Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1684: Let’s Premember Some Guys

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Bryce Harper’s hot streak, the players at the top of the WAR leaderboard, the exploits of Byron Buxton and Nelson Cruz, the suddenly unbeatable Oakland A’s, Ben’s new favorite stat to track (Nick Madrigal’s K%+), pitcher hitting performance reaching a new nadir, and more. Then they debut a […]

One day all the rules will fail And you and I will meet again I've got a feeling I've got a feeling so strong Maybe someday Feeling so strong, maybe someday our clothes will crawl. Hello and welcome to episode 1684 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing pretty well. You know how I started last Friday's episode by saying that we hadn't talked about Bryce Harper for a while? Yes. Well, since that day,

as we record here on Thursday afternoon, you know who has led the major leagues in war over that span? Is it Bryce Harper? It is, in fact, Bryce Harper. It would be weird if it were someone else, then the lead into your story wouldn't make any sense at all. Yes, you cleverly figured out my ruse there. He's played in five games, 22 played appearances since we disparaged him. We didn't actually disparage him. We just noted that we had slash line that's a 370 wrc plus he's been worth eight tenths of a win above replacement so i think i made him mad yeah or at least he's trying very hard to like get the phillies on the right path so that talking about him will be easy come october gosh yeah that's impressive have you have you taken a peek at the war leaderboard at FanGraphs lately? I have actually. Can we talk about this for a second?

Because there are some names on here that I think are obvious and some names that we maybe have expected to see at various points, but are seeing anew in a way that is delightful. And so we'll just talk about the hitters for a moment. So at the top tied for 1.6 wins is uh ronald lacuna jr and mike trout so that's that's not surprising but is still uh delightful in third place with 1.3 wins vladimir guerrero jr how about that you know i am very excited to uh look around at the in the middle of the season and be like wow we, we really got to talk about Vladdy because 226 WRC plus, he's hitting for power, he's hitting for average. The defense is still what it is, but I think that he's looked athletic and sort of high

that first base. And when folks look at our defensive war, first of all, don't look at defensive metrics this early in the season. That way lies madness. But you just remember that there's a positional adjustment that goes into these so that's part of what's going on here with vlad and walking 18 of the time this is like yeah yeah we we all waited we all waited for vlad uh to be vlad uh to be the messianic bet that was foretold and here he is doing that so that's good uh and then we have a bunch of guys

tied at uh 1.1 wins some of whom are notable for having had bad years the year before so jd martinez appearing to be his old self so that's good now that he has his in-game video review back he's back to slugging again i guess we all you know we all have our things we all draw comfort and uh predictability and routine from where we do. And he's making some adjustments. And then we have Justin Turner. Fine. And then there's Jazz Chisholm.

Yeah, that's right. Your fave. Yes. I feel increasingly good about my Marlins pick for most fun team. Yeah, you should. Sure. It is being driven by just a couple of folks. There is a heavy burden being placed on Jazz and Rogers, I guess.

But yeah. And then Harper, which is why I thought to do this. And then Joey Wendell. Old Joey Wendell and Xander Bogarts and Chris Bryant all sitting around one win apiece. And, you know, the differences between, say, 10th place and 20th place, vanishingly small right now. Right. Basically tied. But, you know, we have to put a number in front of them.

So here we are. Yeah. By the way, Vlad's sprint speed has improved by almost a foot and a half per second since last season. He's gone from the 17th percentile to the 49th percentile. Basically an average runner all of a sudden. Anyway, we'll have to come up with someone else we haven't talked about in a while who we can talk about not having talked about and thereby give them a boost put the chip on their shoulder that they can use to motivate themselves give them the lindbergh bump that harper has enjoyed over the past week yeah i think that oh gosh how will

we use your power for good and not for evil maybe if i go a week without talking about Shohei Otani, if I could make it that long, and then I could say, you know who we haven't talked about for a while? Shohei Otani. And then he'll go off for a week. You know, Shohei Otani is currently boasting a 190 WRC plus and a 310 average and a 690 slugging percentage. So I think you're maybe talking about him the right amount. One thing I do appreciate about shohei just as like a profile that i often find amusing and kind of engaging as as uh as long as it's um followed with great success which shohei's has been so far walking a mere 3.2 percent of the time striking out almost 30 percent yeah i saw j Jeremy Frank tweet the other day that Shohei Otani's OPS, which was 1.052, is currently higher than his ERA, 1.038, which was wonderful. And I only look at Shohei Otani's ERA. I do not look at any of his other pitching peripherals because we care about results here. Don't give me any of this expected, estimated mumbo jumbo, these sabermetric nerds telling me what his ERA should be. The guy has not allowed a lot of runs. And last time I checked,

that's what counts. Ultimately, he's keeping runs off the board. He's pitching to the score. All of these things that I have always believed and subscribed to, he is doing them. So that's the only deep dive that I want to do on his pitching stats currently. I think that that's fair. You get to enjoy things. There are times when we get to take off. When you're riding your bike, you have to wear a helmet, but sometimes you loosen it up a little bit and you're like, oh, it's riding free and easy. You know who we should talk about just generally as a team, but also specifically in terms of their contributors? Ben, have you spent any time watching these Oakland A's?

Yeah, 11 straight wins. 11 straight wins. And Mark Hanna, 157 WRC+, almost worth a whole win on his own. Five, how many home runs? Three home runs. I looked at the wrong column, but still, Mark Hanna, 15th right now. Yeah. I saw someone tweet a stat that the A's

are the first team in MLB history to start a season 0-6 and then win 11 straight at any point later that season, which is probably a less impressive stat than it sounds like there aren't that many teams that start 0-6, and then how many teams win 11 straight? Not a ton. So when you combine those two things, well, it's not really that shocking that no team has done that before. But still, when they started 0-6, I don't want to say people wrote them off, but they had come into the year with playoff odds of, I think, 1-3 because they lost a lot of players to free agency and they filled them with sort of generic replacements. And it didn't seem like they projected to win the division again,

but here they are winning every day while the Astros lose every day. And suddenly the A's, it's a pretty anonymous roster as it so often is, but as they so often do, they win anyway. Well, and I can just hear the Oakland fans who listened to the podcast screaming through my headset going, Meg, why are you not bringing up Jed Lowry? And so I will bring up Jed Lowry, who has a 165 WRC+. He's slashing 323, 400, 516. I'm so happy for him. Me too. Wasn't there a report that the Mets

forbade him to have a surgery, and so he did not have the knee surgery that he needed? So this is ultimately a low Mets story, as so many are, but that maybe was why he never really took the field for the Metz. And now he's back in his A's uniform and he looks like the Jed Lowell Reavold. Which is interesting. I mean, for the record, I like Lowell Metz stories better when they don't have like a human sacrifice on the other end of them.

But they so often do, unfortunately. They almost always do. I'm actually struggling to think of a time when they didn't. I mean, we got mad at Mr. Met when he flipped off fans, but I don't think anyone really held it against him for all that long. It seemed to fit the vibe, actually. One of the funny things about Lowry, though,

is that wasn't he one of the guys who realized that he had sleep apnea and just hadn't had a good night's sleep for like 10 years of his life? Oh, I see. That's one of my favorite like player transformation tropes when people realize oh i should sleep that would be good for me yes people should sleep ben it is good for them it only applies to professional athletes not to writers and podcasters uh-huh i'm pretty sure that eno wrote a piece at some point um i can't remember if it was while he was still at Fangrafter when he had moved over to the athletic, but I'm pretty sure that Eno reported on this and that Lowry had been like, yeah, I feel really sluggish. And then they were like, oh, you have sleep apnea. You can fix that. And then he went on and had that incredible season where we were all like, oh, we should be paying more attention to Jed Lowry. The Dominic Smith story.

Exactly. Yeah. Josh Smith story. Exactly, yeah. Josh James story, right? Yes, it is a common, it seems to be a disturbingly common thing. So basically, let athletes get the treatment they need when they need it. It makes them better at their jobs and probably happier as people. Hey, I wanted to talk about one other guy at the top of the leaderboard, and I don't want to leaderboard-splain to the managing editor of Fangraphs here, but you were looking, it sounds like, at the default view with qualifying players, players who have qualified for the banning title. And if you uncheck that and you look at players who have not qualified, you end up with a trio at the top of that leaderboard.

It is not just Mike Trout and Ronald Acuna, whom we have discussed this season. Oh, look at that. It is also, yeah. Look at old Byron Buxton. Byron Buxton. Well, well, well. If it isn't Byron Buxton. Unfortunately, you pretty much always have to uncheck the qualified playing time minimum to find Byron Buxton.

But this season, he has played 12 games at at least which is close to qualifying as we speak here on Thursday and like Trout and Acuna he has 1.6 war and I just looked this up so if you look from 2019 to 2021 so two plus seasons do you know who has the highest war per plate appearance over that span of anyone who has at least 450 plate appearances that's where i set the cutoff i i again i'm going to assume it's byron buxton because otherwise it's real weird lead into this i faked you out it's mike trout but number two is byron buxton so wasted by my own petard well the most predictable name is at the top. But after that, it's Byron Buxton. Right between Trout and Anthony Rendon is Byron Buxton, the second most productive player per plate appearance over that span. But of course, not many plate appearances, 478 plate appearances

in 138 games. So obviously he has had this talent and we've all been on Byron Buxton watch every year, hoping that the breakout is coming. And it has come in limited samples. So we're hoping for a more extended sample. And 12 games is not that clearly. But in the 12 games that he has played this year, he has shown off why we continue to talk about him and be excited by him. And so it's really just a matter of staying on the field as we say every single season about Byron Buxton but so far this year he has so crossing our fingers that that continues six home runs from Byron Buxton

six whole home runs well good for him he's a power hitter now this was the same thing last year. He had a 323 isolated power last season and a 1.5% walk rate. So he just never walked and swung at everything and hit lots of dingers. And this year still, if you look at like the percentile slider things at the top of his baseball savant page that show you where he ranks so average exit velocity 99th percentile max exit velocity 95th percentile hard hit rate 100th percentile expected weighted on base 100th percentile expected batting average and slug 100th barrel rate 100th and then chase rate fourth fourth percentile and that is not like good Like he has a really low chase rate. No, I mean, he has a high chase rate. and 34th percentile in whiff rate. So he swings at everything and doesn't make a ton of contact, but he hits everything really hard when he hits it. And his sprint speed is 96th percentile too. So defensive stud, base running expert, slugger, and just misses a lot of bats. But the bigger problem is that he misses a lot of games. So let's hope he doesn't this year.

If you were a twins fan you would be kind of bummed out to to look at the particular view of our leaderboard that i'm looking at right now because i dropped the minimum played appearances down to 10 and then sorted this leaderboard by wrc plus and again it i did it by 10 which is why you have chris owings in the top spot with a 324 wrc plus across his 17 plate appearances. And then you have Buxton with 48 plate appearances and a.301 WRC plus. And then right behind him with a mere 20 plate appearances and a.292 WRC plus, Josh Donaldson. So get healthy, you guys, because I think that you have a pretty good baseball team,

despite your record. Yeah, it has not been pretty so far. But you know who is tied with Buxton and Trout and a few other guys for the most home runs in the American League? It's another Minnesota twin, Nelson Cruz, who also has six dingers and a 210 WRC+. I don't think he is done yet. I don't think he has gotten old. I mean, he physically has gotten old, but performance-wise, looks like the same old Nelly. So at least so far, this does not appear to be the year when he craters. Yeah, and it's the sort of thing where there aren't a lot of things

that I think will be sad to be right about, quite like when Cruz finally does dip the way that we all know he will. Often, we like being right in general, but I'm glad to always be wrong about Cruz because every year when we do positional power rankings or the last couple of years when he has been on the top 50 free agent post, there's the obligatory, eventually, if all their time, we'll catch up with Nelson Cruz and he'll stop being a productive hitter and then we all get very nervous and we're like oh is this the year and then we're

always wrong and we're so delighted to be wrong and we are very rarely so happy to just really whiff on a thing and we know in the long term we'll be right we're like temporarily wrong but it's nice that the temporary has stretched so far because he's just a real delight to watch and seems like a good egg. So keep on doing your thing. I did really like it last year when he briefly had like a bad bit in like the 400s because he was, you know, he's Nelson Cruz. So he doesn't run so good, but it has come back down to something reasonable. And I guess it had it by the end of last year's a short season too but yeah have you i have a weird i have a weird confession to make so you know we've added wonderful new stats to the site and uh i am still training my eye to be used to what

is in which column because you get used to a view you know you get used to looking at a thing every day for a decade and it being mostly the same and then you throw like xera into the mix and you're like i don't know what this is sorry that's not relevant to nelson cruz he doesn't have an era um x or otherwise but that's the column i don't look at when i go to show hey otani's pitching pitch yeah don't worry about that just don't worry about it yet it's gonna be it's gonna be well i don't look at when I go to Shohei Otani's pitching pitch. Yeah, don't worry about that. Just don't worry about it yet. It's going to be, well, I don't know if it'll be fine, but it probably will be. It could be fine. So don't worry about it.

I won't. Yeah, anyway. So Nelson Cruz, look at those twins. Yeah, I recently lobbied David Appelman to add seasonal age as a column to the Fangraphs player pages. So that's been a good addition. Everyone knows what that one means. Can I tell you a stat that I have been keeping an eye on and anticipate keeping an eye on

closely throughout the season, staying in the AL Central? The stat, the pick to click here for me is Nick Madrigal's K percentage plus, which is not a commonly cited stat, but basically it tells you your strikeout rate relative to the league. It is like WRC plus or OPS plus. It's a hundred is average. And in this case, lower is better. Well, maybe not better, but less strikeout prone and higher is more strikeout prone. And Nick Madrigal's K percentage plus currently is 14. So, you know, 14% of the league strikeout rate. His K rate is 3.3%. He has struck out in two of his 60 plate appearances thus far. The league wide rate

is 24.5. So the league is striking out, you know, seven plus times more often than Nick Magical. And so he has this 14K percentage plus, and I will be fascinated to see if it stays in that range because I was just looking up the lowest K percentage pluses. But the strikeout rate league wide has risen so rapidly lately that it distorts things. So like the last time anyone had a strikeout rate under 5% of their plate appearances in a 500 plate appearance season was 2008 when Jeff Kepinger had a 4.8% strikeout rate. But 4.8% was different even in 2008 than it is now because the league-wide strikeout rate has risen in every season since then. So if you look at Madrigal's 14, I was just trying to find any comps for that. And I looked on the Fangraphs leaderboard for anyone who's had a 500 plate appearance season since World War II, and there's only one player who has been in that range of 14. And it just so happens to have been another diminutive White Sox second baseman, the Hall of Famer Nellie Fox, which I think is a wonderful little confluence there.

So Nellie Fox in 1958 had a 13K percentage plus. In 1961 and 1962, he had 14s. And that's it. No one else has been that low in a qualifying season over that extremely long span. So if Madrigal could do it, then he would be doing something that no one else has even come close to doing for decades and decades. And therefore, I will be on Foxwatch for the rest of the season. Can Nick Madrigal match or better Nellie Fox, who was nicknamed Little Nell and Mighty Might? And a listener, John, wrote in recently to point out that Nick Madrigal's got a pretty

good nickname game. Friend of the show, Jason Benetti, calls him Nicky Two Strikes because he hits well with two strikes. Some of the White Sox call him Mr. 3000 because he expressed some confidence about being able to reach 3000 hits. And Lucas Giolito has dubbed him Merlin because he waves his bat like a wizard's wand. So we probably don't need to call him the new Nelly

or Mighty Mike too. But it's impressive that he has so many good nicknames in an era that seems starved for nicknames, especially because he is not gonna to wow you tools wise. Like he is not Byron Buxton. He is not going to, you know, score on batted balls that he has no business scoring on and rob home runs and then hit super long home runs. He is just going to make a ton of contact and get some base hits. And he has a 106 WRC plus right now. But if he stays in the lineup every day and, you day and he's been batting ninth,

then maybe he'll move up at some point. But the contact has been as advertised. He's striking out even less than he did in his rookie debut last year. So I'm just fascinated to see if he could stay in this range. Yeah. It's just such an unusual profile these days which is the sort of thing that if you were to say to a baseball fan from like 1970 they'd be like what in the world are you talking about we have so many of these guys right but yeah it's he's a he's an interesting one he has been he looks a little less he looks a little less skinny to me than he did last year and i wonder if he is a touch heavier and that might be why his babbitt is solo i mean like relative to what you would expect from

him given both his size and his his contact profile but yeah magical hmm i keep i keep looking for the perfect magical joke like about magical singers maybe jesse could help with this yeah or breaking bad had the Madrigal Company in it. Yeah, that seems- We can workshop that. Yeah, we're going to have to work on it. Yeah, he's the opposite of Buxton. If you go to his baseball savant page, he is 18th percentile in average exit velocity, fourth percentile in hard hit rate,

30th percentile in ex-WOBA, et cetera. so he does not hit the ball hard but then 99th percentile in strikeout rate 100th percentile in whiff rate etc etc so it's really the opposite profile and frankly you'd probably rather have the pyron buxton profile if health would come with it but i've been encouraged that magical has not at all been overmatched like he hasn't been incredible or anything but he's been a solidly above average hitter who can handle the position defensively and that's kind of like the middle of the outcome range that was forecasted for him where i think pakoda like gave him some slim shot like it was like his 99th percentile projection was like he hits 400 or something

and then there were also outcomes where people thought, well, he's too small and he'll get the bat knocked out of his hands and it just won't translate to the majors. But he's been sort of in the middle of there where he's been a pretty good, playable, average-ish big leaguer, maybe a little bit better than that. I hope that he has a higher ceiling than that. But even if he's just what he is, and he is a totally anachronistic contact hitter, that would be wonderful too. That would help with MLB's biodiversity problem that we talk about all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And can I tell you another stat that is on the opposite extreme of strikeout rate? So do you know what pitchers have hit thus far this season? I don't know why you

would, but pitchers. Badly? Worse than bad? You nailed it. Yeah. They have hit very, very poorly this season. They have hit 104. That's their batting average. And 131 on base, 130 slugging percentage That is a negative 28 WRC+, which is Bad even for pitchers Even by pitcher standards The previous low for pitcher Offense was negative 24 In 2018 So they are plumbing new depths here

And they have struck out in 46.7% Of their plate appearances Thus far Which is so about three percentage points higher than their previous high in 2019, which was of course the last season when pitchers hit. And it is probably not a coincidence that they are even worse after taking a season off. I was kind of curious, like what impact would that have? Because you figure, you know, pitchers probably went a whole year without batting practice of any kind, I would imagine. Like the universal DH was in effect last season. The odds certainly seem to be in favor of it staying in effect. And it probably will beyond this year. But this year we still have pitchers hitting in theory, but we do not have pitchers hitting in actuality. They are whiffing and producing very little in the way of positive outcomes. So that'll be a season-long story that I will

be monitoring too, just in case anyone was still on the fence about the universal DH. And I know many people are on the other side there, but after seeing a whole season of pitchers having sat out 2020 as hitters, I don't know. Maybe that will change some minds. Maybe the utter futility on display this season will actually persuade some people that this should be the end. I sometimes wonder if the DH issue is a little bit like, you know, there's this like phenomenon in modern American politics where voters are kind of adopting the role of pundits in the way that they talk about politics and sometimes in the way that they respond to pollsters where they are sort of parroting a more partisan stance than they actually have because that's how they see political discourse playing out more broadly.

And I sometimes wonder if the DH issue like falls a little bit like that. And I don't mean to pick on the pro pitcher hitting contingent when I say this and that comparison is probably one that people don't find especially flattering so I apologize in advance for that but I do wonder if you know like I think that pitchers hitting is goofy and I wish that they wouldn't because they don't actually when they're asked to and it's bad and it slows down the game and it's more fun when you have guys who can actually hit up there trying to do it yi yeti yeti so that that's sort of my stance on it but i can appreciate that someone might want to maintain sort of the quirky differences that exist within baseball and in much the same way that they wouldn't want the layout to every ballpark

to be exactly the same they don't want the dh to be universal uh because they like having this split between the al and the NL. And so I get all of that. But I wonder if like, you know, we gave them truth to them. And we're like, but like the actual act of them hitting, do you actually like like that part of it? I wonder what the answer would be. And the answer might well be yes,

in much the same way that I think that there were people who were earnestly opposed to sort of unraveling the intentional walk being something that you have to do with fourth pitches actually being thrown because they like the possibility that one gets away and something goofy happens. But I do suspect that some of this is like, well, I've come this far and I'm already this entrenched. Right. So I'm going to hang on. And to be clear, that may well be us with the robo zone. We should look inward and acknowledge the possibility that the time will come when we will be holding on to a bit of silliness.

But I do wonder if it's like, do you actually like this? Or do you just want to prove a point? Which, you know, like there's no harm in wanting to prove a point, but it's a little bit different than thinking it's actually good. Yeah. It's so polarizing and we're all so deeply entrenched on one side of the issue. And even I, as a staunch DH supporter, like even though I will advocate for the universal DH and profess my disdain for pitcher hitting, it's not like I'm avoiding National League games or I dislike baseball because pitchers continue to hit. I will watch and yeah, I find it to be a bit of a

bummer. I forget what game I was watching the other day, but whatever team it was, was rallying. And it's like, all right, we've got some action and two out rally and let's see what they can string together here. Can they keep this going? And then the pitcher was up and it's like, oh, all right, well, it's over. Inning over pretty much. And it was. And there are people who will profess, I think sincerely, like they will make good faith arguments that, well, there are multiple good arguments that one can make in favor of pitcher hitting. None of them persuasive to me, but good arguments nonetheless. The one that I'm thinking of currently is that the worse pitchers hit, the better it is when the rare exception occurs and they actually do do something useful at the plate. And I know people believe that and they've cite the Bartol Cologne Dinger and maybe, you know, a couple pitchers who hit at a slightly above abysmal level, you know,

like the, the Grankies and the bum garners even though compared to actual hitters they are still quite poor as hitters but there has to be a limit to that right like i guess you could say well the worst pitchers hit then the more fun it is when one of them actually does do something good at the plate but like the ratio of, you know, useless plate appearances to good ones, like it's just getting more and more skewed towards plate appearances where they're like not even swinging or just don't even look like they should have swung. And at some point it just swings so far in that direction that the rare exception just doesn't really make up for all of the rally killers and the inning enders. Yeah. I can just hear someone saying like, you like pitch framing and you're a Mariners fan.

What do you possibly have to say about you, Tony? Well, we contain multitudes. So we have a topic or two that we wanted to get to, but should we debut our new segment here? Yeah, let's do it. All right. We've got a new segment and a new song, and I'm sort of excited about this. So we were talking last week about how there are so many major leaguers these days. Teams are constantly shuffling the backs of their bullpens. Players are coming and going from AAA.

In 2010, there were only 203 major league debuts. In 2019, there were 261. Now you don't have expanded September rosters, but you do have 26-man rosters all season long. So I was saying that in the future, remember some guys might be difficult because we're not going to remember the eighth man in the bullpen. We might not even know that that major leaguer exists currently. And I think you said that that was sort of a sad thought. And I agree that it is. And so we want to do something about that here. And so we are debuting a new segment that is called Meet a Major Leaguer. So there are many fine major leaguers out there that you have never heard of, that I have never heard of, that most of our audience has never

heard of, or if we've heard of them, we know nothing about them. And we wanted to just play a small part in rectifying that and just providing a brief snapshot, just a summary of, hey, here's a major leaguer who recently arrived. So it's going to be a new debut. Like this season, there have already been 49 new major leaguers as we speak here on Thursday. And typically there have been about 250 per season in recent years. And how many of those guys do we actually know? Are we aware of? Could we say anything about? Very few, very few of them are future stars or top prospects, and yet they are major leaguers. They have reached the pinnacle of their profession. And so we wanted to just take a couple minutes. This will be sort of like a stat blast style recurring segment, maybe once a week or so, or whenever we're moved to do it, where we just say, hey, good job. You are a major leaguer. You

have fulfilled your lifelong dream. And even if you don't last or excel at that level, here are your two minutes of Effectively Wild fame. So that's how it's going to work. And we have a little podcast ditty here, which was composed and performed by my lovely and talented wife, Jessie Barber, who also composed and performed the Stat Blast song. In this case, she had some instrumental assistance from her brother, Danny Barber. So here it is, the world premiere of the Meet a Major Leaguer song. Meet a Major Leaguer. I am very eager to meet this nascent Major Leaguer.

It's the thrilling debut of somebody new. Let's meet this mysterious major leaguer. All right, that is Meet a Major Leaguer, which has been stuck in my head for days. Thanks as always to Jessie for lending me her musical brilliance. And this is, you know, if you go to the Baseball Reference homepage, they tell you the all-time count of major leaguers, right, which currently is set at 19,951. And some people have been counting down, no, counting up, I suppose, to 20,000. Of course, that does not include the Negro leaguers who are now recognized by MLB as major leaguers. And so you should probably add 3,000 something to that count. And hopefully baseball reference will at some point. But point is there have been a bunch of big leaguers and we don't know most of them. So we have each brought a major leaguer to meet. And my major

leaguer to meet today is another Miami Marlin. So you were saying that there are only a couple exciting Marlins so far this season. Well, here's one. I don't know if he's been exciting, but his name is Zach Pop. Zach Pop, who is a right-handed reliever for the Miami Marlins, 6'4", 220, 24 years old. Caught my eye mostly because of his name, which I think is a great name, great baseball name. Zach Pop, a lot of fun to say. Do you think that's a better name for a hitter or a pitcher? Because you were a hitter you could say he has a lot of pop but if he's a pitcher you can say well he he makes the mitt pop so it works either way i i think it might actually be a better hitter name but it is it is so objectively good that it is um it has it has two-way appeal

yeah i think that's true yeah i had a hard time not taking Padres rookie Tukapita Marcano. I know. Which is just like, that's an all-time baseball name. Yeah, fantastic. But Zach Popp is pretty good. And here's what I know about Zach Popp, whom I knew nothing about an hour or two ago. So he is the 256th major leaguer from Canada, but the first from Brampton, Ontario. So Zach Popp, the pride of Brampton.

Did you know that Brampton is the ninth most populous city in Canada? I am half Canadian, and I did not know that. It is right behind Vancouver. It's a suburb of Toronto nicknamed the Flower City, formerly Flower Town, which makes me think of Flavortown, which makes me think the mayor must be Guy Fieri. But no, the mayor of Brampton is Patrick Brown. Anyway, it was once a center of the greenhouse industry, a greenhouse hotbed, if you will.

So that is Brampton. But this is meet a major leaguer, not meet a town in Ontario. But I bet there are more people in Brampton than there have been major leaguers. Yeah, there are a lot of people in Brampton it turns out. There you go. Zach Popp was selected by the Dodgers in the seventh round of the 2017 draft. He was signed by the scout Marty Lamb

who also signed Walker Bueller and Will Smith, the catcher, so has an eye for talent clearly. The Dodgers traded Popp to the Orioles at the 2018 trade deadline in the Manny Machado deal. But then he missed the end of 2019 and all of 2020 after Tommy John surgery, which is one reason why you may not have heard of Zach Pop. So the Diamondbacks took him in the Rule 5 draft and immediately traded him to the Marlins for a player to be named later. And so he's a Rule 5 guy.

There are a lot of rule five guys in the majors this season, several of whom are post Tommy John guys. He's not even the only one in the Marlins pen. There is another major leaguer we have not yet met named Paul Campbell, who also is in that boat and debuted this year. And Zach Popp was actually drafted by the Blue Jays out of high school in the 23rd round in 2014. So he passed up a chance to play for his hometown team, his favorite team, the Blue Jays, or at least his previous favorite team. I assume the Marlins are climbing that list, but he passed up the Blue Jays to attend the University of Kentucky where he majored in finance and also played golf and volleyball and hockey.

And I looked at his social media presence. There isn't much of one. He is on Twitter, but he does not tweet very often. However, he has tweeted once this month and he tweeted on April 4th, April 3rd, 2021 is a date that I'll remember for the rest of my life. No words can express how it feels to step out on the mound and live out the dreams you had as a kid. Thank you to everyone who supported me, and thank you, God, for the gifts you have given me. And Marlin's setup man, Anthony Bass, quote tweeted that and said, I could see your legs shaking while warming up in the bullpen,

but I knew the hitters were in for a rude awakening with that 98-mile-per-hour sinker from hell. And actually, it has been Zach Pop who is in for the rude awakening thus far. He didn't allow a run in spring training. And so he made the opening day roster, but he has allowed seven runs in five games and four and a third innings thus far. But you know, maybe they'll keep him on the roster because he's a rule five guy.

The Canadian baseball hall of fame also quote tweeted his tweet and said, congratulations, Zach, we can't wait to see you and have your autograph added to our Canadian MLB bat. Only Canadians that make the show signed this bat. I did not know that there was a Canadian MLB bat. I wonder how many of the 256 Canadian big leaguers have signed that bat. Anyway, I saw that he ranks 28th on Eric Longenhagen's recently published Marlins top prospect list, and he's not near the top of that list. He is 28th, but hey, he's on there. And here's what Eric wrote. Peak pop looked much like a turbo sinker slider, high leverage,

low slot reliever with a shot to be a setup guy, but he looks more like a very solid middle inning option now. He was sitting anywhere between 93 to 98 during 2021 spring training and more commonly lives 94 to 96. It's not an in-zone swing and miss pitch and instead gets ground balls. Pop's slider has length, though what looks like early break to my eye provides an early in-flight tell and hitters seem able to pick it up pretty well. Unless Pop develops feel for locating his sinker just below the knees with greater consistency, this well-located slider will need to act as his put-away pitch. He has fair command of both offerings, but I don't see a sufficiently nasty offering to slam dunk this guy in the eighth inning or later. So Zach Pop's favorite player, according to his college baseball player page, is Mariano Rivera. So he has a ways to go to catch up to his idol there.

He does not throw a cutter. But I have one more observation about Zach Pop, which is that his name is Zachary spelled with an E at the end, like Zach-ery, which is somewhat unusual. And I plugged that into Urban Dictionary, as one does, to see what anyone has said about Zachary with an E at the end. And here's the entry for Zachary, which has many upvotes. The cutest, sweetest, best looking, funniest, most lovable guy alive. He's protective, caring, beyond perfect. You will fall in love the second you see his blue eyes. I don't know if the real Zach Pop actually has blue eyes. I didn't check. He makes you weak at the knees when you kiss. He is beyond amazing. Once you see him, you can't imagine life without him. You want to spend forever with him,

and that still wouldn't be long enough. You want to protect his heart, make him smile, and keep him forever. He's sexy, athletic, smart, and handsome. He is your world, your life, and the only thing you want forever. And the sample usage is, is he your Zachary? And the answer is, yes, he's that amazing. So Zach. Oh, until the sexy parking man, I was like, are they describing a dog? Yeah, it could have been either.

Is there a dog named Zachary? And to bring this back to Brampton, Brampton's Wikipedia page has a notable people section, which includes such stars as Michael Cera and Russell Peters and people I haven't heard of. There's also a sports subsection, which includes famous Bramptonites from 16 different sports, but no baseball and no Zach Pop on the Brampton Wikipedia page. So my mission here for this segment to be a success, we need to get Zach Pop a mention on the Brampton Wikipedia page. The man is a major leaguer after all. So now you know Zach Pop. What is it about Canadian major leaguers and the University of Kentucky? I can think of two who have gone.

Well, I mean, it's really just Zach Popp and James Paxton, but that's two out of what, 256 you said? Yep. So, you know, that's not nothing. I do like that they were like, you know, we could have the pitchers sign a ball and the hitters sign a bat, but balls are small. So we'll just all have them sign a bat

because a bat can be bigger and make room for them all. And Zach Papp might hit at some point because he is in the National League. There you go. Although it's unlikely. Yeah, it seems unlikely. Who's your major leaguer? My major leaguer is Jordan Sheffield.

And you might be thinking to yourself, if you are passingly familiar with Justice Sheffield's older brother, you might think, well, Meg, Jordan Sheffield was taken by the Dodgers in the first round of the 2016 draft. Now in a competitive balance round, but in competitive balance round A, he is still considered a first rounder. And you might think that that's not really in the spirit of the exercise, which is to remember some guys, but I'm here to tell you that it is because what better use of

get to know a major leaguer than a guy who ended up being a rule five pick. So Jordan Sheffield, who, as I mentioned, is the older brother of Justice Sheffield, was originally drafted out of high school by the Red Sox, but in the 13th round, because he had had Tommy John surgery, and so he elected to go to Vanderbilt, and he did quite well there he did well playing in collegiate summer baseball leagues and was eventually drafted by the Dodgers as I mentioned with 36th overall pick of the 2016 draft and uh you know kind of bounced around in the in the Dodgers minor league system and was taken this past offseason in the rule five draft um which indicates to you that the Dodgers were kind of so-so on him, right?

They didn't make the decision to put him on the 40 man and protect him from the Rule 5. He was selected by the Colorado Rockies at the time of his selection then, and then in the Rockies prospect list, where he ranked 31st overall by Eric Langenhagen. Eric had the following to say. Sheffield, who was passed over in the 2019 Rule 5 and then picked in 2020, which again should tell you something about his stock, has been 92 to 95 so far this spring. His fastball has long either sat in the mid or upper 90s,

and Sheffield has plus secondary stuff with elite spin rates on his fastball and slider, but he also has never been as dominant as his raw stuff indicates because his command is lacking. And so you're like, okay, I get why the Dodgers in particular with so many good prospects and, you know, not a ton of space on their 40 man to begin with. They have to be discerning. They leave him unprotected one year and they're not able to squeeze him by another. And so yada, yada, yada, time goes on and Jordan Sheffield ends ends up making his debut this year which is why we were talking about him at all he is taken in the rule five he makes the rockies roster out of camp which is unsurprising given the lack of depth that they have in their bullpen and he makes his big league debut on april 2nd against who else but the Los Angeles Dodgers. And he threw a scoreless inning. He only faced three batters. He got them all retired.

Not a one of them reached base, which had to feel really good for him because, you know, this was the organization that was like, if you get taken by another team in the Rule 5, well, we can live with that, which probably doesn't feel great, although getting an opportunity to actually play in the big leagues probably does. i imagine that players have complicated feelings about the rule five and so uh jordan has right now a zero era uh in three and two-thirds innings of work he has an expected era of one five nine and a three three six fip so he doesn't really strike anybody out or at least he hasn't so far. But you would

imagine that given the combination of pitches that he has and how they might play in the bullpen, that he will end up striking some guys out eventually, or at least more of them. And so now we have taken time to get to know Jordan Sheffield. All right. Yeah. So his debut has gone a bit better than Zach Pops thus far. He has not been scored upon. I just looked at his four outings and I noted that he has four games pitched and four games finished. So he's been on the mound each time he has come out. And here are the average leverage indexes of his outings thus far. So one is an average situation. Higher than one is high pressure. Lower than one

is low pressure. Here are his 0.03, 0.02, 0.28, and 0.04. So he's been a garbage time reliever thus far, basically. But he's done a good job. So if he does, maybe he will climb the rockies bullpen hierarchy which probably would not be that tough to do so no i guess uh we both independently by coincidence happened to choose former dodgers draftees yes had tommy john surgery and were selected in the rule five draft so how about that well yeah i mean i couldn't very well profile a former, you know, like a first rounder because we want to proactively remember some guys. And you tend to remember first rounders who are big time prospects and do well and come up and there's a lot of fanfare to their debut. And we're trying to, you know, remember the guys further along in the margins. So I imagine that there will be other rule fives. Yeah, we're preemptively remembering these guys. We're making it possible for you to

remember them later. We're pre-membering some guys. And, you know, maybe every now and then we'll pick one who will go on to great things in the majors. But if not, at least you know them. If you see them in the wild at some point this season, you will know something about them instead of saying, who's that guy or not even noticing them. You will remember when they were part of the Meet a Major Leaguer segment. So hopefully this went well and we will do it from time to time. And please feel free to nominate new major leaguers for us to talk about and tell us why we should talk about them. And I enjoyed this. This was sort of inspired by the Better Know a District segments that used to happen on the Colbert Report when Colbert would provide a primer on a congressional district.

And so we're doing the same thing with big leaguers here. I just looked up headshots of Zach Popp, and he does not have blue eyes, unfortunately. But I'm sure he is handsome and lovable and wonderful too. I wonder in the history of baseball brothers, how many of them can both boast being first round picks? Because, you know, because Justice was a first round pick Cleveland a couple of years ago and Younger made his debut sooner. You know, I think had greater prospects shine, which is why he headlined the James Paxton trade um which is you know just kind of a funny bit of Canadian business that we're apparently circling

up on but I wonder of all the baseball brothers how many of them are both first rounders I would imagine that it makes for um more pleasant thanksgivings yeah well that sounds like it could be a stat blast but that's a different segment. Yeah. So you want to talk about June Lee's piece for ESPN that came out on Thursday? Yeah, I do. I mean, I don't, but I do. And when I say I don't, I don't mean that as a knock on the work that June did here, which is very good. This is a worthwhile piece.

And as much as I would like to be able to talk about other stuff, I think we have to keep talking about this. The headline of June's piece is, don't be fooled by Kimming's hiring. Women in baseball say MLB has a long way to go. And June spoke with a lot of women across baseball, the vast majority of whom were anonymous in this post, which is perhaps unsurprising given the critical feedback that they had for the league and for teams about how they are treated in the workplace and how welcome they feel and how well accommodated they feel. And it did not bring anything to light that I have not heard from women I know who work in front offices and candidly from a lot of other female media members who I know. But it's a pretty big bummer when you see it anonymized like this and you know that some of the people,

probably the majority of the people that June talked to are not people I know, and they are describing what sounds like a pretty universal experience of working in the game if you're not a cis dude. And some of the examples of the sort of discrimination or setbacks that women experience when they work in baseball are they're big and high profile and they garner a lot of attention, like it taking so long for there to be a woman who is a general manager or the treatment that you know women in the mets organization and around mickey calloway experience that we talked about at various

points this off season and then again during the season and there's there's that big stuff and i think that because of the extremity of some of that behavior and how just obviously awful it is it is easy to kind of latch on to that stuff but then you read june's piece and it's like they don't have a bathroom yeah near the clubhouse that is designated for their use and there is a story in this piece of a young woman who now a league operations analyst who at the time was working as an intern and set out to develop her video analysis skills and here i am quoting from june's piece but after she sat down to begin her session at the video station located in the coach's locker room she received a text message from her supervisor hey the other intern is going to come in and switch

spots with you the text read did i do I do something wrong? She texted back. The explanation she received. One of the coaches was uncomfortable with a woman sitting in his locker room, which also happened to be the only place to receive the video training. She was pulled from the session, never getting the chance to develop a skill she had expected to use for the entire season. Instead, the training went to a man. I was just like, how the F is that my problem? She said, no one stuck up for me. That was the hardest part. It was my first few weeks and I very quickly did not feel like I was being looked after by the people who had just hired me and asked me to move across the country for them. me and this is something that i have heard from a lot of women who work in the game just how often you are stopped because someone assumes you're not supposed to be where you are so later in in the story after june outlined some of the diversity programs that the league has and some of the networks that the league has helped to develop to try to alleviate some of

these issues he says but even as mlb attempts to create more pathways for women, a culture persists that makes them feel unwelcome. A National League front office staffer described the daily anxiety she feels simply driving up to her own team's facility, worried, based on past experiences in ballparks across the country, that security won't believe she works for the team. This has become a regular occurrence where security doubts her credentials or ignores them entirely spending extra time double checking them regardless of whether she's at her home team's facility or visiting another's they checked me through security five times more than they did any of the men she said of one incident some of my co-workers saw that and they said oh my god we

didn't realize that this actually happened yeah and. And I know female media members who have shown up to the park to do their job and they're wearing their BBWA credential and the security guard will say, oh, the family entrance is actually at the next gate, right? Assuming that they are related to a player, dating a player, what have you. And often you're wearing your credential.

Like it marks you as there in a professional capacity. And it's just, it's very hard for this to not be discouraging because like I said, so many of the issues that we talk about are these big, what we hope to be aberrant, terrible experiences that are so obviously wrong that it feels a little weird to report about them but we have to because they are still happening and they garner all this attention and you think wow if that's happening in the workplace now we have so much work to do and then you realize like we still have to figure out and parents out there i'm gonna do a swear so just be prepared for that you realize that we still have to figure out the fucking bathrooms right right? Like you can walk in with a credential that says that you should be there, that indicates that you belong.

And you're getting stopped by security because the idea that a woman might be going there for a legitimate purpose is so foreign that they have to be checked out again. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's frustrating to read. And June had some stats in the piece that I hadn't seen before that I think were from MLB just about the numbers and percentages of women working in baseball operations roles, which includes on-field positions as well as front office positions. And I guess the good news is that things have improved there very recently. So just since 2016, it sounds like the number of women in these positions has more

than doubled during a period where the number of jobs just didn't increase all that much. So that's encouraging, I guess, that it says 24% of new jobs went to women, which is not close to parity, obviously, but it's better than no one or close to no one, which it was before. And so it's kind of like when we talked about when Kimming was hired, where it was like, well, you're happy about that, but also not happy that it's such an extreme rarity still. And that's the same thing here where you can say, well, good that it's gotten better, but also it was really bad for a long time and it's still bad. And the piece mentions that on the recent racial and gender report card for MLB, the gender hiring score went from an F to a C. So it's better than failing, but still not good. And also, it's about more than just hiring, as the piece makes clear. It's what happens after you hire these women. Do you support them? Do you give them opportunities

to advance? And it seems like in many cases, that's not happening. And as June notes, like there are various programs and initiatives that hopefully are helping and will help here, but there's a really long way to go. And I was just thinking back to my own intern experience as I was reading this and I felt plenty of anxiety and just the normal workplace anxiety that anyone feels in almost any job or at least any job that they care about and want to do well in. And how do I stand out? And do I belong here? And do I have useful skills and all of that?

Like all of that crossed my mind too, but I did not have to worry about where the bathroom was and I did not have to worry about whether anyone was not giving me opportunities just because of who I was. Any of those extra burdens that so many women seem to be encountering in front offices just never crossed my mind. And so I had a much easier time of it than they did and than they are. So hopefully it's improving. Hopefully the fact that the number of women doubled, even if it's still to a low percentage, not that just hiring women is a solution to everything, but at least hopefully hiring women would make it less likely that women would be stopped because security people don't think that they could

possibly work there. At least they would be used to the idea of women working in baseball. And so that would not be so out of the ordinary that people would question it even happening. So I guess that would be some sort of progress, but really it's going to take an intentional change. Like, hey, let's have bathrooms where the men's bathrooms are. And it sounds like June talked to the new MLB executive, Michelle Meyer-Ship, who was hired recently as the league's first chief people and culture officer. And it sounds like she is aware of these problems and talking to teams and talking to women in baseball and hopefully making some of the changes

that they are recommending, but clearly not an overnight thing when so much work had to be done. Yeah. And I think that you get a sense of like the climb that has to happen here. I mean, later in the piece talking about the impact that Kim has had in the industry prior to being named a GM, there's a National League staffer who was recalling her sort of start in the industry. And she says, they straight up told me if we hadn't worked with Kim, we would have been harder on you or been more inquisitive of you or why you're here. But because we worked with Kim, we know that you can do this job, she said. I felt a sense of gratitude toward her. She lifted this whole weight off our shoulders. And I think working in baseball is

really hard. And like I, to be clear, when I say working in baseball, I mean, working for a team, working in sports media is its own hard bit of business, but it is, it is different. And so I don't want to lay claim to an experience that I don't have because I've never worked for a team. And so that particular, the particular difficulty of navigating that environment is, is one that I don't have firsthand experience with, although I've, you know, in hindsight kind of worked in male-dominated careers my entire professional life. But it is just really hard to hear that, like, people assume that you don't know what you're doing as if you had been hired on a lark, right, and that you don't belong. been hired on a lark, right? And that you don't belong. And we want people to both feel welcome and respected and to actually be welcome and respected. And I think that you're right that we have made strides and we do see more women working in front offices. And we should say that this dynamic exists in some version for anyone who isn't like like i said a cis man like i don't

think that this is something that applies exclusively to women i think that you know we need to do work to make that workplace equitable and accessible to everyone regardless of of gender identity but it is it's like you can feel so good about it. And then I guess it reminded me when I was reading this of this moment in the West Wing and I don't need to invoke that too much because that has not aged particularly well. But I don't know, they were failing at legislation or not walking fast enough or whatever.

And Sam turns to Leo and he says, there are times where it feels like we're absolutely nowhere. I remember that, yeah. And you read a piece like this and it's hard to not have that feeling and experience and it can be very deflating. And so I don't want to undersell the progress that has been made because that is meaningful not just like as a statement

but because it means that there are people in the world who are getting to do the work that they want to do and help teams win baseball games and hopefully make things easier for the people who come after them. But simply hiring, like you said, isn't sufficient to solve this conundrum. And it is frustrating that the kind of education that seems like it needs to happen for not everyone, that seems like it needs to happen for not everyone, but for enough people that it is easy to say that it is the culture of baseball, that you might be competent and that's why you're there, right?

That you might be appropriately credentialed and that's why you're in the hallway that you're in, right? That you should be able to go to the bathroom. Right, yeah. So I don know what what more there is to really say about it apart from the fact that it's a bummer but i think about a lot of the feedback that like we have gotten about covering bummers in the last year and when i read a piece like this my first thought is i would really love to be able to talk about literally anything else because it seems like every two weeks we have some version of this right we either have harassment or we have one of these

broad sort of state of the industry pieces or we hear about more harassment somehow the mets are always involved and i am also exhausted by that and i would also like to talk about something else because it is a it is a profound bummer to be reminded so frequently that an industry that I am so closely tied to and a game that I care so much about doesn't really have a lot of time for me. I would much rather talk about Mike Trout because Mike Trout is fun and this, again I swear, fucking sucks. But as long as it does, we're going to talk about it

because I think it's important to give voice to this experience so that people know what's going on and have perspective on like why hiring trends are what they are and why retention rates are what they are and why it takes so long to have women promoted to senior positions.

And also because it's baseball news and we have to talk about baseball news so i appreciate june taking the time to write this piece i think he reported it really well i appreciate the women who shared their experiences with him and i hope that a time comes where we can look back on it the same way that we do on like some of the really gnarly and early experiences of women in locker rooms and say oh i, I'm so glad we're past that, but we're not past this yet. So we're going to have to talk about it until we are. I don't think I cited this stat earlier, but when I said that like 24% of new jobs had gone to women

and that that was quote unquote good compared to the baseline, that's because the current percentage of all almost 5,000 jobs in baseball operations across all teams that are occupied by women is 4.5% according to this piece. It's 225 out of 4,951. So that's a very low number. And of course, it's not going to be 50-50 tomorrow just given not only team policies and MLB policies, but just kind of the larger cultural forces that are maybe not encouraging women to pursue jobs in sports and to play at a high level, which can help you get coaching jobs, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a tough thing to bring closer to parity, but it's a really low number and a higher number would help. But it kind of reminds me of when we had Jen Wolf on last November, episode 1612,

because she had started a text chain for women working in baseball to sort of support each other and share experiences. And it's nice that that exists, but it would also be better if that support were coming from employers. So hopefully that can be the case. And yeah, I will link to June's piece for everyone to check out. And before we finish, I just wanted to shout out another ESPN piece that I meant to bring up on an earlier episode and forgot to. We did not do our usual, you know, the Krasniks, which have become the Rogerses, the annual survey of people in baseball that Jerry Krasnik used to do at ESPN and that Jesse Rogers has inherited from him. And there's usually an off-season preview edition and a beginning of the season edition.

And my pal Zach Cram let me know that this existed for this season a couple of weeks ago, and I forgot to get to it earlier. So we will not do our usual thing where we go through each question and I force you to predict what the people will say, and then we say what they actually said. But I did want to link to it and mention it and just go through the questions and responses without the quiz component here. So this time, Jesse surveyed 28 people and he describes them as executives, players, and scouts. It's always something of a mystery, the composition of that pool because the sources are anonymous, but I think this is the first time I can recall players being included in this sample, which is interesting. Anyway, 28 people were surveyed for each of these questions.

This was published on April 7th, so after the season had started, but still a couple of weeks before we are recording. So just a handful of questions here. The first one was, which team will be the biggest surprise, good or bad, in the league this year? And he asked about good surprises and bad surprises. And I think the answers would probably be different today than they were two weeks ago, even though maybe they shouldn't because it's only two weeks of baseball. But this might be what you would have guessed at the time, and it might actually still be the answer today. The most common response for good surprise this year was the Royals with seven. They have indeed

been a good surprise so far. So good call. And I think they were sort of a popular sleeper breakout pick going into the year. Other teams named Cleveland, Red Sox, they've certainly been a good surprise so far. Phillies, Giants, those were the teams receiving more than one vote apiece. The bad surprises were Reds. They were the leading team with five votes. And then Astros, Phillies, Cubs, White Sox, Angels. So there's a mix of results there so far but reds were the the top of the bad surprise list and i don't know that it actually would have been that much of a surprise to me if the reds didn't have a great season i don't know but uh apparently this is what the people surveyed said but good call on the royals so far and the red socks too i'm surprised that the reds that the reds would be so did we expect a lot of the reds going into the year? Not really.

Not after the offseason they had. I had very low expectations. I was like, oh, you might not really think you need to field a shortstop. You seem surprised that that position still exists, which is why... The operative word there. Yeah, which is why Eugenio Suarez is doing it.

That's weird. That is striking. But yeah, the Royals, if you want to hear more about the Royals, Ben, you should read what Dan Zimborski wrote about them today at Fangraphs.com because Dan, he doesn't think that they will actually win the Central, but he is convinced that they could. And that is a pretty significant shift from where they were by the Zips projections, at least from a preseason

Zips projection perspective. So people should check that piece out if they are curious sort of how doing this well in the first 10% of the season can move things around for a squad, which is in their case, pretty considerably. Yeah. We were kind of in the camp of, okay, I like how the Royals are operating here. They're making an effort, but we're not totally buying that they are actually good. But thus far, they have been good. They believed in themselves and they're backing it up in mid-April. So that's something. All right. The second question was, which star player who struggled in 2020 is most likely to return to form? And the most common response, which I imagine that you would also guess if I had given you any time to think about this, is Christian Jelic at 12.

And he has not made good on that yet. But the second most common response was J.D. Martinez with five compared to Jelic's 12. So he has done that so far. with five compared to Jelic's 12. So he has done that so far. And also receiving multiple votes were Anthony Rizzo and Carlos Correa for what that's worth. So yeah, people were buying the Jelic bounce back. Hasn't happened so far. And I wonder whether they would still be as bullish now, just a couple of weeks later. Yeah, gosh. What is wrong with Christian Jelic? Because it's partly back issues, right? Which can linger and really sap some power and be tough to treat as anyone who has back problems can testify to.

Oh, that's right. He's on the aisle, isn't he? Well, that makes me feel somewhat better, weirdly. I mean, being injured, especially with a thing that can nag at you throughout the course of the season is never good. But it is better than thinking that he was just suddenly sapped of his ability to play baseball by like a mean spirit. Yeah. The next question was, who will win ALNL MVP?

The people surveyed said Mike Trout in the American League. Who knew? Yeah. Only 11 responses for Mike Trout, so I guess people were really trying to think of anyone other than Mike Trout just to be entertaining, even though they're anonymous here. What were some of the other popular selections? Aaron Judge was second with six votes. Really? Yeah. And then Alex Bregman with two and no one else got more than one vote. Shohei Otani got one. Interesting. But yeah,

Aaron Judge, number two. that is quite interesting so that is interesting that would not he I mean like he is a very good player I would have maybe had him in the top 10 but I don't know that I would have had him second to Trout that's surprising do you think that anyone accidentally said Mookie because they're just trying to mentally undo the trade still. Or Lindor, for that matter. But yeah, I mean, Aaron Judge, unlike every other Yankees hitter, has been hitting so far. Yes, he has been. But he has not been Mike Trout. All right.

And then the NL selections were Juan Soto leading the way with seven votes. Cool. Acuna with five. Cool. Betts with three. Bryce Harper with two. Cody Bellinger with two. And then Tatis and Seeger with two apiece as well. So interesting, a smaller field, which you would expect really, because I remember when I was making my MVP picks under duress and

I was trying to come up with anyone other than Trout, not trying very hard because I pledged to pick Trout every year and I have, but I was trying to find any alternative, and it was like I couldn't really find anyone that I believed in as even a realistic pick. Whereas in the NL, there were many potential picks. And I think most of the top 10 players by projected war entering the season, at least position players, were were national league players so there's a smaller group of really elite potential mvps there whereas in the al there were just a bunch of guys who got one vote a piece because there was no no clear crop of these are the inner circle it is somewhat comforting when sort of everyone acknowledges the thing that your site's projections have come around.

So like when we do our positional power rankings at Fangraphs, one of the things that we like to do in the summary page, in which I replicated again this year, was to look at the Z scores of each team's projected positional war, which isn't exclusively one player all the time, but is often driven largely by the guy who is projected to be the starter and get the most plate appearances there and so you know there's like a lot of there's a lot of 0.5s and 1.0s and then you get the negative numbers and you're like that's a bummer and then there's mike

trout with a 3.3 z score in center field for the angels and if you go back to we hadn't done this every year but he's just like orders of magnitude better than than than other people and so it makes sense that he would be the leader in a way that is uh is just it's gonna be so weird when it shifts right like for for years and years when we would do our staff prediction post at fangraphs prior to my tenure at the site it was who's gonna win the nl saiyang and it was clayton kershaw every year he was like it was like clayton kershaw for like eight years or something like that he and then he he finally dropped off entirely one year like he just didn't get any votes i don't think he got any this year and it was it was so strange and you

just you feel a little out of displaced from time when stuff like that happens and i can't imagine how it will feel for us when that happens with mike trout because what will we talk about ben yeah i mean luckily we'll talk about all of the other players that you just mentioned many of whom are like tremendous and great great fun but it will be weird to like have that to lose that totem. Right. So yeah, right. Yeah. I'm in no hurry for that to happen. And yeah, like if Trout were in the NL, not that we would not be picking Trout still, we would. But like I picked Mookie Betts to be my NL MVP this year. And I had to think about it like and you have this crop of players who like okay well one of these guys or all of these guys will be vying for the MVP for the next decade with Soto

and Acuna and Tatis and Bellinger and Seager like all these guys are in the NL right now whereas in the AL like there's no really clear heir apparent I mean they're good young players of course but no one really in that Soto, Acuna, Tatis class where it's like one of these guys is going to overtake Trout within the next year or two or three. Someone might, but there isn't as obvious a candidate for that in the AL, and he's going to be in the AL as far as we can tell for a really long time. So the next question, who is one player you sit down in front of the TV to watch play right now?

And the runaway leader was Juan Soto with 10 votes, and no one else had more than three. Jacob deGrom and Tatis had three apiece. Kyle Hendricks had two, actually, which is interesting. Hendricks and deGrom, sort of the opposite poles of power pitching, both entertaining to watch. But yeah, Soto, the runaway hitter. And there's one scout anonymously quoted here who says, no one will ever be Barry Bonds, but Soto's combination of plate discipline and power is fun to watch. Plus the Soto shuffle, of course. So I can't

dispute that he is extremely watchable although i wouldn't say that he is such a runaway winner in that category but maybe i'm biased shohei otani only got one vote in this category and he's obviously at the top of the list for me they didn't pick corbin burns they weren't like corbin burns's appointment viewing i think that all of them they might today those are all defensible choices though it is a question that i expect to have like a really wide range of answers for in part because there are it does feel like we're kind of faced with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to exciting young players and also because you know like even among people who are in the game like you have your you have your guys your root for right if you work if you work for a team you

probably are going to say one of your guys. Probably. I wonder how many of them don't. I know. I wonder about that too. Yeah. But it does feel like one where you expect there to be a real range. But Soto standing out as the top vote getter seems pretty sensible to me.

I hope he's better soon. Like physically, he's good. He's just on the injured list. Here's another category where Corbin Burns did not receive votes, but almost certainly would today. Which pitcher has the nastiest stuff in baseball right now? Survey says DeGrom got six votes. Garrett Cole got six votes. Then it was Hugh Darvish with five, Devin Williams with five, Bieber with three, and Steven Strasberg with one. And yeah, no one said Corbin Burns. Like this is, oh, someone anonymously quoted a scout said honorable mention to Corbin Burns.

Interesting. It was mentioned at least, but not as an official response. And yeah, this is a category where like pitchers can make that leap more quickly. I think like Burns probably should have been on this list a couple of weeks ago because his stuff was really nasty last year too. But he is, what is his strikeout to walk ratio? 40 to zero now. Still isn't a walker guy. Yeah. He is extremely dominant and has been for a while, but he has had nasty stuff for a while. You could have said that he had nasty stuff

even when he was getting tattooed in 2019. It was just that he had that underperforming pitch, the four-seamer, and also some lousy luck. He has changed around his repertoire and done some pitch design, and suddenly he is totally untouchable, except by Byron Buxton the only player who has touched him thus far with the solo homer he also is a pitcher we should have mentioned as worth watching to hit because he did have he did have two RBI I think yes who is the one player most likely to be traded by the deadline I guess this is one that is still just as valid today can Can I guess? Yeah. Trevor Story. Trevor Story is second, actually, on the list with eight votes. Okay, wait, let me guess again. Trevor Story.

I don't have a different guess. It's a player who was very rumored to be traded over the winter as well. Chris Bryant. Chris Bryant, yes. Nine responses to Story's eight. And then Granke with four, Carlos correa with three max scherzer was not mentioned but i wonder if he would be today given the national start and the rest of that rotation he he seems like he could be turning into a trade candidate there someone mentioned

brock holt which is and starlin castro i i like that like go for the the trade candidate no one's thinking about like this question seems to imply, like, star player, right? But no, someone took it literally and said, I think Brock Holt will be traded. So that is my answer. I mean, I guess, like, that is a good answer. It's just not a flashy one, right? Like, he is a potentially productive, I mean, he's getting probably, I guess he's not even getting full-time work in Texas, but he's like probably I guess he's not even getting full time work

in Texas but he's like a potentially productive bench piece he's hitting well right now although he probably won't hit quite so well forever he has that mustache which makes him look like he's on like a 70s cop procedural like yeah he has the versatility

that makes people say things about players like every team could use a guy like Brock Holt, which is true. But some teams already have guys like that, but not everyone. But there are always a couple of Brock Holts, not literally, but figurative Brock Holts who move at the deadline. As teams that are contenders, they're like, yeah, we don't really have a bench bat we like. That guy got hurt or whatever. So yeah, Brock Holt is a is a good answer albeit a kind of boring one yep all right uh just going through the rest of these quickly will the enhanced

monitoring of doctored baseballs have a small or large impact on the game in 2021 survey says small overwhelmingly a lot though yeah 21 people said small and big four people did. So I guess a few just had no comment on this one. But yeah, that has been the case so far. Definitely something that we've talked about a lot, but no apparent impact on the game. year's shortened season to a full 162 game season. So this is weird. This is like the essay question. There's no multiple choice here, no yes or no, no one word answer. But it seems like the consensus unsurprisingly was pitching and using pitchers and figuring out how to get innings out of pitchers who didn't throw a lot of innings last season. That was the overwhelmingly most common response, as one would imagine. And then the last question, who's your World Series winner,

if not the Dodgers? And this is another one that might be a bit different today, potentially. I love that. Care to hazard a guess? I like, is that how they phrase the question?

Yeah, if not the Dodgers. You can't pick the Dodgers? That's too obvious of an answer. Yep. I would say that I would go with either the Yankees or the Padres. Yeah, the Yankees were 12 responses, which was more than double any other team. Braves, five. Padres, four.

White Sox, three. Mets, three. Blue Jays, one. Yeah, that makes good sense because because as the question acknowledges any of the nl teams presumably have to go through la in order to get to the world series which is going to be a tall order so um it makes sense that it would skew al and we all thought that the yankees would be good and we still think that they will be but boy it's still not going it's still not going that well no they're one and one since we talked about them, but their offense has continued to struggle.

They just haven't hit. And there's an anonymous scout who said, I just like the Yankees as long as they're healthy. They have tons of talent. It just has to be on the field. And most of it has been on the field, but it just not has not been producing. But they will hit if the Yankees don't hit this year. That will surprise me. There are a few things that legitimately surprise me because I've seen it all. I'm blasé about many things because there are so many surprises that you almost can't surprise me. I expect surprises and thus they're not surprising. But if the Yankees do not hit this year, that would qualify as a major surprise for me. So still expect that to happen sometime soon.

Do you think it's because we don't talk about them enough? And so then they have to do better so that we'll talk about them more? Yeah, but we did talk about them a couple days ago. I know. That's really a problem. Maybe they're about to turn it on. It's just a lineup-wide slump. Just everyone's slump is coinciding.

Don't use your power on the Yankees, Ben. And I don't say that to anger the Yankees fans who listen to the show. And I don't even say that because power on the yankees ben and i don't say that to anger the yankees fans who listen to the show and i don't even say that because i dislike the yankees i'm just saying that like um you know if you're going to use superpowers you want to you want to use them for the benefit of the relatively downtrodden and while bryce harper is not really downtrodden at all you know we didn't know you had the power so you weren't you weren't thinking about it that way right you weren't thinking about how do i deploy the superpower that I have. You were just like, do we need to talk about Bryce Harper? But now you know it comes with great responsibility,

and so you can't spend it on the Yankees. You could spend it on trying to extend the Mariners' good start. Oh, yeah. You know who we haven't talked about lately? Because we don't have to talk about it. I don't think to talk about it. I don't think that it's going to last for very long. I'm sorry.

It's a mirage. It's true. We have not talked about the Mariners lately. So I will put that out in the universe and we'll see what happens. Yeah, we can be really happy for Mitch Hanegar, who is playing very well and is healthy and on the field, which is exciting. And Kyle Lewis is coming back. And, you know, Justice Sheffield having a nice start to his season and um yeah we talk about some Sheffields on this podcast yeah yeah Justice is the lesser known of the Sheffield brothers on this episode of Effectively Wild the other Sheffield

we met that major leaguer in 2018 all right right. So we will end there. Okay. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed the inaugural edition of Meet a Major Leaguer. If you'd like to monitor new major leaguers on your own time, there is a great baseball reference page, one of my favorite pages on the site,

the new debuts page that lists each season's new major leaguers. Updated daily. I will link to that in case you're scoring at home. And if you will allow me to be a wife guy for a moment, if you liked the Meet a Major Lager song,

you can find it on my wife's SoundCloud page, which includes all of her podcast compositions, the Stat Blast song, the One Last Meaningless Thing song, which is beloved by podcast listeners. So you can find the Meet a Major Lager song on there with the lyrics. You can listen to it to your heart's content. I am biased, but I listen to it many times. Quite a catchy tune. I've also added the file itself to the shared folder linked from the files section in our Facebook group, which also contains the Stat

Blast song and our outro theme by Ben Gibbard and some other tracks. 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 yourself access to some perks. Bob Ryan, Katie Willis, Philip Tapley, Noah Eisner, and Greg Padgett. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. 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 Meg coming via email at podcast.fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. We hope

to get to some emails next time. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, and we will be back with one more episode before the end of this week. Talk to you then. I saw this sign for the old highway You did cross my mind But it didn't change I do hope that we meet again someday Hope we meet again I hope you never change I hope we meet again

Hope you never change No! I clicked on the wrong thing! I'll be better in this segment the next time. You can leave it all in. But anyway... No! This is the next time. You can leave it all in. But anyway. No. This is our first time. I'm so sorry, everyone.

Let me click on the game log. Game log. God damn it. The thing is the page keeps reloading and then I keep clicking on the list. Okay. We're going to try again. There. I know how to operate my website.