Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1712: The 21-Strikeout Salute

Episode Date: June 26, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the brief big league stay of knuckleballer Mickey Jannis, Joey Votto’s predictions, decline, and reminders of mortality, Greg Maddux forecasting foul balls, and the states of the Cubs and Dodgers post-combined no-hitter. Then they answer listener emails about whether MLB regrets making Statcast data publicly available in the […]

Well, I don't know how to grow up And I don't know how to stay young I just know That I can't stay here Cause I've been woken from a dream Cause I've been woken from a dream I'm never going back to sleep Cause I know That I can't stay here

Hello and welcome to episode 1712 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Van Graffs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Van Graffs. Hello, Meg. Hello. Oh, Mickey Janus. We hardly knew you. I wish I could say he had a good run. And it was a good run relative to most 44th round picks.

There aren't even 44th round picks anymore. There will never be 44th round picks again. To make the majors for a single game is a triumph for a 44th round pick. And hopefully it will not be his last game. But it was not a long and glorious stay in the majors. He was called up on Tuesday. He was shelled by the Astros on Thursday. And he was designated for assignment by the Orioles

on Friday. So, you know, it could have gone better. But I hope he'll be back, and I hope that we'll still get to talk to him sometime. And no one can take it away from him. He is a major leaguer, or at least was a major leaguer, which is more than most of us can say. Certainly more than either of us can say. As a major leaguer, which is more than most of us can say. Certainly more than either of us can say. You got to get the knuckleball back on a more lasting basis. And really, it's the Orioles.

I mean, what's the difference between Mickey Janis and the next best pitcher? And no slight to Connor Wade, who is the pitcher who was called up to replace Mickey Janus. And maybe this is just one of those situations where they will shuffle through various players in search of a competent pitcher. And they also made some corresponding move. They optioned another righty, Dean Kramer, to Norfolk and recalled a lefty, Alexander Wells. So it's just sort of a cycling through fresh bodies situation. But pitching, not really a strength of the major league staff right now. So at least let us enjoy the knuckleballer in the meantime. They are not rudderless.

That would be the wrong way to describe them because they are sort of in recent possession of a rudder. It just isn't one that is- Yeah, they have some rudder. Right, that is going to drive- It's rough waters. Right. They're not making exactly headway the

tide they're you know sailing against the tide but but there's a hand at the rudder oh no we're we're rearing into boris territory but you know the the uh the major league club isn't isn't going anywhere this year um and i think that when that is the reality of your franchise, presenting your fans with a different aesthetic for a little while is a perfectly defensible way to use a roster spot because it's like you're really using them to win, you know? So let him go out there and throw his knuckleball and get shelled. Terrible. Yeah, if you're going to be bad bad don't be boring as well exactly the Astros shelling people has

afforded us maybe the best part of sticky stuff enforcement that I have heard tell of so far I don't know if you noticed Ben but they they put a real bruising on the Tigers yesterday they beat them 12 to 3 and the Tigers in a move that is not uncommon

through a position player out there to eat a little bit of inning because it's like you're well past the point of winning return. And he was checked for sticky stuff while he exited the mound, which I think is the right approach. You have to check everyone every single time. This is how we're going to ensure that no one gets preferential treatment in this new era of

enforcement but i just found it very delightful check the knuckleballers check the position player pitchers no exceptions no one will feel singled out if every single pitcher is checked every time exactly so um you know it isn't it isn't without its entertainment value, put it that way. Yes. So one follow-up, perhaps the last follow-up to our ongoing discussion of player predictions. We get stuck in these cycles where we bring up a topic

and then people write in to tell us something about that topic and then we follow up on that and then it goes on and on it's like our framing flopping discussion that spanned like 10 episodes so it's just you know it's like a mini it's like a subplot within the never-ending season of effectively wild and so right now we are in the player predictions subplot. This is just the little mini arc of this never-ending season. So someone pointed us to the excellent article that The Athletic did earlier this year. C. Trent Rosecrans and Rustin Dodd and Jason Jenks, the sort of oral history of Joey Votto. And Gareth wrote in to say, I was reading the athletic article on Joey Votto and felt compelled to share it with you,

or at least this little snippet. It says, Johnny Gomes, outfielder, I've seen Joey Votto literally plan out like a month in advance, days he's going to hit homers, big games. You talk about Babe Ruth called his shot one time. I've seen Joey do it 10 to 15 times. This leads me to the obvious question. We know players like to predict things. We know they do it often. But does this impress you any differently if you schedule out your success like this? Or does this fall under the too many predictions to merit an actual prediction umbrella?

Seems to be a characteristic of Votto, according to this piece here, where he does this regularly. Jay Bruce says one day he said, I'm going to see how many balls I can foul off this at bat. He said another time we were in spring training and Votto said, I'm going to hit a curveball out to left field today. Skip Schumacher says, I'm pretty sure you Darvish was the one pitching. And he said, if you throw me that slow curveball again, I'll hit it out of the ballpark. He threw it again and he hit it out of the ballpark. And Gomes says, he'd be like, all right, I'm probably going to walk four times today. Or in spring training, he's like, I'm going to foul off as many pitches as I can today. I'm like, what? Sure enough. So he has this habit of doing things. And to be fair, if he intends to do these things that are maybe

somewhat more under his control like if he sets out to foul off pitches or walk you can control those things probably to a greater degree than you can control like hitting a walk-off homer or something because uh probably most players are trying to hit homers or hoping to hit homers all the time. And maybe if you try to do those things, it might actually hurt your ability to do those things. But if you're just trying to foul off pitches, or if you're just trying to walk, you could just not swing, which is something Joey Votto does often. But anyway, apparently he had a whole schedule where he would call his shot days or weeks in advance and then try to stick to that schedule.

I mean, if he's able to really do that, I suppose it is. I don't think that it indicates his ability to be prescient so much as it indicates just how much back control he has. Yeah. And maybe that's the same thing for our purposes. But I also wonder, you know, this, this has been sort of a part of our conversation here that if you make a bunch of predictions all the time, really the only ones that are going to stick are the ones that you get right. We tend to forget those other predictions, but I think that if you're scheduling them out a month in advance, you're at least entertaining

the notion that someone might want to, you know, double check on that, because it is quite a departure from that. I bet he's going to walk it off here, right? Because then when he doesn't, you just, you're upset, and you go back to the showers, and then you forget about it the next day. But if someone is claiming the ability to control their schedule to this degree, I think that your odds of remembering are significantly better. So perhaps it is a testament both to his ability or ability in the past because you know some of that back control has waned a little bit but yeah a testament to his ability and his boldness right these are the true bold predictions because the ones made in the moment nobody's really going to hold you to but if you're if

you're claiming i'm going to hit a home run on this day it's like well all right i'm gonna write that down i'm gonna make a note of it in my notes app then you're gonna be held accountable for it when you fail so he's an odd bird that joey yes a rare bird a precious bird but it does sort of sadden me that he has proven to be mortal that he has proven to be mortal, that he has proven to be subject to the same aging that we all are just because, you know, there's nothing unusual about it. It's not as if he has suffered some extremely precipitous decline. It's not the Pujol situation. normal aging curve sort of disappoints me because there was a time when I believed that he would not be immune to the effects of aging forever, but he seemed like if anyone was going to be able to beat Father Time or at least hold him off for a while, that it would be Joey Votto. And it just hasn't

really happened. I mean, he's still a slightly above average hitter at age 37. There's no shame in that, but he has been over the course of his age 35 to 37 seasons, I guess it is, his past three seasons, 2019 to 2021, we're talking about 240 games and just over a thousand plate appearances and he has a 106 wrc plus over that span with 1.7 war so you know he's not hitting well for a first baseman anymore and again that is usually the case for 37 year olds but i really kind of bought that joey vato just might beat aging just because it seemed like he had such an incredible feel for hitting such incredible bat control that he could really tailor his approach to his strengths and his weaknesses and he was just so cerebral about it all and he remains a character and quotable and wonderful

and an international treasure and all of that but he is no longer a star level player. And there was part of me that hoped that like Ted Williams, whom he emulates or like some other all-time greats, he would be able to maintain that or at least some aspects of that deep into the portion of his career where a lot of players are no longer playable and he's still playable, but no longer an above average or even necessarily an average first baseman. And that's sort of a bummer. I now am less likely to believe that anyone will be able to defy aging because Joey Votto has not been able to. Yeah. And it goes to show that small declines in that skill set can have really meaningful impacts. I think we tend to underestimate how fragile that can be.

It's not that we have plenty of examples of guys who have sort of the big dramatic decline. You mentioned pool holes, but it doesn't always have to degrade all that much for it to have a really significant impact on your skill. degrade all that much for it to have a really significant impact on your skill. So, you know, it's a good reminder of that because as you said, he's certainly not unplayable, he's not unrosterable, but he's not what he was. And now you're sort of, the thing we're starting to look for is like, where does that moment come where it's like, oh, maybe playing Vado doesn't really make much sense anymore. And that's the thing we're on the lookout for, which is sort of a bummer, as opposed to in the early part of his decline,

I think that I was like you, I assumed that there could be, you know, that he'd kind of defied the odds for a long time. And so what I was looking for was the bounce back, and I don't think that's coming anymore. So that's kind of a bummer. Have you spent any time watching the umpire cams that have been going on during the College World Series, Ben? No. So they have the umpires where cameras, I guess they're GoPros

probably, you see like college pitching. You see college pitching come in and some of the guys in this class are going to be big leaguers some of them are going to be first rounders and you know they'll go on to have long um and hopefully productive and and accomplished major league careers but some of them are also you know they're college pitchers they're not going to do anything more than play college ball and then have cool stories to tell their family from now on and you see those pitches coming in and you're like how does it you know it's just one more day where you're like how how does anyone ever put a bat to a ball? It's just we asked them to do the hardest thing so many times. They just have to do it so many times.

And of course, them doing it so many times makes it ever so slightly easier, which is why they're able to do it. But anyway, I just was thinking of that as you were noting the decline because you you're like yeah this is really just tremendously difficult it is just really one of the harder things that we ever ask humans to do so it's not surprising that you can't just think yourself right out of it you can't think the decline away like maybe you can for a while i mean if it were purely dependent on physical skills then players would probably decline even quicker than they do. But they do have some wisdom and some plate discipline and maybe strike zone recognition, and that stuff can slip with age too. But you do pick up certain things that if you had known them as a young player, maybe you would have been even better and you can compensate with what you've learned even as the physical skills start to slip. But there is a point at which even if you're Joey Votto, even if you think about this stuff in a really in-depth and

enlightened way, and he does these like annual or biannual State of the Votto addresses where he talks to C. Trent or he talks to Eno Saris, and they're just these fascinating interviews, and you can tell he's thinking about these things in a way that a lot of players don't. And yet it's just not enough at a certain point. And as you said, it can be little slight erosions. Sometimes it's physical stuff. Sometimes it's just you lose a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And each little loss amplifies the others so that it's, yeah, it's not not like pool holes where he has the lower body issues and he can't run or surprisingly inexplicably he stops walking all of a sudden with vato it's more subtle i guess it's like you know you lose a little power and suddenly you get

challenged more and if you're a selective hitter then that doesn't translate to as many walks as it did and you're not punishing those pitches in the zone. And yeah, it's a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And that can be enough to really change the whole character of your offensive performance and season. So, yeah. And then we sit here and we tell people, well, this weirdo was so good at stuff. And the youth don't believe us. No, they do. There's enough of vintage Votto, I think, in there that people can recognize just how incredible he was. But it isn't quite the same.

It's a very, in some ways, mean thing that we ask of them because we all experience slight decline over the years in our own lives. We don't bounce back from little injuries or illnesses the way that we used to. And we struggle to come up with a name that would have been just right there for us in years past. But we do that at home. No one knows. And when we do it on the podcast, Dylan fixes it for us because he's sure a good editor and a nice guy.

And so we're able to maintain the illusion that we're just as sharp as we were. Yeah. But we keep doing this podcast for another 30 years or so. Maybe Dylan doesn't catch those things anymore. And now they're slipping into the podcast. So then you need an editor for the editor.

Well, that's today's reminder of our mortality. Yeah. Mercy of effectively wild. So last thing on the player predictions. And then after this, no one is allowed to email us about this anymore. That's not true. You can, but it better be good if you're going to do it. So this one comes from Ron and he says,

listening to your discussion of player predictions on the most recent version of Effectively Wild reminded me of a Sports Illustrated article about Greg Maddox I read years ago. In particular, I recalled that the article discussed Maddox's ability to call when a foul ball was going to be hit into the Braves dugout. After a bit of internet sleuthing, I found that my memory was correct. The relevant passage and a link to the article are below. If true, Maddox's predictive talents go far beyond the pedestrian player predictions you discussed and suggest that Maddox is a modern-day Nostradamus, at least when it comes to foul balls. So I'll link to the piece, but this is a August 1995 feature from Tom Verducci at Sports Illustrated. And he wrote, what sets Maddox apart is an analytical Pentium quickind that constantly processes information no one else sees. That's a 1995 sentence for you.

Yeah, sure is. Pentium QuickMind. I guess you can't really use that anymore. I think the Pentium processors are like the low-end entry-level processors now, and back then they were high-end. Although I guess today's Pentium chips are still faster than 1995. So maybe it works on that level, but it's probably not quite as complimentary as it was at the time. Raducci continues, at home in Las Vegas, he is a formidable poker player, detecting when an opponent has a good hand by the way he strokes his chin or suddenly

stops fiddling with his chips. Maddox uses a numerical system in his head that tells him when to stand and when to hit at the blackjack table. But he is even better at analyzing hitters. So So I like this one because, for one, it reinforces the idea that Greg Maddox like Joey Votto has some deeper level of understanding of the game but also we have the denominator here we have how many times he predicted this thing he predicted it four times he went three for four that is the vital information that seems pretty good and also he's not just predicting your run-of-the-mill positive outcome. He's predicting a foul into the dugout. Not just a foul, but a foul into the dugout. That is hyper-specific. And would this have been a repeatable ability? I don't know. adept at reading hitters and perhaps predicting pitch sequences that he could actually identify when this was more likely, or maybe he just got lucky. But either way, we have how many times he did it and how many times he succeeded, at least in the sample of this single season. So well done, Tom Verducci, in relaying this anecdote and giving us the relevant information for once. What do we think the state of like

spray charts were in 1995? You said 95 or 98? 95. 95. What do you think the sort of both availability and accuracy of spray charts were at that time for a given hitter? I would think that they had them. I know they existed even earlier and there were people using computers and tracking those things in the 80s even, but I'm sure they weren't as easily accessible as they are today. And they also probably they would have been hand charted as opposed to tracked by some sort of system. So probably less accurate. And I doubt that they would have included foul balls. Probably not. So, yeah, I don't know if he was consulting the spray charts when he when he made these predictions or whether he just had some preternatural sense of what was going to happen or even, as you said, even what was available was probably not widely disseminated, probably didn't include fouls and would have been a thing he would have had to go and ask for. He would have had to say, hey, I'm interested in this thing. But I like that one.

Like you said, we know how many times, but I do wonder if it is just indicative of what you can sort of intuitively divine just by watching a lot of baseball yeah you know just by watching guys a lot and and seeing what their tendencies are and sort of how they approach approach their work but yeah interesting only four i mean that's that probably, apart from knowing if you're going to win the game, that might be one of the more useful predictions because if you get that right, you can avert major injury potentially. That's true. Yeah. That'd be a big competitive advantage, just have everyone clear out of the way. one of our hitters was going to take a ball to the face but then we were able to look down the way and see this is one of the four predicted times we got everyone out of dodge and then it was fine like i think i think that's a pretty useful skill all right well we can get to some emails that are not about player predictions you don't want to talk about the cubs throwing a

combined no hitter i was just gonna say like I feel almost obligated still to acknowledge the fact that there was a no hitter, even though everyone is so blasé about it now that the Cubs relievers were not even aware that they were throwing a combined no hitter until after the game was over. And multiple pitchers, multiple starting pitchers were pulled during no-hit attempts just on Thursday alone because it's like, eh, whatever, another no-hitter. And this was not only a combined no-hitter, which always saps whatever specialness remains of it, or at least some of that specialness, but also eight walks. So there were a lot of base runners. So this was like the ultimate in the inconsequential no-hitter but congrats to the Cubs right I only bring it up because we were you know we spent a lot of time on the question of whether the the sort of specialness of this event was diminished by its frequency relative to prior seasons and I think we were inclined to sort of give credit to teams and pitchers for having a good outing

and doing a good job and recording a no-hitter, even if it was occurring with great frequency. And then the monkey's paw curled, and we got this game. Yeah. I mean, we got a little bit of a break between no-hitters. Yeah, we sure did. So now this is the modern record-tying no-hitter seven, if you don't count

the Bumgarner one. And this is maybe more notable just from the fact that it was the Dodgers getting no hit. It was not the Rangers or the Mariners for once, the teams that always seem to be on the wrong end of these things. This was actually a good team and a team that has been banged up. Like we haven't talked about the Dodgers lately. They've been pretty streaky where they've looked like the team they were supposed to be for a while and then they floundered for a while

and then they've snapped back into form and they've been pretty good up until this week when they have been not good at all. But it is striking just how many players they have gone through. And this is a team that was lauded for its depth, who had more depth and redundancy than the Dodgers entering the season. But they have not only had to scramble with internal replacements, but also external replacements.

Like who could have projected that the Dodgers would be signing Albert Pujols would be bringing in and then discarding Yoshi Tsutsugo I guess Steven Souza is the latest and just trying to patch some holes until other guys get back you know Corey Seager coming back and Cody Bellinger is back now, but there have been just so many injuries, some serious, some season ending, some short term. But even a team like the Dodgers with as much talent and depth as they have, they have had to bring in other teams, lesser teams, rejects just to have some warm bodies at times. Yeah.

I mean, I would imagine that for the Dodgers it had to have been a particularly grim feeling sort of evening because it's not just that they were no hit, but they were no hit in truly unspectacular fashion if such a thing is possible. And so they really have to be feeling their own mortality right now. It's one

thing to just get totally dominated by a guy, right? Sometimes you're like, well, I mean, like John Means. It's like this to just get totally dominated by a guy, right? Sometimes you're like, well, I mean, like John Means. It's like this is just an excellent performance, and there are a lot of unhittable secondary pitches, and what are you going to do? Sometimes that happens. But when it's like Zach Davies, like E5, you just sit there,

and you're like, what have we done wrong? I don't know if Corey Sears is enough to fix it. Also, Cody Bellinger has grown his hair out in a way that we will probably have to talk about. Yeah, that is a look. Yeah. And we should say that despite all of the shorthandedness, the Dodgers are still winning at a 95 win pace. So that would not be disappointing for any other team in baseball, probably. It's just that they entered the season with such high expectations. And I would take the over on 95.

I would guess that they get healthier in the second half of the season than they've been in the first and that they will be firing on all cylinders sometime soon. I still think that it's the best team in baseball that if I had to pick one team to win the most games from now until the end of the regular season, it would be the Dodgers. And I know that they are missing some guys and I know that the bullpen has been shaky at times, but that's kind of a constant for the Dodgers lately too.

Like if there's one thing that the Dodgers haven't really done during this run it's build total shut down bullpens like some of the i don't know the royals late inning bullpens or the yankees late in bullpens like the dodgers have seemed somewhat vulnerable at least until they get to october and they can put their two extra major league quality starters into the bullpen every time. So that will probably happen again. And Kenley Jansen is his old self somehow suddenly. So none of these problems are really disqualifying in any way, but it has enabled the Giants to maintain that lead.

Still trucking along. Good for the Giants. Maintaining that first place status far longer than anyone expected them to. And really goofing up the trade deadline, I would expect, because starters are thin on the ground, Ben. And some of the good ones are on the Giants, and I don't think that they're going to trade them away. Speaking of which, the Cubs could use a starter, too. And they had a really good one, as i recall last season that uh they chose to trade away that was weird yeah i don't know whether they thought they wouldn't contend without darvish and

and so they thought let's rebuild or they thought we're good enough to win this division without darvish and and like they were good enough to contend which they are they're like neck and neck with the Brewers right now in the NL Central which makes it almost more glaring yes that they chose to trade away the the very thing that they most need right now yeah and is probably least available it's like I think Joe Sheehan made the comp to the Cleveland owner in major league, Rachel Phelps, just trying to tear down the team and the players doing their best to disrupt the plan by playing better than expected. It's sort of akin to that and that the Cubs haven't really invested in their roster and have even subtracted from it. And yet they still have that core of Bryant and Rizzo and Baez and Contreras and Hendrix,

who's been a lot better of late. And that was a championship caliber core for them. And even without a great supporting cast, it's still a contending in the NL Central core. So yeah, if they had an ace, that sure would come in handy right about now. Yeah, it sure would. It sure would. Just try to win all the time, you know? If you're good already.

Yeah. If you just need a Udarvish to put you over the top potentially, that was just a weird time to say, let's regroup and rebuild and get a bunch of prospects who might be good several years from now. This is like the last hurrah for a lot of this core potentially. They should make one more run at it. They're doing their best, just not without much support from ownership. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Let's get to a few. So Mike says, do you think MLB regrets making its StatCast data publicly available since those metrics have fueled the controversies about the juiced balls and sticky stuff. It's kind of funny that MLB freely provides the evidence that fans and media have used to prove that pitchers are cheating and that the league made surreptitious changes to the baseball, which is something I've thought about. Yeah.

And information wants to be free. And it's nice that we have this information. And I wish we had more. There's some StatCast data that is only provided to teams or is available to people internally, but is not published. And I wish it were, but there is a good amount of information out there following in the tradition of PitchFX, which I believe was published and made available accidentally. And then that just became the norm. And I think that MLB and Sport Vision found that it was mutually beneficial and that it drove interest in the game and the data. And it also provided an opportunity for some of the public experts to examine that data and do analyses and find problems with it. So I think it has been a mutually beneficial arrangement. And I think it

still is to an extent in that a lot of writers and media members and fans like to dig into this data and share it and analyze it. But it is true as well that probably a lot of the fuss about the ball and the foreign substances would be more muted between home plate and the pitcher's mound and how it carries once it's hit. And a lot of that is stat cast information, as is spin rate, which comes from TrackMan originally and Hawkeye now. And if we didn't have that data, then it probably would be a little less of a circus. Like we wouldn't have the forensic spin rate analysis on baseball savant after every game looking at who lost a couple hundred RPM and who didn't. So I do wonder whether that has become a bit of a headache or whether the league has mixed feelings about having that information out there now that it has come back to bite them in some sense. Although if it's making the game better to do away with the sticky stuff and lower the spin rates, then perhaps it will be beneficial to MLB as well. I imagine that to the degree that

they have any regrets at all, they probably have more to do with the changes in the ball than they do with sticky stuff. Because, well, I wonder if I actually do think that though, because here's what I imagine would have happened if we didn't have that information. People would have noticed that like, you know, D. Gordon was hitting home runs, right? The exact characteristics of the ball and the way that it behaves would have been somewhat more of a mystery, but some of the some of the observable phenomena as a result of those changes wouldn't have disappeared, right? We'd still see those home runs.

So when you think about what brought the sticky stuff situation to a head, I think a lot of it would have been stuff that we would have been made aware of, even if we weren't able to look at an individual pitcher's spin start to start and say, ha ha, surely he has the spider attack. Because they were doing their own data collection. Clearly, they would maintain their own access to StatCast. So they would have been aware of the changes in spin. And a lot of this was being driven by hitters being kind of pissed, right? And feeling like the balance had gotten out of whack between pitching and hitting. So I think that in some ways,

while I'm sure they would rather there just not be controversies around the game at all, in a weird way, I wonder if this is actually the ideal scenario for them. Because when you have the means as a researcher to get the data you need to analyze a particular situation, you're probably less inclined to spend time squawking at the league for not giving you more. I mean, I think that we wish that the discourse around the changes to the ball had been different and it was frustrating to have the commissioner's office seemingly saying like, everything is the same. Like this isn't that different at all when their own, you know, commissioned report showed that that was not true.

But we were at least able to sort of dig in and point to the changes. Whereas I think that if that information were not publicly available, we'd be sitting here saying, we know that something is different. Like we can observe changes to the game and the way that sort of the shape of offense, but we don't have the means to, to really dig into that. So give me it, give me it, give me it. And that would have been the conversation. It would have been, you know, public side researchers saying, we're not dummies. We know that something has shifted. Please give us the data so that we can, you know, more accurately analyze and then describe those changes. So I am sure they wish that we were just less inquisitive

because we're such a pain in the ass, you know, not you and me specifically, although sometimes you and me specifically, but as a group, we're like, you know, delightfully annoying in our persistence, right? We want to understand the game. And so we dig into it. But we would have that instinct, I imagine, regardless of the availability of the data. And at least this way, they're spared, you know, a chorus of public facing writers being like, give me it, give me it. Yeah. Because that's an annoying, annoying sound even, you know, and then they'd have to respond

to it. And there would be even more charges of sort of weird conspiracy nonsense surrounding it so i i i do wonder if maybe this gives them for lack of a better word like a bat and a ball in terms of their their desire to enforce it it's a lot easier for the commissioner to say like no look at this mountain of research that has been produced about what spin does to offense and how spin has changed over time surely we need to get into this and figure it out because you can't deny this research right in some respects it gives them you know ammunition to to bring the issue to the fore and make it an enforcement

priority so i think they're probably fine on that i'm sure they would rather us not talk about the no ammunition to bring the issue to the fore and make it an enforcement priority. So I think they're probably fine on that. I'm sure they would rather us not talk about the ball ever again. But the spin stuff, I bet they don't mind. No, you're right, though. As kind of clandestine as the whole operation with MLB and the ball has seemed in as many conspiracy theories as that has spawned, and as much as it seems as if MLB has tried to dissemble or sweep some of that stuff under the rug, imagine how much more it would seem like that if they were hiding all of this information, if we knew that StatCast existed, but only teams had access to it and the league was sitting on all of this information that could help expose the part that the ball

has played in all this and was just not publicly disseminating that, that would make it look even more like a cover-up. So in that sense, yeah, maybe they're better off just putting it out there, even if it makes them look bad because they haven't been able to control the ball in some past seasons. At least they were not trying to squash the evidence that they were not good at controlling the ball. So that's something. Quash the evidence, squash the evidence. I guess it would be quash. But it's also probably beneficial that now that they have done this crackdown with the foreign substances, we can tell that it's working. So we can see the spin rates dropping, which after the fact sort of backs up MLB's decision to do something about this because we can see that

it wasn't some sort of witch hunter imaginary problem. No, suddenly the spin rates really are sinking, which sort of justifies their decision to do something about it. And I guess from MLB's perspective, puts the onus on individual players more so than the league, which is probably to the league's liking. I mean, I don't know if that's their main motivation, but if someone has to be blamed for the sticky stuff situation, then they'd probably prefer to have people pointing fingers at players than at the commissioner. So the fact that this information is published the way it is and people scrutinize the results after every pitcher appearance, that makes it more likely, I think, for people to say, oh, Trevor Bauer, oh, Garrett Cole, not Rob Manfred. So there are ways in which it probably benefits MLB to have this information out there. Yeah. And it is sort of funny to think about, where would our lives, yours and mine, where would our lives be if someone hadn't accidentally released pitch effects data to

the world? Yeah. I think about that too. I think about that all the time, Ben. I think about that at least once a week. This became just like an inadvertently public source of information for people. And Felix was good. And now here I am, right? The course of my life has been dictated in some small or large part by those two things happening. It's really very random. So it's nice when stuff works out because gosh, does it seem like it's on accident a lot of the time. Yeah. Imagine if we were still stuck looking at just purely results or ground ball rates or something without having any info on velocity and pitch selection and movement and spin rate.

In some ways, that stuff can be a curse as well as a blessing because you realize that every time you want to analyze everything, it becomes a super deep dive just because there's so much information. But it's also nice to know things and not have to wildly speculate about things. I mean, baseball writers got by for a long time with a lot less information than PitchFX. got by for a long time with a lot less information than PitchFX. They may not have had basic stats at all, and they still wrote stuff. So I guess people would have kept coming up with things to say. It just probably would have been less rooted in actual information. Sometimes I do miss that era of baseball writing, though, because they'd be be like i'm wondering about this thing here's what i can't explain well anyway yep just fire from the hip just uh make up tall tales who's going to be able to check it's not like you can go back and look at the play-by-play log from that

game so we'll just make something up or we'll just speculate about something that we have no way to answer and everyone will be fine with that Those were the days Alright here is a question From another Ben Who says I was watching Monday's game I don't know which Monday This was a recent Monday between the Rays and Yankees And Rich Hill who had been cruising To that point with a 3-0 lead

Surrendered a one out walk to Brett Gardner To my surprise the Rays Pitching coach came up the mound Why does Hill need help I thought It looks like if anyone needs a coaching visit, it is the Yankees hitters. This got me thinking about when and how the practice of visits from pitching coaches was introduced when I've never seen a hitting coach leave the dugout for similar reasons. What would it look like if it were more customary in baseball for hitting coaches to visit batters in the middle of an inning? Would they appear in high leverage situations only or in more general situations as well, mid count or only before at bats? What kind of advice might they give? Would hitters resent this intervention in a way pitchers appear not to? Is it unfair to hitters that pitchers are permitted visits from their coaches while they are not?

Could hitting coaches intervening in at bats helpats help offensive production, or would it be more counterproductive? In any case, Rich Hill went on to immediately induce an inning-ending double play, so I guess the visit went well, or returning to my initial point was unnecessary. So yeah, we don't have hitting coach mid-inning visits. It is sort of an odd thing, isn't it? I mean, I guess that you have the opportunity to talk to your hitting coach literally right before you step into the matchbox. You're not stranded out there for a while. So, you know, you have an opportunity to both get a, you know, kind of get a scouting report on a pitcher before you, well, I guess really before you step into the on-deck circle, and then you have an opportunity to debrief after your at-bat is over

or you've returned to the dugout when you scored or what have you. I can't use the word debrief anymore in this week of Sergio Romo. I mean, all sorts of things. He had his briefs on. He de-pantsed. That's true. He un-pantsed. He disrobed but so you you have an opportunity to talk it

through at some point right and you're certainly going to be communicating not only with the the hitting coach for your own benefit but with other hitters on your team for theirs and yours you know what they saw when they were up there and you you see, it's not uncommon when a guy, like if a guy strikes out and he's trudging back to the dugout, he'll kind of give the guy in the on deck circle a little tip about what he just saw. Right. Yeah. So that's not unusual, but I do wonder if it just comes back to the tradition of it

being kind of, you know, it's fundamentally reactive on the hitter's part. The exercise is's fundamentally reactive on the hitter's part. The exercise is just fundamentally reactive. And so I think given that that's the way we think about it, maybe we just think, you're on your own for this one. I think hitters would hate it. I think that they would absolutely hate it if the hitting coach came up mid at bat in part because we've never done it before. And so it would feel very, it would feel like you had really goofed up, right? If they were coming up there mid at bat to be like, I don't know, pick a bad hitter.

I don't know. There are all sorts of reasons why this doesn't happen, I think. And it's probably better that it doesn't. Again, I am against all mid-inning coaching visits, aside from injury-related visits. But yeah, between the fact that you can look at your ipad and see the pitcher right before you go out there and you can consult your coach much closer to the action than a pitcher who is maybe a few batters into an inning

plus there's probably fewer ways for your mechanics to get screwed up. Pitching is just a more complicated motion, which isn't to say that hitters can't have screwed up mechanics too, but I don't know if it's as obvious or as fixable in the short term, where with a pitcher, you can go out there and say the usual stuff about flying open or whatever people say and maybe you can actually correct something in the moment whereas i don't know if that's as easy to do with hitting that might be something that you need to work on in the cage and also you can talk between at bats and maybe you could even just shout something out there i don't know but also as you said because it's reactive like you can't go out there and game

plan, like, here's what you're going to throw here. Or we want to face this guy or do this with this guy and then set up the next plate appearance. Or maybe we want to pitch around this guy and then pitch to that guy. The hitter doesn't have a choice

of those things. He can't choose to be pitched around or choose to face another pitcher. He just, you know, luck of the draw. And you can make some strategic choices about whether you're going to swing or not. But really, you are forced to react to what is thrown your way. So there wouldn't be nearly as much for a hitting coach to say mid at bat fortunately right and you know i think that we have done a bad job we we talk all the time about how we can speed up the game right and increase the decrease the delays and increase the action we wouldn't want

to increase the delays that would be counterproductive but we already let hitters get away with all kinds of nonsense they adjust their batting gloves they do all this stuff in the box can you imagine if they could also call the hitting coach out there it would just be ridiculous go on and on it's like you you take a bad swing and you're down oh two oh here comes the hitting coach right he's like coaching him through all right don't swing at a terrible pitch this time. Right, what would you say? I mean, I guess that you could remind him of the pitcher's tendencies, like he often throws in this count, in this situation, but you probably know that.

You should, yeah. You should know that before you go up there, and it's not like you can really say, okay, throw a different pitch or what have you. So I think that that's probably why we're like, it's reactive. Go react. Yep. Yep. See the ball, hit the ball, as they say.

Although it can be much more complicated than that. Okay. Kate says, I am not a baseball fan, but I live with one of your Patreon supporters. And so I have somewhat grudgingly learned many baseball stat acronyms. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, Kate. One of the ones that seems inaccurate to me is WAR, Winspeb replacement. Technically, WAR is based on a league average replacement metric.

But realistically, the player's replacement would most likely be from the team's actual farm system. So I'm curious, how would war be different if it were calculated based on the average of wins for players within each farm system rather than the league average? Seems like a team with a strong farm system would have players with a lower war than those on teams with a weak system, right? Or am I overthinking something? Like, is this accounted for somewhere else in war calculations? I feel so sorry that we have driven Kate to this point. subjected to so much Effectively Wild that she is now emailing us, independent seemingly, of the cohabitant who is a Patreon supporter to ask about advanced stat in a pretty nuanced way, like how much Effectively Wild. I mean, whoever Kate is living with here, I hope you are using headphones and not putting this on a shared speaker system when Kate is not in the mood to listen to a baseball podcast, despite not being a baseball fan.

So, I don't know. Practice your effectively wild listening responsibly. I mean, I'm all for people supporting podcasts and listening to the podcast, but you do have to consider the other people, the collateral damage here in these listening scenarios. So poor Kate, who's now just so indoctrinated that she's emailing us about war. Wow. Yeah. I. Did you have a lot of really long road trips like in a row?

Right. Was there no music that you could have put on instead i mean anyway thank you to kate's patreon supporter cohabitant and thank you to kate for putting up with this yeah we're really sorry i hope the jokes are enough it is actually an interesting question though and i would be interested in seeing a team specific war yeah it would be interested in seeing a team-specific war. It would be, for one thing, really difficult to do. It would be very complicated. You would have to account for all sorts of factors that you do not have to account for with war because you'd have to have people maintaining the depth charts at all times. Right. That's an issue, whereas with war, there's a lot less manual input there, which is a feature of war.

Also, it is useful this way to have the common baseline so that you can actually use war to evaluate players on all teams and compare them to the same baseline, which in most situations where you want to use war, you want to compare a player on team A to the player on team B, right? And so you don't want to consider the context-sensitive factors there. You want it to be context-neutral so that you can have a common comparison. And for most of the applications, if you're evaluating a free agent, and well, if you're evaluating a free agent for a specific team, then you do actually want to consider who the replacement would be. But if you're trying to value a player's production or consider Hall of Fame credentials or maybe MVP race, I guess you could say that value is dependent on the player's specific

team situation. So you could consider that. But I think it's more useful to have war the way that we have it now than this way. But I would want both if it weren't a prohibitive amount of work it would be kind of interesting to say that a player on a team with a thin farm system is actually maybe much more valuable to that team in a way than the player on the team with the deep farm system who has a bunch of competent replacements waiting in the wings in triple a like that would be maybe less an individual stat than a team or organization stat, but it would be revealing in some ways.

Well, and you would need to have a lot of confidence in your minor league to big league translations, right? Because sometimes you're talking about guys where you have a good sense of what that quad A player in the big league looks like because you've seen it before. But sometimes you're dealing with guys before Wander Franco debuts. How do you gauge the war of shortstops on the raise? You probably have a lot of confidence that Wander Franco is going to be pretty good, but there is an adjustment in prospects to bust. So you'd need to have a lot of confidence in the predictive ability of your sort of translation from minor league stats to major league stats. Right. And you also have like three or four other people who could play competent shortstop for the race at various points this season. That part makes it tricky too. And so yeah, we are sacrificing some degree of precision

in order to have a more broadly applicable stat. And I think that when we, like you said, when we think about what we're using wins above replacement to really capture, that trade-off is very much worth it, But it is slightly less precise. But hopefully people are being upfront about the sort of error and room for error in war as it exists, regardless of the baseline that you're using. Because it isn't, you know, we spent time at the beginning of this season, and I think we spend time during most seasons, like telling people to not get overly fussed about very minute differences in war

if they're like trying to,'re trying to have an MVP debate. And you're like, that guy's worth five wins, and that guy's only worth 4.9. And you're like, well, hold on a minute there. Don't get sassy about that. So there's error in any stat, right, that is trying to describe something as sort of all-encompassing as war is. But I think that for its purpose, it does a pretty good job.

And a part of it too is that I think that there's value in stats being reasonably easy to understand and sort of figure out. I think that in terms of how likely they are to be adopted by people and sort of how likely they are to be a means by which people understand the game. There is something to be said for them being as straightforward as possible. Now there's

complication in all of this stuff. And some stats are, you know, you need a whole bunch of stuff in a black box to calculate them. And those stats are useful too. But I do think that them being sort of straightforward is in some ways really useful to people actually using them so yeah yeah it's already what there's a fan graphs war right a baseball reference baseball prospectus warp and now it would be wait so this guy is worth this many more on this team but if you were on that team you'd be worth that many more. So yeah, you'd have to have an advanced degree to use that responsibly probably. So it would be useful in some cases, I think, even just to convey the different levels of depth that organizations have, because

depth can be a tough thing to quantify. And it's something that probably in the playoff odds and projections is not perfectly accounted for. And so if you could perfectly account for that, then that would be helpful to have. But I shudder to think of the MVP debates because people already find so many different ways to interpret the word valuable whether it's clutchness whether it's the playoff implications how good the player's teammates are and now if we were considering not just the player's teammates or sometimes people will even pull salary into it for no good reason really but if you were also to consider like who is the backup to this player and so how much more valuable is he really compared to the player who would be playing in his stead if something were to happen to him oh that would

give you endless material for really pointless columns at the end of the season so some baseball writers would probably appreciate that but i would not right i think oh god can you imagine oh no it would be nightmarish but right all you have to do is point to the way that we projected the playoff odds for the rays going into this season to to see that you know there are there are some aspects of this stuff that can be kind of wanting we don't account for depth as well as, you know, we ought to. I think that when other Ben, when Ben Clemens wrote about sort of his takeaways from our playoff odds before the season started, this was one of the things that he pointed out. It's just, it's not that the projections are wrong. It's just that dealing

with that kind of depth is sort of hard to fold in. And so, you know, if there was going to be one place where we were potentially really discounting a team, then the race were going to be it. And now you look at our playoff odds and you're like, well, weren't you so clever, Ben? So yeah, it's not perfect, but I think that it does a good descriptive job and is certainly far less complicated than it would be. So we're going to stick with it well thanks for the question Kate and apologies again for the

podcast Stockholm Syndrome here alright here's one from Matthew Patreon supporter I think you would be qualified to answer this question Matthew says listening to your discussion in episode 1694 about the experience of being a Mariners fan over the last two decades got me thinking about whether it was in fact much worse to root for a terrible team as opposed to a merely below average one.

To me, the difference between a 72 and 90 season and a 62 and 100 season is on the margin. and 100 season is on the margin. There were 10 fewer days on which you could celebrate wins, excluding minor other factors like potentially being in contention for slightly longer. But from your discussion and reader emails and general baseball conversations, I feel like there's a belief that losing 100 games is worse than losing 90 games by more than the simple difference in the number of losses. In this line of thought, there is extra badness that emanates from a truly terrible team that makes the experience of rooting for them more

soul-crushing. Do you think a lot of people have that sense, or am I totally off base? If so, do you think there is a level at which the extra badness factor kicks in, or is there a small multiplier that applies to each extra loss so that you accumulate a little extra badness when the team slides down the scale from 68 wins to 67 to 66, et cetera, and that adds up eventually. From my own experiences as a Mets fan, I tend to stop paying close attention or trying to watch most games basically once the team goes below 500. I still enjoy watching and going to games when they are bad, but I am less likely to be invested on a day-to-day basis.

I think this probably leads me not to notice the difference between a below-average 75-win team and a truly terrible 60-win team, or at least to notice it less than others. I wonder what the answer to this question is for a normal fan, because I don't know that I'm a particularly representative sample. I think that once you're approaching the 100 loss sort of mark, it's its own kind of thing. I think that it's less the difference between say 90 and 100 as it is between like 80 and 100. between say 90 and 100 as it is between like 80 and 100 like that's where you start to have a noticeable difference in your experience of something because if you have a team that

manages to float for extended periods of time sort of around 500 especially in the wild card era it's not necessarily difficult to convince yourself that like oh maybe they'll go on a little run and you never know right you never know what, maybe they'll go on a little run. And you never know, right? You never know what will happen if they go on a little run and they're a team that's around 500. Like a team that's around 500 that goes on a little run might be a wildcard team, right? That might be a team or at least a team that you think could be a wildcard team

like with two weeks left of the season. And that's a dramatically different fan experience than, oh my God, this baseball team is going to lose 100 games. It's 100 games, a round number, 100 games. And I think that some portion of the fan base, especially if it's a team that is being bad sort of on purpose with the hope that it will be better later, might look at that and say,

well, now we're going to get the number one pick in the draft. on purpose with the hope that it will be better later, might look at that and say, well, now we're going to get the number one pick in the draft. And maybe they can kind of get excited about that, but that's not about the team they're watching. That's about the team they want to watch like six years from now. And so I think that for most people, if you're able to trick yourself into thinking that you might contend, there's several caveats in that

sentence, but if you're in that, then, you know, then you're like, you're curious. You know, if the nightly news comes on, your local news, and you missed the sports section, you might turn to the person you live with, your effectively wild

Patreon co-inhabitant and say, wait, what did they say about our local team? Did they win tonight? And you're interested and you're engaged. If they're close to losing, they're on track to lose 100 games, you're just, I'm going to share a story from the 2015 Mariners, which as an aside was not a hundred loss team, right? They were just a bad baseball team. They were bad in a boring way, which I think is the sort of exception to this scenario I'm describing because sometimes a team is like pretty thoroughly mediocre and they managed to be that way in the most boring way possible. And then you're just

like, so the 2015 Mariners were the first team. That was the first team that I covered. That was the first year I wrote at Lookout Landing. And they were just like a thoroughly underwhelming team. They were just the 2015 Mariners. They won. Let's see. How many games did that team win?

How many games would you guess that team won, Ben? You would know better than yeah having lived through you think that wouldn't yes um so they ended up they were 76 and 86 so uh they were on under 500 team but not like you know they didn't lose they didn't lose 100 games they they won 76 of their games and i remember we got to a point in the season where you when you write for a team blog, you just have to cover them every single day, no matter what's going on. And I remember, I think they had fired Jack Cerencic, but the season was not over yet. So like, that was another thing that had happened is like, they fired Jack Cerencic in late August, they still had

a month of the season to play. And I remember Colin O'Keefe, who wrote for Lookout Landing for a long time, ended up working for the Mariners for a while. He would come into the Slack and just say, I can't believe they have to play again. It was like, I can't believe they're making them do this for another month, like a whole other month, you know? So I think that if you can win every couple of days, it's often enough to stay engaged. And you don't feel like your team is potentially going to be remembered for its losing, right? Because so many teams are mediocre. They win 75 games and that's their season that happens all the time no one's gonna remember that i had to look up the record of the mariners from that year and i covered that dumb team

so no one's gonna remember but once you get into like the hundred lost territory then you're like potentially flirting with some like infamy in a way that you don't want you don't want to flirt with infamy it's bad yeah in a way i'm not't want. You don't want to flirt with them for me. It's bad. Yeah. In a way, I'm not qualified to answer this question because not only have I not really been a fan for a while, but when I was a fan, I never rooted for a bad team. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I led a charmed life as a kid. What can I say?

Growing up as a Yankees fan in the mid to late 90s, early 2000s. So I cannot speak to this from experience. I would say that there's some incremental difference where, yeah, it's just a little bit worse to win 66 than it is to win 67. There is more of a bright line difference between playoff contender and not playoff contender. So wherever you set that in a typical season, if it's a mid 80s or high 80s or somewhere around there, depending on your division, maybe it's higher than that. But once it becomes clear that you're not making the playoffs, that is a natural stopping point if

you're not someone who's wired to watch baseball every day, regardless of the results. But aside from that, I'd say that if you're choosing between the 62 win season and the 76 win season, all else being equal, obviously you would want more wins, but I would probably be willing to accept the worst season if I thought that it was going to pay off down the road. This is kind of like the tear down rebuild argument. I would accept short-term terribleness in order to get good again if the alternative is just being bad in a less drastic way, but still not contending. I'd rather be bad and get good again if I can pull off that process, which is not necessarily a guarantee than I would to kind of hover in the angel zone or the Philly zone now where they're just like a bit below 500 every year and sometimes

a bit more than a bit. And in both of those cases, those are both good examples of how you can do the rebuild and you can invest in your roster and it still might not work out. There are no guarantees. But I'd say the thing that really hurts if you're the truly terrible team is not just that you win fewer games. And so even the games that you're watching where the outcome is not decided yet, you're less likely to win those games and you know that. And probably those games are more lopsided, so you don't even have the pleasure of a close game. I guess you could say that a close game is not ultimately more fun if you end up losing anyway. Maybe it's even more

painful in some ways. But in general, you're going to be blown out more. There's just going to be a bigger run differential in the typical game. And the outcome of those losses will be clear earlier in those games. And so not only will you have fewer games where you end up winning, but you'll also have just a lower percentage of innings in the games where you feel like you're in it and have a conceivable chance to win. So I do think being a winning team is much bigger than the difference between being a bad team and being a horrendous team. like, I don't know, sense of your worth in the world. Not that you should determine your personal sense of self-worth by how your baseball team is doing. But if you're part of a fan base that is perennially awful in an embarrassing way, or if you are, say, rooting for a team that has never won a World Series and hasn't made the playoffs in longer than any other team in any sport has made the playoffs, just hypothetically. Those are the same thing, Ben.

If you were one of those, then maybe there's a difference between that, between if you're a Diamondbacks fan this year or even that. Sure. No one expected the Diamondbacks to be this terrible. They didn't set out to be this terrible. If you were a Pirates fan or if you were, I don't know, an Orioles fan, even those are maybe a little bit different. But just like if you're truly terrible and bottoming out and there's no hope even during spring training and you're not even putting a fun or competitive team on the field a lot of the time, that's probably still different.

Like if you're the Angels, you might not make the playoffs, but you at least have some good fun players. In their cases, you have the most fun and best players some of these seasons. So that's a redeeming factor. Even if you're not making the playoffs, it makes it more frustrating that you're failing to make the playoffs in some ways, but at least you get to watch Trout. At least you get to watch Otani. At least you get to watch Rendon. Whereas if

you're the team that's winning 50 something games, you don't have a Trout. You don't have an Otani. There's just no silver lining. So I think that's a difference too. last day of the season. Those were different years. They felt really different. My experience of the team and sort of the general optimism I had was dramatically different. It's meaningful. It really is. Yeah, I think the surrounding seasons matter. Like, is this bad season a blip or is it part of a string of bad seasons with no hope on the horizon? Are you seeing the seeds of the next good team at least? Is the team on the way up or on the way down? I think a 75-win season feels different if you know that it's a stepping stone to something better as opposed to part of an even steeper descent. All right. Well, that's probably a good stopping

point. While we've been answering these emails, the Mets and the Phillies have been playing each other, and Aaron Nola, Philly starter, just tied the all-time record for most consecutive strikeouts. Tom Seaver's record for 10 consecutive strikeouts. Who needs foreign substances? He tied it against Tom Seaver's old team who's wearing Tom Seaver patches on their uniforms. So it was first inning. Jeff McNeil led off and was hit by a pitch. Then Francisco Lindor doubled.

And then there were 10 straight strikeouts, starting with Michael Conforto. And at the end of that string, it was broken up by a Pete Alonso double in the fourth, and then a Dominic Smith ground out, and then James McCann struck out swinging to end the fourth. So it was 11 strikeouts through four, which would have made things interesting, except that this is a scheduled seven inning game. Now it's one nothing Phillies in theory, it could go to extra innings, but this is a wrinkle, an implication of the seven inning game that I had not considered because the 21 strikeout game is one of the most exciting unaccomplished feats. That is, I think we've talked on the podcast

before. Certainly Sam has written about it. That's one of the things that has never been done that really is pretty alluring. Like when someone makes a run at that, even certainly more so than a no hitter in this day and age, but I'm even more excited by the player who's making the run at the 21 strikeout game than even someone who has a perfect game going as rare as that is. We've seen it. We've not seen the 21 strikeout game. And there aren't a lot of interesting record chases these days. And this is one of them that hasn't been done, but it's within someone's grasp potentially. And it would make a great spectator experience because everyone would be aware that this was happening and would have time to tune in. You'd be hanging on every pitch, which is kind of ironic because we talk about there so it hasn't really become much to get to the 21 strikeout level like imagine if Aaron Nola was on pace to do it through seven and the game ended what a bummer that would be that'd be a big bummer that would really be bad I mean it's uh five innings now and

his pace has slowed so he's up to 12 strikeouts through five, which would normally leave him with 12 outs to get and nine strikeouts to go, though he's probably not going to get much further today because he hasn't been very efficient. And it wouldn't happen. I mean, it's very difficult to do. People are on pace for it, and then they're not. Right. That happens inevitably. But if he had kept that up, like, imagine if he's through seven and he's got like 17ks or something yeah the game ends we would be shaking our fists at rob manfred anew in a seven inning

game you've only got 21 outs to work with they'd all have to be k's see this is why we just have to go back to nine because there's just too much opportunity for nonsense. Too much. Yeah, definitely in favor of nine or at least in having some consistent level. And as we've said before, it just, it feels like surrendering. If your solution to shorter games is let's just lop off a couple innings instead of actually improving the pace of play.

That is doable. So let's like try a pitch clock. Let's try to enforce time between pitches and stepping out of the box and everything before we just erase some baseball, which is bad. But this is another reason why it could be bad that I had not even thought about. Rob Manfred, you just, for the 21 strikeout game and gets robbed of the opportunity to finish it off because it's a seven inning game. Oh man. And on a Friday to have to grapple with this on a Friday seems unfair. All right. Well, we will leave it there and we thank you to everyone for the emails. We hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Please keep those questions and comments coming. Podcast at Fangraphs.com. That is where you can find us. You can also send us messages via the Patreon messaging system. If you are a supporter or if you live with one and are forced to listen to the podcast and have access to their computer. Sorry, Kate. have access to their computer. Sorry, Kate.

I feel so much better about my random pop culture asides now because at least there was something else. I'm not saying those were good, right? But at least they were not baseball. It's a little oasis, a brief respite between

the talking about baseball. Bring It On is an Oasis, Ben. That is true. It's a classic film. All right. We will stop there. Well, 12 Ks turned out to be Aaron Nola's total on the day. He lasted only five and a third innings through 99 pitches.

So even if it had been a nine inning game, he would have gone no further. Crisis averted. Still, you were warned, Mr. Manfred. Please don't endanger any future attempts. 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. Hans von Dolfsen, Jeff Silver, Jamie McNichol, Jeff Roberts, and Steven Scroggins. 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. I already told you how and where you can contact us, and I hope you will. Thanks as always to Dylan Higgins, and thanks to you for listening today and this week. That will do it for us. We will be back with another episode early next week. Talk to you then. Rude 21 Now sleep till Cooper's dead Rude 21 Now sleep till Cooper's dead

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