Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1813: The Stanky Draft

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

Inspired by the loophole-exposing chicanery of former player and manager Eddie “The Brat” Stanky, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley draft 19 MLB rule changes that were solely or largely precipitated by one player, manager, coach, or owner. Audio intro: We Are Scientists, “Rules Don’t Stop” Audio outro: Pezband, “Eddie’s Pals” Link to A Game of Inches Link […]

So leave your hang-ups back at the door When you and I are down on the floor Well you know what to do about it Rules don't stop me, forget about it Rules don't stop me, we'll get around it Rules don't stop me, we'll get around the rules. Don't stop me, forget about it. Don't stop me, don't stop me. Hello and welcome to episode 1813 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello Meg.

Hello. How are you today? Oscar Ringer joins Ben and Meg Rowley at Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. How are you today? I'm postponed until March 5th at the earliest, but otherwise fine. Just like spring training. Yeah.

I'm actually in a great mood today, not because spring training was officially postponed, which just made official something we really knew was happening already. There does seem to be a bit of optimism on the bargaining front, just in that the two parties are planning to meet pretty frequently next week, it sounds like. And according to Jeff Passon, he tweeted, one of the things that struck me for months now is a majority of industry people believe a deal could come together very quickly and that things will accelerate at the end of February. So we'll see. There were industry people who were optimistic about a deal getting done before now, but all hope is not lost yet. However, that is not why I'm in such a good mood

today. I'm in a good mood today because we've got a good draft on tap here. I'm pretty excited about this one. It is a good draft. Can I express trepidation about it slightly? Sure. Mostly, this is going to be so much fun and I'm looking forward to it. But I find myself struggling to come up with like a grand unified theory of this draft in terms of what I'm prioritizing. So I struggled with that. And I imagine, you know,

we have sort of a set list of things that we can draft. So there's that. But I think that we might look back on this draft and think, Meg, what were you going for here? What were your objectives? What did you think was good? So, you know, there's that. So I guess I'm with you on that. I kind of like every possible pick here. I just really like the idea of this draft. So what we are drafting today is rules changes in baseball that were precipitated by one person. Generally a player, sometimes a manager, sometimes an owner.

But in most of these cases, one person did something, exploited some loophole, something that wasn't covered by the rules, and then the league was forced to react and institute some rule to prevent that behavior from happening in the future. And some of these are borderline cases, possibly, as we will get into. But I love the idea of this draft because I'm just fascinated by rules in sports, I think, as are you. I mean, you've read the rulebook, right? Like more than once. Yeah, which I can't claim. I have spot read the rulebook, but not cover to cover.

And I'm kind of fascinated just by the give and take of players and teams exploiting things, finding little edges, and then either other teams are forced to counteract them and nullify them somehow, or the league itself is forced to step in. You could write a book, and maybe that book has been written about just rules changes in sports, and really it works in any sport, but baseball has been around for so long that there are just more opportunities to have done this, more rules changes to have been made over the years. So I love the idea of this, and I've done a lot of research because it's kind of tough to pin down the candidates for this, which is why we haven't done it before now. This was actually suggested by a listener and Patreon supporter, Mark Arduini,

who brought this idea to me a long time ago. He wrote to me and said that this was an idea that kind of came out of a correspondence that we had started by something else. And at the end of the thread, he said, next February or September or whenever we're in the baseball doldrums and topics are hard to come by, you could make this a draft. Well, that was October 2018 when he wrote that. But we're really in the baseball doldrums now and topics are hard to come by. So we just saved it for the deepest of the doldrums, the lockout, month three or whatever of the lockout. So thanks to Mark for your 2018 suggestion that you could not have known I would take now. So the reason why this is difficult is that it's tough to establish the truth of a lot of these tales.

And it's also hard to narrow down cases where it really was one person responsible for a change as opposed to just a bunch of people who kind of contributed to it in some way. And I relied on some of my own research here. I also consulted a couple of high caliber historians, John Thorne, the official historian of MLB.com, and also the author of one of my favorite books of baseball history, A Game of Inches, the stories behind the innovations that shaped baseball, Peter Morris, and just sort of sent them my list and they helped me take some off and put some on. And I just wanted to read a little bit from the intro to A Game of Inches here, because I think it helps establish why this is so difficult to actually

come up with a fairly factual list here. And it's really just the difficulty of doing history in any area, really. But here's what he says. Stories of firsts are often told as eureka moments in which a new idea previously overlooked suddenly occurred to the storyteller. In fact, it is rare for a first to originate in this way. In particular, complex maneuvers such as the wheel play or the various cutoff plays are developed through a give and take between offense and defense and cannot be invented in one step. Similarly, the word invent always needs to be scrutinized carefully. Sometimes these statements are simply false. For example, Abner Doubleday invented baseball.

Far more often, they oversimplify by taking a complex development and reducing it to a statement like Branch Rickey invented the farm system or Candy Cummings invented the curveball. Claims such as these are often more dangerous than out-and-out fictions because they contain a grain of truth that makes them more difficult to refute. This tendency stems from the natural impulse to make a long story short. But in doing so, a critical part of that story is omitted. He also notes that good stories often outlive good history, right? Print the legend. So if we want to learn the truth, we need to be especially suspicious of memorable stories about a new invention. So, you know, the apple falling on Isaac Newton's head, right? There are a lot of baseball comps for that. The picturesque image of Candy Cummings discovering the curveball while

throwing clamshells, for example, has become part of the lore of the curveball precisely because it is such an appealing tale. But in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of baseball history, it is often necessary to reject such simple and colorful tales in favor of more complex and homelier ones. As we shall see, the clamshell version has survived primarily because it was what Malcolm Gladwell has termed the stickiest version, the rendering of events best suited to stick in people's memories. The premise of this work is to prevent the version of events most consistent with the evidence at hand, whether or not that makes a good story. And then the idea that it's new to me. So as we shall see, a great many claims of firsts are not really first, but merely someone saying that something was new to him.

Sometimes such claims merely reflect the ignorance of the speaker. If such a contention is extremely ill-informed or comes along after the fact, I have felt free to ignore it, but I have done so only when it is clear that the item in question was firmly established before the date being claimed. And then he also points out victor's right history so there has been a strong tendency to credit all firsts to a few champion teams and players and more generally to the national league rather than its less successful 19th century rivals etc etc so all of these things complicate the idea of actually coming up with this rule is in the books because this one person came up with this idea to do this thing on this day. And then the rule was written. So often false or an oversimplification.

And so there are a lot of legends like there's the legend of King Kelly, for example, in the 19th century, who supposedly took advantage of the substitution rules at the time. And I'm quoting here from Sarah Wexler's piece for the Heartball Times from 2015. The specific details differ depending on which source you are reading, but the general outline remains essentially the same. During a game he did not start, Kelly was sitting on the dugout bench when the opposing team's batter hit a high foul ball that drifted his way. Noticing his team's catcher had no chance of getting to the ball, Kelly called out something to announce he was coming into the game. Usually, this is reported as some variation of Kelly now catching. Kelly then made the catch to record what he believed was a legitimate out under the rules of the day. So there are a lot of variations

of that story. Just self-substituted himself in the middle of the play to make a catch. Great story. So you can understand why it would be told and retold, except there is no documentation of this. Many people, including Sarah, have tried to trace down the origin of this, and it just doesn't seem to have ever happened. And it doesn't seem to be consistent with the substitution rules at the time so seems to be complete bunk and kelly was a colorful character and maybe there were things conflated and people just make up these tall tales after the fact so i'm trying to steer away from those in this draft and then there are some where people will attribute a change that had a lot to do with other players and conditions during that time to one person.

So sometimes people will call the changes made after 1968, the change to the mound height and the strike zone, the Gibson rules, the idea that those rules were made in response to Bob Gibson. And sure, he contributed, but that was the year of the pitcher and the league batting average was 230 something. It was not just him, right? And so he was maybe the most visible face of that, but it was a league-wide trend. Or people will say Ed Walsh's spitball was so good that they banned the spitball, but really they'd been talking about that for years and years and it was just kind of a rampant issue. And then there's some stuff that just doesn't seem to be true.

Like sometimes you'll read that the spitball was banned because of Ray Chapman's fatal beaning. That doesn't even line up with the timeline. The spitball was banned before Ray Chapman was beamed. But also sometimes you'll see that umpires started replacing balls and bringing in fresh baseballs during a game because of Ray Chapman, because he was hit by a dirty discolored ball that he couldn't pick up as well. And there's like an element of truth to that in that they were maybe more diligent about enforcing that rule after he was killed, but they had already started doing that years, like a decade before then. So it's not a new rule that was on the books because

of that. So those are all my stipulations here. And as Peter, the author of A Game of Inches, wrote to me via email, a comprehensive list of this kind would be heavily weighted toward the early years because there was no attempt to cover every conceivable point, leaving plenty of loopholes. So there just were not as many rules back then. So there was also a general belief, he says, that exploiting those loopholes was not fair play. However, by the 1880s, that mindset had begun to change, leading Henry Chadwick to moan that National League owners were selfishly passing rules to thwart the superiority of particular players or teams. And he says the nature of this sort of list is that there are a lot of borderline calls and that there are some cases, he notes, where

maybe one player or one play drew attention to a problem and provided the immediate justification for a rule change, but it could plausibly be argued that conditions had changed to make those changes necessary and that an accumulation of events and players were responsible so that's all of the caveat that i wanted to attach to this before we start drafting and i've also ruled out a few like obsolete rule changes like things that are no longer on the books and are just kind of archaic like in the the 1880s, there were rules made to prevent a certain kind of pitching delivery by John Montgomery Ward, for instance, of the Players League,

where he turned his back to hitters and they banned that. But that or, you know, Harry Wright, for instance, they passed a rule to ban non-players from the bench or, you know, the precursor of the dugout at that time. Obviously, that's not still a rule.

So I've taken out a couple of those that really no longer apply and are pretty obscure. So all of that said, I guess I should give you the first pick here. I don't know if there's a – there's not a Jose Iglesias in the minor league free agent draft pick here. It's all kind of a jumble. And we're not even sure what criteria we're drafting. This is what I'm saying. Yeah.

Because initially you asked, like, are we drafting based on which rules are the best? And I was thinking maybe just we could kind of go by feel and which ones we like and as you pointed out you dislike the rules because a lot of these loopholes and exploits are really fun yeah so you kind of wish that they could keep happening and so we're not necessarily drafting the rule itself because we're happy that these things are banned now but at least in mind, we're drafting based on our appreciation for either the trollishness or the ingenuity or just the sort of silliness of the initial offense that prompted the rule. I guess that's kind of how I'm thinking of it. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

You don't have to draft that way. We can draft based on different criteria. Who knows? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think that, and I want to be clear in terms of my, some of these are just no fun rules. Like there's a sliding scale for that. I think that your insight that while some of these names are sort of strongly associated with one historical figure, that they might just constitute the game having gotten to a point

where they were saying enough already, right? That, you know, we have to move things along. We have to maintain competitive balance. We can have sort of loopholes that we don't feel the need to explicitly close. But if they're going to keep getting picked at, we might have to sort of stitch them up so that we have a game that resembles something that is what we want. If people prove themselves to be unwilling to control themselves, then we might have to have some regulation to do it for them. So I'm sympathetic to that as a need, even if I wish that some of these rules were not explicitly stated. Although I do think that there are a

couple of them that are just patently unnecessary, but i'm going to go i'm going to go with a a conservative pick at the top of the draft actually because i don't see i really don't see a downside to it and i think i think I'm going to take... I'm picking between conservative picks now. This is great, right? You have the first overall pick and you're not sure what to take. Well, you know. Yeah, I guess that that's true. I'm the dreams of this draft with uncertainty at the top. I'm going to take the Chase Utley rule.

I'm going to take the Chase Utley rule because I think that while there are times when there's sort of a gray area around the exact enforcement of this rule, the rules that guarantee that guys are going to stay on the field or at least are pointed in the direction of keeping guys on the field and preventing injury are generally really good rules i think that the intent behind this rule is to balance action on the field with player safety and i think that it

tends to balance it in the correct direction and i don don't want to see one of the dumbest joints in the human body, the knee, taken advantage of in such a way that a guy gets hurt and we don't see him for a while. And so I realize that this is like a pretty conservative pick. And I know that at the time it generated a fair amount of controversy among players. I think that there were guys who thought that it was too conservative. But generally, I think that, like, we want to prevent takeout slides. I don't, and I should say,

I don't think that Chase Utley, like, intended to injure Ruben Tejada on this play. Like, I don't think that he slid with the intent of banging him up, but that was the end result of this, and I think that regulating it so that guys maintain safety is a good thing to do. So that's the idea here.

Do we need to, point of clarification, do we need to explain each of these rules as we're doing them? I feel like most people know the Chase Utley rule. Probably, yeah, because it's one of the more recent ones. But just in case, I have a bunch of links and notes here, so I can. Just for anyone who's new to the show, new to baseball. Yeah, but I can kind of give some of the highlights here. So a runner sliding into second has to make a bona fide attempt to not just slide into the base but also to remain

on the base runners will not be allowed to change their pathway to the base in the middle of a slide to break up a double play base runners can no longer use a roll block on an infielder to break up a double play essentially and i'm i'm quoting here from um a piece by jason stark when he was with espn we will as you said link to all of. You'll be able to check this out for yourself. But I'm quoting from Jason's piece here. Base runners can no longer use a roll block on an infielder to break up a double play. Essentially, that means they can't start their slide in midair and make contact with the infielder

at or near the knee with either a leg, arm, or the body before they've made contact with the ground. If a runner makes contact with the infielder illegally, both he and the batter would be called out. But If a runner makes contact with the infielder illegally, both he and the batter would be called out. But if the runner makes contact with the infielder while attempting a bona fide slide, he would not be called out for interference. Finally, because of these new safety measures,

MLB and the union have agreed to allow umpires to more strictly enforce the neighborhood play and use replay to review the play for the first time. So the idea here was you need to slide in such a way that you are making a a real effort to not just take the guy out but to actually slide into the bag and then stay there and the penalty for failing to do that if it is deemed that you made contact illegally is both that you and the batter are called out. So I think this is a good rule. I think that its aim is good. I think that it levies an appropriate consequence if you fail to follow the rule, because sometimes a rule is good, but the effect it has on the field is

disproportionate sort of to the magnitude of the offense. And I don't think that this falls into that category. So yeah. That's a great one. Yeah yeah when Otley broke Ruben Tejada's leg in what was it the the 2015 NLDS I think I believe that's right that spurred this rule change but of course he was not the first to be hurt on a play like this so great choice and I'm probably going to go in a completely different direction. Do it. You have chosen one that is making the world a better and safer place and prolonging careers and just making everything sports safer for everyone. This is very high minded of you. And I am going in the opposite direction. And I'm drafting the stanky maneuver. Yeah.

My first pick. In my mind, this is the clear number one here in that it is probably the silliest. So the Stanky Maneuver, or it was sometimes I believe called the Stanky Semaphore Wave. This was perpetrated by Eddie Stanky, who is the patron saint of this draft. His name is going to be coming up a couple more times. And in fact, he was kind of initially attached to it. I think when Mark suggested this, he suggested calling it the Stanky Draft, which we probably should do at least informally here, because he was known for being someone who would always look for loopholes and any edge he could. His nickname was The Brat. And also, I believe he was sometimes called Mugsy or Stinky. Just really great nicknames all around.

He was a really good player in the 40s and 50s, a second baseman. He drew a ton of walks. He just kind of exploited every edge and was just a really gritty player and then went on to be a fairly successful manager for a few teams too. But probably he is best known, at least in this arena, for the stanky maneuver, which is not only well-named but extraordinarily silly. So I will read here from the passage on the stanky maneuver in a game of inches. the passage on the Stanky maneuver in a game of inches. In a game on August 9th, 1950, Boston Braves batter Bob Elliott asked the second base umpire to move out of his line of vision. This gave Giants second baseman Eddie Stanky an idea, and he stationed himself exactly where the umpire had been standing and moved around to distract Elliott. His tactic attracted little attention, so Stanky refined it. When the Giants

played the Phillies two days later, Stenke drove Andy Semenik, Philadelphia's catcher, all but crazy with his annoying habit of planting himself behind second and waving his arms to distract a batter as the pitcher delivers. The umpires could find no rule to prevent it. So after the game, they attempted to contact National League president Ford Frick for a ruling. Unable to track him down by the opening of the next day's game, communication was less instantaneous in those days. Frick didn't have his cell phone

with him, I guess. They asked Giants manager Leo DeRocher not to repeat the tactic until Frick could render a decision. DeRocher agreed, but during the game, Semenik precipitated a brawl with a hard slide into third base. DeRocher then told but during the game, Semenik precipitated a brawl with a hard slide into third base. DeRocher then told Stanky to do as he pleased, so he recommenced his jumping jacks and the umpires ejected him. A heated debate ensued. Phillies manager Eddie Sawyer called

it unsportsmanlike and strictly Bush League stuff. DeRocher, however, maintained smart ballplayers have been pulling stuff like that for the last 25 years. I've been in baseball and it's perfectly legal as far as I'm concerned. Additional arguments were advanced on both sides. Some wondered how Stanky's tactic was any different from a baserunner who jockeys off a base to disconcert the pitcher. Fair point. But others felt that distracted batters would be unable to avoid pitched balls and noted that Semenik had been hit by a pitch while Stanky was distracting him, so it became a safety issue. Ford Frick ended the debate by instructing umpires to eject fielders for, quote, antics on the field designed or intended to annoy or disturb the opposing batsman. And the rule, I believe, as written now, says, no fielder shall take a position in the batter's line of vision and with deliberate unsportsmanlike intent act in a manner to distract the batter. So just love this one.

Was it unsportsmanlike? Yes. Was it unsafe? Probably. But there is something that I admire in just the pettiness and the willingness to say, hey, there's no rule against it. Like you would probably hate him in real life. I mean, from what I understand, Stanky was actually a pretty good guy off the field. Like he was hyper competitive on the field and as a manager and he took losses extremely hard.

But he seems to have been a nice fellow and a good family man and he is even reputed to have been a backer and defender and supporter of Jackie Robinson when he was Robinson's teammate with the 1947 Dodgers so seems like he was a good guy and yet everyone kind of hated him in a baseball context. And I guess later he grew to not love his brat nickname because he didn't actually consider himself to be a brat. But I think in a baseball context, he undoubtedly was. And I just I admire this. It's like you could actually I mean, it probably would be beneficial, I guess, if you could do this. It probably would be beneficial, I guess, if you could do this.

It would be unsafe, but also it would be pretty distracting to have a middle infielder hopping around as you were trying to hit. So if anything, it's surprising that no one had pulled this prior to that point, at least in such a way that it prompted a rule change. But I guess you needed a stanky to come along and just have no regard for propriety. Yeah, I just there should be more stanky to come along and just have no regard for propriety. Yeah. I just, there should be more stankies. Yeah. I think he was born stankowitz, but his family changed it to stanky, which I don't know if that's really an improvement, but stanky it is. There should be more stankies.

We have a surfeit of stankies and we need a deficit of stankies. We have a dearth of stankies. Yes. We need more stankies. Okay. We have a dearth of Stankys. Yes. We need more Stankys. Okay. Well, what am I going to do? I'm going to take the Ross Barnes rule, the fair foul bunt.

Yes. So here I will be quoting at length from a piece from 2019 by Eric Chesterton at MLB.com. And Eric raises the really excellent point in the introduction to this piece that baseball is a little bit odd as sports go in that the sort of boundaries of the field of play are dependent on where they are, where on the field of play you are and sort of where the ball is. And that's a little bit weird. Like in football and basketball and soccer, we have a very clear and consistent understanding of where the field of play starts

and stops. But in baseball, we have some ambiguity. And here I will quote the rule on where territory is fair versus foul. A foul ball is about a ball that settles on foul territory between home and first base or between home and third base or that bounds past first or third base on or over foul territory or that first falls on foul territory beyond first or third base or that while on or over foul territory touches the person of an umpire or a player or any object foreign to the natural ground. So the idea that like fair and foul is dependent on whether you're on the infield or the outfield and where the ball touches and all sorts of stuff. This is very strange. And you might think, what's up with that? Well, chicanery. Chicanery is up with that.

And so here I shall quote. In the 1870s, the batter was able to choose whether he wanted the pitcher to throw a high ball or a low ball. With this rule, some hitters began to develop a certain type of swing. They would call for a low pitch and chop down on it to create some pretty wicked spin or english as they called it and we should we should reincorporate english into the baseball vocabulary more than it is now i know that we see it but it's too rare we we ought to have it be more every day that caused the ball to land fair just in front of home plate then dart off into foul territory as long as it landed fair first it was in play forcing fielders to chase down balls nowhere near what we would think of as the field of play the strategy was called the fair foul bunt but it's probably best not to think of it like a bunt to get to first base the fair foul bunt

produced more than just singles if a player struck the ball properly and it bounced off the home plate which was made of cast iron at the time, as an aside, it's amazing that any of these guys survived long enough to play baseball. It just has... Many of them didn't. Many of them didn't, but just hazards abounded. In just the right way, it could bounce quite a ways,

sometimes even under the stands. It was perhaps the world's first cheat code. No one was better at this technique than Ross Barnes, a second baseman for the Boston Redstockings. He was a savant of fair foul bunting, employing the strategy to such great effect that he led the league in hitting three separate times. While most players engaged in more of a bunting motion, it's probably more accurate to label Barnes' technique hitting. According to the Chicago Tribune, quote, Barnes always hit the fair foul with a full swing of the bat, just as hard as he strikes at any kind of ball.

Barnes was not living off of bunt singles. He hit 401 in his first season in 1871, then followed up by hitting 430 the next year and 431 the year after that. And he didn't just lead the league in batting average. He also led the league in slugging and ops in 1872 and 73 and then this piece continues they moved home plate into foul territory so barns couldn't aim for it they moved the batter's box back into foul territory so barns couldn't just chop straight down on the ball and land it fair but barns kept hitting and the red stockings kept winning finally they changed the rules to eliminate the fair foul bunt starting in 1877 the ball had to remain in fair territory past first or third base to be ruled a fair ball the same rules we have today in other words the fair foul bunt became simply a foul bunt and i love the idea we see this so many times in baseball's

history like you said of like guys who are just like you know either they know that there is a loophole or they have a very particular skill and they are able to use it to their advantage in a way that other players don't quite to the same degree. And it teaches us something about sort of what we understand the purpose of rules to be and how we understand the boundaries of fairness within the game. I mean, quite literally fairness in this case, but sort of more philosophically fairness that this presents to the pitching team just a disastrous set of choices that often are going to put the batter at an unfair advantage and lead to have to run and what sort of access they should have to the ball and sort of how easy or reasonable we think it is for them to have to field something. And so anyway, here I am picking the Barnes rule. So there you go.

Yeah, this is a great one. I wasn't sure whether to include this one. And I wasn't sure whether to include this one. I went back and forth because I think this is probably one of the more borderline cases in that Barnes was not the only person doing this and it was kind of a league wide issue. And so maybe this is a case where he was just the most visible person and kind of gets associated with it. But it's not necessarily a one-to-one relationship. Looking at A Game of Inches, evidently the fair foul hit was invented by a player named Dickie Pierce in the 1860s, and then he continued to do it into the 1870s. Thing is that Dickie Pierce was not good. Right. And maybe he was good at the fair foul hit, but it did not make him even a good hitter. He was a below average hitter. Whereas Russ Barnes, Nate Silver has called him arguably the single most dominant player in major league history. He was not great for that long. He's not even in the Hall of Fame,

actually. He didn't play 10 years and he had an illness and left the league quickly. But while he was there and in his peak, like the first several years of pro baseball at that level, 1871 to 1876, he was easily the best, most valuable player in baseball. And just quoting here again from Game of Inches, the tactic continued to develop in the 1870s with Ross Barnes becoming the most expert practitioner of the technique, 1970s with Ross Barnes becoming the most expert practitioner of the technique whereas Pierce's fair fouls appear to have been closer to Bunce Barnes generally used a full swing Jim O'Rourke recalled that Barnes's method was hitting the ball so it would smash on the ground near the plate just inside of the third baseline and would then mow the grass over the line away out into the field. And so as he got so good at this and dominated the league, the fair foul hit became more

controversial. And so I think you could say that maybe he was the impetus for the change, even though he was not the originator and not the only person to do it. But I think it passes the sniff test or close enough. But I'm quoting again from Nate's baseball prospectus piece here. Barnes's reputation has been besmirched to some degree because once he fell from his peak, he fell incredibly quickly. And this somewhat coincided with the rapidly improving quality of competition in professional baseball. In 1877, Barnes fell ill.

The fair foul rule was also changed that year. Now a ball had to stay fair past first or third base to count as a hit, whereas previously all it had to do was land in fair territory. It didn't matter if it then went to the backstop. It was unclear which of these two factors was the more important in Barnes's demise, but either way he was never really the same. However, Nate says, I think Ross Barnes should be in the Hall of Fame. The way that I look at this is as follows. If, as is highly likely, any number of hitters were taking advantage of the fair foul bunt, then Barnes's hitting prowess cannot be reduced to some loophole in the rules. The rising tide was lifting all boats. Instead,

Barnes's decline from 1877 onward probably had more to do with his illness. If, on the other hand, Barnes was uniquely able to take advantage of the Fairfell bunt such that baseball specifically had to change its rules to reel him in. Doesn't that almost definitionally qualify him for enshrinement? Ross, you're too good. We're changing the rules. Someday, 60 years from now, somebody is going to set up a baseball museum in Cooperstown, New York, and this is the sort of thing that will be mentioned on your plaque. How many players in sports history have precipitated a major rule change all by themselves, Nate says, anticipating the topic of our draft here. He wrote, the closest analogy I can think of is the NCAA banning the slam dunk in preparation for Lew Alcindor's career at UCLA, although that story is probably apocryphal, as could be the case with Barnes.

So anyway, that is an interesting philosophical question. That is an interesting philosophical question. If you find a hole in the rules and you exploit it so effectively that you are the best player in baseball and then they ban that rule and you're not so good robo-umps in a few years, right? Well, you look at the great framers and say, oh, they were just exploiting a loophole that was closed after 150 plus years, you know? But it was still really valuable at the time and it took a certain sort of skill. So I think we should credit him for that. So I think that's an excellent pick. It's so interesting because you do have have baseball has this reputation that is well earned as being a copycat league and i wonder if you know the adoption is the the thing that makes the difference which doesn't say that there aren't things that all 30 teams could suddenly start doing that the league would say oh no no no we gotta we gotta get rid of that because it tips things too far the other direction i mean like

they're trying to do this with shifting like like there are all of these rules around sign stealing. But, you know, I think that there is some protection to be had in other teams seeing the utility of something and picking it up and running with it. And it diminishes your advantage, which is perhaps part of why those practices are allowed to continue because they don't seem as if they are tipping the scales too far in one direction. Right. But yeah, it's definitely interesting. The framing is fine, you guys. They got to catch the baseball. They're doing a good job.

That's all. Yeah. All right. What is your next pick? All right. Continuing in the vein of silliness, I am going to take Lenny Randall blowing on a foul ball. Sorry.

Dang it. I took the Mariner on the list. I'm sorry. That's okay. That was my next pick. Randall blowing on a foul ball. Sorry. Dang it. I took the Mariner on the list. I'm sorry. That's okay. That was my next pick. Now I have to think. Okay.

Well, you can think while I explain this one. So I'll quote from a Hardball Times piece by Chris Jaffe from 2011 when he wrote that 30 years prior to that day, one of the most memorable and certainly most original defensive strategies in Major League history occurred. Mariners third baseman Lenny Randall tried to blow a ball foul. In the sixth inning of the game against the Royals, Kansas City star Amos Otis tapped a slow roller down the third baseline. It was one of those balls hit ever so right, right place, right speed, right trajectory that it looked like a sure infield single. It went to where no fielder was.

By the time a fielder got to it and picked it up and threw it out, Otis would be safe. Last but not least, it looked like it wouldn't go into foul territory while it rolled through the infield. That's when Lenny Randall entered the picture. He ran up to the ball and got down on his hands and knees and screamed at it, go foul, go foul, go foul. That was not against any rules. You can still scream at the ball if you want.

He stayed alongside the ball without touching it, but the force of his breath knocked it off course and it went foul. What would be a single was now a foul ball. Royals manager Jim Frey protested, saying Randall was the reason it went foul and therefore the ump's call of a foul ball should be changed. Randall counter-protested he wasn't trying to blow it foul, but just trying to use the power of suggestion. The ump didn't like Randall's argument and changed the call. Otis got his single. The rule has since been rewritten to clarify a Randall-like scenario. Now the rule states that a person can't alter the path of a ball, a verb that does not require actual physical contact to be enforced. So he was not necessarily exactly screaming.

I mean, he was screaming at it, he said, more so than blowing at it. It looks like blowing to me. It also looks like it might have gone foul anyway. I don't know. The video's on YouTube. I'll link to it. You can come to your own conclusion. But I'm guessing it wasn't the breath. It was still in motion and it seemed so it took all the way until 1981 for someone to do this in such a way that uh they determined that you can't blow on it you can't flap your arms at it you

can't create any kind of current you can't uh make a polko foul without physically touching it either so kudos to lenny randall that's delightful i mean i clearly agree i was about to take that yep i'm going to take the george smith rule this is base coach interference sort of a coaching spiritual cousin to the jimmy cooney rule and here i will i will read from a game of inches it's a bird it's a plane, it's only the third base coach. Early coaches made occasional efforts to interfere with or distract opposing fielders. There are instances of this practice as early as 1866 when a club captain had to be, quote, told by the umpire that he must not get on the third base with his men and run in with them, thus hindering the play of their opponents,

which later they attempted to do throughout the game. This is from the Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, August 25th, 1866. The trick became more common during the old school of clowns era, which as an aside, we should do drafts where we get to like go back to old timey era names because the old school of clowns era, I mean, you're not doing better than that. For base coach mike kelly of chicago ran all the way out to the shortstop position to provide a distraction during an 1886 series against detroit at the end of the first full season of the coach's box the new york times observed that the new lines had succeeded at discouraging the trick of personating runners from third base to home plate it doesn't seem to have entirely eliminated the practice.

While coaching for Brooklyn in 1890, George Smith got carried away and ran home ahead of the base runner he was coaching. The catcher tagged Smith instead of the runner, and after a long argument, the umpire ruled the runner out. The tactic was explicitly prohibited by an 1804 rule change. rule change and i just i love the idea very much of a coach being so so committed to helping their player right fans are always trying to help we're always trying to be good little helpers to the teams that we like best this is why we heckle players this is why we heckle umpires this is why i still think that everyone should just yell balk all the time when their team is up to bat and the opposing pitcher is moving around on the mound. We're always trying to be helpers.

And coaches are much more proximate helpers than fans, obviously. They can influence players all the way through their day. They help them be better before they take the field, and they can help them be better while they're on the field. But I love the idea that that is not enough, right? That their enthusiasm to help would, would make it such that they would decide, I am going to go assume the shortstop position and endeavor to distract the fielder. And this is normal play, right? That's fine. Like that at some point you had to create a rule to say no no you have to stay in this little box because we cannot trust you to control yourself and you may create very real confusion

on the field i also think that the the idea of there being confusion here is an artifact of the era of this rule because and i do not say this to offend third base coaches today but the idea that a catcher would be confused about a third base coach versus an active player seems to strain cajolity i mean i understand that guys are running fast and you might be in the heat at the moment but most i think third base coaches are obviously of a different uh playing vintage shall we say than current players so i don't think that this is necessarily as big of an issue in the modern day even if we didn't have this rule because it's so obvious who is who but you know we do have

third base coaches that that wander that sort of test the boundaries like a velociraptor of the of the box they're supposed to stand in and so we probably would still need something today, even if I think the antics would be more subdued and less confusing to fielding players. Yep, this is a great one. Again, this happened in 1890. The rule wasn't changed until 1904. Is it definitely a direct result of that? I'm not positive. It's the most famous and notable example of this happening. And there are times when a rule gets changed because of something that happened some number of years before. So I think it's close enough and in the spirit of this. I also enjoyed on the same page of A Game of Inches that you just quoted from, there

is an earlier section about first base coaches. So the one you were just reading about George Smith, third base coach, but this was also amusing. Another way in which the game's authorities attempted to address the nuisance of noisy coaches

was by limiting the number. An 1897 rule change restricted teams to one coach until they had the bases loaded. This change is recommended because it has been proven in the past that the presence of two coaches

allows a crossfire of talk between them far into the game and frequently of a character objectionable to spectators i love the idea that like the first and third base coaches were just like cursing at each other across the diamond or something it was driving fans away yeah paul bagala and tucker carlson out there screaming back and forth better than that it says the rule was unpopular from the first with an early season article reporting trouble is brewing in the National League and indications point to open rebellion before many days are passed. The rules framed by the magnates have taken all the fun out of the game. They allow only one coacher and make every player sit on the bench. The rule takes all of the life out of the game

if the rule is not repealed it will kill the game in fact it is dead now oh my gosh no one wants to see the game as now played so because they limited it to one coach on the field the game was dead this might be the most extreme example of of the baseball is dying fallacy that i can recall yeah that's spectacular and not to keep on this but the one just before first base coaches is called amplified coaching megaphones were brought to prominence by the u.s navy's effective use of them in 1898 during the spanish-american war with coaching putting a premium on leather lungs that occurred to some unknown innovator that megaphones would be a natural.

A 1902 article noted the megaphone ought to be barred from coaching. It was used on both sides in the great Harvard-Yale game, but there is really no place for it in baseball. And this is base and ball with a space between them. That reasoning appears to have been persuasive as megaphones quietly disappeared from the coaching lines. Wonderful. Racist and uncouth as it was, early baseball had some charms and some quaint aspects.

Yes. All right. Well, because baseball still exists now that we have multiple coaches on the field, or at least we will if the lockout is ever lifted. That's the only reason anyone was watching back then. Yes. Multiple coaches were on the field, or at least we will if the lockout is ever lifted. That's the only reason anyone was watching back then. Multiple coaches were on the field. All right. I will go back to Mr. Stanky for this one. So this will be the second of three Eddie Stanky picks.

And by the way, I meant to mention when I took the Stanky maneuver, I forgot to read the rationale that was cited at the time by James Gallagher, who was a Cubs executive and was on the rules committee. He said, no fielder can place himself in the line of the batter's vision, nor can he make moves to distract the hitter. Gallagher said, I don't think I have to tell you who this rule is aimed at, which was wonderful. But I'm taking a different Stanky-related rule here. And it's the idea that you cannot get a running start when you are tagging up at third base and trying to score. Because what Stanky would evidently do is if he was on third and there was a fly ball hit, he would back up and get a running start. He'd be down the baseline as the ball was in the air and he'd get a running start and he would time it so that he crossed the bag

just as the fielder caught the ball and he'd already have a full head of steam. And so he'd be at full speed and he'd have a better chance of scoring. And I'm pretty sure that Stanky had something to do with this one. It's a little tougher to determine, but I found a 1956 article that says so, that it notes that Eddie Stanky thought up a gimmick, not especially fast himself. Stanky concocted the idea of getting a running start at third base. When an opposing outfielder was camping under a fly ball, Stanky, instead of merely tagging up and waiting for the ball to be caught, retreated down the foul line, started running before the ball actually was caught. When it was, he was hitting the third base bag at full stride and was flying toward the plate.

The majors didn't take kindly to this innovation, so they rewrote the rule. Now it states specifically that you have to wait with foot on bag for the ball to be caught before you can move. And I did find a 1953 article that suggested that it was maybe Alvin Dark and Bobby Thompson on the 1952, I guess, Giants under Leo DeRocher that had been doing this. But Stanky had been on that team just prior to that with the giants under DeRocher. So I think it's consistent with that, that maybe he invented it and then some of his teammates continued to do it. But again, this is just perfect. Stanky encapsulated. He was not a big guy.

He was not fast or super athletic. So he looked for any little edge that he could. And I'm pretty sure that we have gotten this question in the past. This might have even been actually what prompted the email that led to Mark's suggestion that we do this as a draft. So, again, you just have to hand it to Stanky for finding a little loophole and exploiting it while it was still open. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. I think I'm going to take the ambidextrous pitching role. Yeah. And not amphibious pitching role, but an ambidextrous pitching role, which is the Pat Venditti rule. And I just have to say, I don't know that there's ever been a baseball player that my father has found more troublesome or offensive than Pat Venditti rule. And I just have to say, I don't know that there's ever been a baseball player that my father has found more troublesome or offensive than Pat Venditti. And that is not

an objection to Pat Venditti's personhood, which I frankly don't know anything about, and neither does my dad. But I do recall a time where he saw Venditti against the Mariners, and he was just flabbergasted by it and said, he should have to pick. Seems unfair. And I don't think that Pat Venditti's mere existence is unfair, but the Pat Venditti rule is certainly meant to combat a particular bit of potential unfairness that could result from pitchers like Venditti who can throw with both hands. So the Pat Venditti rule, which was introduced as it is

currently constituted, I believe in 2015, was meant to, oh no, perhaps it was, no, sorry, my bad. I think it happened before that because the inciting incident happened all the way back in 2008. So they likely updated it before that. But the Van Diddy rule basically requires that when a switch hitter is coming to the plate, Venditti has to indicate to the plate umpire which hand he intends to throw with, and then the batter is given the opportunity to decide which batter's box he is going to hit from. And this is the result of a confrontation while Venditti was in short season ball in 2008. And here I am going to be quoting from a New York Times piece in response to

switch hitter Ralph Henriquez coming to the plate. In the midst of those discussions, Venditti tossed warm-up pitches with both arms. I don't think the umpires really knew how to handle it, Venditti said. It's not something you see every day. After a seven-minute delay, Smith, who I assume is the home plate umpire here,

ordered Henriquez to step into the box as a right-handed batter and Venditti now pitching right-handed proceeded to strike him out swinging when asked before Friday's game if he had ever seen anything like that McMahon who I think was the manager for the opposing team paused before uttering softly uh no and so they clarified this situation to make certain that the pitcher has to declare first and then the switch hitter is allowed to respond. And it strikes me as the right order of operations, right? Hitting is so reactive already

and giving them a little bit of opportunity to set the terms of engagement as they would if the pitcher were not ambidextrous, right? If you're a switch hitter and you know the handedness of the pitcher going in, you make your decision with a piece of information. You know how you hit from both sides and are likely to be able to just sort of have a sense of how you will fare in the at-bat in a way that an ambidextrous pitcher sort of upends, right? You're shifting the apple cart around,

and we don't like that. We like our apple carts to be stable. So i think that this balances things correctly given the sort of already reactive nature of hitting and uh it's a good rule i don't think pat vendetti's pitching anymore like i think he's no he didn't pitch in 2021 i think he's done now and you know he wasn't amazing as a pitcher but he was amazing as a pitcher right and so that so that's a pretty cool thing, to be able to get to the point where even in short season ball, you can pitch competently with both hands. It's like a pretty spectacular thing, even if you don't have a long or particularly productive major league career. So Pat Venditti, the most amazing, not amazing pitcher ever, and the rule named after him.

Yeah, it's a little bit of a letdown that he wasn't more successful because if you're gonna have that guy who comes along then you want him actually to be really good it's like you know if otani were not quite as good as he is if he were just a competent two-way player and were like average at each thing i mean that would be interesting and wonderful too. But the fact that he is among the best hitters and the best pitchers is incredible. You kind of wish that Van Tiddy were also really great at what he does, but maybe what he does is what enabled him to even be in the majors as a passable pitcher for a time, right? I don't know that he would have been able to in case another ambidextrous pitcher ever comes along which i hope happens but yes just a singular career i know there are some other kind of quasi

ambidextrous pitchers in the past but he really he really did it and uh therefore he forced a forced to rule change all right for my next pick i think i will take germany schaefer and the idea of stealing first base yeah and i went back and forth on including this one because some people think it's kind of apocryphal but i think it's real enough and it kind of is known to a lot of people because it was mentioned in a Glory of Their Times, the wonderful oral history book. And because that's an oral history, it is not fact-checked. And there are a lot of tall tales in that book that were not actually true. And I think some people have concluded that maybe the Germany Schaeffer play didn't actually happen. It's not known when it happened. And it is known that he is not the first to have done it. But historians I trust,

including Craig Wright, have concluded that it is likely that it happened, even though we haven't pinpointed exactly when it was. And I believe that I have found some evidence. I don't even know if it's well known or not, but I was doing a newspapers.com search, and I came up with the time that this rule was changed, and it cites Germany Schaefer as the inspiration for the rule change. So good enough for me. So I will just read from this 1920 article. That's when this rule was changed, and this is written by the MLB umpire Billy Evans. So he writes, Several years ago, in a game at Washington, Hermann Schaefer, who is known as Germany,

pulled a play that was the cause of a change in the rules at the Chicago session. In the game, I have reference to Milan was on third and Schaefer on first. Milan was fast and Schaefer an adept at dodging between the two bases. These two made a specialty of the double steal. If the catcher made the throw to second, Milan always had a good chance to score,

and often Schaefer reached first or wiggled back to first in safety. In this instance, the catcher refused to fall for the play and faked a throw to second, permitting Schaefer to reach second. After two balls had been pitched to the batsman, Schaefer made a dash back to first. So he ran the bases backward. He ran the bases in reverse. In a second, everything was upside down on the field and the crowd in an uproar. The ball was thrown to the first baseman.

Of course, Schaefer then started for second, stopping halfway. The first baseman touched first base with the ball, but the umpire made no ruling. The ball was then thrown to the second baseman, who touched that base, but no ruling came from the umpire. It then became evident to the team in the field that the umpire deemed it necessary to touch Schaefer with the ball between the bases or while standing on first base, as he was the occupant of second, and that base alone granted him immunity from being retired. Finally, Milan dashed for the plate and was out on a close play. The team in the field raised the contention that Schaefer should have been called out

for running the bases in reverse order, and that the throwing of the ball to second base, which he vacated, should have been a proper way to retire him. The rules didn't cover the play that way. The rules committee hopes the play has been so covered in the new rule that no more disputes will arise as to how such a player should be retired if some athlete emulates Schaefer. So he was not the first to do it. And I don't totally understand the sequence because he did this, I believe, more than 10 years, it seems like probably before the rule was changed or close to that. It could be the fact that he died in 1919 and maybe his death

brought it back to light somehow. But for whatever reason, it was finally changed and legislated out of existence in 1920. And evidently, Schaefer was cited as the explicit inspiration there. So you can no longer run the bases in reverse. I guess you can run them backwards if you want. You can run backwards. You can just face the wrong direction, but you cannot run the bases in reverse order. And there was the somewhat similar Gene Segura play in 2013, where he was compared to Germany Schaefer, but it wasn't quite the same.

And the ruling was either not known or technically it was not like intentionally. He didn't mean to do that and so he was not ruled out i believe but technically you are not supposed to do this and uh seemingly because of germany shaffer do you think somebody just held on to that for years and years and then was like and another thing right yeah i think uh yeah harry davis i think was maybe the first to have done it even earlier he kind of gets credit i think it was 1902 he was uh said to have done that but yeah schaefer gets all the credit because uh davy jones talked about him in glory of their times and ty cobb cited the example of schaefer doing it as well but But he was not the originator, just the most famous.

But sometimes that's all it takes to get the rule changed. Yep. Sometimes that's all you got to do. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. We're getting into ones that I just am bummed that we have. I mean, I get why we have the Schaefer rule. Like, I get it.

I think that that's a good rule. Like, I get it. I think that that's a good rule. Like, it sows chaos. Some of these are not. Some of these are bad rules. Here's a good rule. This is a good rule. So I'm going to take the Rodgers, Hornsby, players, managers,

can't be owners rule. And I have a couple of reasons for this, some of which might sound a little ideological. But here's the background of the rule. So Hornsbyby and here i am quoting for my new york times piece hornsby who led the st louis cardinals to world series triumph in 1926 as manager and second baseman was traded to the new york giants after the season it turned out that hornsby owned stock in the cardinals and baseball authorities insisted he had to sell it before he could play for a rival team which makes sense that led to a dispute about the value of the stock and a settlement was finally reached in which other teams helped the cardinals pay hornsby substantially the amount that he had

sought that's kind of weird phrasing new york times but that's fine about a hundred thousand dollars which think about it in 1926 like that's a lot of money to forestall other such conflict of interest situations the present rule was adopted it includes the provision that the commissioner may grant permission for a player or a manager to own stock in his own club only if there's also a signed agreement on how the stock will be disposed of if he moves on to another team the most recent sort of enforcement of this rule actually came against ted turner right yeah um who decided to take over as manager of his team after it had lost 16 games in a row. And this rule was invoked. Now, the purpose of the rule, as we have heard here, is to resolve obvious ownership conflicts of interest. You can't have a financial stake in one club while

you're playing for another that might play against that club because whose interests are you going to prioritize? Your own financial gain at this other team potentially doing well or winning the game on the field? Let me just interject to note that there is some question about the provenance of this rule. You did so much research for this draft, Ben. I know it's hard to put these things down, but Peter Morris of A Game of Inches fame emailed me to say that it may have originated before Hornsby. He noted, I've would be no future repetitions, though that promise was at best selectively enforced, and I'm not sure if it was ever written down. When Hornsby was traded, the NL president insisted that the rule applied to him. While Hornsby naturally disagreed, the impasse was finally broken when Hornsby got a better offer for his shares and sold them.

I could find no indication that any rule was created, but I could well be wrong. So it could be that this was kind of informally agreed to years earlier when there had been owners that owned multiple franchises at the same time, which was not a great look. But it's not clear whether that was an official rule at that time and whether it was not always enforced or Hornsby made it enforced more or whether they actually made it official after Hornsby. But just noting the provenance of some of these things is somewhat unclear. It's a little suspect. Yes. Okay.

Yeah. And the Turner case is an interesting one because at the time, I guess there was some controversy about whether this does any real harm to have him serve as a manager because he owns the team. It's not the sort of clear conflict of interest situation that you have with Hornsby assuming that story is true because he owns the team and the team he's managing is the team he owns so it's not as you know he is invested in the well-being of the Braves and wants them to succeed in theory but I think this is a good rule and I think it's a good rule for for two reasons one of which I think is is sort of more obvious in terms of it presenting a

potential conflict of interest, albeit not the one presented in the Hornsby situation and another because I just don't like the optics. So I think that, and we run this risk in the present moment with teams potentially being incentivized not to play players who have played appearance or innings pitched escalators in their contracts. But I feel as if that potential conflict is particularly acute when you're literally the guy who's signing the check, right? That you might decide to bench just like a little bit a guy who would potentially make more money if he were played as often as he ought to be. So I think that that is a situation that

we want to avoid and i also think that just as a person who's been observing these these collective bargaining negotiations and is sort of dismayed at some of the instinct that fans will have to side with ownership in these situations i think that one of the most powerful claims that the players can make is that like they are the ones on the field doing the game. And if you have the owner in the dugout, that sort of pierces that dichotomy in a way that I think is not particularly useful and sort of clouds the issue of what is the thing that is the managers either. I don't think that that is their primary motivation. But I think that in terms of helping people to understand sort of where the real joy is generated, stay in your suite and not in the dugout is my opinion. I agree. Yeah, this is a good rule, I think, regardless of how it came about. Yeah. All right. For my next pick, I will take one that I think neither of us likes that it exists exactly, but I like that

it was given a reason to exist. And that is the prohibition against giant catcher's gloves. Hate this rule. Give me big glove. Yeah, love big gloves. So this was something inspired by the former manager, Paul Richards, great manager, the wizard of Waxahachie he's known as. He kind of popularized or invented the Waxahachie swap, which unfortunately is also banned now, but loved it while it existed. The idea that a pitcher could go out to the outfield and come back to the mound and you could do that more readily prior to the institution of the three batter minimum. Anyway, Paul Richards,

when he was the manager of the Orioles in the 1960s, I will quote here from the Chicago Tribune, which explains how this whole thing happened. This is talking about the former catcher Joe Ginsberg who caught Hoyt Wilhelm's knuckler, or at least tried to. It says, Ginsberg caught Wilhelm between 1958 and 1961 when they were teammates at Baltimore. Gus Triandos was the Orioles' regular catcher, but when Wilhelm was on the mound, Ginsburg usually was behind the plate. Ginsburg said the bad thing about Wilhelm's knuckler from the perspective of the batter and catcher was that no one knew how the pitch would break. So in the spring of 1960, Orioles manager Paul Richards did something about it. Richards invented an oversized mitt with Wilhelm in mind. We called it the elephant glove, said Ginsburg, because it was shaped like an elephant's ear. Paul Richards was very astute, very thorough. He took advantage of the fact that at the time there was nothing in the rulebook restricting the size of a catcher's glove. Richards, who had been a catcher, asked Wilson Sporting Goods to design the glove. He asked us to make a glove that would be as large as any catcher could handle,

said Gordon Hollywood of Wilson. He said, make the web as wide as can be, yet flexible enough that the catcher could make quick pickups. Wilson made three models and told Richards to choose one. Each glove cost more than $300 to make, which was about $250 more than the best big league glove at the time. There was no die cut pattern for a glove of that type. Everything had to be hand cut. We had to pull people off the assembly line to do the job. To cut a glove like that today would cost you more than $1,000. That was written in the 80s, I think. However, the elephant glove is extinct. It was outlawed prior to the 1961 season after opposing teams complained. Casey Stengel, then the New York Yankees manager, really screamed about it,

said Hollywood. When Wilhelm beat the Yankees in Yankee Stadium, Casey had a fit. He said a glove that big had to be illegal. Unfortunately for the Orioles, the Baseball Rules Committee agreed. They revised the rule to say that a catcher's mitt could be no more than 38 inches in circumference or 15 inches from top to bottom. Richards's glove was 42 inches around and 18 inches long. The glove had so much webbing you almost never caught the ball in the pocket, said Ginsburg. Sometimes you'd get a ball lost in there and the base runner would move up while you were trying to fish it out. It was so big and so flexible you really had to spend time to get used to it. But I'll say this, the darn thing worked.

So I'm sad that we don't have giant novelty gloves. Yes, give us big glove. Because here's the thing. I think that there is a point at which the size of the glove gives you an advantage. But I also would argue that there is a size at which the glove is so big as to be an impediment to fielding. And I think that we should spend a season exploring that boundary to learn when is the glove too big a glove? When is it a hindrance to the action on the field?

You'll look so delightful the whole time. Whatever the size of the glove, give us big glove. It's like any little kids in giant helmets are cute, whatever the baseline cuteness of the kid is. And I think that we should see if there is a baseline cuteness level for all adult players. I think we should explore that. Yeah.

Game of Inches said the rule wasn't changed until 64, not 61. So I'm not sure which, but either way, it was changed. You can no longer have giant gloves to catch knuckleballs. Can't have giant glove. So for my next pick, I'm going to take the George Wright rule, which is that you can't catch a ball with your cap. Yes. yes and we have we have explored parts of this rule in the past with friend of the show emma bachelary who was really shocked by just how punitive the rule is this is a a three base penalty in the event that someone tries to do this so this is from game of inches hat catches

the emphasis on keeping the action going sometimes led to imaginative efforts to take advantage of loopholes in the rules. Another instance was based on Section 22 of the 1857 rules, which stated, If any adversary stops the ball with his hat or cap or takes it from the hands of a party not engaged in the game, no player can be put out unless the ball shall first have been settled on the hands of the pitcher. This rule is obviously intended to penalize a player who used his cap, but the Red Stockings of Boston saw it as an opportunity. They tested their interpretation in a game on September 14, 1872. The opposing team had loaded the bases with no one out

when pitcher A.J. Spalding induced an easy pop-up to shortstop George Wright. Spalding later recalled that Wright removed his cap and, quote, deftly captured the ball therein. He then quickly passed it to me, standing in the pitcher's box. Under the rule, the ball was now in play. I threw it home from once it was passed to third, second, and first, and judgment demanded of the umpire on the play. After deliberation, the umpire decided that the rules notwithstanding, the play would not count at all a new cleaner rule was enacted in 1873 and modified in 1874 the revised wording awarded base runners a base if a fielder used his cap and i would just like to say once again that it does not really make

sense to me that this is a rule i appreciate i appreciate that in theory one could extend one's cap a little bit further than you could potentially extend your glove for instance and then perhaps we're like unless you have a giant glove unless you have a giant glove in which case depending on the size of the glove you're either really catching that thing or you're really not catching it but i guess i would say the following which is like we let guys climb walls right we allow fielders to extend their bodies beyond sort of their natural range and we don't have limits on how tall a guy can be right we don't say that like sorry o'neill cruz i know he's a short stop which is amazing and not like an outfielder, but we wouldn't say to O'Neal Cruz, sorry, simply too tall, right? We wouldn't say that. We don't

have a rule that like caps the height of a guy. And so I think that like, while this might lead to silliness, and I'm sure that there would be players who were overconfident in their ability to actually catch the ball. something like this happened it would be it would just be so delightful and fun to see a guy actually do it right we would we would be delighted by that when guys in the bullpen try to catch stuff in their caps we cheer and clap and think that's just a great old time so i submit that this is a silly rule and that we should repeal it and allow there to be some fun and i'm sure that there would be players like i said who were overconfident but then we

would see them sort of learn in real time and we would get to see how they deal with personal failing and sometimes guys are really endearing in those moments so i say you know at the very least the rule is too punitive it does not currently sit in the happy zone that say this the at least slide rule does where you're balancing the the purpose of the rule against its punitive value but we should just repeal it all together you know we can change we can reinstate rules i think the rule book is is uh um it it's more sort of deft and maneuverable than we give it credit for and we should we should try it out and see how it goes, at least in spring training, once we get it. Yeah, Peter Morris told me that Wright felt bad about this play because he thought it

was an unsporting tactic that he had taken advantage of. But nonetheless, I would enjoy seeing it more. Yeah. All right. For my pick, I'm going to take adjustableable Ballpark Fences and the banning thereof. So typically this is attributed to Bill Veck, who wrote about it in his wonderful book, Veck is in Wreck, maybe my favorite baseball book. And I'll quote a little bit from the passage here. He writes here, since baseball rules are ridiculously and ineptly written, I have always read the rulebook with an eye toward loopholes. So he's stating it right up front there. And other owners did not necessarily take kindly to this. He, of course, went on to be a Hall of Fame owner of multiple franchises. But this is when he owned his first team, the then AAA Milwaukee team. So he writes, one of the new rules had to do with the moving of fences. Having no real players of our own when we first came to Milwaukee, we had to adjust as best we could. It was not only that our hitters couldn't hit, most of them couldn't run either. Our players were so slow, in fact, that we didn't even bother to have a steel sign, et cetera, et cetera. In the interest of closer competition, we introduced a loose sandy mixture into the base pass in such abundant quality that the runners would sink up to their ankles as they ran like kids running on the beach.

If we couldn't run, nobody ran. He was kind of notorious for trimming the grass or letting the grass be long or having the field slope, whatever he could get away with to be advantageous to his team. So he writes here, hitting was the field slope, whatever he could get away with to be advantageous to his team. So he writes here, Hitting was the real problem, though. As I moved among the fans that first night, one of the questions I heard most often was, with a right field fence only 265 feet from the plate, how come we've got no left-handed hitter who can hit a long ball? An excellent question. It is a question that asks the question,

why should all those other teams come in with their long ball hitters and take advantage of our fences? The answer was not long in coming. On top of the permanent wall, I built a 60-foot chicken wire fence, which turned all those short home runs into long singles. The next year, with hitters of our own, it became necessary to do a little maneuvering. Calling upon my Lewis Institute training, I designed a system for sliding the wire fence back and forth along the top of the wall by means of a hydraulic motor. When the visiting team had more left-handed power than we did, the fence would stay up. Otherwise, we would reel it back into the foul line. From there, it was only a short hop to the ultimate refinement. In the best of all possible parks, the fence would be up for the opposition and down for us. We could do this without any

trouble at all, and we did do it by reeling the fence in and out between innings. That is, we did it once. They passed a rule against it the next day. Until they passed the rule, understand this was all perfectly legal, even if it did not necessarily qualify us for that season's Abner Doubleday Award for sportsmanship above and beyond the call of duty. It is my job, as I see it, to get my players the greatest possible advantage within the rules. So that's his story. He was sticking to it, and it's a great story. Unfortunately, it may be apocryphal. So the book Green Cathedrals notes that the story concerning the Vec movable fence is in all probability an urban legend. Two independent saber researchers found no evidence to support the story.

Ballpark's author and researcher John Pastier could find no evidence in 1941 of the pulley, cables, and hydraulic motor necessary to make a movable fence work. Milwaukee baseball expert Jim Nitz conducted extensive newspaper research on the field and found no references to any movable fence. So it seems like it may not actually have been VAC. However, there is a rule against this, and it does seem to be because of Frank Lane, known as Trader Lane. He was the White Sox GM in 1949, and he installed inner fences that cut the foul lines or cut

the dimensions from 352 to 332 and then removed them in the middle of the night just before a series with the Yankees because opposing teams were hitting more homers into the 20-foot space beyond the inner fence than were the Sox. This caused the AL to pass a rule stating that teams could not change dimensions of the field during a season. So it was probably Frank Lane, maybe it was Bill Veck. It was one executive or another in the 1940s who tried this gambit and was immediately slapped down. And that is why you can change your dimensions over the offseason, but you can't change them from game to game. That's spectacular. That's really great. Also,

can't change them from game to game that's spectacular that's really great also i i love the idea that your reputation for both knowing the rules and being willing to bend them is such that someone's like falsely attributes a rule change to you and everyone goes yeah that seems yep this seems right checks out i am prepared for my next pick but i would like to point out that friend of the show i'm a bacheloret, has come up in the clutch with the rule on catches and caps from 1921. This is not the language that is in the current rule book, but I just want to read it again. We've heard it on the show before, but it's just, if a fielder is foolish enough to try to make a clownish catch of a batted ball, each runner gets three bases. If the fielder tries the same thing with a thrown ball,

each runner gets two bases. A clownish catch. Clownish. Delightful. Thank you to Emma and her archive subscriptions. Okay, I'm going to take another VEC rule, which is that he may be responsible for the once per inning limit on mound visits

because he was... That's Stanky. Oh, Stanky. Good grief. Oh, you're right. Look at me not being able to read your emails. Okay. Ready? Are we ready? Also, man, this page from Life Magazine is...

It is so perfect because it involves pineapple on meat from 1955. It's just delightful. Eddie Stanky refuses to concede that his taunts cost the Cardinals any games. It would be shameful if a ball player put out any harder against me than against any other manager, he says naively. If anyone did, he should turn in his uniform and get out of baseball. Stanky's keen knowledge of the games surpassed only by an immense and implacable desire

to win ball games is counterbalanced by the fact that he never learned how to lose. Even Mrs. Stanky, who knows Eddie as quite another person, considerate, patient with children, a conscientious churchgoer, says he can't lose gracefully. When he does lose a game, Stanky becomes almost a sociopathic case. Wow.

Psychopathic case, rather. He seeks sanctuary in the training room and sits on a rubbing table, head bowed like a man in a trance. After losing three or four in a row, he goes on to the other extreme and storms out of the clubhouse with arms flailing. Eddie Stanky's philosophy on managing got a severe shock last July with dust. This is all related to this right oh good grief this is long man it's all good stuff how long is our episode gonna be ben i don't know let's find out with us coming on and the cardinals in danger of blowing a double header to the phillies he began stalling with every old trick he could recall and some new ones

too hoping to delay the game and have it called on account of darkness, he rushed out of the dugout between pitches. He changed the pitchers almost as fast as they could warm up. He even got in a fight with rival manager Terry Moore. By the fifth inning, umpire Babe Pinelli was fed up. Waving his arms indignantly, he announced he was forfeiting the game to Philadelphia. Stanky, hardly able to believe his ears, was striding angrily off the field when he heard something else even more unbelievable. The St. Louis fans were booing him and not the umpire.

As Stanky sat out a five-day suspension, pressure began to mount in St. Louis to have him fired. But he weathered that storm by calling in the newspaper reporters and making a public apology, a rare concession for a big league manager. Stanky failed to get his pitching his major tactical problem straightened out for the remainder of the season and the cardinals failed to climb out of the second division but the man they called napoleon began to show signs of changing his behavior became noticeably less obsessive i can't say that word and obnoxious just before the season ended in an effort to improve his relationship with st louis fans He had the Cardinals dugout thrown open to kids before two games. When 7,500 eager candidates showed up before each game,

he stood patiently on the dugout steps, shaking hands and signing autographs for almost two hours each day. Those who could not squeeze in before game time got signed pictures of Cardinals players. That's nice. Yeah. Yeah. So I believe that that prompted the limit on mound visits to once per inning. That's nice. And so now we have a limit on man visits, which is good. I think we need a limit on man visits, right?

Yeah. I don't know that he always abided by this because I found something, I think, from the 70s when he was a college coach at South Alabama. And notes that a former major league manager who is well aware of the rules, Eddie Stanky, twice walked to the pitcher's mound in the seventh inning of the second game of a doubleheader. Two trips to the mound means only one thing. According to the rules, the pitcher must be taken from the game and another pitcher brought in. Although the guess here is that Stanky was perfectly aware that he had violated the rules. No new South Alabama pitcher was forthcoming. And FSU coach Jack Stallings rightfully protested.

Stanky said innocently that on his second visit to the mound, he hadn't talked to the pitcher. He had conversed with the first baseman So he is still trying to get around the rule by saying that even though he made a mound visit he wasn't actually talking to the pitcher while he was there I guess the pitcher was just overhearing his talk to the first baseman So anyway the FSU coach protested the game to the NCAA. So this rule, I think, was passed against him or inspired by him. And even so, he would not necessarily abide by it. Just love Eddie Stanky. He is absolutely the best. later there's a times piece from like 83 and uh at the end of it the last line is if there's anything i can't stand stanky said it's an umpire who doesn't know the rules but often there was no rule because uh he hadn't exposed the loophole yet but yes that that 1955 life piece notes that he had been campaigning to become the most unloved man in baseball.

Just the way he curled his lip annoyed people. He made a fetish of hating everybody not wearing a Cardinals uniform and welcomed their hate in return. He made umpires jobs tougher by needless nagging and endless delays of the game. His walks to the mound to talk with the pitcher were so obviously staged that even the local fans became irritated you do you eddie i love eddie stanky patron saint patron saint of this of this draft all right what is your next pick my next pick all right i will take roy thomas and the foul strike rule so this is a another case that maybe that maybe Roy Thomas was the most notorious practitioner, but not necessarily the only one who is abusing the rules as they existed at the time. But

quoting from an ESPN piece in 2010, in 1901, baseball's National League Rules Committee finally got wise to the whole foul off a pitch till I get one I want or I get a walk routine that had become standard practice for batters and implemented the foul strike rule. In effect, the ruling stated foul balls not caught on the fly were to be ruled as strikes unless two strikes had already been called. The AL committee decided not to adopt the same rule but would two years later. There were apparently several reasons the rules committee wanted to clamp down on fouls. One was to cut the cost of foul balls that were hit into the stands. Another was umpires had only two game balls at a time and would have to go get the fouled off ball from the stands. And probably most important to the actual game of baseball, rulesmakers thought

the practice of fouling off pitch after pitch after pitch was disruptive and upset the balance between pitching and hitting. Many credit Philadelphia Phillies center fielder Roy Thomas for spurring the rule change. Thomas, who played for the Phillies Pirates and Boston Doves from 1899 to 1911, was known for his frequent foulings and supposedly once fouled off 22 pitches in and at bat. So you could just indefinitely do that even without having two strikes. And Roy Thomas just exposed how annoying that was. So that stopped and he seems to have precipitated it. And I think we are probably better off for it. Yeah. And there was apparently a lot of controversy around this at the time. A Game of Inches says that when fellows like John McGraw or Roy Thomas then with Philadelphia went to bat, the pitchers could expect to have anywhere from 10 to 20 good strikes deliberately fouled off. Of course, pitchers didn't throw as hard back then.

It was hard to miss the ball maybe. McGraw could run up halfway to the pitcher, swing hard but late, check his swing, and cut fouls along the left field line for an indefinite period. Roy Thomas was more skillful than McGraw in this line of work. Thomas had the practice of turning good strikes into mere fouls so perfected that he could take his usual cut at the ball and, getting a piece of it, foul it straight over the catcher's shoulders. Connie Mack, reminiscing in 1924, cited Thomas McGraw and Huey Jennings as batters who were adept at using this tactic to draw walks. And a contemporary account provided this description of McGraw's method.

Whenever he picks out a ball he thinks will be a strike, he brings his bat to meet it at an acute angle to the catcher. And in consequence, the ball is fouled off to the left. One Cincinnati pitcher became so annoyed by Thomas's persistence during a game in August 1900 that he sucker punched him. So yeah, that sounds pretty annoying. that he sucker punched him. Wow. So yeah, that sounds pretty annoying. Glad they changed that rule.

Yeah, that seems like one that is necessary. I'm kind of surprised that it lasted this long. It's almost as if we wanted to talk about hats. Okay, I am going to take what is known broadly as the Buster Posey rule, but really ought to be the Alex Avila rule. This is the home plate collision rule. It is such a common misnomer that fellow friend of the podcast, Grant Brisby, felt the need to defend Buster Posey's honor

in a piece for the McCovey Chronicles in 2016, laying out the timeline here. We are all familiar, of course, with the May 25th, 2011 Buster Posey injury in which a home plate collision basically broke every bone in his leg, just shattered his leg all the way apart. And it was pretty bad. And then in 2013, Alex Avila was injured pretty badly in the ALCS. And then the following February, baseball introduced this rule around home plate collisions, which is as follows. So this is rule 713. A runner attempting to score may not deviate from his direct pathway to the plate in order to initiate contact with

the catcher or other player covering home plate. Unless the catcher is in possession of the ball, the catcher cannot block the pathway of the runner as he is attempting to score. The failure by the runner to try to touch the plate, the runner's lowering of the shoulder, or the runner's pushing through with his hands, elbows, or arms would support a determination that the runner deviated from the pathway in order to initiate contact with the catcher in violation of Rule 713. Notwithstanding the above, it shall not be considered a violation of this rule if the catcher blocks the pathway of the runner in order to field a throw and the umpire determines that

the catcher could not have fielded the ball without blocking the pathway of the runner and that contact with the runner was unavoidable and uh you know i think we're a pro catcher podcast like i think that that's one of our of our stated positions as a podcast and not just because of the framing, although we do really like the framing. And so while I think that, you know, it can be at times a difficult rule to enforce, which is part of why I think I opted not to take it and rather took the chase out leave rule just because, you know, bang bang plays at home can be hard. Sorting out what's involved often does require the use of replay, which can slow things down. So I think that in that respect, it is a little bit inferior from an enforcement perspective. Like some of these home plate collisions are just like horribly gnarly and they really mess guys up and they mess guys up who are already taking an incredible amount of sort of physical grind as catchers and so i think trying to preserve catcher health is like an admirable

sort of project just given how much again wear and tear they they take back there so it's a good rule uh for the most part it does sometimes slow things down to enforce it and i think that we should all listen to grant and call it what it is which is the alex avila rule and not the the buster posey rule if only because one of the people in the giant's orbit who was um the most annoyed by this rule is gooseose Gossage. And he calls it the Buster Posey rule. And I think really if we can distance ourselves from Goose Gossage as much as possible, we're probably living better lives.

Yeah, this is why it's hard to establish the origin story of some of these things. This is a recent rule. And everyone says the Buster Posey rule. And granted, Posey probably played a part in it for sure. Oh, sure. But after Posey, there was the Matt Trainor was injured in a collision. Deanna Navarro was injured in a collision.

And then Avila was injured in a collision. And then they changed the rule after previously saying that they would not. So, yes. All right. I will take the Phantom DH rule. The Earl Weaver exploit. So, Earl Weaver in 1980, he would use his pitchers as his DHs. So he listed Steve Stone, the Cy Young winner, as a DH, even though Stone had not hit at all in the previous few years. And he wasn't even in the ballpark, I believe, because he had already left for Toronto because he was going to be starting a game there the next night. But he was the listed DH in the starting rotation, and the contemporary coverage said Weaver got the inspiration to cast Stone as DH two nights earlier

when the Orioles knocked out Tiger starter Milt Wilcox before he had retired a batter. Detroit manager Sparky Anderson brought in another right-hander, Roger Weaver, in relief, but Weaver got to thinking, what would have happened if Anderson had brought in a left-hander? For someone as devoted to playing the percentages as Weaver, it would have meant pitch hitting for his DH. So to keep his options open, he listed Stone in the lineup in the sixth spot and waited to see who was pitching before he sent someone to the plate. And then a few days later, he explained it.

He said, I got the idea in a letter from a fan, which is cool. If I had a left-handed DH and the Tigers had brought in a left-handed pitcher, I'd probably have had to switch to a right-handed DH. That means my first guy would be lost for the rest of the game. This way, our real guys are available for the whole shot. Detroit manager Sparky Anderson conceded it was a crafty maneuver, but he's not sure it's kosher. I think the starting DH will have to face the starting pitcher if he's in the game, Anderson said. If the starting pitcher doesn't last until the DH comes up for the first time, that's different. Anyway, Weaver went on to do this 21 times during a 22-game stretch, I think.

And I don't know whether it actually made any difference, but it was emblematic of his just playing the odds and the probabilities any way he could and leaving his options open. the odds and the probabilities any way he could and leaving his options open. So after that season, there was a change. The official playing rules committee amended the DH rule to ban the Phantom DH because Weaver had been accused of making a travesty of the rule. And the new rule read that the designated hitter named in the starting lineup must come to bat at least one time unless the opposing club changes pitchers. So he could still change his DH the first time around to gain the platoon advantage, but he would lose the services of a real hitter

and not a pitcher who wasn't even in the ballpark. So I just love how inconsequential and kind of petty it is, but he still was going to do it as long as they let him do it because you never knew it might help a percentage point here or there. Yeah, I think that. Yeah, there you go. All right. I guess I'm taking Carter Capps.

I'm taking the Carter Capps rule, which has, you know, you were kind enough before this draft to share sort of the list of rules that you viewed to be acceptable draft choices, which was very nice because I was not confident that I was going to be able to come up with enough on my own. And you have this written as no second step in delivery. And I realized that that was the actual objection to Capsa's delivery, but it feels like it doesn't really do justice to the problem here, which was that this was a really funky delivery and they thought that it was bad. And so they changed it. And so here I am quoting from a Jeff Sullivan piece from 2017.

An addition to Rule 507 stipulates that a pitcher may not take a second step toward home plate with either foot or otherwise reset his pivot foot in his delivery of the pitch. If there is at least one runner on base, such an action will be called a balk under Rule 602A. If the bases are unoccupied, then it will be considered an illegal pitch under Rule 602B. And so this eliminated Capps' little double hop, basically.

And, you know, I think that there was some question as to whether or not he was really ever planning to do the double hop in games, that this was sort of him working through the delivery that he wanted in spring training and that he didn't really have any intention of doing the version of this that was outlawed. But I think that it's fine.

I like rules like this because, again, we are trying at all times to sort of sort out what we view as innovative out what we view as innovative and what we view as detrimental and sometimes that line is sort of blurry and i find it interesting when we really dig in on the bach rule and say oh that is obviously illegal because no one knows this rule like really i would submit to you that a lot of umpires are hoping they don't have to deal with box because while they know the rule, they maybe don't feel confident in its enforcement. So that this would be the place where we would kind of plant a flag and take a stand against something that we view as as really crossing the line is kind of funny to me.

Yep. But yeah, I guess I'm taking this because we're just we're still drafting Ben. That was a good one. Yeah, I think his initial delivery where he hopped once and then dragged his back foot is still legal, I think. You could still do that. But the innovation that he seemed to be practicing where there was another hop, it was like, well, if we allow that, you could hop all the way to home plate in theory. So they had to swiftly ban that even if he was not planning to actually use it in games but i missed that carter caps he was fun for a while yeah all right we have one pick left each i think

my last pick will be a bill veck pick or i guess an eddie goodell pick so eddie goodell of course the three foot seven player who was signed by bill veck and went up there and took a walk as one of Vec's many publicity stunts. He got away with this because the rule at the time was you could sign someone to a big league contract and Vec knew that the commissioner's office would not review the contract until the following Monday morning. So I think he signed him like on a Friday and he knew it wouldn't be reviewed till the next week. And so he was able to play him before it was actually reviewed and Goodell played on Sunday right and then that Monday MLB voided Goodell's contract and changed the rules requiring that all contracts needed to be ratified by the commissioner before any player could appear

in a big league game so you could no longer sneak it in while the commissioner wasn any player could appear in a big league game. So you could no longer sneak it in while the commissioner wasn't working over the weekend. They had to be approved before they could appear in a game. Now, if this were to happen again today, I don't know what grounds you would have to void that contract. I'm looking at a sports law blog post that points out that given the Americans with Disabilities Act and other things, I don't know that you could ban someone just on the grounds of their three foot seven. I don't think that would fly. So I'm not sure what grounds there would be to not ratify a contract, at least based on someone's physical characteristics. But the point is that rule was instantly changed. So whether or not we give Vec credit for the moving fences, we can give him credit for this or give Eddie Goodell credit for it.

Very good. What is even left, Ben? The last one is the Jimmy Cooney rule, I believe. Oh, I thought we did this one already. I don't think so. You mentioned it. I don't think we took it. I guess we didn't take it.

Can I say? Do I remember what this rule is? That's another good question that we could ask ourselves. Maybe I'm, what am I confusing this with? The George Smith rule? Maybe. Maybe that's what I'm mixing it up with. I can read the Cooney thing.

I have it handy here. So this is rule 6.01A number 5, I think. Oh, this is a great one. No, no. I take it back. i'm stealing my own back from you so this is yes 601 a5 if a batter or runner continues to advance after he has been put out he shall not by that act alone be considered as confusing hindering or impeding the fielders so this rule is with runner's interference and is pretty

straightforward. It is interference by a batter or runner when any batter or runner who has just been put out or any runner who has just scored hinders or impedes any following play being made on a runner. Such runner shall be declared out for the interference of his teammate and here i am quoting from a chris landers piece on this very subject immediately after that though comes the curious comment above stipulating that if a runner continues to advance after he's already been called out he may or may not be guilty of interference if that seems like an oddly specific event to account for in a rule book well you're you're not wrong. It dates back to 1926 when the Dodgers and Cubs combined for one of the weirdest plays in baseball history. The Cubs had loaded the bases with just one out in the top of the sixth.

With Jimmy Cooney on first, Joe Kelly. Man, all these Joe's are so, Kelly's are so, you know, they're, they're shifty. Hit a grounder to Brooklyn first baseman, Babe Herman. And so many more babes back in the day than we have now. Don't have a lot of babes. That sounds weird. Out of context. Looking to start the double play, Herman quickly threw to shortstop Robert Moranville, covering

second to retire Cooney. Remember this detail. We promise it's important. I'll read it again since I don't know how words are pronounced. Looking to start the double play, Herman quickly threw to shortstop Robert Moranville, covering second to retire cooney moranville's throw back to first was wild and the chicago runners were off to the races brooklyn pitcher jesse barnes finally got to the ball a lot of barnes's uh but as he saw a cub trying to score he instinctively threw home to his catcher mickey o'neill o'neill prepared to make the tag only to watch as the runner calmly peeled off and started heading for his dugout. It was Cooney, who despite being

called out back at second, kept running as a diversion. By the time O'Neal realized what had happened, he had followed Cooney halfway to the dugout and Joe Kelly, the man who started all this madness by hitting a simple grounder, was standing on third. Brooklyn protested, but no one could come up with any rule that prohibited the trick, and Chicago would tack on two more runs in the inning. Wanting to prevent any Cooney-style gamesmanship, but also allow for runners who were just trying to stay out of the way, MLB created the provision that exists today, which essentially leaves the matter to the umpire's discretion. And now I remember why I didn't draft this rule, which is, I think it is important in this instance to allow for manager discretion, because a lot of guys are just trying to get out of the way. They're trying to peel off. But I think that we should have as little empire discretion in the rule book as possible

because it makes everybody very feisty. People get so mad when people are able to exercise judgment. And I realize that exercising judgment is like really critical to any kind of jurisprudence, including baseball jurisprudence. But sometimes it gets out of hand so i don't know i took it last and also maybe i thought you had already taken it so there's a couple of things that i would say all right well that concludes this draft i think we took 19 people and rules and i didn't know it would take as long as it did but it's a favorite topic of mine thank

you to mark for the stanky draft suggestion sorry Sorry it took us four years to do it. And I also appreciate that the rulebook has a rule that kind of covers any future exploits, which is just that each umpire has authority to rule on any point not specifically covered in these rules. weird the umpire can say that's not in the rules and this is my ruling but i'm sure there's still some loopholes out there even after centuries to be exploited still that will require further changes so i'm sure this wasn't comprehensive feel free to write in and let us know about any additional ones but probably for the best that we didn't have any more picks to make right now or this episode would be even longer i mean I appreciate very much all of the research that you did leading up to this draft because it made me seem a lot smarter than I am. All right, that will do it for today and for this week. I wonder what percentage of rules in the MLB rulebook are there because someone hacked

baseball at some point and necessitated an amendment. It's very much in the spirit of our Effectively Wild email hypotheticals. Could you do this? Could you do that? All of these players and people thought that at some point. And then eventually the league said, nope, you can't do that anymore. However, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going

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Thanks to all of you. If you sign up too, you can get access to our exclusive monthly bonus episodes as well as the Effectively Wild Patreon Discord group,

which has right around 500 members now. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon site if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. via email at podcast at fan graphs.com or via the Patreon site. If you are a supporter,

you can follow effectively wild on Twitter at EW pod. You can find the effectively wild subreddit at our slash effectively wild. Thanks as always to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Dear Eddie, dear Eddie, you're here. Dear Eddie, we hold you so near. Dear Eddie, don't you know this is for you? For you.

Dear Eddie, all we need is for you. For you. Dear Eddie. All we need is the truth. The truth.