Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1814: The Angel in the Outfield

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

In an all-mailbag episode, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley answer listener emails about baseball with nine DH spots (and separate offensive and defensive units), baseball with eight lineup spots instead of a DH, a visual baseball rulebook, their favorite types of ballpark quirks, adjusting offensive stats for the behavior of the ball, an ethical question […]

You might remember how it used to be Three and I could show you any fantasy Particular visions, nothing 3D Now I'm dancing deep No cheap nostalgia Controlled up by me Hello and welcome to episode 1814 of Effectively Wild, a Fanagraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fanagraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm somewhere between apprehensive and hopeful, I would say. We're recording on Monday afternoon. It's the beginning of a pretty crucial week when it comes to determining whether and when opening day will be, and it sounds like it'll

be a busy week of bargaining. But as of yet, we have no news and no updates to provide. So we will wait and see along with everyone else. But in the meantime, we have a ton of emails. And I know that you have been busy with Prospects Week at Fangraphs, which we will cover later this week on the podcast. We'll have some hot prospect talk. Oh, yeah. But for today, just emails and a real legitimate wire-to-wire email show. Because often we start out intending to do an email show and then we end up bantering and going on tangents about nonsense and then we get to one email at the end.

No, this is just going to be full mailbag. Just going to empty them out or at least dive into the backlog here. So I have a large number of emails in a document here, and I guess we will just go and see how many we can get through. Okay, let's do it. All right. Let's start out with a couple DH-related questions. I don't know why I would do this to myself and to you, but these topics do come up fairly often. And I think we have talked about this before, but I couldn't figure out when.

So Casey says, I don't think you've ever discussed this, but would baseball be better or worse with nine DH spots? Offense and defense are totally separated in football and the sport is probably better for it. How many two-way players, meaning batter and fielder in this case, would there be? On the one hand, it may dilute a single superstar to put him on one side of the ball, but watching eight stellar defenders would be more entertaining. Obviously, rosters would need to be expanded considerably. So I know that this has come up on the show before because it gives me hives just to contemplate this idea.

And I know that I have gone on a little rant about it before, but I don't know when that was. I will say what annoys me about this is not what Casey is doing here, which is that people will make the slippery slope argument against the DH, which just drives me batty because there is no slippery slope when it comes to the DH. It is a very non-slippery slope. There's a ton of traction on the slope. It took like 90 years from the DH being proposed to the DH being adopted in one league.

Then it took another 50 years, seemingly, for the DH to get added to the second league. So there's no slipping going on here, I wouldn't say. It is an incredibly protracted process. But also the idea that, well, if we're just going to get rid of pitchers hitting, then we should get rid of shortstop sitting or catchers hitting too. Why would we stop here? Well, because it's completely different from every other position. Totally different.

It's not analogous. Yes, catchers and shortst stops are worse at hitting in the typical season on average than players at other positions but they are still competent professional major league hitters pitchers are not and have not been for a very long time so the gap between say catchers and first baseman or whatever offense first position you want to name is so much smaller than the gap between the worst hitting real position and pitchers hitting. And it's just completely different skill sets. Pitchers don't even practice hitting.

They've been abysmal at it for a really, really long time. It just has nothing to do with one another, the two skills. Can you throw a ball really well? skills can you throw a ball really well and can you hit a ball really well there's just not a ton of overlap between those things at least when it comes to pitchers and so I don't think there's any pressing reason to do the DH for other positions I don't think there is any groundswell of support for that it is not going to happen for any number of reasons partly that if you had complete specialization in offensive players and defensive players, rosters would have to be much bigger. Much bigger.

Owners would have to pay a lot more players, although I guess they could pay the individual players less in theory because they'd be doing less work individually. But still, it is not going to happen for that reason. That's one of the reasons why it's taken so long to get the DH added to the National League. So don't think it's going to happen. Don't think it needs to happen. Don't think that the arguments for having a DH instead of the pitcher really apply all that well to players at other positions. But I guess Casey is not necessarily making that argument. He is pointing out that in football, you do have this sort of specialization.

And in theory, I guess it makes sense that, well, if we want to watch the best players at all times, then why would we not want to watch the best offensive players and the best defensive players at all times, even when those are not the same players? So that's the best case you could make for this, I imagine. I've noticed a trend amongst our listenership, Ben. Are you ready for the trend I've noticed? That in the face of something really, really spectacular, we like to entertain hypotheticals where we undo entirely the spectacular thing. And like the example of this is that we have spent hours,

I mean, like literally hours on this podcast, entertaining the question, what if we made Mike Trout worse at baseball? What if we were to, in some important way, diminish Mike Trout's ability to be fantastic? And so I find it very funny. And I know that this is in no way the spirit in which this question is being asked. And I, like you, commend the ability to ask this question without entertaining the very silly slippery slope stuff as if we haven't spent, you know, the last however many years in the American League just happily motoring along with the DH and doing great. But it is very funny to me that in a year where we have combined positions to great effect, right? And admittedly, DH and Pitcher in one spectacular Otani-shaped package is quite different than this question.

But in a year where we have been like, what if we combined a bunch of stuff? We're like, what if we undid it entirely? So I just find that funny. I don't necessarily dislike the idea, although I do appreciate the ability that having fielders hit gives us to marvel at guys who to your point are importantly monumentally chasmously better at hitting than pitchers are but who do have to be at least kind of competent in the field in order to to play there and then they still have to hit and so i i like that part of baseball i like that this is a spot where we perhaps think of baseball as

being more akin to basketball than we do football right where like yeah you shoot and you defend and obviously there are folks within the professional basketball leagues who are are better admittedly at one versus the other just like there are guys in in baseball who are you know sort of earn their keep on one side of the ball more than the other but i don't know i like that they do both and i think that the sort of way that the game has evolved allows for a variety of defensive competencies and you do have positions where if you are a defensive standout because of the difficulty of fielding that position, we let we discount your bat and think that that's just fine. Right. So I feel as

if the game sort of accommodates a variety of profiles in a way that works really well. And in cases where it hasn't, teams have figured out ways to position guys so that they can get a really good bat into the lineup every day and hide, you know, the worst of the guys fielding deficiencies, you know, in a spot where he's just not going to get the ball hit to him very often. So I think that it complicates the game in the way that people like to talk about the National League doing pitcher strategy. I think that this actually actually allows for complexity and an assessment of players

and having to move guys around and figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are and sort of allows for a strategic layer that people like to think that pitching stuff does where it's like, we know how managers are going to manage in the NL. This isn't secret anymore. So yeah, I don't see or feel the need for this. I don't dislike the idea of, of sort of having an expanded bench, uh, for,

for big league clubs, but I don't, and to have that bench sort of lend itself to specialization, right. So that you can have a vroom vroom guy, um, not a literal vroom vroom guy, cause he'd probably not be very useful to you because you gotta you know sometimes you don't want them to vroom vroom sometimes you want them to break break but you know i like the idea of having benches that lend themselves to specialization and that you know can kind of make room for guys who have very particular skills but i don't think that that needs to overwhelm roster construction to the point that we separate fully fielding and hitting. And I don't think that the sort of development infrastructure that we have in the game right now necessitates that at all.

Because to your point, like guys just, you know, they hit and they field unless they're pitchers, in which case they mostly just pitch. So I don't think that the specialization that we've had there has curtailed being good at both in a way that is manifesting to the detriment of the game at the big league level. Yeah. One of the points that anti-DH people make that I think is fairly valid is not so much that it makes the tactics or strategy that much more interesting at this stage, but that it does emphasize the depth of your roster a little bit more because you do need to have pinch hitters and defensive replacements and a little more flexibility and so it does kind of make your roster matter more from number one to number 26 and you see a team like the Dodgers for instance that makes the most of

that so I do see some value in that argument but even so I do really appreciate players who have more than one skill and can do more than one thing it It's why I love Otani so much. And if there were more players anywhere in the neighborhood of Otani who could hit and competently pitch and do both of those things at a major league level, fine. I'd be maybe willing to put up with the many people who couldn't. the many people who couldn't but it is clear at this point it's been clear for a long time that unless you are otani you basically can't do that and all of the pitchers who are cited as being good hitters are in fact terrible hitters they are just good hitters by pitcher standards so look i love zach grinke and how much he prizes his hitting ability as much as anyone but zach grinke's not a good hitter he's a great hitter by pitcher standards in this era, but he is still a pretty terrible hitter. And so that is not necessarily an argument in favor for me. And I do like the idea of higher caliber of play. I guess we celebrate all the time how these are the best baseball players and the best baseball, at least

on a skills level, that we have ever seen. But I think I prize the ability to do more than one thing, more than I prize seeing the absolute best at that skill, doing that skill at any one time, as long as the person doing it is not so vastly underqualified as pitcher-hitters who are not really even recruited or trained to hit. And really, it has no bearing on their value to a team or their job performance or how in demand they are, whether they can hit or not. It is just so extraneous. And it's just too much to ask of a pitcher really to be good at hitting major league

pitching as well as to produce major league pitching. It just can't be done at this point. But I don't love super specialization. And I do like the idea of having players who are just on the field at all times, right? I think there's something to be said for that. I mean, we kind of bemoan and lament pitcher usage now because it leads to starting pitchers being on the mound less often and then you just have a whole host of more or less interchangeable relievers coming and going

constantly well you could have the same sort of problem if you have a different unit that's on the field and then a different unit that's at the plate like how are you going to have superstars right how are you going to have faces of the game if no one is on the field at all times and everyone is just called on to do the one thing that they are good at and not show a wider range of skills? That would kind of be a bummer, I think, even if you were seeing the very best talent at all times. So not in favor. Yeah. And, you know, there are football stars, right? It's not as if the only stars on football teams are quarterbacks, although there are a lot of star quarterbacks. I mean, they're not all as good as they ought to be. Star quarterback is a little bit like ace where it's like, tell me what you mean by that. But, you know, other sports that have that kind of specialization do have stars, but, you know, they maybe have slightly larger viewership and they're not all like necessarily as big a stars as they would be if they were doing both things i don't

know it's sort of hard to prove that but i think that you're right that this sort of allows a fuller appreciation of the skill involved and i think that part of why i like it is that you know there's the athleticism involved in hitting and the athleticism involved in fielding share, you know, base elements, you're able to do both of those things. I can't even do one of those things. So, yeah, I am opposed, but I appreciate the way in which the question was framed because it managed to do it in a way that was not at all alarmist. No alarmist here. It's great. Agreed. All right. Related question from David. And I know that this has come up before, but I can't remember when.

He says, I was wondering with all this has come up before, but can't remember when. He says, I was wondering with all this DH talk, if pitchers can't hit, why is the solution a DH? Isn't the straightforward solution an eight-man lineup? There's probably some creative managing that that would eliminate, but it seems like those options are never used and most would result in losing the DH and pitchers hitting after all later in the game. Has anyone ever considered this? It feels somehow more elegant to me. And yes, it has been considered. I believe we have considered it at some point, but I think there are a couple problems with this. And it is elegant. It does make sense. If you were going to design things from scratch,

would you say, let's design nine lineup slots and then have the ninth one be this weird one that is different from all the others? Or would you just say, well, let's have eight then. We'll just lop off one and we won't have to deal with this DH idea that makes everyone upset. Everyone will still play defense and also hit and all will be well. I think there are a few problems with it. One, there's tradition, of course, and there's just a certain symmetry in having nine spots in the field and nine spots in the lineup and three outs and nine lineup spots and it all just sort of gels.

And of course, it goes back to the beginning of baseball. And so people would probably be mad if you tried to change that as well that's part of it that is not necessarily an argument for keeping it or a great argument that it's just always been done that way although the fact that it's always been done that way does mean that if you were going to go to eight lineup slots you would change stats stats and records, I think, more so than you do by eliminating pitcher hitting because all of the players in the lineup would get more plate appearances within a given game and within a given season. And so you could set records and break records that were set in the nine lineup spot era. And maybe that would be exciting.

In that we have lamented the lack of record chases. But they would all have invisible asterisks next to them. And people would be mad about that. So I don't know that that is looked on as a plus. You see what the PED era did to records. And how people got so upset about that. And are still upset about that. So if you had players, you know, getting 750 play appearances in a season or 800 or something, if you're the

leadoff person, I haven't calculated exactly how many played appearances would be added to each lineup spot, but you know, it would be a decent number and you would also get players who were getting five six seven played appearances in a game more often so that's part of the problem potentially too and then the last thing i was thinking is that i think the dh is actually good yeah it allows places for good players to play yes who are still able to hit and still able to contribute and still able to entertain us, but not able to do the entire job. Now, maybe that is kind of in conflict with our answer to the previous question where we said that it's nice if you can be well rounded and do all things. But I think it is kind of nice to have just that one spot, right, that you can put the Nelson Cruz or the David Ortiz or whoever.

And I know that most DHs are not like that, especially at this stage that teams use it to rotate players in and out of the lineup as opposed to having a dedicated DH superstar in that slot. It's nice to have the Edgar and the Ortiz and the Cruz, just those guys who can really extend their careers and still be great hitters and still thrill us in that way. And the fact that they can't play first base or that they don't have to play a subpar first base and just stand there and you live with it because of the bat. I don't mind. I like that it actually gives us a place. the bat I don't mind I like that it actually gives us a place you know and there are a lot of great players who have extended their careers and made runs at records and milestones and I guess you could kind of asterisk that too like I I think that Henry Aaron wanted to break Babe Ruth's record as a non-DH like that was kind of important to him, I think I have read, because Babe Ruth couldn't DH and players in earlier eras couldn't DH and he kind of wanted to do it, quote unquote, legitimately.

But I think there is something to be said for providing that place for players to age gracefully and still show us their skills when they have some high level skills, even if some others have slipped. And I guess there's also the labor argument too, right? In that you're not necessarily eliminating 15 or 30 roster spots, but you are eliminating 15 or 30 starting spots, right? And so there would probably be less pay for players who are converted into bench spots, even if you didn't eliminate the roster spot entirely. So that's a consideration as well and a reason why it probably wouldn't happen because the Players Association would oppose it. Right. I think that those are all really excellent points.

I think the one that I am the most fixated on as we sit here on a Monday waiting to find out if we're going to get 162 games is that I just think that we have, you know, we shouldn't resist change to the detriment of the game. But I think that when we are going to alter the parameters of record keeping in a fundamental way, we should like have a really good reason to do that. And I think that the ineptitude of pitchers hitting to this point gives us a good reason to extend the DH to the National League. Like we have a reason and we have precedent for it. But eliminating a lineup spot, even if we didn't care about all of the labor questions that you just brought up, which we do, and even if we didn't think that they would just fill that spot with another reliever if given the

opportunity, which they absolutely would, we should just be mindful of like, why? Why do we need to change the thing? And if the answer to that is just because we would have done it differently from the beginning, that in and of itself is not sufficient to me. Now, that might be the start of an argument that I end up finding persuasive. But I think here, we're used to a thing and it works well. And we can, within the existing parameters of the game, alter it that it works even better by expanding the DH.

So why not just do that? Because I think you're right. We want to see the guys who can still thump. Imagine if we didn't have Ortiz's final season. Like he wouldn't have had the final season he did if he'd had to be in the field. He would have been forced into retirement long before that. But we got that season. That season was great. So we should allow for that so that if you need to tumble entirely out of the defensive spectrum, you can. And I think that we should also appreciate the difficulty of just DHing. I think that there

are guys who've talked about that, you know, it can be kind of hard to not be out in the field. So I don't think we should underrate the difficulty there even though we obviously are being honest about how good say gd martinez would be in the field right which is not very good at all but you know that's like or nelson cruz we we want to see nelson cruz we don't want to see him like in left or right but we want to see him in the batter's box and i'm comfortable with that right and it gives you a place to give players a partial rest or if someone's nursing a nagging injury they can still be in there right and i think those are positives too the other thing is that if you had this in only one league i think it would have a more severe unbalancing effect than just the DH did,

because you might have players who really wanted to play in the eight-person lineup league because they would get more playing time and they would rack up bigger numbers. And so that might make it easier for that league to recruit players. And of course, there were players who knew that they needed to DH or wanted to DH, and so they were al players more so than nl players but in this case every hitter would have some incentive maybe to go to the eight person lineup league just so they could get more bats of course if you had that in both leagues then that wouldn't be as big an issue but yeah all right ed says meg recently commented that she wished MLB had more visual aids in the baseball rulebook. That is a good idea.

And it got me to thinking, why not also put links in the rulebook to videos that could help elaborate the rules or illuminate the rules? For example, obstruction was called on the Red Sox player Will Middlebrooks for preventing the Cardinals' Alan Craig from scoring in the ninth inning of Game 3 of the 2013 World Series, the result of the call was that the winning run was awarded to St. Louis in their 5-4 victory over Boston.

The video clip from the Fox broadcast in showing Middlebrooks lying on the ground and Craig sprawled over him provides a dramatic demonstration in a high-leverage situation no less that it is still obstruction even if inadvertent or as in this case even if there was nothing Middlebrooks could have done to get out of the way

by the way last night I discovered that Star Trek already thought of this in season 7 episode 4 of Deep Space Nine Take Me Out to the Hollow Suite originally aired in October 1998 which Ben and Michael Bauman discussed with the writer on the Ringer MLB show several years ago several members of Captain Sisko's baseball ignorant team are trying to learn the rules in preparation to take on the Vulcans.

There is uncertainty about what a fly ball is, so the definition is called up on one of the tablets and the animation shows a baseball arcing out of the infield. The idea has been out there for almost 25 years. It's time for MLB to pick it up. So what do you think, the animated illustrated MLB rulebook? I think it's a great idea. I mean, I don't know why we don't do this, you know? I know that there is just like really stirring trade in physical rulebooks, Ben. You know, they sell one every year i don't own one i don't own a physical copy of the rule book which is probably pretty surprising to most people listening to this but you know they publish a new one every year because they update the thing every

year but i think having a a companion a visual companion to the rule book seems like it would make a lot of sense now i guess part of the reason that they haven't done this is likely the intended audience of the rulebook, which is not, I don't think, really us. I mean, we as consumers engage with the rulebook whenever someone is confused and, you know, Emma and I get into our race to see who can find obscure rules fast enough when something funky happens on a broadcast. But in general, I think that the rule books target audience are the people who are playing the game and the people who are officiating the game, not necessarily casual fans. So I think that that might be part of it,

where there's sort of an assumed level of comfort and understanding on the part of the folks who are getting the most use out of the rulebook and training beyond the rulebook itself that facilitates that understanding and is available to them. So that is my suspicion as to why it hasn't happened more. But, you know, like MLB has a glossary on their site and visual aids would certainly help. I mean, I know they'd be sort of restricted in which ones they could use right now. But I think that often complicated plays benefit from not only one example, but a couple of different examples to help people really get their heads around it. Although maybe the real getting factor that I am underrating here is how many Bach entries there would need to be. And they just got frustrated and flummoxed and decided to move

on yeah i think it's a good idea and i think you are just the person to spearhead this project great this is right up your alley great oh no i'm gonna spend too much time doing a thing that seven people read just like the good old days ben yeah maybe something like this already exists at some level i don't know i mean maybe there's an umpire manual either for professional or amateur umpires that have, I mean, I don't know if it's like, you know, now you could have something that's just on a tablet and you could queue up video clips and they could either be real life game clips or they could be some sort of MLB field vision type stick figure examples potentially. But something like that seems like it would make sense even just to teach kids the rules. Yes. So yeah, I like the idea and maybe something like it already exists, but if not, it should. Okay.

Question from Nathan. As my mind was drifting earlier this week, I got to thinking about the growing uniformity of ballpark dimensions with Camden Yards as a left field wall as a recent example and Bush Stadium as the next one up potentially. That led me to the question of what is the best kind of uniqueness in a park? If you could only

pick one variable, which would it be? A few ideas I've had for uniqueness types. While height, while distance, while corners slash jaggedness, total outfield area, total foul territory area, ground rules, for example, the catwalks at the trop or Wrigley Ivy. Unique seating, for example, fans at field level behind the outfield wall or a hot tub. In-park water features, the ability for balls to leave the park entirely. Do you have a favorite distinguishing feature of ballparks?

Some of these kind of go hand in hand, I guess, right? Because if you're talking about wall height, that is probably going to be correlated with wall distance. You would not have a very deep wall that is also very tall. You would probably have a very tall wall that is shallow, and the tallness of the wall is there to compensate for the dimensions. And then outfield area, that's obviously going to be related to where the fences are. So some of these are just different ways of saying the shape of the fences or the outfields.

are just different ways of saying the shape of the fences or the outfields, right? And I do think that that is a great quirk if you have a great disparity between the dimensions in one side of the park and another. I mean, if you have a very short down the line with a tall wall and then a very deep power alley or center field, and as we have discussed and as has been documented there is less variability in all these features than there used to be partly maybe because they used to just build ballparks in the middle of a street and they would just fit it into the dimensions that they had available to them whereas now it's more often a dedicated project where they raise everything in the area or have some area

that's not already built up and put a ballpark there and just built it to their preferred specifications but i think if i had to pick one that probably would be my favorite like you think of the polo grounds and all of these legendary parks that are kind of quirky and often it's just that it's really short down the line and really deep somewhere else let's say and then it favors a certain kind of hitter and a certain kind of batted ball and that maybe has some strategic implications as well i like quirky ground rules i think that's pretty high on the list for me the catwalk the ivy like quirky ground rules are pretty cool i think in part because they are not, they are not especially common.

I mean, like all parks have ground rules, but in terms of ones that sort of defy expectation, you know, we can kind of name them on one hand. And so it doesn't feel played out. It does feel specific to that ballpark and really helps to contribute to like the sense of place that you have there, which I think is maybe the thing that moves a uniqueness trait to my mind. of place that you have there which i think is maybe the thing that moves a uniqueness trait to my mind like does it help to establish and situate the ballpark in a particular place because i think my favorite parks are distinctive like they feel like they are a product of the city

that they're a part of that they are part of the team they're a part of. I don't have to tell you, I liked old Yankee Stadium better than new Yankee Stadium because it felt like a place, whereas new Yankee Stadium feels like a movie set. And I think that the feeling of place can change over time. Part of this is definitely familiarity and longevity. So don't worry yankee stadium you can get back in our good graces in 50 years but i think that any attribute to the park that sort of situates it in a particular place is is meaningful to me so like for instance unique

seating is not something that i tend to be moved by except at chase because having a hot tub in your outfield is like the most Arizona I've ever experienced. And I say that with a tremendous amount of affection. It's the best Costco you'll ever watch baseball in, you know, so like it really does help to make you be like, here I am in the state of Arizona with all that that entails. I can say that I live here now. So, you know, I think that anything that really helps to ground you in a particular place so that when you turn on the broadcast, you're like, oh, yeah, there you are. You're at here today. You know, where you can immediately identify the home team by turning on the broadcast. And like we can do that regardless

of the park, probably, especially because they often put their name right back there in case you're confused. But I don't know, something that really helps ground you in the place where you are is fun. And I think that everyone kind of relates to their own home park in their own way. I can acknowledge the limitations of the Coliseum. What is it called now? Ring Central? Yeah. I picked this in our draft, so I should remember.

But I can acknowledge the limitations of the Coliseum but when I have watched baseball in Oakland I've been like I'd really like this if it were my home park like I would feel defensive on behalf of this ballpark if it were the place that I watched baseball the most often so I also think that there's you know there's gonna be stuff that feels really important to us about the place we watch baseball the most that might not resonate with other people. Yeah. I was going to say the same thing about just how distinctive the park is. And I think a big part of that is not just what's inside the park, but what is outside the park and what you can see when you're inside the park.

Right. when you're inside the park, right? So a big part of why PNC Park is so great is that you have that beautiful view of the river and the Pittsburgh skyline and Pittsburgh is famous for its rivers and there's one right there. And so I think that is great. It's great just because it's eye candy

and it's something really interesting and very immediately identifiable to see almost wherever you're sitting in that park. But also because you get the entertainment of splash landings, which is not just in Pittsburgh, but that is a great thing as well in San Francisco where you have people in kayaks paddling over to pick up home run balls. That's extremely fun. And just the idea of the splash landing, the idea that there are people out there waiting for the balls with nets, and then you have Josh Bell hitting towering homers in Pittsburgh that soar into the water,

that is wonderful too. So that's not necessarily something that is available to the designers of every ballpark because you need the right place to put it where you can get that great view. But if you can, and not even just major league parks, but a lot of minor league parks, indie league parks that just have great natural landscapes and wonderful vistas. I mean, it's pretty great to play baseball in a place that doesn't even look like the center of a city. It looks like you just plopped it down in front of a mountain or something. It's really picturesque so that's one of my favorite ways to distinguish a ballpark as well totally i i completely agree i think that you know the experience that say mariners fans would have

of baseball would be meaningfully worse even even than it has been if you could not sit you know in the upper deck and see the pacific northwest around you and see the skyline and see the mountains and it does sort of move you in a way that is unexpected and and really important to your experience of it so yeah right all right i've been thinking about our eight-person lineup answer. Are we shortchanging the idea that you would get to see the best players more often, which is a good thing, right? That's something we talk about how in baseball, you can't decide when your best player is going to have the bat in his hands as you can in basketball, where you can decide, yes, I want this person to take that important shot you would get to see otani and trout and tatis and soto and akunya more often because they would more often be the players at the plate and you'd also juice offense which could be looked at as a positive yeah i i'm not unsympathetic to that argument and maybe i'm being you know maybe i sound like someone who's like the novel destroy society but i don't think that for me it balances out from the like logistical headache of no longer being able to i mean i know we can't like there are limitations to cross-era comps

too so i don't mean to say that there aren't but like i like that we are able to, with the appropriate adjustments for offensive environment and how well integrated the leagues are in the presence of the DH, we're still able to kind of compare guys today to guys a long time ago. And I think that once you pull a whole lineup spot out, that starts to become more difficult. It would, you know, like think of all the work that Jay Jaffe would have to do to like change Hall of Fame standards. That would be monstrous. We don't need to make Jay work harder. Jay works really hard now. Well, speaking of adjustments to historical comparisons, here's a question from a listener who preferred to remain anonymous. who preferred to remain anonymous.

Since we already adjust some metrics for park factors, in the future, do you think we will similarly add an adjustment for the properties of the baseball as well, most likely to represent the performance of the average baseball used over the course of a season? I need to think more about how this would be calculated, but it seems like a natural progression. So you would have OPS plus or wrc plus or whatever that would in some way account for the baseball and i guess the question is whether that's actually necessary

because we already adjust for offensive environment right right so you might be sort of double counting yeah i worry that we would be double counting. I don't know that. I mean, I appreciate the spirit of the question insofar as I think that there are like we do see important shifts in offensive approach that are responding to the ball at times, even if they don't know they are. I mean, that's not the only reason that players have endeavored to say barrel balls and hit with you know elevate the ball rather than get grounders that's not exclusively in response to the ball there are lots of reasons to do that even without a juice ball but you know we do have players sort of adjust for their approach we account for that adjustment insofar as it manifests itself in in actual offensive in the actual

offensive environment are there aspects of that shift that we are perhaps not fully accounting for in the stats i mean maybe i guess but i think we kind of already do this and i think it would be hard it would be challenging to apply a ball-based adjustment because of how minute how big a shift a minute change can inspire you know even in the last several years where we have seen very dramatic shifts in sort of how aerodynamic the ball has been they've never fallen outside the parameters that are prescribed by major league baseball They've just shifted meaningfully within those parameters. Now, we might need to tighten those up if we want to have a more consistent offensive environment.

But I don't know. It's a very sensitive instrument. Yes, right. You know, and so I think that that presents some challenges, although probably not ones that are insurmountable. But yeah, I think we're kind of already doing this. Yeah, or at least on the individual level. But yeah, I think we're kind of already doing this. If you were to make adjustments across seasons in order to account for how much of the change in the league offensive environment was related to the ball, then you could calculate that. I don't know that you would need to apply that on the individual level if the conditions are consistent, but it might help you explain, okay, here's why the home run rate was this much higher in this season than that season.

okay, here's why the home run rate was this much higher in this season than that season. But if we knew that this player was using ball A in this plate appearance and ball B in that plate appearance, right, because we know that there were multiple models of baseball in use in the past couple seasons, if we had the granular data that we would need to adjust for that, then we could. It would just be like park factors, right? It would be like ball factors and you would just adjust for which ball that player used in given games. But we don't have that data currently and it seems like we can't really suss it out with StatCast. Let's say if you knew which balls were sent to which parks and were in play in each played appearance, appearance then yes you could

make that kind of adjustment but i don't know that we can do that currently and hopefully we won't have to do that because they will actually figure out having the same ball in play all the time we are in a moment where obviously we have to talk about the labor stuff because that is determining whether we play ball soon or at all this year but i just think we should take one more moment to appreciate how wild it is that we talk about literally anything else than the variation in the ball it is a it is wild it is a truly wild bit of business i cannot i cannot believe that in the year of our lord 2022, we are still having these conversations. The fact that there is this much variability,

so much confusion about who is using what, that there are two balls. It is wild stuff. I think that we, you know, there's been a lot of reporting on this. There's been a lot of coverage of it. And I still think that we will look back 20 years from now and say, I don't know that we covered that enough

because it is so wild. It is just wild. So anyway, I'm grateful for a moment to appreciate the wildness of that because sometimes I think about other stuff and I arguably shouldn't think about literally anything else. Yep. Yeah. The ball does affect certain players disproportionately in certain ways. And there are pitchers who maybe allow types of batted balls that make them more vulnerable to a ball that carries farther and hitters who could benefit more from that. for instance as someone who may have been affected negatively by the ball last year although he was also playing through a sports hernia so I don't know how much that had to do with it but in theory I guess you could come up with some kind of adjustment that took that into account and had a individual player by player adjustment for how the ball behaved that year and how it may have affected that player but it's tough because you never know how players are adjusting their approach or not to take advantage of a certain type of ball. And there is some benefit in just having a one size fits all adjustment for some analytical

purposes. So it's something that you could think about, but I don't know that we need to make that adjustment in all cases. Okay. Bo says, forgive me for what I'm about to say. You have a super secret skill that allows you to see briefly, but with great clarity, into the near future. One day, you're enjoying an Angels game in right field, and a fly ball is hit to deep right. As Otani is racing back to the fence, Otani is playing right field in this scenario. Cool. offense otani is playing right field in this scenario cool your secret skill kicks in and you get a vision of otani crashing into the wall and suffering a career-ending leg injury why do they do this to us why do they always make us say hey you know that thing you like it's broken

now he did ask for forgiveness preemptively luckily you're carrying a ball with you, and you're close enough that you could confidently hit Otani, distracting him enough to give up on the play. You won't seriously injure him, and he can now play out his glorious career. So you have one of three decisions to make. One, not throw the ball,

watch the gruesome injury up close, and lose Otani's career forever. Two, throw the ball, keep quiet about your special skill, and your reputation in baseball is ruined. Your closest family and friends will believe you and you can still find a job. It just won't be in baseball. Three, throw the ball and subsequently prove to the world that you have this skill. Otherworldly attention will rain down on you and all the pressures that come with it. On the other hand, you will likely become rich.

More importantly, Otani will be forever grateful to you and you'll probably get to hang out with him a lot. So do you sit back and let him get hurt or do you throw the ball and distract him? And if you do throw the ball and distract him, do you own up to him or do you just take your secret to the grave secure in the knowledge that you saved otani even if everyone else thinks that you were actually trying to hurt otani i am so confused by this question because

if you could substantiate that this was a skill you would absolutely save him and then and then tell people about it is there is there a downside to that that I'm not appreciating? You might be ostracized. People would look at you as some witch or wizard. They would be afraid of you, right? You'd be like a mutant of some sort, and you might be part of a downtrodden mutant X-Men class, and you would be be shunned and people would be suspicious of your skill or they would be constantly trying to take advantage of it right and you would just be someone who was constantly in demand to try to avert disasters and there'd be great responsibility

so there'd be a lot of attention coming your way like you would be forever the person who can just see a split second into the future right you wouldn't be able to live a normal life anymore you would need like a superhero-esque alter ego i mean sure i guess that that is true and i suppose that sometimes the x-men were like this was a hard day yeah that's like part of the whole premise of the x-men right is that it's not always so great to be a mutant or you don't get treated so well yeah yeah it was it's pretty effective literature in terms of its purposes i still think that if you're sitting there and you have the opportunity to to sort of save someone from a grisly fate, you probably do it, even if it's someone you like less than Otani.

Well, yeah, although then are you basically forced to become a superhero because you have to use your powers for good? And so if you're the only person who has this ability, there are limited contexts in which you could predictably leverage this. But if you have this foresight you're able to avert disaster then are you morally required to do that does that have to be your

your full-time job just uh pushing people out of the way of oncoming traffic well and like you know how do you how do you make a living doing that actually you know as Buffy showed us you know being the Slayer is not lucrative you gotta work at the burger place sometimes you know they can pay the Watchers but they can't pay the Slayer like these people can't invest something and then like have

anyway you could get on Patreon probably and be supported by people who fund your altruism. I guess that's true. I mean, I think that you would be the place where it would get thorny is like, are you content deploying this skill be deployed to places that are subject to greater catastrophe, more sustained catastrophe rather than sort of everyday catastrophe in order to try to maximize your power? I don't think this powers into a baseball question it's not open up a whole box of can of worms and yeah it becomes bigger than baseball i think that worms often do come in boxes now like if you get them they probably come in both for your garden or whatever they probably come in a box well i i think that you would save

him and i don't know how you substantiate that like i guess then you have you have to see you can't perform just one miracle i guess is what we're learning from this question you'd have to perform at least two and then even if you do that how do you how do you show that the catastrophe would have actually happened you've just averted the catastrophe it does seem as if you you should be able to come up with something better than lobbing a ball but i guess those are just the tools that you have at your disposal in the moment i think you try to save otani and i think it would really be tricky though because i don't think that you actually could substantiate that this is a skill and so then yeah and then so

people would be like you are a monster trying to throw a baseball at a beloved player or really anyone. So then do you have the ability to stage the throw such that you could attribute it to accident rather than intent? And you'd probably still get kicked out of the park and people would be like, you should be more careful around other people, but you wouldn't be thought to be like assaulting a stranger. Right. That's the thing yeah i mean you wouldn't necessarily be a household name pariah if you did this but if one of us did this for instance uh i don't think we could continue in our careers right definitely not well and you'd be you'd be twitter's main character for sure oh sure yeah and that doesn't seem like it ever goes well for anyone people don't seem to enjoy that experience what a heel turn this would be for me to go from the big otani booster to the guy who's pelting otani with baseballs in the outfield they do yeah they

would do like uh behind the music but but not you know it wouldn't be behind the music it would be behind the the otani literally because you'd be standing behind him in the outfield my hang-up would be yes i mean you would have to demonstrate to your own satisfaction and everyone's satisfaction that you actually have this ability and it would have to really be a rigorous peer-reviewed laboratory setting double blind type of experiment because whenever you have you know esp or remote viewing type of claims then often the studies that are done don't have the right controls and aren't repeatable so you would have to do it just beyond a shadow of a doubt and i would doubt myself i'm not generally one who tends to believe in supernatural phenomena and so i would very seriously doubt my own perception of this and of course there are

people who think that they can perceive ghosts or have esp or whatever and i am always skeptical of those claims and i would be skeptical of my own belief in that i think you'd have to like the sad thing is is that in order to prove it you would have to like, the sad thing is, is that in order to prove it, you would have to like predict and allow another catastrophe to happen. Yeah, that's probably true. I think that that would be the only means you'd have to substantiate this is to say, look, I had to throw this ball at Otani in order to save him from a cataclysmic injury. And someone else isn't going to be so lucky so that you guys will be nice to me for the

rest of my life. And someone else isn't going to be so lucky so that you guys will be nice to me for the rest of my life. And then the question becomes if one other person's calamity is sufficient to really prove it or if you have to commit further calamities. And then it's like now you have a really weird trolley problem. Yeah, right. So I don't know. This is sure a pickle. I don't know. This is sure a pickle.

I guess you're not having these moments revealed to you early enough to not go to the ballpark at all. Your options are to watch or to- Or to send him a warning. Yeah, or to enter. Don't play in this game or don't go back on that ball. You really wouldn't be able to yell or cause a ruckus? I don't know. It takes a lot to distract players out in the field they're used to yelling what if you went onto the field now now you'd still get into trouble and it would be

expensive but people would think of you more fondly than they would if you threw a baseball at a baseball player so maybe your option is to leap onto the field from the other right and yeah and in right it would still be embarrassing yeah and and you know in right field at angels is it angel stadium what do they call that ballpark anaheim angel stadium yeah angel stadium like you actually probably couldn't jump onto the field because that wall in right is like not, you know, you can't. It's a ways up there. Yeah. I don't know, man.

It's one thing to have this be a hypothetical. Like if I could do this without jeopardizing. Is it, Ben? Is it one thing to have it be a hypothetical and another for it to be real? Okay, yes. Good point. But it's one thing to have it be a hypothetical where I save Otani and incur no cost to myself. Like if I could do this anonymously, no one would ever detect my intervention. Fine. If it comes down to basically Otani's career or mine,

as much as I love Otani, I know that I would make the selfless choice here because, look, I love Otani. It would be a great disaster if he were hurt and even more so if I knew that I had the power to help him avert that outcome. Right. But, boy, you are really potentially putting yourself at risk here. Your family, your livelihood, your vocation. It would be tough to be a public figure anymore. It would be tough to continue doing the thing that you love because if you did this and then suffered in silence and never disclosed why you did it, except maybe to your close friends or family or something, well, then you are going to be drummed out of the business. Your name will be notorious.

And if you do make the claim, then you'll be notorious in a different way. And you'll either be a superhero or you will be hanged or something. So I think that there's a lot of cost here. You know, you can sit there and do nothing and no one would ever blame you. And it would never come back to you. And you would be deprived of Otani, but you would not suffer any personal consequences would many among us actually sacrifice their own careers and reputations to save shohei otanis i don't know that that's the case i feel the need to ask you something ben and i realize that rules may vary by jurisdiction but

i'm worried that you think that witchcraft is more illegal than it actually is in this day and age. I think that the odds of you, your choices are not to admit to this ability and then you face death or become a superhero. You're not Goody Proctor. I think it's okay, man. Baby. You're not Goody Proctor. Like, I think it's okay, man. Maybe.

I mean, like, you know, consult your locality, right? Terms and conditions may apply, but generally I think that you're not going to, like, get burned at the stake where we've moved on. Maybe. Maybe. I'd like to think that that's true. Maybe I've just consumed too many superhero stories, but there's always a cost. There's a responsibility that comes along with the power, one might say. So it's a tough call. All right, here's another slightly Otani-related question from Andrew, who says, with Otani as baseball's undisputed face, who should be the heel? Not an actual bad

guy, because who wants to think about actual bad people, but a player who is beloved by his own fanbase and enjoys riling up rival fans. I remember Bryce Harper miming tossing a ball into the stands at Dodger Stadium and taking delight in being vigorously booed. It was a move straight out of pro wrestling

and as a Dodgers fan, I loved it. So do we have a heel in that vein? Not someone who is reviled for actual heinous actions, but just is a bit of a troll or just r right? Like, not necessarily a bad guy in any way, just someone who got on people's nerves, and he would always kind of, you know, jaw at people and taunt people and was sort of seen as a red ass maybe and just kind of, you know, got on people's bad sides,

but not for any actual terrible off-the-field behavior. I have an answer that I don't think works anymore. But the most recent player that I can think of who falls into this category, I think it was Alex Bregman. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. Or any 2019 Astro or 2017 Astro. I think it was Alex Bregman before we knew about the sign stealing. And now I think it's sort of entered a different condition for a lot of people where he seemed like, you know, he would like do the I mean, it all reads so differently now. Yeah. But, you know, he would do like the dugout thing after hitting a home run and he would kind of go at other players, but not in a problematic way on twitter and i think it was bregman but then all of that behavior gets reinterpreted with the benefit of hindsight after the sign stealing stuff

and i think that how we engage with all of the guys from that astros team particularly the the few of them who are still on the astros is really different now so i don't think that bregman the few of them who are still on the Astros is really different now. So I don't think that Bregman works. I think that for a lot of, at least not anymore, I think for a lot of people, even though the behavior, like the signs, I don't want to equate the sign stealing with other behavior that say may garner a suspension for major league baseball, because that feels like icky accounting. But I do think that he transgressed a moral

line for a lot of people in a way that sort of disqualifies him from this now but at one point i think it was breckman i'm trying to think now i mean a lot of the people who have sort of flirted with this lately have ended up just actually sucking so right So that's, you know. Maybe like Josh Donaldson is kind of like that. Sure. He's sort of like fiery and he will taunt opposing players and is kind of a red ass. So maybe Donaldson. Donaldson's not a bad answer.

Amir Garrett has been a bit of a brawler. Yeah, he's been a brawler. He's not endeared himself to certain fan bases yeah but has been like Garrett might be a good answer because yeah he's been like contentious with some folks but I think he is still see maybe maybe Pruszynski is like too far to the extreme for what I'm thinking of as like a good heel because I do think that there are a lot of people who have really genuine affection for Amir Garrett and he doesn't seem like a bad guy he's just you know he he can when the circumstances are right sort of engage in in some brawling I'm trying to think

of other guys who fall into this category we're really a lot of guys really want to be nice now like and I don't think Amir garrett is not a nice person but like there's like a you know i think a lot of players kind of lean toward the the bland rather than having enough personality to to possibly establish themselves as a heel you know you do have people who anger opposing players and some portions of the fan base just because of celebration right because of bat flips or because of like that's a different heel i i feel like a heel and as we have established on this show i don't me and wrestling are like not familiar so i i might be missing some of the subtleties of the

heel as a as a wrestling trope but i think that like people who players who bat flip are generally not meeting the criteria of the heel because they are excited for themselves and for the accomplishment. I think for a lot of us, the whole thing is that they're not really trying to be inconsiderate to their opposition. They're just excited for themselves and what they've just done more than anything else. I don't know if they if i would classify them as heels i think they're missing like that like that's yeah kind of vibe that a heel can have sometimes i don't know maybe i just don't i'm not gonna watch wrestling

to find out but maybe i am miss misappreciating or underappreciating aspects of the profile here. Yeah, I can't think of that many off the top of my head. And I mean, I guess the Astros have just filled that role. So even if it's a different thing, like they've been the team and the players that everyone loves to hate and taunt and make signs and bring to the ballpark and boo. So you almost don't need another and you're right that bregman kind of was that even before so what about joe kelly oh joe kelly

yeah it's not you know he's he is i mean speaking of the astros responding to some astros business a lot of the time so maybe that disqualifies him. But, you know, he's got a, he did the like pouty face thing. Maybe it's just one gif. I don't know. Yeah. All right.

If we're missing an obvious heel, write in and remind us. Yeah. All right. This question is from 2018 from a listener named Sam and it is AJ Pruszynski related. It starts, you all talked recently about AJ Pruszynski's running to first after a not actually dropped third strike.

That is the sort of thing that A.J. Pruszynski would do that might get him the status of a heel. Jeff Sullivan's reaction was something like the burden isn't on Pruszynski to get it right. It's on the umpire. And the Sam says, I don't wait for anyone else to notice. If baseball operated on the same principle, where would the biggest differences be? Would there be many? Are there many times where an ump gets the call wrong and an honest player would speak up to say, actually? So this is a staple of ultimate. This is to some extent a staple of golf, right, where you're obligated to record your score accurately on your scorecard but not so much in

baseball in baseball there is a long tradition of getting away with whatever you can get away with and sometimes you are discovered and outed and you are seen as a cheater and people are mad at you and sometimes people think it's lovable and put you in the hall of fame because you cheated constantly and we're known for that so it's really kind of a case-by-case thing but what would be different about baseball if players actually had to hold themselves accountable oh my god would their personal accountability be subject to replay review? Good question. I don't think it's a good idea.

I mean, no offense to Ultimate. If you have a sort of established culture of accountability like that, then maybe it works great. I don't know enough about Ultimate to know how the average Ultimate player, that was hard to say, feels about that. i generally think that our own perceptions are fallible and i think that that fallibility leaves open the possibility of getting these kinds of things wrong even if you are trying your very level best to enforce the rules yourself i I think about some of the very close calls that occur in baseball that umpires get wrong with no incentive to do so, like a player might simply because it

requires being at just the right angle to see how something has happened or, you know, being able to ultimately slow something down super super super slow in order to to really arrive at the correct call so i think that the combination of our own fallibility and how razor thin some of the margins on these are would make it would make it rather difficult i mean i think just think about like how players think they know the zone and some of them do yeah we answered a question not terribly long ago right about what if you just let each party involved call the zone themselves like how different would it be at the end of the plate appearance you know what would the disparity in balls and strikes be between say the pitcher and the hitter or the catcher in what the count actually was at the end of it. So yeah,

I mean, we see constant disagreements about that, or at least disagreements between the hitter and the umpire. I suppose if you had the catcher and the pitcher being entirely honest, they would not always disagree with the hitter, even though they sometimes maintain that they do right so i think that it's just a recipe for mostly for further delay so there's that part of it i think it would be funny to watch it for exactly one game so that everyone could get a sense of how bad an idea it is but i think that particularly since rules in sports are often subject to interpretation and that you can have a slightly different interpretation that is perhaps not supported by replay but isn't like inherently wrong it's not it's not motivated from a desire to deceive but rather just a different

understanding of the rule or its application in a particular moment or whether the thing you did qualifies for the exception or whatever. It's just better to have a neutral arbiter that can kind of be like, hey, yeah, you stepped out or you are in fact safe or whatever. And I think because we don't have a tradition of self-enforcement, fans would be very, very skeptical that any of the calls were right. enforcement fans would be very very skeptical that any of the calls were right you know shifting that midstream i think would be a problem in terms of the credibility of the game from the fans perspective if for no other reason than like we know how powerful the incentives are

for teams to and players to walk right up to the line of propriety and sometimes cross it if they think it will net them even a tiny advantage. So, you know, I don't know how you square that part. Right. I don't know enough about other sports that do this to know why it's done that way or how well it works. I think, you know, in golf, do players keep their own scorecards because it's part of the mythos of golf as this kind of elitist occupation for gentlemen you know that they are held to this standard of integrity or they hold themselves to it and so you don't need an official to do it or is it partly a practical reason because it was hard to have someone actually following you around this giant course to keep track of how many times you hit the ball and similarly in ultimate is it partly the fact that well maybe the economic financial stakes

are not as large typically in ultimate as they are in say major league baseball for instance where you have much more incentive to cheat and there's a lot of money riding on it? Or is it partly that the economics of Ultimate haven't historically supported having the number of umps or officials or refs on the field that you would need to actually police this stuff? I mean, even in the NFL, for instance, you don't have enough refs on the field to actually monitor all of the players at all of the times, right? And so there are constantly things that should be penalties that are not called penalties because there's no way for the refs to see every one of them, let alone the first down chain and the imprecision that is just inherent in that process,

which I kind of enjoy as someone who does not follow football, but feel like that might make me mad if I were an actual football fan. Anyway, I think in baseball, you do have a lot riding on it and it is fairly feasible to have the number of umps on the field that you need to catch these things more or less. There aren't that many cases where you can get away with something. And when players can, we see that they try to, I mean, we see outfielders all the time trapping balls and trying to sell them as catches. And I suppose some of those times they may actually believe that they caught the ball, but often it is pretty clear that they didn't. And they're just hoping that no one saw. You also have the case of players trying to beat out a grounder to first.

And often if it's close close the player will make the safe sign as they cross the bag right and that's the signal that oh i really beat that out and maybe we should check the replay and in those cases it's again tough to tell whether the player is trying to sway the ump by weighing in themselves or whether they actually think that they beat it out and it's tough to tell because they're sprinting down the line and they can't necessarily see when the ball enters the glove or where exactly the fielder is standing and so they may think they beat it out and they didn't as you were just saying so there are cases like those where you could just have reasonable

disagreement right i mean there'd be a lot of cases where both parties would have different conclusions and unless you went to replay, there'd be no way to sort it out exactly. So even if everyone was being honest about what they thought, you would still have a lot of disagreements and you would still need some neutral third party to arbitrate. Right. And I think that what we have come around to on the idea of instant replay is that like you want the call in the field to be right. You know, more than anything, like we want the call in the field to be right. And I think our experience of replay would be meaningfully improved in the quality of some borderline calls would be meaningfully improved if the standard

that like the replay booth had was getting the call right rather than judging the situation on the field relative to what the umpire's original call was and it feels like the same principle applies here which is that you're more likely to get accurate calls if the person who is making them isn't incentivized to have a particular outcome unfold but rather to just get the call as correct as they as close to correct as they possibly can and so i think you know we should not have folks call their own calls and like if they want to try if they want to press it like i think there's a there's a long tradition of that that doesn't then spiral into like the worst cheating scandal we've had in recent memory so like you know we can have a little bit of wiggle room for that and i think that players continuing to push up against that boundary inspires umpires to try to do a good job and

so there is something i think sort of mutually reinforcing there that is actually beneficial to the game more generally but yeah you'd never like you'd be safe all the time you'd think you were safe all the time you probably do think you're safe all the time they're so close like the bang bang plays are just so close and the rule book isn't illustrated so really right related question from richard which touches on the idea of batting out of order, which is a case where if you make that mistake, the ump is not obligated to point it out, right? Unless the opposing team does. Right. So Richard says, the home team scoreboard operator purposely posts the wrong lineup for the visiting team to get them to bat out of order to get an out. This would have to be only a slight change, maybe posting a more typical lineup when the manager has made a tweak. Would the team and or manager be checking their written lineup?

Or does everyone just look at the scoreboard? I assume the announcer is going by the scoreboard, so could also be announcing wrong. Would the opposing team or umpire even notice? So I guess this is a question where we might benefit from asking a player hey do you look at the posted lineup in the dugout or do you look at the scoreboard or do you just kind of keep track in your own head who's up and where in the order you are so that might be instructive but if you were to do this yeah you could certainly screw up the announcers.

And sometimes that does happen already with the count or the number of outs. But could you screw up the team or the umpire? Would they notice from first pitch on if the lineup was posted incorrectly? Oh, gosh. I mean, eventually, maybe, probably. Like we've seen it happen. I wrote about it one time. Well, like the Mets batted out of order and the reds were like wait a minute hold on a second that's wrong right so like yeah you you'd pay attention and the rule book incentivizes you to pay attention like it's

in there that like they they want you to have to correct some stuff so you're right there are instances where they want the opposing team to be the one to raise something to an umpire, but there they're trying to incentivize attentiveness and they say that. That is the virtue that they are trying to instill in the playing field that you be vigilant. That strikes me as, I guess, fine, especially when it's something as infrequent

as batting out of order because this doesn't happen very often, whereas you could imagine it being, if they were like, well, you better tell us if you think that guy wasn't safe because otherwise, you're just going to let him call himself safe.

It's like, well, that happens all the time. We'd never get out of there. The game's already so long. Right. Yeah. I bet this would work somewhere at some point, not every time, but if you wanted to try it, it could occasionally pay off for you. I'm sure that some players do look at the scoreboard. We know they look at the scoreboard

for some things, but would they look at this when they're batting or would they just see, hey, who's up ahead of me and that person is looking at the posted lineup? I don't know, but I bet it would work at some point if you tried it often enough. Although if you tried it too often, then everyone would pay attention to it and you would get caught and it wouldn't fool anyone. So you'd have to pick your spot, save it for a big game, and it might work some percentage of the time. All right.

Myth Patreon supporter says, let's say I am a young pitcher with a special talent. I can throw a good 94 to 96 mile per hour fastball with decent spin and I have pinpoint accuracy to the point where I can only throw a pitch to one of the four exact corners of the rulebook strike zone. With only one pitch and only four possible locations, albeit a good pitch with perfect command, do you think that I could be a Major League starter and or reliever? How would a team potentially game plan against me? How hard would I have to throw to make this a foolproof repertoire? And finally, would the coming of the Robo-Umps signal my demise or my career renaissance? So I think we have answered questions along these lines like how hard would you have to

throw to get away with only having one pitch or how softly could you throw with one good pitch and perfect command to get away with it but in this case you have perfect pinpoint command but for some reason it only applies to the four corners of the strike zone and it's only a fastball a pretty good fastball with good spin although 94 to 96 is not elite velocity anymore but pretty good so could you get away with this i mean what's the shape of the fastball like how does it look coming in like doesn't that you know what i mean like decent spin is what the question says yeah i don't know i feel like just one and having it be a fastball and having it be like unremarkable from a movement perspective would be hard like right am i should i be overthinking this more than I am? Sure. Although if you can limit it to that one location, then, well, you could move closer to the plate, right?

Right. I mean, you can concentrate all your powers on that one pitch. Now, this is not one location. It's four locations. Sure. You can't move out over the plate because it could be up and in or down and in. It could be up and away. So you are changing heights and working in and out.

Yeah. I don't know that you'd be, like, un-rosterable, but you probably aren't. I mean, you're definitely not starting doing that. No, I don't think you're starting. And you maybe are being limited to less high leverage moments, but I don't know that that necessarily makes you un-rosterable. I mean, we didn't think that Logan Webb would work either, right? Kevin Gausman has a career and has had a pretty good one. So like, I don't know,

maybe it's fine? Question mark? I think if you're a reliever and you don't have to face the same hitters multiple times in the same game, I think you could get away with this probably. And people are yelling at me like, hey, Meg, they don't just have the one pitch. And it's like, yeah, I know. That's true. They have more than the one. That is a problem. And as for RoboLumps, they don't just have the one pitch. And it's like, yeah, I know. That's true. They have more than the one. That is a problem. And as for RoboLumps, I don't know that that would affect you that much. Like if you had perfect command and you could expand the zone slightly,

then that would make you more valuable. But in this scenario, it seems like you have perfect command, but for whatever reason, you can only just throw it right to the exact geometric corners right so i i assume you're already not able to say throw it a couple inches outside to get that called strike because if you could do that then why couldn't you throw it anywhere else in the

strike zone if you wanted to or outside the strike zone so if you are just limited to the four precise spots, then I don't know that the RoboZone matters all that much because eventually the book will be out on you, right? This is all you throw and you're going to know whether there's a RoboZone or not that, well, it's going to be a fastball between 94 and 96. I mean, could you at least take a little speed off maybe and throw a harder fastball and a softer fastball? I don't know whether that might help a little bit. Does that violate the spirit of the question? Yeah, maybe it does, right? So, yeah, I think you could get away with this because I think perfect command is probably really valuable. No one has perfect command, but we know that having great command can make you a Hendrix or someone who can get by without incredible stuff, or at least what we would traditionally define as incredible stuff. Of course, those players have more than one pitch, and they might have seam shifted wake and all sorts of sneaky movement that actually makes it better than the velocity alone would suggest.

sneaky movement that actually makes it better than the velocity alone would suggest so this is still a real deficiency not to be able to throw multiple pitches into any location you want but i think even pitchers who are reputed to have great command do not have anywhere near perfect command and so to have that ability would still make up for a lot of other things that you lack. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Last question from Scott. If a team used a program for all tactical on-field management, then fed that information to a human, and the human manager did everything they were told by the program, would we ever be able to tell?

And would the robot be better? Assume all lineups are set by the program as well as pitching decisions, steal signs, pitch outs, everything. I think you could write a robo-manager program now that would maximize all percentages or most anyway. Maybe some team is already using a robo-manager. I don't think they're using a robo-manager. I mean, I think that most organizations have a good amount of communication between the baseball ops group and the manager. And so I think that you'd have a harder time telling the difference now than you would have 20 years ago, just because I think that managers, modern managers have done, and there are certainly exceptions to this rule in some cases, I suppose. But I think that modern managers have done a really good job of internalizing the wisdom of front offices in terms of how best to optimize

their lineups and to think about bullpen moves and what have you. So I think the difference would be more minute than you would expect. I do think that it depends, I guess, what exactly the computer knows, because I think one place where we as viewers sometimes get wound around the axle for managers is when they have information particularly about their relievers that we might not have on the public side. So they are avoiding a guy who might seem like an obvious choice to us to come in in a given situation, but he's not available because the manager knows something about him that we don't. So if the computer knows that, then maybe the distance collapses even further. But yeah, I guess there would be some differences. I mean, like computers are programmed

by people. So the idea that it is like a perfect strategy optimizer is probably a little bit of a misnomer because you're still introducing some sort of biases into your programming. And I think that, you know, it's useful for us to differentiate between good process, bad results and bad process, bad results and even bad process, good results. And I don't know that we we always do a perfect job. still have to play and how we categorize that from a mistake perspective is interesting because i think that some of us do a better job than others of saying well the rationale there was sound but like you know that the guy just like hung a fastball and that happens and doesn't mean he shouldn't have been in there just means he probably should have thrown a better pitch or that hitter should have laid off that one you know and he didn't so that's too bad but you know that doesn't make the lineup card bad so i don't know stop trying to make machines do human jobs you

know it's like we've had we have a whole subgenre of television and fiction that tells us that that's a bad idea and we keep trying to do it so stop it stop that don't do that please no thank you i think it would depend on whether you could adjust the inputs in game because a lot of what people say about well the manager knows something that other people don't or the pitching coach knows something well it depends on what they're seeing in the game is someone warming up in the bullpen in a way that makes you think they've got great stuff or bad stuff? And does that translate to the field? Or is someone running out of steam on the field? Or is there some off the field issue that the manager is aware of with a certain player that a projection system's not going to know? So in

theory, all of that could be baked into the algorithm in real time, right? Or at least it could if the rules were changed. I mean, technically right now, you're not supposed to have interactive electronics in the dugout with you. And probably you're not supposed to have, say, a manager calling up to the front office and saying, this guy's got, well, before the game, you could say, oh, this guy's dealing with this or that off the field issue or nagging toe injury or whatever. And you could, in theory, factor that into your projections somehow, because that's basically what a manager is doing when a manager makes out the lineup cards or projecting in a non-computer

based way how that would affect that player potentially that day. So you could put that into the system. Or maybe there are teams that right now are looking at how a pitcher's arm angle or stuff changes throughout a game and being able to detect an incipient injury or just running out of gas. And, you know, are you legally allowed to communicate that to the dugout during the game? That would be iffy. I guess you could, in theory, have someone in the clubhouse and then there could be some communication back and forth there. I would assume that something along those lines has happened or could happen. But yeah, I mean, probably you could just factor in that human

element. It's like if you have a scout evaluation of a draft prospect and you use that as an input in your model somehow, then yeah, you could kind of combine the human element and the algorithmic answer that you get. And maybe it would be sort of similar but just depends like would you have the processing power would you be able to share that information and integrate it during the game and would you even want to or do we like it so that managers and players actually have to make some decisions on their own right right okay all right well we got through a decent number of emails there they're a good number that we didn't get to but we will get to those in the future so please keep them coming everyone all right i didn't read these questions but we did get a couple of responses to our answer

from a previous email show where a listener asked about how much a billionaire would have to pay a player to retire. Two questions prompted by that, an anonymous listener asked, what if teams could straight up pay other teams to not face certain players under their control? So what would Steve Cohen have to pay the Nats

to never field Juan Soto against the Mets? Do you think some cheap franchises like the A's or Ray's would switch their baseball business model to collecting these bounties instead of trying to win games with an optimized roster? And Dan, a Patreon supporter, also curiously using Steve Cohen in the example, wondered how much the baseball billionaire might have to pay to buy out another team's depth and prospects. So how much would the Mets have to pay to make the entire Atlanta minor league system retire? What about all the role players on the big league roster? Do you think this would be an

efficient way to get the result? How long lasting would the result be? I would not necessarily put it past any billionaire to try to take advantage of the system, whether that is paying off another owner or being paid off. I think there would probably pretty quickly be rules made against this to steal the subject of our previous episode about players or people who have caused rule changes to be made. I think if someone tried to do this and it were obvious that this were being done, it would quickly lead to a prohibition. You would not want the perception of a pay for play or pay for not play system. And really, how satisfying would that be for you as a fan of that team whose billionaire owner paid off the other fan base not to play

its good players or to have all of its prospects retire? It seems sort of unsporting. You want to test yourself against the best, right? So I think this would be banned. I think it should be banned. I don't know that it would actually be all that effective because investing in your own roster might give you more bang for your buck than paying other people's players not to play in the few games that you face them every year. Are you going to pay off every team's or just your division rivals or just one major rival? It would be pretty costly and it would not be particularly player friendly either.

I assume they'd have to consent to sitting and to getting this bonus. And then as we discussed in the previous scenario, you would be maligned for that by people who faulted you for taking the money not to play. So yeah, let's try to incentivize billionaires spending on their own teams as opposed to spending so that other people's players don't play. I think that would be in the best interest of baseball. Also, speaking of that hypothetical of paying a player to retire, spending so that other people's players don't play. I think that would be in the best interest of baseball. Also, speaking of that hypothetical of paying a player to retire, we got a response from listener Peter Chen, who notes, I was listening to episode 1812, and during your discussion of how much would it cost to retire, I was reminded of the curious second career of

Jackie Robinson as Chock Full of Nuts executive. Apart from Shoeless Joe Jackson and David Ortiz, I believe Jackie has the best final season by war of all time. Citation needed. I have not fact-checked that. 4.5 B-war and 4.2 F-war. But he'd only earned $31,500 in 1956, a pay cut from the previous season. And he'd been searching for a business opportunity with more regular hours and higher pay. Chock-full-of-nuts offered him a salary of $50,000, an almost 60% pay increase

just as he learned that Walter O'Malley was shipping him off to the Giants. Of course, the Dodgers were moving out of Brooklyn at that point, and Jackie did not want to move with them. There were obviously lots of reasons why Robinson might have wanted to leave the game, especially the torrents of abuse he took and the toll of injuries on his once-speedy legs. But he also loved the game and played extremely competitively. One can hardly think of a more competitive player. In any event, one data point for your consideration, Jackie's peak salary was $39,750. His executive job was a roughly 25% increase. So it'd have to be pretty big, I think, for most baseballers. And that was basically my answer. I said you'd have to pay a premium along those lines. And of course,

Robinson was at the tail end of his career. He was in his late 30s already. He acknowledged at the time that his legs were gone. Of course, he was still a productive player, but he was not the offensive player he had been. His babbips were down. He was probably not beating out as many balls. And yes, a unique career in multiple respects. And I believe his job with Chock Full of Nuts allowed him the time to do other types of civil rights work and enabled him to be a trailblazer in another industry. And they supported his civil rights work and he would write editorials and columns. So that gave him more time to be outspoken about those issues. But it is a decent comp. Of course, that's in an earlier era, right, where players had to have second jobs and

offseason jobs because they did not make retire at 37 type money. So I think the calculus might be different these days where you would probably not get a post baseball job that paid you better than your baseball job if you were very good at baseball. And one other response we got from Raymond Chen, frequent listener and Effectively Wild wiki contributor. I was wondering whether people would write in for suggestions of rules precipitated entirely or largely by one person.

That was the topic of episode 1813. Raymond wrote in, how could we forget the pine tar incident? In 1983, in the ninth inning with two outs, George Brett hits a home run to give the Royals a come-from-behind lead. Yankees manager Billy Martin appeals that Brett had too much pine tar on his bat. The umpires agree and rule Brett out for using an illegal bat, ending the game. League president Lee McPhail overrules the umpires and says that the home run stands, but the bat must be removed from the game. The game resumes a month later, and the Royals hold on for the win. The game resumes a month later and the Royals hold on for the win. This de facto rule change is made official in 2010. I didn't check that, although I

did see that date cited elsewhere. I suppose that fits the criteria for that draft, but it doesn't quite fit the spirit of what we were drafting. All the cases we were drafting were cases where a player or coach or manager or owner exposed some loophole in the rules, and then that loophole was patched to prevent that from happening again. In the case of the Pintar game, that didn't really happen. The rule didn't change in that it was still illegal to use Pintar above a certain point on the bat the way that Brett was using it. that Brett was using it. And by the way, from what I understand, that rule wasn't put in place so much because the pine tar was seen as performance enhancing, but because it might discolor the balls and cost teams in the league more money to replace them. But that part of the rule was not amended. What was amended, I believe, was the penalty. It was just changed to say that the play stands, but the bat must be removed as opposed to the play not standing either. So if anything,

this example actually made the rule a little more lax. In one way, it didn't change it at all. It just sort of decreased the penalty. So technically, yes, I suppose that could have been our 20th pick, but it's a little different in nature from the ones that we were drafting. Thanks for the suggestion, though, and I welcome others. In fact, we received one other from Bobby Pape, Patreon supporter, who had previously emailed about this. to do that. They did sign him, but then they immediately traded him to the Texas Rangers for a pitching prospect and a backup infielder. And then MLB, shortly after that, changed the rules, preventing teams from trading players until a full year had elapsed after they were drafted. And that rule is often referred to as the Pete Incavelia rule. Although then there was a loophole in the Incavelia rule where teams could trade a recently drafted player as a player to be named later before that year had elapsed. And that was finally closed in 2015, probably prompted by a Trey Turner

trade. So maybe that could be called the Trey Turner rule. So not an on-field rule, but I think it fits the description. So thank you, Bobby, and I welcome more. I also welcome support of the podcast on Patreon. You can go to patreon.com slash effectively wild, and you can sign up to make some monthly or yearly contribution to help keep the podcast going and help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks as have the following five listeners, Nate Emerson, Hope Corain, Michael Hathaway, Mark Olinger, and Sean O'Toole. Thanks to all of you. You can, of course, get access to our monthly Patreon-only bonus episodes, one of which we will be recording in the coming week, and the Effectively Wild Patreon Discord group,

now more than 500 members strong. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectivelywild.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins, as always, for his editing and production assistance. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. to go. You catch me up on the guitar. I can see your future. There's nobody around.