Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1740: Thumb WAR

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

Ben Lindbergh talks to Defector’s David Roth about the Mets’ freefall in the standings, the extremely Metsy controversy surrounding multiple players giving the thumbs down to fans, and how the franchise still practices Wilpon-era self-sabotage. Then (46:18) Ben “benters” with Ben Clemens from FanGraphs about the post-sticky-stuff collapse of demoted Cleveland closer James Karinchak, the […]

Steppin' out, I tried to fix it Pulled the thumb out of that hole Give me ingredients, I'll mix it How can you move without a goal? How can you move without a door? and two guests will fill in for her. First up is the great David Roth of Defector. Last time we talked about the Yankees, the New York team whose playoff fortunes improved dramatically in August. That was the best of times for one of New York's teams. Today we'll talk about the worst of times for the New York Mets,

who have seen their fortunes fall just as steeply as the Yankees have seen theirs rise. Not only are they losing a lot, but they're also sort of feuding with fans. Keep in mind that we recorded this segment before the Mets walked off the Marlins on Tuesday in the continuation of a suspended game from April, and the hero of that game in the ninth was none other than one of the instigators of that feud, Javier Baez, who had an RBI infield single to keep the Mets alive and then scored on a Michael Conforto walk-off. So at least for a day, I'm sure some of the bad blood stopped

boiling. Baez was predictably booed when he pinch hit in the eighth, but the boos turned to cheers, at least temporarily, in the following inning. Fans are fickle. And Conforto said, we gotta keep winning. Winning is all we want. Winning is all the fans want. We're all pulling in the same direction here. I can tell you that the guys wanted to win this game about as badly as any other game we've played. In short, winning cures all. And as you'll hear shortly, they have many more ills to cure, and they'll need many more wins in a short span of time to get back in the race. After that, I will be joined by Ben Clemens of Fangraphs to talk about another swift fall, this one involving Cleveland closer James Karinchak,

who has gone from being one of the best relievers in baseball to AAA. We'll discuss how that happened, what it did and didn't have to do with sticky stuff, and then we'll also discuss the excellence of Adam Wainwright, who is thriving at 40 in the post-foreign substance era. We'll also discuss the Cardinals, who are still kind of contending, even though you may not have noticed. And then I will play you out with some stat blasts. And I should warn you, the second segment of this show is clean.

In the first segment, David will do some swears. And we have left them in because when you're talking to someone who's as skilled at swearing as David is, it seems like a shame to censor him. So hide your kids. Though really, if you let them watch the Mets, you should probably let them pick up some profanity too, just so they'll be equipped for what's in store. So let's meet those Mets. Almost a year ago, we had David Roth on the show to mark two milestones, the launch of the website he co-founded, Defector, and the New York Mets' brave new world without the Wilpons. The good news all these months later is that it seems like Defector's doing great. The same can't be said of the Mets, who are doing a damn good impression of their same old selves.

of their same old selves. And after stumbling along at the top of a weak division for most of the season, they have completely cratered lately, getting demolished by the Giants and Dodgers on a recent road trip, which is somewhat understandable, but also going 8-19 in August, heading into a Tuesday doubleheader. They now trail Atlanta by several games. They're also behind Philadelphia. Their playoff odds, which were hovering around 80% for most of the season, are now down to 2.6%. And on top of that, multiple members of the team gave the fans the thumbs down during Sunday's game. It's so funny that I can't even say it with a straight face, with the parts of Siskel and Ebert being played by Javier Baez, Francisco Lindor, and Kevin Pillar. Maybe the funniest part is that apparently some Mets have been thumbs downing the fans for most of the month, but no one really noticed because presumably the Mets have had so

few occasions to celebrate. So team president Sandy Alderson released a statement condemning the thumbs downing. The players apologized. Team owner Steve Cohen is tweeting through it. Things are generally going great. So David, last time you were on, I think we asked you whether you had mixed feelings about the fact that with the Mets seemingly poised on the point of competence, your services as the internet's foremost Metsologist were about to be in much less demand. But as it turns out, the brand is still strong. Well, that's right, Ben. Defector is doing great. We're coming up on our first year live online and we're planning a celebration for all our fans uh it'll be online and of course at a venue in brooklyn

uh that's september 9th thumbs up to defectors fans yes won't be talking about any of the other things you addressed uh don't feel like it's it's time yet yeah this is really something man i uh i was away for a lot of august and i was able to keep up with the Mets in the way that you're able to keep up with the Mets. I have the MLB at bat app on my phone. So I knew that they were winning twice a week. But coming back and finding out that they've been taunting fans every time they score a run at home, which is to say, again, every three games. It's really remarkable shit i'm uh i don't think that i uh get that surprised by the things that the team does anymore or at least i want to believe that that's the case and this whole thing is uh feels newish to me yeah i don't

love it but i do if i'm gonna watch the to watch the team lose two out of three games to the Marlins for the entire rest of the season, I've done that before. Miguel Olivo is not walking through that door to get into a meaningless shoving match with someone. This is basically, I'm just excited to have a new experience of this old experience. Yeah. I'm happy to see that you just published a piece about this at Defector because initially I was worried that you might be tired of thinking about the Mets and making the rounds on the podcast circuit every time the Mets step on some new rake. But it's probably bad enough being a Mets fan without people like me sliding into your DMs to ask you to air your unhappiness in public. But before we get to the thumb stuff,

I foolishly thought the Mets would win this division. And I thought that even before the season started. Yeah. And I became even more convinced after they had been in first for months and Atlanta lost a few important players. And I just want to know what went wrong for this roster because as unproductive as the booing may be, let alone the thumbs downing, it reflects some justified disappointment with the way the Mets have played and squandered this division lead so quickly and efficiently. Yeah. I mean, it's really in some ways, like, you know, if you do the like 30,000 foot version of it, it's easy to see like how they might have sort of started to tank out in July and

August. They weren't really that good when they were in first place, but like they were still in first place and plenty of not that good teams win divisions like that. I mean, this isn't the national league East has had a lot of problems this year. Like the, the Phillies are convinced they all have super gout because they got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine and the Braves don't have,

you know, Acuna and a lot of, you know, they have been without Sirocco all year. They were without Ian Anderson for a lot of the year. This is a year where the Mets could win the division, even if they underperformed what I expected from them. And I don't think, to go back to your point earlier, I don't think it was unreasonable

to assume that they could win the division this year. I mean, even with a bad season from Lindor, which, you know, it's been a pretty bad season from Francisco Lindor, that what it would have required for them to be deep in third and all the way out of it on September 1 was basically, like, it would have to involve, like, significant time on the aisle for de Grom, which, like, we are now in the, you know, looking at that. time on the aisle for de grom which like we are now in the you know looking at that but then it also would have and i think this is the part where i just like you know even when they were kind of winning games and looking bad and like you know scoring five runs a series but winning two out of three or whatever that it didn't occur to me that all of their good youngish bats could just flatline at the same time and except for alon Pete Alonso, they really all kind of have. In different ways, but there's just a weird sort of punchlessness, even from guys that, you know, like the bad version of Dom Smith,

like the version of Dom Smith that was called up before the team helped him fix his sleep apnea belatedly, like years belatedly, that like the version of him that sold out for power and hit homers like was not a good Major League Baseball player. But the version of him, to a certain extent, Jeff McNeil, to an extent, Michael Conforto, all of these guys slugging under 400 is just bizarre to me. Yeah, I thought the Mets were going to get better as the season went on, both because the lineup seemed to be underperforming and then also because of potential reinforcements. And I've heard you talk before about how one

classic Wilpon move was to not make a move and then say that your big move was going to be getting someone back from the injured list. But I thought that might actually be true this time. At the deadline, I think the Mets were up, what, four on Atlanta, three and a half on Philly. Carrasco had just come back the day before and pitched well in his first appearance. There was hope that they'd get Lindor back, DeGrom, Syndergaard at some point. A month later, Carrasco has stunk since then. DeGrom and Syndergaard are still weeks away if they come back at all. And they've lost like 11 games in the standings to Atlanta and fallen behind Philly too. So everything went suddenly horribly dramatically wrong and they hadn't really gotten the guys back that they thought they might get back and no one has really picked up their performance. So all those things I thought it was reasonable to assume at that moment and that might have caused the Mets not to make even more moves other than bringing in Rich Hill and Javi Baez. Like none of that panned out. In fact, everything went backward. Yeah. And that, I mean, the idea of like a deadline, I mean, Hill was, I guess, a little bit before then.

And that was like straight up a salary like dump by the Rays. I guess that they're like insurance is paying Tommy Hunter, but that's like what they needed to do so they could add Nelson Cruz. I think. I mean, I don't really know, you know, what else. The race process is always kind of like I'm afraid of it and I don't even like to pretend to understand it. Like it's the way that like I feel when I see like a complicated math equation. I'm like, wow, that looks amazing.

And then I just like start thinking about a Garfield comic I read as a child or something. In this case, though, like getting one big star right before that star hits free agency and then making a couple of other moves, the idea of being like, well, we need a fifth starter type. So let's get someone who is like the fifth starter for another team. Like that's a very Mets thing. The idea that like if you like every team has a fifth starter, the Mets are like, well, that guy's the worst guy.

So instead of pursuing a third starter and having their fourth starter become their fifth, they're like, well, no, like Jason Vargas types. Is Jason Vargas available? Then they go out and get Jason Vargas. In this case, Hill I dearly love. I feel like he always was going to be a Met. I'm not mad at that deal.

It hasn't really worked out that well, but I think that some of it, again, is some really puzzling management from Luis Rojas in terms of leaving starters in games longer than he should, seemingly just on principle. But he's not the biggest problem. He's not a very good manager. But the bigger issue, and this is the issue with the bias thing,

I mean, to me, it felt like an attempt to sort of recapture the magic of trading for you in a cesspitus in 2015 and if you had to trade for a guy that was available at this deadline and also could potentially in the way that cesspitus did just like become some sort of like up like a vengeful creature of myth and i'll let it you pick the culture but like something that has like that breathes fire and like has really sharp talons or whatever and just destroys uh cities and villages and stuff what cespedes did in 2015 is something that bias definitely could have done yes but it doesn't mean like and this is the case with that doing that and having that be your only deal, it's the same sort of deal.

Like, they worked out with Cespedes, but then also in 2015, there was the waiver deadline. So once Cespedes turned it on and the team really opened up a lead in the division, then they could go and get Tyler Clippard and Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson, who were not, like, vitally important figures but also were like important figures like they were better than the guys that they replaced and in this case when you can't do that you're depending on bias to turn into cesspitous and then you're also just hoping and this is classic willpon brain mets that everything just keeps going right and if everything this is you know the teams that the mets have gone into the the regular season with over you know certainly during the Wilpon years and I think to a certain extent maybe to a lesser extent this year the idea has been like all right well it's an 85 win team but if everything

goes well it's an 89 win team and that wins us the division or it gets us into the wild card but that variance goes both ways and that like it took two f***ing decades for them to get their head around that and it just never sorry abouting decades for them to get their head around that and it just never sorry about that am I allowed to curse on this by the way yeah go all right I think to muzzle you in that way would do a disservice to everyone right I apologize um to anyone who is offended by the thumbs down language that I just did um I would apologize for them taking offense at that but the like never understood that. And so in this case, they built a little bit more of that into the roster going into the season. But there's still, in so many ways, there's still like the kind of Jurassic team that they were last year.

They have a different owner. They nominally have a new GM. But it's the same stuff with not being able to rehabilitate injuries, making guys play hurt, like just kind of like burning through like arms in the bullpen, kind of willy nilly, at least like, you know, the lower tier arms in it. And so they are where they are, like they got lucky in a lot of ways, the pitching really has been very good for the entire year. But like the stuff that they could conceivably have backstopped against at the deadline or before that, or the chances they could have taken at the deadline to make it easier for themselves to absorb the kind of injuries that they've gotten. They just didn't take any of those chances. Yeah, they have really had bad fortune there. I don't know whether it's fair to say it's bad luck at this point or whether it's bad management or some combination of both. But according to baseball perspectives, they've lost like 12 wins above replacement, something

like that in just projected value to players who have been on the injured list. And that is the most of any called setbacks. And maybe it doesn't matter. I mean, if deGrom is going to miss some amount of time anyway, then if you string it out and make people believe that he will be back sooner, then ultimately, I guess it doesn't make a difference unless you're deluding yourself into thinking that you're going to get someone back, and that's why you don't make a move. But that sort of pattern of injuries and also discussing injuries seems to have persisted. And I don't know if that is just institutional memory or the fact that there are still a lot of Wilpon era people who are in place or what. Increasingly, I think it's the last bit. I mean, I think that, which is weird too, because there's sort of some like latent admiration for

Sandy Alderson in me, I think just because he was, you know, MLB basically like assigned him to the Wilpons in the days after the Bernie Madoff stuff kind of knocked the bottom out from under the team's payroll. And like, he didn't make that many great moves. He made some. I mean, he's like, he has his strengths and his weaknesses as an executive,

but like he was easily the most admirable guy in that organization, which is sort of like, you know, like what's the best sandwich at the subway in the bus station? You know what I mean? Like the idea of people, so he was the BMT of their, uh, of their like clubhouse, but that doesn't necessarily translate. It doesn't mean it's high quality. Like you can still absolutely get some sort of like liver fluke from that sandwich.

It's just that like, it's the one that smells best. And in this case, I think that the way that they handle the injuries, like I think in the past, I would get more angry about the weird lies about, you know, this guy's day to day. You know, there's it's not a setback. It's just the sort of thing where he can't lift his arm anymore. But that's normal. Like all that stuff, as annoying as it is as a fan, and it's insanely annoying. I think that I took that more to heart because it seemed like the part that they could control. You know, like you don't necessarily know how a player is going to come back from Tommy

John surgery. Although I think with the Mets at this point, you can say that if that player is on the Mets, they're going to come back much more slowly and much worse than the average player does I think that like with Syndergaard you know for a while they were talking about like you know he's already thrown 97 this is spring training like it's very exciting and it's just like it's the same sort of stuff it's the same stuff with Carrasco that these are injuries that are either not properly understood or not properly explained. And I think that like for the longest time, I just assumed that they were lying. And I think it's, you know, maybe that was giving them too much credit.

Like it might just be that there's still some tendency there to try to rehab this stuff in a way that's like, you know, three or four iterations of baseball best practices ago. And that's just what they're going to do. And Carrasco, I am very excited to have him as a Met. I think he's a cool pitcher to watch. He really has been pretty bad, although he pitched very well in his last outing. But in that case, it was like that injury. So it was two different injuries, neither one of which was the one that kept him out,

you know, for like, you know, with the end of last season, or like it was one of them was like an oblique. And then another one was like him overcompensating from that, I think it was an oblique. But in both of those instances, it was like, it just was clear that it was being handled kind of ham fistedly and poorly, like keeping hitters around like that are like, they can't run, but they're available as like pinch hitters, or like guys that can't hit, but they're available as like pinch hitters or like guys that can't hit, but they're available as pinch runners. Like, I don't know if there's some sort of like understanding in the front office that putting a player on the 10 day high L means that like

you owe major league baseball $1 million cash payable immediately, but they have been so reluctant to use it. Even after it became a 10 day IL, even after they changed, you know, even after it became a 10-day IL, even after they changed ownership, after they changed GMs, that I have to wonder if that's some sort of Alderson thing about the idea of are you hurt or are you injured? Either way, obviously, it's not doing much for them at this moment. So it's frustrating. They should be a lot better than they are. And the one thing that they had going for them all year, which it seemed like they really liked playing with each other and the vibes were generally good. I mean, obviously, it's easier to do that when you're in first place than when you're in third. But even that sort of seems to have soured at this point. Yeah. So here's how Baez explained the thumbs thing. When we don't get success, we're going to get booed. So they, the fans, are going to get booed when we get success well said yes it tracks now the real reversal would be that if the fans don't get success they're going to get

booed by the mets so maybe the mets could follow their fans to their places of work and boo them when they spill coffee or flub a presentation or something and i would really respect the level of effort that would go into that doing an asshole chant at someone as the train doors on the two close the second you run down the stairs it's a tough one but can't say you didn't earn it the fact that baez lindor and pilar were the thumb warriors here is among the most metsy aspects of the story i think because all of them have been pretty disappointing as Mets, but on their previous teams, these three were the definition of fan favorite. I think they're statues of Kevin Pillar in Toronto for some

reason. His face is on Canadian currency now. It's like a lot of loons and Queen Elizabeth and Kevin Pillar. That these three guys came to New York and just got Mets-pilled immediately is amazing. August 6th. If that's the first time they started doing that, that is one week. It is seven days from when Baez was traded to the Mets. They went from fan favorites to openly warring with fans via hand gesture. I guess they didn't pick the most offensive finger they could have chosen.

So that's something. But yeah, Baez was doing the thumbs down before he unpacked, basically. That's how long it takes for a popular and pretty productive player to get sucked into the vortex of dysfunction here.

So that is the most shocking part to me. Pillar was beloved by Mets fans earlier this year. He was hit in the face and came back very quickly, but was very like, I mean, he just acted like Kevin P kevin polar like i don't necessarily know that he's a guy i want to have a beer with or whatever but like if you're into like ball players who get their uniforms dirty and stuff like he's gonna win you over that's the sort of like if we're talking about

like bog standard like dude sitting in the promenade yelling the entire game at city field then like polar would be his guy, you know, like Lindor, you might not like, because like, he's not white and he's getting paid very well. And, you know,

bias again, is the sort of guy where like, he's really just sort of like turned the hobby bias dial to like 11 or 12 since he's with the Mets. So like every game is like two incredibly hopeless strikeouts, one absolutely scalded ball that either goes over the wall and is caught and then like dealer's choice, you know And that's just, that's his approach and it's how he is. And I like, I love him for it. Like, I don't, I don't really understand what, I guess people were, were booing him because

he was striking out too much, but he really hasn't played that much as a Met and he hasn't played that much worse than like, I mean, really that much worse than Lindor has. Lindor, you know, was booed pretty soon. I mean, he got off to a very, very slow start and never really got the chance to sort of like... He had like a couple of weeks where he played like Francisco Lindor, but that was really it. I mean, I think that'll change.

I think he was also one of those guys that by signing that big contract, by coming over as like this sort of franchise cornerstone, there's a faction of Mets fans, I think as there are of every team that mostly think of their job as being sort of like owners in absentia. And with a new owner, you know, let alone like a distressingly epic online owner

like the Mets apparently have now, that there are, there's a lot of people that like call him Mr. Cohen and like, you know, really want to like like that don't work for him and call him mr cohen you know that like do that on their leisure time suck up to a boss that they don't have that are like well you know you got to give him time like you know like by signing that deal lindor really tied mr cohen's hands and like we've seen nothing from cohen that suggests that he is any different as an owner than the willpons were except for the fact that he's got a twitter an owner than the Wilpons were, except for the fact that he's got a Twitter account. And, you know, that can change in time. Like, I think that

it seems clear this year that they, even though they were in first place at the trade deadline, that they didn't really think the team was that good. They weren't going to roll the dice on going over the CBT, which the team has never gone over. But there were a bunch of deals that I had heard that the team basically, you know, like you can have Josh Donaldson if you're willing to pay his contract. Like just give us somebody an A ball and we'll do that. And the Mets weren't willing to do that. Now, you know, I think as a baseball move, that doesn't really wash with me.

It doesn't, I don't really like it very much. But if they felt like we don't want to commit ourselves to this amount of money for a team that we still think is a year away or that we think isn't going to go far this year. Then like I guess that's the Mets acting like a normal team for once. But like it sucks. It sucks as bad as it did when they were like a weird family business being run into the ground by a bunch of sour Long Island guys. Yeah. Well, historically speaking, athletes telling fans to be better behaved has roughly a 0% success rate. I don't know if you watch The Bachelor, but it reminds me of contestants on The Bachelor who just are not making much of a connection with the person they're trying to woo and they're not getting enough time.

And so they think the way to stay on the show is to start accusing other contestants of not being there for the right reasons, which sometimes is true, but the lead never thinks, yeah, this person stirring up crap is the one I want to marry. Yeah, good point. I'm not attracted to this person anymore. Right. I mean, it's not the part of your brain that reasons, that makes you boo or not boo. It always ends up being self-sabotage. I mean, players complaining about attendance, like you're not supporting us enough when

we're winning or ballpark comportment of some sort. It never has the intended effect if the intent is to repair the relationship, but maybe it isn't. Maybe it's just to vent and experience the same catharsis that the fans do when they boo. But the headline on the back page of the Post was never going to be like, bias makes good point. Cogent gesture underlines conflicted met season forces us to examine our own behavior yeah yeah right the actual post headline by the way was mets colon go to hell fans which terrific yeah so that's what you're going to get whenever you do those it just always adds fuel to the fire but i guess at that point

you're not really thinking about it and also they were doing it for weeks without anyone noticing so the more i thought about it the more the only part of it that i actually object to is bias randomly deciding to snitch on himself in a post-game press conference the rest of it it's like if you decide that you want to win despite like the new york post like absolutely go with god like i like half of what i write is just like the idea of being like i hope that someone who works at the new york post will read this and get upset like it's a vile publication it's not like the sort of thing where you need to like apologize for being mad at them and ditto for like the buttheads in the fan in the stands or like the guys sending like n slurs to taiwan walker on instagram like fuck that. And the Mets have those as surely as other

teams do, and I think have a lot of them. What I don't get is the idea of this kind of like scolding the fans. I mean, it might just be that Baez is not, you know, like he's a much better hitter than he is talker, you know, which is true of most baseball players, I think. There's just something about that decision to air it out and then to have to, you know, these sort of like forced apologies that we got before the game today where it's like, you know, my thumb did something that I don't approve of and like, I'm going to be looking into that very strongly or whatever.

It's just kind of like. If my thumb offended you. Yes. Then my thumb would like to extend its apologies. But at that point it's like, you know, what are we even doing here? Like that was what was, I was telling you before we started recording that, like, I think this is the first type. Well, but at that point it's like you know what are we even doing here like that was what was i was

telling you before we started recording that like i think this is the first type well the thing that i wrote about this like i've written about the mets a lot like at a lot of different places and i think that most of those stories are effectively the same or they're one of three types of stories and this was the first one i think some of it is that it's august you know and you're writing about baseball in august and everybody that's just like existentially, you're very much aware of what you're doing at that point, which is kind of, you know, complaining about the weather just in baseball terms. been terrible to watch and like just really unpleasant to sort of experience more broadly you know like this is there's hard to like find even anything to talk about with the team that this was the first time i wrote one of those like what are we even doing here posts and i really wouldn't have pegged this year as being the one that would be like this

ostentatiously and unpleasantly meaningless at this time in the season. Like I really thought September would be a little more fun than it's shaping up to be. Yeah. And prior to the apologies, Sandy Alderson posted a statement to Medium. I was not aware that the Mets were on Medium. When are the Mets starting their sub stack? Oh, they don't follow you on there? No. Anyway, Alderson said the Mets will not tolerate any player gesture that is unprofessional in its meaning or is directed in a negative way toward our fans.

I will be meeting with our players and staff to convey this message directly. Mets fans are loyal, passionate, knowledgeable, and more than willing to express themselves. We love them for every one of these qualities. Now, I don't know if all of those qualities are lovable in the extreme, but how do you feel about booing in general? Because I sympathize with bias in the sense that I've never been a booer. Not just because I'm not really a fan of any particular team anymore, and there's no booing in the press box, but even when I was a fan, I didn't boo. And I guess I'm just wired that way. And also, I was a Yankees fan, and they were winning the

World Series all the time, so what would I have been booing way. And also, I was a Yankees fan and they were winning the World Series all the time. So what would I have been booing anyway? But also, it just seems kind of cruel at times or counterproductive, at least, to boo your own players, barring some operation shutdown deal. Like if they're trying, then what's the point? And generally, I think most fan bases are like approximately the same degree of depraved. Yeah. But are Mets fans just so scarred that at this point they are especially prone to some sort of behavior that turns the team against them or helps perpetuate the team's hapless reputation or something? Or could this have just happened to any team that was going through a rough stretch? I don't think it could happen to any team.

But I've done like legit some soul searching on this one. I going through a rough stretch. I don't think it could happen to any team. But I've done, like, legit some soul-searching on this one. I'm not a booer. I don't, at the very least, I'm not going to boo anybody that's on my, you know, team. Like, I'm sure I've booed Chipper Jones in my life. And, like, if someone produces Zapruder footage of me calling Chipper, whatever, like, calling him Larry at Shea Stadium, like, whatever.

Guilty as charged. Like, I'm sure I did that. But, like, the booing a player on on the Mets like that's not what I'm going to a Mets game to do like I'm going there hoping that they'll win and doing my best to encourage them to that end I think that there is a certain like stripe of Mets fan and I think the Wilpons themselves were kind of this type of Mets fan in a weird way who define that fandom like almost entirely opposite to the Yankees

like or relative to the Yankees and so are going to be doubly dissatisfied like they're one of those people where it's like a perfect day is the Mets win and the Yankees lose like just people with like bumper stickers for brains and that is like that's a real mentality is the Mets win and the Yankees lose. Like just people with like bumper stickers for brains. And that is like, that's a real mentality. And it's not, I don't have friends who are like that.

Like I have a lot of friends that are Mets fans. Like most of them live in the computer. I grew up in a town where all my friends are Yankee fans. And that's cool. Like, you know, we're still buddies and everything, but I knew their experience was different than mine. Like I knew my team was worse. But in this case, I think there are people

that can sort of never give up that like sort of like little brother, like resentment stuff. And it's all I know, it's hacked to like, put fans on the couch in that way, especially fans that like, I myself don't know or talk to, but I know they're out there. Like I hear them at games. And I, you you know like have sometimes I guess gotten like you know some interaction with them online or whatever but I think that it's just sort of like it's a parallel universe of fans that like for whatever reason I'm I'm not necessarily in but I do know that there are people out there that are you know like either in it because they like being angry or that sort of have understood fandom in the way

that like, and I think some of this is like, is tabloid stuff that the Mets are always covered as if they're kind of ridiculous and disgusting relative to the Yankees who are at least rich. And then there's also, I mean, like, you know, local sports radio, all of this, like ranting about how embarrassing the team is and stuff like there's a lot of that just kind of like ambiently out there to hear and i can't imagine you know sort of like absorbing it and just like walking around feeling constantly this like sort of churning disgust for the baseball team whose hat you're wearing at that moment but there are people that are like that i just like i don't know i mean i don't know that you can necessarily reach people like that i think it's

the sort of thing where you know if they were in my mentions after every game saying that they wished i was dead like if i were like marcus stroman and i had to deal with that shit i would feel pretty badly about it yeah but in terms of getting booed at work though i mean obviously like you said it's not an experience that normal people have but like that seems to be one that you should be able to tune out i think think that that's like part of the job of being a ball player is that, but it's tough. I mean, I do think that Mets fans have a lot invested myself very much included in

the idea that like we are different and our experience is different. I think a lot of fans have that, you know, that like the Red Sox back when they lost all the time, that that was like a thing that everybody sort of knew about and was annoyed about regardless of whether they actually knew any Red Sox fans. I think Mets fans, it's a little bit different. But the idea that we're somehow the most miserable and the most grating about it, like, I mean,

obviously no one that's listening to this podcast or that's reading my posts is the sort of person that is like that. But I do think that there's like some soul searching probably warranted there too. is like that but i do think that there's like some soul searching probably warranted there too yeah in the past i've suggested that to some extent maybe mets fans were milking the long suffering fatalistic fan act and that there was sort of a big market arrogance to thinking that the mets had it bad or worse than everyone else when teams like the padres or the rockies or the mariners exist and are also out there perennially losing and never winning a World Series.

And I think there's some truth to that, but I'm getting closer to conceding that the Mets might just be baseball's Bermuda Triangle in some way. I mean, I think that there's a dysfunction there that's really different. I think the one thing that I haven't seen talked about that much, I see i forgot i'm forgetting who it was now which i feel bad about this someone pointed out online that like basically the team swoon begins in earnest the moment that they announce that they're not signing kumar rocker and i think that there's something in that the way that they handled all of that like clearly making this some sort of dispute with scott boris and doing it through back channel leaks and talking about how he's injured and like,

you know, picking him and then getting into the staring contest instead of, and not to getting a backstop that all of this stuff, it still just feels so small time. And more than that, just kind of like ugly. Like, this is the part of it.

That's kind of tough. Is that like, I like the players on the team. Like I grew up going to the games. Like I'm not going to stop cheering for them. I don't think, but it's hard to get your head around the fact that the team that you like or the team that you cheer for like really is kind of shitty in some ways like in terms of its its character in terms of like how it is in the world and that's like that's not a great feeling either

but yeah that's like sort of what this story dragged me back to is that like, I'm not going to go on liking this team, but like maybe I should think about how much I'm getting back in that deal. I don't know if you saw, there's this very vaguely described clickbaity kind of study that went around recently from an online sports book called BetUS that purported to measure the stress level of different fan bases via some kind of sentiment analysis of text on Twitter and Reddit to the extent that I could even tell what it was doing. And not all of the baseball results made sense to me. White Sox fans were the third most stressed, and I don't

know what White Sox fans have to be stressed about right now. They do get mad online though. So if what we're measuring is how mad people are in their posts, then that kind of checks out. though. So what we're measuring is how bad people are in their posts and like that kind of checks out. Well, the bottom and top teams did make sense because they had Orioles fans as the least stressed, probably because you just can't really be stressed about it. Because they're watching like the National Women's Soccer League. Right. If you've tuned out months ago or if you just always expect to be blown out, I don't know if it's possible to be stressed. Mets fans were most stressed with 32% of the comments in their game threads qualifying as stressed. And I don't know if it's possible to be stressed. Mets fans were most stressed with 32% of the comments in their game threads qualifying as stressed. And I don't know whether that matches your experience or whether at this point there's just sort of a resignation that comes with it or

whether it does still cause some stress. It sounds like this has unearthed some stuff for you that is stressful, at least in a different direction than some of the previous stresses. Like it demands a level of like introspection that I'm honestly not like, it's not why I'm going to baseball games to like consider the choices that I'm making. Like I go there to have like precisely three beers and one sausage and pepper sandwich. But I think in this case, like with the idea of being stressed, it's like some of it is kind of a gag. You know, like I'm in a DM with a bunch of Mets fans. Many of them are, you know, like a lot younger than me. And like anytime something goes bad, like there's a bunch of there's a response to it.

But I think that most of it is kind of like, yeah, nobody wants them to lose. But also like the reason that people are putting pictures of like our Bud Dwyer at his press conference in there when like like Luis Rojas leaves Taiwan Walker in to start the seventh is that it's a bit like it's a gag. And I think that in the case of like a lot of this, like broadly speaking, I don't expect anything from the team. If they make me happy, then I feel like I'm playing with house money. Like I still remember how dreamlike the run in 2015 was because of the fact that, like, the team really, I mean, if you look at their lineup on opening day that year, it's like John Mayberry Jr. was in it. I think Daryl Siciliani was in it. Like, it was a last place team's lineup. And they got better over the course of the year.

Guys came up from the minors and were good. And then they made moves to improve and but like seeing it all happen seeing daniel murphy abruptly go from being this duffer to being the guy that he was during his like sort of mid-late career peak where he was like a 320 hitter like seeing that happen all at once and experiencing the cesspitous thing like it's as happy as i've ever been as a fan and like i was alive when they won the world series i was eight you know and I was alive to see him make the World Series I guess in 2001 2000 and in both of those you know in those previous instances I guess that like I hadn't yet sort of lowered my expectations I felt like I was playing with the house money and if they won it all that would be great and if

they didn't I knew that I was you, experiencing something that I didn't expect to experience, you know, and that I sort of thought that if I would get to experience it, that like a lot of things would they underperform, you know, like, and to a certain extent, this is like one of the very few instances of like actually healthy, I think like expectation setting in my life. Like, I wish I could do this with my work or with like, you know,

actual interpersonal relationships. But like in this case, like, yeah, like I'm disappointed they're not playing better, but like, I can't say that I'm like living and dying with every game at this point. Like, it's clear what they're doing and, like, what's happening. It's happened, you know, five times have there been seasons like this that, you know, unfolded in more or less the same way.

And this isn't in any way the most agonizing of them. question how anybody could, after two decades of the Wilpons and just this broad understanding of how things work when you don't give the team a greater chance to succeed, how are you still surprised by it? Last thing, everything we've talked about today is pretty trivial, I guess, compared to everything The Athletic has reported about Jared Porter and Mickey Calloway and Ryan Ellis and the HR department that was seemingly most interested in just sweeping stuff under the rug. And I don't know how fair it is to draw a direct line between that type of failing and the on-field failings and the other front office failings that they've had, whether those are two sides of the same coin or whether they're different issues kind of coinciding.

But what would the recipe be to fix this team? Like in the short term, can they keep contending with this core? Like it's always tough to just recommend that an organization goes scorched earth and that like a lot of people lose their jobs. But you would expect that probably Rojas won't be back. I'd imagine he was inherited by this regime. And when you're a manager who presides over a collapse like this, it's generally not great for job security. I don't know, can they fix themselves under Alderson? Does he have

to go? Does every holdover have to go? Do they have to start fresh? What amount of house clearing is required? Because there was some when Cohen took over and there was some front office reshuffling there, but it doesn't seem like it's been enough. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I'm not generally one to call for people to lose their jobs just on principle, but I think a great deal of a cultural change is going to have to happen in the organization just for them to get, not even to get, you know, be competitive again or whatever, but to be like a normal major league team that like a lot of their, their sort of their processes. And I don't know that you can, I mean, some of this probably has to do with Wilpon. I always

sort of, because I disliked the Wilpons more, saw it as being like sort of acid running downhill, that those were just guys that did not value the people that worked for them. And so not just in terms of like making guys play hurt at the major league level and stuff, but to see the way that the team, for instance, treats its minor leaguers, not just in terms of paying them, although that would obviously be a good place to start, but being really reckless with rehabbing guys, making guys pitch hurt, like there's just a backwardsness and a kind of nastiness that I think like pervades the team's processes that like before you even get into the fact that they, you know, really don't have like an elite analytics department or like really like any sort of like the sort of like informatic stuff that other teams

have. The Mets, like that infrastructure is either extremely small and cosmetic or not there at all. So to a certain extent, it would be nice to see them build that stuff up and just have like a better understanding of, for instance, the players in their own system, which they have routinely been, they're like way too high. Like they think all their fours are sixes and all their sixes are fours is what one of like a friend who's like a scouting guy has said about them.

And that, I mean, that's something that you should fix just as a matter of like housekeeping. But I think there's also, and this is the part that like, you know, it's sort of hard to trust Steve Cohen, who, you know, of private equity, like the famously employee-focused. This is like coming from a vaccountable men in the clubhouse and, you know, in, and also in the executive suites that like, that should change just because like, not just because it's the right thing to do. And because there's no place for these, like just harassing, like mediocre shitheads to have a job in your organization if you want to have a top flight organization or in any organization, to be honest. But I think that also like all of that,

like old boys club stuff, all of this kind of like the lack of accountability or like the idea of like Alderson taking up for all these like absolutely replacement level dumbasses that were, you know, making it hard to work there if as a woman or as like any sort of person who is less powerful than them. Like when he talked to Katie Strang and Britt Giroli about that, that like he was one step shy of being like, you're trying to do cancel culture on Ryan Ellis right now. And like, I'm not going to let that happen or whatever. Like, if he can't accept that, like this is that culturally the team needs a reboot then he is not the guy to do it i get like to a certain extent bringing him in as like a

transitional figure from like you know the will pawn version to the coen version but also like what about that culture needs to be preserved like what was it that you needed like a sherpa to guide you up this mountain of garbage that like was it sort of discarded recklessly by these shitty millionaires over the course of 20 years like i don't know if like zach scott's the guy that wants to rebuild it i sense that he's just the guy that wants to make trades and like get a sense of uh you know like pitch design and all that stuff but at some point like they're going to need to like very seriously look at every level of the organization and not just bring it into line with like modern baseball stuff, but with making it not be the way that it is now, like making it suck less, but also making it not suck in the

ways that it was allowed to suck for two decades. Well, Meg has been on vacation and partly unplugged from baseball. And she tweeted a few days ago that she couldn't wait to come back and ask me to explain the Mets to her. And by that point, I had already invited you on because I know I'm not qualified to explain the Mets. And maybe nobody is, but you're the best that we have. I'm honored, I guess, to have that role. I would encourage Meg, just stay on vacation, man.

It's good. We're almost done. Another month and you can just come to the fun part of baseball. Yeah. Well, it is always a joy to listen to you talk about the Mets, even if it's not a joy for you to talk about them or watch them in any way. So congratulations on Defector's first birthday and follow David at David underscore J underscore Roth on Twitter. You can also find Steve Cohen on Twitter at Stephen A. Cohen too. But don't.

Great times for everyone involved. But yeah, thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. All right. Listen to David on The Distraction. Read him on Defector as always. All right. Let's take a quick break and I'll be

back with Ben Clemens from Fangraphs to talk about the dramatic decline of James Karanchak, the secret to Adam Wainwright's success, and the Cardinals' unremarkable but continued contention. I got a grip on myself and it feels good Get a grip on yourself, take my advice I got a grip on myself and it feels nice So last week when Meg went away, I did an intro monologue and afterward I was wondering if it would be accurate to call that banter in the episode description, considering I was talking to myself, and someone in the Facebook group said, no, that's not banter, that's Benter, which was clever, but still I wondered whether I could call it Benter if it was only one Ben talking to himself.

So there is only one way to resolve this uncertainty, which was for me to bring on another Ben. So now I am joined by Ben Clements of FanCrafts. Ben, thank you for mentoring with me today. I like it. How's it going, Ben? Good. A couple of months ago, the writer Aaron Ryan tweeted, every all dude podcast has a host named Ben or that seems like he should be named Ben. And this usually is not an all dude podcast, but today it is. And we are doubling down on the Ben stereotype. Anyway, we're not here to talk about being named Ben, although we are both experts on that subject. We are here to talk about the collapse of erstwhile Cleveland closer James Karanchak, as well as the continued success of Cardinals birthday boy Adam Wainwright, who turned 40 on Monday and who makes for an interesting contrast to Karen Shack. In fact, when we were talking earlier today, you called Karen Shack the anti-Wayne Wright. So we will get to that, but just a bit of background here to tee you up. So I've perhaps felt a little less fondness for Karen Shack since April when on Instagram, he compared vaccination to Nazism via a fake Herman

Goring quote. However, I have found him to be a compelling pitcher going back to a few years ago when he was posting not bad quotes and memes, but otherworldly strikeout rates in the minors. And then he got to the majors and he had that herky-jerky fire-breathing closer look that makes him fun to watch. And this March, when my guest from last week, Zach Kram, was working on a feature for The Ringer about the best reliever in every MLB season, he asked who I thought would have the reliever championship belt this year. And I said that it might be premature, but that I was tempted to say James Karinczak. And for a while there, that looked like the right call. He did

not allow a run in his first 13 appearances of the season. He struck out 25 batters against two walks in 11 and two thirds inning pitched over that span. That was a negative 0.35 FIP. Pretty good. He obviously didn't quite keep up that pace, but he was fairly effective through mid-June or so. back to the beginning, like from the day he debuted in the majors, which was September 14th, 2019 through this June 16th to pick a somewhat arbitrary endpoint. Karinczak had a 2.44 ERA in 62 and two thirds innings pitched. He had the lowest FIP 1.87 of any pitcher with at least 35 innings pitched. And he trailed only Liam Hendricks among relievers in FanCraft's score. So he was arguably the best reliever in baseball.

And after that, things went south quickly. So since June 19th, he has a 6.38 ERA and a 6.87 FIP and 23 strikeouts and 18 walks in 24 innings. We can go even more extreme in a smaller sample. Since the All-Star break, he has an 8.4 ERA with a 7.63 FIP and only nine strikeouts against 10 walks in 15 innings. And he was last seen on August 27th when he entered in the eighth inning against the Red

Sox and in classic Cleveland fashion, blew a 3-1 lead by allowing a walk, a single, and a three-run homer. And after that, he was optioned to AAA. So he has no known injury. He hasn't really lost velocity. And yet he's gone from being one of the very best believers in the majors to not being in the majors at all. So what the heck happened to James Karinczak? Yeah. Well, the date that you picked as an end date is suggestive of something. Yes.

And you said June 16th, which is not the same as June 21st, the day that baseball stepped up its foreign substances enforcement. But I think you'll hardly be surprised to know that part of the story lies with Karinczak's unprovable but almost certain former use of foreign substances and his loss thereof. So if you look at the pitchers who lost the most spin on their fastball since that day, you know, everyone lost some spin. Karen Chak is third. He's lost the third most after Birch Smith and Madison Bumgarner. If you'd care to look at spin velocity ratio instead,aren check is fourth

sean armstrong also creeps in there so we know that pitchers who relied on high spin pitches to get swings and misses did worse after they weren't allowed to doctor the ball to make it spin more and karen check is you know he's up there in terms of how much spin he's lost, but that doesn't remotely explain just how bad he's gotten. As you mentioned to me, as I was looking through this, you know, lots of other pitchers have lost a lot of spin. Walker Buehler is in the top 10 on this list and he's great. He's been better afterwards. Yeah. Or you just mentioned Madison Bob Gardner, right?

I mean, since the end of June, he has a sub three ERA. He's been really good. Right. Losing spin is not synonymous with suddenly being unable to pitch. And so while that's an easy explanation, it is pretty clearly not enough. But what if I told you this? Karinczak has lost the most ride on his fastball of any pitcher in baseball since the crackdown on spin. His ball is dropping four more inches on its way to the plate now than it did before. Okay. What if I also told you that Karinczak has lost the most run on his fastball since the crackdown on foreign substances? He's also lost about four inches of run.

the crackdown on foreign substances he's also lost about four inches of run uh-huh that's um that will tell you that this is not just a foreign substances crackdown because there are lots of other pitchers who have lost around the same amount of spin that he has and they're not losing you know basically six inches of movement is there anything about i don't know spin efficiency or something else that could cause someone to lose proportionately more movement given the same amount of spin? So yes and no. Karinczak's spin efficiency has gone way down. Okay. Can you explain what that means to everyone? Yeah. So if you think of a, like a tire traveling down the road, but imagine that as a baseball, that's a baseball with a, with a hundred percent transverse

spin so all the movement on the baseball specifically makes it in the case of karen check's fastball move up and to the right from his perspective in other words none of the spin is kind of football spin it's all tire spin and for four-seam fastball specifically you want as much of your spin as possible to be transverse like uh like tire spin because they they don't really benefit from gyroscopic or football spin very much at all just because of the way that the seams work they don't create the wake that could make you benefit from gyroscopic spin right so karen track is very good or was very good at getting the most out of his spin his spin efficiency was in the 90s.

90% of the spin that he imparted on the ball was directly transverse. So basically creating movement on his fastball before June 21st. Since June 21st, about 60% of his spin is transverse. So he's making less spin and less of it is useful spin. And you might say, well, how is that possible? I don't exactly know how it's possible, but I can tell you one thing that is really suggestive. Okay.

If you look at all of his pitches since, again, using those two splits as cutoffs before, what's the best word for this? The crackdown? Before everything changed for him, pretty much all of his pitches were thrown from the same release point he was really consistent i don't know he's a good pitcher and about 85 of his pitches were thrown call it roughly 200 degrees of release

angle which is a little bit less than perfectly overhead and if if you can picture his delivery in your head you know he's he's really coming over the top yeah so since the since june 21st and honestly this doesn't seem to me like it can be attributed to sticky stuff so maybe we need to call it something else since june 21st uh about half of his pitches are from that arm slot it was previously 90 percent and the rest of them are kind of creeping creeping even further overhead interesting and that's a huge difference i haven't seen any pitcher kind of lose their release point so much he's like 40 of his fastballs are being thrown from a different arm slot than they were before and that's really meaningful his mechanics just seem to have fallen just completely apart on this pitch

to where now he's releasing a different point and that's causing the ball to spin wrong. So not only does he have less spin, but it's the kind of spin that doesn't create as much movement. And so now the ball is moving six inches less, which as you might imagine is kind of a problem when your whole job is to just throw fastballs past people. Right. Yeah. And I guess we should stipulate that even though we're using the June 21st crackdown date, that wasn't the day when everyone just went cold turkey all of a sudden. And that I think even with Kerchak, he had started to lose some spin even in some of the outings prior to that. There are some pitchers who had lost spin even in may just because there had been memos and then there were other reports and there were signs that this

was coming so it's maybe not night and day in terms of his spin like on that date or before and after that date but i think probably whatever you're saying would apply even if we chose a slightly earlier cutoff but basically you know he's going from like i don't know 24 to 2500 rpm at the beginning of the season to more like 21 to 2200 or so before he was sent down so yeah it's a big difference but as you're saying that's not the only thing that was happening and if you think of it in terms of efficiency so let's say he was at 2,400 and getting 90% efficiency. That's the equivalent of like a 2,150 or so spin that actually matters for this four-seam fastball. And so if he's down to 2,100 and throwing at 60% efficiency, he's actually lost nearly 1,000 RPM of useful spin for four-seam fastballs.

That's almost half his RPM. Yeah. And so there's a reason that he's drawing whiffs on half as many fastballs as before. The ball's not doing what he wants it to. Right. And Lucas Pasteleris from Baseball Prospectus looked into where his strikeout rate decline ranks historically.

And I was sort of expecting it to be like the very top of the list and it wasn't quite there but whether you use a cutoff of like before and after June 15th with minimum 25 innings pitch before and after or July 15th which was the all-star break this year and 15 innings pitch before and after like he's up there you know in the previous cutoff he he's top 30 all time and certainly among the biggest drop-offs recently. And that's just in terms of strikeout rate ratio. If you went with raw strikeout rate decline, he might be at the top just because it was so high to begin with and so much lower after that. But it's up there in recent years.

There was, to name another Cleveland reliever, Adam Simber. recent years. There was, to name another Cleveland reliever, Adam Simber. In 2018, he went from the Padres to Cleveland, and he had sort of a similar or even bigger drop-off in strikeout rate ratio, although he continued to pitch fairly well, more so than Karen Chak has post-strikeout rate decline. So as you're saying, maybe it's not just purely losing spin. Is there any reason to think that losing that spin might have precipitated a change in release point even if it's just like a lack of confidence in his stuff suddenly or like he's trying to replicate the lost spin by somehow adjusting how he releases the ball even if that wouldn't actually work like it just throws you off your game somehow. Like Garrett Richards, for example, who is another pitcher who seems to have suffered post sticky stuff.

And he didn't lose his job in the majors, but he lost his spot in Boston's rotation and went to the bullpen. And it seems like, and Devin Fink wrote about this for fan crafts a while back, but he just kind of like scrapped everything when the sticky stuff crackdown went into effect. And he was like trying to throw new pitches and trying to do everything different to the extent that you wonder, like, is he trying to do too much? Like, was this in his head in some way?

So I wonder whether it could have been in Karinczak's head to some extent, too. Oh, that's entirely possible. And I think one of the problems for Karinczak is that he only throws two pitches. And both of them were really affected by this his curveball is kind of at the top of these lists too in terms of he's he has the fifth most curveball spin lost so which one do you want to throw um you know if they've both gotten much worse that he doesn't really have an obvious one to lean on instead and i do think that that's a lot of the problem here is that it's hard to tease out what's mechanical and what's because there's less spin and what's him reacting to that by trying to do something different because it we just don't know the cleanest date for when his struggle started

happens to be you know around the time that there was a spin crackdown. But there could easily be a counterfactual world where they don't crackdown and he still gets this gyroscopic spin. He's bad and now we just wonder why. Karinczak has run just insane walk rates in the past in the minors. It wouldn't be a complete shock if he lost it for a little bit. He had a 10 inning stretch where he walked 10 per 9 in double a in 2018 yeah so i just don't know how he'd be able to tell without just asking him and also guaranteeing complete honesty from him seems tough

whether this is related to the fact that he's trying to do something different whether it just happens to have struck at a poor time i think one thing that we can say for sure is that his mechanics are off. And if you watch him pitch, if you watch videos before and after, his mechanics are off. And his pitching coach said as much when they were talking about sending him down to AAA to get him right. But knowing what specifically caused it and which caused the other and anything like that, I think is a little much for us to say just by looking at the numbers. Yeah. I mean, it would be, I guess, a pretty big coincidence if he completely fell apart this way and it had nothing to do with the massive spin rate decline

that just happened to coincide with him completely falling apart. But also, as you said, we've seen plenty of guys who just didn't suffer any drop off at all, or maybe went through some stumbles or some growing pains. Like Garrett Cole, it seemed like had some hiccups initially when he lost a lot of spin. But since then, he seems to have figured out how to pitch as he is now, and he's been pretty much his old self again. how to pitch as he is now and he's been pretty much his old self again so i wonder with karen chak like i guess you can never rule out some sort of physical issue too you know if it's a change in release point i mean he hasn't really lost velocity which would be a potentially a sign of an injury but sometimes if your arm slot changes or you're unable to replicate your release point or something that could point to

some sort of physical issue that he hasn't disclosed. I don't know. But there's also, I guess, the fact that I don't know whether you looked at this at all, but I have the perception that he's like a good pitch tunneling guy. Like that's something that benefits him because it's hard to tell the fastball apart from the curve. Like he's only throwing those two pitches. So if you could always tell which was which, that would be bad for him. And so I would imagine that if your release point is all over the place, and I don't know whether his curveball release point has varied as much as the fastball one, but if there is more separation and more difference there,

then I guess it would be more apparent which pitch is coming. Well, also, you know, if you throw the pitch with more gyro, the ball looks different coming out of your hand. True. Yeah. And so even if the angles are roughly the same in terms of pitch tunneling, if one ball is coming out with a spin to where you can see a dot, if you think about like a slider or something, and the other one's coming out with seams tumbling, it's going to be a lot

more obvious to hitters that they're separate because they'll look different. But yeah, he's both falling out of his arm slot on both pitches, it looks like to me, and throwing one with basically a lot more cut than he's ever thrown. I think that's enough to make you think, oh yeah, the curveball could definitely be a lot worse. Yeah. And pitching coach Carl Willis, he obviously didn't say, oh, yeah, Karen Check, huge sticky stuff guy. That's what's happening here. But he did say sticky stuff, generally speaking, if it didn't make a difference, they wouldn't have made it illegal. So he is not denying that it could have had something to do with this. But also he is saying he's just not squaring up the ball at release that last little click. He's not behind the baseball. That can start with the beginning of the delivery. It can start with the takeaway from his glove, but his arm path getting behind the baseball a little bit sooner is going to allow him to square it up, create that efficiency, and create that right again. And he also said he seems to have not been himself for a little while now in terms of some of the pitch profiles we've seen, which obviously leads to results that we're not accustomed to seeing as well.

So at the end of the day, the decision was made with the basis and foundation of what's best for James Karanchak and how we can get James Karanchak back to himself. So we will see if he will right the ship in AAA, if he'll be back this season or whether it'll be a longer term project. But generally, like if he had maintained the same release point and had just lost some spin but not necessarily some spin efficiency the way that he did is there any reason to think that he could not continue to be successful maybe not quite as dominant and unhittable as he was but like just based on what you've seen of his stuff, like, should he work if he could get back to

throwing the ball the same way, even if it doesn't spin or move quite as much as it was? Yeah, I mean, he's going to be a very streaky reliever. Even when he was dominant, he was very streaky. Just because, you know, last year, when you were citing his great run prevention numbers, he also walked five batters per nine. That's a 15% walk rate I think it's unlikely that that's going to get better but yeah if you think he could be a fine reliever striking out 35% of batters he faces and walking 15% there's no reason to think that he would be disproportionately affected by a loss of spin it hurts everyone everyone's fastballs are missing less bats on average and there's nothing particular about the highest

spin guys or the highest whiff guys that makes them worse, aside from the fact that he does throw four-seam fastballs. Guys that don't throw any four-seam fastballs or any sliders or curves that really need the break. You know, if you're a sinker change-up guy, well, this probably matters less. But relative to his cohort of foreseen fastball throwing relievers no there's no reason to think that if he fixes this mechanical issue that he won't be back to being effective is there anything in general that you would recommend if you are a pitching coach and one of your charges is a guy who's lost a bunch of spin or he has benefited from using sticky stuff like i guess you can't quite recapture your old performance and maybe

it's foolish to try. I mean, that's the whole point of banning sticky stuff is that it would have some sort of effect and that pitchers would not be quite as effective. And we have seen that. But is there anything that you can do to compensate in general? I mean, would you say, yeah, just keep doing what you were doing and it might not be quite as effective, but deal with it. Like it won't be as effective for other pitchers either. So you'll be fine. Or would you suggest making some tweaks like Timothy Jackson at Baseball Perspectives last week wrote a piece about some of the pitchers who had lost the most spin. And he mentioned that it seems like Garrett Cole maybe has started throwing a little bit higher in the zone. Maybe he's not getting quite

the ride that he was. And so he is just elevating even more and maybe that's working for him. So I don't know, would you just say like, yeah, just resign yourself to your new circumstances? Or would you say maybe throw different locations or throw different types of pitches or something? No, I think it's, some of it is just resigning yourself. Some of it is that you have to say, my fastball will miss fewer bats now, or my slider won't have quite the same kind of break. And you need to be confident with that and just say, well, I think the stuff is still good enough to get batters out because everyone's stuff is worse. But yeah, changing location to be higher

in the zone makes a lot of sense. Relying on those pitches less in counts where you need a swing and a miss makes sense too. If you have a third pitch that feels to you, or I mean, heck, the data shows to you has lost less movement because teams have this data, then say, oh, why don't you think about working that in more? If you had just a fastball that no one could hit and then it got hittable, well, you should probably sprinkle in your other pitches that haven't declined as much, slightly more. But generally speaking, confidence is the most important thing. And I think maybe what you should do is just tell the guys to keep pitching the same until they've demonstrated that they can. In a general sense, have you been surprised by anything we've seen post-Sticky stuff? We've talked about it on the podcast,

I've written about it, as have others. And it seems like there have been modest offensive gains, at least based on when I looked at this about a month after the crackdown went into effect, it seemed like the gain in offense was roughly double the average increase just due to warm weather at the same time of year. for a bit more. The more spin you lose in general, the more you've been hurt by that. But I don't know what you were expecting or what your priors were, but there were people who thought this is going to make an enormous difference. Some people thought this isn't even going to be noticeable. We ended up somewhere in the middle where I guess aside from Karajak and maybe a couple of other unfortunate pitchers, it hasn like totally derailed any careers and it also hasn't like totally fixed every offensive problem and brought contact all the way back it's just kind of turned the clock back a few seasons which is not nothing but also not a sufficient fix probably yeah i guess i'm a little surprised that hit by pitches haven't gone up i know that was

kind of a one of the things that MLB literally cited in their decision was that pitchers will just learn how to be pitchers again instead of throwers. And so hit by pitches will go down. That didn't make a lot of sense to me. And what's happened is that it doesn't seem like they've been affected too much at all. And I suppose that's not the biggest shock in the world,

but I expected them to go up a bit initially as pitchers who weren't used to pitching with different things got reaccustomed to it. For the most part, though, if you told me, oh, it won't have a huge effect, I'd say, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, the fact that almost everyone was using something, if not the more potent stuff, and the fact that some people were pursuing the potent stuff and not just individual pitchers, but also teams seemingly advocating their use or doing nothing to discourage it. I wondered whether there would be an even bigger effect, just because if they're all thinking that this matters so much, then maybe it actually does. But I guess it kind of makes sense, given that all of the effects that we're seeing are kind of long-term effects. And as far as we can tell, no one was really abusing spider tack and all of these more exotic substances until the past few seasons yeah i mean if you

think it saved your team i don't know like an eighth of a run a game which is pretty small that's not out of line with the effect we've seen that's two and a half wins a year yeah it could be worth it for marginal effects particularly when you consider that that's the overall offense league wide and not every pitch or every pitcher was affected by this i think it it's not surprising that teams were treating it like it was a big advantage because if you could manufacture two and a half wins out of whole cloth you would but it's also not that surprising that it's not a huge effect like it would be weird if you didn't let pitchers use the kind of extreme foreign substances that had only come into place in recent years. And suddenly, pitchers just couldn't pitch anymore. All right. So let's shift to someone who has had a much

better time of it in the post-Sticky Stuff era. And that's Adam Wainwright, who is pitching lately about as well as he ever has, even though he just turned 40. He's not Wade Miley good, but he is really good and he's durable. And there were doubts as recently as a few years ago about how much he still had left in the tank. And it turns out that he has a lot left in the tank. And not that he is exactly the same as James Karinczak or anything, but I thought it would be interesting to contrast them just because they're both pitchers who are known for their curveballs. And Wainwright has not lost any spin seemingly post-crackdown. He did admit to having dabbled in sticky stuff at some point because he was implicated in those text messages with the former Angels visiting clubhouse manager who was fired because he was supplying sticky stuff to players and

wainwright was one of the players he named and wainwright said oh yeah like i tried it once and i didn't like it which was easy to say but the spin rates have backed that up that he doesn't seem to have lost anything there but just as karen check is not tanking solely because he lost sticky stuff wainwright is not succeeding solely because he did not lose sticky stuff. He has a lot more going for him. But why has he been able to weather that change so well? When I looked into it, I pinpointed two things, both of which I think are just interesting in the way that they go against how pitching mostly works today. So one thing is that Wainwright still throws his sinker a lot. And I

think the decline of the sinker has been overblown. It's come back recently as teams noticed that if you teach every pitcher to throw a sinker, lots of them will be bad. But if you have the ones who are good at it, throw it. Well, they're good at it. So yeah, they're better. Wainwright has always been a sinker first pitcher. And as the pitch lost velocity, it's just started getting hit a lot. It never missed a lot of bats but he used to throw it hard enough that batters didn't square it up very often he was never a super hard thrower but take a not super hard thrower and start pairing velocity and things can get bad quickly and so the change that he's done is something that every pitcher would like

to do he just started hitting corners with it it's it's really effective he's uh he's in the top quarter of the league in avoiding the center of the plate and most of the guys who are in that are robbie ray types they're they avoid the center of the plate because they avoid the plate they yeah and wayne red is also in the top quarter of the league in hitting the corners of the plate. This is with his fastball only. And so he doesn't really throw it in the middle. He does hit the edges of the plate a lot. And I mean, yeah, it's great if you can do that. It doesn't seem fair or it doesn't seem like something that every pitcher isn't trying to do.

But yeah, he just appears to have done it better than most. And that's been a big, like a really big tailwind for him this year. He just doesn't allow damaging contact on his sinker. And some of that is the fact that the Cardinals have the best defense in baseball behind him. They've saved 18 runs relative to average behind Adam Wainwright specifically this year. It's lapping the field.

And it's something like a point of ERA that they've saved is one way to think about it, just from defense behind him. So he's a three ERA pitcher. He'd be like an upper threes ERA pitcher without that. That's a lot of runs. Yeah. The Cardinals are, I think, fourth as we speak on Monday in defensive efficiency behind only the Dodgers, the Astros, and the Giants. Those are all really good teams and the Cardinals are not quite as good a team, but defense is keeping them kind of in the periphery of the playoff race as it has for the past several seasons. I mean, they have been a good defensive team and even without Colton Wong, they continue

to be a good defensive team, I guess, because they picked up Nolan Arnotto. That helps. And Tommy Edmund, player of the week, is maybe not quite replacing Wong offensively, but has done a good job defensively. That's just still sort of an unsung team quality. Often when I see a team that is maybe doing a little bit better than I tend to give them credit for, it's because, oh, their defense is good. And it's a little oh, their defense is good. And that's like a little less of a visible commodity. Right. And, you know, you said they're fourth in defensive efficiency, but if you look at the Cardinals, they're fourth in defensive efficiency. And

basically all of that has come behind Wainwright. To put numbers to it, he's up to 20 runs above average saved. And the second best pitcher on the Cardinals up to 20 runs above average saved and the second best pitcher on the cardinals in terms of outs above average saved is kwanghyun kim at four like they've just saved way more runs behind wayne right way more outs in their four runs than they have behind everyone else and some of that is because he allows a ton of balls in play. And the more balls in play you allow, the more outs above average you can make. And they put a really good defensive lineup behind him. But also just, you know, he's been fortunate. They've succeeded on 84% of the plays behind him.

And you'd expect them to succeed on 79% based on where they're positioned. That 5% success rate added is more than double anyone else in the Cardinals. Anyway, you look at it like the Cardinals had great defense and it's almost all been behind adam wayne right yeah that's a pretty good strategy if you can manage that yeah just glancing at his baseball savant page like his hard hit percentages and average exit velocity allowed like all that stuff is kind of like right in the middle of the pack so it's not as if he is allowed notably weak contact either so good for him yeah so that's obviously a huge help but the other thing that he's done that has made all this work because look you can have a good defense but if you're throwing a mid-80s fastball you can still have a pretty bad time out there the defense can only do so much he's not allowing a ton of home runs for example and one of the things that he's done to make this fastball hurt him less

is just throw a lot more curveballs you know like you said you think of wayne wright as a curveball thrower but before 2018 he didn't throw that many curveballs it was his best secondary and he threw it maybe a fifth of the time but he almost never threw it a third of the time in a game he just he pitched you know forwards it were. He didn't use his secondaries first. He used his fastball first and he used his secondaries in swing and miss counts. Since 2018, he throws his curveball a third of the time pretty much always. I think 80% of games he throws it a third of the time and he just uses it a lot more. He uses it to start counts. He uses it as an out pitch, but also as a get me over pitch.

And he'll throw it down the heart of the plate. He'll throw it on the corners. He just uses it in a lot more situations than he used to. And I think that's actually, despite Wainwright being an old school pitcher, it's a very modern pitch thinking thing to do is, hey, you have this good pitch, throw it all the time. Yeah, I was kind of joking earlier about Wade Miley, but I guess there are some parallels here. I mean, Miley has been even better in terms of run prevention and Wainwright has pitched a few more innings, but they both are throwing, you know, 89-90 these days and lots of balls in play

and getting grounders, getting support from their defense, and also just not throwing pitches in the heart of the strike zone. I mean, I don't know how Miley compares in terms of like hitting the corners or being in the shadow zone as MLB calls it, but he has thrown the lowest percentage of pitches in the strike zone, at least as defined by pitch info. He's thrown 44.9% of his pitches in the strike zone this year. I mean, he just relies on getting a little extra on the outside of the plate, getting those calls and getting chases and just staying away from damage, which is kind of what you have to do if you're Wade Miley, or I guess if you're Adam Wainwright at this point of your career.

Yeah. And he also has picked one pitch that seems to be working and just thrown it to the exclusion of all else, cutter instead of curveball. But I think that that's something that a lot of pitchers who have lost their quote unquote primary have realized is, you know what? Why was that my primary? I have better pitches. I just didn't use them enough. And that's one way that we think of all this pitch design and everything like that as just increasing flamethrowing guys with a slider. But it's also helped a lot of people prolong their careers by doing things like use your best pitches more. Well, while I have you because you are a Cardinals correspondent here, Cardinals fan to some extent, former Cardinals writer. We just haven't talked

much about the Cardinals this season, I was realizing. I guess that is because they're not a particularly flashy team. They have been in the running, but never really in the thick of the race. They're playing the Reds and Wade Miley this week as it happens. And that's one of the two teams they're chasing, the Padres and the Reds are in between the Cardinals and the second wildcard spot. And they're over 500. They're like within striking distance. And yet the playoff odds are bad. And I've just kind of written them off for a while. I mean, it's been clear that they're not going to keep up with the Brewers for quite some time, but they're still in this thing. So what's the mood of the Cardinals fan base these days? Yes, you know, picking up the players that they did at the deadline, I think a lot of people were kind of confused by, wait, what? Jay Happ and

Jon Lester? Is that, are you a buyer? Are you a seller? What is that exactly? And Happ has been effective for them. And Lesterester who started disastrously has pitched pretty well of late but yeah what's the mood of the fan base these days and should we have talked about the cardinals any more than we have i think the mood of the fan base is just pretty negative overall and a lot of that just comes down to how bad the bullpen has been this year oh yeah they're losing in ways that you just remember yeah Yeah. They're losing by walking the bases loaded and then walking in runs. They're losing by intentionally

walking the bases loaded and then hitting guys. And these things just stick with you as a fan in a way that if you were just kind of bad and your team wasn't as good as their team, I don't think you'd remember as much. I think that's been the one thing that's made the Cardinals fan base most negative on the year. Aside from that, I mean, it's great that Wainwright's having an awesome year and Molina getting his 2000th hit is really cool and just continuing to be a great,

basically to build a Hall of Fame career and case has been fun. Just the lack of urgency, which you mentioned in those trade deadline moves, and then the rough bullpen I think has made it. I think you've done okay by not talking about the Cardinals this year, because Cardinals fans have, myself included, just not enjoying this kind of construction of a team. predicted them having just their bullpen hasn't even been that awful it's just that it they've overworked the top three guys and now they all seem to be breaking down but if you had looked at it beforehand before the year you would have said oh yeah this this could work they've got some hard throwers alex reyes is very interesting as a closer because he's you know he has enough pitches to start and it just hasn't quite worked out that way not that he's had a terrible season he has positive wins above replacement by a smidge but But I don't know. The way that they're losing looks ugly, and that's made it feel bad. And it's made it made some subsequent moves that I think put them clearly ahead of the Cardinals even before the season started. And I guess there's a certain level of,

I don't want to say spoiled or entitled because that sounds maybe more derogatory than I intend to be, but Cardinals fans are accustomed to a certain level of success, right? And so it's almost like I was saying before we started talking, it's like the NL Yankees almost. I mean, in terms of the success that they've had historically and are bad by their standards, they're not bad. They have not had a losing season since... When was the last time the Cardinals had a losing season? I'm clicking back on baseball reference to 2007? No. Yeah. I think it was the mid-2000s. I forget what year exactly. Yeah. I think it's 2007. That's a long time to go without a losing season. I guess they haven't had a really good or a great team since maybe 2015 was when they won 100 games and won the Central.

And since then, it's been like 86 and 76, 83 and 79, 88 and 74, 91 and 71, won the Central that year, 30 and 28 last year, snuck into the wildcard game, and then 66 and 71 won the central that year 30 and 28 last year snuck into the wild card game and then 66 and 63 sort of same region this year so like you know that's like low tide for the cardinals it's like still a few games over 500 like kind of in contention that's not bad like most fan bases would trade with you over that long a period. But also like if you've won the number of World Series that they've won and had the good players that they've had and everything, then you expect maybe more investment and more success. So I get it. It's one of those sort of double standard things that you understand because that standard has been set. Yeah.

standard things that you understand because that standard has been set yeah so after the 2018 season i wrote an article about how the cardinals always have the same record and it's it's only gotten more that way they're they always seem to win between 81 and 89 games they've they don't play many meaningless games like they're they're in it till every year. And that just seems to be the way that they build the team long-term. It's kind of amazing. If you look at standard deviation of win percentage or anything like that, they're very consistent and they're not great,

but they are very consistent. The only teams that are roughly in their consistency level since the beginning of the wildcard era or the two wildcard era, it's actually the Dodgers, the Yankees, and at the time, the Padres, although the two wildcard era, it's actually the Dodgers, the Yankees. And at the time, the Padres, although they've left this group now by being good and the Padres were

really bad consistently. Yeah. And then the Dodgers and Yankees were really great consistently. And the Cardinals were just, you know, they had a five 50 winning percentage of this era. They were quite good, but not on the level of the Dodgers or Yankees.

They seem to build to a consistent level all the time. Yeah. And I don't know. I think as a fan, that makes it easier to be like, ugh, like, can't we win more? You know, you see other teams who win 87 games sometimes also win 97 sometimes. Yes.

They'll do that again at some point, surely, but they haven't really had a lot of breakthrough successes in the past, I don't call it 10 years, player development-wise, in the way that I don't call it 10 years, player development wise, in the way that they used to. And I think that combined with the fact that 85 wins doesn't feel that good during the year. Often, it means that your team is probably often playing kind of sloppy baseball, or just bad baseball for stretches of the year has made Cardinals fans kind of impatient to Yeah, like you said, when they added Aranato, it felt like they were really going for

it. And it turns out they weren't as better as everyone thought. Yeah, and maybe that was just a case where the Rockies came along and just kind of offered a special deal. And they were not intending to go all in or anything. But when that comes along, then you take it. Although Austin Gomber has been quite good for the Rockies. So we should note that too. I was kind of thinking even just in more recent seasons, consistency, I think of the Angels and the Phillies, except they're

consistently like right below 500 or even a little worse than that. Right. The Angels actually are pretty consistent. Yeah. You'd rather be consistently a little bit above than consistently a little bit below. So that's something. All right. So we have covered the collapse of Karinczak. We've covered the excellence of Wainwright. We have covered the mediocrity of the Cardinals. We have covered all points of the compass here. So you can read Ben at Fangraphs regularly. You can also find him on Twitter at underscore Ben underscore Clemens. And this concludes our Bender. Thank you, Ben.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. Okay, thanks to David and thanks to Ben. I'm going to leave you with three rapid fire stat blasts here. Hit it, Jesse. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, All right, I wanted to share all three of these stat blasts today because they were all prompted by recent listener emails about recent games, and they all fall into a certain stat blast genre that's basically,

hey, I was watching this game. This thing seemed weird. How weird was it? We got a lot of those. Sometimes it's tough to tell if you're seeing something extraordinary or not. They say you see something new at the ballpark every day. Some things are new to some people, but not actually new. For instance, here's a question from Justin, who was watching the Yankees-A's game on Sunday, and he wrote that the game was tied one-to-one and both runs were unearned. Has there ever been a game that ended

with the only run scored being unearned? I assume there has, so going a step further, what's the most combined unearned runs in a game where the only runs scored were unearned? So yes, there have been many such games. This wasn't one of them. The A's ended up winning 3-1 on a Tony Kemp Homer, and those last two runs were earned. However, there have been, according to the baseball reference stat head tool, 519 games since World War II in which all the runs were unearned. You could go back further, but earned run slash unearned run recording was sort of spotty in earlier eras, so I started there. The most recent one of these was actually a Yankees game just this month, Yankees and Mariners on August 8th. The Mariners won that one 2-0, and as one would expect, most of these games

are fairly low scoring. So the record for combined runs in a game where all the runs were unearned is seven. And that has happened twice. Once on August 9th, 1964, when Cleveland beat Minnesota seven to nothing. Minnesota made four errors behind Camilo Pascual. That was a fairly normal game compared to the other time this happened. And this is a pretty famous one. August 30th, 1987, the Tigers beat the Rangers 7-0 behind a three-hitter by Doyle Alexander. Charlie Huff, Rangers starter, went seven innings, allowed seven runs, all unearned because of six passed balls by catcher Gino Petrali. Huff, of course, was a knuckleballer. He was tough to catch. Petrali had a rough day. He tied the modern record with six passed balls in a game. He said

after the game, Huff threw the ball great today. We'd still be out there playing. If I'd caught the ball, I let in all their runs. Petrali led the majors with 35 pass balls that season. He also led in 1988 with 20 and in 1990 with 20, all thanks to Huff. So there were no errors in that game, just pass balls and all unearned runs. That's kind of like when a pitcher commits the error and gets the unearned run. Didn't he earn it though? Sort of the same for a knuckleballer, right? Passed balls are an occupational hazard. Are they really passed balls or are they wild pitches? In a sense, they're supposed to be wild. Wild enough not to hit and often too wild to catch. So technically unearned, but also sort of earned. Thanks to Justin for that question. Next one up comes from Russell, who says, in the bottom of the ninth in the Tigers at Cardinals game, Detroit pinch hit three times in a row, with only the last one being for a pitcher.

Is this the most consecutive pinch hitters to have occurred? Well, Russell, not even close. I went to frequent stat last consultant Ryan Nelson with this one, and the longest streak of consecutive pinch hitters is seven. Now, this is the record for both teams combined. It's also the record for a single team. It happened with two teams on September 21st, 1993, Atlanta and Montreal. It happened on September 4th, 2007, Mariners and Yankees. And these were both blowouts and a bunch of starters were being replaced. So for instance, in the 2007 game, it's the bottom of the seventh. It's an 11-1 game.

Alberto Gonzalez pinch hit for Alex Rodriguez in the bottom of the seventh. It's an 11-1 game. Alberto Gonzalez pinch hit for Alex Rodriguez in the bottom of the seventh and then in the top of the eighth. The Mariners had Jeremy Reed pinch hit for Jose Lopez. Jeff Clement pitch hit for Unieski Betancourt. Adam Jones pinch hit for Ichiro. Charlton Jimerson pinch hit for Jose Vidro. Vladimir Balentine pinch hit for Jose Guillen. And then Nick Green pinch hit for Raul Banez. That's six consecutive pinch hitters in a single inning for a single inning for a single team, and that is a record within one half inning. Six is the most. There were a bunch of other instances of six consecutive pinch hitters if you count both teams. Now the record for most

pinch hitters in a row by one team, which as I mentioned is also seven, that has happened four times, but only once for real, as Ryan put it. Three times it happened where a pinch hitter was announced but did not appear, and then there was another pinch hitter. But it did happen once where all of the pinch hitters actually pinch hit, Danny Goodwin pinch hit for Jose Morales, and then in the top of the eighth, Butch Weininger pinch hit for Glenn Borgman, former Effectively Wild guest, Rob Wilfong pinch hit for John Castino, Mike Cubbage pinch hit for Bob Randall, and Glenn Adams pinch hit for Bombo Rivera. And the Twins lost that game 7-4, despite all of the pinch hitting. The manager of that Twins team was Gene Mock, who liked to mix and match, and basically Seattle had started the game with a lefty, Rick Honeycutt. And so Mock had a whole right-handed lineup. But then Seattle put Byron McLaughlin in. He's a righty. So Mock just emptied his bench for left-handed pinch hitters. And of course, in those days, benches were bigger because

bullpens weren't so huge. So he pinch hit over and over and over again. By the end, he had nobody left on the bench except for a few pitchers. All of the pinch hitters were lefties and none got a hit. And then the Twins lost. So Mock said, platooning isn't worth a damn if you don't win the game. That's a good example of a case where you'd see three consecutive pinch hitters and you'd think, that was strange. I wonder if that's ever happened before. And it probably is pretty rare in this era.

But that wasn't even halfway to the record. And to drive that point home, the other three teams that technically had seven consecutive pinch hitters, even though not all of them came to the plate, were the 1970 Reds, the 1979 Rangers, and the 1986 Padres. So yeah, it's been a while since we've seen that sort of thing for one team. Though six has happened within fairly recent memory. And seven for two teams combined happened as recently as September 29th, 2012, Rays at White Sox. And it worked well that time. There was a pinch hit walk single, walk, and grand slam in that order. And last one, this question comes from Joe, and it's prompted by that 16-inning Padres-Dodgers

game last week. Joe says, it got me wondering just how historically bad did the two teams have to be at scoring with runners in scoring position to get a game that long with guys on second every inning for seven innings straight? Ironically, a full Manfred Ball game's worth of zombie runner. Is this the most combined outs with runners in scoring position? What about for a single team? So I went back to Ryan Nelson for this one, and appropriately enough, the record holder here is the Mets. He writes, the most outs ever made with runners in scoring position when we look at just one team was by the 2015 Mets, who in an 18-inning game on July 19th against the Cardinals had 28 outs with runners in scoring position. This included going 1-for-26 with runners in scoring position including one double play as well as two RBI sack hits.

Cleveland had 27 in a game on July 10th, 1932, and both the 1981 Mariners and 2014 Reds had a game with 25. and both the 1981 Mariners and 2014 Reds had a game with 25. The most outs ever made by two teams combined in one game with runners in scoring position was during the previously mentioned 1981 Mariners game. The Red Sox and the Mariners combined that day to record 45 outs with runners in scoring position. It took 20 innings to complete the feat and required that the Red Sox get 20 outs with runners in scoring position going 6 for 23 with three double plays and the Mariners to get 25 outs with runners in scoring position going 4 for 26 with a double play and having a man thrown out at home. There have been seven other games with 40 or more outs with runners in scoring position. Now Ryan notes that of the 395 games with 30 or more combined

outs with runners in scoring position, 279 went to extras. So that's 71%. And of the 159 games where a single team had 20 or more outs with runners in scoring position, 114 went to extras. That's 72%. So the record for combined outs with runners in scoring position in a nine inning game is the June 24th, 2016 contest between the Rockies and the Diamondbacks. They had 37, which beats a four-way tie for second place at 34. The visiting Diamondbacks went 5-for-20 with runners in scoring position. The Rockies went 4-for-26. It was not necessarily an offensively inept game, however. The teams combined to score 19 runs, but also left a combined 28 men on base. Considering the NL record for team left on base is 18, the Rockies

16 and Diamondbacks 12 were quite a few. You probably won't be shocked to learn that that game took place at Coors Field. And it also lasted four and a half hours, which at least at the time was the longest nine-inning NL game ever. The single-team record in a nine-inning game belongs to the 2007 Texas Rangers, who in a June 1st game against the Mariners compiled 22 outs with runners in scoring position. They went four for 23 with a first-inning and two bases loaded sack flies. They left 17 on base, but they won the game anyway, thanks to those two sack flies and three bases loaded RBI ground outs. Then there's an 18-way tie for second at 21. The combined record for runners left on base

is 44 in a 25-inning game between the Cardinals and Mets on September 11, 1974. The record for a 9-inning game is 30, and there is a four-way tie. Most recently, the 2018 Marlins and Nationals on July 8. For a single team, the record is 27. That was in a 20-inning game. Atlanta and Philadelphia, May 4, 1973. Atlanta left 27 on base. And the single team record for a nine inning

game, September 21st, 1956, Yankees against the Red Sox, the Yankees left 20 on base. So as usual, I will link to that data on the show page and also some stories about some of those notable games. Thanks to everyone for the questions. 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 while also ensuring that Effectively Wild stays ad free. Evo, Metse, Irola, apologies if I butchered that, Kevin Matz, Janet Gardner, Francisco Dominguez,

and Stephanie Neely. 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 Spotify and iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast at fangrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Meg will be back with me next time, so we will talk to you a little later this week.