Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1797: Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a bargaining meeting between MLB and the MLBPA that reportedly produced little progress toward a deal, the odds of a punctual start to the season, the retirement of Jon Lester and their lasting fascination with his pickoff-throw yips, a familiarity penalty for relievers who face the same team […]

Hello With the situation I was in Looking back, don't shoot us Till I puke in the kitchen Hello and welcome to episode 1797 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ed Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. Just us today for the first time in a while.

Been talking to a lot of guests lately. Yeah, it's so quiet in here. Yeah, so I've got some banter, we've got some emails. I guess we should note that technically there's news by the barest definition of news, which is that there was a labor meeting of sorts. Yeah. And reportedly nothing of note happened at it, but I guess it's technically of note that it happened. It sounds like from all of the tweets we've seen so far, and we're recording on Thursday afternoon, so there may be more details by the time you hear this, but everyone who reported on it says that essentially nothing happened, but that nothing was expected to happen. says that essentially nothing happened, but that nothing was expected to happen.

So I guess Bob Nightingale described it as the first bargaining session in 42 days between MLB and the MLBPA ended Thursday and just as expected. There was little movement. The timetable is unknown when they will meet again. Evan Drellick said MLB's proposal today didn't encourage the players. A couple small changes. Expectations weren't high going in. So in that regard, the proposal actually went mostly as expected. And then Jeff Passan sounded, I guess, the most alarming note, perhaps, in that he said,

baseball labor update. There is no deal. There was never going to be one today. MLB made a proposal. The reaction among the players was not positive. Few on either side expected it to be. The question is how soon the MLB PA counters. And then the ominous last sentence, spring training starting on time is in peril for a while. I am struggling, Ben. Here's how. Okay. Let me count the ways.

I've been struggling with how nervous to feel and how different from our prior expectations this is versus how in line with our prior expectations this is. Because I don't think that we really were terribly optimistic that spring training would start on time and I don't know that we were terribly optimistic that the season would start on time I think there has been this sense for a while now that this will get taken down to the wire and we will probably be at least a week or two late when it comes to the regular season and how much you know how many games that ends up meaning for 2022 is sort of gonna be some function of how late we go and then whether we get expanded playoffs in in this season right because in

theory we could just push everything back but that gets harder to do if we're having to accommodate another round of games. So I don't know. I'm trying to decide if I feel more anxious today in a way that is a rational response to stimulus, or if I am just as anxious as I was, or if I should feel more anxious than I do, which as we've discussed before, I have a seemingly limitless capacity for. So I don't know. I don't know how to feel about it. It has been sort of a bad news day away from baseball.

And so I'm trying not to have that interact too much with this. But it seems like we are unlikely to have pitchers and catchers reporting on time because they're supposed to report like a month from now. And we don't have anything resembling a deal done. And I also struggle to know, like if Aristotle were judging me today, that's the direction we're going right now. We'll do other stuff in a minute. But here's where we are at this particular moment. And it was sort of like assessing my goodness as a person. Would he be disappointed in me? Would he think that I was

sort of living a good life and doing virtuous acts? Because on the one hand, I don't want a deal that is unfair. And I think that as we have discussed many times on this podcast, there are great many things that the sport needs to do to sort of course correct on the balance of power between owners and the players, on the sort of entertainment value of the product on the balance of power between owners and the players, on the sort of entertainment value of the product on the field, on how generous or exploitative it is being to any number of people involved with it. We have work to do. But also, I'm afraid of not having a job.

And I don't think that we're anywhere close to being in that kind of mindset. But as I have previously noted, my capacity for anxiety is limitless. I am Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls. So yeah, I don't quite know how to feel, which means that I am just defaulting to feeling terrible. But I'm persuadable. I'm not so far gone that I'm not persuadable. So do you want to try to persuade me that I don't need to feel terrible and that I can balance the demands of my job

and my desire for continued employment with my desire to be a good person? Yeah. I didn't prep you for this, Ben, but do you want to make a case for my soul today on effectively wild as the podcast resident optimist or at least non-pessimist i guess i could try i felt fairly optimistic that we wouldn't lose games and i don't know that i have reached the point of pessimism about that i'm not optimistic about spring training starting on time. I don't know how much spring training is really required to start the season on time or how much later they could

start the season and still get the full slate of games in. I think what's worrisome is you mentioned this coming down to the wire. I don't know where the wire is anymore exactly. The wire could be in any number of places because when there was a CBA expiration deadline, we knew where that wire was. It wasn't a real wire. They just tripped that wire and kept going, but it was at least a deadline. And now there isn't a deadline in the same sense. There are various deadlines. There's pitchers and catchers reporting. There's the first game of spring training. There's opening day. Every day is a deadline of sorts, but there isn't exactly one agreed upon day. So that's kind of concerning because if there isn't one unified deadline that everyone is aware of, then you might have multiple parties with different levels of urgency. And I don't know that you're as likely to get something done. So the fact that they went 42 days without talking, I don't know how negative I should

feel about that, because on the one hand, it seems like, well, you can talk all you want, but nothing actually productive gets done until it really comes down to wherever the wire is. So if they had been talking regularly and exchanging slight amendments to their proposals for the past 42 days, would we be any closer to actually having a deal? I don't know. But it is kind of disconcerting that after more than a month to think of things, it sounds like, based on what we know right now, that MLB was basically just like, yeah, we were good with the previous proposal, more or less. And here are a couple tweaks maybe, and that the players unsurprisingly weren't having that.

So something's got to give, clearly, and I don't know that the owners are all that willing to give these days. I suppose that they suffer more from missing spring training than the players potentially, just because the players are not paid during spring training and teams do make money off of those games so let's hope that that greases the wheels at some point here soon so not panicking yet from the perspective of yes it would be nice for there to be a full season and for us to have something to say on this podcast but it is getting to the point where the clouds are getting darker and they're gathering yeah and then like how do i plan an editorial calendar ben yeah good luck with that

you know season preview podcast right when do we do our season preview when do we do that yeah i have no idea can someone like send smoke signals and or wink at us to indicate which team will sign carlos correa and then we'll do that one last sure you know we'll just do it last and then it'll be fine we could start you know soon question mark i mean these are not the most important aspects of this right when the when the progression of the sport and people's livelihoods, like the players livelihoods are involved, these sort of trickle down issues are I think we're able to put them in their proper perspective. Right. And like, I think that the jobs of the people who work in baseball media are important, but I can appreciate how we don't want to just rush to get a deal done to make sure that I know when to run positional power rankings. That's silly. But it's not unimportant to me personally and to the people who listen to this podcast and to the writers who I'm going to have to say, hey, you have to write 30 blurbs about a billion dudes, just like so many guys. So I think that we can acknowledge the strain that

the uncertainty places on any number of people. While not also wishing for a bad deal, we can do both of those things at once. And I'm just here to say, like, Aristotle, get off my back, man. I'm doing my best. I know that living your good life is a matter of habituation and practice. I gave that lecture at Wisconsin. I know the rules, but I'm just very stressed today. So anyway, I guess we should answer some emails.

Yeah, we'll get to some emails. If there's any additional detail, then we can discuss it next time. But it doesn't sound as if we're missing much relevant information here. And the winter is really testing the contention that no news is good news, at least when it comes to hosting a baseball podcast. But I do have some other stuff to say. And the good news, I guess, for MLB.com is that the league's official website can now run articles about Jon Lester, because Jon Lester is no longer an active Major League

Baseball player. He announced his retirement. And I just wanted to say, obviously, incredible say obviously incredible career just so many reasons to remember him long and successful career he won three world series he was a five-time all-star he beat cancer he pitched almost 3 000 innings at a well above average clip he pitched almost another full season's worth of postseason innings with like a two and a half ERA, which is really incredible. So any number of reasons to celebrate and remember John Lester. And yet I think when it all comes down to it, the thing that I will most remember about John Lester is that for a while there, he could not throw to first base. That's the lasting legacy of John Lester for me, Yeah.

That's the lasting legacy of John Lester for me, I think. One of many, but probably the most salient thing about John Lester. In my mind, the thing that I'll remember about John Lester on my deathbed, if I remember anything, is the fact that for a while there, he could not throw to first base. And we got a ton of podcast fodder about that at the time. And there was a thread in our Facebook group the other day, which was really fun. It was about things that happened in baseball that we would have talked about ad nauseum on the podcast if the podcast had existed at the time. So pre-Effectively Wild news, and we could get some banter or maybe a whole episode out of that thread one of these days because there were a lot of fun suggestions. But that is a perfect example of an effectively wild story that tickled my fancy for three or four years there. And it was fascinating for a few different reasons, I think. First, the fact that he had extremely selective

yips, which I didn't really realize was a thing. I mean, we knew pitchers sometimes get the yips and can't throw the ball to home plate. We know pitchers sometimes get the yips and can't throw the ball to home plate. We know catchers sometimes get the yips and can't throw the ball back to the pitcher. We know that infielders sometimes get the yips and can't throw the ball to first base. But to be a pitcher who can throw to home plate perfectly fine, but not be able to lob the ball over to first base, that broke my brain in a new and different way. And it was also something that was not like painful to talk about in the way that the yips often is because when the yips comes up, I mean, it's a fascinating subject, but you also just feel for the person

so much because they're suffering so clearly and their whole livelihood is at stake. And with Lester, I mean, it probably bothered him and it affected him somewhat, but he was still a pitcher and still a really successful pitcher. He just couldn't throw the ball to first base. So it was so strange and it seemed like it should matter so much more than it did. And that was the most perplexing thing to me. And I think he was able to transcend this issue because for one thing, he didn't allow a lot of base runners in the first place. And for another, he was quick to home plate and David Ross

was his catcher for a while and he had a good arm and he was good at backpicking. So that would keep runners closer. So there were ways that he got around it. And it was always fascinating to me that it didn't matter to him more. And yet runners should have taken advantage of that more than they did and it is just wild that they didn't and i remember jeff sullivan writing about that multiple times at fancraft because it fascinated him too i mean this was something that came to light before that ao wildcard game yes in 2014 and it wasn't until like 2018 or it was years before he finally figured it out or like developed his bounce pass throw over to first base that he kind of compensated i mean there were years there where everyone knew about this and there were like big playoff games and you would see the runners threatening to go and dancing off first base and they just would rarely go i

mean occasionally but they did not run nearly as wild as you would think that they would. And it was always the question of why don't they go more? And maybe it was partly sympathy, but I think Jeff ultimately developed the theory that they just couldn't internalize the fact that he couldn't throw to first base. They knew it. It was in the scouting report. Maybe to first base. Like they knew it.

It was in the scouting report. Maybe the first base coach was telling them that. But once they were on the base and they're looking at a lefty who looks like he's about to throw over there, they just couldn't bring themselves to accept that he wouldn't and that they could take really as long a lead as they wanted and run with impunity. And so it just never happened. And that will fascinate me to the day I die, probably. And I would submit that even after he figured out the bounce pass thing, they still should have run on him more than they did.

Like they still should have run on him more than they did. It is one of the best things that has ever happened in the history of the sport. I'm not overstating it. It ranks in a profound way. It should be, you know what, like MLB.com, you need some content. Go and inspect this mystery more. I know that Jeff wrote about it, you know, at length, but there is still grist in this mill because it is one of the wildest things

that has ever happened. And I wonder, I imagine that there were a couple of categories of sort of reluctance right there were the people who were just not base runners anyway right and so they thought look even though this strange circumstance exists and even though i in theory if i'm going to be able to run on anyone it is going to be him i'm just not i'm not a i'm not a vroom vroom guy you know i'm not the v-vroom guy, and I don't want to look silly because I will say that in that stretch where he just really, he literally couldn't throw to first base,

can you imagine how you'd feel if you had gotten caught? Can you imagine if you're the guy who still manages to somehow get caught? That's in the first line of your obituary, really. It's the thing that travels with you, you know, from clubhouse to clubhouse just forever. So there's like that category of the guy. And then I'm sure that there were some guys who were convinced and had like a Carrie Matheson, like, you know,

color-coded board in their apartments that like this was all along Khan, right? This was a bit. And he was waiting to deploy it until the ideal moment and so if you were the guy who was gonna you know run in that situation then oh no john was gonna get you because he was just committed to the bit it was a years-long operation and then there were the people who were just i don't know cowards maybe like do we want to call them that that seems like too strong a judgment but i I just don't. It's the best thing. It's one of the best things that's ever happened in the sport. It really is. And I don't know how well we'll be remembered because just looking at

a few news articles about Lester's retirement, I mean, if I were writing them, I would say John Lester, the former major league pitcher who for a while there could not throw over to first base and also was a five-time all-star and won three world series and beat cancer etc i mean that's the order of things that i would highlight in my first sentence or first paragraph of his baseball obituary so i don't know that this will be remembered i'm sure that future generations of baseball fans and future baseball podcast hosts will come across this somehow, some when, and then they will marvel at it the way that we did. And maybe now that he is retired,

he'll be more open to revisiting it and talking about how that happened and how he got around it. But it's really incredible. I mean, beating cancer way more personally significant and notable than beating first base pickoff attempt yips. And yet it just really, it boggles my mind to this day. I remember doing an article for Grantland, I guess it was going into the 2015 season where I had like all of the makers of all of the various simulation software for baseball run the numbers for John Lester if he could never throw to first base and they suggested that like it should make him significantly worse maybe not as much worse as you would think but it just

didn't really seem to hold him back very much and I love that so thank you John Lester for all of the memories but specifically for those yeah it's it's pretty incredible I have a technical question for you Ben okay i don't know the answer to this and it was relevant during the kyle seger conversation too are they officially able to retire like they were they were technically 40 man guys right they were 40 the the last that we knew of them they were on a 40 roster. And so are they able to retire, or does the paperwork not process until the lockout is done? I've heard conflicting answers on this question

when I have asked team people, and so I'm very curious. Because clearly the Red Sox tweeted about Jon Lester, and the Mariners tweeted about Kyle Seeger. Teams in the league are treating active players like the third rail. So the fact that they are treating Jon Lester as someone they can mention that suggests that he is officially retired, but otherwise, I don't know. I don't know. And so I could imagine those teams going to the league and being like, look, you're not going to get sued by Jon Lester over a likeness

issue. He is retiring. Can we have an exception to this rule so that we do not seem like complete ghouls about important franchise icons being done playing the game in this moment when everyone thinks that baseball teams and their owners are ghouls? I could see there being an exception granted, but I am curious,

from a technical transaction perspective, if he is actually allowed to be retired or if he has to wait until the lockout to process the paperwork, I don't know the answer. And team people I've asked have had conflicting reports. So I put it to our listeners. I don't know what I'm doing. It's been a weird feelings day, Ben. It's been a weird one. One more thing I wanted to mention related to our series last week, we talked to Cameron Grove in one of our episodes about measuring the unmeasurable. He was the astrophysicist who's done a lot of pitching

research on the side and other research. And we were talking about the times through the order penalty and the reasons for that. And I mentioned on that episode that one thing that I'd like to look into or have someone else look into is whether there is some sort of reliever effect when relievers face the same team multiple times within a postseason series, whether they are worse because of the familiarity. And Cameron subsequently ran those numbers and produced some analysis on that subject, which he tweeted and which I will link to on the show page. But he seemed to find that there is, in fact, a significant familiarity penalty for relievers in postseason series. So he looked at the stuff of the relievers and the expected run value based on the stuff and all of that based on the movement and velocity and their pitch characteristics, and that doesn't seem to suffer. So if they face the same team two or three times in the same series, their stuff is roughly the same, but their results get way worse, like significantly worse, especially the third time

that the team sees that reliever in that same series. So that would suggest that in fact, there is a familiarity effect for relievers that extends across games, at least within the postseason. And then he did a little follow up where he looked at regular season results. And it seems like there's probably something there, too, maybe a little less pronounced. And there are a number of ways you could do this. And maybe it depends on how many days between the outings there are and, you know, that kind of thing. But it does seem as if there's something to that. And this will bear significant factor. That could be a good thing, I guess, if we want starters to go deeper into games, let's say, then you'd have some incentive to have them stay in longer because you don't want to hurt yourself in a later game in the series by

bringing in a reliever who might not need to pitch in that game, for instance. But very interesting. There does seem to be something there and as i mentioned on that episode i think i had previously studied a playoff familiarity effect for starting pitchers and found that as long as you're on full rest there doesn't seem to be one but that could be for any number of reasons there are obviously more days between games for starting pitchers and maybe they're just more resistant to the familiarity effect as it is because they have more pitches, et cetera. But it does seem to be something to this, and that kind of matches my intuition, but maybe it matters even more than I thought. Yeah. I mean, it was a very interesting result. The degree of it, the magnitude of it did make me

think this probably merits additional investigation, which I think Cameron definitely conceded that there's more work to be done here. But it was an interesting result, and I hope that it's one that he studies further, because I would be curious to see what some of the results of looking at those potential confounding variables you mentioned leads to. But see, people should come on effectively wild, because we give you interesting questions. Yes, exactly. And I was also thinking because of that measuring the unmeasurable series that, you know, we talked a little bit about injuries and how so much of that is still unmeasurable, what causes injuries, what can prevent injuries.

But I think if there's one piece of data that I wish we had, it would be better injury data, especially for past years, because I find that when I try to analyze a past player's career, often there's so little easily accessible about their injury records, right? And if you look at modern players, maybe you can find if they had an IL stint or maybe even baseball prospectus track some day-to-day injuries, for instance. But it's not easy to find. For past players, it's all but impossible to find. I know that there are some old baseball encyclopedias, the Nefton-Cohen books, that did have some injury records for earlier eras. And I don't think those have been digitized anywhere, but I don't think they were all that detailed anyway. And I was thinking about this because Craig Wright, the historian and

sabermetrician in his excellent subscription newsletter, Pages from Baseball's Past, which I have plugged many times on this podcast, it's at baseballspast.com, he just did a little story on the premature decline of Jimmy Foxmy fox who of course was one of the best players of all time and certainly had one of the best starts to his career of all time but tailed off incredibly quickly in his early 30s and there have been a number of theories about why this happened and i was just re-appreciating Jimmy Fox's early numbers because he was very much on pace to break Babe Ruth's all-time home run record. I mean, he started off so fast. And granted, Ruth really started as a hitter in earnest a little later because he came up as a pitcher

primarily. But Fox came up as a catcher and he was blocked by Mickey Cochran for a while. So he didn't really have that huge a head start. And through their age 32 seasons, I think Ruth had hit 416 homers and Fox has hit 500. And he also had a huge RBI lead, if you care about that kind of thing. He wasn't as good a hitter overall. He didn't get on base as often and Ruth hit for an even higher average, etc. overall. He didn't get on base as often and Ruth hit for an even higher average, etc. But power-wise, he was on track to be perhaps the best home run hitter of all time and certainly to eclipse Lou Gehrig potentially. And then it just sort of stopped. He stopped hitting homers. He stopped hitting at all. And then he stopped playing Major League Baseball and he was essentially out of the game at a fairly early age. I mean, he hit 500 homers through his age 32 season, which was 1940. And then after that, he hit a grand total of 34 homers. And really, it was 19 in one year. And then they just stopped coming, basically, and he was gone in a couple of years after that.

And the theory is that people have advanced for that in the past. Some have suggested that it might be attributable to his drinking, but Craig went through that, and it seems like his drinking really started at a dangerous, damaging level late in his career and probably wouldn't have produced such a steep and sudden drop off and then there's some suggestion that maybe it was an appendectomy he had and there was a more invasive surgery for appendectomies back then but that doesn't really fit the timeline either because he bounced back from that fine and was okay for a while and then others have also suggested that it could be because he was pressed back into service as a catcher at a fairly advanced stage, not having done that for a while. And then he played catcher like every day for a six-week

stretch and he got kind of banged up and possibly broke a toe and maybe that took a toll. But again, he kind of bounced back at the beginning of the season after that, too, so it isn't really the smoking gun that it might seem. And Craig, doing the detective work that he often does, concluded that the most likely suspect or culprit here was a concussion that Fox had suffered years earlier after the 1934 season. Just before his 27th birthday, he went on this touring team of barnstorming big leaguers and he got beaned he was facing the pitcher Barney Brown who was a negro leaguer and he got hit I think above the right ear and he went down and it was possibly retaliation for Fox having hit a home run off of Brown earlier in that game. And Wright mentions that that kind of thing was probably more common in the Negro Leagues at the time. The hit by pitch

rate in the Negro Leagues was like 75% higher than it was in the AL and NL at that time. But whatever the reason, it's kind of classic concussion symptoms. I mean, it was described as a mild thing at the time, but it lingered for quite a while and he didn't play. And then it seemed to progressively get worse over time. And he had sinus issues and headaches and blurred vision and all kinds of concussion symptoms that we have seen subsequently end or shorten other players' careers. And maybe the severity of it wasn't quite realized at the time. But that's the kind of thing that it's not unknown. Like if you're a Jimmy Foxx scholar, you know about that kind of thing.

But it's not something that you immediately see when you look at his baseball reference page. It's not like huge headline news about Jimmy Foxx. You could read retrospectives of his career and not really know about it or recognize its significance. And that happens not even in a major league game, but that happens so often when I read Craig's newsletters and he will trace a player's career or season. And so often it seems like when a player slumped, Craig will find out, well, he actually fouled a ball off his toe or something,

and he was limping around for a while and it was reported in the papers at the time, right? But there's no real record of it otherwise. And so it's some day-to-day thing that the guy was playing through or maybe he sat out for a while and you could see that there's a gap in his game log, but you wouldn't necessarily know why. And that sort of thing is so prevalent, like not that every slump is related to an injury of some sort, but probably a lot of them are. I bet if we had perfect injury info,

like if we knew every player's health every single day of the season, I bet that would explain a lot of slumps. Like not slumps due to random batted ball luck, of course, but if you could correlate, like here are when players were hitting the ball less hard, and here's what we know about how exactly they were feeling that day. And I think there have been some studies that have correlated injuries with exit speeds and that sort of thing. But if we had that kind of perfect injury information, and we wouldn't have access to the state of mind of every player on every day. And it could be psychological, too, not just physical. But I bet that explains a lot of variation in performance that otherwise we just chalk up to find that information without doing a deep dive on, let's say, newspapers.com, which has made that kind of thing easier, but still not easy. Well, and not accessible to like the average fan, right? Even if you are inclined to that kind of research, it's, you know, it's one more subscription that you have to have, right?

Yeah, I think it would be great to have that kind of information. I think that we just, we forget so much stuff like we think we're gonna have good recall on the effect that injuries have had even on the guys who are active now whose you know injury histories are much easier to find and some of which depending on the kind of injury they have are tracked in a database somewhere but we don't remember that stuff we're gonna forget and then there are gonna be guys whose careers we look back on and we're like, I wonder what happened there. And then we'll move on and we won't have an appreciation for, you know, the different kinds of things that they had to grapple with over the course of a career. So, yeah, I wish that it was

something that sat there. I mean, it's hard to know. It's just hard to know how big an impact it has. And for some guys, I think it's really obvious, you how big an impact it has and for some guys i think it's really obvious you know and you're able to trace the moment of a decline or the end of a career to a particular injury it's like an obvious discrete intervention into their baseball timeline but other guys it's harder but it give you a sense that would be great yep all right i just saw since we started recording that the atl Atlantic League announced that they will be moving the mound back as in back to where it was before. Oh, I was like, wait a minute. half of last season. Now they are moving it forward by a foot back to where it was. I explained that extremely clearly, but they'll be using the standard mound distance this season. And I'm

kind of disappointed by that actually, because I know there was a lot of consternation about health and using players as guinea pigs and would players blow out their arms, et cetera. But I talked to some players and other people about that for a piece at the end of the season, and it sounds like it was a complete non-issue and that no one really complained about it after it went into effect and that there wasn't any observable uptick in injuries or anything. There also wasn't any clear effect when it came to improving the offensive environment, really. There were not really fewer strikeouts or anything. I think there were fewer whiffs,

but it just didn't produce the effect that I was hoping and thinking that it would. But it was only a foot, and it was only half of an Atlantic League season, and I was kind of hoping that there would be additional testing. And it sounds like there won't be, at least in that context,

which I suppose means that there is an even greater need for lab leak oh yeah we need lab leak we need lab leak you know i thought i you know i thought i had the other day though i was like oh maybe we should like we should design a logo for lab leak and you know we could put it on like a hat or a t-shirt and people might want it who listen to this podcast and then i was like it would be hard to design a lab league logo that doesn't invoke steroids right that isn't like evocative of that so i've you know but i'm you know i'm still thinking on it because people would think it's spalco or biogenesis right right this is the this is the gating factor around

merch for lab league not for lab League itself. Lab League lives forever. All right. Here are some emails. And this first one will be football related. So we will need your help here as the more football educated among the two of us. This is from Andrew who says, there is an interesting scenario at play in the final weekend of the NFL season. Even I was aware of this. I became aware of football whether I wanted to or not because of this scenario.

It was possible that the only way for both the Raiders and Chargers to make the playoffs following their Sunday night game to end the season was if they were to tie. Of course, if either one of them had won, it would stand to make the playoffs. But if they had both tied, then they would have both made the playoffs and forced the Steelers out of the playoff picture. Andrew continues, this led many to speculate we would have four quarters and an overtime period where the two teams kneel the ball every play. Field position complicates this slightly, but not enough so to nullify this as a sound strategy. Sadly, both coaches have said they will not use this strategy if the scenario were to occur. This email was sent before the game. And Andrew continues, this got me thinking

that if MLB were ever to replace the zombie runner with a tie after X innings, eventually we may see a similar scenario where teams are incentivized to tie. Assuming a scenario where there is absolutely no upside to winning over a tie for both sides, how would you envision this working out on the field if teams actually tried to pull this off? More realistically, how do you think players, coaches, and front offices would respond to a situation like this? Baseball has taken huge steps in recent years, advancing optimal strategy with aesthetics be damned, but you have to think there is a limit, right? Ben, I'm so sad that you don't like football because watching that game and watching the end of that game was some of the most fun i've had

watching sports in a very very long time and i was following it vicariously oh my god and i was rooting for a fun scenario i was rooting for a tie i mean first of all i thought that the the idea that they were going to say up front oh yeah we're gonna tie i was like of course they're not gonna do that right they're not gonna do that even if even if at at certain points in the game they had gotten to a point where it's like why don't we tie just because the the risk of something goofy happening is high enough that we should just take the clear path to the playoffs and tie and and you know let you know ben roethlisberger be sad at home they were never gonna do that because like they're professional athletes and i would imagine that if you're a pro athlete especially an nfl player where you're like

hey you know how i get in a car crash every week at work and you know that might have some really serious long-term implications for my health i'm gonna do that in service of a tie i would tell you to go get lost if i were an nfl player so it never seemed likely to me but it was the most fun i think that the incentives for ties though are very dangerous because you don't want folks in the sport coming together and saying no we've we've predetermined the outcome of this contest because once you allow for that in a world where you are also heavily incentivizing people to gamble it just it makes everybody nervous it works in the back of your brain too actively going forward so they were never gonna admit to like match fixing basically like they were never gonna do that because it would be disastrous but i really wanted them to yeah it's so bad yeah and they came out and said like no we're not gonna

we're not gonna do anything like that right and it just ended up being so possible right because it was close it went to overtime they were in fact tied right the raiders ultimately won 35 32 and i know there was a lot of confusion and consternation about a timeout at the end which as I understand it from reading smart football people was overblown and Bill Barnwell at least suggested that that didn't matter so much and there was kind of a confusing comment by one of the players in the immediate aftermath which if you parsed it selectively suggested that the timeout had changed things and that really it hadn't to any great degree. And there were some incentives to win, like it did affect the amount of rest before the next game or your playoff seating or opponent, that sort of thing.

So there were some stakes there. Bill concluded his article by saying the Raiders wanted to win given their playoff seeding possibilities, but they wanted to not lose more than anything. They got in a position in which it would have been virtually impossible to lose and then slowed things down to ensure that they would be the only team with a chance to win. The Chargers' only motivation was to avoid losing. When the game came down to one play, the Raiders overwhelmed the league's worst run defense to set up a season-ending field goal. The Chargers didn't lose because they poked the bear with a two-cued timeout. They lost because they got overpowered by a more physical team with their season on the line. For all the modern external factors surrounding this game, that's the oldest, simplest football story in the book.

So I know it was sort of a letdown for a lot of people that this was not a tie and that the teams were not committed to a tie. And I'm sure that part of that is just the macho football, we're not going to concede everything, we want to win kind of thing. And as you mentioned, maybe game fixing considerations as well. If this were to happen in baseball, obviously there are a lot more games and the implications of any single game are a lot more games and the implications of any single game are a lot lower but i think there would still be kind of a cultural resistance to the idea i mean there's a cultural resistance just to the idea of allowing ties in baseball obviously there's a big american at least bias

against the very concept of finishing in a tie yeah we don't like people regard as unsatisfying right and so if team said yeah we decided to tie we stopped trying at a certain point then i think that would be considered unsporting and people would look down on that and teams would probably be reluctant to say publicly that that's what they were doing right so i don't know if this is a way to make the zombie runner rule even worse i don't know if that's possible but i don't think we would really see teams acknowledging that they were trying to tie or didn't care about tying but might there be some situations where it made sense and you gave a less than full effort to win perhaps i mean i could definitely see if you're you have the option for a tie and you have a completely like depleted bullpen right and you're

you know you're worried about either compromising future games as a result of just continuing to throw more guys out there or you're worried about injury that like then a tie becomes more attractive because the payoff is a potential win later and you're like a tie is a tie and i think in baseball the impact of any given tie is going to be you know so much smaller like i had chatted with a couple members of our staff like is there a baseball version of this that you want to write about because i was so jealous of football writers for having this to to write about i was like i would have bothered everyone all weekend we would have run content every day around this question right because it's just so cool it's cool to think about but i think that the circumstances under which an individual game is going to matter for

making the playoffs you know those those tend to be few and far between in baseball the potential for them exists every year and we had some scenarios this year where like clearly it came down to the last day but it tends to not be that and so you know the promise of a future win at the expense of a tie that's probably not going to end up moving the needle for you on a postseason on your postseason probabilities like i think that there are times when a team would take that trade off but i think you probably just try to win anyway you just try to win and so you'd say we don't need a system that allows for ties and incentivizes them because we just are going to try to win a baseball game you know what i mean yeah there are a lot of games with no playoff

implications especially toward the end of the season i mean you're either already out or you're already in and yes as you said if teams are worried about stressing their bullpens then maybe maybe there would be cases and i'm on record as saying i'd be fine with ties if it meant no zombie runner rule again prefer just playing out the game the way that we used to but i would would rather have Tyus than zombie runner rule, I believe. But yeah, I think it might happen in certain situations perhaps. All right. Eddie says, the Los Angeles Lakers season is in all sorts of disarray. We're really starting out with other sports here on this episode. This is fun. With problems ranging from injured stars, bad offensive scheming, and seemingly nobody on the roster being able to defend when it matters.

With many attributing the last several iterations of Lakers rosters to LeBron James's extensive input, whether true or not, he's receiving about as much blame as a general manager would for constructing a bad roster. This has me thinking, what if baseball's largest stars had a similar level of authority in how their surrounding teams were built? More specifically, what if Mike Trout took charge in building out the rest of the Angels Major League roster? Who would he look to acquire any specific changes with coaching? Would there be any major shakeup to begin with? I guess the Lakers are up to 500 these days, so good for them. But yeah, that is something that you don't see so much in baseball there isn't as much of a player empowerment era i suppose and there isn't as much of a trend toward

players just getting together with their friends to try to win a championship and it's just harder to do in baseball than it would be in basketball i think that's the big thing that stands out to me like in basketball it might even make sense to a certain extent because you only have a handful of guys on the floor and you can't just plug in play anyone. Like you have to have some chemistry and I don't mean just clubhouse chemistry, but it actually matters how players skill sets match up with each other. How they complement one another is meaningful in a way that is, I think, much more obvious and much more pervasive across the roster. Like there are definitely places where the chemistry between individual players on the diamond matters, but it's choppier. It's much choppier.

Right. And so if you're with Bron James, I mean, not only is it more important to you, probably who you are playing with, because it affects your game, but it should be probably the case that he has a bigger say in that than, say, Mike Trout would, just in the sense that his preferences or who he plays well or doesn't play well with might actually affect the team's fortunes to a greater degree. And he's like a huge part of the team, just percentage wise,

in a way that Mike Trout isn't. So I think it makes a lot of sense in basketball, or at least more sense. I'm not saying it is ideal to have players calling every shot necessarily, because they might still be prone to making certain mistakes that someone else might not be. But I'm just saying like you have to take into account an individual star much more than you do when you were constructing your roster. So if this were to happen in baseball, I don't know that there is really any great advantage to it. I mean, unless you have, you know, Zach Granke, who is reputed to be a great scout in his

own right, for instance. Like, if you have a player who's really good at evaluating other players, sure. But otherwise, being a GM is a big job. Yeah. And a full-time job, more than a full-time job, frankly, as is being a Major League Baseball player. So I don't know that you would get much of an advantage from combining those things, especially because they're separate skill sets and players are worrying about their own games. They don't have an opportunity to see everyone else playing

all the time. They don't necessarily have the background in statistical analysis to be able to evaluate numbers the way that an entire front office can. I'm not saying that they wouldn't have insights, but I'm just saying that often, you know, when you have player votes for awards or all-star selections or whatever, they don't always end up being the best players as we would evaluate value. Maybe we're not always right either, but, you know, players will make judgments based on who they like and who they know and the small samples that they have seen, etc. So I don't think they're really all that well suited to construct rosters. And sometimes you see that when players will advocate for a move to be made or not made.

And sometimes it doesn't really seem to make sense on the surface. And who knows from a clubhouse perspective. But yeah, I don't know that that's in most players wheelhouses just as being a player is not in most executives wheelhouses I do think the place where it could perhaps be meaningful but it would constitute more of a collaboration than something as directed as what at least has been reported for LeBron when it comes to the Lakers is if someone like Trout were able to be persuasive on payroll as a general concept and then how that payroll gets allocated

is left to the general manager and the baseball ops team and scouts and what have you. So I could see an instance where if we lived in a world where Artie Moreno was going to listen to Mike Trout and Shoya Ohtani more on, hey, do we increase Angel's payroll from $172 million to $250 million? If they are the voice that is going to be able to move the needle there, and I know that the way that the Angels have spent has not been stingy, although it also hasn't always been super smart i think there you could end up having really meaningful impact where someone like trout goes in and says like so you know how i'm the best baseball player of my generation what if we spent like another 50 million dollars on pitching so that you could go to the postseason with me again the best baseball player of my generation and if that voice were able to sort of shift things around then i see it as as valuable i do think that players have like they do have some idea of who good players are i think that

they are maybe slow to update their understanding of that right i think that when we see players rank other players i tend to be struck more by not that they identify guys who were never good, but that they maybe identify guys who aren't as good anymore. It's like, he's not prime, whatever. It's time for a new dude to be in this list. So yeah, I don't know. I think that there could be some value there if they're like, let's go win a World Series. Why don't we? And then the front office is like, thank you for that windfall. We shall go do that to the best of our ability. Remember when Dallas Keuchel called out Jeff Lunau for not making the Astros better at

the deadline or doing anything significant? And then that possibly precipitated Lunau making the Justin Verlander trade. It at least put more public pressure on the team to make a big all-in move. And then they won a World Series. And there were some other things going on that year as well. But that may have been a situation where a player publicly saying, hey, let's go for it here. Let's give up some prospects. And again, that's, I think, the problem because players would 100% every time give up all of the prospects.

Because players would 100% every time give up all of the prospects. Like, there's probably a middle ground because, like, players, maybe they don't know the prospects and maybe they don't care about how good the prospects will be years down the road because they're no longer going to be with that team, probably. It doesn't matter to them. So they'll be like, yeah, sure, trade all our blue chippers to go get this veteran because I've heard of this veteran and because I want to win now, right? So you need, I think, some perspective that a player doesn't necessarily always have, understandably. But you also need the perspective of the player to be like, hey, let's go for it. We've got a good group of players here. We could actually win this thing. So let's not sit on our prospects prospects too, because this year might matter.

So there's a bit of a middle ground there. Yeah, for sure. All right. While we're talking about the Angels, as we so often are, we got a question about Shohei Otani, who was profiled this week in GQ. And yes, of course, I read the profile and I studied all of the photos in the photo spread with great interest. Nick, Patreon supporter, says,

In Shohei Otani's recent GQ profile, in response to a question about what he'd change about the game, Otani responded, Honestly, I'm satisfied with everything. No need to make any drastic changes. Nick says, With respect to on-field baseball, I totally agree. drastic changes. Nick says, with respect to on-field baseball, I totally agree. As a proud baseball evangelist, I will happily disagree with anyone who says that baseball is boring or dying or for old people, et cetera, et cetera. But off the field, there are lots of things to change about baseball, and Otani's answer was unqualified. My question is, do you think Otani got a call from

the MLBPA over this quote, it cannot be good for the union when the face of the game says all good in the middle of a lockout negotiation. Is this a downside to Otani's unflagging optimism? I understood this question to be about the game itself and not the ecosystem in which the game operates. Like that was how I read that quote. Maybe that is a generous reading on my part. I struggle to think that a guy who,

I guess we could interpret this a couple of different ways and have sort of evidence from Otani's own career as proof that our interpretation is correct. I mean, on the one hand, if anyone is going to be aware of how the existing system tends to take advantage of players who want to play in the majors and perhaps does not compensate them up to their worth.

We might look to Otani as someone who fits that bill, right? Because of when he signed in the international market, you know, he was subject to, he received far less than he would have if there had just been open bidding, right? Yep. So there's that part of Otani. But also, he really wanted to play baseball here. And he was willing to sort of take that trade off i think in part because he was probably cognizant of the fact that he was just going to make a bunch of money in sponsorships and so it wasn't as if all he was going to take home was the salary he receives from the angels

so i don't know maybe if we want to be less generous to him we could say that he perhaps isn't prioritizing these things the way that other members of the union might but i just read this as him being like baseball rocks like as a sport i don't think that it necessarily means that he looks at the way that the the rest of it is constituted and it's like i am perfectly happy with how international amateurs are treated and also domestic amateurs and yeah you know like like I read it as being about the game. I did too. He likes it. He's enthusiastic about it.

And I think that a player of his stature, like I mean in a figurative sense, but also like literally because he's just so tall, a guy who is the face of baseball, who has managed to start to sort of cross the divide from enthusiasts for the game to more casual fans of sports generally, I think him saying like, baseball's great. We should all love this sport because it's so awesome is good for the sport.

I think that that is a positive thing to have sort of an unapologetic booster for the game and one who is able to do such remarkable things when he plays it that's to baseball's benefit and i hope that he has more opportunities to to talk about himself and the sport and the league and you know he does have a big platform so if he looks around and feels that other parts of the the economics or the environment are wanting i hope he'll use his platform to talk about those things because that's important too. But yeah, I mostly just read it as he's like, I think baseball's rad and so are sweater vests.

The sweater vests look fantastic. They always do, but on him especially. Yeah. I mean, we don't know how the question was posed to him. Right. And of course, there's the translation issue. We don't know exactly how he said it or what was said to him, et cetera. But I read it that way too.

I still think it's funny that he is probably the first time in the history of baseball discourse to be asked how he would change the game and say, well, you know, no notes. It's great. I think it's perfect the way it is. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know that anyone has ever said that. Even people who love baseball always have some suggestion for how it could be different. And maybe he just doesn't want to wade into those waters and rock the boat in kind of a puff piece profile.

And again, we don't know exactly how this question was posed to him. Certainly baseball is working out well for him. I mean, maybe not financially as well as it could, although he has a lot of endorsement deals. But he has dominated it in a way that no one else did. So if I were Shohei Otani, I don't know that I would want anything to change either. But it is kind of nice because the article was kind of pushing the, you know, baseball is dying, baseball is broken, we need Shohei Otani to be the savior angle. And I kind of like that he was like, no, you States, it is still wildly popular elsewhere in the world, and that baseball is more than Major League Baseball. So it was nice to hear from him directly,

or as directly as we can given the language barrier. But I doubt that he was getting any angry emails from the MLBPA about this. Yeah, I doubt it. I also really liked that in the video that accompanied this, they just let him speak Japanese and then they subtitled it because I think, you know, can all get more comfortable with that and engage with guys sort of as they are. And I don't know.

I just, I thought the whole thing was well done. I thought it was quite well done. Yep. Always happy to hear from Shohei. All right. Here is a question from Jacob. Well, this might depress you more than you are already. Oh, no.

Jacob says, and this was sent prior to the labor meeting on Thursday, what if for some reason they never decided to negotiate and the lockout stretched in perpetuity? How long would it take fans to give up hope, players to seek new jobs? How long would you continue to do the podcast until you moved on to other things? You were certainly able to fill the airtime when there hasn't been baseball during the pandemic, so how many episodes could you keep making before you ran out of content with no new baseball to cover? I certainly hope this doesn't happen, but I thought it might be an interesting hypothetical

to entertain nonetheless. Interesting hypothetical. When will Meg be unemployed? How long would that take? I need to go back to therapy. I don't know. I mean, I am still kind of of the mind that baseball viewership and sort of engagement

has not totally recovered from the pandemic year. And we got baseball that year. So if we lost baseball entirely for this season, particularly if the context for losing it is not a global pandemic, which I think people would understand if, you know, we had gotten to the point where we had said this isn't safe to do, but it's because of an inability to reach a labor deal in a sport that's incredibly lucrative. I understand the spirit of the question, but I don't imagine we would never have baseball again. But I think that we would have given up really important cultural space if we did that. How long could we go? I don't know, Ben.

I don't know how long we could go. I don't want to find out. I'm kind of keen to not have an answer a like firm answer for this question yeah but i think that one of the things that both parties to this negotiation have to keep in mind is that you know there's a lot of other stuff in the world like we we did on our most recent ask us anything episode for for patreon supporters like we talked about all of the things that we had consumed in 2021 that we enjoyed or rather some of the things because there were so many things that we listened to and read and that, you know, if we were to lose an entire season to a lockout, it would, it would leave a pretty lasting and profound bad taste in people's mouths. And the last time we had something like that, like everybody had to start using steroids before

we got over it. So I'm not keen on that as a solution either. So I hope that, you know, we, not keen on that as a solution either so i hope that you know we we can get our acts together and do do what's right for the sport and uh and not have to test the theory because we used up so much material when we had 2020 and you know at some point we'll we'll run out of something to say even even when we get weird so i don't know man yeah i mean there's been a lot of baseball history so in theory we could continue the podcast indefinitely i mean we could talk about baseball for the rest of our lives even if there were no new baseball there's been hundreds of years of baseball would the podcast be entertaining would anyone still be listening would our hearts be in it no i don't think so there would probably still be people doing historical research into baseball. People would still be using baseball data to investigate other things. happening or at least new fodder to discuss and of course there would be an almost infinite number of

potential past topics but i don't know i don't want to put a time on it because i i don't even want to speak it into existence not that i believe that i could or that this will happen but you know we've made it through most of a winter here with no news with a lockout we made it through what a few months last summer when nothing was happening except players and owners sniping at each other right and if let's say we lost this entire season and then we went into next winter with the lockout still in place or something you know know, maybe we wouldn't record three times a week. And it takes a lot for me to say that, as you know, but I think we would be entitled to walk it back and dial it down a little bit at that point. And how long it would

take for us to give up the ghost entirely. I'd like to think that, you know, we would every now and then convene to talk a little bit on this feed about baseball in some context, even if there were no new baseball for the rest of our lives. I mean, those of us who came of age during a time when there was baseball would still continue to care about baseball and miss baseball and maybe want to remember some guys every now and then right and so we could get together to do that i think but you would not be making any new fans if there were no new baseball for years and years and no prospect of new baseball i think that's really the question

like when does it go from okay this is a work stoppage but it's going to be resolved to this is never going to be resolved baseball isball is over because at that point. Or at least baseball here is over, right? Right, exactly. Yeah, pro baseball here. It would continue elsewhere. Yeah, I mean, we could pivot the podcast to being NPB and KBO and who knows what else, right? We could talk about foreign leagues that would still be going on.

But the podcast in its current form, I want to say we could get through an entire season without baseball probably as long as we expected there to be baseball sometime soon. I think that's part of it is like how long is the blackout period that we know of? If you told us that there's no new baseball and no new baseball news for the next year. That would be a daunting prospect to continue to podcast. But if there were always the hope that there was about to be baseball, if they kept dangling the carrot in front of our faces, then I think we could probably keep talking for a while. I mean, I enjoy some of the shows that we've been able to do during the walkout that don't rely on current events or anything

particularly timely or topical. There are a lot of interesting subjects that I'm glad that we've had the opportunity to delve into, and I don't feel like we're necessarily on the verge of running out, but I think it's really about what the expectation is for when baseball would return yeah yeah i think that the sort of endless or potentially endless you know drag would be a real problem right if the if it if it operates like the horizon and it's always moving away from you it's like oh i don't know right so yeah and as for players i mean players if you know after a certain number of years would age out, essentially, and some of them can afford to not work or some would have to pursue second careers. And I guess working in baseball or at least Major League Baseball would not be an avenue open to them. It would be weird because they would continue to be talented amateurs, right?

It would be weird because there would continue to be talented amateurs, right? You'd still have Little League. You'd still have high school and college, presumably, unless the absence of Major League Baseball just disincentivized anyone to play at those levels, too. I mean, would you have less participation in Little League because there's no MLB to get people hooked or to give people dreams that they could one day play there? Maybe you'd see some decline in participation but i think probably for the most part people play baseball and softball because it's fun to play baseball and softball right so i don't think they would disappear and

so you'd still have talented players coming up but they would have to play overseas or really ultimately at a certain point you'd form a new league, right? I mean, if MLB just decides we're not going to play, then at a certain point, you would see some sort of players league spring up, right? Which Emma Batchelor just wrote about at Sports Illustrated or a federal league or an indie league would suddenly get all the best players. I mean, probably we would just pivot from major league baseball to whatever the new highest level domestic league is, where probably most of the most talented players would gravitate to after a certain amount of time. Yeah. I mean, I imagine that after a while, there would be something that came and sort of filled the void. And then the question would be sort of what caliber of player can that attract? Because, you know, you have guys who maybe say, I want to keep playing baseball and I've earned enough and I can take less to go to a new league.

And you might have guys who say, I can go do something else and make more money or the same amount of money. Like the economics of it, I imagine, would matter there too. I'm skeptical that we would get like, it's like, oh, finally finally i'm free from the shackles of mlb and i've gone to a league with better owners question mark like i don't know that that would necessarily satisfy in the way that that we would want it to but yeah i don't know it's a weird it's a weird uh it's a weird bit of business but yeah hopefully one that we will not be able to

answer definitively yeah Yeah. Okay. A different Jacob says, I was looking through the career war of some of the greatest catchers of all time, and they seemed low to me. For example, according to Baseball Reference War, the highest ranking catcher is Johnny Bench at 80th all time with a career war of 75.1. I think most people can agree that Bench is better than the 80th best player of all time. Is this a result of not having a good grasp on catcher defensive value, framing, staff ERA, etc.? Is there a better comprehensive stat that can be used to describe catcher value? Well, part of the thing that I think is useful for folks to remember here is that like B-Ref's version of catcher war does not include framing. remember here is that like b refs version of catcher war does not include framing so that is going to be for a lot of these guys is going to make up a potentially quite meaningful bit of the gap and neither does fan crafts were prior to the pitch fx era right and neither does baseball prospectus warp prior to 1988 right advent of pitch by data. So yeah, we can't go back as far with some of these stats.

Right, and so that's going to be a big piece of it. I think that with that sort of adjustment in mind, it's still, I don't know, I still think that war is a useful metric for catchers. Obviously, I'm going to be biased toward the versions of war that are able to, to the extent we can account for the value of framing because we know how valuable framing is for teams. It will be interesting to see sort of how that evolves. You know, there's been a real compression in terms of

the framing skill within the guys who make it to the majors and sort of stick there, right? So since we have an understanding of how valuable this is you don't you don't have as many butchers back there as you used to so there's that part of it and then obviously we're going to have a number of catchers whose value sort of flips and changes once we get a robo zone so how we account for this stuff is going to be changing over time which i don't know i get why people are fussed by that i think war always changes i mean it doesn't constantly change just to be clearly everyone it's fine but like it's an evolving stat right and stats evolve over time so i think that it's still the best composite stat available and then for the guys who you know we don't have good

framing data on we're kind of left to rely on how how reputation might supplement our understanding of their game and i think that we need to allow that there's a big part of catching value that we still can't account for in war right we still don't have a good way of of quantifying the value of game calling in war so i think that catcher war is probably among the the most incomplete in terms what it can encompass, even though it is much more complete now than it used to be. I don't know. How do you feel about catcher's wars would be higher and some would be lower. You don't know which way it would necessarily go for the best ones, but probably you would have someone higher than the current highest if you could quantify all of that. But I think it is largely a product of playing time. I think that's the big difference between catcher and other positions. Just compared to players who play less demanding defensive positions, catchers tend to take more time off and they have shorter careers. And then there's the wear and tear that can take a toll on their offense. And Johnny Bench, he played a long time for a catcher, but he still has only about as many career plate appearances as say scott roland right he has almost a thousand plate

appearances fewer than todd helton and those are two players people knock for not being durable sometimes and he is quite durable by catcher standards so i think for hall of fame purposes and career evaluation purposes you kind of have to compare catchers to themselves like the jaws averages for catcher are significantly lower than they are for other positions. So that's just the way it is. And it doesn't necessarily mean that they're less valuable. It just might mean that they have shorter careers and they take more days off and everything. So that just kind of comes with the territory. Right. Yeah. I think that part of the job of folks who write about baseball and use advanced stats

is to help the folks reading about them to understand that context and sort of put it in perspective. It's part of why I think Jay's work on Jaws and the Hall of Fame is so valuable because you're able to view those guys not only within the context of baseball, but within the context of their specific position and understand sort of what is Hall of Fame caliber given that position. And I know that for some positions like DH and reliever, people's mileage can vary on that. But in general, I think that the stat is always the starting point. And then you use that stat to help tell the story. And that almost always involves greater context than

what we are able to have encompassed in that number and you know for dhs and relievers you're having one context and for catchers another and you're right that like playing time is a huge part of that and and then we have to acknowledge the things that we either can't quantify yet or have been only recently able to quantify and and try to tell as complete a story as we can. All right. I have two more here on my sheet. Jeremy Patreon. I think this will probably be quick. I suspect we will agree.

I was recently reading Joe Posnanski's Baseball 100 article about Frank Robinson's historic first year as player manager of Cleveland. It got me thinking about player managers. Do you think we will ever see player managers again, especially as front offices more and more script on-field decision-making or even look to cut costs? I know Ben has personal experience with a player manager through Phelan Lentini with the Stompers.

What did he learn of the positives and negatives about player managers? Do you think baseball is the sport most amenable to having player managers or might player managers fare better in other sports? Who is baseball's best or most successful player manager? What position would make the best player manager? Would it be too hard if you were the catcher?

There are more questions about player managers here, but I think we can just primarily answer the first one here, which is will we see or should we see another player manager? And I don't believe there's been one since Pete Rose. I think his last season as player manager was 1986, which was just before I was born. So there has not been a player manager in my lifetime. And I don't expect that there will be. No, I don't think there will be either, especially because of all of the, it's like, there's so much work, right? Like what, what a manager does on the field is obviously a big

part of their job but there's so much stuff that they have to do away from that and the idea that they're going to be able to do that and then also do the work to be a really good baseball player seems seems like there's just not enough time like we only have the the 24 hours in the day so yeah i don't see the advantage really and jeremy makes a good point about the job and responsibilities of managers changing. And to some extent, some duties have been taken out of their hands. But I just still don't think it makes sense. And I think if anything, we are seeing increasing specialization.

We are seeing the expansion of coaching staffs. We're seeing teams that will have 12 or 13 major league coaches right so i don't think we are heading toward a world where you are going to say we don't need a manager anymore or a separate manager we'll just make this player the manager i just don't really see the benefit unless you think that there is some greater leadership impact or it's better for the clubhouse to have a manager be the player but i don't think that's the case i think it puts players in awkward positions to be the manager to have to fill out the lineup and make bullpen changes and how do you even make four or five pitching changes a game if

you're playing second base at the same time or something. I mean, there's just so much going on and there's just no need to do it. I don't think there's much more of an emphasis on player development at the major league level and you can't really be responsible for developing other players if you're worrying about yourself. There's just no need. I think it makes sense that baseball has gone away from this and I can't imagine it going back in the other direction. Yeah, I can't either. I mean, the HR component of being a member of the clubhouse i think is just it's it's possible but you would have to work really hard to have that be true and there's no

reason to require a player to do it so just like have a have a skipper plus you need to call someone skip it's great right yeah jeremy baited me with his last question which was if shohei can pitch and hit do you think we will ever again see someone play and manage? I didn't think we would see someone do what Shohei did. So I suppose it's within the realm of possibility. It's probably more feasible to be a player manager than it is to do what Otani did. So you could do it. I just don't think you would be as good at either job.

it. I just don't think you would be as good at either job. And that touches on the Stompers experience. And I don't know if that was predictive of anything in particular, but it certainly seemed as if being the manager took a toll on Faywant, too, who we hired for the team, we signed for the team and thought he was going to be way too good for that league because he had before and subsequently played at a high level even in the Atlantic League, which is the highest level of indie ball. And this was the Pacific Association. And he kind of had a down year statistically for him, judging by his performance in surrounding seasons. And maybe it was because Sam and I were bugging him all the time. But I think it was also probably because he had that responsibility.

And I don't know that he loved that or embraced it or pursued it subsequently. So again, I just think the more you can take off a player's plate and just let them focus on their on-field performance, the more everyone will benefit. Yeah. And I mean, it's funny though because if anyone would be able to do it in terms of their ability to sort of manage different constituencies within the clubhouse i would imagine a two-way player is best set up to do that right because they can speak with credibility to the position players and pitchers but it's like you know two jobs is that's a lot of jobs for a big leader to do three sounds like far too many jobs. So I tend to think that we won't see this again. But I don't know.

Everyone does like Otani, seemingly. He seems to be quite popular in that clubhouse. So, you know, I think that the people part of it is there, but the feasibility is still lacking. So yes. All right. Last question. This is about a bit of Baseball news that was announced

Recently that the Orioles are making Some changes to the configuration of Camden Yards Matt says I Recently came across an interesting post in conversation In the Orioles subreddit that sparked An effectively wild style question Could a team construct a competitive roster Advantage by manipulating their park dimensions

How often could they deploy The strategy and still realize an advantage? In a recent message to season ticket holders, the Orioles notified affected fans that for the start of the 2022 season, the distance from home plate to the left field wall will be pushed back as much as 30 feet in varying increments at different points in the wall, and the height will raise approximately five feet. By pushing back the left field wall, we've created a playing field that is fair for both pitchers and hitters. One of the top comments makes this observation.

Great move by Orioles GM Mike Elias. Load up on left-handed pitching prospects and kill the right-handed batter's alley in left field. Another commenter observed that the Orioles have an upcoming crop of speedy outfielders who can handle the larger dimension. The implication is that a GM can collect players and prospects who may not suit the current park effect, but then later make strategic changes to the ballpark dimensions that better suit the constructed roster. I know teams already construct rosters with stadium effects in mind, but are there other examples of teams constructing rosters with prospective stadium effects in mind, or otherwise

manipulating park conditions to suit a specific lineup? you think that what the orioles are doing actually coincides with roster rebuilding or is it just coincidental and a long-needed change and for that matter are there any limits on how often a team could tweak its stadium dimensions i recognize that it's easier for the orioles to change seating layouts since most seats are empty anyway. I hope Baltimore gets it together because I feel so bad. You guys have Rutchman. That part's great, but man, it can be kind of... And Mullins. Cedric Mullins.

That's great. I don't think that there's any rule that I'm aware of about how often they're legally allowed to change their layouts. I do think that the seating and season ticket holder thing is a meaningful consideration for a lot of clubs i think the roster construction piece does matter i mean there's a reason we don't see it very often i think in part because it costs money and you don't want to displace people and you want to

have a an idea of what your ballpark dimensions are going to be in advance. I do wonder if teams are perhaps more open to more frequent shifting of their dimensions now because the unknown of the ball is such that they are maybe just like, what are we like? Who knows what we're going to get? It could be crazy. It could be nothing. Like, I wonder if there is an openness to that that is more meaningful now that we have such fluctuation in ball performance. But then again, maybe that makes them less open to change because it just introduces yet another variable. And so why move things around and make things more complicated for yourself?

I don't know. I feel like we see the right amount of dimension change like we don't see it often but we know we don't never see it i think it's fine i don't know i i can't get terribly fussed about this i know that people had like a lot of jokes about this you know affecting particular yankee sitters um but apart from that, I don't really, I don't know, I don't get overly fussed about the dimension thing because we don't have a lot of super extreme dimensions left. Like I think that we've kind of migrated to-

Yes, it has become much more standardized over time. Yeah, we've kind of migrated to the median on a lot of this stuff. So I think that's part of why we don't see a lot of change because it's just, you know, it's not, there's not a lot of change left to be had. check that but just the ones that immediately come to mind like petco or like marlins park or lone shark park or whatever we're calling it these days i think those were trying to help the hitters out a bit and this one is the opposite and it is merited in the sense that if they want a more balanced version of baseball well camden yards has been pretty unbalanced at least according to the stat cast park factors over the past three years it has been pretty unbalanced, at least according to the StatCast park factors. Over the past three years, it has been the second homer-happiest park behind Great American, I think.

And last year, if you look at single-year park factors, it was far and away the most homer-inflating park in the majors. And, you know, the Orioles did a lot of homer-inflating themselves with their pitching staff. But in theory, this should account for a lot of that. I mean, I don't think this change will be significant enough to make the Orioles a run preventer. I think they will need to actually have some good pitchers to do that. And they do have some good pitchers on the way. And maybe part of this is that they don't want Grayson Rodriguez and their other top pitching prospects to encounter this Homer Happy Park where they'll feel bad about giving up lots of home runs.

But of course, you will also hurt some of your position players, and they've done a decent job of developing those. The only rule I know of is that I don't believe you're allowed to change your dimensions in season. of is that I don't believe you're allowed to change your dimensions in season. Which I think goes back to Bill Veck, or at least Bill Veck claimed that it went back to him changing outfield dimensions like by the series within a season, just based on what the opponent was for that given game. And the league did not take kindly to that and outlawed it almost immediately so I think you are frozen once you start the season but as far as I know you could change it every season if you wanted to yeah as you said obviously there are obstacles to that and moving a fence I mean this

is no joke I mean 30 feet in some parts, like that's pretty significant. And I'm actually kind of disappointed because Cam that we'll see fewer opportunities for home run robberies. So that's sort of sad. But as for whether you can actually give yourself a competitive advantage here, I'm skeptical, I guess, about how well you could predict the conditions, the ball, and your roster in advance to tailor this to your strengths or to diminish some of the weaknesses. I guess the best example that comes to my mind is one that involves friend of the show, former podcast guest Dan Evans, who when he was just out of college at the end of the 1982 season, he was working for the White Sox as a newly hired full-timer. the White Sox as a newly hired full-timer. And Harold Baines told him that he thought that the White Sox had been hitting more balls that died on the warning track than their opponents. And Dan Evans went around and other players agreed. And at the time, the White Sox had this early system that they used to chart balls in play. For instance, it was like an Apple IIe that Dan Evans would lug around and chart

all the batted balls and all the matchups and everything and would give you this rudimentary you know spray charts and splits and things that we take for granted now but back then only the white socks had or only a couple of teams had and that seemed to confirm baines's and other players observation that the white socks had been on the losing end of that equation there. And they ran the numbers and they studied the wind and all of those things. And they ended up actually moving the fence or not moving the fence. They actually like moved the entire field, which was easier to do at Comiskey at that point. And so it was like eight feet less difference, I think, from home plate to the outfield, at least certain parts of the outfield. And it seemed to pay off. And who knows

what would have happened otherwise. But the 1983 White Sox were way better and won a ton more games and went to the playoffs and hit a ton of home runs. And there was a good MLB.com article about that recently that I will link to. But that was an example of looking at results from that season and the current construction of the roster and seeing that there might be an advantage or at least less of a disadvantage to changing. And it seemed to have the intended effect, at least in the short term. So there's some precedent for that. And I'm sure that the Orioles wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think it would benefit them in some way. So I suppose they've run the numbers and they've looked at their roster and they've looked

at the players that they have coming up and tried to do some long-term analysis there. But I think it's complicated. There are a lot of different factors that you would have to project. So it might just be as simple as, hey, we don't want an extreme number of home runs to be hit in our park. Right. I think that that's the safest move when you're not able to predict with certainty year to year variation in the ball and you're not able to know exactly how many of your prospects are going to pan out is to move toward something that is mild and in the middle because it's the easiest to navigate around. Right. All right. Thanks for the questions. We can wrap up here. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. Some details about MLB's

proposal to the union have trickled out since we started recording this episode, but it sounds as if the takeaway was what we thought at the time, which is that this is incremental changes. We can discuss some of the specifics at the start of next episode, but I'm sure you know where to find those reports if you're interested in reading them now. I will include a link on the show page. A little more recommended reading. We talked earlier today about LeBron James and the differences between NBA and MLB players in terms of the percentage of a roster that they make up.

One Jeff Sullivan wrote a fun post for FanCrafts back in 2014 called Let's Imagine a Baseball Playing LeBron James, in which he went through a thought experiment of how good a baseball player would have to be to make the same impact on a roster in a season that LeBron James does over the course of an NBA season. And he found that it's essentially impossible. But following along as he reached that conclusion was a lot of fun. So I'll link to that as well. And finally, thanks to everyone who wrote in to tell us that Georgia head coach Kirby Smart brought up the burning the boat story. He used it to motivate his players to win a college football championship over Alabama. Those of you who have read The Only Rules It Has to Work and who go way

back with the podcast may recall that that became a podcast meme and book meme because of how common it is for especially head coaches seemingly, although people in all walks of life, to tell the story about Hernan Cortes burning the boats, motivating his soldiers by essentially telling them that there was nowhere else to go. They couldn't retreat. There are all sorts of problems with that narrative, but it doesn't seem to stop people from repeating it over and over and over again. It's amazing how much mileage college coaches especially seem to get out of burning the boats. Not as big a thing in baseball, although it has come up from time to time. But it is gratifying

that some of you remember, I don't know, five, six-year-old topics and will still inform us when something relevant occurs. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild and pledging some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going

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You can join the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can join the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. And we will be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you then. And all of my language. Talk to you then. I don't have it now. I don't have it now.