Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1701: Just Spitballing

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Luis Urías, the zombie runner, and walk-off wins, a few other aspects of the Will Craig/Javier Báez play, a new stat called the “Boner,” MLB and NFTs, Theo Epstein’s recent comments about making changes to the game, Shohei Ohtani’s player-page traffic and the future of two-way players, the […]

We are the champions! Oh, no, he's got a boy. Oh, no, no, yeah, he's got it. He's got it. Hello and welcome to episode 1701 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing all right. We just asked each other how our long weekends were,

so should we maintain the facade that we are just beginning our conversation on this podcast the ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing all right. We just asked each other how our long weekends were, so should we maintain the facade that we are just beginning our conversation on this podcast and say, how was your long weekend? And then have that exchange again. Sure, let's do it. Ben, how was your long weekend? It was quite restful, thank you. How was yours? It was the same. Thank you so much for asking. Excellent. That's great. Well, we will talk about some of the baseball that happened over the long weekend, a little bit of news, a little bit of feedback from previous discussions, maybe a few emails that were left over from last time. pointed out by Craig Calcaterra. And this is about the Brewers and Tigers game on Monday, which ended in a walk-off win for the Brewers. They won 3-2 in 10 innings. And so here's how the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel game story starts.

How certain was Luis Arias that he was going to win the game Monday? Certain enough that he told teammate Willie Adamas before he went ahead and did it. Before the inning, when we were going to the dugout, he said, I'm going to walk it off. I said, I know you got it. Adamas recounted not long after Arias' single dropped to cap a 3-2, 10-inning Memorial Day victory over the Detroit Tigers at American Family Field. It was amazing to watch it.

It was even more because he told me that he was going to do it. He had that confidence in himself that he was going to do it. He had that confidence in himself that he was going to do it. And my reaction to this was that you can't really brag about a walk-off if you're in extra innings and there's a zombie runner and the game is tied and all you have to do is score the zombie runner. And Arias was, I think, the second hitter up that inning. So you have Omar Narvaez at second base as the zombie runner. Kestin Hura comes up and he bunts Narvaez over to third base.

So now you're in a third base one out situation. Urias doesn't even have to get a hit or anything. I mean, he did. He singled, but all he really had to do was put the ball in play and sack fly, whatever, get Narvaez in from third. So it seems to me that the zombie runner has really removed the ability to brag about a walk-off or to guarantee a walk-off and have that be an impressive feat. Because really, the expectation is that there's going to be a walk-off in that inning. That's the default. That's the baseline.

is that there's going to be a walk-off in that inning. Like, that's the default. That's the baseline. If you enter the bottom of the inning and it's a walk-off situation and the game is tied, like, in extra innings this year, according to the Fangraph Splits leaderboard, there have been 238 runs scored in 194 and two-thirds innings pitch. So there's more than a run per inning or per half inning being scored in extra innings this season. So, yeah more than a run per inning or per half inning being scored in extra

innings this season. So yeah, that's kind of the basic. That's not like, wow, he's so confident. He knew he was going to do it and he delivered. That's Manfred ball. That's the way it works. I'm so glad to have found something you feel so strongly about. Yeah. I'm not mad at Arias so much. I'm more mad at Manfred, but I am a little bit flummoxed about trotting this out as an example, I guess, of Luis Arias's supreme confidence and ability to deliver. So I appreciate what you're saying, Ben. I want you to know that I am validating your experience of this quote. I'm not here to tell you you're wrong.

I might offer, I might offer, just, you know, if I were going to offer, I'd maybe offer that Urias is hitting 221, 323, 79 on the year. He's striking out almost 26% of the time. So basically what, league average? Yeah, that might be true. Fair enough. But what I'm saying is, and you know, as you said, the various ways that he could participate in a walk-off, you know, there are a couple of options here, right?

He has a couple of ways that he could get the results that he ended up getting. And we might credit him for actually recording a hit rather than a sack fly but yeah he could have done any number of things but he is not guaranteed to do those things under more normal game conditions right at other points in the year and when you're hitting with a 93 wrc plus perhaps any amount of confidence in in moment like that, despite the various avenues you could have to help your team win, would be thought of as confident. It could be seen as confident because you're just not guaranteed. I mean, he's far from the worst hitter in baseball, but he's far from the best. And so that's what I'd maybe say about that but again i see your point i i think that your point

is valid but i doubt very much that that he thought of it that way i bet he was thinking definitely didn't i bet he was thinking you know i'm not always getting into one this year it's not a sure thing but i just have a good feeling and will, you know, like maybe that's the thing. Although I also will say that, and again, this is in 104 batted ball events. So take it with the grain of salt that is required. But he also, in support of your point, has, say, the highest barrel percentage of his career so far. And he's recorded the highest max exit velocity of his career. And his average is sort of right in line with where you'd expect with the highest hard hit percentage of his

career. And so in that respect, you might say, well, yeah, you're doing this more often than you ever have before. But then, Ben, maybe that's why he's confident. Maybe that's why. Yeah. No, he's having a career year so far, so he should be feeling good about himself. But I guess really I'm just looking for more ammunition to complain about Manfred Paul and the zombie runner, and I found it here. And to be fair, the Tigers faced the same situation

in the top of the 10th, and they did not deliver. Right. So they had Jake Rogers as the zombie runner. Then Willie Castro came up and bunted him over. Isn't this great? Isn't the extra innings that we are stuck with now wonderful? We get sack punts again, just what we needed. And then Robbie Grossman struck out, and then Harold Castro struck out.

So they did not plate that runner, and the Brewers did. But I'm just saying it's not quite like guaranteeing a championship or something. Or you're down in the series and you say, I'm going to put the team on my back. We're going to come back and win this thing. It's not Joe Namath or Mark Messier. It's I'm going to score that runner who's on second base with no outs. Like, yeah, you know, you probably should. And I wonder whether this story would have been recounted.

I was just about to say. A, if he hadn't delivered, of course, then it never comes to light. Of course, you only hear about the guarantees when they pay off for the most part. But also, would this have come out if he had had the walk-off but hadn't done it on a hit? If he had just, you know, what if he had reached on an error and then the winning run scores? Still a walk-off. Or what if it was just a sack fly or something? Would Adamas have said, yeah, he knew he was going to do it. He was going to get that run in. Or do we only hear about it because it was a clean single? Anyway, I'm just pointing this out because it sort of stood out. You know, it doesn't quite mean what it once would have to deliver the walk-off. So on top of everything else, the zombie runner has slightly devalued the walk-off. It's still nice to win.

I didn't actually watch the video, but I'm sure he got mobbed just as he would have if this had been any other situation. But, you know, it doesn't quite have the same impressive ring to it to me. What percentage of situations like this do you think feature a player confidently asserting to one of his teammates that i'm gonna do it that we never hear about like is it every time if you told me

it was every time and we're only hearing about it you know the times when it actually comes to fruition i would believe you like and i i wouldn't find them to be you know haughty or self-aggrandizing like i i think that as we have discussed many times on this podcast the fact that anyone ever gets a hit at all is is a miracle and the fact that anyone ever gets struck out is a miracle too and i i maintain that position even in an offensive environment like this one because team you know players are just so good now they're just so very good and so i would think that you would have to have an absurd amount of confidence perhaps even at times bordering on hubris to not just cry when you get in the batter's box because it seems so hard.

So I wouldn't be surprised if it's every single time. And I would say whatever you have to do to get through Manfred Ball is what you should do. That's what I have to say about that. Yeah, there's probably a lot of instances where a player jokingly calls it. say about that yeah there's probably a lot of instances where a player jokingly calls it and then if he actually does the thing that he called then it gets treated as a serious prediction so it's like yeah i'm gonna walk it off here and it's kind of tongue-in-cheek or i'm gonna homer here or whatever but then if you actually do it it's you know yeah he said he was gonna do it and he did anyway congrats to the brewers and to l Luis Rios on that well-earned win.

So just to follow up a little bit on our Will Craig discussion from last week before we leave poor Will alone and stop dredging up this play. But A, he talked to the press about this, which he hadn't done when we spoke and he didn't do immediately. I think he did the next day. And I didn't care if he had never talked to the press about it because what was he going to say? I think we all kind of knew and he did say pretty predictable things about it, but he had good humor about it. And he said, I replayed that probably a hundred plus times in my head, exactly what happened. Of course, I'm going to end up on a blooper reel for the rest of my life, probably. I just keep moving forward with it. And I think the best way to do it is kind of just accept it head on. Don't deny it. Don't shy away from it. It happened. I messed up. I came off the bag and caught the ball, turned to look and saw him bolt toward home. And I just kind of lost my mind for a second. It just kind of all went downhill from there. It just kind of all went downhill from there.

As soon as I released the ball, I was like, oh, my gosh, what am I doing? I know better than that. It's simple baseball 101. But I guess in my mind, when I saw him running back, I just kind of lost my mind for a second. And, you know, we talked last week about how this was more of a Will Craig low light than Cubs or Javi Baez or Wilson Contreras highlight. than a Cubs or Javi Baez or Wilson Contreras highlight. But maybe we should give them a little more credit than that just because they did precipitate the play. I mean, it still required Craig to, as he said, lose his mind for a second.

But that happened because the runners were running the way that they were, right? So Baez, who has this reputation for kind of deking fielders into doing things that they shouldn't. And he has, I think, reached on the second most errors over the past few years, baseball reference pointed out, which is probably more of a product of the fact that he's a pretty speedy right-handed hitter who hits the ball on the ground. Yeah. He fits the profile of someone who reaches on error a lot, but maybe it has something to do with just how aggressive he is and kind of forcing fielders to make mistakes. And that was

the case here where, yeah, he turned around and he started running back toward home. And I'd have to think that, I don't know, 990 times out of a thousand or something. The first baseman gets the out anyway, but you don't typically expect the runner to turn around on his way to first and return to home plate. And that did confuse Craig for a second. So it did require Baez to actually take that non-traditional step of retreating on the way to first base, which maybe we can give him some credit for that and Contreras for just continuing to run and busted around third and kind of confuse Craig into doing this. So I want to give them a little more credit for the running than I did in our initial discussion, I think. And Craig said, you know, he turned to look

and saw him bolt toward home and kind of lost his mind for a second. So in that case, I guess he's talking about Baez, not Contreras, who was also bolting toward home, but from the other direction. But again, like if we were going to break down the win probability added or debited here, I don't know exactly how you would do it.

I think you would still give the bulk of it to Craig and not to Baez, but Baez deserves some. Okay. So I don't want to refute Will Craig's own understanding of his life, because to do so would be silly, because he is recounting his understanding of this moment as it unfolded he is not trying to shirk responsibility for it which might make us think that he is an unreliable narrator right he is he is admitting that he made a mental error and it had a bad outcome and is you know that's fine he gets to say that but i'm gonna i'm gonna push back ever so slightly on this which is to say i still i still think that will craig's weird behavior to start this is what is what

sort of cast off the chain of events because he he moves toward javi before javi turns around that's true so i so so so i think that it's fine for us to to say that bias was sort of heads up in this moment right he did a thing that i would imagine i haven't seen what javi has said after this moment so i don't know if he's addressed this in the media my apologies if he has i would suspect that he did not think that this was going to work right like i i doubt strongly that bias was like oh we're gonna score a run here i i'm sure that he was cognizant of the fact that the most likely outcome in this scenario even given it branching off into the strange timeline where will craig just doesn't put his foot on the bag is is him being tagged out uh in the baseline and there being no run scored and us all looking at will craig and being like you okay buddy and then him sheepishly later saying

i lost my mind for a moment but in that scenario he has still recorded the app but i don't know people are are really excited about javier baez which i think is great and i think he is a very exciting player to watch and he is certainly a master of the tag this would never happen if it were javier abias in the other position right he'd never he'd never make this mistake it just wouldn't happen because he's a master of the tag so even if he goofed and didn't put his foot on the back he would have he would have just tagged him because he's he's famous for that and i don't think that he's like a conjurer. So anyway, I just, I think that you're right, that we can give maybe a little, a scooch more credit than we did. And also, I think that Will Craig's initial move

is what caused Javi to turn around when he saw Will Craig proceeding down the base path toward him. Then he was like, oh, I'm going to run back this way. Let's see what happens. And then Will Craig's brain went, and then we got what we got. Again, I don't mean to call

either Javi Urbaez as a special player who does fun stuff, or Will Craig as a guy who's just honestly recounting having a bad day at work into into doubt and like i'm just i'm looking at him walking down the base path and javi being like oh i'm gonna turn around because i pulled the play out i don't know people get people are really intense about this play people are really intense about it ben yeah they're really there's a lot of feeling behind this play i I don't know, man. It's a lot.

We got one more email about this that I wanted to read. This is sent to us by Dan from Milwaukee, who points out, Will Craig made a mental mistake, but so did every other Pirates fielder, which is an important point. Will Craig is the face of this play, unfortunately for him, but there is plenty of blame to go around. So Dan writes, with regard know, Will Craig is the face of this play, unfortunately for him, but there is plenty of blame to go around. So Dan writes, with regard to the Will Craig hijinks or the El Mago magic, I think it is only fair to point out that Will Craig was only one of nine Pirates fielders who could have prevented this fiasco. We could also probably lump in coaches and managers and other people who were in the dugout and could have yelled something.

Oh, yeah. He writes Perez could have yelled, please turn around, Will, and run back to first. I do not want the ball from you. Anyone else on the team could have offered similar encouragement as well. Craig would have had plenty of time to hear the cries and think, hmm, I am not making a smart baseball play right now. But if I simply stay between Baez and first base as I retreat back down the baseline, I should have no problem completing the force out and preventing a run from scoring. I think this would also be a good way to prevent further humiliation on this play and avoid being the laughingstock of baseball for the next few days.

I'm going to do it. I'm going to go back to first base. I must remember to thank my teammates later for this helpful suggestion. Presumably, no one offered this helpful suggestion to Craig. Second, perhaps more egregiously, I believe that every pirate in the field, excluding Craig and Perez, could have converged at first base and yelled, hey, Will or Michael, throw us the ball and we will step on first base for the fourth snout. From watching the video, it is easy to establish that Javier Baez's time from home to first

was approximately 15 seconds. This seems like it must be at least close to a record on a safe trip to first, which is true. Baez's sprint speed to first base on this play was six feet per second. I know this is an average velocity, not a sprint speed, but let's just go with that number because it's funny. For reference, that equates to a 1440 mile, essentially a comfortably brisk walking pace. Craig effectively abandoned first base about five seconds into the play. That would leave at least 10 seconds for any or every other fielder to think, hey, someone needs to be at first base for the force out and to run and cover first.

According to baseball savant, the MLB average sprint speed on competitive plays is about 27 feet per second. But let's use a slower pace of 23 feet per second to make up for the longer than 90 foot sprint that would be necessary for, say, left fielder Ben Gamble or center fielder Brian Reynolds to reach first ahead of bias. Any pirate with a little hustle should have started moving toward the infield shortly after the crack of the bat, either to back up the fielding play or the throw to first or to go back to the dugout, assuming the out would be recorded or to assist up the fielding play or the throw to first, or to go back to the dugout assuming the out would be recorded, or to assist in the developing pickle fiasco.

Assuming a light jog toward the infield during the first five seconds of the play, I think even Gamelin Reynolds would have been within 230 feet of first base and could have made it there in time to force out Baez at something less than an all-out sprint. I have attached a totally precise Microsoft Paint graphic of PNC Park with a 230-foot radius circle centered on first base for visual reference. I will, of course, link to that helpful graphic. Hopefully, Will Craig can use this in his defense in the upcoming Kangaroo Court proceedings. In any case, my favorite part of this play is when Baez watches Contreras score, signals him safe, pauses in the ready position, and then the switch flips in his head and he realizes that he still needs to somehow get to first base safely, it would have been incredibly anticlimactic if, after all that action, Adam Frazier or Gregory Polanco

or Tyler Anderson had been calmly waiting at first base to take the throw from Paris. I don't know whether this would have been more or less funny if it had ended that way. Probably less. I don't know that it could be more funny or alternately embarrassing than it was but thank you dan i also think that look i'm gonna say a thing and i don't mean to in any way impugn pirates fans i'm going to impugn them but not for their attendance right the one might think that given the record of the Pirates and sort of the understood trajectory they have as an organization this year, not in the future necessarily, but this year, that there might be a lot of Cubs fans at this game in Pittsburgh

and perhaps fewer Pirates fans than on average because there are really Cubs fans buying up those seats. Could be true. But there were no Pirates fans. So my question is also related to this email. How did they not collectively yell, throw two firsts from the stands? As if to say, you know, if the fans always want to be helpers,

that's why we stand behind home plate and do like funny dances and go blah. Because we're trying to throw off the opposing hitter. And it's why we yell at umpires that and like unresolved anger stuff and we we think we're being good helpers and most of the time we're not because baseball requires a tremendous amount of focus and more often than not an individual voice isn't really that distinguishable from the sort of buzz of the ballpark but collectively collectively, I think they could have come together as one would for the wave and yelled, throw to first!

And then perhaps he would have gone, oh! And he would have... And then this wouldn't have happened. So like the one time we need you guys, right? The one time the fans have the power to impact the play on the field. And well, I mean, I'm sure that they were actually just so flummoxed by the whole thing that they forgot to yell because they had been watching baseball and then they briefly watched something else happen.

Right. I'm more inclined to forgive fans given that they are not professional fielders. But, and for all I know, there were people who were yelling at Craig and he just didn't hear it or didn't pay attention because he had tunnel vision or tunnel hearing. And he was just so mesmerized by Baez and Contreras that he didn't process the instructions in time. But it is funny also that Craig won a minor league gold glove in 2019. So he's like not a bad fielder. He's like more in there for his defense maybe than for anything else. Just not on this particular play. But again, I think this is probably the last time that we will pick on Will Craig here.

And if anything, we're attempting to not defend him. Well, you are. not defend him but uh well you are i'm saying that that don't engage in ambiguous first moves in the base paths because then people are gonna try to pull a trick on you right we we don't really hold this against will craig who among us has not made a bad error at work it's definitely happened i sometimes tag the wrong prospect and stuff. Thankfully, that doesn't really get noticed by five people, and then I get to fix it. It's a less public mistake, but it's still an error. So, you know, Will, we sympathize, man.

Like, we've all, well, not been exactly where you are, but, like, in a broader sense, we have been. And I admire the way he handled this, which was not to be defensive or snarky. Again, I agree with you. If he had just hung out in the clubhouse and not talked about it, that would have been fine too, because I don't know that there's a lot that is edifying to be had here.

But also, he didn't, and he took responsibility, and now we can all move on. Yeah, and we talked about how he didn't actually receive an error on this play, even though it was an egregious one. And we got an email about that, too, from Ian, who said Ben was talking the other day about needing a stat to more accurately describe the Javi Baez-Will Craig play. And the answer is so obvious. The boner. Will Craig play? And the answer is so obvious, the boner. Named after Merkel's boner, of course, the boner can be defined as a momentary lapse in judgment that negatively impacted the player's team's chances to win. They could be determined and scored by the official scorer and could even

be graded and assigned to multiple players and even teams. The boner is both an offensive and defensive statistic and could be used across sports as it just as equally applies to Will Craig and an NBA player who passes the inbound pass to the wrong team. I'm thinking that boners could be rated in a one to four scale, a category four boner being Will Craig running after Javi Baez, whereas a category one would be more along the runner forgetting to tag up from third on a deep fly ball. I guess that would be like a toot plan could be a category one to three boner maybe. For instance, the Javi Baez play could be scored as Javi Baez grounds into fielder's choice 5-3. Javi Baez safe at first due to boners by Will Craig, category four, and Michael Perez, category two. Javi Baez advances to second on throw year by Michael Perez, category two. Javi Baez advances to second on Throw Your Air by Michael Perez.

So you could have both a boner and an error, or multiple boners and an error on a play. But maybe, you know, you say we need more words, and maybe we need more stats. Maybe we need the boner. I have so many things to say, I will I will say one of them first and it is would we have this be a sponsored moment would hymns sponsor oh man that could be a gold mine in baseball so we'd call up Roman I'm not gonna read hymns ad copy on here one of the great things about us not

having ads on the podcast is is some of the indignities that, well, you have to do pods with ads and everybody's got to pay their bill, so I'm not knocking that, but I have been spared the indignity of some really bad ad reads, so I will not read him's copy, but I would just like to point out to whoever their advertising agency is that they need to chill because i believe that adults get to consume entertainment and media without always having to think of the children like sometimes it's fine for stuff to be for grown-ups but your ad copy is out of control i will leave it to our listeners to look it up it is indecent and offensive so that is the first thing i will

say and the second is i like this idea very much, but I also hate it. And I'm going to do that thing that's irritating where I read an old tweet of mine. But I'm going to read this tweet. The worst moment in baseball history was Merkel's boner because my mom knows it happens. So every time we go to a game and there's some base running drama, she points and asks, is that a boner? It's true. This is the real thing that my mother does. So please stop introducing opportunities

for more boners think of my mother yes that was officially a boner according to the official score to the box score and everything i am not to be trusted with things that would entertain middle schoolers so anyway that's delightful but please know because baseball twitter can't be trusted with that we can't even do the puns without embarrassing ourselves imagine if there were more boners do we need to put like a warning on this episode i'm so sorry technically this is not explicit probably but it kind of is. It's not more explicit than him's ads, which I did not expect you to go all haze code on the-

I'm sorry, but it's a lot. Again, I'm not going to read it on air, but it's a lot. I at least appreciate that when the Roman ads come on, you get to contemplate the strange relationship that has no doubt taken place between Zach and his hippie doctor dad. Yes. You're like, oh, you must have been very candid with one another. And then you get a HIMSS commercial and you're like, am I going to prison for having seen that?

I don't know. So anyway. Yeah. I've had that thought actually. If my dad were a doctor, would I bring that up if the situation arose or did not arise, so to speak? No, I probably would not. I imagine you would say, hey, dad, do you have a good referral you could give me to a blood doctor? Someone who's not you.

A urologist? I don't know about doctors for man problems, but I don't know. All the advertising suggests to me that it's not getting better for you problems, but I don't know. All the advertising suggests to me that it's not getting better for you guys, and I'm really sorry. Anyway, Ben, I don't understand NFTs. Oh, no, me neither. This is my very smooth transition away from boners

to other things that men like. I don't know. We haven't had one of these in a while and they're always so much fun i know you have other things to talk about can we briefly talk about how silly i find it that there's going to be uh an nft of lou gehrig's luckiest man speech yeah there's gonna be an nft of that. So first of all, look, there are a lot of things that people enjoy that I don't understand, and that's fine.

Everything in the world doesn't have to be for me. I'm perfectly content to have people enjoy what they enjoy, except that NFTs make me feel old. So that part I resent. And also, isn't that public domain by now? What I'm referring to is that Major League Baseball is going to, in the words of Jeff Passon, as reported on Tuesday, significantly expand its non-fungible tokens offering this fall, partnering with a new company that plans to eschew the highlight-driven NFTs popularized by NBA Top Shot

and instead focus on other collectible digital elements, those involved with the project, told ESPN. This also includes, like, the opportunity to do meet and greets. And then what is the non-fungible token? Your memories? Meet and greets with whom? With ballplayers. Like you'd have a chance to maybe meet your mean? For example, take the White Sox, your mean Mercedes hitting a home run

on a 47 mile per hour 30 pitch from minnesota twins williams estadio among the most viral moments of the young baseball season i i again say we need a new term for viral there could be a still photograph nft and an artist rendering plus the highlight and maybe an nft that offers an offers an opportunity to interact with mercedes astadio or both there could be so i know that these are all i know that these are all distinct things right like a still photograph an artist rendering a highlight and so i suppose that those are technically non-fungible but isn't it but isn't it kind of cheating to have several versions of the same highlight? Anyway, we don't have to talk about NFTs,

and I know that we're going to get explanations in the email. And if this gets you going, okay, I guess. But I don't understand it from an appeal perspective. And I understand the appeal of collectibles like i i made sure to get the left-handed and right-handed uh katal marty bobblehead from the diamondbacks this year like i i'm not a collectibles hater i just don't understand this especially with garrick's speech because it's like uh it's not like that's the clip of that's going away, right? No, that's the issue with NFTs. In addition to the fact that the PR messages that I receive about these things, which happen too frequently for my liking, are always just inscrutable and impenetrable.

But I have made an effort. There was a point where I said, all right, I should probably figure out exactly what this is trying to tell me. And I've read various explainers and listened to various interviews, and I kind of get the sense. I grok it to an extent, but none of my deeper understanding has shed any light on the appeal of this beyond its value to some small minority of people as a speculation, as a market, small minority of people as a speculation, as a market, which as I understand it is already kind of collapsing in some quarters. So it seems very much like sort of a scam, like a money-making opportunity. And yes, I'm fine with collectibles too.

You could say that maybe a physical collectible is maybe more pleasurable than something that is digital like this, but there's a lot of value in digital things too. It's just that it's not actually creating scarcity. It's sort of an artificial scarcity. As you said, you can get an NFT of that moment, but anyone else can also watch that moment and experience it in pretty much the same way, just without the artificial value that gets attached to it. So it is sort of meaningless to me and to many people who are not just kind of trying to capitalize on the gold rush while the getting is good. And so MLB has tried to get into this too, inspired by the NBA Top Shot effort, which again, I understand that the prices are already tanking pretty quickly there, but

Topps watched an official MLB equivalent of that pretty recently too. So in addition to all of that, as I understand it, which I don't understand it very well, but as I understand it, it's also destroying the environment terribly too. So there's that, on top of it seemingly having very little value to society. It is also actively destroying society. So I'm ready for NFT craze to subside. I know there are certain applications of NFT technology that are worthwhile and useful, but they're not this sort of thing. So yeah, I'm ready to stop hearing about this sometime soon.

Yeah. Well, we can stop talking about it now. But that one seemed particularly strange to me because, again, I would imagine that a lot of people who have never really engaged with baseball in any kind of real way like know that speech, you know. So that part strikes me as odd. Yeah, the NFT press releases are wild. I was like, I worked in finance for a while and I have no idea what you mean by some of this stuff. Yeah, I read a study somewhere that was like,

the more you mention the word like blockchain, it's like the more people tune out. And I have found that to be true. We sell millions of MLB jerseys a year. Why shouldn't a jersey come with an NFT? But why should it, though? They answer that question first, please. Anyhow, I just wanted to transition us away from boners.

Yes. So I feel like I've succeeded. You took us to something even worse, potentially. Not that boners are bad in all cases. I'm just saying when Will Craig makes them. Anyway, happy inaugural Luke Eric day while we're at it. I have so many jokes and none of them are, well, they're all good, but I'm going to not.

Okay. What else do you want to talk about? What is baseball even? Well one thing I wanted to mention is that there was an article over the long weekend by Bob Nightingale in USA Today

and this one was about Theo Epstein and it was Nightingale talking to Theo Epstein about the changes that he is thinking about making to the game and all the changes that he is thinking about making to the game and all the thinking that he's been doing about that, relevant to a lot of our recent discussions, especially with Craig Goldstein last week. And this article, it's tough to say how solid it is, but it seems to break some news that MLB is on the verge of making some real changes along the lines of what we've discussed.

The article says, MLB plans to seriously crack down on the rash of pitchers using illegal substances in the next two weeks with umpires ordered to be vigilant in stopping pitchers from using foreign substances to dramatically improve their spin rate, even if it means embarrassing some of the biggest pitching stars in the game.

Makes it sound like some sort of sting operation. MLB has just been biding its time gathering intel and now it's ready for a raid. We've heard this before. It's kind of turned out to be a false alarm, but now there is apparently a timeline on this if this report is credible. So we could be seeing more of that soon, more of the Giovanni Gallegos situation, but much more widespread than that was. It also says that there's movement toward catchers wearing electronic devices on their wristbands to signal pitches instead of the traditional way that is vulnerable to sign stealing, which I'm in favor of. Then it also says, beginning in 2022, teams will have a maximum of 13 pitchers on their roster. It could potentially be reduced to 12 pitchers, even 11 in ensuing years. So again, I don't know if this is set in stone or what. The article makes it sound as if

it is. So that is very much what we were talking to Craig about last week. So it sounds like that's coming. Sounds like robo-umps are probably coming too. Pitch clock, et cetera, et cetera. Lots of changes that we have ruminated about at length. But really, I will link to the article just for people to check out the Epstein quotes. Because when I read what Epstein has to say about this, it does give me confidence. And I'm trying not to be too much of a mark here, because until we see it, I probably shouldn't believe it. But I was pretty optimistic after

the Epstein hiring was announced. And everything he says, maybe because he agrees with me on most things seemingly, so I'm inclined to say, yeah, he's got it right. But it really sounds to me like he understands the issues involved and whether that means that the fixes will happen sometime soon and they'll be perfect and everything will be wonderful. I don't know. But it is nice to have someone who is working with MLB in some capacity who is at least getting the messaging surrounding this stuff, right? I feel like the protagonist of Rutherford Falls, the new Mike Schur show who goes around deciding, this guy gets it, that guy doesn't get it. But when I read Theo Epstein's quotes, I feel like this guy gets it. And I'll just read some of the things that he says in this article. But A, he's good at, I think, kind of trying to diffuse some of the inevitable blowback that comes along with this conversation. Because whenever MLB talks about changing something, even though it changes things a lot less often than other leagues do, people get their dander up about it.

And so the way he goes about it, he says, I think there's a misconception that MLB has an interest in trying to completely change the game and reinvent the wheel. And that's not the case. We just want to nudge the game back into a better balance. The game is constantly changing. And I think for the last 10 years, it's been moving in a direction that nobody would choose on their own if they were starting from scratch. I don't think anyone would sit down and say, hey, we really want to have a 25%, 30% strikeout rate. It's just recognizing that the game's changing a little bit.

It's important for everyone who cares about the game just to have a discussion that can be thoughtful and intentional about steering in the direction that's good for everybody, particularly the fans. So if the game's going to be evolving, how can we put up some guideposts to make sure it changes in a way that's the best possible version of baseball, action-packed, and the most entertaining version of the game for fans and players alike? And it's hard to hate that, I think. Even if you're a traditionalist, which is sort of a strange thing to say because a lot of these changes are designed to make the game more traditional in a way.

Even if it's changing the rules, it's kind of flashing back to earlier eras of baseball. But he's not coming out and saying baseball sucks. You know, this is unwatchable. We need to do something. Baseball is dying. It's over. So that's good. I think that he's not really downplaying the product in a way that would turn people off.

And he's also not saying we're going to shake up everything. We're going to reinvent the game. He's just saying, hey, we're just talking here. We're just thinking about this. We're just having a discussion. And who could quibble with that, really? So I think he is taking the right tack here. He has adopted the right tone.

Whether that means he will actually win hearts and minds of people who are resistant to these things, I don't know. But I'm just saying he's not going to great lengths to put people off. Maybe the suggestions that he's making will put people off, but I think the way that he is framing them is the best way to frame them. And when the subject of the strikeout rate comes up, as we were talking about on a recent episode, instead of blaming the hitters and saying players are bad now or hitters don't know what they're doing, he pinpoints the actual problem as we see it, which is, he says, I think it's a lot of factors coming together at once, changing the way certain elements of pitching and hitting are prioritized and therefore taught. has evolved from more of an art to more of the science of bat missing. A lot of people in the industry have done a great job of weaponizing data and technology to train for the traits that allow you to miss bats and strike a lot of people out. So pitchers are able to train for velocity and to optimize the spin on their breaking pitches. You can almost rename pitching to bat missing.

And then on the offensive side, he says the pitching has created a different environment for hitters. So their last resort is to hit a ball hard in the air and pop it out of the ballpark. Hitters in the draft now are being selected based on the ability to hit the ball hard in the air. Launch angle and exit velocity are being prioritized in teams development. So it's a bit of a vicious cycle where the pitching is so good, the defensive positioning is so good, that hitters prioritize the home run and not two-strike approaches or using the whole field. So again, I think that's great that he is not saying that nothing has changed, but he's not saying it's the hitter's fault, it's the pitcher's fault, it's the team's fault. He's not pinning the blame on anyone. It's just these larger forces and incentives

that are shaping player behavior and have produced the sport that we're watching now, which is kind of what we've been getting at. So again, I think that's good probably for persuading people that he's not going to make anyone defensive and say hitters are screwing up, hitters suck. He's saying hitters are responding to the conditions that they find themselves in in a rational way. So we just have to change those conditions. So again, nothing has actually happened yet. So it's probably premature to celebrate this too much. But it just makes me reassured, I think, that he is involved in these discussions and that he seems to be looking at it the way that I would perceive to be the right way. Right. I think that it is always good to be worried your remark

not you specifically like all of us i don't think that you're um like uniquely vulnerable to naivete i don't mean to suggest that at all but you know you want to realize that lucy's gonna pull the football away before you start kicking right yeah so i think that that's a good posture to take just because there are so many even if we don't want to read something sort of nefarious into it, there are just a lot of different competing interests whenever we ask these questions and try to answer them as we discussed with Craig. And so making sure that the right things are being prioritized, and of course, what is the right thing to prioritize is going to vary person to person, but it's a good, you

know, we want to ask questions and be critical of it to ensure that, you know, it's the competitive interests of the game rather than, you know, corporate stuff, because that matters to someone, but it doesn't have to matter to us really, like beyond baseball being on TV. And so yeah, I think that I think it's okay to be excited about this perspective, even as we maintain a close eye on how the process plays out. Because as we've talked about a bunch of times in a lot of different contexts on this podcast, the only way that you're really going to solve problems is if you properly diagnose them. And so having this perspective on it, I think is really valuable, because then you're going to entertain solutions that speak to those problems rather than solutions that speak to something else.

So I think it's fine to be optimistic even as we maintain a healthy dose of skepticism because that's just always what's called for these days. So yeah, I think that that's fine. I'm just glad we're talking about boners anymore. If I bring it up one more time though, you're going to doubt my sincerity on that point. So I'm going to not bring it up one more time though you're gonna doubt my sincerity on that point so i'm gonna not bring it up any more times he also brings up moving the mound back which of course endears him to me as an advocate of that or at least experimenting with that and again when it comes to that he is trying to make it sound less threatening than it could.

He said, I understand that the 60 feet, six inches has been around for over a century, but here's one way to look at it. Isn't it worth running an experiment for half a season in the Atlantic League to find if that might be the answer? Yeah, that pitching is so good right now that we've outgrown 60 feet, six inches by a foot. And if it is and can be done safely, maybe we don't have to change six other things, which is something that really appeals to me about it is that that could be kind of a cure-all or maybe not a cure-all, but maybe you have to do-

An elegant solution though. Yeah. One or two things instead of seven things. And he said, I think it's important that we find that out. If it doesn't work, then you can move on and no one will ever talk about moving the mountain back again. But I think it's important to find out. Again, he's just like going way out of his way just to tiptoe around this and say, hey, we're just talking here. It's just us. We're just rapping about this. Why not see if it works? And it's harder, I think, to really get angry about that, you know, as opposed to someone coming in and saying, this must be changed now and being militant about it. So, you know, he's had a lot of experience running organizations and talking to the press

and everything. So it's not a surprise that he seems pretty adept about this, but it's still nice to see because not everyone at MLB is. adept about this, but it's still nice to see because not everyone at MLB is. And one last thing is that the shift comes up. I guess Nightingale asked him about that. And he's not anti-banning the shift or tweaking the shift in some way necessarily, but it's pretty clear that it's not his top priority. He says, if I were to pick one thing that we have to focus on to create the best version the game can be is putting the ball in play more because by definition, it will give players more chances to show their athleticism and helps the game move quicker. And I'm with him on that.

And he says, I hear voices out there saying, well, just have better hitters or tell the hitters to use the whole field. I don't think that's enough to ask organizations or players to prioritize a way of playing that might be more familiar. I think it's important to find ways to adjust the rules a little bit to create incentives that reward those behaviors. So, you know, it's under consideration. But I think his first priority is let's get more contact and then we can figure out how to improve that contact too if we need to do that also. Anyway, good signs, I think. Lab leak, lab leak, lab leak. still think lab leak is a good idea too do you think that if we sold hats with test tubes on them for lab league that people would buy them i don't know if they would there's a fangraph store

so you could test it oh boy test it the way that we're testing moving the mound back Make a prototype Lab league hats, lab league for hats Couple other Quick things I do have a couple emails I'd like to get to But just wanted to mention that in May Which is now over There were 127 pitchers who threw At least 20 innings

And the lowest ERA in May Belonged to Kevin Gossman Who's been great for the Giants, 0.73 ERA. But second lowest and lowest in the American League, Rich Hill, 0.78 ERA in May. And that is one reason why the Rays have won 16 out of 17 games, which is good. It's also that they hit pretty well too, which is kind of surprising, both given their history and when you look at their surface stats, which are not very impressive before you era adjust and park adjust. But yeah, the Rays are really good. It turns out surprising, not many people, but Rich Hill, perhaps surprising some people. He's still pretty good too. The old guy still got it he does he i mean again we will remind everyone to not get overly fussed about tiny minute bits of war accumulation although you know getting into june it starts getting more defensible but he's basically accrued as much uh war in third in 57 innings as uh he did

all of last year albeit only in 38.22 last year. So Rich Hill striking out more guys, walking fewer guys, right? Yeah, look at that. I can do math and look at rates and stuff. So yeah, good for Rich Hill. It's funny. Well, he's pitched more innings than he did last season, but we're also at the point in this year where we're basically as deep into the season as we ever got last year. Teams have played just about 60 games,

almost 60 games at this point. And that is how long the regular season was last year, if you recall. So yeah, imagine the season ending this week. And that's what we had last year last year sort of sucked for a lot of reasons yeah i wouldn't repeat it he's throwing his curveball a little less often thrown his cutter a little bit more but you know i don't know that he's anything but just rich hill but good for rich hill 41 goodness that's all i want him to be just rich hill just be good enough just be uh are we really gonna let a dick mountain reference go by given the rest of this? In this episode of all episodes? Nope.

The answer is no, we will not. The other thing is we got a response to our discussion last time we answered an email about whether it would work for MLB to use sticky stuff, foreign substances. I shouldn't even say sticky stuff on this episode either. Oh, no, Ben. Foreign substances as sort of a way to equalize competitive balance. So instead of using draft order, you would say, hey, terrible team, you get to keep using foreign substances, which in this scenario we have outlawed for other teams.

And Eric, our Patreon supporter, wrote in to say, in response to the idea about allowing certain teams to employ pitchers using a foreign substance, I'm reminded that this was in fact the case 101 years ago, sort of. During the winter meetings of 1919 to 1920, owners agreed to partially ban spitballs. They were each allowed to designate up to two spitballers in their rotations who would have license to use their not-so-fine substances. No other pitchers were permitted except the chosen two on each team. Then after the Ray Chapman tragedy in 1920, the spitball was outright banned, sort of.

The 17 remaining active pitchers with licenses to drool were grandfathered in and allowed to continue their trade until retirement with no newcomers permitted to take up spitballing. The last surviving flim thrower was Burley Grimes, who retired in 1935. And that reminded me of a great edition of Craig Wright's wonderful newsletter, Pages from Baseball's Past, which I always plug on this podcast. You can find it and subscribe at baseballspast.com. But a few years ago, Craig wrote about the grandfathering in of the Spitballers and how that affected their performance and performance across the league. And I will link to this, but I will just read a bit from it because it's interesting and relevant because imagine if

that's what they were to do now. I don't think that is what they will do now, but if this supposed crackdown in the next two weeks on foreign substances comes to pass, imagine MLB said, hey, whatever you're using now, you get to keep using, but we won't let anyone else start using it again. Don't think they will do that. Don't think they should do that or that there's any reason to do that. But if you said, you know, hey, these guys have learned to pitch in a certain way with these foreign substances and it would be unfair to take it away from them now. So we will let them just play out their careers and we'll ban it for everyone who's entering the league or you'll only be able to designate certain pitchers. The guys who are really loading up, they can keep doing it and everyone else can't do it. So just imagine if that were to happen because, as Eric notes, there is precedent for that. So Craig Wright wrote,

On February 9th, 1920, the Joint Rules Committee banned all foreign substances or other alterations to the ball. To accommodate Major League pitchers who were already established as spitballers, or other alterations to the ball to accommodate major league pitchers who were already established as spitballers, a list was created of 17 pitchers who would be allowed to throw the spitball for one more year to help smooth their transition to being conventional pitchers. The new rule greatly affected the pennant races and the World Series. The Brooklyn Dodgers had two of the eight grandfathered spitballers in the National League. One was their top pitcher, Burley Grimes, who in 1920 was third in the league in both

the area and wins. They also had spitballer Clarence Mitchell, who was five and two in a spot starter role. The Dodgers won the pennant and then lost the World Series to Cleveland, who had the most innings thrown by grandfathered spitballers. Stan Kowalewski and Slim Caldwell combined for over 550 innings and won 44 games for Cleveland with their wet ones. Kowalewski was especially dominating as he was second in the league in ERA and led in both strikeouts and fewest hits allowed per inning. So that is almost the scenario we were talking about where certain guys or certain teams get to do this and they get the advantage. And I don't know whether a spitball gives you more or less

of an advantage relative to non-spitballers than someone who is using advanced foreign substances that are not produced by one's own body. But perhaps we could test that. Someone should get in a lab and lather up with spit and see how that compares. But if you assume that it's comparable, then that's why it worked. And so Craig went on to note the five teams that did not have a legal spitballer had a combined winning percentage of 433 and included the two last place teams, the Athletics and the Phillies. But despite the competitive inequities manifested in the transition year, it was decided in December of 1920 to extend the exemption for the 17 registered spitballers to a lifetime

exemption. And this really helped those pitchers and lengthened their careers and improved their performance. And Craig says, it proved to be a tremendous boon to several of the Spitballers. Bill Doak had been a sub 500 pitcher before going on the list and afterward had his only 21 season

and was 82 and 68 as a grandfathered Spitballer. Urban Shocker had never been a 20 game winner until he became one of the handful of legal spitballers. He then had four straight 20-win seasons and ended up having the best winning percentage of any exempt spitballer. Jack Quinn was 36 years old going into 1920 and had fewer than 100 career wins. As a grandfathered spitballer, he seemed to pitch forever. He threw his last

major league pitch at age 49 and retired with 247 wins. In the first six years of the spitball ban, half of the 12 ERA titles were won by the exempt spitballers. Over the first seven years of the ban, the top three pitchers and win shares in the American League were three of the legal spitballers, Urban Shocker, Stan Kowalski, and Red Faber. Over in the National League, Burley Grimes was fifth in win shares and went on to win the most games among the grandfathered spitballers. So all these guys, or a lot of them, seemingly got a lot better when they were allowed to cheat in a way that no one else was. And he also points out that Grimes, Kowalski, and Faber all had Hall of Fame careers

with most of their success coming after they were exempt from the ban of the spitball. To put their advantage into perspective, there were 68 pitchers who pitched enough to qualify for the 1919 ERA titles. That winter, 14 of them were put on the list of pitchers who would be allowed to continue throwing the spitball. Three of those 14, that's 21%, became Hall of Famers. Among the other 54 ERA qualifiers in 1919, only four went on to the Hall of Fame. That's 7%, which suggests that being a grandfathered spitballer increased by about threefold the chances of having a Hall of Fame career. So I don't know if the groups that were chosen to be grandfathered in or not, whether they were different in performance pre-ban,

whether certain prominent pitchers were more likely to get the grandfather status or not, which maybe could skew things. But all in all, it certainly seems as if, yeah, having guys who can put stuff on the ball that is not allowed for everyone else, that would make a pretty big difference. So that's a historical precedent to consider as MLB maybe does something similar or at least makes more of an effort to eradicate another type of foreign substance. How would you allocate? Let's say they were like every team gets two. How would you allocate your two? What would the criteria be that you would use? I mean, I think that you'd i'm probably over complicating this in some respects i think the case for who benefits

the most is probably one that's fairly easy for teams to suss out but do you like you could be so sneaky and nefarious like you could decide that you will not let your young guys who have to go through arbitration be among the two because then you depress their results. I think it's probably better to just not trust teams with that. Isn't there some, I mean, there's not an explicit version of this in the enforcement as they're envisioning it. But the idea, at least in the beginning of the season, this I suppose could change. But was that that you know they were going to look in part for year-to-year variation in spin and so they were going to be not officially grandfathering but sort of effectively grandfathering some guys in

now how that brushes up against the testing component you know i think there's opportunity for the rubber to meet the road there but there there was some idea that like, unless you're showing a huge season to season spike that you might pass, you know, not undetected, of this or not pay more. But you could certainly figure out which guys would benefit most from being able to spin it, like who's most dependent on that, who gets the biggest boost to their spin rate from using stuff, whose arsenal is most dependent on that spin and movement. With some guys, it might not make that much of a difference. With other guys, it might be a make or break thing. So analytically, you probably could figure it out. And then, yeah, you just have to say, sorry, we ran some tests and it turns out we're picking this guy, not you. And I wonder also whether any teams would decide not to do this, to take some moral stance or something, because Craig also notes that the Athletics, Phillies, Pirates, Cubs, and Senators did not register a spitballer. Pirates owner Barney Dreyfus was so opposed to the spitball that he refused to register

Pittsburgh spitballer Hal Carlson. Carlson's career ERA prior to the ban was 14 points better than the league ERA. Forced to pitch without his spitball in the first five years of the ban, Carlson's ERA was 77 points worse than the league ERA. He eventually adapted to being a conventional pitcher and posted better than average ERAs after after that but there was clearly an adjustment period for him and he didn't get to keep using his spitball because his owner said no spitballs are bad which uh is probably a point in his favor but yeah it it hurt his player in that case and i guess hurt his team too interesting owners with moral stands. Curious. Yeah, how about that? And I also wanted

to mention, to absolutely no one's surprise, I wrote a piece about Shohei Otani that was published on Tuesday. I will link to it, though if you are a regular listener of this podcast, you've probably heard me make some of the points I would make in there. I was going to ask, when I saw it go up on the ringer, I was like, should I read this or should I just ask Ben to tell me the stuff he hasn't told me about Otani already when we podcast later? Yeah, I definitely covered some ground that would be familiar to podcast listeners. But one thing I found out as I was working on this, I wanted to try to capture Otani's appeal. And one way I tried to do that was by asking people who run certain websites and sites with player pages to tell me where Otani's player page ranks in terms of visitors this season. So MLB.com, Shohei Otani has by far the most visited player page this season since opening day.

by far the most visited player page this season since opening day he has more visits to his player page than anyone and the second place player who is mike trout has uh way fewer hits otani has 57 percent more views of his page than trout and i also asked sean dolanarinar of Fangraphs. And at Fangraphs, it is even more lopsided. Otani is far and away the number one guy, even if you just count his hitter page. If you lump his hitter and pitcher page views together, he's like almost double Trout. So it's like Trout and any other one player or any other three players combined do not have the traffic that Otani alone has. So it's not just me is what I'm saying. Although I probably have been responsible for like a good number of those Fangraphs

page visits. I don't know how many exactly. Should have asked like Sean, check this IP, see how many times my IP has visited the Otani player page. Although I guess I've used multiple computers. But yeah, that is one reflection, you know, one little piece of data that I did not have just to show that he is kind of capturing people's imagination. So it's not just me.

He's really like a sensation. So that's why I wanted to write about him because I say these things on the podcast, but I had not actually had anything down on the page since spring training. And there's been a lot of Otani action since then. So you can go check that out. It's about the stats and everything, but it's also about the experience of watching him and rooting for him. And also whether we will actually see a successor, another two-way player come along, which is far from assured at this point still. Like the longer he succeeds at this level, I think the more likely it is that he will inspire copycats and that those players will get a chance to test their mettle. But there was like a wave

of articles from 2017 to 2019 about how there was like a new generation of two-way players, and it was Otani, and it was Hunter Green, and it's Brendan McKay and it's, you know, Jared Walsh and Jake Cronenworth and Caleb Cowart and Christian Bethencourt and all of these guys. And really, Otani is almost the only one still standing. I mean, I guess McKay is kind of still a two-way player, although he's recovering from an injury, so he hasn't been pitching. But there just aren't a lot of guys like Either their careers have stagnated or they've specialized. They've picked a lane like Hunter Green and Cronenworth and Walsh, who have had a lot of success as hitters, but it's far from assured. I was talking to Eric Langenhagen about this, and there are four players in MLB.com's top 60 draft prospects list who are plausibly two-way players still at this point.

So that's encouraging that there is some hope on the horizon and that those guys might not be forced to specialize. Bubba Chandler, Carson Williams, Spencer Schwellenbach, and Braden Montgomery all have chances. And there are three guys this year in the minors who are kind of doing the two-way thing and have played multiple games as a pitcher and as a DHer at another non-pitcher fielding position. Sean Reynolds with the Marlins, Tanner Dodson with the Rays, and Lucas Erseg with the Brewers. But none of them is a top prospect or at all assured of actually making it to the

majors and making it as a two-way player. So that's kind of why I prize Otani so much is that there isn't a backup plan necessarily if this goes wrong. We really might not see another attempt like this ever or for a century or something. We might know the answer to this, and I just don't remember when the roster limits were going to be put in place, and then they were obviously scrubbed, and now it sounds like they're going to come back in some form. How did two-way players count against a team's pitcher limit? I don't remember if there was a definitive answer to that question.

I know that there was some concern around Otani and how his injury-plagued year was going to factor into that. Yeah, there was an Otani exemption. It was kind of written to allow Otani to be a designated two-way player, sort of. But yeah, did that actually happen? I'm reading from MLB.com now. Every player on a team's active roster will have to be designated as a pitcher or a position player. The designation must stay the same for the entire

season. And starting in 2020, the number of pitchers a club can carry on the active roster will be capped, which didn't happen because of the pandemic. This is from 2019. Only players designated as pitchers will be allowed to pitch in a game, including in the postseason with three exceptions. The game goes into extra innings. A team is winning or losing by six or more runs. The player has earned a two-way designation. And the way to get that designation was if you pitched at least 20 major league innings and play at least 20 major league games as a position player or designated hitter with at least three plate appearances in each game. And then once a player has earned the two-way player designation, he maintains that

status for the rest of the season and the following season. And while he has that status, his team no longer has to use one of its pitching roster spots on him. So basically a two-way player is a position player who's allowed to pitch with no restrictions. And then it said, how does this affect Otani? And that's what you were asking about. So Otani is the only true two-way player at the major league level. He's also the only player who would qualify for two-way status if the rule went into effect this year as opposed to next. pitching at all this season as he recovers from Tommy John surgery. So he'll have to re-earn his two-way player designation in 2020 when the new rule is implemented. The Angels should be able to designate Otani as a pitcher for 2020. There's no restriction on players who've been designated pitchers as far as letting them bat. It's only players carrying a position player designation who cannot also pitch. So once he reached the 20 innings pitched and 20 batting games threshold, he'd immediately qualify for a two-way player under the rule for the rest of 2020

and all of 2021. And at that point, the Angels would potentially gain an extra pitcher spot on their roster. But none of that ended up happening. Right. None of that ended up happening. And I would imagine that, you know, I don't have to tell you like otanis are very rare and some of that is is a development thing but it isn't all that like it's just very hard to be very good at both sides of the game and so i doubt that there will be too too many guys who are suddenly looked at as more viable two-way options than they might have otherwise been as a result of roster construction limitations but you know if it gets down to like 11, I wouldn't be surprised if it's entertained at least for longer for guys than it would be were the roster rules to remain more flexible in terms

of how you sort of designate your pitchers and your hitters. So it'll be interesting to see if that matters. Although I don't imagine it will all right maybe we can just run through a couple of these because they're related to things that we have discussed one kyle our patreon supporter says over the last year or two i have heard wander franco described as a generational talent i've also heard other young players like vlad guerrero jr fernando tatis jr one soto r, Ronald Acuna Jr., a lot of juniors, etc., etc., referred to as such. This leads to two questions I have for you. What is the length of a baseball generation? How far back of a debut would still be considered the same generation as Juan DeFranco? And two, how many generational players can you have in a given generation? While all of the above mentioned players are obviously extremely good, should they all be considered a generational talent? And I was thinking about this myself because I was reading this MLB.com piece

that was collecting all of the praise for Otani. And there were people in there calling Otani a generational player. And I think that's pretty inarguable. He's like a multi-generational player. But then there was also this quote from Mariners manager Scott Service. There's a lot of kind of generational type players running around the game right now, and we've just never seen anything like it before. It's very, very unique. Sort of paradoxical that there could be a lot of generational players in the game at the same time who are just like, by definition, part of the same generation. So I was trying to square that in my mind. And we may have discussed this on the podcast at some point, maybe when we were making fun of Scott Boris for calling all of his clients generational players but i wonder like in some sense i i think it it's okay for service to say that because the way i think about it is that you can kind of have different tiers of

generationalness like otani is totally generational but then you can have players who are maybe generational for a franchise which is like maybe what we mean when we say that sometimes. So like, you know, Juan Soto can be generational for the Nationals or something, although maybe not because like Bryce Harper was just a few years ago. But maybe that's not a great example. But, you know, you could have players who are great for a certain team that has not had a player of that caliber for a generation. So they could be generational for that team, even though there is someone who's part of the same generation on another team who is generational for that team. So I think you could say that, but probably we're overusing the term a little bit.

It loses something if you have many players running around who are generational players at the same time. But people are reaching for ways to describe just how many fun, young, exciting players there are in baseball right now, which is a good problem to have. It's not a problem at all. It's only a problem in terms of terminology. And what do we really mean by it? You know, like, do we just mean the best guy? Do we mean a generation defining player, right? That strikes me as something that might be a more broadly applicable term, right? That you could have this crop of young, exciting players who all kind of came up within a few years of one another

and they are marking and sort of shaping this generation's understanding of the game in a way that you know is a little bit different than before the very very unique you know i try not to be pedantic i mean i'm paid to be pedantic because i'm an editor but very unique that not that one i i do remain kind of a fuss budget about anyway yes because they're it's either unique or it's not. It can't be very unique. No, I'm with you on that one. Can't.

Sorry, Scott. Anyway, but you're right that each franchise has generational players for their own franchise, which then really potentially dilutes the term depending on how good the franchise is. True. really potentially dilutes the term depending on how good the franchise is true definition for generational might be you know significantly less impressive depending on the team that you're rooting for it is probably an overused term but i don't know what else we would say what else would we say ben how else could we use it i think of generations as being like, what, 15 years long, 10, 15 years long, 20 years long. How old are millennials?

40 to... Yeah, almost 40 to... 25? 20. Yeah, mid-20s probably. So like 15 years, you know? So probably like that because we all agree about how generations are defined and never fight about it. Yeah. But I don't know.

I think we know what people mean by that. What I take that as meaning is a guy who you could credibly see being not necessarily inducted into the Hall of Fame, but in a Hall of Fame conversation. Like, that's what that means to me. Like a guy where when his name comes up on the ballot, you don't worry about him going one and done, and you expect there ballot you don't worry about him going one and done and you expect there to be some real conversation about him and some of that conversation for a guy like you know like trout is going to be like well yeah he's in the hall of fame and that's

the end of the conversation it's going to be the most boring profile that jj ever writes because there will be so little controversy but so much accomplishment so in that respect it's different i think that what we mean are like guys where when their candidacy comes up we consider it seriously and don't find it to be laughable in some way yeah i think everyone kind of gets the gist and i think also a baseball generation can be a little bit different from a human generation so i think it's okay to use a shorter term there's actually a study i remember reading about that how long is a baseball generation? Which I can't find right now, but if I find it after the episode, I will provide an update at the end. There's just a lot of turnover in MLB. So arguably generations come and go and rise and decline quickly, but still maybe

we should try to find other terms at times so that we don't water it down too much. But yeah, anyway, I think our millennial estimate was roughly right. Although Wikipedia's page for generation says that it's generally considered to be about 20 to 30 years. Oh, really? I don't know. It's a little longer than I would think. Wow. I mean, I don't know. But yeah, millennials are like 81 to 96, I think, technically.

So 15 years. Has geriatric millennial made its way into the... I hope not. Sometimes I think that people just want to be mean. Yeah. And this is a question that relates to something that Theo also touched on. This is from Doug, Patreon supporter, who says, how much of defensive positioning should be attributed to a player's

skill or is where a player stands before a pitch completely determined by the coaching and front office staff? And that is a thorny question and a pretty impossible question to answer from afar and with war or defensive

run saved or whatever. clearly there is a team component and clearly there is a player component and the exact weighting there varies by player and team and not just whether the team gives the player that information but then whether the player actually absorbs and applies that information so So it's really hard to know. And that's why no one really makes an effort to try to divide up the credit there. There are team positioning, defensive run saved metrics, and you can either attribute it all to the player, you can attribute it all to the team, or i guess you could kind of arbitrarily come up with some split but really it it just varies so widely by organization and by player that i

don't know if i can make any blanket statement like yeah clearly i i guess the team component is increasing over time whereas before it was know, the player's personal study or instincts or whatever that was making the difference. And it still does make a difference, but it's probably leveled the playing field in that that information is available to all players and they can use it or not. And certain teams may emphasize it more. So, you know, with some teams and players, it may be like almost like amateur baseball or something where the coaches teams call the pitches. You know, you can't attribute any of that to the catcher or the pitcher necessarily. Whereas with other teams, it may be largely the players and certain players still don't really

like to get that information or use that information and maybe they don't even need it in some cases so yeah that's that's a tough one well and it and it can change for a guy over the course of his career right like you know i think that as players age and maybe they're less you know like a pitcher is less able to rely on stuff alone right that they have to be more receptive to information beyond that to help refine and sort of mature their repertoire. So I think it can depend for a given player even over the span of a couple of years. So it's really hard to untangle.

I think you're right. It's quite tricky. But yeah, you still have to execute though, which I think is always part of the hangup with attribution. You know, it's a big part of it. It's like even armed with the right information you then have to go do. And that is not something that is a given, right? The ability to actually go do what you've been told is sort of the most optimal way to approach a given bat or your positioning in the field or whatever you still have to be able to go and do it yeah so that makes it thorny too yeah and this is why i wanted to

bring this up now because theo epstein said that he kind of wants to put more of positioning into players hands or at least have less of a heavy-handed in-game role for teams and front offices, essentially. So he said, analytics obviously have their place in the game, but it'd be great if they're used more for pre-game preparation and not as much in-game. We want to improve the pace of play, but what slows the pace down is the synthesis of a ton of information that's in the game now. If you can limit the analytical stuff to pre-game and let the players use their instincts and their

intelligence to position themselves, it would lead to a faster pace of play. It puts a premium on players' instincts and intelligence. We have players who are more athletic now than we've had in the history of the game, but it would be great if we could find more opportunities for them to show their athleticism. Fans don't want to see

players look robotic. The players are smart. They understand the way the game is played better than anyone else. So let them position themselves a little bit. Let's put the game back in the player's hands. They can use their instincts, use their intelligence, and put their athleticism on display more for fans to get that entertainment value. And I find myself pretty sympathetic to this perspective. And I remember on a long ago episode having a slight dispute with Sam. I think it was inspired by that controversy between, I think it was the Mets and the Dodgers because the Dodgers were supposedly using laser range finders or something to mark on the field

where their fielders should stand. And I was saying that something in me kind of revolted at that idea. And I think Sam kind of took the opposite position. But I didn't really like the idea that the Dodgers were essentially just like marking a point on the field and then the players would just walk out there and stand there like it's smart. You know, I'm sure they do a good job of it and all. something about kind of taking that responsibility and that skill entirely out of players' hands like that, like just marking where they should stand with a little, I don't know, golf marker or something. It just seems too simple. There should be a role for players either positioning themselves or at least following the instructions themselves without having it so explicitly pointed out to them. And I hadn't really considered this as a pace of play problem, although I suppose Epstein

is probably right about that. But I think I just, I like it better because when players first started using cards, you know, positioning cards, whether they were outfielders who would pull out a card to see where to stand, or now catchers will have those wristbands that will tell them what pitch to call, or sometimes even pitchers will have cards. And at first I thought, oh, this is cool. It's new and novel. They're using information. I'm in favor of information. This is good. It's a competitive advantage, all of that. But now that it's become just reading the scripts like it's the same lines ultimately but it does take something away from it i mean it it it takes your suspension of disbelief out a little bit it removes you from that experience which you know you don't have that same suspension of disbelief in baseball but also just the fact that they kind of have like

the answer keys and they're pulling them out during the test, you know, it's like, well, maybe they should have to memorize that, right. Or, you know, and, and I think that's good because it does put a little bit more of the skill and the performance back in the hands of the players. Like even if it's just memorizing this information before the game, they still have to keep it in their heads and deploy it effectively during the game, which is a skill, you know? So I think I'm actually in favor of that. I don't know if it's easy to eradicate that, but you probably could.

You probably could just have umpires come out and say, no, you can't look at that card, which has actually happened. I forget who it was. umpires come out and say no you can't look at that card which has actually happened i forget who it was it was uh a phillies pitcher and i think it was joe west came out and and told him that he couldn't use the card that he had even though he was allowed to to use it but you know i don't know am i am i preaching to the choir here or do you not care about this or you fine with it it was austin dav, by the way. Joe West came out and confiscated his card. I'm not bothered by the cards.

I don't find the explanation that it would improve pace of play to be particularly persuasive. Positioning guys on the field doesn't take very much time. It's not as if they stop game action to do that they do it well you know it's not unusual to see the bench coach like standing in the dugout being like move over there and he's doing you know big arms he's got big arms to be like you gotta move over there and he does it while the game's like the game action is in progress it doesn't stop the game to do that so i don't find the argument that it would like improve pace of play to be particularly persuasive setting that aside like i guess that i think it would be fine to limit the in-game instruction but i also don't

care and like you know we still have base coaches So what about fielding is different? No, yeah, no, that's a good question. And mound visits and all of that. So, yeah. Right. So we have other opportunities in the course of play for the coaching staff to provide an assist. And so I'm not saying that there isn't a difference. I just would need to think about why we would treat this particular aspect of it differently.

Perhaps it's not the same, quite the same as a mound visit, because there you do have to stop the game to go out there and talk to the guy. And then the ump comes out and is like, you're taking too long. And then you're like, yeah, fine. And I'd be fine with banning that too. I think I've actually advocated in the past, like instead of limiting mound visits, just do away with them, you know, other than like injury visits or whatever,

because really like you should be able to plan for the hitters you're going to face before the inning starts. And if it's mechanics or something, well, I mean, again, that is a skill, right? Being able to self-diagnose and self-correct, and you can always come back to the dugout and get that pointer after the inning. So I actually would be totally fine with doing away with that also. But you're right. It is consistent with that. Oh, Ben, you're on my mind. Right.

But it's consistent with base coaching, right? I would say that it's more of a piece with that than it is with a mound visit where you do have a disruption in the game's action. But I don't know that that means we need to make room for it but i also because it has been so common and such a part of the fabric of the game for so long even if the fielding positioning part of it is more obvious than it used to be or certainly again you see the guy doing big arms yeah it just doesn't bother me that doesn't mean that i can't get bothered about it i mean if we know anything about me it's

that i have the you know i'm susceptible to getting riled up but yeah i'll just wear you down and keep bringing it up until you are bothered by it the way that you're bothered by the zombie runner i don't find it to be a problem i like when they pull their little card out and they're looking at it i like it when i like it when a reliever pulls the little card out and it's not a good reliever and it's a really good hitter it's like you have a you have a a not good reliever i'm not gonna pick on a new one let's call him bob and bob's out there and he's facing mike trout and he pulls the little card out of his cap and you're like does it just say yeah he's good what is it on the card you know

um i like it when fielders are distracted by other stuff and then the the bench coach has to do really big arms to get his attention i like it when an outfielder is is looking at his card to figure out exactly what the outfield alignment's gonna be and he looks really unimpressed with whatever's on the card like he's like this stupid math i don't like it so i i think that i've talked myself into liking it a lot and thinking that we can't possibly let this beautiful part of the game go because where would we be without it yeah well i'd be fine with doing away with the base coaches too i think we've had an email about that i say say, get rid of all the coaches. Players fend for themselves. But still, having like uniformed personnel on the field who are there for that kind of

in-game intervention, maybe it feels a little different than just like the card that's printed out by the intern in the front office or something. Like, I guess the distinction between coaching staff and front office is, you know, pretty much broken down at this point anyway. So really, what's the difference? What the source of that information is? But I don't know. It just, it seems like you're breaking the fourth wall or something. It's just like breaking the game to say, here's preparation that maybe you should have done before the actual game was going on. Like, we're watching you do your studying right now. Like, this should have been done off screen is kind of how I feel about it. Yeah, I just really am not bothered by it. And I like that a lot of it takes place without a break in the action, you know, and somehow they managed to not yell. They do big arms. They'd managed to not yell. It's like I've

been watching, you know, playoff basketball. And first of all nba coaches and i get it like hopefully everybody's vaccinated but like they're the worst about their math so they just pull them down so that they can yell and i'm like we've been doing this for too long for you all to still be doing that but there's a lot of yelling because you know it's loud in there and you gotta you gotta yell but there's a lot less yelling and in baseball probably because you don't want to be like here is our strategy. Right. I would imagine that that's part of it.

Huh. I'm going to try to get worked up about this for you. I don't think I'm going to succeed, but I'm going to try. I'm going to think about it the rest of today and tomorrow and be like, can I find a way to find this objectionable so that Ben and I can share this? Although, again, you know, us having different views on something for once is maybe not the worst thing. No, it's good to disagree sometimes. Yeah. It's not that I disagree so much as that I don't care.

That's fine too. All right. The last thing, just want to get this quick stat blast in because I have updated numbers here. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Deist past Okay, as you may have noticed, times have been tough for the Baltimore Orioles lately. As we record on Tuesday afternoon, the Orioles have lost 14 straight games. It's the longest losing streak since the 2013 Astros, I believe, lost 15 straight. Funny how when you hire ex-Astros people to rebuild another team, they kind of do it in a similar way. And that team tanks and is is both a good story and a good player.

And so we got a question. This was last Thursday. We got this question from Robbie in Potomac, Maryland, who says, As I have been watching the Orioles this year, I have noticed that Trey Mancini is good, while the rest of the offense is mostly not. There are some good guys there, but it's true. In seeking some way to quantify this, I saw that Mancini has 42 RBI and 30 runs, and the Orioles as a whole have scored 191 runs as of the morning of May 27th. Thus, Mancini has contributed to, quote unquote, 72 out of 191, or 37.7% of the Orioles' runs this season. Yes, the home runs are double-counted,

but I think that's fair, as he is both the run producer and scorer. Is this a lot? As a Washington Wizards fan, I often hear similar numbers stated with regard to Russell Westbrook's points and assists, but I haven't really heard any questions of this flavor regarding baseball.

37.7% seems pretty high, but where does it rank all-time? So, yes, of course, people could quibble with the metrics we are using here. And yes, RBI and runs and its old school box score statistics. But I think it's kind of fun in this case because we're talking about was the player directly involved with scoring a run? Either he drove it in or he scored it himself. And so I think this is worth looking into.

And the numbers have changed a little bit. So the percentage has fallen a little bit. Now the Orioles are through 54 games and Trey Mancini has scored 30 runs and driven in 42. That is 35.6% of the Orioles' 202 runs. 6% of the Orioles' 202 runs. So that is regressing to the mean slightly because since the email, the Orioles have played five games and scored nine runs, and Mancini only played in three of those and didn't score any runs and didn't drive in any either. But I still got a breakdown here from our newly appointed frequent StatBlast consultant, Ryan Nelson, who says, this seemed like it would be pretty straightforward,

but I ended up digging deeper and deeper into it and found some fun stuff. So Ryan is calling it a contribution rate. And he notes that the player with the highest contribution rate in a full season is 1972 Nate Colbert for the San Diego Padres. Colbert had a good but not exceptional season that year. He had 87 runs and 118 RBI. His 198 combined runs in RBI was 40.57 of San Diego's total of 488 runs, which was fourth worst in the league. The Padres had a 79 WRC plus as a team that year. Colbert had a 139. It still blows my mind that Nate Colbert is the Padres franchise leader in career home runs, by the way. I guess Tatis or Machado or someone will probably pass him a few years from now. At least the Padres hope that will be the case. But still, the fact that that has stood for so long and that he doesn't really have that many home runs for someone who's leading a

franchise. I mean, he's only got 163 with the Padres. It's just not a big number. So that always surprises me. But that is one way you could do it. Second place, Ryan Wright is a little different. That belongs to one of the all-time great offensive seasons, 2001 Sammy Sosa. Sosa led the league in runs 146 and RBI 160 that year, but famously did not lead the league in homers despite hitting 64. His combined 306 was 39.38 of the Cubs' 777 runs. So you could have a pretty good hitter on a terrible offensive team. You could have a great hitter on a pretty good offensive team. And Ryan writes there, two more seasons with a better contribution rate than Trey Mancini's 37.31 as of last Thursday. 1935, Wally Berger for the Boston Braves,

which was 38.17%. And 2011, Matt Kemp for the Dodgers. 1963 Hank Aaron is fifth. In 2020, Jose Ramirez is sixth, although that was obviously in a shortened season. So Mancini, when this email came in, was on pace to be fifth place all time, but there's a long way to go. And now that his contribution rate has fallen somewhat, he is only on pace, so to speak, not obviously technically on pace for 18th place all time. So that is what his current rate would give him. And Ryan really went above and beyond and also provided the leader through any number of games of the season. So if you want to keep tabs on Mancini and the SAT as the season goes on, you can do that. So Mancini is through 54 games. And as noted, his contribution rate is below 36%. Now, the all-time leader through 54 games is Willie Mays in 1964, who had a 43.6 rate at that point. So that was pretty high. And Ryan wraps up some interesting small sample size observations. The 1968 Dodgers only scored one run in their first four games,

and that run came off of a Ron Fairley solo shot. His one run and one RBI gave him a 200% contribution rate through four games. In 2018, Joe Panik pulled off the same feat 200% through four games, but his came as the Giants won both of their first two games, won nothing off the back of two solo homers by Panik. The Giants then lost 5-0 and 9-0 in the next two games. 1958, Boston Red Sox player Jackie Jensen had the longest season start of 100% or higher when he started the season 5-18 with four homers in the Sox's first five games. His four runs and eight RBI was 133% of the nine team runs.

And none of the four players to best Mancini's rate as of last week is a Hall of Famer. But the next 11 highest are by 10 Hall of Famers and Jose Ramirez. So just rounding out the top 10, as Ryan mentioned, it goes Nate Colbert, 72, Sammy Sosa, 2001, Wally Berger, 35, Matt Kemp, 2011, Hank Aaron in 63, Jose Ramirez last year, and then Chuck Klein in the Baker Bowl in 1933, Ted Williams in 1942, Dale Murphy in 1985, and Babe Ruth in 1921. And I will, of course, link to the spreadsheet with the data as usual, kind of a fun list to look down. So probably not a list that you want to be on in the sense that your team is probably bad, but on the other hand, you are having a good

season at least. So that's something, but I guess you probably as a fan don't want one of these seasons. I don't know what the collective team winning percentage of the top guys is, but if you're concentrating that many of your runs in the hands of one bat, it better be a really all-time great bat or else it's not a good sign as it is not for the Orioles and Mancini. Yeah. I mean, it would be some comfort, I suppose, to know that you are having your own individual good season, but I think that in general, yeah, you would want to be having an individual good season amidst a variety of other Sterling seasons so that you might continue that season into October. All right.

That's all I got. You have anything more to say about boners before we go? I really do not. Well, you might, but it sounds like you're restraining yourself. I just think. No, I think you have the right idea. We probably covered that topic. I have another joke.

Share it. No. Okay. You know, I just, I love our listeners, and many of them are bright, funny people, and some of them would just tweet weird, out-of-cont context stuff at me. And I think I will.

I think that there's enough grist for the mill. Put it that way. Okay. We'll save some for next time, perhaps. Yeah. I mean, but if they last more than four hours, then you know what I mean. And on that note. Good on Dunge.

Well, the Orioles snapped their streak They beat the Twins And Trey Mancini had another good day But he produced only three Of the Orioles combined 14 runs in RBI It was a 7-4 victory So his contribution rate dipped again

But that was good news for Baltimore A couple posts to direct you to I was thinking about this as we were having our conversation About generational players But I couldn't quite find this study in time. I was able to dig it up after we finished speaking. A couple years ago, April 2019, Tom Tango did a post at his site, tangotiger.com, where he tried to quantify how many years are in a sports generation and then how often you get a generational player. And he did it via Twitter polls. So he basically asked his own followers, do you consider this player generational?

He actually did it in hockey. And he found that based on the line where his followers started to say, no, not generational, there were about 10 to 15 generational players over a 40-year time period. So by that measure, by what Tom's followers actually consider a generational player to be, you get a generational player every three to four years on average. that the average life expectancy of a player's pro sports career is a lot shorter than an average lifespan, then maybe it's okay to have a sports generation be a lot shorter than a generation generally is. Players come and go more quickly than people come and go. He actually did the

same series of polls with baseball players instead of hockey players, and he got even more generational players. He got to something like 26 players over a 52-year time period, which would mean that a generational player in baseball comes along every two years. He said, in baseball, I think you'd be hard-pressed to set the number of generational players in the 52-year time period at under 13, so every four years we have a generational baseball player. If you think of humans with an average lifespan of 80 years, a generation is about 25% of that, or 20 years. For an athlete, they can go close to 20 years for a full career. So saying four or five years to denote a generation seems reasonable enough. So that's another way to make

what Scott Service said make some sort of sense. And the players could be clustered. So maybe you don't get a new one every four years, you happen to get a couple of them in the same year, and then you don't get another one for a while. So still sort of overused, I think. But Tango's redefinition makes some sense. And then secondly, just wanted to point you to a Fangraphs post by Ben Clemens published on Tuesday called What's Eating Francisco Lindor? We talked about this last week. Why is Lindor slumping?

Why isn't he hitting better? And we were kind of perplexed. We noted that he's doing a lot of things sort of the same, but he's not getting the same results. And we weren't doing the deepest of dives. It was a bit of banter. So I feel sort of vindicated that Ben kind of came up empty too. He identified various minor factors that are probably suppressing Lindor's stats, but he concluded, I'll level with you. I can't figure out why this is all happening at once. Maybe the answer is that Lindor is just a little off his game and a little unlucky at the same time. He's just not hitting the ball as well as he normally does, period. He hasn't slumped when it comes to strikeouts and walks. His swinging strike rate is

roughly unchanged, and he's making his customary high amount of contact while walking at a career high rate. We mentioned a lot of that, and Ben goes into much deeper detail, and there are some ways in which Lindor is clearly producing or not producing differently from before, then the question becomes, well, why is that happening? Is it a mechanical issue? And that's another level of analysis that one could do and some have done. But if you heard our discussion about that and were left wondering, so wait, why is Lindor not hitting? And you wanted more information? I refer you to Ben's post, which may still leave you kind of confused. Ben writes, for the most part, Lindor has done what he always does, put a ton of balls in play without overwhelming power and

gotten the short end of the stick. This isn't a dramatic change in his game, but rather the ugly downside of a volume-based offensive approach combined with a small but real slump in contact quality. That's small consolation for a ravaged New York roster, but it bodes well for the rest of the season and the rest of his 10-year contract to boot. Lastly, on a recent episode, 1694, Meg and I discussed the bogus numbers about All-Star game revenue that have been bandied about and how people shouldn't believe that MLB moving the All-Star game from Georgia to Denver cost Cobb County or local businesses or both $100 million or more. Well, on Monday, MLB and the MLB Players Association and MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark were sued by a conservative small business advocacy organization called Job Creators Network,

which demanded the immediate return of the game to Georgia and $100 million in damages to local and state small businesses, plus $1 billion in punitive damages. The president and CEO of this network said that MLB robbed the small businesses of Atlanta, many of them minority-owned, of $100 million. We want the game back where it belongs, etc., etc. I saw some news outlets just repeat the pretty baseless claims about enormous windfalls coming from All-Star Games.

Others provided the proper context and counters to those claims. And this lawsuit sounds like an extreme long shot for multiple reasons. I enjoyed the quote about this in an NBC News story from Nova Southeastern University law professor Robert Jarvis, who teaches a course on legal issues in baseball and co-wrote the textbook Baseball and the Law, Cases and Materials. He said, this is the dumbest complaint I have ever read. If this was turned in as a law school exam, you would have given it an F and counseled the student to find a different line of work. Mr. Jarvis is not mincing words there. Anyway, maybe this will be dismissed before it actually reaches court, but it would be kind of amusing if MLB did actually have to defend itself here because it would probably be forced to

discredit those revenue numbers. So I don't know whether to root for this thing to get tossed or for it to go far enough that MLB actually has to go on the record saying that actually there isn't that much of a revenue boost. Either way, I suppose there would be positives to take away. 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 timothy plachinsky jared hirsch dylan heinzen paul and david byerman

thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild you can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and spotify and other podcast platforms keep your questions and comments for me and meg coming via email at podcastfangraphs.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 another episode soon. In honor of the inaugural Lou Gehrig Day this week, I will play you out with a song that was recorded and sent to us by longtime listener David Newberry. It is called The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth,

and it is off his 2020 album, As Far Away As You Can Go Without Coming Back. You can find that at davidnewberry.bandcamp.com. Take it away, David. Thank God for my health and I will Keep winning games, good For what it's worth When it comes to winning I'm the luckiest man On the face of the earth