Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1582: Change My Mind

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller follow up on two Stat Blasts from the previous week and banter about the Dodgers’ impressive winning percentage pace, the surprisingly normal state of the standings, the Phillies’ bullpen, and the record-setting sale of a Mike Trout baseball card before discussing some of the ways in which the 2020 season […]

First of the lessons I ever got taught Is a crime ain't a crime if you never get caught So I'ma get going Put on a bow and then get going Whatever direction the wind blowing All the indie rap, none of the crime It sure does feel good being one of a kind Come on

All the mountain tops, have nothing to clump. Sure feels good being one of a kind. Good morning and welcome to episode 1582 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast on Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Sam Miller of ESPN along with Ben Lindberg, the ringer. Ben, how are you? Okay, how are you? I'm good. Thanks. Thanks for asking. Got any chitter chatter? Yeah, a little bit. A couple follow-ups on stat blasts from last week. So first of all, the record of the 1969 to 1970 Orioles of winning 23 straight times against the Royals of

that era is safe because the Detroit Tigers took two out of three from Cleveland over the weekend. They entered that series having lost 20 consecutive games to Cleveland. If they had gotten swept again, it would have tied the record, but instead they won the series. So they snapped that streak. Even more interesting to me you know how we talked last week about the most pitches ever thrown in a one two three inning been paying close attention to every every inning since yes i remember that the record has been broken what get oh come on yeah incredible coincidence in, it had happened when we spoke last time, except that the data I had did not include it. So what happened is I asked Lucas Apostolaris last Wednesday afternoon for a list of the half innings with the most pitches thrown, one, two, three innings, or at least three batters up and three outs. three outs and the record was 28 as he determined at that time and no one had thrown 28 in one of those innings since 2011 so years had gone by since this had been matched and we were sort of marveling

at the fact that this hadn't happened in years especially with more pitches per plate appearance every season and it happened that night Wednesday so it hadn't happened for like nine years. And then that very day that I asked him for that data, it happened. So Wednesday, Matt Barnes of the Red Sox was pitching against the Phillies in the top of the eighth inning, and he threw 29 pitches to get out of that inning. Now, it did include a double play. So it went strikeout, walk, double play. So according to us in a previous episode, episode 866, according to our wiki, evidently we said that if you get a double play, it's not a 1-2-3 inning. That's what we said at the time. It's not a 1-2-3 inning, but it's a 3-up, 3-down inning.

It is a 3-up, 3-down, and the data that Lucas sent was all three up, three down. And this had never happened even in a three up, three down with a double play. And then it happened. Matt Barnes did it. And I watched the inning. It took about 16 minutes, a little more than 16 minutes to get out of this inning. And it happened because he threw seven pitches to Phil Gosselin leading off to get him to strike out. And then Didi Gregorius took him to 14 pitches and walked on the 14th pitch. He fouled off nine pitches in that plate appearance. And then Alec Bohm is the one who grounded it to the double play, but on the eighth pitch of the plate appearance. So 29 pitches, he did it. And I listened to both broadcast crews and neither of them gave any sign that they thought it was a record or unprecedented or anything although they did make multiple comments

about how he was having to really work for it this has not been easy for Barnes and they complimented Gregorius on his plate appearance and all the fouls but they didn't realize that this was something that we had never seen before, at least since 1988 when we have the pitch-by-pitch data. And I can't believe that it happened on that very day that I asked for that data. And it sort of makes sense that Barnes would be the guy, I think, because as Jerry Remy mentioned in that inning, he does throw a lot of pitches. He's averaged about 21 pitches per inning this year. Of course, you might say, well, it's skewed by that 29-pitch inning, but not really because he averaged 20.4 pitches

last season. So he is just one of the highest pitch count guys. He's in the top 10 this season, and I imagine last season too. So he would have been one of the best candidates to do this and he did it. Well, Ben, I don't like it. No, why not? I don't like coincidences like that. I don't, I really have, I don't know. I'm somewhat, I think I'm somewhat, I don't know if hostile is the right word, but like wild coincidences like that, they feel so powerful. They feel like so significant, and yet knowing that they're not, to me, makes you wonder what else in your life you think is significant but is not, you know? Like if it feels that significant that on the very day that you queried 35 years worth of data

in search of an obscure record that nobody would ever think of, the record was set, of data in search of an obscure record that nobody would ever think of the record was set yeah if that means nothing which to be clear it means nothing it's total chance then what does the love i feel for my wife necessarily mean you know like is it just chemicals and coincidence does it mean anything ben i don't know i don't like it i'm sure that's more meaningful than matt barnes throwing 29 pitches in anything but uh yeah i was somewhat gobsmacked when lucas told me that this happened so uh all right it could happen any day you never know okay you have more yeah so the dodgers right now are 22 and 8 that is a 733 winning percentage and they haven't fluked into it either their base runs record is also 22 and 8

their pythagorean record is 23 and 7 so they're playing basically like 119 win team and normally you would say well they're playing way over their heads but with the 2020 dodgers i'm not totally sure that they are maybe a little bit but probably not that much. And I remember saying coming into the season, I think one of the things that I drafted in one of my episodes with Meg and Craig Goldstein about things we were sorry that we wouldn't get to see this season was the Dodgers for a full year, because it looked like they might really have a chance to be an all-time great team, set some records. I mean, they were close to an all-time great team last year, and then they got Mookie Betts and David Price, and it was really exciting to see what they could do

over a full season. And we're not going to know, but if they were able to keep up this pace or something close to it, then I wonder how we will think of them, whether we will think of them as an all-time great team or could have been all-time great team, or whether we'll just say, well, it's 60 games and they happen to have their hottest 60 games at that time. But basically, they've been incredible. There are guys on that team who haven't even performed up to their true talent level, like Cody Bellinger, for instance, and yet they're still doing this.

And of course, David Price opted out. And if anything we we could have seen maybe an even better dodgers team over a full season but they're really delivering on the hype and i've been excited to see them do that but i continue to be sorry that we will not get to see this team strut it stuff over 162 games yeah well the 2017 Dodgers, you'll remember, they were kind of like they had an outside chance of breaking the record, the 116. And so then, of course, last year they had, what, like one of the five or ten greatest third-order winning percentages ever. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think they actually had had as far back as maybe 2013 or 2014,

I think they had another 50-game stretch that was one of the greatest stretches of all time but i'm not finding anything when i google that so maybe i'm confusing you know 2013 they had a 2013 right like right after puig came up right like they started out really poorly puig came up and then they they had yeah like i think they i think whatever they did was probably more of a fun fact than a record but was called like like a record at the time for some stretch that they had so certainly i mean with the you don't really need to i i think that focusing on what the 2020 dodgers are is actually the wrong question it's the the question is what the 20 you know maybe the 2017 to 2020 dodgers have been which is is one of the, you know, one of the all time great

runs from a team. And you could even go further. They are, I wrote about this earlier, but they're, they're definitely the greatest stretch of a team never to win a world series. So if they don't win a world series, they're, they're going to be that. And if they do win a World Series, then they're simply one of the all-time great runs. And I don't think that we need to worry too much about 2020 as well, because I don't think that they're likely to be any worse in 2021. I mean, maybe they're not likely to win 70% of their games, I guess. But I was thinking about the super teams before the season began. And my kind of feeling with the three super teams was that the Astros felt like they had kind of tipped slightly into their downward trajectory.

They were still a super team, but that they had peaked in probably 2019, maybe even 2017, but probably 2019. The Yankees felt like they hadn't quite peaked. And then the Dodgers felt like they're permanent, that they're just permanent the question of peaking and decline is irrelevant they have figured like they have figured out a way through resources and style and also just where they are like given how many given how much good talent they have right now and how good talent especially if you're a wealthy team good talent can then be turned into more good talent it can feed itself they feel like they are a good bet to be the best team in baseball for like nine or ten more years and so so i guess at some point in

the future we will debate which dodgers team was the best Dodgers team and maybe the fact that this is a 60 game season will rob the 2020 team of of their glory uh but the Dodgers story is just not a one-year story in any any way and so I don't think it it it matters too much I think it like I think I will be perfectly happy to see them win 73 percent of their games and not feel that I missed the chance the opportunity to see something something something bigger. Is it, does it seem weird? So the Dodgers have played 30 games. They're halfway through their season. The Giants have played 30 games. Padres have played 30 games. So in one way of thinking of things, the season is half over. We have not actually seen half the games that will be played, played, but from opening day till the end is we're halfway from

that to that. Right? Right. And I wonder how shocking or weird or surprising or anything you consider it that the standings look kind of almost exactly like they were supposed to look. Yeah, I was thinking that. Other than, you know, there are a couple teams that are just out of the playoff race who are much better than the rebuilds

they were supposedly in, you know, the Orioles being the most obvious. And there are a couple teams that seem like they might be competitive and that have actually been disasters, like the Angels and the Red Sox. Throw the Marlins in with the Orioles and that. But if you just look at the playoff teams, it's pretty much almost exactly what you would expect it to be or what you would have projected it to be.

And the other thing that's really interesting to me is that, remember last year, the AL had like no pennant rate, no playoff race at all there was like there was some intrigue over the wild card spot where there were three teams fighting for two spots but and and ultimately a good team got left out because there were seven good wait how many teams make the playoffs? 10 prior to this season. You can leave that in. It's embarrassing, but I don't care. But the NL was this crazy race where every team that could win the division could also miss the wild card for the most part. And it's exactly the same this year.

So right now, if you look at the playoff odds start the american league has one team that has playoff odds currently between 20 and 95 which is sort of amazing one team between 20 and 95 the national league has 10 teams between 20 and 95 and they also have a 17 and they also have two 96s so if i wanted to be i could pull 13 teams into between 17 and 96 but just 10 teams that are really like that you i mean that so anyway that's a lot like last year does it surprise you how quickly the standings found the level that we would expect for a full season or do you think that's about right no it does sort of surprise me i think when i did an article on standings and small samples before the season started, I said something like on average, I think there are about three teams. Once you get to the 60 game mark in any given season, there are usually about three teams that would be in playoff position then that would not make the playoffs over a full season or have not made the playoffs over a full season. So I expected that maybe 30% or so of the teams that made the playoffs this year would not

be teams that we thought of as playoff favorites or legitimate playoff teams. That was when I still thought there would be 10 playoff teams. So with 16, all bets are off, really. But yeah, it does sort of surprise me that even halfway through this thing, roughly, it already looks fairly normal. And I don't know if that's a good thing or not. I think you said before the season started that you thought the perceived legitimacy of the season would come down to which teams made the playoffs or which teams won in the playoffs. And so that would be a good thing if you want this to be treated as a real season that people actually care who wins and celebrate the winner like they would in any other year. Then you'd want the standings in the playoffs to look

normal and the teams that make the playoffs to look like we expected them to. On the other hand, this season has been so strange in so many ways that it would also be kind of fun to have your Orioles or Tigers or Marlins making it. And at this point, a couple of those teams have chances still, but it's not looking great. Yeah. If you're from the perspective of the eventual World Series champion, whoever that is, this is kind of pretty good because you know that not only will it be hard to devalue the World Series title if you're facing a predictable slate of very good teams, but in fact, because of the extra round, you're going to probably have the hardest playoff path that any team has ever had.

You're going to have to face four good teams to win the World Series. So maybe this is setting up a good postseason. Although I do think this was one of the very few, one of the very rare chances that we had to have a true Cinderella, a true upset possibility in the postseason. Usually you're rooting between an 86 win team and a 96 win team. And even the 86 win team isn't what you would consider a a a dark horse they're just slightly worse but we had the chance to actually have an orioles or a marlins

in the postseason and i would like to see that i think it would be good to have one time one time only situation where the worst team in baseball yeah could be in the postseason and uh who knows maybe beat everybody else all right tell me about the phillies bullpen yeah so just a couple quick things here the phillies they are in last place right now and that is largely a product of their bullpen which has a an eight something era or did until recently on sunday they finally won they snapped a losing streak their bullpen was actually good and held a lead. But entering Sunday, they had lost five straight. And in every one of those, they had had a lead

at some point. And then the pen blew it, I believe. So they made a trade on Friday to try to shore up the bullpen a little bit. At that point, it's just kind of,, I think as Craig Calcaterra put it, rearranging deck chairs, but they had to do something. So they traded Nick Pavetta and Connor Siebold, a minor leaguer to the Red Sox for Brandon Workman and Heath Hembree. And so Workman comes in for his first game with the Phillies on Saturday and Zach Wheeler had had an excellent start. He had a lead. He handed it over to the Penn, and the Penn immediately got in trouble and was up to its old antics, and Workman, the new arrival, comes in with runners on first and third, one out in the eighth inning, and immediately gives up a two-run double to Matt Adams, and the Braves have the lead. Then the Phillies tie it up in the top

of the ninth, so Workman comes back out, loads the bases, and then gives up a walk-off single to Adam Duvall, takes the loss. So that's got to be pretty demoralizing. I think we've talked before about what the worst kind of team to watch is for fans, which team construction just leads to the least entertaining or most agonizing games and I think maybe we agreed that it was like a team that's pretty good in other respects but just has a terrible bullpen so that you're constantly blowing leads and you never feel like any lead is secure and that's kind of what Phillies fans have dealt with and must be extra demoralizing to make a trade, bring in a couple new arms, and then the new guy comes in and it's like he's caught whatever all of the other Phillies

relievers have had all season long. Not that he was great with the Red Sox or that he was an obvious savior or anything, but when you make a trade and you bring in some fresh blood and then the fresh blood comes in and immediately does the same thing that the rest of the pen has been doing all season. As a Phillies fan and just as a Philly, that must just be an extra demoralizing outcome, I would think. Well, you were just talking about the Saturday game. Yes, Sunday went better. Well, Sunday they won, but not because Workman was— No, Workman was bad again, right yeah so it went it went better

they did win and brandon workman got the save but only after he what put the tying runs on base gave up a double one run scored and the tying run was thrown out at the plate and so i i guess in a sense if the worst way to watch your team be bad is to see the bullpen blow the game repeatedly i guess the best way to be good might be to win every game with the runner with the tying run getting thrown out at the plate yeah pretty good victory yes if you were gonna have a walk-off defensive play like a like a walk-off dog pile it would probably be that right like the tying run gets thrown out at the plate, the potential tying run gets thrown out at the plate.

I could see doing a walk-off style celebration among the defenders for that. Yeah, well, you studied dog piles and walk-offs and who gets dog piles, right? Who would it be in that situation? Would it be the catcher? Would it be the outfielder who made the throw? It would be the outfielder who made the throw it would be the outfielder who made the throw your hope is to that i didn't see that throw but this was a double into the gap so presumably it was actually the the cutoff man the relay man who made the throw now you're really in trouble uh i think that in that case it's the relay man

who makes the throw it helps that he's in the middle but he's yeah he's actually in the middle so you can converge around him he's in the center of the field the other two people who were involved in that three three person relay can kind of meet meet there so i would say that yeah the cutoff man but my findings are that the dog pile does not always find the person who who actually is most responsible for the victory they just go straight for the batter, no matter what the batter did. And I think in this case, they might actually just go straight to the catcher, no matter what the...

Although the catcher, there's a long history of catchers running out to celebrate whoever threw the ball that made the final out. You know, the catcher goes out to greet the pitcher. So maybe the catcher would grow out to greet the shortstop. Does it depend on how good the tag is?

Maybe. I don't know. It could. Yeah. All right. And lastly, you probably saw this, but in addition to all the other accomplishments in his storied career, Mike Trout now has added the distinction of being on the baseball card that has sold for the most money ever.

So a Mike Trout card sold for just a hair under $4 million, which broke the record set by the famous Honest Wagner T206 1909 card, which sold a few years ago for a little over $3 million. Now there's a Mike Trout card that sold for almost $4 million, and that might sound somewhat surprising. Certainly when I saw this headline, I was sort of surprised that that would happen, A, because I think we think of baseball cards as not being that valuable anymore. I did do an interview on a previous episode about how that market has picked back up, at least for the ultra-expensive cards, and that seems to be the case in one of the articles I read about why this sold for so much. Evidently,

the fact that the market is a little shaky and was down earlier this year. Someone speculates in the article that maybe mega rich people are now transferring their funds into other markets that are maybe a little less volatile, like baseball cards, except that's been a pretty volatile market too. Anyway, the reason why this Mike Trout card sold for so much, even though Trout is still around and they're still making new Mike Trout cards and he's still signing them. There's just an unlimited potential amount of Mike Trout memorabilia. But this was a one-of-a-kind card. So it was a 2009 Bowman Chrome Draft Prospects Mike Trout Super Fractor signed rookie card. Super Fractor means that it's one out of one.

It has a special pattern, and it was signed in the pack. So even if you had a different Mike Trout card from this era and you got it signed by him subsequently, it would not be as valuable because this was signed by him, the only card signed by him, the only card signed by him at that time. What an arbitrary distinction. It is kind of, right? But that's how this market works, evidently. And the cover photo is of him, I think, in the Arizona Fall League. So this is 2009. This was long before Mike Trout was Mike

Trout. He was just a draft prospect. He had just been drafted and was a sort of a prospect, but not really an all-world prospect at that time. And because it's one out of one, there can never be another. And that's not even the case about any of the old cards that sell for a ton. You could always find some more of those. So, you know, you could find another Wagner card, you could find the famous Mickey Mantle card, could be sitting around in an attic somewhere, and that has happened, but you will never get another of these Trout cards because it was one of a kind. So even though there are many, many other Mike Trout cards and they will continue to make them, the fact that this was unique makes it uniquely valuable. So between that and the fact that it's Mike Trout and he's on track to maybe be one of the all-time greats and this was not even really a rookie card. It's a pre-rookie card. So he has done that now.

So I guess that's another thing to add to his resume. I am going to say that I actually would rather have a non-one-of-a-kind card that is in better condition than any of the others of its type. Like if there's, what is this, like 500 T206s or something, but like there's one that's in the best shape. I think that to me would be a cooler thing to own than to have all the only one of a thing the only one of a thing i mean it's worth what it's worth and so everybody's happy here

but it's like a completely artificial scarcity right yeah there's no this is just that like there's lots of things that are one of a kind in the world and and you could have they could have made as many as they wanted of this card it just it's like all very artificial and although it's not like if you made a one out of one Mike Trout card now right it's they made it one out of one maybe partly because it was just part of this you know set of one out of one things that get made for these draft prospects maybe but yeah but they made it for him before they knew that Mike Trout would be an incredible player. So it's less artificial than if they just said, hey, we know how great Mike Trout is. We're just going to arbitrarily make a one out of one right now.

That's a good point. That's fair. I don't want to—my point, sorry, is not to diminish—well, it was, but to diminish the one-of-a-kind card. It's just that I think it would be cooler to diminish the the one of a kind card it's just that i think it would be cooler to have the best version of a of a real thing i i personally would resonate more with me to say that there's a small group of people in the world a very vanishingly small group of collectors in the world who have managed to get a version of this card and i have the best one of them that i that i beat all of them yeah so i would still rather have i would still rather have that than the one of a kind i think they

should have made uh i think they should have made 500 of them and had one of them just be better than the others because it just bent the corners on all the others yeah and there's a history obviously that goes with the t206 i mean it's been around for more than a century and it's been bought and sold at auction many times. And so it's a famous card in a way that this one is not. I guess it's famous now because it's sold for almost $4 million. baseball memorabilia, the T206 that has this legend surrounding it, whereas this thing does not or has not anyway. But it's appreciated pretty quickly because it sold for $400,000 two years ago. So in the last couple of years, evidently the market has decided that this is way more valuable than it thought it was then. Bill Haber, the saber researcher who I wrote about with regards to the Don Mattingly birth date controversy, he had Hannes Wagner T206. He had the whole set except that card. And this was in like the late 60s or so. And he just,

I mean, because it's so rare, it was very hard for him to find it. And he finally found one. And I think he bought it for like $5,000, something like that at the time, maybe $500. It was enough that he had to talk his wife into like freeing up family budget for it. Then a couple months later, a much better version of the Hannes Wagner T206 became available to him. And when he declined to buy it he's like i already have one and so he ended up passing the card on down to his son who sold it for a lot of money but i think that the one that he passed up i can't i might be wrong about this i think it might have been the

gretzky one like the the the one that is now you know millions and so i think that was part of the family lore that he uh he passed it up because he just wanted to complete the set he didn't really care about i don't know if that's true but that he cared less about the value of the card and more about just completing his set so he took the one he could get uh-huh did you know the the backstory of the mickey manil 1952 tops in the ocean do you know about the year so this is a fairly well-known story but it was new to me when i heard it a year ago or so so that card was i forget why but because of the number in the set they actually produced way more of that card than they did for the average card in the set like that

was i don't i don't remember exactly but like something like when they would do the first run of a set or something they would kind of like create tons and tons of one portion of the set till they like i don't know i i don't know the diesel the bottom line is there were tons and tons of that card and when they finished the set and they distributed it, they had all these extra cards, including thousands of the Mickey Mantle rookie card, and they had to get rid of them. So they went out into like the New York Harbor or something and just dumped them in the water. Thousands of them in mint condition, uncut. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I guess the card industry has learned its lesson from the glut of cards that it produced because that was a big part of the reason why the baseball card market collapsed, right? There were just so many cards and so many brands making the cards and it just depreciated them kind of across the board. So maybe this one out of one thing is kind of a correction to that.

thing is kind of a correction to that. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, Atlantic Ocean, I'm now reading a thing about it. And I'm not getting any, I guess, actually, I guess, 500 cases, 500 cases of 1952 cards were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. All right. Okay, set it? Yep. Early in the pandemic, sort of, maybe not that early, I saw somebody noting that we were in the golden age of now more than ever, where the pandemic comes, completely upends everything you know, changes the world, traffic is gone, your ambition is gone, everything is different. yet somehow you know like we we could make everything fit our priors and so the uh the the most common example of this was that there was uh you know like political uh figures would say now more than ever all the things that i was was saying were important are even even more important. Another example of this was.

A great tweet that someone made. I don't remember who. That said that every advertisement on TV. Was now more than ever. Will sell you our product. And so I heard somebody say. Like what priors have. Have you changed.

With this pandemic. Like what world view. Or what strongly held belief did you have that you no longer that you've changed your mind now that you've seen a world-changing pandemic happen and um i i've been thinking about that a little bit with baseball as regards to baseball partly because as as noted we're halfway through the year through the season by one measure of looking at it and as of now there's no platoon split yeah the league's Woba when the pitcher has the advantage is 314. And the league's Woba when the hitter has the platoon advantage is 314. That's unprecedented. Or I mean, it would be over a full

season. And in fact, if you remove intentional walks, I think the hitters have actually done slightly better when the pitcher has the platoon advantage. And of course, that doesn't change my mind about baseball. It's not like I'm like, wow, now I see the platoon advantage as a mirage. It's just a small sample and it will end up being normal. So I have not, for instance, updated my priors about the platoon advantage. I still believe it is as real as it ever was. And nothing has changed my mind about that. But I wondered whether there were any things that I had changed my mind about

or that I had maybe felt differently about or updated my beliefs about. And it's hard. I actually don't know that I have any. So I have not prepared you for this. So I am now asking you to engage with a question that I walked around with for a few hours this. So I am now asking you to engage with a question that I walked around with for a few hours yesterday. And I don't expect you to necessarily have much to contribute. But a few things popped into my mind or came to mind that I thought I would share.

I don't even know if they meet the standard that I've set. I don't know that these are things that I even had priors on. I don't know that I'm really changing my mind as much as fitting new information into bigger priors or what, but I'm going to just mention a few things that I feel, I think I feel differently about now than I did three months ago about baseball broadly as a, as a major league, major league baseball broadly as a, as a league, or maybe league or maybe even as a bigger sport.

So I'm going to tell you these. And please, if anything, if you have an answer to the question, I would really love to hear, but I don't want to put too much pressure on you. So I think I have like maybe four, four-ish, okay, of different degrees. So I'll start with the kind of most frivolous one. I think that having seen the way they did the schedule this year, where basically everybody in the West plays everybody in the West, everybody plays everybody in the Central,

everybody in the Central plays everybody in the Central, and everybody in the East plays everybody in the East. I think that's actually better, and they should do that permanently. I think that we should just get rid of the American and National League and do regional leagues, East and West. There are some advantages to this that I had not anticipated. The main one, I think, is when you look at the difference in travel miles logged, it's huge. It's just massive. Now, partly that's because they're staying entirely within the divisions. If you were to split the country in half,

then you'd have more travel because Milwaukee would have to travel to Seattle and San Diego. And as of now, Milwaukee, Milwaukee is going to travel fewer than 4000 miles this season and the whole season fewer than 4000 miles. Normally a team will travel like 120,000 or so air miles. So the lack of travel, travel i think is is probably something that the players would really like and that i believe probably would make them better i think that travel is a real physical strain i think that jumping time zones a lot is a real physical strain i know that there's both research on this and also criticism of the research on this but it seems to me that athletes don't like traveling people who focus on optimizing performance don't think traveling is particularly good for the players.

And you could just cut the amount of travel. You could cut the amount of, you know, the carbon footprint of these teams considerably by cutting a lot more flying. But more than that, I think there's something really nice about having games be in your time zone a lot more. I don't think that East Coast kids are well served by having games that start at 10 p.m. I don't think that's that good for baseball. And having games that start predictably within a time zone that is actually suited to your lifestyle a lot more, more frequently, I think is good for the fan experience.

It's more predictable and it keeps people from getting really locked out of seeing a lot of games because they start way too early or way too late. I also think that fans, fairly short amount of time, would feel a lot more kind of connection to a regional league than they do to the the scattered leagues that we have now there used to be a time when fans were fans of their team and then they might also have some loyalty to the league they were in and that doesn't really i don't think exist anymore because of interleague play and because of i don't know changes in society or whatever But I think that there is still a lot of regional identification in our country.

And I actually think that a fan of a West Coast team would feel a little bit of ownership if they were in the West League as opposed to just the National League or just the American League. I think you see that in college sports a lot where there's a real regionalism that people identify with. And so I think they should just get rid of the American and National Leagues and have it be East and West Coast. So that's one thing. So the way they did it this season did create a greater imbalance, right? If you care about the competitive integrity of the schedule, right? Because you had some teams facing an easier slate or a harder slate, more imbalanced than usual when it's kind of more widely distributed which teams you face, right?

So I don't think that bothered anyone all that much for this season because it was just like, well, this is what we need to do to get this season in or some semblance of a season in. But would that bother you if it were institutionalized, if that were the case every year for a full season? Well, it wouldn't be. The reason that that imbalance is happening this year is twofold. One is that you're only playing nine other teams. And in my scenario, you wouldn't have three regions where you're playing the same nine teams over and over again. You would just have two regions,

so you would be back to having two 15-team leagues, so there wouldn't be as much imbalance there. The other reason that it matters this year is that a West Coast team is playing only the Wests, but they're still competing in the standings with the teams in the East and the Central. The NL West is competing with the NL East, but they're playing only Western teams. And in the scenario that I envision, your standings would also, you wouldn't have standings

that were different than the schedules. You would both only play teams in your part of the country, and you would also be competing in the standings with teams in your part of the country, and you would also be competing in the standings with teams in your part of the country. So the balance would—there'd be a balance just like there's an imbalance between AL and NL in some years now, but the imbalance would not be any more impractical than it is all the time okay and also just because we got rid of pitchers hitting this year the last real distinction between the leagues is erased anyway so if you were clinging to al nl for that reason that reason's gone now too so that's a i don't know if that changed any any that's just an idea that has occurred to me as i've been watching this and thinking i actually like this more there would be arguably some downsides there would be West Coast players that would not be seen very much on the East Coast

at all because they wouldn't travel to the East Coast. They wouldn't really ever play during East Coast hours. And I think that's actually okay. I think that would be fine. I think having a feeling that your players on your side of the country are yours and the other side of the country has theirs would create a little bit more of a league rivalry that there used to be and that there no longer is. And sort of a sense of, again, like regional pride of who's playing in your region. Anyway. And you can see them. It's not like in the past when you had to see them in person or you couldn't see them at all. Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, obviously, this is how they do it in the NBA. And I don't know if people think that it's better or worse, but I think it makes sense. All right. Second thing, I have flipped my notion of who is serving who here between the fans and the teams. I used to think that the teams were providing a service to the fans and I now see it as the opposite. The fans that congregate at the stadium are generally providing the service to the team. The game is so different without crowds. It's still enjoyable, but the lack of a crowd,

for one thing, it seems like we've seen it in home field advantage. If you're a home team, you really do need that crowd, I think. I mean, we won't know for sure. We can't know for sure in such a small sample. But it seems there's no home field advantage in the standings right now. And it seems probable to me that that's because the fans were doing it. If you take away the fans, the home field advantage largely disappears. And so if you're the home team,

the fans are not just there because you're selling them something. They are there because you really need them to be. You have a great incentive to gather people to cheer you on. But also, as a product, as a experience, when you're watching on TV, it is a lot worse without fans. It's not intolerable. I haven't found it like I have to turn it off, but it's a lot different energy. It is more lulling to me. And as we talked about earlier, one of the reasons that it hasn't been super jarring to see big blocks of empty stadiums is that lots of games were already sparsely attended. So we were used to having big blocks of empty stadiums. And that's

not great. That's not the ideal. There's clearly a difference between this and the ideal, which is a full crowd cheering like crazy that gives you a real, like when you're watching it at home, it gives you this proxy emotional response that you can relate to. It gives you information. It gives you highs and lows in the audio that just really can't be manufactured with this fake crowd noise. And basically what I'm saying here is that I think that tickets should be free. I think that I know that a big part of the business model here is that teams want to sell tickets to people for money, and that's how they pay their players.

I think it's holding the league back, though. I think if every game was a sellout, in some ways the league itself might be more successful, particularly as it transitions more and more into a game where the economics are built around huge cable packages and where the threat to the game is that it's going to lose cultural omnipresence or cultural relevancy. I think baseball needs to figure out a way to have full crowds all the time once you know when it's safe when it's healthy again and i don't know if that necessarily means every ticket should be free but a i think it's every

ticket that i think every child who wants to go to a game should be able to go for free and i think that the value that a fan brings to the stadium might actually be greater in the aggregate in the long run than the money that that fan pays. I think that they might actually be doing more for the team. I remember, I think I've mentioned this before, but I remember, oh my gosh, Ben, oh no. I remember an Andy Rooney thing from years ago. And by saying that, I realized, oh my gosh, I'm doing Andy Rooney. I'm Andy Rooney-ing right now. Wow. But an Andy Rooney thing where he said that it always struck him as really weird and backwards that you had to pay a baseball team to wear their cap when you're advertising for them. If a company came to you and said, hey, can you advertise

our product? You'd be like, yes, if you pay me, I will. And yet we pay for the hats. In the same way, I think we're doing more for the team than the team is doing for us. And that's what I think. I think that the ticket should be free. This is a radical economic theory that you have here. And does this change then your belief about who baseball belongs to? It does. Yeah. See, we've talked in the past about maybe unwritten rules for instance and and you've said that basically you think that the players set what the game is or the game belongs to the players and we're just sort of the spectators we're watching but they can do what they want to do because the game is theirs so now i guess you're saying that you have come to think that the game is for us

the game is for fans i think i do i i was i'm i don't think that anybody like the game is not any anybody's it's it's all of those those stakeholders have some share of it and so i i'm not saying that it's not also largely the players but yes i think the power to gather as a crowd is this is an incredible force that you can't take for granted. And the fans by gathering are essentially giving legitimacy to the sport. And if they don't do it, which they currently cannot, then a lot of things about the sport start to just look like a lot less, they look a lot less big. But the crowd could very easily like if they could, they could go to the big. But the crowd could very easily, like, if they could, they could go to the players and go, you know,

we're thinking about going to Ultimate Frisbee instead. And they could really negotiate some real changes, I think. So because the crowd doesn't actually collectively bargain, it's not likely to use that power. But yes, I do think that the crowd is a huge part of this game and when you take it away you realize how much they were they were contributing to it and they were certainly contributing more than i i realized i i thought that i think i took the crowd for granted is is the main thing okay this is somewhat of a similar one, but my dad, who is, I've mentioned is a,

is a big baseball fan and baseball is a big part of his life in that he basically never missed a game, never misses a game during the season. He's, he's at, at home. He's got all these projects around his house and he listens to baseball while he's doing them. And so because of that, he, he consumes probably more baseball than I do. And this year with the way that the season began very late, he, he just, it got out of his rhythm and opening day came and he didn't even realize that it was opening day. Like I had to tell him the night before it, did you know tomorrow's opening day? And he, he sort of like had heard that it was coming, but he was totally out of his rhythm and he hasn't really picked it back up. He's not really following games that much this year. At least last time I checked with him a couple of weeks ago, he's not, he doesn't know

like, Oh, this is the time of the day where I turn on the game like every day. And that is like an That is an incredible, abrupt shift for him in his life. It has just made me realize that the way that the world has always been is not necessarily how it is going to be or needs to be, and the way that the sport is can quickly change, can quickly shift. I have always had in my head a sense that Major League Baseball is in decline, but has a lot that it is going, like it will be able to ride this momentum for many decades. The owners who don't seem to be that interested in re-imagining it so that it lasts for 500 more years, seem content to just

wring the value out of it for the next few decades, and then they'll pass it down to a family member and they'll wring some more value out of it for a few more decades. And then eventually it will become, you know, a fairly small sport, a small league. That's my pessimistic view of baseball is that without a long-term vision or a lot of aspirational vision for what it can be, it would kind of slowly decline while the owners made some money. And watching my dad just like not out of malice, not out of even design, but because of a virus that he doesn't even have, just has completely removed baseball from his life without even trying. He doesn't want to. He didn't make a

decision. It just sort of happened that baseball was no longer in his life. And this is a person who was a huge consumer of baseball, has just made me realize that it can go fast, that the 80-year outlook is not guaranteed. I don't think that baseball is going to abruptly disappear or that Major League Baseball as an industry is going to abruptly disappear, but just seeing how one super fan could have a normal life that didn't have baseball in it at all suddenly and abruptly has made me fear that there are scenarios where major league baseball as a sport could go poof really fast uh-huh what about the three months or so when there just was no baseball on whatsoever and our lives went on that's a time of the year when for our entire lives, we've been accustomed to watching baseball during those months. And this year, we did not and could not. And we went on. We even continued to do this podcast. And for a lot of people who don't do baseball stuff professionally, they probably just found other stuff to do, found other ways to entertain themselves. And so that was kind of a proof of concept of, hey, if you just took this away, life doesn't end. You could still

find ways to spend your hours. So probably some number of people took those few months as a sign of, okay, I don't need this in my life. Maybe I still want it. Maybe I still like it, but I don't need it, even though it's something I've had for my whole life. So I still want it. Maybe I still like it, but I don't need it, even though it's something I've had for my whole life. So I don't know. I mean, the ratings are good so far. So it's not as if a lot of people just abandoned baseball once the season started. Like your dad, it doesn't seem as if there's been a mass exodus, but just not having it for a few months when we're used to having it probably just showed that, well, maybe we don't have to have it. But, you know, weird circumstances, of course. And we were without a lot of things that we're accustomed to having at that time.

Yeah. A lot of things in this pandemic that we have, you know, I don't want to quite say learn to live without because we're not it's not like we're making the commitment to live without them. They're unavailable to us. And yet, in a way, we're making the commitment to live without them. They're unavailable to us. And yet in a way we are kind of learning to live without them. There are things that if you had told me five months ago, I'm going to take this away from you for five months, I would have expected that after five months, I would have been just like extremely thirsty for them. And in fact, I, I'm not that thirsty for them. Like I haven't eaten at a restaurant in five months and my favorite, our favorite restaurant, which is like a little Chinese food restaurant,

set up two tables outside and they're very far from each other. And I think, oh yeah, that actually looks pretty safe. And we we've been getting takeout from them as often as we can because we want to make sure that they survive as a business. And we've just gotten used to eating at home, which is not how we ever would have done it before. We really like to go out on a Friday night and eat at this restaurant. And so I mentioned to my wife, oh, that, you know, maze is open. They've got these two seats. And we went, oh, that's, that's cute. We could do that. And both of us found that despite having not eaten at a restaurant in five months, there wasn't any real like urgent desire to do it. It didn't sound like something that we were desperate to get back

to normal. We had just, we have learned to live a different way. And so I, I guess what I'm saying is that I feel a little bit more worried that baseball isn'tball isn't necessarily something I can take for granted. I have spent most of my time as a writer thinking that stuff about how healthy the industry is or how good the ratings are or how good attendance are doesn't really matter that much to me because obviously baseball is going to be around for as long as I'm around. And whatever long term problems it has for its future will come after I'm probably dead. I'm not totally sure that people will come back from this in the same numbers. And I'm not sure what else could disrupt things. But there are ways that I could see the population just quickly leaving it behind.

the population just quickly leaving it behind. Okay, that's scary. I don't like it. I'm not, this is not, this is not my, I have not updated what I hope will happen. If anything, I've, like I said, I've become a little more protective because now I see it as a little bit more fragile than I had. I thought of it as a behemoth and it is.

And I think it needs, the industry really needs to take a lot better care of itself. I think I'm in some ways even more frustrated and disillusioned with how the league's owners and commissioner's office don't seem to have the urgency to protect it that they should. It just seems like they really are like in some ways, just strip mining this sport for what they can get right now. And they need, I think they need to do better yeah okay all right well i don't know if i have had any brilliant ones while

i was trying to pay attention to what you were saying but i guess maybe one would just be how much has changed about the sport this year and people have mostly accepted it, I think. Maybe not your dad, but we haven't seen people abandon baseball in droves yet, at least based on what we can tell. We'll see if they actually come back when they're allowed to physically come back. But so many of the most fundamental things about the sport have changed this year, whether it is pitcher hitting in the NL, whether it's the schedule, as you mentioned, whether it's the fact that games last for nine innings and now they don't always, or the way that extra inning games end now, or just all the other

changes that we've seen thus far. I think people have mostly said, I am okay with this, or at least I am willing to go along with this for now. And that's probably partly because of the circumstances. And it's because, hey, it's a pandemic. And if we want to get the season in, then we're going to have to be willing to kind of bend and fold what we conceive of baseball being. But I think people have mostly gone along with it. of baseball being, but I think people have mostly gone along with it. And a lot of these things that have changed, I think people either kind of like actually as it turns out, or they don't hate them as much as they thought they would, or if they were to stay in effect next season and beyond, people would not really revolt or riot because

they happened this year. So maybe it's because it was unique conditions and they were able to just do these things that maybe they were interested in doing anyway, and they put them into effect in a season when everyone was just going to shrug and be like, okay, fine, we have to do this for now. But I mean, all of these very fundamental things have changed and you haven't really seen people renounce baseball in large numbers based on what we can tell. So that to me makes it seem as if even though people think of baseball as this hidebound traditional sport that is unwilling to change anything and has changed fewer things, at least in some respects,

than other sports, that maybe it's okay. If you can just kind of ram it through and do these things, then people will just keep watching and either get used to it or decide that they actually kind of like it. So I think that is maybe one realization that I've had this season. And another one that I can think of is just sort of a smaller one. But I've long thought that spring training is too long, that we don't need to have several weeks of spring training and like a month of fake games before the season starts because players stay in shape year round. Now they train over the offseason. They never get as out of shape as players used to. Most of them don't have to take second jobs over the offseason, so they're free to keep exercising and throwing and hitting and whatever they want to do and so i've thought that we could shorten spring training by weeks and it would be fine except that this year that's kind of what happened in a way and we've had injuries left and right and pitchers just getting hurt in unprecedented quantities and that makes me think that maybe we can't

actually do that. And I don't know whether it's because of this strange structure of the season where you did have most of spring training and then you shut everyone down for a few months and then you had a short spring training or whether because guys weren't conditioned for this, if they had planned all off season to have a shorter spring training, then that would have been fine. Then they would have come in in pretty good shape anyway, and it would have been okay. But because they were expecting the regular structure and then they didn't get the regular structure, they're all falling apart. I don't know. But now I would be a bit apprehensive about changing that because maybe you need more than three weeks or so for a pitcher's arm to get up to speed. And that's something that has really taken away from my enjoyment of the season and my perception of the season's legitimacy is just how many players have been hurt, and in particular, how many pitchers have been hurt and have had arm injuries. So that would make me wary of attempts to change that in the future, even though I was convinced that you could easily pretty painlessly change that coming into this year. That's a really good one. That's a great one. And also it does seem, I don't know for sure,

but it does seem more and more like the evidence is that the hitters also were not nearly ready to play. There's just the quality of play in that first week beyond the injuries the quality of play in that first week or two yeah was anomalously bad yeah and as long as we're updating uh we might as well update our updates you we had that conversation i think it was two weeks ago about why babbitt was so low. Yeah. And you had some theories, some explanations, and the league-wide BABIP at the time was like a freakishly low 276. At least it was 276 when you locked in your Ringer article. Right.

And now it's up to 287. Over the past two weeks, it's 298. And so I'm curious, which is normal. 298 is about normal. What do you make of that? What is your updated hypothesis for what was happening in the first two weeks? Because as I noted in that article at that time, even over samples of that length, it was unusual or unheard of to have a BABIP that low. So I don't think it was just that, but I think it was maybe partly that and partly just a bunch of weird kind of a jumble of things that were happening. jumble of things that were happening. Like the fact that it has been normal since then could either suggest that it was entirely a fluke and there was nothing meaningful there whatsoever,

or it could mean that there was some weird thing happening for a couple weeks or a few weeks at that point. And whatever was weird up till then has not been weird since then. And I guess I'm, I kind of lean more toward that than toward it was never anything to begin with well it it rules out it seems like it maybe rules out that the fielder's part it rules out the fielder's part and it rules out anything about shifts or about shifts you know what yeah defensive shifts or shifts in the game shifts in the style of hitting or anything like that it basically narrows it down to two possibilities flukish small sample or something specific to the start of the season unless this unless this 298 since then is the

freakish small sample which one would have to presume that that's not the case but but yeah it means that in fact the kind of pleasant and elegant theory that fielders were disrupted by the colorful T-shirts of fans and that they weren't hearing the crack of the bat as well when they were fans, probably pretty much disproven now. Probably, yeah. Which is too bad. Yeah, it is too bad. I never fully believed it, but I wanted it to be true because it would have been a cool thing. That would have been something that we had learned about baseball this year. Yeah.

And now, yeah, it's not looking great for that. But the weird thing is that it wasn't just that hitters were hitting the ball less hard or something. It was that when they put the ball in play with the same initial launch conditions, they were not getting as many base hits. And so I still don't really know how to explain that because it doesn't seem like it was just that the hitters were off, that their timing was bad or something, because then they would have just not been hitting the ball as well and they wouldn't have been expected to get as many hits. So it wasn't just that, but I don't know. have been expected to get as many hits. So it wasn't just that, but I don't know.

I'm going to bring back the lack of platoon split thing for a minute here. So to say it again, there were, we're halfway through a season, you know, sort of, we're like 30,000 or 35,000 plate appearances into the season. And batters have not done any better when they have a platoon split than when they don't have the platoon split. That's the top line finding, right? any better when they have the platoon split than when they don't have the platoon split. That's the top line finding, right? But if you break it down, they actually have struck out a lot more against pitchers when the pitcher has the platoon advantage. They have walked less often when the pitcher has the platoon advantage. What is really happening is entirely that when the batter has the platoon advantage, the batter's BABIP is 280 this year. And when the pitcher has the platoon advantage, the batter's BABIP is 280 this year. And when the pitcher has the platoon advantage, the batter's BABIP is 295 this year. And we tend to think that

BABIP is a statistic that is prone to fluctuation and flukishness, but also has a fair amount of truth to it. Because if you hit the ball harder, you're more likely to have a good BABIP. If you run well, you're more likely to have a good BABIP. If you you hit the ball harder you're more likely to to have a good babbitt if you run well you're more likely to have a good babbitt if you spray the ball around you're more likely to have a good babbitt but a 15 point platoon advantage well i guess reverse split on babbitt sort of suggests that it's totally a fluke that and and what we know what we know from 150 years of baseball is that it must be a fluke. There's no way that like suddenly because of a virus that there's a reverse split on BABIP. It doesn't make any sense at all.

And again, we're talking about 30,000 plate appearances. We're talking huge numbers. And so I always have to remind myself that small sample sizes are so, it's a small sample size for so much longer than you think it is yeah i mean sometimes it really does take tens of thousands of plate appearances i mean we see that with park factors all the time where it takes years for park factors to become reliable and then you'll still

have these one-off years where everything goes completely topsy-turvy and so a lot of times you'll hear a broadcaster will be talking about how someone is you know doing something in 140 plate appearances and they'll go and that's not a small sample and in fact like entire careers can have small sample aspects to them at least when you're talking about like league-wide or something yeah yeah or something. Yeah. Yeah. So. Okay. So I'm, I,

I, yeah. So basically what I'm saying is I still kind of think that the first two weeks BABIP, even though it was a big number of balls in play, to me, it sounds like a fluke. It sounds like it was just a fluke. Yeah,

it could be. All right. We can end there. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks for listening. As always, related to what Sam and I were just talking about, after we finished talking, I saw a tweet by Fabian Ardaia who said,

Mike Trout said he didn't realize his jumps were slower in the outfield this year until he saw it on Twitter, said he's made a concerted effort the last few days to work on it, added that hearing the ball off the bat with no fans has been an adjustment. That's something that had been pointed out by some people, that Mike Trout's jumps this year have not been great according to StatCast, and that that might be why his defensive stats are not so great this year either. So Trout evidently suggesting that hearing the ball off the bat without fans has been something he's had to adapt to. So maybe temporarily it actually impaired his performance. Interesting. You can also support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. 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. Gretchen Ehrenkofer, Ryan P. Sullivan, Jacqueline, Jason McWalter, and CJ Labasse. Thanks to all of you. You can send your comments and questions for me and Sam and Meg via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. If you are a supporter, we will probably get to emails next time. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild.

You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Thank you to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. I only hope that you won't change your mind You're mine Despite the fact that time's Not on my side And I only hope that you Won't change

Only it takes a sin To remind yourself how the other half lives.