So it is not live.

It is not live. But yes, you have to watch to get the earliest possible answer to the question of who's winning. And everybody else is in the same timeline as you. Yes, exactly. Except the players, though, which you're going to be watching in the day and you'll be watching an event that's happening at night. And I guess that happens if you're in a different time zone already from where the action is taking place. But that might be a little discordant when you see that, you know, you're constantly visually reminded that this is not actually happening as you're watching. Another thing you could do, by the way, if you were to do this, I've always wondered whether if you had it to do over, if you were a brand this, I've always wondered whether if you had it to do over,

if you were a brand new baseball fan and you had not invested 30 years of your life getting into the rhythm of baseball as it's always been played, would it make more sense for you to watch a baseball game the way that we watch, that people watch the World Series of Poker, where a day's worth of activity is edited down to a couple of hours or a few hours. And you see there's a lot less downtime and it is produced in a way that brings the story out a little bit more. Now, I think I and you and everybody who's listening right now would just recoil at the idea of that because it's not what we're used to but i wonder if there is actually an audience out there that would like that and if you could actually if in this world where there are no

fans and we're only going to consume this via television i wonder if this plan that i'm speculating on the night game plan you could actually have two broadcasts the full length one and then one that starts much later into the game. And they end at the same time, kind of like that, that World War Two movie, but they start at different times. And one of them is is unedited, unabridged, and you get all the downtime in the boring parts. And then one of them is an hour production that has been, you know, chopped and screwed so that it's like a nice tight 60 minute entertainment product product. I wonder if people would like that and if that would end up becoming a thing, if there is potential in the next 100 years for that to become a thing. Well, there's your next giant article.

So this was a question about Home Run Derby and why we aren't doing Derby already right now. Okay, let's see. What was the question? Why aren't we doing Home Run derby? All right, man. Well, you can't do anything right now. You can't do anything right now. If it takes 15 people to do it, and if someone's going to have to hold that baseball, and then someone else is going to have to pick up that baseball, and germs have been transferred, it's a non-starter at this point in time.

And so that's why we're not doing it right now, right? You can't, I can't go out. The basic rule is whatever idea you have for baseball, if you can't go out and do it in the park with a friend, then they're not going to do it on TV for you. And so until we're to the point where you can go out to the park and play ball with four of your friends, just like throw the ball around, which where I am, you can't do that. And I think in most of the country, you can't do that. It's not really an option. It would still take a lot of people to put on a good home run derby.

The home run derby that they did in the early 60s is really bad for watching there's there's two cameras you do not in any way appreciate the majestic soaring of the ball you never see it land yeah you don't really get any sense of the physicality of it and so to do it right you'd still need a dozen cameras and a dozen microphones and it would have to be a lot more dynamic and you're talking about a you know probably a couple or a few dozen people minimum to put on an event and so we're just not we're not there yet yeah it is probably the sort of event that you could do before you could pack a stadium full of 50,000 people and put on a baseball game but not yet yeah you could probably even do it before you could do a game without fans but still you

would need a lot of testing and access to testing and you'd need to not prevent anyone else from getting testing in the country in order for you to do this and i think the problem with derby is that you do need a ballpark really to make it entertaining now you could do it i mean you could have someone in their home batting cage do a home run do it i mean you could have someone in their home batting cage do a home run derby right and you could have like a a hit tracks machine that a lot of teams and players have that will tell you what that ball would have been if you would hit it in a big league ballpark and sometimes they even have screens where you can overlay a ballpark and it'll show you where that ball would have gone so would that be satisfying for a viewer it's

like you know they have that for golf too you can just drive and it'll show you where your ball would have landed on the course so would that be good on tv i don't know i think you kind of need the ballpark you kind of need the ball actually going over the fence and the suspense about whether it will go over the fence and even if if it's simulated suspense, I don't know that it's the same if it's a digital ball and the algorithm is telling you whether it would have gone over the fence. I don't know. And there was an article about this earlier this month by Joel Sherman in the New York Post. And evidently, MLB has at least considered this idea, as you would expect expect And it says MLB officials did Bat around the idea of staging

A home run derby as a way to derive Some revenue during the coronavirus pandemic While providing baseball entertainment to help keep The sport vibrant in fans' minds The logistic problems just appear too great While an NBA star could have A court at home or access to a hoop That would not entail others be with him

Or very few if for example a cameraman were needed to film it no major league player has a baseball field in his house i wonder if that's true i wonder if there are any baseball players with fields in their house i mean any of them like any of them like corn farmers right stadiums would have to be opened and how many municipalities are ready to do that at least now While the virus is still rampant in the country And the facilities are just part of the problem In theory you could eliminate a catcher and have a pitching Machine deliver pitches but someone

Would still have to load the machine and the field Would have to be prepped in some fashion And some level of security might be needed And players would have to get to the stadium and a few Cameramen would be necessary etc Etc so it's More feasible than having real Games but still a problem at this point. I would watch it though.

I would absolutely watch it. Oh, I would totally watch it. Yeah. I mean, I would watch, I would watch the worst version of this that you would come up with. Yes. Assuming that, that there, I mean, there are better cameras now than there were in 1960. So the, the floor of what we're talking about is way, way, way, way higher than that 1960 home run derby. I will say that part of the vision that I had for this league growing is that you don't

need a stadium. You can have a stadium, but you don't need a stadium. You could do it, you know, you could have them hit the ball into a lake if you wanted to. And I don't, I could envision a kind of a cool thing that maybe isn't technically possible and maybe would look really hokey. the data of the ball that they've hit is immediately turned into a simulation of a real live, a real world setting. So basically they hit the ball and then the, when the camera would normally switch to the overhead shot and you see the ball flying out of the park, like, you know, normally home run derby player hits the ball and then you get a new camera where it tracks the ball if the if the switch to the camera that tracks the ball was basically tracking an imaginary ball but in a real live outside environment uh-huh like the

grand canyon or something like the grand canyon or like fenway and so you're seeing fake ball, but looks like a real ball soaring algorithmically out of real Fenway or real Grand Canyon. I could definitely see getting into that. I mean, what really you'd have to convince yourself that you're enjoying it because you know it's fake, but it is the same, like to a dog, it would be the same. And so you just have to kind of turn off that part of your brain that's really suspicious and and let your dog brain enjoy it yes yeah this is uh bringing up some questions from devs this is like the philosophical conundrum this is like the experience machine is the simulated event actually as good as the real life event if you know that it's just a simulation

but yeah i mean people are watching mlb the show and uh that can be fun so sure all right it's time for the stat blast and today's listener cover is by theodore beerhoff although it's technically by his band gabriel earnest which he said is an essentially imaginary band that I've been the only member of since the last millennium. And this cover, I've been very impressed by the creativity and skills of our listeners who've been submitting these covers. This one is a power pop cover in the style of my favorite band, Sloan. And the vocal sounds just like Sloan's rhythm guitarist, Jay Ferguson. So I am very predisposed to like this one. Can I hear it? Of course, let's all hear it. They'll take a dataset, sort it by something like ERA- or OPS+,

and then they'll tease out some interesting tidbits, discuss it at length, and analyse it for us in amazing ways. Here's today Stop last Oh, Ben. This is the good stuff. Yeah. Oh! Woo! I am going to need an MP3 of that.

Okay. Right now. Jesse's original is going to get pipped by of that. Okay. Right now. Jesse's original is going to get pipped by some of these covers. I guess they're really good. That was nice. That was very nice. And, you know, going back to the imaginary baseball going out of Real Fenway, it doesn't bother me that that's an imaginary band. It doesn't affect me to know that a bunch of people were not in a room

performing that song as one, band it doesn't it doesn't affect me to know that a bunch of people were not in a room performing that song as one that it was stitched together from a single person's uh performance i will say that lately people are going to think this is the weirdest opinion i've ever had but lately i have been bothered by lead singers that are also harmonizing i feel feel like that's a lie. If you're harmonizing with yourself, you're lying. I agree. Yeah, when it's too obvious that it's the same person singing simultaneously, that does bother me too. All right.

This is a very quick stat blast. I'm assuming you're expecting one from me. Yes. That was a lot of faith you had in me. You didn't even ask. Yeah. This is a quick one. You know I've been going

over old world series and so i've become kind of really obsessed with the highest leverage championship leverage index play in history and i would like you to to try to give me a guess i'm not expecting you to be right or wrong and maybe it's obvious maybe it's impossible just what what would you guess is the highest leverage, championship leverage index play ever? So, well, you know, that's what it is. The highest championship leverage index. So not championship win probability added.

So not the Hal Smith question. Not the Hal Smith question, which is the highest win probability added in a play. Championship win probability, but the leverage index. So what was the most tense moment in world series history before the plate appearance was resolved hmm was it the 97 world series game seven the renteria walk off or the mesa blown save that is actually number six so that's a very good guess uh so that was that was bases loaded two outs tie game bottom

of the 11th yeah that was not jose mesa pitching though that was that that was the the game seven of that world series but charles nagy was on the mound right that was after mesa mesa was earlier in that game and that was i don't know if this is the one you're thinking of, but this was Craig Council tying it with a sacrifice fly against Jose Mesa. And that was the fourth. So that's the fourth highest. Okay. So you've gotten close. You can, that's fine.

You've done a good job. That was amazing, Ben. You just named number four and number six and I'm impressed. All right. Okay. The actual answer is eddie murray in 1979 so the situation with eddie murray is that the orioles were down by one in the bottom of the eighth inning there were runners on second and third kent colby was on the mound they intentionally

walked ken singleton to face eddie murray so murray came up with the bases loaded two outs bottom of the eighth, down by one. And I've watched this play like I've watched that plate appearance about 10 times because it is fantastic baseball. And the whole series leading up to it is incredible story. And if I was going to write a whole book about a play, I would write the book about that play. But I can't quite figure out how that's number one because I can talk myself into believing it's number two because really, if you think about it, if he makes an out,

then the Orioles go to the ninth inning trailing. If he gets a hit, they go to the ninth inning winning. If he gets a double, they go to the ninth inning up by two. If he draws a walk, it's tied. I mean, there's a lot that can happen there. And I think, in fact, I think I've just answered my own question, which is, so I had the question, though, that has been bugging me. How is it ahead of Willie McCovey in 1962? Because Willie McCovey in 1962 famously lined out to end the seventh game of the World Series. And his team was also trailing by one, and he had runners on second and third. So it is the

most either or situation basically in baseball history. Yeah. Multiple peanuts comic strips devoted to that moment. Exactly. If he makes an out, the series is over and one team wins. If he gets a hit, the series is over and the other team wins. It's just like right there. That seems to be the most. And so championship leverage index, well, leverage index generally for people who are not quite aware of this phrase, basically measures how much, how much, how in flux the game is. So it's how likely is the next play to materially affect

each team's win expectancy. So in championship leverage index, it's the same thing, except it's how likely is it going to determine who wins the championship of the season and so you can have a championship leverage for the first play of the first game of the regular season all the way until the last play of the world series and a situation like that we're talking about where it's the seventh inning the seventh game of the world series you are as close as possible to the end of the season and the difference between a win and a loss is the entire season. And in these cases, the difference between a hit and an out is basically the entire season. And with McCovey, it very literally is. The difference between an out and a hit was who's

going to get a parade. And I just couldn't figure out how it could get higher than that. Murray, very high, very similar, but it was the eighth inning. So how could it be higher than McCovey in the ninth inning? Murray could have singled and given his team the lead, but it's not a win. And Murray could have made an out and sent his team to the ninth inning trailing, but it's not the end. So do you have a theory for how this is a more tense situation? Hmm. No. Well, I don't think so. I didn't. And I will tell you what I was kind of why I was thinking that it might be is just that. So this is, as I understand leverage index,

what it's kind of doing is it's taking all the outcomes that could happen and then measuring how much win expectancy changes in the aggregate. So say there's a home run in every 20th plate appearance in Major League Baseball, then one out of every 20 times McCovey's going to homer, and one out of every 20 times Murray's going to homer, and how much is that going to affect the win expectancy in that situation? the win expectancy in that situation and in a way for murray the home run is a bigger deal because say the orioles had i don't know a 20 win expectancy when they're down by one now they have maybe a 90 win expectancy when they're up by three yeah so that's like a 70 i'm making up numbers but that's like a 70 swing whereas a walk's not as good as a hit so i yeah it's it's going to come down to the walk.

And that's what I did not realize until I started talking this through a minute ago. But we'll get to the walk in a minute. I was thinking it might be the home runs and the extra bases because a home run by McCovey, the Giants were probably like 35% likely to win, 30% likely to win. Well, no, I mean, it's a hit. They need a hit. A hit or a walk and a walk or an error.

So yeah, like probably like 32, I'm going to guess 32%, 33% likely to win. And if he gets a hit, then it's 100%. And it doesn't matter whether it's a single or a homer. And so maybe for the Murray situation, home runs and extra base hits kind of jack up the leverage index because those outcomes are going to change the win expectancy more than they would for McCovey. But yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I think you're right. And I think I'm right now

that it's because there's a roughly a 10% chance that each of those players is going to walk. And if Eddie Murray walks, then the Orioles go from 20% or whatever it was, maybe it's 30%, to 65% or 70% because now they've tied the game and they're still batting with the bases loaded. Whereas if McCovey walks, it almost doesn't change the odds much at all. It now increases them a little bit because the next batter could also walk. But McCovey's run doesn't really matter. And you still need a hit to bring those two runs in. And so it is the 10% of the time that the system expects a walk.

And so that's what it is. It's that McCovey could walk. And so that's why Murray was a bigger deal. All right. I'm glad that we talked this through. It was bugging me. I have always thought of the McCovey situation as being the highest leverage moment in baseball history. And in a sense it was because if he walked, it doesn't actually change the moment. It just pushes

the do or die to the next play. And so then the next play would have been the highest. So it's interesting because logically speaking, McCovey could either end the series or win it if you put the ball in play. And if he didn't, it was going to be the highest leverage situation in baseball history. So then the only reason that McCovey's is lower is because he could have kicked it down slightly without changing anything and made that the highest leverage. So I feel like mccovey should get credit anyway that not mccovey but that plate appearance should get credit anyway because

the same logic would apply either for him or for the next batter and the walk wouldn't we should just throw the walks out of the calculation yeah i'm not just like they did for a hundred years it's i'm so happy that you're seeming to get what i'm saying about that yeah because i don't feel like hypothesis makes sense it might be completely wrong okay anyway so eddie murray number one willie mccovey number five but you can do the mental adjustment in your head they're both they're both pretty pretty awesome all right question from Andrew, Patreon supporter. What are your thoughts on the likelihood of contraction, expansion, and or relocation of teams stemming from this crisis?

I feel like teams being sold is the most likely, which always brings the possibility of relocation. But I've heard a few journalists suggest MLB may look to rich investors willing To pay the expansion fee to offset Lost revenue this and Contraction of teams strikes me as unlikely But curious as to what You all think I think I hope you're going to say it's more likely Because I'm going to say I think it's a lot less likely

Than it would have been a year ago Because if you're going to I mean the value of an expansion franchise Right now has to be like so much lower than it was six months ago. We just don't know what's going to happen with anything. We don't know what's going to happen with crowds generally. We don't know how long the economy is going to take to come back. You wouldn't want, baseball is, Nate Silver, I remember wrote one of his first articles at Base prospectus about this baseball is largely a good economy sport it is expensive to go to a baseball game

and people who go to baseball games in the 21st century not not as much necessarily in other cities in other generations but right now it they tend to be middle class or or wealthier because it's it is very expensive. And because, well, for various reasons, you have to spend a few hundred dollars for a night of entertainment. And that's just not realistic if you don't have a few hundred dollars that you can blow on a night of entertainment. And so I don't think you would want to launch your franchise in a bad economy.

And right now, no one knows what the economy is going to be like for the next number of years. And so it seems like you would be selling expansion rights to new teams is forever. You probably wouldn't want to do it when you're getting pennies on the dollar. Yeah, I agree. Unless you were so desperate that that was the only way you could stay afloat. And I don't know if MLB owners are anywhere close to that but there is some precedent for like owners hurting financially and looking to expansion to try to refill their coffers like after the collusion scandal and after they were forced to pay a big settlement to the players for colluding against them they did expand shortly after that the 93 expansion and it was acknowledged at the time or after the fact that part of the motivation for that was the expansion fees, was getting the new owners of the

franchises to pay the existing owners big sums to let them join their league. So in one sense, that could apply now in that if owners are hurting, then they might say, well, let's add a new team. We're thinking of adding teams anyway. It was pretty inevitable seemingly that we would go to 32 teams, so let's just move up the timeline so that we can all make a quick buck when we need one. But that earlier scenario was not one where you had a potentially disastrous economy. So as you were just saying, I don't think you would get nearly as much right now. And just in general, the idea of expanding when business is really bad is maybe not the best.

So I think those things probably cancel each other out and maybe even lean more toward not expanding until you can at least make sure that everything's okay for the existing franchises. And that is a possibility, I guess, that if a certain team that doesn't have a buffer that some of the wealthier teams do, if that team is really running dry, then they might look to sell just out of desperation. They can't make payroll or something when next season starts. And in that case, I guess you could see a higher likelihood of sales. And if we're talking

about one of the teams that's already mentioned as a potential candidate for relocation, then I guess that might make that more likely. But expansion, I would agree, probably less likely, despite the incentives to get a new revenue source. All right, let's see what else I've got here. Lewis says, you mentioned a baseball completist on a recent episode Which makes me wonder about someone sitting down And watching every game from a baseball season By my estimation, it would require watching 2467 games That's using the 2019 postseason

Three hours long If you watch three games a day That would take 823 days Or two and a quarter years if a writer did this and wrote a column on the experience what would the takeaway from that column be please don't write this column for your own sake i know you were already jotting it down in your tickler file but you know you know what's funny yeah there's so many games that just by using the three hour estimate instead of the more accurate three hour and nine minute

estimate he shaved 17 days off of what you would need yeah i would say that even if you had the time even if you were not aging for instance and you could do this without worrying about how much of your life you were spending on this, it would still be really unpleasant because you would be watching them all out of order. You wouldn't want to watch all 15 games from one day over the course of, how long would that take? Two days? Well, I guess if you were sleeping, then it would take you like three days of nonstop watching, I don't think.

Yeah, I mean, he's saying three games a day. So that's five days. Yeah, and so, okay, all right. So before, I'm going to start again on that notion. Okay. You could watch one of two ways, right? You could either watch the first game, then the second game, then the third game, then the fourth game, then the fifth game, then the sixth game. And that would mean watching all of the Monday games. And by the time

you got to the Tuesday games, you would basically be on the next Monday. And by the time you got to the Wednesday games, you could be on the next, you would be on the next Monday. Or you could watch, be on the next Monday. Or you could watch, say, all the Yankee games, Angel games, and Marlins games, and watch each one every day like they were intended to be consumed. And so then you would basically be following the three storylines very closely in real time. And you'd have sort of the comfortable ebbs and flows of the season. And when reliever gets knocked out of a bad outing and has to throw 42 pitches and is unavailable the next day, well, you're watching the game the next day. So that, that carryover information is fresh for you. And you're thinking about it. Player sprains his ankle, player's red hot. Everything that you want to know from yesterday or from the previous week

would still be fresh to you. So that, I think, is how you would want to do it. The problem is that then you're watching three seasons and then you're starting over on the same season and you've got all these spoilers and you're like, are you skipping the Yankees game? Then the next time you do it, you go Rays, Giants, Pirates. Do you skip when the Rays play the Yankees because you've already seen that game?

Very confusing. Very hard to organize this project. Yeah. And you already like probably know a lot about it because they're showing the standings in September on the Yankees broadcast. And you're like, well, I guess I know everything now. And so then you, you can't really do that way. So then you have to go back to the first idea of watching all of the first day of the season over the course of a week, all of the second day of the season over the course of the week. You still have that problem because they're constantly saying the scores of other games while you're watching a game.

So you'd have to watch them. You'd somehow would have to figure out which game was actually over first so that you could watch that game so that they don't announce the outcome of the other games that are ending. So you don't start with the game that started first that day, but you have to somehow know the game that ended first and then the game that ended second and then the game that started first that day, but you have to somehow know the game that ended first and then the game that ended second and then the game that ended third. But there's still even then, it's the ninth inning and they're going to go,

and in Cincinnati, the Reds are winning seven to three and in the sixth inning, and you haven't watched the first six innings. Now you're about to watch the first six innings. And in fact, because you're doing this this way, you're going to watch the first six innings in a couple of hours when that information is still fresh. And you're going to hear it over and over.

You're going to hear the red score. It's 6-3 in the sixth inning or whatever I said, like nine times. So there'd be no suspense. It would be disastrous. Yeah. It would really be. You couldn't do it. You couldn't do it.

It's not a matter of time and fatigue. You just couldn't have the story work. Too many stories. No. I mean, the primary takeaway that it would be positive that I can think of is that I'd have a much greater awareness of and appreciation for the broadcasters. So that's something that I sort of lament now because I don't watch every team's games regularly or I don't always listen to the same broadcast crews, and I don't even always pay attention to the broadcast. Sometimes I'll even have it muted or have the ballpark sounds on or something.

So when someone asks me, rank the best broadcasters, I might have some idea of the very good ones, but I don't necessarily know all of them. I can't do a definitive ranking. So I would enjoy getting to know the quirks of each broadcast crew, but that would not outweigh the fact that this would be literal torture. This would be absolutely horrible. And your main takeaways, he asked what the takeaways would be. The takeaway would probably be that there's just way too much baseball being played. I mean, the pace of play, the time of game,

because as you mentioned, every minute is costing you like measurable amounts of time, like hours and days over the course of this experiment. You would be so mad when Pedro Baez came in or, I mean, you'd know going in how long this was going to take you, but you'd be so hyper aware of every little tick that was taking extra seconds away. And so I think you would be really aggressive about trying to cut down on the time of games, maybe shortening the seasons, fewer innings, because you'd have to watch so much meaningless baseball that your average non-fan just never, ever tunes into, because why would you unless it's the only game on?

So I think probably you would be a full-throated supporter of one of your ideas to have yeah mercy rule as we've talked about or just a tournament where everyone plays just to get rid of all the the dead weight in this calendar so oh yeah i mean you'd be rob manfredfred times 100 when it comes to just trying to cut back on the length and pace and amount of baseball. Let's say that you committed to watching five hours of baseball a day. Okay. I don't know why you have, but you have.

You've committed to five. You will sit and watch five hours of baseball a day, and they will give you one of two options. They will either give you one full game and one half game, and you can pick the game of the day. So they're not going to necessarily throw you a terrible game, but, you know, a game and then a half of another game. And maybe, I don't know. I don't know how you pick the half game.

It's not important. Or someone will package all the ninth innings for you. So you just get the ninth innings for you. So you just get the ninth inning of every game. And sometimes you're seeing mop-up reliever come in, finish it up, but you're also seeing all the rallies, all the close games, all the closers, all the walk-offs. You don't get to see the 10th.

So if the score is tied after nine, you don't get to see the conclusion, but you're going to see the conclusion of 13 games a day probably and get to see all these exciting conclusions. Do you think that that package would have any appeal to you? Yeah, I think so. It's not quite like the baseball red zone channel equivalent or like the game changer where you can set it up to only show you the high leverage moments or something like that, but it would give you a lot of exciting moments. And maybe it's not quite as exciting to see the dramatic conclusion if you haven't watched the rest of the story. You know, you're just joining in the ninth inning. You don't know how it got to this point where everything's at stake. You haven't been part of the story, but I think it's still pretty fun just to see that high stakes action. So yeah,

I would take the ninth inning package. Okay. All right. I got to go have tea time. Oh, all right. What kind of tea? I've been on a juniper mint honey, I believe. Oh, tea lately. Sounds nice. It's a Tazo. Love mint in my tea. Yeah. I have lately really loved mint in my tea. Yeah. I have lately really loved mint in my tea. Yeah, love mint in anything. All right, enjoy. All right. All right, I've got a couple more questions on my list here that one of us has already answered via email.

So I will relay those questions and answers here. Listener named Yitz asks, why do most minor league players usually skip AAA and go straight from AA to MLB? And I wrote in response that I wouldn't say most minor leaguers skip AAA or most prospects even, but it does happen, and it's probably become a bit more common in recent years. One reason it happens is that the talent gap just isn't that enormous between AA and AAA. So I wrote an article about five years ago for Grantland, which I'll link to, looking at what the gap in difficulty actually was between minor league levels and then between the minors and the majors. You can kind of tell using minor league equivalencies or statistical translations. So what happens to a person's stats

when he goes from AA to AAA or from AAA to the majors? If you look at how much within the same season, let's say a player who's promoted declined statistically after the promotion, that gives you some idea of the difficulty level in each of those leagues. And granted, there's a selective sample there because players only get promoted if it's believed that they could succeed at that higher level. But still, historically speaking, AAA has been about 75 to 80% as challenging as the majors, and then AA has been about 90% as challenging as AAA, which would mean that AA is about 70% or so as challenging as the majors. So one reason is that the talent gap between AA and AAA just isn't as big as the talent gap between AAA and the big leagues. So it's not as jarring

to go straight from AA to the majors as it would be if the gap between AA and AAA were equivalent to the gap between AAA and the majors. So that's part of it. Part of it also is that there are a lot of bitter veterans hanging around AAA sometimes. Guys who never made it to the majors or guys who have made the majors and now they're kind of on the way out of baseball and maybe they feel like they should be in the big leagues and they're a bit aggrieved about that. So it's not always the best environment. And also you get some extreme environments sometimes too, like some AAA parks are not really that conducive to great development for pitchers or hitters, or the conditions are just so strange that it's not great preparation for the majors maybe, like when your AAA affiliate is in Las Vegas, let's say, and it's hot and dry

and kind of a band box, and maybe you don't necessarily want your pitchers subjected to that, let's say, I guess you could say it's trial by fire. Just throw them into the deep end. Maybe you want them to fail before they make the majors, but maybe you don't want to demoralize them. So that can be part of it too. It can also be a geographical thing. Again, like when the Mets had their AAA affiliate in Las Vegas and some of their other affiliates were closer. If you wanted to bring up a guy and you knew you needed him quickly, maybe you don't want him on the other side of the country. Sometimes it's just an emergency where you need an immediate replacement for a major league player and your best option just happens to be in AA and then that AA player comes up and maybe succeeds

right away and never needs to go back to the minors. So there are a bunch of reasons why it happens sometimes. I do kind of wonder though whether teams might be a bit more reluctant to do it now that the big league ball is used in AAA but not AA, and the big league ball, as we all know, is extremely lively right now, and so when you go from AA to AAA, that's a change in the model the same ball. And so I wonder if teams would be more likely to want their players to get accustomed to the big league ball before they're actually in the big leagues. Of course, that could change. Maybe they'll start using the big league ball at lower levels. Maybe the big league ball won't behave the way it's currently behaving, but that's one factor to keep in mind. And the other question I want to answer here is from Kurt, who says, why isn't Chris Sines more of a modern folk hero? Is there anyone who has produced more war by appearing in only one game of quote-unquote real baseball? So Chris Sines, for those who don't know,

he made his Major League debut for the Brewers April 24, 2004 in a game against the Cardinals. He got the start. He threw six scoreless innings. He walked three. He struck out seven. Gave up two hits. Hit a batter.

That's a 72 game score. Very good, obviously. And that was it. That was his whole career. Because later that year, he suffered an arm injury. He had to have Tommy John surgery. And he never made it back to the big leagues. Some guys don't.

You know, we talk about the Tommy John success rate being something like 80%. It's not automatic. If four out of five guys do make it back to their previous level, the other one doesn't. And Chris Sines came back to pitch in AA and IndieBall in 2007 and 2008, but he did not pitch well, and that was it for him. And so he has a career zero ERA in his one scoreless start. So why isn't he more of a folk hero? Meg answered this one, and she said, your instincts are right, or at least partially

so, and I think the partial part helps to explain why he's not a folk hero. Per the play index, he's tied with four other pitchers for the most war from appearing in exactly one game. The others are Bill Ging, or Jing, 1899, George Stoltz, 1894, Babe Dottie, or Doty, 1890, and Harry Raymond, 1889, all starters, and all worth.5 baseball reference war, as was Chris Sines. The bar for most war from having appeared in exactly one game is lower on the position player side, where several are tied with.2 wins above replacement. I think part of why Sines isn't a folk hero is that he played recently, but before the

ecosystem of sites that appreciate weird stuff like this was as well established or as much a part of the baseball internet as it is now, and so hasn't been resurfaced by those interested in modern or more ancient oddities. I think part of it is that the Brewers team he pitched for finished 67-94, so his one good start didn't end up mattering to the larger course of Milwaukee's season, except to give Brewers fans a more watchable game than they might have been used to. That is valuable, but the sort of thing that tends to fade as fans go about the work of forgetting a bad season, and it didn't result in the team making the postseason so it wasn't brought to the attention of a wider audience. And then there's the fact that four others have the same baseball reference

war and they all pitch complete games, granted a long time ago, while signs only went six innings, but I appreciate having him brought to my attention, so that's something. And I think Meg is right about those things. I do think the fact that the only four others who have done this or who are tied with him in war from one pitched game are all from the 19th century, that does suggest that we should probably pay more attention than we do to Chris Sines. All of the others were before the so-called modern era of baseball, so the fact that he did this in the 21st century I think makes it noteworthy. And it's one of those what-ifs and kind of a tragic tale, maybe not as sad as, say, Larry

Yount, who hurt himself warming up and never actually faced a batter in his one major league game. But it's up there, and it's a good cautionary tale when a pitcher does have Tommy John surgery that you can't necessarily count on him making it all the way back. So let's all take a moment to remember and pay tribute to Chris Sines' brief major league career. And speaking of players coming back from Tommy John surgery, I read this week that Shohei Otani is throwing two bullpen sessions a week, and one would think that when the season does restart, if it does, he will be fully operational and ready to go as a two-way player, which is pretty exciting. That's one of the things that's getting me through this break without baseball. If and when it does come back, we'll have two-way Otani back again.

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Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Sam and Meg via email at podcast at vangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system. If you are a supporter, thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can go pick up a paperback copy or a digital edition of my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, now featuring an all new substantial lengthy afterward. And we will be back to talk to you a little later this week. are using data to build better players, now featuring an all-new, substantial, lengthy afterword. We will be back to talk to you a little later this week. When the fight went out of the limousine

On the night of the junior champion's quest As our hero Adam Martin touched his toes Was almost everybody guessed The judges found him second best But a huge unsightly boil upon his nose. Boil crisis. Cue that boy show, Adam.