Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1745: The State of the Starting Pitcher

Episode Date: September 11, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Blue Jays’ hot streak and playoff outlook and the meaning of clutchness, then meet major leaguers Andy Ibáñez of the Rangers and Janson Junk of the Angels. After that (37:07), they’re joined by Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus to discuss the state of starting pitching, the future […]

You used to say I had what it takes. I think I did if you meant too little too late. And by the looks that I'm getting, I made some big mistakes. But I thought you said I was great. Hello and welcome to episode 1745 of Effectively Wild, a Fanagraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fanagraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? All right, ready for the weekend. How are you? I too am ready for the weekend. Sure. A lot of our listeners, I'm sure.

Yeah. We will ease you into it today. Sure. A lot of our listeners, I'm sure. Yeah. We will ease you into it today. We'll be talking a little later to Rob Maines from Baseball Prospectus about his recent work looking into the state of the starting pitcher in Major League Baseball, as well as competitive balance. But before that, we wanted to introduce you to a couple new major leaguers. And also, should we talk briefly about the Blue Jays?

Because they have suddenly seized the spotlight and it seems like just a few weeks ago or even less than that that we were talking about another al east team that had seemingly salvaged its season and that is the team that the blue jays just savaged and they now have saved themselves it looks like so the blue jays they bottomed out on august 27th with a loss to the tigers they were 66 and 61 after that game their playoff odds had fallen to 4.6 percent since then they've won 11 of 12 and eight in a row entering the weekend including a three-game sweep of the A's and crucially a four-game sweep of those Yankees, in which the Yankees never led a game for

a single second, I believe. So they have looked fantastic lately, and they have propelled themselves right back into this thing to the point that they are now at 51.9% chance to make the playoffs, according to the FedRest playoff odds. So they've gone from like 1 in 20 to better than even odds in just a couple of weeks. So that's a nice couple of weeks worth of work. And they still have some work ahead of them, but they've been fun to watch.

And for now, they've closed the gap in the loss column with both the Yankees and the Red Sox. They have been. I have never seen a group of people react less well to good news than some of the Blue Jays fans who are convinced that our playoff odds were just deeply broken, which to be clear, I do not mean in a shaming way. I think that this stuff can be confusing for folks. And so it's good to, when presented with an opportunity to talk about what influences it, to say, hey, look, they were 11-1, and the Yankees were 2-10, and four of those wins came at the other team's expense.

So that's going to dramatically alter the odds because- And the A's too. They leapfrogged them also. Exactly. And when you're at 5%, you need a dramatic set of circumstances to transpire to turn your fortunes around. I think going 11-1 with many of those wins coming against teams that were either a directly header or right where you are in the standings, it's dramatic.

It's sufficiently dramatic. So everyone, things are working as expected. And it's fine. And you should be happy because this is better than it was before. It's just like people are very upset. I'm like, but aren't you happy? I mean, I understand why Yankees fans aren't happy, but they had good reason to be unhappy

regardless of what our playoff odds said. Yes. Yeah, it can be confounding when the playoff odds shift very quickly because you would think that the playoff odds would account for the possibility that you would reel off an 11-1 stretch, which they did, but it wasn't a great possibility against good teams, no less.

And so that is just kind of a low probability outcome. And when it happens, it really does swing your odds significantly at this point in the season. And when you go on a run like that in the last month, when the race is so close and when you're going head to head against the teams that you're chasing, then it really can change things quickly. And of course, like the surprise isn't necessarily that the Blue Jays are in better position now. It's that they weren't in better position earlier probably just because they've been a good team all season long and they've been underperforming. I mean, they have the fifth best run differential in the game. They are behind only the Dodgers, the Rays, the Astros, and the Giants.

They've outscored their opponents by 145 runs, and their base runs record says that they should be six games better than they are. So if you go by base runs record, the Jays, quote unquote, should have the best record in the AL East because the Rays have actually overperformed according to base runs by five wins, while the Jays have underperformed by six. And so, you know, that's not a perfect reflection of what their record should be necessarily. But in most cases, it holds. And in the Blue Jays, it hasn't. And in large part, that's kind of because they've been the bizarro Mariners when it comes to clutchness right I mean yes the Mariners do not have a good offense and yet they have performed well offensively when it counts in the clutch and the Blue Jays have an incredibly potent offense but they have come up shorter when it matters when it's a high leverage situation runners in scoring position however you to break that down. So you would expect that given enough time, that would even out. And you don't always get enough time for it to even out. But maybe it is just the right time here. But you just look at the names on that team and in that lineup.

And yeah, it's a good team. It probably should be a playoff team. So the fact that they're neck and neck and it's basically 50-50 here, that, if anything, is the surprise given their underlying performance this season. I agree, Ben. Yeah. And I don't know even who would make sense for a neutral fan to root for here because you've got a bunch of good options. I mean, all of these teams are fun in their own way,

and there's the intrigue of a potential Yankees-Red Sox wildcard game matchup, which, you know, probably gets Yankees and Red Sox fans and network executives more excited than the typical fan who just hates both of those teams and doesn't want to watch them. But I think even they may be just the prospect of a winner-take-all single game. That is pretty intriguing. And yet the blue jays are an incredibly fun team and that lineup and all the young guys and guys who've not made the playoffs or just very briefly did in the wild card series last year i mean these guys it seems like it's time for kind of their october coming out party so So I'm eager to see them make a run there as well. Can I tell you what I'm rooting for?

Yeah. It's going to shock our listeners. Okay. I want both the Red Sox and the Yankees to fall out of the wild card. I want the Blue Jays to play the Mariners and I want the Blue Jays to win. Oh, wow. Because I think you're right that it is time. because I think you're right that it is time.

Part of what makes baseball exciting is when we get to see stars perform on the biggest stage in October. And we, as you mentioned, got a little taste of Toronto in the postseason last year, but it was only a little taste. And it was in the midst of those crazy wildcard series. So you didn't see much of it, did you, Ben? You were watching eight games at once. You were trying to watch eight games at once, which I'm going to say,

as a person who loves baseball very much, too many games at one time. Too many. It was too much. I was exhausted, and I did not understand what was going on. So I want an opportunity to see Vlad be Vlad in October. I want Robbie Ray and his tight, tight pants to be on the mound.

And I want the Mariners to finally break their postseason drought. But I think that the Mariners coming out party in October, when you get to say, oh my God, the Mariners have a good baseball team. That isn't this year. That's not, you know, they'd be arriving early, and that's fun and exciting, and they'd get to be done with the post-season drought. We wouldn't have to talk about that anymore for at least three years, which is exactly how long I think it would take before people would start worrying about it again,

but you know, this is not a team that is likely to make a deep playoff run. And the Blue Jays are a good team, and they are ready to do that. And so I think, you know, it would be nice for the Red Sox and the Yankees to get to rest and relax in October and heal and contemplate their lives in the season. And then for the Blue Jays to knock the Mariners out of the wild card and then to see the Blue Jays take on, you know, I would enjoy the Blue Jays against any of the division winners, any of the division winners.

It would be so fun. It would be fun to see them against Tampa. It would be fun to see them against Houston. It would be fun to see them against the White Sox. So that's what I'm rooting for to the extent that I have a rooting interest, which I would like to emphasize, I very barely do. I very, very barely.

But what little part of me there is, it is like, oh, let's root for a specific outcome. Just rooting for that one. Although if the Mariners make the postseason, you want to talk about a fan base that's going to be mad about good news. We're never going to hear the end of that with our playoff odds for that team.

My goodness. True, true. Yeah. Well, who wouldn't want to watch the Blue Jays play other than, I guess, the teams who would be missing out on the postseason at their expense. But yes, and they have Julian Merriweather back now, their April relief hero. So that could help. And they get to play the Orioles for four games now which should

help as the Yankees play the Mets and hopefully one of those teams is able to win a series against the other I guess they almost have to but we'll see so Blue Jays very interesting team have been all season long but things are finally coming together here and we'll see if it's too late or not and you know their fans deserve to be rewarded i think they've waited a while and also the blue jays invested in that team and were active over the off season and they tried to make this a playoff team so they've got that going for them and they're at home now and i don't know that that has much to do with this little turnaround here because again most of that positive run differential was accrued when they were the itinerant team that was playing in Buffalo and Dunedin.

They were still outscoring their opponents at that time. So unless you think that really being a home team, again, on a permanent basis is what has maybe enabled them to be a little less unclutched or something, which I guess is not impossible. Less unclutch or something which I guess is not impossible but It's nice at least that they are Doing this at least part of the time In front of their home fans And would be a thrill for them I guess to get to see them in October

Especially if they had an extended Run so we'll see For all we know we could be bantering In a week from now about how They went 0 for 6 or something And the Yankees went on another run at this stage of the season, things can change very quickly. And I wanted to just mention we got a question along these lines from a Patreon supporter named Justin, and he was really asking

about the Mariners, but this applies to the Boutets in the other direction. He wrote, random philosophical question that I was wrestling with after reading the following question and answer in Dan Zaborski's fan graphs chat. Essentially, the questioner asked Dan to explain how the Mariners are so drastically outperforming their run differential, to which Dan answered that the most likely reason was that they have an unsustainably high 820 OPS in high leverage situations. And this got me thinking about a general concept that I'm sure you've touched on regularly. Basically, analytically, it seems obvious that this OPS is an aberration, and given a large enough sample, it would correct itself over time. But it seems hard to make this jibe with the general sports fans concept of clutch performance. We value so many sports

performers specifically because of their inordinate success during the most meaningful times. Guys like Derek Jeter and Tom Brady are obviously excellent, but I think are especially celebrated because of the perception that they perform better in the big spots. The Mariners' success is just one anecdote reflecting this, but to what extent should we as fans dismiss this kind of thing as a statistical anomaly? And to what extent should we accept the pretty clearly erroneous idea that maybe the Mariners are just better in the tough situations? After all, the old cliche always talks about timely hitting.

But if you do just dismiss it, then at some point, where do we direct our appreciation for the performance? Should I never watch the playoffs and just crown the run differential leader the winner in my head, which would benefit the Blue Jays, but that is not how we follow sports. It would be a very boring way to follow sports anyhow. I'm curious what your thoughts are about this. I am willing to accept that the way that individual athletes interact with psychological stressors probably does impact their performance in those moments. And that if that is our understanding of what clutch is, right, the ability to sort of

deal with and endure increased psychological stress in high leverage moments and not be flummoxed by it, then I think that there's probably something akin to clutch. I think that how big an impact that has on any given moment is probably, it's probably not very big. And I don't know that we do well i know that we don't necessarily do a really good job of being able to measure that or sort of properly place it uh among other factors uh like just your underlying talent for instance uh in terms of how guys do in any given moment but it seems unlikely to me that it doesn't matter at all right your ability to sort of bear up under those moments because people do respond differently to psychological stress. And I don't

say that like your inability, see, inability has judgment associated with it. I don't mean it in like a judgmental way, right? You're not a bad person if you feel stress or find yourself sort of wilting in moments like that. But it is an inopportune time to do it if you're a professional athlete. So yeah, but I tend to think that more often than not, it's more about it not being an impediment than it unlocking some new level of performance, I guess would be the way that I kind of understand

that. And that given that it's really, in most cases, going to be about your underlying skill meeting, game state meeting, health meeting, the randomness of a baseball season. So that's kind of how I think about it. But I'm increasingly careful to assume that just because we can't measure something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or matter because, you know, we keep being wrong about that. So. Yeah. I think it probably means that if we can't measure it at this point, it's not so big that maybe we should ascribe as much importance to it as traditionally a lot of people have just because it would show up if it were a very obvious skill. And if it were a consistent one, then you would be able to see it.

Whereas now it's like, well, we can't rule it out. And it seems intuitive that there would be something there. And like you, I assume it's probably more about just staying at your usual level or so than finding a new higher level. Despite facing that pressure you you don't fall off and that would be clutchness i think and there could be something there it could just be a few points of weighted on pace average here or there something like that too small to sort of prove conclusively exists over a season or even over a career in some cases. But I'm sure there's something, but I doubt it's an enormous difference just because by the time you get to the big league

level, you have probably filtered out people who are going to suffer some enormous penalty if they're facing pressure because it's kind of a pressure pack job. But I think it obviously makes a difference on a team level in a single season like you can't say that there's something about the mariners that is inherently oh they're wired to come up big in the big situations or something whereas the blue jays are are just you know weak mentally right and they they fall apart in the the tough situations or something. Obviously, I don't think that, but there has been an obvious and demonstrated difference in their performance in clutch situations. So I think it's possible to think both of those things at the same time and to think, well, this may not be repeatable or sustainable or it might not even reflect some inherent quality of this team. But it is true that one performed well in clutch situations and the

other did that and that's why they are where they are in the wild card race instead of one being way ahead of the other so you can certainly enjoy it and if anything maybe you can enjoy it even more if you recognize that it's improbable right maybe it's even a little bit fluky it's still fun and in a way if you know how unlikely it, maybe it's even more fun that it happened. So in retrospect, you can look at it and say, yeah, this made a difference and it might not continue next season with this player or this team. But it really mattered for this specific group of players at this specific time. specific group of players at this specific time and i don't know if that detracts from the enjoyment of it from some people because they think well if it's not their true talent if it's not exactly a manifestation of some special skill then should we even reward them for that or should

we celebrate that or something but that's the way sports work we don't simulate these things thousands of times except in the playoff lots and right in real life it only happens once and the chips fall where they may and you are happy or sad yeah and you know given that only one team can win at the end we're all a little sad or at least most of us but that doesn't mean that it's not enjoyable as we arrive there so think about clutch the same way right that like it's not likely to sustain itself in any sort of predictable or sticky way. But gosh, it's fun in the moment. Assuming, you know, you happen to have the good fortune of rooting for the Mariners.

What a weird sentence I just said out loud on a podcast. Yeah. And really, we're lucky that this random fluky stuff happens. Oh, yeah. Well, I guess it would be kind of cool if our projection systems were super accurate, it would not ultimately be more fun if we could predict everything that was going to happen way ahead of time. So there's just some inherent variation in baseball, as Dan and other proprietors of projection systems often say. of prediction systems often say, even if you did have perfect knowledge of everyone's true talent and all these other factors, there would still be just random fluctuations that you cannot predict because they're random and it's fluky and chance and that can be the separator in any given season.

And even though that can be frustrating and kind of confounding at times, ultimately it is a future, not a bug. I think that strange stuff happens sometimes. So let us meet two major leaguers before we bring Rob on. Major leaguers. Meet a major leaguer. I am very eager to meet this nascent Major Leaguer It's the thrilling debut of somebody new Let's meet this mysterious Major Leaguer

All right, so we're going to talk about two new or new-ish Major Leaguers as part of our recurring segment here. I just took a little look. We're up to 236 newly minted major leaguers in 2021, which is a bit behind the pace of 2019 when there had been 249 new major leaguers through the same date. And maybe that's partly because rosters have not expanded by quite as much as they used to. Or actually prior to September, there was some gap there. So I guess that's good if you feel like you can't keep track of all of the major leaguers. But we want people to become major leaguers and get to brag about it too.

Anyway, there's still a ton. And historically speaking, the pace is pretty extreme. And that's why we do this, to make sure that major leaguers don't slip through the cracks. And I just look to see which teams have had the fewest and the most new major leaguers this year. And as you would expect, it is the non-competitive teams that tend to have more new major leaguers. So the Baltimore Orioles have had 16 major league debuts this year,

including our pal, Mickey Janis, who was on the podcast in person for a Meet a Major Leaguer segment, and their newest major leaguer, Michael Bauman, whose progress I have been tracking for years as a friend and colleague and podcast co-host of another Michael Bauman. And Big Mike Bauman, the Orioles version, it's his birthday. So happy 26th to Big Mike. And the other Mike and I had him on the Ringer MLB show back in 2017. So we've been following his progress for quite some time, like Emperor Palpatine with Anakin.

And he's back on the show this week to take a little victory lap because he had a nice scoreless debut. So that's the advantage, I guess, of having a bad team is that at least you get to meet a bunch of new faces. And the Angels are second on that list with 14. The Rangers are third on the list with 13. And we are going to talk about an Angel and a Ranger today. After those two teams, it's Cubs with 12, Marlins with with 12 then actually Blue Jays with 11 interestingly and the fewest new major leaguers Atlanta has had just one just one single major leaguer yeah quite a disparity and that is sort of surprising I guess their only major leaguer to to debut this year was Kyle Muller on June 16th so after that it's the cardinals with

three oakland and the white socks with four anyway should i go first or do you want to all right so my major leaguer for today is a texas ranger and his name is andy abanez and i wanted to talk about andy abanez because well i think we have probably let a lot of Rangers slip through the cracks this year. Not a ton of reasons to watch Rangers games, although there have been a bunch of debuts there lately that have actually gone pretty well. the players they acquired recently, and they've looked pretty impressive in the rotation. But Andy Bañez has actually been up for a while now. He came up on May 4th. And I think we have talked on multiple occasions about Adolis Garcia, the Cuban-born player who has really caused more of a sensation on the Rangers this year. He is not a new major leaguer. This is not his first year in the majors, but he is a rookie and he is a leading contender for the Rookie of the Year award in the AL, even though he has fallen off offensively in the second half. But

Andy Abanez is the lesser known Cuban-born rookie on the Rangers, and he is actually almost exactly the same age as a D'Lis Garcia. So D'Lis Garcia was born March 2nd, 1993. Andy Ibanez born April 3rd, 1993. So basically a month apart, they are both 28 years old. Andy Ibanez, 5'11", 205. He is kind of a utility infielder. He has played a few different positions. He's even played a little left field,der. He has played a few different positions. He's even played a little left field,

but primarily he has played second base. And he came up back in May when Brock Holt hurt his hamstring and Ibanez just went on the IL this week with a hamstring strain of his own. And what major leaguer hasn't hurt his hamstring at this point? So hamstrings giveth and they taketh away. But in between those two stints, he played 62 games for the Rangers, hasn't hurt his hamstring at this point. So hamstrings giveth and they taketh away. But

in between those two stints, he played 62 games for the Rangers, had 215 play appearances, and he did quite well. He hit 260, 304, 415. That is a 97 OPS plus. So he has been basically a league average player, if not better, depending on your war metric and your defensive measurements. And it's been a while for him. He did not debut as quickly as Adeliz Garcia did. Garcia actually defected in 2016 and made his major league debut in 2018. And he's more of a toolsy player, more of a scout favorite, I think. But Banez, it took a little bit longer.

He defected in 2014, and he did not make the majors until this May. And he was in the Rangers system that whole time. He signed with them in 2015 and just sort of slowly worked his way up. And he played professionally for the Cuban national team. He was actually the youngest member of the 2013 Cuban national team in the World Baseball Classic. And prior to that, he had played in the Cuban national series, the major leagues of Cuba for a few years at an early age and had handled himself well there. And really, he just doesn't jump off the page, doesn't jump off the screen. He actually wasn't ranked on the most recent few Rangers prospect lists at Fangraphs. So Eric Langenhagen didn't love him. Scouts, I think, generally didn't have him highly rated. He was mentioned on the 2018 Rangers list from Eric at Fangraphs just as an honorable mention.

And at the time, he wrote that there are contact skills here, but probably not enough power on contact for Ibanez to be more than a fringe bench bat. And it looks like he has maybe turned out to be a little bit better than that. So it took a while for him to get there. bit better than that. So it took a while for him to get there. He got called up not only because Holt had hurt his hamstring, but because he was really raking in AAA before he was called up at Round Rock. He was hitting.352,.410,.648 in 27 games. So that'll get you called up. And he has done pretty well. So good for Andy Ibanez for finally making it and joining his countryman and friend Adoles Garcia. And I will link to Levi Weaver's piece for The Athletic about Ibanez when he first came up. But it's sort of a heartwarming story because he pinch hit in his Major League debut and he singled against the Twins' Taylor Rodgers.

In his Major League debut, and he singled against the Twins' Taylor Rodgers and Levi wrote, the news came while the team was taking batting practice. Brock holds hamstring, which had bothered him on and off all season, was not recovering the way he had hoped after tweaking it again during his tiebreaker against the Red Sox on Sunday. The team was going to place him on the 10-day injured list, move Sam Huff from the 10-day to the 60-day IL to make room on the 40-man roster, and activate Ibanez for Tuesday night's game. Among those most overjoyed to hear the news, Ibanez's fellow Cuban and unofficial team emotional wellspring, Adolis Garcia.

We've seen the joy with Adolis with some of the big hits he's gotten, but when his friend got called up to the big leagues, it was probably one of the coolest moments I've been a part of, manager Chris Woodward said. He came running out of the cage, gave Ibanez a big hug, and basically tackled him. I definitely just got super excited for him, Garcia said after the game through an interpreter. I feel like I had more of a reaction than Andy did. I felt like I was the one getting brought up to the big leagues. I'm really proud of him, and I just want him to enjoy the experience. And based on how he has played,

And I just want him to enjoy the experience. And based on how he has played, I imagine that he has. So the lesser known and unsung Cuban rookie on the Rangers this year, also deserving of some singing. So we have met Mr. Andy Ibanez. That's lovely. That's very nice. Well, mine was picked for less sentimental reasons i'm introducing us to jansen junk because i'm going to corner the market on on funnily named angels starters

this is my you know i've moved i've moved on from intestinal distress this is my new beat yes what i'm up to this one's this one better. So I just get to call him Junk. It's great. Junk was a 22nd round pick out of Seattle University in 2017 by the Yankees and made his way to the Angels in the Andrew Heaney trade. So he was moved at this year's deadline. He was ranked 60th among the prospects moved at the deadline, although we will remind our listeners that there were both a lot of and some very good prospects moved at the deadline.

So that's a thing to know. He's currently 29th on the updated Angels prospect list. And it's funny that you mentioned all of the guys debuting for the Rangers because Junk was called up on September 3rd and made his start in the same game when Glenn Otto debuted for the Rangers. But prior to that, he had in his time in AA with the Angels had pitched 27 and a third innings to sort sort of you know okay results a 527 era a 444 fip and was brought up and it's funny because his big league line is now sort of the the inverse of that um where he has a very good era and a fip close to 10 but who's counting those sorts of things and i'm gonna get to his performance in his debut in a second but But first, I just, Ben, I have a bone to pick with Jansen Junk. Oh, what's that?

He doesn't throw junk. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's probably better for him. It's probably better for him. I mean, like he should prioritize his own professional success over my ability to make jokes. But I'm just saying that the guy doesn't throw junk. I mean, if you'd like to know a little bit more about his repertoire, so this is from Jake Malhot's write-up of Kevin Goldstein's scouting notes on junk at the time

of the deadline. Junk had a 178 ERA and 68 strikeouts in 65 and two-thirds innings at AA. This is his stint in AA with the Yankees. He has taken a real step forward this year. He throws a low to mid-90s fastball and has finally found a decent breaking ball with a new slider he's a fringy prospect with a back end or middle relief ceiling and it's not entirely clear what his role will be with los angeles going forward we have him projected in relief uh sort of long term but it's the angels and it's pitching for the angels so he's in the rotation right now because there's no downside right they should just see what they have and uh and and kind of It's the Angels, and it's pitching for the Angels, so he's in the rotation right now. Because there's no downside, right? They should just see what they have and kind of go from there.

In his first outing against Texas, he did okay. He did allow two, count them, one, two home runs to DJ Peters. So he gave up a couple of runs here, and he got pulled after, I think, three innings of work. But after the game said, it was amazing. I've been working most of my life to have this opportunity. And here I am quoting from a piece in the Federal Way Mirror by Olivia Sullivan, because he is a Decatur High School graduate. So they were interested in him for his local connection. in him for his local connection. I had a lot of nerves leading up to my debut, but once I got on the field, everything was calm and I realized it's the same great game I've been playing my whole life, just brighter lights and a bigger stage. And I have to say, that's not a junk answer. That's a great answer for a young guy just making his debut.

So he's up in the big league rotation. I'm sure that he will continue to get opportunities as they figure out if that fastball and new slider is sufficient for him to face batters multiple times. But yeah, that's Jansen Junk. Can he just throw a couple of his pitches every year so that I can make jokes about it? Well, the good news is that he may have a junk baller stage of his career. He may not now be a junk baller, but he could age into it. So that's the hope, I guess. I mean, he probably hopes that doesn't happen anytime soon. But the other good news is that on the same day that Jensen Junk debuted, Cutter Crawford made his major league debut for the Red Sox.

And Cutter crawford does throw a cutter pretty regularly so there is that at least it's spelled with a k but close enough yeah man the names this season they're just great names incredible just amazing they're really fantastic names i'm glad we decided to start doing this segment in this season when we're just awash with great names. I wish there were a way to quantify the name value just because I think there's a perception that nicknames at least have seen better days. But who needs a nickname when you have Jansen Junk and Cutter Crawford and Tacky Naughton and Lars Neutbar and Tukapita Marcano and just Will Vest and just all of the other phenomenal names that we have discussed this season. It's really been a banner year.

Yeah, it's been amazing. I have said this several times, but it's just the full range of names. We just have a great range of names so oh i should correct one small thing ben he was called up on the day that glenn auto debuted he did not debut against glenn auto these are important clarifications to issue but you know it was sort of all mooshed together in the same time glenn auto's not a bad name it's just not it's just not jansen junk right yeah not quite the same and andy abbanez, not quite as exciting. Although I did mean to mention there have been 328 hitters with at least 200 plate appearances this year. And Andy Ibanez's strikeout rate ranks 16th best.

He has struck out in only 13% of his plate appearances and walked 5.1%. So that's pretty good. He's got the good bat-to-ball skills that Eric mentioned years ago, and he's turned out to have a little more power that's played too. And if you want to learn more about Jansen Junk and Why Wouldn't You, he was actually a guest on Fangraphs Audio just a few months ago, July 2nd, episode 929. I remember listening to that. David Lorela had Junk on when Junk was still in AA for the Yankees, where he was pitching well. And he seemed like a smart, inquisitive guy, very into pitch design and knew his numbers

and driveline research. And he talked a lot about that and also about being college teammates with Tarek Skubal. So I'll link to that episode on the show page. Go check it out. And that'll do it for this segment. We have met two more major leaguers, Andy Ibanez and Jensen Junk. Can I share some breaking news here on the pod

that's related to great names and also folks who will soon be major leaguers? Okay. Guess who's debuting in Seattle tonight, Ben? Oh, who? Seth Beer. Oh, Seth Beer. Seth Beer's coming up for the D-backs

against the Mariners. And the year that Seth Beer was in, Seth Beer. Seth Beer is coming up for the D-backs against the Mariners. And the year that Seth Beer was in the Arizona Fall League, they gave out a pronunciation guide for all the players to media members so that you don't mispronounce someone's name because that's true. You should say people's names the way that they're meant to be said. And they included Seth Beer's and the note from the Sports Info people was, like the beverage. And that was delightful. So I hope Seth Beer has a very nice time. And they included Seth Beers and the note from the sports info people was like the beverage.

And that was delightful. So I hope Seth Beer has a very nice time. Yeah, we already have an email from a listener, Brock, who notified us of Beer's arrival and also raised the idea that maybe he'll have a popular jersey. Because I think that probably a lot of people who are attending baseball games might want to have beer on their back as well as in their hands. So he wants us to discuss who would have the best-selling jerseys relative to their overall contributions as a player. I guess that is a discussion for another time. Yeah, but one we should definitely have because that's great fun. Oh, that's an astute observation. I bet if he manages to stick around, he will have a disproportionate showing of jerseys, I would expect. about the rash of six-man rotations and seven-man rotations and the fact that starters are pitching fewer innings than ever and why that is happening and whether it will continue to happen

and whether something should be done about it or whether it's fine. And we'll also get into competitive balance in baseball, too. So we'll be back in just a moment. moment All right, so we are joined now by our pal Rob Maines from Baseball Prospectus, who this week just wrapped up an epic four-part series on what is a starting pitcher, sort of a summation of the state of the starting pitcher in 2021, which, as you all know, has been in constant flux, I suppose, but has been really in accelerated flux lately. Rob, hello. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Good to talk to both of you again.

So what, if anything, in particular prompted this inquiry? It was a Cubs game. I was watching a Cubs game and Boog Shambi made a comment. And I don't remember exactly what he said, but something to the effect that starting pitchers were going on more rest in 2021 than they ever had before. And, you know, with the tools we've got available, like baseball reference, that's a really easy thing to look at. And it got me thinking about how we are, I mean, it's been pretty well documented that the number of innings that starting pitchers go per outing has been coming down because of, you know, concerns

about pitch counts and fatigue and times of the order penalty. And I thought that if we're also seeing starting pitchers not only pitch less per outing but pitch less frequently, that really suggests that the role is changing. And in going through the numbers, it really is. This year looks like it's going to be the first year ever that more starting pitchers are going to go on five days rest than four days rest, which has really been the norm since the early 50s. You love a good fact-checking a broadcaster comment article. You get a lot of mileage out of those. Sometimes it holds up and sometimes not. And either way, it can be pretty interesting. Although obviously this is something that we've all been thinking about and talking about all the time lately, just because the changes have been so stark. And I guess you could say this is a long-term

thing, but really over the past decade or really over the past couple of years, and obviously special circumstances there, and we can get into that, but things have really picked up steam to the point where now starting pitchers are basically pitching slightly more than half of the innings in mid-rug baseball. It's down to, what, like 55% or so, right? And it's tough even to classify exactly what a starter is in some cases and what a reliever is. And you did one part of your four-part series that was sort of addressing potential responses that you imagined or objections to why these things are happening or why it might not reflect a permanent change. And we can get to that. But I guess even more than you have already,

do you want to sort of lay out the big picture? What does a starting pitcher look like these days? Yeah, we all have an image in our mind of a starter. I would say someone who goes at least five innings because that's, you know, what you need to get credit with the win, even though, you know, we don't pay that much attention to that, and someone who pitches every fifth day, and neither of those are really the norm anymore. There was this brief period in the late 60s, early 70s, where there were four-man rotations, but really it's been a five-man rotation norm, which typically means that you're going on four days rest and now you're going on five days rest typically. And the number of innings that they're pitching has really dropped

precipitously. As I said, just in the last decade, 2011, the average starter went a little over six innings and 86% of starts were five innings or more. And now here we are 10 years later, of starts were five innings or more. And now here we are 10 years later, we're barely above five innings and only about 66, 67, about two thirds of starts are greater than five innings. And so what it's done is it's moved a lot of the workload over to relievers and that's resulted in, you know, some kind of mundane things like starters are getting fewer wins in a lot of cases just because they're not in the game long enough to get credit with that. But also it's the role of starting pitching in terms of all the factors that are necessary for a team to win a ball game has been diminished. Ben mentioned that you came to the conclusion that this is a choice by design, but for our

listeners who haven't had a chance to read the rest of your series, what were some of the other explanations that you considered in terms of what might account for the diminished role of the starter? Well, one that messes up a lot of these numbers, you know, days of rest as well as length of outing is the role of openers because openers aren't supposed to pitch five innings. And in a lot of cases, like back when Ryan Stanek was starting 28 games and, I don't know, pitching 50-something innings, they could go every other day or every third day. The thing is that openers have always been a fairly small amount of total starts.

And in fact, according to the information that Baseball Information Systems provides for us, they've been diminishing. They kind of had their high water mark in 2018-2019-ish, and the usage of them has been going down. Another explanation, particularly for this year, that I think does hold some water is the effect of the pandemic. I think Lance Lynn pitched 84 innings last year, and he led the majors in innings pitched. And so we've got hundreds of pitchers who are going to blow by that number this year. And that creates some injury risk and some fatigue risk. And we're seeing usage for guys, not only they haven't seen in a couple years, but in some of them,

it's been even more than that if they didn't pitch a full season in 2019. So there is some reason to think that managers and pitching coaches and GMs are pumping the brakes with their starters a little bit just because of the change in workload from last year. But what we're seeing this year is maybe an acceleration of a trend, but still a trend that's been going on. It's not that all these figures of fewer starts on four days rest and fewer innings per start just fell out of the blue in 2021. These have been going on, like I said, for a decade. And so they're not things that you can really say is just coronavirus related artifact that's going to suddenly snap back to normal next year. And then, of course, there's the constant issue of injuries. And Derek Rhodes at Baseball

Prospectus has documented that we've seen for at least the first few months this year, a really large increase in pitcher injuries. And certainly that results in some cautious use of pitchers. But the thing is that a guy who gets injured doesn't, you know, he doesn't really affect the days of rest numbers because a guy who gets injured is going to have, you know, in most cases, 10 at least days of rest between starts. So that doesn't enter into this five days versus four days equation. So, you know, there are a lot of things that are maybe accelerating trends, but the trends have been in place. Right. So you mentioned the injuries and you could have done a state of the reliever here too. I mean, in a sense, this is a state of both

because you're talking about how starters compare to relievers. But if you had looked at reliever usage, you would have found that there's a lot more rest there too, that teams are using relievers a lot less often on back-to-back days or back-to-back-to-back days or even beyond that. It's very rare now. And so part of this, part of this backing off on pitchers and lightening the workloads

is just about the times through the order effect and trying to give hitters different looks. And so there's that, but there's also the workload concerns and the injuries. Like in theory, I mean, part of what is driving this is trying to keep pitchers healthy, right? And that doesn't seem to be working so much. Of course, it's tough to compare because yes, there's the pandemic and that screwed up everything. And then you also have the 10-day IL instead of the 15-day IL. And so a lot of the circumstances have changed. But a big part of it is, hey, we don. So there are no constants that you can really compare to sort of an unchanging baseline,

unfortunately, which would be helpful for analytical purposes. So it's probably too simplistic to say, well, if part of this is about preventing injuries, there are more injuries, and therefore this is actually counterproductive. But it's certainly not a fix for pitcher injuries, we can say that much. Yeah, certainly it hasn't been. Although I was talking with Derek about this just a couple days ago, the pace of injuries has flattened out over the last couple months. We're not seeing, I think we're more or less in August and September about at the same rate of injuries as we were in 2019 and 2018 in August and September.

Though I'll be honest with you, I don't know whether that's true of hitters and pitchers or just hitters. So I wouldn't say anything that's going on for sure there. The other thing, of course, that's going on with relievers is like if you look at the Dodgers, they call it Mitch White. They have him pitch a game and then they send him down because they figure, well, I can't pitch tomorrow, so we'll send them down. So that's another mitigant that allows teams to have, even if they've got a nine-person bullpen,

now they've got effectively 10 or 11 if they're shuttling guys between AAA. So you can always bring in a fresh arm in the sixth inning, so why push your starter? So starters are throwing fewer innings. You note in your summation piece that that naturally means that they're also accruing fewer wins, not pitcher wins, but wins above replacement or warp in your case. I'm curious where those innings and where that value is going. We know it's going to relievers, but what is the distribution starting to look like. Yeah, that's where I think we're seeing something unprecedented, because there have been plenty of times that there's been shifts in value in baseball. One of them I cite in the last part of the article is if you look at WRC from, you know, from fan graphs for second baseman and third baseman, up until 1933 1933 typically second baseman were better hitters than third baseman were and the reason for that was until he got kind of

well into the lively ball era third baseman were kind of rangy guys kind of what we think of his second baseman out there rangy guys who could come in and field all those bunts and be able to be defensive specialists while second baseman because there weren't a lot of you you know, fielders, I think a lot of it was just they weren't adept enough to turn a lot of double plays. Second baseman didn't have to be as acrobatic as they are today, and what we saw gradually from, say, the beginning of the 20s to the early 30s was a shift in value where you saw defensive value go away from third baseman, get accrued by second baseman, offensive value moving away from second baseman, going to third baseman,

but you maintain some sort of homeostasis. Each of them had their value. It's just that one went from being a glove-first position to a bat-first one, and the other one went from a bat-first position to be a glove-first one. What we're seeing with pitching is, yeah, we're seeing value shift away from starting pitchers because if they're not providing as many innings they can't be providing as much value but it's not that they're giving it all to you know the the closer is accruing all the value or the guy who comes in to the eighth innings accruing it it's all getting dissipated among this blob of you know eight or nine relievers per

team so that if we look at pitching war, it's about the same per team year to year, but how that's allocated is less among the five pitchers and where the value that they're giving up is going a little bit to a whole bunch of guys, none of whom are really high war pitchers. And by war, the baseball prospectus value, we haven't had a reliever get more than four wins until, I mean, since Brad Lidge was pitching. So it's been a while that there's been a particular reliever who's been able to vacuum up a lot of value. It's just going to a whole lot of guys, which has implications both in terms of career value for pitchers, but also for, I would argue, monetary value for them

as well. Right. Yeah, there are so many ramifications of that. I wrote an article a couple of years ago about how pitchers now don't rank as highly on prospect lists as they used to. And one reason for that is because I think maybe prospect evaluators have come to realize that pitchers get hurt a lot, and so they're a little less dependable long term. But also it's just because even if you stay healthy and things pan out, the ceiling is lower because you're not getting 300 innings out of an ace. You're not getting 250 out of an ace. You're probably not getting even 225 and you might not be getting 200. I mean, it's just a handful of guys who are going to get to that level that it used to be that

dozens of pitchers would clear in a single season. So that has implications in terms of like where you draft people and where you rank prospects. And then as you're saying, it also has implications in terms of, you know, Hall of Fame voting, for instance, where I think you noted in your article that pitchers maybe have been a bit underrepresented lately compared to position players because the historical standards of pitchers, either we have to adjust that so that you're comparing recent pitchers against their contemporaries, or you just don't elect as many because they aren't as valuable as they used to be, even if they're the best pitchers of their era. And then there are other implications.

I mean, there's awards voting, obviously, where you're less likely to see, say, a pitcher get consideration in the MVP race, but also there are the economic aspects which you touched on in your piece, which is, you know, if you were to say, okay, well, those innings are just getting distributed over a wider pool of pitchers, great.

Well, then maybe at the high end, some pitchers will get paid less, but then at the high end, some pitchers will get paid less, but then at the low end, pitchers will get paid more. But that doesn't really seem to be happening because you just have this huge mass of sort of faceless relievers who make the league minimum and get shuffled in and out of the back of bullpens. And if you don't have the pitchers at the top end of the market who are sort of setting the price and pulling everyone else up, then that's an issue. I mean, you know, we've seen some big pitcher contracts lately, but you have to wonder how long that will continue to be the case if these trends continue. Yeah, and the guy who can really provide excess value above, you know, even the four or five win level is becoming more and more rare. We're likely to have

the fewest this season of any season in history, other than last year, of course. And we've talked about the things that are sort of contributing to this trend. I guess one question that I have for you, and you mentioned at the end of your piece that you like the idea of limiting roster spots for pitchers, right? That it seems like there needs to be a rules-based intervention to try to balance this if we think that the version of baseball that it's giving us is, you know, less fun to watch, right? Because you note that offense is down in part as a result of this and that we have this sort of carousel of pitchers. And I know that we've talked on this show a lot about how you sort of lose an important

narrative center in a game when you don't have a starter who's out there for more than five innings. So we see these aesthetic concerns and you note rules as a potential way to intervene on this problem. But I'm curious if you think there are any incentives within the game itself that might see us sort of tip back the other direction in the years to come? Because it does seem like we fret about things sort of cyclically in baseball. And then, you know, the thing that was a market inefficiency becomes something everyone does. And then we shift back to stuff we've done before. So apart from rules, do you think that there's anything that might tip the scales back in favor of starters? That's an interesting question. I'm a little concerned, actually, that we haven't seen the peak of this yet, because one of the teams that's

notable this year, and, you know, former guest on the show, Zach Kreiser, has written about this, the Brewers, which have been, if you look at the starting rotation they had entering the season, I think they had among the five of them maybe three years in which they had gone 162 innings in a season. And I think those were all the Brett Anderson seasons between when he was broken down. And they've been one of the leading teams in giving their pitchers five days of rest instead of four between starts.

And there's a lot of imitation that goes on in the industry. And I think the Brewers have a pretty sharp analytics team. And I think that they could become more a model of where we might see more teams going in the future than like the 2015 Royals and their offensive philosophy was for the way offenses might go. So I think that, you know, there could be a move to give less of a role to starting pitchers, even in what they're getting this year, even with the pandemic being done. In terms of turning things around, obviously one of the reasons that we're seeing the problems

with offenses that we're seeing today is that there's nobody on the bench. You know, you've got, if you've got 14 pitchers on a 26-man roster, you're kind of limited in your ability to platoon and pinch hit. Though, you know, if you look at the more successful teams, I don't know that that is being viewed as an impediment right now. Yeah, I guess this week's sign of the starting pitcher apocalypse is that the Twins are currently employing a seven-man rotation because Michael Pineda came off the injured list and they have Joe Ryan who came up and he's been pitching well and then they have a bunch of other guys. So it's just seven-man rotation and, you know, the Twins are out of contention, obviously, and they're just trying to, like, not overwork anyone and see some more of the young guys that they've brought up. So it makes sense, I suppose.

But that kind of thing gets normalized. And next thing you know, we'll be seeing teams in different situations who are going with seven-man rotations. We've certainly seen six-man rotations all over the place. And then you have the Rays, who are always pushing the envelope in this sort of thing and of course as they continue to have success often they have spawned imitators with the opener and as you noted maybe the opener has gotten a little less common after the initial wave but if we have fewer openers we just sort of have an openerization of starters i guess where those things are kind of blending together. And I'm sure other teams are looking at the Rays model and easier said than done, obviously. But if they could do that, then if they would win a World Series with this sort of amorphous mass of pitchers who are not really in assigned roles? I mean, is that the future? Do you think that there will

always be some mismatch in innings totals, I assume, because you're always going to have good pitchers and bad pitchers, and it would be silly not to use your good pitchers more than the pitchers on the back end of your roster. But I just wonder what that differential will be ultimately and potentially how many innings you're leaving on the table with your good starters who perhaps could be conditioned to throw more of those innings. Yeah, either that or I could see a situation where there might like if the rules were changed more about how long you have to keep guys up or keep them down on the farm when there's uh you know moves between the majors and

the minors um that could push teams maybe to at least get two inning relievers instead of one inning reliever kind of you know the ideal that we all have of what Andrew Miller was during his really good year, though he pitched only 74 innings back in 2016. But still, you know, some way that there is a back-end reliever who accumulates more value than guys who just come on to pitch to three or four batters and throw 20 pitches one inning at a time. But for starters, there's not a lot of evidence that I can see that the trend, at least that we've identified over the last decade or so, that there's any impetus for that to burn out. Yeah, my next question was going to be kind of related to that, which is we've seen this shift in starters. And I'm curious if you are anticipating any particular shifts, not just in how relievers

are getting more innings, but if there might be new roles that sort of emerge as we start to think about those positions as being slightly more fungible with one another than they have been historically. Yeah, because the role of the reliever really hasn't changed that much. I mean, for years, it's been a one-inning job for the most part, and it's remained that. It's just that there's more of those one-inning slots to fill. I could see that if we get to a norm where starters go only four innings, if you've got to go with five relievers every game, even if you can shuttle guys between AAA and do all that sort of stuff, you're going to run out of arms at some point. And so I could see a point where the reliever role for at least some guys becomes more than just an inning at a time.

But, you know, that means it would go from one to two innings. It's not going to be one to four. So it would be a little bit of a value shift where you have some guys accumulating a little more, but not to the extent that they might have, like I said, even a decade or two ago. Yeah. And that skill set is a little bit more replaceable, I suppose. Not that it's easy to be a big leaguer in any role, but it's easier to find someone who can come in and throw two pitch types and get you an inning than it is to find someone who can go through a lineup multiple times, which maybe comes back to the economic aspect that we were talking about. You know, you're shifting innings from more of a rare commodity to more of a common commodity, I suppose, in that there are a lot of guys in AAA who could give you that inning in the middle of a game,

and teams are taking advantage of that by constantly bringing them up and sending them down. So you didn't editorialize much in this series. You're just kind of chronicling the state of things and the way things are headed, and you weren't saying, oh, pitchers today are so soft or this is bad baseball or unwatchable or anything.

But you've been watching baseball for a long time, dating back to the days when starters were expected to finish what they started, right? And we're rarely racking up innings. So do you find that this is something that you lament a lot or that you miss a lot? Or is it just, hey, baseball is always changing in some fashion or another? You know, I think it's probably 60% the latter. I mean, it's still, the game's still a gas to watch. And the things I guess that I miss are number one, we alluded to earlier, the fact that you've got a zillion pitchers on the staff just means you don't have the type of offensive tools that are available that you've got a zillion pitchers on the staff just means you don't have

the type of offensive tools that are available that you're used to. You don't see multiple platoon positions anymore. You see a few guys who pinch hit a lot, but you don't, not that pinch hitters were always all that successful, but you don't have a lot of good bats on the bench. You know, the eight guys that are starting or nine guys in the American League, who are starting for your team are probably going to, unless they get hurt, start the vast majority of their games. And so there's not the opportunity to get better offensive matchups that I think are more interesting in terms of run scoring, they're more interesting for the pitching

strategy. You'll lose out on that. Then on the pitching side, you know, the idea of a three-inning reliever or two-inning reliever, I can understand why it's got some appeal, but it's still, you know, it's still a guy who's just basically max effort for a little while. I do miss seeing, I don't care about complete games. I mean, they're cool and fun, but I don't bemoan that we don't have as many as we did in 1973 or something like that. But the way that starters, and I'm not, you know, I've written a lot about the times through the order penalty, and it's real. And I've written, I think it's worse

than a lot of people think it is. So I understand that too. But even you go back to a Pedro or to kind of early career Kershaw, the guys who could go six, seven innings. And yeah, there's definitely a drop off from the second time to the third time to in some case, the fourth time through the order. But those guys whose fourth time through the order or third time through the order was still so dominating that it was just fun to watch them carve up hitters. That, I think, is something that we miss. And like, Meg, you were saying about the aesthetic of the game. I think it's an aesthetic thing.

It doesn't necessarily affect length of play or scoring, but it's something that I think it's part of the game that's fun, just like it's fun to see Tatis do all the things that he can do or Mike Trout, when he's got a healthy cap, do all the things he can do. I feel like we're being robbed of an opportunity to see some really talented pitchers do all the things that they can do. Right. And you've written a bit before about the potential to limit the number of pitchers on a roster as a solution to this. And that's something that in the past, I think I was much more non-interventionist and I was just sort of hey let things fall where they may and teams will adjust and it'll be fine but

now that we've seen this really continue to skyrocket it seems to me that maybe it would not be the worst thing for MLB to step in and try to curtail this So do you have a favored potential fix for this or a way to address the use of multiple pitchers? Yeah, well, full disclosure, this is an idea I stole from a Hardball Times article in, I think, 2016 by Craig Wright, who you talk about a lot on the show. And, you know, Craig Wright knows far more about pitching than I do. And he had suggested that as a way not to remedy anything about the way the game's played, but actually to reduce the number of injuries. Because his feeling was that the way that pitchers were being used, whether it's starter or reliever, short bursts of max effort, and I guess

five innings counts as a short burst for a starter, it puts more strain on arms and results in more injuries. And if you have fewer pitchers, pitchers have to pace themselves more, and therefore, you know, they're not going to put as much strain on their arms. And the collateral benefit vis-a-vis the game today is we get more base runners. We get more balls in play. We don't get all strikeouts. game today is we get more base runners. We get more balls in play. We don't get all strikeouts. So that was a Craig Wright idea in which he said, and I think at the time he was saying, this was when, what, we had maybe 12 pitcher rosters was the max, he said, but every year just ratchet down the maximum by one. And so I think in today's game, we'd say in 2022,

you can have no more than 13 on a roster, knock that down to 12, 11, and then maybe we take a breather there. I mean, I can remember when there are nine-man rotations, and that's not really realistic. But if you couple that with some rules about minimum stays, either on the major league roster after a promotion or on the minor league roster after a demotion to reduce churn. I think that then what he's talking about, about having pitchers pace themselves more rather than max effort, that would result in both heavier workloads for pitchers, I would hope, fewer injuries, but also would solve some of the balls and play issues that,

you know, you've talked a lot about on the show. Right. So one other thing I wanted to ask you about while we have you, you wrote a two part series about a month ago at BP about competitive balance and how to measure that and mobility versus inequality. And Meg and I talked a little bit about that offline at the time. And that's always a hot button issue, especially when we have CBA negotiations going on and people talking about payroll floors and ceilings and so forth. And Joe Sheehan just wrote something recently in his newsletter about competitive balance in baseball and how it's actually better than it is in sports with

salary caps, at least for the most part, like football and basketball. So you took a look at how things have been in baseball lately. What did you find, and what do you think is even the proper way to look at that? Yeah, well, there's two ways of looking at it, I think. One is if you look at equality, you can just take a snapshot every year and see how much leagues are stars and scrubs, how many teams win 100 games, how many lose 100, how many are super teams, how many are horrible teams. And by that measure, things have gotten a little better lately, but we're kind of stratified

right now. This year is going to be, I think, an improvement. But we can remember a few years ago, you could pretty much pencil in the Astros, the Dodgers, Yankees, and or Red Sox, the couple of years, the Twins, you know, for 100 wins. And, you know, we all know who the sad sack teams were at the bottom of that. But what I was thinking of is that, you know, you can stomach a lousy year. I mean, the Red Sox have gone from good teams to last place more than once. You can stomach a bad yeary year. I mean, the Red Sox have gone from good teams to last place more than once. You can stomach a bad year from your team if you think that that's not where they're

destined to be in fifth or fourth place every year forever and ever. And so I looked at mobility, which I defined as the change in the standings over five and seven year periods. Because I figured those are long enough that, you know, if you've got a team that finishes first every year for five years or first and second or is in last or second and last for a really long period, then you can feel like there's no more ability. There's no hope. Teams can't move up.

And that's, I think, what people are concerned about, that the Dodgers and the Yankees are always going to be at the top of the standings and the poor old Orioles and Pirates are always going to be at the bottom. And what I found is that that is just not what's going on now. We're not at maximum mobility, but we're certainly not as, you know, sort of set in stone in the standings the way we were in much of the 50s when you had, you know, the Yankees and the Dodgers were giants. Those were always good teams every single year. And if you were a fan of the Philadelphia A's or the Senators or the Browns, even in their first year, first few years in Baltimore or the Phillies, there really wasn't any hope. You were going to be watching a bad team

year over year. So where we are right now in terms of mobility, we're not at the max. The maximum actually was kind of the 90s in baseball. But we're, I'd say, kind of in the top third mobility if you look at the whole history of the sport since 1901. So yeah, it doesn't feel that way when you've got the Dodgers leading the division every year and the Pirates are in last place every year and the Orioles are losing 100. But those teams like that are really the exception. And in fact, if you just look at who's been winning, who's been making the playoffs every year, the names have been, sorry Meg, more or less changing every year. And you know, it's a sign that things are not as,

your team is not destiny every spring. There's hope does actually spring eternal. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, it's easy to forget, I think, what baseball looked like at a time before we were all watching or we were all alive, but there have always been terrible teams. And there were many cases, teams that were terrible for decades, and they were tanking in a sense back then. I mean, they were not expressing that in the way that today's teams do. And maybe the economic incentives were different then, but all of these just notorious teams and franchises that just didn't compete. And you would hope that with as much money as is in the game today, that you would not see with as much money as is in the game today,

that you would not see the same sort of anti-competitive behavior, but there almost have to be bad teams by definition. Not everyone can be good at the same time. So it is helpful to have that historical perspective. It's interesting that you mentioned the 90s as sort of the halcyon days for competitive balance in at least one sense because that was of course when bud selig was going on about hope and faith and talking about how there was no competitive balance yeah well you know the decade started with the twins and the uh braves going to world series both of them were worst to first teams and it just carried on there is a lot of well the braves were good almost every year, but other than that,

there was a lot of turnover that year, both up and down. All right. Well, read Rob Maines at Baseball Perspectives. He writes very regularly and he does a lot of these very valuable pieces, I think, that are just kind of taking a look at how things have changed or have not changed

and bringing some data to the discussion instead of just sort of how we feel about things or sort of our anecdotal observations. It's really helpful to have all of that kind of quantified on the page so that we can discuss what we want to do about these things. If anything, first we have to explore what exactly has happened and is happening. And you can also find Rob on Twitter at Cranboy, C-R-A-N underscore boy. Rob, thanks as always. Pleasure to read you and to have you on. Thanks for having me. Good talking to both of you. I appreciate it. Okay, that will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening.

You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up to help keep the podcast going and help keep the podcast ad free while getting themselves access to some perks ben langager nathan barker will peckenham rebecca fleming and matthew hein 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 wildively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastatfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. I guess we've all got one of them It's best that you and I stay friends next week.