Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1704: How the Foreign-Substance Crackdown Could Go

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter (sans spoilers) about baseball movie A Quiet Place Part II, Eric Sogard sliding over first base, a Travis Jankowski TOOTBLAN, Miguel Sanó repeatedly predicting success, and Jesse Winker raking, then consider whether it’s actually “unfortunate” that the first true two-way player in ages is as good as Shohei Ohtani, […]

Ignoring all of the remedies Believing all of the rumors With their endless database I want to sit with my enemies And say we should have done this sooner While I look them in the face Maybe that will crack the case Hello and welcome to episode 1704 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangrafts. Hello, Meg. Hello. I went to a movie this weekend in an actual theater, just like the before times theaters are still standing. I went with my wife to see A Quiet Place Part 2. I'm not hyper romantic about movie theaters. I like them, but I'm also perfectly happy to watch a movie at home.

But from time to time, there's something you want to see that you can't stream yet, and we are returning to regular activities. I know you've been to baseball games. I went to a theater, and I bring this up because A Quiet Place Part 2, it turns out, is a baseball movie, which I did not know going in and would not have assumed. going in and would not have assumed. If you know the setup for the film, you would not think that it would be a baseball movie. Although we've seen like Signs was a baseball movie very much. And this is sort of in the same vein. For anyone who doesn't know A Quiet Place, it's about these monsters who can't see, but they can hear everything. And so everyone has to sneak around if they're still surviving so that they don't attract the monster's attention. And it's Emily Blunt and John Krasinski and their kids trying to survive. So this is the sequel. And I'm not giving anything away here because this is in every trailer. But in the sequel, there is a sequence at the start that covers how this calamity happened, or at least as the calamity is occurring, as these monsters are attacking for the first time. What I did not see in the trailer is that there's actually a baseball game that takes place during this sequence. So there's a little league game. It's like this is normal life before everything goes to hell.

Everyone's just in this idyllic pastoral setting playing a baseball game. And I maintain that baseball is still overrepresented in movies relative to its popularity. I think we mentioned that when we talked about Sonic in the baseball scene and of course, Tom and Jerry. The reason why baseball is in so many things is that it's so wholesome and it's America and national pastime and all of that, even if that's not so much true anymore. And I do not have an hour on A Quiet Place Part 2 and its baseball scene the way I did on Tom and Jerry. But there was something that kind of caught my attention and made me go, that was sort of weird. that kind of caught my attention and made me go,

that was sort of weird. It set off whatever siren in my head goes off when we watch a baseball scene in something, and it's not quite right. In this scene, a runner is rounding third and heading toward home, and Killian Murphy, who is in this movie, he's watching, and he starts shouting at the kid, dive, dive, dive,

as if he's telling a submarine to submerge or something and i thought it was weird because you probably wouldn't say dive no you would say slide and yeah i leaned over and whispered to my wife why did he say dive and not slide which i'm sure she really was happy about then it turns out that there's a reason for this and and again, I don't want to spoil anything specific for anyone, but the daughter of the Krasinski and Blunt characters is deaf. And so Cillian Murphy in this scene asks her how you say dive in sign language. And I won't spoil how that comes back later in the movie, but it comes back later in the movie that he has that knowledge now.

And so that, I think, is why he said dive and not slide. And it probably didn't stand out to anyone else. But to me, it's kind of contrived that it came back later in that way and that they had to have him say dive instead of slide, or it wouldn't have worked in the later scene where this is invoked again. So I see what you're doing, Krasinski, with your screenwriting tricks. And I'm sure he knows that that's not quite the common parlance. Like you can say dive, of course, but usually you would say slide. So it stood out as awkward to me. And then later on, I realized, oh, OK, that's why they did it. I love that your first in-person movie experience in a theater, again,

still deals with some post-apocalyptic reality. Yeah. In which a community of people must rally together to deal with an existential and external threat to their well-being. Right. I couldn't have just eased back into it with a little light entertainment. I guess I could have gone to see The Conjuring or something instead. So this was better than that. But anyway, if anyone has seen that and had the same thought, let me know. Or if anyone does see it and sees what I'm talking about, you will have that moment of realization that our brains are all broken and we can't help but think these things. that our brains are all broken and we can't help but think these things. This is part of the issue with movie trailers generally is that they can kind of function in the same way

where you're given enough that you can kind of piece together everything that happens in the movie. Or you remember scenes from it as you're progressing through the film and then you're like, oh, I get what this is leading to. It's better when the contrivances are are concealed and you are you are taken aback you're like ah what a thing i've learned i've seen in this place that is meant to be quiet it's a quiet place i haven't seen the first one yeah it's pretty good i mean i i know i i have had it spoiled for me i know what happens we will not spoil it

further for those who have also not seen it it's an interesting conceit for a film and then i was very surprised to see that they were going to make a second one because it seemed from what i understand sort of tidily not totally resolved but somewhat resolved but we only have so many ideas i think is is the thing that we've discovered. It's a lot like the discourse around strikeouts and the offensive environment. It all just comes back again. So there you go.

Anyway, if you're looking for something to see, if you are also returning to theaters, then check out the baseball movie that I saw, A Quiet Place Part 2. And on the same day I was seeing that, did you see the slide slash dive that was happening in the Cubs game involving Eric Sogard? Yeah, I sure did. I have never seen this before. Eric Sogard slid and just clear-

He cleared it. He missed the bag. He cleared it and clean missed it. Yep. He cleared it. first base or should you not? And should you just run through the bag? And does it cost you speed? Most of those debates presuppose that if you do slide or dive head first, you will touch the bag. That part is not normally in doubt. But in this case, he did. He just somehow slid entirely over the bag despite his head being right there and his hands and everything. You'd think that would be the one advantage of sliding head first is that it's hard to miss the bag, and yet he managed it. Yeah. We just had some very odd base running of late.

We had the Will Craig assisted Baez play, which clearly was a positive for the Cubs rather than a negative. We had this nonsense. Travis Jankowski like committed the worst two plan i've ever seen the other night for the phillies did you see this ben no i didn't see that one oh hang on i need this because you gotta look at this we gotta consider them together sorry wow yeah gosh you got turned around multiple times on this play. I just, you know, this is different than Sogard, right? Like Sogard is engaged in a physical act

that we would consider not impossible, but unlikely. Like just the sheer size of first base and the size of Eric Sogard, you know, you just think that you're going to have contact between the two. So that is a different thing, right? That is a physical matter behaving differently than you anticipate it behaving because you expect there to be contact between two bits of matter business. I don't know what happened here.

The best part of this entire play is him at the end doing an angry little, like, I can't believe I didn't, I can't believe that I just did that. You can see him reacting in real time like, damn it, I can't fathom what just happened to me. Anyway, are people just still maybe a little out of practice being back at work and in front of other people? Are we all nervous about other people still? Is that what's going on here?

I don't know. Going back to the office can be jarring. Yeah. But yeah, in this case, I guess he thought there was a ball in the dirt and he thought it got by the catcher and it did not get by the catcher. And so he was kind of dancing off second and then he was going to second and then he realized, uh-oh, the ball didn't get by the catcher. And then he retreated but didn't retreat all the way.

And then he just kind of stood out there turning around in circles for a while yeah i think that sometimes your brain just misfires a little bit and you don't know what to do after that you know you just you're so far beyond what your prior experience has dictated that you continue this act of fumbling long past the point that we would expect it to the part of it that made me bring this up is that people were comping this to javi bias they're like this is the opposite of the javi bias play i was like no this is the base running answer to will craig this is these are spiritual cousins like they are of a piece together you're just identifying the wrong protagonist in one instance. I'm going to continue to beat this drum until I'm done with it.

Did I let you say enough about Eric Sogard or did I distract you terribly? No, I don't have much more to say about that. I just wanted to marvel at it and also compliment Laz Diaz, the first base umpire, making a great call and realizing that he did just soar right over the bag. Soared right over it. Which Laz Diaz, I don't know if he's ever seen that before, but from the angle he was at, I don't even know how he realized that. Because I just would have assumed probably if I were Las Diaz, well, he must have touched the bag at least. That's the bare minimum.

But no, he somehow recognized that that didn't happen. So good call by him. Also wanted to mention another instance of a player predicting something. So we talked about this last week because I brought up Luis Arias predicting that there would be a walk-off and that he would walk it off in a tied game in extra innings entering the bottom of the inning. of the inning. And my quarrel with this was that I just didn't think it was an impressive thing to predict that the odds were that he would walk it off, or at least that his team would walk it off because you have the zombie runner and it's tied. So you would expect that it would be a walk-off. You pointed out also that there is the problem of not knowing how often he predicts this sort of thing. And so that might also make it less impressive

if he is constantly predicting walk-offs and this was the one time that it happened, then it wouldn't be as notable. Well, on Sunday, the Twins' Miguel Sano turned a triple play and it was a nifty one. He started it, at least. It was on a bunt. And then it came out that he had predicted

that the Twins would turn a triple play. This has happened before. The Twins have turned a bunch of triple plays involving Miguel Sano, and he has apparently predicted at least a few of them. So this is the game story from the Pioneer Press, which starts, over the past five seasons, no team has been involved in more triple plays than the Twins, and no player has been involved in more than Miguel Sano, who has been a key component in turning all four of them. Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe it's good situational awareness. Maybe it's his predictive powers willing things to come true. My first one in LA, I told the pitcher, Adalberto Mejia, I told him, let's make a triple play here, Sano said. And my second one at home, I told Martin Perez, too. Hey, let's make a sinker in, ground it to third, and let's do it here. And then today, I called that one, too. So I've called three.

And I went back and found a game story from 2017, which is one of those triple plays. And it reads, before Thursday's game against the Angels, Twins third baseman Miguel Sano worked on his defense with third base coach Gene Glynn with an emphasis on fielding grounders while positioned near the third base bag. Sano gleefully predicted to all that would listen that he would turn a triple play later that night. And sure enough, just a few hours later, the twins turned their first triple play in over a decade. And Sano said, I kept thinking about it and saying it. I came in early today and practiced fielding ground balls down the line and touching the bag and throw it to second. Once the situation came, I kept saying, Mejia, give me the right pitch. And he did it. And so this was reported in various places saying MikElson O is called three of four triple plays, incredibly rare event. But the denominator we need here is not the number of triple plays.

It's the number of predictions of triple plays that McElson O has made. So if he called it three times and it happened all of those times, and there was just one other time when it happened after he didn't call it, that would be pretty impressive. But if he is calling it routinely, if he is declaring that there's going to be a triple play in every triple play situation, then it's not so impressive. And you could totally imagine a player doing that even just jokingly, you know, hey, triple play here. Right. So I lack the necessary information to decide whether this is impressive. So I want more. I want a follow up when people report, oh, he predicted it. I need them to ask the follow up, which is how often do you predict it and how often have you predicted it when it has not happened? That question just doesn't seem to come up or at least it doesn't get reported well and i would imagine that you would also want to know when the prediction is made because it's one thing to say you know when you arrive in the clubhouse that day as it

kind of sounds like he did and you know you're going into the pre-game and you're like we're going to turn a triple play today because then like if you don't have a situation in the game where a triple play is possible, well, then like, you know, no one's going to be like, you're really calling it wrong. Like they're probably going to forget because it's not like they are presented with an instance like, oh, you know, Sano's prediction is in play and then it doesn't happen. You're going to you're going to forget because you say all kinds of things at work that don't end up coming to fruition but so you want to know when if it's right before you could potentially turn a triple play and then you don't a bunch of times well then you're going to be like you're not any kind of a clairvoyant Miguel but if you're just saying it you know in in the clubhouse beforehand when you're like having dinner or whatever then uh then you're probably gonna remember that right and apparently this is not the only occasion when uh suno has predicted

something and it has come true as dohyung park who covers the twins tweeted the other day call him suno stradamus oh boy it probably won't but i appreciate the pun but apparently suno also predicted that he was going to have a three homer game in mid-May he had a three homer game like May 19th I think it was and then the game story says Sano was so confident that he even called his shots in the dugout that's something crazy and unbelievable but I told myself and I told Jose Barrios hey if he throws me a cutter inside I hit it to left field if he throws me the sinker middle in, I might hit it to the middle. If somebody comes in, I might hit it oppo. Sanoa almost nailed those predictions as hard as he nailed those baseballs. I think he maybe got the sequence of which pitches he was going to hit out and where he was going to hit them out slightly wrong.

I think he got some of them right and some not so right. But still, apparently, he had predicted that he was going to have a three homer game. So suddenly, I'm thinking, okay, this is a Miguel Snow ability. And I was trying to look for other predictions that he had made to see if they had all come true. And I found one that did not actually come true. So his ability to predict baseball events is somewhat limited. I found this story in the Star Tribune from, I think it's late January, 2014. And this was before Miguel Sano had made his major league debut and he only played 67 games above class A, but he said that he intended to play for the twins at the major league level that season

right away. He thought he was going to make the teamins at the major league level that season right away. He thought he was going to make the team out of spring training and his expectations for how many home runs he was going to hit. It says when it was pointed out that his home run totals have jumped from 20 in 2011 to 28 in 2012 and to 35 last year. Sano didn't need an interpreter to explain what's next. I'll hit 45 this year. More games, he said, maybe 55. You never know. And he also said that he'd have 120 walks,

maybe 150. Confident guy. Well, as it turns out, about a month after that story was published and that prediction was made, he hurt his elbow and he had Tommy John surgery and he did not play baseball that season. So that one didn't quite come true, but I guess it's maybe just that he has confidence in himself. And so he predicts that he'll hit 45 homers or he'll hit three in one game, or he will turn a triple play just seemingly at every opportunity. So I'm going to chalk this up to McElson just being a prolific prognosticator more so than a prescient prognosticator. I think that that's a fair assessment. And it's like I said last time, when you're a professional athlete, I think that you are under tremendous pressure all of the time. It's a very hard job.

And so I think that if you have to boost your confidence by saying, I'm going to do it, and you find that sort of self-affirmation to be either useful or motivating, then more power to you. I'm not going to hold people accountable for their predictions being right unless they're constructing a projection system for me. Yeah, this is more media criticism maybe than player criticism. Feel free to predict whatever you want if it gives you a confidence booster or it's fun. But if it's going to be reported after the fact that you predicted those things, then I need a more complete accounting. I need to know how often you were predicting these things, how often you're actually correct. Just one more bit of banter. Jesse Winker is on a pretty incredible roll

right now. He hit three home runs on Sunday for the second time this season. I think he is the 21st player to have multiple three homer games in the same season. It's happened 25 times. Sammy Sosa did it three times in a single season. The others are all two times. And of course, it has happened more often of late with the home run rates being what they are. So this is not quite as uncommon an occurrence as it once would have been.

We were just talking about Miguel Sano hitting three homers in a game. No wonder he is predicting that in these days of high home run rates. But Winker has done it already this year. Adam Duvall did it last year, who could forget? Nelson Cruz did it in 2019. Mookie Betts did it in 2018 and 2016.

So it has happened fairly frequently. But Winker is still just on a an unbelievable tear just all season now he has the highest wrc plus of anyone other than vladimir guerrero and vladimir guerrero is basically leading the league in everything now the messianic bat is here it's been wonderful to watch but right behind him is jesse winker with a 188 wrc plus just behind vlad's 195 he's batting 350 412 665 in 50 games and 221 plate appearances he's one homer behind vlad for the major league lead and he he's basically surpassed his previous single season highs in everything at this point. Of course, he hasn't really played a full healthy season. He's topped

out at 113 games, 384 plate appearances in previous seasons. And he's always been a pretty good hitter. He's a career 137 WRC plus guy and was well above average coming into the year, but just hadn't been healthy, hadn't been in the lineup all the time. And he's someone who tends to get platooned a lot because historically he hasn't hit lefties very well. But man, he is mashing. And I bring this up not just to note that he is mashing, but also because we are recording on Tuesday a few hours before Winker plays the Brewers and starting for the Brewers is Adrian Hauser whom Winker has absolutely owned in their past matchups and this is like one of the the more notable head-to-head batter versus pitcher ownership lines i think going right now he has faced hauser 13 times and he has a 23 85 ops in those 13 plate appearances he has homered five times he's gotten eight hits and he's struck out

a couple times but that's your 6 15 6 15 17 69 slash line so we don't know yet what he will do against hauser on tuesday perhaps i will update at the end of the episode but good times ahead at least based on that admittedly small sample track record that i don't really put any stock in but still it doesn't seem like jesse winker needs any help to hit these days i have two thoughts about this the first directly related to hauser is that while we know that like what you said 13 played appearances yeah that we know that that doesn't mean anything right or it doesn't necessarily mean anything right it's 13 played appearances you can't say anything you can't

conclude yeah you can't you can't conclude anything based on that i suspect though i have a suspicion that head-to-head matchup statistics are one of the stats that players believe the most in. I would like to assert that. I think that it is probably the sort of thing that both of these guys are painfully aware of, even if on some level, and I actually don't know anything about either of their sort of propensity to engage with statistics as a way to understand the game. So I don't know if they would look at that and like intellectually be aware that it doesn't really say anything definitive, but like emotionally be kind of either gleeful at the prospect or trepidatious about facing each other. So I don't know if that's the dynamic that is at play for one or both of them. But I suspect that in general, players are very keenly aware of who has gotten them and who they've got, right, in the past, and that they perhaps put more stock in it than is useful. And I don't blame them because I think it is difficult to intellectualize away from feelings. And if you have had a guy hit a bunch of home runs off of you, for instance, you're going to be conscious of that every single time because it makes you grumpy and you get the ball and you mash it around while he's running the bases. And so I think that that is my first

assertion. The second is more of a question. I am curious if this phenomenon exists for you. I think that Jesse Winker is a great example of this. I think that Jesse Winker, part of this is, as you say, that he is platooned, and so you see him less often than you might otherwise. But I think that he is a player whose poor defensive reputation has perhaps impacted my understanding of his game in toto. Because you are correct to say that like, smartly platoon, sure, but in the right situation has been a good hitter over the course of his career right in in a year when the reds offense last year was just really not very good at all he was he was certainly a bright spot right he had

146 wrc plus albeit only in 183 plate appearances but he you know he was one of the good hitters and they didn't always have those but i think i thought his year went less well than it did in part because he is somewhat of an adventurer in the outfield does that happen to you do you have this experience of guys probably yeah because we spend a lot of time looking at war leaderboards so that's probably part of it when you're looking at the holistic contribution, which is important, of course, but you might not realize that so-and-so is actually a really good hitter. He's just dragged down by other things that he doesn't do as well. Right. And so I think that Jesse Winker was perhaps in that category for me. And now I'm glad we've talked about it because i am going to make a conscious effort

to appreciate his contributions at the plate more actively even though i still think he is an adventure in the outfield he also has a very long neck that's unrelated to either of my earlier observations but it's just like that that thing goes on for miles smile long neck it really does and when you go to his baseball reference page, it gives you the selection of headshots. Yes. One is just like the head, but not the entire neck. I mean, it would be the entire neck for most people, but it kind of cuts off the bottom of his. But then if you mouse over it and it shows you his previous headshot then you get the whole panoramic view yeah

there is a lot of it so a lot of neck but a lot of neck that guy have you have you seen the the classic children's film chicken run ben yeah years ago yeah so i have made this observation before but i feel the need to make it again he He feels aesthetically similar to the chickens in Chicken Run, not because he looks like a chicken. Otherwise, he has a perfectly normal human face. But the ratio of head to neck feels like something out of Chicken Run. I have like 20 references. I got to cycle through them every now and again.

This is the artifact of getting older, I suppose. But Jesse Winker, I've thought a lot about him, but just not his competence as a hitter. So shame on me. Just his bad defense and his neck. Such a long neck though. It's just quite, it's quite a, it's quite a neck. I wonder if that's related to the bad defense somehow.

I don't know. Maybe he's just like too high up there. I don't know. I'm just like too high up there i don't know i'm also noticing on his baseball reference page that his nicknames are listed as follows wink del wink or bird so they also think he looks like he's from chicken rod yeah that's probably why anyway always enjoy a good age 27 breakout season if you can call it a breakout given that he was very good already but still yeah just want to mention by the way because you mentioned that uh players are aware of how they've done just made me think of episode 1547 when i talked to mike jorgensen about how he went

oh for whatever it was against doc ellis he had 39 plate appearances against doc ellis without a hit which is the most of anyone in history and i was sort of surprised to learn that he was not really aware of that or like his son had told him about it, but he didn't know as it was happening really that he had never gotten a hit off of him or that he held that record. But he was aware that like he hadn't hit him well and he didn't have his number or anything and that maybe ellis had his number so that does support what you're saying and i always do wonder about that like yeah we know that statistically speaking it's too small a sample to conclude anything but at what point does it get in the players heads to the point that it does affect their confidence somehow we were just talking about how psyching yourself up can be a big part of

succeeding. So if you're failing to psych yourself up because you know that you haven't hit the sky in the past or vice versa, then at what point does that exert some influence, even if we can't detect it in the stats and wouldn't be able to project it? So we will see what Winker does against Hauser. So there are two things that I want to talk to you about. One is Shohei Otani, as usual. The other is this brewing foreign substance storm, which we have touched on, but there has been subsequent reporting since the last time we talked about it. So first thing on Shohei Otani, he is leading all American League players in baseball reference war. He is fifth among all major leaguers in war. He is not leading the American League in fangraphs war. And generally,

I do lean toward fangraphs war, not because this is a fangraphs podcast, but just because I prefer certain choices that it makes. But in this case, of course, I have no choice but to side with Baseball Reference War, which recognizes that Otani has been the most valuable player in the American League. And I would suggest that perhaps there's someone you could speak to about possibly bumping him up that list and maybe finding some way to just put your thumb on the scale a little bit is all I'm saying. I know you have to be objective About these things but I won't tell anyone If you don't and I know you enjoy The work of Cedric Mullins

This season and it has been Fantastic but the fact that he is Leading Shohei Otani is just not Acceptable to me although I do Enjoy that he is listed on the leaderboard As Cedric Mullins the second Because we're just lousy with Juniors in the major leagues these days.

We don't have a lot of seconds and thirds and so on. So I applaud that at least. But I don't like the fact that Otani is only 15th in the majors on the combined war leaderboard. So if you could just put a word in for me. Well, if you want to think about it this way, if you look at the AL side of it, which, look, for awards purposes is how you want to break it down, right? That's how you want to think about it. Then, you know, we have Vladdy and then Garrett Cole. And then you have Bogarts, Mullins, Moncada.

Man, we maybe need to talk about Yuan Moncada's year because people are not doing that, and he's having a heck of a campaign. Anyway. And the next guy on the list. Yeah, and then Marcus Simeon. I was just about to say, same for him. And they are all clustered at 2.8 wins, and then you have Otani at 2.6.

And I will just, again, you know, I think it is always useful for us to remind ourselves and our listeners that while we have a lot of confidence in the methodology that goes into constructing war and think that it is sound that like we acknowledge that there are error bars on these sorts of things and that if you wanted to ben you know if you if you were keen on on showing deference to your god um you could say what you are you could say that really, what is the difference between Otani and the four dudes above him? Probably well within the margin of error.

That is true. But then do I have to also apply that caveat when I mentioned that he is leading all players in baseball reference war and he is leading Marcus Simeon by two-tenths of a win? No. I think theology is a really complicated subject and faith even more so. And that if you are able to reconcile those choices to yourself, they aren't hurting anyone else. And so I think that you're within your rights to exercise your faith as is most emotionally and spiritually resonant to you. So that's what I'd say about that. Well, I didn't bring this up solely to give you a hard time about what war says about Otani. And I do understand why it says what it says and why FanCraft's war, which is fit-based for pitchers,

discounts his performance somewhat this year, just given that he has walked so many guys and they haven't come around to score. A lot of guys, just a real whole mess of dudes, really. Although lately it seems like he's started better. Yeah, he didn't walk anyone in his last start, which was a first for him in MLB. And it seems like he has maybe taken a little off. I don't know whether that's intentional or not. The velo has rebounded from the big dip, but not all the way to where he's throwing 101 now. So I don't know if that's intentional or whether it's workload management or what it is.

It's hard to tell with him. But I wanted to bring him up because there was a tweet that circulated over the weekend from Jeremy Frank at MLPRandomStats at Twitter. And he tweeted on Saturday, Frank at MLB Random Stats at Twitter. And he tweeted on Saturday, it's kind of unfortunate that the first legit two-way player in a while is as good on both sides as Otani is. Like even being average at both is a feat that would be celebrated. He has ruined being a two-way player for decades to come because none will be as talented as him.

And then he went on to tweet, like imagine some guy comes into the league in 10 years and is like a 700 OPS for a spaceman and a 4.6 ERA closer. That still would have been incredible five years ago. And I see what he's saying, but I also completely disagree. And I don't know how you feel about this, but it's true that I appreciate two-way players in all forms. So give me your Micah Owingses and your Brooks Kieschnicks and your huddled Michael Lorenzens. I will accept them all. I'm interested in all of them. And it is true that I would probably be less impressed by that kind of skill set now, having seen Otani, who has a legitimate case to be among the best players on both sides of the ball.

But I don't think that this is actually unfortunate. I think that it is actually quite fortunate that he has come along and shown that it's possible to play at this level as a pitcher and a hitter. Because for one thing, I think he had to be this good to get the shot that he has gotten. Right. It had been a while, really, since anyone had got a legitimate shot. Like, to bring up Lorenzen, for instance, you know, every now and then he gets to hit and he's been better at it maybe than a typical pitcher. And, you know, maybe he's played the field occasionally.

Like, he's dabbled in it, but he's not clearly good enough at hitting that the Reds will just make him kind of a full-time two-way player. And I think there's so much pressure to specialize that if you are not great at either thing, then you're inevitably going to be forced into that box. And it's only because Otani is so superlative as a pitcher and a hitter that he has been allowed to do this and given the long leash that he has had. And I think it's almost a prerequisite really after the long, long history of essentially no true two-way players, but some occasional experiments and guys who were decent at both things or marginal at both things. I think he had to be this good for one thing just to get the shot. But also,

I think the fact that he has been so good at both offers some hope that there might be room for more two-way players in MLB. Not that they're all necessarily going to be Otani or that there will be another Otani anytime soon, but he has established that this mold can be broken. It can be done. A single human being can perform at this level in the majors as a pitcher and hitter. And I wonder if that just opens minds, you know, and maybe there are people who are more willing to consider, hey, this guy played two ways in college. Let's draft him and let him continue to be a two way player. We've seen some of that.

So I think it just established a precedent that hadn't existed for almost a century. And I think it was important to have a high profile player be that trailblazer because another Brooks Kieschnick just wouldn't have gotten it done. I think that that's right. And I also think that we should give ourselves some amount of credit for being able to distinguish between saying or believing that because someone is not as good as the sort of platonic ideal of a particular kind of player, that they are bad, right? Those aren't the same thing, right? Like we don't, you know, Mike Trout has been like, I think, a really instructive example of this over the years where we all agree that Mike Trout is the best player in baseball. But

that doesn't mean that we don't enjoy Mookie Betts, right? That doesn't mean we don't enjoy Ronald Acuna Jr. or Fernando Tatis or any of these other guys, right? We can acknowledge the separation that exists between Trout and the field in a healthy year for him, but that doesn't diminish our enjoyment of those other guys just because we get to watch the best player of his generation, you know, on the field most nights, although not as many lately as we would like, you know, I think that we should be careful to not confuse someone not being the best for them being bad. There's a really wide spectrum of talent that exists between the best and the worst player. And I think that you're right that, you know know there's a lot of like logistics and hassle that goes into trying

to make otani's two-way career happen and i think that if he were not having the kind of success that he is in a season where he is fully healthy and is really able to contribute on both sides it doesn't take a lot for like that all that logistics to make it not worth it i mean think about how many text messages you get that you like don't respond to for five days. And this is a lot harder than responding to a text message. So I think that you're right that him being so, so sensational on both sides makes the case for at least giving it a try. And most guys won't be as sensational as him. And they probably will either be asked to specialize much earlier in their careers or be used sort of less consistently in both roles, but kind of be the guy who comes in

and does one or the other kind of unexpectedly. And you're like, oh, I feel better about this than I expected myself to because, you know, that guy actually can hit for a pitcher, right? But, you know, just because other guys guys are gonna kind of get siphoned off doesn't mean that all of them will and the fact that someone this good can exist i think will inspire more teams to try it and that's fun so and inspire more players and yeah absolutely like kids watching otani have got to be pretty excited about this and maybe aspiring to do what he does. And most of them are not going to be able to do that. Maybe none of them will. I don't know. But I don't think they're getting quite as excited about seeing Micah Owings hit a home run or

something like that. It's not going to create a generation of kids who want to be Shohei Otani. So I think that is pretty important too. And also, if the downside of having a superhero basically come along like this is that I will be a little less impressed the next time Akishnik comes along, I'm okay with that. I think that is a fine trade-off for me, given that I don't think I've really enjoyed any baseball story ever as much as Shohei Otani. enjoyed any baseball story ever as much as Shohei Otani. And so I'm willing to give up being quite as excited about the next marginal two-way player to come along. And that brings to mind a question that we received recently from listener Derek, who said, I was thinking about two-way players this morning and specifically me joking to my friend that Waskar Inouye is one after his grand slam. This was before Inouye hurt himself.

I was wondering what would be the Mendoza line for a two-way player, the point at which a team would tell a guy he has to be either a pitcher or a hitter, but not both. Presumably he'd have to be whichever one he's actually succeeding at, but still be on a major league roster. Otani is great, but he has set the bar too high to be the expectation for a prospect. I feel like Michael Lorenzen might be that threshold, but even he feels more like a pitcher than a true two-way player.

Maybe Otani, great as he is, has broken the position for the rest of us. Derek was essentially expressing the same sentiment about a month earlier, but where do you think the line would be roughly right now? Someone else comes along and is not as elite as Otani, but is decent, is some level of major league caliber prospect from each side. How good do you have to be so that a team doesn't say, okay, this is the thing you're good at and you're only useful when you do this thing. So stop trying to pretend that you can do the two-way thing. That's a really good question. I think, I don't know if I would put it in terms of specific performance terms. I mean,

I think that the cheapy answer is to say good enough to satisfy the two way player requirements in the new roster rules, right? Like that's the cheapie answer to be like good enough at pitching and hitting that you're going to get the, whatever it is like 20 innings and however many plate appearances and, and have that feel like it is a net positive to the team i think that as important as how good you are at each is what the differential is between the two levels of skill

right i think that that's an important consideration too because you know earlier in the season i tweeted a thing that made you almost quit doing the podcast with me which was to say that like he i said that otani might be hitting well enough to like not pitch anymore. Really? He might be hitting his way out of pitching because his bat was, was so superlative and he was walking a lot of guys. He's still walking a lot of guys, but this is still a lot of fun and he's been quite good at pitching despite

his walks. Even if, as you noted less good by our estimations than by some other metrics. And so I think that part of what is at play is the differential, because if you're just like, you know, if you have a guy who's like a role player level pitcher, but he has an 80 bat, like the calculus there is probably pretty easy. It's like, just go hit, right? Because you're so good at the one that whatever marginal value we think we're gaining by having you occupy both roles is small in comparison to like the hassle of having to architect your usage and what we

think your potential would be if you just committed to one versus the other. So I think that would be a consideration also. I don't quite know what that ratio would need to be in order for a team to say, and it probably depends a little bit, right? It depends on the other guys you have on the roster. And it depends, I imagine, on the coaching staff and the manager and how both comfortable and sort of excited they are to manage your usage in that way, right? we've talked before about how you know sometimes um madden can get a little cute but like he might be the perfect manager for someone like otani because he's just willing to do the weird stuff you gotta do to like have him do this role well and so i think there are also considerations beyond the player himself that probably factor into how that usage gets deployed um and i think i have managed to answer your question without actually answering it. So I consider this a successful experience. No, I think you're right. I think it is more

about the differential. I guess the absolute value has to be roughly replacement level at each thing. Like if you are a replacement level pitcher and hitter, then there will be a spot for you. I think on rosters, you will not yourself be replaced because you will be like two replacement players in one and you'll only take up one roster spot. And so that'll make you better than the best available AAA person who could be called up in your stead. So I think you have to be roughly replacement level at both. But as you said, you can't be significantly better than that at one and not the other, or you will just be forced to specialize.

Right. Like I think that if Vladimir Guerrero Jr. were a two-way player and he were having the year he has and he was like reliever quality on the one side and he's doing what he's doing on the other, they'd be like, just go ahead. Right. So because the messianic bat is here it is risen it was here all along it was just that he was really young it's fine it was just hibernating a little bit yeah it has come out of its chrysalis now and it is a

fully fledged bat like that he has become both a savior and a cicada. He is now some sort of special mutant creature. non-mop-up innings, then you can be below average, certainly, but probably a little bit better than replacement level. And I'm talking true two-way player here, not just, I don't know, a Drew Butera or a Williams Estadio or someone who pitches semi-regularly, but isn't really that. I guess Butera couldn't hit either. So I don't know exactly what he was. You have to be better than Butera. Christian Bethencourt. Yeah. You have to be better than Butera. Christian Bethencourt. Yeah. Like guys like that. You have to be better than Bethencourt, better than Butera. So that's the line for the two-way player. It's not the Mendoza line. It's the Bethencourt line or the Butera line. So you got to be better than that. But not like Astadio who pitches every now and then and does a decent job, but that's just kind of a bonus. He's just the designated position player pitcher at this point for the Twins seemingly, but it's not part of his job. It's not really why he's on the roster. So I mean, a regular role. And then the last thing about Otani is

another question we got from Matt that I don't know if we've never talked about this. It seems hard to believe, but I don't recall a specific conversation. He says, I admit I heard this question on the Baseball Tonight podcast today, but really wanted your take. If pitcher Otani could pitch to hitter Otani, who would come out on top over one at bat or maybe a sample of at bats? And I answered via email and I said that I think there are a couple of ways you could approach this. If the question is which Otani would win most of the matchups, the answer has to be pitcher Otani just because pitchers get outs more than they fail to get outs Otani is both an above average pitcher and an above average hitter. So it would hurt each Otani's stats to face Otani all the time. But if the question basically boils down to whether he's better as a pitcher or as a hitter,

I'd say hitter right now, though I might change my answer down the road if he does really regain his control that he had before his surgeries. And I think the other thing that pushes me over into Hitter Otani would win, especially over a bigger sample, is that Hitter Otani probably gains more of an advantage from knowing Pitcher Otani's patterns and tactics than the other way around. Like, you know, maybe Pichirotani will be like, okay, Hiderotani knows what I'm thinking, and so I'm going to change everything. But that would be an advantage to Hiderotani, because now Pichirotani is off his game.

And if he does pitch the way he normally would, well, Hiderotani can think along with him and know where he's going to throw and what he's going to throw. So I think that would be a bigger advantage than Pitcher Otani derives from facing Hitter Otani, where I guess he might know, like, what's the pitch that I'm least comfortable facing or something, and he could throw that pitch. But I think it's a bigger advantage the other way around yeah i think particularly given the command stuff i think that over a bigger sample that's likely true wow tony's really walking almost 15 percent of dudes like that's yeah it's not the best but no it's fine but he strikes out so many people that he seems to work himself out of trouble so yeah sure sure sure yeah, he really does. But Wowzers, it's a lot of walks. It is. It's good.

It's a healthy. It's a bushel pack. I hope he's gotten that under control. And it's fun to watch him. It's not so fun when he's losing the command and the controls going in and out. But I saw someone say the other day that he still thinks that Otani should just be an everyday right fielder and that he'd be more valuable or durable in that role. And there is certainly still a case to be made that that's true. But just watching Otani pitch like the splitter alone is like, I mean, it's the most unhittable pitch in baseball, arguably, and one of the prettiest pitches. So just as a fan,

as a spectator, I don't see how you can consign Otani to a non-pitching role exclusively when it would cost us one of the just most exquisite pitches in baseball. Like for the splitter alone, I hope that we get to continue to enjoy the aesthetic experience of Otani. I agree with you completely. I think that there may come a time where the issue is forced, but with him performing the way that he is, I don't think that we're anywhere near it. I think that it is fine to be a little less optimally distributed to get to watch something like this. I am now imagining him as Evan Peters playing Quicksilver, just running back and forth and doing both,

like throwing the pitch, but then also trying to hit the pitch. Yeah. I've seen GIFs where people will just splice together the footage of Otani hitting to make it look like he's facing himself. You can tell that we are going to exercise restraint because I'm not going to ask you to talk about Mare, which is really the only thing I want to talk about that and Otani. I just want to talk about Evan Peters and Mare of Easttown, but that's not the point of this podcast. So let it be. No, unfortunately, we can talk about that offline. But man, now that I think about it more, hitter Otani has the platoon advantage because he

bats left and throws right. So that's another point in hitter Otani's favor. But there's a point in pitcher Otani's favor too, which is that pitcher Otani is a great off-speed pitcher. His fastball is not necessarily his strong suit. He's got the great splitter and the good slider, whereas hitter Otani is a great fastball hitter, but has not done well against splitters and sliders. So maybe it's closer than I thought. Plus there's that video of Otani from like 2016 or so on a Japanese TV show where he is hitting against himself in VR and he doesn't do that well, but he was just getting used to the system, I think. So fun question. Anyway, last thing, I want to ask you what you think will happen here with this looming foreign substance supposed crackdown. So we've talked about this before in a larger sense, just going back years probably at this point, but it really seems to be coming to a head or to a cap or to a belt buckle or to a glove.

And it seems like there have been these recent rumblings that MLB is really going to start taking this seriously and start punishing pitchers and really try to root out this behavior. And we got some details on Saturday, courtesy of a Buster-only report at ESPN. And I'll just skim and read some of this here because I think it's useful context. Only wrote, following the owners meeting this week, last week, during which some of the collected evidence was presented, including baseballs, hats, and gloves slattered with various substances, a conference call was held among officials Friday. According to two sources, the plans for enforcement of the existing foreign substance rules are being finalized,

and a memo could be sent to teams as soon as the week ahead, with full-blown action beginning in earnest in games as soon as June 14th. Among the final possibilities being discussed, pitchers will be checked randomly by umpires with every starting pitcher likely to be checked at least two times per start. With officials cognizant of having equipment checks slow a sport in which the pace of play is already thought to be too deliberate, pitchers might be checked as they walk off the field at the conclusion of an outing. One management source estimated that there will be eight to 10 random foreign substance checks per game. The discussion about penalties has been centered on suspending offenders 10 days without pay. Upon hearing this in a meeting the other day, one owner noted that the MLB Players Association might file a grievance,

and the broad response around him was that the issue was too important to allow someone to get away with a light penalty. The issue is too important for us now, said one executive. Position players will be subject to foreign substance checks, although the conversations are around issuing warnings initially to non-pitchers, with umpires warning catchers and others to clean up an area of concern. The contentiousness over the use of foreign substances has boiled over to the degree that a lot of the evidence being presented to central baseball oversight has been video

provided by position players, angry over what they see as blatant violations of the rule. You've got players turning in other players, said one official. It's through the use of video and observation that baseball officials have now compiled what amounts to specific scouting reports on where and how pitchers are using substances, according to one source, such as on his belt on his left side or between the third and fourth fingers of the glove or underneath the hat, said one source. They know all the spots. The pitchers who were pulling on the strings on their glove or going to a spot on their belt, said another source. It's gotten completely absurd and it's time to clean it up. It was so obvious that a pitcher on one team was using something that players on the other team started screaming at him to stop cheating, and they thought that they did intimidate the pitcher into stopping. Teams say pitchers are using various types of homemade glue, pelican grip, spider tack adhesive, or high volumes of pine tar. The substances being used, said one team staffer, have some players concerned about applying too much to their skin lest they do damage. some players concerned about applying too much to their skin lest they do damage. The hope is that once umpires check pitchers regularly, the use of foreign substances will dissipate. And as some players are inevitably busted, the gentleman's agreement between managers will evaporate and teams will more aggressively police each other through their use of in-house video. So do you

think on a scale of nothing at all comes of this and we never hear about it again to there is a complete crackdown and all the pitchers are suspended and spin rates plummet across the league and strikeout rates fall and scoring rises, et cetera. And we find out that actually everyone was cheating because everyone's spin rates suddenly sink. Where do you think this will actually fall? What do you think will happen here? I think the most likely outcome falls in between those two poles, perhaps weighted ever so

slightly toward the enforcement end of the spectrum, by which I mean, I think that there will be a couple of perhaps higher profile suspensions as balls are checked. You know, you mentioned that I've been to some games and I don't know if this guy or if someone in his role is there every single game, but I've noticed that there's a gentleman who sits near the D-backs home dugout, and sometimes balls get rolled to him, and he sits there, and he has a little clipboard, and he has a little roll of stickers, and he has a little bag.

And I think what he does is he puts a sticker on a ball so that he knows whose it is, and he makes a note of it, and I think probably makes a note of the pitcher and the circumstance and when and what have you, and then he puts the little ball in his little bag of balls. And then I assume that those balls go get tested yeah and he does it to pitchers from both teams the the d-backs and whoever they're playing so i don't know if he's there every time but i think that like he was probably and and people like him who are occupying those roles as we talked about

we're probably doing something more akin to sort of fact finding in the early going and are now going to be really essential to enforcement. And I think that they- It's like the survey testing before the actual PD testing kicked in where it was like, let's just test everyone and see how pervasive a problem this is. And I guess they've just been spying on everyone and collecting all of these items and have, I guess, found that it reinforced the idea that enough people were using that they need to do something. Right. And so I imagine that something will be done and we will see some suspensions. I think

that we will also, as you noted, see guys who, where we start to see their sort of average spin numbers decline. And not all of those guys are going to go from being really good to bad, right? I'm sure that there will be a couple of pitchers who have felt pressure to use sticky stuff to stick in the majors in the same way. And there are a lot of differences in both the specifics, obviously, and then the broader picture around sticky stuff versus steroids. So I don't mean to say that they are completely akin to one another, but I think that there probably are guys who have used sticky stuff because they feel like if they don't, they're going to be out of the league in much the

same way that there were players who felt that they had to use steroids or they were going to fall behind and not be able to maintain a roster spot. And so I think we'll probably see some of those guys too. And that doesn't mean that they can't adapt their repertoires or try to come back and do things differently. But I imagine that we will see some whose careers are altered, if not shortened as a result of this. But I think the other dynamic that is similar between the steroid era and now that sort of colors my expectation of how enforcement will play out is that as many people's work on this subject has noted, this is not a new phenomenon now the quality the caliber of the sticky stuff right and how effective it is in increasing spin in particular i think is it has taken a big step forward and then you do have players who i don't want to get into like a whole i don't want to litigate trevor bauer again but

like you have had players like bauer who have been very vocal about the issue lately. And then you have position players who are like, what the heck, man, like we're trying to do our thing and you're gaining this really unfair advantage. And so I think that there is a similarity to the steroid era here where there could have been an intervention much sooner. And I think that the kind of play that we have seen and the move toward more sticky stuff has been incentivized by the environment and baseball has been pretty content to not intervene on that now if that's because their understanding of what was being used prior to now was like oh it's sunscreen and rosin which i think that like a lot of people are like fine right like if you do that whatever and so i don't

mean to say that like the conditions haven't changed but i do think that like we have moved on from sunscreen and rosin and we moved on from that a while ago and there was not then immediate intervention so things have changed and also the leak has been slow to react and so i think that what we are likely to see is a couple of suspensions that are meant to make an example of some guys there will be other guys who are crafty enough or lucky enough to continue using sticky stuff that is more intense than sunscreen and rosin who coast. And yeah, that's kind of how I think it'll play out. Yeah. Would be my expectation.

I agree with you. It's kind of a mix of MLB being complacent about this in a very similar way to the way it acted or didn't act with PDs and with sign stealing and also circumstances changing and maybe changing so quickly that MLB and really most people just didn't realize how acute the problem was. I mean, spin rate wasn't well understood and wasn't well quantified before a few years ago, really. And I think that was the thing that really pushed this over the edge because everyone realized, oh, spin is useful. It is good to throw with more spin, all else being equal. And it turns out that sticky stuff

actually does really enhance your spin rates. And so there's been this arms race here with sticky substances where it's just these more exotic and more effective substances that have taken over in just recent years, it seems like. So I still fault the league for how it has failed to be proactive about this, but also I think circumstances have changed. So it's not just, well, everyone knew this was going on. That is true. It's always been common knowledge that pitchers were using something that went against the letter of the law. But I think as long as it was just pine tar or sunscreen and resin, everyone was kind of okay with it. Whereas now we can quantify it. We realize it's making a huge difference in some cases. And strikeout

rates are soaring and there's so much scrutiny and storm und drang around that, that this is kind of associated with that issue. And so it's, yeah, we need to do something about this. So I'm really fascinated to see how it plays out just because we really might actually get an answer here about how much this mattered, which is unlike the PED era where certain guys got caught or their usage came out in other ways. But we never knew who was not using with any certainty. We knew which players were not suspected of having used anything, but you could never say for sure. Whereas in this case, if they do actually really crack down and check everyone and we see certain pitchers spin rates suddenly decline and others not, I'm not saying that would be 100% certainty that you could identify who was using it and who wasn't, but it would be pretty strong evidence that we never had with that other

kinds of cheating, really, even with sign stealing, aside from the banging scheme and the audible noises that went with that that could be counted. Even then, you don't know, well, this team is sign stealing, but was this player sign stealing? Did he want the signs? Did he use the signs? Did he get the signs? In this case, you might actually be able to tell. And that is pretty intriguing to me. And it's possible that there could be disproportionate effects on certain teams. If the use of these substances is as widespread as it seems to be, then you probably wouldn't get one team where everyone's using it and one team where no one's using it. But there could be clusters. There could be certain teams that have passed around a more effective substance. So will we see one team's spin rates take a dive while another's are largely unaffected? And if so, what sort of scandal would that create? And could that affect a pennant race? Or they have checked anyone, right? You mentioned Bauer. Bauer's spin rate in his last start on Sunday was lower than it had been in any start before

his spin rate spiked in September of 2019. Suspicious timing. And as you said, it's not like guys are going to go from great to terrible. This is something that enhances some pitchers' performance and enhances some more than others. But Bauer, just to stick with him, like he had a quality start on Sunday. I think I think he walked four guys, but it wasn't like he was horrible. And he was a leading contender for the Cy Young Award before he got hit by a comebacker in 2018 before his spin rate spiked. So not saying that he is purely a product of that. And that anyone else will. Like there was some buzz about Garrett Cole's spin rate. Possibly declining slightly in a recent start. So you know that wasn't quite as conclusive perhaps.

But there are some early indications. That maybe some pitchers are reading the tea leaves here. And are saying okay. Now that they're serious about this. I will stop. And if they do send out a memo and say, this is when we're doing it, and I hope that they do, I hope it's transparent like that. Ideally, it would be public and not one of these weird, like, we're going to send a memo to teams that will be leaked, but we won't actually announce anything or acknowledge

it publicly, which is always the case with MLB with changing the ball or whatever. It would be great if they would come out and just say, yeah, this is a problem. We're acknowledging it. We want to do something about it. So you're going to see umpires start checking pitchers. And I don't know whether that will be a press release situation or a secret team memo that gets leaked situation. But I hope that players and teams are all apprised of this

and that they know going in, okay, here's when it's going to happen so that you don't get any surprises. You don't get managers arguing and getting ejected because they feel like their guys are getting targeted and no one else's is. If you're going to implement this, don't do it the way that Joe West did with Giovanni Gallegos the other day. Do it across the league in a rigorous, systematic way so that everyone knows what to expect and knows that they can't get away with things. And I almost wonder whether they should just do ejections at first and see whether that works as opposed to suspensions. because again it's like MLB is kind of complicit in this

so for them to crack down all of a sudden and be like oh these are the bad cheaters and we're punishing them you know maybe it would be better just to warn them eject them and then see what happens I don't know I can see the case for either way but I just

I worry about it turning into solely like it's the bad, evil, immoral players as opposed to MLB and the league kind of dragging its feet on this stuff. And then you get into grievances and appeals and all of that, whereas you can't appeal a suspension. So it would just be kind of cleaner and simpler. simpler. Right. I think that that more honestly distributes the responsibility for the problem than suddenly and without warning starting to suspend and sort of tar the players involved here. I mean, I think that if you read the piece that Stephanie Epstein published in Sports Illustrated, it's clear that there are teams that are not only encouraging their players to utilize sticky stuff, but supplying their players with it. And so for us to say that this is purely a result of the players sort of self-direction,

I think would be to inaccurately diagnose both how things got to where they are and why they are the way they are, right? These, these characteristics, these fastball characteristics in particular are, are prized by teams and they are trading for players who exemplify them naturally. And they are trying to enhance them using sticky stuff and to lay all of that at the feet of the players without acknowledging the institutional responsibility that teams and executives in the league have, I think is a dynamic that we're all keen to avoid. So I think that the right way to deal with this, if what they want is for the sticky stuff to be out of the game, is to do what you said, to say, look, here's the day. When we all come back from the all-star break, here are the rules. And they're going to be strictly enforced.

They're going to be applied across the board so that we don't have any situations where some pitchers are being singled out versus others who are allowed to skate maybe because they're high profile veterans or whatever, right? We're going to apply this equally and you get to come back from the all-star break having decided what you're going to do. And if you continue to use sticky stuff and you get caught, you're going to be suspended or you're going to be ejected and then suspended. You know, if there's a second offense or what have you, but there should be a clear sort of progression of punishment. It should be. And I, I, I don't want to let people off the hook for having cheated,

but I think that given the different layers of responsibility here, it's probably better for them to say, look, whatever happened before that happened before. Here you are now. You're a new you. This is post all-star break you. And here are the rules that we're going to enforce. And there are still going to be guys who choose to cheat. Like there are still going to be dudes who try to do that, who think they can get away with it, who think they can be crafty, who start coming up with that, that super secret substance that I hypothesized might exist, right?

Like the other part of this that is going to mimic or potentially mimic the PD scandals is the sort of arms race to come up with new sticky stuff. That's harder to detect or whatever. So we're gonna have to continue to monitor this but if the league is serious about it i think there's a way to do it that sort of is honest about the circumstances that led to this and still achieves the the goal they want i am not optimistic that that is what will happen because that is not historically how mlb has dealt with situations like this but i But I think that it would be a refreshing change of pace

for them to say, you know, we were kind of asleep at the wheel on this stuff and circumstances changed. And so it's not all our fault and you guys are still making active choices and you have to be responsible for them. But we kind of let this be loose and now we're going to tighten up

and we're all going to do it together. And I think that that is a much more productive approach to taking a guy's cap or selectively enforcing the rule or you know you know the thing i worry about is like a couple of relievers get dinged and suspended and all the big name starters get left alone except maybe trevor bauer who just cannot stop talking and so yeah well at this point he gets asked about it constantly so he doesn't even have the option necessarily of not talking about it but that's very fair he's brought that on himself because he talked about it so much in the past although perhaps that has done some good as you said you don't want to relitigate the whole thing i. I really would prefer not to do that. Yeah. I saw about 10 threads about power in our Facebook group.

So you could go there if you do want to get involved in those discussions. A lot of them are like, is he a hero or is he a villain? And in my opinion, he's neither, actually. In this case, at least, putting aside the other stuff. I don't think he fits neatly into the hero or villain bucket because yes he brought this to everyone's attention before he was cheating but then also he was cheating too right i'm not gonna say yeah and i'm not gonna say that he necessarily won the saiyan and became the highest paid player in baseball because he was using the stuff but he

did do those things while he was using the stuff. They're definitely correlated and there may be some causation there too. And so again, like using it, well, it seems like most pitchers are using it. So it's not that he is a villain because he started using it necessarily. He was doing the thing that a lot of people were already doing, but it does kind of take the moral high ground away a little bit when you go from just blowing the whistle to then, well, all right, if they're not going to stop this, then I will get on board too.

Because he wasn't even necessarily on the edge of a bullpen or something. You brought up the example of a player who had to do it to stay in the league or felt that he did, and that wasn't really the case with Bauer. It wasn't like he was on the verge of losing a roster spot. And he has been kind of hypocritical about this or perhaps not forthright at times as well. Even after he started using the sicky stuff, he wrote the Players' Tribune piece about

cheating and he was on HBO's Real Sports and said he would never do it because of his morals. And he was kind of already doing it at that point, I think. But what I would say is that he really did raise awareness about this and opened my eyes about this. I think I can say, just to use an I statement, I was not aware of how much difference the sticky stuff or at least some sticky stuff could make before he did and publicized those experiments about trying various things and testing it. And then actually doing it in a game or doing it in many games. It was so sudden and stark and dramatic that that was kind of a wake-up call for me I think just to show how effective it could be and how much of a difference it could make and that was when I went from oh everyone does this but it's not a big deal to oh everyone does this and actually it might be a big deal and for obvious

reasons not a lot of pitchers were bringing this up and trying to drag it out into the light to force MLB's hand if not for the stink that he had made about it. And it really has been a stink that I don't know whether we would be in this place now. Whether that's for better or worse, we shall see. But I do think he has altered the trajectory, at least, of the awareness of this and perhaps of the discipline in almost Canseco-esque fashion.

And we will see what that discipline looks like and yeah you know i do think that just based on how much his spin rates went up and then came down again like probably not everyone who's using something is using what he's been using and so it might not be as dramatic a difference but i do think if this really is applied in a rigorous way, you might see league-wide spin rates actually perceptibly sink. I don't know how much to predict it will be this number of RPM or whatever, but I think it could be significant after years and years of that continuing to climb every year, whether because of sticky stuff or because teams are just doing a better job of getting guys who have high spin rates naturally, it might actually reverse direction. And that would be pretty unprecedented. And that would

have an impact on whiff rates, on strikeout rates. I tried to estimate what that would be when I wrote about this for the Ringer last year. And it's tough to do, of course, because with a lot of players, you don't necessarily have a control group because they might be using stuff all the time. But I tried to figure it out just by looking at top and bottom quartiles of pitches of each type for the same pitchers, judging by Bauer units. You can't even talk about this stuff without mentioning Bauer at some point. That stat is named after him. The stat, for those who don't know, it's RPM over miles per hour, which it's important to look at it that way because spin rate does increase along with speed.

And so I've seen some people showing like, well, high spin rate pitches are this much more effective than low spin rate pitches. And that's true, but it's also deceptive because, high spin rate pitches are this much more effective than low spin rate pitches. And that's true, but it's also deceptive because the high spin rate pitches, if you just lump them together like that, are also high velocity pitches for the most part. And so those are effective for other reasons. So you kind of have to control for that. And when I tried to do that and just looked at the same pitchers and what happens when they throw pitches with high power units and low bower units like it's significant it's like i have the numbers in my article i will link to that so you don't have to listen to me read them on a podcast but in theory if you took that away from players it

could really produce a difference and that would be something to see strikeout rates reverse themselves or at least stop climbing every year and And I kind of wonder also, like, are they going to police pine tar and sunscreen or rosin? Like, are they going to ask the umpires to try to distinguish on the field between substances? Like, this one is okay, that one's not okay? Or will everyone get ejected and suspended the same? That's interesting to me, too. It seems like a lot to ask umpires to do a chemical analysis in real time. some of the enforcement toward sort of post-game, because as you said, like, how are they going to differentiate between, you know, spider grip or whatever, you know,

Michael's secret special juice, special stuff, versus, you know, it's like I had sunscreen and rosin. Like, this is the thing that everybody uses, and we kind of think that that's okay. So it isn't an uncomplicated enforcement environment, even if you say, okay, here's what's allowed and here's what's not. Here's the date that it's going into effect and you make your own choices from there, right? It is still going to be, I think at times, very contentious. I don't know what capacity there is to really affect these things real time unless a guy just has a bunch of stuff globbed on him. The idea that you'd be nervous about how much you have

on your fingers because it might mess up your hands, it's just like, what are you doing? Yeah. No, it's Travis Sachik when we were working on the MVP machine. And just recently writing for the score, he went and went to a facility and tested some of this stuff out himself. And even though he doesn't throw hard, he still saw the huge spin rate spike. And he was telling me about how hard it was to get the stuff up his fingers. And it was like stuck there for hours or days. So you have to use like special substances to remove the special substances. So yeah. And I also wonder, I guess the last thing is whether we will see any difference in control and hit by pitches, which is what we've heard all along. Oh, pitchers have to use something so that they can get a grip and hitters are kind of okay with it. And I think when David Artsmo was on the podcast talking about this, he said he thought that was sort of BS and that it's kind of a justification, but we'll see. We've already talked a lot this season about hit by pitch rates being higher than they ever have been before. And so if there is any substance, no pun intended to that,

and we start to see even more of those, then that's not good either. And that came up this past weekend too, when Austin Voth, the Nationals pitcher, had a broken nose because he got hit by a Vince Velasquez pitch while Voth was trying to bunt. And then Nationals manager Dave Martinez said after the game that he thought that was either related to the sticky stuff issue or that we might see more of that if this happens. He said, I hate to bring it up, but you will see more of that if we keep messing around with the stuff about the balls. I mean, really, they've been trying to clean some stuff up, but it's hot.

It's slippery. Guys are sweaty. I know that Velasquez didn't throw intentionally, but I'm afraid that if we don't come up with something unified for that, you see a lot more of that. And that's a scary feeling because these guys throw 95, 96, 97. Some guys throw 100. Hopefully they will come up with some kind of happy medium to resolve the whole baseball issue with the sticky stuff. some legalized substance or some ball that has a naturally tacky cover that could be coming, but it doesn't seem like there will be an immediate short-term replacement for that. So if there is any truth to that specter of more hit-by-pitches, then I guess we will soon see. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Some of the hit-by-pitches we've seen lately, Ben, they've been very scary. I know.

They've been very bad i know they've been very bad there's nothing about sticky stuff that would have prevented what happened to tyler zombrow but anyway yeah i i don't quite know what the solution is there i mean i think that the the way to get to a solution even if it's hard to affect in the short term and does require some tinkering and adjustment is really for the league to sort of face the issue head on and honestly and and accept sort of the role that they played and what how we've gotten where we are and you know really incentivize not only players but also clubs to do the right thing right the responsibility needs to for oversight needs to not just sit with the players and the umpires but with the

you know folks who are directing their strategy and behavior on the field. So it needs to be the kind of thing where we all, well, not you and I, because we didn't really have anything to do with it, but where everyone else comes together and says, look, we all have a role to play here in making this right. And you're more likely to get a league approved substance that they think sort of straddles that line if they say yeah we have to like actively enforce this because we didn't for so long or someone should call dave roberts and be like you can't just keep saying you haven't asked your dudes if they're using a thing dave like you gotta ask them that now this is part of your job like me ask my players if they're using sticky stuff what's like yeah i don't know you're just the manager who could say why that would be important for you. So yeah, I think that it is going to take everyone being honest, which is not a thing that baseball is famously good at. So that makes me nervous. But I think that the only way you can kind of sort through really thorny questions of enforcement and responsibility and what have you is for everyone to do that. So I hope they do.

Me too. Well, I'm glad we're getting some resolution about this, hopefully sometime soon. And I'm hopeful about the hit by pitches because when I ran that same analysis for hit by pitch rate that I ran for whiff rate, it showed basically no difference in a pitcher's top and bottom quartile Bauer units delivery. So we'll see if that holds true. And we'll also see how teams adapt to this. I guess another way in which you mentioned that teams are kind of complicit in maybe actively encouraging players to use these things or employing people who would supply them, Employing people who would supply them, which was the case in, you know, the Angels with the visiting clubhouse manager who MLB fired and then got sued by, although that was subsequently dismissed. But another thing is that teams will happily sign pitchers who, you know, seem to be using these things. I mean, Garrett Cole made many other changes, so I'm not going to say that he was a product of sticky stuff and spin rate purely necessarily, but he cashed in and got a giant contract. And Bauer, of course, just over this past winter, the Dodgers were quite happy to sign him, either figuring that MLB wouldn't actually do anything about the foreign substances and that he would continue to do what he was doing, just not really thinking about it or figuring that

even if something happened that he'd still be decent and worth the money for them. I don't know what the rationale there was, but that's something that they probably should have, could have factored in. And now we'll see whether that signing turns out to be worthwhile anyway. And maybe Bauer, in a sense, got what he wanted if what he wanted was to raise awareness and have the league crack down on this and also got what he wanted in the sense that he won a sighing award and a lot of money so maybe it worked out well for him but will it work out well for other players who are now approaching free agency or something and you know don't get that same advantage or teams who sign players who might have been more dependent on this than others.

So there will be all kinds of implications coming from this if it actually happens. So I guess we can wrap up there because we will probably have other opportunities to talk about this sometime soon. But it's a natural experiment of the sort that we don't get often. So to suddenly have this mystery hopefully answered, like how pervasive is this? How much of a difference does it actually make? It might not just be anonymous sources and speculation. It might be actually getting to see what happens on the field. So that to me is interesting, although it makes me wary of somehow screwing this up worse than

it already has. But hopefully we'll know sometime soon. Well, there's no precedent for them making mistakes, so I don't know why you're so concerned. No. Yeah. Oh, me of little faith. All right. So what happened after Meg and I spoke?

Let's see. Shohei Otani hit a baseball 470 feet. In addition to his home run, he doubled and walked. That's one way to climb the Fangraphs War Leaderboards. Jesse Winker went one for three with a single and two ground outs off of Adrian Hauser, so the dominance didn't continue. Cabrian Hayes hit a baseball over the fence and then failed to touch first base as he rounded it and was called out. So add that to the Will Craig play and the Eric Sogard play. Players can't find

first base anymore, apparently. I think it's easier not to step on the bag than it is to slide headfirst and still miss it, but still not great. Maybe this is a Pirates problem. Maybe players are just unfamiliar with first base now that the League OBP has fallen to 313. Whatever the issue is, not a lot of hits to go around these days. Can't afford to give back the ones you get. And Garrett Cole was asked via Zoom if he has ever used spider tack. He sort of stammered and was speechless for a bit and then gave a non-answer. Unsurprisingly, it didn't look great and he probably should have had some more polished non-answer prepared. But I don't know how productive it is to grill individual players on whether

they've used certain substances. It seems safe to say that most of them have, and they're kind of constrained in what they can say without getting themselves into trouble, and these may be questions better directed to Rob Manfred and league officials about what they knew about spider attack and when. Anyway, it is against the rules. It's fair to punish pitchers for it if they continue to do it, and it's fair to ask them about it rules. It's fair to punish pitchers for it if they continue to do it. And it's fair to ask them about it too. I just wouldn't expect a lot of enlightening responses. 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 jayden slagle john sandstrom nathaniel kane nishant menon and kyle sharamataro thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild you can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and spotify and other podcast platforms keep your questions and comments for me and meg coming via email at podcast at.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, and we will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then. Outro Music