Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1615: Yesterday’s News

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Marcus Stroman accepting the qualifying offer and tweeting about Tony La Russa, what the AL Cy Young voting says about the Dodgers, and the singular greatness of the 2014-15 Royals, then answer listener emails about Noodles Hahn and how quickly former star players get forgotten, whether there should […]

Mark is dead Or at least he might have said I know it used to be said You should see what I once had It is free Hello and welcome to episode 1615 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hello. Marcus Stroman accepted the qualifying offer. Good news for me in my free agent draft. I didn't think he was going to do it really. When I drafted

him, it was more because I thought the estimate was more than he would get on the open market than because I thought he would actually take it, but he did. So big leg up for me and I can screw up a bunch of other picks, which I probably will judging by how last winter went. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. I don't know if he was convinced by the press conference that Sandy Alderson and Steve Cohen gave on Tuesday, which a lot of people were impressed by just because it was competent, which was a change for the Mets. And they said the right things, which is easier than doing the right things, but also hasn't been easy for the Mets in recent years. So don't know if it was that or just the fact that he didn't pitch this year or just the general uncertainty about the market.

But I did think when he was tweeting about Tony La Russa on Tuesday, and he was making headlines for that too, because he said that there was no amount of money that he would take to play for La Russa. And he might sincerely believe that. I certainly wouldn't blame him for it, given what we've learned about La Russa. But I think that was probably easier to say, at least if he had an inkling that he was going to accept the qualifying offer and would not be on the open market and thus would not need the White Sox as a potential suitor, even if he wasn't going to sign with them, still would have helped to have them there to drive up offers. So maybe that's why he was so

open about that. Maybe not. Yeah, no, I mean, definitely it's a lot easier to speak your mind when you have a job instead of are looking for a job. I think that is a universal experience. Right. Yeah. So I was just thinking we're about to hear about the Cy Young winners a few hours after we speak. And we don't know the identities yet, but we do know the top three because they call them the finalists now, even though they are not finalists. It's just a way of drumming up interest in the awards before they actually announce the winners. And we do know that two of the three finalists in the American League and presumably the second and third place people, because Shane Pieper is going to run away with that thing. But second and third place will be in some order Hyunjin Ryu and Kenta Maeda. And those are both 2019 Dodgers pitchers that the Dodgers let walk or traded away, decided that they didn't need. And they were not the only

starters that the 2019 Dodgers did that with. Rich Hill also was allowed to leave, and the Dodgers also traded Ross Stripling in the middle of the season. That's four of the six starters on the 2019 Dodgers team with the most starts on that roster, and they all left, and the Dodgers didn't really bring in anyone else. I mean, they traded for David Price, who opted out and so didn't end up pitching. So you take away like two-thirds of the starts almost or the top starters from that 2019 team. You don't really replace them, at least with outside additions. They're all good. I mean, Ross Stripling did not have a good season, but was still well-regarded enough that the Blue Jays, a playoff team, traded for him down the stretch to bolster their rotation. And the other three, Rich Hill was his usual effective self when he was available. And then the other two were two of the three best pitchers in the American League and second and third place Cy Young finishers. And yet the Dodgers got better. They were on pace to be one of the best teams of all time and won the World Series. And I guess the starting rotation was not really their strength. I mean, they were like 11th in starting pitcher war, I think, but it was a fine rotation and a solid staff and good enough for them to be the best team in baseball, despite letting all of those excellent pitchers leave and not really replacing them. So I guess that just sort of, to me, speaks to the depth of the Dodgers and just the fact that they really seem to be on a different level from anyone else.

Yeah, I asked when I was talking about all the trades that the LCS teams had made, and I was sort of ranking them by how well they had worked out on the championship push. I asked Craig Goldstein whether Dodger fans rue the Maeda trade, given how successful he was. And he's like, no, they don't really care at all. They don't even think about it, probably. care at all they don't even think about it probably he had he had the second lowest i mean short season but he had the second lowest whip in history in history for a qualifying starter and uh no no regrets at all no none at all i mean maybe there are some somewhere but i mean this is the the nice thing about rooting for a team that wins 70 of your games of their games it just like what what would you regret like every every move brought us here yeah and so you don't have to to think about it i mean i honestly think that like i don't know that there's anything that you could talk yourself into

regretting in a world championship season like as far as personnel because it all just feels like well if we had that person then it's a whole different run of simulations and we might not have been here so uh also ryu and maeda were were both fantastic and their replacements were were basically dustin may and tony gonsolin and i don't even know if like on an on an inning by inning basis that's probably like a I don't know quarter of a runs difference in how well each pair pitched this year I mean Gonsolin was I think had like the fifth-ish best FIP and like around that best ERA plus this year and so I mean I I don't I think that there's like a some some skepticism of whether

that's his true talent level but arguably if Gonsolin had pitched a full year in the American League if he pitched a full year and started as many games as Ryu and Maeda started he might have been a Cy Young finalist possibly yeah it's just like they maybe didn't really have a fit for Maeda or he didn't you know break out in the way that he did with the Twins this year when he was with the Dodgers and they kind of maybe jerked him around a little bit maybe underrated him arguably they just always had so many pitchers that he was sort of a swing man for them and would be in the bullpen sometimes and he wanted to start and whether it was because they didn't want to pay him as much as they would have had to pay him if he was starting all the time, or just because they just didn't really need him to, he didn't really have that leash fully let off while he was with the Dodgers.

And they just let him walk and it's fine. change anything in any World Series year, but at least in some World Series winning years, you might say, well, we should have done this or that, and it would have given us a better chance to win. Maybe we got a little lucky that we won. In this case, it's not that at all. It's like, yeah, they won. They got the great outcome. But if you simulated it a bunch of times, they would win more than any other team. they were just the the best team easily even though they lost the the two top Cy Young vote getters in that league and as you said they just they had May already they had Gonsolin Julio Urias pitched more Buehler's already great Kershaw had an even better year like they just they really didn't need those guys so it's like that's a solid team's rotation like you could maybe

be a playoff team with the rotation of guys that they let go and uh it just didn't phase them at all oh i mean you could certainly be a playoff rotation with yeah with the ones they let go so all right so here we go the um maeda ryu combined had a 163 ERA plus. And May and Gonsolin combined had a 176 ERA plus. That's considerably better. In fact, the two rookies were considerably better. They did throw 30 fewer cumulative innings. But in fact, they started 18 games and the two that left only started 23.

So it's not like they were part-timers or anything either. So yeah, how do you like that? How do you like being able to just produce good ballplayers all the time? Yeah, it seems like the way to live. All right. And the only other thing I wanted to mention is that Neil Payne did an article for FiveThirtyEight on Wednesday that is starting a series called The Little Teams That Could, like the teams that fooled the forecasters. And he kicked it off with the 2014 to 2015 Royals and how they were one of the great underdog stories in sports and baseball. stories in sports and baseball and given just their projections and their Vegas odds and also their recent past as a franchise, they were incredible long shots to do what they did.

And just reading the article, I'll link to it so everyone can check it out, but just reminded me how much I enjoyed those teams. Those were maybe the most fun teams. Certainly, I think of the time that I've written about and talked about baseball professionally. But maybe in my lifetime, like, you know, among teams that I didn't have a rooting interest in, those teams were just incredible. Who are we talking about? I'm sorry. I'm doing Dodgers pitcher math. Can I do quick, quick? I'll just seal this.

But the year before, Rio won the ERA title and so of course it's not like the Dodgers thought they were like they weren't releasing JD Martinez here like they knew that that they were letting two two really good key players go okay so they establishing that the year in 2019 before they left they had a combined era of 3.18 and may and gonzalin had a combined era of 3.28 so even even before this the two rookies had i mean obviously again in fewer fewer innings but we're not talking about like eight innings they had each thrown gonzalin thrown 80 and may had thrown i think 30 or so and they had been about as good so all right yeah so are we talking about the orioles or the royals i i sort of vaguely heard an aww sound say it again who the royals the

royals the orioles yes the o royals did you say the o royals or the orioles i did not say that but uh o royals all right let's let's put oh royals in the back pocket for another day all right i wrote an article where i called them like the oreo royals or something when i combined the the two rosters when they were both terrible just to see if they would be a good team if you put them together and i think they still weren't that good but i think there are some similarities there in that the the orioles and the Royals both defied the projections and our expectations. And the Orioles did it maybe over a longer period, but the Royals did it with greater concentrated success. And it just brought back the memories of watching those teams and marveling at those teams.

There's so many individual memories like the, you know, Alex Gordon not scoring and Eric Hosmer's mad dash and the 2014 wildcard game. Those teams were so much fun. I really don't think I've had more fun watching a team. And they were not like a sabermetrically built team, which in a way made them more fun, except in that people would kind of hold them up as an example of like the way that you should build teams in general, or, you know, why projections are bad and wrong. And I think those lessons I probably didn't agree with on the whole, but those teams, if anything, the fact that they weren't like other teams and that they weren't the way that you would normally say teams should be built made them more fun because they kind of broke the mold for that period in baseball. And they had such identifiable traits.

Like you just you knew the things that they did well. They were fast. They were great on defense. They were great at making contact. And they had the fire breathing back of the bullpen. and all of those things were sort of fun to analyze like they had the amazing outfield when they would put their top flight outfield out there. how good they were when they were ahead because they were able to put that outfield in and then deploy that bullpen and so they were like a different team when they were winning than when they were losing because they could just shut you down if they managed to get a lead anyway there were so many great comebacks during those playoff runs and so many memorable plays and games

and players and i just i love those. And I guess they're kind of like the things that people lament that have kind of gone away from baseball, the contact and the speed and all of that. And they were sort of like this, you know, 1980s-esque oasis in mid-2010s baseball. So I don't know when or if we will see another squad like those two, but boy, I really like those teams. Yeah. I mean, I remember talking about them. Yeah, this was they were not ancient history. No, they were on this podcast. It was part of this era. And we said all these things about him. I mean, I think the fun thing about them, too, was that there was like a two year period where we updated our priors, right? Like there was a real, I think the conversation that we were having,

if you could somehow graph it on some level of suspicion that we had toward them or enjoyment that we got from them, it was a clear trajectory. And it's always fun to go through that process with a team. I have really, the Hosmer Mad Dash has grown in my memory into just about maybe my favorite play of the last decade. I'm trying to think. Like, there are some plays that were big deals at the time that when I've rewatched them recently,

because I did a thing on every World Series, and so I watched a ton of World Series action. And like the play that, for instance, the play that ended one of the World Series games in 2013 where there was like an interference call at third base where like a runner was trying to go to third. The throw got past the third baseman. He got up, and then the third baseman tripped over him trying to get the ball.

And then the runner was thrown out at home, but it was ruled that the third baseman had obstructed him in person. Do you remember that play? Vaguely. Okay. At the time, it was like the world had ended. It was all we talked about. It was like the biggest deal in the world. Everybody wrote about it immediately.

We all were arguing like we were angry, dissecting what the rules said and everything. And I rewatched it again and I thought, I have no emotional feeling about this play. And it ended a World Series game. It was a walk-off World Series game. Right, right, right. And then I watched the Hosmer thing and I almost started crying.

Like it's so beautiful. I still can't believe they ran on the scouting report of the first baseman's throwing arm. That to me is the most unlikely piece of information to ever come in handy. First baseman throws a ball competitively about once every 10 games. And they had it. They had it. It's incredible. That was another fun thing about yeah like the

advanced scouting was a big part of their winning or at least it was presented as being a big part with that and you know lester not making pickoff throws and all these things it was like they seemed to have an edge at picking apart opponents flaws and vulnerabilities and that was even more fun because it was like they had picked up something and they were actually exploiting it. So, yeah, just a really great, fun team. I still, like, don't think they were necessarily even the best teams in baseball in those years. But, boy, they were the most successful and they were the most fun. So, all right.

I've got some emails here to answer. This one comes from Matthew, Patreon supporter. He says, I was recently reading the Wikipedia article for Noodles Han. It noted that after his retirement from baseball around 1910, he continued to work out in the Cincinnati stadium before Red's home games for decades afterward. In the 1940s, players were shocked to discover who he was, having had no idea Hahn had been a star player in his time. To them, he was just an old man who exercised and hung around. For six seasons, from 1899 to 1904, Hahn had about six war and pitched around 300 innings per year. My question is, how much better would he have to have been to be more immediately recognizable 30 years later and is that threshold any different now than it was in

1940 so you know that i responded to this question uh sort of undercutting the premise here a little which i believe this story is probably made up and that there was actually no no situation where the players had never heard of him and like that my guess is that it made a good story to say noodles han has been working out for 20 years and no one knew who he was but that probably it's not really that true like i think if there was an old guy hanging out at the ballpark is that that's what was happening he guy hanging out at the ballpark, that's what was happening. He was working out at the ballpark and the players would see him every day, but they never, they never knew who he was. I just think that like the first day you'd go, who's that?

Yeah. And then they'd say, Noodles Han. He's a former ballplayer. And you go, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll read you the passage because I found the passage in the book. It's called the Cincinnati Reds. It's a history of the team by Lee Allen. And it was published originally in 1948. So it wasn't published like a long time after this period, which maybe makes it more credible. But it says, Noodles always kept himself in perfect shape. After he had retired from the game, he became a meat inspector in Cincinnati.

And in the afternoons, he used to go out to the park and put on his old uniform and work out. As late as 1946, at the age of 68, he still performed this ritual. Although almost 70, he would have pitched batting practice had manager Bill McKechnie permitted. Some of the players in the early 1940s, upon joining the Reds, wondered who he was. So this is... Yeah, but I mean, wouldn't you? Yeah, sure. Of course he would. And then it says, unlike some old timers, Noodles was never one to get a rookie off in a corner and tell him how baseball used to be played or should be played. He was never a mine of misinformation about the game and was even reluctant to discuss his own

career. But the players found out. Steve Mesner, who played third base for the Red Legs during World War II, happened to cross a faded clipping one day that told about Noodles' no-hitter in 1900 and his feat of striking out 16 in a game the following year. Could this be that old fellow who works out with us, Mesner thought? Well, what do you know? If it hadn't been for that, the players would have considered Hahn only a nice old guy they say used to pitch for the Reds so what exactly are we supposed to be impressed with here is it that they didn't know upon hearing his name that they didn't recognize his name is that is that what it is yeah I guess so I don't know how he happened to cross this old

clipping it seems like someone must have given it to him or something. But if they were just saying, hey, there's this old guy working out here, who's that? And if someone said, oh, it's someone who used to pitch for the Reds and they left it at that, I guess it's that they don't know he was Noodles Han, who was a big star. Or if told that it was Noodles noodles Han maybe that didn't really register for them yeah because if they I mean I'm sort of trying to parse the the the the shock here so the players were shocked to discover who he was having no idea Han had been a star player at the time so they weren't shocked to discover he was a a player. No, I guess they knew that he was working out because he used to be with the team. He wasn't just some guy who snuck in every day.

So they knew he was a former player. And then at some point, they were shocked to find out that he had been a really good player. I guess so. Okay, so quick little aside. But when I was doing the series on players whose wars Mike Trout had been passing, there was a player on that list. So Hall of Famer, who was one of the, you know, he has 70 some more in his career. He was a big time star.

Honest Wagner said he was the, you know, accepting himself the greatest shortstop who had ever lived. I don't think Wagner said accepting myself, but I think it was implied that he was rating the other shortstops. And I noted in my write-up that there had been an article five years earlier about Wagner saying this about him and saying, while most young fans have never even heard his name or don't even know who he is or something, and this was five years after he'd retired. Five years after he'd retired, already the world had moved on because this was a world where you didn't have, maybe you didn't have 30,000 baseball cards that you saved until, you know, you were 40. And maybe you didn't have the internet and you didn't have broadcasts telling you fun facts about players and recounting trivia. And so

memories of players back then were very quickly erased, I think. So, I mean, we're talking about a Hall of Famer who five years later was not known by the average baseball fan, according to this article that I read. So it doesn't surprise me that Noodles Han would have a harder time staying in the public imagination than a pitcher today would. But even with that said, Noodles Han, okay okay he uh you know he he had some bolding but he was a pretty good pitcher for a fairly short career but it's like hall of fame caliber for a player yeah okay you know so your career so do you think though that the i'm gonna ask you this is a two-part question do you think the average player today would recognize this name and then b would

would you find it like in any way criminal or like heartbreaking or shocking or notable that they wouldn't recognize this name so mike quayar would would the average player know who mike quayar is no i don't think so of course not no of course not and in the six late 60s and early 70s he was every bit the pitcher that noodles han was he was a four-time 20-game winner in six seasons he led the league in winning percentage twice he led the league in shutouts he was uh you know three times cy young you know vote getter who won the cy young and probably i mean there are obviously baseball fans and baseball players who know who he is but if he were working out in baltimore and six orioles maybe four orioles were hanging around batting practice and

said who's the guy running on the warning track and they said mike quayar they'd go oh who's he right and that would be natural i think that would be fine i i don't feel like it's a tragedy exactly i would say that jerry kuzman probably probably would get mostly not recognized and for a period jerry kuzman was i would say at a similar level to noodles on so i don't know i don't know that this is unusual is what i'm saying no i don't think so and you often hear about players who just don't know much about baseball hands bill hands do you think anybody knows who bill hands is ben do you know who bill hands is he was on the podcast so is that right yeah wait former podcast guest is he the guy that we called yes about the thing he allowed a lot of home runs to pitchers didn't he yes

and you forgot about phil hens already so i did forget about phil hens yeah uh anyway a comparable to uh noodles han h's hands, Noodles hands. And Noodles, like, first of all, like, I know Noodles Han mostly because his name is Noodles, right? Like, if he was Frank Han, which is his actual name, I would not know him either. Now, this is, you know, it's been a long time since the 1940s, and I'm not in Cincinnati, but that's a big part of the reason why I know who Noodles Han is. But also, yeah, you hear all the time about young players who don't know even more famous players than that, maybe from further back in time. But, like, players make the major leagues because they're good at baseball, not because they're good at baseball history.

And often those things will correlate to some degree. Like, you know they're good at baseball history. And often those things will correlate to some degree. Like, you know, you grow up playing baseball, maybe you're interested in the sport and you read about it, but not always. Sometimes you're just focused on playing, focused on the field and you don't know baseball history and that's fine. And, you know, I think it's nice when certain players really care about the history or, you know, like you hear Joey Votto talk about the history and how into it he is. That's great. But not everyone is wired that way. And like young people in general just don't know a lot of things because they weren't around when those things were happening.

That's true. You do learn a lot from like 23 to 40 as a person who's in the land. I've learned a lot in that 17 year period. Just because you don't know somebody yet doesn't mean that they have been like lost to history. You just don't know them yet. You've got more learning to do.

Yeah, there've been plenty of times I can't think of examples off the top of my head, but when I've heard about something and like didn't understand how I didn't know that before, or it seemed like common knowledge, and yet somehow it wasn't my knowledge. It had just missed me somehow. Or like a few years ago, remember when Cody Bellinger didn't really know who Jerry Seinfeld was or wasn't aware of Seinfeld the show, and everyone was piling on and mocking him. And yeah, okay. I mean, mean seinfeld is is pretty pervasive and it was

surprising that he didn't really know what it was but like he was born you know after its run like he didn't remember the peak of seinfeld's and maybe he's just not into sitcoms or something so so what is what happens what are we getting at then what is our i'm not sure what i'm i'm not sure what i'm agitated about. Are we just saying that this isn't a story worth telling? Yeah, I don't think it's that surprising, I guess. I do think maybe it would be harder today for this to happen. I don't know.

I could see it being the other way, too, because baseball was a bigger deal at that point in American society. And it was the dominant sport. And so maybe kids would grow up knowing more about the history. On the other hand, you didn't know what anyone looked like. I mean, unless you were going to the games, you couldn't watch MLB TV. You weren't seeing full-color photographs of people in the newspaper. They weren't doing TV interviews all the time. Like there are probably a lot more famous players than Noodles Han that nobody would have recognized just because in 1900, no one knew what they looked like or, you know, saw like baseball cards or, you know, etchings in newspapers or something.

But that's not the same so i think in some ways like if you're famous now maybe you're you're more visible and people know your likeness a little bit better than they would have at that time but mostly i don't think anything has really changed and if anything like the fact that baseball has receded somewhat from the the popular imagination and all these other sports are popular and all these other forms of entertainment are popular. Like coming up today, even if you live in that city, like unless that guy has been a broadcaster with that team, you know, has had some kind of second life with that franchise other than just working out every day in the park by himself. Yeah. Like if he's been around then you might know but if not

if he just uh retired and went away then i don't think today's young players would know them any more than the 1940s reds knew noodles han okay so hypothetically you get a hundred ball players modern ball players and you say wilbur wood was a major league pitcher tell me one thing about him how many how many people do you think would be able to tell you one thing about Wilbur Wood? One? Zero. Wilbur Wood, you know, won 20 games four years in a row.

You know, had a 1.91 ERA one year. Cy Young finishes third, second, fifth in three consecutive years yeah maybe this is i mean i don't know if you if you think that the noodles haunt the story of the noodles han thing is is about like i don't know is about pathos then i guess there's a lot of it going around and we should be uh constantly sad about the the turnover of ballplayer biographies but i think it's more just the nature of the sport that, you know, like the fact that we watch players age into obsolescence is already the baked in sadness of the game.

And there are lots of ways that that shows up in how we consume baseball stories and baseball careers and all of that. And so I would say that though, the noodles haunting is pretty normal, pretty natural. And so I would say that the noodles haunt thing is pretty normal, pretty natural. Like, I don't know. I guess there are some fields where this doesn't really happen. Like if you, in a way, if you are like, say, a musician who has a bunch of top 10 hits, or is a big star in your era, in a lot of ways that you don't get forgotten. There

are occasionally they're forgotten musicians, but mainly because they didn't manage to hit. They like the stories of musicians who are forgotten tend to be geniuses who were overlooked or didn't get a chance, but music, I guess, builds on previous music. And so you don't, you wouldn't have a situation. don't think where noodles han of of of you know of rock and roll or the noodles han of r&b would get would get forgotten generally speaking 45 years later it's different in sports isn't it yeah i guess so maybe it's not totally different like if you're a player who does something innovative, you can be influential and other people can model themselves on your delivery or your batting stance or something about the way you played the game. like how he wants to go out or is he okay if his show, if his audience just kind of keeps going along and maybe gets smaller and smaller over time?

Like does he have to have some dramatic exit? And he said, this is going to sound grim, but eventually all our graves go unattended. And he continued, I had a great conversation with Albert Brooks once. When I met him for the first time, I was kind of stammering. I said, you make movies. They live on forever. I just do these late night shows. They get lost. They're never seen again. And who cares? And he looked at me and he said, what are you talking about? None of it matters. None of it matters? No, that's the secret. In 1940, people said Clark

Gable is the face of the 20th century. Who thinks about Clark Gable? It doesn't matter. You'll be forgotten. I'll be forgotten. We'll all be forgotten. And then Coney said, it's so funny because you'd think that would depress me. I was walking on air after that. So it could be depressing that Noodles Han wasn't remembered, that we'll all be forgotten. Or it could be liberating because if you screw up, it doesn't matter. No one will remember it after a while. And, you know, what's the use of like feeling any pressure or competing with anyone? Because even if someone else is more famous or more successful in the short term, eventually their grave will go unattended too. And there's something nice about, I mean, you do what you do to be appreciated by the world that you're in and

it's i think better to focus on that part of it than to than to think about doing what you do to be misunderstood by a future world that doesn't have the same context that didn't like isn't living in the same period doesn't have the same the same all the same background going on that informs what you're contributing to the world and so it's like a little bit different with with sports but i almost yeah i almost do feel like it like you would maybe rather have the thing be uh have an expiration date so that like future generations can't continue to mangle it yeah true i mean because because really like if you know if we really did a deep dive into noodles haun it would only take about five minutes before i said something like well baseball was fake back

then he sucked like and that's not fair to him yeah true okay this is a question from Nicholas. Baseball is something of an anomaly because it awards two MVPs each year, while most other sports only award one. The historical reason for awarding the two MVPs made sense since the two leagues never played each other in the regular season. Although that logic has fallen away with the growth of interleague play, it actually makes sense in a way for the covid inspired 2020 season where each region forms a self-contained league would you be in favor of awarding three mvps and cy young's rookie of the years etc this year one each for the east central and west divisions regardless of league yeah definitely in the logic holds up and 100 on board with this it feels really weird to me that i continue to in my head sometimes or in my actual writing sometimes say that somebody led the national league in era this year or that they led the american league in war this year when the national league was not playing national league teams primarily or or american league teams they were not playing a unified group of opponents and it makes perfect sense that yes you have three different universes that were not overlapping this year it makes sense that you would have

basically one mvp per site uh if you think of each region as a as a competitive site now the problem what nicholas is not foreseeing is what a pain this would be for designing your website that listed all the mvps and i think that to some degree you have to give sean foreman an easier job and just pretend that a lot of a lot of the illogic of this year doesn't exist so that his website can still have nice straight lines. Yes, I agree. I don't think it's worth breaking the precedent because, yeah, I don't know if it even really makes sense to continue to have AL and NL differentials when really the separation between those leagues, even in a normal year, are kind of gone. But if we're going to keep doing that, then yeah, we might as well just stick with the tradition because it just

doesn't matter that much. I guess there's someone out there who could win an MVP or a Cy Young if you were giving out three this year, and maybe that would change the way they're perceived or something. But it's 2020, and it's the short regular season and it's two months. And so people are going to discount that accomplishment anyway, especially if you're not someone who would normally be an MVP favorite. So I don't think it's that big a deal, but I agree philosophically that it makes sense. All right. Well, this is sort of along those lines. Brock says,

All right. Well, this is sort of along those lines. Brock says, I was listening to Ben and Meg discuss the DH issue on an episode from last week, and Ben mentioned that he was curious how anti-NL DH people felt having lived the DH lifestyle for a 60-game season. I was thinking about that question and came up with a takeaway and question of my own. The thing I liked about the NL having no DH was always no more than the fact that the leagues were substantively different. It honestly has nothing to do with the pitcher hitting or not. I imagine there are some DH proponents that don't feel the same, but I imagine some would agree that simply having two sets of rules was something they enjoyed about the DH issue. So my question is, what rule could we add or change in the National League that would have a similar impact in exchange for permanently adopting the dh meaning it cannot be a purely superficial rule it has to substantively change the game roughly as much as pitcher hitting but also not dramatically shift how the game is played so no pits in the outfield curious what you all would come up with you say substantively yes okay yeah all right i don't um let's see this is a good we're not

gonna get into that this is a good question i have to i want to i i think i want to i think i have something to say about this question it's a tough it's a tricky one what i might have to say is wow this is this is tough but yeah can i while i think about this can i just do the quick stat blast sure they'll take a data set sorted by something like e r a minus or obs plus and then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to days to past. So this is a silly one. By the way, I've been having a hard time remembering which ones I've done recently.

Have I done the triples versus doubles yet? No. No. Wow. Okay. I've been having a lot of conversations with myself in my head lately. All right. Along those lines, I hope I haven't done this one yet, but there is an MLB rule. It's rule 6.07, and it relates to what happens if batters bat out of order in the lineup, various situations arising, in the words of the rule, arising from batting out of turn. And for this, they give an example, and I've always been kind of like bothered by this example. They give an example of a lineup, and the lineup has nine hitters. And those hitters, the rule book names the hitters. the rule book names the hitters and those hitters are named abel baker charles daniel edward frank george hooker erwin and so abel's leading off erwin is batting ninth and they give examples where

you know abel is called out and baker is the proper batter and so on and so forth now does anything about that list that lineup bother you i'm wondering where they got hooker yeah well it's a name it's a yeah is it john lee it's a last last name okay yeah it is some of those were not less names right thank you that's what bothers me it's always bothered me okay so let's just quickly go through abel first name or last name uh first at least the famous abel okay baker last last charles first either could be either definitely either you got your josh charles your ray charles you got a lot of charles yeah daniel could be either but could be either but mostly first yeah okay edward first

first definitely first this is like basically has never been an edward last name like there's been a lot of edwards but edward first name no frank first for yeah kind of both i would say but yeah more first definitely more first george first well could be could be either. Could be either. Yeah. Eddie George. All right. Hooker. I think Hooker's got to be last. Last. There's just no doubt about that.

And then Irwin. Irwin could be either. Could be either. More last, I think. Yeah, I think so. So I have never been able to figure out what are they, which do they want us to think these are? Because you definitely have instances, I think, where Hooker can almost only be a last name. And so then do they all have to be? You wouldn't switch. You wouldn't switch in the middle from first to last. And yet Edward almost certainly has to be a first name. And so I wondered, has to be a first name and so i wondered where did this lineup come from who who are these players who some some whoever wrote this must have had ball players in mind they must be a student of

the game so i wanted to see whether this lineup makes more sense for first names or last names so i have uh i've gone through baseball history now something that's important to know is that this rule appears to date to 1957 that there i don't know if this specific wording was but according to an article by mark pankin in the uh saber baseball research journal from 2013 rule 6.07 the current Rule 6.07. The current rule 6.07 has been in place since 1957. And I think that kind of makes sense with these names, these names, whether first or last, they have a sort of a 1957 vibe to them. And in fact, I tried to figure out whether Abel Baker Charles is like it whether this sequence of names has like kind of a you know Wilco Tango Foxtrot sort of thing where like these are these are known words for these and it doesn't appear to be the case although I did find an example from that time

period where somebody hadn't had three stoves in like a factory and they named the stoves Abel, Baker, and Charles. I believe something like that. So there was maybe some hint of Abel, Baker, Charles maybe being a thing. Anyway, so I have two lineups here. Where are they in the lineup, Abel and Baker? It's all alphabetical. So Abel leads off, Baker bats second, Charles bats third. Hmm.

Well, yeah, I was thinking maybe it's like the military abbreviations. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Abel and Baker and Charles was in there. That's different from Charlie. Charlie, yeah. George is one of those, but that wouldn't apply to all of them, so I don't know if that helps. Yeah, good question.

All right, so here's the lineups. If we assume that they mean these as first names, we have leading off Abel Lizotte, Lizotte, who was a 1890s major leader, 1890s major leader, the only first name Abel up through the 1960s. I limited this to players who played before, like before 1970, I think. So I gave him a little wiggle room, but Abel de los Santos, more modern player, for instance, is excluded because clearly comes after this. But for the most part, it didn't matter. Like almost, I think that in fact, the example I gave is the only one where it really mattered, where there might've been a slightly better major

leaguer who was more modern. All right. So Abel Lizotte leading off first baseman, brief major leaguer. And then batting second, Baker Moore. In fact, he's an indie leaguer from 1997. That's the only first name Baker who's ever played professional baseball. And so I think that we have to say that, in fact, he doesn't exist. So there is no Baker. So you've got a civilian is going to be batting second all right and then batting third catcher charlie geringer that's a good one he's a hall

of famer uh batting fourth you have third baseman daniel o'connell who is a major leaguer with 20 ish career war batting fifth you have edward eddie collins hall of famer so that he's good batting sixth you have right fielder hall of famer frank robinson he's good batting seventh you have left fielder hall of famer george herman ruth so he's good so this is a pretty good lineup yeah and then hooker never been a hooker never been a first name hooker in basic baseball, majors or minors. So again, we've got a civilian batting eighth. And then Irwin, we have a bunch of choices, but all minor leaguers, no first name Irwin has ever been in the majors. So we're going with, because it's the funniest name, Irwin Uteritz, who was a minor leaguer in the 1920s and played shortstop. Also because he played shortstop and

I needed a shortstop. So, all right. So we we have two civilians we have four hall of famers we have a journeyman we have a minor leaguer and then we have a very brief horrible major league appearance so that's our lineup the other lineup we have john abel was a minor leaguer. He's in the outfield leading off. Home run Baker is our third baseman. Actually, I think we have to put him just for, I think we have to put him at like first base or something, but he's our best player in the last names. Home run Baker batting second.

Ed, the poet, Charles, third baseman from the 1960s, is batting third. And then we have minor leaguer Bill Daniel, who topped out at Class C. We have nobody, last name Edward, so we have civilian batting fifth. Minor leaguer Albert Frank batting sixth. Minor leaguer Don George batting seventh. No major leaguers in any of those. And then we have pitcher Buck Hooker. He's a legit major leaguer and he's

batting eighth. And then a shortstop, Arthur Irwin, also legit major leaguer, a solid career. He's batting ninth. So who wins? The question of who wins here is actually kind of tricky. So if you prorate their career wars over 600 plate appearances, then you basically, you would have 20 combined war for the first namers so you know you're frank robinson and you're eddie collins 20 career war whereas for the last namers you'd only have about 12 career war which is obviously less so the first namers are winning but we have a civilian pitching for the first namers and then we have a civilian batting second and playing center field or or an outfield and outfield position now maybe george herman ruth pitches

that changes things a lot but you have to figure that the war of a civilian is considerably less than zero like it could be up to like 20 ish negative 20 more so i think the two civilians might actually the two to one civilian advantage might actually cancel this out so i don't know the answer here i think i think i i mean hook? Whose first name was ever Hooker? Whose first name before Baker Mayfield was ever Baker? There is one major leaguer with the nickname Hooker, which you may have seen. I don't know if that counts,

but Frank Whitman, who was a shortstop for the White Sox for two years in the 40s and was blocked by Luke App appling at the time okay his nickname was hooker i don't know why but uh if that counts then he's a major leaguer you're right if that counts then this changes everything if if that counts if we're taking baker and hooker as as nicknames i don't know if there's ever been a Baker, but these, these would make a lot. I think these would generally make more sense as first names than his last names, but on the extremes,

they kind of make more sense as last names than first names. So I just don't know. I have not answered this. I don't understand why they did this. I don't understand how this is in the official rule book. And it's sort of amazing to me that it's 60 years and this hypothetical lineup still exists yeah nonsensically i think i'd take the one with babe ruth i'll take my chances it seems better the thing is that i wasn't sure whether he could pitch because he's batting seventh and now if he

were batting fourth or third that would make sense you know or or second or first if they put babe ruth first that would make sense uh you know in the top of the lineup that would make sense, you know, or, or second or first, if they put Babe Ruth first, that would make sense. Uh, you know, in the top of the lineup, that would make sense. And if they put a ninth or eighth, then that would signal, well, they're treating them like a pitcher and that would make sense. But by putting him seventh, it implies that he's not a pitcher. If, if they, if he were a pitcher, he probably would be batting lower unless they were giving him credit for being Babe Ruth, in which case he would be higher. So to me, it suggests that Babe Ruth, George batting seventh

is being treated as an outfielder, as an outfielder who they don't see the value in, but nevertheless is an outfielder. All right. Well, have you thought of an answer to the question about a rule change? The tricky thing about this is that the rule change, you want it to distinguish the leagues, but without funneling a lot of pitchers to one league or a lot of hitters to

the other league, basically. You don't want to have a situation where, I don't think, where the player pools are dramatically different. And so the first rule that I thought of that I think would be fun to have different would be if you had one league where it's normal baseball as we know it, but then the other league you had every inning start at the top of the order, for instance, and then you'd have a lot more dynamic game in that league where you'd have, you know, obviously the stars would bat a lot more often and the innings would have a lot more scoring and rallies, you know, there'd be a threat of, there'd be a real chance of scoring in every inning. And that would be fun. I think that you could have that where you'd have the traditionalist league where you have three, two games, and then

you have the modern league that juices offense, but without actually changing the play, you're not changing the ball or the playing field or how much much gravity there is you're simply creating a scenario where the better players can exert their greatness a little bit more i think that would be pretty popular like i think that to a hypothetical young viewer that can see mike trout or whatever player they're interested in mookie betts or fernando tatis every every 20 minutes guaranteed right if if you knew that that tatis was batting every 20 minutes because you're going to start the lineup over, I think that would be a lot of fun.

And the hypothetical young viewer would probably be interested in that. But the problem is that then every good hitter would want to play in that league and every pitcher would want to play in the other league. So you would quickly have a sort, this great sort, where you would instead, you would end up with one league that was 30 to 26 every day every game and the other league that was one to nothing every game so how do you keep it basically equal while having two different rules and in a

way dh is sort of perfect with this it affects the playing field by about what a quarter of a run per game it gives you the sense that you're watching a more the more offensive league but without it being so different that like no pitch or whatever pitch in the american league or anything like that yeah it does make certain players more likely to go to one league but those are the players who just wouldn't have jobs exactly in the other league so it doesn't affect anything exactly and it's a small part of the player pool. So that was my idea, but I've deemed it unworkable. So I don't know. What do you think? there was some difference and because this set baseball apart from other sports that just you know have conferences and the conferences are the same and we're basically moving toward that model we've already moved toward that model we just call them leagues instead of conferences but that's

basically what they are now and i like the idea that baseball is doing something different that set it apart from other sports like i love that baseball's playing fields are all different and have different dimensions. That, to me, is something that really sets it apart from hockey, from football, from basketball. But I also think that's a good thing. It's just a thing that enhances the entertainment value. It makes the game more interesting, more analytically complex. And I don't really think there are any negative effects. I guess you could say it's not fair.

You know, some players get stuck in parks that are not good fits for their skills. So that's unfortunate for them. But from a spectator standpoint, I think on the whole, it's great that we have those quirks. from a spectator standpoint, I think on the whole, it's great that we have those quirks. But I don't know that that is true for a division between leagues, between half of the teams and another half of the teams, particularly now that they're playing each other, not just in the World Series and the All-Star Game, but throughout the season. How do you do that without having it be destabilizing or giving one team an advantage? It's hard to come up with any rule that is significant, that really makes a difference, but doesn't give either side an advantage.

It's really hard to come up with something like that. And I don't know that we need it. I mean, maybe the different leagues construct is just an old-fashioned thing that i don't know that we need it i mean maybe the different leagues construct is just an old-fashioned thing that we don't need anymore you know there have been a lot of things about baseball that have been discarded over time and it's been to the benefit of the game or at least not to the detriment and this just may be one of those things like if the leagues had not been different historically would we be saying we need to arbitrarily divide half the teams from the other and have them play a different brand of the game in some way i don't think so if you have the exact same rules then then you don't but i

personally as a personal matter of taste i do like the leagues being a little different and in order to do that you do need to have something that differentiates them because it otherwise does feel completely artificial to act like these leagues are different, that we need to have an AL home run record or that we need to have even the World Series be between two arbitrarily divided leagues if they're played exactly the same. And so I think I agree with the premise here, but that is definitely a matter of taste. If you don't feel the need to have that then i agree with you i do think it adds something i think i don't know why it adds something but feels it

feels it gives i don't know it creates a little bit of a sense that that there is an other that there is something like sort of that you can choose that you can sort of i don't know that there are two different worlds and when you're in one, you feel that kind of dis-ease that you're a tourist, sort of. And I think that that, to me, is a net positive. I don't think that if there had been only one league all this time, then I agree that I probably would not, you know, come up with it in my own head. Well, why don't we split it in my own head. Well,

why don't we split it in two and make one of them different? Right. That probably is not an idea that would come to me if we didn't already have the two leagues. So maybe that's evidence that I'm just trying to hold on to an old antiquated notion. But I think I do like it. And of course, I have always lived in a world where the American League and the National League were essentially the same industry. If you are an old timer, then the American League and the National League were different businesses. They were different, like they didn't necessarily talk to each other in the same- Different presidents, different leadership structures. Yeah, yeah. And really sometimes a lot you know some rivalry and

some really um different some in some cases really different levels of play and some um some bad blood between them and it made a little bit of sense but for me in my life it's always only been i mean not technically because i like they had different umpires until the late 90s and stuff like that but uh for the most part it's always only been that one league had the DH and the other league didn't have the DH. And so in order to maintain the two league construct at all, you need to have a different rule. That's the only thing that ever differentiated them for me.

And so unless I'm willing to just put them all into 130 team league, which maybe I am, but unless I'm willing to do that, of people. I mean, a greater percentage of people would prefer one version or the other, unless you somehow perfectly calibrated it so that 50% of baseball fans like it this way and 50% like it that way, and this is great because they each can watch the game the way they prefer, then there's probably one way that's more entertaining. And then you're depriving people of the more entertaining version of the sport. And are you making up for that with the fact that you get some difference and maybe there's some entertainment that comes from there just being a difference? I don't know if you are.

That's kind of how I felt about the DH and pitcher hitting. I just thought this is not fun for me to watch pitchers hit anymore. They are so terrible at it that I don't want to see this. And so if you're making me watch pitchers hit in half the games, then that is to some extent adversely affecting my enjoyment of baseball. felt different, of course, and whether it was just because of tradition or because they legitimately thought that and continue to think that, probably a bit of both. But if you thought like, well, there's a little more strategy in certain ways if you have this, so it's worth having pitchers hit poorly or every now and then a pitcher does something good offensively, and so that makes up for all the times that they don't do something good. I didn't really feel that way. But, you know, for me, I would have just said, no, it's better to just have real hitters hitting all the time. That's more entertaining. But obviously there was a schism there. What if, and I don't know if this qualifies as a rule change, but I guess it

would be in the rule book. What if there was a dead ball league and a lively ball league? You know, not to the extent of like one league is the current baseball and one league is 1910 or something, but two degrees. And there's historical precedent for this because in the past, the leagues did use different balls. And sometimes there was a dead ball league in a comparative sense. Sometimes there was a dead ball league in a comparative sense. So what if you just had slightly different ball specifications so that one league was lower scoring or fewer home runs and maybe more contact oriented, whatever would come out of that. And the other league was lots of homers and scoring. And so if you like more scoring and more homers and seeing the ball get hit a long way then you have your league for that and if you don't if you prefer a different brand of baseball

then you have the dead ball league yeah and i guess the analogy to tennis where some players are are like unbeatable on clay but very beatable in grass shows that even if it really seriously advantages you or disadvantages you in one of the other that it doesn't make the sport like it doesn't disqualify the sport tennis players are perfectly yeah happy living under these sort of separate surfaces despite the fact that they greatly advantage or disadvantage them in different scenarios two questions here well i guess maybe a comment and a question. I feel like at this point, Major League Baseball and maybe traditionalism generally doesn't want to acknowledge that the ball is the story,

that the ball is, you know, as your pal Zach Cram wrote, an unreliable narrator, that a lot of what we chalk up to as baseball is actually just like, well, maybe they got a good ball in that specific batch. They don't want us looking too closely at that. And so denying, rather than like codifying the difference in baseballs, I think that maybe they would prefer to deny the difference in baseballs.

So I don't know that it would be something that the league would want. But would you, in this scenario, are you imagining that both leagues would have similar run scoring, but in different ways? Or are you imagining that you'd have a five run per game league and an eight run per game league? I think you'd have to have some difference in scoring if you had any real significant difference in the ball, probably. So I think there would be some sorting like we were talking about in your scenario where some players would gravitate toward one league, but it wouldn't be that dramatic. It wouldn't be like, I mean, I guess like maybe all the hitters would want to

go to the higher scoring, livelier ball league, but probably not because like there are only so many jobs to go around league you were in so maybe you'd just have more fun if you were hitting more home runs and scoring more but it wouldn't be as great an incentive to like stay away from one league but there might be certain players who you know like they just have a an uppercut swing or whatever and they're just very fly ball oriented and so they would want to go to one league and then the other league would be whatever i mean there would be certain skill sets that were slightly more conducive to success in one league or another and that might be kind of interesting like analytically just trying to figure out like is this guy a dead ball league player or a lively

ball league player like how much better would this guy be if you were in the other league so that'd be kind of a fun problem to figure out and you'd still have both and it might be even valuable just from like a testing you know kind of sandbox style like all right which version of baseball do people prefer like if it becomes clear that people like one way to play baseball much better then that could be the standard way and then maybe we could finally figure out like, how do we set the ball? Like what is the ideal version of baseball? Because MLB never really seems to figure that out, or at least never really seems to do anything about it. They never really seemed to figure out like, what should baseball look like? Okay, let's change the

rules so that it looks like that, or they don't do it in a very active way. So this might be a way to demonstrate like, all right, well, look, suddenly ratings are up in this league and down in the other league. So it turns out that yes, people really do like seeing tons of home runs or maybe not. Maybe they like seeing contact and pitcher's duels. So you'd get both. It's like, you know, MLB is always fluctuating from era to era, from one way to another. And in this case, you'd have like multiple eras operating alongside each other. It would be kind of fun. I'm going to end with one very simple suggestion that I think could draw a contrast between the leagues. And it is simply this. One league has the current

baseline rules where you may deviate three feet in either direction and the other has say six feet in either direction and so it becomes a much more of a much more of a tag league okay no but not but not so extreme that like i mean you know as as you know i think as i think i think i know this but i'm pro no baselines at all right yeah uh with with some various other changes but, but it wouldn't be that extreme. But yes, you have six feet instead of three feet. And you could still do interleague play, and it's not like, you know, you wouldn't be able to play. And that's another thing, I think, with the multi-ball scenario.

It's not like these two teams would play each other and, you know, they would be unable to, or there would be a huge imbalance or mismatch in any given game like you know maybe you'd have your roster constructed to be like a lively ball winning team but like you could still win a dead ball game pretty easily so it wouldn't be like you know upsetting the competitive balance terribly probably i guess yeah all right that'll do it for today sam says he'll keep thinking about possible rules changes. So maybe we'll return to that topic. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Sean Price, Kofax Kroptkin, Chris Wicke, Karina Longworth, and Michael Cohen. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastoffangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks 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'm leaving. Leaving. I'm going back down the line. Down the line. Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. line daughter line oh yeah what you say goodbye

what you say goodbye