Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1698: The Smoking Theragun

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the scant separation between the top teams in each division and the division races they find the most intriguing, Buster Posey, Scott Kazmir, and other old Giants, Isiah Kiner-Falefa backing up his objection to coming in last on FanGraphs’ shortstop positional power ranking, Mariners catcher José Godoy becoming […]

You turn red with rage, but at your age, all the things that you regret, you need more time to forget. And you don't go close, you don't go close, you don't go close. Hello and welcome to episode 1698 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FamGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of FamGraphs. Hello Meg. Hello. I was just surveying the state of the standings as one does. Sure. And they're pretty close. Pretty impressive parity going on so far this season.

Pretty impressive parity going on so far this season. We're like 29% of the way West The second place team is within a game and a half Of the leader So in all six divisions The leader has no more than A one and a half game lead And only one team, the White Sox Has a 60% or higher Chance to win its division currently

According to the Van Gras playoff odds So absolutely nothing Is locked up to this point. And I haven't checked to see if this is historically anomalous or even unusual, but it feels a little bit unusual to me that there isn't even a single division where someone has pulled ahead. There's just no daylight between the leader in the second place team and in some cases the leader in the fourth place team.

So this is pretty fun yeah i mean it's a funny thing because on the one hand some of that parody is a result of like teams being bunched together in a way you think isn't doesn't denote that they're particularly good like i don't know that we look at the central and say ah it's a bunch of powerhouses like duking it out right but you're right to say that they are kind of closely lumped together and not every division is the central. And so it suggests that people are going to have to try. And what is a delightful thing that is,

we're in favor of people having to try. We think it makes for better baseball when there are rivals nipping at your heels. So yeah, this is good. And it's not that I didn't enjoy the giants being on the top of the nos like sorry giants fans but you know it makes a little more sense now than it did so like that's good too but yeah it's there aren't a ton of teams that are really well and truly out of it i mean the ones that are like really well and truly out of it but the pirates and the orioles

and the d-backs of it all are thin on the ground. So thank you. Yeah, they really are. Do you have a favorite division race right now? Is there one that's particularly intriguing to you? Because as you said, there are some where it's just a free-for-all of mediocrity mostly. I mean, there's like the NL East where all five teams are within two games of each other, which is pretty fun. But on the other hand, the leader, as we speak, the Mets are a game over 500, and they're the only team in this division

that is even 500, let alone over 500. So that's just kind of a mess. And then you've got the divisions with a bit more separation between the top and the bottom, but the top teams are maybe better teams. And so it's not just, well, everyone's kind of lousy. It's there are actually some good teams here and there are all played well. And at least two of those teams were expected to play well. And then you have the Rockies and the Diamondbacks bringing up the rear. And there's a lot more separation between them and the Padres, Dandridge, and Giants because some of those teams have actually played well as opposed to everyone just kind of playing the same amount of poorly, basically.

So I don't know. Do you have a preference? I feel like we've talked in the past about the difference between a division race that is close where everyone just sort of sucks and division races where maybe it's a little less close or at least it's less close for all five teams, but the teams at the top are actually good. And so it's a compelling race between those two or three. So I don't know. Is there one that's catching your eye here? race between those two or three. So I don't know. Is there one that's catching your eye here? Well, they're kind of like you said, this is a good question. Now I have to think about a way to make my answer logically consistent across all six divisions.

I do think that when you have genuinely good teams battling it out, that that makes for compelling watching. So that would point you in the direction of, say, the NL West, where, you know, despite their early season swoon that made us all a little bit nervous, the Dodgers are one of the best teams in baseball, if not the best team in baseball. And so to see them and the Padres duking it out at the top makes good sense. And you still have something of an element of there being fresh blood there, right? Because the Padres, this is like the first year that they're really ascendant you know sort of came into the season in the midst of a historically tight race at least by the zips projections with la so like that part is very compelling and then you also have ones where sometimes the mediocrity and the the general

kind of meh of it all allows teams that you might not otherwise have expected to see in a year like this play an important role. So like, I don't expect that Miami is going to occupy the spot that it does currently for the duration, but I like that there's, you know, a little bit of a mixing up of your options there in the East, although I do expect them to sort of give way to Atlanta atlanta at some point here and you know the mets might just start pulling random fans from the stands to play center field so at some point presumably that will catch up with them it's an odd thing to joke about because like it's really a shame that these guys are hurt but also like it is it is starting to

to venture into territory where we almost can laugh about it because it's so ridiculous. So there's that part of it. They're at like their fourth or fifth string options at some positions. It's their fifth string guy. James McCann's playing first base. They're on like Cameron Mabin is playing center field because like the four guys ahead of him on the depth chart are all hurt. It's bad. And yet they're still in first place. But all hurt it's bad and yet they're still in first place but yeah it's bad it's bad so i think that mediocrity can sometimes let faces that you haven't seen a lot in the past i mean obviously miami made the postseason last year but that wasn't by virtue of this the funky format so i think that sometimes mediocrity can allow you to just see more of a team and see a team contending that doesn't always and so if it has anything to recommend it, I guess it has that to recommend it. And then you look to, you know, you look to a division like the Central,

and it's fun in its own way. I mean, not for Twins fans, but we all thought that the White Sox would be good, but we expected Minnesota would be good too, and they are not. And so that's a bummer for them, but it has allowed sort of the White Sox to surge ahead, and that's neat. And the Royals are still weirdly in that mix with the Cleveland Sandwich between them. So I don't know if I have a favorite.

I like that there are so many different varieties of competition being showcased here because I think it gives you a little bit of everything depending on what your preferred flavor is. And then, of course, we have the Rays where we spent a lot of our preseason sort of lead up to opening day reminding people why projection systems tend to discount organizations like the Rays and why their depth and sort of the quality of the guys

that they can bring up from the minors are going to allow them to maybe play above what the projection suggested, and here we are. Although, you know, when you go on, what is it, 11 games now? Are they at 11? Yeah, I think that was finally snapped, right? But they got to 11 in a row. Yes, so when you go on a winning streak like that, it helps. So, yeah, I don't know.

Which one's your favorite? I think the NL West is my favorite, just because I guess the Rays streak is still alive, right? Or at least as we speak on Tuesday. Yeah, because they did end up winning that game yesterday even though they- Yeah, they had the big rally. Yeah, they made it close. So yeah, I think the NOS just because we entered the season expecting the great two-team race

and we've gotten that, but we've also got the bonus of the Giants kind of crashing that party in a fun and unexpected way. The Giants are so old. They're so old. And I love that they just added Scott Casimir as their reinforcement. Scott Casimir is back. He's back. He hasn't pitched in the majors since 2016, making his earlier layoff from the majors Look like just a blip It was a year he was out of the league Prior to that Several years before that Now he's been gone since 2016 And he's back and he pitched pretty effectively In his first game back

But that was the reinforcement 37 year old Scott Casimir Which I welcome because I just want them to be Like the oldest team of all time Or at least the oldest successful team of all time And they do have the oldest batters in Major League Baseball by a lot. Their average batter age this year is 30.9. That is a full six tenths of a year older than the next oldest team, the Angels. And their pitching staff has been older than average, but not as extreme. So now that Kazmir's in the fold, maybe they can start raising that number too. But that's been a lot of fun that they've just kind of vaulted back into competition without really rebuilding, or at least rebuilding the way that we kind of expected

Farhan Zaidi to do. So I don't know if they can keep this up this year, and I don't know if they can smoothly segue into the next Giants core after this current aging and possibly departing soon core leaves but it's been a lot of fun to see Buster Posey and Co. be back in business again so I kind of hope they can keep that up I'd be surprised obviously if they could hang with the Padres and Dachas all season but I'm already surprised that they've managed to stick so close thus far. So I think that is my favorite division race, but there are a bunch of good ones here. I mean, Rays, Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays are a few games back of those teams, but obviously a threat to catch up and maybe overtake the Red Sox at some point, we will see. So Rays, Yankees, two teams that have been on a real

roll for most of the season, that's a pretty good top of the race. And I think that is probably up there, maybe my second favorite, but I'm kind of enjoying the NL East morass as well. Just I don't know what to make of all those teams because the Mets were my pick leading into the year. And I didn't feel confident about picking the Mets over Atlanta, but I ultimately did. And they're just a game ahead now. And they've done it despite that offense that I thought would be good, underperforming, and now just being decimated, more than decimated by injuries. At least they're getting Jacob deGrom back on Tuesday. But if he thought the run support was bad before, with most of the opening day lineup out of commission,

I don't know what it will be now. So I hope that as they start to get guys back, they will play a bit more the way that they were expected to. But will they be able to hold off Atlanta? I don't know. Will any of those other teams make Atlanta? I don't know. Will any of those other teams make runs? I don't know. So I guess I would go NL West, AL East.

NL East for me. No offense to the centrals and AL West, but not quite as compelling to me. So do you ever have the experience of you see that a guy is having a good early going and then you check back and your expectation is that he will have cooled because that's what tends to happen when guys are really hot in the beginning they cool off because you know the universe gravitas towards regression so buster posey has not done that no yeah let's talk about this for a second so he is he's not a qualified hitter yet we need a better word for that. We need a better word than qualified.

I know that we all mostly know what we mean. We know what we mean when we say that. And I think our listeners know what we mean when we say that. But I find myself tripped up on it every time I say it out loud because it sounds so judgmental.

It's not at all. Sounds like you're saying he doesn't deserve to be a big leaguer. So anyway, we need a new word for that. Effectively wild in search of new words. So he's only had 121 plate appearances. So if you go to our leaderboards at Fangraphs and you're like, where is Buster Posey? Remember that you have to drop your PA threshold down because he's not quite qualified yet. But 194 WRC plus.

Yeah. And his usual sterling defense. He's hitting 355, 436, 45. He has nine home runs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did not know he still had that power in him.

I guess taking 2020 off has worked out quite well for him. Maybe he needed that time to recuperate i noticed that the framing ratings are not what they were at least right now yeah they're not quite as good smallish sample but it's like average as opposed to consistently well above average in the past but he is hitting so well that it almost doesn't matter so yeah i i love that this power is back because like even in the last couple seasons he played like 2018 he didn't have much power at all 2019 he didn't have a whole lot of power and it seemed like those days were kind of behind him and he needs this for his hall of fame case i think which unless you are factoring in framing quite heavily, is borderline at best right now.

And it looked like he wasn't going to be adding to those totals much. And suddenly he is again. And obviously the Giants need him to do that, too. So Joey Bart suddenly looking up from being heir apparent to the old man still has some slug left. Yeah, I don't imagine that. Well, I'm sure that Joey Bart would rather be in the big leagues than not, but I think that it is to his benefit that he is not being rushed along to contribute to a surprisingly good Giants team.

He clearly needed to work on some swing stuff last year, so him having a little more time to marinate is probably not the worst thing, but yeah, Buster Posey. If I had to pick a position and guess which one would benefit the most from having time off, Ketcher would be at the top of my list. Yeah. Is he getting like a year back on functional knees like in his life away from baseball as a result of missing 2020?

He might be i mean he was you know he was home with his family and he and his wife had twins and so it's not as if uh buster posey probably got a lot of sleep last year i'm sure that he was quite tired even though he wasn't playing baseball because infants were grueling and taking care of kids is really hard work but he probably didn't have to crouch as much so that part is good and he's less filled with lava even if his head might have felt filled with sand at times because he was quite tired you know how people are tired so anyway buster posey that was sort of my hypothesis with salvador perez too when he missed time with tommy john surgery and then he came back and was setting the world on fire last year and this year has

continued to hit and play pretty well so he was someone who just worked so hard and never wanted to take a day off and when you get some forced time off i'm not recommending that catchers just skip a season routinely or hurt themselves so that they can sit out but just saying silver lining and yeah probably applies more to catchers than any other position, maybe pitchers as well. But with pitchers, you have to worry about building your arm strength back up and all that. Whereas with catchers, yeah, if you're not going to be taking time off regularly and making sure that you sit and don't tax yourself too hard as a starter, then maybe not the worst thing to take some months off come back

feeling refreshed in your 30s so yeah nice to see those guys do well and and the giants as a whole just because we talk about shohei otani all the time which gosh would a burden because i have the catcher leaderboard up right now i am going to to make note of a very meg player and his very mike zanino line which is mike zanino right now is sitting 214 287 582 those 11 home runs certainly helping to bolster his 140 wrc plus he is walking 8.3 percent of the time and striking out 38 percent of the time mike zanino i don't know you could contemplate changing but i think uh it never changed this is just who you are this is the good version of you so well done, sir. I like that.

I like having Yasmini Grandal succeed with his low batting average and high on base and Mike Susino with his low batting average and high slug. They're different ways to produce. So speaking of that, I wanted to mention, remember back in March when we talked about Isaiah Kiner-Falefa calling out the Fangraph's positional power rankings for shortstop? Oh, yes. Because of what the projection said, he ranked at the very bottom, 30th on the shortstop positional power rankings. And he was not pleased, as one would expect him not to be.

And he said he was going to pin it up in his locker or whatever. This is going on my locker and he pointed out that he led the al in defensive war last year i haven't fact-checked that but he won a gold glove at third base but he was moving to shortstop and the projections probably didn't know what to do with him because a small sample last year at third exactly right back that's he hadn't played that much shortstop and seemed to have the skills, but it was such an atypical progression going from playing some infield in the minors and everything to then catching and then moving to third base and then moving to shortstop. And the Rangers obviously entrusted him with that position and thought he could handle it and traded Elvis Andrews. And so they had faith in him, but the projections, at least some projections, did not.

And he took issue with that. And so we talked at the time about his comments and about why the projections said what they said. But I noticed that he has walked the walk thus far. He has backed it up. He has performed quite well. And actually, looking at the Fang graphs, leaderboards for shortstop. Now he ranks fourth in war by a shortstop after Xander Bogarts, Trey Turner and Fernando Tatis Jr.

And in his case, it's not overpowering offense. It's above average offense, but his defensive run saved leads all shortstops right now. And I know small sample defensive stats, and I probably should not even be citing these if I were being responsible about it. But he's eight runs above average, according to DRS at shortstop, and that leads all shortstops. And the other systems are not quite so high on him, but still above average. I think he has an above average UZR. He has an above average outs above average at MLB.com at Baseball Savant. So he is thus far backing it up and he can look at his locker if he actually printed out the positional power rankings and tacked it up there and he can say, ha, I was right at least thus far. So good for him. Yeah, he's having a very nice season. And as you said, and as other Ben noted at the time, it's a very strange profile for a projection system to know what to do with because you don't see many players sort of progress along the defensive spectrum in the way that he did.

And Zips, for instance, takes into account minor league data, but there were position switch stuff going on there right where he moved from shortstop to to catcher while they tried to see if that would work and so yeah it was just the kind of positional shift that the projection systems are not particularly well set up to handle and i'm happy for him good for him like that's great we want everyone to have a nice time you know we advocate a nice time so we were not we were not rooting against him i don't root for our harsh projections to be right just so that they're right as long as they end up being wrong in ways that we can account for so that we have confidence in the methodology behind them like that's just a thing that's going to happen because guys surprise you and especially in a year like this one where we're coming off a shortened

campaign and so you have prior year stuff a little more heavily weighted in the projections than 2020 just be as a way of dealing with it only being 60 games it was ripe the moment was ripe for tomfoolery or yeah kind of full of foolery i say that. That's hard to say, but good for him. It's cool. Yep. So while we're talking about catchers and former catchers, a couple of things. One, on Friday, everyone met a major leaguer, Jose Godoy, backup catcher for the Mariners who arrived to unexpectedly great fanfare because he won the sweepstakes.

He was the 20,000th major leaguer of all time, according to Baseball Reference. So BaseballReference.com has had not a countdown, but a count up on its homepage for years now. And people have been tracking the progression toward 20,000. And it just so happened that according to the site's accounting, Jose Godoy was the 20,000th. And so there were a lot of people pointing that out and celebrating that and welcoming him to the majors. And good for him. He's a 26-year-old backup catcher type who was in the Cardinals system for a really long time. I think he was signed in 2011 or something. So he is signed as a, was it a free agent, minor league free agent? I think that might be right. Yeah, by the Mariners. Unfortunately, neither of us took him in the minor league free agent draft. You're just kicking my ass, Ben.

Yeah, faulty has done well for me. Furious. Anyway, that's not the point. You're just, I'm just getting smoked. So Godoy escaped the cardinals and there should be like some sort of support system for like catchers who were just buried behind yadier molina for like years and years either never made the majors or like made it but never played like tony cruz who like for some number of years was like the least used player

on a major league roster because Yadier Molina never took a day off either. Maybe he should like have Tommy John surgery or something, sit out a season and come back. That might do him some good. But no, he's playing pretty well as it is. So I guess he's fine. He's playing quite well. But Jose Godoy now made it to the Mariners. And so good for him. Good for everyone on Twitter who got there Waiting for Godoy jokes out but also There was this whole conversation about well Is he actually the 20,000th and It's like very pedantic of course but

There is like essentially No way that he is Actually the 20,000th because There are a number of sources Of uncertainty first of all like With early record keeping You have like a lot less precision. So there may be duplicate guys or missing guys, and there are guys who have only a last name or

something, and we don't know anything about them. So it's quite likely that even according to the system that Baseball Reference is using, that it's not quite perfect, and he is close to 20,000th, but not actually 20,000th. But then there are other disputes. So as John Thorne, MLB's official historian, was pointing out, MLB does not count the National Association as a major league. And that is what baseball reference dates the beginning of the majors to. I think there was some encyclopedia At some point that said Major League Baseball Started with the National Association

Which was sort of a predecessor To the National League It was in operation from 1871 To 1875 So baseball reference is starting The count from 1871 And I think Deacon White Who was the first player to have a plate appearance

In the National Association, whereas MLB. The count starts later. And so by that measure, we haven't actually gotten to 20,000 yet. And so Jose Godoy, I'm sorry, but you're not 20,000. But then there's also the Negro Leagues factor. And this 20,000 count does not count Negro Leaguers who played between the years of 1920 and 1948, which is when MLB just recently designated those years and those leagues as major league, recognized them as major league. And so when those players are added to the total, as they have not officially been yet, I don't believe, but they will be, I'm sure, both by MLB and maybe also by Baseball Reference, because I know that Sean Foreman at Baseball Reference is making an effort to

kind of revamp the Negro League's stat display at the site so that Negro League stats will be added to StatHead and probably will be displayed in a different section of the site and maybe a different section of player pages, et cetera. So that would add a few thousand players to the total of major leaguers. And so by that measure, Jose Godoy will probably end up being even further from 20,000. So I kind of wonder whether long term he will be recognized as number 20,000 just because everyone pointed out that he was 20,000 according to baseball reference on that day. And so that fun fact sort of spread. And I wonder whether that was enough to solidify it as trivia, like the Mariners tweeted out a video of Ken Jennings doing a

Jeopardy style question about like, who was the 20,000th major leaguer? So is that enough to just make that hold up in history? Or will that just be erased as soon as Negro leaguers so is that enough to just make that hold up in history or will that just be erased as soon as negro leaguers are added to that calendar other changes are made and then posterity will not remember jose godoy as the 20 000th although they will still remember him as a major leaguer either way i'm sure he is happy to be a member of the mariners and major leaguer but just not really sure whether that thing that everyone made a big deal out of over the weekend will actually have any legs or sometimes these things, they change, but if enough people in the moment see things that way and there are enough stories out there about, oh, he's

the 20,000th Major Leaguer, then just be sort of set in stone, even though things change. So history is weird, and it can be made in a number of ways. And sometimes it's accurate, sometimes it's inaccurate, sometimes it changes based on changes that happen after the fact. So I don't know if he'll hold this designation, but at least for a little while, he gets to be known as number 20,000. It's such an interesting question about how we remember this stuff, because I would imagine that for a certain subset of the baseball watching public right now, that this is like the kind of fun fact that gets squirreled away in their heads to like reemerge years later during bar trivia or whatever, right?

You know, it's the sort of thing where when you're playing Trivial Pursuit, you're like, hey, I know that one. And then you dredge it up and you're like, wow, I can't believe that that piece of information is floating around my brain. Like, what could I know if I didn't know that? And so I think that some of that stuff persists. But I also think that we tend to, and I don't, I mean, all of us, this is true of me too. I think that we tend to have greater faith in our memories than is really warranted.

Like, I think generally we're pretty bad at remembering things over the long term. And that's why the way that this information ends up getting presented at, at a site like Baseball Reference is really important because we have, we've become, I think, a collective of folks who are really good at looking stuff up. And the number of things that we feel like we have to have logged is probably a lot smaller than it was in prior generations, because we don't have to go to a stinking encyclopedia to find it, right? Like we can just Google it, even though sometimes people still don't Google. If you can type out a question on Twitter, you can also Google. I'm just saying it takes the exact same amount of time and you might get an answer faster. I don't know, thing

to contemplate. But, and maybe they're not doing this on the homepage. And maybe this will get reintroduced after reference sort of goes and does that work that they're doing to try to make sure that they're really reflecting an accurate record, which I think is really admirable. Like this is clearly very important to Sean. And it's so valuable to us because again, we don't remember anything. But I know that on the player pages, I believe it lists what debut number you were, right? He is the ex-debut. And so I wouldn't be surprised if for people who are not alive right this moment or paying attention right this week, that they actually end up getting whoever the real 20,000th major leaguer is right more often than not

because they're not going to remember and they're just going to go look it up. And then it'll be whatever the results of that research are to sort of make sure that the record is complete and includes all of the players that it ought to. So I'm optimistic that future generations will get this right. And I am also certain that the current generation will fight with them about it because some number of us will remember Godoy and be like,

but wasn't it that backup catcher for the Mariners in a season where they were hitting under 200 as a team? That's not fair. That's not what they're doing anymore. So I don't know. This is why the way that this information gets presented and the accuracy of it is so important because we just don't remember stuff. And so having reliable sources to go to to say, what did he hit that really good year? And then finding the answer that's true is really valuable, I think. Yeah. To make matters more confusing, if you go to Godoy's player page on Baseball Reference, it says he's the 19,998th player in MLB history, which I'm guessing is because three players debuted on that day, May 21st. And alphabetically, he is the last. So I

bet that's what it is. But if you search on the new debuts page at Baseball Reference, right now it says there have been 20,002 major leaguers and Godoy is third from the top, which would make him 20,000. So like even Baseball Reference, if you look at the different pages might give you different answers, but it's hard to present this sort of information. And it comes back to a question that we brought up when Major League Baseball made that change to its classification of the Negro Leagues, which is who gets to decide this stuff. And maybe multiple parties decide it, and then we have to figure out which one we recognize. So for instance, MLB might date its own history to 1876, which is kind of weird because MLB didn't exist in any real way in 1876. It was just the National League. There was, actually, it's 1871. And then it's like, well, which one is the authority? You know, does MLB get to decide when these things start? Well, by default, sort of, it tends to have the authority just because it's MLB and it's the highest level and most prominent domestic baseball league. And so when it says something, people tend to pay attention because it has a big footprint and a big fan base, and it seems to carry some weight of authority. But of course, it doesn't have to recognize these things. And the process by which MLB decided which leagues were major was really faulty. And that happened years and years ago, and they never revisited it until just last year. And that's why it took so incredibly long for the Negro League's question

even to be raised. And so ultimately, if MLB says it starts from this date and Baseball Reference says it starts from that date and everyone goes to Baseball, you know, then maybe baseball reference is the one that kind of gets the default say in these things because John Thorne might be tweeting something different, but thousands and thousands of people are going to baseball reference and seeing that count on the homepage. And so that's the number that gets ingrained in people's minds. So again, like, you know, how history gets made, it's very messy and that's not necessarily a bad thing or it's not a problem. Sometimes it's a problem. Sometimes it's just you have to understand the complexity of it. And so, you know, some sources can claim to have the final say, but then if everyone is using the other source and it says something different, then ultimately that might be the one that stands up. Yeah. And, you know, I just said it's so important for us to have this thing we agree on.

But of course, that's not how history works, right? Like their history is always contested and our understanding of it is. to our broader understanding, like not just as baseball fans, but of people as to how complicated these kinds of moments can be, that even something as seemingly easy as just counting, you're just counting the guys. Like that should be a thing that should be straightforward, but it comes with larger questions that aren't about the accounting of it at all. So it is kind of an interesting snapshot

as we try to properly document and literally account for the game's history, which is not as simple and straightforward as it might seem even when it comes to something like stats. Yeah, it's deceptively simple. Deceptively complicated? No, I guess it would be deceptively simple. It's more complicated than it seems. Something about it is deceptive. But yeah, it's not just as easy as counting from an agreed upon start.

Right. The other backup catcher bit of news that I wanted to relay was Eric Kratz drumming up the whole sign stealing saga again. Just when we were all ready to let it die, Eric Kratz has brought it back to the fore. ready to let it die. Eric Kratz has brought it back to the fore. And the most popular, most read story on MLB trade rumors for days now has been Eric Kratz makes sign stealing allegations. And so this is not necessarily new. If you dig a little, a lot of this stuff has surfaced before. But late last week, he was on a Yes Network show and he was asked about the Astros sign stealing scandal. And he said, I can tell you that a team that has been to the World Series often recently, we caught them doing something almost similar. There aren't really a lot of teams that have been to the World Series often recently that are not the Astros. So pretty clearly he's talking about the Dodgers here.

And that is consistent with a story that surfaced a few years ago where the Brewers accused the Dodgers of sign stealing or said they suspected that the Dodgers were sign stealing illegally. And Eric Kratz was on that Brewers team. signs dealing illegally, and Eric Kratz was on that Brewers team. So again, not new, but brought up again and brought up for the first time, I guess, since the Astros scandal broke. But he went beyond that and implicated not only the Dodgers, but also the Rockies. And he got more specific here. He said, I can also tell you, because I don't really care. I don't know anybody over there.

The Colorado Rockies were doing the exact same thing in 2018. They used to take a Theragun and bang it on their metal bench, and they were doing the exact same thing from the TV. So there you go. If you think no one else was doing it, you are wrong. The difference is the Astros may have taken it a little too far. So Kratz is trying to implicate the Rockies and the Dodgers here. There have been other rumors about the Brewers even over the past couple of years. It's not surprising at all to me, the idea that there were multiple teams doing things. I mean, we know that

the Red Sox were doing something that was investigated that was not quite to the extent that the Astros were doing things. But the same incentives were in place for all of these teams, the same lax monitoring by MLB applied to all teams. And players are going from team to team constantly and bringing their schemes with them. So it would not be at all surprising to me if other teams were sign stealing and sign stealing in a way that was reminiscent of what the Astros were doing. I guess the question is whether anything will come of this, whether we care about whether anything comes of this or whether we're ready to retire this whole thing. As MLB is, I'm sure, to put it behind them, I'm sure Astros fans are all saying, see, see, it wasn't just us, as a lot of them have been saying all along. Not that that is an excuse for what the Astros did, the defense of, well, we weren't the only ones doing it. That doesn't really work. They got caught, and they were probably doing it more than the typical team and with greater sophistication.

team and with greater sophistication. So there are going to be a couple Astros science-doing books coming out soon from Andy Martino and Evan Drellick, and I assume there will be some sort of revelations in there and that we will be hearing about the Astros again. But something like this, where it's just a not very prominent, although certainly long lasting former major leaguer coming out and making an accusation without evidence or corroboration. Is that something that should trigger, you know, and they'll be launching an investigation? Like it's a little bit different from Mike Fiers saying, yeah, my team was doing it and I saw it. This is him accusing other teams, teams that the Brewers played in the playoffs that year

of doing it. So, you know, does that rise to the level of, oh, well, we better look into this if we said that we're going to investigate any evidence of this as Kratz coming out and saying it happened enough? Or will MLB just kind of try to sweep this under the rug the way that I'm sure they would have wanted to if the evidence were not so clear in the Astros case. Yeah, it's interesting the sort of calculus that goes into these moments for guys about when they say something, both in terms of where they are in their own careers when they elect to disclose and also where other people who they know and might have relationships

with are relative to the teams that they suspect are up to something untoward, which I don't say to say that he should have said something earlier or not said something at all. It's just, you know, there's clearly like a calculation that goes on there. And I don't mean that in like a conniving way. I mean that in a you're considering different factors when you're deciding what to say versus not. And it's obvious that some things matter more than other things in terms of when you disclose. So that part of this is interesting to me. And I do think that it will be interesting to see, you know, how do we think about the sort of gradations of cheating on this stuff? Because I don't think that anyone is under operating under the misunderstanding that other teams did not try to derive some benefit from from stealing signs potentially in a way that was either strictly disallowed by the rules or was understood to trans you know transgress a

line that was important to people but even among that there does seem to be an understanding that what Houston did went beyond what other people were doing. So and so again, we're not trying to excuse that. But I do wonder if our sort of public opprobrium will start to extend further down that spectrum of behavior to say no, like there's a lot here that we find unsavory and that we feel to be not only in violation of the rules as they are written, but violation in the spirit of these rules because we like we like it when teams are a little crafty, right? We like it when the runner on second can decipher a sign and relay it to the batter. That feels like normal baseball stuff. And then there's all this other behavior that sits outside of what people can do themselves

without the aid of technology. And I think that we're probably not done grappling with exactly where the lines are within that set of behavior. You know, we've drawn this bright line between like what the Astros did versus everything else, but there's a lot more that probably is going on that would benefit from some consideration in terms of how we think about it and whether we view it as sort of ingenuity and pressing an advantage versus violating the competitive spirit of the game and i don't think that we're quite done with that conversation and shouldn't be although i think because of just how explosive the astro situation was it's really hard to have

that conversation like with everyone remaining calm because Because what will often happen is that Astros fans, who didn't have anything to do with it, will be perhaps justifiably annoyed that they have to keep hearing about it, but them's the shakes. And then they will turn to Yankee fans and Red Sox fans and be like, but didn't you guys do this thing? And then those fans will be like, but your thing was worse, and then everybody else for a little while.

Right. Yeah, I mean, sign stealing, even illegal sign stealing has been pretty pervasive throughout baseball history. Like go back and listen to episode 1505 from last year if you want a little bit of that background. But I think what was unusual in the Astros case and what made it so difficult to ignore was A, you had fires coming out, a member of those teams coming out and admitting to it, but also admitting to it pretty shortly after it happened, while a lot of the same members of that team were still there. So this wasn't coming out years and years after the fact. It was pretty recent memory, and the wounds were still raw for teams that the Astros beat. So that was one unusual element of it. And then the other unusual element of it was that it was audible to all of us. And it wasn't just, well, Eric Kratz said they were sign stealing. It was we could go back and watch and listen to that footage and hear it for ourselves. I don't know whether that would apply to the Rockies. I don't know whether people have gone back and listened to see if you can hear the Theragun banging their version of the banging scheme off the middle bench. But that, I think, is what set the Astros apart and just made it so't just a hearsay. It was very obvious and we could kind of corroborate the confession and the accusations. So don't know if that'll apply to any other teams that were doing it at that time. And so I don't know whether it would bring the same level of animosity and condemnation. If MLB is going to be consistent about this, then I suppose it's obliged to

investigate. But I have a lot of sign-stealing fatigue just personally because I don't feel like it matters all that much. I think the evidence and the data out there shows that it's less beneficial than one would think it to be. And also, not that you can't investigate more than one type of cheating at a time, but I'd rather MLB focus on the cheating scandal right in front of our faces. The use of foreign substances, which is probably more impactful and pervasive than illegal sign stealing ever was. So there's that too. would be the way that we compensate for the Coors Field hangover effect and the fact that the ball moves differently at Coors Field than it does everyone else. Maybe we should just tell the Rockies what's coming and that would kind of even the playing field a little bit. But I would be interested in decades down the line when everyone from this era is willing to come clean and everyone who is playing then is out of the game and you start

getting these things surfacing as they sometimes do. At that point, I would be kind of interested in knowing, okay, just how pervasive was this? How out of line with the rest of the league were the Astros? Was this actually kind of par for the course? The way that so many players were angry at the Astros as well as fans sort of signaled to me that what they were doing was probably beyond the pale, even by the standards of what was going on in the majors at that time. Although I suppose it could have been some false outrage on some players' parts. But if we ever get kind of a complete accounting of what was going on in that era, we can say oh that was

the sign stealing era or something because we know that like a majority of teams were doing it and players from every team come out and say oh yeah we were doing it too and we just got away with it like that would be of interest to me but i kind of hope it doesn't just dribble out every year where we get oh yeah the 2018 so-and-sos, they were sign-stealing too. And then we get another news cycle and another investigation so that it never ends. I'm sorry to Astros fans who may feel like they got scapegoated or something because they got caught and maybe some other teams that were doing it didn't, but it would probably be better for baseball if this weren't just a constant refrain and maybe we could put it to bed for a little while and attempt to move on. And hopefully

they have strengthened the protections and the restrictions such that this isn't still going on, at least in the same way. And maybe we'll get some sort of technological solution in here soon to set everyone's minds at ease and make it impossible to steal science in the way that they were. But that's kind of my thinking on this. Kratz is stirring this up again, and I'm not really eager, despite the fact that I brought it up on this podcast and that we've been talking about it. I'm not that eager to have the science-stealing conversation ad nauseum on and on forever. Well well and i think one of the other things that that gets factored into that and i think will probably have some some role to play in whether or

not accusations like this gain traction and whether you do see sort of a serious consideration of them and some sort of investigation which like we should also say that mlb hears about team behavior from other teams all the time like for all we know, this stuff has been looked at, and either they've determined that it didn't happen or it wasn't serious or that they couldn't prove that something had happened, and so it didn't rise to the level of public attention because there was no enforcement being done on the league's part.

We don't know. I mean, I'm not saying that that's what happened, but that is a possibility because it isn't as if when this was all happening with Houston that we were like, well, nothing like this has ever happened elsewhere. You know, I think there was a lot of attention paid to the behavior of other organizations around that time. the Brewers' suspicions. He said that the Brewers told MLB's video room security people of their suspicions, but, quote, the security personnel responded that they had not detected anything. Of course, I doubt they did a really in-depth investigation. And there was a lot of smoke around Astro's sign stealing before there was actually documented proof and a real investigation

of the Astro's sign stealing. That didn't't really happen until fires kickstarted it all by coming forward. So, you know, whatever the inquiry was back in 2018, I'm guessing it was kind of cursory and that it would be more thorough after the astro science doing was revealed. part of this is the context the organizational context that you find yourself in like part of why this is certainly not the only reason and again i'm not saying this to try to downplay what they did but part of the reason that the conversation around the astro sign ceiling reached the fervor that it did was that that was not the only sort of culture knock against that organization right this was this was taking place within the context of other bad behavior that arguably did different, but also similarly serious damage. So I think that that was part of why it took on the life that it did, not only because you had a whistleblower and not only because you had confirmation so soon after a World Series had been won, but because a lot of people just didn't like the Astros.

And so this, you know, the way that we engaged with that piece of information was to fit it within an existing narrative that we had of the team. And, you know, I've been plenty critical of the culture that they were employing at the time. So, you know, you can count me among those people, but, and not just because I enjoyed saying banging scheme so much. You really did though. You really did, though. I really did because it's just the best.

The scheme, not so much. The name, superlative. So I think that that's part of it also. It's like, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if someone was just like, the Rockies haven't suffered enough. We can't just leave them out of this for now because, gosh, who even, who would you go after?

Most of the front office is gone. All of the people who were involved or I don't know, selling solar panels, I don't know what they're up to. So anyway, it's just, you know, that is part of what shapes the reaction that fans and observers have to behavior like this is sort of

what what is their baseline understanding of the culture of the organization and the people who work there and what are our expectations of their behavior and do we view this as sort of like a an aberrant strange transgression that we might be able to forgive and move on from or does it you know become part of a pattern of behavior that we find really distasteful? And I'm not saying that that's the wrong way to look at it, but I do think that that tends to influence the way that this stuff plays out. Yep. So we are recording just a few hours before Tuesday's game start. And I think that Joe West will break the all-time games umpired record on Tuesday. He tied it on Monday.

Yeah, he worked at first base in the Cardinals-White Sox game on Monday. He tied Bill Clem's record for most games umpired at 5,375. Clem, of course, was an umpire from 1905 to 1941, so this record has stood for a really long time. And West, who is 68 years old, he has himself been umping for a really long time. He started in 1976 in the majors. So I assume that he will go ahead of Clem and have his 5376th game here very soon. And I guess that means that Joe West has to be a future Hall of Famer, which is not the way that a lot of people think of Joe West, who is pretty notorious for his ump shows. But just the longevity, I would assume that he is a virtual lock for the Hall. And I was just looking at a list of Hall of Fame umpires, and there are only 10. And there's really been a drought recently. So the last Hall of Fame

umpire to be inducted was Hank O'Day, who was inducted in 2013, but he was inducted by the pre-integration era committee. And he was an umpire from like the late 19th century to 1927. So it was a long, long time after Hank O'Day stopped umpiring. So before O'Day, the last guy let in was Doug Harvey in 2010. And Harvey is the most recent umpire on the field to make the Hall of Fame. He umped from 1962 to 1992. So we have not had an umpire inducted into the Hall of Fame who has umped more recently than 1992. And before that, it was a lot of guys really from the early years of baseball, the early decades of the 20th century. So people talk sometimes about how players are

underrepresented from certain eras and recent eras in the Hall of Fame that maybe Hall of Fame voters have not accounted for the fact that there are a lot more teams and a lot more players these days. And so if you're going to stick with a consistent percentage of players who are Hall of Famers, then there should be more admitted over time. It seems like umpires, really, they had halcyon days of getting into the hall. And lately, it's been very tough for umps to get in. And I don't know why that is exactly, whether we've all just grown to think all umpires are terrible even more than before. I don't know. It seems like that's kind of been a constant in baseball history, fans thinking that umpires are terrible even more than before. I don't know. It seems like that's kind of been a constant in baseball history, fans thinking that umpires are terrible at their jobs. So I don't know if it's that we have better data now and we can quantify them being bad at their jobs, but I kind of doubt

it's that really. It just seems like the veterans committees or the successors to the veterans committees are either not considering umpires as often or are just not letting them in as often. Or I don't know if it has something to do with there being more umpires these days. And so individual umps are less prominent unless it's for bad reasons or whether the average longevity of umpires has changed in some way, but kind of odd, I suppose, that the rate of admitting umpires has changed to such a degree. But I would assume that Joe West, for better or worse, will be a Hall of Famer one day and that he's kind of cementing that case this week. And

I guess it makes sense if you're one of the people who think like, well, the Hall of Fame should tell the story of baseball. And so you can't tell the story of baseball over the past 50 years or so without Joe West. And there is some truth to that. Of course, you could have an exhibit that involves Joe West in some way without actually having him have a plaque. And maybe he hasn't been all good for the story of baseball between the ump shows and the cowboyness and the country crooning era. And I don't know what the aging curve for umpires who is immediately recognizable and kind of a household name for baseball fans, which is maybe not a great reflection of his performance. But on the other hand, he has just been kind of a constant since long before we were born and long before any current players made the majors, Joe West has been there. So I assume that he will be rewarded for that, even though fans i'm

sure will have some snarky stuff to say when that day comes how much do you think that the existence of replay plays into the perception fans have of umpires being less good than they used to be or maybe not even less good than they used to be but just not very good at all yeah because i think that there's the strike zone component of it in there. I think the availability of data that allows us to quantify not only how many misses, but the severity of those misses and their frequency, that certainly plays a big role in it for folks like us.

I don't know if that plays as big a role for just a casual observer, but I think that when fans see umpires get overturned in replay review, that it probably colors their understanding of how competent those umpires are, even if the expectation that you do your job perfectly 100% of the time is one that we just don't really see play out other places, like even sometimes with jobs where you would expect them to generally do a tip-top job. So I wonder how much that has to do with it. I don't know how I feel about him being in the Hall of Fame. I tend to be one of those people who wants the Hall to be a museum that tells the story of the game. And I think that longevity, you know, is some kind of a skill.

Do they just have really bad pensions? Like, why is he still working? That's the only question I have, but that's not. Because he wants this record. But yeah. That's like a, that's a real commitment to going to work every day, I guess. So that part is,

I don't know if I want to laud that behavior over much, but it's something. It's commitment. Let's put it that way. So I guess he belongs in there. I wish that we could get a really concrete sense of sort of how his skills have changed over time to the extent that they have. And if there is an element of this that is, as you say, just, you know, he's sort of in the twilight of his career and skill does atrophy over time. That doesn't make him like, it's just not meaning to be rude to him, but it's just a thing like you got to see. Well, to be an ump, who knows how he's doing with the old specs.

So I don't know. It's a weird thing. But I do wonder if we didn't have replay and super slow-mo if people's general perception would be yeah umps do a pretty good job you know well I think probably not because I think people have always hated umpires I mean like the movie kill the umpire came out in 1950 and I think that had been a frequent refrain among fans for many years before that. Don't advocate killing umpires. I think we're kind of in the camp of like, yeah, replay and pitch tracking tech has exposed how fallible umpires are. But whereas other people are like, umpires suck. They're bad at their jobs. I think we are more in the camp of like, it's a hard job. They do a pretty good job. Yeah, they do a pretty good job and they do about as good a job as humans could reasonably be expected to do. You know, are they the very best people that you could choose out of the entire potential pool of umpires in the world? I don't know. Maybe not.

But of the number of people who want to be umpires and are attracted to that profession, you know, they're probably among the best at their jobs and it's just an impossible job to do perfectly. So I think people have always been convinced that umpires were making mistakes and obviously were somewhat biased at times. It's true though that they didn't have the hard evidence necessarily. I mean, you might've had still photos sometimes that captured a play at the perfect moment to prove that an umpire got a call wrong. But often you didn't and you didn't get to see it in motion. And that has been a change. So to have the data and to have replay review and to have high definition replay footage, which often answers those questions beyond a shadow of a doubt,

that has kind of confirmed, I think, what fans already suspected or thought they knew, that umpires routinely made mistakes. So whether that has led to umpires being more loathed than they once were or to have a lower job approval rating than they once did. I don't actually know because I think it's always been pretty low on the whole, but I kind of doubt that accounts for the drought in umpire hall of famers, but it is sort of strange. I would guess that that just has more to do with, I don't know, makeup of veterans committees or just which types of personnel those committees

tend to focus on. But if we're going to have umpires in the Hall of Fame, then it is weird that we haven't had any Hall of Fame umpires for decades on the field. They're saying that there hasn't been a Hall of Fame umpire on the field since the early 90s. That doesn't really make sense. So just to be consistent, you should probably have some umpire on the field since the early 90s. That doesn't really make sense. So just to be consistent, you should probably have some umpires. I don't know if it's Joe West just because he's lasted

forever. And he's also, I think he's been the president of the umpires association. So he's kind of a leadership role and some influence there that maybe goes beyond his own personal performance and all of that. So maybe that could contribute to or detract from his case. But yeah, I think that probably the perception of umpires has not changed all that much over the years. It's just that we do have the hard evidence now to back up what we think in the moment. Yeah, I mean, we boo them when we can't visualize the strike zone sitting in the ballpark.

So I don't know that, yeah, I mean, we can quantify it now, but I think you're right to say there's always been some mistrust because it wasn't as if, it's not as if not being able to see the strike zone ever inspires anyone to hold back. But yeah, it is an odd thing.

And I hope that it does not speak to a perception on the part of some within the game that that role is less skilled than we think it is. Because it seems strange. If you look at the way that players are distributed in the Hall of Fame, it's not like you have perfect parity between positions, right? that have a lot more guys admitted as them than they're voted in as them than others. But it does seem to be a striking amount of scarcity, even if you allow that there's going to be some variation sort of role to role within the folks who are admitted. And it makes you wonder, like, what is the standard by which they are judging this stuff? Because it can't be documented accuracy either from a strike zone perspective or a replay perspective because we just didn't

have that. And I'd be surprised if they were like, well, we didn't have the data, so we couldn't possibly admit people to the Hall of Fame because that seems inconsistent with the vibe that some of the veterans committees have employed. So yeah, it would be interesting to hear exactly what it is that they're looking for. And I wonder if it is just as simple as like they're looking at longevity as a proxy for skill perhaps like they're thinking you couldn't possibly have stuck around this long if you were really bad at your job and so your your very survivorship is indicative of your talent maybe that's the way

that they're thinking about it i don't know yeah. Yeah. All right. Are you an Olympics person? Do you care about the Olympics? Do you watch the Olympics? That's a very fraught question, Ben. I enjoy people listening to the pod are like, oh, no. What is she going to do now? I enjoy temporarily being an expert in a sport I hadn't seen the day before. I find that thrilling.

Every summer and winter game has a sport that I don't ever engage with otherwise. I'm like, this is really cool. Why don't I watch this? It's because they don't show the biathlon on TV very often, Meg. That's why you don't watch it before now. Yes, it's a big televised sport event. Of course, I watched the Olympics. I think that politics around the Olympics are kind of yishy.

And I think that all major sporting events can inspire some sort of misguided budget priorities and spending on the part of the governments that host them. But yeah, with all of those caveats in mind, which apply to all the other sports I like, I'm an Olympics person, sure. Yeah, yeah, I'm not hardcore into it. It's kind of, you know, it'll be on in the background sometimes and I'm kind of happy to have it.

Like I don't get into it that much because like I'm not that interested in most of these sports like to the degree that I would follow them between Olympics. So it's kind of a limit to my level of investment in it. Although I get it at just a sporadic infrequent thing where you kind of get invested in the people and the storylines and everything. And it's fun to follow for a while. So I brought this up just because the roster for the US baseball Olympics qualifying team was just announced recently. And i pay so little attention to the olympics in general that i was like not even entirely clear that baseball was in the

olympics this year until fairly recently because it hasn't been since 2008 i think and they've already announced that it won't be in 2024 so it's back for this year, which was supposed to be last year and then was postponed to this year because of COVID. So it was one of five sports, I think, that were added for the 2020 Summer Olympics, which will be played in 2021. But this caught my eye just because the roster is really interesting for this qualifying team. It's like such a strange mixture. So like to be eligible for this team, you can't be on an MLB 40-man roster. But other than that, anything goes.

So it's this weird mix of like remember some guys and like a few actual well-known prospects and just like people who were on MLB rosters like five minutes ago, but now are not and like some pretty big past their prime player names. So I'm like kind of more interested than I was before the names were announced. I mean, you've got like Matt Kemp, you've got Matt Wieters, Homer Bailey, Edwin Jackson, John Jay, who I was watching in Angels games like a week or two ago. And Todd Frazier, who played in MLB this year but is not there now. Yep.

Logan Forsythe. So it's like a bunch of guys who have already graduated to the ranks of remembering some guys managed by Mike Socia and a remember some guys coaching staff. But then it's also like Matthew Libertor, top pitching prospect for the Cardinals and some other prominent prospects for the Red Sox and Rays. So kind of a fun mix of new and old. And so the qualifiers, I think, take place next week and the U.S. is going to be competing with a bunch of other countries to make the Olympics. And I have not seen their odds or have seen anyone break down how likely they are to make it or to go far.

So I don't know whether I should be paying close attention to this or not, but I definitely perked up and was like, huh, that guy in the Olympics. All right. attention to this or not but i definitely perked up and was like huh that guy in the olympics all right is there a reason apart from the fact that you play baseball during the summer that we have not made baseball a winter sport in the olympics and you're like meg that's dumb they got domes everywhere they're playing these olympics they could put a field inside because then you could have actual big leaguers yeah that would be kind of fun right i think i saw someone suggest that on twitter and now i'm not remembering who and so i apologize that i cannot remember you but you whoever you are had a great suggestion because it's like wouldn't it be cool to have like mookie bets be in the olympics wouldn't you think that that was pretty rad

wouldn't you be like yeah look at look at Mookie Betts going? Because then it would have like a real WBC feel to it because you could have all the other country teams that have big leaguers on their rosters or guys who are playing professionally in Asia participate in the Olympics. And then it would be a bunch of people who aren't just remembering some guys

but are some current guys, some real, not just guys, but dudes. I also like that in the original version of the tweet that I saw of this from USA Baseball, so they spelled Repchinsky correctly, but they spelled Mark with a K instead of a C. That's the easy part. Yeah, just as a delightful typo to be had.

But I wish that we would get a little bit creative with the timing of this because it would allow for an elevated level of competition and i don't say that to like you know cast side eye at matt weeders or homer bailey or like anthony ghost yeah i saw anthony ghost like not pitching super well in lead them i think i drafted him in our draft but like yeah you know he was like doing okay in lead them it's i drafted him in our draft but like yeah you know he was like doing okay in lead them it's like this is not really who you want to david robertson david robertson like some of the prospects like you said are exciting like smotherwoods richardson

is like a real prospect and we have labor tour and interesting assassin yeah you're like there are guys here but there's also like eric folia who i'm'm sorry, Mariners fans, like you just got to let it go. It's not that exciting anymore. But like Jaron Duran, that's kind of cool. So yeah, I don't know. I think that we could make this as much fun as the exercise of remembering some guys is. And don't get me wrong, fun exercise. It would be even cooler if you had like real big leaguers put,

because then what if Mike Trout got a gold medal, but never won a world series ring? That would be such a cool fun fact. I mean, it would be a super big bummer for him because he I'm sure very badly wants a ring. But if you set that part of it aside, cool fun fact,

then he at least gets a gold medal, right? I guess you would have to change the eligibility rules too, right? Because if you can't be on an MLB 40-man roster, then it wouldn't matter if you held these in the winter instead, then the big name players still wouldn't be able to play. and train for this during the offseason? And do their teams want them to? And that kind of conversation that happens already with the WBC. And then does that conflict with the WBC in some way? That's a fair point. If they overlap, does it detract from it?

But I know what you mean. It would be fun to have the real dream team or dream teams going up against each other, especially because baseball is a pretty international sport. So it wouldn't be like you're just stacking a single roster necessarily either. But yeah, I guess we have the WBC. And the nice thing about this, about it not being a Winter Olympic sport is that Eddie Alvarez was a nice story last season when he made the Marlins at 30 years old, I think. And he's a guy who won an Olympic medal, won a silver medal at Sochi in 2014 for short track speed skating. So speaking of two-way players like Eddie Alvarez, short track speed skater extraordinaire and Major League league baseball player and potentially summer medalist as well in the olympics and if he were to do that there's a page i came across here i think there are only five people in the history of the olympics who have medaled in both the summer and winter olympics so that is a really exclusive club and i don't think a man has done it since 1936. And the people who have done it, it looks like their sports are at least a little more analogous than speed skating and

baseball, which don't have a ton in common. So that would be a pretty cool accomplishment if he were on this team and they managed to medal somehow. That would definitely give him some multi-sport bragging rights. So another reason to pay attention to this. Yeah, for sure. It does allow for some cool weirdness, but I also think that I might try to get a gold medal now. I've decided this is important to me. It was Cooper Lund.

Cooper Lund made the suggestion that it be a winter sport. All right. Just lightning round here. The A's ballpark situation is sort of festering. I guess the Rays ownership situation is sort of festering too. There's a lawsuit now of the minority owners of that franchise against majority owner Stu Sternberg alleging that he has sort of forced them out illegally. But the A's situation, which we talked about a couple of

weeks ago, maybe when the Las Vegas stuff resurfaced, has gotten more acrimonious and more details have come out. And it seems like the A's are offering Oakland a pretty raw deal here and are trying to pressure them into it, according to the reporting. I'm reading here from Alex Coffey's piece at The Athletic. She wrote, the A's current term sheet offers a non-relocation agreement of only 10 years. Non-relocation agreements for stadium projects are standard, but 10 years is on the lower end of the spectrum. The Raiders currently have a non-relocation agreement with the city of Las Vegas for 30 years. It was extended to 31 years in 2020 when the San Francisco Giants built a new ballpark

now known as Oracle Park. Their non-relocation agreement was for 25 years with the potential to extend their lease up to a total of 66 years. The city of San Francisco financed only $15 million in infrastructure costs compared to the $850 million the A's are asking from Oakland for what would be a 10-year commitment. 50 million the A's are asking from Oakland for what would be a 10 year commitment so it sounds like they're asking for a lot of money and then

also not offering to stay for a long time in return so that doesn't sound great and the A's president Dave Cavill was very sort of ostentatiously in Las Vegas this week and was tweeting about being

at a Golden Knights game. And I saw a clip from the A's postgame show where the hosts brought up that tweet from Cavill and they said, we were asked to respond to this. And then their response was that they just stood there silently for a while, shook their heads and then walked off the set without saying anything. I think it was Brody Brazil and B walked off the set without saying anything. I think it was Brody Brazil and Bip Roberts who were hosting that show. So that was a way to express their disapproval of the A's trying to strong arm Oakland into giving them the ballpark deal that they want.

So none of this is surprising, but everyone talking about Las Vegas and Portland and the A's are touring these locations and making a lot of noise about threatening to move while trying to leverage that pressure to get the deal that they want out of Oakland. So it doesn't sound great all around. It's just a really bad way to treat your fans. I understand that relocation is a bad way to treat your fans. But to be, you know, tweeting about being in Vegas and it's just, you know, like people are having a hard time in the world. And it's fine for them to not want to prioritize ballpark spending. And, you know, you spent the last like five years being rooted in Oakland. So maybe like if you're going to do this and you're gonna really genuinely explore

relocation options i know that they want to exert public pressure but like shut up about it a little bit i think maybe because this is rude like these this is a really bad way to return the sort of devotion that you've received from fans who have trekked to a ballpark that is kind of gross, but that they have made theirs and that is always super lively, even though it isn't the nicest park in baseball. And so it's just, you know, like, don't get caught up in being cute and clever. Like, it's okay to just be nice about stuff. And the whole exercise is sort of in defiance of that idea. The whole exercise is sort of in defiance of that idea,

but even in carrying it out, they could treat their fans better than this, I think. So that's what I have to say about that. I really don't understand the Portland part of this. I understand Portland as a potential expansion city, but I really don't see what incentive the Mariners would have to allow the A's to come into their territory as an established franchise that is a division rival and not even get a like an expansion fee out of it oh that seems like it's unlikely to happen to me yeah so this whole story is sort of unsavory but

it's a playbook that has been pretty proven to work in the long run. So not shocking that it's being trotted out again. And the last thing I wanted to mention here, I got a question that was related to the Willie Adamas trade. So I have a quick stat blast about that. But have you heard of the curse of the colonel? I don't think we've discussed this. The curse of the colonel that is supposedly responsible for NPB's Hanshin Tigers not winning a championship since the 80s. I don't think we've brought this

up. I was vaguely aware of it, but it was being discussed in our Facebook group this week. And I think it's my favorite of all of the baseball team curses. So I got to tell you a little bit about this and I'll be cribbing liberally from the Curse of the Colonel Wikipedia page. So the Curse of the Colonel refers to a 1985 Japanese urban legend regarding a reputed curse placed on the Japanese Kansai-based Hanshin Tigers baseball team by the ghost of deceased KFC founder and mascot Colonel Sanders. of deceased KFC founder and mascot Colonel Sanders. So naturally. Yeah. So the curse was said to be placed on the team because of the colonel's anger over treatment of one of his storefront statues, which was thrown into the Dotonbori River by celebrating Hanshin fans before their team's victory in the 1985 Japan Championship Series.

As is common with sports-related curses, the Curse of the Colonel was used to explain the team's subsequent 18-year losing streak. Some fans believed the team would never win another Japan Series until the statue had been recovered. They have appeared in the Japan Series three times since then, but they have lost every time, so

they have still not broken their streak here, and this gets likened to Curse of the Bambino, Curse of the Billy Goat, etc. But I think this one is way better. So 1985, the Hanshin Tigers win largely or at least partly due to the efforts of Randy Bass, who was an American player playing for the Tigers then. the Tigers then. So Wikipedia says, the fan base went wild and a riotous celebration gathered at Ebisu Bridge in Dotonbori,

Osaka on October 16th, three weeks before the Japan series. There, an assemblage of supporters yelled the players' names and with every name, a fan resembling a member of the victorious team leaped from the bridge into the waiting canal. However, lacking a Caucasian

person to imitate MVP Randy Bass, the rabid crowd seized a plastic statue of Colonel Sanders, like Bass, the colonel had a beard and was not Japanese, from a nearby KFC and tossed it off the bridge as an effigy. According to the urban legend, this impulsive maneuver cost the team greatly, beginning the curse of the colonel, which states that the Tigers will not win a championship again until the statue is recovered. Subsequently, numerous attempts have been made to recover the statue. So they had this 18-year losing streak after 85, and during that time, there were attempts to recover the statue. So they sent divers down.

They dredged the river, but they couldn't find the colonel. Fans apologized to the manager of that KFC series, but many KFC outlets in Kobe and Osaka moved their Colonel Sanders statues inside until the series was over to protect them from Tigers fans. The replacement Colonel Sanders statue in the Notonpuri KFC branch was bolted down to prevent a repeat of the incident. So the big development was in March 2009, the colonel was discovered. They finally found the colonel in the river and divers recovered the statue. At first, they thought it was a barrel. Then they thought it was a human corpse, but hunch and fins on the scene identified it as the upper body of the long lost colonel. the right hand and lower body were found the next day but the statue is still missing its glasses and left hand and it is said that the only way the curse can be lifted

is by returning the colonel's long lost glasses and left hand so the statue was recovered with replacement glasses in hand returned to kfc Japan, although that branch does not exist anymore. So it was placed in a KFC near Koshien Stadium, where I think it still is. But Hanshin has still not won a championship. And a lot of people blame the curse of the colonel and his hand and glasses are still missing. So legend has it that until they are found,

they cannot win a championship again. And, you know, it's not that long, I guess, but it's, you know, since 85, it's not exactly Curse of the Bambino length, but it's a smaller league, fewer teams, so it's maybe more notable that they haven't won. And I think this is the most colorful curse that I have heard in baseball.

Why didn't we just spend the whole episode talking about this this is fantastic so do we think so he was made of plastic yeah so presumably his hand and his glasses are just at the bottom of the river somewhere right it's not like they would degrade they couldn't know like they could have been carried away by the current, I guess, if they snapped off. So if it took them that long to find the body, I don't know. Yeah, this is a good point. I'm surprised that no enterprising young fan has tried to claim

that they were discovered. Like, I have found them. Then they carbon date the colonel and, oh, no, it's a scam. Yeah, it's a fake. Yeah, well, and maybe, you know, if you take the curse seriously, perhaps you don't want to risk incurring additional wrath from whatever the spirit of the colonel is. Yeah.

Fantastic. Yeah, yeah. I don't believe in curses, but if you're going to have a curse, like, at least make it a good story and this is probably the best one I've ever heard yeah that's pretty spectacular I have a feeling that while individual franchise owners probably are not keen on having their big Colonel Sanders statue stolen

the KFC corporation probably thrilled with this by now because think about how much free advertising they're getting from this haunted colonel. Oh, spectacular. While we were talking today, Zach Plesak, Cleveland pitcher, was placed on the IL. He got an x-ray. It revealed that he has a non-displaced fracture in his right thumb. Did he do something dumb?

Yes, he did. So he did not punch anything, and he did not play video games and hurt himself, but here's how it happened, according to Terry Francona. Plesak was rather aggressively ripping off his shirt and got it caught on a chair

at his locker. What? How do these things happen? How do these things happen? There's such a long litany of weird baseball injuries. And we've been playing baseball for a long time. There are a lot of players. There are a lot of ways to get hurt. But still, it's just like aggressively ripping off your shirt.

I guess that goes along with your theory about players wanting to be naked all the time or wanting each other to be naked. So he was in such a hurry to be naked that he aggressively ripped off his shirt and I guess hit his hand on something. And now he has a fracture. the other day was putting on jeans and um maybe because i've been wearing soft clothes for the majority of the time the last year managed to to rip one of my toenails on the inside of my jeans there was like a little you know there's like a little loop of thread that was loose but not visible from the outside and i must have put my toe in in just the right way and it ripped part of my toenail off, which is a gross story to share, but it did make me think, huh, sometimes weird stuff just happens

and you're not angry, you're just confronted with the physical reality of your body rubbing up against other matter in a way that doesn't please one side of it. So that's too bad for him. I mean, the consequences for me are significantly less severe than they would be for a professional athlete. If you were a player, would that be IL stint worthy or would that be day to day?

No, thankfully not. It was not nearly so gross as that. But a couple hours later, I looked down at my toe and saw that it was a little bit bloody and I thought, well i what did i do and then i i pieced it all together i did some forensics interesting figured it out so gotta be careful out there putting on clothes taking off clothes yeah the pants are out to get you and the shirts all right quick stat blast Blast. On Friday, the Brewers and Rays made a trade. The Rays traded Willie Adamas to the Brewers.

There were some pitchers exchanged in the move as well. And for the Brewers, this gave them some better shortstop defense. They have not really been able to find a shortstop who this gave them some better shortstop defense. They have not really been able to find a shortstop who could stick and hit and also play defense. And they're hoping that Adamas will be that. And for the Rays, of course, this clears some room eventually for Wander Franco, although not immediately. It was Taylor Walls who was called up in the short term. But this is interesting because Willie Adamas has been a pretty good hitter and player overall for most of his career. He's been about a league average

hitter on the whole, but he has extreme home road splits and reverse splits, which I was not really aware of, but it's pretty notable. So we got an email from listener Darren, who wrote in to say, when the Brewers acquired Willie Adamas recently, it was mentioned that Adamas has been a significantly better hitter on the road than he's been at Tropicana Field. Over his career, he has a 67 TOPS plus at home compared to a 133 TOPS plus on the road in an overall sample that spans more than 1,250 major league plate appearances. So T OPS plus that's relative to the players overall OPS plus. So he's been,

you know, about 33% better than his overall line on the road and that much worse at home. Darren continues. Apparently this has been a documented issue in the past where Adamas has said he has experienced trouble seeing the ball at Tropicana field. He apparently wore non-prescription glasses seeing the ball at Tropicana Field. He apparently wore non-prescription glasses inside the trop to help with the issue. And he sent us a link to a story in the Tampa Bay Times in 2020, Ray's Willie Adamas trying glasses to boost home

numbers. And Adamas said, I've been having a hard time picking up the ball the last two series. I could barely see the ball. I don't know if it's the air conditioning, the lights. I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out something to help me pick up the ball a little earlier. I'm just trying to figure out something so I can help the team a little bit more. So he had these clear glasses provided by the team's trainer. Says he doesn't need to see an eye doctor. He prefers to figure out a way myself.

Okay. He doesn't wear glasses off the field, but he acknowledged the difference in the numbers. So Darren continues, when the Brewers acquired Christian Jelic back in 2018, he was another hitter who had performed better on the road than at home throughout his career up to that point. It was thought at the time of the trade that Marlins Park had suppressed some of the power from the left-handed hitting Jelic. In that case, Jelic obviously went on to win an MVP award with power that quickly appeared on full display.

My question is sort of the reverse of the typical Coors Field quandary when it comes to home road splits. I'm curious about the largest variances of all time in which a hitter performed markedly better on the road than at home while playing for a single team. Also, if any of those players went on to play for different teams later on in their career, did their overall numbers improve toward the direction of their previous road splits? So I asked recent Effectively Wild frequent StatPlus consultant Ryan Nelson to look into this, and he did.

And this is, in fact, quite notable, the Willie Adamas reverse split. the Willie Adamas reverse split. So Ryan says, Willie Adamas has the all-time greatest home road OPS split in favor of road games going back to 1900. And this is with a minimum of 1,000 plate appearances with a team. So I will link to the data as usual,

but it's Adamas who had a 643 home OPS and an 854 road OPS. That is a difference of 211 points of OPS. That's a lot. So the other biggest differences, Donovan Solano with the Marlins, he was 199 points. Shea Hillenbrand with the Red Sox, 193 points. Red Kress with the White Sox, 192. Walker Cooper with the New York Giants, 189. Bubba Trammell with the Padres, 187. Greg Gagne with the Dodgers, 185. Mike Cameron with the Seattle Mariners, as you may recall, 183 points.

Ben Grieve with the A's, 182. Gil McDougal with the Yankees, 181. And then the only other guy at 180 or above is Ahmed Rosario with the Mets. And that was not all guys who went on to be superstars once they left those teams. But Ryan continues, when looking at what it means for a player when they go to a new team after having an extremely negative home road split with their previous team, it is kind of a boring answer. The home OPS tends to go up and the road OPS tends to go down and the players go on to have a pretty balanced split for the rest of their career.

Overall OPS stays about the same as with the old team, just less extremely split. One could speculate about why this is, but based on the fact there doesn't seem to be much trend about where the player comes from, except for the glaring exclusion of any Rockies. Where they go, player profile, age, or really any other factor that I can think of, my money is on the fact that the extreme home-road splits are mostly fluke. And I guess I would tend to agree, even though we're setting a minimum of 1,000 plate appearances here, still, that's 1,000 plate appearances overall, which means it's less than that when you look at either home or road. And it might just be kind of fluky. You take enough players over enough seasons,

and just by chance alone, you would expect there to be some weird ones. So the average split for the top 50 most extreme splits was 158 points of OPS. Ryan did some math and found out that with those same players, after they left those teams and went on to play elsewhere, which not all of them did, but a lot of them did, the average split thereafter was 13 points. So much smaller than 158. Still a reverse split, which is kind of odd. Maybe makes you think that there's something there. Ryan said it's not statistically significant, that 13-point split. So again, that may be nothing, but, you know, you would expect them to be better at home than on the road. And even after they went to new teams, they were still a little bit better on the road, but barely. So what tended to happen

is that their home OPSs climbed by, on average, 68 points, and their road OPSs climbed by, on average, 68 points, and their road OPSs fell by, on average, 94 points. And so their overall OPS went down by 14 points compared to what it was with the team where they had the extreme reverse splits. I guess you'd factor in some aging there, because these players probably would have been getting on in years by the time they moved to another team, at least in some cases. So that's an issue too. But yeah, on the whole, you take the extreme reverse splits guys and you look at the next sample and you find that it's not

nearly as extreme. So what that means from a player acquisition standpoint, do you want to go after the guy who has the weird extreme reverse split because you figure oh he'll be the guy he's been on the road all this time and then you know we'll get him out of this home ballpark where for whatever reason he can't hit and the the road ops is more reflective of who he is and then he'll just be that guy like all the time except maybe even better because he'll get the home field advantage that most players get. But that tends not really to be the case because guys just get worse on the road and better at home. So I don't know. It's probably a fluke in some cases. In some cases, it might just

be like a bad hitter's park, like maybe with Cameron with the Mariners where that hurt his power a lot, the configuration of that park at that time. And sometimes the park adjusted stats will account for some of that. Sometimes they won't because it'll affect that player more so than most players. And maybe it can be something as simple as like Adamas saying he's not picking up the ball that well. Like, I don't know whether that is actually the case or whether he just hit poorly there for no reason. And after a certain point, it began to seem as if like, oh, there's actually a problem here. I must not be picking up the ball well. And it became like a mental block more than anything. You might start to search for some

justification for something that is really kind of a product of chance. But if it does get to that point, you might think like, well, if this guy thinks he's worse in this park, maybe getting him out of this park would be a good thing. So that's the kind of trade that maybe if Adamas is a little bit better overall and it also clears room for the others, raise shortstop prospects and gives the Brewers a solid defender there, then maybe that works out for everyone. But it's probably not a case of like, find the guys with the extreme home road reverse splits and profit after that. Would you rather have an extreme, if you were a player, would you rather have, and you had an extreme split one way or the other, would you rather be very good at home and like abysmal on the road or vice versa? I'd rather, I guess, just be even. But if I have to have the extreme split in either way. Because it's a rude question.

I'd rather have it at home just because you're probably going to get booed regardless of what you do when you're on the road. No one's going to appreciate it. So you might as well make hay while you're playing in front of your home fans and they're seeing you up close, maximize your cheers. Yeah, that's a very good point. I mean, I think there is something to be said for – I imagine there are guys who kind of delight in the idea of being like a mercenary, right? Who goes in and, and really gives the home crowd their business, right? And it's like, haha, we shall win. But you know, that kind of petty enjoyment probably fades over time and cheers are, well, they don't last forever, but they feel nice. So I think you're probably right.

All right. And'll end there. 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 monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Seamus, John Randall, Nathan Wamser, Colin Post, and Matt Thompson. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast Thanks to Dylan Higgins, as always, for his editing assistance.

And we will be back with another a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins, as always, for his editing assistance. And we will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then. I've been traveling on a wing and a prayer by the skin of my teeth by the breath of a hair. Traveling where the fall winds blow with the sun on my face in the ice and the snow. But ooh, it's a game. Sometimes you're cool, sometimes you're lame Ah yeah, it's somewhere

If you don't know where you're going Any road will take you there