Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1699: Fixed That for You

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Baseball Prospectus editor-in-chief Craig Goldstein banter about cicadas, New Era’s short-lived “MLB Local Market” caps, the exploits of Adolis García, and Byron Buxton being too fast for his own good, then discuss Craig’s recent writing on how to fix what ails baseball, touching on what exactly the problem (if any) […]

🎵 Music 🎵 Which is more complicated than you have heard For the birdie he will not cooperate Unless you guarantee the going rate Hello and welcome to episode 1699 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Riley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing alright. Good. And we are also joined today by a special guest.

We have Craig Goldstein, the editor-in-chief of Baseball Perspectives. Hello, Craig. Hello. A special guest, not just a guest. All of our guests are special. Oh, well, whatever. You won't get us to pick between our children. But yeah, so hi, Craig.

Thanks for joining us. How are you? I'm doing well. I am surviving cicada season right now in Maryland. Wow, what's that like? I haven't seen a cicada where I am in Manhattan. Right now, where I am, it has not been too bad. We have a lot of trees, which means it's going to get worse because I think they will come out, but they're very shaded. So I think the ground soil hasn't quite reached the point where they're coming out in mass,

like literally at my house. And the ones that are coming out are getting eaten by birds, which I've seen a few of. But just today we started hearing, like I can hear outside my window, just even with the windows closed, like the general thrum of the cicada noise happening. So that was a first for today. And I can't say I'm thrilled about it. They strike me as very squishy. I remember there being cicadas during one of the summers when I lived on the East Coast, like maybe it was when I was in college, because you know, they only come out every now and again. And they were just, they had an unpleasant squish to them when you

would step on them where you're like, this is gonna require, you know, like rinsing to get off my shoe. Yeah, well, I'll be honest, I've done my best to avoid them so far and have mostly just like swept them off off my deck when I've needed to this this year. My recollection from last time was like a crunchiness, but that might just be the exoskeletons yeah i'm sorry but it's just they're it's like you cannot avoid them they're unavoidable yeah well they don't eat people or small children right no i understand it so you don't have to hide your son or anything it's okay no he's been picking up exoskeletons. No, they're essentially harmless. They're just everywhere.

They're like mostly blind. They're stupid. Their whole thing is to just be so many of them that all of their enemies combined can't kill all of them. And then they mate and then go back underground. I'm not an entomologist. Don't take that. But that's my understanding. Yeah.

I guess it'd be a bigger problem if you were farmers or something. If we were living off the land and we were worried about our crops, that might be a bigger issue. But as it is, it's just background noise when we're recording podcasts, which is also a problem, but not as acute a problem. And I don't think your microphone is picking up the cicada drone right now. So I think we're okay there too. But it doesn't seem like a bad life. Just like stay inside, stay underground, stay out of the light for several years, emerge periodically to eat and die, I guess. It's not that different from my life, really.

Well, they sleep a lot more than you do, Ben. That's true. So that part of it is pretty different. So Craig, we have you here because we always are happy to have you, but also because it seems like Baseball Perspectives is in the midst of a Let's Fix Baseball theme week, which I don't know if that was planned or if it's just happened that way. And I guess to some extent every week these days is How Do We Fix Baseball week. But you've had a number of articles coincide on

that theme and you and Patrick Dubuque wrote one and then you followed up on that piece and Russell Carlton wrote one about how changes are necessary. So we're going to talk to you about all of that. But before we get into it, just a bit of banter. We were recording yesterday, Tuesday, during the whole Caps saga,. And I don't know what the plan was, whether this was inspired by Nike's MLB City Connect series of jerseys, which seems to have been pretty well-received, but these caps were not well-received. They were the opposite of well-received. And I generally don't have opinions about apparel and I don't wear hats. So this was not really my area of expertise. But even I could see that things had gone horribly wrong here.

These caps, for anyone who hasn't seen them, and you can't see them anymore on New Era's website because they were pulled within a matter of hours after being mocked mercilessly. But they looked like they were designed by the manager of tchotchkes in office space and they needed a minimum of 37 pieces of flair. And it was like some of them had area codes and some had too many area codes and then some had too few area codes. Like they were missing the area code that the team played in there were a lot of tacos there was local food that wasn't really local or just didn't look like the food there were patches for long ago championships but not recent championships they were just incredibly busy and meant to have little logos that symbolize something important to that team.

But they looked totally terrible. And then they were gone within a few hours. And I can't remember a day on baseball Twitter where everyone came together to mock something and then get that thing removed from the internet. Really since the Grand Junction Chubsbs day which remains the best day in baseball twitter history probably but not since the grand junction rockies came out and declared that they would not under any circumstances be named the grand junction chubbs have i seen everyone band together to make fun of something and just get it wiped away. So what do you think happened here? So I like ugly hats. I am a famous proponent of ugly hats. I have, until this most recent

debacle, never met a Diamondbacks hat I didn't like. I have a lot of them, and they're all varying degrees of questionable, and I think they're wonderful, and I'm proud to own them. questionable and i i think they're wonderful and i'm proud to own them these struck me as designed either by someone who had never been to the united states or i wondered if it was like a consulting exercise so they brought together people who were familiar with each of these markets and their baseball traditions and the food that humans eat there and like their local flora and fauna, and which zip codes are relevant to the given jurisdiction. And then someone was like, we have to, we have to disrupt this and make you all switch teams. And then you will come up with something new and innovative that a person overly familiar with the market would not do. And then that's why you end up with uh cincinnati chili that looks not like any kind

of food except maybe dog food certainly not like an actual bowl of sky chili which i don't like but i respect that it exists as a phenomenon in the world and it doesn't look like this when it does so that's that's my theory that it is either someone who has just never been here and was like, I will do my best, or a lot of people who were quite familiar and then had to watch in horror as people from a different part of the baseball ecosystem tried their best to enact this monstrosity on us. Yeah. I saw a lot of people saying it was like a clip art version of a hat which I think makes a lot of sense certainly but I thought it was more of like those patches that people iron on to jean jackets

or used to or something like that it was kind of like that for every hat but also in the worst way possible like I think those can look good depending on what patches you use and how you style them on your jacket or whatever. But this I just need to draw attention to because this this drove me crazy about Cincinnati and Philadelphia especially. But like on the side of each hat, they would say the city name and then they would they would put underneath it a nickname for that city. For Philadelphia, it just said Philadelphia Philly, which is confusing because they're the Phillies. Famously the Phillies. And also famously, a nickname for the city is the city of brotherly love, which like Tampa Bay had Cigar City. I think Miami had Magic City. They had some of these. Baltimore had Charm City, right? That's a nickname for it. They had some of those,

but then they also, like in Chicago, instead of Windy City, it was Chi-Town. I didn't understand the approach to any of this. It's infuriating. Yeah. It was very much like we read the Wikipedia page about this city and we picked out a few little chestnuts and stuck them on a cat. That was kind of the vibe that it gave off to me. And I wonder how it got to the point of being out in the world and being actual products. I assume that these things are sitting in a warehouse somewhere and will sit there for all time. But you would have to think that these went through a number of iterations and design revisions and meetings and planning sessions. And the fact that they were savaged so swiftly and just universal lack of acclaim when these

came out in the world, I wonder what went on behind the scenes. I'd love an oral history of how these caps came to be or almost came to be because a lot of people must have thought, yeah, these are great. No notes. Ship them. And then they went on Twitter and everyone hated them seemingly. And so I wonder about that. I almost wondered whether they were designed to get everyone riled up to get attention. they were designed to get everyone riled up to get attention. Sometimes I see purported fun facts these days that I really think are just intentionally terrible, and they're just

designed to be quote tweeted a million times by people saying, this is the worst fact I've ever seen. SportsCenter- I did that today. SportsCenter, yeah, right. You were referencing one that made me think that. ESPN Stats and Info tweeted, according to Elias Sports, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is the first son of a five-time All-Star to lead MLB outright in home runs at the end of any day in MLB history. worded so that it was excluding like Bobby Bonds and Ken Griffey Sr. because they were three-time All-Stars and I don't know who was a four-time All-Star. Maybe the Boone family or something. Gus Bell was a four-time All-Star. Okay.

So yeah. So it's clearly like trying to exclude people who would ruin this fun fact so that you could end up with this. I don't know whether that was intentional, but SportsCenter tweeted something like a couple weeks ago where it said this is wild jason tatum has scored 50 points three times this season there's been a no-hitter thrown on two of those nights not even all of the nights no just two of the three and it it's got, you know, 26,000 likes and 2,000 retweets and 509 quote tweets. And all of them are like, this is the most worthless that I've ever seen. And I assume that was the point. So I thought maybe that was what Nuera was going for here. Just like, let's make them intentionally terrible and people will wear them ironically or something like I kind of wonder like if they just left them on sale after creating this sensation on Tuesday whether people would buy them just thinking like I will own the

worst hat in history and I will wear it around as like a fashion statement and I am you know mocking this hat as I wear it or I'll buy it because it won't last that long and it'll be a collector's item or something because it's so terrible they'll never make more. But for now, at least, you can't purchase them. So I don't know that that was the plan. In that respect, I appreciate them pulling them because I did not have enough time to talk myself into buying them. Whereas I bought a Grand Junction Chubb shirt and still own it. So, yeah.

Yeah. So I appreciate them doing that. Producer Dylan had a theory in the Fangraph Slack that I found compelling, which is that they had some ideas for some of these that they liked and thought were good. And then they realized that they were going to have to do them for the rest of the teams in the league and then quickly ran out of ideas, which might account for sort of how many tacos and burritos and deep dish pizzas they are. Because like if you look at, I'm here to say a controversial thing.

I think the Brewers one is pretty okay. What was on that one? Hold on here. The Athletic, I would point out to people, if you can't find it, has a good recap of all of them. Yes. And they rotate through the images so you can see all sides of it. It's quite helpful. Yes.

So if you take a peek at the Brewers one, the zip code thing is silly. And I find it especially strange for teams that have sort of a broader geographic footprint than just the city, which I guess is true of most baseball teams. But, you know, it's like Milwaukee is the Brewers are Milwaukee's team, but they're really Wisconsin's team. Like you could just put like Scwaukee is the brewers are milwaukee's team but they're really wisconsin's team like you could just you could put like scotty on here and people will be like yeah it's so great we love wisconsin because they're really weird about loving wisconsin and wisconsin i can say that because i live there they're like super proud to be from wisconsin so

this one makes some amount of sense to me they have cheese famous for the cheese they have beer famous for the beer you know they have the benefit of just like good secondary logos we have talked on this podcast before about how good the the wheat stitching baseball is so like that's good badgers obsessed obsessed with badgers in the state of wisconsin so like this one i think is good it maybe speaks to dylan's point which is you know they had a couple of ideas and then they were like, what color are peaches? I don't know. Just put it on the Braves hat. Because like, peaches are not this color. They're not pink like that. Have you ever held a peach? It doesn't look like this. I think this, I think this fruit is not well. I think that it is like diseased fruit.

So what I would also say about the, I don't think it's a good looking hat. I think it might be the best version of this hat. Yes. What I will also say is that it's helped by not only the secondary logos, but also that cheese and beer are yellow. Right. And akin to Milwaukee's yellow already on the hat. And so it's all of a piece. Right.

But the other part I was going to say that i i really wanted to hit on is like they call them local markets but then they treat every team in california as the same they gave them they gave them the same palm trees the california bear and tacos and i just california's real big guys well you can't treat them all the same and it's interesting that they treat them all the same except for san francisco which has sushi instead of a taco or a burrito okay that's right okay so what right yeah as if you can't get good tacos in the mission sort of famous for that i don't know Even the Milwaukee cap, like I get that the art is appropriate for that one at least. And again, I'm not a hat wearer, so I don't necessarily know what people want in their hats.

But is a regular brewer's cap improved by slapping a wedge of cheese and an area code on either side of it? I don't know. Even if, yeah, okay, that is like Milwaukee or like Wisconsin. I still don't know if that's really like the image that I want to be broadcasting into the world as I walk around. I would have left the front two panels unadorned except for the normal cap logo, the team logo. And then if I had been designing this hat, which I clearly did not, although people know I love ugly hats, so they'd be forgiven for wondering, I would have scooched the cheese and the beer into one panel together. And then I think you're in business then.

I think that this is a thing that I'd be like, oh, I used to enjoy going to baseball games in Milwaukee when I was a grad student, and this makes me feel nostalgic. So I'm going to buy this kind of ugly brewer's hat because i was a badger you know and i like cheese who doesn't like cheese except people who are lactose intolerant or you know don't consume dairy so there are some people but not a lot of them live in wisconsin so yeah the potential was here for acceptably ugly in, charmingly ugly hats. But then it just got a little too busy. Did we figure out why Pittsburgh has zero area codes? And also just says on the back, Yinzer. It's not a graphic.

It just says Yinzer. Yeah. What's up with that? And also the front panel is just a steel beam but like it's not it's also at an angle it's very that i kind of i i think they had to put it at an angle otherwise you wouldn't yeah you wouldn't be able to tell what it was they would be like i i what you what is going on yeah the kansas city cap did not include the area code for kansas city even the team twitter accounts were like dunking on new era here yeah the kansas city royals account

changed its its bio i believe yeah yeah it was well done i appreciated their effort there so anyway don't know what the thought process here was. Don't know what the rationale was. But thank you, New Era, for giving us a little levity on a Tuesday. That was a nice day. Do you think that they'll quietly put them back on sale at some point? I kind of do. I kind of think maybe they'll make a few tweaks now that they've crowdsourced.

They've market tested this and found it wanting. So maybe they put the kansas city area code on the kansas city cap and then they put it on sale but yeah so much work must have gone into this or maybe no work at all went into this one or the other it's hard to tell whether too much work went into this or not nearly enough work i don't know and again like it's not that i could necessarily design a better cap like whenever i try to make some sort of image it comes out looking like the graphic design is my passion meme so i don't know that i could do better than this but i could have at least said don't do this

so i guess that would have been an improvement yeah i wonder if the the pirates when they just kind of ran out of steam and they're like just just put the steel beam up there, it's fine. I wonder which of these I'm going to end up buying when they go back on sale because I will convince myself that they are good. They should have said, Arizona, it's a dry heat. Come on. Or had a wayward sprinkler head that is blasting water onto the sidewalk at four in the afternoon. This is becoming my passion. I want to write letters to people being like, this is not the optimal time to water your lawn. It's going to evaporate. to ask you one other thing. Can I ask you to explain Adolis Garcia to me? Because you just wrote about him on Wednesday in Boxcore Banter at BP, and you wrote about him a couple of weeks ago.

And I've now decided that I need to know who this person is and why he is playing so well. For a little while there, it was, you know, if you wait long enough, maybe the small sample fluke stops happening and then you don't have to know anymore. But now it's looking like we might need to explain and understand this. And just watching Shohei Otani on Tuesday, he hit his 15th homer. And in the same game, Adolis Garcia of the Rangers hit his 15th homer. And their offensive stats, their slash lines and WRC pluses are like almost perfect matches for each other, Otani and Garcia. WRC pluses are like almost perfect matches for each other, Otani and Garcia. And of course, Garcia does not pitch.

But still, if we are all salivating over Otani's offense, then we should also salivate over Adeliz Garcia's offense. And that kind of came out of nowhere. So who is Adeliz Garcia? And is he this good? Yeah, I mean, I want to be clear that I am not an Adeliz Garcia expert or anything like that. But he's been interesting to me for a bit. And I still kind of think he is someone who if you weighed out the

larger sample, it's not necessarily going to look like this over time. I think, you know, a sub 5% walk rate is hard to be sustainably this good. But his power when he does make contact is extremely real. And so the home runs, I think if he's in a run of a seat, you know, part of a season where he's making a lot of contact 15 home runs is is still real, you know, so much as like what happened over that sample is real. It's whether it's, it's going to continue going forward. When I first looked at him, his strikeout rate was, I think, 32% or somewhere in that range. And it's just that level of strikeout to walk ratio is always concerning to me. Now he's brought it under 30%. He's actually under 28%, which seems much more plausible in terms of, or, you know, like it's an acceptable tradeoff for the amount of power he brings, which is a 6'13 slug right now, which it's absolutely nuts.

I mean, he's got a longish swing. And so to me, I think that's going to be high maintenance. I suspect there are going to be times when he has, again, another like run of play where it's just a bad streak as opposed to a really good one. But that doesn't mean on balance, he won't be really good. And he's extremely good defensively with a really strong arm. For background, he's 28 years old, but he's a rookie this year. He's like the new Randy Rosarena in a way. Yeah, because he came out of St. Louis. Right, from Cuba, signed by the Cardinals, played like 20 games for the Cardinals,

and then left the Cardinals, was kind of given away. I guess in his case, he was purchased as the technical transaction type. So just some exchange of cash in December 2019 and played a few games for the Rangers last year and certainly was not on my radar, but has certainly put himself on it this season. Yeah, I think in the first piece, I linked to a Jamie Newberg piece from The Athletic where he talked about him reworking his swing a little bit with the Rangers, whereas I think Orozarena had started to overhaul his with the Cardinals. So I don't know that this should be on the Cardinals. And I think it's also important to remember that the Rangers put him through waivers in February. So I don't know that they knew they had something. He didn't break camp with the team

or anything like that. He was added after, I think, Ronald Guzman had a knee injury. So I don't think that they necessarily knew what they had with him. But he also did receive a fairly big bonus when he signed with St. Louis out of Cuba. So I don't know that it's entirely a surprise in terms of, you know, kind of an intrinsic talent level, if you want to think of it like that. I think people thought he was interesting and just hadn't quite put it together. He'd always hit for power, but always walked too little and struck out too much. And he's kind of, he's still walking too little, I suppose, but the higher contact rate or the lower he's able to push that strikeout rate, the more he's able to access his power. I like that you get in a rosarino do-over craig i felt like it was coming for you

well yeah see i was gonna say don't listen to me on q on on you know cuban signees from the cardinals who go to another team uh definitely should not be the expert on that i also love that he you know there's there's like if you took his performance in a vacuum it would be exciting no matter what but he's also had these like very clutch moments in games so huge yeah you know so there's that part of it too it's like the performance on its own would be the kind of thing where if you were you know clicking through um you know the ranger step chart and you're like wait a minute what's going on with this guy i haven't you know really thought about him before i know that he you know has been moved around and passed through

waivers and all sorts of stuff but then you add the the sort of timing of some of his big hits and you're like wow good for you man this is great yeah i mean i think the big thing is he's he's super fun i mean he's uh i think he captures a lot of uh people's hearts because he he has a lot of people's hearts because he has a lot of spirit. He's been clutch. He's had two straight walk-offs the last weekend, I think. One was essentially a fielder's choice, but again, it's a walk-off and it matters. I think he plays with a lot of flair and it's all really fun. I think that people in Texas have kind of attached themselves to him, and understandably so. Well, it's been a lot of fun to watch him. And the only other bit of news I wanted to react to was something related to another AL outfielder, Byron Buxton. And Dan Hayes, who covers the Twins for the Athletic, tweeted on Wednesday, Byron Buxton is still

having trouble decelerating when running, which appears to be slowing his rehab down, won't immediately go on a rehab assignment. So I hate that Buxton is hurt, but I enjoyed this injury update, both that being unable to slow down is slowing him down, but also that his problem is decelerating, which is like the opposite of the problem for most of us, I think, who have trouble accelerating. And if you've seen Byron Buxton run, then you could understand why it would be hard for him to stop running because he runs really fast. And I understand the different muscles and parts of the body are involved there. So it is possible to get up to a certain speed and then maybe not be able to slow down from that speed. Although I guess friction and other forces would eventually take care of that problem. But really, he is so fast that he cannot slow down. And that is why he is not on the Twins right now.

And I'm not interrogating that diagnosis any further. So it seemed incredibly appropriate that that would be the thing holding him back. And also in one of those weird, fluky baseball things, he is not currently being missed by Minnesota all that much because Rob Ref Snyder, Rob Ref Snyder, who the twins are playing in lieu of Buxton, has played 11 games for them, 36 played appearances, and he is hitting 438, 472, 719. That is a 236 OPS plus. And obviously that is not his true talent level. But I do enjoy when you're missing a superstar and you plug in some scrub. No offense to Rob Refsnyder, although that probably is offensive to him.

But he was signed in November as a free agent with them and was not expected to play a significant role, really. He was kind of depth and backup. And here he is stepping in for Buxton and hitting better than Buxton was. And that's the kind of thing where if you're the Twins and a lot of things have gone wrong for you this year, you kind of need the Rob Reff Snyders of the world to snap up and give you otherworldly production for a couple of weeks while you're waiting for Byron Bexton to be able to slow down again. Surely a sentence that Twins fans expected to hear uttered about them at the beginning of this. You just need the Rob Raffsiders of the world to step up for you. That's what you need. Two things. One is that a lot of Yankee fans

are saying I told you so on Rob Raffsider right now. But the other was I had not heard about his inability to decelerate. So this is exciting for me. And I immediately thought of Luis Mendoza from D2, the mighty ducks. I don't know if anyone is familiar with that, but he, he was extremely fast, but could not stop on skates.

That was his whole storyline. So yeah, I think we have, you know, we have precedent for this. Yeah. Or he could just be like vroom, vroom guy from the famous Effectively Wild hypothetical. And if he never needs to stop, then this won't be a problem for him. Yeah. All right. So fixing baseball. Why are we having this conversation? I suppose before we get into your specific proposals for fixing baseball, we should talk a bit about why or whether baseball needs to be fixed.

So let's pretend this is the scout scene from Moneyball and I'm Billy Beans sitting at the head of the table and you're talking about, oh, we need to move the mound back and no, we need to limit the number of pitchers on the roster or whatever. And then I just bang my fist on the desk and I say, what's the problem? So what is the problem that we are trying to address here? So I think it boils down to the run environment and how we get the runs that we have. Because I think if you look at the 2021 run environment, I think the last time I looked, it was 4.3 something, which is not so bad, but is a substantial drop off from the last few years prior, which I think we're closer in the 4.6 to 4.7 range. But I think the way that we get there is kind of ripe for that number to collapse because it's been largely reliant on home runs. And we've had a change to the ball and home runs are down this year and i think it has the potential to drop further and i think there are a few causes

uh for this and i've been influenced by i i've read a lot of different articles at fangraphs obviously at bp i've read i think i've probably been most influenced by Joe Sheehan's strident on pitchers being too good. And I think he's made a compelling case and that it's not just like, again, the intrinsic talent of pitchers. It's the way that teams have gone about using them. And one thing that I had anecdotally noticed that I think kind of pushed this article forward when I was talking about it with Patrick, who, who Dubuque, who wrote it with me, was that relief pitchers are being used less and not come into games. And glaring instance of this to me was in the Dodgers-Padres series that everyone Santana. And these are not so. So first of all, obviously, it's April. And I think it was one way for managers to show like we're considering this April and not September. It's not that big a deal despite the atmosphere. But I think it's also evidence of the fact that teams just aren't going to go to guys and push them back to back. It was down significantly in 2019 as well, and it's dropped even further this year through about mid-May. It was almost 15% in prior years. If you go back to 2007, at its high point, it was approaching 21% in terms of how many times a pitcher had been used back, a relief pitcher had been used back to back in games through that point in mid-May. So I just kind of rambled a lot. But that ability to be a rested reliever and throw max effort and the increase in velocity that we've seen, the sharpness of breaking stuff, things like that, I think plays into why hitters

are struggling so much these days. And do you think that we are being a bunch of fuss budgets about this? Because obviously we talk about this a lot too, and we generally agree with you and Joe about that. And we talked about that last week, about how we think the root cause is that the pitchers are too good. But it's kind of a weird dynamic where, on the one hand, we are in the group that is not going to lose interest in baseball, no matter how high the strikeout rate is, realistically. I mean, it's some part of our jobs, for one thing, but also it's something that we care about a lot. So we're hooked. that we care about a lot. So like, you know, we're hooked.

On the other hand, we obsess over this stuff probably more than most people who in theory might actually like stop watching baseball because of this or be turned off by this. Like we're kind of trying to put ourselves in the shoes of like the casual fan or people who maybe are not fans yet, but potentially could be. And are they going to be turned off by this more static game and less contact and less fielding and less base running and just less action, at least by a certain definition? So on the one hand, we're less susceptible to losing interest in baseball, but we're so hyper-focused on this that maybe we're just paying attention to it more than the average fan or blowing it out of proportion. So are our brains broken by this or is this actually an issue and not just one that we keep chewing over because it's content?

I think a little bit of how to understand what this means. Because our saturation point is way in the rearview mirror, right? I mean, mine is, right? I put on a game pretty much no matter what I'm doing. Like you said, I'm hooked. But I do think we've seen reporters talk to more casual fans or people that tune into this on a less serious basis, express concerns about kind of the pace of things. Which certainly when I talk about max effort pitches, there's also the amount of time between pitches that a guy takes to build back up after throwing so hard. I know Eno Saris has looked into that. And, you know, there are a few different avenues at which to approach it. While I do think maybe we're being a little bit fussy,

I also think that there is a broader problem and that people do find the pace of the game to be an issue that there isn't a lot of action. I think I would say we were more the problem if home runs weren't also dropping off people right the you know the reality is that people like home runs and if you want to go back to the 2017 18 19 somewhere in that mix of of whatever the ball was i know it was changing a lot but anything in that range uh where home runs kind of papered over the dominance of pitching and defense right now, I think most casual viewers would probably accept that trade-off. I think when you get into deadening the ball as a way to try to get hitters to change their approach, and that's basically what we've

got in 2021, I think it actually becomes more of a real problem all the way through and not and not just for those of us who are oversaturated with the sport. I have a kind of related question, I guess, which is and I know that some of the the rule changes that you proposed in your piece are perhaps slightly more serious than others, right? Oh, some were extremely silly. But I wonder how you think about kind of balancing that, not that you are going to be responsible for sort of changing the direction of the sport all on your own, although, you know, that would be great entertainment. But when we're thinking about it, you know, as people who are

super invested and do observe the sport on a daily basis and sort of have to have considered opinions about its direction and what might be done to help course correct where we think things have gotten slightly or perhaps profoundly out of whack. I wonder how you think about the balancing sort of the stuff that is a bit more silly and would result in, you know, a more casual and entertaining aesthetic, but might also strike some like traditionalists as being particularly troublesome because it is at its core goofy right these are goofier suggestions versus more serious stuff because i think that there's room for both of those things and i i often wonder to your point like how silly are the silly suggestions really do they strike me as silly because i also think

about like fastball spin rate or are they just like kind of silly and a person watching them will be like, well, that's fun, you know? So I wonder how you think about that because I think that there's, you know, we have a couple of issues that we have to sort out before we even get to fixing the game. And a lot of that has to do with agreeing on common problems, right? Which gets to Ben's question, but also sort of approach in terms of what we're trying to prioritize in the game. Is it action? Is it a particular aesthetic? Those are related concerns, but they're not entirely the same.

You know, is it some amount of levity and fun? Is it, you know, incredible dominance? Like, what are we trying to prioritize? And I wonder how you think about that. Yeah, I think I get to this a little bit at the end of the piece suggesting additional rule changes, where I discuss people who suggest one way to put a restrictor plate on pitching, which is how we framed our first article, is to essentially penalize some number of pitches over a certain velocity. And I don't like that approach. And I understand why it appeals to people and that it is a very direct solution to the problem that I've stated is a problem. But I think the problem that I have with it, with this solution, is I want these players

to be competing at their, I want them to be trying their hardest in any given moment, which doesn't necessarily mean max effort. I want them, like, if we change the policies around the game at an upstream point so that the best thing that a pitcher can do is not necessarily throw at 100% effort, but perhaps 90 because they might be needed the next day, or they might be needed another inning or something like that. I want them competing at their highest point. So if you then say, let's say 95 miles per hour is the line of demarcation, and if it's over that, it's a ball. Well, I don't want guys to be scaling back that hard. And I don't want it to be that easy for our hitters.

I think when we see great athletic achievements, it's because the other side is also attempting to be great. And if you can't even attempt to be great, then I personally would lose interest as an entertainment thing. But I also think that's where the sport sport should go is with people trying their hardest. And if someone can throw harder than 95 miles per hour, I think they should be able to. I just think that we can make it hard for them to do it all the time if that makes sense. Yeah, I agree with you because it can be pretty exciting to see someone light up a radar gun or light up stat cast on a pitch

by pitch basis. Like, you know, it's pretty exciting to see, oh, Hunter Green was clocked at 103 or whatever. And I wouldn't want that to entirely go away. You know, if someone is able to throw that hard, I think it's cool from time to time. It's just when everyone is throwing incredibly hard, A, it's a little less exciting, but also there are all of these byproducts of that that maybe are not so desirable and are not so exciting. So I pretty much agree with your position here, and I'm kind of playing devil's advocate, asking if we're all being too fussy about this.

But I think when we talk about the three true outcomes, we're mostly talking about one outcome in particular. I think we're mostly talking about the strikeouts. Like walks are not really out of line with historical norms and no one gets all that upset about walks really. And home runs, yeah, we're at an all-time record rate, at least recently, and we're still pretty darn close to that rate right now. But I think at least home runs are action and a lot of people like home runs. And so I think the big problem with the game as we tend to discuss it is strikeouts. And that's kind of been the constant throughout the entire time that certainly the three of us have been covering the game in any kind of professional

capacity. Strikeouts have been rising and other things ebb and flow and come and go and strikeouts just climb and climb and climb. So you mentioned the restrictor plate analogy, which was kind of the conceit for your piece with Patrick. For the non-NASCAR fans among us, can you explain what that means exactly? I didn't need to explain because I'm famously a huge NASCAR fan. I'm just all about those NASCARs, the NASCARs, not about them. So yeah, I'm not much of a racing person either. Although I feel like F1 is seeping its way into baseball Twitter in a certain capacity, but I don't really know a ton about racing. And apparently neither does Patrick. I thought he did because this was his kind of analogy.

But I loved the analogy because I knew enough that he explains it in the piece. But there was an issue with essentially a safety issue with cars going too fast. And NASCAR's reaction to that was that they installed restrictor plates, which were a one eighth inch thick metal designed to limit airflow into the engine and reduce top speeds. They're not in use anymore. They use there is a different type of mechanism, not a restrictor plate, but it does cap top end speed. And that's essentially where that analogy came from. And when Patrick said that, it just kind of clicked in my head. I thought it was just a really good way to get at what we're trying to talk about and what we're trying to do with the suggestions that we had in that piece, which was

essentially cap pitcher roster spots to 12. I've heard from a few people that 12 was too high. It should actually be 11, which I know when I was growing up watching baseball, most pitching staffs were about 11 pitchers, 10 or 11, and 12 was considered a lot. Now we're at 13 and 14 in a lot of organizations. And so the idea was that if someone, and this wouldn't be the only change, but I think this would be kind of the upstream policy change, which is that if, if you are, if you need to be available the next day, which as I was pointing out with relief pitcher usage, and you're not that, then you might, you might approach how hard you throw a little bit differently. Um, if, if you're required to be available or if you're required to eat an inning because another guy isn't available.

And that goes for starters too. It would all of a sudden place more of an emphasis on starters who could take that extra inning and not require someone else to use it. And it would still leave how teams stocked those spots open to them. But I think it would, in a subtle way, apply pressure in the direction that we want it. And if guys weren't throwing max effort, I think hitters would have more of a chance at the plate. Yeah, I think that it's an elegant solution to a problem that kind of has at least recently lent itself to more clunky suggestions because I don't want I don't want the the balance to shift too far in the other

direction right like I think that what we're the sort of point that we're trying to navigate around is a perfectly balanced scale if we if we can manage it and there are going to be days where just by natural variation in a hitter's performance or a pitcher's where it's going to tip slightly one way or the other, but you're trying to establish some kind of equilibrium. Although maybe if you do that, then it becomes just wildly boring because everyone's sort of on an equal playing field. But I think you want there to be a more consistent back and forth and volley between both sides so that you're not experiencing endless rise in strikeout rates. And then we get to a point where it's just like really no fun to watch at all.

But I want to see guys throw 100. So you have to have some kind of solution that allows for both. And so I like this, even though I don't understand racing. Yeah. Well, and I also wanted to touch on, you know, Ben said that it was kind of the one outcome of the three true outcomes. That's the problem. But I also think it's a number of things too. And this restrictor plate idea doesn't address all of them. But I think it's important that everyone kind of understand and agree on what the problems are, which Ben mentioned too. But I think an overlooked one is how defense has changed and how much better it's gotten and that the places that guys used to hit the ball on the field and get base hits aren't base hits anymore. And that's, you know, we measure that a lot with Babbitt, but we look at like the homer rate and say, that's okay. We look at certain metrics and compare them to the past, but it's one thing to put it all on the hitters

or pitchers. But when hitters are getting to the ball, you know, and not striking out, their ability to get on base is lower than it has been ever before, or in quite a long time, I should say. And that's going to inform their approach at the plate. And that is, And that's going to inform their approach at the plate. And that is right. It's all a feedback loop on how hitter approach. I go back to and I think it was Max Scherzer said this a few years ago, but basically, like, you can't string rely on stringing together hits against pitchers to score runs anymore. Right.

That's why guys are swinging. So, yeah, it certainly is. There's culpability on the hitter side. But it also makes the most sense that if you can't, if guys are striking out so much that you can't rely on three, four hits in an inning or, you know, a walk in three hits or whatever to push a run across the plate, then of course you need to swing for the fences because that's how you get runs. And so when the ball is in play and not a home run, the reward isn't there for them.

So it's natural that they're going to change their approach. It's not that they're against singles or doubles or anything like that, but it's a logical reaction to the situation they face that they're up against in terms of both pitchers who are exceedingly good at missing bats and then defenses that are really good at converting those balls into outs when they're not missing bats. Yeah. It would be easier if we could just install restrictor plates on pitchers, but they're not machines, so we can't really do that. And their bodies are sort of machines in a way, and they do have fine control over them. And we have gotten listener emails and I believe answered listener emails about, well, what if you did just impose some velocity limit?

And you said, well, you can't throw over 90 whatever, or you can only throw this number of pitches over 90 whatever. And it just seems like an inelegant solution. Like you, I think it's not great to ask players to play at less than full capacity to intentionally restrict themselves, I think it would be much better if we could kind of organically induce them to do that by putting rules in place that just require them to pace themselves to some degree. So I agree that that's much more preferable above and beyond like, well, how feasible is it? Can pitchers tell exactly how hard they're throwing? You know, are they throwing 95.1 or are they throwing 94.9 or whatever? And what would the penalties be? Like, there are a whole host of complications that would come with that kind of thing. But also, you're just like putting the onus on the pitchers themselves to pitch worse. Something about that just seems wrong and backward to me. Well, and I think you also, we want to be mindful of like how much, for lack of a better way of describing this, like how many more committee meetings do we want to introduce to a given baseball game, right? Like if you, it's going to be hard for a guy who

is used to throwing a particular way to suddenly regulate down on a consistent basis. And there are going to be times where he's like, well, I was meaning to throw 94, but I accidentally threw 96. And then you have to have some kind of break for there to be enforcement in the course of the game. And so like, how much of that do we really want? Because we already slow stuff down from a from a sort of necessary procedure point enough. It's like if if what you want is to have guys throwing a little less hard like you know enforce the pitch clock maybe and make them make them take a little break between pitches not too long of a break right there's a balance to be struck too but like make them take a little break because then it's a little bit hard i don't know like you know there's

there's stuff like that that you could do but i i think we need to be careful about layering more confabs into our experience of baseball because no one likes that part like we we allow for it because it's necessary as we've talked about in the course of discussing replay like we have to have some mechanism by which you correct obvious wrongs on the field as they're happening because we can see them on tv now and we can spot them and know they're there. But I think that we should be mindful of like how much the rules that we introduce in any given year depend on sort of in the moment on field enforcement, because if they do, then people are going to use them and then they're going to slow the game down even more. Does that make sense? Yeah. So one idea you bring up is just installing pitch clocks

at the major league level which to me seems like a great and obvious solution we've already had them at the minor league level for a while now it seemed to go totally fine and seamless yeah i mean like it's you don't even notice i i absolutely want them yes me too and the whole like romantic notion of you know there are no clocks in baseball and all of that. I get that. But also like there's already a rule on the books about how long you can take between pitches. It's just not enforced. And this would have multiple positive effects potentially in that it would keep the game moving faster and ending sooner without any terrible Manfred ball artificial constructs. But also, presumably,

you would encourage pitchers to throw less hard. And I know there is a school of thought that says this would endanger pitchers, right? Because you would give them less recovery time and everyone is throwing max effort. And so if you give them less time to recover, and Rob Arthur has shown that when pitchers take more time between pitches, they do throw harder, which, I mean, it makes sense. You get more recovery time and you can really charge up. But I know that your response to that, and I think it's a sensible one, is, well, then don't throw max effort. I mean, you know, slow down. If you offer someone a choice between throwing max effort and hurting themselves and throwing

less max effort and not hurting themselves. I think, you know, I hope they can make a sensible choice because you're talking about, I don't think you're talking about three miles per hour between, you know, it's not that substantial a change, but it's enough that it might make a difference. And yeah, I think there's a potential for these guys to get hurt. But I think throwing max effort every single pitch also leaves potential to get hurt. Well, and I mean, it seems like the sort of thing that we could put some kind of study around. Like we have pitch clocks in the minors.

Is the Tommy John rate higher among minor league pitchers in a substantial way than it is among big league pitchers? I don't actually know the answer to that, but I don't think so. So if we have an environment where pitchers are already operating under that constraint, we can get some kind of an idea of what it would look like at the big league level. I mean, we test everything else. So it seems like we could kind of put a number to that, and there's going to be some acceptable risk tolerance that we allow for.

This is always the balance that we're striking, right? Between keeping things moving and keeping guys safe. And, you know, it doesn't seem like it's so substantial a risk as the pitch clock is currently constituted that we'd be irresponsible, right? Yeah. Or you could do studies of like minor league pitcher injury rates before and after the pitch clock was put in place or what happens to pitchers when they go back and forth between levels that do and don't have the pitch clock. Do they get hurt more at a certain level? Do they throw harder or less hard at a certain level? So yeah, I would think that you could test that sort of thing, but it makes sense to me on a lot of levels. It makes sense to me on a lot of levels.

Craig, what do you think about how we ought to sequence multiple changes at once? And you touch on this some in your piece that you wrote with additional rule changes that, you know, these things interact with one another. So it isn't as if, you know, if you introduce multiple changes at once, the effect of any one might end up being both less significant than you anticipate and potentially operate in a slightly different way than you were anticipating. So how do you think about that part? Yeah, I think I'm maybe a little bit hypocritical on this because I think one thing that I was hard on MLB in terms of how they've tested some changes in the past was when they tested about, I don't know, it felt like five or six different changes in the Atlantic League.

tested about, I don't know, it felt like five or six different changes in the Atlantic League in 2019. I was like, well, how are you going to tell, you know, the impact of one from the other, right? How are you going to draw any signal from, you know, you don't know which one kind of had which effect. So I think when we're testing these, they need to be done kind of on their own. But I think when you're implementing them at the major league level, it's, it's going to require doing more than one thing at a time. And I think we're kind of living that out in, in the ball change and what they, what they did in terms of increases exit velocity,

you know, off the bat, but it also, the ball doesn't carry quite as far. That seemed to be part of what they wanted to happen from what Rob and I think Meredith and other people have done who studied these changes. That seems to be what's actually happening. But without other changes, we're left with an offensive environment that's significantly different than the one we had before. And the missing, you know, I've seen some

people say like the missing piece here is home runs, but okay, but they seem to be missing. So what are we going to do about it? Right? So the question is like, the first change I suggest in the additional rule changes, and this is not in any order, but it's just the first one that we started with was making gloves smaller in the field, right? And it's kind of a silly change. This was when you were talking about silliness versus seriousness. This is something I think Patrick and I have talked about a lot because I've been pretty resistant to it, but the idea has grown on me, which is that if we have a problem with defenses being too good and hits turning into what were hits now being outs, this is a pretty direct way to solve that problem.

And if you are taking away home runs and want more balls in play that also go for hits, you need to make that also part happen. Because as we just discussed, part of the problem is all of these balls in play becoming outs rather than doubles, which is, I think, the idea that people have when you take home runs away. Yeah, I think that makes some sense. I think what you were saying about the Atlantic League and the concurrent changes is something that I mentioned at the time too. And I think one of the advantages of the way MLP is doing it this year is that it's taking advantage of the fact that it basically took total control of the minor leagues and is leveraging

that to just test one or maybe one or two changes per minor league level. And because there are so many different levels that can be laboratories now for MLB at the same time, they can run these sort of independent experiments instead of stacking them all at the same place at the same time. So I think that can be beneficial but also i think some of the changes that they have chosen to test are kind of like identifying one aspect of the way the game is trending but like trying to treat it in isolation almost without like considering the the holistic effects like i'm fine with the bigger and better bases like that that seems uh like an improvement but also it doesn't seem like it's going to make any

big impact on the running game and then you know the the pickoff attempt changes and the pickoff rule changes that have turned minor league games into track meets at you know eight ball where those changes are being tested like maybe that's going a little bit too far and it's just like it's not necessarily that we need the base pass to be shorter or no one to be able to do pickoffs moves it's like you know just maybe having more base runners would be a good thing and that's something that could be accomplished through other changes that would also address these other issues it's like yeah we could try to restrict the shift and maybe potentially that would lead to a few more base hits here or there, or we could change rules so that you might get more stolen bases. But ultimately, if the problem is that pitchers are

too good and that's kind of the core issue that's causing all of these other issues, then if we could do something to address that and reduce the strikeouts, then you'd get more balls in play and presumably more base runners and you'd make it more worthwhile for a runner on first to take second because there'd be a better chance of a run scoring single and you'd just get more action that way without targeting symptoms of the real problem instead of the cause that's kind of the way that i think about it like these these these might help but it also seems like it's picking around the edges of the problem a little bit and that we should just address the problem, you know, which presupposes that everyone agrees on what the problem is and how to fix it, which is obviously not the

case. But we agree more or less on this podcast. And so that's all that matters. But really, I think that the restrictor plate idea is a helpful one. And so whether it is the pitch clock or the other potential solutions that you mentioned in that article, like just limiting pitcher usage, either the number of pitchers you can have on the roster, the number of pitchers you can use in the game, et cetera, like all of that makes sense to me.

And I'm more willing to intervene in those areas than I once would have been. And I think that a lot of people still are. And I was listening to the last episode of FiveThirtyEight's podcast, Hot Takedown, which is good. And I was enjoying it. And it's hosted by Sarah Ziegler, who's really good. And she's been on the show. But she was saying, she was saying she doesn't want the league to step in and make these changes because she's kind of philosophically against the league intervening, and she wants the players to sort these things out themselves. And someone counters, and someone counters that counter, and it goes back and forth. And she said it's a pendulum, and sometimes it swings toward hitters, and sometimes it swings toward pitchers.

pendulum and sometimes it swings toward hitters and sometimes it swings toward pitchers. And I think that is just fundamentally a mirage. I think that's like a common perception and maybe one that I held at times. But I think when it comes to strikeouts, at least there's no pendulum. It's not swinging. It's just it's on one side, like not just recently, but throughout baseball history, really. Strikeout rate has been climbing more or less since they started throwing pitches and they, you know, stopped throwing them exactly where the batter wanted to throw them and throwing them underhand, etc. It's just been climbing slowly and steadily or recently quickly and steadily. And not just in the majors, but in the minors, in college baseball baseball at all levels, the only way that it has really swung back in the other direction is when the league has stepped in or conditions have changed to actually swing that pendulum back forcibly. So I don't think it's something that is just going to fix itself.

And it seems like it's a vicious circle and it's just going to be a self-reinforcing process because it has always been beneficial for pitchers not to allow the ball to be put into play. That has always kind of been the best outcome for pitchers, whether they knew it or not, and now they know it. And there are all of these other forces that we've touched on here and on other episodes that are contributing to pitchers getting better at missing bats, but that is kind of the best thing you could do if you're a pitcher and that's not going to change. So I think that you need to restrict their ability to miss bats in these ways that we're talking about. And a lot of that goes for home runs too, because hey,

home runs are valuable and hitters have realized that and the home run rate has climbed over the long-term too with various fluctuations largely related to the ball. And I should say that one thing that does encourage me a little bit is that a lot of the difference in offense relative to last season comes from pitchers hitting. I mentioned this in my piece about no hitters last week, that if you take out pitcher hitting, the strikeout rate is not really that different from last season. And Mike Petriello has subsequently written about that, and Dan Simborski was tweeting about it too. So if you just compare non-pitchers to non-pitchers 2021 so far to last season, which is maybe a little misleading just because last season was warm weather, if you strip out the pitcher hitting

this year, then the increase in K rate goes from 0.7 percentage points to only 0.1. The BABIP decline goes from three points to two points. The batting average decline goes from 8 points to 5 points. OBP goes from 9 points to 5 points. So it's still down a bit, but it's also early in the year, and the declines just aren't as extreme. And that's good news, because probably pitcher hitting won't happen next year, and so you could expect to get some sort of boost from that. But obviously these are long-term trends. So it's not just a one-year dip. Still slightly heartening that the decline among real hitters is not quite as pronounced in this season alone as maybe people have been making it out to be.

When I was talking earlier about a pitch clock, did I make it sound like I thought that more time between pitches leads to less velocity? Because that's not what I meant to say. I worry that i said that i spent 20 minutes last night thinking that there were only 120 games in a major league season don't know where that brain fart came from but it persisted for almost a whole half hour so anyway for our listeners who are like what's going on with meg's brain would that we could find the answer friends would that we could find it. So, Craig, what else you got?

You mentioned smaller gloves, but you listed several other ideas in your second article here. And some of them we've touched on here sometimes at length, like moving the mound back and banning the shift and such. But you've had some other ideas that you walked through here. Yeah, I think some of this was just what I've seen. other ideas that you walked through here? Yeah, I think some of this was just what I've seen. I think one of the more obvious ones to me that won't happen is some combination of bigger outfields and taller walls, which I think like the I mean, I think it could get to a point that it's silly, like if every team just has huge, very high walls. But if you want to convert home runs into things that are not home runs, but also not outs, you need to have like the wall makes those doubles, right? Those things that would have been

home runs tend to be doubles if they hit high enough up the wall. And so I think that's one way to do it. I think Coors has shown us, obviously, there's a difference in the air there. But if you have a huge outfield, and this is true of Kauffman Stadium too, like their single, double and triple rates are significantly above the rest of the league and their homer rates are below. If you have a big outfield, if you just change the amount of space that someone has to cover, it makes, you know, BABIP goes up. So I think those are direct solutions that also present problems in terms of teams are not going to give up the seats that those changes affect. And also just moving the amount of construction and changes to happen in every park across the league, which kind of I just don't see how that would happen.

But another one, I've seen people express a preference for a smaller strike zone. I've seen people express a preference for a smaller strike zone. I don't particularly like this because I think it requires pitchers to be as good as within the strike zone or better than they are now, which would mean that they'd want to throw as hard as possible. And I don't know if that's a fair counter to the idea of a smaller strike zone, but obviously it would make hitters very good. One thing that I hadn't known that I'll reference from Joe Sheehan's piece, which I included in this, was that when everyone talks

about 1968 to 1969, they mentioned lowering the mound, but I didn't realize they also dramatically changed the definition of the strike zone, which they had changed in 1963. And there was expansion that season too for new teams, which helped also. Yeah, and honestly, I think expansion is probably inevitable and there's a lot of reasons the league should, I didn't put that in here, but I think the league should consider it.

I'm sure they want the revenues from franchise fees if that, you know, coming off of the shortened season and partial attendance thus far this season. And it's good for players, obviously there are more jobs. So I understand the appeal of it. Um, and, and I just, I had always in my mind, uh, thought that that was the, the change was from the mound and hadn't kind of realized how big an impact the strike zone made, but I certainly understand that, but I, I don't know that it solves our issue with pit. It certainly makes them worse in some capacity, but I don't, I still think there

would be a lot of strikeouts, a lot of chase pitches. And I think, you know, you said, again, going back to what you said before about the one issue being strikeouts, I think we might have an issue with walks then. If a hitter can cover the entire zone and almost all of it with the barrel and not just the end of the bat and that kind of thing i think they're they're just a smaller zone means more walks and i don't know if that addresses the aesthetic concerns that we have well it it certainly causes us to think more about you know we we had this shift where we're like you just got to get on base like the important thing is you get on base if you do a vr walk that's fine it is it does make us think about the aesthetic side of that more which is if we were to shrink the zone so you have a higher walk rate let's assume that that's one of

the effects of doing that and then you also make other changes to the way that the field is constituted that we think will encourage more base stealing. Do we care aesthetically? Is that an aesthetic trade-off that we find compelling? Because it's like, yeah, watching a bunch of guys walk, maybe that's not everyone's favorite thing. But if they're more likely to attempt to steal a base once they get on base, perhaps that's a trade-off that we find worthwhile

because we have diminished action at the beginning of their offensive performance, but because we have diminished action at the beginning of their offensive performance, but then we have increased action on the back end and we find that stuff really exciting. So I don't know what my answer to that question is, but I like it as a thing that we need to talk about because I think we say action and we don't really ever talk about what kinds of action we're excited about and what sort of stuff we're the most keen to see more of or we don't talk about it enough right it's like not action all action is created equally so i like this as a thing to debate because i think that there's some value

in us trying to be a bit more precise about what it is that we really want to see when we say increased action because if guys are just going to run a bunch later i'm i'm game for that that sounds cool yeah i i think that's a good point. The one other one that I really thought is worth considering, and I thought the athletic did a really good job on this piece from Ken Rosenthal and Brittany Giroli, which was about the amount of pine tar, sticky stuff, whatever it is people are using in baseball. And if you prohibit that and really, you know, MLB has said at various points, we're cracking down on this and then nothing actually happens. But it seems like

pitcher, I mean, several pitchers were quoted in that article, not, you know, not with their names attached, but saying that it's too much. And I think if hitters and pitchers all agree that the amount of sticky stuff used on a baseball is too much and that it's having too big of an effect on spin rate and movement. And, you know, Rob, Rob Arthur mentioned that the ball, the changes to the ball increased movement as well, that that's all going to impact how, how hard it is to be a hitter. And yeah, I just think that one is again, in concert with some other changes. I think that's one that we should really consider. And I understand that there are safety concerns with guys throwing as hard as they are. But I

guess my thought is like, if you are, I think, I feel like Jose Alvarado is the guy that people bring up a lot in terms of just max effort, very high velocity and doesn't know where it's going. A lot of the time, if you're a team, like you might not be able to tolerate how often Jose Alvarado misses the zone. And also that if you're Jose Alvarado, maybe you need to change how you throw if you can't find the zone at all without using. And again, I'm not accusing him of using it. I don't know. But you know, if you're someone in that mold of player who is using sticky stuff on the ball, maybe you have to change your approach to what you do. And one other idea you brought up briefly is the idea of bringing back the fair foul bunt, which is a bunt that lands in fair territory but then spins foul and is considered a playable ball anyway, which is something that like 19th century hitters like Ross Barnes exploited.

And so this is no longer legal, but it would be interesting, right? That'd be one way to combat the shift. And we've gotten related questions just about moving the foul lines. We got an email from listener Joseph who said, 1970 saw the sort of minor league experiments we're seeing in 2021. The Eastern League had a DH. The New York Penn League had an automatic intentional walk. And the Gulf Coast League expanded foul lines, bending outward an extra three degrees beyond the first base bag. All were deemed failures at the time, yet the first two are now a part of MLB.

Even Charlie Finley's rejected proposal of a 22nd pitch clock has been included in organized baseball. I think that's something he tested in the 60s, although his orange baseballs from the early 70s have not come back into vogue. But Joseph continued, if baseball is pretty much literally throwing everything against the wall, why are they not looking into expanded foul lines? looking into expanded foul lines. If successful, it appears to check every box MLB is looking for, as it obviously would increase the possibility of hitting doubles or triples down the line and force shifting defenses to cover a larger area, thus cutting down on easy ground outs. And we've gotten other emails about that. Andrew, Patreon supporter, just wrote in to say, I've heard people mention moving the

fences back, which is interesting, but I haven't heard anyone mention moving the foul lines instead of having them go out at 90 degrees from home plate. In order to increase offense, you could do something like 100 or 110 degrees, but still leave the bases where they currently are. You could rebuild all of the stadiums to account for this, but the easiest way so you don't have to change stadium or field sizes would be just to have the foul lines go straight until they meet the sidewalls of the stadium and then just follow the walls to the current foul pole. Anything that hits the wall is foul. And to hit a home run, you still have to hit it between the existing foul lines. At what angle does it really put a strain on defenses? So that's an interesting idea that I haven't really heard discussed much.

Again, don't know if it's my favorite. Still feel like increasing contact is still more essential and beneficial than changing what happens after contact is made. But, you know, those things can go together to some extent, because if you make it more advantageous to put the ball in play, then you incentivize players to do that more often to the extent that they can against unhittable pitches. against unhittable pitches? Yeah, I think generally when I've thought about, you know, because again, we just talked about expanding the amount of ground fielders have to cover is a way to increase batting average on balls in play. And I thought about foul lines and then I thought, well, then you're changing how far a runner has to go, you know, on the base paths. But I guess, as they said, you don't have to. I never really thought about it like that. My reflex is to be like, well, I don't think I like that. But it's one of those ideas that I could see myself kind of coming around to. Not that I necessarily would like it, but I don't think I would mind it. It would just be different. And it's kind of like if baseball, one of the

classic questions of this podcast is like, if baseball were different, how different would it be? And I don't know. I mean, there's no reason that the base has to be the edge of the fair foul line. As far as bringing back the bunts, I don't know if it's obvious, but this is another Patrick Dubuque suggestion and hobby horse. And I actually, I really like it. I think I'll give you a preview of an article. There's actually two coming, but one is coming Friday from Rob Arthur on defensive positioning. And one nugget in there is that

there's two positions that have changed the most in terms of how deep they play. And one of them is third base over the last six seasons. On average, it's moved back. I think, again, I'm not, I read a draft of it, but it's not in front of me. I think it's eight feet that third basemen on average have moved back over the last six years. And that is, you know, again, if there's a threat of a bunt, I think you have to be in. But between the pitcher, the catcher, and the distance between the mound and the foul line, there's not a lot of worry about that happening. And so I don't think it's even just the shift, to be clear. It really does, you know, that's on regular,

you know, unshifted balls as well. And so I think doing something like incentivizing players to bunt changes how defenses have to react and position themselves. And that's part of why BABIP has dropped. And so I think that would be, I don't know, I don't think it would be an especially harmful. I don't think it would be used a ton, but I think even the threat of it changes how defenses have to kind of compose themselves. It strikes me that part of our problem here is one that sort of comes before we recommend changes or try things out in the indie leagues or partner leagues or minor leagues which is that i think there is just a fundamental reticence and distrust on the part of a lot of observers to say let's make all of these changes and we want the body

that's overseeing that to be mlb because we don't necessarily think that they're gonna do a good job or they're gonna prioritize the right things or that their aesthetic is the same as ours or that what's being sort of shifted around is being done to try to increase competition or have players like doing their very best while still having some sort of balance but that other things might be in, like how easy it is to bet on it or whatever, right? Like we just, between the way that the ball has been handled and messaged around, and then some of these other looming considerations that the league has to deal with, I think part of our problem is that we're just a little bit nervous about entrusting really big fundamental changes.

And some of these are smaller, but some of them are really big. They would have a really meaningful impact on the way that the game is played. We're reticent to sort of entrust that to the sports governing body, which is a problem. So I guess one of the things that I wonder is like, what is the mechanism? I know that there's a rules committee and a competition committee, and those committees are staffed by people who work in the game. But I'm curious what process we want to see these sorts of changes kind of go through and what the sort of bar is that needs to be cleared before we're satisfied that they should have a place in the majors. Build a committee, Craig.

I was going to say Ben. I'm going to be honest. It's a good question. I don't have a great answer to in terms of how I would prefer it come to the fore. I think what it is right now would be like it's Theo Epstein, right? Yeah. That's where we're at right now. I don't know.

I think the first thing you said, though, is a really important one, which is that it's about trust. And I think that's why Theo Epstein got hired to do this job, rightly or wrongly. I think he's viewed as someone people trust to do a good job at the things he's tasked to do. And I think that the level of distrust and that people don't want, you know, the maybe this is is to some degree how how the the 538 podcast host feels, which is that, you know, that like, you don't want to see MLB mess with this because they're likely to mess it up. I certainly understand that

notion. And it's something that that I think I confronted a lot when discussing these potential changes. But I also think the need for for changes is to me so apparent that like, we've got to do something and I'd rather try something. And I think it is, as we've said throughout, like it needs to be tested, it should be measured, it should not be, you know, kind of pell mell kind of attitude towards it and just instituting it like we have another, you know, you said this was a bit of a theme week. It is both impromptu. It kind of just happened in terms of timing. And then also we thought of ways to fill it out. And Steve Goldman is writing tomorrow about the bulk rule, the year of the

bulk in I think it was 87, where Dave Stewart got called for 16 bucks a year and 11 of them were in April. And like, it was just like a change that the commissioner was like, here, we're changing how seriously we take the bulk rule and how we're going to call it. And it was a disaster. And we've seen it with the neighborhood rule, right? They rescinded it mid-year and that kind of thing. So yeah, it all needs to be kind of measured as to the best way to bring it, you know, which things end up getting measured. I don't have a good idea.

I'm sorry. Yeah. No, it's tough. Year of the Bach was 88, I think. 88, sorry. Anyone who's mid-email to us right now correcting that. But I think, yeah, there are some committees that exist already, like the competition committee, the playing rules committee. These are the bodies that are charged with this, but have thus far failed to fix the problem. So do we need some sort of new structure? Do we need some independent body? eventually belatedly outsource the investigation of the ball and the home run rate to basically a panel of scientists and physicists and statisticians and then they put out their report that was like

commissioned by mlb but at least ostensibly independent of it i wonder whether there needs to be something similar about just like what we want the game to look like i don't know or at least whether that could be a component of it i I mean, I would want the players and the league both to be involved, and players don't always want to change things either. And sometimes they can be a force to sort of obstruct this sort of change. So it would be better if this were a collaborative process, or even if there were some public components of like what do the fans want what do the experts who study this stuff think would be the most efficacious way to actually address these problems so it's sort of idealistic and probably pie in the sky but it would be nice to

have an impartial party that was unbiased by gambling interests or the need to sell ad time not just motivated by maximizing short-term revenue. It's kind of complicated, but I think the drumbeat is loud enough now, and this is just a constant enough story. It's just part of the narrative about the sport in a way that probably MLB would prefer for it not to be. So I think it's risen to the point where they will have to do something about it.

And I think the increased experimentation in the Atlantic League and the minor leagues is a sign of that. So it's just a matter of actually moving things from independent ball to affiliated ball and then from the minors to the majors. And that won't necessarily be quick or easy, but I think it does have to happen. And I think it will happen sometime soonish and we should probably save some thoughts on this for the next time we talk about fixing baseball like next week or whenever that will be I know people get tired of this no hitter yeah this conversation because like yeah it's true that you can go back into the earliest days of baseball like you know look up 19th century papers and you can find people saying, oh, how do we fix baseball? Baseball is boring. And that's just like a constant refrain throughout

baseball history. But a lot of these things, like they have been steady progressions. I mean, games have gotten a lot longer over that time. So it's not just people complaining about fashion or music because it's not to their liking or the new generation doesn't have the same taste or something. It's like these things are actually changing. The strikeout rate is a lot higher than it used to be. Games are a lot longer than they used to be. There are a lot of reasons for that, but it's not just hand-wringing over nothing. It could still be excessive hand-wringing, but these are real observed trends that are happening. So it's not just in our heads, like the extent to which you're bothered by it, that varies, but the actual effects are right there on the page and on the field.

So it has to be addressed and Craig Goldstein has solved it. So it's really just a matter of whoever the decision maker is reading his articles. Yeah, read my articles. Putting this stuff into practice. So thank you, Craig, for coming on and walking us through all of this. And I guess there was a bit of breaking news while we were trying to figure out how to fix baseball that I should probably relate here because it's been a long time coming. The investigation into Mickey Calloway has concluded.

It's been a mere, what has it been? I think the investigation was launched like February 1st, right around there. It's the Titanic meme. Like it's been 84 years. Yes. And it's May 26th. So it has finally reached a resolution. Here's MLB's statement from Rob Manfred.

My office has completed its investigation into allegations of sexual harassment by Mickey Calloway. Having reviewed all of the available evidence, I have concluded that Mr. Calloway violated MLB's policies and that placement on the ineligible list is warranted. We want to thank the many people who cooperated with our Department of Investigations in their work, which spanned Mr. Callaway's positions with three different clubs. The clubs that employed Mr. Callaway each fully cooperated with DOI, including providing emails and assisting with identifying key witnesses. Harassment has no place within Major League Baseball, and we are committed to providing an appropriate work environment for all those involved in our game. So it took a really long time. It ended up where one would have imagined that it would right after reading the first athletic article about this, but eventually it led to that place.

So the ineligible list, it basically means that he can't have a job in baseball until the end of next season at minimum. And then after that, he can apply for reinstatement, sort of like the Brandon Taubman punishment, but I guess a feel uncomfortable. To be clear, I never intended to make anyone feel this way and didn't understand that these interactions might do that or violate MLB policies. However, those are my own blind spots, and I take responsibility for the consequences. In my 25 years in professional baseball, I have never taken for granted the privilege of being even a small part of this great game of ours. To say I regret my past poor choices would be an understatement. I remain hopeful that I can return to baseball when eligible at the conclusion of next season. But for now I plan to work on my own shortcomings and repairing any damage

I have caused with my colleagues and particularly my family. So as we speak, Mickey Calloway is still listed as the angels pitching coach on angels.com, but they released a statement saying that they are ending his employment with the Angels effective immediately. So congratulations to Artie Moreno for not having to pay Mickey Calaway, which is why it took this long. Yeah, there was some speculation.

Right. I mean, you know, they could have fired him and not had the investigation at all or fired him not pending the investigation and just paid him and then done the investigation after that. Seems like a good idea to do an investigation, not just to establish his culpability beyond all doubt, but to turn up the full extent of the bad behavior. Of course, I do understand that it's better not to pay him, not just because the angel saved some cash, but also because, hey, he's not making money for being a terrible person for a long time, seemingly. But also, one of the reasons that was sort of suggested as why is this taking so long is maybe the idea that it had implicated others or that other things had come

to the fore, like who knew about Calloway's behavior and what came out in all these emails and texts and everything. And so as we record here, right after this announcement came out, there's no immediate indication that there will be further punishment or anyone else caught up in this. So they always kind of want to snip things neatly so that it's just like, oh yeah, it was the bad apple or it's like the one team, the one person who was doing this thing as opposed to a pervasive problem. So whether anyone else will get caught up in this, I guess, remains to be seen. But for at least the long national Mickey Calloway investigation is finally at an end. I always feel like I'm supposed to have something profound to say in moments like this.

And I really don't, except to say that I guess the thing I'll say is that I'm grateful that there were women who came forward to talk about this issue because it's very scary to do that and so I appreciate their willingness to do that I appreciate the reporters who worked on this conducting themselves in a way that made those people feel comfortable coming forward and talking to them. So I guess I'll focus on that part of this and hope that when we move forward as an industry, not just in front offices, but like across baseball, whether it's in media or on the field, that we all try to make the places we work safe for everyone and that we hold each other accountable. And that starts with everybody. We all have to bear that responsibility to keep each other accountable and that starts with everybody we all have to bear that responsibility

to keep each other safe so yeah i guess that's the thing i'll say i don't know how profound it is but i i don't know i don't know man hopefully some of the changes that have come about because this will make it easier to report this sort of abuse in the future but also hopefully it just like it won't be on the the targets of that abuse to be the ones to report it necessarily. So, yeah. And I guess we'll wait to see if there's any subsequent action that comes out of this. You said there is a seeming instinct to nip things neatly. But given how long he was allowed to behave this way and how many organizations it happened across,

allowed to behave this way and how many organizations it happened across, I think it would be naive to assume that he didn't at least benefit from a lot of people feeling like they didn't have to say something to him directly. So I hope that that culture continues to improve and change because like you said, it shouldn't just be the responsibility of the people who get victimized by creeps to like shift things around. They're a little bit busy recovering from being victimized by creeps so we all need to take a hand in this sort of thing i'm really mostly just tired of having to talk about it all the time it's really a bummer for for everyone to have to be reminded

that the industry they work in isn't perfectly welcoming to them to say nothing of the people who have to endure this kind of treatment every day so let's all do better so we don't have to talk about it so damn much because it's pretty exhausting. Yeah. Fix baseball in all of the ways. Yeah. But also the other ways. Yeah.

So you can find Craig Goldstein, who is the editor in chief of Baseball Perspectives at Baseball Perspectives. You can also hear him on the Five and Dive podcast. And although I cannot in good conscience recommend it, you can follow him on Twitter cd goldstein thanks again Craig thanks for having me all right well after we finished recording Adolis Garcia hit another home run his 16th on the season yeah I guess this guy is good and we also got a big foreign substance story involving one of our subjects on our last episode Joe West Cardinals manager Mike Schilt got ejected after West and fellow umpire Dan Bellino wanted to check Giovanni Gallegos' cap because of suspicions about a foreign substance, and then Schilt kind of went off on the way that MLB is policing or not policing

foreign substances in a post-game interview. Interesting stuff that I imagine Meg and I will discuss next time. Couple of quick points following up on our last episode, 1698. We briefly discussed the idea of baseball being a winter Olympic sport instead of a summer Olympic sport. We also discussed all of the obstacles to that happening and why it wouldn't work, but we neglected to mention one pretty important one. A few listeners pointed this out to us. This email is from Darren, Patreon supporter, who says, I'm writing to answer Meg's

question regarding baseball potentially being in the Winter Olympics. Currently, the Olympic Charter mandates that all events in the Winter Games must be sports that are played on snow or ice. Well, yes, that is a bit of a problem. Darren continues, I'm a big fan of the bicycle racing discipline of cyclocross, which is a form of off-road bike racing that is primarily done in the fall and winter and known for races involving challenging weather conditions and mud, think northern France or Belgium in December, for several years cycling's governing body, the UCI, has made a push with the IOC to include cyclocross in the Winter Olympics. And while snow or ice is certainly possible at races and makes for epic conditions, it is by no means a requirement, and therefore, the UCI's attempts at getting cyclocross

into the Winter Olympics have so far been unsuccessful. My guess is if cyclocross is not eligible for the Winter Games, then that makes for grim odds of baseball's inclusion. Of course, maybe that just raises the question, how would baseball be different if it were played on snow and ice? But I'm fairly sure that's been answered on the pod before. Indeed it has, I think way back on episode 265, we talked about baseball on ice. And there is some precedent for baseball being played on ice, primarily in the 19th century, but it is not ideal. Another thing that's not ideal, the Mets lineup these days. And that's also something we touched on in 1698 when we discussed the incredible confluence

of injuries on the Mets roster. After we had that discussion, the Mets selected outfielder Billy McKinney off waivers from the Brewers, and he was slated to bat cleanup for the Mets on Wednesday night before their game against the Rockies was postponed. Billy McKinney batting cleanup is, as they say, not what you want. But hey, still in first place. The only rule is it has to work. 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.

Michael Stevens, Michael Peretti, Maxwell Rowe, Katie B., and Brian Herr. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastwithfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance.

And we will be back with one more episode before the end of this week. Talk to you then. I've got a lot of hats. I've got a lot of hats. What a wear is where I'm at because I've got a lot of hats. I had a lot of dreams.

Used to have a lot of dreams. Now I've got a lot of hats. I had a lot of dreams. Used to have a lot of dreams. Now I've got a lot of hats. Dreams are nanny hats too.