Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1735: In Play, Run(s)

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Germán Márquez and the ethics of diarrhea disclosure, stretched pitching staffs that were supposed to be deep, the Orioles and Diamondbacks competing for MLB’s worst record, a somewhat deceptive salary floor in MLB’s economic proposal (and the future of the ongoing CBA talks), Mets owner Steve Cohen’s critical […]

I can't get over what I saw. I can't change the law of averages. I'm going down. My uncle did it. My daddy did it. Hello and welcome to episode 1735 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 Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello, how are you? I'm all right. How are you? I'm all right. Well, we're both doing better than Herman Marquez, and I hesitate to bring this up because I know it's kind of your brand, and I'm not sure you want it to be your brand.

But German Marquez had diarrhea. Yeah. He did. He had diarrhea. And we know this, or at least I know this, because of a Thomas Harding tweet, the Rockies beat writer, who said, Rockies manager Bud Black said right-handed pitcher German Marquez was sick. Diarrhea, to be exact. We want to be exact about these things.

He held the Padres to one hit for the first six innings, faded in the seventh, but he also drove in a couple of runs in the win. Presumably, no pun intended on runs there. But for all I know, Bud Black asked, hey, Hermann, can I tell the press that you had diarrhea? Sure. Yeah. And Marquez said, press that you had diarrhea? Yeah. And Marquez said, go for it.

Sure. Yeah. Sure thing, Skip. But just as a general policy, I feel like this should be a HIPAA violation or something. Oh, no. To tell reporters that a player had diarrhea without their consent, which I'm not saying was the case here. Right. But it should be like when you go on the IEL for COVID, but the team

can't say it's because of COVID unless the player gives them the okay. So unless it's like a Chanho Park situation where the player comes out and says repeatedly that he had a lot of diarrhea, we should just stick with flu-like symptoms. Just preserve the privacy. Say they were not feeling well. Say they were under the weather. But do we have to be exact about the diarrhea? I mean, I know that it has provided content for you in the past, and it has provided laughs for all of us. But imagine being Mr. Marquez, who, in addition to having diarrhea,

had everyone in the world know he had diarrhea. So I was really surprised but no one no one tweeted this at me and i i couldn't believe it it made me optimistic that i have not established this brand as as sort of firmly as i had been led to believe. And, you know, I could take this moment to say, well, I'm not going to talk about the doodoo, and then the doodoo will fade, and it will not be part of my brand.

But it is funny. Yet here I come, Kool-Aid manning in. Yeah, here we come. You know, it's funny because I think diarrhea is famously inexact, which is part of the problem with diarrhea, right? That's like part of the issue here. Yes. Your brand is not firm.

Neither is Herman Marquez's bowel movement. That's the problem. I mostly think that we all have our moments of crummy tummy. We all have times when things move more quickly than we'd like them to. Put it that way, where we are. The game moves a little fast for you. Yeah, we are. Yeah, we can't slow it down.

We are a fast-moving train. I just don't know why we would need to know this about someone. Right. Especially because I think that a lot of people's default assumption, if you say that, like, a starter had to make an abrupt exit, is that he had diarrhea. Like, it's part of the subtext of the conversation. And so you could just say, you know, he wasn't feeling well and he had to exit the game abruptly and we'd all be like, he had to do the do-do.

Leave a little to the imagination. Not that we will be imagining it necessarily, but we've seen pitchers puke on the mound, for instance. So it could be a substance spewing out of some other orifice instead, or it could just be nausea. It could just be feeling not yourself. We don't have to know necessarily that it was diarrhea. And again, for all I know, maybe Herman Marquez said, hey, be brutal in your honesty. If they ask you why I faded in the seventh say that it was because I had diarrhea. I want that out there. Yeah. But if not, I mean, Bud Black is a veteran manager. I'm sure he knows his way around a clubhouse and a post-game press conference.

So maybe he was not violating any confidences here. But I'm just saying, just as a general rule, do we need to know? Right. It's like, to be clear, I don't think that there's anything shameful about diarrhea. Like you're not, you know, it's not a failing. I mean, it is a failing, but not one that you have any control over. It could be in some cases if you're not practicing proper hygiene. Sure, yeah.

If you're not washing your hands, you never know. I'm not casting any aspersions here, but it happens to the best of us and the cleanest of us. Yeah, it's just, you know, it is human bodies are fickle and sensitive. You know, they are like, it is like a rob lowe and parks and rec it is a microchip and there is sand in it and then um you find yourself standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom saying stop pooping sometimes you can and there's nothing wrong with that like you know i'm i'm glad that it's impressive that he lasted as long as he did i am a i am a migraine sufferer and sometimes broadcasts will be like,

he had a migraine and he tried to start. I have often thought to myself, I would maybe sooner die than be in a major league ballpark and have to hear ballpark while in the midst of a migraine. That sounds like a kind of torture in violation of the Geneva Convention. I have nothing but sympathy for for these guys who have to go to work um often in the midst of conditions that would lay the rest of us out for for most of the day but yeah i remember erstwhile fan graphs or carson stooley's

position on um like hearing about other people's sex lives was that he just didn't want to he didn't want to know he didn't want to know about what your bodies do and he's not going to tell you what his body does. I think that we can be kind of weird about bodies because they make noises. They secrete stuff. It happens. We hope that everyone is well

and on their way to being less porous. But it happens. But I also share your... I don't need to know that about you like it's just a very intimate thing and i you know have spent parts of my career indulging curiosity about it but but generally i don't need to know about stuff if if uh if it's not really relevant like you know if a pitcher needs to pitcher needs Tommy John surgery, that we need to know about.

Sadly, that is a thing that is really relevant to our ability to assess that player and understand what his career might be like. But if you just need to use the bathroom, I don't need to be intimately familiar with that. I think that's between you and your God in the toilet. Yeah. In the famous Archie Bradley instance that you were alluding to there, he divulged that himself, right?

He offered up the specifics. He did. He shared this on a podcast. And to be clear, he might have a different understanding of it, but as my investigation showed, it couldn't have been actual diarrhea. It had to have been a very tiny amount of poop. Because if it's more than that, then he can't come into the game. If it's more than that, if I recall correctly, and do I want to Google this?

Yeah, I'm going to. Because I think it's good to reference your own work in an accurate sort of way. I wonder if I do pooped himself if I am the first return without putting my name in there no second i'll i'll go with that that's fine i can live with that i've visited this page three times in the last little while well isn't that a isn't that an interesting thing no so what i was going to say is that i think that well archie bradley can be said to have pooped himself, he can't be said to have had diarrhea because they were wearing home whites and he did not have time to change his pants. And so if it had been diarrhea, then we wouldn't have had to hear him disclose it.

We would have been able to see it on the broadcast. So anyway, it's the strangest job in the whole wide world. There are very few jobs that I think are weirder. I know there are some, and I'm sure that when you're sitting at Thanksgiving and you're the person responsible for putting hair on CGI animals in movies, explaining that job to your grandparents is probably pretty weird, and they might struggle to know how you pay your rent and suspect that you're maybe engaged in illegal activities on the side in order to sustain yourself so like maybe those jobs are

weirder to describe to family but in terms of being in the moment i just submit that there are a few things as weird as being a professional baseball player or professional athlete generally but baseball is our purview so i'll stick to that yeah because like if you if you again you're the you're the cgi animal hair person that is the thing that your art school background has taken you to. If you have diarrhea at work, nobody knows. And you don't even have to tell your boss what's going on. You can just say, I don't feel well. And your boss is almost certainly not going to call up a reporter and say, so-and-so had diarrhea.

That's why he left a little early today. Almost certainly not. So it's just a very strange job. And the fact that they can do it to the level they do at all is something that I wish we marveled at more actively because it is just so goddamn strange. It's living in a fishbowl. Everyone knows most things about you. It's how much money are you making and how exactly are you performing at your job? And did you poop in an irregular fashion today? Is there banter about this, and I'm not sorry about that. So maybe this is kind of hypocritical of me. If we really didn't want to know, then I wouldn't be calling extra attention to it. But really, it reflects well on German Marquez, if anything, because as you said, he transcended this situation. And most of us, if we encounter this challenge, we don't make it six solid innings before fading in the seventh.

We may not make it any innings. And if this reflects poorly on anyone, it reflects poorly on the Padres, the opponent of German Marquez on that day, who really have had tough times lately. And you go from getting no hit by Tyler Gilbert to being shut down and losing a game to German Marquez mid-diarrhea. So that is really the shameful part of this, if there is one. So maybe it is that Marquez wanted it out there just to rub it in, so to speak, not literally, but I should have used a different phrase there. Yeah, solid innings. Are we not doing phrasing anywhere?

Yes. So maybe there's some benefit to having that information out there just to say hey he was that good even though this is what he was dealing with yeah i mean i i i don't want to spend too much time reading intent into the poop related antics of the rockies but maybe i I mean, maybe he did. It's not like he left the game super early, you know. In today's game, you leave when he did, and people are going to be like, that was a solid start.

You know, that was a good effort. I do think that the instinct to disclose at all here is a little interesting because you didn't have to at all. You could have just been like, he was tiring, so he got pulled. Instead, we know about the state of his digestive tract. As a reporter, as someone who has to talk about baseball, I suppose it is more advantageous to me to have Bud Black oversharing about his pitcher's pooping

than to, say, have Joe Girardi, who is often not disclosing actual injuries that might have some bearing on these contests, but maybe there is a middle ground where you acknowledge serious injuries, but you don't necessarily acknowledge the diarrhea. Right. Like I said, I think that there are things that unfortunately have such a profound on-field impact that we do kind of need to know about them in more specific detail. But if a guy is just not feeling well and has to exit, maybe the thing you say is that he wasn't feeling well and it's not something we expect to persist in.

You just leave it at that. All right. Crossing German Marquez diarrhea off of my outline for today. Moving on. So speaking of the Padres and more serious ailments being suffered by pitchers. I thought you were going to say, speaking of the Padres and poop, have you seen how they play lately? A zinger.

Yeah, I could have gone in that direction too. Yeah, we kind of already talked about that, but it just is kind of incredible to me that we have the Padres starting Jake Arrieta in this day and age and the Dodgers starting Justin Brule and Mitch White backing him up. And White was great, but Justin Brule handing the ball to Mitch White in a tight pennant race just wasn't the way they drew it up before the season started. And those two teams, if you would ask me, coming into this season, probably league leaders in rotation depth, right? And they have dipped so far down into that depth that often they have not had enough starters and they have to keep bringing in starters. And then those guys get hurt. I enjoyed the Cole Hamels Dodgers era. It lasted about two weeks and he never actually pitched for the Dodgers. But then it's the next guy on the chain. And these are the teams that seemingly were impervious to rotation issues, as impervious as a team could possibly be. All the cliches about how you never have enough pitching just have never been truer because pitchers don't go deep into games even when they are regular in the bathroom.

And you have relievers who just are not pitching on back-to-back-to-back days anymore. And so between that and between the fact that you have these historic injury rates, just no team is unscathed. And even the teams that seem to have been built for this were not because no one can be built for this. There are just so many injuries and they have really destabilized the playoff races in a lot of ways, except that no team really has gotten off scot-free when it comes to these injuries.

So I don't know what we do about this. Not a problem we're going to solve on this particular podcast, but it is one that keeps coming up. It's really one of the running themes of this season for me or even of this era in baseball, just even the deepest staffs, not deep enough.

I think that everything that you just said is true. And so I don't want to refute it, but I would like to add that when we did our minor league free agent draft and you took Krismat out from under me, I believe I was on record as saying that I thought he had sneaky potential

to see a lot of innings because while there is a great deal of depth on that staff, there were guys who had injury questions. I think that this was before we didn't know that Moriho needed Tommy John, and Krismat has pitched in relief. He has not really been a starter for them, but I did think that if all the bad things happened, that we might end up in this situation, although I was not expecting it to be quite so bad.

So this is just my way of, you know, sort of softening the ground for everyone when they look back and they're like, wow, Ben really spanked Meg in the minor league free agent draft that I did want Krizmat. I mean, like, Fulte's been the real problem for me, but I just want to remind people that I was frustrated, angry. Yeah. Yeah, and Mackenzie Gore has not been a substitute for them.

He's had blister issues. He's had delivery, mechanical issues, and that just does not speak well of your confidence in one of your top pitching prospects that you're bringing in, Jake Carrieta, who at this point seems to be basically incapable of getting outs anymore and is also hounding reporters for wearing masks in the press box at the same time he is not getting outs. So just double trouble there. But I guess that's partly a product of the fact that

you don't have the August waiver trading deadline anymore. And so you can't just go get an arm at this stage of the season unless it's someone else cut loose who is just there for the taking. And that's not going to be top tier talent. So when you get to the point that it's Jake Arrieta or Buss, that's a bad place to be, especially when you have the Reds nipping at your heels and you have a huge disparity in strength of schedule over the rest of the season where the Padres face the toughest schedule, the Reds face the easiest schedule. game this week, which is a change from their recent history. So there's still a slim, slim margin there, but really just a general observation about the fact that you can't count on any pitchers these days. It's bad for you. It's amazing that anyone does it for any length of time with any degree of success. Again, we should just marvel at it every single day because it is impossible except in all the moments when it's not right so speaking of not a race to the top but a race to the bottom we have not really

broken down the o's and d backs race for the worst record in baseball which has gotten competitive we've been talking about all of these other races for playoff spots. Well, what about the race for the 2022 number one draft pick? It's heating up. So the Orioles have now passed, I guess I could use that verb, the Diamondbacks, for the worst record in baseball. They have lost 14 straight games. during their 14 game losing streak i signed craig calcaterra's newsletter on thursday they've been outscored by 91 runs so about six and a half runs per game somehow that is according to craig the worst run differential in any 14 game span by any mlb team in baseball references database which goes back to 1901. That's not so

good. And with their latest loss, the Orioles joined the 1911 and 1935 Boston Braves as the only teams to have two 14-game or longer losing streaks in the same season since 1901. So when the Diamondbacks were having their very long losing streak, the Orioles also had one that was almost as long. And now they are on yet another really bad run. So I guess this makes some sense that they would be there. It's less surprising that they're where they are than that the Diamondbacks have been where they've been. And the Orioles now, as we speak, Thursday afternoon, 38 and 81. That's a 319 winning percentage. Diamondbacks 40 and 81. That's a 331 winning percentage. The Orioles after the Padres have the toughest strengths of schedule remaining over the rest of the season, partly, I suppose,

because they don't have to play the Orioles. And so the Fangraphs' playoff odds project, well, they project both of these teams to miss the playoffs, unsurprisingly, but also... Yeah, I'm afraid so. But the Diamondbacks are projected for 57.8 wins and the Orioles are at 54.7 wins. So this is neck and neck right now,

but the Fangraphs' playoff odds expect there to be about three wins separating these two teams by the end of the season. So it's not a race anyone wins exactly, but I guess things have gotten slightly better for Arizona since like the worst stretch of losing in modern baseball, basically, when we had Mike Farin on to talk about that. So they've pulled out of that nosedive to some extent. Speaking of injury issues in the rotation, they have had more than their fair share, which is why Tyler Gilbert was getting a start in the first place. But yeah, the Orioles, they're a team you expected to be the worst team in baseball. It was somewhat surprising that the Diamondbacks were this bad, not that they invested heavily in contending, but they were bringing back enough players that you

thought, yeah, maybe, or at least they'll be respectable. And that has not turned out to be the case, but they might not end up with the worst record in baseball. So that's something. Right. And they've been, as you noted, they've just been so hurt. And I think that, like you said, we didn't expect them to be playoff contenders. I mean, I don't know that we expected their division race to be quite as tight just because we didn't expect the Giants to be the Giants. And so the fact that there were three really, really good teams above them instead of just two is perhaps surprising.

But yeah yeah they're they're in some some sorry shape i i think that i am still of the mind that the d-backs are positioned to return well do i believe that anymore which of these two teams do you think is is likely to be not post-season bound because that's a big jump but like respectable like which of these teams do you think is most likely to play 500 ball over the course of a season sooner because on the one hand i think that the and it's not as if their minor league system has been without injury either but there you know there are some some quite good pieces in the dvx system although baltimore system, by our farm

system rankings, the most valuable in baseball right now. They've leapfrogged the Rays number one on the board. Yeah. Well, when you have an 80 future value prospect graduate, it tends to ding you a little bit, although because it's the Rays, not all that much. A shockingly strong second place showing given the graduations that have led them to where they are. But, you know, some of the Baltimore prospects are, I think, a bit further away. But then again, but then again, Ben, some of these Baltimore big leaguers, despite their putrid showing, have proven themselves to be like real guys.

They got more guys on that big league roster than I certainly thought they would going into the season. So I don't quite know which of these two teams I expect to be better sooner. I do think that when you look at Arizona's big league roster, there's just like, there's a lot. There are some more senior gentlemen on that roster. So that's a thing. And you do have some guys who I think are intriguing and will be part of

the next good Arizona core although they have not been without their own injury concerns so I don't quite know I I'm inclined to say Arizona but I I wonder if I'm perhaps once again discounting some of the the the guys who are already on Baltimore's roster but I don't know they they strike me as potentially getting in a spot where the timing of their really good prospects and the existing big league roster might not be quite perfectly synced up like at some point soon here Rutschman's just gonna be I mean he might already be there now but he's just gonna be ready and it's like well what do you what do you do with that if you're Baltimore you wait as long as possible, which is going to be gross. Yeah, it's going to be gross.

They were they were a rebuild that reminded me a lot of Miami's. And I think they still do in some ways where it's like they had to, in addition to the sort of work that they had to do to reinforce their farm system and and actually help talent develop, they had all this infrastructure work that they had to do, right? Like they needed to kind of build systems and hire people to look more like a modern front office. And obviously, as we've talked about, they had all this work that they had to do internationally to like participate in those markets because they had just really not done that before. So they reminded me a lot of Miami, which was sort of in a similar spot. And like

Miami, Baltimore got a jumpstart by hiring some smart people away from other teams. So I don't know. I could see them being weirdly good in like two years if they spend some money. And then I could also see them not being good until like 2025. By the way, the Orioles lost today already. So I'm behind the times. They have not lost 14 straight. They have lost 15 straight. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Yeah. So I am a believer to some extent in their player development. It does seem like they've taken some leaps there. I mean, they're very explicitly following the Astros model here. I mean, disturbingly so. Hopefully without the cheating and some of the other unsavory elements

but they do seem to have improved their pitching development quite a bit and they've come up with some surprise players even at the big league level so in theory like you can look back at the astros example and is this i guess the question is are these orioles worse than the Astros ever were have they gotten to that point or have they bottomed out at about the same place like the Orioles have they've been bad for for a while now I mean they won 54 games in 2019 they won 47 games in 2018 so from that standpoint, it would be depressing. I suppose that they won 47 games in 2018 and now three years later, they're not going to win many more games than that. So you'd like to see some kind of growth there. I know that maybe the pandemic in the last minor league season set them back to some extent, although they seem to have done a decent job of developing guys remotely.

extent, although they seem to have done a decent job of developing guys remotely. But I guess you would have to say that the 2018 Orioles were worse than the Astros ever got. I mean, they were in terms of win-loss record, at least. I haven't dug deeper to look at the underlying numbers and seen who was worse. But it's your splitting hairs, I guess, because they were both completely terrible. And so you could, if you're an optimist, say, well, what happened then? And look at the trajectory that the Astros followed in the years after that and hope that perhaps the Orioles could follow the same path. Of course, I think it's a little tougher today to do what the Astros were doing a decade ago just about because other teams have caught up to some of the esters player development

methods and you have other teams that are trying to do rebuilds in similarly dramatic ways perhaps although not quite as drastic but i think there's reason to think that they will be good again in the next few years but if you're asking me who's gonna to be not embarrassing sooner, I guess I would say Arizona. But if you're asking me who's going to be good sooner, then maybe I would go with Baltimore because it seems like maybe the Diamondbacks will have to step back a bit before they step forward, which is a sad thing to say about a team that has had as lousy a season as Arizona has. But the bones of that roster are maybe a little bit better than the results have shown.

Yeah, I think that that part is definitely true. I mean, I don't want to discount or sort of undersell how bad the injury has been there. It's just been really, really, really very devastating. And so there's that piece of it. Which of these teams... I'm going to ask such a rude question, Ben. I have a really rude question. Which of these teams i'm gonna ask such a rude question ben i have a really rude

question which of these teams spends money again first oh that's a good question i don't really know they're related questions right yeah yeah i guess they are yeah i don't know with orioles ownership seemingly in flux and rumors about that team being put up for sale and all of that. It's hard to know exactly whether they're in a position where they will decide to invest or not because they haven't been close to contention for a while. So we don't really have much to go by here. So I would be basically wish casting or speculating, but hopefully the Orioles will have that farm system and have those prospects and actually pay to surround them with players in a way that the Rays probably won't. In some ways, they suffer from the same sorts of problems, right? Because they have this current bad situation and they have good farm systems that they hope will help to pull them out of it, but And they have, you know, good farm systems that they hope will help to pull them out of it. But their divisional picture is pretty similar, right? And that if you're, you know, if you're Baltimore, you have to deal with Boston and New York and you have to deal with Tampa and the Blue Jays are good and spending money. So you have to deal with them and then if you're the D-backs you're like I have we have this great farm system we're fourth in baseball per fan graphs and then you're like the Dodgers spend money and the Padres

spend money and the Giants are good like this and probably about to spend money again I don't envy them their circumstances I mean I think that maybe if you're one of those teams what you're trying to do is like switch to the central like I am in Arizona and did you know that that is now the Midwest?

Congratulations. We have shifted things around. I must participate in the Central. Well, if we're speaking about teams spending money, I guess we should probably bring up the news from the CBA negotiations that came up this week. Sure. that came up this week. There was a first face-to-face meeting between MLB and the Players Association this week and the first MLB economic proposal.

I think the union had proposed something months ago that seemed to involve a plan that would call for arbitration to begin sooner for players with less service time, which makes sense. That is something that you would expect the union to want. And now MLB has proposed something that, well, you would expect MLB to want, I guess, except I don't know that it has been consistently reported that way. So the plan here, and we should emphasize that this is just like an opening salvo. We're months away. I mean, the CBA expires

December 1st, so you've got three and a half months. This is just sort of a first proposal, a first shot across the bow. I doubt MLB expects this to be adopted. It will not be adopted. It's just kind of a conversation starter. But just, you know, I guess we could make it a regular segment just like kind of translating the economic news from the CPA negotiations, because you can't count on these things always being reported in a way that actually reflects reality. So I think what many places picked up here was the idea of a salary floor. And that is something that could potentially make sense and be beneficial for baseball in some configurations. This is probably not one of those configurations.

No. So the idea here, which was reported by the athletics, Ken Rosenthal and Evan Dralek, is that there would be a payroll floor. Every team would have to spend at least $100 million. And if history is any guide, a lot of those teams would spend $100 million in one cent, most likely. But there are a number of teams every year that are below that, and that is probably a bad thing. And the Orioles are certainly one of those teams. And so under this plan, those teams would be required to spend that much at least. So that just in isolation seems like it could be a good thing. And so you've got some reporting, oh, owners propose salary floor.

Hey, they're trying to combat tanking. They're trying to make baseball better. Isn't that nice and altruistic of them? Of course, that is not exactly the upshot here. The plan would also call for the luxury tax threshold to be lowered from its current $210 million to $180 million with a 25% tax on the overage. And $180 million is like, that's where that competitive balance tax threshold was, I don't know, a decade ago. I mean, many years ago. Yeah. In that same piece, Ken and Evan lay out sort of how that first tier has moved in the last 10 years. And in 2013, 2012 and 2013, it was at $178 million.

And then in 2014, it jumped to $189 million. So yeah, it's been almost 10 years since it's been that low. Yeah. And that probably hasn't even kept pace with revenue in the game. And now we're talking about turning back the clock here. And ostensibly, this would be done so that it could subsidize the low spending team spending. The idea is, well, these small market teams and the poor small market owners can't possibly afford to spend $100 million on their rosters. And so this is kind of a wealth tax in a sense.

It's like taxing the wealthier teams so that the poorer teams can afford this. Of course, that presupposes that the low spending teams cannot just choose to spend more, that they don't have that money available to them. Most of the available evidence seems to suggest that, in fact, they probably do, and they probably could spend that much, certainly in post-pandemic circumstances. And as Joshian pointed out, most or all of those teams have at one point or another been over that. It's just that they have subsequently dipped below that. So let me quote from Joshian's summary of the situation in his newsletter here. $259 million. It might not happen overnight, just as it didn't happen overnight after the 2016 CBA, but over time, the $108 million figure would become a de facto cap for most teams,

taking $259 million off of the league payroll. And he's basing that on the fact that teams are already trying pretty hard to stay under the current CPT threshold. Now he continues, would that be made up at the low end? Again, per Katz, there are seven teams with a payroll under $100 million, a total of $146 million under that threshold, bringing all these teams up to $100 million, which I assure you would become a maximum payroll for some of them as much as a minimum one, would add $146 million to the league payroll. Put those two calculations together, the reduced tax threshold cutting $259 million and the salary floor generating $146 million.

And on its face, this offer is designed to lop off at least $100 million, about 2.3% of what the league pays the players. And then he goes on to say that the actual effects might be even bigger than that because you would be taking out some of the top end salaries that sort of set the market and boost all of the players. So really, while the concept of a salary floor has some merit, pairing the salary floor with an even tighter soft cap that a lot of teams would treat as a hard cap would almost certainly reduce spending overall. And that one would expect is why the owners are proposing this, not out of the goodness of their hearts. And take it with a grain of salt whenever I say something about another sport, but in the NBA and the NFL, which have weaker unions and also have salary caps, I believe the salary floor is 90% of the cap. Whereas in this

MLB proposal, the floor is like 55.5% of the cap. Now, I know it's not a hard cap, but if it's going to be treated that way, then if you were going to go with the same 90% rate, then you would have the floor set at $162 million if the cap is 180. So this is just nowhere close to that. Well, and it's like you think about that in an absolute dollar terms and that seems bad. And then, you know, if you compare what percentage of our estimate of league revenues, and like here we should say,

we don't have a perfect understanding of what the actual revenue picture is because while we know, you know, we've seen broadly reported what the value of national TV contracts are and you have teams like, say, the Braves that give you some insight into what a team's books might look like because they are part of a publicly owned and traded company. We don't have a perfect picture there.

And I think that that's going to be something that clouds the ability of analysts to, even when they are trying to do so in good faith, fully interpret the claims and sort of proposals that are put forth by both sides here, but by the league in particular, given kind of how those tend to skew. So that's going to be a challenge for all of us. I think we try to rely as best we can on well-reported public information, but it does hamper our ability to say, no, like here's-

Yeah. MLB doesn't want the public to have a perfect picture because the picture might be rosier than they want people to think it is. Right. But when you think about how TV contracts have grown over time, when you think about all of the ancillary revenue that is associated with baseball teams but is perhaps sort of decoupled from the product on the field and then think about what percentage of that sort of total revenue amorphous as it may be at times players are receiving

relative to what they used to it's bad from an absolute dollar perspective and then it's really bad when you think about it as a percentage of leak revenue. And so I know Michael Bauman tweeted this yesterday, and I think that it's a good idea and one that you've reiterated here, which is that we don't necessarily have to get super worked up about each individual proposal at this stage in the game, because while they are certainly part of the broader negotiation, it seems very unlikely, whatever version of a deal the union and the owners end up agreeing to or really haggling over in earnest is going to look anything like this. But it is disconcerting that the opening salvo is one of not, hey, we understand that we're in a contentious labor environment and that league revenues have grown pretty dramatically over the last couple of years. And so we will, you know, sort of stand pat. That isn't even the opening position. It is one where they're trying to retrench even further. So that's perhaps not the best indicator.

Yeah. And, you know, we've talked before, we talked to Greg Boris, the director of communications for the Players Association for almost 20 years back on episode 1542. And he was saying that winning the public PR battle is probably less important than people typically assume it is. So it's not as if MLB is putting this offer out there so that credulous reporters will say, oh, wise and beneficent MLB owners are proposing a salary for, and then the players will say, oh, this actually is a good proposal. We should accept this. No matter how incompetent you think the players association negotiators are, they're not that incompetent. So they're not going to be fooled by what someone blogs about this, but there is still an element of that where just, you know, as you're all following along with this to the extent that we can and to the extent that these

things get leaked, which seemingly these things get leaked more often from the league side for whatever that's worth. But I think that we should at least be aware of it. And yeah, it's relevant just to the extent that it has some bearing on what we expect the outcome of these negotiations to be. Both sides are trying to get theirs. They're both trying to look out for their own interests and get as much as they can. It's not like the players are the stewards of the game and are looking out for the best interests of baseball. I mean, to some extent, baseball doing well benefits both sides, but they're both trying to get what they can get. So this is the owners trying to get what they can get. But as you were just saying there, you kind of wonder if this is

the first offer, there's no, okay, well, we like aspects of that. This is close. Maybe we can work with this and we can offer a higher number and then we'll meet in the middle somewhere. Like, this is just, it's got to be a non-starter. It's got to be like, we may not even dignify this with a response kind of thing, which is something that we seemed to see last year when there was all sorts of sniping back and forth and the two sides often seemed far apart. So, you know, if your interest as a listener of this podcast, as a fan of baseball is, hey, I want there to be baseball next year, then it has some bearing on, you know, whether Major League Baseball will be played.

And I guess you could say, like, if you're someone who doesn't care about whether the funds, whether the revenue is distributed equally. And, you know, there are a lot of fans who feel that way. If you just thought, hey, I want baseball to be played and I want competitive balance, I guess if this proposal were adopted, then in theory, it might actually lessen the distinction between team spending, right? I mean, I guess it would cluster payrolls closer together. It's just that it would do that at the expense of a fair and equal division of revenue, right?

Because the players would be getting less. Now, if you're someone who doesn't care if the players are getting less because you figure, hey, they're making much more money than I am, then I guess you might say, well, this is competitive balance. I hope they take it so that all the teams will be more evenly matched and so that there won't be a work stoppage. But if you care at all about just who gets what they deserves and who is actually generating this revenue and what would be an equitable division of those things, then it's

hard to approve of any aspect of this plan thus far. that like in terms of the societal impact that a pro baseball player has relative to a teacher, right? That's how these terms are always drawn up, right? The sides are always like the teacher versus the ballplayer. I'm like, I don't think that that's quite how this works. But like, you know, I do think that there is a conversation that we could have as a society about how we compensate work and value work and how much wealth we think is appropriate to have concentrated in individual families. And I think that that is a worthwhile conversation. But I find it strange that the terms are always set that way, because if that conversation happens, if we all, you know, get together in the big building that will house all 330 million of us, right, and sort of hammer

out, like, what are our values as a society in terms of how wealth is distributed? I don't think that that conversation ends with major league baseball players being paid less and owners retaining the share of revenue that they currently have, right? Like, if we're going to reimagine work as a society and a community, we got to do it top to bottom, right? It doesn't just mean that we alter the fates of the millionaires and sort of leave the billionaires to do their business. That's not how that conversation seems likely to unfold. So given that we are trying, that some of us care a good deal about sort of workers being compensated in a fair way relative to what they create in wealth,

then I think you look at this and go, well, retro. And if you don't, then, you know, I think that it's worth thinking about, you know, these folks do make a lot of money. Many of them make a lot of money, but not all of them are making, you know, $100 million over the course of their contract. And, you know, the ones who are making league minimum do well too. But I think that hopefully we're having a conversation about not just the top earners, but the guys who are making less than that. And hopefully this conversation, and this is going to be a responsibility of the union, also considers the guys who never make it that far, right? And so I look forward to all of this unfolding on Twitter, where I'm sure the discourse will

be very productive. Yeah, no, and you often do see writers presented as like, oh, the two sides, they just need to figure this out. They need to work it out without really trying to figure out which side is trying to actually advance things or get things closer to some sort of equitable agreement. And I also understand why if you're just a casual fan of baseball, or certainly if you're not even a fan of baseball, why this would not be your top priority or interest. And there are certainly greater injustices in the world than who is getting

the percentage of revenue in MLB that they deserve. There are greater injustices in professional baseball, let alone in the rest of the world. So I do understand why people may not be spending a whole lot of emotional capital on worrying about the plight of major league baseball players. There are minor league baseball players to worry about. There are people all over the world in more dire straits. So I get that. And some people are just like, hey, I want to watch my baseball games. Figure it out, guys. I don't care how it gets resolved. Just resolve it. But as you're saying, it does have some bearing on just what we value as a society.

Or even if in your own workplace, maybe there is some analogous situation, maybe the dollar figures are much smaller. But if you were to put yourself in the place of the players, maybe you would just be dancing on rainbows and saying, hey, I'm in Major League Baseball. I'll play for free. But if you were talented enough to make it there and you thought that you deserved as much as your skills merited, then if you were actually in that situation, you probably wouldn't just say, hey, pay me whatever you feel like. Yeah. I mean, we don't have to belabor this point, but I think part of why this stuff is important for us beyond the context of baseball is that professional athletes are our most visible and well-compensated unionized workers in the US. In the US. And so I do think that it helps to form a vocabulary for people who work in much more mundane jobs to think about how, you know, they want to be treated and how they want to advocate for other workers who they are standing next to and how they understand their value in a workplace. And you're right, like these, these guys are making,

you know, even the ones making the league minimum, like, would that we would that we cleared that check, right? My life would be a lot less stressful with those sorts of financial resources. But the fact of the matter is that we're, we know, we know exactly what that guy makes. And we don't know exactly what the organization employing him is taking home and like you said that's not an accident right like the the league and its owners want us to be sort of ignorant to those dollars in specific terms because when you have you know when you have mookie betts's deal when you have bryce harper's deal when you have mike trout's deal a normal person looks at that and is like oh my god i could never spend that money in a hundred lifetimes and we know exactly what that is to the penny if you go to roster resource right now we can

tell you exactly how much money each of those guys is clearing in a given year right but we don't know we don't know what the dodgers make yeah We don't know if the owners have diarrhea. I'm sure they do sometimes. Yeah. It doesn't get reported. No amount of money can buy you perfect bowel movements every day of your life. Famously, everybody poops. So anyway, we will do our very best as these negotiations unfold to engage with them with as much information as possible and and kind of break it down but i think like every other facet of the game i view our obligations here to just

assess claims critically and sort of skeptically and you know we will take time to point out the places where we think the union is failing too and i think that minor leaguers and their treatment are going to be a sort of regular refrain from both of us in terms of our disappointment that their fortunes tend to get sold out in favor of veterans and that, you know, young guys' fortunes get sold out in favor of veterans, which is arguably worse since they're actually in the union. So we're going to do our level best to engage with it critically and try to help folks navigate it. And this is an antagonistic system. So the fact that they're at each other is kind of by design. So that doesn't necessarily indicate that anything is failing. collaborate but they also have to advocate for their own sides and so them being nasty with

each other while potentially not productive isn't like that surprising or necessarily an indication that we'll have a lockout and you know just because there is a lockout doesn't mean that next season is necessarily in jeopardy there's a lot of time between December 1st and when these guys have to get going

but yeah it's a tricky thing to like know how to talk about as a as a media member in some respects because i wouldn't hate just like a normal ass year ben it would be nice to have a normal year but us having a normal year is is far from the only consideration here and there are some very important questions that the sport needs to answer for itself about how it's gonna be for the next little while here so us not being stressed is not at the top of the priority list yeah the next couple months are just probably be posturing anyway so we don't necessarily have to do the full blow by blow i'm sure that this will all come to a head in november

and that's when the serious business will get done or not get done. And that'll be fun, right? We'll go right from playoffs and World Series to, hey, we've got one month to effort a work stoppage and get a new CBA hammered out. So that'll be a fun transition. If there's a lockout, do we do winter meetings? I don't know. Probably not.

It would be nice if someone could answer this question because it seems like no one knows the answer like did they have did they have winter meetings during the last strike like what do you talk about yeah everyone will drink even more it's really can just all have a seltzer friends we don't have to be 20 we can just be seltzer drinkers you know even hard seltzer right can just be seltzer drinkers. Not even hard seltzer necessarily. Right, just normal seltzer. They got so many flavors now. There's just like so many different. I am drinking a Pamplemousse seltzer.

I had a blackberry seltzer yesterday that was really quite excellent. There is a cucumber mint seltzer at Target now that is a little too perfumey for me, but is really good in cocktails. Anyway, this has been the seltzer hour. Do you want to little too perfumey for me but is really good in cocktails. So anyway, this has been the seltzer hour. Do you want to say something nice about Shohei Otani so we end on a positive note? Probably good for a crummy tummy, that sort of seltzer. Exactly. Yeah. I do have

something to say about Shohei Otani. Unsurprisingly, I did just want to acknowledge while we were on the subject of billionaires with at least verbal diarrhea or Twitter diarrhea. You had your boy, Steve Cohen, who- Not my boy. No, not your boy. Some people's boy, although maybe not anymore. I don't know if he's milkshake ducked himself or not. Probably he never should have been in the position to be milkshake ducked,

but he tweeted this week, it's hard to understand how professional hitters can be this unproductive. The best teams have a more disciplined approach. The slugging and OPS numbers don't lie. Of course, referring to the offensive offense of his team, the New York Mets. Nothing he tweeted was a lie. Nothing he tweeted is incorrect there. Now, the Mets' lack of discipline, I wouldn't say is their biggest problem, but they have had some issues there. I was just looking at ratio of in-zone swing rate to out-of-zone

swing rate, and they're 17th there. They have swung a lot at pitches in the zone, which is good, but they've also swung at a lot of pitches outside the zone. Not so good, but he's not wrong about the production on contact being somewhat subpar and i myself have recently expressed some consternation about that fact however i am not the owner of the team now the mets did win their next game and in true new york tabloid fashion i am sure that someone drew a connection there although i think they didn't score for the first like eight or nine innings of that game and then they finally actually beat the Giants. Someone beat the Giants. How about that? And the Mets on this horrible stretch they're on where they're playing the Giants and the Dodgers

every single day, they actually won one. So good for them. This seems like a situation where probably your players are not going to be motivated by a tweet from the owner criticizing them. I would not think. Now I can't understand why it might be hard to restrain yourself. And I guess I could even see why, hey, you buy yourself a baseball team. One of the perks is that you get to complain about the team that you purchased. It just seems counterproductive. I mean, I shudder to imagine what George Steinbrenner would have been like on Twitter because he was how he was without Twitter. And I imagine that it would have been just nonstop tweeting.

And Cohen is not even close to that level. Other people brought up the Ray Kroc precedent. And for those who don't know, I will link to a breakdown of the Ray Kroc McDonald's founder and former San Diego Padres owner who in his first season owning the team and like his opening 1974 box, and he grabbed the microphone for the public address system, and we've drawn 39,000 fans for ours. The bad news is that this is the most stupid baseball playing I've ever seen. The players were not thrilled by that particularly. And Willie McCovey, the Hall of Famer, and at the time the Padres union representative said, I wish Mr. Kroc hadn't done that. I've never heard anything like that in my 19 years in baseball. None of us likes being called stupid. We're pros and we're doing the best we can. His words will ring in the players ears for a long time. And it went on from there. Even the opposing players had nasty things to say about that. And Marvin Miller was upset about that. Now the fans seemingly were not so upset about that. And Padres attendance was doing fine for

a while, even though they lost a bunch of games. And I'd imagine that some Mets fans were probably pleased that Steve Cohen was like reflecting the id of the fan base, right? Because the Mets have been a frustrating team lately. And maybe for some fans, it's cathartic to see the person in charge say, hey, why don't these bums hit some baseballs better, even though it probably doesn't accomplish anything. So that's the whole dynamic here. And, you know, I guess you buy a baseball team team you're entitled to disparage that baseball team but if your point is to make the baseball team play better or make the team feel better about itself as opposed to just garnering the headlines yourself like you know is this a light a fire

under them type situation i doubt it so this is just stevie spouting off i just don't think you want your players to view you as a bulletin board moment. I just don't think that that's a great... I don't think you want to be bulletin board material if you're the owner. I just... Well, first of all, if I had the kind of money that man has, I would be off Twitter so fast. I would disappear.

You'd be like, do puns exist anymore? We don't know. There lies Meg's twitter account it never was resurrected so like that part of it i just i'm like aren't you wealthy enough to not have to be down in this soup with the rest of us like come on so there's that part of it i just mostly think that to go back to our discussion at the top of the episode like it is a really weird workplace and it's a weird job but it's still a job and it's still a workplace. Sometimes people will ask me what advice I have about writing

as an editor person. I get nervous tweeting that stuff even in general terms because I'm worried someone at Fangraphs is going to think that I'm subtweeting them. That seems mean. You don't want to be a person who's airing your employees less good moments. I just think that it's a bad workplace culture thing. The Mets could probably use some turnaround when it comes to that.

Don't tweet, Steve. You got weird shark art. You got a baseball team. Go sit in your suite and you can heckle. You know what? He should heckle because they'd never hear him. Yeah. The Wilpons didn't tweet.

I guess that was one point in their favor. They said all sorts of other things, but they didn't tweet. So that's something. Yeah. Unless this is like the Tony La Russa management strategy of like, hey, if they all hate me, then at least if they band together against me as a common enemy then maybe that will motivate them so i don't know if this is like because in a way if if they play better then it makes cohen look like oh he motivated them in some way like

the the way to get back at him here would be to play even worse to be even more undisciplined to prove to him hey we're not even gonna listen to be even more undisciplined, to prove to him, hey, we're not even going to listen to you. If they suddenly start playing better, then it's almost like correlation doesn't equal causation. But some people, it's like when you have a closed door meeting after a slump and then the team starts playing better. It's like, oh, some player had some fiery speech that really fired up the team.

And if the Mets finish strong, it'll be, oh, the Steve Cohen tweet. That was it. But yeah, it's probably less strategic than that, than it is just him being frustrated and also kind of liking having this platform. I mean, he's been a very wealthy man for quite a while, but wasn't really a public figure in this way until he bought a baseball team. And he's probably enjoying those aspects of celebrity that come with major sports team ownership. Well, and in that respect, I do like that he appears to revel in, I mean, I'm reticent to even say this. I think that sports owners, to the extent that we're stuck with them, seeming to care a great deal about the franchises they own is a positive. I think that sports owners, to the extent that we're stuck with them, seeming to care a great deal about the franchises they own is a positive. I think that that is a good thing.

But I don't think that this expression of it is particularly fruitful. I think you're probably right that he's not even thinking about it in those terms, right? He's just, you know, billionaires. They're just like us. He's seeking the dopamine hit of Twitter. Like, that's what this is for him. I would guess that would be my speculation. But I do think that you have to remember in those moments that your players do see what

you tweet and that ultimately, if you're going to rally together with anyone to try to turn the fortunes of your franchise around, it's going to be those guys in the locker room. It's going to be the other people who work for you. It's not going to be the folks who follow you on Twitter. Keep that in mind instead. I also just reject the idea that the current members of the Mets don't also wish that things were going better. Sure, of course.

I'm sure that they're like, we know, Steve. We're aware, Steve. When you really say a person's name to be like, I'm calling you Steve, but I have another word in mind. So I just think, you know, we're all better off if we don't tweet. I'm back on Twitter. I regret it every day. But here we are.

Yeah. All right. Well, I have two things. One is happier than the other, and that is Otani. So maybe we can end on that. The other thing is that this was in theory going to be an email episode and it's not really here. But I do have one email that I figured I would mention because it relates to a story that has been in the news this week. Sort of a scary story, although fortunately not as scary as it looked like it might be. And that's Chris Bassett, Oakland A's ace, who was hit by a line drive off the bat of Brian Goodwin, 100 mile per hour line drive right back up through the box. And it hit Bassett and he went down and he never lost consciousness, fortunately. But he was, you know, immediately incapacitated temporarily and he was bleeding. And of course, you fear the worst in that sort of situation.

And it was not nearly the worst, but wasn't good. It's never good to get hit in the face by a baseball traveling at that sort of speed. to speed. And so the A's announced that he had gotten stitches for two facial lacerations and was diagnosed with a displaced tripod fracture in his right cheek. He is going to have to have surgery for that. It sounds like early next week. His vision tests were okay. A CT scan revealed no additional damage. He got hit on the cheek really. And so it doesn't look like he has any damage to his orbital bone. So again, all things considered, probably about the best outcome that you could have hoped for really. But we got another question about this from Colby Bogey, a Patreon supporter of ours. And this was a couple of months ago, inspired by another incident of a pitcher getting

hit by a pitch. And he wrote about two and a half weeks ago, I another incident of a pitcher getting hit by a pitch. And he wrote, about two and a half weeks ago, I witnessed the worst thing I've ever seen on a baseball field. And one of the worst things I've ever seen in any context, I was at the Durham Bulls game with my family when Tyler Zombrow was struck by a line drive and fell to the mound convulsing. It was a traumatic experience and I can't stop thinking about it. I've been a bit surprised by how little it's been discussed by national outlets. I think if it had happened in a major league game, it's all we would have talked about this month. Fortunately, Zombrow is okay. I believe he had to have brain surgery, so it was serious, but I believe he recovered. Of course, he hasn't pitched

since then. And Colby continues, this has led me to think about several how different would baseball be hypotheticals around protecting pitchers from line drives. I know there's a padded baseball cap that basically no one uses, but that wouldn't have helped in this situation because Zombrow seemed to have been struck on his cheek. The best idea I've had so far is to always use the type of screen that batting practice pitchers use. I've thought of three major downsides to this, though I think two could be easily remedied. One, it would interfere with the pitcher's ability to field bunts or weak ground balls. However, maybe the ground in front of home plate could become foul territory to ameliorate this. Two, some batted balls would strike the screen. Again, this could be ruled a foul. And three, it would interfere with the catcher trying to pick off a

runner at second base as well as certain throws into home. This is the downside that seems hardest to fix without making fundamental changes to the game. i would love to hear your take on this as well as any other ideas you have around improving pitcher safety and really like even number two like batted ball striking the screen i mean hit would be for the best if you protect the pitcher and so many hitters when they inadvertently hit a pitcher they feel terrible terrible about it. And I'm sure they'd rather lose a hit than they would hit someone. But still, like, it would be tough to basically take away up the middle from hitters. I mean, you've already kind of taken that away many times with the shift. So that's a tough thing to do there. So I don't know exactly what the perfect solution to this is. Like every time it happens, every time there is some

kind of close call we all wring our hands about this understandably and say like one of these times it's going to be the worst case scenario and i don't want to like fear monger about it because they've been playing major league baseball for a really long time and no pitcher has been killed by a line drive at the major league level fortunately and there's been a lot of pitchers and a lot of line drives so it's it's not like a high probability outcome but of course there have been many guys get hit and get hurt and there have been careers that have been ended or disrupted by that so we've avoided the absolute worst outcome but there have still been bad

outcomes. And at other levels, there have been tragedies that have happened. So it's not like it's out of the realm of possibility. There was a pitcher, an 18-year-old pitcher in amateur ball, American Legion, Brandon Patch, who was killed in 2003 by a line drive and you know that was with an aluminum bat and subsequently aluminum bats were banned in some places because of that and then of course you had the Mike Kulbaugh situation where the first base coach was killed by a line drive and that again like he was hit in the neck and it just happened to hit an artery. So, you know, as a result of that, base coaches started wearing batting helmets, but it didn't even hit him in the head. So like sometimes you're just going to get that extremely improbable thing that happens. And I don't know that in high level athletic competition, there's any way to protect everyone at all times perfectly.

Like there's inevitably going to be some element of risk, but it really is scary. I mean, from a workplace safety perspective, even from a spectator perspective, because like once you see that, it's hard to like want to watch baseball for a while. So, you know, in that Tower Zombrow game, like they just stopped the game. They didn't keep playing because no one wanted to because everyone was so distraught about that and concerned about him. So I don't know what the answer is. Like you could certainly have more protective headwear, but how do you protect against someone getting hit in the neck or in the cheek? You know, are they going to wear like full Giancarlo Stanton type batting helmets at all times? I just I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, I think that well, I think a couple of things. I think that it's really hard to plan for the extreme edge cases of an edge case scenario, right? Like you said, this isn't something thankfully that happens all that often considering how many pitches get thrown in major league baseball every year i do think that we could probably do more to try to address the head wound component of it right so the helmet the protective helmet seems like something that would help in a lot of instances it wouldn't necessarily prevent the worst case scenario that you're describing and there are going to be times where it's just like the combination of where the guy's delivery takes him versus the ball puts him in a position of vulnerability that's hard to plan for and so many things have to line up just right for a guy to get hit by a comebacker that i think we could probably do more to account

for some of the scenarios and unfortunately there's just always going to be some amount of risk but i do think that we could probably prevent some of them right we could prevent some of them and then it's just about whether these guys think that it's worth it to them i mean i do think that there is some amount of a feeling like you look kind of silly that is probably at play here. But I also think that players understand how serious and sort of not only career altering, but life altering these kinds of injuries can potentially be. And so I think that if you said, hey, we have this helmet and it's not super uncomfortable

and it'll protect you in a lot of instances, I do think you'd see guys who were willing to wear it because it's like why not you know you're probably gonna feel like it's unnecessary most of the time but you probably feel pretty great about it while you do i mean like we put catchers in a bunch of gear for a reason they get the crap kicked out of them back there and i think that we could probably be doing a bit more and then sadly are going to be in a position where there are going to be injuries but let's take like the reasonable step to combat some of these and then you know hopefully try to learn from some of the other edge cases i'm just so glad that he's gonna be okay i know yeah no it was really scary and obviously like they're in the middle of a playoff race and he's one of their best pitchers. Of course, they want him back on that level too, but they just want him back, period. They're just happy like the catastrophe occurs, you know, and even if you can foresee the catastrophe, it takes like up until it's right in front of our face.

And then we say, okay, well, we need to prevent this from happening again. we need to prevent this from happening again. So whatever that measure, you know, whatever like rule protective measure would be implemented the day after the year after that something terrible happened, like let's do that now. And again, like, I don't think there's any possible way you could protect all pitchers at all times. Like if the worst thing happens and you have a pitcher who's in the wrong place at the wrong time, like especially these days, I think where you have exit velocities that are higher than ever and pitch speeds that are higher than ever, which contributes in part to the higher exit velocities. releasing the ball closer to home plate and they're like putting their entire bodies into the delivery. So it's probably not a priority for most pitchers to be in like ideal fielding position, right? They're just trying to generate as much velocity as they can. So all of those factors combined make you think that it's even more dangerous than it ever was. And it's been

dangerous for a really long time. Look at herb score. So I think that whatever that thing is that would be done after the worst case scenario happens, then hopefully that could be done before the worst case scenario happens. And maybe it is just the low-lying fruit of protective headgear and improving that just so that, hey, at least if you get hit in certain spots then you're

protected even if you're not protected in all spots yeah because it's you know something something is better than nothing right like there are guys who you know and it's very scary to get hit like bassett did sort of in in the cheek or what have you but you know like if he had had one of the big funny hats right they do look funny we can acknowledge they look kind of funny but like they've slimmed them down i think from the first versions and there's like a version where you just have like a protective insert inside a regular cap and so it it doesn't really look all that unusual it's maybe not quite as protective also but right you know pitchers would be more willing to be seen in it. But, like, you know, when Matt Shoemaker got hit,

like, the protective helmet cap would have made a difference there. I mean, I just think that we can be, we have this, sometimes we let the perfect be the enemy of the good, right? And we have this idea that if the helmet can't protect every inch of the guy's head or what what have you that it's not worth doing and it's like well no like there might still be a lot of benefit here so yeah so hopefully that happens before something worse happens and you know maybe if the mound gets moved back i'm not saying moving it back by a foot or two would make an enormous difference in reaction time, but I suppose every millisecond counts when it comes to that. So that wouldn't be

necessarily a reason to do it. But if that does happen at some point, then I guess it would be some slightly beneficial byproduct of that. But yeah, I just, you know, having a screen on the field, I mean, like, you know, I know, having a screen on the field, I mean, like, you know, I'd rather have a screen on the field than have someone die, obviously. But I doubt that players would want that, you know, even the players who are shouldering that risk, it seems like, you know, or making every ball in front of the plate is foul or something. I mean, that would be a pretty significant thing. And I guess you could say, you know, it's just a game and it's safety first and everything,

of course, but there is kind of a cost benefit analysis. I mean, everything we do in life comes with some risk and we are constantly calibrating that in our lives. That's something that we're all familiar with, certainly over the past year and a half as we decide whether to go out in the world and what we're comfortable doing and not comfortable doing. So we take some slight risk every time we leave the house or get out of bed or drive in Major League Baseball. And fortunately, it's not an astronomical risk, but if it comes down to putting a screen in front of the pitcher or something, then you're really dramatically destabilizing the way baseball works, I think. So I don't know that that's the workable solution necessarily. Yeah. I think you're much more likely to persuade baseball as an institution and players as individual people to say like hey we have this helmet hat helmet hat what do they call it what do we call it i don't

know we need to come up with something cool to call it that's like step one in in getting this to to fly but we have this helmet hat and it's cool and it will protect you and you will never well not never but your your odds of being injured on a comeback are dramatically lower and so you can you can wear that and then we'll all be happy i think that that conversation is one that can eventually be successful i think saying we're gonna put a screen in front of you is gonna be a non-starter so yeah we have to figure out how to work within the system and kind of know what's a what's gonna lead to guys being protected better and what might continue to draw sort of skepticism and and ire and helmet hat that might be problem number one but that seems a lot easier to solve than trying to convince these guys to put a screen

on the field yes i agree all right so we can end with our daily dose of otani here and we did get a tweet to the Effectively Wild Twitter account at EWPod from a Braves fan named Russell who said, what gets more airtime in the next Effectively Wild cycle talk or Shohei Otani's 40th homer? And I think you know the answer to that, Russell. And I guess maybe he was preemptively spicy about us devoting more time to Shohei Otani than to Freddie Freeman's second career cycle. Salute to Freeman. He's been great and good for him. And his story about it was charming.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. He had a charming story about his wife giving him a well-chosen cappuccino. Yes. I'll read the quote. My wife, we had breakfast this morning and we had two cappuccinos delivered and she chose the cappuccino and she handed it to me and said, this is the one with a lot of hits in it. So I have to give this one up to my wife, Chelsea, because if it wasn't for the right cappuccino pick, I wouldn't be here talking to you guys. So, yeah, the cycle with the walk, which I think some of our listeners were suggesting could be called a cyclone. could be called a cyclone if you have the walk to at brave stats on twitter effectively wild listener noted that this was the 43rd cyclone in al or nl history and freeman's been great he's started slow this season but he is like right up to his usual seasonal stats it's like you know i

guess last year the mvp year the 60 game season was sort of an outlier, but basically his slash lines look like they always do. And he's been a big part of Atlanta's resurgence. So there you go, Russell. We talked a little bit about the cycle at least, but I won't talk that much about Shohei's 40th homer, but I will talk about that outing as a whole, because that was one of his best and most memorable games on Wednesday. It was one of his best and most memorable games on Wednesday. Going against the Tigers, he pitched eight innings, one run, no walks, struck out eight. And yes, he also hit his 40th homer, a mammoth blast. And that was a lot of fun. That was one of the more enjoyable two-way Otani outings of the year. And the Tigers fans were hyped about the homer. That's when you know that this is no longer a local interest story. You have the opposing team's fans who are super excited that their team just gave up a home run to this guy because that's how exciting he is.

And they're just happy to be in the building to see him excel. He was like, he was getting into it. He was grunting on the mound more so than he typically does. He did a little shoulder roll after his homer, I think mimicking a Joe Adele home run celebration. And I was pulling for him to get the complete game because he was at 90 pitches through eight, which is, you know, he hadn't gone eight innings in an MLB start and looked like he could have gone nine. Madden said he thought he looked a little fatigued and it was a hot night. He was sweaty and it was a close game. So those were some pressure packed innings. And also the Angels had a day game on Thursday afternoon. So you got to get him back in there as the leadoff hitter in DH. And that game has already happened. And he had a couple hits and a couple walks and played a part in a pretty exciting Angels comeback over Detroit so I get why you might just let Iglesias take that ninth inning because Shohei doesn't have the four or five days off before his next start he's right back in there the next afternoon and yet I still sort of wanted to see him go the distance because

that would have been cool yeah that would have been cool but we wouldn't have gotten this comeback which if you're a Tigers fan you're like that's not nice this was terrible but if you're an otani fan uh you're like well that was that was pretty that was pretty nifty his combined war is up to 7.2 fan graphs now that does not include his contributions at the plate today right so presumably it's ticked even slightly higher. But I have to say my favorite part of that home run celebration was Joe Adele reacting to Otani incorporating part of his home run celebration into his own. He had this look on his face like, I'm with my guys. I am part of the guys.

It was just really nice. It was just a really nice little moment. So yeah, Otani, good gravy. I will get over him having gone past 6.9 war, which is a very nice number. baseball reference entering Thursday. So given his performance on Thursday afternoon, I imagine that on Friday morning, he will have surpassed the eight-door threshold with 39 games to go. Pretty impressive. And really, it's hard to say whether he's been better as a pitcher or a hitter lately because it's kind of close. He has totally turned it on as a pitcher since that disastrous two-thirds of an inning outing at Yankee Stadium with me in attendance. He has made six starts. He's thrown 40 innings. He's allowed 26 hits, seven earned runs. That's a 1.58 ERA. He has walked four and struck out 37.

So his strikeout rate is down. It seems like he's pitching to contact a bit more, but also pitching to control and command. And he is really limiting walks like he's become one of the best control pitchers in baseball over that span, which is mind boggling, really, given his control struggles at the start of the season, but going back to July 1st, which conveniently happens to be the day after that Yankee Stadium outing, minimum 30 innings pitched. There are 124 qualifying pitchers entering Thursday, and he has walked 2.7% of the hitters he faced over that span. That is unsurpassed, unbeaten in the American League. Only Madison Bumgarner, who is at 2.6% over that span, was lower. And only a few pitchers have a better FIP than Otani over that same span. Corbin Burns, Walker Bueller, and Otani is tied with another A's pitcher, Frankie Montas, for the best FIP in the American League over that span, 2.35. That's better than Cole. That's better than Radon.

That's better than Brandon Woodruff. So he said recently that he thought he was still reaching his potential as a pitcher and maybe he hasn't yet it's tempting to think about what he could do next season if he doesn't have these rust induced control issues at the start of the season and if he doesn't have any limits on his workload because he hasn't been off the mound for years even dating back to like May 6th, which was the day after he had a six walk outing. So I'm sort of cherry picking here,

but hopefully you'll forgive me. He's walked like 6% of hitters over that much longer span. So he's become a control artist. And I never really thought that control was going to be a long-term problem for him because he had pretty decent control in Japan. He walked 3.3 or 3.4 per nine, and that's how many he walked per nine in his rookie season for the Angels before he got hurt too. So I didn't think control was the issue that it appeared to be when he was hurt and when he was recovering from being hurt and being rusty. was recovering from being hurt and being rusty but to see him do a complete 180 after those early season struggles and just become one of the best control pitchers in the league and he's kind of

changed his pitch mix a bit he's backed off the splitter slightly even though it is one of the most effective pitches in baseball and he's gone to like the slider and the cutter and the cutter has been effective and he's getting a ton of ground balls now and still allowing weak contact like it's a kind of a different model of otani as a pitcher but an extremely effective one yeah i think that this is maybe just the thing that the very good players on the angels are gonna do now where people like this is a fundamental problem with your game and they're like fine we'll fix it yeah right fixing it guys we're guys who fix things. I was listening to the Angels broadcast and they were saying, this isn't us being homers, but he might have a case for the Cy Young Award. And I was like, guys. Relax.

That does seem like you being homers. Yeah. However, he has been good. Yeah. You know, Chris Bassett should be a contender for the Cy Young Award. He should be. Bassett should be a contender for the Cy Young award. He should be. Radon and Cole and

Lance Lynn and others like they're guys who have pitched more innings than Otani and they've been better innings than Otani so he has no case. However he could get votes potentially I guess and he's pitching at a Cy Young level I suppose we could say over an extended stretch here

not extended enough for him to actually contend for the award, but he is still leading the major leagues in homers and he's going to win the MVP award. And he is and has lately been pitching like a Cy Young caliber pitcher. So it's special stuff. We don't need to tell you that, but I'm going to tell you that anyway. It's special stuff. I have terrible news for you, Ben, which is that even though he is not a top our board leader board, I imagine

he will not be a top others, although I have not checked. You're going to get double barrel. Make Lance Lynn the Cy Young. Just do it. Just make it. You're going to get it here. You're going to get it from Bauman. I know that he doesn't have the strongest case of all the guys, but I want it in my heart.

It's a pretty strong case. It's a pretty strong case. I don't think it's the strongest case, but it is a good case. But yeah, we don't have to make Otani the Cy Young. He's perfect as he is. And that is the MVP of the American League. Yeah, and MLB's Instagram account posted something about him hitting his 40th homer and leading

the majors, and I saw Vlad Grojr posted hard ice in response. So it's nice. It's like a mutual admiration society. They all just like each other and want to be pals, and it's so nice. Yeah, and my pal Zach Cram from The Ringer was pointing out

that Otani has a shot at a 50-25 season. He's on pace for 50 homers still. He is not quite on pace for 25 stolen bases, but not far behind that pace. And there's never been a 50-25 season. That would be pretty cool. There have been some 50-20 seasons. pretty cool there have been some 50 20 seasons and obviously there have never been 50 20 seasons where the guy also pitched well during that season or pitched at all but you know a rod has done 50 20 willie mays has done 50 20 ken griffey jr has done 50 20 and brady anderson of course has done

50 20 but 50 25 it would be kind of cool if Otani did something unprecedented that did not rely on his pitching performance. If it was just, hey, he did something a position player never did, let alone the pitching aspect of it all. So I'm just trying to savor this, what we have left, 39 Angels games in about six weeks of the season here. And what is that? Maybe six or so more Otani starts if all goes well. And I'm just trying to treasure each one because you can't count on a season like this happening again. It has never happened before. Hopefully he will have more of these seasons,

but you cannot count on that at all. And so watching this season wind down, at least for the Angels, I kind of have like this end of summer camp feeling where I'm like, this has been fun, but I don't want it to end. Not from my personal experience, because I only went to summer camp once and I got homesick and hated it and was counting down the days to the end. But many people's summer camp feeling where they don't want it to end. That's kind of what this has been for me where i'm like oh he

only has this many games left to tack on to the totals of the season that i will be looking at on baseball reference and fan grass for the rest of my life most likely it's like a pleasant dream i don't want to wake up from i think that you need to find some fun otani facts and holster them though right like don't don't put them all out on the table before the season ends because as we discussed in this episode we might have a long off season in the making here and we love the baseball we love the baseball and we want people to keep loving the baseball even when we go through a contentious and potentially uh debilitating uh labor negotiation so i think we need to sprinkle in fun stuff

amongst the sadness so that people remember that we love the baseball and you all love the baseball and we are all here to love the baseball together. So some of them, I realize, are going to make their way onto this pod in the remaining weeks of the season, but I think you should save

some of them, Ben, so that when we're really in need of a good bit of fun come January. Otani, yay! I'll try. It's tough to hold anything in reserve and not react to it in real time. But I will try. It is a long, cold winter. and who knows whether this will be longer and colder than most. So I will need the memory of Otani to warm me and sustain me through those cold winter months. We'll have the warmth and just loveliness of Otani. We'll be able to marvel at the big beef boys. We'll, I don't know, we'll spend a week getting excited about zach wheeler like we'll we'll we'll have fun stuff to do but i don't know that any of the stuff will be as fun as the otani

stuff because he's pretty great yes all right so on that fun note we can conclude that will do it for today thanks as always for listening 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. Will Garris, Joshua Kopin, Robert Beretta, Amelia Newberg, and Christopher Mitchell. 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.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins, as always, for his editing assistance. And we will be back with one more episode before the end of this week. Talk to you then. So I'll sit and wait Till I can find the sense it makes I know this sick world's bound to explain So I'm hanging on if only by a thread Inside my haunted head