Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1688: Beware of Flying Objects

Episode Date: May 1, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Rays flamethrower Shane McClanahan’s regular-season MLB debut, a Bryce Harper hit by pitch and the causes of the current HBP epidemic, and the biggest surprises of the topsy-turvy standings entering May. Then (33:32) they’re joined by listener and Patreon supporter David Whitcomb to answer listener emails about whether […]

🎵 Made in the shade Deep in the shadow Hello and welcome to episode 1688 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Alright, how are you? Doing alright. Well, we're going to do some emails today and we'll be joined by a guest for that segment. But a few bits of banter before we get there. Did you see Shane McClanahan's regular season debut for the Rays on Thursday? I did not. I

missed it. Yeah. Well, he was pretty impressive and we don't have to do a meet a major leaguer segment for him because technically he did make his major league debut last year in the playoffs. But this was his regular season debut. And he threw four innings and, you know, he looked pretty good. He struck out five, didn't walk anyone, gave up a couple of runs. But he was throwing like 100, 101. And he's a lefty and he's not a giant or anything. He's listed at 6'1".

And it's just like routine almost at this point. It's like, yeah, sure. A lefty comes in and throw in triple digits and yeah, whatever. We're used to that. He's not like the best prospect in baseball or anything. He's not even the best raised prospect. He's not even the best raised prospect named Shane for that even the best raised prospect named Shane, for that matter. It's just so humdrum. I mean, it's not nothing, but looking at the fastest pitches thrown by lefties this year, the hardest pitch he threw according to StatCast was 100.5,

and that was the 31st fastest pitch thrown by a lefty this year. It's still special, but, you know, Aroldis Chapman, who seems to have his top end velocity back, is throwing gas and Jose Alvarado is throwing gas. And so Shane McClanahan is just another guy, whereas, I don't know, not that long ago. I mean, when Chapman came up, it was an absolute sensation that he was throwing as hard as he did. And now it's just, yeah, Shane McClanahan, welcome to the league, along with all of the other people who are throwing 100. what would be most striking to like if we were to transport a fan from 50 years ago to today i guess let like there are fans from 50 years ago who are still watching baseball today i don't mean to suggest around but like if you you know if you pulled someone who died in between pick help me construct a better scenario but you know what i'm saying like if you if you were to transport a fan from a prior era and just plop them down in the middle of baseball today i think that one of the things that would be the most arresting to them is is just the the

proliferation of velocity it's like the average basketball velo goes up every single year and you know we're getting to the point where i think that the difference to to fans today who are trained to watch for velo means that some of these velo shifts are sort of imperceptible to them because it's like oh he's how hard is he throwing really hard you know but it is it is wild what we become accustomed to because i remember you know when like you know broadcast would talk about a guy hitting 100 for like a whole half inning after he'd done it and now we're kind of like yeah let him do that you know it's like they're gonna have to start shifting the the flame velo i know yeah sam wrote about that several

seasons ago and i still see flame emojis or flame graphics sometimes with like 95 mile per hour pitches and it's like we need to update our thresholds here because that is common that is run of the mill now. Yeah, we have to recalibrate the flames because they are no longer sufficiently sensitive. Nope. They're insensitive flames. This kind of gets to what I wanted to talk about or one of the things, which is guys getting drilled by pitches. And this happened this week to Bryce Harper.

And here's another reason to talk about Bryce Harper, not the reason I would choose. He got hit in the face by a 97 mile per hour fastball. And fortunately, he seems to be okay, which is great because it was scary, of course, at first. And not every hit by pitch is a beanball is getting hit in the head by a fast fastball. But there is something of an epidemic with hit by pitches in general. And this is something that has been happening in recent years, just slowly and steadily or not even that slowly. And it's reached a new height this season. And Rob Maines at Baseball Perspectives wrote about it this week. And Rob has been writing about this for a few years now, just tracking how much more common hit-by-pitches are getting. So looking back from 1901 to present,

the average number of plate appearances per hit-by-pitch is about 153, 152.8 over that very long period. And now, this season, it's 75.4 through Thursday's games. So basically twice as frequent as it's been throughout history. That's the hit by pitch rate now. And it's been gradually getting more and more pronounced. In fact, the four highest rates per plate appearance of hit by pitches are 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018. So this is not just a blip. It's something that's been building. And Rob has been sort of sounding the alarm on this for a while, just because not only are we getting more players hit by pitches, and it's more pronounced

if you look at it on a per plate appearance basis than a per pitch basis, because there are more pitches per plate appearance these days as well. But it's a record on a per pitch basis too. And so he has pointed out that when you have more guys getting hit and pitches being thrown harder and harder, that seems like a scary combination. And you might get more Bryce Harper incidents and maybe they won't end as well. And it's tough to know what to do about that exactly and how high this rate could go. But Rob has pinned it on two factors. So I'm quoting from his piece this week. Batters have been hit with increasing frequency for two reasons, one obvious and one less. So pitchers are throwing harder, so batters have less time to get out of the way of a pitch. And there are more strikeouts. That means there are more pitcher's

counts in which the pitcher tries to get the batter to chase a pitch on or a bit off the black. If that pitch is inside and he misses by a few inches, the batter jogs to first while trying not to rub the body part that got hit. There are other possible factors, batters standing closer to the plate, protective equipment that reduces the risk of injury or extreme pain from being hit, but they're not as easy to quantify. So I'm going with those two bullet points. So it's just something to worry about, I guess. Not that we need another thing to worry about, but it was on my mind. Whether it's something that's not major, like just Mike Trout getting hit in the elbow and missing a few days, or it's Bryce Harper getting hit in the face and you worry that it will be much worse than that.

This is something that we're seeing in the modern game. The Harper hit by pitch was so scary. When they did the slow-mo tracking it kind of coming into his face, one of the angles you could see the the folks who were sitting behind home plate and as soon as it hit his face one of those guys made the face yeah and you know you feel weird watching a replay of that but you want to see if it you know maybe it hit something else and it ricocheted and that's still painful and potentially damaging. But no, that sucker hit him just flush in the face. It was really bad.

I have come around to the idea that one of the primary differences between me and professional baseball players is that they just never immediately throw up when they're hit by a fastball. up when they're hit by a fastball. I think I would just immediately throw up if I were hit by a fastball in the face, on the elbow, in the meatiest part of my behind. I would just immediately crumple to the ground and then throw up. And then the camera would have to pan away and the broadcast booth would have to talk about something else because you don't want to pile on to the poor person who slumped over vomiting on themselves after getting hit by a pitch. But yeah, it's very scary. And I think that, you know, it will not surprise our listeners to learn that we are not we are not a fan of intentional beanballs. And the pitch that hit Harper and then the next pitch that hit Gregorius, those were clearly mistakes. Like, I don't think that there was any intent to hit them or injure them at all. And so I don't mean to suggest that this was like a, you know, a beanball situation, but

it does sort of highlight that, yes, theoretically, the pitches that are meant to hit a guy to prove some kind of point, like that we all need therapy, are thrown less hard. But it can just be really hard to command stuff. It can be harder than you expect. And even pros, even major leaguers can struggle and it can be so scary. And so I think that, you know, it's just further argument to, to get those out of the game because we have enough of them that are mistakes, genuine mistakes. We don't need to up the total with intentional business. That seems, that seems ridiculous. And again, this was clearly just, you know, he didn't have command at all. But it was very scary. Yeah, it was. One factor that Rob didn't mention that I think is contributing to this and maybe also ameliorating the risk a little bit is that we're

seeing more breaking balls being thrown. And, you know, this kind of goes hand in hand with what Rob was saying about more strikeouts and more pitchers counts. And in pitchers counts, very often you're going to throw breaking balls, although that's not as predictable as it used to be. And so you get more breaking balls being thrown. Pitchers are less able to command breaking balls than fastballs in general. And also you're trying to get guys to chase. And so you are maybe more likely for those to be wayward. And in a way, that is a positive, I guess, that you could say that more hit by pitches are coming on breaking balls. Like for instance, in 2008, according to Baseball Savant, 22.8% of hit by pitches were breaking balls. And 2021 32.7 percent are so way more of hit by

pitches are breaking ball these days last year was 34.8 percent that was the the highest percentage in the pitch tracking era so you've gone from like you know a little more than a fifth of hit by pitches being on breaking balls to basically a third of them. And so I think that is a good thing in the sense that, A, the average velocity of a hit-by-pitch or a pitch that produces a hit-by-pitch is lower than ever, actually. So that's sort of the saving grace here, that the average velocity of a hit-by hit by pitch this year is 88 miles per hour. And that is the slowest average velocity of pitches that hit people in any season in the pitch tracking era. So that's good. Yes, it's true that maybe one factor is pitches are getting thrown harder and so hitters can't get out of the way. But when they do get hit, the average speed is lower by maybe a mile per hour almost compared to some earlier

seasons. So that's good. And also I think breaking balls are less likely to be up in the face area. And this is, I think, something Rob has written about that even though the overall rate of hit by pitches has increased, the rate of getting hit in the butt or the leg or whatever, like that's obviously a lot less potentially lethal than getting hit in the head. So maybe just looking at the hit by pitch rate makes it seem even more dangerous than it actually is when you look at what pitches guys are getting hit on and where those pitches are located. So that's something, that's the silver lining. But still, it is scary because you do still get those outlier pitches, like the ones that are fastballs bases instead of one or suspending people automatically or, you know, having harsher suspensions or something that would make pitchers wearier of doing that and maybe also like take away the inner part of the plate a little bit. And maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing in this era either. I don't know, but you'd need to do something to actually make it more costly for pitchers to stay away from those regions. Yeah. I tend to be of the mind that like, I don't know that automatic suspensions,

I know you're not like really advocating for that necessarily, but the intent behind it does matter. I suppose that the benefit of something as severe as that is that it incentivizes the manager to pull a guy who really just doesn't have any sense of where the ball is going very quickly. Right. So maybe it doesn't kick in on the on the first hit by pitch, it kicks in on the second hit by pitch or something. But yeah, it's sort of a tricky problem to solve because you're, you know, you have, first of all, you have two categories of hit by pitch, right? You have the ones that are clearly intentional. And I think it makes sense to be very draconian because despite us all knowing that that is like a bad way to manage one's feelings, we are still doing it. And by we, I don't mean you and I, but baseball players. So I think that being draconian there makes a certain amount of sense just because it is a form of self-policing within the game that is really dangerous

and doesn't seem to be going away even though it is, I think, less common than it used to be. But then for guys who are really just not doing it on purpose, I don't know, there's something about suspension that strikes me as being disproportionate most of the time. But then when you do have guys who, as you said, are sort of in that rare category of both pitches that are to the head or neck and then are very fast, the risk is pretty substantial. So I don't know that I have a fully formulated opinion on what the right level of sort of punishment and policing is there. And I wonder if something like getting an extra base than they already do might be something

that helps to counterbalance it somewhat. But it's hard when a guy isn't doing it on purpose because I'm sure that he would rather not hit a dude with a pitch either, right? Like you don't want to give away a free base and you certainly don't want to hurt someone. So it's a tricky problem to try to fix from a rules perspective because I don't think that for the vast majority of these hit by pitches that there's really an intent either to hit or injure. And so it gets a little tricky. And to be clear, if I got hit by like a very, very loopy slider, I would still throw up.

Yeah. Getting hit by a ball in the face is not pleasant. I can testify to that. I broke my nose, not even in a game, but in eighth grade, I was just playing catch with some friends in Central Park. And I got like a short hop that bounced off a tree root and right into my face and broke my nose and had like a bandage on my face in our graduation photo. Oh, no. So that was not great. And that wasn't even like a pitch and wasn't even a game situation. It was just really a bad hop, just environmental obstacles. So, you know, baseballs are hard and they have velocity. So it's something that you have to be concerned about. And frankly, it's pretty impressive that hitters stand in there at all when Shane McClanahan is dealing. So that kind of amazes me anyway. And yeah, we got an email this week that's not part of our email show, but someone pointed

out that Mark Canna is one hit by pitch away from taking over the franchise lead for the A's. And Mark Canna has not been with the A's for all that long like this is his seventh season and he is sitting on 59 hit by pitches and this is Brian who wrote in to say that he's tied for the most hit by pitches in Oakland A's history and the other four guys who are like in the same region it's you know Canna has 59 Hit by pitches in 1961 Plate appearances then you have Sal Bando with 59 hit by Pitches in 5908

Plate appearances Reggie Jackson With 57 Jason John B 55 Ricky Henderson 55 and those Guys all have 4400 Something 5500 Something 7400 something Plate appearances and Canna here has fewer than 2,000.

And that's not all the era effect. That's also probably something specific to Mark Canna. He should be careful up there. But it is also the era that is having that effect. You're just seeing more hit-by-pitches. And so Brian asked if Canna should ask for the ball the next time he gets hit, and probably not, right? No.

I guess it's a mark of honor. I guess it's like, hey, I survived my 60th hit by pitch. No one else has been plunked more on this franchise. But I don't know that I would want to remember that. You can remember it by the bruise. Yeah. I wouldn't want to give a surly pitcher any ideas either. Like, you don't want to inspire anyone to say, well, I'll hand you your 60th or what have you. Like, that would be terrible.

Of course, if that person presented themselves as being keen to deliver a landmark hit by pitch, then that person we could suspend because that seems like your priorities are somewhat warped and you might not be a particularly nice person. Yep. Anyway, I think there probably is some little Peltzman effect, as they call it, the risk compensation. Like if you adjust your behavior in response to the perceived level of risk. So like if you have a bike helmet on when you're riding, you might ride in a riskier way because you think you're more impervious to injury. in a riskier way because you, you think you're more impervious to injury and something similar could be going on with like protective gear with hitters. Even if we're not seeing like the ginormous Barry Bonds type elbow protector,

we're still seeing some protection that hitters didn't use to have. And so even though pitches are being thrown harder, maybe they're more willing to take one for the team or stand in a way that would make them more likely to be hit just because they figure it's less likely to lead to injury. And I guess it is. And so it's good that they have that protection, but also not great if it means that they're getting hit even more because they're less afraid of getting hit. So it's a push and pull. Anyway, I just hope that we see not many more plays like the Harper one, because that was unpleasant.

I can't believe that he didn't break his orbital bone or something. I was like, oh, we're about to lose. I thought of you, actually. I was like, ah, we're going to have to talk about Bryce Harper, because he's about to be out for at least a month, because his face is going to be broken. I know. Yeah. So I was glad to be wrong.

Me too. But I just cannot. Does he have a, is he Wolverine? So, you know, I was glad to be wrong, but I just cannot. Does he have like a, is he Wolverine? Is his skull made of a different substance than bones? Like is it adamantium? Is it adamantium? He sort of had the Wolverine hairstyle, so maybe he has the bone structure too. All right.

Well, last thing I wanted to mention here, we don't really do real or not real type segments that you get on many baseball podcasts at this time of year. But this is our last episode in April. We're recording here on April 30th. There's just one more game to go in this month. And most teams have played about 25 games, which is still a small sample in baseball. It takes 67 games for half the variance in team records to be due to talent and half to chance, and you're better off just with a preseason projection than in-season record for many months to come. It's basically a 50-50 shot that if you're leading the division now, you will end up winning the division. Sarah Langs just ran these numbers at MLB.com, and she found that since 1996, or from 1996 through 2019,

77 of 144 eventual division champions held at least a share of that division lead entering May 1st. That's 53% of division winners. So having a hot start through today tells you something, but not as much as you might think. As we speak, and I guess probably also at the end of the month in most of these divisions the current leader is not the leader that was projected to win that division by Fangraph's preseason odds and I wonder what you think is the most surprising or I guess if you had to to rank like likelihood of these results standing up for the rest of the season like right now the brewers are in first place and i think they were the pre-season playoff odds favorite so that is really the one division where the current leader is not or would not be an upset so yeah

you've got the red sox up by three games right now in the al east you've got the royals up by three games right now in the AL East. You've got the Royals up by a game and a half in the AL Central. You've got the A's, who were the defending champions, but not favored to repeat, up by two games in the AL West. You've got the Giants in first place, as we speak, in the NL West just by half a game. And then in the NL East, every single team is under 500 for the moment, which will not last long because the Phillies and the Mets are both a game under 500 and are playing each other this weekend. So someone will be at 500 very soon. But right now, every team is under 500. And so the Braves, Phillies, and Mets are all preseason playoff odds favorite and the Braves were probably the preseason public consensus favorite. So surprising, despite the caveats you just listed, and the least likely to persist.

So maybe both of the East. Maybe I find both of the East confounding in similar measure. I don't, this Red Sox team, I don't know about this. I mean, I know that they're in the spot that they are. I think that we talked about the various ways in which projection systems might discount a team like the Rays. And so to see them sort of sitting in second place despite not being a preseason favorite is probably unsurprising. But for Toronto and New York to be as far back as they are

is quite surprising. For the Yankees and the Orioles to have the same record. Wild stuff. That is truly a wild bit of business. So that actually might be the thing that I find the most confounding about the early going, and I don't think that that will persist. Because I think that the Orioles are a pretty bad baseball team in the aggregate, and I think that the Yankees are a pretty bad baseball team in the aggregate, and I think that the Yankees are a pretty good baseball team in the aggregate,

although they have not played good baseball of late. But that is a wild bit of business. I wish that I had had the courage to say that the Royals were more than interesting going into the season. Me too. And I just was a coward. And I suspect that the White Sox will emerge. I think I picked the White Sox to win the Central.

If not them, I picked the Twins. What's up with the Twins? I picked the Twins to win that division. And yeah, the Twins and the Royals are facing each other this weekend. And they have reverse records right now. It's like the Twins are facing each other this weekend and they have like reverse records right now. It's like the twins are 8 and 15. The Royals are 15 and 8. Their playoff odds are actually very, very similar right now.

And also their base runs records are also the same. I think they both have 12 and 11 base runs records. It's just that the twins have fallen far short of theirquote expected record, and the Royals have far exceeded it. And the Twins have also had lousy luck or timing or whatever you want to call it with extra inning games and seven inning games. A lot of their losses have come in Manfred Ball 2021 weirdness, but still, it counts the same in the standings. So yeah, that's probably the strangest individual result for me thus far. I would not have been surprised to see the White Sox atop this division or the Twins or even like Cleveland making a run at it maybe, but I didn't think the Royals had what it took yet like you i thought they would be interesting but uh but not not quite this competitive no oh yeah and and i i remember when we talked to grant about the giants and you know we we observed their their offense being

pretty dynamic in the shortened season in a way that I don't think I expected. But I did not imagine that we would be living through a simultaneous like Evan Longoria and Buster Posey renaissance. No, I love it. But yeah, it's great fun. I mean, like, don't get me wrong, this is delightful. And Tony Wolfe wrote about this for us earlier in the week. But that rotation has been pretty impressive, which when you consider kind of how they assembled it, you know, That rotation has been pretty impressive, which when you consider kind of how they assembled it, you know, they've they've we talked about this with Grant, too. They've been a good they've been a really proficient sort of roster churn club. And I think they're doing it in a way that's smart. They're trying to see, you know, who they can kind of get surprising performances out of.

And they made their entire rotation out of bounce back candidates and they are all simultaneously bouncing back. entire rotation out of bounce back candidates and they are all simultaneously bouncing back although you know i suppose that with with cueto getting injured it's not a completely rosy picture but it it is um it is surprising that it has kind of clicked as well as it has and you might look at that and say well they're not likely to sort of perform this well as a group for the duration of the season and i think that that is true in much the same way that i suspect that um the dodgers will kind of get out of whatever small funk they're in and kind of steam ahead and um san diego is proving why they acquired all their pitching depth you're gonna get so many freaking chrismat innings man i'm furious yeah feeling pretty good

about that but like the and like the D-backs are a game over 500, and the Rockies are still bad, but we're not living in the upside down, so that part, it's nice to be able to ground yourself in something predictable. But yeah, there's been a lot of surprise in those seasons first month, and I think that looking at these teams,

if there's anything that I would expect to sort of persist, I don't think that the Royals will be at the top of the division, although I think that this squad has proven itself to be better than we thought, although perhaps not division winning better. So that's unsurprising. I think that, or maybe not unsurprising, but the most likely to persist. The East. I don't know about the East. I'm really disappointed in Braves pitching. Everyone owes Pakoda an apology. Yeah. Yeah. I picked the Mets to win that division in part because of the offense and that has not shown up either. No. Apart from Jacob deGrom,

who's trying to provide his own offensive support and not quite succeeding. But that offense, non-pitchers, has been middle of the pack and I think should be better. So yeah, it's a lot of oddness. Like the Marlins are the only team in the NL East with a positive run differential. Yeah, that makes no sense. A lot of it comes down to sequencing and timing and clutchness. A lot of it, like it comes down to sequencing and timing and clutchness. Like if you just sort the teams by clutch fan, clutch metric, the top teams right now are Seattle, San Francisco, Kansas City, Miami, Oakland. Like these are a lot of the teams that we're talking about exceeding expectations.

And then at the bottom, it's the Cubs, the Blue Jays, the Dodgers, the Padres, the Twins, the Yankees. So, you know, a lot of it is just that. And you would expect that to even out over the course of the season, although it doesn't always. But yeah, lots of weirdness going on here. And Giants rotation has a 2.20 ERA. It's like, yeah, some of those guys are pretty good. Like Kevin Gossman, I get it.

It's like, yeah, some of those guys are pretty good. Like Kevin Gossman, I get it. But like Anthony DiScafani and Alex Wood and Aaron Sanchez and all these guys, are they that good? I don't know. No, I don't think they – I think the answer is no, they're not, but they are right now. Yeah. So, yes, I think the most unlikely to be sustained, I think, is Giants over Dodgers and Padres. Yes, agreed. And the Dodgers, yeah, they're in a little bit of a funk now.

And it's more pronounced because it's the Dodgers and we were expecting them to win every game. And their odds of having a record-breaking season are getting quite long now. Right. Because all it takes is like, you know, a bad week or two. Yeah, one bad stretch. So that, I think, you know, Giants probably bound for third place

when it's all said and done. But maybe they're better and more entertaining than I gave them credit for. that i think you know giants probably bound for third place when it's all said and done but maybe they're better and more entertaining than i gave them credit for and and maybe bound for some sort of wild card uh situation right they'll certainly be in that conversation in a way that i did not anticipate them being you know it is inspiring me to like what what did i even predict you know i had i had uh dodgers brewers and braves as my division winners and then i had padres and mets as my wild cards in the nl and then what did i say in the al i had los angeles minnesota and new york and then toronto and the white socks in the wild card

so some of that will come true yeah still no, when the dust settles, I think the predictions will look more on point. But right now, not so much. Not so much. Which is fine, which is fun, frankly. Neither of us cares all that much about our predictions. So I think we're fine with upsets and surprises. So bring it on. My brave mike trout mvp pick is looking really strong yeah i'm glad that i had the the strength to go with my go with my gut you know you really that's what you want you want to you want someone to go with their gut yes be bold yeah he's still hitting 420 god bless him yeah i really enjoyed when Ben Clemens made bold predictions for the season and you could tell that like they weren't that bold. Like he was really trying to make bold predictions, but like they weren't. They were like bold for Ben and bold for me and bold for like a sabermatrician, but not bold for like the typical person who does bold predictions and like inside the bold predictions, he would be like, I know this isn't actually that bold. Right.

It's like, oh, bless his heart. He really tried to do it. And I empathize because I don't even try to make bold predictions because if I don't believe it, then I can't bring myself to predict it. Yes, it was a fun exercise to kind of chat with him about because he really didn't make any predictions that were so terribly spicy. He was like, I got to come up with something really, really hot. And then they were still very reasonable. They were like, oh, I have selected the 20th and or 80th percentile projection for a given thing, and it is spicy.

But it was still within the realm of things that people would potentially project for a given thing. And it is spicy, but it was still like within the realm of things that people would potentially project for a guy. You know, we're just, we're logic bound sorts. And we don't tend to gravitate toward the hot take, which I like about us in general. But I think there is a marketplace for hot takes. You know, there's a hot take economy and we're not participants in it all that often. And so I think that when we try to dip our toe, we are fundamentally afraid. appear to be paying off thus far.

He had Kansas City will finish ahead of Cleveland. That was one of his AL bold predictions, the boldness debatable. Then he had Carson Kelly will be an all-star. That one's looking pretty good these days. And he had Colton Wong will have a higher WRC plus than Keston Hura, which that's working out pretty well too because Kestin Hira is not. So anyway, looking good so far, I guess. All right.

Well, that's all the banter I've got. All right. All right. Let's get to some emails. And we will be joined today for our email segment by a guest and a listener. And I don't know if many people know this, but the highest tier of our Patreon support and titles are supporters at that level to a perk that is not accessible to the lower tier supporters, which is that they're eligible to join us for an email episode. And this doesn't happen all that often. It is perhaps not shocking that not a ton of people take us up on the highest tier of support, but every now and then someone does. And so we've been joined by a few listeners over the years, and it's nice to have the

guest and to have someone who has been listening to us join us for the episode. And so today we are joined by David Whitcomb, who is one of those listeners and has been a Patreon supporter of ours for a while and was smart enough or silly enough or misguided enough to support us at the level that entitles him to come on an episode. So hello, David, and thank you. Hello and welcome. That's my line.

Oh, yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself, aside from the fact that you have supported us at this high Patreon tier. What should people know about you? Where are you? What do you do? Et cetera, et cetera. Sure. There's not a whole lot to tell.

I'm a pretty boring guy, but I live in Atlanta or suburban Atlanta. I coach Little League Baseball. I've been a baseball addict for many years. I'm a recovering baseball addict, I suppose. And I'm a mortgage underwriter by trade. It's about the most boring job you can possibly imagine, but it pays the bills. See, that sounds like the sort of thing where people will say being an actuary or a mortgage underwriter, an accountant or something, people will sort of denigrate those jobs.

They're like, oh, that's a boring job. But there must be people who do those jobs who are entertained by those jobs, right? But it sounds like you are not one of them. I try to make it entertaining. I comb through people's bank statements to see how often they go to Chick-fil-A or something along those lines. But, you know. Well, tell us about your baseball fandom. My baseball fandom, I'm a Red Sox fan by heart. I fell in love with, actually, with Mo Vaughn at a AAA Pawtucket Red Sox game when I was

about 11 or 12 years old, I guess. And I've been a Red Sox fan ever since. I did have season tickets to the Braves their first two years at SunTrust, now Truist Park. So my son and I, my son is now 14 years old. He played ball from when he was three years old up until last season when everything else was canceled by COVID. So anyway, so he is my compadre in baseball fandom. I don't know. That's about it. I'm coaching. I'm so into baseball. I guess the best way I can describe my baseball fan, I'm so into

baseball that I'm coaching an eight and under baseball team this spring for the local park here, even though I don't have an eight-year-old on the team. I just reached out to the local park to see if they needed any help with coaching. They said they need an eight-year-old coach, and I said, I can do that. My favorite thing about baseball players that age is that the helmets are always too big for their bodies. Yep. And it is probably one of the purest and most just endearing little things that you can notice about baseball because they got these big heads running around the bases on these tiny, tiny bodies. It's spectacular.

No, absolutely. Our level actually requires chin straps for that reason specifically so that the helmets don't fall off. So there you go. Yeah, I guess I hadn't thought about that, that the weight of it might be enough to cause kids to lose their helmets as they're rounding the bases. That's a good innovation. Yeah. So yeah, no, I like the eight-year-old level. It's coach pitch. So we pitch to the kids

and try to encourage them to get their hits and that kind of thing. And I always say it's a fun level because they're just smart enough to play baseball, but they're just dumb enough to throw to the wrong base half the time. How happy are the kids to be outside again and to see their friends again after a year of isolation? Yeah, very much so. My mom actually comes to a bunch of my games for me just as like moral support and, you know, just to have a familiar face out there in the crowd for me. And she comes to the games and she said the kid hit his first homer of the season last night or two nights ago, rather. And, uh you know the smile he had coming around us coming around the bases whatever she said that's probably the biggest smile she's ever seen

so they definitely are happy to be out back out there we're taking the necessary safety protocols with masks and hand sanitizer and you know rubbing down the catcher's gear when we switch catchers and all that kind of stuff whatever but definitely the kids are happy to be back out there well that's great thank you for imparting a love of baseball to the next generation and also for supporting the podcast. What possessed you to support the podcast? Or as I understand it, I guess it was a gift. It was. That's right.

Yeah. No, actually, I've been a longtime supporter since. So the first episode I ever listened to was Jeff Sullivan's first episode. And it was, you know, you owe your either gratitude or remorse for having me on to Keith Law. He actually tweeted that, you know, if anybody had to replace Sam, it would be Jeff, would be as good a pick as anybody. And so that's why I decided to check out the podcast. And so I've been a Patreon supporter virtually ever since. My wife actually asked me about, you know, people appearing on the episode because she's been subjected to listening to it in the background, that kind of stuff sometimes.

And she reached out to me. Well, she tried to reach out to you guys, and then she just told me to do it to find out about what it would cost to get somebody on the episode. And you advised me about the Mike Trout level, and the rest is history, as they say. Well, thank you to you and also to your wife. Yes. I recommend that all spouses of listeners give this gift. I think it is a wonderful gift. I am not at all biased in this. Yes. Co-signed. Co-signed. So let's get to some emails here. And here's one that I think you

wanted to weigh in on. So we got a question from listener Josh, who says, I was wondering how many consecutive years of winning a fantasy baseball league it would take for a team to want to hire you. Assuming this league is a 10 person league filled with the average fan graphs reader, my approximation was somewhere between 10 consecutive years of winning and never. On one hand, 10 straight years of winning shows that you have a pretty good understanding of evaluating talent. On the other hand, this is not real baseball. I was curious if you two had any thoughts on this, or in this case, us three. So David, do you have thoughts? I do have thoughts. This is channeling my inner Sam Miller, I suppose, but the answer to this is very easy. It's never. I have a fantasy league that i've been running for well since 1998

so whatever that is but it's been concurrently or consecutively running since then and uh i call it very competitive and it's 14 teams and a lot of us have known each other for the whole time and some of us are relatively new like another patreon supporter nathan valentine uh who's in our league but anyway he is uh so the league itself is very competitive and I think people take a lot of pride in winning and all that. And it has absolutely nothing to do with real baseball. Like it has, you know, I mean, I suppose, you know, that somebody could get hired by a team, certainly not to be Jeff Breidich's replacement, for example, although how much worse could they do? But the, you know, I think the answer to this is very simple. It's just never.

I was going to ask, like, what is the, what is the turnover been in that league? Do you? So, yeah, that's a good question. About half the people, I think eight, eight or nine are original owners. And then we've turned over the back end. We started as a 12 team league and we expanded to 14 about 10 years ago. And so, you know, most of the people like Valentine is our most rookie owner and he's been in it for four years. Oh, wow. Yep. I don't imagine that it would necessarily impress a team that you had won so often. I mean, they'd probably be happy for you, but not in a way that compelled them to offer a job.

I was in a fantasy league with a grad school friend and some of his friends from his sort of college and childhood years and forgot to set my lineup so often that they kicked me out. Well, it was sort of a bright edge situation, actually. It was a mutual parting of the ways. I was like, I probably shouldn't do this anymore. And Thomas was like, you're right. Did you trade Nolan Arenado to a rival owner and give him 50 bucks for the privilege? No, but I ended up gifted Mike Trout because I took over a roster and then forgot the keeper deadline and accidentally released him to the league. So my level of attention to detail, thankfully, is much higher at FanGraphs than it was in this particular league, but it was not Sterling. Yeah, no, that's fantastic.

So I think you're probably right that in most cases it would be never, certainly if it's like a standard fantasy league, if it's just your five by five stats or whatever, which don't necessarily even map on to value. But I think there are maybe some fantasy leagues, the ones that are closer to real baseball. So like Adenu at Fangraphs or if it's some sort of like simulation league more so than fantasy, if it's like Diamond Mind or something along those lines, then I could see the skills sort of mapping onto real baseball. I'm not saying that would be the only thing did it in some way that would impress people that worked with a team, like you had your own projection system or some method to your madness, then I could see it kind of piquing people's interest if it were coupled with other relevant experience and skills and good interviewing and all the other things that you generally need. and the Cardinals, he kind of came to public attention in Sam Walker's book Fantasyland because he was sort of Walker's statistical consultant for his fantasy season that he chronicled in that book. And he was using like projections and translations and the things that he brought to the Cardinals. And so that helped. He also like worked with NASA and was a rocket scientist.

So, you know, it wasn't just fantasy, but he honed his baseball skills in that league. There are other baseball executives like, well, I guess it's not as impressive an example to cite, but disgraced former Astros executive Brandon Taubman was a high-level fantasy player, I believe, who had his own models and projections. I remember articles being written about that. Or Mike Fishman, the AGM of the Yankees, I think was a pretty sophisticated fantasy player before he was working in baseball. So I think there are some skills that map onto that and that might make you a more attractive candidate. But it's not just, hey, I won my Yahoo League for five years,

so hire me. No, I certainly think there's some translatable skills, but I think by and large, if you're going to spend 10 years doing something, you'd probably spend doing 10 years of something a heck of a lot more productive than winning a fantasy league to impress teams. Yeah. And if you were in national tournaments and that sort of thing, I mean, if you're playing daily fantasy and you're winning vast sums of money and you're going to like prominent tournaments and you're like a fantasy celebrity, I'm not really involved in that world. And I haven't played fantasy baseball myself for many, many years. But I could see that sort of thing. Like if, you know, you have your sophisticated projection system that is enabling you to win those things or give you an edge, then I don't see why that wouldn't be applicable. So, you know, it might help, but it depends on the league, I think,

and on your approach. Yeah. I was going to say that when I look at the analysis that, you know, folks do on the, like the Rotograph side, you know, they're smart cookies over there. So there's definitely, even if you're maybe looking at the game from a slightly different perspective and trying to answer different questions than someone who's writing on like the fan graph side would you know there's there's definitely a grist for the mill there if you're trying to demonstrate a team skill set but yeah if you if you just went five by five in yahoo they're probably going to say that's nice. Yeah. Alright, John, Patreon supporter,

says, I'm watching Cubs Brewers on Sunday, April 25th. They're in the seventh inning. Daniel Vogelbach batting against Alec Mills swung and missed and turned around to ask the umpire if it had been a strike, as we often see hitters do in just about every game. On the Cubs broadcast, Jim Deshaies

said that when he pitched, he felt this practice to be an unfair advantage to the hitter, that the umpire should not give away whether the pitch was in the zone or not. He did not elaborate much, but it seemed like to him it was a matter of the pitcher not knowing the answer from the umpire, like if the pitcher could also be privy to knowing it would have been a strike without the swing, that would balance the scales. It could be also that maybe if the hitter was fooled, swung and missed, and had This seems so fussy to me. Yeah, this never occurred to me. In part because the catcher is there. And so I guess if it's a matter of the pitcher not being privy to the answer and the catcher thinking that it's particularly important for the pitcher to

know what the umpire said, there is a mechanism by which that information can be conveyed, right? They can have a mound visit about it. And the pitcher can visualize the strike zone, right? Like they're looking at it while they're throwing the ball. So it seems, you know, and their feel for that might not be perfect. And depending on the umpire, you know, it might vary perhaps significantly from like the rulebook zone. But it's not as if they, you know, throw the pitch and then are blinded, they can kind of see where it landed. So I don't, I don't know that I necessarily think that this matters all that much. I guess an umpire would be within their rights to not answer the question. question, but it doesn't seem like it's a situation that has sustained potential for like an information imbalance. And I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing for the hitter to ask

if only because they often do. And so we know that they're allowed to, right? It's like, maybe if we were designing the rules from jump, we would say, no, you have to sort of rely on your own sense of the zone in order to make your swing decisions. But I don't think that we've done that. So why be fussy about it? I tend to agree. I wonder whether this question, because I was watching a Nick Pavetta start for the Red Sox the other night, and he asked the pitcher, or the umpire rather, multiple times about the where was that or where'd that miss or whatever.

In fact, he took a couple steps off the mound after a pitch once heading to the dugout with what he thought was the third strike on the third out. And then as he's coming back, he said, where did it miss? So I think that the hitter, the pitch to Meg's point ends up behind them. They can't see where it finished. Whereas with the pitcher, he can see the pitch through the entire tunnel, so to speak. So I don't really know that the imbalance is there necessarily that is implied in this question. Yeah. Leave it to a former pitcher to be miffed about this. But I would think that, yes, you don't see those consultations between pitchers and umpires quite as often as between hitters and umpires just because of the proximity. But you do often see them clarifying things as

they're walking off the mound or to the mound, as you said, David. So I think if they want to avail themselves of this information, they do have the option. And the you said, David. So I think if they want to avail themselves of this information, they do have the option and the catcher knows too. So it's not as if only the hitter gets to find out. I guess if the umpire refused to say, I guess I would respect that. I don't know that I've ever seen that happen, obviously, but just wanting to be so impartial and not favor either side that you just refused to answer. But no, I don't really think it's much of an advantage or much of an imbalance, especially because, yeah, you know, they can go back to the dugout in the tunnel would have been had they not swung and missed. So it's some useful intelligence probably. But again, they're not the only one who gets to know. If the pitcher wants to know, he can find out too. And it's probably less important for the pitcher to know.

So yeah, I don't think this is really destabilizing the pitcher-batter balance or anything. And frankly, if it is, hitters need the help at this point so i think anything that uh cuts down on strikeouts potentially i'm usually in favor of that now isn't this question about to be obsolete in a few years anyway don't we think with automated strike zones yeah probably although as meg has said people get mad at umpires even when it's the robot zone making the call. So yeah, you might still see hitters saying, where was that or whatever in the umpire save? I don't know.

Well, I don't know if they will. I'm trying to think to the instances that I've seen of the sort of auto zone in use. I saw this get tested in the fall league and then a bit during instructs in Arizona this past fall. And I'm trying to remember if the call was made regardless of whether or not there was a swing, because what happened at least during instructs was that there was like a booming voice from the sky over the PA that said, you know, ball or strike. And I don't know that it called that when there was a swing. So in this particular circumstance, I don't know, you know, ball or strike. And I don't know that it called that when there was a swing. So in this particular circumstance, I don't know.

You know, the hitter might still want to have a sense of whether it was a ball or a strike. And I don't know if that information would be sort of automatically supplied to them or not. But as Ben said, it wouldn't matter. We'd still yell at the umpires because we're shifty sorts in that way. All right. Staying with the topic of umpires,orge in thousand oaks california says i enjoyed the too close to call discussion on episode 1685 but i was waiting for the real question which is what kind of signal would the umpires make in the too close to call situation will they cover their eyes to indicate they didn't see it clearly

will they give an emphatic shrug of their shoulders or will they cover their ears like managers do to request a replay? Your thoughts on this would be appreciated. So this was, again, when we discussed the scenario that happens occasionally in cricket where the field umpire just says that it was too close to call and defers to the replay ump. So if we were to bring this to baseball baseball what signal would the field umps deploy to show that it was too close to call if recent history is any indicator there would be no

specific signal at all the managers just took the putting their hands over their ears upon themselves but it's not as if there's a specific signal that was mandated by the league requiring you know for replay review no it's not like mlb umps have the the nfl ump hand signal system although maybe they should they should right yes well but they'd have to do something right even if informally they would have to convey to the players and the managers that they were not making a call so they'd have to do something could they all huddle up and do the three monkeys, like, see no evil?

Right. Yeah. I like that. Like, you know, they're all enacting, like, the shrug emoji on the field. Yeah. Right. I like the really emphatic, pronounced, slow shrug. Just, I don't know.

And then, like, a bemused facial expression. Yeah. That'd be fun. Yeah. Great. I think that's, well, what this question doesn't ask and what I think would be helpful in replay review for whatever it's worth, is if the call on the field didn't matter.

You know, I think that's something that's been talked about. The call on the field was safe, but we have to have clear and convincing evidence to overturn that call. I don't know that that necessarily, this question would, if there were a see no evil, they could overturn the call without having the call to overturn, so to speak. I don't know if that makes any sense, but anyway, bottom line is that I think that would do a lot of good for the game with the replay reviews, like the Alec Bohm

review, for example. Yeah. I could see either the cover, your eyes, the monkey see sort of gesture, or maybe like a binoculars gesture, like kind of the opposite of the headphones gesture, just like putting your hands around your eyes might be something. Or maybe like, I don't know, like scratching your eyes, just like you have foggy glasses or something and you're trying to clear your vision you're you're rubbing your eyes you something to convey that you didn't see you need a higher authority i kind of would like there to be um a lack of direction here because i think one of the the fun things about umpires if we want to find a fun thing is the the variation and sort of their emphatic strike three

call um right so you know some guys do the punch and some guys do the like close their fist gesture and you know some guys do the really dramatic like hook sign and so um i would like to see individual umpires interpret the i don't know on their own and see what they come up with is there you know is there a move that we kind of gravitate toward as we have with managers doing the headphone thing? Or would we see natural variation the way we do when a guy gets, you know, punched out on a, you know, a called strike? And maybe there are all kinds of things that we're not even able to conceive of here that could do an interpretive dance. I think that at least in the early going, it would be good to see how they understand ambiguity.

How do they express it as human people? That would be fun to watch. I like that idea a lot. I like the idea of equipping the umpires with some sort of device, like a headset or something along those lines, and then they could do their interpretation of a bat flip except for it's a headset flip.

Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Hazardly cast it aside as if to say, this is not my problem. You figure it out when you play umpire. Right. Yeah. I always think like the umpires with the really pronounced strike three ring them up call. I always wonder whether they're so tempted to do the call and the gesture that it makes them more likely to call a strike. I kind of wonder whether if you ran some kind of correlation between most pronounced strikeout gesture and whether you're a pitcher's ump or a hitter's ump, I wonder whether we would see that pitcher's umps would be more inclined toward the really pronounced gesticulation just because, well, if you're making that gesture

more often, then you want to have some signature move, but also because you're tempted to do your signature move. And so when I see like a bad call by an ump who has the really exaggerated gesture, it kind of makes it more annoying to me because it's like, oh, you just wanted to do your move, didn't you? And that's why you're calling this a strike. So I wonder whether that would be the case here too. If someone came up with a really creative signature too close to call move, then maybe they wouldn't want to make any calls because they would just want to defer every time. Yeah. I think that it is a valid concern because I asked my mom one time, like, what would your strike three call be as an umpire? mom one time like what would your strike three call be as an umpire and i expected that to be something that you know someone who likes to go to baseball games with me but isn't a you know a

daily watcher of the sport that it would take time and she had it ready she had like a a whole thing planned it was elaborate it was like seeing the joe biden liquid swords tweet in real life where she was just she had that shit ready to go so um i think that you're you're right to worry because people like to you know they like to have a bit mostly i think people enjoy having a bit yeah which goes against the whole if you're an umpire and you're doing a good job no one notices you maxim but i wish that you could act out your mom's strike three call but this is a podcast so it's not very conducive to that that's an even higher patreon level mag interpretive dance yeah all right alex patreon supporter says can we talk about intentional walks i noticed that ichiro had 181 intentional walks which makes him 26th all-time in that category and ahead of all but two active players,

Miguel Cabrera and Albert Pujols. Why would anyone intentionally walk Ichiro once, let alone 181 times? Is this just a sign that intentional walks peaked in the early 2000s? For instance, Mike Trout has 107 career intentional walks. Will Trout ever pass Ichiro? And I think this is just a reminder that intentional walking

was wild back in the day. People would just hand those things out like they were candy before people were actually making managerial decisions that were governed by run expectancy charts. I think Ichiro is not the only example. And I don't think it's just an era effect. Intentional walks were about twice as frequent during the early days of Ichiro as they are now. And I'm not saying it made sense at the time, but you can sort of see how it happened because in his prime, of course, he was a really high average hitter and managers were afraid to face Ichiro with runners in scoring position because it seemed like he just had the power to place the ball wherever he wanted and could get those runners in. And often the Mariners hitters hitting behind him were not the best. Like there was a lot of Mark McLemore and Randy Wynn and like Franklin Gutierrez backing up Ichiro. Randy Wynn and like Franklin Gutierrez backing up Itro. So, you know, lineup protection may not make hitters better, but it does affect the shape of their production in some ways and might lead to more intentional walks, for instance. And so I think that's how it happened.

And it's not unique necessarily. I was looking for a comp and Wade Boggs was sort of a similar hitter, albeit without the same speed, which makes it even sillier that people were putting Etro on so often because you put him on first, then he could end up on second or third pretty easily. That was not the case with Boggs, but Boggs was similar in that he was a high average hitter without a ton of power, maybe higher on base, but he led the AL in intentional walks six times in his career, three times more than Ichiro, and finished with one less intentional walk than Ichiro in six fewer career plate appearances. So basically almost exactly the same rate. Ichiro finished 28th all

time in career intentional walks, Boggs 29th. So there was some precedent. People would just walk guys back in those days. Yeah. I actually did a little bit of homework on this one because I was intrigued by this question. So I looked up Pichirou's beginning. I think it was either 11 or 12 seasons, all the seasons in which he had at least 600 plate appearances, which for him was pretty common because he didn't walk ever except for when he was being walked intentionally, I guess. And he hit lead off, yeah. And he hit lead off and everything. And interestingly, I'm going to make a lot of friends with this comment, but interestingly, his on-base for

those seasons was 365, which obviously is good, but not 1,000, which is what an intentional walk is. He had a 113 OPS plus over those seasons, which again, isn't necessarily an all-in measure and it doesn't measure. I didn't look up stuff like runners in scoring position or how many steals he had or all that kind of stuff, whatever. But bottom line is, again, here's where I'm going to make a bunch of friends. But Curt Schilling once said, what is the on-base percentage of a walk? It's 1,000. So I'm not going to walk anybody when I don't have to. And I do wonder, this question kind of hits the nail on the head. I actually, when I read the question, had a somewhat contrary opinion, thinking that, well, H. Ichiro was a great hitter.

That's why they walked him a bunch. And then looking back, he probably didn't necessarily merit all those. Although, who does besides peak Barry Bonds? Right. And maybe not even him. Right. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Ichiro, let's see. For his career, he actually had a lower batting average with runners in scoring position than he did overall. So his, or I guess with the bases empty, he hit 307 with runners in scoring position and with the bases empty, he hit 311. He did have a significantly higher on base with runners in scoring position, which is maybe not unconnected to what we're talking about here. He actually had a 404 on base with runners in scoring position and probably a lot of that was the intentional walk. So if you took that away, he actually had a lower slugging percentage with runners in scoring position too. So yeah, managers were probably

too afraid of him. But in some of those years when he was winning batting titles or challenging for them and you have someone in scoring position, it always seemed like Ichiro, if he wanted to, could easily flick one into the outfield or just find a hole or something. And I guess maybe people overestimated the extent to which he was able to do that and just thought, we'll put him on rather than having him drive this guy in. But yeah, I would guess that of those 181, only a small, small fraction would be analytically justified if we were to go back and run the numbers on those. Well, lest we forget, Ichiro could have hit a home run every single time he appeared to. That too. Yeah.

Yeah, they were afraid of the power that lurked within. Right. Yeah, this just goes to show that when people have the email questions in advance, they do homework, which I'm not saying I want to change the way we do email episodes, Ben. Sometimes it's nice to not have to do homework, but this is making the case. Yeah, we appreciate the extra mile there. He did have a T OPS plus of 110 with runners in scoring a position for his game. Yes. So there's my homage to Jeff.

Right. All right. Question from Brian. and scoring a position for his team. So there's my homage to Jeff. Right. All right. Question from Brian. I have long been on the move the mound back train. Welcome aboard, Brian. I have always believed that moving the mound back would help offset the fact that players are much bigger and stronger than they were in 1893.

Then a thought hit me. Why not make the entire diamond bigger? Pick a percentage that you want to increase the length of the base pass and the distance from the mound to home. I would also move the fences back when possible. The increased area in the field of play could lead to more balls getting through the infield. Increased area in the outfield could lead to more base hits falling in. A larger infield could incentivize more bunting for hits.

With this, you could see a resurgence in more athletic, speedy players who could keep the ball on the ground. More balls in play could lead to the need for more athletic and reliable defenders in the field. I don't know how the increase in the length of base pass would affect stolen bases. The runner would have further to go, but the ball would have to travel further from the pitcher to home and then from the catcher to second or third base. Wanted to know what your thoughts are on this. Has this ever been considered? Would the increased length of the base pass offset any of the other gains you might get? What would you do with the ball in this scenario, deaden it or juice it? bigger within the existing footprint of the parks we have now or is there also a moving of like is everything getting bigger or is it just the infield like is the outfield shrinking because the infield is taking up more space well he's suggesting here that the outfield might also get bigger he just wants to supersize everything everything is bigger i don't know if it changes

my answer but i just wanted to make sure that i had understood that as i was listening to you because you know it's a dynamic in the question at least sure fine make it bigger that's fine i think that would be fine how big a difference do we think this would make it would certainly make a difference i think that it would incentivize speed because you would need guys who could get down the line quickly because they have farther to go. I mean, you'd have farther to throw also, but I imagine that you would still need speed to offset the... I would perceive there to be an advantage to fielders in that balance. Am I making any sense?

Someone else say words. I have to think about this more. David, do you have thoughts? I do a little bit. So I'm something of a baseball traditionalist and I'm not necessarily a proponent of moving the mound back, although I wouldn't necessarily mind the mound being lowered to counter. Because again, you just said it on, I think, two episodes, the league wide batting average is something like 230. So definitely something has to be done to protect the entertainment product as the baseball product becomes less and less –

well, I don't want to say less and less watchable. I still watch it. But for the casual fan, perhaps it's less entertaining. But to Meg's point, I guess it would emphasize speed. It would emphasize fielding. It would make my large adult son, Byron Buxton, even more the best player in baseball. So I don't know that I'm necessarily a proponent of it,

but certainly an interesting idea. As the bases get bigger, they're going to have to do something, right? Like as they continue to increase the bag size, they're going to have to do something to, or else the bags will encompass the whole field. Well, I don't think the idea is that they grow exponentially. They're not like troubles. I guess they multiply, they don't grow.

That's actually, for all the Trek people out there, I immediately spotted the error in my comp, so don't worry about it. I think that it certainly would incentivize bunting to a degree, but I guess the question is how much of a difference would it really make in how fielders position themselves? If we anticipate that it would lead to an increase in bunts because if you place one perfectly, the infielders theoretically have farther to go to field the ball and then try to get you at first base. Wouldn't they just position themselves in the same place they always had, but it would look weird because they'd be further into the infield? Am I thinking about this the wrong way?

No, I think you're right. I think, I mean, they'd make further plays, like more balls would get through, there would be bigger holes. And I guess this is what we want. I do think it would incentivize contact and there'd be more balls in play and there'd be more hits and more base runners. So I think that all of that good stuff would happen. I think that it would be more disruptive, of course, to traditionalists who are already up in arms about

moving the mound back if suddenly we're talking about throwing out all of the hallowed dimensions and the 90 feet and all of it in addition to the 60 feet, six inches. And I'm definitely on team move the mound back more so than move the mound lower because I tend to think that people who are advocating lowering the mound have sort of an overblown sense of how well that would work just because I think the comp to 1969, yes, there was a big increase in scoring, although not such a huge decrease in strikeout rate that year but i think that had more to do with the fact that the strike zone shrank and also there was expansion with four teams at once that year so i i would think that it's hard to untangle just the

lowering the mound from those other two things but i would think that the bulk of it comes from those other two things and also now that the mound is only 10 inches, like, could you even lower it another five inches? Probably not. Right. But you'd probably be an even more minor adjustment. So I think, though, even as someone who is on Team Move the Mound back, I acknowledge that one of the big issues is that you have to move the mounds everywhere on all the fields, not just major league baseball, but amateur ball, minor league ball. I mean, you don't necessarily have to do it at every little league or maybe the mound differences are shorter there anyway, but you don't have to do it at every single amateur field, but you'd have to do it at a lot and who's going to pay for that? And it would be a big hassle to do that, but it's a lot and who's going to pay for that and it would be a big hassle to to do that but it's a lot less of a hassle to just move the mound and the pitching rubber than it is to just reshape the entire field and also if you're talking about like bigger dimensions and bigger outfields

in particular i mean did it even fit in the current ballparks right this is part of why i wondered like are we we're constrained somewhat by the existing architecture of the fields that we have at least in theory unless we want to you know undergo expensive infrastructure projects you know there would be people who would miss home runs because theoretically you would have fewer of them if the whole field is bigger and you're moving the fences back like you're going to reach a point where you have fewer home runs. I think one advantage of this is that if you were sitting in seats very high up, the players would look tiny.

That's an advantage? Yeah, it would be funny. They'd look small. You'd be like, oh, Aaron Judge, he's so tiny. I guess that's true. But what if you're in the bleachers? You'd need binoculars to see the plate. Yeah, that's true.

But Altuve, you'd be like, oh, he's so tiny. Right. This actually, there's something of a corollary here to the NBA in that some people want to move the three-point line back in the corners in particular. But there's no way the owners are giving up those seats. Right. up those seats. So I wonder if there's, like you said, Megan, besides just an architectural problem, there's a financial problem that'll never be solved. Yeah, right. And people have talked about making basketball courts bigger, right? And also NHL rinks, like switching from the NHL size to the international size with more ice area. So I think a lot of sports have thought

about this sort of thing, and maybe some have done it. And it makes sense because players are bigger than before, and they're faster than before, and they cover more ground. So I get it. It does make sense philosophically, rationally, logically. But I just think practically, it doesn't make as much sense if you have to tear up and rebuild every diamond and possibly every ballpark and move the fans farther away from the field and have even worse views, even if it would be cute that they looked like ants. Because they'd be so tiny. Yeah. For a few innings, that might be amusing.

And then you would probably miss actually being able to see anything. Yeah. would probably miss actually being able to see anything. So, and we've already seen fans like moved farther away from the field just because of like luxury boxes and the way that stadiums are constructed now where they want to, you know, have the upper deck is like farther back from the field than it used to be. And, and yeah, what does this do to like, I mean, maybe if there's ample foul territory, then you could just have less foul territory and you wouldn't necessarily need to re-engineer the entire ballpark. But this would be a huge hassle and a huge expense if you think of doing it to all baseball diamonds across the country and the world. So I think it's a heavy

enough lift to just move the mound back. And I personally think that that would accomplish a lot of what you want to accomplish here. So I think that's a better idea. feel is lacking and having more balls in play is fun. But I do always think that we ought to proceed with caution when we're implementing a scheme that we can feel confident will result in fewer home runs. And then we're kind of trying to suss out exactly what it does to the amount of balls in play because, you know, in much the same way that deadening the ball has the potential to just tank league-wide offense because you're really being buoyed by the home run rate to kind of keep offense afloat. And then if that goes away, you might be in an uncomfortable scoreless time.

I think we'd need to think carefully about what does it really mean from a contact perspective before we did it because you wouldn't want them to not score and be so tiny because that feels like it's probably a bad product. You're like, oh, look at the tiny guys who can't score. That's like my team. The eight-year-olds, the guys who can't score. All right. Let's take a question here from Kyle, Patreon supporter,

who says, I have a question about pitching, in particular the virtues of pitching at relatively very low velocities. This isn't a question about position players pitching necessarily, but it is one that was prompted by the recent delightful performances of Anthony Rizzo and our beloved Williams Astadio, in addition to the slow curves and ephus pitches of Zach Granke, the most notorious slow-throwing active pitcher who comes to mind. Given baseball's ever-increasing average pit speeds and correspondingly increasing strikeout rates, it would seem obvious that throwing gas is superior from a competitive standpoint, but what if it isn't always so? I wonder whether it would be possible or desirable to cultivate a pitcher, an honest-to-goodness pitcher, whose four-seamer tops out at 80, let's say, as a position players might, but who has legit secondary offerings in the low 70s, 60s, and even 50s or high 40s.

Perhaps a low 70s slider, a mid-60s change, and a low 50s curve. If everyone else is doing one thing, isn't there some wisdom or competitive advantage in bucking the trend? How well would Major League hitters be able to make the adjustment to pitchers whose stuff deviates so wildly from the hard-throwing norm? Williams only needed seven pitches in his one inning of work on Jackie Robinson Day. Rizzo struck out Freddie freaking Freeman on 61 miles per hour. I can imagine several objections to this hypothetical. Key among them is whether it's possible to impart enough spin on a ball that's thrown that slowly. Can such slow pitches be sufficiently deceptive to be truly competitive? As well, I suppose it's possible to impart enough spin on a ball that's thrown that slowly. Can such slow pitches be sufficiently deceptive to be truly competitive?

As well, I suppose it's important to consider fan experience here. I suspect many people would not enjoy watching a pitcher, no matter how talented, throwing lollipops every fifth day. I love watching flamethrowers as much as anyone. I just think it would add a fun, interesting new dimension to the game to regularly see more diversity in pitch speeds. What do you think? I don't think it would be a pleasurable experience at all uh and i think i think hitters would collaborate that's that's my opinion uh i you know the the old adage about hitters can time a bullet if they know it's coming you know i i don't i think that the reason we enjoy it is the novelty yeah uh and if the novelty is taken away by the regularity uh because one cancels out the other, then I just don't see, I don't see it being especially practical, I guess is what it boils down to.

I think I would tend to agree. I think that, you know, part of the idea behind the Ephus is that it catches guys off guard to have something come in that slow. And, you know, it's not as if velocity is the only thing that matters, right? You can throw, I mean, like, let us recall the tale of Corbin Burns, right? You can throw a really high velo four seamer, and if it doesn't move at all, it can get timed up pretty easily. So there's more to the quality of a pitch, sort of the effectiveness of a pitch, than just the velocity, but the velocity isn't unimportant. So I imagine that if you were sort of shifting the entirety of the offering down, you just have a lot less wiggle room. And I think the pitch, particularly the fastball would have to have some pretty impressive movement to it in order to be competitive sort of over the course of an entire start or an entire season. But I do think that giving guys a sudden and different look than what they're expecting is it can be effective and can kind of screw with a guy's timing. So I appreciate the spirit behind this because I like the idea of pitchers or teams trying to zig when everyone else is zagging. But I think that there is a reason that we have seen

this particular trend around both the velocity of the average fastball, which has gone up, and then the frequency of throwing those, which has gone down relative to what it has been historically. But those fastballs are in themselves still, I think, very effective and then are part of a broader, sort of more effective repertoire of secondary offerings. So I don't think it would work.

And I do think that we would get bored of it pretty fast unlike the pitches i suppose because i do think that watching a guy just throw gas is is really compelling and you might not have a a particularly easy time differentiating between say a fastball that comes in at 95 versus one that comes in at 90 i don't't know that most fans just watching it can discern that kind of a velo difference, but you can tell the difference between like 95 and 80. I think that that's a little more apparent. So yeah. Yeah.

Wasn't it Zach Greinke who in spring training started just to prove a point through lower velocity, just to prove a point to some writer or something along those lines? Yeah. To a pitching coach or something. Or a pitching coach or whatever it was. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I would get tired of this if it worked, if it, if it somehow were sustainable and repeatable, I think I would be delighted by it, but I just don't think it would be. I think as you're both saying,

I mean, changing speeds is effective, but in this case, we're not really talking about a difference in speeds within that pitcher's repertoire. We're talking about a difference across pitchers. And I think that that could work on a limited basis. Maybe it works if you're a reliever. Yeah, we do sometimes see, and Jay Jaffe just wrote for Fangraphs about how position player pitchers have been unusually effective thus far this year. Weirdly so, yeah.

Yeah. And maybe that is because hitters are trying to like leap out of their shoes because they know it's a position player. And so they're, you know, trying, it's like in their head, oh, this guy's got nothing. And so I will gear up to hit it and then you're less likely to hit it in practice. Maybe that would be true if you had like a legitimate pitcher who threw at that speed, but I just think you wouldn't really be able to sustain it like in moderation. Yeah, it works when Grinke throws one in there or you Darvish or someone who like, you know, with Darvish who can throw like upper 90s and then throw one in the 50s or 60s or whatever, then it's a huge difference. And that's why that's effective. But if you're topping out in the 70s or at 80 or something, then suddenly your 50 or your 60 something mile per hour pitch is not as great a differential. It's like similar to everyone else's differential. It's just that your top end

speed is a lot slower. And if you know that, if that's the scouting report, and this is what someone always does, then you're going to be prepared to face that. Whereas if it's a surprise, if it's just someone mixing in an Ephus pitch, or it's a position player pitcher, you've never seen pitch before, and you've never seen video, and you're not prepared for it, then maybe it can take you by surprise. But I just, I kind of doubt it. Like, I don't know, maybe if you had like a really hard throwing staff and you had like your seventh inning guy was throwing 102 and your ninth inning guy was throwing 103 and then suddenly your eighth inning guy is throwing like 70 or something. And just the differential between those different looks like maybe maybe it would help offset

people's timing a little bit but i really have my doubts that you could get by for very long with this as your stuff well and it seems like it would i mean perhaps if you're a reliever right because we we've talked about this before and i think that there are teams that that try to construct bullpens with guys who have different looks. So maybe for an inning at a time, if you're that guy, it throws a hitter off. But yeah, I think that over the course of a season, you'd get found out, and then you'd just get hit around a lot. Imagine it maybe having some sort of carryover effect where you had the slow pitcher and then you bring in the real flamethrower and now everything looks even faster than it would otherwise. So maybe there would be some like bonus to the pitchers who followed you or something. Or if you could do like my idea about the mid plate appearance pitching change and you go from like the 60 mile per hour guy to the hundred mile per hour guy.

I don't see how you could time that but yeah if this is your game then i just i don't think it could happen and yeah you're not going to get as much spin i guess you would get more movement just from gravity like your pitches would sink a lot because you wouldn't have any spin offsetting it so you know you would have to throw like the Ephus style trajectory. And yeah, unless it were sufficiently different, unless you had like the hypothetical pitcher who just like throws a pop-up and somehow manages to make it come vertically straight down through the strike zone, like on top of the plate instead of like passing through

it the normal way. If you could do that then uh maybe it would be different enough that you could get away with it if that were a repeatable skill but isn't that just slow pitch softball i guess so yeah yeah i don't think it's the the market efficiency just the throwing 60 miles per hour i wish it were but probably not yeah but then we wouldn't delight in it the same way it's like you, the novelty of it makes you go, ah! Right. All right, maybe we can take one more here.

Here's a question from Justin who says, a couple weeks ago you had a question along the lines of what if baseball wasn't different, subverting the usual question type. I was interested and entertained by the direction that question took but it wasn't where I assumed it would head. I was wondering if baseball were re-simulated again and again from its beginning to today with the same people and circumstances but probabilistic outcomes free to vary, how different would our reality be from the re-simulated reality? Some things I think would be very different. I don't think anyone would reach a 56-game hitting streak, and I don't think Chris Davis or anyone else would have five straight seasons with the same batting average.

I wonder if Barry Bonds would be the home run king, or whether he'd never catch Aaron, or maybe A-Rod or someone else would get there instead. I think other things would be the same, though. The dominance of the Yankees, Hall of Fame careers from the most clearly brilliant players of our timeline like Mays, Seaver, Bonds, Aaron, etc. What other things from our timeline do you think would safely replicate if we re-simulated everything? And what from our timeline would disappear

if things went a little differently? Are there any players you think might have much better or worse careers if baseball weren't different? I wonder if we would have an Evan Gaddis, right? Or like players like that. Like there are, I imagine that one variation of the timeline is that players who have unusual trajectories to get to the majors, some of them wouldn't make it, right? They'd fall off those trajectories. scout that found them or they'd, they'd hit a little worse in someone else's minor league system. And then they wouldn't get, you know, picked up by the team that they ultimately, you know, triumphed with. I think that the email is right to think that, you know, like if you think about a projection that you see on a site like fan graphs, the number that we're showing people is like the, you know, the, the mean projection, it's the 50th percentile shot. And that how good that is, is going to be determined by the player. So there's still going to be guys who are really

outstanding, even if they're, you know, a little less good, or they have more seasons where they hit their 50th percentile projection than their 90th percentile projection. And I'm not, I can't think of a specific guy, but you're going to have really good players remain really good. You'll probably have some players who are mediocre, who in this timeline are like, they go from being guys who are 50th percentile projection dudes in, you know, sixth season to 70th percentile projection dudes in two. And then their entire, you know, career line is a little bit different because they've had a couple of years that were better than what we saw play out in real life.

But I also think that, yeah, there would just be some guys who we wouldn't know we were missing because the circumstances around their sort of inclusion in the game would be just different enough that they kind of faded right you you don't end up getting the shot that you did because you were, you know, a less gifted, maybe you were a less gifted amateur than you were when you were drafted in the real timeline or, you know, your minor league career kind of fizzled at key moments and someone's model didn't, you know, pop you as a guy who a team should look at and say, oh, maybe we can fix that guy a little bit and then he's going to go on to be good. So I wonder if we'd have some of that stuff where – and we would never know. So it would be kind of tragic.

We'd never know that Evan Gaddis was just like still a janitor. Yeah. It's an interesting take. I didn't quite necessarily follow the – because he said the same circumstances, and I said, well, if everything's the same, then everything's the same. But no, that's an interesting take, Meg. So, so your takeaway is more or less that we don't know if Chris Taylor would have had a career. Well, I mean, yeah, I don't know if that is quite in the spirit of the question, but yeah, maybe, maybe Chris Taylor like doesn't commit three errors in the game that I'm convinced single-handedly persuaded Jerry DePoto to trade him.

And then he stays a Mariner and maybe he's really good as a Mariner. You don't know. Maybe the new regime is able to help fix him in the way that the prior player dev group couldn't. That possibility certainly exists. But yeah, I would imagine that there are guys who have stretches that inspire a team to say, oh, we should go get that guy.

And maybe in the alternate timeline, that stretch goes less well, or maybe it goes even better. And then the team that had them is like, I don't want to trade him. He's great. Right. Yeah.

Essentially, this is a both, I don't know, morbid and happy thought or whatever, but I wonder how many players like Oscar Tavares would have had a career. Yeah, no, that's true.

Yeah. I mean, I was thinking of it in terms of injuries. Like you would, I don't think that if you re-simulated things, you would have, you know, Barry Bonds would be bad or something, but like. He might be hurt. Yeah, right.

Exactly. I mean, presumably he has the same skills, but yeah, maybe he steps on something the wrong way and hurts an ankle and then that hurts his mechanics and then he hurts his shoulder and then who knows, or maybe it's something more catastrophic. So injuries, I think, would change the pantheon to a certain extent. And you would also get guys probably maybe not like the tip-top inner circle guys who were so great that they would have succeeded anywhere, but it doesn't take much to change which team a guy gets drafted by, let's say, and then that changes what coaches he interacts with and what instruction he receives. And maybe that means that he doesn't meet the right coach at the

right time to learn the right pitch or change whatever it is that enabled him to unlock his talent. And all it would take is to have a few games go a different direction so that the draft order changes and some other team gets to select that player. So I think that if you looked at the inner circle Hall of Famers, however we would define that, I think most of them would be the same in every simulation. But I think there would be a good deal of variation. variation and you know we would see some guys we never heard of or in our timeline they're just pedestrian players and they'd be great in one of these other simulations and and guys that we know or household names would just not be known or might have very short careers or something so i think there are a lot of what ifs like that and yeah i wasn't sure exactly what you know if the

circumstances are the same, what does that apply to? But I guess that means, you know, the Yankees are still a big market team or that sort of thing, you know? And so, yes, I don't know, you know, the Yankees wouldn't have exactly the same number of World Series titles in every simulation, but I think they would probably have more than every other team in every simulation. So certain things would not change.

And certain notable plays, that's a big difference. The names that we all know, like the shot heard around the world or these super famous plays, the circumstances of all of those would be different. I mean, most of them would not happen again. So the signature plays of baseball and the people involved in those plays would all be different. I mean, most of them would not happen again. So the signature plays of baseball and the people involved in those plays would all be different. So that would be a big change to the historical fabric of the game and certain plays that produced rule changes like the Buster Posey rule or the Chase Utley rule or certain injuries that prompted rules changes. Maybe those changes would happen eventually,

but not exactly when they did. So that would change the timeline of baseball. So, you know, there'd be kind of a butterfly effect. Maybe you guys don't throw Maddox anymore, right? You throw something else. Right, right. Because he's not the, he wasn't the, in that timeline, he's not the leader of, you know, sub 100 pitch shutouts.

This kind of wraps the last two questions together, but the slow pitch, different universe, but same circumstances. Maybe Aaron Boone doesn't hit the home run off to Mike Field in 2003. Yeah, right. Yeah. No, I think it would be significantly different. I think mostly it would be the same, but the differences would be pretty important. And you would definitely notice that

it would not take long to notice if you were dropped down into one of these other simulated mlb realities like you would know probably right away that things were different i wonder if i could visit the timeline in which the mariners draft mike trout to see if he is really like unscrew up a bowl there still is no timeline where that exists well then this is the meanest machine i don't think even the mariners would have screwed up i think you're right oh i think that the differences might be smaller like if you started the simulation now as opposed to in the past, just because like in the past, I think there was more happenstance with like whether a player was seen by a scout. Like if the team even had a scout or they had one scout or something crisscrossing the country. And if they got a tip, then they saw that player.

And if not, then maybe that player is never in the league. I think things are more regimented now to the point where you might see a player end up with a different team, but I don't think he would be out of the league entirely, like just never found. I don't think there are as many players who are sort of slipping through the cracks as once did. So I think the differences would be a little less dramatic if the timelines diverged in the present day

as opposed to in the past and of course if you start the different simulation earlier and then it's just compounding differences over time and you know now who knows what baseball would look like if you started the simulation in 1876 or whatever right by the time you get to 2021 then all sorts of things are different right the rockies are still bad though right probably all right well this was fun thank you david i hope you enjoyed it hope it was a great time worth your wife's money and uh if there's uh anything else yeah any last uh words anything you want to plug or anything i just wanted to close with one comment from two episodes ago uh i'm disappointed in both of you but mostly meg uh oh no you missed a golden opportunity here meg that you were doing the you know meet a ball player uh segment or you know and

you mentioned lewis had quote caught the ray's attention he was selling solar panels of course he caught the ray's attention and i could have gone with a turned head joke too. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. See, this is why everyone needs an editor. Yeah.

There you go. So no, but that's all I got. I missed an opportunity on that episode in that same segment because I was talking about Kent Emanuel and I didn't even make an Emanuel Kant reference. I could have dropped in so many philosophy jokes and just didn't do it. So yeah, I'm sure listeners sitting at home listening to us miss these golden opportunities. Appreciate you coming on

and being able to give voice to that. You're speaking for all of the listeners who are lamenting that we didn't say something that we shouldn't have said. Speaking for all the little ballplayers. So tiny. Well, thank you again. And this was a pleasure.

And we never know when listeners hop on here what we're going to get. But I think it has worked out fairly well so far. I guess it's sort of a selective sample. Probably if you're someone who would not do well on a podcast, then I guess you probably would not volunteer your services for a podcast. But we have not had to rue our decision to do this. It's been fun every time. So thank you again, David. Thanks, guys. All right. Just wanted to mention that we got a couple questions prompted by our discussion earlier this week about Madison Bumgarner's seven-inning non-no-hitter. One question from Max, one question from Alex Davis, Patreon supporter. Alex wondered,

if a pitcher threw a no-hitter in a seven-inning game that was a tie, then pitched two more hitless innings in extra innings, then the game ended, would we call that a no-hitter? And I've got to say yes, because the rule as of 1991 says that a no-hitter is a game in which a pitcher or pitchers gives up no hits while pitching at least nine innings. So if we're going by the letter of the law, which MLB seems to be doing in Bumgarner's case, then I don't know what grounds there would be to exclude that extra innings, nine inning, no hitter from the official list. So that makes the cut for me. And last note, just because this was something we were tracking, whether Mike Trout would have the best calendar month of his career, at least offensively this year, and he did. On Friday, he went two for four with a double. He is now hitting 425, 523, 781 in 21 games and 88 plate appearances, and that is officially his best month ever by WRC+. So April of 2021 edges out July of

2015, which had a 260 WRC+. So congrats to Trout on his best offensive calendar month yet, which was worth a solid two-bore. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening. You can be like David Whitcomb and support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already done so. Andrew Dillon, Bill Gallagher, Matt Lindner, David Calvert, and Adam Halpin. 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 for me and Meg coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.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 as always to talk to you early next week. Thank you. I think your blues was understated.

Cause you can't feel this anymore.