Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1831: Where the Rubber Meets the Mound

Episode Date: April 2, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Jacob deGrom’s latest injury, the White Sox-Dodgers trade involving Craig Kimbrel and AJ Pollock, umpires explaining replay reviews, “Home Run Derby X,” a lousy likeness of Derek Jeter, Yankees games on Amazon Prime and the continued splintering of baseball broadcasts, and an update about MLB’s official cerveza and […]

🎵 Don't love you anymore. Hello and welcome to episode 1831 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm alright, how are you? Well, I'm not Jacob deGrom. So I'm fine. Jacob, jacob jacob sucks yeah jacob has a what is it stress fracture in his shoulder am i getting that right he has a stress reaction stress reaction well that's probably better than a fracture yes considerably mets fans were like oh no what happened did it get worse i guess

a fracture is a type of reaction but a reaction is not necessarily a fracture yes a stress reaction distinction yeah but still bad reaction and his right scapula right scapula scapula is a funny word to say as jeff passon reported it the positive no damage to the muscles tendons or ligaments in the shoulder which is a profoundly complicated joint prone to all sorts of problems profoundly wow but still not good he will be shut down for up to four weeks before he starts throwing and is re-evaluated so he is set to miss a significant amount of time to start the season. Really, really a bummer. It is. It's not a total shocker, I guess, in that he has had a variety of injuries now going back a bit. And I guess the greater worry was his elbow, right? And

it's not his elbow. It's his shoulder. Maybe you'd rather have it be his elbow. It's not good either way. But all of my fears about DeGrom have been borne out. I was just always worried, like he's too good. He's flying too close to the sun. He's throwing too hard to sustain this. And he just has been breaking down constantly since then. So sucks for the Mets, obviously, and for him. And it's his contract year too, his walk year, right? So maybe it's time to sign Johnny Cueto or something, or just the time to be happy that you signed Max Scherzer and you traded for Chris Bassett already. But they have depth, but there's no replacing the best pitcher in baseball when he is on the field so no there really isn't and you know i think that we all acknowledged that if there was going to be an issue with this staff it was that they have not always been great at staying on the field but you know as people who i think enjoy being right this is an area where we would have been quite content to be wrong absolutely well we will be previewing the nl east next week

so i imagine that this could come up again. But in the meantime, Mets fans, I guess you're used to this sort of news, but you never want to hear it. So we'll just do a quick little news roundup here because we are devoting most of this episode to emails, and we will be joined by a listener and Patreon supporter, Stefan Lund, for that portion of the podcast and a stat blast as well. But quickly here, there was an interesting trade Between teams whose seasons We have already previewed So on Friday the White Sox Traded Craig Kimbrell to the Dodgers

For AJ Pollock And then subsequently the White Sox announced That Garrett Crochet it sounds like Will be having Tommy John surgery So more bummer injury news Which it's always more of a bummer When we're like a week away from opening day Or less at this point which it's always more of a bummer when we're like a week away from opening day or

less at this point and it's like you're so close just preserve everyone in amber at this point like I know that they all need to get up to speed and build up their strength and everything but you're so close to just running them out there for that opening day start or the opening day lineup and then it's snatched

away from them and from you and it sucks every time but this trade is kind of intriguing right because of course kimbrel was on the block and was a likely trade candidate they held on to him for a while and now now it's just a straight up deal between contending teams for established veterans and And there's no cash in the deal. The cash kind of equalizes. It's fairly close, right? Because they both have one year left on their deal, but then Pollock has an option with a buyout after that. And so if you include that guaranteed cash, the money is roughly equivalent. Although this is one of those cases where, as Ben Clemens recently wrote, the new CBA changes things slightly with this kind of deal just because of the luxury tax

complications and calculations. It's basically like now if you trade someone, the competitive balance tax hit is recalculated at that point based on the remaining dollars and years in the deal. So it's not just the average annual value, but it's what is the remaining average annual value essentially. So if a person's contract is front loaded or back loaded, then that could actually change the size of the luxury tax footprint for the team that is acquiring that player, essentially. So there are implications that, you know, that saves the White Sox, I guess, a couple million here, or maybe cost the Dodgers a couple million more. It's not a huge thing, but it's a new little wrinkle in the CBA. And I'll link to Ben's blog if you want to see the details about that.

But the interesting thing, I guess, is just that the Dodgers allowed Kenley Jansen to leave and now are trading Pollock for a Jansen equivalent in Kimbrell, who was dominant early last season and then kind of fell apart after he was traded across town in Chicago. So I guess the Dodgers are banking on the dominant Kimbrel being back. And maybe people are questioning, well, why not just hold on to AJ Pollock and re-sign Kenley Jensen? And I guess the answer is because that would cost more money. And the Dodgers are already spending a lot of money and this would have taken them over the newest and highest penalty or what, the $290 million penalty, it would have triggered the very highest tax rate and they wanted to avoid that.

Yes. I have to note two things, which is that when we are discussing White Sox injuries, we can't say it's a bummer injury because that might actually concern Aaron. Bummer. But yes, it is an interesting trade for the reasons that you highlighted. I think that if you're Gavin Lux, you have to be thrilled, right? Because this just opens up more playing time for you on the roster. I can appreciate how Los Angeles would look at this and say, we are trading from surplus in much the same way that the White Sox are, although some of

that surplus is obviously a bit more strained on Chicago's part now that we have this news around crochet. But we can trade from a surplus. We cannot credibly be accused of not spending enough money. No one can level that claim against us. That seems like a lot. This seems like a good way to address a bit of an organizational issue. You can have Trinan go back to really high leverage moments and be deployed as he needs to be and was to such great effect last year and then uh and then you're gonna just continue to have a really good baseball team i feel a little bit bad i imagine that this is purely

about destination and not being sure kimbrough seems so happy to be on the dodgers like he just seems jazzed which i i imagine is not in any way an indictment of his experience in Chicago, but it's like if you know that you're a prime trade candidate, you don't know where you're going, right? And sometimes you go to a team that isn't as good as the Dodgers are, which would be easy since most teams aren't as good as the Dodgers are. So it seems to make a good deal of sense from that perspective. Yeah, I don't know the the and now i have to return to the injury thought and it being worse so close to

opening day it's like if you've gotten through most of being a character in the mist and then you haven't reached the last 10 minutes of that movie yet right yeah and it's i guess you know also kimbrough is uh very much a stickler for defined roles and specifically a closer role in his case. And he seems to like that a great deal. It seemed like he attributed some of his lack of success with the White Sox, or at least that was a speculation that maybe the fact that he was not closing could have contributed to his underperformance. So I don't know. You hand the closer role back to him. I don't know whether that is really the secret to his success or not, but perhaps maybe that will lead to a bounce back.

And we talked on the Dodgers preview, the NLS preview, about the Dodgers depth maybe not being what it was historically. And so they are really banking on Cody Bellinger being good at baseball, which has been true in the past, but has also not been true in the more recent past. And he has been struggling this spring as well. And so I think there's some stress about, hey, Cody, I know you tweaked your swing again and maybe he's just getting the hang of it. But hopefully he bounces back because they are kind of counting on him. I mean, they can move Chris Taylor out to the outfield and then Lux can play some second, but you are really hoping that Cody Bellinger will be good. So there's a little risk that you're taking on there, but that is a pretty stacked

staff and bullpen now. Right. And I think that there is risk there with Bellinger, but I think that we have to risk adjust the bat there in Dodgers terms because even if Cody Bellinger is an absolute zero with the bat again, as long as he is a capable defender, it's not like the Dodgers offensive's well-being hinges on Cody Bellinger. They can just bat him ninth and it'd be fine. If he didn't swing, if he just went up there and he never swung, is the Dodgers lineup appreciably worse?

I mean, it's definitely worse, but is it worse in a way that we're worried about? Probably not. Like that might be a touch dramatic. I might be indulging in hyperbole here, but they can afford to take that risk because the downside doesn't matter. Because it's like, that's just like, that's just, I'm looking at it again. And you just sit there and you're like, this is real. Like the commissioner was like, yeah, you can do this.

That's a laugh. As I recall, they did go to the NLCS last year with Cody Bellinger never hitting. So it can't be done. And it's also a pretty big addition for the White Sox too,, because they really did need a corner guy, a right fielder. Despite their manager's protestations, they sure did need another outfielder. I love that. Yeah. So La Russa took some flack for a quote, I guess, earlier this week where he said that fans who wanted the White Sox to go outside the organization for another right fielder are probably not White Sox fans because White Sox fans know we have guys in this camp who can handle it,

which is just a very LaRusso-ian obnoxious way of putting it. So unnecessarily confrontational. I mean, like, okay, he's not going to say, yeah, our current right fielder suck. Like, I get why you say, you know, you at least project confidence in your internal options. Sure. But it is very funny that they immediately went out and traded for adam hazley and then went out and traded for aj pollock so white socks front office also not white socks fans evidently he just he didn't have to put it that way he just

didn't have to put it like the players we have here you know like it didn't have to be you're not a white socks fan if you think we need, which it's pretty apparent that they did need one. And clearly they thought they needed one. So come on. Yeah, come on. Come on. In other news, umpires are going to speak to us now. Thank God.

We've talked about this before, but it's actually happening officially now, seemingly. It was supposed to have happened sooner, but now it will be happening. do have happened sooner, but now it will be happening. Umpires are going to have microphones on the field and they're going to inform the fans, both in the crowd and at home, of the progress in replay reviews. So one of the umpires, while the replay review is happening, is going to walk to one of the baselines and face the press box and make the announcement and will announce who is challenging and what is being challenged. And then we'll relay the verdict and explain it when there is one. So this is exciting. I think this is overdue. This is good. It's good for fans to know what is happening in the thing that they are watching. Yeah. I think that anytime you can clarify for folks who are actually in the ballpark

what is going on, because there is just a lot of confusion the rule book is complicated and sometimes these calls get overturned for very minute reasons that no one in the park is going to be able to see even when they show it on replay and so i just think it's it's good it's good for people there to be aware of why action on the field is unfolding the way that it is and like i i have set for myself, the goal of writing more this season, and now I have to. You just said it out loud. This is some real megs right here.

So I think it is good. It is going to add a touch of time to everyone's evening, but I think that for fans in ballpark to have a good understanding of what's going on rather than looking around at each other confused is that's nothing but good. Yeah. Sometimes even players and on-field personnel seem confused. And maybe it doesn't even have to add that much time if it's just one umpire who is doing this and communicating it while the other umpires are going about their business. Then maybe it won't add time.

So this is good. Although I do feel for the umpires in this ESPN story. I didn't even think of this, but AJ Hinch is quoted saying that several umpires had expressed nervousing these announcements during the spring not in games but i don't know just before or after games i guess which is kind of funny but i had never thought of that like yeah you might have public speaking anxiety because if you're an umpire like your whole job is public and it's right there in front of millions of spectators who are often very angry at you and so i wouldn't have thought that they would be apprehensive about this but it is different like they don't have to address the crowd so yeah this is something slightly different maybe you don't like the way your voice sounds or something so this is an issue now right or like you know i think that there is a difference between being like surveyed at work and feeling surveilled at work and and having to announce

something with clarity in a short amount of time in like a different in a different voice you know than they probably use when they're like explaining something to the the bench coach or you know the the guy who's standing on first i think it's totally reasonable that they feel kind of itchy about it. I imagine it'll probably fall to the crew chief to do this. It probably will be the crew chief that has to make the announcements, right? I guess so. Unless, I don't know, is it important that the, who is, which umpires are actually on the call with New York? I don't know if it's the crew chief or whether it's the umpire who's involved in that play or... I think it's generally the crew chief, but I am saying that with confidence that is not earned. So I'm sure that we will hear a little bit more about that

in the coming days. But I imagine it'll be the crew chief that is responsible. And so maybe that person feels a little bit more like sort of self-assured but i will say to the to the umpires who feel nervous about it it's understandable and you don't want to make yourself the the point right in much the same way that media doesn't it's like this is about the call on the field but there are people whose personalities we have gotten to know whose careers after officiating have been altered by the fact that they are like the official on the mic on nfl broadcasts like we have opinions about those people which actually should make you feel as nervous if not more nervous but you have the opportunity to sort of carve out for yourself a

you know an audience that you know maybe they they are inclined to boo you but then they'll get to know you and they'll be like oh you know i know, I don't know. I like, oh, Joe, you know, that Joe. I know it won't be that Joe. He's retired now. But like, you know, like. Oh, man, he could have sung the announcements. Maybe this is why they waited. Yeah, just get Joe West.

He'll start singing one of his country tracks. We can't entrust this responsibility to Joe. We need to wait until he's comfortably retired. And will we ever end up with a hot mic situation? Will we get any more asses in jackpots? Almost certainly, yes. Yeah, you would think, right? So that's one positive byproduct of this.

Maybe they could just designate the umpire on the crew who is most comfortable with public speaking. Could be the designated speaker, like the person who is the best orator. Could be the one who gets to make the announcement. I don't know. I don't know how they'll do it. But this is a positive change, I think. And another new innovation that was announced this week is Home Run Derby X. You know it's like different and edgy and cool because there's an X in it. So this is not quite the XFL, but it is a new version of Home Run Derby, a dedicated Home Run Derby tournament slash potential league that was

just announced, run by MLB. It's going to feature a set cast of participants, and there will be a global tour of four cities, London, Seoul, and Mexico City. There will be four four-person teams. They will represent the Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs. I guess because they have the most international fans, I don't know. Maybe it'll be rotating. But each team has one former big league star. The press release called them legends, which is a bit of a stretch in some cases. It's Adrian Gonzalez, Johnny Gomes, Giovanni Soto, and Nick Swisher. I don't know if I would call Giovanni Soto a legend. Maybe he's a legend to some.

Sure. But you have those guys, and then you have on the rest of the team, it's a four-member team. So you have a woman from softball or women's baseball a player from the minors and a wild card and the press release just says that the wild card will be influential content creators i don't know if that's gonna be like streamers youtubers maybe it's maybe it's podcast hosts maybe it's us maybe No, thank you. Absolutely not. I have three opportunities a week to make a complete fool of myself. I don't need to add athletics to the endeavor.

Are you crazy? So it's sort of a hybrid of baseball and the traditional home run derby. It's like played on a small version of a baseball field. Home plate is on a stage. The mound is on a podium. And the field is like adaptable and then each batter gets one at bat of 25 pitches they try to hit homers but there is defense so two of the opponents are in the outfield a home run scores one point for the offense a catch is one point for the defense and then there are other ways to score that are sort

of video game inspired like mvp baseball 2005, like aiming for targets in the infield or over the fence. So you get more points if you hit certain things. And then there's a hot streak, like five consecutive pitches where home runs and target hits count double, but a catch also counts double. So it's almost like banana ball in a way. So it's almost like banana ball in a way. Maybe they're taking some inspiration from that or just XFL kind of just let's mess with the established way that we do these things. Why not try it? It requires fewer people and fewer resources and less space. So maybe if it catches on, it could help with the adoption of baseball. And I'm all for promoting baseball in other countries. And it does kind of harken back to a discussion that I think we've had on the show about like what are the fundamental parts of baseball? Like if you boil baseball down to its component elements, like what do you need for something to qualify as baseball?

Do you just need someone hitting something? Do you need someone pitching something? Does it need to be a ball and a bat? Like, what qualifies as baseball? And this is distilling it down to the point where it's still pretty baseball-y, I guess. But it's just a smaller scale stripped down version of it. And it sounds like it could be fun. I don't know.

Why not try something? Yeah. Sure. I don't think that this could possibly do any amount of harm like at all. It could not do any bit of harm to anything to try this. And I don't know if it'll feel amazing. I don't know if it'll be the kind of endeavor where it's like it's very participant dependent, where some teams

and groupings are a lot more fun than others that i could totally see or i don't know if it'll be the kind of thing that just proves to be a blast and we all enjoy it but there's no downside to trying so just try a thing like we are pro the league trying stuff that that they are trying because it might be fun for people i think we're just like as an editorial policy in favor of that within reason because you know there's there's no downside to this just no downside try stuff maybe it'll maybe it'll be great it could be great we don't know all for it all right and i should also i guess we should uh credit sam miller for suggesting this or predicting this too because he wrote an article for ESPN a couple of years ago, which was like an alternate future history of how home run derby became the biggest sport in the country.

And I think we talked about it on the podcast too. And it's kind of matching up with his timeline. I think he suggested that something along these lines would happen. So he's a big derby fan. I'm not quite as enthusiastic about derby as Sam is, but we're proceeding along his timeline here. So it could happen. And I also want to ask you if you saw the Derek Jeter plaque. Did you see the Derek Jeter plaque this week, which was announced by the Yankees?

the Yankees. The Yankees are going to honor Derek Jeter at Yankee Stadium on September 9th because basically pick a day and they're honoring someone from their dynasties in all likelihood. And they have like plaques and they have statues and busts and number retirements so you can have one of these honors

and then another honor and so there's going to be like a Paul O'Neill thing and a Derek Jeter thing. Sure, okay. But the Derek Jeter one, the first 40,000 fans are getting a replica of Jeter's Hall of Fame plaque. Does that look like Derek Jeter? Is that what Derek Jeter's Hall of Fame plaque looks like? Is that what his face looks like in Cooperstown?

Is this his Cooperstown face? Because it doesn't match the face he's walking around in the world with. Not even a little bit, really. That's really very bad. And I feel terrible because I'm sure some artist somewhere had to work on this. Maybe they were like sketching him from memory. It doesn't look like his face.

It does not at all look like his face. And it looks like a tombstone more than a plaque because it does look like it does look like we are supposed to say like all right yeah it does right it says like Derek Jeter number two on a pedestal and then the plaque is on top of it so it's not just the plaque and it basically it looks like a headstone probably not intentional either but the bigger problem is that yeah it just does not look like Derek Jeter and I think the most common comp was the Christian Ronaldo plaque or statue from a I guess it was a statue or a bust from a few years ago that everyone mocked because it didn't look like

Ronaldo and I think that the artist uh did have a hard time with being mercilessly mocked and memed on social media and I think ultimately redid the Ronaldo bust, although he said he was still happy with the original. But, you know, it didn't look like Ronaldo. It didn't really look like a person. And this does not look like Cheater. And again, you would think at some point in the process, people would look at that and compare to Derek Cheater's face.

Like, I'm sympathetic. I mean, it's hard. Yeah, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it on a piece of paper, let alone in bronze or whatever. That's really not... I think that a not small part of what is throwing me off here is the nose is really wrong.

Yeah. I mean, the whole thing is wrong. It's just like it's quite wrong. The proportions seem incorrect. I don't know what he looks like, but it's not Derek Jeter. It is very funny that it looks like a tombstone. The Mariners did an Edgar Hall of Fame plaque giveaway, or maybe it was Griffey.

I can't remember. It was one of the two. And I think that perhaps in anticipation of someone saying, hey, are you trying to bury these very alive people in your giveaway here? What they decided to do was they gave people like a little easel. And so you just put the plaque on a little easel when you got it home so that it didn't look like you had murdered an important member of your franchise. I just sent you a link to a picture of his actual Hall of Fame plaque, and it is not the same face. See, that looks a lot more like Derek Jeter. It does. It absolutely does.

In fact, it looks like Derek Jeter, but the rest is the same? Right. They decided to do a replica and yet change the face to a face that looks a lot less like Derek Jeter. Is there like a copyright issue here? someone doing their best with an imitation of existing art. Your need to be kind about that is probably a lot lower. This is like a caricature artist on the Jersey Shore. The best part is that the spacing on the wording of the plaque is the same. They maintained the weird spacing that they have to, to I guess not have words go onto the next line or something. Yeah.

This is its own nightmare that we won't spend too much time on. But yeah, that is not the same placket. It's not until September 9th is this day. So they do have time to redo this. I don't know whether they've already manufactured the 40,000 thingies. And we know the Yankees are, you know, if not nutting these days, they are definitely watching their budget. So I don't know if they can scrap all of these bad Jeter plaques and redo them. But I don't know that I would want to display this if I were Derek Jeter or a Derek Jeter fan.

It's just it's not a great likeness. It actually even more than the Ronaldo. It reminds me of, you know, that like fresco. Yes. From like 10 years ago in Spain, there's like a painting of Jesus and it was restored. It looks like a monkey or a werewolf. Yes, there's like no mouth. It's like, you know, a woman who had the best of intentions, but tried to restore it and

just like basically rubbed out the face and replaced it with something that does not look like a face or a human it basically looks like that so if you're not seeing this i know that this is an audio medium but we will include the links on the show page do check it out what i would encourage people to do if they happen to read like you can't go back but I wish that we could go back and tell people like click the link and, and experience along with me that this is, cause it's just not the same face. This is a different,

like one of them looks like Derek Sanderson Jeter, the captain and the other looks like some other human, you know, like a, a not similar human. I also, so Ben, this is not the point that we are coming to here but you know how now what twitter will do is you'll like see that you'll see the tweet and then you scroll down and it shows you like more tweets and it's like supposed to get you to follow

other people right so the more tweet that i'm looking at is a picture of mike trout jj watt otani yeah right upton And I just have to say, we should take a moment to appreciate what a gigantor human being J.J. Watt is. Because when we look at Shohei Otani, we're like, you're tall and strapping. You are a tall, strapping guy, famously so. And then he looks like J.J. Watt's kid brother.

Yeah, he really does. Football players are huge. I mean, Trout still looks fairly big. Yes. We talked about how Trout has the football build, as everyone always says. But yeah, Otani, who's got like the broadest shoulders and back of anyone, he looks like spindly here. Yeah, he sure does.

So anyway, that's not the point of this segment, but it is the thing that I'm just going to be in awe of for the rest of the day. I do love that Watt is like the biggest Otani super fan out there it is very pure and wonderful it's great it is very cool when athletes who presumably know in a much more visceral way than we do how hard all of this is are just like in awe of one another yes very cool yes and also in other news related to the continued splintering of baseball's product on TV or via streaming networks, the Yankees also announced that 21 of their games this year will be available only via Amazon Prime, at least locally. these 21 games, which in the past would have been available, I think, over the air, Channel 11 WPIX, which had a longstanding relationship with the team. Now you can only watch them on Amazon Prime. So you not only have to subscribe to cable and Yes Network, but you have to get Amazon Prime

for these 21 games too. And they won't be on MLB TV locally. They will still, I believe, be available on MLB TV outside the New York market. So, you know, if you're not in New York or you're a fan of the team that is playing the Yankees, you can still watch those as part of the standard MLB TV package. But even so, you know, this is extra expense. And as we've talked about, like we are somewhat sympathetic to the idea of future proofing baseball against continued cord cutting and making it available

via streaming and other platforms and channels and everything. But if we're just going to get to a point where everything is so fractured that you now have to pay for cable for a while and also pay for a streaming service or multiple streaming services, because of course there's some MLB games now that will be on Apple TV plus and also on peacock and then you got to get mlb tv too so it's kind of how like you know we've gone from bundling a bunch of channels together in cable to now basically bundling streaming services together and so we are now paying for cable via streaming services in a sense it's just like reorganized itself but this is not ideal if it's getting increasingly hard at least in the short term to find baseball and for at least some

fans in some markets to afford to watch their team yeah i think that you know like we've talked about there does need to be some strategy around how we're going to deal with the potential collapse of some of the rsn money but i don't think that what we are advocating for is a solution whereby you have to sort of pick all of these different little spots and not be able to watch it and i do think there's just like there should be an understanding on the part of people who are figuring out these solutions that like a lot of your viewership is older and in addition to making things hard for them when they are trying to watch stuff you are making things hard for whatever youth they have in their life yes calls them to say how to find this thing right yeah like you you just want the barrier to entry on all of this stuff to be really as low as possible.

And so it sounds like what they should be striving for is using your already very good and robust. And we make jokes about MLB TV sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't behave the way we want it to, or they make feature changes that we think are wonky. But for what you're paying relative to what you're getting it's pretty incredible mb tv and so you have this platform that already exists and can facilitate this stuff and so it seems like the solution on the streaming side should be leveraging that in a way that you know allows people to have one login that allows them to watch the baseball they want to watch and i imagine that

if the future of viewing baseball lies in that direction like it will of course get more expensive and so there it isn't as if you know this will all remain static or as if there aren't potential accessibility issues there too but it's just too many it's too many things to have to do yeah if what you want is to just be able to watch your dumb yankees and if you get to a point where you're cannibalizing the mlb tv package like i don't know if we're there yet but if you're taking away some apple tv plus games and then some peep cock games and then sunday night baseball of course on espn like if it gets to the point where it's like an appreciable portion of those games that are not available, then maybe you provide a discount or a rebate or something. I'm not holding my breath expecting that to happen.

But, you know, it's a good value, I think, if you're someone who's watching baseball regularly. But if they do keep carving out games here and there and saying, no, we're cordoning off this for this Platform and that for that platform You know that should in theory be reflected In the price I don't expect it to be But it should be Alright and lastly I have an update On the great MLB official Cerveza slash beer

Sponsorship question of 2022 As discussed earlier this week MLB has named an official Cerveza Corona In addition to the official beer Budweiser. And we wondered how that is possible and what sort of arrangements make that possible. And does that mean that MLB will now be segmenting its sponsorships and just awarding multiple sponsors within the same category and just using a word from a different language that means the same thing, et cetera. Well, as you pointed out in that conversation, Corona is owned by the same big conglomerate that owns Budweiser, right? So Anheuser-Busch or InBev or ABI. However, there is another wrinkle to this, which I was not aware of. And I was informed of this by a listener named Burkhard, who is an expert on this subject. He hosts a podcast called Liquid Assets, a beverage

industry podcast. And he is on Twitter, at beverage podcast. And he messaged me to say that the Modelo group owns Corona, Modelo, and a bunch of other Mexican beer brands, and it is owned by Anheuser-Busch ABI. However, when ABI bought SAB Miller in 2013 to 16, the FTC stipulated that in order for that deal to go through, ABI was obligated to sell the rights of Grupo Modelo brands. So the rights to those brands were bought by Constellation Brands, a company that mostly sold wine and was based in Victor, New York. So it seems as if these are different entities. So Burkhardt said it is silly.

But when it comes to selling rights to be the official beer versus the official cerveza of Major League Baseball, it seems way more hardcore if you are selling those rights to two different companies, which is what they did. So there was sort of an antitrust element here and the Grupo Modelo brands are under a different umbrella. And he linked me to an article in the Sports Business Journal from early in March that was headlined MLB splits beer category for the first time. So this was indeed big news, blew a lot of minds out there. So Anheuser-Busch renewed its MLB deal domestically, but Corona takes on import rights. So for the first time, MLB is splitting the beer category with Anheuser-Busch InBev, So for the first time, MLB is splitting the beer category with Anheuser-Busch InBev, MLB's most tenured corporate sponsor at 42 years renewing, while holding on to domestic beer, premium light beer, and hard seltzer marketing rights.

And Constellation Brands is close to securing import rights for its Corona Extra brands. And a marketer is quoted as saying, for most of the bigger category deals now, it's about paying less and carving out the specific rights you need. So Corona gets to be the official cerveza and gets to expand the appeal of Corona Extra and be the big import beer here. It already had some local MLB team sponsorships, but evidently this is a trend of sorts to segment these things to split the categories. So MLB gets two top beer brands with big marketing budgets instead of one. And that is something that is happening more and more now. And evidently, teams have split the beer category between domestic and foreign, but it doesn't generally happen for large sports properties, although evidently the NFL divided its malt rights between Miller and Anheuser-Busch in the 1980s. So probably more than anyone wanted to know, but hyper-segmentation in sponsorships is a trend, and this is maybe pushing it a bit

further. So MLB always on the cutting edge when it comes to lining up as many sponsors as possible for everything but it's a little more complicated than we made it out to be and it is in fact surprising that this has happened wow i mean and then you just ask yourself like at what point does it is it diluted to the to the point of being completely useless to them from a marketing perspective. And I ask that question knowing that it's fairly useless now. But what a weird thing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And Burkhardt mentions that perhaps trying to market Budweiser to Latino fans or to import lovers wasn't a particular efficient use of their resources.

or to import lovers wasn't a particular efficient use of their resources. So ABI is happy to cede that ground perhaps to Constellation Brands and reinvest those marketing dollars. And cutting back on advertising evidently is something that big brands have been doing to protect their profits in the current inflationary environment, at least in the beverage industry. So they can't make bottles and cans and barley cheaper, but they can cut ad spends at least. So it's part of that trend. Anyway, thanks to Burkhard. There's always an

expert on every topic that we inexpertly discuss, and I like to be schooled on these things. Yeah. Man. All right. Well, we will take a quick break, and we will be back with listener and Patreon supporter Stephan Lund to answer your emails and do a step last i'm still here Remember me Emily

All right, we are back and we are joined now by Effectively Wild listener and Patreon supporter Stefan Lund, who has been at the Mike Trout tier of Patreon support for the past couple of months and thus is entitled to join us on this episode and is welcome on this episode as well. Stefan, welcome to the show. Hi guys, it's great to talk to both of you. So I know that you've listened to some of our previous Patreon guests, so you know how this goes. My standard first question is how did you find the podcast and what possessed you to support us at the level that entitles you

to come on the show? And I believe that you maybe have a similar answer to the second part of that question as our last guest, Kevin Brotsman, who got this as a gift for Christmas from his partner, which maybe that's a popular thing now. Maybe that's going around. I support it. Yeah, actually, in more ways than one, actually. Like Kevin, I also found the podcast in 2016, and I also got this particular appearance as a Christmas present from my fiancée, Emily, in this case. Her only other condition besides, you know, of the present was telling Meg what a big fan of hers she is. So, not a listener all the time, but she loves your Twitter. So there's that.

Well, if she's around, she's welcome to hop on the mic and tell Meg herself. She funded this whole thing after all. So thank you to Emily. And when is the wedding? Do you know? It's next April. So April of 2023.

Cool. Congratulations in advance. hope it all goes smoothly so how did you come across effectively wild back in 2016 oh yeah so that's uh i was uh i'd kind of uh kind of fallen out of my fallen out of my baseball fandom for a bit wandered from the wandered from the church so to speak for of years. And I was graduating from college and about to move back to Minnesota where I'm originally from, and I wanted to get back into my old Twins fandom. And so I think I just searched baseball podcast on Apple Podcasts. I'm not totally sure what came up. But the thing I distinctly remember was, I think it was episode 863 that you did with Aaron Gleeman and Alex Remington, I want to say. Twins guy and Braves guy, because both of them had started the 2016 season 0 and 9.

Right. And I went back and listened to that recently, and you all had a debate over which team was more depressing. And it came out Braves. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Twins have had the worst of it. Yeah, the wrong answer probably. At least that season, right? The Braves won 68 games. The Twins won 59 games that season.

And I guess the Braves have probably had it better since then, too. I don't remember the Twins winning a World Series since then. Yeah, let alone a playoff series, yeah. Or a playoff game, yes. But us debating, what is the sadder thing? That sounds like us. Well, glad you found us, even if that was why. So tell us a little bit about your Twins fandom and

why it was lapsed for a while and how you came back and I guess how excited you are about Carlos Correa. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I first followed the Twins in 2001, when I was six or seven years old, and I was, you know, they were real good for the first half of the season, then kind of collapsed down the stretch. So then I picked up in 2002 with,

and they won their first division championship in a good decade or so, and, you know, drafted Joe Maurer and all that. So I was kind of on the bandwagon from seven, eight years old. Of course, as I just mentioned, that 2002 was the last time they won a playoff series. So yeah, exactly. So the last two decades, most of my life has been kind of spent in the wilderness. But yes, I was, you know, I was a pretty active fan through most of my childhood. I went to game 163 in 2009 with a friend that was, you know, amazing and all that. But just, you know, I got into high school, not a ton of my friends also followed baseball. I, you know, I stopped playing a pick-up lacrosse and Nordic skiing and just kind of fell away from it. The twins also

weren't very good. That probably helped. And by the time I picked it up again, I mean, by the time I picked it up again, they were, as I said, they lost 103 games that year. So it's not like I stayed away for the entire doltros. Not a complete fair weather fan or anything. But yeah, like I said, I was moving back to Minnesota after being away from college. I want to get back into something that I'd loved before.

And so I found your podcast, and it was sort of an immersion experience for learning a foreign language or something. I've been a stats kind of kid. I had a ton of baseball cards and a bunch of notebooks full of my hand-calculated home runs per at bat for for the 1987 giants or whatever the hell it was but uh but i never really got into the sabermetric side of things so so listening to your podcast religiously was sort of a way to you know dunk myself headfirst into into uh you know baseball in the in the modern day so to speak i guess correa's the other thing yeah yeah maybe better days ahead yeah no i mean you know it's it was it was a maddening month to be a twins fan they got they got exactly they got they got kiter falafel on my birthday so i spent my whole birthday being like oh they got this this weird guy with a you know a bit of a

catcher it looks like a pretty good short stop maybe like this this could be this could be really interesting of course i flipped in the next day and like you know we all like mitch garver down here and um not that we don't like ryan jeffers but you know losing mitch garver wasn't uh particularly fun uh but also you know then they just didn't have a short stop and so you're sitting around you know waiting for the other shoe to drop yeah yeah i don't know after after they did all this trade so quickly you kind of expected that to maybe come a little bit sooner and and you know all this all this is going down my sister was in town i was trying to explain to her like that i was

kind of just on tenderhooks like checking the internet every so often like what's gonna happen what's gonna happen and finally we get up one morning and you know she you know you know she sees me and me and emily like talking up a about something. And she's like, so this is the other shoe, right? And I'm like, yes, this is a really big shoe. dependent on so many other people whose interests are not necessarily aligned with your favorite teams doing the thing that they need to in order for what they're doing to make any kind of a sense, right? Like it's either a free agent really deciding, yeah, I do want to live in the Twin Cities for half the year or another team, you know, facilitating a trade. So those are some of the worst moments because it's very much out of your control. I mean, you're a fan, so it's always out of your control, but your proxy is not in full control either. Right. And outside of baseball, you are studying American history, you told me. You are

finishing up a dissertation now. And if you want to share the topic, you can, or your hopes after that, do you plan to teach or what are your aspirations? Yeah, that's a good question that I've been rolling around in my mind. Yeah, I'm a graduate student studying the American Civil War at the University of Virginia, which is where I am now in Charlottesville. But I'm almost done. We're pretty set on moving back to Minnesota, which is not only where I'm from, but where Emily's from also. So that does a little bit restrict whether or not one goes into academia. So I've been looking around at a couple other options. So I haven't settled on anything yet. Believe it or not, finishing up the dissertation takes up a lot of one's time. Yeah, I did not attend grad school and that was one reason why. I didn't finish my, and that was one reason why.

I didn't finish my PhD, and that was one reason why. Right. Well, the topic, you said, is censorship of the press during the Civil War. So that sounds interesting to you and to me, I think, right? And maybe also relevant in some ways today. So good luck with the dissertation and with the wedding and with the twins. Yeah, thank you for all those fronts. It's certainly relevant.

A good bit of it has to do with mob violence, and sometimes I wish that was less relevant. To Charlottesville, for instance? Yeah. Well, yeah, I arrived in town three days before that all went down, so that was a hell of an introduction. Man. All right. Well hell of an introduction. Man. All right. Well, let's answer some emails.

Excellent. Some very fine emails. So this is an email from, well, you know what? Actually, before we get to some emails that were submitted, I have an email to post to you, essentially. Let's pretend that I sent this as an email, which is what is going on in this line from Billions. And I will just set up this clip. So I was watching Billions the other day, as I still do for some reason. We're in season six now. This

was episode nine of season six, an episode called Hindenburg. And for people who aren't aware, and maybe that's for the best, Billions is a Showtime show that is basically about people who make a lot of money and people who are mad at them for making so much money and try to stop them from making money, but mostly fail. And it was famous early on for having Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti going toe-to-toe. Damian Lewis has since left the show and has been replaced by Corey Stahl, who is the new very rich person who Paul Giamatti is trying to take down constantly. So it's kind of this vengeance and rivalry

and lots of corporate intrigue. But also, it is primarily a means for the creators of Billions to make references to things that they care about. So Billions is a baseball show. It's primarily, though, I would say a basketball show and a boxing show and a classic rock show and like gangsters I've never heard of show. basically have to just google constantly while you're watching billions because every character in billions instead of speaking in lifelike dialogue just tries to shoehorn in references to the creators of billions's favorite musical artists or movies or whatever it's very strange there is a entire website called the billions companion that just like explains what the characters in billions are actually referring to at any given time. And you kind of need that handholding.

So it has come up on the podcast before, way back on episode 808 and 809. Sam and I talked about an earlier baseball reference on Billions. This was in season one, I think episode three, where Bobby Axelrod, who was Damian Lewis's character, cites Brian Doyle's career batting average. That is former Yankees utility player Brian Doyle. But for some reason, they misquote his career batting average. So Axelrod says that his average is 161. In actuality, his career average was 168.

And so Sam and I puzzled over, well, why would you go to the trouble of mentioning Brian Doyle and his 160-something career average and then not get the last numeral right? So we puzzled that out for multiple episodes, I believe, and I forget what conclusion we came to. But this is in the same genre. So I've sent you to this clip, and I will now play it for our audience. It's just about 10 seconds long. It'd also be a shame to lose our comer as in one making rapid progress and showing promise. You know, I have been starting to feel it lately, like Otani in year two in the majors, just hitting my stride. Okay. So what's happening here, the first voice you hear is from Taylor,

one of the rich people on the show at the big scary hedge fund private equity place. And they are saying that, you know, this person who the second voice you hear is the actor Dhruv Maheshwari, who plays a trader named Tuck Lull. And basically Tuck Lull and another character are thinking of leaving the company to go work for another company and so in this scene they are found out as they are about to leave and so they are convinced to stay and Taylor says it'd be a shame to lose our comer as in one making rapid progress and showing promise and then Tuck Lull says, as you just heard, you know, I have been starting to feel it lately, like Otani in year two in the majors, just hitting my stride. And initially, I was thrilled to hear a Shohei Otani reference, just his name makes me smile. And to

hear him in the show was a lot of fun, you know, instead of like obscure college basketball players or something, or obscure to me at least. But then I started thinking, does this actually make any sense, this reference? Otani in year two in the majors just hitting his stride. That's not when Otani hit his stride. No. In fact, you could say that he hit his stride immediately, right? I mean, he was good basically from the get- in 2018 with the Angels and then he got hurt. But year two in the majors for him was 2019.

And that was not when he was hitting his stride. He didn't pitch in 2019 and he hit worse in 2019 than he had in 2018. And he didn't even play that much more. So that's just not right. Right. I mean, if you want to say that he didn't hit his stride until this past season, that is his fourth season in the majors. So I can't really come up with a way in which second season actually makes sense here. And I don't know whether this makes any sense to either of you.

No, it doesn't because it doesn't make sense. Like imagine that they only care about him as a hitter for a moment, right? Like we could just pretend that that's a thing that they only care about. It doesn't make sense even if all you care about are traditional stats, right? Like when you first posed this to me, Ben, I thought, oh, well, you know, maybe even though this is a show about like highly analytical people involved in complex financial transactions like maybe they're maybe they're uh you know they're only like traditional triple slash line people or something like that but

it doesn't make sense under those confines either because he you know like i guess he had one point of batting average better in 2019 than 18, but the rest of his line was worse. Yeah, he was literally rookie of the year. Right, in 2018. He hit more home runs that year. He walked more. Maybe they only care about strikeout, right? It's like maybe they lost track of him.

Yeah. I mean, I guess you could say like in universe if you want to come up with that sort of explanation as opposed to just well the writers messed up here then you could say that this character Tuck Lull like paid attention to Otani initially but then like didn't pay close attention like maybe he's just not a baseball fan yeah he's just like vaguely following otani's career and he thought it was his second season i mean i guess that could be the explanation but that's just not very satisfying no it's not what year is it in the show i think it's present day i don't know that it specifies but yeah it's basically now so but it doesn't even really

matter when the show is taking place. The only explanation I could come up with is like, if this is referring to his NPB career, like Japanese majors, I mean, that is the major leagues over there. And he did kind of hit his stride in his second season in NPB. I mean, it wasn't his best season, but it was a big stride over his rookie year. But that seems like a stretch. I mean, you wouldn't assume that characters in the US are talking about his second season on NPB unless they specified that. So I don't know. I mean, I applaud having Otani references anywhere, of course. But this is another example of, hey, call us. Right. Like, you know, we're available to consult. I don't know. Stefan, you got anything here? I feel like they must mean the actual majors. It feels awkward in the first place because you say their second season. You kind of just assume the majors. You say this is going to be Kelleneck's second season. You don't think like, oh, but what about AA or something?

Right, I know. Yeah, you're not saying his second year as a pro. Right. So my best, I mean, I think the idea that like this particular character just isn't the biggest baseball fan and otani is the player that he knows might just make the most like in universe sense yeah and not if i had to stretch it it's maybe like he only cares about him as a two-way player and since he threw all the two innings in 2020 that like 2021 is his second season as like fully formed like fully operational death star otani yeah okay but like that's like i'm stretching here i don't actually believe what

i'm saying because then you'd have to i think then you would have to you'd expect them to specify like his mvp season or it's just it's deeply strange it's weird one rookie of the year there are many examples you could come up with of players who blossomed in their second season maybe they wouldn't be as famous or as topical as

Otani but you know maybe they're just like well we have to appeal to a mainstream audience here and they've only heard of so many baseball players. Not that that stops the writers of Billions from just cramming in like the most esoteric references that they possibly could. So this is not a show where I would think like, oh, they can only refer to a limited number of baseball players. Again, they literally referred to Brian Doyle. So I just I don't know why you would pick Otani to say this is the example of someone who like hit his stride.

Like he was awesome. Like I remember I blogged about him like in literally like his first week in the majors, I think, because he had like an incredible start. Right. He had like a one more week, like a week or two into his career. He was great right away. And then, yeah, ultimately he got hurt and he wasn't pitching for the end of the season but it just it doesn't fit so all we can say to bail out the writers I think is that this character just is not that plugged into baseball but that is not a fulfilling explanation to me so I just

I don't know how these things don't get fact-checked like if I wrote this in a Ringer article, people would look up his baseball reference page and say, well, what do you mean his second season? This was his fourth season and he was good in his first season. And that's a Ringer article. This is a Showtime TV show that will be watched by millions of people and has a lot of people behind the scenes with the production. So I just I don't get how it happens exactly. I never got an answer i don't think about the brian doyle thing that i could see maybe it's a slip up maybe the actor says the wrong number and it's not worth reshooting the scene when you realize i don't know

but this this must have been in the script so i just i don't get it well maybe maybe he was meant to say a different year and so maybe the actor did just flub it and they were like, yeah, whatever. Yeah, but if he's trying to come up with an example of someone who like hit his stride at a certain point, then Ohtani just doesn't fit really. So, yeah. All right. Well, I think, Stefan, your explanation is probably the best other than the just in-universe one. Just the idea that, well, it was his second season as a full-fledged two-way player. I guess there's that, but we're stretching here.

So that's been weighing on me. Just wanted to share the burden with everyone. Okay. All right. Here's a question from Dennis who says, MLB hasn't seen a team captain since David Wright and Adrian Beltre retired in 2018. The last captains before them were Jeter and Canerco in 2014 and then Veritech in 2011. I guess I should mention that Brandon Belt is like kind of the captain of the Giants. Like he named himself the captain and it's like kind of tongue in cheek.

And I don't know whether it's like official or not, but's kind of been calling himself that all right continuing why are captains so rare in baseball is it related to the fluidity of rosters does it seem duplicative of the union rep position what makes an official team captain anyway is it more official to be voted on by the players versus knighted by the organization? Might organizations be reluctant to elevate a player to that status for some labor-related reason? So why don't we see captains more often in baseball? Or I guess we could ask the question, why do we see captains elsewhere? Maybe having captains at all is the strange thing. I have a theory.

Okay. captains at all is the strange thing i have a theory okay i think that part of it is just the inertia of tradition and other sports like have team captains who i think players vote on i mean i'm sure there's feedback from the coaches but like in football i think that they vote and there are multiple captains in those sports right they tend to have like a captain like the quarterback is almost captain right at least yeah well and like in in football like the quarterback is almost captain right at least yeah well and like in in football like the quarterback is almost always a captain and then you will you generally vote for a defensive captain and also a special teams captain so you'll see multiple guys with patches and i think some teams are like very loosey-goosey about it they have like a lot of they're lousy

with captains which makes it interesting because my theory about why we don't see it in baseball more often is that i think that there's a not division in like an acrimonious active sort of way, but there is, I think, a clear delineation often between pitchers and position players on teams. And so even though there are guys who are sort of viewed as clubhouse leaders and they very well might have the respective reliever here or there or whatever, I think that there is enough of a split in those units that sometimes having sort of a unanimous captain is maybe a little harder to reach. And so they should just vote for a pitcher captain

and a position player captain and then call it good. And then they could have captains if they wanted to. But also just like, does it come with responsibilities being a captain? Like in football, you just flip, you go out for the coin flip. Right. I don't think you have jobs after that.

Like it doesn't come with chores. Yeah. Well, my theory, I think, is that in MLB, in baseball, the manager fulfills most of the roles of the captain in hockey is like a real thing because it's the person who is authorized to speak with the refs regarding like rules interpretations when the captain is on the ice or if the captain is not on the ice then the alternate captain can talk to the ref about the rules and in baseball the manager just comes on the field right which cannot happen in hockey because the head coach is you know wearing uh dress shoes and it's icy out there right so i think that could be it because like if you look back i believe in early baseball history like 19th century it was common or standard

for there to be baseball captains. But I believe at that time, the manager was not supposed to interact directly with the umpires. Like they were not supposed to come on the field. They just had to sit on the bench and be quiet, I think. And that changed at a certain point. And so once you had coaches, once you had managers, and they could just argue with the umpire themselves, then I don't really know what you need the captain anymore for. It's just sort of a symbolic leadership position basically.

And then maybe your theory about it being harder to have a unifying force in a baseball clubhouse or like an acknowledged leader. Maybe that comes into play there too. But I think just practically there's less use for one in baseball and then i read at least like on the the captain in hockey wikipedia page that uh there is a role or at least there has historically been one for communicating players wishes to management let's say and so maybe that is as dennis asked in the question you do have team reps right and union reps and so maybe they fulfill that role too so i kind of doubt it's like uh teams suppressing captaincy so that like you don't have to pay captains more or

something like that i mean i i kind of doubt it's. I think it's just that it's sort of a vestigial position in baseball more so than other sports. And I guess it's the same with football to some extent. I mean, you still have your head coach just on the sidelines, right? I mean, they might have a headset and they might yell a lot, but they don't just like walk on the field and coach players during the game. And that is kind of the case for all the other sports except for baseball, which is the sport where the manager for some reason wears the uniform and just walks out there whenever he feels like it. Yeah. You have a guy in football who's responsible for making sure that the coach doesn't enter the field of play often because sometimes they're bad at it. And then someone has to tell Pete Carroll or Sean mcveigh you can't be on here so much we gotta hold you back i can see the virtues of the football approach as far as they just have

so many people on those teams and they and they do entirely different jobs you know kind of gets what meg was saying about you just have pitchers and position players and they don't i mean that they're on the field at the same time, obviously, sometimes, but like they just do different jobs. So, you know, I agree. I don't, you know, I always thought it was weird when other teams had, maybe I wouldn't think it was so weird if I'd been a fan of a team that had a formal captain. But it always just seemed kind of odd when other teams did because I didn't really get what they do. Yeah, it's kind of pompous. It's like, oh, the Yankees have a captain. Or we're the Yankees, so the captain. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of pompous. It's like, oh, the Yankees are the captain. Or we're the Yankees, so the captain.

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of silly. I guess if there's a tradition associated with that team, then it's nice if you're anointed the captain and there's a legacy of captains. I mean, that's something that other sports have with uniform numbers, right? Like in soccer, for instance, there are these legendary numbers that like have to be bestowed on people. And I guess NPB has that also for like aces. There's a uniform number that aces will tend to have. We don't really have that in MLB, but I kind of like that. So maybe captains could serve that purpose. But yeah, I don't know. There's also just like a lot more player movement these days than there used to be and so there are fewer players who are really long tenured with any one

team which could discourage captaincy but growing up as a hockey fan as a kid I did think it was kind of a cool thing just like the c and the a on the chest and like knowing which players were which like I used to memorize like who's the captain of this team who's the alternate captain of of this team? I thought that was kind of cool. I don't know that I even knew what the point of captains were, but I still kind of thought it was nice to have that little visual denotation of who was captain. So yeah, it can be cool, I guess. But in baseball, I just don't think it serves the same purpose. It does make it kind of surprising that Jeter was differentiated in that way on a team where they won't even put the names on the back of their jerseys.

Right. Yeah. All right. Here's a question from Greg who says, I recently watched the new John Boyce video about Dave Steeb and it got me thinking about the weird run from 1974 to 92 when relievers won eight Cy Young Awards and even three MVPs. Voters have gotten smarter, though are still imperfect, and a reliever has not won the award since Eric Gagné did in 2003. Since 2003, the best reliever seasons by Fangraphs War was Liam Hendricks in 2019 with 3.8. He did not receive any Cy Young votes. While recognizing that voters typically don't use Fangraph's War to determine their Cy Young votes,

at least with relievers maybe, I'd like to pose the question, what do you believe a reliever would have to do in 2022 or in any future season to win the Cy Young? Particularly if this is a modern one-inning reliever who might occasionally get more than three outs in a game, to take it even a step further, what would it take for a reliever now to win nvp so can this happen again i'm not sorry that this era is over but could it come back somehow i feel like if i had to make an argument for this it would be based on when probability added probably like like if you're if you i mean if you were to make an argument for mvp and this particular reliever that we're imagining exists you know were to pitch just some incredibly valuable innings for their team and maybe pitch a ton of them then you might be able to make a plausible argument that the context of their contribution was

so important that their team wouldn't have been the same team without them. And that even a slightly less stellar performance in those situations might have really ruined them. I mean, I don't know how many people would be convinced by this argument. I think I'm creating an imaginary, like, you know, God reliever in my head to fill this role. But that's what comes to mind first. And even I'm not totally convinced by what I'm trying to come up with. more inclined to think there's a scenario under which this could sort of unfold like sitting here in 2022 than I would have been 10 years ago but we would need to see just because relievers are taking more and more innings and starters are going you know like less and less deep into games but you would still need a pretty radical transformation of the way that we see pitchers used now, even with the understanding that we have of like leverage and the role that that plays in value.

And, you know, some of the value stats take that stuff into account, but I just think it would be like, I can think of a scenario where we would look to a team and say, wow, the relief core is what really did it for this team this year. Like if the Mariners had made the the postseason last year, for instance, I think that we would have all acknowledged that a really stellar performance from that bullpen unit is why they were there. That was why they were in the race to begin with.

But I think it would be hard for us to have that thought and not attribute that success to more than one guy. So I think it would be really hard. I mean, I guess you could have a reliever who is really superlative in long relief over the course of a season. But then it's like, if they're able to do that with sufficient leverage for us to attribute team success to them, then why isn't that person just starting? So I don't know. I think it would be really, really hard if only because we end up having, even within the context of modern pitching usage, still having like really exemplary performances from starters. They should just have a reliever award. I mean, I think they do, but not one that the BBWA votes on, right? Like

we should just have a reliever award because then we don't have to have this problem. Yeah. The only thing I can think is that if the upper limits for innings pitched in a single season continue to fall, if we're at the point where 200 innings is basically the max and maybe no one will even get there this year or soon enough, then maybe if we have a reliever who comes along who is not Mike Marshall or anything, but just like a little more in that direction so that he has a rubber arm and is pitching regularly.

And let's say, you know, the fabled hundred inning reliever comes back or something or not even a hundred, but 80 or, you know, 90 or something and is just kind of like running out there constantly which again like that goes against what we've seen too because even relievers are generally pitching fewer innings and having more days off between appearances but if someone like that did come along and the difference in innings were not as great because you had starters topping out at 180 or 190 or something and then you have this reliever at 80 or 90 and the reliever is just spectacular and doesn't blow a save and barely allows any runs and the team squeaks into the playoffs i mean

maybe maybe that could happen i think it would really have to be something unprecedented i'm even remembering like fernando rodney remember his 2012 with the Rays? Yeah. When he had a.6 ERA, which was a record for some number of minimum innings. And he also had 48 saves and he pitched 74 and two-thirds innings. And he finished fifth in AL Cy Young voting and was 13th in MVP voting. Now, that was a decade ago. So things have changed and probably made that even harder now, although that was after like Felix winning the Cy Young. So things were already changing at that point. But if you did even better than Fernando Rodney, like if you had a season

where you just like didn't give up an ermdrad or something, like you just have like a zero ERA, then maybe like the stats would just be so flashy on a rate basis and it's hard because like you even it's rarer now to have assigned closers who are getting all the saves and everything and but i think yeah if you just like ran the table and just like didn't give up a run which would be like pretty impossible but if you somehow did that even over 60 innings or something and you never blew a save and it were important and you had the high leverage and the win probability added and everything, then maybe. And it would help if there weren't some dominant standout pitcher Cy Young candidate too. Right. So I think last year is actually a really good way for us to illustrate how difficult this

would be. So like DeGrom threw 92 innings of 108 ERA ball. He had a fit he was worth almost five wins by fangrass version of war which is fit based and he received one fifth place cy young vote so first of all i think you'd absolutely have to cross the hundred inning threshold and maybe you interpret those hundred innings differently if it's someone who is understood to be a reliever versus a starter who just got hurt. But if voters aren't looking at DeGrom and what he was able to do in around 100 innings and saying this is worth more than one fifth place vote, I think you're really going to struggle to have someone who isn't in a starting role shine enough to merit a push.

I think it would take a pretty big sea change in the way that we see pitchers deployed and voters think about it because, gosh, we spent an entire day freaking out about Corbin Burns. Like a whole day of our lives just spent freaking out about Corbin Burns only throwing 167 innings last year. So, you know, it's just like,

I think it would be tricky. Although I guess I'm looking at the Cy Young voting on the AL side, and I guess Rossiola Iglesias got a vote. That's crazy. Who did that? I'm going to have some smorts for you. That's surprising to me. All right.

Well, I'm not eager for this to happen again, so I'm fine if it's really difficult now. Yeah. Yeah, it would take something really spectacular and pretty unprecedented, I think. All right. now yeah it would take something really spectacular and pretty unprecedented i think all right rowey says why are innings pitched still shown with a base three decimal point for a sport so statistically inclined it feels a bit odd to stick with say 143.1 to convey 143 and a third innings i do actually prefer the traditional way, but has there been any exploration of why it stayed that way even during the analytics revolution? And I could call Meg onto the carpet here because Fangraphs does this too. Well, you should call me to the carpet for not

being consistent actually. Because I tend to let people do it. I don't mean in text even, I mean like in leaderboards and that sort of thing. Oh yeah, we definitely do it in leaderboards. Yeah, and this is a small little thing that most people probably wouldn't care about, but it has been the bane of my existence at times because I'm trying to work with spreadsheets

or export certain things from Fangraphs or Baseball Reference or wherever and you have the innings column and it exports as you know whatever 0.1 whatever 0.2 whatever 0.3 and if you want to actually get the true innings total then you have to go in and replace those in some way so that instead of 0.1 for one out one third of an inning you have 0.33 or you know 0.67 for2 instead, right? And that can screw up your denominator, basically, if you're doing certain kinds of calculations. So it is a very limited subset of the audience

that probably finds this to be an annoyance. And I'm sure that most people understand exactly what it means. If you're looking up something on Fangraphs, you know that it's not a tenth of an inning. It is a third of an inning. It's one out. And that's just the convention. And you grew up used to it that way, right? You see it in box scores, et cetera. So it's a small thing. But I do wish, I guess, at least when you were like export or something, that it would maybe convert it in some way, just for the convenience of those of us who are crunching the numbers from time to time. way just for the convenience of those of us who are crunching the numbers from time to time yeah i mean say saber agrees with you at least from a copy perspective right because the saber style guides preferred usage is 1-3 2-3 for writing it out but um i don't know we're slow to change

when was the last time you updated your security settings on your computer? Yeah, do I have security settings on my computer? I don't know. But yeah, I mean, right, it's just we get by and everyone knows what you mean. And unless you are actively working with these numbers in some way, then it's not a problem for you. And that's just a small portion of the audience. But, you know, it's a little, I don't know if i'd even elevate it to the level of pet peeve it's it's a peeve i guess it's a it's a modest minor peeve for me a modest peeve understated peeve yeah demure peeve and i don't know like why it stayed that way probably just inertia just because it was that way but But I guess like if you wanted to

be precise, then it would take up a little more room because you'd have to go out to a second decimal place and maybe it looks a little less clean too. And then, you know, if you have that column going out to two decimal places, then why isn't this other column going out to two decimal places? So it might seem sort of inconsistent so it's probably just a space and cleanliness kind of aesthetic thing or just no one caring about it particularly because no one's really getting confused about what it means but yeah i mean even if you were to round i mean i guess you could round right because sometimes you might see that like 0.3 or 0.7 for two thirds of an inning, right? Which is not completely precise, but it's closer than 0.2. So even that I would applaud, I think, if you were to make that change, I would be in favor of that. Like even if you don't want to inject fractions into the equation or multiple decimal points, maybe just 0.3 and 0.7 instead. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine how this started.

Like, I don't know. It just, you know, it's not like we usually have like one third and two third keys on typewriters. You know, and like if you're printing it on a baseball card or in a, I don't know, I like you spend a lot of time on newspapers.com for my job and there's some really old papers that I can totally see the difference between one-third and two-third being pretty illegible at a certain point. And then, yeah, just inertia. As you say, it's perhaps a peeve, but not enough of a peeve to anyone to overhaul everything that

you know it's it's a i imagine it's a pretty simple like find and replace on a on a spreadsheet or whatever you know so i i feel like it might just be a weird middle ground where like yeah it's not quite right and yeah it's a little annoying but the solution is easy enough even if it is a bit annoying that it's not a big enough problem for anyone to try and overhaul and fix entirely whatever that fix would look like right yeah i'm just looking at our leaderboards and realizing this is unrelated to the innings pitch problem but boy real estate is sure precious on the fangraphs leaderboards these days yeah we bag a lot in here yeah right so that's a reason, I guess,

that you're not sacrificing information for most of your readers. Although I will point out that Baseball Perspectives does do 0.3 and 0.7. So I'm just saying, keep pace with the cutting edge here. And I will not make this my main cause. I have my hands full with the zombie runner and many other pressing issues of the day. But, you know, it's something I'd like to see. So I applaud Baseball Perspectives for displaying it that way. And you want to bring it up on a future call with David Oppelman someday? You know, number 27 on your list of priorities on the itinerary for that conversation? Then I would not be sorry about

that. I will take it under advisement. Okay. Question from Aaron. There's a strange phenomenon in Major League Baseball right now. A lot of second basemen bat left and throw right, left-handed and right-handed. Matt Carpenter, Jazz Chisholm, Colton Wong, Rugnet Odor. I'm sure there are others. Obviously, you wouldn't play second, Colton Wong, Rugnet Odor I'm sure there are others Obviously you wouldn't play second base if you throw left-handed And I assume a righty thrower batting left is the result of a switch hitter Deciding at some point to just focus on the side with the platoon advantage Not necessarily, there are a lot of reasons why you can end up that way

But he says it's kind of weird how common it is, right? All that said, it seems like there should be a term for someone like that. We have southpaw for lefty pitchers or in surfing, they have switch foot for people who can surf with either foot in front. But as far as I know, there's no baseball term for batting with a different hand than you throw with. What should we call it? He then continues in a parenthetical. It occurs to me someone could bat right and throw left, but I don't know why you would decide to take the disadvantage on both sides i'm not sure if there are any right left position players in the majors there aren't yeah there have been there

are players who do this and it's a small group most famously ricky henderson right so ricky henderson was a righty batter lefty thrower and i think ricky said that he just batted righty because everyone else was batting righty he just figured he should ricky's kind of on his own wavelength sometimes but there have been some players and some good players who do that like uh you know recently like uh colin cowgill was was one of those guys so i like that you left the door open for me to put this player on the list by saying some players and some good players, suggesting that both bad players and good players can count

because like Evan White for the Mariners, he wants right and throws left. Right, right. Yeah, maybe that's his problem. I don't know. It's not his problem, Ben. There is a term for that, I think. Sometimes you hear them called wrong way guys. That's kind of a scouty term.

Or backwards guys. Yeah, wrong way or backwards guys if you bat right and throw left because, of course, if you bat right, then you are getting the platoon advantage against fewer opponents. And if you're going to have the split handedness then ideally it would be the other way and i don't know i texted kylie mcdaniel to ask like is there some secret scouting term for this and he basically said not really that they're just called left right usually left right guys because usually it's listed on the roster that way bats slash throws and left slash right is ideal or i guess switch hitting possibly could be ideal but if you're going to be split-handed in this don't

be a wrong way guy but i don't know that there is a better or more common term for it than just left right and if the opposite of the reverse is the wrong way guy i guess you could say it's the right way the right way guy but that i don't know i mean we already have like playing the game the right way as a cliche kind of which could confuse you maybe and there's to say there's a right or wrong way to do this but there are maybe more advantageous or less advantageous ways but yeah we could use a different term for this, I think. Flip-flopper comes to mind. Flip-flopper.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, but see, that evokes a switch hitter to me more. Yeah, I could see that. Yeah. I know that Evan White has been referred to as a weird ass in Mariner's fandom. We just call him a weird ass. So I affectionately refer to him that way.

I know that Nathan Bishop, who used to run Lookout Landing, refers to Evan that way. Now it feels discourteous because he's injured again. And you've got to be careful with your hyphenation when you're calling someone weird ass because otherwise you might be staking a claim to knowledge you don't have. Right, yes. Don't know, candidly, how irregular the bottom may be.

Right. But the bat left throw right is less weird. It's more common. Right. So I don't know. What would that be? I mean, you could just say split handedness or not ambidextrous, but semidextrous, semidextrous, something like that. I don't know.

That's too bad a splitter is already a thing. Right. Yeah. It is too bad. That would be good. I can't tell you as a child baseball player and a lefty, I always felt like the guys who did one thing right-handed were sort of like betraying the cause or something. Yeah. I know there's a lot of left-handed solidarity.

Well, it mattered to me a lot more as a child. I played first base, and it was like the only position where that was a potential asset. Right. Alright, well, left-right players is fine, I guess, but if you can top that, listeners, please submit your nominations,

because I think we could do better. Alright, here is a question from Dan who says, The Cleveland Guardians have a brand new bespoke theme song carefully crafted by local musicians. According to Cleveland.com, on Wednesday, the club debuted We Are Cleveland, an upbeat driving rock track highlighted by its pulsating drumline, piercing guitar riffs, and soaring vocals. The track can be described as having a little bit of everything, but above all, it's 100% Cleveland. And Dan says, but is it a baseball song? It seems to have a little bit of everything except baseball or even an oblique reference there too.

Are we absolutely sure it's not a roller derby song? The lyrics can be found, and then he links to the place where they can be found, which I will link to, too. But he says the closest thing I can find to a baseball lyric is in this town. Knock us down. We will always rise. This could refer to the cycles of tearing down and rebuilding common to many small market teams. But it could also refer more literally to roller derby. So I like Dan's theory that they just stole this song the way that they stole the name Guardians

from the local roller derby team. But I'll play a short snippet of this song for our audience and I will keep it mercifully brief so as not to subject you to the entire thing, though you are welcome to subject yourself to it if you're so inclined. We are, we are Greenland! subject yourself to it if you're so inclined. Okay, so that's a little snippet of the song. Is it a baseball song?

Not explicitly. I mean, it is by our standard definition in that it is now the theme song of a baseball team. But other than that, it refers to the 216 family which is the cleveland area code so it's a cleveland song sort of it says cleveland a lot but no nothing about it by my reading actually says anything specific about baseball i find i might be reading too much into it but it's art so you're supposed to interpret. I do find it funny in a song that is about rebranding a team name that was understood to be horrible, that we never compromise, never apologize is a line in this song.

That's neither here nor there, but that is funny to me. You make a fine point. Yes. neither here nor there uh but that is funny to me find that funny point yes i have enjoyed not the song i do not care for the song it's not very good it's not very good i have enjoyed the youtube comments on the song the top one the most upvoted says we literally just wanted an outfielder in free agency. That's great. Yeah.

I mean, that was kind of my first thought, too. It's like, just like, I mean, like, obviously, like, I'm not going to be the most sympathetic listener to a Guardians theme song. But, you know, I was more excited about citing Josh Donaldson than I would be about any song. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it raises the larger question of, do we need sports team songs at all, really? Have there ever been good ones? I mean, okay, there are a couple distinctive ones, at least. I don't know if they're good, but they've just

been around for so long that you feel a fondness for Meet the Mets, let's say, right? But most of the sports team theme songs, including like, Let's Get Metsmerized, just to stick with Mets, let's say, right? But most of the sports team theme songs, including like, let's get Metsmerized just to stick with Mets songs. I mean, all of the like early 90s, like rap style ones are just completely cringeworthy now, but also sort of fun in a way. But they're all pretty terrible. Like never really do you hear a sports team theme song and go like, oh, that's a legitimately good song. Like, I would listen to that song in a completely different context. I mean, a lot of the other YouTube comments are pointing out that, like, this is just going to sound great, like, echoing through the empty stadium as, like, no one goes to see Guardians games because they're not spending on that team and they trade all their

good players so it's also just like it's too intense for a baseball song I mean it's like it's like an anthem I mean it's like you're supposed to be cheering this thing I could see it in soccer maybe but like baseball doesn't really have the tradition and I'm all for like team chants but this just I can't really imagine like singing along to this like even if I were a Guardians fan I just I don't know what the point of these things is particularly yeah I think it's sort of like I think it's a little like nicknames where and here we are having already discussed captaincy but like i think it's a little bit like nicknames in that you want something like this to be organic and you're never gonna get that with like corporate pr like the the message i sent to you ben offline before we

started was like why is this stuff always so cringe it It would be one thing if the fans in Cleveland in this new chapter of Cleveland baseball had a song in a place that literally has the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We're like, this is our song, and then they sang it, and it was something that came from the fan base. But this is just always going to feel kind of manufactured like it because it literally is manufactured yes exactly i mean i know ever like someone has to write songs right if you're in a song you gotta write you gotta write a song

so i guess in that sense most music is manufactured but this is not something that is a spontaneous expression on the part of the fan base to be like yeah here's our here's our understanding of our identity in this in this new chapter like that's just not what this is stefan are you familiar with the fight song we're gonna win twins yes i would i am familiar with this they used to play it at the they used to play at the metrodome a bunch i don't you know i'm trying to remember if i've heard a target field recently They used to play at the Metrodome a bunch. I don't, you know, I'm trying to remember if I've heard of Target Field recently. Knock out a home run, shout a hip-ho-lay Cheer for the Minnesota Twins today Minnesota Twins

Like, that wasn't trying to be a song. I never really took it. You know, like, it was just like a fun thing for them to play when they run out on the field. And I think the bar for that as an artistic endeavor is a lot, a lot lower. But the thing I was going to say that kind of combines what Meg has said, that, you know, it's hard to,

you want something kind of spontaneous, but also does combine a bit of the corporateness of it. I believe the twins for their 1987 World Series VHS that they sold or whatever, had it featured Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now by Starship. And so that is an example. I believe I have this right someone's going to correct me i'm sure but that's an example of the team putting that out that you know putting a then a modern song to their you know to their to their baseball team but that's then kind of

been reclaimed by twins twitter in the last couple of years thanks to the like of likes of parker hageman into uh he'll just put that song on, you know, either Twins highlights or low lights. The song works either way. It's either kind of heartwarming or just like, yep, those are our bumbling guys, you know, so it kind of, you know, so that is an example of something that was originally out there as a like, we're going to slap, you know, slap our corporate, you know, whatever on this and has since been reclaimed by the fan base for like fun Twitter videos.

So it could happen. It just might take 30 years. Yeah, right. There could be some value to just having a fight song that's like ironic. I mean, it's so bad, it's good, right? And maybe you can kind of recontextualize it. And I guess a team might put a song out there with that intent but i don't know that that's what's happening here and this is not like so bad it's good it's just bad i think so i don't

know if it's bad in a fun way who knows maybe it'll catch on and we'll be proved wrong but i don't see it i mean there are there are sports that have you know singing and chanting and stuff as part of the you know the fan experience and my understanding even baseball that it's in Korea, I think, and maybe other stadiums. I'm not familiar with that. Yeah. So I don't know. If that was a bigger part of American baseball culture, I would happily engage in that. But that's not what this is.

Yeah. I mean, to have like a you'll never walk alone style chant. I mean, I envy that when I see like soccer teams that have that happen. But again that has some sort of local connection at important moments in a game, and that can feel cool. Like the Mariners played Jimi Hendrix's song after they win. So it's like it is rooted in the place. You're able to identify it as having something to say that is also about the place it's from.

But first of all, Jimi Hendrix famously wrote good songs, so that's a big difference. And it doesn't feel forced in quite the same way that it would if it were something that Mariner's PR had tried to write, which I don't know, there might be some very talented songwriters amongst that PR stuff.

I don't mean to denigrate them. If any team PR department could do this or team marketing department, it might be the Mariners. Yeah, yeah. All right, last one here. done a great thing if any team PR department could do this or team marketing department it might be the Mariners but yeah all right last one here this is Matt Patreon supporter who says hypothetical question if the pitching rubber extended

from first base to third base how different do you think baseball would be would pitchers change up their starting location at the expense of a longer distance to throw the batter off would pitchers be positioned for defensive purposes? Would we see lots of pitching from the foul lines for dead pull hitters? My gut is that given how much velocity matters, most teams would stick with pitching down the middle, but you have crafty guys that get by with lower speeds,

so maybe some would be able to make a career out of it. So the pitching rubber extends all the way from foul line to foul line instead of just being a little slab on the mound here where would pitchers stand i mean i was gonna he said how would it change the how would it change how pitchers pitch or how would it change the game overall well both yeah how different would baseball i was gonna say ground ball pitchers are gonna have an interesting time of it right yeah yeah would you fall down on your way to first base if you're a hitter like would you slip i well that's a yeah that's a good question too maybe it's is it a raised rubber still but it extends across the entire that's what i was imagining yeah you'd

get all kinds of caroms that yeah that would be cool don't get me wrong i love this but like it would be very weird people would trip it would be carnage out there yeah this is like not as bad as a pit potentially from an injury standpoint but the next worst thing so i think from a just pitching standpoint i think even if you were farther away from home plate you'd want to have a more like extreme oblique angle right i mean it would be pretty impossible. Now, granted, could you throw strikes? If you still have to get the ball over the plate, then you can't really do that. If you're pitching from over at the foul line,

it would just like the angles. How are you actually going to get the pitch over the plate without like beaning the batter? So I guess you couldn't stand all the pitch over the plate without like beating the batter so I guess you you couldn't stand all the way over but I would think that you would want to move part of the way just I mean for one thing you'd give hitters a worse look at the ball I mean it's why some pitchers will move from side to side on the rubber as it is or they will stand on the extreme side of the rubber just to give hitters a worst look at the ball, depending on their handedness. So if you were to move even farther over,

then yes, I guess the ball would have to travel a longer distance, but it would be tough to get a good look at it. And it would also be tough to get around on it, probably. I mean, you'd have to pull it. You'd have to pull it basically. And if you know that the person is going to pull, then you can move your fielders over there. And then that's the other advantage, as Matt was saying, that you'd have the pitcher who would be more in line to field these balls, which I guess it would place a greater emphasis on pitcher defensive skill, but it would basically be like having a another infielder stationed at the place where the ball is going to go as opposed to up the middle

so i think that would be an advantage although it would be like the new hot corner would be like the the picture there'd be even more injury risk so that would be an issue too so that might be a reason not to stand way over there but yeah i think you would move not all the way but but a good portion of the way between the bases but they move back and forth during and at bat like is this going to add to time of game where like you're starting at third for like the first couple pitches you walk across the dive head to pitch for the other side yeah one two four from hand from batter to batter you would probably yeah yeah and would it depend would you have to do it similar to like pat venditti having to declare a handedness oh yeah right probably yeah i think this is uh probably something that

would actually change baseball pretty significantly and probably not in good ways no i mean you just wouldn't get six three grounders anymore right like they'd hit the i mean not in good ways. I mean, you just wouldn't get six three-grounders anymore, right? Like, they'd hit the, I mean, not in at least what we're thinking of, like it would hit the rubber and it would carry them off somewhere. Yeah. And then it'd just kind of be a free, like, I don't know. I don't know if you'd see more or less double plays. Like, you know, you're not going to get the hard ground ball that you can, you know, flip and turn around and turn a double play,

or maybe you catch people off base. It's like a line drive that hits the carom. Right. Oh, yeah. The thing is, like, if the rubber extends, then does the mound extend? This was going to be my next question. Now you have to, now I really want to know what this does to base running. Because you've got to run up the little hill and then down the little hill.

Right. Up and down right up and down up and down imagine trying to break for home if the mound goes all the way through or to the baseline it would be a disaster there's i i would love though to be in the room when a sport that is like we must ban the shift tries to pitch this to the rules committee it's like yeah yeah get rid of the shift, but as an aside, maybe this gets rid of the shift, right? Because the ball could carry him off of a mound that is extended all the way around. Crazy. Yeah, if it were just a rubber that extended, then the ball could go over that or you could get a hop that went over that. But if the mound extends all the way,

or you could make the pitcher choose between having a mound in the middle of the field or not having a mound but just having the rubber elsewhere so he has to pitch like off a flat ground but he gets to choose whatever angle he wants that might be a way to equalize things a little but again i don't know that i see any upsides here necessarily so yeah this would be a instance where baseball would be different if it were different i believe believe. Dramatically so. Yeah. All right.

I will leave you with a quick stat blast. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's today's Stop Loss. Okay, so this Stop Loss was not prompted by an email, but when we did our NL Central preview earlier this week, I just made an offhand comment about how much older Albert Pujols is than the new Cardinals manager, Oli Marmole, right? Because Albert Pujols is, as far as we know, he is listed at 42 years old now, and Oli Marmel is, what, 35, I think? So this is a pretty big gap. And it's funny because when they showed a video the other day of Pujols walking in

from the bullpen and getting congratulations before a spring training game, he looked like a manager. I mean, he kind of had the manager build more than Ali Marmal does probably. But this is a big gap and it got me wondering, is this one of the bigger gaps or is this the biggest gap in a long time? Because we have seen maybe a trend toward younger managers recently. I mean, I don't know. Managers used to be very young in the early days of baseball when everyone was a player manager or a lot of people were. And then that went out of vogue a little bit and now obviously we haven't had a player manager since the 80s it's been decades and as we've discussed I don't think that that will be coming

back anytime soon on the other hand you also maybe have aging curves changing a little bit differently and players not lasting as long in many cases so I asked Ryan Nelson frequent stat blast consultant to run the numbers here, and he did. RetroSheet made this fairly simple for him. And the difference between Pujols and Marmole is 2,359 days, so that's about six and a half years. But that is not unprecedented or even close to it in the grand sweep of baseball history there have been 38 managers who have had players more than 2359 days older than they were and i think ryan was able to do this like on a game log level and just look at the actual number of days different between them on any given game but he

notes most of those were in the age of the player-manager and a long time ago. So if you only include duos where both manager and player were born in the 20th century, then only five managers have had a bigger gap. And there were some player-managers involved there. So the number one answer, perhaps unsurprising, is Lou Bedreau, who was the youngest manager ever, and he was a player manager at the time. So Lou Boudreau became a player manager for Cleveland in 1942 when he was in his age 24 season. So as you would imagine, he had a bunch of older players and he was younger than a lot of his players, most of his players for many years. But the biggest gap was when he managed Joe Heving in Cleveland or Heving. I don't know how you pronounce that from 1942 to 1944. And the difference there was 6,162 days, approximately 17 and a half years.

So that is the upper limit. The other ones. So Lupa Dro was one of the five I mentioned. upper limit the other ones so lupa dro was one of the five i mentioned marty marion with the browns in the 50s and satchel page who was on the browns at that time and that was more a function of satchel being an advanced age the difference between them at the most was 3800 days and that is a about 10 and a half years or so and then we we have next Kevin Kennedy with Nolan Ryan on the Rangers in the 1990s. That was 2,672 days, which is about 300 days more than the Pujols Marble Gap. And then Renee Latchman with Gaylord Perry on the Mariners in 1980s was 2,423 days.

And Joe Cronin with Lefty Grove on the Red Sox in the 30s and 40s. And the max there was 2,411 days. So Pujols Marble, not unprecedented, but it is the biggest gap since 1993, which was Kevin Kennedy and Nolan Ryan on the Rangers. So that satisfied my curiosity. It is indeed very unusual and hasn't happened for almost 30 years. So thank you to myself for the question this time. And thank you to Ryan for answering it.

Good job, self. You're so smart. And thank you very much for joining us today, Stefan. This was fun. I know that people can find you on Twitter at joining us today, Stefan. This was fun. I know that people can find you on Twitter at slundmn, I believe. And you also have a baseball blog where you have blogged about baseball at times.

Yeah, I started that as a sort of, I was feeling down and out of sorts about the dissertation, but I want to keep writing and researching. So yeah, if you want to read, I'd call it a bittersweet baseball blog. It's mostly like perfect games that were ruined by a home run in the first bat or the case of retiring Brad Radke's number for being the best pitcher in a series of really, really bad twins teams, or even just what's the worst quality start. You can find that sort of thing. But if you you can find that sort of thing but if you care to read that sort of thing it's

solohomer.wordpress.com is the other thing yeah Brad Radke I remember Sam doing a thing about how Brad Radke was like the or twins pitcher and like there was a whole tree of pitchers descended from Brad Radke and basically like all twins pitchers

for a while other than like johan santana francis galeriano were basically brad ratke reincarnated he was just the template for the twins for years and years so yeah he was very good too yeah you guys you guys got off that easy i would have easily hijacked this entire show but this became a minor i shouldn't say a minor obsession i basically gave up normal work for like a week writing about Brad Rack. See, this is disconcerting because you're taking time away from graduate work to write about sports on the side as a distraction. So in eight or nine years, you're going to be the co-host of Effectively Wow. Congratulations.

All right. Look forward to it. Okay. Well, thanks again. And again, good luck with the dissertation. And maybe you can make it a baseball dissertation. They played baseball during the Civil War. Maybe you can sneak in a baseball reference somewhere in there. I'll do my best. There are a lot of footnotes and no one's going to read them all. That is also true for most of these podcasts. All right. Thank you, Stefan. Yeah. Thank you, Stefan. Yeah, thank you, guys. All right, that will do it for today and for this week. Thanks, as always, for listening, and thanks to Stefan for joining us today.

He was telling us after we finished recording that his sister was questioning what qualified him to appear on this podcast. You know what qualified him? We can be bought. You can buy us off, too, just like Stefan did, or really just like Emily did, who actually financed this operation. Don't all of you do it at once, because we can't do this every episode, but we do enjoy talking to our listeners sometimes. We are podcasters of the people. Our listeners play a huge part in the podcast, even when they aren't on it. But if you want to be, sign up for the Mike Trout tier on Patreon. Two final notes. I mentioned on a recent episode after the Phillies signed Kyle Schwarber and Castellanos that Jason

Stark's article at The Athletic about their defense had quoted the Phillies' Charlie Manuel, former manager, current special advisor, as saying, if we hit, we'll field better. So the suggestion was that, hey, this is a bad defensive team, everyone's saying it, but Charlie Manuel is suggesting they'll hit so well that they will give themselves confidence and they will play better in the field. I noted that I had relayed a request to Russell Carlton of Baseball Prospectus to try to look into this, see if there's any truth to what Manuel said. And I don't know that Charlie Manuel actually believes this. Maybe he just needed something to say that would not be negative about the Phillies defense.

But Russell looked. He did the research. He adjusted for everything that you should adjust and control for. And I will read his conclusion here. I will also link to the article. Quote, did success at bat lead to success in the field? Not really. Whether or not a batter got on base in the previous inning wasn't predictive at all of fielding outcomes. It didn't make players better or worse the next half inning. They were their normal selves either way. Maybe I need to look at this differently. What if one plate appearance isn't enough? I look to see whether a player's OBP in their previous 10 plate appearances had any predictive power.

Nope. Okay, maybe it's not an individual level effect. The Phillies certainly will hit this year. Maybe if the team scores a runner two or three in the previous half inning, there's a jolting effect on the whole defense in the next half inning. And they can ride that to better defensive outcomes. No. Just no.

It's the sort of thing that sounds like it could be true and maybe even feels like it could be true, but it's eyewash. Just because someone says something doesn't make it true, there's no cloaking this one. The Phillies defense is going to be awful. I'm not surprised, but thank you to Russell for running the numbers regardless. recorded, but apparently some minor leaguers who have wives and children and probably partners too are having issues with the new housing policy. So it's a good thing that teams are now obligated to provide housing for their minor leaguers. And for the most part, that has been an improvement and plenty of players seem to be happy with this new system. It tends to be team provided housing, like a dormitory style system. However, many of these players do not have a bedroom to themselves. They are sharing with another player. Fine if you're a 20-year-old in A-ball and you're on your own. Not so fine if you are married or you have a partner or you have kids

and maybe they are intending to live with you. So good story from the AP about this. I will link to it on the show page. Hopefully teams will accommodate these players and their special circumstances. Not that special, not that uncommon, especially at higher levels of the minors where the players tend to be older. It sounds as if the teams just didn't think about this, didn't consider the possibility that this might be a need of many of their players. Hopefully they figure this out. So I'm trying to put myself in the situation of some of these minor leaguers who are married or who have kids

and thinking about going and playing baseball without them for six or seven months? Not ideal. Seems like there are ways around this, and the article even notes that in hockey in the AA equivalent of that sport, all players are guaranteed a furnished bedroom, married players are entitled to their own furnished apartments. Other sports seem to have figured this out. Granted, there are more minor leagues in baseball that are affiliated with the parent clubs, but still. Better than no housing for anyone, that's for sure. But hopefully they can find a way to spend enough to have housing for everyone. And hopefully some of you are interested in supporting the Effectively Wild podcast on Patreon, as Stefan and Emily did. If so, you can

go to patreon.com slash effectively wild and sign up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep us going and help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks the following five listeners have done so tyler nolan jim stewart laura peterson chris strovel and stewart verholst thanks to all of you one of the perks you get as a patreon supporter above a certain tier is monthly bonus pods from me and meg the most recent of which we posted just this week. There's also a great Discord group for Effectively Wild Patreon supporters only. You can all join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email

at podcastfangraphs.com and 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 will wrap up the Division Preview Podcast series with the AL East and NL East early next week. We will get those out to you by opening day, which, by the way, is next week. So enjoy that thought as you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you soon. This is your captain calling

This is your captain calling To tell you I'm out of my brain again This is your captain calling And if you think we're falling you're perfectly right and I'd be delighted if any of you could give

us a hand and land the plane