Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1685: Too Close to Call

Episode Date: April 24, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley offer a few updates on the first subject of their “Meet a Major Leaguer” segment, Zach Pop, banter about Corey Dickerson’s impending 200th career double, and answer listener emails about weather-based scheduling, giving umpires the option of not making close calls and deferring to replay reviewers instead, the strange statistics […]

Yes, I'm gonna be a pop star. Yes, I'm gonna be a pop star now. Yes, I'm going to be a pop star. Oh, mama, mama, see me. Mama, mama mama see me, I'm a pop star Hello and welcome to episode 1685 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Beggars. Hello Meg. Hello. Rally of Becks. Hello Meg. Hello. So on Thursday we debuted our new segment, Meet a Major Leaguer. And the first Major Leaguer we met was Zach Popp, Marlins reliever. And who would you suppose pitched two perfect innings in Thursday's Marlins Giants game with a couple of Ks? It was none other than Zach Popp. And I actually noticed and was happy for him. I think that's one benefit of this is

that before I might not have bothered to look at the Marlins Giants box score. And if I had, I might not have recognized the name Popp. But as it was, I got a little rush of recognition and pleasure for this major leaguer I have met. And I met him via five minutes of Googling, but I know where he's from and where he went to school and his hopes and dreams. And so I'm invested now. And it's kind of like the minor league free agent draft where we draft a bunch of people that maybe we had never heard of before we did our research for the draft. But then when you see their names pop up throughout the season, it's a nice little perk. So I'm looking forward to that feature of meeting a major leaguer.

Or sometimes you have heard of them and you plan to draft Krizmat and you think Ben's not going to draft him. He's not going to do that. And then he does. And you're like, oh, shucks. The winning pitcher in the latest Padres-Dodgers quasi-classic matchup. I mean, I am very happy for him, and I am happy for Zach Popp. And yeah, I think that you're right.

The benefit of these things is that it reminds you that these guys matter to somebody. And some of the guys we highlight in this series will go on to have distinguished careers, and they will sort of force the issue, right? They won't need our help to be remembered by us or their families or anybody else because they'll they'll do good stuff and they'll be a part of big moments. And we'll look back and be like, I remember when silly Ben and Meg thought they had to highlight so and so. He's got a Cy Young now or whatever.

But a lot of them won't do that because most big leaguers don't. And so it's nice to have that little feeling of investment and to know that like, you know, someone your pocket and you deserve to be met at least for a few minutes on a podcast. And in other news about Zach Popp, I put out a call on that episode for someone to edit the Wikipedia page for Zach Popp's hometown of Brampton, Ontario, because I noticed that he was not listed as a notable person from Brampton, even though there were many figures from other sports on that page. And within, I don't know, an hour or two of the episode going up, Zach Popp was added to that page by someone whose IP address I can see. I cannot see a username, but whoever you are, thank you very much for rectifying this wrong. Zach Popp now officially,

you very much for rectifying this wrong. Zach Popp, now officially, according to Wikipedia, a notable person from Brampton. The pride of Brampton has been recognized for his accomplishment. I just, the diligence of our listeners is, what could we accomplish if we put our minds to it? I mean, I'm not saying that we aren't accomplishing something worthwhile now, but like, what else could we do? We should think about it. I mean, we're already improving the most comprehensive storehouse of human knowledge on the planet. So I don't know if we could do much better than that.

We've added Zach Popp to the Brampton Wikipedia page. And as someone else, Ron, wrote in to note that Zach Popp now has a 9.95 ERA and a sub one whip, 0.947, which is quite a combination. But anything's possible in six and a third innings when you have a 77 BABIP, but you've given up a couple of home runs in that time. So hopefully the sub one whip is more predictive of Zach Pop's future than the almost 10 ERA. I love the early part of the season. Yeah.

And also in other news prompted by a recent podcast discussion, after we talked about Gene Segura recording his historic 200th career double, which occasioned him to pause and celebrate briefly and for the Phillies to flash a notice on the scoreboard at Citizens Bank and for everyone to clap and give him a standing ovation, someone in the Facebook group noticed that Corey Dickerson is sitting on 199 career doubles right now. And I looked at his game logs and he had four doubles in his first nine games of the season. And since then, he's played nine more games with zero doubles so do you think he is pressing because he's realized that he's on the verge of this milestone the big double benny and he has something planned for his 200th double and so he's trying to get it now and as we all know when you try to hit your 200th double, you might not get it.

So that could be responsible for his little slump here. Gosh, I hope not. Well, I'm going to say no. And the reason is that I think that while it is useful to be mindful of the impending milestones, and I'm doing scare quotes as I sit in my office, milestone. I would imagine that the place that you feel the most pressure is not when you're two away, but when you're one away, right? And so I would think that we are just seeing a little slump. And what might happen is that he comes out of that slump and he starts hitting other things besides doubles.

Doubles are the only thing you're allowed to hit like what are we doing here and then he'll become conscious of it again and then he might enter an even longer more protracted slump because it'll be the it'll be the next one i've often wondered for guys who are approaching like actual career milestones and are perhaps like one way but on the road you know if, if they – maybe we've talked about this before. If they subconsciously hold back a little bit so that they can, you know, sort of mark that milestone at home in front of a home crowd with their family perhaps present in a way that's easier and a little less fuss.

I wonder if that happens. If they're like, I don't want to thump a thump tonight because if I wait, I can do the 500th one at home and they'll clap and they'll stop the game. And a lot of teams are good about acknowledging those big milestone moments, regardless of whether or not the player who achieves them is part of the home nine,

because we want to be mindful of history and we are stat obsessed as a sport after all i've seen visiting players sort of mark big achievements in a ballpark that is not their own and it's nice like in some ways it's it's a it's an even nicer acknowledgement of the of the moment because you're like this is so good and so noteworthy that people who want you to be sad at the end of the night are taking a moment to say, hey, good job, you've done the thing. But I do wonder if they will be like, I'd rather do it at home because they probably have like a framed something or other ready for me.

Yeah, I don't know why I remember this, but in 2010, Alex Rodriguez was sitting on 599 homers, and it took him an abnormally long time to get to 600. It took him 46 at-bats, which was, I think, the most that anyone had taken. I'm reading an ESPN recap here. Of the seven players with 600, Homer Rodriguez's 46 at-bats between number 599 and number 600 were the longest. So, you know, it's an exclusive group. So not a huge sample there, but it took him 46 at-bats, 12 games, and people were suggesting at the time that he was pressing because he was trying to get number 600.

So, you know, 600th home run is probably slightly more memorable than the 200th career double. I mean, they're both up there, obviously, like, you know, both totally worthy of stopping the game to celebrate for a while. But if you had to pick one, you'd probably take the 600th career homer over the 200th career double. That said, I hope that Corey Dickerson has something elaborate planned here because you got to up the ante. I mean, after Segura showed how it's done, now you have to top him. So I hope he has some sort of, I don't know, synchronized dance planned for the 200th double. Hopefully he's using this delay between his penultimate double and the historic double to actually come up with some kind of choreography here to make the moment memorable. Or perhaps like just about every other

player who has ever gotten to 200 career doubles he will not even notice or mark the occasion in any way but i am kind of curious now oh yeah maybe he's like look i i just i have a dance but it's not ready for prime time yet so i gotta i just gotta keep practicing yeah we're going to do some emails today and a stat blast perhaps. So I don't know if you have anything else that you want to bring up before then, but I'm just about tapped out on banter. Ben, I want to see the Dodgers play the Padres every day. I know. I know. But at some point, I know I said this before, but there's got to be a dud in the group at some point. My expectations are so high now.

I expect every Padres-Dodgers tilt to be as good as baseball gets. And they cannot keep delivering like this. And yet, looking at the rest of the matchups here for this weekend, it's like Kershaw and Darvish and Bauer and Snow and Musgrove and May who strikes out hitters now. It's like every single day that the Padres and Dodgers play, they have the best pitching matchup and it's like must-see TV. So eventually one of these days they're not going to deliver, but thus far, it's been an absolute joy. Yeah. I think that that double play that they turned last night was one of my favorite things I've seen so far this season there's just like a palpable vibe I kind of like that and and we'll have to see obviously how the rest of this series progresses but I've added a criteria to wins for this that I would like

team strip surf I would like the Dodgers and the Padres to win the majority of their remaining games against one another on the road there's's something about the Dodgers going into San Diego where people are chanting, beat LA and taking the series that feels cool. And there's something about that crowd last night having to watch the Padres stick it out that was also cool. I don't know. It just seems to add something to the rivalry vibe,

even if at the end of the season if at the end of the season they end up split between them mostly i i just i want i mean i don't like can't be totally split but like if even if it's a very even matchup for the the duration i i like that some of these victories are coming on the road because it just makes everyone more invested in and i don't find this to be a series particularly marked by animosity. I know that people have said that. And sure, there was that moment on Friday where Santana plunked Mateo and it got a little testy.

But generally, they seem to respect one another. And I don't know. It's just I don't want to see them play the Rockies. This is more fun. Yes, your tweet that we should replace all the Padres, Rockies, Dodgers, Rockies, Gibbs. We should just do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Who says no to that, really? Rockies fans don't, I don't think. Well, but so after I tweeted that, I thought better of it, it perhaps because maybe they do. Maybe they're like, hey, I want to watch the Padres live at Coors. I want to see these guys. So maybe they would object because their team has more limited opportunities for fun. And these teams have a lot of opportunities for fun. And who doesn't like fun?

I managed to say that in a way that I think doesn't denigrate the Rockies too terribly much. Yeah. No, that's pretty uncontroversial. I like fun. Most people like fun. Yay, fun. All right. Speaking of scheduling, here is a question from Brian, which you have already answered via email, so I know you have thoughts. I'm not sure if this has ever been discussed on your podcast, but do you think it would be a good idea for MLB to implement weather-based scheduling? Here are some examples from Thursday's slate. Atlanta at New York, Toronto at Boston, Tampa Bay at Kansas City, Arizona at Cincinnati, and Houston at Colorado. All of these games were played in cold weather while the away team's warm weather and or indoor stadium sat empty. Also, the Mets have played five fewer games than their opponent for Thursday, the Cubs, because of inclement weather.

I think it would be better suited for the players and the fans if warm weather slash indoor teams played as many home games as possible in the first six weeks of the season while cold weather teams slowly had home openers at the same time. Then in the middle six weeks of the season, cold weather teams played as many home games as possible and the schedule returned to normal for the remainder of the season. I understand excessive travel would be a downside for the players and coaches, but I think the upsides are more beneficial for the sport as a whole. I don't think that it's a bad idea if what you're trying to do is prioritize or minimize the possibility of weather delays.

But as I said in my response, the resistance that you get is from warm weather teams who don't want to sacrifice the juicier part of the baseball calendar and slate the earlier part of the calendar toward their home games. Because I think that on average, attendance tends to be better when you get into the real summer months when kids aren't in school. And so while it would make sense for us to play in LA and Houston and Miami, more often than not in the early going, that inherently means that, you know, Minnesota and Chicago and Boston are getting games at home in, you know, June, July, August, and they do already. It's not as if the schedule is flipped entirely the other way, and perhaps six weeks would be a sufficiently narrow window at the beginning of the year that teams would say,

this is worth it for us, but I suspect that the objection would remain that you're in a weird way punishing warm weather cities by putting their home games earlier in the schedule when you're less likely to get sort of peak attendance that you get during the summer. So that's why I think you don't do it. Yeah, I think you're right about that. And I wonder if it would also skew things kind of competitively like it. It would obviously even out over the course of the season. But if you have some teams that are playing on the road all the time early on and then other teams that are having home field advantage and maybe racking up some extra wins, does that then affect what you do at the trade deadline, let's say, and how the season is sort

of shaping up? I guess it wouldn't have to because if you were deprived of home games early, then you could count on more home games later and maybe you would bake that into your projections for the second half of the season. But it would kind of color your perception of how your season was going, I think. And maybe it makes it harder on some teams to have it kind of, I wonder whether it would lead to, I don't know, more injuries or more fatigue or something. Like if you do have some teams that are just having really long road trips at certain times, as opposed to things being a bit more spread out. But those are probably minor concerns. I think the one that you noted is the reason why it wouldn't happen, even if it's mostly for financial reasons rather than competitive ones.

It will be interesting to see if the thinking around this shifts as time goes on, though, because in theory, you know, having to contend with weather extremes in any number of directions is something that we are, you know, it just goes to show that, well, you should not build new ballparks willy nilly. That's silly. Don't do that. That's a waste of money. If you are in need of building a new ballpark, building one with a retractable roof might be a useful add on to maximize the number of days that you can play without having to commit to a dome because nobody likes those. All right. We've been talking a bunch about replay review lately. Here's another question in that genre. This is from West, who says, at the start of the pandemic, I began watching cricket as it was one of the few sports that was still taking place, and I fell in love with it quickly.

Although I've been a baseball fan since childhood and had no prior exposure to cricket, the fact that it is another bat and ball sport caught my attention, and after learning the rules, it has become a thrill to continue watching. Thank you. One where no call is made by an umpire and the review booth makes the call and one where the umpire makes a call, a team on the field elects to have the call reviewed and the booth immediately reviews it. So the latter is like the baseball circumstance, but there is this other circumstance where the umpire just says it's too close to call and basically just defaults to the review booth, which is interesting. basically just defaults to the review booth, which is interesting. So West says that first circumstance leads me to an idea for close calls, such as a tag out. What if instead of making a safer out signal, the umpire made a new signal declaring that play was too close for me to make an accurate decision. I'm sending it up to the booth. Then the review booth makes the final decision without an on-field call even being made. Interesting.

Yeah. So I like this idea. I see two potential issues with it. The first of which is I wonder how often an umpire would invoke this. I mean, clearly it's a thing that happens in cricket. Is that because I wonder how long that has been true? Is it like just a thing that has been true since replay was introduced into the sport and so they're sitting there saying i have of course i would admit when i don't know a thing people don't know stuff all the time we

often have to ask for help and so i will ask for help in this instance and there's just like a you know sort of a culture around asking for for replay review because you admit that you don't know stuff and who doesn't not know stuff we all don't know stuff so i wonder how often that would actually be used and if there would be a shift in how often it's used over time so that's one thing and then if it's being used a good deal of the time does it add sort of significant heft to game time because if you think about the plays where this might get used most often like when a guy uh over slides or comes off the bag at at second for a second and might be second for a second that's a bad way of phrasing that but momentarily comes off the bag at second um and

might be out because the the second baseman sort of maintained the tag i think that there are instances where that theoretically could go to review, but teams decide we don't see enough when we look at this to actually do it. And so I suspect that while teams are eager to root around for an out that might be hiding between a player's foot and the bag, that we are spared, if you want to put it that way, some number of reviews because they just decide, oh, this is in fact too close. And because there's a call on the field, we don't know how it will go. And so we'll just move on. So it does seem like it has the potential to add some heft, but it seems like the way around that concern is to just clarify the rule at, uh, about, uh,

guys coming off the bag and say that there's like a safe zone or whatever. So it's not impossible that we would find a way to utilize this and not um immediately bulk up the amount of time we spend on replay and i i quite like the idea because it gets us out of this conundrum of like do does the booth need to know how it was called on the field does that matter should we take that into account this is just to say hey this is really close and we have technology so why don't you look at it for us please you know that seems like a that seems so sensible yeah i like the intellectual honesty of it right just admitting i don't know i don't know that was you're like that was close someone should look at this really really finally if only we had advanced technology that allowed us to time travel back

to a few seconds ago and look at that with perfect clarity from many different angles at once. If such wonders existed, then we could just default to that instead of me making a call just, you know, spur of the moment. Because I don't know what umpires would say about this, but like some percentage of umpire calls must just be like coin flip. I mean, even they must think like man i don't know that was that was basically a tie i'm gonna go with this like that go with my gut here you know i'm slightly leaning toward that one so i'll go with that and just the fact that we have replay review i guess takes some of the pressure off that you know you're not gonna end up with one of these terrible notorious decisions that uh everyone realizes was wrong later but you can't do

anything to correct it i wonder if there is sort of like a slippery slope here and obviously this has been happening in cricket so it would be instructive to know exactly how it has worked in practice there but like if you know you have this option, then does that make you more likely to use that option over time? Like, do you just keep going to that if it's even close? Like, if you're not totally sure, because why not? You know, why risk making an incorrect call? So I wonder, like, if that option is available to you, then it would be hard not to make use of it, I guess, because there are a lot of close calls there. It's like when people say that you could have robo-umps and if something happened to the system, like if the system missed

a single pitch or something, well, the ump empire could still be back there prepared to make the call in the event that the system malfunctions. But would you in practice really be ready to make that call? Like if it works 999 times out of a thousand and then there's one where there's a glitch in the matrix and it doesn't make the call, were you really prepared for that eventuality? And would you be ready to make an accurate call in that situation? And I wonder, in this case, would you just be more and more inclined to just let the system decide just to toss it to that higher authority with the technology at its disposal? And maybe that's not necessarily a bad thing unless it causes more reviews and more delays, as you were saying. But maybe there are ways around that.

I don't know if it's like from a spectator perspective, it would be weird, certainly, just to like not see a call. It's already weird compared to the past, like when the call on the field always stood unless, you know, maybe umpires got together to discuss it and then change their mind or something. But for the most part, when the umpire made a call, that was the call. Whereas now, it's always in the back of your mind when there's a close call that, oh, they might review this and maybe it'll be overturned. But at least for a second, you get the satisfaction of getting a ruling. Whereas just think of how weird it would be, at least at first, to have a bang-bang play or something and then nothing.

Then you just have to wait a few minutes to see what anyone thinks about it that would be odd but not necessarily worse i guess you would get used to that so i see some merits to this well and it from the fan psychology perspective the way that we the way that we engage with experts is so funny, right? Because on the one hand, we're so keen to tell umpires that they're wrong. We love to boo them. We love to boo their calls. We do that when we are in the ballpark without any view, like consistent or clear view of the strike zone, right?

We're over on the side. We can't visualize the whole thing. And it's, boo, you got it wrong. Because it's, you know, we're having having fun we're having a good fun time we're rooting for our guys and and the umpire reads as you know like a substitute teacher or the guy who oversees study hall or whatever we want to give him a you know and i give him a hard time and so we engage with them that way and we do not defer to their expertise but i wonder how we would engage with them admitting i have found the boundary of my expertise or like what my human eye can do and

does that does that admission which is you know is there regardless of whether or not they say it right that they cannot perfectly see tiny changes between the bag and the foot, right, that they are not maybe perfectly placed to interpret a bang bang play. That's the reality, regardless of whether or not they admit it. But if they do, do we then start to question all of the other things? Does it actually increase the amount of doubt that we have in the system? Like, it would just be a very interesting dynamic to observe because on the one hand like i said we don't defer to their expertise but we kind of admit that they have it and we expect them to assert it at the very least even if we don't have a ton of respect for it so it would be a weird it would be a weird kind of feeling out thing to see how fans look at that

and i think that this is part of what we're going to see when we do finally have a robo-ump, right? That there will be this shifting around and there are going to be times when we like boo very inappropriately. I saw this at Fall League, right? Like I saw a robo-zone being called and fans booing the ump because they didn't either they didn't realize that there was a robo-zone or more likely they didn't care. didn't either they didn't realize that there was a robo zone or more likely they didn't care and so this poor guy is taking all of this umbrage from the crowd and i i half expected him to turn around and be like i'm not making this call this isn't me yell at the machine but we don't do that because that's not satisfying because the machine doesn't slump its shoulders and look defeated or get fussy and like clean the plate with the

broom like really furiously because you've got to be a professional but you're still mad that you're getting yelled at so i would be fascinated to see what happens just for that reason i feel so bad i make umpires the subject of experiments like all the time yeah this is why we need lab league lab league lab league yeah, I hadn't considered that. That's interesting. Does it undercut their authority if they admit that they missed something? Does the facade of infallibility fall? And it shouldn't, right?

Because of course they're not infallible. They're humans who are alive. Right, yeah. All right, here's a question from Ian. Earlier today, Jesse Rogers sent out this tweet about the stats Javier Baez is on pace 4 currently And this was actually Wednesday, so the numbers are slightly different But not that different

Jesse tweeted, it's fun to play on pace 4 after a handful of games to start the season Never pans out, but still Here's Javier Baez if he keeps it up over 162. 200 batting average, 40 homers, 121 RBI, 50 stolen bases, 10 walks, 313 strikeouts. And Ian continues, given all the caveats and improbability of these being anyone's stat line, let's pretend that he does actually play at this exact level all season. Brett Taylor of Bleacher Nation noted that if he has that offensive production plus his defense and base running, that he'd provide three wins above replacement. I guess my question is pretty simple.

Is that a good season? All things considered, if one were to put up three war while also striking out 300 plus times, would that season be considered a success? Oh, the discourse around this would be so bad. Yeah. Yeah. If I has a stat page, it's really,

it's just wild right now. It's really bad playing a game as we speak at this moment, but coming into Friday, 34 to one strikeout to walk ratio. Yeah, it's really bad. And yet 250 isolated power, which is quite good. And five stolen bases, no times caught stealing, his usual stellar defense. Like, what a weird stat line.

And yeah, 0.4 war in only 18 games, 73 plate appearances. So yeah, on pace for a pretty productive season, but would be the weirdest and in some ways, I guess, one of the least aesthetically pleasing. But I don't know, Faiz is like, he's an exciting player, but this would probably test the limits of our patience and certainly his patience, which is non-existent right now. find it fundamentally impossible that someone's striking out almost 47 percent of the time and is gonna end up having like a normal babbit for instance like there's just so much about this that is that is not gonna work it is an ugly stat line and i wish it upon no one but especially a player who does have elements of his game that are so watchable but like the hitting part is not that for bias right now it is yeah and like you know sometimes a guy won't have a strikeout rate that is as dramatic as this but like we'll we'll strike out a lot and uh and and he watches at bats and you're like oh well like this isn't the strikeout rate makes it seem worse than it is right like he's still putting together some interesting at bats and like you see him like yeah you know trying to figure out the zone and

he's fouling off hard stuff and like he's just he's just striking out a lot you're like ah that's too bad but then you watch you watch Javi Baez and you're like holy Moses can you see the baseball yeah like some of these strikeouts are just he's fishing on stuff that is two feet away from him seemingly so i feel like bias has become this weird he's become one of the weird case studies in like how people engage with analytics and that's a bummer because like watching him play defense is legitimately thrilling at times, and he is a good base runner, and the power when he does connect is incredible, and it's very exciting, especially in a guy

who is not so tremendously big and strong, seemingly, but is quite strong, clearly. But this is very bad. I think that people would be skeptical of any season. People tend to be skeptical of seasons that derive a significant amount of their value from defense because we tend to be skeptical of defensive metrics, I think more than offensive metrics, which isn't to say that we don't look at good defenders and say that's valuable, but that the degree to which it can influence a player's war when it becomes very extreme tends to make us a little bit nervous just because we know that there is noise in that data and it takes a long time to stabilize.

So I think that that would be kind of thrown his way. But if you had a stat line like this, the number of times that you struck out in high leverage situations seems like it would just by definition be a lot. And that would make people very angry yeah i mean he's been an outlier for a long time and even when he was really productive and an mvp candidate he was doing so with a strike out to walk ratios that seemed like it was unsustainable or at least it would be for most players right at that level of productivity. And he made it work and he had a high BABIP at the time for a string of several seasons. And so that bailed him out and it wasn't quite as extreme as this. This is so extreme that even for Baez and even with his many talents, this is probably unsustainable. But if he were somehow to sustain this stat line and just this overall package over the full season, like, yeah, it would be valuable. I mean, I don't have a reason to disagree with the war. Like, it wouldn't be pretty at a lot of times, and it's not how you would draw up the three war season, but wins are wins, runs are runs, right?

So, you know, he would have a roster spot. Like, I don't think he would be an all-star candidate or anything the way that you might be with a different composition of three wins above replacement. But the value is the value. So would it be considered a success? No. I mean, not for him at least because he's established a better baseline than that. But for someone else, I mean, if we were talking about, what's the name of the former Padres guy who like washed out because he struck out constantly,

but also hit home runs. He had like this extreme fly ball rate it was like a 60 fly ball rate or something and oh i'm thinking of uh ryan schimpf the player with the the padres and angels a few years ago who had not quite so extreme a profile as this but like low batting average high isolated power high slugging struck out a lot just had an extreme fly ball rate and made it work like briefly like made it work in 2016 and then it sort of stopped working and now he hasn't been in the big leagues for a while but like if someone like that were to turn in a three war season like this which he kind of did in his rook here but if you could keep doing that and no one had the expectations that they have of Javi Baez then yeah I mean you'd keep playing him and paying him so it would work in that sense but I

just don't think anyone even Baez quite has the skill set to make that work so it's gonna have to come back to earth in a few respects a little bit here hopefully sometime soon yeah i imagine that something has to give here but gosh what do you think his win probability added would be if he had a season like that oh man see this would be the part that would make people nutty like i think that you're right like the war the war is what it is and i think that there are you know like i said if if a guy is driving a ton of his value from defense we tend to not that we don't think it's real but we're like oh there might be some wiggle in that number that we're not fully capturing because the these metrics are fallible to a degree that we

don't seem to associate with the offensive stuff but he would just be bad in big moments like it's it's impossible that he would not be bad in big moments and very little makes fans angrier than a guy who like routinely strikes out with the bases loaded and i can hear someone saying he hit a grand slam this week and i'm saying that's great but like he clearly wouldn't do that a lot if this were his stat line for an entire season so i think that he would be valuable but he would not be well liked. And that would be a shame. Yeah. Because if his strikeout rate is like close to 50% overall, then in high leverage situations with the flamethrowing reliever in there, desperate to get a strikeout, then it's going

to go even higher than that. And yeah, people remember the bad times, I think, more readily than they remember the good times, you know, negative bias or whatever cognitive bias it is. And so all or nothing teams and all or nothing players, people tend to find them frustrating. I think even if they are overall just as productive as someone who's a bit more balanced, you remember, like if they're stringing together a bunch of strikeouts and flailing away in runners in scoring position situations, then you remember those times maybe more easily than you remember the odd Grand Slam.

So, yes, I think people would be fretting and stressing about those plate appearances. All right. Here is a question from Anna C., Patreon supporter in Richmond, Virginia. I am writing to offer you another edition of the ongoing multi-part series, What If Baseball Were Different? I was thinking about how my senior recreational softball league is organized. Let's not talk about how 40 plus women are considered quote unquote senior. And I wondered what MLB would be like if it were similarly organized. The teams are built to create as much balance in the league as possible, though often exceptions are made to

allow couples to play together, for example. The team composition ensures that all positions are covered by players who are comfortable in those positions, and tournament-level players are distributed evenly across all the teams. This could be applied to MLB using similar criteria, but since we have so much more data on each player, it could be even more precise, creating teams that project to have no more than 86 wins each year. Would this be fun to watch? I think so. We know that player projections and past performances are useful data points, but game to game they are almost irrelevant. Conditions change, lineups change, or someone could just be having a bad day. Evenly matched teams based on war or some other criteria essentially have a 50-50 chance of winning every day. No fan bases would have to deal with perpetually losing teams because of front office or ownership decisions, but there would also be less of a chance of creating a multi-year dynasty team. One downside is that fans would likely have to deal with losing favorite players to another franchise every year, but to some extent that happens often enough already. As a player, I certainly enjoy going to every game knowing we have a chance of winning as much as losing. It makes me put more effort into every play I'm involved in. It's certainly no fun to play against a hugely dominant team, and when I've been on that side, I spend too much time feeling bad for the other team because we're so obviously mismatched. That being said, I suspect a professional player would feel very differently.

So what do you think the ultimate projection parody league? I don't like it. I like the idea of arriving at something similar to this sort of accidentally. I think the over-engineered part of it is what is maybe rubbing me the wrong way, because I suspect that I think that when teams are required to sort of find their own way to win, and they are able to construct their rosters the way they want to, they can go about it in a couple of different ways. And let's just assume for the sake of answering this question, teams want to win baseball games. What a

thing to have to say. But let's assume that they do. I think that they approach it from different directions. And that's how we see, you know, particular pitches come in and out of vogue and hitters of different statures and guys with different kinds of swings. And I think that not having it be sort of organized from a central place tends to lead to differences that are interesting and maybe promote biodiversity, even if that biodiversity only like flashes briefly and then everyone starts doing the same thing. But then everyone does, then some people start doing a different thing because everyone's doing the same kind of thing and they want to try to strike out and and not strike out in a baseball sense but you know uh strike out on a new path that leads them to winning so i think that i would prefer a mandate of or a set of incentives that says to every team go try to win and then see what they do with it then take players and sort of line them up and draft them to construct teams that are likely to project to be perfectly even with one another.

Because there would, of course, be variation, right? We would still get surprising results because projections aren't perfect and they're a median projection. And so there are going to be guys who reach their 90th percentile projection, just like there are going to be guys who sit down around their 10th percentile projection. And so you wouldn't actually end up with teams that are perfectly matched because guys are going to surprise you and change and all of that good stuff. But I like the idea that we would let teams kind of figure stuff out and figure out how they want to fit a roster together themselves rather than mandate one that looks a particular way. Yeah, we've gotten questions like this before.

I don't know if we've answered them, but questions about trying to find a way to either do away with teams that aren't trying or teams that are super teams just to bring everyone closer to everyone else's level. And there's something to be said for that. Certainly there's something to be said for parity and competitiveness and not having the Dodgers play the Rockies 19 times a year or whatever.

Name your matchup here. But I think there's also something to be said for when you have two elite teams going at it compared to two mediocre teams going at it. compared to like two mediocre teams going at it. In either case, they're evenly matched, but there's just not as much juice to, I don't know, Reds versus Cubs or something. Just to name a couple NL Central teams that are not great, but not greater than each other to a significant degree. That feels a lot different from Padres-Dodgers. And I've seen a lot of people saying like, well, why can't we have more matchups like Padres-Dodgers? This rivalry is so great. And sure, I'm all for having more rivalries like that. But I think part of what makes it so special is that it's rare. It's rare to have two teams that are in the same division, that are so good at the

same time, that have such bright futures, that have been so aggressive in upgrading lately. They can't all be the Padres and the Dodgers. The Dodgers are looking like one of the best teams of all time, and the Padres aren't that far behind. So not every team can be that. You're not going to get more than a handful of teams in that kind of bucket every year. I don't think it's not possible really to do that or sustain that. So I think we should appreciate that rivalry while we can. And certainly there are teams that should look at the Padres and say, hey, this is not an enormous

market mega franchise and look how aggressive they have been about getting better. Maybe we should do that too. But if every single team were trying to get better aggressively all the time, you would not be able to build a team as good as the Padres and the Dodgers because there's only so much talent. There are only so many wins to go around, really, and it's a zero sum game. So that's a long way of saying that I think I agree with you here. There are certain aspects of this to recommend it, but on the whole, I would not really be in favor of artificially suppressing the best teams. Yes, if we can put some incentives in place to make it so that there are fewer teams that are really bottoming out at any given time,

that would be a positive for sure. But I don't think you could take it quite this far. I mean, there are all sorts of CPA and economic and mechanical reasons why it would be difficult to do it, even if you wanted to. But I don't know that I would quite want to either. Maybe we could be a little closer to this than we currently are, but not all the way. Yeah, I think that that's right.

All right. We got a couple of questions inspired by the Super League, the short-lived Super League. And don't worry, you don't have to of questions inspired by the Super League, the short-lived Super League. And don't worry, you don't have to be an expert on the Super League. I think we need to learn more about it. I've reconsidered my position. I think that we need to know more stuff about it. Okay. I find the Super League pretty interesting, as short-lived as it was. And we got a couple of questions here.

This is from Ryan, Patreon supporter, who says this European Super League coverage has been a whirlwind and has made me feel pitiful as an American baseball fan. European soccer fans quickly organized to shut down an undesirable change to their sport, whereas we've, with a little complaining, accepted one third of teams tanking at any given time, blatant service time manipulation, abysmal minor league salaries, and a multitude of other sports capitalism ills. The presence of robust supporters unions seems to be a differentiating factor for Europe. Big clubs have several supporter groups that collectively work to advance fan interests and apply pressure to owners acting adversely to those interests. Do you think it's possible for something like a true supporters group to take root for baseball fans, or are we already fully boiled frogs? And we got a similar question from Jacob, who says part of the reason the European Super League dissolved so quickly was the universal revolt led by fans, players, club, social media accounts, and even managers.

Is there anything that could be done to baseball or any American sport that would unite people, especially fans, in this way? Why haven't we banded together to stop the zombie runner? Personally, I think American sports fans could never accomplish something on this scale. German fans came together to stop Monday night football matches, while similar criticisms in American sports like NBA back-to-backs and long schedule or NFL Thursday night football and their contribution to player health are discussed, fans largely don't care. I can't think of a time American fans have come together to stop something aside from sending our energy to the Nationals as they beat the Astros or the Cavs as they faced off against the 72-win Warriors. It's not that American sports fans are dispassionate, but I think we're more passive participants due to the fragmented, centralized nature of our sports. But I think we're more passive participants due to the fragmented centralized nature of our sports. MLB is a super league that shuts out and systematically oppresses domestic competition to protect the financial stake of its owners. It's primarily engaged with through TV and baseball itself is a game that can't maintain fan momentum in person without the prompting of a loudspeaker. Cultures of European football and American sports are so different, and one of the reasons I follow European football is that difference. Promotion and relegation, the wide array of intermingled professional teams, many great national leagues engaged fans with their fun chants and traditions. So is it too late for us? Can we band together to not dismantle MLB's Super League but affect some sort of change? dismantle mlb's super league but affect some sort of change um i think that it's really i i think that the the lack of domestic competition is really really makes this challenging and and the the reasons that are outlined here are why i was like oh we need to care about super league because

it does demonstrate like the the power of sort of collective action to intervene on a sport that I think you know clearly the suggestion here even though these are privately held teams is that it is a public utility a public good in some way and that the people who enjoy it the most should have some input into how it is run. And that mobilization is certainly aided by like the clubs and alliances that were outlined here. And so there's an infrastructure and a mechanism for that kind of like mass action in a way that I think most American fans don't engage with in quite the same way. Like you can be a fan, but that's a more sort of individual experience, even as you are staking claim to a broader identity that is a

collective one like there are exceptions to this there are certainly cheering sections and traveling clubs and what have you for mlb teams but they don't occupy the same place in sort of our understanding of baseball's culture that they seem to for european soccer leagues and here i am speaking without a ton of experience with european soccer leagues because i'm not a huge soccer fan which isn't that it's a bad sport i like that you like the thing you like it's just that it is not a thing that resonates with me and it is on very early in the morning and that combination is not a thing that is going to move me but i'm glad it moves all of you it's not an anti-soccer take it's just a meg doesn't like soccer take anyway so it's you

gotta it's dangerous out there you gotta be clear about this stuff so i think that the the lack of sort of an infrastructure for that kind of mobilization is a big part of it i think that the way that we view teams in the u.s is part of it where while there is a lot of language invoked around baseball as a public trust in america's pastime. That isn't the way that we tend to actually engage with the sport. And we're used to it being more sort of capitalistic in its approach and sort of its manifestations than I think you necessarily see with European soccer. And so I do think that it would be hard to really do something on a mass scale unless people are willing to stop watching in a really committed kind of way.

And we don't, again, seem to have a mechanism to enact that kind of a campaign. Now, that isn't to say that there haven't been moments in baseball's past where the behavior of ownership or the league or the players hasn't led to a decline in in viewership generally but given the nature of the contracts that the league and teams have like it would have to be sustained action over a really long period of time before i think it would really move the needle so i'm not optimistic that it is a thing that we are currently set up to do but that doesn't mean that it isn't a thing that we are currently set up to do, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a thing that we couldn't eventually be set up to do.

It's just you got to start laying the groundwork for it. Like, you know, the Dodgers Pantone Club has to like take a dramatic left turn from its current activities. So yeah, that's what I have to say about that. No more Mookie bill billboards or at least put the billboard in front of Rob Manfred's house or something yeah and have it be about the zombie runner yeah I think the system is really entrenched in baseball at least it's just been this way for a long time it's been a long time far beyond most people's living memories since MLB had a real domestic rival

that was giving it a run for its money and making it worried and giving fans a choice of a similarly high-level domestic league. So I think it would just be tough to overcome that tradition and that inertia now. It would just be tough to overcome that tradition and that inertia now. And I think also, as I understand it, in the Super League case, no one wanted this. Not even the personnel on the teams, like the players, the managers, no one wanted this except for a small cadre of billionaires and owners who thought this would be good, this would make us some money. And so there was as much of a revolt from people involved on those teams, really, it seems like,

as fans and supporters. So I think that's another area where there's a difference from, say, the zombie runner or expanded playoffs or whatever rule we're up in arms about right now it seems like the players are mostly fine with those things or not really moved to protest them in the way that fans might be and so i think if if players are willing to like walk away or make a big stink about it then that helps a lot and I'm just not sure with most of these changes, you know, like we might come to like moving the mound back or something. And that might be the thing that players are upset enough about to really form some kind of concerted action. And in that case, I would be in favor of it. But all of these things that I am not in favor of,

it seems like people actually on the teams, a lot of the stakeholders are perfectly fine with, if not also in favor of. So I think you would need some kind of disconnect between league management and club ownership and then like everyone else to provoke that really strong and rapid response. So I don't think we're there with the specific issues that we're discussing here. So don't want to say it's impossible, but there are a lot of hurdles here.

And I don't know, maybe we can look to the Super League example for inspiration and adopt some of the things that worked out to stop this. But I think it would be a long road with a lot of obstacles right and and part of it too is that some of the the rule change stuff and what have you that players might get like exercised about there is a mechanism by which that stuff can be addressed and we kind of know what questions the league can move unilaterally on and which ones it can't and so i think that is part of it too like there there seems to be sort of more normal procedural stuff that can be done through collective bargaining and and i don't say that as if that that mechanism doesn't exist in european soccer i don't know the answer to that question i

don't know but i think that there are other avenues that are seen as as sort of appropriate for more directly invested parties like players to express their dissatisfaction with the league. And so those can get very contentious, but they still occur within the confines of collective bargaining rather than spilling out into protest and whatever was going on. I was asleep because of vaccine dose too. Were people actually protesting in the street? I think there was some component of that.

That's so cool. Obviously, there's a social media outrage and uproar. So yeah, I think there was a physical component, an in-person component to it too. Man, it's like between that and like, I don't know. It was just, yeah, like they had that that and like I don't know. It's just, yeah. Like they got that protest thing figured out. Alright, here's a question from Scott.

I was sitting at the Cubs-Mets game yesterday and really feeling the lack of action for the first time at a live baseball game. This led my brain down a pace of play rabbit hole. Here's an idea I'm not sure is any good. In fact, I'm fairly certain it's bad but I'd love to hear you banter about. This is my favorite kind of email.

Yeah. And I say that sincerely. I'm not giving him a hard time. It's like, I have a bad idea that I'd like you to think about with me. Yeah. Please confirm that it is terrible. Obviously, a clock like basketball or football wouldn't work in baseball for a variety of reasons. But what if each team individually had a maximum allotted amount of time like a chess clock? Perhaps the clock would start with their first pitch of the inning and end the moment the third out of the inning was recorded. If a team's clock hit zero, they would automatically forfeit the game. Depending on the amount of time allotted to each team, how much should it be? Could this effectively speed up the game in an engaging way?

What implications would there be? What types of strategy could arise? Maybe every extra inning simply adds a small amount of time to each team's bank. What if a player or coach actually has to hit a button to stop their clock like in chess? I find the idea of a team leading in the ninth, but being forced to play extremely quickly so as not to time out hilarious what else comes to mind for you but wouldn't this couldn't not necessarily would it for sure but couldn't this lead to a ballooning strikeout rate and even more even more strikeouts like doesn't this discourage you from scoring a bunch of runs in what way if so if the offense has to like clock out after a while and they work long at bats and they get guys on base

and they hit some home runs and then they work other long at bats and they get other guys at base and they have to work other and they hit other home runs aren't they cut off in that process at some point and they're like now the inning has to be over. Am I misunderstanding what he's saying here? It does seem like it would penalize success, right? Like the more runs you score, the more batters you send to the plate, the longer it takes. So at some point, then yes, it seems like you are hurting teams that score more. And also another problem here is that it seems like the offensive team is not totally in control right how long a half inning takes like it's it's a group effort it takes two to produce a four-hour

game and if anything you could manipulate it so that if you're only counting the time against the team that's batting let's say well then don't the pitchers on the opposing team have incentive to take even longer? Pedro Baez becomes the highest paid player in Major League Baseball. Exactly. Then you have everyone wants to be the human rain delay so that you're eating away at the remaining time that the offensive team has. I guess you could go in the other direction. Would that work if it were a pitching team that the clock was counting down against?

But then again, you're further penalizing a team for being bad. So either way, it seems like you are hurting a team that is either allowing more base runners or producing more base runners. And the team that's allowing more base runners presumably they're already trying not to do that and you probably don't want to give the team that is good a reason to tank intentionally and be bad and sandbag the rest of the inning so i think scott's instincts that this was a bad idea was correct yeah because like you. Cause like, you know, you'd be getting down to the, the last, the waning seconds of your clock and you'd, you'd press and swing at stuff

you shouldn't and strike out. And it takes time to strike out, right. That maybe you would, you'd try to put the ball in play on the first pitch. Yeah. Yeah. That's a better, that's a better read of the situation than I had been. That's, that's accurate. I think you're better served to, to, if you're keen to move the action along, you're better served to time individual components of play than you are to put a clock on it like you would in football and say, here, you have a quarter that's this long or whatever. Because what you're trying to do is move each individual piece along rather

than manage to a specific time and then you get you know pitchers who deliver the pitch more quickly you could enforce any of the rules about batters at the box and so i i think that we we often suffer from trying to be a little too cute when it comes to this stuff, which is that you can just have a pitch clock that you enforce and you can enforce some of the existing rules that you have. And that's not going to solve all of the issues around pace of play because some of them are the results of bigger trends within the game that lengthen games. Like how strikeouts famously take longer than ground outs do.

And everyone knows that, says it on the fly, and they think about stuff. So those broader trends are not necessarily something that you can counter with like a pitch clock. But there are smaller moments within the game that you can kind of move along and smooth the way for. And if you put a clock on individual components of it i think that that can be pretty effective and probably helps to accomplish what you're trying to which is to keep the action moving rather than penalize like a beginning because we like those like those are a lot of fun we forgot if a team scores like six runs you're like wow look at all the action i just saw there were six runs scored and that that stuff we like and so i think as with all of this it's

useful to keep in mind, like what is the problem that we're really trying to solve for? And then try to write rules to that end. And that's, and specifically, rather than like doing a sort of rougher broad strokes, here, put a meh on this. And then you're like, oh no,

I had the bases loaded, but I'm out of time. So I guess you don't get to see if i hit a grand slam too bad like that would be terrible you would people would riot yeah i think they would riot yeah there are all kinds of elaborate proposals along these lines like i think there's a bill james idea that we've discussed on the podcast before where you would tie pace of play to revenue sharing like have teams take an economic hit if they're dawdling so that ownership will put pressure on the front office to,

hey, let's go acquire players who play speedily and let's instruct them to play speedily. And maybe if there's a pot of gold there waiting for you, if you actually hurry up, then teams will do that. Although players themselves might not be as incentivized to do that unless players start getting paid according to how quickly they play to some extent. Then they would have some incentive to play faster too. So there are all sorts of ideas like that that maybe they could work, but we don't have to get that complicated as you were just saying. There are already rules on the books or really simple rules that you

could implement that should fix this. Like before we really turn this port upside down, we might as well like try the really simple and probably pretty effective ways of doing this. Like in the Atlantic league and low a this year, they're testing a 15 second pitch clock. Right. And we haven't even implemented the 20 second pitch clock in mlp like that's such low-hanging fruit like it's happened in the

miners like it seemed to have some of the intended effect and no one seems to mind it like let's just do that for one thing like yeah it might be an incremental improvement, but it's something and it seems like it's really simple and it's been tested and proven. So now they're testing the 15 second pitch clock and I don't know whether that will actually happen in MLB someday or whether they're just trying to make the 20 second pitch clock more realistic by saying, okay, we won't do the 15 second,

but let's do the 20 second. But really, like that's such a simple thing. And as you were saying, just, we won't do the 15 second, but let's do the 20 second. But really, that's such a simple thing. And as you were saying, just enforcing batters, not stepping out of the box, et cetera, et cetera. As people have documented, the great Grant Brisby article that everyone cites where he went back and watched an old game and found that the largest difference

between old games, faster games, and new games, slow games, is the time between pitches and players just taking their time more so than added commercial time or other factors so that just seems like it would be pretty simple to crack down on and yeah i know that there are injury issues there like if you start limiting recovery time between pitches then our guys gonna hurt themselves but you know maybe they just won't throw max effort on every pitch because they will have some fatigue set in and they will have to take something off those pitches. And that would be beneficial in other ways, potentially. So

really, like those are the simple things. And yes, what we do here in large part is entertaining wild hypotheticals. And if baseball were different, how different would it be? But in some cases, we don't even need to. Like there are simpler solutions that could be implemented that just haven't been. Yeah. I mean, like at some point you have to ask, do I have to adjust this strap again or should I get a new elbow guard? Maybe it's just not sticking the way it used to. You know, Velcro wears out after a while.

Elastic wears out. I don't think you have to futz with it. I think it's fine not sticking the way it used to. You know, Velcro wears out after a while. Elastic wears out. I don't think you have to futz with it. I think it's fine. All right. Here's the last one before I end with a stat blast. This is Kevin who says, if you were good enough to make the majors but didn't care about baseball and hated being under pressure but also liked collecting a major league paycheck, what is the ideal position on the 26-man roster? Do you want to be the backup catcher that doesn't play often and nobody expects too much from? What about the fifth starter?

I think the ideal would be the long reliever. You're almost exclusively pitching in games that are already lost. And if you perform poorly, nobody really cares. Just let me collect my paycheck and go home to do some birding with my really nice and expensive binoculars. What would you choose? Long reliever is a good one. Yeah. In part because I think your place on the roster is less precarious than if you're a

bench bat. Yeah. Or, you know, like, yeah, if you're like a fourth outfielder, you're kind of, you're assuming you're going to have to move every couple of years at the very least, although you might stay in the majors. So I would probably, I would say long reliever. I mean, backup catcher is just so taxing because you are going to start probably at least one day a week.

If you have a day game after a night game, you're like, I got to work a full day tomorrow. Yeah, catching is hard. Catching is hard. If I don't even like my job. I wrote an article several years ago about the players who had remained continuously on a major league roster and had gotten the least playing time over the course of a season. And it was like backup catchers

and loogies and utility infielders. And the backup catchers were the Kings. It was like at the time, Tony Cruz, Yadier Molina's backup who never played. But when he did play on rare occasions, he had to catch. And I don't know, this is just a paycheck for me. I don't want to go back there and get hit by foul tips and bats. Yeah, no, thank you. Your knees are full of lava at the end and you're just getting the crap kicked out of you back there. So catching seems like it would be out.

I think that long relief is probably the leader in the clubhouse, but if there are changes to the roster rules and the number of pitchers gets limited, then I think being a bench bat is more appealing. You know, if you're like a speedy sort of late inning defensive replacement guy, the pressure is high in some ways because you're presumably being brought in in a moment where you want to maintain a lead, one that might be narrow. And so you're like, oh, I got to pay attention really closely. But you get to run around and be active at work.

And who doesn't like that? And you get to yuck it up with the guys in the meantime. So maybe that. I think what you're looking for is probably like the ideal role is going to be one where you don't really have to worry about being optioned up and down to the minors during your option years. You want to stay on the big league roster so you can collect that paycheck. So there's that part of it. And I think it's probably also one where you want to have some amount of longevity with the organization you're with. Like you understand as a, you You understand as a role player that you're probably going to play

for a couple of different clubs, but you probably want to stick at least somewhat because if you don't like your job, you're not going to want to move for it because moving is terrible. So you're going to be like, I don't want to minimize the amount I have to move. And so you want to have a roster spot that's relatively secure. And so you want to minimize precarity as much as you can. Yeah. There aren't that many dedicated long relievers around these days. That's true.

Might be hard to carve out that role. If you could, I agree. That's pretty attractive. But yeah, with pitcher usage the way it is these days, there aren't that many players you think of really as long relievers. I kind of like the idea of fifth starter, spot starter type, because then you have the predictability of when you're going to play. If you're a reliever, then you just never know. You mentally have to prepare every day because you could potentially pitch unless you've worked a bunch of days in a row or something. And I don't like uncertainty. That's one of the least favorite aspects of my job for me. I generally like my job a lot, but on some occasions I will have to write just without any warning and

I'm not expecting to write, but then some sort of news will break or something and whatever I'm doing at that time, there will be some pressure on me to write some rapid response. It doesn't happen all that often these days because I tend to write different types of pieces. But when that happens, I don't love that. So if I were a Major League Baseball player and I didn't really like being a Major League Baseball player, then I think it would be nice to maximize the days on which I know for sure that I'm not playing baseball. Like if you're the fifth starter, you know, with near certainty, especially in the age of the zombie runner rule that you're just probably not going to pitch in between the days that you're starting and you know which days you're starting.

So you can kind of check out in between, like you have to do some amount of preparation, of course, and you have to go to the games, you can just you know sit around just talk to your your pals in the bullpen or whatever and not have the pressure of knowing that you need to pitch that day and if you're a starter like no one expects you to be that great so i think for me i would go with that it's like less physically taxing and less unpredictable. So that seems like the best of both worlds to me. If you could be like, you know, dedicated pinch hitter, which is another job that barely exists anymore, although I hope it will come back.

I hope long relievers will come back. But that is also one where you don't have a lot of playing time, which would be a positive, but it's unpredictable. You don't know when you'll have to play and there's generally some amount of pressure on you whenever you do play. So not ideal either. I just don't think that anyone, it's so, it's so hard and it's so demanding. It takes so much of your life that I don't think that the league minimum would be a sufficient incentive to to finagle this i don't know i mean like i don't mean to say the league minimum is not a good that's a good you know you're doing you're doing just fine if you're making the league minimum consistently

but it is it's so trying if you have any kind of a family life, you know, it's a lot to ask of your family to be like, yeah, we're going to make a half a million dollars a year. But like, I'm going to hate my job and we're going to have to move around. And, you know, for a couple of months out of the year, like you might have to solo parent a lot of the time. Like, I just don't know that there i think there are guys who are like real baseball nuts and then there are guys who are like who like baseball fine who are in the majors but i don't think that there are many major leaguers who are like i hate this like i hate baseball i hate being a big leaguer i don't think that that happens very often because it is too weird and hard to to go in with that kind of a perspective on it so yeah No. Like some people are just baseball rats, like all they think about is baseball. They live and breathe baseball. Others, no, it's not quite that for them. It's an occupation more than a vocation. And there are examples of players who have said, okay, well, I actively disliked it. Maybe it just wasn't quite as important to them.

Like Ty Buttrey, right? The Angels pitcher who we talked about earlier this season, who decided that this wasn't actually his dream. It wasn't quite what he had envisioned. And he'd had enough of it. And now he was going to do something different with his life. And he didn't say he hated baseball. He just said it wasn't his top priority. It wasn't worth the effort that he was devoting to it. So there are definitely players in that kind of boat. But it's hard to be among the very best in your profession in the world if you actively dislike that profession because getting good at something generally requires practice and effort, and it's harder to put in that effort and

practice if you don't like what you're doing. So you'd have to be really supremely talented, probably, or have a lot of tolerance for a pastime that you don't enjoy to get good enough to be a big leaguer without some level of affinity for the sport. It's like in the 2000 film Center Stage, Ben. Ah, yes. When Maureen decides she doesn't want to be a ballerina, and she tells her mom, wouldn't you rather I found something I really love than something I happen to be good at?

And it's very emotional, and there's a whole subplot about her not being well and having an eating disorder, and that makes this maybe a bad comp, but it's like that. You want to do stuff that you really love rather than stuff you just happen to be good at. And not everyone loves their job, but if you don't, you don't want it to be taxing. And even if you were to minimize how taxing being a big leaver is by being a fifth starter who only has

to go, you know, on his scheduled day or being a longer leaver who only has to throw sometimes, or being a bench bat who comes in in the late innings it's still it's still a lot of work it's still taxing it's still too much to to make it worth it and so you would uh you would go back to school instead of being the best ballerina at the american ballet academy yeah that was the comp that was on the tip of my tongue too so and there are examples of players who you know have to step away for a while. Zach Greinke, right, you know, was suffering from social anxiety and obviously loves baseball and is dedicated to baseball, but was not in the right frame of mind, the right headspace to devote himself to baseball for a while and then he came back when he was ready and has obviously excelled and stuck with it but has a different level of commitment i mean he clearly loves it and seems like he maybe wants to continue working in baseball after his playing career but also is like content with reporting on

the last possible day to spring training because he's a veteran and he will show up when he's required to he doesn't need to be there even earlier than that. So yeah, different strokes for different folks, of course, in baseball as well. All right. Last question, which is the inspiration for the stat blast. Let's cue up the song. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to DASTA+. All right, this question comes from Andrew, a Patreon supporter, who says,

I was recently astonished to see that Bill Buckner notched 15.1 career war in his 22 MLB seasons. Not to pick on Billy Buck any more than is necessary, but I wondered if he might be the player with the biggest discrepancy between black and gray ink, counting stats, etc., and actual value as measured by war. Has something like this been calculated before to find the most overrated or underrated players? In recent years, we have spent more time on the latter, learning that Gene Tennis compiled 46.8 War was a very happy moment for me. Again, I don't want to be mean, but it would be useful to know which players were the most overrated too.

I have had to grapple with revised understandings of two of my favorite players, Jim Rice and Tony Gwynn, and their actual value. It can be a bummer to learn that certain players weren't truly as productive or valuable as we remember them to be, to learn that certain players weren't truly as productive or valuable as we remember them to be, but it's all about learning more about how the game really works, or at least how we currently think it works. So this is an interesting question. For those who don't know, black ink and gray ink are two little statistical toys concocted by Bill James, and just reading from Baseball Reference, the glossary there where these stats are available. The Black Ink test, it says, named so because league leading numbers are traditionally represented with boldface type. And this definition comes from Bill James's book, The Politics of Glory.

The essential point is to measure how often a player led the league in a variety of, quote unquote, important stats. led the league in a variety of quote-unquote important stats. So it's, you know, a certain number of points for leading the league in homers or RBI or batting average, runs, hits, slugging percentage, doubles, walks, stolen bases, games at bats, triples, and equivalent stats for pitchers too. And the glossary notes that this method penalizes more recent players because they have 14 to 16 teams per league, while the older players had just eight. To get a point, you have to lead the league in that category. So the more players, the more teams, the harder it is to do that. And it also notes that Hall of Famers have a wide

variety of values for the black ink test, and the method is unforgiving of positional differences, but it is a neat little metric. And the gray ink test is very similar, except instead of leading the league, it is finishing in the top 10 in the league. And these were both designed as sort of hall of fame worthiness, or maybe more like likelihood of making the hall. This was in the pre-Jaws era, of course. And this can be, I think, a helpful little test for what Andrew is going for here, because there are certainly players who have led the league a lot in certain categories that maybe were more valued in the past than they are today, don't really translate to war the way that they do for a player's reputation. So I have tried to answer this question with the help of Kenny Jacklin of Baseball Reference, who sent me a huge data dump of pretty much every player in Major League history and their rank and actual score in gray ink and black ink among batters and pitchers separately and also in batter war ander War, their totals and ranks. And so I have a massive spreadsheet, which I will link to on the show page, possibly the largest spreadsheet that I have ever linked to for a stat blast. But I think I've got some interesting results here. So thanks to Kenny for that. interested in the players whose war outstrips their black ink or gray ink derived reputation.

So players who have good wars, but not good black inks or gray inks. So something that they did was not really reflected in leading the league. So I sorted here by the greatest difference in this direction between Black Ink batter rank and batter war rank and the number one name on the list is Alan Trammell which sort of makes sense right he is a player who is underrated

I think perennially and you know is a hall of famer but it took an awfully long time for him to be a Hall of Famer. And one reason for that is that really no black ink. I mean, he, if you go to his baseball reference page,

he led the league in sacrifices a couple of times and that's it. Other than that, no black ink, but obviously a really great player and war shows that. So here are, I don't know, the top 10 or so by this metric you've got alan trammell you've got barry larkin who also has no black ink i think i recall when sam maybe

looked up in a bp piece once the the best player ever with no black ink i think he arrived at barry larkin as the answer so there's bar Barry Larkin, Scott Rowland, who finds himself very much in the Alan Trammell camp of sabermetric cause where the war and the Jaws say he's a Hall of Famer, but the traditional stats don't really because Scott Rowland never led the league in anything. He has no black ink on his B-Ref page. Then you've got Ivan Rodriguez, and he's

not a player who was underrated or had trouble getting into the hall, but I guess it's what the glossary said about positional differences, right? You're not getting any credit for being a catcher or a shortstop here, whereas War gives you credit for that.im edmonds next uh another name that's often mentioned as a player who deserved more hall of fame support than he got in his brief time on the ballot mike piazza which is an interesting one i i guess you know it's hard for catchers to lead the league in things because they play fewer games and a few more catchers coming after that yogi barra bill dickey gabby hartnett and yeah i mean yogi of course no one really underrates yogi but look at the teammates he had who were leading the league and things at the same time robin ventura jeff kent bob johnson

tony perez ron say that's uh enough. And I see a few other names. Ted Simmons, who just made it to the hall, but was kind of an underrated guy for a long time. So that's the black ink underrated batters. And then the underrated batters for gray ink. So these are guys who didn't lead the league necessarily, but didn't even finish in the top 10 in categories, but still had some value as players. Mark Belanger, who of course was a frequent gold glover, defensive specialist, and that makes perfect sense here because he had a 68 career OPS plus, never led the league in any offensive categories other than sacrifices

and yet was a great glove guy and war gives him credit for that so he's a perfect candidate here terrible hitter who had a pretty hefty war so that's kind of the archetype for this type of player Jim Sundberg another player in camp, a catcher instead of a shortstop, but same sort of player. Scott Fletcher, Rick Farrell, Tom Haller, Del Crandall, Terry Steinbach, Bob Boone, Mike Socia, Rick Dempsey, Casey Blake, Corey Kosky, Salvador Perez. So a lot of catchers and shortstops, like defensive specialists, as you would imagine you know the the gray ink test does not give you points for like finishing in the top 10 and drs or uzr or whatever it's all offense so these are defensive specialists all right for pitchers pitchers who had bad black inks but

good wars the number one name on the list is Jerry Kuzman Jerry Kuzman the Mets Great so let's see did he Have any black ink What so ever Nope Jerry Kuzman I guess he led The league in losses a couple times And FIP once Not that anyone knew it at the time

And strike out for nine So yeah no traditional Black ink but good pitcher for a long time. So Jerry Kuzman, Jeff Pfeffer, famous from episode 1500. I think this is Jeff Pfeffer, but not Big Jeff Pfeffer. I forget which Pfeffer this is. Callback to a couple hundred episodes ago. A wee Pfeffer.

Yeah. Claude Osteen, Hooks Douse, Bob Rush, Bert Houten, Tim Wakefield, ago a wee pepper yeah claude ostein hooks douse bob rush burt hooten tim wakefield fritz oster mueller larry durker charlie liebrandt brickyard kennedy rick wise chris short cole hamels that's an interesting one cole hamels yeah because you know cole hamels been a good pitcher for a long time but no black ink at all on his baseball reference page so i once wrote about this at bp about cole hamels and sort of how you know we don't want to make too much of pitcher wins but how he was like a very he was a pitcher at risk of sort of being forgotten yeah after his career ends because the traditional markers that we look at that might

make a guy jump out at you when you're doing research years later they don't exist for him and that isn't to say that he wasn't a very good pitcher but that the way that his his skill sort of manifested relative to his peers put him in a sort of precarious position from a memory perspective and so this is unsurprising to me. Yeah. Yeah, it fits. All right. And then the last category for players who look better by war than they do via these traditional tests. So this is players, pitchers whose war is more robust than their gray ink score would lead you to believe. And in this case, it's all relievers really at the top, because if you're a reliever, you probably haven't even finished in the top 10 of categories that are more oriented towards starting pitchers, but you might still have a decent war if you were good

for a long time. So Joaquin Benoit is actually at the top of this list. And yeah, that's a good name. Joaquin Benoit was really good for a long time but he was a reliever so he was not leading the league or or close to leading the league in anything no black ink and others uh after Benoit Darren O'Day, Luis Aquino, Terry Leach, Mike Adams, Jeremy Affelt, Jason Fraser, Steve Reed, Scott Leinbrink, Scott Kamenicki, etc., etc. I could keep remembering relievers, but that kind of reliever who hung around for a while but didn't get saves, right? That's another thing because I guess saves are a category that counts toward this. So these are like good setup men who never really became dedicated closers.

Will Harris is another name near the top of this list. However, if I set a minimum level of gray ink here so that you actually have to have had some gray ink, this basically excludes most of the relievers. And then we get a list of starters who sound a lot like what you would expect. Mostly non-Hall of Famers who were really good and maybe are not Hall of Famers in part because they didn't lead the league in a lot or even come that close to leading the league in a lot. But here are some names that seem fitting. Frank Tanana, Wilbur Wood, Hoyt Wilhelm, Kenny Rogers, Rick Rushall, Andy Pettit, Louis Tiant, Brad Radke, Al Orth, Kevin Apier, Jimmy

Key, Mel Stalemar, Mark Burley, Jamie Moyer, Tommy John, Brett Saberhagen, David Wells, Jake Peavy. Those are some good names and maybe more in line with what you would expect. Okay. Now the question that Andrew actually asked here was about overrated players. I wanted to accentuate the positive first, but so the overrated players. So looking here at batters who had higher black ink ranks than you would expect from their war ranks and Bill Buckner comes in. So I set a minimum here. Basically, I set a minimum with a black ink score of nine, which is Bill Buckner's black ink score, because otherwise, if you set no minimum, it screws it up and you get a bunch of unknowns that no one has heard of.

I think this is more in the spirit of the question. So Bill Buckner, by this metric, is actually only 19th. So there are some other more overrated players ahead of him here. And Kenny sent me like all players from all of history. So the number one player on the list is Hick Carpenter, who played in the late 19th century. Not really a household name, but he hadette. Dante Bichette, who is like kind of a classic go-to example of like good surface stats, not good war because, you know, he hit for power, but he didn't really do anything else that was good. And he was playing at a time of high offensive standards and he is playing in Coors Field and everything. So when you do all the adjustments, it turns out that Dante Bichette, who was like a four-time all-star and guy who got

MVP votes in four seasons and had a runner-up MVP season and led the league in homers once, well, he has a 5.6 career war, according to baseball reference, in a 14-season career. So that's kind of the epitome of this. So Dante Bichette, then you've got some old school guys, Bob Dillinger, High Myers, Levi Maierl, if I'm saying that right, but then Chris Davis. Chris Davis, the Oriole. So yeah, don't want to pile on Chris Davis, but perhaps predictable. Again, a guy who's led the majors in homers a couple of times and led in RBI and also led in strikeouts and some other things, but not a great player lifetime, according to

War. And D Strange Gordon is on here too. Vince Coleman, Lip Pike, Doc Kramer, Ryan Howard. So you've got other guys like this, Zualo Versalis, Whit Merrifield is on there, Cecil Fielder, Juan Pierre. So you've got an interesting mix here of sluggers, one-dimensional sluggers who don't look so great once you do the park adjustments and everything and weren't so good in other ways. And then like Speedsters who stole bases but didn't do much else. So that's what you got here. And Buckner again, as I mentioned, is only, what did I say, 19th on that ranking. However, if we do gray ink for batters, so the batters who finished in the top

10 in a lot of statistical categories a lot of times, but did not have very impressive wars. The top name again is Lip Pike, but this is another late 19th century player, like 1870s guy. If we remove poor Lip Pike here, Bill Buckner is the number one on the list. So Andrew was onto something here. Bill Buckner was very often in the top 10 in a lot of statistical categories and sometimes led the league in some things and also had some black ink, I guess I should specify. Let's see. He led the league in doubles a couple of times. He won a batting title. He led the league in at bats once and he played a lot and for a couple times. He won a batting title. He led the league in at bats once, and he played a lot and for a long time,

and so he finished in a lot of top tens and was not a great player, according to War. So Bill Buckner, Cal McVeigh, Abner Dalrymple, Tom York, Joe Carter. Joe Carter, another guy who's sort of overrated by traditional stats like RBI, doesn't fare so well in War. Fred Luteris, Irish Musel, John Riley, George Wright, Hal Chase,

Charlie Jones, Prince Fielder shows up again, Jackie Jensen, et cetera, et cetera. And I guess to wrap up, we have the pitchers. So this doesn't really work as well for pitchers. I don't think this is not so satisfying a list, but I tried to come up with equivalent cutoffs't know that there's as satisfying a way to do this for pitchers, but I'll put the spreadsheet online for anyone who wants to slice and dice the numbers. It's guys who like had a lot of black ink in like a short career so that they haven't racked up that much war yet. So it looks like there's a big difference there, but actually they're pretty good. You know, you've got Blake Snell on here. You've got Jose Valverde. And then just to finish up, I guess, with the gray ink guys, not a lot of familiar names to most of our audience, probably Fred

Goldsmith, Vic Rasche, Pete Donahue, Cherokee Fisher, Bob Groom, Larry Cheney, Frank Smith, George Bradley, Pat Malone, Kirby Higby, lots of old timers here. Allie Reynolds is on there. Denny McLean is, I guess, a pretty good one. Denny McLean is maybe better known than his war would support. So I'll put all of this online. It's a good question. Thank you very much, Andrew. I think it produced some satisfying answers for the overrated and underrated batters at least,

and maybe for the underrated pitchers as well. So thanks to Kenny for this enormous dump of data, which I will put online for people to comb through to their heart's content. All right. Well, that's all I've got. So thanks for the good questions. Keep them coming. We will be back with more emails and banter and news and whimsy and weirdness next week.

All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks, as always, for listening. On Friday night after we finished recording, William Zastadio further endeared himself to the internet and to me in like four or five different ways within four or five hours. He was being interviewed before the game, and he was asked about throwing 46-mile-per-hour strikes,

and his explanation was gasolina. Then he started in the game against the pirates at first base batting ninth which is interesting because we did a stat blast earlier this week about the most uncommon combinations of field position and lineup position and that stat blast was prompted by the twins starting mitch carver their catcher in the leadoff spot which we determined was the most uncommon combination. But the second most uncommon combination was first baseman batting ninth. So the Twins did that too with Astadillo. Of course, it's uncommon for first baseman to bat ninth because first baseman tend

to be power hitters. And so was Astadillo in this game. He hit a home run on a pitch that was 4.24 feet off the ground. According to Sarah Langs, that was the highest pitch hit for a home run this season. Also the highest since September 2019. Really high, way above the strike zone, way above the ground, which made it more impressive because Williams Asadio himself is not way above the ground. He said after the game, I was impressed with myself. That was a high pitch. It was like at least shoulder height on Asadio.

So that was great. During the game, he had to take cover because there was a bat shard that went his way. So he sort of turtled to protect himself, pun totally intended, before making the play. And then after the game, Jake Cave, who also homered, was doing a post-game interview. And as a video posted on Twitter showed, Williams Astadio was lurking just off screen, gesticulatingulating trying to get Jake Cave to mention Astadio's home run as Rocco Baldelli said we say how all the time when we're talking about him there's always something that happens and maybe more than one something that happens in the course of a game

when Williams is playing totally true if he's on the field there are three or four different things that happen that just wouldn't happen with anyone else so So the camera loves him, and so do I. That game, by the way, lasted two hours and 17 minutes. Speaking of pace and length of game, 2-0 Twins victory over the Pirates, in which Jay Happ came five outs away from a no-hitter. Anyway, all hail Williams. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild.

The following five listeners have already signed up and pled some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Johannes Masaida, Benji Englander, Kurt Crawford, Alex Coopersmith, and Ian Jessup. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at Facebook.com slash group slash

Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Meg via email at podcastfancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back with another episode early next week. Talk to you then.

Like you die in the sky, oh we'll leave this world behind but you're so right we're free oh let the world seem like one big puzzle piece and we're floating on We're alone