Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1819: The Underground Baserunner

Episode Date: March 5, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley answer listener emails about shortening the regular season, whether baserunners could tunnel under the basepaths, creating a fictional top prospect, whether umpires expanding and contracting the strike zone lengthens games, where the Hall of Fame should have been located, aesthetically pleasing pitching motions, and whether Statcast could improve the fan […]

Stars are on the ground And the proof is flying overhead So kick me when I'm down And I'll be the one you're laughing about now I don't know if it's real I'm supposed to feel down Hello and welcome to episode 1819 of Infectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Reilly of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you?

I'm doing alright. Looking forward to a little lockout respite today. We've been lockout heavy this week, understandably, I think, but this will be a little oasis in the midst of the lockout. I'm sure the lockout will come up at some point in this episode, perhaps in the first question that we answer. But yes, this is going to be mostly emails and a stat blast and meet a major leaker, all of the evergreens. So this should be fun. Yeah, it should be good. A brief reprieve before, you know, once more in the void. Yep. All right. Let's start with an email from Adam. And this is slightly lockout related, but he says, you have spoken at length about the magical arbitrary numbers in baseball, like 90 feet between bases and a 300 average,

but I've been questioning why 162 is the magical arbitrary number of games for the MLB season. I hope that is an acceptable time to say the MLB. Yes, it is. Well done, Adam. A few players and media members have argued that chopping April off the schedule was always the goal of the owners because they can skip X number of games and still make a profit. If this is the case, why wouldn't all parties consider that long term? To be clear, I don't want less baseball, nor do I look forward to the inevitable we will pay you less because you play fewer games fight.

But this could make each game mean that much more while reducing a bit of strain on players, all while keeping revenue sky high. Starting games in mid-April and or ending the season in mid-September would have a few advantages. Reduced chance of opening day being snowed out, more time to rest players and play unique games, and the opportunity to end the season before fans check out with the start of the NFL, NBA, and NHL games. Baseball purists will always complain, and I admit I would miss the unintentional arbitrary 190 win totals the 162-game season gives us to separate great teams, good teams, and teams closer to average, but that is not a reason to ignore this conversation outright. What are your thoughts? So I'm sure we've talked about this on the podcast before, but this is newly relevant because who knows how many games we're going to get this season if we get games at all.

But going forward long term, what do you think about cutting back? I mean, I'm admittedly less attached to this than I am to some of our other arbitrary benchmarks because the number of games has fluctuated over the course of baseball in a way that I don't know for whatever reason I'm just it's not as if every other benchmark has been held completely consistent right including the you know the height of the mound and what have you so I'm I'm less attached to that I like that I am able to very easily mentally peg as the question suggests like what a good team is versus a very good team versus a lousy one, just because I'm used to converting things into 162. I don't know that we learn a lot more by virtue of having, say, 162 instead of 150 games, right? We know

less, right? Because as soon as you have fewer games, you have less information, you have less data. And so you're going to know less, but is it a meaningful bit of less? I don't think so. Like I think after 150, we could say, you know, those Dodgers are real good. Yeah. So I don't think that I'm necessarily opposed to something that's trimmed up a bit, but I think it is hard even in a year where we don't have a literal lockout and such a contentious labor environment. It is difficult to go to players and say, let's cash fewer game checks. I imagine that for big time free agents, that probably, that however many game game difference 10 game difference or whatever it

is probably isn't like a hugely material difference in their in their overall contract right like if you're the yankees signing garrett cole and you're like i'm gonna get you for one one fewer start do you really knock him that much i mean you probably do because you're a baseball team and as we've shown they'll they'll fight over meal money, apparently. But I would imagine that it doesn't end up making that meaningful of a difference to the big marquee guys. It probably means a lot to players on the roster bubble because just fewer days means fewer opportunities to be up and making a big league game check rather than something in the minor. So I think that they would probably be the worst position to weather something like that.

But I don't know. Just from a statistical perspective, I'm not opposed to tightening things up a little bit and getting folks into the ballpark around May 1st instead of April 1st when the weather is nicer and more places to enjoy it. But I'm not bothered by the slog either because as we've as we've seen

like our capacity to continue to like this thing despite evidence that we probably shouldn't seems to be limitless so i don't know yeah it's when i was a kid and i just watched one team all the time as most fans do i loved just having baseball beyond almost almost every day. And it was just appointment viewing for me. It was, you know, at that time it was all right, 7.05, whatever it is. That's the time that the game is on. And that's what I'm going to spend the next three hours watching. And it was a disappointment when there was an off day. So there would be a lot of fans who just value having it be a constant in their lives and just being able to count on it even if it's just in the background

a sort of soothing white noise almost so i would be sorry to see that go and i think you do need a lot of games just because in baseball compared to other sports you need more games to assess true talent and there's a lot of randomness and so if you want to actually determine the best teams, you need a lot of games. As you're saying, you don't learn that much more between game 155 and 162 or whatever it is. You learn an incremental amount, but by that point, you have a pretty good handle on it and you're be surprised to see it happen, especially after seemingly two out of three seasons with shortened schedules. Maybe that could kind of open the door to it in the same way that the pandemic and social distancing protocols made it possible for seven inning games to work their way in or the zombie runner or whatever you have strange circumstances and sometimes for better or worse worse in a lot of cases it makes things conceivable that wouldn't have happened otherwise or would have taken a lot longer to happen and i think if you're going to keep expanding the playoffs and the playoff field which again i'm not in favor of but it just seems like an inexorable increase in the number of teams that make the playoffs.

If you're going to do that, then you're diminishing the stakes even more. I mean, it just doesn't even make sense. As someone who loves baseball and loves baseball being on all the time, to play a six-month season, 162 games, to trim half the teams basically into a playoff field, that's just not enough stakes, I think, in the regular season. Like you could still watch it just for recreation. I guess it doesn't have to have huge stakes if you love baseball, but it's just a pretty tough sell for someone, I think, to say there are 162 games. And then after that, half the teams basically are still in it so you didn't even necessarily need those 162 games and maybe who wins the division might actually matter more in some formats we'll see but i think if you're gonna go to 12 and then eventually 14 and who knows how many after that then there has to be some corresponding decrease i think or else it'll just be so many games are effectively meaningless

when it comes to determining the playoff field. And again, we don't have to look at everything through the lens of the playoffs are the only thing that matters. So you can count who wins the regular season, but baseball has just repeatedly de-emphasized that. And so I don't like that. I don't know that that's smart I think you could kind of lean into the nature of baseball being an everyday activity more so than something where there are a limited number of games but higher stakes but MLB just keeps chasing that playoff money and if you're going to do that then I think you almost have to have a corresponding decrease or it's just going to be too much for not enough

payoff in terms of what is this game actually determining yeah i think that that's fair it's just going to be i don't know i just look forward to a time when we have agreed when we have all agreed like here's how many games you're gonna get and it's one thing to have a season shortened by a pandemic but you know we're losing stuff this year because of ownership avarice so i just look forward to knowing so that i can start recalibrating my mental adjustments to things so that i'm not sitting here going what is good i don't know i mean i definitely none of us knew in 2020 we were at peace with that we were like no no we go like this truck but now i'd like to i'd like to start dialing it in so let's all decide

and then go from there well that's the other thing because we've had the 162 game season for 60 plus years now we have the statistical baselines and the target numbers so calibrated in our minds and even 154 is not so dramatically different before that. So if we could go back to that, then maybe it's still in the realm of comparable. But anything less than that, you're going to have even fewer record chases than we do now. And we've lamented the lack of record chases, but fewer games, it's going to be less impressive, at least the counting stats. And then you'd have to have caveats with all the rate stats too, because, oh, it's a shorter season and there's more randomness, et cetera. So that would be a hassle that would do away with, or at least make it more difficult to do cross era comparisons, which is a strength of baseball, I think, compared to other sports. Of course, you could still do per 162 rates or per 100 or whatever you want at that point, but it's not quite as easy, not quite as simple. So I would miss that. I think I do value the consistency of having the same length schedule. lose much revenue and maybe you wouldn't actually have to trim pay because if you are reducing your inventory then in theory you're increasing demand and so maybe you'd have per game cost goes up yeah maybe you'd have higher attendance on average just because there are fewer games to go to and

maybe you would have higher ratings for those games and you would just be doing away with you know garbage time maybe and so you could continue to command big tv contracts at least until everyone cuts the cord and i don't know what happens with streaming but that would be a way to say well maybe you could trim a little without necessarily having anyone take a pay cut and then having that be a whole fight so yeah although in that circumstance we should remember that there is a group of people whose pay would get cut with fewer games and that's all the people who work at the ballpark yeah so like you know that piece of this is is really

unfortunate whatever reduction we get no matter how sort of well reasoned it is you know i i doubt strongly that they're gonna to look around and say, well, we should make sure that the hot dog guy gets made whole because now he has a couple fewer home games. And I don't think any of the reductions that people have talked about here are so meaningful that it would be, we're not talking about losing 40 games or anything like that, but it is a consideration that I hope that when they're thinking about this stuff, they

sort of take into account at the beginning of the process rather than at the end where they're like, oh, yeah, the beer gal, what do we do for her? You know, as we've seen in recent days, they can be sort of an afterthought for these kinds of decisions. So yes, just as we're recording, there was some news earlier about the mlbpa setting up a small donation from the fund to give to game day workers and then mlb it seems like we'll be following suit it doesn't sound like it's an enormous amount of money for now and maybe it's partly a pr thing but at least it's not a total afterthought but of course it happens long after the lockout goes into effect and everything. And once people pointed out, hey, these people are going to be suffering because of these consequences. So yes, I think that is a problem too. So I think this will happen at some point. I don't really say that I want it to happen, but I accept that it will happen and I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing and

I see the arguments in favor. But again, I don't really want there to be less baseball, so it's not toward the top of my list. All right. Chris says, after watching a video of a runner jumping over a catcher to reach home, I started wondering, is there any rule that would prevent a runner from digging a tunnel from one base to another? With the base path extending to the left and right but not up and down, what would prevent an expert digger, say a mole person, who could get underground before being tagged from using that skill to avoid the fielder while still remaining in the base path and touching each base from below?

There's an obvious issue in making clear to the umpire you've reached base. Yeah. But I imagine that could be solved. Could it? I don't know. But yes. So a mole person. This is baseball meets Dig Dug or something.

It's like in the animated Batman series when they would. I'm sure this was in the comic books too. But nerds, I'm only one kind of nerd. So just relax. It's like when they spliced in DNA to make people like have a cat eye or whatever. And then it got out of hand and Batman had to stymie them. He got out of the scrape. Don't worry guys, he's fine. I mean, I think the most obvious issue here is, so you're, don't you just... This question is making me so happy because this feels like such a normal off-season question

for Effectively Wild. Yes. Okay, so if you're the fielder in this scenario and you see Moleman down net first start to engage in his mole ways. Don't you just go to second base and stick your glove on the bag? You say you're assuming that he's slower just because he has to dig in tunnel?

Yes. He's not teleporting. There's still excavation that has to take place. So don't you just go to the next base and put your glove on the bag with the ball and say, I have got him. But can you cover the bottom of the bag if it's subterranean and he's just tapping the underside of the bag? But we don't have that. I'm going gonna say a thing

and if i have been fundamentally misunderstanding baseball for my entire time we're gonna cut this so that people aren't like that does the base go i don't think it actually goes underground okay you can pick it up and remove it so take a take a normal a normal fielder and a normal baseball player i say normal without judgment on on mole people to be clear this is not an anti-mole person stance it's just like a you're you're you're you're taking a a non-mole person and you're running from from one bag to the next like the requirement is not that you touch the bag on the top it's that you you touch the bag anywhere, right? Like you're not. I think so.

You've read the rule book. I don't know whether it says anything about tunneling, but I mean. No, but I mean, as the fielder, like you can, if you tag the bag, you could touch it on the side. You could touch it on the top. You could touch it on the corner. As long as you're making contact with the bag. I have not misunderstood baseball for 35 years, right?

I mean, I guess it would be more like 30 years because I wasn't really like hip to baseball as a two-year-old. So I don't think that simultaneous tunneling from the bottom and touching from the top are dispositive on getting an out, are they? No. What are the rules of mole person baseball? Are they fundamentally different? I think that the time is the bigger problem here

because I think that, and you have to emerge at some point you can't just be under there forever right because then then you're really in a fix because how would you ever know where the the fielder is yeah how do you know when to advance right and maybe you just always advance you're like vroom vroom guy except no one can stop you yeah and how does anyone know whether you're advancing that's the problem that the questioner brought up like how does the empire know when you've touched the bag maybe yeah you could have some technological system maybe that detects that touch and transfers it but if you couldn't see it and then do you have a camera down there in the tunnel like does mole man have like a gopro or something so that we can

monitor his progress through the tunnel it would be tough from a spectator standpoint i think and also think of the grounds crew right the poor grounds crew because if he's tunneling like that dirt is presumably just being sprayed everywhere and he's ruining the base pass in the field for everyone and it will just collapse into a sinkhole it'll turn into a sam miller style pit right you'd have to stop the game to repair everything so this would be really disruptive right and it's a safety issue because you absolutely would get collapsed and then yes and then not the other non-Mulmans would fall into the sinkhole and injure themselves. They'd sustain breaks and soft tissue damage. And that would be terrible.

And yeah, it would look like you had a motorcross. Motorcross? Is that the motorized bike thing? Do I know what sports are? Is that a sport? Anyway, it would be like when whenever ballparks have like a wild event that is in baseball and they show the after and i'm just like why did you look at how they massacred my boy you know it's yeah so i think that we would

probably say our our compromise would be we are hopefully an inclusive sport and you moment may play baseball there's nothing in the rule books that prevents you a mole person from participating in baseball but we are going to require you to be on the surface rather than subterranean because otherwise it just gets so complicated and then you're like you're spending all this time and tech and all sorts of stuff trying to navigate the the the subterranean part of baseball and it's less fun because the you know the fans don't get to see any of that in i mean like you said they could have a gopro on the guy but we have so little base running action as it is imagine imagine if we took some of that and we put it underground, it would be tragedy. So I think that the mole people will have to run the bases themselves above ground inside of

everyone. And I don't know, I don't have any idea whether they would be faster or slower on average, but I'd like to find out. I'm generally opposed to genetics splicing like this again because it seemed to be a real problem for Batman at times. Yeah, and not just Batman. You have the Mole Man in the Marvel canon too. He's always fighting the Fantastic Four and the Moloids and he's always trying to take over the surface, which seems strange because he has the whole subsurface to himself already. Isn't that enough for you?

Mole people get a bad rap, it seems like, at least in superhero fiction. And so I'm perusing the rulebook right now, and I don't see anything that would make this illegal. Rule 5.09b says, any runner is out when he runs more than three feet away from his base path to avoid being tagged unless his action is to avoid interference with a fielder fielding a batted ball, a runner's base path is established when the tag attempt occurs and is a straight line from the runner to the base he is attempting to reach safely. But it doesn't say anything about that straight line not being subterranean. I'm just not seeing rule 5.06a.

A runner acquires the right to an unoccupied base when he touches it before he is out. Doesn't say anything about where he has to touch it. We've exposed a loophole here. So I hate to say that if a mole person were to play baseball, we would basically have to legislate them out of existence or say that you have to play topside. You have to conform to the non-mole people rules. But I think just in order to preserve the sport, you would have to pass a rule. It would be like eligible for our stanky draft, right? Oh, yeah. Where you have a mole person come along

and suddenly they change the rules to say, actually, you have to be above the surface of the earth. You cannot be a subterranean baseball player. You have to touch the top of the base as opposed to tunneling through and touching the bottom tunneling would take on a whole new meaning it's now a pitching term right but tunneling now would be a base running term so this would really change everything in a pretty disruptive way it's a clever creative question but as is so often the case i think if baseball

were different in this case it actually would be pretty different, but it would not be improved. Yeah, I don't think that it would be improved. I think that it would be a disaster, but hopefully not one that we couldn't find our way around. Do they have bad eyesight, mole people? Yeah, that's a stereotype, I think. Oh, see? We're learning all sorts of stuff today. Yeah, that's a stereotype, I think.

Oh, see? Like, we're learning all sorts of stuff today. So, but it's a relevant question because you wouldn't want to force, you know, I would imagine that actual moles, do actual moles have bad eyesight? I think so. That's probably what the stereotype comes from. Right, right. They probably, yeah.

So it's like you don't, or at least aren't used to the sun. But in this scenario, the mole person would have been above surface for a while, presumably. How else would we know? How would we scout them if they weren't playing baseball above ground? Unless we're sending people underground to scout a mole league, which I suppose is possible. And then it's like, is it right beneath the ballpark? And it's just like a separate ballpark see i think that i think that this is a real logistical hassle apart from anything else and that in order to participate you would have been above ground for longer i think that's i think

that that's right you'd need subterranean scouts they'd have to put their hard hats on and and descend like miners or oh yeah spelunkers or something. Spelunker. Yeah. I think it's a real pickle. Could you have pickles in this scenario? I mean, you can't avoid the tag. You're always avoiding the tag, so you wouldn't even have pickles.

So that would be bad too. Yeah. I mean, it's just, yeah. And do moles like pickles? What do moles eat? That's beyond bad too. Yeah. I mean, it's just, yeah. And do moles like pickles? What do moles eat? That's beyond my expertise. Okay. Here's another weird one from Peter.

Your top 100 discussion, as well as recent negotiating proposals based on top 100 lists, led me to wonder, even in today's information-saturated scouting environment, could a team successfully conjure up a fake top 100 prospect? Let's leave aside their motivation. Maybe they want to manipulate the list to nudge one of their other prospects further down. Maybe they want to raise their farm system rankings. And also, let's say that they have plenty of money to generate this illusion. I'm guessing the prospect would have to be young and international where there's not as much scouting. Lots of the international free agency guys have pretty variable evaluations from different folks, and many are basically on one team's developmental campus. A few Bigfoot-style grainy Instagram shots would help too, followed by a big fake bonus announcement. Most prospect evaluators talk to other evaluators,

scouts, etc., so you'd probably need a scout or two to sell the lie also i guess a corollary is can you imagine any scenario where this might be advantageous you can't trade the player without the jig being up nor do farm rankings get you revenue maybe in trade bargaining it maybe makes you seem more reasonable i'll give you this guy but there's no way i'll part with fake guy he's too valuable so could you concoct a fake prospect i mean i do not think you could do this i don't really think that there is a ton of motivation to but i think first of all that there's probably some underestimation going on here of of how much even for the the young international amateurs there is like the instagram stuff is is better than just grainy

bigfoot footage and once they get to to the complex you would have to be generating data in some way because even on right even for guys on you know dsl teams who you know peter is right aren't getting scouted in person as thoroughly until they come stateside, they are generating data, which gets shared with other teams and which, you know, many prospect writers are able to sort of source from teams. So you would have to have someone generating data. Maybe you just fabricated entirely, but you could only maintain the illusion for a very narrow window because eventually those guys do come stateside and if they don't come stateside for a number of years you probably are reading into that as having something to do with how good a prospect they are so like the window

in which you could pull something like this off is going to be pretty narrow because you could generate a fake signing, but you have a hard capped pool. So if you pretend you're giving $2 million to an international amateur, you can't like sign other guys for more money that you are giving to this fake prospect. You'd have to be like underspending relative to your cap, right? Yeah. And then you would only be able to pull that off and have that guy be deemed a relevant prospect for so long before other teams and public evaluators are like, why haven't we seen that guy yet?

Like, where is he? And, you know, increasingly it's not unusual for international amateurs to do some kind of showcase outside of wherever they play. Like sometimes those guys come to Arizona and do showcase games here. Sometimes they do workouts stateside to make it easier for folks to see them. So I think it would be really hard. And again, for what? You're not going to, I think, really gain that much from a trade perspective by deeming someone who no one has really seen untouchable. They'll be like, okay, you haven't seen that guy. That doesn't really alter the calculus for us in terms of whether this deal sort of balances

in the way we need it to to make sense so and like you couldn't name him as a player to be named later because eventually you have to like produce a player to trade so I think it would be really difficult now I think that there are plenty of there are plenty of guys

who get sort of overhyped based on limited information and based on you you know, a couple of reels of Instagram video and who end up either not signing for as much as is initially thought or who don't do as well as we think they will because we're going on such little information. But yeah, I don't know that there would be much incentive for this because i think that what you want is to and sometimes both teams and the industry go overboard in doing this like what you're trying to do is generate enthusiasm and excitement for your club's future

and i think that you know you you have good players there's no need to make one up like most teams have good players and even if they don't have good players there's no need to make one up like most teams have good players and even if they don't have good players they have players right and they can talk about them and and and sort of talk about the projection and whatever so i don't think that there's a ton of incentive to do this yeah you could have done it in an earlier era of baseball history back when players just routinely got signed off the street and showed up out of nowhere and you know when you had like Sid Finch being a believable thing or like the legend of Toe Nash just being found out in the wilderness and had an incredible talent and that kind of thing could

happen especially before the draft and before you had huge scouting networks and even before minor league systems totally plausible back then. And maybe you could have concocted a great prospect and managed to sell the rights to some other team. But now it would be so difficult to do. I can't imagine how you could do it because you'd always need data. Like you'd need a player ID. You'd need registration.

You'd need a number in a system in a database somewhere it just it wouldn't work which you'd need to produce pd test results like there's all sorts of stuff and you know we don't say any of that like the way that the international market unfolds is is perfect or not subject to a lot of, at times, very gross corruption. But there are processes in place that I think would be hard to stymie along the way. And I think the thing that would really dissuade a team from doing this is the nature of spending in that market, right? If there were unlimited spending on international amateurs, then maybe there would be some incentive to do this or at least less of a disincentive not to. But, you know, you have your hard cap and you can trade for pool space,

but like even still, you can only trade for so much. And so you would be sort of reducing your ability to make good on deals that you have already made because you can't just, you know, spend that money that you would have spent and have people go how did you spend two million dollars more than you were allotted right so i think that that by itself is gonna make it a problem and how long could you keep it going you would be found out like there was a good story in the athletic last month by cody Stavenhagen, who wrote about this scam, this con artist who in the spring of 1971 claimed to be the NFL wide receiver Jerry Levias and announced that he was retiring from football and that he wanted to try out for a baseball team. And he showed up at Detroit Tigers

spring training and passed himself off as this former NFL player and like got quoted as him and everything and just passed himself off as him and it was not his only con but he was quickly found out when he started trying out and was not athletic it's like okay well this is not that guy clearly so even if you could somehow get away with it for a little while it wouldn't last and if it were discovered that you had scammed another team by inventing a fake prospect oh yeah sure that uh the deal would be undone and that you would be disciplined and that there wouldn't actually be any long-term advantage to this anyway so implausible in a number of ways, but good idea, I guess. Actually, bad idea, but good question.

Okay. Linder, Patreon supporter, says, Has the tendency for umpires to expand the zone on hitters' counts and condense the zone on pitchers' counts been considered as a cause of pace of play problems before? To me, this seems like it could lengthen the time of a game somewhat significantly. Hmm. I've got to say, I hadn't really considered this. And we've talked about this tendency of umpires, and I have praised this tendency of umpires, whether it's intentional or subconscious or not. There is this demonstrated tendency for, as Linder says, the size of the zone to change based on the count. And whoever is down in the count basically gets a little leeway. So if you're down 0-2 as a hitter, then suddenly the zone shrinks a little bit. And a pitch that might be called a strike on 3-0 would not be called a strike.

And that sounds unfair. It sounds inconsistent. It sounds arbitrary. But I think it has some advantages in that it gives a leg up to the person who is currently at a disadvantage in that plate appearance. And it makes the plate appearance more competitive. We know that hitters do terribly on O2 as it is, so if you take away the advantage they get on O2, well, then you're in an even deeper hole, and you're less likely to have any positive outcome from that plate appearance, and it's even more over before it's over, which seems like it would hurt from an entertainment perspective. And I did find some evidence of that along with Rob Arthur in an article we wrote last year where we looked at the lower league where the robo zone was in effect. And it did seem like you could sense that kind of thing by looking at splits by count

and maybe hitters and umpires and pitchers, everyone would just adjust to that eventually. And it wouldn't be as big a disadvantage as having that suddenly sprung on you. But this is not something I'd thought of, but it makes sense, right? Because if it is making the plate appearance more competitive, that means it's also extending the plate appearance or making it likelier for it to be extended. And therefore, it is adding time to the game. It's adding pitches, not necessarily slowing the pace of the game down. But yeah, this probably is true. It probably is true. But I think that if we're thinking about the spectrum of behavior that adds time to the game, I think that behavior that adds time to the game in service of more potential action

is stuff we can live with and then there's the stuff that is like irritating right so it's like pitching changes and futzing with your gloves and stepping out of the box and so i guess what i would say is i think that this is on balance a good thing because it does spur some action, right? And sometimes it spurs a strikeout. So it's not as if it is universally in favor of offense, but it does allow hitters to stay in a little bit longer. And so I am fine with this and think there are other places we can trim. Does that make sense? Yep.

Yeah, this at least it comes with an advantage. I think it makes the game more entertaining, whereas other things that lengthen the game do not. They don't improve the action. So I think, yes, if you're going to trim somewhere, start with the places you can trim that doesn't actually make the game less entertaining. Although if this happens, I guess you could look at it as a silver lining potentially yeah all right question from patreon supporter now i only want to triumph hall of fame discourse

should focus less on who gets a plaque in a hallway and more about the location the only reason that cooperstown is in cooperstown is because of its connection to the long debunked double day creation myth there's no reason otherwise that baseball's most iconic museum would be in a small town in upstate New York, hours away from anything. My question is, if you could put the Hall of Fame anywhere else, where would you put it? Imagine that it's a retroactive change, since it's not like it's worth moving it now. Where would I put it? I mean, I don't know where i would i guess i mean obviously

we're not moving it now which the question acknowledges where would you where would you put it ben hmm yeah i'm trying to think like this is one of those quaint things about baseball like cooperstown it's it's synonymous with the baseball hall of fame and right that's kind of cool but also it means that most people never get to go to the Hall of Fame, or at least not often. I live in New York State, and it's been a while since I was at the Hall of Fame. So if you wanted to put it in front of the most people, then I guess you would just move it downstate and have it be in the city somewhere, which is a very uncreative answer. And I hate to be an east coast biased person and just

say well it's the biggest population center so put it in the place where the most people could visit it and it would get the most exposure it's a pretty boring answer i guess like if you could have it be roving in some way and i know that the hall of Fame has had traveling exhibits. It would be tough to pack up an entire building and all the plaques and all of the memorabilia and all of the archives and everything. It kind of has to be physically situated somewhere. You could have it be centrally located, I guess. Pick some Midwestern city, let's say, and maybe it wouldn't have the population of New York City. Midwestern city, let's say, and maybe it wouldn't have the population of New York City, but at least it would be equidistant from everywhere in the contiguous states. So that's something.

Or I like the idea maybe of putting it in D.C. and integrating it into the Smithsonian infrastructure so that it could be free for everyone to go to. And if we are acknowledging baseball sort of an important cultural institution it seems like that might be cool to have it be part of that system as a place for people to go visit i like the idea of maybe putting it like i think in part because it might inspire people to visit the other museum although i could also see a cannibalizing visitation there so i would want to think about that relationship more closely but it might be cool to have it and the negro

leagues museum in the same place yeah so that you could if you're an enthusiast you could have you could kind of do a tour of both and have a more complete understanding of baseball in the u.s and its history so that is an appealing alternative. So, yeah, I think that maybe having thought about it, those would be my two picks. So Kansas City or DC, maybe. I think it should be in the metaverse. Actually, I'm kind of kidding, but this would be a better use of the metaverse than, say, having a big league ballpark in the metaverse. big league ballpark in the metaverse if there's no baseball in the metaverse then that's the reason why you go to a big league ballpark or the primary reason to have a museum in the metaverse perfectly recreated that might actually work because it's not like you can touch the exhibits or at least

a lot of them you know everything's like behind a glass case anyway. And so if it's just about seeing it, well, if you could just render it in a lifelike way and scan it in so that you could walk around the virtual halls of the museum, I'm sure that this sort of thing exists in some form somewhere. But that would probably be a pretty good use, actually, of, you know, just have the Baseball Hall of Fame be in VR or something and not just in VR because not everyone has access to VR, but that kind of thing. Like in the future, probably more people would visit it if it were recreated on the internet in a digital virtual way than in any physical location. So that might be the future, but yeah, I guess we've covered the major possibilities here. Well, and I know that, you know, during the pandemic, a lot of museums were doing work to create sort of a digital experience for people so they could still engage with stuff. And,

you know, I think that especially because Cooperstown is so far away, but even if it were in the middle of New York City, City, if you're able to create a more accessible experience for people who can't travel there for whatever reason, whether it's financial or disability, that's a good thing to be able to open that up. I think I agree with you. We're very harsh on the Braves. You know what? I stand by that Truist Park take. But I think that this is a situation where you could really bring the Hall of Fame

to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to experience that museum and that history. And I think that that would be an admirable goal. I don't know if

it has to be the literal metaverse because, yeah, I don't know if it has to be that, but some sort of VR or digital experience of it I think would be really cool see we're not cranks yeah it's just about finding the right application right all right question from Benjamin throughout my childhood I have had an

infatuation with pitching motions whether it was a submariner submariner a lefty being deceptive or as you have referenced on the rules draft, a completely funky motion like Carter Capps used to have, I love what each pitcher could bring to the table no matter their overall talent. That brings me to Ted Lilly, the most pleasing motion I have experienced watching live or on TV. I go back to this grainy video someone took from the bleachers of Lily pitching for the Dodgers at Petco Park all the time. I'll link it here. I'll link it on the show page. It's obscure, but it reminds me how much I enjoyed his pitching when he played for my hometown team, the Dodgers. Lily was never the greatest, but he certainly got the job done when called upon.

Now here's my question. What non-star level pitcher always caught your eye and was aesthetically pleasing to watch for you could be from any era in MLB history someone that scratched that pitching itch like Ted Lilly randomly does for me and do we under focus on pitching deliveries relative to batting stances do you think because we talk so much about batting stances and swings. And I guess there's a fair amount of talk about windups and motions and people will talk about Juan Marshall or Hideo Nomo or some of the most distinctive ones. But it seems like we fetishize batting stances more so than deliveries. deliveries and I don't know whether that is because they vary more I don't think they really do vary more or whether it's because we just get used to pitching motions because you see someone throw hundreds of times in a game or at least you used to whereas batters come and go and you only get a few at bats of them per game I don't know what it is exactly but it seems like we should talk even more about pitching motions than we do I agree with that't know what it is exactly but it seems like we should talk even more about

pitching motions than we do i agree with that i think that it is an under under reported or appreciated aspect and i think that some of it is just that the the pitching answer to the batting stance fascination has to is generally takes the form of like look at this amazing pitch right and that's sort of right that's sort of the um the lens through which we view that but yeah i think that we should spend some time on both the the funky ones and the sort of platonic ideals right so you sent me this question in advance and i thought about it and i'm gonna to violate the non-famous part pretty badly. But so here are some ones that I came up with. Are you ready?

Yes. So this is one I told you. Now I have to make sure that I... Sometimes you got to check which Rogers you're talking about. So Tyler Rogers, submarine or submariner? I would say submariner. I would like to say submariner. There's a whole debate about this

in our Facebook group. There are a number of people who have served on submarines, which I get a kick out of because I am obsessed with submarines. And I've asked them, how do you say it? And there's been some disagreement even among them. Among Submariners? Yes. So it doesn't seem to be a settled question. I would say in baseball, most people say submariner. Yeah. Whereas like the superhero would be more submariner because it's like a mariner, which is a word, which is also a word in baseball because it's the name of a team. But I think you tend to hear submariner more about the pitchers. But I kind of am partial to Submariner myself. So the funk there is really great.

So I would vote for Rogers. This one is not funk so much, but I love the looseness, the whippiness of Edwin Diaz's delivery. Because you're just like, that should break immediately. And that part isn't fun to worry about, but the fact that it hasn't, you're like, well, that's pretty cool. So the looseness of his arm I find very aesthetically pleasing. I think that if you're looking for just a very smooth and easy and amazing delivery on an incredible pitcher,

you have just DeGrom is probably the platonic ideal there, where it's just so smooth. I asked this question of Craig Goldstein. He wanted to nominate Dustin May for all that weirdness. You got limbs and hair flying every which way, and so there's the Dustin May of it all. I really appreciate the Kershaw yoga pose pre-delivery. So I didn't stick to non-famous guys.

So you can stick to non-famous guys, and we probably won't have any overlap. That's okay. The first name that came to my mind was a famous guy, I guess, pretty predictably, and it's a former teammate of Ted Lilly's. Andy Pettit was my guy growing up. I love his motion. i love his whole appearance on the mound he has the hat pulled down low so that all you can see are his eyes and they're in shadow and i don't know if it's supposed to be intimidating or whether that's just what he did i see how

some people could see that as obnoxious possibly but i thought it was cool as a kid who was rooting for him. And he had the glove in front of his face as he was standing there. So really all you could see was his eyes and then the motion itself. I mean, he had the cool pickoff move, of course, but it was just very controlled and he had the nice kind of classic rhythmic hands and arms over your head type of motion. And I really really enjoyed that and actually when I was a kid and I would mimic deliveries or batting stances my go-to's were Pettit and Paul O'Neill and they were both lefties and I was not a lefty and so it never looked right which was always disappointing to me like I could fake it as a lefty and not do it as well, or I could like transpose it to my right handedness and then it still never looked really right.

And I was thinking also we focus less on pitching deliveries maybe than batting stances. And there's also a lot less prizing of the lefty motion, right? Right. Like in baseball, I mean, you talk about lefties for having different repertoires in some ways. Or, of course, there's the whole sort of stereotype of the crafty lefty or of like the wacky lefty. Right. But in terms of like, do they look different as they deliver the ball? Like, do you hear anyone say like a classic left handed delivery, like a sweet lefty delivery. Like, we don't really hear that, right? The way that you hear it about a swing. And we've talked about why you hear that about swings before, and we've gone through some of the theories. And there was a good MLB.com article about that last year that I'll link to on the show page. But my theory has always been that it's about which way you run, right? And so if you run counterclockwise, lefties get to come out of the box more smoothly,

and they don't have to break their momentum and then that's part of it. But that article did some video analysis and tried to slow things down and reverse things and show that that isn't actually why. I'm not totally convinced, but I guess you don't have that. Maybe a support of that argument is the fact that like lefties don't necessarily look better throwing a baseball although Ted Lilly was a lefty and he inspired this question and then Andy Pettit was my go-to and he's a lefty so I don't know maybe there is something to it after all but other than Pettit I think probably my pick for non-star level pitcher would be like Paul Bird or Ross Ohlendorf who had the throwback motions like

just out of time completely like they look like they should be in black and white where they do the whole like step back and rock their arms back and then go over the head kind of thing I like that so really no one else did that or very few did that during their

era so I always enjoyed that a lot and i like the kind of smooth and calm and controlled and precise ones too like the roy halliday or cliff lee where it just looked incredibly almost robotic machine-like really repeatable and then of course i like some of the wacky ones too i mean i like the the submariners submariners and el du, of course, I like some of the wacky ones, too. I mean, I like the Submariners, Submariners, and El Duque, of course, another Pettit teammate and Lily teammate. Always enjoyed him very much and his distinctive motion as a kid growing up. So, yeah, you have the weird ones that really stand out, and then you have the ones that

are almost hypnotic, and they kind of lull you into not even paying attention to them which is maybe why we don't notice them so much but that can be sort of soothing as well yeah we just don't appreciate the boring deliveries because there's like you appreciate the ones where you look at it and you're like if i were a coach teaching a kid that's what i would tell that kid to do right so like those ones i think where it feels like sort of the platonic ideal is like okay that's great and then there are the ones that are weird and funky yeah the johnny cueto's i mean they're really fun but yeah love love the cueto like i also thought of like and this is me maybe just enjoying watching him pitch and this is why it's kind of a difficult

question like i was like i love like you Darvish. There's something particularly like striking about his delivery, apart from the fact that he throws a bunch of different pitches. So maybe that's why I find it striking. But it's like, you're a big dude who's good. Like, you know, you have sort of like big dude goodness. Or it's like, you know, you kind of have that experience with someone like Garrett Cole,

where it's like, you're just like a giant who throws really hard. And so it's like, I don't love, I don't love the, like, I don't know. I can't think of any one whose emotion comes to mind where I'm like, hate this.

And I know that there are examples. Also, do you have the experience sometimes? I know that like Sam has talked about this in the past. I think maybe you guys were talking to Grant. Do you ever have like pitcher handedness, face blindness? Oh yeah.

I have it even more with batters probably than pitchers yeah yes i do have that where you're like i know i have watched this human being throw not just one inning but maybe many many innings but when you're trying to conjure the mental image of him throwing you can't situate him based on handedness in your mind right or someone like a righty might throw like a lefty in some ways like lefties tend to have lower velocity on average in part or almost entirely because of the familiarity advantage that they have just hit or see fewer lefties especially when they're coming up and so they can get away with less pure raw stuff so sometimes you'll have a righty who seems like he would be a lefty based on how he

throws and then you have to remind yourself oh no not actually a lefty right right so i i find those those moments of of handedness fit face blindness i'm sure there's a better phrase I could come up with. Very humbling where I'm like, do I know anything about baseball at all? Right. Yeah. More lefties are coming to my mind now. Like Barry Zito, I enjoyed.

Dontrell Willis, of course, was a classic. But then you had like Tim Lincecum was great. Everyone loves Tim Lincecum, of course. And that was more like explosive, violent, like he was leveraging every inch of his frame to get the most out of his body that he could for as long as it lasted. bend at the waist that preceded the actual delivery. But I liked how he kind of held his glove up with his elbows kind of like craftily, like almost that he was going to rub them together in sort of a nefarious way. But yeah, he was great. I guess that in the way that people lament the standardization of stances and swings now

and think that, well, now that you have more standardized player development and you have video and Twitter and everyone is just seeing the quote unquote ideal swing all the time, you have fewer outliers. the windup, right? And the rise of pitchers permanently pitching from the stretch or almost always pitching from the stretch. And that is kind of a shame too, I think, in that the full windup is often more aesthetically pleasing and more differentiated than just pitching from the stretch. And I guess technically it takes a little more time between pitches too. So maybe from a pace of play perspective, it's not the worst thing thing but i do kind of lament the decline of the full wind up yeah yeah i think that we were missing something we've lost something there i mean not entirely but sometimes yeah okay let's take one more here this is from shane this is an old one from a few years ago i was sitting on the first base side at a minor league game this week and foul balls were being hit all around me that This is an old one from a few years ago. a home run ball could they use the stat cast technologies to determine shortest concession

lines shortest line to the bathroom what other ways could stack sb use to improve the fan experience at the ballpark so turn stat cast on the fans and analyze the ballpark experience instead and i'll just say i have tried to do articles on like foul ball distribution especially before MLB really strongly encouraged teams to extend the netting all the way down the foul line in the wake of some foul ball related injuries I wanted to try to figure out well how far do you have to extend the netting or should you where are the foul balls clustered in terms of frequency and speed and the most dangerous foul balls and at the time a few years ago when i was trying to do that it was basically impossible to do because stat cast and and earlier pitch tracking technologies just really didn't track

foul balls like they only tracked trajectories of batted balls that were actually in or close to fair territory like on the playing field and so most of them just would not be picked up. Now, Hawkeye, I believe, that is now used in the StatCast system is better about that and picks up more foul balls, but I don't think it's complete. And we don't really have the data for that. And I have in the past requested that data from MLB

and it has not been forthcoming. And maybe they are not really eager to have that be written about where are the most dangerous foul balls. But I think that it would be more feasible with current technology, but still really difficult to do. And like StatCast doesn't track like what's happening in the stands. So you would need to expand the system and have more cameras covering those areas that are not currently covered. But if you could, if you wanted to go full Big Brother and just have everybody in the ballpark tracked, even the less athletic bodies, is there anything you could do that would be useful for fans? Like you could definitely track like where you should sit to catch foul balls or where you should sit to avoid being hit by one so that is definitely one application of it yeah i don't think we have to like turn stat cast onto lines to be able to assess like wait times for stuff like we probably have other mechanisms by which we can do that that don't involve radar like i think it's useful to remember what it is right like what the array is actually doing like we don't probably need it to to like measure time through a line we have other mechanisms for

that like we can just bother the disney people yeah but i think that i think knowing where foul balls are concentrated is is very useful both for catching them. And when I say what I'm about to say, I want to make clear that I am not conceding the fact that it's super easy to get out of the way of a foul ball. That's not what I mean. But particularly for little kids, you might want to avoid those spots just because they're little tiny children. And depending on how small they are, they might not put a hand up at all, right?

It's not me saying that it's easy. If it's a screaming lion, it's not. That's the one that comes the most immediately to mind. Just like roots in and out of the park. Again, you wouldn't necessarily need StatCast. You need StatCast for that. When you go to a particular park all the time, you know, okay, here's the best entrance i should use for this and here's

where i can cut through to skip this line and this is a lesser used entrance and if you have like regular seats then you know how to make a beeline to that seat and yes you might know like the best times to i guess a lot of it would not necessarily be about the route you take but like the timing you know like if you want to go to the bathroom if you want to go to the concession stand when should you do that in order to miss the least action and also

have the least amount of time spent in lines or like if you want to go stand on a line where they have a good TV so you don't miss much like there are a lot of little quirks like that but I don't know that we necessarily need full motion tracking to have answers to those things yeah i i think that we have other mechanisms of like like surveilling crowds also isn't it kind of intuitive to you when you're at the park to know when you're like i don't know maybe it's

not your first time at least yeah if you that's fair if you're if you're new to the the situation maybe it's uh not something that you are as well suited to to sort out but like when i'm at the ballpark and i'm trying to decide when i'm gonna go like to the bathroom or to get a snack or to grab a beer or whatever like you're paying attention to the pitching and you're paying attention to where you are in either team's lineup and then you like kind of try to time it out so that you're not missing the the best the best dudes it's a little pro tip from me to you it's free you don't need to go to savanta at all it's just like a free tip from me to you and i don't know like in terms of when the lines are going to be the busiest, like they're definitely going to be the busiest right after the inning turns over. Because people are like, haha, the inning has turned over. Surely I will be able to get a beer in two and a half minutes. That's a thing that's happened exactly one time in the history of ballparks. You can't get a beer in two and a half minutes at Chase. And there are like 10 people at those games.

of ballparks you can't get a beer in two and a half minutes at chase and there are like 10 people at those games yeah sometimes like i guess you might not even know about all the food options that are available like you know there are some ballparks that have like gourmet dining options or like more exotic options than you would typically find in a ballpark and so if you're just not aware of that then that'd be nice to know or some of the other attractions and like kids activities and things that are in the ballpark that, again, if you just go straight to your seats, you might not even be aware of or displays and team museums and exhibits and such. So that kind of thing, that's good. But I don't know that we need analytics to help us there. It's more about like taking a tour or reading up about the ballpark or just walking around so right i would appreciate like maybe some kind of ticket analytics assistance in the sense

that teams use analytics to determine like variable pricing and that sort of thing so i would like to know like all right how am i going to get the most bang for my buck like if i want to go see x number of baseball games this coming season, assuming there are baseball games this coming season and that there is a season, when should I buy those tickets? And what games should I go to in terms of the entertainment that I'm going to see and how good the game is likely to be and what the price is likely to be? And should I buy it on the secondary market? And if so, am I going to get a good deal if I buy this game at this time? How far in advance should I buy it on the secondary market? And if so, am I going to get a good deal if I buy this game at this time? Like how far in advance should I get these tickets?

Should I try to snap them up at the last second when the resellers have given up and slashed their prices? All that kind of thing. Or like when is just cheapest to go? Because it can be expensive to go to the ballpark these days, especially if you were bringing anyone and you're traveling. And so just kind of an efficiency analysis of like, how can I get the most bang for my buck at the ballpark? That would be useful, I think. I'm realizing that the two markets that I have

been in the most in terms of going to a home park are like a really bad way of gauging any of this because like there is reasonable attendance at t-mobile but it's not like a runaway it's not yankee stadium right but for a couple of times a year and chase is sure not representative thankfully of what average attendance is like which i do not say as a knock on diamondbacks fans but i do say as a knock on the diamondbacks so i don't know that i have a really good feel for like how time consuming doing anything out of your seat might be at a major league park these days i think my sense might be kind of warped yeah yeah problem all right let's end with the stat blast and meet a major leaguer, so stat blast first. Okay, this step last is inspired by a question from listener Greg, who says,

I am a fan of the Cincinnati Reds. We are interesting, I swear. If you say so, Greg. of the Cincinnati Reds. We are interesting, I swear. If you say so, Greg. I live minutes from their now high A affiliate, the Dayton Dragons, and as a fan of the Dragons, I try to keep up with the former players as they progress to Cincinnati or elsewhere. I have noticed a trend over the last decade or so. For the last seven years, 2015 to present, there's been a former Dragon on one of the World Series teams. So in 2015, Johnny Cueto was with the Royals. 2016, Travis Wood was with the Cubs. 2017, 2018, and 2020, Justin Turner was with the Dodgers.

2019, Tanner Rainey was with the Nationals. And 2021, Jose Siri was with the Astros, all former Dayton Dragons. So Greg says, is this a record for appearances by a specific minor league team? The only one I could think might challenge it would be a Yankees affiliate from the early to mid 90s when they had members of their dynasty and traded away a bunch of prospects too. So I was not sure whether this was notable or not. Sometimes people will email us and say, is this weird? And I will instantly know whether it's weird or not. In this case, us and say, is this weird? And I will

instantly know whether it's weird or not. In this case, couldn't tell you. This could be notable. This could be not notable. I wasn't sure. So I posed the question to Ryan Nelson, frequent StatPlus consultant, and he did his usual magic and went back all the way and came up with a tidy, handy-dandy spreadsheet, which I will link to on the show page. But a couple of caveats. First, you have to figure that the higher the level is, the likely you are to have a long streak because, of course, a AAA team is going to have more future major leaguers on its roster than a team in A-ball, let's say. And so the AAA team is going to have a longer streak or at least has a better chance to have a long streak than the lower-level team.

The second thing is rehab stints didn't really seem to be in the spirit of the question. It's kind of cool if you're a fan of a minor league team and a major league player goes down there, but you don't feel ownership or a personal investment in the career the way that you do if you see that player as a young player who then goes up and has success. So we wanted to exclude rehab stints, and what we did was set a playing time minimum of five games for the minor league team. So if you just had a one-game rehab start or something, that doesn't count. So remember, the streak to beat here with the Dayton Dragons is five years. They are a high A team, but if we open this up to any minor league level and we go back post-war since 1946, sort of the modern minors, the first year that AAA was a classification, the record is 18 years.

Yeah. And that's the Indianapolis Indians AAA team from 1959 to 1976. Those 18 years in a row, there was a former member of that farm team in the World Series. Now, that was a period during which Indianapolis was an affiliate of many parent clubs. First, the White Sox, then the Phillies, then the Reds, then the White Sox again, then the Reds again. So there you go, Greg. It's not the Dayton Dragons, but it's still a former Reds affiliate. Indianapolis is currently a Pirates affiliate. But five different parent clubs. I don't know whether that makes it more likely to happen or less likely to

happen. I guess maybe you've got a better shot of having one of your parent clubs end up in the World Series than if you were with that same team every single season, because you could happen to be with a bad team that doesn't even contend, possibly. But anyway, the streak began with Jim Landis in 1959, and it went all the way to 1976, which was, of course, the big red machine era. And at that point, you had George Foster and Ken Griffey Sr. and Dan Dreesen. And along the way, there were a lot of other good players involved. Former Effectively Wild guest Al Worthington, Roger Marris, who'd been with the team even earlier when it was still a Cleveland affiliate Norm Cash Harmon Killebrew and then of course other great Reds Dave Concepcion etc so that kind of makes sense because you have the Reds in there I mean there were some good teams

that the Indianapolis club was affiliated with the Reds had a bunch of World Series appearances now I should note that if you exclude 1994, the record is actually longer. So if we count 94 not as a broken streak, but just exclude that year because there was no World Series, then the record is actually slightly longer. And it's another AAA team, the Edmonton Trappers, who went from 1991 to 2011. And the Trappers only existed up until 2004, I think, but they had former players go on to make World Series appearances after that. But their streak started with Carl Willis in 1991, and it continued all the way through Andy Chavez and Kyle Loesch in 2011. And they, too, had several different parent clubs over that period.

They were with the Angels, the Marlins, the A's, the Angels again, the Twins, and then finally the Expos. That streak included players like Tim Salmon, some other players from the 2002 Angels team, Devon White, Luis Soho, who went on to make World Series appearances with the Yankees, Jim Edmonds, Matt Stairs. So that would be a 20-year streak if we give them a pass for 94. Now if we go a level lower, we're going to get a shorter streak. So now we're down to AA, and the record is held by the Huntsville Stars. And it's much shorter, 1995 through 2006. And the Stars were an A's and Brewers affiliate during that time.

So it started with Luis Polonia in 95 and 96, and then Eric Plunk, Mike Bordick, Kurt Abbott, Scott Brocious, Jay Witasik, Scott Spezio, Jason Giambi, Mark Bellhorn, and Luis Vizcaíno finally in 2005. Now that takes us to high A, so remember this is the Dayton Dragons level. Five years is the streak to beat, and I'm sorry Greg, but we can beat it. The high A record is held by the Modesto A's, 1999 through 2006. So that's seven seasons. The Dragons are still two behind that. And the Modesto A's, they had Jose Canseco.

They had Walt Weiss, Mike Bordick, Kurt Abbott, Jay Witasik, Scott Spezio, Jason Giambi, Mark Bellhorn, Neil Kotz, Luis Vizcaíno, and Jeremy Bonderman finally in 2006. And as I said, Huntsville had been an A's affiliate, and obviously the Modesto A's were an A's affiliate. So some of the same names there on both of those teams, which is interesting because Jason Giambi and Mark Bellhorn, et cetera, they were not winning World Series with the A's or appearing in World Series, I should say. So you don't always have to have been the affiliate of a parent club that is the big red machine, let's say.

You can just trade guys or have guys leave via free agency, and it just so happens that they do it in a row. But you had a lot of talent. Of course, you can have a lot of talent on a farm team, and that doesn't mean you're guaranteed to win World Series or even win pennants a few years down the road. Now, if we go one level lower to A-ball, and again, remember, it's harder and harder the lower you go to extend these streaks. But at A-ball, the record is actually longer than at high A or double A. So the record in A-ball is the Lansing Lugnuts 2007 to 2017. And the Lansing Lugnuts were a Blue Jays affiliate during that time. And before that, the Cubs. So those teams were not winning World Series during those years. So again, sort of surprising.

But a lot of it is luck. You know, part of this streak was just extended by a middle reliever who was on a pennant-winning team each year. So this started in 2007. Jeremy Affelt, then Chad Durbin, Matt Trainor, Mark Repchinsky, Ryan Terrio, Ryan Dempster, Carlos Beltran, Tim Collins, Noah Sindergaard, Jan Gomes, and finally in 2017, Rich Hill. But again, that relied on Affelts and Repchinskis, who just so happened to be on pennant-winning teams. Doesn't mean they were superstars.

Or Rich Hill, for that matter, who was on the 2017 Dodgers team that went to the World Series. That was 14 years after he was a Lansing lugnut, and many organizations later. And then finally, Greg speculated that maybe a Yankees affiliate would be somewhere on That was 14 years after he was a Lansing lug nut and many organizations later. And then finally, Greg speculated that maybe a Yankees affiliate would be somewhere on this list, and he was right. The rookie level record is the Gulf Coast League Yankees, 1995 through 2001. Perhaps not shocking there, although it started with a former GCL Yankee who did not win a pennant with the Yankees, Fred McGriff. Then Andy Fox, and then the Dynasty years and the Core Four and Bernie Williams, the aforementioned Andy Pettit, all the way up to Alfonso Soriano in 2001.

And then the streak was broken. So it's a little unpredictable. Sometimes, yeah, you can be a farm team of the Yankees or the Reds when they're a Dynasty. Sometimes your affiliation just bounces around a bit and you just so happen to have a player who's on a pennant winning team. But I'm sorry to say, Greg, this does not further your case for the Reds being interesting, or at least for the Dayton Dragons being interesting. Although depending on how you handle 94, a Reds affiliate is involved in the record. So I hope that helps. Thanks as always to Ryan and check out his hard work in the spreadsheet linked from the show page. that there are just some teams that are particularly good at it. I don't know. That's an interesting thing. I'm kind of glad to be surprised because it suggests that there are threads of good player

dev that I'm maybe not appreciating all the time, or at least in certain historical periods. But yeah, that's a very interesting one. I don't know that I would have guessed at least half of those. I mean, I definitely wouldn't have guessed the specific ones because as we learned from my half right Twilight rant, I don't always keep track of what affiliates belong to whom super well, but even just the parent organizations in that stretch of time. So yeah, cool question. Okay.

And we'll close with this meet a major leaguer. Meet a major leaguer. Meet a major leaguer. I am very eager to meet this nascent major leaguer. It's the thrilling debut of somebody new. Let done a Meet a Major Leaguer. We haven't seen Major Leaguers playing for a while, but we have wanted to keep this segment alive. And today, we wanted to do something a little different. We have highlighted Negro Leagues players in the past, but mostly we have focused on new Major Leaguers who have just recently made their debut and might be lost in the shuffle just because there are so many major leaguers being used in a typical season these days. But today, just wanted to do Meet a Major Leaguer Ukraine edition because, of course, many people's thoughts are with Ukraine. We're all watching Ukraine these days.

And Ukraine does have some history of producing major league players. It is not a long and illustrious history, but it has happened. And this is related to something that we talked about last week. I got an email from listener Isaac Johnston, who says, I just listened to episode 1816 with Kerry Yonagagawa about Japanese American baseball and the use of baseball to integrate into Americanness. It was a fascinating discussion and reminded me of the experiences of European Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century. Though they didn't bring baseball with them from Eastern Europe, they quickly used the game to assimilate into American

culture. As Mr. Nakagawa mentioned, baseball and American-ness was obviously a radicalized and Christianity-defined concept at that time. So Jews operated within a strange space between other Christian European immigrants who were quickly assimilated into whiteness and their religious otherness. For decades, Jewish immigrants faced blatant and systemic anti-Semitism while trying to use baseball to become American.

Interestingly, after a few decades of being in America, baseball was frowned upon as a waste of time within parts of the American Jewish community. And Isaac sent me his senior college thesis, which is actually on this subject. So I will link to that on our show page. But just quoting from his conclusion here, as Jews began their mass migration to the United States in 1880, they saw their new country as a land ripe with the possibility to determine their own future. In contrast to the Eastern European countries they left, Jews did not have to endure any process of emancipation from legal discrimination in the

United States. Once they arrived, they could immediately become Americans. But what did it mean for them to be Americans in a Christian-dominated English-speaking society? For the first time in the very long history of the Jewish people, Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century had the chance to define themselves as part and parcel of their country's populace, and upon arrival at Ellis Island, Jews looked around America and saw the cultural importance and social weight of baseball, the game that the relatively young country had adopted as its national game. Jews seized upon the game of baseball as both a recreation and as a means of becoming American with impressive speed. And it goes on from there. I'd encourage everyone to check that out. But that leads me to today's

major leaguer, who is Isidore Izzy Goldstein. So there are three historical major leaguers who were born in what is now Ukraine. So they all came from Odessa, which, of course, is a big port city in Ukraine that is currently bracing for an attack. And all three major leaguers who were born in what is now Ukraine came from Odessa. Bill Kristol was the first, and he was a left-handed pitcher who pitched for the 1901 Cleveland Blues. The second was Reuben Ewing, who pitched for the 1921 Cardinals. And the third was Izzy Goldstein, who pitched for the 1932 Tigers. So all of these players were one-and-done players. They had a single season in the majors with their respective teams. Two pitchers.

Ewing was actually a shortstop, I believe. And they had brief stays. They're all replacement level or below war wise. So not the most distinguished careers, but they came from a long way to make the majors and they had interesting stories along the way. So fortunately, Goldstein, he has the longest career, although it is not a long one, but he did pitch 56 innings for the 1932 Tigers with a 106 ERA plus. And he was also sort of a two-way player. He had some offensive talent too. So he went five for 17, 294 average in his limited at-bats. And he has a Saber bio, a very thorough Saber bio by Alex Tepperman, which I perused here.

And Izzy Goldstein. have not yet been written, these are indeed important questions. And he goes on to make the point that actually we should know about a player like Izzy Goldstein. He writes, the life and career of Izzy Goldstein symbolize a certain facet of the American Jewish experience, of course, but Goldstein's life says so much more. As a Jew, his experiences provided examples of the power of baseball to bring ethnic minorities into mainstream culture. As an Jew, his experiences provided examples of the power of baseball to bring ethnic minorities into mainstream culture. As an immigrant, Goldstein's life shows the power of baseball's Americanizing influence. Furthermore, as a fringe player, Izzy's cup of coffee career provides a sample of the lives of the majority of major league ballplayers. And that's kind of what we hope to do with this segment is shed a little light on the lesser known players.

of what we hope to do with this segment is shed a little light on the lesser known players. So Izzy Goldstein and the other players from Odessa, they all came over seemingly for the same reason, although at slightly different times. Bill Kristol, the first of them, was born in 1875. Reuben Ewing, the second, was born in 1899. And Izzy Goldstein was born in 1908 and lived until 1993. But they were all born during a tough time for Jews in Europe, aren't they all? Aren't most times tough times for them? And that time in particular, that time in that place, Odessa at the turn of the 20th century, again, I'm pulling from the Saber bio here, but there's almost half a million people there and about 30% of them were Jewish, and it's still very Jewish today. And the Tsar of Russia, Alexander III, introduced the May Laws in May 1882. And this was a system of discriminatory policies that created quotas in Jewish education and professional development and led to a lot of ghettoization and lack of opportunities. And of course, there were pogroms and all sorts of other types of persecution. But because all of that was going on, because of that Russian influence on what is now Ukraine, that same region, a lot of Jews emigrated at that time. This was a long time before

the Holocaust, before Hitler, but there was all kinds of discrimination going on then and many reasons to leave and seek out opportunities elsewhere. And so all of these players, even though they left over a period of decades, those may laws were in effect from, I think, 1882 right up to when the Russian Republic ended in 1917, I think. So it was a period of decades and they all emigrated during that period. And we don't know a whole lot about Goldstein's life in Ukraine or early in his time in the U.S., but his parents were there. He had a couple of siblings. There's some dispute about whether he was born in 1908 or a year earlier, which his army enlistment records seem to suggest. But as the Saber bio notes, his pre-American identity is likely lost to history, a condition Jewish American turn-of-the-century writers have called an important aspect of Jewish

immigrant identity. And I noted that on Izzy Goldstein's page on the Jewish Baseball Museum website, they have some pictures of him, and it's kind of a lanky, he was a right-handed pitcher, but a switch hitting batter. And he was listed at six foot 160. And there's some pictures of him. There's also a picture of an old baseball card of his that says he was born in New York, which was not the case. So I don't know whether he told people that or whether they assumed that or whether it was widely known that he was from Odessa at the time or not. the Bronx and his family was there. He was not a great student. He went to George Washington High and was not great at school and not interested in school. And he dropped out and joined a local semi-pro baseball team. And he was pretty young and inexperienced. And so that didn't work out well. But the James Monroe high school baseball team needed a pitcher, so he decided to go back to school. And the James Monroe baseball coach lured him back, basically needing a ringer, needing a good pitcher.

And so he had a situation worked out where he would be this high school team star pitcher in exchange for the team doing his homework and taking his tests. So pretty much like a modern kind of college athlete sort of scandal that happens sometimes that was happening then and he joined hank greenberg on that team hank greenberg lived a few doors down from izzy goldstein so they had hank greenberg on this high school team and they had a future major league pitcher so that worked out they made it to the city finals although they lost in the city finals four to one and izzy took the loss in that game but after that tournament he dropped out of high school again 11th grade he went back to semi-pro ball and then he wanted to give a shot to becoming a pro pitcher and this it worked, and he played on a team on Long Island,

and word got around that he was promising, and the Tigers signed him. So before the start of the 1928 season, they sent him to the Wheeling Stogies of the Class C League. That is a fun name for a team. And he pitched well there, and the Tigers were impressed, and they promoted him to Class B, And then he got promoted eventually after that. He spent another year in the minors, but he was doing fairly well in the 1931 season. He was playing for class AA, the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League, but then he was on the move again and he went to the Texas

League and he was bopping around and doing pretty well in 1932 he had done well enough that they invited him to spring training with the Tigers and they really wanted him to be a part of that team and eventually he got the call he did well in spring training they sent him back to the minors but he pitched so well there went 6-1 with a 1.58 ERA that the Tigers promoted him in April of that year, and he made his Major League debut at Navin Field in Detroit on April 24, 1930. He got his first win about a month later, and they tried him as a starter. He went seven and a third innings in a game, gave up five runs, 10 hits, didn't do so well, but he got another try a month after that. He pitched the game of his life, June 27th. The Tigers took on the White Sox

and manager handed the ball to Izzy Goldstein, who responded with a thrilling outing, displaying both undeniable talent and unnerving wildness. So the Tigers beat the White Sox nine to three. Izzy went complete game, three earned runs, five hits, although he did walk five and hit two White Sox. So he had a propensity for walks and wild pitches he hurt his arm, and that was basically it. He bounced around in the minors for a while and tried to make some comebacks, but it seemed like his arm just wasn't the same and eventually left baseball. And went back to playing some semi-pro ball in New York and then finally decided he was retiring with the end of the 1938 semi-pro season, got his release officially from the Tigers, and became a menswear retailer in New York City, which was not uncommon for Jewish immigrants of that generation. So another part of the Jewish immigrant experience that he represents. And he did that for five years. And then World War II

broke out. The draft was instituted. And he was 36 at that point, but he was single. He didn't have dependents. And so he was drafted in September 1943. And he was sent to the South Pacific, which was quite dangerous. But he served there from 43 to 45 and survived and made it back to the U.S. and went back to selling clothes again. And after that, the Saber bio says, though Goldstein's maturation was slow, his life after the war was that of a responsible adult and citizen. Gone was the rash youth who twice dropped out of school over the next 30 years until 1975. He continued working in menswear, retiring at the age of 68. Like so many Jewish immigrants of his and later generations, Izzy moved with his wife, Caroline Levine, to Florida

and escaped the bitter winters of the Northeast. And he was basically living in anonymity for a while until 1985 when he was interviewed for the book, The Jewish Baseball Hall of Fame, A Who's Who of Baseball Stars. And he was then a notable figure and he was recovering from surgery, heart surgery and a stroke at the time, but he reminisced for the book and was missing the game. And he ended the interview by humbly noting that at the age of 77,

it is flattering that people still remember. And he then lasted until 1993 when he died in Delray beach at the age of 86 and the saber bio concludes the world barely noticed izzy's passing for the world acknowledges its heroes and villains upon their death rarely does it mourn the passing of the everyman so that was izzy goldstein the most accomplished probably and longest tenured of the major leaguers from modern day Ukraine. So now we have met and learned a little bit about Izzy Goldstein. more obscure player or even a player who was quite well known in his time but has sort of been lost to history for modern fans that you can so reliably find a detailed and well-documented

and well-cited saber bio for them it's just like an underappreciated aspect of the research community and there's a lot of good work that happens at Sabre. But this feels like an opportunity to sort of hat tip to that because I'm very rarely disappointed. And it is an area where I could be understandably disappointed given how much baseball there has been and how much time has passed between now and some of its earliest days. And I'm just, I very often am not. And so it's really cool. And I think we should tip our caps. So yeah. And what a, what a cool major leader to have met.

Yes. Yeah. It is a very useful resource. And I was surprised and impressed to find such a thorough biography for Izzy Goldstein. I will say that the other two Odessa born players, Bill Crystal and Ruben Ewing, do not have Saber bios, which is understandable because Bill Crystal played six games in the majors and Ruben Ewing played three. So they're not toward the top of the list. But if you're looking for something Ukraine-adjacent to do these days, and there are maybe more useful things you could do, I will put a link to various charities and places where you can donate in the show page as well. But if

you want to do something baseball related, Ruben Ewing and Bill Kristol could use Saber Bios as well. But thank you to Alex Tepperman for the work that he did on Izzy Goldstein's. And that will do it for today. All right. I meant to mention earlier when Meg said something about this being the offseason. I wanted to ask, when does the offseason end if the lockout continues? Does the offseason end when opening day was originally scheduled to be, or does it end when opening day actually is? So if we get to April 1st and there are no games, is that still the offseason? Or is it the season, but there's a lockout? I don't know. I don't remember what I said in 2020 when this situation happened.

I guess I probably said that the offseason just continued until opening day. But there's something strange. I mean, hopefully we won't get to this point, but if we get to June or July and there are still no games going on, it won't really feel like the offseason. It'll feel like the season without games. After all, the seasons are still changing, regardless of whether baseball is being played or not. It will be spring. It will be summer. Rob Manfred and the owners cannot deny us warm weather and sunny skies. But one reason why the lockout is so disturbing is that we kind of

have internal clocks as baseball fans, right? We know that, hey, March has rolled around. It should be spring training time. Opening day is supposed to be a few weeks away. We will feel that in our bones, even if games are not played. So I guess technically I would continue to call it the offseason, but it will feel like the season and that will make baseball's absence more painful. I think one thing that makes this lockout so painful for me is that it doesn't really feel like there's anything all that important at stake at this point. Now that the players have walked back some of their initial asks it feels like a lot of it is haggling over numbers and preserving the status quo and the

numbers are important don't get me wrong but it doesn't really feel right now like there's going to be some big improvement in baseball at the end of this that things will look up things will be brighter they'll be brighter just if games are being played but it would be one thing if there were some massive structural change at stake or on-field issues, and I thought that on the other side of this thing, baseball would come out looking great with a fresh coat of paint. But instead, it just feels like days are slipping away, games are slipping away, and there's not much that you can point to and say, well, this will be worth it because after this is all over, baseball will be better. And maybe in some small ways it will

but if you could say hey not competing will be much more discouraged players just have to hold the line here and baseball will be more competitive and more entertaining and more crisply played and that would make the weight worth it in a way whereas now it feels like we're losing something without a lot of potential to gain something that might make up for it later none of that is to say that the players should just accept whatever deal is on the table, just saying that as a fan, that makes it more unpleasant for me. But what makes it more pleasant is doing this podcast with your support, which you can provide via Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the

podcast going and get themselves access to some perks while helping us stay ad-free. Duncan McHugh, Sean P. McNamee, David Hassler, Doug Nazarian, and Justin Cirillo. Thanks to all of you. Our Patreon supporters get access to monthly exclusive bonus pods and an exclusive Discord group and many more perks. Please check it out. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively

Wild on iTunes and Spotify or your podcast service of choice. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastbandcrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. On this side I'll go and fight It's heroes and villains upon their death Rarely does it mourn Rarely does it mourn the passing of the everyman