Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1547: The Hitless King

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about MLB’s ongoing labor negotiations, the team-to-team differences in minor-league pay and front-office furloughs, and the perils of believing that baseball is purely for profit, follow up on the previous episode’s discussions of Carney Lansford’s claim to be a descendant of Sir Francis Drake and a forward-thinking 1989 Cy […]

Oh, it's no deal, you can't sell that stuff to me. Oh, no deal, I'm going back to Tennessee. And it's no deal, you can't sell that stuff to me. Oh, no deal, I'm going back to Tennessee Hello, Sam. Hi, Ben. Going to do some emails. You know, I've been monitoring the news as we all have, waiting to hear whether there will be a season. And right now we're kind of in a holding pattern as the Players Association decides whether to reject or counter the owner's offer, which was presented on Tuesday. The player's position is that the owners already agreed to pay them their prorated salaries for this season. The owners say, well, that was just if we were playing games in front of fans. for this season. The owners say, well, that was just if we were playing games in front of fans,

and now because we wouldn't be, you have to take more pay cuts on a sliding scale that would disproportionately affect the players who make more money. The players understandably disagree and say, no, you're trying to back out of a deal we already made. But what's sort of striking is the little other bits of news that have been coming out about furloughs and salary reductions for front office people and also pay for minor leaguers. And it's sort of strange how little uniformity there is. Like, I would almost think that there would be some collusion in this area. I mean, legal collusion, I guess. There's nothing against owners talking to each other and saying, hey, are you going to underpay minor leaguers or not pay them at all? And yet they don't seem to have done that. There doesn't seem to be great consistency. And so

one team will say, yeah, we're going to keep paying minor leaguers their stipend. And another team will say, we're going to extend the stipend through this month. And then another team will say, nope, we're cutting them off. So the A's this week, for instance, are suspending minor league pay after May, and yet the Marlins are extending it at least through August, which would basically be the end of the minor league regular season. So it doesn't really seem to follow a predictable pattern. It's not like the big market teams, the teams that spend a lot on free agents or have high payrolls are really taking care of their minor leaguers or their front office people. And then the small market teams that tend to be cheap in other ways are also cheap in this way.

It just seems like it's kind of all over the board. And so the A's, you might figure, yeah, okay, that's sort of an A's move. You know, like the money ball, the A's players have to pay for snacks in the vending machine type thing. You might expect them to be the ones to send the letter as their GM David Forst did to say, well, we care about you and we wish you the best, but we're just not paying you. And by the way, you can't play for anyone else or anything in the meantime. And because you're technically still employed, you aren't eligible for traditional unemployment, although maybe you can get pandemic unemployment assistance. And yet you might think, well, the Marlins would be in that camp too,

because they've had low payrolls there, along with the A's, one of the teams that tends to get protests from the Players Association about not spending their revenue-sharing money. So I don't know why there's so much kind of across-the-board response here. And especially if you're like the lone team that's not going to pay your minor leaguers for right now, it makes you look even worse if the Marlins are coming out and saying, we'll keep paying you. And you're the team that's saying, no, we won't. Yeah, that's a really good point. I don't have much. I don't have any insight into why that would be. It is it is very odd.

Yeah, because it's not that much money. I mean, it's, you know, it's a small item, as Jeff Passan and others have pointed out, like paying minor leaguers $400 a week, even if you add it up for all the players in your system, it's just not that much money for a few months. And so you'd think almost even if you weren't motivated by other reasons, you just wouldn't want to take the PR hit because teams owned by billionaires, the A's are owned by a billionaire. And so everyone obviously says, oh, the billionaire can't pay the minor leaguers $400 a week. And meanwhile, if the Marlins, like the, you know, go-to franchise that's bad for baseball and Rays, for instance, who furloughed a lot of front office people early. And you figure, OK, it's the Rays and then other teams like the Cardinals and the Twins and the Padres. They've been kind of on the other end with guaranteeing their employees their full salary for a certain amount of time. But again, it doesn't seem to break down very predictably along the lines that you might expect based on big league payrolls.

Yeah, I'm flummoxed. It's very odd. You would think that, I mean, one of the stories that comes up throughout baseball history of teams working together is that even when it is not collusion in the legal definition, the league office tends to have a lot of sway over teams. The league office is able to, with a phone call, get teams to do things that are not necessarily what you would think would be in their best interests or that they're able to rally owners to present a unified front, I guess, is part of it So for instance, I think I remember this,

but Selig always used to really value the idea of every decision had to be unanimous. And so once a big vote would pass the point where it was going to clear, he would basically pressure everybody to vote, you know, to come around and make it a unanimous decision. I don't remember what, if that was all decisions or a certain category or something like that. But yeah, I mean, this is just such a small expense in the grand scheme of the corporation that you would think that there'd be, it would be pretty easy to make a phone call and say,

we're all doing this. And like read the room, read society, like this is not the time to go cheap on a million bucks. And in a sense, all 30 teams are going to pay for the few that make this decision not to pay their employees. And on the flip side, if a bunch of teams are going to do it, then they would probably want to convince everybody to jump with them and say, this is just simply a line in the stand that we're drawing. So yeah, I agree. I'm just rambling. It feels like this would definitely be a case where it would not be left up to each individual team because it's not really a competitive thing. It's not like

one team is trying to gain an edge. This isn't like strategy. It's not like this is the A's strategy for how to do whatever. They're just all making business decisions in an industry which is a very tight-knit industry it would it feels like it would be very easy to keep everybody operating in the same in the same way and to have like one way of doing business yeah and even aside from the pr aspect like imagine how bad it makes you hook to your organization and your players if the marlins are doing the thing and you're not doing the thing it's just kind of tough to justify that I think so yeah yeah I mean I mean it makes the Marlins look bad too it doesn't in the very specific it makes the Marlins look look fine like

to the 12 people who are paying attention to the scoreboard of which teams are paying their employees and which teams are not it's a very small number of people. The much larger number of people are just going to see a headline that says teams are furloughing their clerical staff in the middle of a pandemic, or they're furloughing their minor leaguers in the middle of a pandemic, or they're furloughing their, and they're not going to necessarily draw a distinction between which teams are and which teams aren't. They're just going to think, oh yeah, there it is again, baseball, big ugly business. And in particular, if you're planning as owners, if you recognize that you're going into a, what might be a year or two year long process of public relations as you hammer out the next collective bargaining

agreement, if you've kind of established in the public mind that you're the kind of business that furloughs people in the middle of a pandemic, you know, people who really need the paycheck. How much goodwill is there going to be when you're arguing about, you know, a $10 billion CBA a year from now? It feels like a very short-sighted thing, too. All right. Well, nothing has been resolved. And when it is, we will talk about it, of course. But I think you can go back and listen to the episode Meg and I did in the interview that we did on episode 1542 about the broad strokes of the dispute. And not a whole lot has changed

other than the details of proposals that won't actually be approved or adopted. So follow Jeff Passon and Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellick on Twitter, and you'll be up to date. And once we know something concrete, we will discuss it. I feel like owners and also people who, you know, who defend the owner's position in a baseball business perspective will lean on this idea that, well, you know, hey, baseball is a business. And there are two ways that you can take that.

One is to say, hey, baseball is a business and companies need to figure out a way to make payroll and stay liquid. And like, you can't obviously, you know, you can't, there are limits to what you can do as a business owner and still exist as a functional business. And so if I, at the beginning of the off season, say, ah, well, they should sign every free agent, give the fans what they want, have some fun, a person might reasonably say, it's a business. They've got to worry about payroll next year and the year after and the year after that too. The other way though where you can say, well, it's a business is, and it should be run with the cold calculating unemotional-ness of a business. And it isn't that, it doesn't have to be that. Like

that's, I think what people get mad at is that it is not, it doesn't have to be a business in the same way that a hedge fund is a business where its sole and exclusive purpose is to make one nickel more than you could have made with a different decision. It doesn't have to exist solely as a profit-making function. And so if you want to say, yes, some responsibility is required in certain decisions in order to keep the business healthy then then that's cool but if you want to say that like the whole point of this is for the owners to make money because it is a business then you lose me yep i agree i mean you lose a lot of people

yes they don't say people don't say that but they you know like that's kind of implicit in the well they can go ahead yeah well just uh don't look at the replies to the tweets about the ongoing negotiations because they're all about the players being greedy not all sometimes you do see some about both sides being greedy at least which is uh progress i guess but anyway we've talked about these issues and we will talk about them again. So anything else before emails? Two updates. Okay. One, this is an update to Carney Lansford and Sir Francis Drake.

Okay. Connor writes an email that is, I'm going to read. I'm going to be reading for a little while because this is a very important update to the Sir Francis Drake story. So this is from Connor again. My family, like that of carnie lansford also claims that we are distant relatives of sir francis drake as i listened to sam and ben discuss the carnie francis canard it was almost as if you were recounting my own story my mother's adamant about it she claims were related on my maternal grandfather's side i consistently and reflexively

use it as a fun fact in any sort of icebreaker situation. I've never investigated it because it's too outrageous to confirm, too habitual to spoil, but now I was forced to explore. The Drake family mystery has produced lots of false claims and strange cultural artifacts. There's a video game about a fictional Indiana Jones type descendant. A 1911 Scranton Tribune article reported that a local man was attempting to secure his right to the estate of his, quote, knighted ancestor Drake. Quote, that he is a direct descendant of Drake has been established. His proof has been verified in both New York and in London. Here in Scranton is a record of the Rodney family from Elizabeth Drake down. In New York and London are records that connect with the Scranton record and complete the chain back 300 years and more. Down through the years run the

strain of Drake blood directly to John Rodney, now dreaming of the day when he'll get his portion of the half-million-dollar estate. So it wasn't just that Rodney's claim came out of nowhere. There was presumably a long line of ancestral claims to Drake. This, he links, this convoluted family tree appears to show that Sir Francis Drake estate was bequeathed to his brother Thomas and that either a nephew or cousin, and then either a nephew or cousin also named Sir Francis Drake. So a long line of ancestral claims, but claims to apparently to the brother, not to a direct descendant then there is the case of oscar hartzell an iowa farmer who fraudulently claimed to be the rightful heir to sir francis

drake estate he was imprisoned in 1934 for the crime of selling over 1 million dollars worth of shares in drake's fortune whereas john rodney claimed sir francis Francis Drake's estate was only worth a half million, Hartzell estimated the estate to be worth $22 billion. Hartzell never claimed he was a direct descendant of Drake himself, but that the progeny of a secret marriage between Drake and Queen Elizabeth I had assigned Hartzell's family to claim. Hartzell lived in London for a while, dining and drinking solely on the lucrative rumor that he was the heir apparent until the American government sent a spy who, after winning Hartzell's trust, quote, over several bottles of champagne,

discovered the truth of the fraud. And here he links to an article, Francis Drake's heir and the $1.3 million swindle in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph. There is a whole book about this swindle. There are a couple potential reasons the Drake ancestry problem has endured. First is the money. The article on the Hartzell scandal points out that the name Drake is not uncommon,

and for a century or more, Americans bearing the name and claiming to be descendants of Sir Francis Drake have gained publicity and collected funds with which to prove their claims to the Drake wealth sometimes alleged to be held by the British government. Many believe, or at least used to, that there was an unclaimed treasure sitting in an English vault somewhere waiting for its true owner to come along. Drake's pirate activities probably deepen the intrigue, and Drake's drum is a famous totem of English folklore. It's ghostly beat heard when the island is in crisis, reportedly last heard during the evacuation at Dunkirk. In fact, while reading about another fraudulent ancestral claim from 1929, I discovered that Drake mania reached such a fever pitch

that the State Department was forced to issue a statement that while mystery surrounded Drake's lineage, quote, there is not and has never been any unclaimed Drake estate. Second might be semantics. As Drake was the eldest of 12 sons, it's possible that many are related to Drake. For instance, I am related to my uncle, but not descended from him as I am not directly descended from my uncle. So unfortunately, while Lanceford and I probably don't share a famous ancestor, we likely have confidence men somewhere in our family tree, or perhaps our relatives were

the victims of one of those schemes, or maybe like so many other bits of ancestral lore, the Drake name Osmost from public legend into family narrative, or maybe the money is all mine. So that's a very convincing update yeah i might start claiming that i'm descended from francis drake why not yeah yeah i mean that it's worked out for some people in the past at least for a while there might be other people that you ben lindbergh might want to be descended from well i don't know if i want to be descended from charles lindbergh. It's kind of a mixed legacy, let's say.

Maybe there is a fortune. It's probably likelier that there's a fortune than that there's a Drake fortune. But it seems like a bunch of colorful characters have at least claimed it. So I'd like to be descended from the earlier Drake imposters. All right. Secondly, we have found evidence that denny arcand of la presse the sports writer does exist a couple of bylines of articles that he wrote in french have been found from the old days and in fact he still is occasionally writing for la presse but not about sports a sports writer from the time responded to Ryan Thibodeau who asked with this,

quote, likely a writer named Denis Arcand of La Presse who covered the Expos for a couple seasons. Yes, he existed. I vaguely remember the circumstance. I told Ryan that I would like that

to be my, what do you call that? Headstone thing? Epitaph. Yes, he existed. I vaguely remember the circumstance. So he's also mentioned in a few English language articles that refer to him or quote him. And primarily twice he was in the news.

Once was in 1993 when he was nominated for a National Newspaper Writing Award for, and I i quote stories on yvonne calderon huh i thought it was gonna be for good cy young voting but no yeah so i don't know i would love to read what award worthy articles on yvonne calderon were possible in 1993 the other articles the other writers in the category had written a very heavy news newsworthy things and so i imagine that he had actually done something pretty fantastic uh with with with calderon i do not know what they are and then uh so this is that was 1993 and in 1990 he um appeared in some english sports articles again for his ballot but this time it was for his MVP ballot, 1990 MVP award. And this article says, Daryl Strawberry finished third,

and Ryan Sandberg somehow left off the ballot of Denis Arcand of La Presse in Montreal, finished fourth. What's the war say? This is not quite so flattering. Oh, no. The 1989 ballot was brilliant and way ahead of its time and you know shockingly good considering what the culture and the stats at the time would have been pushing him toward sandberg was uh of course he was a second baseman and he led the league in home runs

so already that's pretty good but uh he also finished third in the national league in in war and so he was a very good pick and so so leaving him off is is not fantastic on the other hand if you just look at the rest of that ballot of not his ballot but the uh the results there's lots of people who had lots of i think lots of picks that we could look back on and say that wasn't great. For instance, Sandberg was third in the National League in War, but Lenny Dykstra was second in the National League in War, and he finished way behind Sandberg in the voting, so lots of people left him off their ballots. And Bobby Bonilla was 31st in the National League in War,

and he finished second in MVP voting, and he had the only other first place vote, in fact. But Barry Bonds got 23 of 24 votes and Bonilla got the 24th. Now, it is conceivable that our friend Denny was that vote, but I don't think so. I think if whoever this writer was that was sort of scorning his exclusion of Sandberg certainly would have mentioned if he had also been the Bonilla voter. So somebody, I mean, you know, I would say it's a much more egregious pick to have Bobby Bonilla as your number one that year with like 40% of Barry Bonds' war than to leave Ryan

Sandberg off. All right. Well, I was looking for some ways to try to track him down too. So if either of us does, if he's still around and we're able to ask him about his oral Hirschheiser and not Mark Davis' 1989 Cy Young vote, we will. But if any more information comes to light, you will be the first to hear it. But he does exist. We can talk to him for an oral Hirsch-tory. That's good. Okay. All right. Emails?

Sure. Okay. I have a question from Anne who says, I have an interesting idea for MLB. I think they should start implementing a three stars award similar to the NHL. I think it would be great to be able to give credit to position players in a win and recognize the work of the team that came out on the losing end. So let's say the center fielder throws out the would-be walk-off run at home plate in the bottom of the 12th inning.

His team gets the win, but he gets no credit. With all the sabermetrics available nowadays, there should be something for the position to recognize their hard work. So for non-hockey fans, the three stars system is a staple of hockey, not just NHL, but all kinds of North American hockey. And I think they've been doing it since the 30s. And so they just give out three stars in a game to recognize players who were good. And I think it's mostly just an honor thing. I think there are some awards, like if you accrue a certain number of points, there are points associated with the star system. And I think maybe there are some charitable donations or there's something called the Mol nice way to recognize players who did something good and have individual achievements in addition to team achievements. And it doesn't have to be the person who scored the most goals or made the most saves or whatever.

It could be some subtle thing that might be forgotten in time. And I don't think there's a baseball equivalent to this except that Fangraphs does this. And I don't know exactly when and why Fangraphs started doing this. I did send that question to David Appelman, and if he gets back to me, I will mention it at the end of the episode. But Fangraphs, if you go to the box scores at Fangraphs.com, there is a three-stars system for each game, and it's user-selected.

So you can choose which player you think deserves the first star, the second star, the third star. So, for instance, if you look at last year's Game 7 of the World Series, the Nationals won, obviously, but the third star of the game, according to Fangraphs voters, was Zach Greinke, who had a really brilliant start in a losing effort and i like that but i don't know that anyone really knows that this is a feature that fancraft provides i never see anyone mention it i never see anyone use it for analytical purposes i doubt it's all that well supported because it's just not very well publicized so it does exist there but i don't know of it existing anywhere else and i'm

not sure why it exists there but i like it i think i wish we supported that more game balls remember game balls if you win the game and you you get the last uh ball that's used in the game you get to keep it put it on your mantle or something or no no no game ball we did a uh we did a game balls stat blast uh maybe a year ago right yes proposing proposing it as a stat and so it kind of like what game winning rbis used to be where you would actually be able to look at the end of the season and see who had the most game balls as the most uh valuable player on the team that day right and in this case star star the game there's three stars for for just the winning team is that right

or no stars can be anyone just for the game and can i see how many stars zach granky got or he got one star yeah he was the one star guy and then the actual heroes of the game like howie kendrick or whoever got two or three stars no no i mean over the course of a season oh i don't think there's a way to look that up i'm sure that david appleman could pull that for me but i don't think i can sort it myself yeah okay i like it i mean there's no do you necessary reason to do it like as ann was saying all the safer metrics we have we don't really need stars we could just use wpa was that what you used for game balls? Yeah, it was. So, you know, pick your metric.

Yeah, I feel bad being this simplistic, but I feel like if I'm not counting something, it no longer exists. And so the idea of a fleeting award that's given to somebody and then it's not tallied in any way, I can't do anything with that. Right. Well, I do think it should be tallied too. I think we should award it and also keep track of it.

But yeah, currently we can't. So that's why we've never talked about it until now, as far as I can recall. But I like it in principle. And like, yeah, you could use WPA or something else, but I wouldn't necessarily want to just tie it to that because I would want to allow some leeway for people to give it to someone whose contribution went unrecognized in

some way. Like, you know, WPA doesn't account for everything and it doesn't account for a great defensive play. Let's say it just, you know, that gets chalked up to the pitcher. And so if someone like an end scenario, you make a great play at the plate, you make the throw and you prevent the tying run from scoring or whatever and you don't get WPA credit for that, I guess you get a little bit of war credit for that. But that's something that statistically could be overlooked. But if you watch the game and you were following it, then you would know that person played a pivotal role. and you were following it, then you would know that person played a pivotal role. And I like the idea that decades later you could see that so-and-so was the second star of the game and maybe he went one for four or something and it doesn't look like he did anything all that remarkable. And then you'd have to dig a little deeper and look up a game story or something and figure out,

okay, why was this guy valuable? What did he do? Here's the problem. here's the challenge here i guess or here's where i worry that this would go and before i say where i worry that this would go i want sorry to clarify but the question and what you're describing what you would like imply that that stars can be based on something other than wind probability added but the fan graphs model currently takes the top three wind probability at it right no it's fan voted oh it's sorry okay yeah you can go and select it and i don't know how many people actually vote on that but you can yeah and if nobody say nobody voted on it i think it just doesn't display it

i'm looking at one here and it goes one two three win probability at it let me see if i can find it doesn't matter all right so take something like m like MVP, an MVP award for the season, you know, or for a team MVP. And what tends to happen, there's kind of two different forces pushing at how that gets interpreted. One force is really pushing to recognize people who the stats did not already recognize. And so that's how you end up with situations where, which we're all familiar with, where the reporters ask the manager at the end of the year, well, who do you think should be the team MVP? And the manager lists like the fourth right-handed reliever in the bullpen. He's like, we couldn't have done it without him. He gave me a security blanket in the fifth inning. And without that, we never would have bridged from the starters to the closer. And

you're like, oh. And that happens with a lot of kind of like niche awards that don't have an official definition. But it also happened a lot in early MVP voting. I wrote about this a few years ago. I went and I read the columns that sports writers were writing about MVP voting, their MVP ballots in like the 20s and 30s. And it was a lot of, you know, standing for like second baseman who hit, you know, 260, but like, quote, always came up with the big knock sort of a thing. It was a lot of that, like, look, you know, obviously this, this guy bats eighth, but, you know, something about him just really clicked with me and I thought he was a winner.

And so then you end up using the award as a way of recognizing that person. And it, it is, it's nice to recognize the eighth hitting second baseman in some way, especially if you believe that he really helped the team. And it's great that there would be places in the sport for that person to get recognized. Although if you're a good fan, then you'll recognize that player all the time and you'll grow to love him

and he'll be your team's broadcaster in 30 years but it also gets really frustrating for a lot of people who just basically see these ballots as being one person's you know like like one person's popularity contest and they're it's totally subjective and who really cares about the subjectivity of of you know x number of voters or one voter or all voters. We don't, I have my opinions. I don't necessarily need a lot of other people's opinions. And so it ends up getting frustrating and we end up arguing about them. And then over the course of time, we make them fit closer and closer to the objective

measures until it is hard to justify any vote that isn't a war sort. And then now we've got a totally redundant award that just confirms what we already all collectively agreed to put on the front page of the stats. So in either case, it's kind of tricky. And I just don't know that, I don't know that maybe we're just not sophisticated enough as a civilization to handle this. Or maybe it's just that not everything needs to be labeled and we need, we can, we should just figure out how to appreciate things on our own individually.

Like I like the notion of finding more ways to celebrate success. of finding more ways to celebrate success. And I also foresee two phases of an award like this being not that fun. Yeah, you're probably right. And especially at a site like Fangraphs, even if it's not based on WPA, it probably would mirror WPA most of the time because WPA is right on the page where you vote for those people. And also the readers of Fangraphs, the voters of Fangraphs. They'd probably be people who are paying attention to WPA anyway. So yeah, it might either just match the stats that you would use and so be useless or just to be so wrong essentially or not really based on anything useful that again it would also not be valuable so

i like it in theory and i you know i like the idea of recognizing something that someone did in a losing effort which you can do statistically again but we probably don't give enough credit to the person who did something good in a game that his team didn't win like zach grinke in that world series was brilliant in that game that was such a fun win. Like Zach Greinke in that World Series was brilliant in that game. That was such a fun start to watch too. Just like such an aesthetically pleasing start. He had everything working and that was just great vintage Greinke.

So I'm glad I can go to that page and see that he was a star of the game, even though they lost the game in the World Series. So kind of cool in theory, but you're right in practice, maybe not so much. Yeah, he also was third in win probability added when tom tango's fan scouting reports that was a really great and useful thing and as the years kind of went on i've sort of started

to feel less like i was getting that much new insight out of it, because you just started started to assume that the people who were voting at these sites, because it was voted on by people at fan, you know, I mean, it was basically voted on by people who were clicking on links to the survey that would be published, you know, at baseball perspectives and fan graphs, or tweeted by Baseball Perspectives and Fangraphs writers. And you're like, well, those people are probably like, there's probably a lot of making the numbers fit or making your vote fit the numbers kind of a thing. But then the alternative to that is then you ask a bunch of people who would never look

at advanced stat sites. And then maybe you end up with a really, you know, you risk ending up with an uninformed vote. And so you're kind of torn. You're sort of, you're stuck. Once the data exists, then it has a way of exerting a lot of influence on subjectivity. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's kind of like the, what I think Nate Silver describes in political polls as the herding effect, where once you start to have a handful of polls about a race, then all the other pollsters sort of start adjusting their polls so that they're around what that is.

Right. And that means that sometimes if you do have a problem with your polling, then maybe you'll fix it. But if you're actually detecting something that everyone else isn't, then no one will detect it now because you don't want to be out on an island there. So yeah, Appelman actually just got back to me. And speaking of Tango, the three stars thing was Tango's idea. So he adopted it from hockey because Tango is a hockey analyst and fan.

So that makes sense i will say that looking at an old box score i would actually find it pretty useful as a quick way of centering myself because you know in an old right the further away you are from the game the more it would help some to have somebody who was there and who was watching it give you the couple sentence description of what happened rather than trying to piece it together from the box score. And so if we started doing this now, then I don't know that I'd be that interested in it right now. And like I said, I would have some worry about the methodology, and I don't know, I worry that it might both not be what I would want it to be personally,

and also that it might both not be what I would want it to be personally, and also that it might not be consistent. But I think in 50 years, we would have a very useful historical resource. So we should keep it keep going. I guess we should keep going. Forget it. Who cares if I have issues? Appleman confirms that it is based just on user voting that people tend to vote a lot more in the postseason. And he says there aren't even votes for every game. So like not every regular season game will even have stars if you look it up. And he says it's become less popular over time in general. So we are trending in the wrong direction. But I don't know that anyone actually knows about it. So now you know. Now you can go vote for stars in the game. All right. Well, on that topic of award voting converging with the objective measure, we got a question from Brock who says,

Lately, I've been thinking about the injustice that is the 2012 AL MVP. We all know the story. Just looking at the top line, Trout put up 10.5 baseball reference war and 10.1 fan graphs war to Miguel Cabrera's 7.1 baseball reference war and 7.3 fan graphs war. But alas, Cabrera won the Triple Crown, and Trout captured only a select few first-place votes. My question is this. Let's assume that 2012 happened again, with the only difference being that we have 2020's understanding of war and value and advanced stats and all of that. So Trout is still a rookie. I think this is important in the equation. And Cabrera is still the first Triple Crown winner since 1967, and they both still play for the 2012 Angels and Tigers. In this hypothetical world, would Trout win the MVP?

Would it at least be close? One more time, I want to make sure I understand the hypothetical. Everything is the same except that it takes place in 2019. Well, everything's the same except that we now know what we know about war yeah it's not what we knew then or it's as widely embraced as it is now okay because i'm wondering whether it would matter if it had come after miguel cabrera's 2013 season when he was considerably better and did not win the triple crown had a higher batting average had had the same number of home runs, and had, like, which was way better across the board as a hitter, had won all three-thirds of the slash line,

and had, you know, clearly his best season and won the MVP award. And, like, we know that the triple crown is somewhat arbitrary, that if you hit 44 home runs and it leads the league, then it led the league. But if you hit 44 home runs and it doesn't lead the league then it didn't lead the league even though 44 is the same number both times so we already know that like i think that we talked about it at the time that you know i think that i actually went back and found that cabrera's home runs rbis and batting average only would have won the triple crown something like like five times in the 45 years since stromsky and that doesn't really

necessarily matter because it's fun and and the fact that you do it the fact that it requires uh circumstances of the universe helping you is is just part of most things but if it had come after cabrera had actually had a better season and so it didn't even feel like cabrera's best season i wonder if we would have felt less about it in any way, or if we just wouldn't have noticed. And the fact that he, you know, had two more RBIs would have been enough. But anyway, that's not really in the spirit of the hypothetical. Because, you know, eight, it'd be eight extra years that there had never been a triple crown. True. It would be even further back. Yeah. And yet there'd probably be less importance placed on the triple crown

just because, you know, eight more years of caring more about new school stats as opposed to old school stats. So I don't know if I feel that way. I think that the difference between now and 2005 is pretty substantial. That in 2005, it was still very common to think RBIs and batting average were

most important. But I don't think by 2012, it particularly was. And I don't think that I'm trying to remember how we all talked in 2012. I feel like everybody already kind of knew that we were past RBIs and batting average to a pretty large degree by then it was that it was the triple crown is what made this different like i don't think if cabrera had won the batting title in the rbi crown that year he would have won whereas in 2005 if you do this exact same hypothetical but say now it's 2005 and he doesn't even win the triple crown he He only wins RBIs and batting average. I think he would have won it in 2005 with just the two traditional legs of it. Whereas in 2012, I think it was really the fact

that it was a triple crown. I think we'd already given up on batting average and RBIs, but we still liked the triple crown. And I think that today, if it were still active, we would still like the triple crown. I mean, I am exposed to a very small number of people and the people that i'm exposed to have gone through some changes in their lives since then and there's been a little bit of a backlash to some of the ways that we thought a lot of the ways that we thought

back in the you know late aughts and early teens and so there's a little bit more of an appreciation for the pointless romanticization of elements of the past and i feel like like in 2000 i might am i i have been you're gonna have to give me some some uh reality check here but like by 2012 it was already pretty common to say no hitter who cares about no hitters you know babbitt is a social construct right whereas i think that no hitters now are sort of seen as more fun than they were in 2012 because you're just like yeah sure they're it's a lot of fluke and a lot of luck but they're still fun it's fun to see the suspense it's fun to see a thing that matters to the players the fact that a no hitter matters to a pitcher is part of what makes a that matters to the players. The fact that a no-hitter matters to a pitcher is part of what makes a no-hitter so much fun. The fact that it takes good BABIP behind

you, and you can recognize that in the fact that the whole team is excited and on edge and trying to do their part is part of what makes it fun. Am I wrong? Do we actually have more appreciation for no-hitters now than we did in 2012? It's hard for me to gauge. 2012 was the year we started this podcast. So maybe we do? I don't know. I still am not super excited about that.

But maybe just like baseball Twitter is, I guess, what we're actually gauging here. And even that is not very representative of baseball fans as a whole. So I think, yes, there is some greater appreciation for that. But also maybe that's kind of counterbalanced by just accept now, but I do think there was more resistance movement there. I think if there were a triple crown winner this year, or if this year were a regular length season, I don't think it would give you that much of an MVP boost because Cabrera already did it. So if we were in a universe where Cabrera had never done that and this were the first person to do it in decades, then maybe. But because Cabrera did it and because there's been sort of this backlash to Cabrera winning and people see that as sort of an old school, new school divide. you were on the wrong side of history or something. So I think given that history, it wouldn't really confer the same voting benefit today. And the makeup of the voting pool has changed to some extent too. But the fact that it hasn't, in this hypothetical, it hasn't happened,

I think that it would still be, I think we'd still would kind of freak out about it. And there's a lot of trying to put yourself in the mindset of a hypothetical that's very difficult, but we were not that interested in Miguel Cab hypothetical that's very difficult. But we were not that interested in Miguel Cabrera's triple crown. I don't even know if we we talked about it on this podcast that summer. And I think that if it were going on 53 years since it had happened, and it happened now, I think we'd give it more credit. I mean, look, we know batting average is silly and yet the chris davis thing is based on batting average it's not like we throw everything out just because it has batting average attached to it let me give you a hypothetical here and i think this is not this is a much this is a

different thing and so i don't know if it will carry over but i think it's somewhat analogous we for the most part know that you walk is as good as a hit, that a batter who has a great on-base percentage because he walks a lot is more valuable than a batter who gets on-base less but has more hits because he never walks. And for that reason, we know that a, say, a record on-base streak would be more impressive than a record hit streak.

And in fact, we know that a streak itself means nothing. Like reaching base 57 times in 57 games is not better than reaching base 70 times in 57 games, but with an offer in the middle of it. So we're smart. We're sophisticated. We're sophisticated. We know that a hitting streak is fluky, misleading, and captures a stat that is inferior to other stats that we prefer,

namely getting on base. And yet, I think we would freak out if there was a 57 game, if someone were trying to get a 57 game hitting streak. I think it would be the most fun thing there could possibly be. I don't think we would diminish it. I don't think i would say these words about it being arbitrary maybe i would but i'd say i would say it as a way of showing how much i love it anyway and i think that's a better record than triple crown there's only been one joe dimaggio hitting streak there were a bunch of triple crowns and that for various other reasons but it's you know somewhat comparable right it's a historic record that you grow up knowing about you've got it burned into your brain you know it's been forever since it happened that everybody who

was there is 90 years old now and that you kind of give up even thinking it will happen again and then it happens and you know we rightfully got excited about it. I think, what was the question? The question is, would the outcome of the voting be different now because of what we accept about war or appreciate about war? Okay, that's a different question. I don't think that we would pay, I don't think we would be less into the Triple Crown. I think we would be more into the Triple Crown. I think we would be more into the Triple Crown.

I also think that Mike Trout would win. I think that the legitimacy of war is greatly enhanced since at least the sort of the number of people that are using war and not dismissing it is much bigger now. So I don't think that you I don't think it's so much that the Triple Crown has lost stature or would have in this hypothetical as it is that war has just simply gained so much more stature yeah i think so and war has changed in some ways as some people have pointed out for instance the new baseball prospectus version of warp wins above replacement player actually has cabrera like some amount less than one war ahead of trout for 2012 now i think Matt Trueblood wrote an article

about that and whether we need to reevaluate our understanding of that race. And I don't think so, because A, again, it's within one win. It's like within the margin of error. And all the other wars are still pretty united on this. It's basically just that I forget the details, but I think Baseball Prospectus' new offensive stat, deserved runs created is maybe a little higher on Cabrera and lower on Trout. And there were maybe some other factors too, but I still fully absolutely believe that Trout was significantly more valuable than Cabrera that year. It takes more than that to change my mind. than that to change my mind. And I do think that, yes, if you replayed everything, but what we think of war today is what we thought in that scenario, then the voting would be different. And I don't really care anymore. It doesn't bother me, really, the outcome of that. It bothered me a bit at the

time, I think, because it still felt a little bit like an us versus them and we're fighting for respect or something. And now that we've won that battle to the extent that it was a battle, I'm not really crying over a skirmish that we lost along the way. Like, yes, maybe it makes Mike Trout's career a little less illustrious that he doesn't have that MVP award, but does it really? I don't know. I don't know in the long run whether it actually does because his reputation is just so tied to war at this point. And if anything, I think the fact that he was snubbed that year and in other years, maybe just makes people more eager to point out how great he is and celebrate him. And so I don't know in the long run whether it will change the perception of Mike Trout as a player one bit decades from now when we look back and when war is even more firmly established.

I mean, you could say, I guess, that at that point, the MVP award will basically be war and every MVP award will just match war. And so maybe we'll have an inflated sense of what an MVP means because we'll assume, oh, MVP must have been the best player that year. And so in a way, as we've kind of discounted the MVP award now because we look back at awards voting in the 70s or 80s and 90s and it doesn't make any sense and it doesn't really conform to war. And so we say, oh, that was sort of meaningless. Maybe the opposite will be true and we'll kind of pay less attention

to MVP voting because it'll just tell us what war already tells us but yet we'll expect to see that a really great player had X number of MVP awards and so maybe it will detract from Trout's case. I don't know. When he's in the Hall of Fame, I don't think

war will be on his Hall of Fame plaque because war is always changing and so I don't know how will be on his Hall of Fame plaque because war is always changing. And so I don't know how you would chisel it in there, really, unless you just said like it was over a certain number. Maybe that would be safe, but probably his number of MVP awards would be on there. And so it's part of his legacy, I guess. Yeah, I think it slightly diminishes his legacy, not so much because he has won fewer award, but because so few rookies have won the MVP award in baseball. And yeah, I can off the top of my head, I can tell you the two and only one of them

was kind of a, you know, a true rookie in the sense of it being his first year playing high level professional ball because each row Suzuki was the other one. And he was coming over from a very distinguished career as professional playing high-level ball. So there is a way that Trout's rookie year being an MVP rookie year would have made it more legendary, and I think that Trout's rookie year is the most legendary part of his career and the most fun part of his career, my favorite part of his career. That is my favorite part of Mike Trout's career.

So I guess if it had been his second year year i would not have been as energized by it but i agree that mike trout's gonna have you know they are not going to go pull out his hall of fame plaque and a chisel and go okay let's see what should we narrow the columns increase the font like there's going to be so much to write on his Hall of Fame plaque. Yeah. They're not going to have to like get creative to think of anything. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think both of those seasons were historic.

And I think that the fact that they happened together elevated each of them. That MVP race is probably one of the two most famous MVP races ever. That one in the DiMaggio Ted Williams one where a 400 hitter and a 56 game hitting streak went up against each other. And so I think that they'll write a book about that season and that MVP race. Yeah, it will elevate both and they both look a little better. And I will also say that a couple of weeks ago, I was asked to settle the, I was part of a group of writers that settled debates that each team's fan base debate kind of, I don't know how to put this in shorter words, but the one for the Tigers was, did Miguel Cabrera deserve to win the award?

And, and I wrote that, you know, the Triple Crown is amazing and really something historic and something to remember. And that it also is not the same as the MVP award. And you can't just say, well, he won the one thing, so therefore he should win the other. They're not a perfect overlap. I said, you know, those honors are for things other than home run RBI and batting crowns won simultaneously. Only the Triple Crown is for that. And I went on, some might take that statement as demeaning to the Triple Crown. It's not. It's the opposite.

The Triple Crown is enough. It doesn't need further validation. You don't win the Triple Crown so that you can cash it in for something bigger. The Triple Crown is the bigger thing. In the past 50 years, 101 players have won MVP awards. Only one has won the Triple Crown. The biggest mistake any Tigers fans made was coupling the two. And I basically feel that way about Trout Season 2, that it was so much better than almost every MVP season of our lifetime

that it doesn't need the validation of an actual MVP award. That's how it feels in my heart. But also I know that to a person looking at the record some years from now, unlike with Cabrera, it will not be obvious. Yeah, it's kind of like the Armando Galarraga thing where in a way losing gets you more acclaim or more attention, at least for a while. And like there are a bunch of guys who have three MVP awards or two MVP awards, and I don't even really know. Like I know Bonds has seven, but I couldn't tell you whether other legends have two or three. You know, Trout has three.

I guess I hope he gets four because I think no one other than Bonds has more than three. So I would like Trout to be kind of alone there, at least alone if you don't count Bonds because you know why, right? And so if that costs him a fourth, I guess that would sort of upset me. But really, it's a good story this way. It's a good story if he wins as a rookie, you're right. And Fred Lynn, by the way, was the other rookie MVP, if anyone was Googling, wondering. But I think it's maybe a better story that he didn't win. We have this sort of signpost or inflection point where we can gesture to that and say, see, 2012, that changed our thinking about a lot of things. That became this big debate That brought war into the mainstream And after that everything About the way we thought about baseball was different So I kind of like that that happened

In retrospect Alright we will end I guess with A stat blast and this week's Stat blast song cover Comes from a husband and wife duo Both Effectively Wild listeners Mack Long Prey and Sophie Welsman. And I will link you to this one.

I've liked all of these covers so far. I think they're all great. But boy, this one is a strong contender because this is like very professionally produced, very elaborate, which makes sense because they are professionals. So take it away, Mac and Sophie. at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways here's today's stat blast I like that a lot. That's the best, so far the best singing of the word plus and the best singing of the word blast. Really hits those really well.

Great work. Mac and Sophie are, as Mac says, pandemically unemployed musicians from Toronto. So if you're looking for any musicians to employ in Toronto, go check out Mac and Sophie. I will link to their website on the show page. All right. So I've got a bit of a longer stat blast, but you've got an update first. An update, sort of.

I wasn't here. I don't know. Is it an update? If someone goes to Disneyland on Tuesday and then you go to disneyland on wednesday is that an update or are you just going to disneyland yeah all right this question was from evan evan emails i have been reading good night giants and then he links to a kid's book good night giants by brad epstein about three or four times a day now, and something keeps on bothering me that my two-year-old is probably not old enough to analyze with me. The Giants are

scoring, quote, singles, doubles, triples, as well as, quote, hitting home runs clear out of sight. That implies at least two singles, two doubles, two triples, and two home runs. One of the home runs is with a runner on second, one of the doubles. In the end, the Giants beat the rival Dodgers 4-3. That seems to be a highly disappointing final score considering the number of extra base hits. At first, I thought it would be quite improbable for such a box score. Although if an offense could achieve this level of futility, it's the Giants. But then really, we're talking about as few as eight hits spread out over nine innings. So maybe it's not that bad. That got me thinking for a team to hit for multiple cycles.

Theoretically, the team could have scored just two runs total how often does this happen now you say it's an update because during the jeff run episode 1228 you answered this exact question except it was good night cubs yes this was the same book same events but with the it being about the Cubs. Different title, different art, I guess. Brad Epstein's got a great franchise going here, I guess, where it's just a different book for every team, but the details are the same for some of them, at least. It's the talk in baseball of books. So you answered this back in episode 1228 and found that no team had ever hit for two cycles 1228 and found that no team had ever hit for two cycles and scored only two runs. And before I realized that you had done that before I was told that you had done that,

I also ran the query. There's actually, as you said at the time, there had been five cases where a team had hit for two cycles and scored three runs, but never two. There's now been a sixth. The White Sox and the cubs actually this year played a game oh hey the cubs did it well the cubs did it but no the cubs scored seven the cubs were the seven the white socks scored three the white socks did it the white socks did it but they said they scored three so they're part of the the group of now six that have scored three runs while hitting for two cycles however the reason that i'm bringing this up is because, as I put it, there's a twist.

One of those six games where a team scored three runs, they hit three home runs. And so they hit for two cycles. And among those two cycles, they also hit three home runs and they scored the minimum three runs, which is, you know, that's the question, right? Can you basically hit for two cycles while scoring nothing but solo home runs? And they did. They hit for two cycles

while scoring nothing but solo home runs. So this was the Texas Rangers against the Seattle Mariners on June 9th, 1987, and I will just quickly explain how they came to score only three runs on 11 hits including three homers two triples two doubles and four singles which is a lot of offense for three runs so here it it is. First inning, leadoff single, next batter, grounded into a double play. Second inning, I'm going to ignore the home runs. You know the home runs are solo shots. Second inning, two out triple, all right? And then fly out. So two out triple, crucial.

Third inning, leadoff single, runner caught stealing. Then two out triple and then didn't score. Fourth inning, two out single. Fifth inning, two out double. So all these are two out. That helps. Sixth inning, nothing. Seventh inning, one out single. Next batter, double play.

Eighth inning, nobody. Ninth inning, one out double. So that really the only time a runner got on with less than two outs and wasn't immediately erased by a caught ceiling or a double play was a one-out double in the ninth huh it's all about the sequencing yeah i get those hits and punches well next time i have to explain the concept of cluster luck absolutely to that box score that's a great point because you know mike morgan who was the starting pitcher for seattle and who allowed all of that offense he threw a complete game

yeah wow he was terrible that's a weird one i would not even give him one of the three stars of that game no all right so my stat blast question or answer here this comes from a listener named sam in the facebook group, Sam Thoen, and he wrote, My issue with listening to Effectively Wild is it causes me to wonder many things I don't have nearly the researching chops to find answers to. That is also

our issue with Effectively Wild often, but we get to ask people who do have those researching chops. So Sam said, Somebody blow me away. What is the most number of times a batter has faced a pitcher without ever recording a hit? So maybe that thought was prompted by our discussion of Mike Trout's record against Max Scherzer on our last episode. But our Facebook group is full of smart people with great research chops. And one of them is Lucas

Apostolaris of Baseball Perspectives. And he answered just out of the good of his heart and his own curiosity. And I asked Lucas for the full list, and he sent me the hundred most played appearances that any batter has had against any single pitcher without a hit. This is going back to 1921, and I will put that online if you're interested. By the way, if you want to know the most played appearances that anyone has ever had against a pitcher without getting on base, it is Ray Durham against Mariano Rivera, my white whale. That's the one interview I want to do, I've tried to do. I tried when Rivera retired. I tried when he went into the Hall of Fame. Ray Durham, I have not been able to secure an interview with him about that. But Ray, if you're listening, call me. I have not been able to secure an interview with him about that. But Ray,

if you're listening, call me. I'm still interested. But he went 26 plate appearances against Rivera and never got on base. But the record for most hitless plate appearances goes to Mike Jorgensen, or really, I guess it goes to the pitcher who kept Mike Jorgensen hitless, Doc Ellis. Doc Ellis, of course, is famous for his LSD game and for his headhunting game, but less famous for holding Mike Jorgensen hitless in a record number of batter versus pitcher plate appearances. But he is kind of an outlier in this respect in that it's 39 plate appearances. in this respect, in that it's 39 plate appearances. They faced each other 39 times from 1970 to 1977, and no hits. And the next longest is 33. And after that, it gets kind of bunched up. There's a 32 and a few 31s and a couple 30s. And it's all kind of close together. But then way out on an island is the 39, Mike Jorgensen and Doc Ellis, and the 33 is Jason Bartlett and Nate Robertson, which was fairly recent. But I was very curious about what Mike Jorgensen might have thought of this as it was happening or in retrospect because Mike Jorgensen was a pretty good player.

He played for the Mets. good player. He played for the Mets. He was a fourth round pick in the second draft and came up, played for the Mets for years, and then the Expos, the Braves, the Cardinals, the Rangers, the A's, and later went on to work with the Cardinals for many years. And he was the interim manager in between Joe Torre and Tony La Russa, actually. And then he went on to be a front office guy and a farm director for years and years, special assistant to the GM. And from 1970 to 1977, he was a good hitter those years when he was hitless against Doc Ellis.

He had a 106 OPS plus. He was mostly a first baseman, outfielder, pinch hitter, played 17 years in the big league. So pretty good player, but could not get a hit against Doc Ellis. So pretty good player, but could not get a hit against Doc Ellis. So I tracked down Mike Jorgensen earlier today, and I ran this fun fact by him, and I'm going to play about a four-minute clip now of Mike Jorgensen's reaction to this fact. I hope you asked him about Ray Durham and Mariano Rivera in the absence of Ray Durham in your life. In the absence of Ray Durham in my life. So what I wanted to ask you about, it's kind of a silly sort of trivia question, but a reader up for me, it seems to have been you against... Well, I think I know who the pitcher is. Okay, go ahead.

Is it Doc Ellis? It is Doc Ellis. 39 plate appearances. I didn't know I was in the archives that way but it'll be it um you know i never knew that until a couple of years ago when you know baseball reference got um popular and all that and my son is my son is a baseball fan and now they look you're looking through it and he he sent me some stuff once in a while hey hey dad did you know you did this did you know you did that who did you who was the pitcher you hit the best

and who was the pitcher you didn't hit? And I was answering the questions as best I could. He said, how about Doc Ellis? And I said, well, I mean, I remember facing him a lot, played Pittsburgh a lot when I was with the Mets and I was in the

National League a lot, most of the time, actually. And I said, well, you know, he's a sinker ball guy, sinker slider, kick the ball down. I said, I don't remember doing any real damage against him, but I guess I got a few hits. And he said, I don't know what it was, and he said, well, how about 0 for 34 or 37? Right.

And I didn't know that. Huh. Interesting. Yeah, that's what I was wondering, whether you thought about it at the time, whether you realized that you had a hard time with him or not, because I would think that after all those at-bats, you might start to think, how can I hit this guy? But I guess you never did. No, and it's funny because we were actually teammates for a while in Texas,

and it never came up. Huh. Usually one guy or the other will say something about it. Maybe he didn't realize it either. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, you were a good hitter during those years that you were facing him, and so I guess it's just one of those fluky things. So, you know, he was a good pitcher too,

but he never seemed especially tough to you? No, he wasn't a dominating pitcher. He was certainly a good pitcher too, but he never seemed especially tough to you? No, he wasn't a dominating pitcher. He was certainly a good pitcher, but you wouldn't think of that. I mean, if you just said that against somebody like Nolan Ryan or somebody like that, I'd say, well, yeah, that makes sense, but I know I got some hits off of him. Right. Yeah, and you faced him 39 times and you were 0 for 32, but you did have six walks and only six strikeouts. So, you know, it's not like you were overmatched, I guess. You maybe just had some bad luck or something.

We're hitting the ball right at people. Yeah, he was a ground ball pitcher. So, you know, that's what I guess I was doing. Probably hitting that old 4 to 3 easy out. Were there guys that you faced and you just thought, I'm going to have a tough time with this guy? Or was it just sort of you figured that with enough at-bats, you'd kind of hit your usual performance? Yeah.

You didn't always look forward to how far in the future or if you were going to face a guy again. You're after it at the time. But funny, there weren't too many pitchers like that. I said, oh, boy, well, forget it. There was a couple. One of them was Donnie Robinson who was also with Pittsburgh for a while. He was really tough for me.

And they had a left-handed pitcher named Ramon Hernandez that was an absolute nightmare for me. And I knew that. I knew, you know, if I was facing him, I just, you know, hey, it's kind of make-believe you're playing stickball back in New York or something, you know, because we'll see what happens. And I'm pretty sure I never got it. I got a hit off in the AAA.

I know that. But I don't think I ever got in the big leagues. All right. Well, thank you for indulging me. I wasn't sure whether you would know about this or whether you would have noticed it back in the day when it was happening or not. No, I wouldn't have then. And if you had called me a few years ago, you would have shocked me with that one because my son did when he called me. Let me know.

Okay. So I did not surprise him. His son got there first, but it did sort of surprise me that he was not aware of this because this is historic. No one has ever had this many plate appearances against a single pitcher without ever getting a hit. And as he mentioned, he was teammates with Doc Ellis, and I'm quite surprised that he had zero awareness of this as it was going on does that surprise you it does surprise me yeah it's incredible how good one's memory is for baseball that you know that they've like lived through like played and like i remember i was thinking about this when you and meg were talking about the writer who looked into donald trump's career as a. And you had like some people who were saying that he was good and some people who were saying he was bad. And at this point, of course, once you become the president of the United States,

then you filter everything through the like, well, you know, like do I believe that they're telling the truth or what, you know. But I will say that I believe 100% that everybody who played with Donald Trump as a teenager remembers exactly how good he was. Because I remember how good every person I ever played with was. Like to the most granular detail, I could rank them all and it would be perfectly aligned with their wars in Little League. Anyway, I remember, I think I, yes, to answer your question, I'm surprised. Yeah. And there are cases where there is some long streak like this, and the players do definitely

know about it. Like, one of the interesting things is that at the top of this list, there's some very good hitters, great hitters who had very long hit list streaks. Like the number six guy on the list, 31 plate appearances, is Jeff Bagwell against Scott Sullivan, who was not a very remarkable, just like kind of side-arming middle reliever. And there's an article about this from a couple of years ago at MLB.com about how they both knew about this. And actually Bagwell would always bring it up to Sullivan as they were playing, as they were facing each other. And the next one on the list is Dick Allen against Luke Walker.

I mean, those are some incredible hitters. But sometimes players know about this, but I guess it was because Jorgensen didn't feel like Ellis owned him. Like he didn't feel like he was overmatched or he had his number or something. And so I guess you just forget a bunch of routine grounders. And some of these streaks, you look at them and it's like, oh, well, that guy was just overmatched. Like the number three streak, 32 plate appearances is Ron Reed against Deron Johnson. And it's 32 plate appearances, one walk, 13 strikeouts. I mean, that's pretty overpowering. Or if you go down to number 21 on

the list, Roger Clemens versus Torrey Hunter, 27 plate appearances, two walks, 14 strikeouts. I mean, if you strike out 14 times against someone in 27 plate appearances, that's probably going to stick in your mind, especially if it's Roger Clemens. And Doc Ellis was a really good pitcher during those years. He had a 112 ERA plus. He got Cy Young votes one year. And yet, I guess it was just kind of one of those things. It's, you know, plate appearance here, plate appearance there, and you never really put it together. Because one of the reasons I wanted to ask was that, like, I'm always curious about, is it just a fluke or is there some psychological block?

So that, like, once you get up to 20 plate appearances or something and you're aware that you haven't hit that guy, then do you go up there i can't hit that guy and then does that make you less likely to hit that guy but evidently that was not at play in the jorgensen ellis matchup it just happened yeah yeah there was a i mean it's very different but there was a piece in the athletic by rustin dodd about pitchers who faced eric jeter and faced him one time in their career and struck him out and they all remember you know the pitches they threw the the sequences of the pitches they remember they remember many aspects of of that game and this is very different because it's not facing a hall of famer when you yourself are a pitcher who's likely going to be out of the majors very quickly but but yeah you you would really think that you would just sort of be able to quickly notice

the pattern that's forming. Like, oh yeah, I went 0 for 4 against him. You would think it would happen in the first two games you would be aware of it. You would go 0 for 4 the first time. You'd have that in your head the second game because you'd be thinking, oh, I faced this guy. What did I do? You'd remember that in your head the second game because you'd be thinking, oh, I faced this guy. What did I do? You'd remember 0 for 4.

And then you'd go for 4 again and boom, pattern made. You'd be like, wow, it's the second time I went 0 for 4 against that guy. And then how do you, at what point does your brain quit tracking the 0 fors? So I wonder, is it possible that he started with like a pinch hitting appearance and then like six years passed? he started with like a pinch hitting appearance and then like six years passed and yeah i mean it was over a course of seven years and i guess eight seasons or i guess they skipped a couple seasons in there but it was many games and it was uh did it start with oh for ones i what i'm saying is did it start with oh for ones because if it started with 0 for 4s you would think it would very quickly become you know an ongoing story in his head right yeah it started with an 0 for 1 when jorgensen was a pinch hitter in the ninth inning but then after that it was he drew he drew a walk in the second

start against him maybe the walk let the air out a little bit. It was an intentional walk. Maybe he thought when he got intentionally walked, maybe he thought, I own this guy. He's afraid of me. Yeah. So there were some offers in there, full games, but yeah, I don't know. And the ones that he mentioned when I was talking to him, like he mentioned getting hits off Nolan Ryan, I guess he would remember that because it's Nolan Ryan. He went three for 13 against Nolan Ryan. The ones that he remembered giving him such a hard time, Don Robinson was one of them. And he didn't do so badly against Don Robinson. He faced him 17 times. He went three for 14. I mean, it's not great, but it's not so terrible. And then Ramon Hernandez was the other one he mentioned. He faced him 13 times and went

0 for 11, which I guess you remember, but again, it's just three strikeouts, two walks. It wasn't like he struck out every time, and that's 0 for 11 as opposed to 0 for 32. So it's odd, I guess, what you remember and don't remember. And just to end this, while I had him on the line, I asked him, or he brought up Albert Pujols because he was the Cardinals farm director from 1992 to 2001. So he was the Cardinals farm director as Albert Pujols was first coming up.

And so he told me a little three-minute story about the first time he saw Pujols, how he knew Pujols was great, and also about a time when the Padres were trying to trade for Pujols and the Cardinals kind of came close to doing it. So I will play that clip here. You know, Albert was obviously was a 13th round draft pick. And, you know, those days weren't the same as they are nowadays with statistics and everything else going on. But there's quite a bit of uh i guess which we'd call old school eyeball scouting going on of course and we had albert up in peoria

and we had heard i was back and forth i was a farm director at the time and back and forth through our different clubs from st louis and we'd heard in the office that we needed a catcher. We needed a backup catcher because our catcher got hurt. And we heard that the Padres had offered Hernandez and that that was a possibility for a trade and that they were asking for Albert. And I can remember John Moseley, he was kind of new in the office,

but he was instrumental in getting Albert signed. And I'd seen him play quite a bit once he got started with us in the minor leagues. And I'd seen Albert a few times up there in Peoria. And we went into Walt Jockety's office and said, look, we know we need this catcher. It's a big league kind of deal and all this kind of stuff. But if there's any way, we don't think that you want to trade this guy because we really believe he's got potential. And we knew it, 13th round pick, and nobody was really sure, but his numbers were great.

And the story, one of the reasons that we went in there and I went in to talk to Walt was because the two or three times that I'd been up to Peoria, I had seen a scout from San Diego in the stands, and he lived in Peoria. And I did some snooping around, and I found out that he was there at very, very many of their games. And so I knew that he'd seen Albert play a lot. And what we did was we tried to get him out of there before they kept looking at him. We sent him to Potomac.

Now, I'm not exactly sure of the timing of this. The trade may have been made before we sent him. But I was in the process of trying to get him out of there because we were trying to hide him a little bit. You could do that a little bit better in those days than you can now. That's about what happened with that. When did you realize what he was and what you had there? Well, you know,

you see so many kids now. The first at-bat that I'd seen Albert have was in the Instruction League. He was drafted. He didn't sign that summer, and he went to the Instruction League, sitting in the stands with Moseylock, who actually, I think he physically signed Albert. And he hit a ball in our spring training facility up on the patio up there

where the offices are. And that's a ball that you see hit, oh, every once in a while in the major league spring training. But when the air is heavier and it's hot down there in September and you've got these younger kids playing. You don't see balls go up there very often. So it was, in fact, never. I'd never seen one.

And Mo and I looked at each other and said, maybe we have something here. And then the times I saw him, I mean, he just hit every time I saw him play. And his great discipline and his bat speed and his ability to use the whole field were very special. So, you know, we just, we're lucky that we got to hold on to him as long as we did. So this is something that Derek Gould actually wrote about last year and confirmed the details of and makes it sound as if it was kind of close to happening. And instead, the trade that they ended up making was for Carlos Hernandez. And it was Carlos Hernandez, the backup catcher,

was traded from the Padres with Nate Tebbs, a minor leaguer, to the Cardinals for Ben Johnson and Heathcliff Slocum, who was in his last season, as was Hernandez. And so, boy, that would have been one of the worst trades of all time if it had actually happened, I guess. We would remember that as a notorious trade. You traded Albert Pujols, who was about to be the best player in baseball, for a backup catcher. The Padres scout that Mike was mentioning is Brad Sloan. And yeah, it didn't happen, but there were conversations about it and it could have happened yeah that would have that would have been almost as bad as not drafting him in the 12th round yeah that too I guess it's not the most fun hypothetical because like if Pujols had gone

to the Padres I don't know if anything actually would have been different like maybe the Cardinals wouldn't have won the World Series that they won with Pujols but like I don't know if anything actually would have been different. Like maybe the Cardinals wouldn't have won the World Series that they won with Pujols. But like, I don't know, the Padres got Adrian Gonzalez and they were still just the Padres for a while. And then they got rid of Adrian Gonzalez. So maybe that's just what would have happened if they had had Pujols instead. So I don't know, maybe it would have hurt the Cardinals more than it would have helped the Padres, but still would have changed some things. Wow, man. His career, man.

Just imagine drafting a 13th rounder, and then a year later, a year later, he's your starting first baseman, and he finishes fourth in MVP voting. Oh, goodness. Yeah, that's something. All right. All right. All right. That'll do it for today. Mike Jorgensen's baseball reference bullpen page, by the way, says that he is the only

Major League Baseball player born on the date of Babe Ruth's death, August 16th, 1948. Is that a fun fact? I don't know. Kind of a macabre fact. I also meant to mention, Mike Jorgensen, handsome man. Check out some of those 70s baseball cards. Kind of a James Marsden doppelganger. Also, after we recorded, Max Scherzer, who is a member of the union's executive subcommittee, tweeted, After discussing the latest developments with the rest of the players, there's no reason to engage with MLB in any further compensation reductions.

We have previously negotiated a pay cut in the version of prorated salaries, and there's no justification to accept a second pay cut based upon the current information the union has received. I'm glad to hear other players voicing the same viewpoint and believe MLB's economic strategy would completely change if all documentation were to become public information. So he's essentially saying the owners are full of it, and he's probably not wrong. That's the sort of fearsome Scherzer fastball that makes Mike Trout fear him, so it doesn't sound as if the players are going to make any additional salary concessions anytime soon, and the uncertainty about the season persists. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks.

Alex Legg, Rebecca Vaughn, Jeff Warren, Timothy West, and Colin Sauter. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group and post your unanswerable questions where maybe someone will answer them. Not only will you sometimes get an answer to your question, but you might get the player who is the answer commenting on your question on podcast at facebook.com slash group 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 podcastwithfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. If you're looking for reading material, you can find it in my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to

Build Better Players. It is out now in paperback with a new afterword that is also included in the Kindle edition. And we will be back with one more episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. He still thinks that he's the man that he used to be. He's 39 and holding and acting 23.