Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1692: No Mo’ No-Nos

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Mariners’ impending call-up of top prospect Jarred Kelenic, the Dodgers’ recent slump, the Oakland A’s threatening to relocate, Wade Miley’s no-hitter and how long it takes for no-no fatigue to set in, whether MLB’s offensive downturn will force the league to take action, the role of hitters […]

It's up to you not to heed the call of You must not act the way you were brought up Who knows the reasons why you were grown up Who knows the plans and why they were short of Hello and welcome to episode 1692 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing well. Sounds like Mariners fans will soon be meeting a major leaguer. Doing well. Sounds like Mariners fans will soon be meeting a major leaguer. Probably not one that we need to do a jingle in a segment about because kind of a well purport to and ended with the news that we're likely to see on Thursday. So it was a wild ride. Yeah. Crazy time.

Alluding to someone who made a fake Mariners PR account, which just amuses me. Like, misinformation is bad. You know, there's too much misinformation out there. But something about that just amuses me, that someone thought I will make a fake Mariners PR account. And that was how they spent part of their day. And they used the logo or whatever. And it duped a lot of people and turned out to be prescient. I don't know if the person who made that fake account was tipped off or something or just figured, well, it's coming because Kalnick is really good and he's hitting well in AAA. So I'll just get a jump on the official Mariners PR account. But, you know, sometimes when people make the fake Rosenthal or the fake Passon or whatever, and they just like change an L to a one or whatever, like, don't do that.

But also, I will not pretend that I have not chuckled about that from time to time. Yeah, it's not how I get my jollies. I don't quite understand it as an instinct. It seems deeply silly to me. But yeah, they do occasionally really get people. They do occasionally really, really get you. But yeah, we should see kelnick on thursday it is going to i feel i feel anxious on his behalf i feel preemptively concerned because

you know so much happened over the off season with kevin mather's comments and this very obvious case of service time manipulation the contract pre-debut extension that was offered to him that he refused unless you know he stayed at the alternate site all of last year and he started the year in triple a this year and the the mariners as a collective of outfielders so far 20th in baseball from a war perspective they have been worth less than a win as a as a contingent there have been individual performances that have been better than that, obviously, but less than a win and 93 WRC plus. And the thing about being a top prospect is that lately we have come to expect that that means that you are going to be very good right away. Just very good right away. It's like that's not always true.

good right away or it's like um the that's not always true and so um if he takes even just um a very good prospect normal amount of time to get used to stuff then people are gonna freak out and they're gonna create new fake accounts that are going to be concerned and wallow i guess mitch hanegar has been worth almost a win kyle lew I was going to say, the outfield as a whole has not been great, but at least some individual outfielders within that outfield have been good. Hanegar's pretty much picked up where he left off pre-injury. Kyle Lewis has been pretty good when he's played. It's really just the left field situation with Sam Haggerty and I guess Taylor trammell in center has not been the best but but yeah if you kept kyle lewis and hanniker and then you slot kelnick in there suddenly you got yourself an outfield right and you have julio coming up behind kelnick too right and so

the the future has the potential to be bright and i you know i'm i'm sure that we have listeners who are like but meg isn't jared kelnick like the fourth prospect on the top 100 at fan crafts? I'm here to say, yeah, yeah, he is like, love Jared Kelnick. Think that he is going to be a bopper. I don't think that he, you know, he will be a corner guy, um, both when he comes up and I think long-term, but I think the bat will play in a way that that's not going to really matter. And so people are probably saying, why are you anxious? And part of it is that I can, long term. But I think the bat will play in a way that that's not going to really matter. And so people are probably saying, why are you anxious? And part of it is that I can convince myself to be anxious about just about anything. So that's one aspect.

But also, like I said, I think we've come to expect that these guys are going to be superstars right away. And many of them are. And maybe Kelnick will be too. But you also just do have to adjust to the majors sometimes. But you also just do have to adjust to the majors sometimes. And I hope that it all goes swimmingly and that everyone gets to be as excited as they want to be. And this is part of why if guys just, you know, if they come up when they're ready so that their coming up is about their individual performance and what they can contribute to the team and how they're one of the best 26 guys that the organization has to offer,

then, you know, they don't have to become like a talisman for all these issues in the game that are really important. And I don't mean to say that we shouldn't talk about those. You can't talk about Kellnick without talking about that stuff. It became a major storyline with him through no fault of his own, right? That was the organization's leadership deciding that they wanted to shift the conversation, perhaps even if they did not necessarily assume that we would all hear about it in quite such candid terms but i i just hope that it all i just hope it all goes well for him and i hope it goes well for mariners fans because uh you know wouldn't that one suck

yeah i was just looking at eric's rankings or I guess it's maybe Eric and Kevin's rankings. I don't know how they're combining on those now. But the top prospects at Fangraphs, as you mentioned, Kelnick is fourth. And technically, I guess he's probably third now because it goes Wander Franco, Adley Rutschman, Randy Rosarena. And Rosarena entered the season as a prospect, technically, with his rookie eligibility intact, but now has lost it. I mean, he's cleared the rookie threshold this season. So Kelnick fourth, but I guess sort of third, really. And I was just curious to see how is Randy Rosarena doing?

Because I was very curious about him entering the season after the postseason he had and the regular season he had even last year. And I saw his stats and he's hitting 267, 362, 383, and that's a 746 OPS. And at first my inclination was, oh, well, that's not so good. 746 OPS. And then that's a 122 WRC+. That is 22% better than the league average in 2021. So even though I pay very close attention to these league baselines, and we certainly talk about it often enough on the podcast, I still find myself recalibrating like, oh, 746 OPS, that is good. That is quite good now. So yeah, we really have to reframe our expectations here. Yeah, Randy is not hitting with quite the same thump that he managed last year, which is perhaps unsurprising,

both because of the inherent extremity of that thump, quite a thump, and then also the change in the ball. But yeah, having a nice productive little season uh in tampa albeit one that is not quite as um as awe-inspiring as it was last year but you know it's still cold yeah is that argument i mean that is true that some of this is that the weather has to warm up but what i was about about to ask is, do you sit there and say, but Meg, he plays in a dumb part of the time.

Do you? And then you say, well, the ball's different. And it's like, yeah, but I still just want to see the home runs. Yeah, I guess it is true that he has played more indoor games than the typical player. But yeah, the offense will pick up a bit

as the weather warms up. Presumably so. But not a whole lot. At least not enough to get people to stop talking about offense. You know what is weird? I would have expected to see Kelnick around this time this season, but I would not have expected that when he came up, the Mariners would be playing the Dodgers

and those two teams would have identical records. Yeah, they sure do. Which is quite odd as we sit here on Tuesday afternoon and the Mariners and the Dodgers face off with 18 and 17 records. And I guess really the Dodgers part of that is probably the more surprising, especially given how they started the season. But what in the world? Weird, I guess, you know, mid-May.

It's still early. They are both surprising, but you are correct. The Dodgers are the more surprising of those, which just goes to show how surprising they are because I had much lower expectations for the Seattle club. So, oh, Dodgers, what will we do with you? I love that we are – so they are dramatically underperforming our expectation of them.

The idea that they will be the winningest team is just... We're done with that business now. Yep. But I do love the amount of consternation that we are all engaged in, and they are three games back. It's just fine. It could still be totally fine. It could all end up looking exactly the way that we expected,

albeit with fewer wins. But it could all end up looking exactly the way that we expected, albeit with fewer wins. But it could all end up looking just exactly how we expected. Remember when we were all worried about the Yankees, who are themselves still three games out of the Red Sox? What a weird year, man. I think that they should try to get to know the ball better before they bring it home. I agree. Before it meets the family. It's revealing stories at dinner, and you're like, oh, I don't know.

I might have made a mistake. It sounds like you're speaking from experience, but I won't get into that. No, no. I have a perfect track record and impeccable taste. It's never been a problem. Well, while we're speaking about the AOS, do we have anything to say about this Oakland ballpark situation? Which like, frankly, I've almost tuned out lately, just because it's been going on for so, so starting to explore the possibility of moving to a different city now, which I was not really even aware that they hadn't already been exploring that possibility or threatening to explore that possibility. Because that's the go-to move for teams that are trying to get a new ballpark is, well, if you don't give us the ballpark we want and the place we want it, maybe we'll just go somewhere else. And every now and then they actually do go somewhere else.

That hasn't happened in quite a while, but there's a lot of precedent for that almost happening. And teams kind of holding that over the city council's head or whatever local entity is controlling the fate of its ballpark. And sometimes it's serious, sometimes it's not. So I haven't followed the ins and outs of those negotiations well enough to know exactly what category this falls into when it comes to sort of bad ballpark deals or good ballpark deals or whose fault it is or where the ballpark should actually be. But it has reignited this whole discussion of, well, what would be the best city, et cetera. But it's kind of the classic

tactic really at this stage. So I find this tactic, it's always distasteful. And I should say, and we should say, as you've noted, that the struggle here and the delays around Howard Terminal and the environmental impact statement and delays around how we're terminal and the environmental impact statement and all these things like that preceded the pandemic and the amounts that they're talking about mean that that that should oakland get what it should the a's i should say get what they want and remain in oakland at a new park on the waterfront that this is a multi-year tax expenditure on the part of the city. But I find the timing of this particularly distasteful because I don't think that there's anything, there's nothing about the situation that Oakland as a club faces that

outweighs whatever the municipal budgetary priorities of the city should be as they are exiting a pandemic and so for them to get kind of shirty about a delay it's like well i don't know we were kind of busy trying to not die for the last year so sorry man i guess we kind of prioritize that over the environmental impact statement for a new ballpark. Like, I think that there's a lot that goes into this conversation and how necessary each of the constituent elements of it are and how much is just the ballpark versus the real estate development that exists around it and whether or not we want to prioritize that as we are thinking about where parks should be and how, you know, how we conceptualize, you know, and sort of

conceive of infrastructure in modern American cities. And that's like a big and important question. But this tactic of being like, that's a nice, you know, baseball team you have there, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it in a moment when there are just things that are obviously so much more important. It just really, it just is icky. And I wonder how it will be met by other owners, not because they are so adverse to threatening relocation as a means of securing public financing for their ballparks, but relocation is sort of an interesting situation for them right now. Because the one hand having the ability to leverage the possibility of relocation to secure public funds i imagine is like you know something a club

that every team wants to have in its bag so that it can extract as much as it can from local municipalities municipalities a hard word to say for me today municipalities sorry so there's that part leave it all in dylan people should know i don. The penalty, sorry. So there's that part. Leave it all in, Dylan. People should know. Here I am. So there's that part of it. But expansion into new markets with new teams is a more lucrative proposition for the existing set of owners. And so while we've talked about some of the ways in which splitting up the national revenue pie makes expanding the league maybe less appealing than you would necessarily assume it to be, right? That owners like to keep the amount that they have. And so the idea of divvying that up even with the expansion fees is maybe less of a clear-cut financial win for them than you might expect it to be, it still seems like an obvious financial win compared to relocation.

And so how those forces sort of interact with one another over the next couple of years is going to be really interesting to watch because I think that we are just reaching a point where there are so many good players and rosters have remained the same size-ish for a long time now. I think that there's a lot about expansion to recommend it, but you are going to have this push and pull of ownership incentives where getting that infusion of money is going to be enticing but being able to say well you know it sure would be nice if we got this who's it or what's it to put on the ballpark and maybe we'll just look elsewhere if we can't you know we'll think about it that is also a useful negotiating tactic even if it's one that we find like just inherently yucky like just pay for your own ballparks really pay for your own ballparks if you can't afford to pay for your own ballpark sell your team in my opinion because i don't know that you you do not deserve to have this ballpark it's much easier for you to do this so you should do it oakland and let the a's it's just disappointing

we've talked a lot on this show about how the situation in san diego is so great for any number of reasons but one of them is that san die Diego can be a baseball town now, right? And Oakland has seen the Warriors go across the bay, has seen the Raiders go to Vegas, and the A's have an opportunity to do the same thing, right? To say that like, we take rooted in Oakland seriously. That's more than just a marketing slogan. And we're gonna be a baseball town and commit to the city.

And like, that's important to us, even if it means we end up paying for more of our own ballpark slash real estate development than we initially planned. And so for them to kind of waver on that and then for the league to like push them to waver on it, I find really distasteful and disappointing and I wish that they wouldn't. So I hope they listen to this plot and change their minds. I'm sure that's all it'll take. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we can get someone on who's familiar with the specifics of the city and just all of the ups and downs of this negotiation at some point to tell us about it. But it does seem like these days it's not just about where can we put a ballpark so that people can come and enjoy the baseball game. It's about where can we put a ballpark so that we can have a whole real estate development, which will make baseball itself just a part of our portfolio.

And that maybe limits where you can put these things or changes your priorities. And so that may be one hold up here. I don't think there's any question that the A's could use a new ballpark. They have the fifth oldest one in the game and it hasn't aged gracefully. We're not talking about Fenway or Wrigley or Dodger Stadium here, but MLB's statement said the Oakland Coliseum site is not a viable option for the future vision of baseball, which was an interesting way to put it because the future vision of baseball, as far as MLB and many of the owners concerned, is not just baseball, it's bigger business.

So you could put a new park on the Coliseum site, theoretically, but maybe the Coliseum site can't be a thriving ballpark village of the type that teams are trying to construct these days. But I think, obviously, moving a team would be a little different than adding teams, but people are immediately saying, oh, Las Vegas and throwing out potential places. I think there are some problems with Las Vegas as an MLB city just in terms of population and climate, etc. The A's really do have roots in Oakland. I mean, they've been there for a long time. really do have roots in Oakland. I mean, they've been there for a long time. So I hope for the sake of Ace fans that they get to keep seeing their team in their city and that they don't get held hostage here over this deal. But it would be far from the first time that this tactic has been used

and often it does prove effective because people really do like having baseball teams and they don't want to be the ones who lost the baseball team, a local politician, let's say, who might have the best interests of the city in mind, but also doesn't want to go down as the person who let the team leave because people care about their teams too. And it's always hard to do that kind of economic calculation of what exactly is it worth to a city to have an MLB team or a sports franchise in some other sport. There's kind of an intangible value to that as well as a tangible value and a tangible cost. So it always gets complicated, but I hope that they can work

something out that will be advantageous to all parties but i don't know if we're past that point or not so i'm sure that this will continue to drag on for a while longer so we'll have other opportunities to talk about it yeah i mean i'm sure this dynamic whether it's with oakland or somewhere else this dynamic just persists in sports so i'm sure we will but i wish they'd all think better of it don't you don't like you get to obsess over all the design stuff more if it's your... Yeah. Wouldn't you say like, hey, I get to make it look however I want to because I paid for it, so it'll all be purple.

Yeah, I enjoy the renderings, the ballpark mock-ups. There have been so many. We could probably take a trip back through memory lane and just review all of the renderings of the Oakland ballpark to be that haven't actually come to pass. But they always have the nice little trees and the weird looking people strolling around and sitting on berms and such. So I always enjoy seeing some of the futuristic visions of what ballparks could look like. And Oakland has given us a lot of those over the years. Unfortunately, none of them has come to fruition.

And so we're still stuck with whatever we're calling it. Ring Central, your favorite corporate sponsorship named inexplicably. Were the Howard Terminal renderings the ones that featured the retractable? That's not the right word. But they were the ones that had the batter's eye that you could lower or raise. And so when they initially came out, people were like, but

there's no batter's eye in that ballpark. That's going to be hard. And then they're like, oh, it's a giant screen. It comes down, you guys. It's like, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't anticipate you prioritizing your Bay views, but I guess I should have since it's also a real estate development. You know, be good at one thing. It's just really hard to be good at even one thing. And running a baseball team is really hard. People try all the time and fail even when they're trying. And sometimes they don't try at all, and that's its own problem.

But sometimes they try really hard and they fail. And so it seems like if you're trying to do that and develop real estate that you're trying to do too many things. It's like do you do spaghetti, meatballs chicken masala what is your what is your restaurant good at well you know i favor the diner approach of serving everything i know but i'm just saying when you want elevated cuisine sometimes it is useful to have fewer things on the menu so that they can really you can really focus on them. Get them right.

Yeah. There's something to be said for that approach too. So we are recording, as I mentioned, on Tuesday. We haven't recorded since last Thursday, so there's been a bunch of baseball during that time. We had another no-hitter, which at this point is old hat. I was watching the end of Wade Miley's no-hitter against Cleveland, which was no-hit yet again the second time this season. Poor Cleveland. And it was a good

no-hitter, quality no-hitter, although by this point, I'm not even impressed anymore. Eight strikeouts, that's all? That's all you're going to give me, Wade Miley? That's not even the Musgrove no-hitter. That's not the Means no-hitter. But really, one walk, one base runner, that's a pretty impressive outing. But it just gets old for me pretty quickly, I guess. A, because I'm not nearly as interested in a no-hitter as I am in a perfect game. And once he was the perfect game, I'm not quite as into it. But also, just with the offensive environment being what it is with the league batting 234 that night, Friday, there were two no hitters going on or two no hitter attempts, perfect game attempts. And Sean Minaya still had one going after Wade Miley finished his off. And I didn't even tune in to that one that was like when no-hitters jumped the shark

for me I guess like I I'm never super into no-hitters but you know if I'm just sitting around I'll tune in to watch the last couple innings because it's fun to see people celebrate and it's still tense even if it's not your favorite baseball thing but really once Miley got his and that was the third in addition to the Bumgarner non-no-hitter. And then when Minaya was going for it, I was just like, you know what? I've already seen Sean Minaya throw a no-hitter. I've seen a bunch of no-hitters this season already. That was the moment, I think, where it became not even must-watch TV for me. And who knows how many more ahead of us we have this season if the offense

doesn't pick up significantly. So, you know, we're just going to be seeing a lot of no-hitter attempts. And that's something I wrote about a few years ago, and we're probably seeing even more now, I'm sure, with the batting average being as low as it is and the strikeout rate being as high as it is. So not that it's not still sometimes an impressive feat and not that throwing nine no-hit innings with one walk and eight strikeouts is not pretty impressive, but when it's Wade Miley and when multiple people are attempting it and coming close on the same night, I just kind of felt like it loses a little bit of its luster and I'm not necessarily tuning in. I didn't see one pitch of it because I had some family stuff, but I think that I'm trying to decide how much of it is actual exhaustion with no hitters and how much of this is a Wade Miley specific phenomenon for me, because I think two things. One, the need to pull Wade Miley at what would be, for most pitchers,

a high pitch count is both. I think it is not super necessary on its own because I'm convinced that guy could throw like 160 pitches a night and it would be totally fine. And I think that even if it were, you could not physically remove him from the mound if he wanted to. If you're his manager and you go out there and you're like, you have to be done now or your arm's going to fall off, he'd look at you and go, let it fall off. I think that

that's a thing Wade Miley would do. And so I am learning something about how much the perceived risk of a guy being pushed too far and thus having apart from all the other urgency and pressure he faces the pressure of his pitch count mounting being like an important part of how i experience the tension of a no hitter and you know some of that's diminished just because we've had so dang many of them so far but part of it is the wade miley of it all where i'm like i think you can just go like it's yeah plus like you know when young guys we've we've seen this like young guys will get pulled at moments that are kind of controversial while they still have a no-hitter intact and sometimes there's grumbling

about that and I I feel for them but I also in the back of my mind always think well they're gonna get another opportunity because they're young and there are a lot of these now. So you'll probably, you'll get another shot. But with Wade Miley, it's like, I don't know. I don't know how many more shots you get and your arm might be made of rubber. So just stay out there. And then if you give up a hit, we'll pull you. But until then, you just do your best. So it has revealed another aspect of my enjoyment or experience of the no-hitter in a way that I wasn't really prepared for. Because who is prepared for Wade Miley to throw a no-hitter? No one. No one believes that.

I saw it in the fan graph Slack and I was like, someone's having a go at me because they know that I'm busy right now and can't engage with it. But no, it really did happen. A lot of other people saw it. Not me, but other people did. I saw it myself i can testify to that not even one pitch yeah well there were 114 of them that's how many he ended up throwing and yeah not worried about him think he's probably fine think he could have thrown some more and that would have been okay too so so yes that is part of it i guess that saps some of the excitement of the no-hitter. I guess you could say it's more exciting because it's an improbable pitcher who's going for it, but it's somehow more fun to watch the just guy who looks unhittable and actually is unhittable on that night, but looks like he should be. I think that is maybe more exciting to me. And like the means no hitter, which really could have been and maybe should have been a perfect game if the rules were a little bit more modernized, there weren't really

any close calls even. He didn't allow a lot of hard hit balls or balls that should have gone for hits. So there wasn't a ton of tension in that respect either. But I just think all of the attention that's being paid to the offensive environment, the silver lining of it is that I do think we will see change come from this. It's such a steady drumbeat. I'm trying not to talk about it on every single episode here because people would get sick of us talking about the batting average and the strikeout rate. But even trying to do that in moderation,

we still end up talking about it a lot because it's one of the main storylines in baseball now. And I think it's gotten to the point, and each successive no-hitter will hammer this home, where I think MLB will be forced to intervene. And all of these things that we've been talking about for years now as, oh, here's a potential solution, here's something they could do. I really think we are hastening those changes being made. And the experiments in the Atlantic League and the minors, that's kind of a bellwether of that. But really, I just think when you get a year of the pitcher, when it's just so obvious that things are out of whack, that's when you see changes. And I think that's where we are now. So whether it is moving the mound back or changes to the strike zone or further changes to the ball or

other rules that we have discussed and will continue to discuss, I think we're at the point now where even MLB realizes that it can't just kind of let things slide and hopefully fix themselves because that's not going to happen. And it's just such a ever-present story about baseball that I don't think MLB wants to be the main narrative about baseball that no one can hit and people aren't getting on base and the pitches are too good and all of that. I think that they will step in and perhaps the players, to the extent that the players have kind of wanted to keep things the same, maybe even they will be persuaded of the need to do things. So while it's tiresome to talk about it constantly and hear about it constantly now,

I do think that will bring about change. If we could peer into the future by three years or five years or whatever, it's getting to the point now where, I don't know, if you had to predict the first season where the strikeout rate drops, you know, it's been going up for 15 plus consecutive seasons now, right? And left to its own devices, I think that climb would continue. But what do you think? If you had to speculate about the next season when the strikeout rate will actually recede, when would that be? Gosh, five years, 10 years, 10 years.

See, I think 10 is too long. Five years? Yeah. I mean, I probably wouldn't go further than five because I think if it were creeping up slowly and if it weren't so acute and it weren't so visible, then I could see it continuing to just gradually incrementally climb. But if the strikeout rate is going to rise by a percentage point or more per season and the universal DH, if we get that next year, that might help a little bit, but we got that last year and the strikeout rate rose nonetheless. So I don't think that will help really. That certainly won't arrest this rise. So we're at the point now where I might start to guess like, you know, maybe three years or something now. Just I think there will be some significant change in that timeframe, certainly in the three to five year timeframe, whether it's robot umps, whether it's moving the mound back, whether it's the strike zone, something I think will change that will actually shift things and stop the ascent

and actually reverse it a bit. Not permanently, but at least take a step back. I think we are getting to that point where it's just unignorable now and i think people will get sick of talking about it and decide to do something yeah who gets to they need a think tank they need a committee they need a blue ribbon commission i guess they have one i would like to i wouldn't mind serving on such a committee because we're already devoting a lot of time to thinking about it so talk about on the podcast though i know because we couldn't you know it would be poor form to discuss committee We're already devoting a lot of time to thinking about it. Well, we talk about it on the podcast, though. I know. Because we couldn't, you know, it would be poor form to discuss committee business out of session before findings had been released.

You don't endear yourself to your fellow committee members that way. We're not going to run this committee like Congress. We want to get stuff done. So, you know, we'd have to, I don't know, we'd have to talk about Mike Troutmore, I guess. You'd have to give a Daily Otani update. I don't know that people would mind it, candidly. I think that people would be like, this is fine. It doesn't sound so different from what we're already doing.

But yeah, hopefully that's the, you know, Theo Epstein group that is trying to think about these things and pave a path towards some contact-rich future. But I think it's coming. I think it's coming sooner than I would have anticipated if the change were not quite so stark. So that's kind of what I'm taking away from this, that maybe we're bottoming out here or maybe we're not quite bottoming out, but I do think that it's just become so glaring that something will be done pretty soon in short order here so i don't think we're going to get to 20 consecutive seasons of increasing strikeout rate but i don't know i'm betting against the recent past here i do wonder how the league is going to

start well maybe they'll talk about it in exactly the same way but i do wonder if it will lead to more candid conversations on the part of the league that aren't the result of leaked press releases and what have you but are really like a candid conversation about the kind of aesthetic they envision for the game what their understanding of what fans want is because you know they do do market research even if they don't end up you know putting into practice stuff that we like there There is market research that is done about the state of the game and what fans are responding to. I think that the ball is impacting a lot of those things, even if the fans who would typically respond to those

surveys might not be cognizant of the fact that some of what they're seeing is the downstream effect of a change in the ball. I so I do wonder if it'll, you know, finally inspire the commissioner to or someone he designates to talk about the ball and the offensive environment and kind of what they would like to see out of the game, not for gambling purposes or time of game. But like, what is what do we think baseball should look like and how active a hand do we want to have in bringing that about and i know that you know when he talks about pace of play and and and what have you he ends up touching on some of those issues but the centrality of the ball to a lot of them is still a thing that we're kind of like i don't know the ball you know i don't know what accent i'm doing when I do that. I don't know what it is.

But anyway, I just, I hope that there is maybe a more candid conversation because I think that at this point, as you said, the effects are so obvious that it really is owed to the fans and to the players and to the people who care about the game to kind of confront it head on and be like, what do we want? What do we want out of the game? What do we want it to look like? And how do we make that happen? Because this kind of half in half out leaked memo world we're living in isn't sufficient to the issue at hand, I don't think. Yeah. Theo was on my boss, Bill Simmons's podcast last week. and I listened to

that segment, and it was a pretty good conversation. Theo mentioned moving the mound back, which made me happy, of course, but he referenced MLB's fan market research and surveys, and he said that according to those responses, the most popular plays, I think he said, are triples, doubles, and stolen bases, which sounds about right. Those are exciting plays. Triples are fun. Doubles are good too. Stolen bases. So it sounds like people like balls and play and action on the base pass and not a surprise. I would like to actually see that data instead of just hearing it described and referenced vaguely every now and then, but it's good that they're doing that research and

hopefully that it is pointing them toward these changes. And I also meant to mention, we talked about one byproduct of some of these forces, which is hit by pitches. We talked about that last week and how hit by pitch rates are at their highest level ever. And there've been a bunch of people writing about that even since we talked about it on the podcast. We talked about it prompted by a piece that Rob Means wrote at Baseball Prospectus. But since then, Rob Arthur wrote about it at Baseball Prospectus and Sarah Sanchez wrote about it for Fangraphs. And Ken Rosenthal wrote about it for The Athletic, which was inspired, I think, by Ronald Acuna getting hit by a pitch on Saturday, and it looked at first like it might be bad, could be a broken hand or finger or something.

Turned out not to be, fortunately, but there was a scare there. And so Rosenthal wrote about it, and he basically blamed it on poor command coupled with velocity. And that's a reasonable hypothesis. I'm sort of skeptical of the idea that pitcher command is so much worse than it used to be just because I'm always skeptical of anyone saying that players are worse at anything than they we talked about last time, which was partly factors identified by Rob Maines and partly some others that we added, but more pitchers counts, more breaking balls being thrown, more velocity making it harder to get out of the way. And there's some truth to all of that. But what I thought was interesting, which Rob Arthur discovered in his piece, is that

it seems like batters are playing a role in this too, that it's not actually that there are more pitches that are likely to hit people or that would have hit people in the past. It's not that more pitches or a higher percentage of pitches are being thrown way farther inside than they used to be. Actually, that's not really the case. And it doesn't seem like location explains this spike or explains much of it. It just seems like hitters are actually being plunked on pitches that in the past they were not being plunked by quite as often. So same location, guys are getting hit more often now. And it's kind of a conundrum here. It's sort of a mystery really about why this is happening. And Rob ran through some of the potential explanations here. And some of them are,

it could be that hitters are standing closer to the plate. It could be that they're wearing more body armor. And we've certainly seen some notable examples of that. And MLB changed the rules about the elbow pads and they're not supposed to be longer than I think 10 inches. That was like almost 20 years ago in response to the big Barry Bonds armor, I believe. But I don't know how well that's ever been enforced. And maybe that armor is a bit more prevalent now. And frankly, it's hard to blame hitters for wanting to protect themselves when guys are throwing as hard as they're throwing these days. But it could be where they're standing. It could be what they're wearing. It could be that they're just more willing to take one for the team these days when it's harder

to get on base via other methods as we were just talking about. Or it could be that even though pitches are not necessarily being thrown farther inside than they used to be, that hitters are just generally flummoxed and off balance because the stuff is so good and pitchers are tunneling their pitches more intentionally and trying to disguise what they're throwing and make all of their pitches look the same out of the hand. So it could be that. And they're just, you know, generally kind of on their heels because of the velocity and the break and the spin rates and all of that, that maybe it's just harder for them to get out

of the way, even if physically the pitches are not farther inside than they used to be. But that was not something that I anticipated. If you had asked me, I would have thought, yeah, there are just more pitches being thrown in locations where you're more likely to get hit. But that's not the whole story, evidently. So that's pretty fascinating. Yeah, I think that that might be the most compelling explanation to me, because I, that and the idea that guys are, I don't know that. I don't know how much it accounts for. But I do think that there might be something to the idea that guys are like, fine, I'll just get hit by a pitch. I need to get on base. i don't care how it happens if this is a reliable means then i shall do it because i'm not hitting the ball yeah it's really really bad right

now but i i think that the idea that while the the increase in in spin making it more difficult i think that that's a compelling explanation but but I don't know. I just, yeah, yeah, I really hate to see it. And so I hope we can kind of crack the code and then whatever part of it is the responsibility or sort of the results of, of hitters being indifferent to the possibility of a hit by pitch that we can like have a talk with them about it and make them change their mind. Cause you know, we like you guys you around and one of these days one of you is going to get plunked in a way that sends you to the injured list for a long time so please don't yeah i don't think it would be a great thing if offense were at such a low level

that hitters were like our only recourse here is to put ourselves in the path yeah no that doesn't seem good if the incentives are aligned toward letting yourself get hit by these pitches. And as we mentioned last time, because a higher percentage of the hit by pitches are on breaking balls now, the average velocity of a pitch that hits batters is actually lower than it used to be. So that's good, but there are still plenty of dangerous ones. And even if it's not up in the upper neck head area that's the most dangerous, it could still be in the hand-finger area. There are all sorts of places you can get hit. So that's not great, no.

But I think probably part of it is batter behavior and probably is just the stuff is so good. And another argument in favor of that is that wild pitches and pass balls are up to at very elevated rates. Wild pitches are at their highest level since the 19th century, I think, and pass balls are high too. So it's just, you know, it's hard to hit the pitches. It's hard to catch the pitches and it's probably hard sometimes to stay out of the way of the pitches too. So those are all things that are kind of dangerous. And, you know, you can't just count on Bryce Harper's cheeks being indestructible. Like that's good that he wasn't seriously injured and that Acuna wasn't seriously injured.

But, you know, some guys are going to get hit and they are going to be injured, even if it's not catastrophic or life-threatening or career-threatening. It could just be season-threatening, and that's not great either. So probably better to have fewer hit-by-pitches on the whole. Yeah, agreed. I did want to mention, though, that it made it more impressive to me. The fact that the stuff is so good that you can't hit it, you can't catch it, made it more impressive to me when I saw that on Friday, there was a near umpire perfect game, at least according to one source. And I've written about this before.

I've talked about it on the podcast. And so a bunch of people tagged me on Twitter when the umpire scorecards account at ump scorecards, which is a pretty popular account that basically quantifies every umpires performance behind the plate in every game and then tweets out a graphic about you know how many pitches were missed and where were the missed pitches and what was the overall accuracy rate and the overall consistency rate and just gives umpires a grade. And, you know, it's a popular account because people like to be mad at umpires when they screw up. And this account gives you data and gives you graphics and tells you whether the calls were skewed in favor of one team or another. So I think it's, you know, providing a useful service or something that people are interested in, certainly. And so on Friday, in a game that the Cardinals won 5-0 over the Rockies, there was a performance by umpire John Lipka that, according to the umpire scorecard's account, was nearly perfect.

So according to that account, Lipka called 135 of 136 taken pitches correctly. So he missed one pitch in the entire game, which would be very impressive. And according to the graphic here, he barely missed like the one that was technically a missed call was, you know, just barely, barely by fractions of an inch, probably. So that was pretty impressive. And I messaged a bit with Ethan Singer, the guy who set up that account and does the calculations. And he doesn't have an archive of all of the games that have ever been called by this method. spitting out a 100% value since the account was created, which I think was just last year, last summer. So it hasn't been around that long, but he hadn't seen one that was this impressive. And so a lot of people tagged me because they were saying, oh, so close to the Empire Perfect game that you wrote about once. And when I wrote that article a couple of years ago,

there had not been an Empire Perfect game since 2008. There had not been an umpire perfect game since 2008. There had never been an umpire who called every pitch according to the rulebook strike zone accurately. And so I was forced to look at just half umpire perfect games, basically, where they called every pitch correctly for one team in a game. So this was exciting that Libka got so close. The problem with the umpire perfect games, which I mentioned at the time, is that A, you can't really track it in real time. So it's not like the, hey, Sean Mania is pitching a perfect game. Let's all tune in. You don't actually know that it's happening in the moment. And the other problem is that it depends on the methodology you use

and you get slightly different answers, which really matters when you're talking about fractions of an inch here with these calls. So as Ethan acknowledged in my messages with him, if you calculate the accuracy slightly differently, you get a slightly different answer. So I got Baseball Perspectus' data, which is based on Pitch Info, which is the source that is used for a lot of fan graphs. Velocity and pitch type and plate discipline stats. And according to that, the accuracy rate for Libca in this game was only 94.1%, which is…

Embarrassment. Yeah, really terrible. No, I mean, it's still, according to bp the eighth most accurate game this season so good job libka but it really depends you know what are you using sort of for the top and bottom of the zone because that can be defined a little bit differently are you doing that per pitch or per plate appearance or by the game like there are different methodologies you can use and how exactly are you counting a strike like Like, does it touch any part of the strike zone? And it's sort of probabilistic too, because, you know, there's some slight error that

is baked into these systems. So you never have exactly a perfect location. And so you kind of have to build in, well, we know it was within this range of that reported location so all those factors kind of change what you get and then also i think pitch info does like corrected pitch locations like after the game you know they'll do park corrections based on whether there's any offset in the camera system in that ballpark where it's consistently off in some direction or something so So they'll correct for that. And then that'll change things too. So all I'm saying is this was not necessarily the most accurate game or actually as close to perfect as the Empire Scorecards account said it was, depending on the methodology you use. But I did want to just shout out Libka because he is really good at this, I think. And he's not a well-known name. John Lipka is, you know, he's not Joe West and he's not Angel Hernandez and others.

Which perhaps proves the point, right? Exactly. Right. So that's part of it. The old saying about how, you know, if an umpire is doing his job, you don't know his name. That is true for Lipka, I think. And so I got BP's data and, you know and I'll link to this from the show page if people want to check out the most accurate games and the most accurate umpires and all that. But Lipka, going back to 2008 here, so this is like hundreds of umpires. If you look minimum 4,000 called pitches, which is not a ton, Lipka is on the top of the list. And he has overall a 90.7% correct call rate, or I guess 90.8% actually, which is quite good. And maybe that doesn't sound

so impressive, but 90.8% is actually the highest for anyone with at least 4,000 called pitches. 90.3% is the second highest. So there's 4,000 called pitches. 90.3 is the second highest. So there's a bit of a separation between him and the next guy because there are generally very small gaps between the names at the top. And I just want to mention him. If we're going to talk about the notorious umpires whose names we know, we should know John Lipka as well. And one reason why we might not know him is that he is a fairly recent umpire. And in fact, he's not a full-time major league umpire. He's not a member of the umpire's union. He is like a AAA call-up ump who kind of goes up and down. And so he made his major league debut in May 2017. And he's just been sort of up and down since then, but he appears to be really good at this, and he's showed up at or near the top of some previous studies of umpire accuracy. And again, he is at the very top of the list here using the data I got. So good job, John Libka. And

the next time there is an opening on the MLB umpire staff, I hope he gets a shot because it really seems like he deserves it. And he's a young guy. He's 33, actually could be any number of factors. Could be their age or their eyesight or something, but it could also be that they've just kind of been groomed to call pitches this way and pay attention to the feedback that they get based on the data. And maybe they're more malleable and more willing to conform to that than some umps who've been around for decades and were kind of used to calling things their way in the past but lipka is really good so you know whether he was actually almost perfect in this game or not he has a track record of being really great better than anyone over the years so we should know his name how did the did you watch any of it no i wonder how the crowd reacted to him like yeah did they know yeah i'm i'm trying to talk to him.

Umpires don't do a lot of interviews. Yeah, that's understandable. Yeah, if I do get to talk to him, then I might go back and watch the game and see if he was, you know, getting any guff from anyone or if anyone seemed to recognize that he was calling a good game. recognized that he was calling a good game because that's actually an interesting thing that in one of his recent appearances behind the plate, April 20th, he actually ejected a couple of guys on the Mets, I think. I think he ejected at least one player and I think he ejected manager Luis Rojas as well because they were complaining about his zone and his zone was actually good in that game like according to the BP data he was 93.1% correct in that game which is the 19th most accurately called game this season so I don't know if that went against the Mets more or not but you

know they were getting frustrated with him and felt like their guys were getting squeezed and actually the data says he was doing a good job. So even if you are accurate, it does not always ensure that players and coaches will be happy with you. And I think Tywon Walker was thrown out in that game and he walked a bunch of guys and he sort of admitted after the game that he was more frustrated about his inability to throw strikes or find the strike zone than Lipka's actual performance. But sometimes you know, sometimes it's about the umpire and sometimes it's about just the players not being able to do what they wanted to and losing the game and getting upset about it. We need a safety zone for yelling, I think.

Like the very first piece I ever wrote for Fangraphs was about how baseball should have a penalty box like hockey does. But I think we need a designated like feelings booth because I think that this is not unusual right and there's some it's it's not unique to baseball players very human thing that you're frustrated about something you've done um or perhaps about something that isn't the thing that's right in front of you at all. It's a fight you had with your partner earlier in the day or a mean thing someone said to you on Twitter or whatever. And you're just kind of in a mood. And you need a place where you can scream and have it be clear like, hey, man, I'm having a day.

And I need to yell about it. And I want it to be very clear that I'm not yelling at you. And I need to yell about it. And I want it to be very clear that I'm not yelling at you. I'm just yelling as a way of releasing it so that I can start to move on and escape the cloud of this mood. And so there should. And I know the guys go down in the tunnel and they go into the clubhouse and they get mad about stuff. And sometimes they have fights with fights with raccoons, about raccoons. I'm going to know like 2% less about the Mets than everyone else the rest of the year because of when I just happened to not be on Twitter.

And you know what? It was fine, everyone. It was fine. It was fine. Anyway, that's not the point of this conversation, although it does involve the Mets. So I think that we need like a feelings box or something where it's just understood that it is not frustration being expressed at someone.

It is just being expressed so that it can be expelled and moved on from. And we could make it comically small so they're all in there together. And so then it would be funny in addition to being therapeutic. Maybe it would stop being therapeutic the smaller you make it. So at a certain point, it has to fit, guys. But I just think that it's not that people necessarily are trying to have their feelings at another person. It's just that it's very hard to not get defensive when feelings are expressed in your general direction. And so we should allow a place to sort of release that valve and also let the other person not have to be in in the crosshairs of it because that doesn't feel good

either and so we should you know of course he got ejected because this guy's doing a good job and he probably knows that he does a really good job and he's like hey man like i'm just trying to but a lot of hey mans man's in this episode. I don't know what that's about. I don't have an explanation. No swears, but a lot of hey, man. So here we are. But anyway, I just think that we need more places in public

where people can process their feelings, because especially after the last year, we're all going to have a lot of them, and we're horribly out of practice. And so we're going to end a lot of them, and we're horribly out of practice, and so we're going to end up being really weird in public. And this is just an expression of that. But I bet that the fans still booed and yelled at him,

even though he had umpired a very good game. And I know that I am out of step with the rest of America in terms of the amount of sympathy I have for the job that umpires do. And I do think that they need to hold one another accountable for bad calls and that guys who are consistently underperforming should not be in charge of crews and probably need to cede the way toward young, or not even young, but just more skilled or consistent guys

so that we have cleanly officiated games because that's really important to the integrity of the sport but i also have a lot of sympathy for people who are on the receiving end of public feeling that may or may not be warranted so i just think that umpires are um it's a really hard job yeah it is it's not as hard as pitching that's a harder job but but also it's still a hard job so that's my salute to lipka and it's not just calling balls and strikes i think he's good at all kinds of calls because the website close call sports which does a lot of really close-up accurate breakdowns of umpire performance they had an april call of the month that was published last week, and that was a John

Lipka call as well. And it was a call he made on a Chris Bryant attempted steal of second where his foot popped off, and it was a tough but accurate call that was affirmed by the replay review. So Lipka, another good call there. And I will also say that according to the BP data, an umpire has come one call away or one ball strike call away from an umpire perfect game. And that was Dan Iasonia, April 6, 2016. According to that methodology, he made 127 ball strike calls and 126 were correct. So, so close, but it looks like Libca is our best chance now. And I also wanted to mention, I got this data from Lucas Apostolaris at Baseball Perspectives, and I also asked him for just the league-wide correct call rate according to this methodology. And it was steadily improving year by year for some time, starting at 2008.

And then for the next 10 years or so, it was bit by bit creeping up. So in 2008, it was 87.4% of calls were correct, according to BP or Pitch Info's data in the rulebook strike zone. And then 10 years later in 2018, it was up to 89.2. So, you know, that's pretty significant. That's almost a two percentage point increase in 10 years, which I think just came from umpires getting feedback from the data and being graded and encouraged to use that as a resource. So that was good that they were gradually getting more accurate, but that gradual rise has ceased and has actually gone backward a bit in the past few years. So from the high water point of 89.2% in 2018, it has fallen a bit to just 88.7%

last year, 88.9% this year. So it has not continued to climb. And I wonder if that could be just because the stuff is so good because, you know, it must be hard to call those pitches, maybe not as hard as it is to catch them or to hit them. But it's got to be tough when pitches are moving more than ever and traveling faster than ever. One would think, I mean, you're getting less of a look at where those pitches are. And, you know, maybe you've got more pervasive catcher receiving skills that are influencing that, too. I don't know. But I would just think the raw stuff might make it a't continuing to increase. So we may really have reached the point, you know, the human limits where at least when pitchers are throwing as hard as they are now with as much movement as they are now, human umps just aren't going to get better, at least, you know, not without some kind of VR or AR training tool or something that maybe they could use as a supplement.

So, you know, that sounds like a low number, basically, probably to a lot of people who are saying, oh, one out of every 10 calls is incorrect. That's not good. Robot umps now. And you may be right about that, but I would note that, you know, A, most of the obvious calls are correct. So the percentage is a lot higher on, you know, the no doubters, and it'll just be a lot lower on the kind of borderline calls. And then also I will say that it shouldn't be 100% probably because if it were 100%, that would mean we would have the issue that we had like in the Atlantic League a couple of years ago where they were using TrackMan to call it. And so they were using the rule book strike zone,

but a lot of those pitches were not pitches that people were used to having called strikes. So they were high and they just dipped down into the strike zone, like in the back of the zone. And it seemed high to everyone, but technically it nicked a part of the strike zone or the opposite. It was really low and probably really hard to hit, but maybe just caught the bottom of the strike zone before sinking below. So there are a lot of pitches that technically are strikes, but no one ever calls strikes. And that's one of the things that they'll have to iron out if they do transition to the robot zone. They'll have to possibly redefine the strike zone

a little bit so that the rulebook zone is the way that it's actually historically been called so you wouldn't want it to be a hundred percent because that would mean you'd have all kinds of pitches that everyone would be upset about or at least hitters would be yeah it's the sort of thing where i mean we've talked about this before you know you think you're mad now right just wait until it's an actual rulebook zone yeah because which isn't to say that like we shouldn't eventually embrace technology if it can help us have a more cleanly officiated game but i i think that there is this false understanding that people have that it's going to sort of automatically rejigger calls to something that we perceive to be right and feel are right and that's not going to be true it's going to take a long time and i think that even when people do get

used to the zone they will still be mad about it because we like to have feelings in public and we don't have to have them in a feelings box we just get to yell at people from the stands the stands are a feelings box yeah maybe the umpires could go in a box while the yelling happens so that it's like soundproof and they're like sometimes they do deserve to get feedback put it that way so they're not perfect but yeah the those findings are consistent with when ben clemens looked at this question for us earlier in the season, he found that if you're looking at it, at least compared to last year, that there hasn't been at that point in the year, there had not been a really dramatic change in sort of the accuracy of the calls. And he looked

at it based on sort of distance from the plate as a means of sort of differentiating easy calls from hard ones. And that that's very consistent with his findings. So he did make pains to say, as you have, like that might not satisfy you that it is just as good as it was, but it is useful to remember that even though it can feel like there has been a dramatic shift for whatever reason,

and I don't know if it's maybe that those, and this was not a factor in his analysis and hasn't been a factor in any of the replay analysis that I've seen so far, although I would be interested in it. You know, it could be that some of the most egregious calls are coming in the highest leverage moments. And so they strike us as being even worse than they are because of when in the course of the game they are falling. calling but in general things are as they were whether we are satisfied with that is a separate related and important question but not exactly the same question so yeah so speaking of feelings boiling over and you just brought up this mets nonsense like as someone who was not online this weekend okay so i was gonna ask like to ask how you caught up with the story,

but maybe you haven't yet. And that's probably okay. Let me tell you what I've heard. So I heard that there was some sort of a... At every point, I'm going to stop and ask you if my understanding is correct, because I want to see how long it takes me to get into incorrect territory. So there was a botched double play attempt yes okay and that involved jeff mcneil and francisco lindor in some combination and they went down into the tunnel but not far enough into the tunnel to escape the notice of the broadcast camera question yes yes okay and it is it is thought that they had a potentially physical altercation and there was speculation online that jeff mcneil had a black eye as a result of that physical altercation although

when i saw pictures of him from that same night in his postgame presser, he looked normal to me. And I do not have confidence in the way that concealer would have been applied in that moment. So it seemed that he did not have a black eye. No, I don't think so. I don't think there's compelling evidence that he actually had. It was like a weird, you know, the shadow on his face from the lights and the cap made it maybe look like he had a bit of a, he had the beginning of a shiner. Perhaps. But it seems like, perhaps.

Yeah, I mean, unconfirmed, but there did seem to be some sort of fracas in the tunnel, right? In the tunnel, right? They went far enough that whatever happened was not visible, but it was clear that there was some kind of kerfuffle here because many other Mets rushed to the vicinity and were gesturing at each other like, hey, you got to come see what's happening in the tunnel here. And we still don't know exactly what it was but the story that that we have been given yes from lindor and mcneil who seem to have resolved whatever their conflict was yes at least in a way that is has resulted in hugging in front of cameras in a way that seemed genuine enough and people do move on from things yep but their their version of events is that there was a mammal of some kind in the tunnel yes and that one of them thought that it was a large rat right and the other thought it was a raccoon yes i do not know which of them thought it was which thing. I believe Lindor thought it was the rat. And McNeil thought it was a raccoon. McNeil supposedly said it was the raccoon. Okay.

And so their heated argument was because they did not know which thing it was. They did not agree on which small furry vermin type mammal it was. They did not agree on which small furry vermin type mammal it was. Apparently an opossum was mentioned by someone as a possible answer too. Okay.

And so that all happened and there is also some component of this that is about how the Mets beat writers. We're really trying to get to the bottom of what actually happened in the tunnel, but we're unable to do so.

And then some people pointed out that perhaps their efforts could be better spent on other aspects of the organization's dysfunction. We don't need to dwell on that part, but I think that, you know, point well taken. So that is my understanding of this. Yeah. Very strange sequence. Pretty good.

No one has a complete understanding of what happened here. It took like an hour for me to piece that together from Twitter because early on in something like that, you make a decision about whether or not you're going to click links, right? You just decide, no, I'm going to see what I can, I'm going to see what this platform gives me. I'm going to see what Twitter gives me in terms of my understanding.

So I have not read a story on it. It strikes me that, you know, getting into a physical fight with a co-worker is not great but if you are able to resolve your conflict and move past it and you decide that rather than give fodder to reporters about clubhouse conflict especially in a moment when your organization is in a in kind of a weird tense time that if you guys decide you want the public understanding of your impassioned conversation to be that you could not properly distinguish a rat from a raccoon and thus had to almost come to blows over it i think i'm fine with that i think it's's fine. It is obviously ridiculous.

And we're all looking at each other going, well, this is bunk. But at least, like, it's impossible to, I'm sorry. You can't be confused about rats versus raccoons. I've lived in New York. I've seen New York rats. I know how big those suckers get. They can be big, but not that big. But they cannot be that big

they do not have little human burglar hands and they do not have a little human burglar mask and they do not have fur on their tails famously oh a thing about a rat is that it has that bald terrible tail often i'm maybe some of them have fur but they don't have the puffy, striped raccoon fur on the tail. So this is a patently ridiculous story. And I refuse to believe that even if everything up to the conflict was actually true, like even if they did spot a small furry mammal in the tunnel, I refuse to believe that these two men who seem to be completely functional people

who have existed in society and have seen animals in cartoon form at the very least, even if not right up close, I refuse to believe that this is a source of conflict. This is not blue dress. What was the other color? I saw a blue dress. Gold.

Right, gold dress. It's not like that. This is clearly them deciding, this is the story we would like to tell you because we're embarrassed that we did not walk 10 feet further up the tunnel so as to shield the public from this at all. And so this is the amount of silly we're willing to be.

I think that's what we can say. Now, neither of these men is a native New Yorker, and Lindor is new to New York. But even so, no one could be confused about rat versus raccoon. There are rats and raccoons in Cleveland. Sure. Yeah. These are not necessarily confined to New York. And growing up in New York, I wasn't exposed to a ton

of wildlife, at least while I was in Manhattan. But you do get pretty familiar with small mammals, such as rats and squirrels and raccoons. Yeah. And it's not easy to confuse them. And I am sure that that's not what happened here. And I think what gave this story slightly longer legs, raccoon length legs instead of rat length legs, is that interim GM Zach Scott came out and basically debunked the story. I mean, I don't think anyone bought the story, but as long as everyone was sticking to it, it was like, well, I guess, maybe. But then Zach Scott came out and was like, they shouldn't have made up that story, or at least that I wouldn't have.

He said they can choose to handle things the way they want, probably not ideal. These things, when something is not that big, why make something into more of a story than it needs to be? They're obviously having fun with it a little bit, but to me, the interpretation of what they were saying was essentially they didn't really want to comment on it. They wanted to keep it in-house, which I respect, which is true. I mean, these things boil over when you're playing with a number of other young men in close proximity for many months, like there will be some workplace spats from time to time. And Lindor and McNeil had had some instances of miscommunication on the field and that boiled over a bit. And I don't know whether it came to blows or forget about it if not for this rat raccoon story, which is just the most M. And I don't know what to make of this.

Like, because it was caught on camera, at least the reaction to it, I guess they had to say something. And they could have just said, hey, no comment, not a big deal. Like, you know, we're keeping it in the clubhouse. And I don't know whether that would have motivated reporters to dig more or whether they just would have said, all right, fine, not a big story here. We will move on. I have to think that this got more play because of the rat raccoon dispute story and then the subsequent rejection of that by the team's own GM. I have to think that that made it a little bit bigger news than it would have been otherwise.

So maybe it wasn't wise to take it in that direction. to think that that made it a little bit bigger news than it would have been otherwise so maybe it wasn't wise to take it in that direction and it's certainly an interesting choice and it's very metsy and it's one of those sort of low stakes met stories like it's not about harassment it's not about a player getting hurt more than he should have been it's just a weird rat raccoon story but like lindor is new to Mets so I don't know if the Metsness just rubs off on each player as they come into that clubhouse or whether that could have happened anywhere but we classify it as a low Mets story because it's the Mets or what but they continually top themselves yeah I mean it's it is the kind of thing where if what you're trying

to do is tamp down questioning you're only going to inspire more questioning. And I'm given to understand that there was a joke made about it on the scoreboard. Like, is it a rat or a raccoon? And it's like, well, so if they want to try to make this a clubhouse thing that we're not going to get involved in, then don't do that part. try to make this a clubhouse thing that we're not going to get involved in, then like, don't do that part. And, and again, we will say like, don't come to physical blows with your coworkers. That's not, that's not effective conflict resolution. And we're not, we're, we're not on board with that. But I do think that it is a very strange part of these guys' jobs where there are going to be

things that they just really would prefer to not litigate in public and some of those things are are sufficiently serious either in terms of the way that they impact the team's performance on the field or some of the other issues that they might touch right like we wouldn't be satisfied with oh well they didn't want to deal with the harassment story outside the clubhouse. So rat or raccoon, you know, not that McNeil or Lindor were involved in the Porter situation. But, you know, if that had been the Met stance that like, oh, well, that's just clubhouse business, we wouldn't be satisfied with that because that issue is sufficiently serious and sort of impacts the safety of that workplace. But I do think that there are times when we assume that we get to observe clubhouse rituals

that aren't really about us or for us. And I don't know that it necessarily lends itself to a really happy workplace if you know that every time, you know, John from Accounting microwaves fish, it's going to be in the tabloids the next day. It's like, I don't know how to resolve that problem with John now, because I don't want that conversation to be in the tabloids. So it is a tricky thing to navigate. And I think that good reporters do a good job of kind of knowing what is a public interest and what they need to help us to understand

or the context they need to give to a team in order for us to understand kind of how it is coming together or performing. And when stuff is like, you know, just like kind of silly day-to-day workplace drama. And I don't know that that balance is being perfectly struck now or will be in the future. But I do have some sympathy for these guys being like, can't I just deal with this guy without you asking me? Rat or raccoon?

It's a... I don't know. Do you think they figured it out and they're like, okay, we're good. What are we going to tell people now? And do you think they both... Yeah, like, let's get our story straight. Okay, I saw a rat.

You saw there was a raccoon. Hopefully, maybe that was a bonding experience. Maybe that brought them back together after this dispute. Do you think they were like, this is dumb. That's why it's perfect. Or do you think they were like, they will be fooled by this. That's why it's perfect. So maybe I do want more reporting on it.

I'm part of the problem. Yeah, you're asking more questions. Anyway, that was weird. So I will leave you with just a couple of thoughts. One is that some guys are at least coming back from injury. We've talked about losing guys to injury. And since we fretted about them, both Byron Buxton and Jacob deGrom have gone on the IL. Hopefully not for very long stints, but that happened.

But some guys are on the comeback trail. Cody Bellinger seems to be running again. Hopefully he'll be back soon. And even though we were down on the Dodgers' recent performance at the beginning of this episode, I would not be at all surprised if after Bellinger comes back, they just reel off one of their runs where they play at a above 116 win pace for a couple months or something. I don't think they're going to get there because of this start that they've had, but I would not be at all surprised if they look like the Dodgers that we thought

they would look like and that they started the season looking like for some extended stretch of the season. I still think that will happen. And also Luke Voigt is reinstated now. So he's back with the Yankees who are now officially a top 10 offensive team by WRC plus. So they've pulled themselves out of that hole and they've been hitting well. And now they've got Voigt last year's home run leader back from the torn meniscus in his left knee. Seems like he is doing well. He hit a few homers in his five rehab games at AAA, and they need a slugging first baseman because only Cleveland has had worse performance out of its first baseman so far this season than the Yankees, whose first baseman have collectively

produced a 45 WRC plus to date. So Luke Voigt will be a boon to that offense. And also wanted to mention and link to Jay Jaffe's impassioned diatribe against the zombie runner rule, which I was happy to see gracing the electronic pages of fan graphs. And Jay talks about his evolution and thinking, how he was ambivalent about the rule last year and now he wants it fired into the sun so i was very happy to see that he has come around and he mentioned i'll just read one paragraph he said here's the kicker as for the actual time saved it doesn't amount to much the average extra innings game in 2018 clocked in at 239.7 minutes four hours basically and fell to 229.3 minutes in 2019 with the runner on second

rule in place that shrank all the way to 224.5 minutes last year, a drop of just under five minutes this year they're back up to 226.3 minutes in other words we're talking about a savings of somewhere between five and ten minutes for a slice of games that's in the ballpark of

10% of all games going to extra innings, all in exchange for a major disruption of baseball's rules and accounting that produces far more bunts and intentional walks. So Jay is firmly in the against the zombie runner rule camp now. And I thought he made a pretty good case. So I will link to that piece. Yes, he felt very strongly, and I feel like it is one of my responsibilities as an editor to help writers channel their passions. Yes. Yes, but I did think of you as I was editing it. I was like, oh, Ben's going to like this one. Yes, I did.

I don't want to rain on the good injury news parade, but some developments have developed while we were recording, Ben. Oh, yeah? Do you want to hear about them? Not really, but lay it on me. Fernando Tatis Jr. has tested positive for COVID, so he is on the COVID IL, and Jerickson Profar and Jorge Mateo are being placed on the IL as close contacts as part of the health and safety protocols.

And then there has been a bit of bad news on the Yankees side of things when it comes to their coaching. So third base coach Phil Nevin has tested positive with a breakthrough case of COVID. So for those who are unfamiliar with that, that is someone who has been vaccinated but still contracts the virus.

And a few other staff and coaches still have tests pending and are few other staff and coaches are still have tests pending and are being i would imagine isolated while those results are pending no players are involved and they expect to play their game this evening but kind of a bummer these you know breakthrough cases are something that the cdc has told us to expect and part of why the vaccines are so amazing is that you contract covid and then have significantly less severe symptoms um and potentially are asymptomatic entirely but it is a bummer i think a thing important for us to talk about and talk about very clearly because i think

it does make people quite anxious um so we hope that phil is on the mend and asymptomatic and that everyone else is okay but we are still playing baseball in a pandemic. Just when you feel like you're going to be allowed to forget, they're like, no, no, let us remind you. It does not mean that vaccines don't work or that they aren't effective or that you shouldn't get vaccinated. And the Yankees were one of the teams that cleared the 85% threshold. And all the people here

who have tested positive or who've been sort of sequestered did get vaccinated. So you can still catch it. It just won't be as serious if you do, which is a good thing, but can still keep people out for a short time. So yeah. All right. And I will just end with one more PSA, which is just to the listeners, which is just to say that, as you have no doubt noted, Meg, many people inform us when someone says effectively wild on a baseball broadcast. What?

Then you don't say. I feel bad about this. And I don't want to be ungrateful. I get a nice little feeling every time someone mentions that to us because it's cool that people are watching baseball and thinking of us as they do. And that phrase reminds them of the podcast and that they take the time to tell us about it. So I'm appreciative of that effort. But I also don't want people to waste time. And I am here to say that you don't necessarily need to inform us of every instance of this phrase being uttered. It is a pretty common phrase. In fact, it's why we named the

podcast that. It's not always a reference to the podcast. People say effectively wild judging by our Twitter mentions and emails and Facebook comments just about every day somewhere on a baseball podcast. So you don't necessarily have to tell us. I do every now and then use a sound clip of someone saying Effectively Wild on the podcast. But if you'll notice, it's always for some specific purpose. It's a player that we talk about all the time who is getting called effectively wild. Like, you know, if someone says Shohei Otani is effectively wild, which he is very often these days, but if that happens, I might consider playing that. Or, you know, I think Rich Hill in the past has been called effectively wild, and maybe I use that sample. Or if Williams Estadio gets back on the mound and someone says he's effectively wild, maybe I would use that because they're sort of the patron

players of the podcast. Or if someone does explicitly reference the podcast on a baseball broadcast in the context of Effectively Wild, happy to be told about that. Or if there's some kind of interesting conversation maybe about the meaning of Effect you know, so-and-so is effectively wild. I don't necessarily need to know about that, but thank you for telling us when it happens, just saying you don't necessarily need to alert us to every instance because, you know, it is a pretty common saying, which is what we named the podcast about. It would be nice if every time it's used, it were a reference to the podcast, but that is not in fact the case so we would quickly just be swamped with effectively wild clips if we actually used all of them so i use them very sparingly and only in special cases so please continue to tell us about those but do not feel that you need to rush to twitter again not trying to be cranky here i don't mind at all i'm trying to save you all

some work and effort but i i do appreciate the impulse so you know we we co-host this podcast you and i and i feel like the show has gone through many iterations and right now the iteration we're in is a show that's that's ours and And I feel like we are partners in this endeavor. But there are times when I'm like, you know, this is a throwback thing. This is a thing that has persisted in the podcast since it started. And a thing that, gosh, that I might have even done when I was still just a listener um of the show and i so i don't i i've i want to treat with great tender care those traditions yes um because they mean something to people and i share your sentiment and i'm glad you're the one that that brought that to people's attention because

yes we we we don't mind it's you know it's it's it's lovely that people think of the show when they're not listening to it uh that's a really that's a really swell thing but also i would share your bit of feedback which is that if you have thought to yourself i should i should tell ben and meg about that the odds are not terrible that someone already has. They're not 100%. They're not, but they're not terrible either. So everyone just live their life the way they want to. But if you were worried that we wouldn't know about it

without your help, I think that you can release that anxiety. You can go in the the feelings box and and and let it go yes at ease yes but thank you everyone yes well we recorded this episode prior to shohei otani's start on tuesday night against the astros this time he was not effectively wild he was just effective and not wild at all. Maybe we'll talk more about this on our next episode, but this was the Shohei we've been waiting to see. The one with command and control.

He pitched seven innings, four hits, only one run allowed on a solo shot into the Crawford boxes, just one walk and 10 strikeouts. And that's, again, against Houston, not a team that tends to strike out a lot. And he did it while batting second in the lineup. And then after his seven strong innings were over, he didn't just get the handshake and put the jacket on

and watch the rest of the game from the bench. He moved to right field, as one does. So that was quite exciting. 88 pitches in seven innings, 62 strikes. Just an efficient Otani, one who was painting the corners. He had everything working, his new cutter, his four-seamer, his splitter, just some beautiful sliders, and the Angels lost. But still, real progress for Otani. painting the corners. He had everything working, his new cutter, his four seamer, his splitter, just some beautiful sliders,

and the angels lost. But still, real progress for Otani, his best start of the season. Very exciting to see. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small amount of the amount to help keep the podcast going

and get themselves access to some perks. Adam Fugate, Manish Goel, Steven Pierpoli, Caitlin Coppy-Swiecka, and Dylan Buell. 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.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then. Bye.