Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1836: To Me, You Are Perfect

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley break down a watershed week in overturning traditions, discussing the Dodgers pulling Clayton Kershaw after seven perfect innings and provoking a “baseball is dying” debate, the Giants flouting the unwritten rules, Alyssa Nakken debuting as the Giants’ first-base coach (under vexing circumstances), the new-look Alex Cobb, Andrew Heaney, and Jesús […]

🎵 Hello and welcome to episode 1836 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? Well, it's been a busy week in the MLB culture wars. Oh boy. So I am reeling from some of the discourse, and we're going to contribute to that discourse today, I think. But we had back-to-back days of just trailblazing, groundbreaking baseball debates.

Baseball is dying. Baseball is over. Maybe some of those debates were a bit blown out of proportion, but I think it was kind of a fascinating week. First with the Giants really sort of settling new territory when it comes to unwritten rules and enthusiastically breaking them. And then on Wednesday, the day after that whole kerfuffle, we got Dave Roberts pulling Clayton Kershaw from a perfect game after seven innings, which was a kind of controversial decision, wouldn't you say? I would classify it as kind of controversial. I guess. I guess it's kind of controversial. I mean, look, I understand that people wanted to see Clayton Kershaw try to throw a perfect game. I too wanted to see Clayton kershaw try to throw a perfect game but i think a couple

of things about this the first is clayton kershaw seemed fine with not trying to throw a perfect game to completion like i'm sure he wanted to but as he said in his remarks after the game like you know he wasn't ready he wasn't stretched out to try to do that. This is a guy who missed big chunks of last year with injury and one whose late season injury meant that he was not able to pitch in the postseason and who is not 20 anymore and who is trying to return the championship trophy to Los Angeles. And so I think that you have to think about what a guy's gonna be able to do in October and that's what the Dodgers

want and that seems to be what Clayton Kershaw wants I also suspect that like if Clayton Kershaw Clayton Kershaw future Hall of Famer Dodgers legend if Clayton Kershaw had said to Dave Roberts and I don't know if Clayton Kershaw swears so I'm gonna do Meg interpreting Clayton Kershaw had said to Dave Roberts, and I don't know if Clayton Kershaw swears, so I'm going to do Meg interpreting Clayton Kershaw.

I think he does. I'm very sorry if you find this offensive or if this isn't the way that you would speak to Dave Roberts or what have you, but I think that if Clayton Kershaw had walked into that dugout and said, Dave, I'm going back out there, that he would have gone back out there. It's Clayton Kershaw, right? If he had wanted to press the point, I suspect Like it's Clayton Kershaw, right? If he had wanted to press the point, I suspect that franchise legend Clayton Kershaw could have done it. But instead he was like,

yeah, I'm content with my perfect 80 pitches. I mean, he said after the fact that he wasn't able to go 100 that he couldn't have even gone 90. So I think it's, you know, we should remember that like real people are involved in these decisions. And while we might want to see things, like if they tell think it's you know we should remember that like real people are involved in these decisions and while we might want to see things like if they tell us it's okay it's probably fine

so this one seems fine i thought you were going to talk about whether you know a foul tip is a whiff like that was the other one that tried to take the internet by storm not going to wade into that territory too controversial for this pod pod. That's the third rail. Yeah. We may have discussed that on this podcast previously, actually. I'm almost certain that we have. I think so, yes. And I won't wade into those waters again.

But, okay, I have a lot of thoughts. Tell me your thoughts. So I have some other banter, but I'll save it. We're just getting into this. This is the newsy subject here. We'll backlog some banter, perhaps. But while we're on the topic of the day and the week. So, Kershaw, I think there was a different reaction in the moment before we had all the facts, right?

Before we heard from all the parties involved. There was a tremendous uproar and wailing and gnashing of teeth and condemnation of Dave Roberts. And the first thing I'll say is that almost no decision these days is just unilaterally a managerial move. So when everyone is saying, Dave Roberts, Dave Roberts, yes, Dave Roberts has been the author or at least the co-author of many a confounding managerial decision in his day. But Dave Roberts has been the Dodgers manager for a long time. He was recently extended to continue to be the Dodgers manager. And just about every team now, the manager is not the field general anymore, not even the field lieutenant necessarily. It's like the field sergeant, maybe. He has input, certainly, but he is executing the directives often, or at least it's a collaborative decision. So if Dave Roberts is the one actually executing the move, pulling the pitcher, he is not doing that without any input, first of all, from Clayton Kershaw and his players and his fellow coaches, but also some guidance from the front office, almost certainly.

Also, some guidance from the front office, almost certainly, right? So I think it's a dramatic simplification of any debate of this type to say, oh, blame the manager or praise the manager. The manager is just a cog in the larger decision-making apparatus at this point. So that's a small point, I would say. The other thing is that, of course, I was disappointed to see Clayton Kershaw leave that game. I think, you know, everyone was. I mean, even if there was a large part of you saying, this makes sense, it's justifiable, I get it, discretion is the better part of valor. Obviously, there is a part of you that just wants to see Clayton Kershaw go for the perfect game. Of course. And I will say that while we can lament that he didn't get to go

back out there for the eighth or the ninth, we could also just celebrate the fact that Clayton Kershaw pitched seven perfect innings and looked incredible. I mean, he wasn't back to peak Clayton Kershaw. He was still throwing 90 out there, but it was working because he has that great slider and he's able to locate it and sequence in such a way that he's now like a slider first pitcher and it's still really effective pitch even though it's slower than it was so i know it wasn't the a lineup necessarily for the twins correo was out but he was just carving up those hitters and we didn't know for sure that we would see kershaw in a dodgers uniform again or that we would see him at all again, frankly. And so to see him,

not necessarily with his vintage stuff, but with his vintage results for seven innings, was an unexpected treat. So we should not let what we lost or what we could have potentially gained take away from just how much fun it was to see him at the top of his game more or less again. So that's something. I would also say that the debate about what this means for the soul of baseball and the stat heads are ruining baseball and this is why baseball is no fun anymore saw a whole lot of baseball is dying points made. And I get it.

It was reactive and reflexive and people were disappointed. And there is a real change here. Like This would not have happened in an earlier era. That few years. But I think people were kind of conflating the analytics debate with just the pitcher health and injury prevention debate, right? pulling someone who is quote unquote cruising because he's approaching the third time through the order or something like that. It's not that. It's a totally different debate. I guess you could say that those are related in some way. They have both contributed to a decline in starting pitcher innings and earlier hooks. But this is a totally different decision, a totally different set of circumstances. And as you said, cold day, oft injured pitcher, 34 years old, didn't throw a ball for the first few months of the offseason because he didn't know if his arm was going to work anymore, you know, injuries to his shoulder and his back and his forearm. And there was even concern that maybe he'd have elbow issues. He'd have to have Tommy John or something like he wasn't even sure if he was going to come back that was reported to be one of the reasons why he did not want a qualifying offer he didn't want to have to make that decision then because he didn't know if physically he was going to be in shape to return and because you had to compress spring training and he hadn't been built

up all the way on and on I mean there's so many right? But you can still say it was disappointing and it was deflating to see him leave that game. I think it's just the degree to which you then extrapolate that to make some larger point about baseball dying or the values that the sport now has as a whole, or where you blame it on analytics, the boogeyman, that's where you kind of lose me. So I think it really depends on the degree of your animosity toward this decision and what you think it symbolizes. It does symbolize something, but maybe not what everyone was saying it symbolized. Yeah, I think, you know, here I will reference Jay Jaffe's piece about this for us at Fairgraphs. You know, Kershaw had a PRP injection in October of last year. He didn't start throwing again until January. He had three Cactus League starts this spring and then a sim game on April 7th. He was not, which was the day before the Dodgers opener against Colorado, he was not fully stretched out and he's far from the only one like through

Tuesday. Here I am quoting Jay. No starter had pitched more than seven innings in a single game. Only five out of 150 had gone more than six and only six had topped 90 pitches. Like it is, it is not as if we are in a moment where these guys are ready. We have 28 man rosters for a reason right now.

We are doing collectively everything we can to try to preserve these guys' health in another weird year. Two out of the last three have been strange. So I think that it's fine to feel disappointed that he wasn't given the opportunity to go the distance, but I think that that is underestimating how unlikely it was that he would have done that perfect or not. The point is not just to enjoy Kershaw for one day and 20 extra pitches, but to enjoy him for an entire season. I don't know. He didn't look upset on the broadcast. I understand that we didn't have the context of this conversation that Roberts and Kershaw, and I think you're right to say probably a great many other people

employed by the Los Angeles Dodgers were having in the lead up to the decision to pull him. But, you know, he wasn't gnashing his teeth and wailing in the dugout either. Like, he had his jacket on and looked warm for the first time all day perhaps so i don't know i i get it like we we it's so easy to assume that the thing that we didn't get to see would have been incredible right we are we we assume we just assume that like kershaw would have gone out there and he would have finished the perfect game and we would have been able to tell this incredible story of this guy who had this set of facts before him and defied them. But we don't think about, you know, whether he would have given up a, you know, a base hit to

end the perfecto or if he would have grabbed his elbow, you know, like we don't we don't consider that part of it. So I get it. But I think you're right that even if we are living in that feeling, we need to recognize that it doesn't have to extend beyond that moment it doesn't have to say something about the game it just says something about a guy who we all have a great deal of affection and respect for but who is you know 34 and and a new 34 by the way so like happy belated birthday, Clayton Kershaw, but who is 34 and is in the phase of his career where you really want to think carefully

about how best to maximize his availability. And this is a team that, you know, among the contenders really does need to think about keeping their guys healthy and keeping their starters available because they are not, you know, gifted with the depth that they had in prior seasons in the rotation. They have to be really mindful of that.

So I get feeling disappointed, but I think that this was the smart call. And no less a luminary than Clayton Kershaw is giving you permission to feel okay about it. So you can let that in. It's fine. Yeah. And he almost certainly wouldn't have finished it off. I mean, the odds are low. He could have. There was a realistic chance, but he said his slider was losing bite, although it still seemed to be effective. He was losing a little velocity. The last batted ball he gave up on the last out he got was quite hard hit. And so he said it was time.

And Austin Barnes, his catcher, said it was time. And so, you know, odds are if he goes out there again, he probably loses it. Now, still, we were, I guess you could say, robbed, deprived of the chance to see him finish it. So I'm sitting here and saying, yeah, the actuarial tables and statistical probabilities. Yeah, I get it. Like, that's why perfect games are fun and exciting and rare. And you want to see someone get a chance to do it. But I think, you know, you had an earlier generation of great point and all caps filled tweet said, Clayton Kershaw, perfect game, 80 pitches, take him out. Five exclamation points. What the? What's the game coming to? One of the area's best.

And you take him out with a perfect game in the seventh, seven to nothing Dodgers winning. Take him out. This is baseball. Please, people that have never played, get out of its way. So I don't know who he's referring to there. I guess the eggheads in the front office who are dictating this policy to Dave Roberts, supposedly, maybe. But Dave Roberts played the game. Clayton Kershaw plays the game.

And they all seem to be on board with this decision. And Fergie Jenkins, the Hall of Fame pitcher, tweeted, not even if I had a broken arm and had to roll the ball over the plate, am I leaving a perfect game in the seventh. Okay. Look, I mean, there's truth to that. Like in that era, sure, no one would have come out of this game. And entertainment wise, there are advantages to that. And we've been open about that we've talked about the fact that we don't love the diminishment of the starting pitcher and the fact that the starting pitcher can be the protagonist of the game and be a big part of the story and seeing the pitcher adjust and go through the lineup

multiple times and pull out new tricks from the bag like that can all be much more fun than seeing just another interchangeable reliever get into the game. So I am absolutely sympathetic to that. And I am also sympathetic, I'll say, a couple things. Just one, as a species, we don't do a great job with delayed gratification in general. So if you're telling me, hey, you don't get to see Clayton Kershaw go for the perfecto right here, but just wait till October and maybe we'll get Clayton Kershaw going for another World Series championship instead of, you know, Clayton Kershaw being out for October as he was last year. Right. OK, so maybe if he's healthy at that point, we'll look back and say it was for the best that we didn't push him there because now we're getting to enjoy Clayton Kershaw on this big stage. That said, the Dodgers goals don't necessarily align with mine or with most fans. I mean, I want to see Clayton Kershaw pitch a perfect game more than I want to see the Dodgers win another World Series. So there's that. I'm not saying we all have to have the same desires as the Dodgers, but we do, I suppose, have to put ourselves in

their place and see how they came to this decision. The other point where I'm maybe most sympathetic with the people who were really crushing this move is that it can be tough to discern the actual effect and the preventative power of pulling a pitcher after 80 pitches, let's say, instead of 100 pitches. To some degree, there's a little bit of junk science that goes into that. We don't know. We don't know how to quantify that. Maybe teams do a better job of quantifying that, but obviously a far from perfect one.

And so we have the bird in the hand, which is Clayton Kershaw getting to go for a perfect game, which is super exciting to all of us. And then the bird in the bush is like, well, maybe he doesn't get hurt down the road because he doesn't throw 20 extra pitches and he doesn't put that extra wear and tear on his arm when he's not built up. Like, we'll never know, right? We'll never know whether this prevented an injury or made it less likely that he would suffer an injury in the future. There's just no perfect correlation there. I mean, the more you play, the more you throw, the more wear and tear there's going to be. But people were comping this to the Johan Santana game, right, where he stayed in to pitch the first franchise no-hitter for the Mets and threw 130-something pitches and then got hurt not long after.

I will say I think that is somewhat oversimplified. He did have some good games after that no-hit attempt, so it wasn't like he broke the next day, but it was not long after that, and perhaps there was an effect. Maybe it wasn't quite as clear a cause-and-effect relationship as we think there, but you could say, well, Santana, he got hurt a lot too. He was getting up there in years maybe it's for the best that he had that last signature moment he got that no hitter because if he had been pulled there's no guarantee that he would have gone on to pitch many more years and make it into the hall of fame I mean he very may well have gotten hurt

at exactly the same time in exactly the same way. We'll never know. And because he got to go for it, he got that special moment in his career and for Mets fans career. So I do see that case. And it's possible that we've gone too far. Like, I think there's definitely a benefit to cutting down on real instances of pitcher abuse and doing the Doc Gooden and, you know, throwing 140, 150 more pitches at a young age, like those sorts of things. It seems like there was a pretty clear relationship between really piling up pitches and innings on a young pitcher's arm and then subsequent injuries. But now that we've gotten to the point where, you know, 100 is often a hard

limit. I mean, it's not clear that that is totally justified. You know, we're now just limiting pitchers to the point that I don't know that anyone knows that this is working. Like it's clearly not working in the sense that pitchers get hurt constantly. So, you know, they're throwing max effort a lot and that leads to injury risk even if they're not throwing as many pitches so that's the only reservation it's like we've traded this attempt at a special moment and the chance at getting a perfect game and that indelible memory for possibly probably some injury prevention boost but no one really knows how much and we can't quantify it and we'll never know if it actually made a difference so that's the only thing like have we gone too far

because this was 80 pitches as opposed to 130 something although we covered all of the other reasons why 80 pitches in this case was more than it would have been later in the season or for some other pitcher. I think that's all fine. Yeah, but also, this is fine. I guess that it would read really differently to me if this same set of circumstances, minus the proximity to an abbreviated spring training, were playing out much later. I mean, I thought that what David Cohen said on the Yankees broadcast later that night was a smart way of thinking about this,

where he said the problem for managers is that you have to make the decision after the seventh inning, because if you allow him to go out and pitch the eighth inning, then you can't stop it. If he's perfect after eight, he's only three outs away

and he might be over 100 pitches, then you have a real quandary. And I think you're right that like, we perhaps look at the 100 pitch ceiling as too both firm a ceiling in terms of its strength and also too firmly supported in terms of the specific science. But I think that the idea that this was sort of the last moment at which roberts could say okay we can make a change here because if if he is looking at the ninth inning and he is anywhere close to 100 he's just going back out there like there's

no stopping that now maybe you think that the risk calculus is too conservative to say that that's a problem because like maybe he just goes back out maybe he gets three pop-ups and then he has a perfect game and that's great i don't know i just i'm i'm having a hard time being exercised about this because clayton kershaw seems fine right like if clayton were mad i would feel mad for him because he like he knows i mean he knows what it's like to stare down a potentially historic performance and then have it like kind of come apart because of well an error the last time right not not potential injury but like he knows what it's like to be on the precipice of doing something really spectacular and then not having it materialize and like he seems fine so I don't know I just like I think it's fine because yeah he doesn't seem angry right well Kershershaw's attitude, I think, makes it tough to blame Roberts, let's say. Yeah. You could still lament that that is his attitude as opposed to the Fergie Jenkins, just, you know, grid it out and pitch as long as you can kind of attitude of an earlier era.

I guess. Because maybe that's a little less entertaining. Or, you know, like we've done podcasts about these kind of decisions before not just in the playoffs but with the dodgers for that matter with very similar situations i mean i remember doing an emergency episode with sam and andy mccullough when dave roberts pulled rich hill after seven perfect innings episode 952 back in 2016 and then shortly before that, I guess it was that same season, Roberts pulled Ross Stripling from the chance to have a no-hitter in his major league debut. He had one going after seven of the third innings. And I can't recall exactly what we said at the time, but I think

maybe Sam said something along the lines of, who knows what Ross Stripling's career will turn out to be. And maybe this would have been the most memorable moment of his career. You never know. You could make the case that with some pitchers, I mean, Philip Humber's perfect game or something like that, that's what you it's worth it. You know, like maybe he'll get hurt, but at least he'll have this one timeless moment where he is perfect and he will always be remembered for that. And with Kershaw, he has so many accomplishments. I mean, he has a no hitter. He's got a ring. He's going to be a Hall of Famer. He's won three Cy Young. So in a sense, you could say he doesn't need any additional accolades or accomplishments.

It's Clayton Kershaw. He's done almost everything in this game on the other hand i guess you could say well because it was kershaw it just would have been so much fun in a the old guys still got it tiger woods winning the masters kind of way right climbing the peak again after you thought that he was on the downside of his career so because it was was Kershaw, I think we cared more than we would have if it had been some generic pitcher. And, you know, I saw people who were upset seemingly in the moment that Roberts didn't immediately bring in his top bullpen arms, like go to Blake Trinan or something to preserve the perfect game, which to me is mostly meaningless.

the perfect game, which to me is mostly meaningless. I mean, I don't really care about the combined no-hitters or even the combined perfect games. It's just, you know, I think if you're going to pull the guy who is going for it, then at that point you have demonstrated that you are putting the long-term needs of the team ahead of any individual accomplishment or even team accomplishment of a perfect game and so if you're going to save your back end arms for a higher leverage situation fine i i didn't to me it's like once kershaw was pulled from that game all of the stakes just immediately subside so that i couldn't have cared less about really but you know like if you're looking at this and you're saying hey it's as simple as this 20 years ago, 30 years ago, whenever the guy would have gone for a perfect game and we would have gotten to enjoy that together.

And it would have been a whole lot of fun whether he made it or not. And now we don't get that. And you're telling me that the tradeoff is, well, maybe it will help Clayton Kershaw stay healthy. Maybe it will help the Dodgers win in the long run, but we'll never know. I get it. I understand why people don't love that change. But, you know, you just do have to acknowledge that I think the Dodgers, it wasn't just like some stat heads run rampant and run roughshod over the traditions of the game and they hate baseball. You know, there was a calculus there that, like a lot of changes in the game, makes sense on some level for players, for teams, aren't always the most spectator-friendly outcomes unless you think that it made such a difference that this will prolong Clayton Kershaw's career and we will get to enjoy more Clayton Kershaw starts in the future because he didn't use up his pitches in this particular outing.

Didn't Ross Stripling's dad thank Dave Roberts for pulling his kid? I don't recall the specifics, but I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah. And you know, he's gone on to have a decent career. I mean, he hasn't thrown a no hitter, so you could say it was an opportunity lost. But Stripling at the time said no problem right call it's the right thing to do so i mean he was a rookie in his major league debut so maybe he didn't have the standing to storm off the mound the way that rich hill did like there was some yeah miscommunication yeah like he he came to terms with it after the game but in the moment like you know it wasn't communicated that clearly.

And I think Roberts made some mea culpa's after the fact for how he handled that. So that was definitely a different reaction. And it's a different guy and it's a different time. And maybe it also reflects the fact that that was six years ago and the norms have shifted even since then. Yeah. I mean, Stripling was, you're right to say, he was a rookie. He was in his first major league start. He'd also missed all of 2014 and 15 recovering from tommy john surgery and had topped out it's so nice to have jay having written about this because i sound like i know all these details

from memory and i super don't thanks jay he had topped out at 78 pitches in spring training that year and his dad did in fact thank him he said and here I am quoting from an AP piece from 2016. One of the cool things I experienced this morning was Ross's dad was down in the lobby today and just sought me out. And he came up to me really kind of emotional and just thanked me from him and his wife for looking out for their son. When you have a father and mother who know their kid's story and what he's endured to get here, they enjoyed that moment more than anyone for him to say, thank you for taking care of my son's future and our family. I'll have him and his wife's support forever. I felt good about it regardless of that,

but to kind of get the parent stamp of approval is always a good thing. I just, you know, these are complicated choices, and you're right that our interests and sort of desires as fans are not always aligned with the teams or the players and those interests aren't always aligned and i think that as long as the thought process is is careful and and does take into account sort of the potential impact of that moment and how special that moment can be but is trying to counterbalance the, you know, the best case scenario is that Clayton Kershaw goes back out there and throws a perfect game. And the worst

case scenario is that Clayton Kershaw leaves the mound clutching his elbow. And I think that it's hard for a fan to balance those two things, but that ends up being a pretty easy choice for the franchise. And I don't think that we need to imply a lot more scientific rigor than exists around like specific pitch counts and knowing exactly when the guy's gonna break and because if we knew that then like they'd never ever get hurt because we just would we'd know and we'd be like okay you can't throw one more today because that's the one that's gonna get you and we you know we're not the precogs in minority reports so we just we do have some guesswork here i think you're right that teams are further along in that process than the public side is but you know they're not totally sure

either but i don't know i think it like again kershaw wasn't mad like if he had if he had been like rich hill my feeling about it might be different, but we can be disappointed and also be fine. Yeah, I think the level of vitriol varies. And I think- And you know what? If you're not on Twitter, you don't see it. So then you just, then it's really fine. So maybe the biggest takeaway here is that we should all log off. I mean, the people who should be really mad in all of this are Mariners fans, because my one superstitious belief, like really in my soul you know give me truth serum and I would tell you this is true is that they're not making the postseason until

someone else throws a perfect game who is a Felix so the people who should really be mad live in the Pacific Northwest my only fear now is that Kershaw will get hurt later this year which is not a bad bet because he tends to miss some time every year right and when he goes on the il with a backache or whatever it is people will say oh see pulling him early didn't prevent this and instead we were deprived of this perfect game attempt and you know why you're overthinking it etc etc and you know i wouldn't be surprised if this comes up again. But I'll just say, you know, I'm mildly disappointed, but I don't think the circumstances support this being a complete referendum on the state of baseball and the downfall of the sport. So along those lines,

that was the story of Wednesday. Now, the story of Tuesday was also in the NL West, of Wednesday. Now, the story of Tuesday was also in the NL West, and this was an interesting one. We had the first real Unwritten Rules flare-up of the season. Every year, I think, this is it. This is going to be the last one, and then we will all just agree to not make a big deal out of this again. But it always comes back up again. But this time, maybe I've been fooled before, but this seems a little different. This seems like it could have the potential to really change the conversation here. And I know I said that after the Fernando Tatis 3-0 homer and after the initial complaints about that were walked back and it seemed like the tide had turned. But it's still there. And ironically, you have Fernando Tatis Jr.'s team here who's on the other side of this one and making us think about it.

Funny how that often happens. But what happened here was the Giants were playing the Padres. They took a big early lead, the Giants that is, and they didn't do the things that the unwritten rules dictate that teams do or don't do. They did not take their feet off the pedal. And so in the second inning, Stephen Duggar stole a base, a great sin of stealing a base. I think the score was, what, 10 to 1 at that time. And so that ruffled some feathers. And then in the sixth inning, Mauricio Dubon, he had the audacity to lay a bunt down and get a hit. And that angered the Padres. The Padres were not happy about that. You could see it on their bench. You heard after the game that Eric Hosmer, quite condescendingly, gave Dubon a piece of his mind at first base. Hosmer said after the game, I definitely told him how I felt, how we felt about it. He said it was a sign given to him by their staff.

I just told him, I think you've got to be a little smarter in that situation. You've been playing professional ball for a good amount of time. Obviously, if you're at this level, you've got to be smarter than that. Okay, Eric. So this is the the standard party line i mean this is a tale as old as time right you're trying to run up the score you are still attempting to play baseball and score runs and not make outs and that is uh seen as a great transgression despite the fact that usual, the other team was still trying to get

those guys out. The Padres were still throwing breaking balls. They were still shifting. They were not giving up themselves. And yet the Giants had the audacity to continue to try to win and try to pile up numbers and do their best. And we probably talked about this 10 times before because this kind of debate just constantly resurfaces. Yeah. What was different this time was Gabe Kapler's reaction. And initially, it seemed like Kapler was maybe doing the Jace Tingler sort of thing after Tatis hit his homer where it seemed like he wasn't happy about it and Chris

Woodward the Rangers manager wasn't happy about it often you will see the manager of the player's own team pull that player aside and say something I mean Tony Arusa throwing Jermaine Mercedes under the bus after he homered on 3-0 off of Williams-Astadillo last season right that happens all the time and so when you saw de bon go back into the dugout capler pulled him aside and just without hearing what was said just knowing that history that precedent it seemed like capler was giving him a talking to maybe he was scolding him too after the game we found out that no that was not the case. Actually, the steal and the spunt had been ordered or at least condoned by the Giants staff as part of a season long preset strategy. And Kapler said, I fully support both of those decisions.

Our goal is not exclusively to win one game in a series. It's to try to win the entire series. Sometimes that means trying to get a little deeper into the opposition's pen. I understand that many teams don't love that strategy. He went on, he said more about it, but he fully backed up his players and he made it apparent that this is a team level decision. He said, I get why teams don't love that strategy. It's something that we talked about as a club before the season and that we were comfortable going forward with that strategy. It's not to be disrespectful in any way.

It's because we feel very cool and strategic. Cool? I don't know. It's the best way to win a series. When I say cool, I mean calm. Ah, okay. We're not emotional about it. We're not trying to hurt anybody. We just want to score as many runs as possible, force the other pitcher to throw as many pitches as possible.

buddy, we just want to score as many runs as possible, force the other pitcher to throw as many pitches as possible. If other clubs decide that they want to do the same thing to us, we're not going to have any issue with it. If we don't want a team to bunt, we will defend the bunt. If we don't want a team to steal, we will defend the steal. If we don't want a team to swing 3-0 late in the game, we'll throw a ball. And I can't really remember a more ringing repudiation of the unwritten rules than that. I mean, definitely some of the dogma has eased up in recent years and some minds have been changed. Like Chris Woodward, for instance, the Rangers manager who didn't like Tatis hitting that homerun 3-0 when Jermaine Mercedes hit his homerun 3-0. Granted, not against the Rangers. He said, Woodward, that he had thought about it and that he changed his mind and that he didn't have a problem with it and that it was fine in today's game. So I think these attitudes are less entrenched and pervasive and aggressive than they once were. I'm not going to say it's unprecedented but treating the unwritten rules as a market inefficiency almost and saying

like this is what we do we're going to exploit the unwritten rules I can't really remember a manager embracing that so wholeheartedly and a team just embodying that as their whole ethos yeah I just I love this game

so much but gosh we're sure stuck in the mud about stuff sometimes i mean i i was talking about this situation with friend of the podcast craig goldstein earlier and i can understand wanting to create for yourself like emotional distance between the disappointment of losing and like the reality of having lost. And I just wish that the that the folks who get wound around the axle on this stuff could just come out and say, you know, like, I'm, I'm mad we lost. It felt bad. I wish we had won instead of losing. But there was nothing that San Francisco did here that was like, they weren't being they weren't being chumps like no one was being a jerk they were just playing baseball they weren't doing it like at them they were just doing it because that's what they're there to do at the ballpark and I think that it's important in moments like this to like acknowledge that what is what is a terrible feeling for you isn't necessarily the problem of the other person right like it would be one thing if it i i don't even know what it would

look like like i'm struggling to think of what it would look like for the giants to be like in the wrong here like what they would have needed to do for me to be like all right guys that's a little much like you're up by a billion runs like you can you can relax but i think you just get to play baseball i think capler is right that doing that does press an advantage later in the series and i know that some of the guys on san diego were like well you know maybe i think it was will myers that was like this is inviting other teams to do the same to them and in the reverse situation it's like yeah, yeah, okay, sure. That's the project here.

The project is playing baseball. I think it's especially important to keep sight of the fact that while the team-wide stakes in this moment were pretty low for San Francisco, that doesn't mean that the individual players involved in this game don't have stakes themselves. There's no asterisk next to your game log when you've kind of given it up for the other team because you're ahead by 13 runs, right? Like we don't blow out, adjust your stats in that way. So, you know, if you're Mauricio Dubon and you've played a season's worth of games across

four years and you're trying to make a case to be an important part of a contending ball club, like you just got to get on base. Like, what are you talking about? The stakes for Mauricio Dubon are his career. It's not you feeling disappointed. And like, again, I don't want to discount that feeling of disappointment, but I think that we have to, as individuals,

like have a moment of self-reflection about how much that needs to be the responsibility of other people. And again, like if they were behaving in a way that felt pointed or mean or, you know, inconsiderate, like I guess I'd get it a little bit more, but I'd like it if these guys would just come out and say, you know, I wish we had won. Sucks that we didn't win. That felt bad. You know? Like, it's okay for it to feel bad. Saying it feels bad doesn't become this huge statement

about the game and playing it a particular way. It's like, it just is an acknowledgement of your reality. Like, that felt bad. I wish it was different. Like, that sucked. That'd be fine. Like, Eric Hosmer should say that. He should be familiar with it, one would think.

Right. Yeah, and to their slight credit, I suppose, there was no retaliation or anything. They didn't drill anyone the next day. What a low bar for us to clear. Extremely low bar, but still. They were sure stand-up guys because they didn't throw their baseball at the other team.

Like, what are we doing? That's where the bar has been set by baseball history. But yeah, instead they just got dominated by logan webb in like a two hour 13 minute game but no benches cleared no brawls happened nothing so that was refreshing but i think i appreciate this not only just stating it so plainly not even saying like oh i don't have a problem with it but saying like no we are actively yeah we're Yeah, we're going to press the point. Yeah. And of course it makes sense.

It's silly not to. And how can you ask one player who if the pitcher is trying to get him out, he's just not supposed to get on base or whatever. Like people are paid based on their results. It's nonsense. But to make it a team philosophy, if the Giants are successful, if they continue to be a winning team, I could see that really breaking down whatever resistance remains. And, you know, the Giants are a respected team and a respected organization and a team that's coming off an incredible season. So for them to do that with a lot of veteran players, I think that furthers the idea that lends some credibility to the idea that we don't have to abide by these old rules anymore.

What's interesting to me is Kepler is basically making it sound as if the giants are doing this, not because they think the unwritten rules are silly, though they are, but because they think that there's an advantage to them in pressing their normal advantage. to them in pressing their normal advantage. And that kind of goes along with something that I remember Sam Miller writing for ESPN a few years ago in a very similar situation. I don't recall the exact circumstances, but I think it was a bunt that was laid down. It involved the twins. It involved Brian Dozier, and Brian Dozier was upset about an opponent's bunt.

And the way that Sam broke it down, he wrote, unwritten rules are a scam that players run on each other to trick their opponents into acting against their own self-interest. They are stupid, of course, the unwritten rules, that is. But more than that, they're brilliant on multiple levels, and they seem to work. And ever since I realized this, I've been a lot less annoyed. So Sam pointed out, for example, is that his goal is not to get the opponent to quote unquote respect the game, whatever that means, but to get the twins opponents to go easy on the twins. So as Sam wrote, run down the unwritten rules that are most often enforced, and almost all of them hit these themes. Don't bunt to break up a no-hitter because we want to throw a no-hitter. Brilliant. Don't yell ha right when they're about to catch a pop-up because that

would startle us and we might drop it. I'm sure it would. Don't bunt 10 times at our pitcher who has the yips because he'll probably mess up and you'll get on base, et cetera, et cetera. There's always an ulterior motive here and an advantage to the team. What I wonder, though, and I don't think there needs to be any great advantage to justify doing this because it's only logical to just play to win at all times, but I could imagine that there could be a clubhouse chemistry morale boost to this. Like, hey, it's us against the world, right? morale boost to this like hey it's us against the world right and we're the ones who were uh we're going over the hump here and we're gonna take on these old rules about baseball and maybe

that could be a bonding exercise but do you buy the idea that there could really be like a season long season series type of advantage to the giants in this you know the idea of forcing the other pitcher to throw as many pitches as possible just getting more footage on video seeing the opposing pitcher more times like do you think that is a significant incentive like is that a reason to do this over and above just why wouldn't you do this i guess i'm skeptical well i'm skeptical that it is a huge advantage i think it would be silly to think that there's no advantage right like the idea that you run through part of a bullpen or you know tax particular guys that you're able to rest your dudes and like employ lower leverage relievers because you've expanded your lead such that like you don't even

think about touching your high leverage guys like yeah i'm sure there's something to be had there i don't know that it's all that meaningful i worry this isn't like a i don't know like i worry about a lot of stuff so we should state that context from the jump but also i am mindful of the fact that the giants appear to be very smart and I don't want to assume that everything is smart that they do just because they're the Giants. Do you ever have that experience with a team where you're like, this must be magic, and it's like, you know, they're still just a baseball team. But I have to imagine that someone somewhere was like, here's how many runs teams are leaving on the table every year by not continuing to play baseball hard. Yeah, right. Low leverage runs, of course, unless we're talking about some cumulative effect that manifests itself down the road.

I mean, yeah, that's the thing that makes me skeptical. It's like, well, if you're in this sort of blowout situation already, I mean, you're using your garbage time relievers, right, who are probably not going to be the ones who are in against you. Right. Or a position player, speaking of, you know, making a mockery of the game or showing a lack of respect for the game. But right. I mean, you don't need to make a pitching change there just because a guy dropped down a bunt with an enormous lead. dropped down a bunt with an enormous lead. It's not like, you know, that's a sign that that pitcher was getting knocked around or that the leverage is suddenly super high. You could just leave him out there and let him wear it or bring in a position player to pitch. So yeah, you have to make a number of leaps to say this will benefit us down the road because, you know, this domino will hit that domino and this guy will throw a few more pitches and he'll be unavailable the next day.

And so you'll use that guy and then he won't be available in this other important moment. It could happen, you know, it would be pretty impossible to measure. And I doubt it would be a significant advantage to me. I feel like probably the bigger advantage is just like having that be part of your team identity and just like pulling together as you know us against them sort of thing i could see that really bringing a clubhouse together yeah i i could definitely see that i mean i think like the you know the thing that's gonna make the bigger difference coming out of that game is that like yeah alex cobb just like sits 95 now so that's right i don't know we talked about it on the season preview but we're gonna going to have to take a peek at Alex Scott. But I think that there are far more meaningful changes to individual players or approaches that

teams can make to sort of better maximize their wins. And I would imagine that as we stack those up, if we put them on a leaderboard of like big change leaders, that this is probably pretty low on the list. But I do think that it is something that can kind of bring a clubhouse together. And I think that anything that pushes back against sort of unexamined and restrictive orthodoxy of like players on the field and how they conduct themselves is going to be to the benefit of your club. Now, some, you know,, not every cultural more is bad. We have to live in a society, right? We have rules for one another about how to demonstrate care and respect. And I think that those things are important, but very rarely do the unwritten rules really

concern themselves with that, right? They are far more often concerned with, as Sam noted, like playing less well for the benefit of your opponent or controlling the behavior of individual players or whole swaths of players. And so I think that if your organizational philosophy is we're going to try our best, We're going to let our guys try to maximize their performance every single night. You know, that is going to redound to the benefit of the organization, because I think people tend to do a better job at work when they feel like they can freely be themselves without scrutiny. And this is, you know, this isn't this isn't the same as wiping the eye black off of ronald acuna jr but like again i think anytime we are pressing against previously unquestioned orthodoxy and saying like what if this is really useful to us

like what if this really makes sense what of it do we want to retain and what of it are we have we moved past for whatever reason like i think that's always a good thing to do doesn't mean you can't respect tradition it doesn't mean that you can't play with respect for your teammates and for your opponents like you can do all of those things but we we don't have to take as given these these long-standing rules like if they are worthwhile they will bear the weight of scrutiny yeah i hadn't thought of that but that's a good point that maybe if you question this bit of orthodoxy, then you open up minds and they suddenly say, well, what about the idea that you're only supposed to throw fastballs in this count or whatever? You know, maybe we can question that, too, which is something that the Giants have done as well with some success. So they questioned the unquestioned orthodoxy of Alex Cobb not being able to throw hard anymore.

And look what it got him. An Alex Cobb that sits 95. How great. Yeah. And speaking of other things that they question, I guess we should note that this game was historic for another reason in that Alyssa Nacken made her on-field debut, right? So Giants coach Alyssa Nacken coached first base, became the first on-field in-game regular season female coach in the majors.

The circumstances under which it happened were weird and not ideal. So, you know, temperatures were raised and feathers were ruffled. And at some point, Mike Schilt, former Cardinals manager, current Padres third base coach, went over to the Giants dugout to talk to someone Antoine Richardson the Giants first base coach was there and intercepted him and said you know as he tells it can I help you or who you're looking for and Schilt just seemingly very rudely dismissed him and said to Kapler control that MF-er which seems seems totally unwarranted. And then Richardson came out and said that he thought there could have been racial undercurrents to that comment. And subsequently, he and Schilt talked about it and hugged it out and seemed to have made up. So maybe that's under the bridge at this point. But it was a weird way for a cool thing to happen. But it was a cool thing that happened. Yeah. I would really like to hear.

I know that they are not obligated to do this, but we have not heard why he was ejected, right? Like we have not got the justification from the umpire for that. Richardson, yeah. Right. Richardson was ejected. Yeah. So I think that that is a moment that probably bears scrutiny for any number of reasons. I think that the aftermath of this, aftermath is maybe too dramatic of a word

to use, but it was like they spoke, Richardson and Schilt spoke jointly after they had had a conversation where Richardson explained what that moment stimulated for him and what it it made him feel and the disrespect that he thought it showed and you know i think that he granted grace to schultz to say like this this guy's not a racist and has been supportive of the black community and schultz seemed to have listened in a in a non-defensive posture to try to understand you know what he says he meant. I love that he's like, I meant it innocuously. I was like, that's a pretty rude thing to say to anyone, regardless of the racial undertones or overtones. Can you call someone that innocuously? I don't know. I mean, you could say is quite the word he used, but that was the sort of gist of it that he didn't mean it to convey anything with particular racial overtones, but was willing to listen to the ways in which he might have missed the mark on that and

the way that that interaction made Richardson feel, which if you're going to have any kind of move forward, I think that we have to look at moments like that as you know potentially uncomfortable but learning opportunities right so yeah it was a very it was an unfortunate backdrop to a really cool moment and i think you know we have to acknowledge the backdrop as well as the moment but i really would like to know what the umpire justification for the ejection was there because that seems like did he think that richardson? Right. Like, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah.

It's just a strange thing to say. Whatever motivated it. Dismissive and condescending at best. And far too large for the moment. And I can appreciate how. I mean, like, I won't pretend that I would know how that would feel being in Richardson's shoes. Right. I can understand the baggage that goes with that.

feel being in richardson's shoes so i don't right i can understand the baggage that goes with that so so i guess like it is good that out of that moment seemed to appear some candid dialogue that was that was really listened to rather than you know not but yeah it was a weird it was a weird backdrop for a very otherwise cool moment so yeah i don know. But hopefully there are future circumstances where, firsts, even as we look forward to them not being remarkable. You know, it'll be nice when we don't have to feel as if they need to be called out as something special. We just look around and are like, here are a bunch of our great coaches. They come from all sorts of places and they bring a lot to our game, you know?

Yeah. All right. Well, those were the watershed moments of the week. Those were all things that I think situated us in this particular time. I don't think any of those things would have or could have or would have been likely to happen in an earlier era of baseball. And, you know, for better or worse, maybe for better and worse, I think they, to varying degrees, reflected some negative and some positive and some maybe neutral and case-by-case basis changes in the sport. So we have discussed it. There were many happenings involving many different people that took on a variety of tones.

Yes. And we have commented on some of them. Yes. Now, a few final notes. You mentioned Cobb looking good. Yeah. One of my favorite things about a new season is just like seeing players who seemingly have suddenly reached some new level of performance or they have some new trick, some new pitch. They ticked up in velocity.

They're pitching in a different way, whatever it is. So it could be Cobb. It could be Andrew Heaney who dominated the twins uh in addition to Kershaw doing so and he showed off his new sweeper that is all the rage right now everyone throws the sweeper or as the Yankees call it the whirly right the new sort of side to side slider that all the cool analytically oriented teams are throwing these days so he looked good and Jesus Lizardo looked really good which i know ben clemens wrote about for fan graphs right he was throwing a lot harder and

he dominated the angels and had 12 strikeouts in five innings so that's exciting because if he is putting it together now then that marwin staff is scary so maybe so that that was exciting too so i love that i mean love seeing you know vlad jr come out and just lay waste to garrett cole and the yankees like after having his fingers split open by a spike yeah that was gross it doesn't happen so much anymore that used to be very common very dangerous in the early days of baseball yeah and like before antibiotics so there would be like life-threatening infections when when guys got spiked and they had like really sharp spikes like dangerous like can't believe that that happened for so long on fields in this sport but it did anyway he stayed in the game and what he hit a couple more homers after that so that's just you

know i mean it's a cliche to say like oh the ball sounds different off his bat or whatever but it does really it does in its case so i personally love this time of year as long as we all go in clear-eyed that like some of the things that we're noticing right now and i don't mean to say that like all of a sudden like alex cobb sinker isn't gonna be hard anymore but like you know we as long as we go in understanding that this is like you know what at most eight games six games not very many games and that it could all change tomorrow and that the the stars of today could be the scrubs of next week like as long as as long as we know that and do not invest overly much in early season narratives and think that they will persist forever,

then we just get to revel in stuff that is goofy. To it. Have you had a look at Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s line? No. Would you like to hear about it, Ben? Yes, please. Are you ready? He is currently hitting 391, 417, 957.

He has a 283 wrc plus yeah i love like his ops doubled in that one game which is a sign that it's april but also a sign that he went four for four with three homers and a double so that'll do it i mean i think that like a responsible analyst would note that there is a gap, for instance, between his Woba and his ex-Woba. I would also note that his Woba is 583 and his ex-Woba is 558. Again, it's 24 plate appearances. He's going to be great because he's a really good baseball player. He obviously won't do this, but who cares? We just get to have fun with this part.

He has a 565 ISO. What a thing. It's just like sometimes it's great. Sometimes we fall prey to a misunderstanding of ourselves in the early going. Albert Pujols tried to steal a bass today as we were recorded, and he was thrown out by quite a distance. Oh, was he? Because he's been quite successful in the rare times when he's gone.

Yeah, but not this time, Ben. This time didn't go great for him. You think that the thing's being slowed down, and it's not. But who cares? It doesn't matter. We're not going to remember that tomorrow. We're probably not going to remember that six months from now. He hasn't been caught since 2015.

I know. It'd been a while. It'd been a while. But sometimes we get to just enjoy stuff in the early going and we get to enjoy, you know, Vladdy being just like really stinking good at baseball and hitting the ball really far and it going a long,

long way. So, yeah. And now we get to enjoy Mackenzie Gore on Friday. We talked about all the top prospects who have come up so far this season. We're getting another one because Blake Snell is hurt. Man, I mean, the Padres, they just acquire a new rotation's worth of starters every offseason. And somehow they find themselves dipping into the reserves nonetheless.

But in this case, it is not the dregs that they were calling up last year. It's Mackenzie Gore, who seemingly has rehabilitated himself. they were calling up last year, it's Mackenzie Gore, who seemingly has rehabilitated himself. So we talked a little bit about him with Eric Langenhagen when he was on to talk about the Fangraph's Top 100, which Gore was not on, right? And that was sort of a swift fall for him on that list and on many other publications lists too, because not only did he not make it to the majors, but he really seemed out of whack mechanically. And there was some question about when or whether he would get things together. Seems like he has because he had a fantastic spring training. He had a great first start in the minors, and now he is coming up to replace Snell. So we're going to get to see him make his major league debut on Friday. So that's another

thing to look forward to. It is another thing to look forward to. I'm excited to see what he looks like now. Can I read you our top 10 for position players in war right now? Sure. Because it's just fun. It's the beginning of the season. Let's do it. Jose Ramirez, pretty good. J-Man Choi, very fun.

Owen Miller. Sure. Steven Kwan. Nolan Arenado, Austin Riley, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Brandon Nimmo, Seiya Suzuki, and Matt Olsen. That is your current top 10. As you might imagine, there are a number of guys who have the exact same wars, both Brandon Nimmo and Seiya Suzuki. In fact, the tie extends all the way down to Brandon Biltz at 16.

The ones above him include Anthony R rizzo george springer wander franco anthony santander so that's exciting and then belt as i mentioned we just love we love the early going we get to be excited about stuff and you know right now clint kershaw's on the top of our pitcher leaderboard so maybe we should just stop the season right now tim and tyler mcgill just like we all expected. I'd rather keep it going because Otani's pitching in a couple hours, so I think we should play this out a little longer.

But speaking of Pujols, we got a lot of people notifying us about maybe the first notable player prediction of the season. We got into talking about this last season, and then it turned out that it was so common that people were constantly emailing us and tweeting us about it. But the idea that players are predicting things that happen in baseball games, and we complain about the fact that there's never a denominator.

We never hear about the times when they predicted something that didn't come true. Well, Pujols hit his first home run for the Cardinals, and he called a shot. So as the MLP.com story relates it, some three hours before Tuesday's first pitch, Pujols left the batting cage and called his shot to Cardinals manager Oliver Marmel. Basically, Pujols told Marmel he was seeing the ball well and he was about to jump on the first pitch he saw and do some serious damage with it. And indeed he did. And he said later, you know, when you have 680 home runs, sometimes you can make those calls. I guess that was one of those where I felt good out there. I had a good feeling about the approach I was going to take tonight.

And sometimes you get lucky and it happens. So kudos to him, not only for calling it, but then acknowledging that there was luck involved. So I appreciate that. But yeah, he sure has hit a lot of homers in his day. So if anyone knows the homerish feeling, it would be Albert Pujols. But I do appreciate that he acknowledged he is not necessarily prescient or unerring in his predictions. It just happened to work out this time. Yeah, I think that seems fine. That seems

good. Good. You know know that's the wisdom of age i mean not the wisdom to not try steel bases but the wisdom of age nonetheless all right and lastly on the topic of predicting things and probabilities i don't know whether you were watching either of the apple broadcasts last friday whether you went through the hassle of signing up for apple tv plus which i already had in order to yeah okay i had it. Yeah, okay. I did. I didn't watch all of both of them, but I did check in on them because, you know, they were good games. Right.

So they know what they're doing, those scamps. Yeah. And so it's an MLB Network produced broadcast, but some of the production choices were made at Apple's behest. And maybe the most notable one was the near constant presence of probabilities in the bottom think i i found maybe less interesting than i might have thought in theory but beyond that the actual numbers seemed like nonsense to me some of them seemed very yeah i mean they were taking a ton of flack on twitter to the point where i was almost like taken aback that they left the things up the whole game and multiple games because it was like

it seemed so obviously wrong to me that it was like cringeworthy it was like a little bit embarrassing especially on your debut broadcast i mean for one thing the fact that they went out to a second decimal place like okay the level of precision here does not require that but beyond that it it just it seemed like the numbers would move too dramatically from pitch to pitch or they would move in the wrong direction. Yeah. Yes. And people took a lot of screenshots and there were some that were just so far fetched where it would be like a great hitter in a favorable count with like a really low probability of reaching base in that plate appearance and and vice versa. And the count would move more in their favor.

Exactly, right. And the probability would get worse. Yeah, right. It made no sense to me at many times. And so I had a lot of questions about this. So Joel Lemire, former Effectively Wild guest, I believe, he wrote a piece about this for Sport Techie, and he documented at least where these numbers come from. And it turns out that they are provided by a company called Invenu,

N, the letter N, and then Venu. And they are a company that produces these live predictive algorithms. And, of course, this is closely connected to sports betting. You had to figure there were a few like actual lines and odds given during those broadcasts. But the framework here is clearly meant to provide a framework for sports betting and for micro betting. And so I'll read from the story here. Apple initiated the interest in displaying the on-screen probabilities, and then MLB Network selected Envenu as the supplier of real-time algorithms which are calculated using Sport Radar's data feed. NBC Universal Sports Tech Accelerator and made its broadcast debut during regional NBC Sports California coverage of a White Sox athletic series in September 2021.

So they can do this for outcomes on any given pitch and also outcomes for the plate appearance that vary by pitch. And they are going to keep doing this, it sounds like. And the quote from the CEO, Kelly Proct, is the first instantiation is to see it to start to understand probabilities, which, if anything, it had the opposite effect for me. I understood probabilities less after I saw these numbers and was caused to question myself. I saw these numbers and was caused to question myself. But Prakt says, and she's a former Hewitt Packard enterprise executive, in venues, machine learning algorithms consider 120 inputs from the field of play, including not only batter and pitcher historical data, but temperature, wind, and much more the founding team includes tech experts with experience at verizon and tinder and its signature product is the next play api that is available to sports books and broadcasters for mlb and nfl games so i don't know seeing the numbers i kind of question i mean it i don't know the makeup of the entire team but it doesn't sound like they necessarily have a sports background and so i i question this could be unfair to me, but I wonder whether some of the people who are developing these probabilities even are qualified to sort of

sniff test them and see if they make sense from pitch to pitch. But the idea of 120 inputs, I mean, that sounds a bit overdetermined for me. I'm all for complexity if it actually enhances accuracy, but I don't know that there could possibly be 120 inputs in that moment that would have some appreciable effect on improving your probabilities here. And just the way that they fluctuated and seemingly moved in the wrong direction. And even the CEO gives an example in this article. So she says she recalled that Braves designated hitter Jorge Soler opened with a 2% chance of homering against Astro starter Frambois Valdez in last year's World Series, which increased to 3% after ball one. Fine. The second pitch was also a ball, at which point Soler's homer potential grew to 19%. Soler then slugged a 2-0 fastball into the left field seats.

Okay, fine. It worked out to a degree there, but that can't possibly be right. It can't possibly be right that the odds of a homer for Jorge Soler there were 19% and that it would jump from 3% after ball one to 19% after ball two. That's impossible, right? I mean, that's impossible. 6% of the time. So, okay, maybe this was Jorge Soler in a good year and he had the platoon advantage and I don't know, maybe the wind was blowing out or whatever. There's just no way that you can get to 19% or that one ball could catapult you from 3% to 19%. That's ridiculous. And so the idea that this is the example that the CEO chose to demonstrate the utility of the system gives me grave doubts that this thing is actually working.

And so put aside the fact that this is going to use tech to pump up the right thing to bet on so that fans aren't inundated with options while scrolling through betting markets in the short interval between pitches. help bettors make informed wagers because of course we know that if there's one thing that betting companies want wagerers to do it's it's to make informed wagers you know not to lose their money i mean they uh they want you to win money of course they're not preying on people with gambling problems or anything like that so so anyway that gives me some cause for concern about just how pervasive this will be but more than than that, I really think like, you know, she's talking here about how some social media commentary has implied that there was a problem with the odds and that really it's people misunderstanding probability because they don't understand that something that is unlikely to happen can still happen. No, I get that. Yeah. I'm bored with that part i i say that

about our playoff odds all the time yes yeah some people may misunderstand that but we know what that means we get that uh that rare events can occur but it just the underlying numbers just do not make sense and so when she says that's where as sports fans, instead of saying, oh, that was wrong, probably it's that you saw something great, which is why I watched the game. Can it be both? It could be wrong. And also we saw something great. So I like the idea that if something seems wrong, that just means that we saw something great, not that we saw some broken probability model here. And Joe pressed her on this seemingly and asked about an instance where a player's chance of a hit increased when the count changed from 01 to 02. When asked about this, Proct explained that only probability was shown on the screen.

And in some instances, a chance of a hit might go up while the chance of striking out might also be increasing. While another probability, say taking a walk, may have plummeted to ensure that everything still added up to 100 percent. There's a whole lot going on behind the scenes of that number. You're just seeing one little swatch. Well, OK. I mean, still, I think the swatch that we're seeing is pretty important. It has to make some sort of sense and we have to understand what these numbers are supposed to indicate, which I don't think the broadcast did a great job of conveying maybe i missed that part but also i don't think that that totally holds water for me either that explanation so again i i think they might have to revisit this

you know maybe i mean look if they supply the underlying numbers here and it turns out that actually they're brain geniuses and and i'm the one who's misinterpreting these numbers i will happily own up to that but it just totally did not make sense in many instances to me and so that i found distracting and i guess there's the larger question of you know do we even want or need this even if the probabilities are accurate even if they reflect reality does it actually enhance our enjoyment of the broadcast to see that so-and-so has a 19% chance of doing something? I mean, whatever, like maybe that just spoils it for you in a way because you're focused on the probabilities or maybe it makes it seem like, well, it's just random that it actually happened in this version of the multiverse. And, you know know it's all meaningless

because uh in other universes it could have happened a different way i i don't know that i actually want this even if it works but i don't think it works in its current form yeah i don't think it works in its current form i'm not opposed to like i think that part of what understanding probabilities can do is to highlight the moments where you're like wow i'm watching something incredible because this was very unlikely to occur but that feeling is only earned if you have faith in the underlying math that tells you that what you're seeing is rare and rare to the right degree like you know i remember there were a number of folks who were sort of worked up last

year because we had a couple of teams that went on these like really amazing runs and and just flipped their playoff odds from basically nothing to 100 right this happened with the cardinals they went on the 17 game run and it was amazing and people were like the fan graphs playoff odds were wrong and i'm like well, you just saw something really cool. Like that's the way to interpret this information. But the reason that we're able to say that is because we had confidence in our underlying understanding of like how rare it is to have that happen against the backdrop of what was going on in the rest of the division, right? Like if you don't have a firm understanding of the actual scarcity of the

thing, you're not going to be able to get excited about it. And I think it's appropriate for us to be skeptical when we're being sold something, right? So I don't know. I don't think that the answer of, well, people don't like math. It's like, no, the people who like math are the ones who are like, what is going on with your math? Yeah, right. Yes, exactly. So we'll see if the probabilities persist this Friday and if they look any different and any more logical. But right.

I mean, I appreciate win probability stats and WPA and looking at that after the fact, I think, in particular. And maybe we don't represent the mainstream audience that the Apple broadcast is trying to target, right? So, you know, we have kind of a hardwired sense of these probabilities, not that we're like laser accurate from pitch to pitch, but, you know, we have an idea of this pitcher is good and that hitter is good and you have the platoon advantage or you don't. And know enough to know that if the count goes from 0-1 to 0-2 that your odds of getting a hit probably don't go up.

Yes, I feel fairly confident in how the count affects probabilities of positive outcomes occurring. So maybe if you're just getting introduced to baseball, maybe it could be helpful to have your hand held there and to see, okay, this is unlikely to happen. So I should calibrate my expectations accordingly. And then if it doesn't happen, I can not be it more. So maybe it's just a me thing where it's like I kind of have like a very rough and fuzzy sort of model like this in my head just from watching a lot of baseball and knowing some stuff about baseball numbers. And so maybe seeing it on the screen is kind of overkill. Whereas, you know, if you're just getting introduced to the sport, I could see it being like almost, you know, watching friends in a different language, you know,

to learn that language or, you know, like people who speak not English as a native tongue, and then they watch a lot of friends and they're able to learn how to speak English from that. Maybe this would be the way to sort of- And then you never get to pick another walk-up song ever again in your entire life. And then you never get to pick another walk-up song ever again in your entire life. You get to learn baseball by watching along with the probabilities. I could see some appeal there. But as long as they are properly calibrated and they're not filling your head with misconceptions about the sport.

It just seems like the sort of thing that it doesn't need to be on the screen all the time. Yeah, right, at notable times maybe. Yeah Like it can be used. At notable times maybe. Yeah, it can be used to highlight like high leverage moments. It could be used, you know, and it also doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that has to occur in real time. Like there can be editorial direction to the use of those stats. Like maybe when you use them is like is when Jorge Soler hits a home run and you want to help people understand just how likely or unlikely that moment was. Like it doesn't need to be a ticker tape the whole time that he's up there batting. It can happen after he does the cool thing. Cause like, if he had struck out in that moment, like we wouldn't care. That wouldn't be cool. That would

be him striking out. Like he does that sometimes. So it isn't to say that it can't be reworked into something that makes some amount of sense and that could enhance particular moments and inform people. But I think that it's going to be tricky to do that because we look at moments like this as like an opportunity to tell the viewer something about the game that they didn't know. about the game that they didn't know and this company views it as an opportunity to make you play some micro bet and so i don't think that those things are working in tandem or because like you said it's not as if the house doesn't want you to know all the stuff there's a reason we don't let people count cards i mean we we we might say go to town but like casinos don't let you do it and it's not because it's because they want to take your money like come on yeah And when you're changing the metric from plate appearance to plate appearance, I found myself looking and suddenly the numbers change. And it was like, whoa, wait, that can't be right. Oh, okay. For some reason before it was your probability of reaching base, whereas now it's your probability of making it out.

It's like, let's standardize it at least so I know what I'm looking at. So, yeah. Or just choose selectively certain numbers to highlight. Anyway, we'll see. Maybe they will change or improve the presentation. Anyway, that will do it for today. Send us some emails, please, and we think and we intend to get to them next time. All right.

So we started this week by talking about a successfully completed perfect game by Roki Sasaki. This time we talked about a perfect game that was interrupted after seven innings. Who knows what lies in store for our final episode of the week. For now, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get themselves access to some perks. Caroline H., Chris Miller, Lucas, Michael Santana, and Olive. Thanks to all of you.

That was not an Olive pun, but thank you, Olive. Patreon perks, of course, include a couple of playoff livestreams, monthly bonus pods, access to the Patreon-only Discord group, and many more. Please do check it out. You can also check out and 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 coming for me and Meg via email at podcast at vangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can find the Effectively Wild

subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance, and we will be back before the end of the week. Talk to you soon. Just wanna live in the moment Don't have to wait for time Stop worrying me And when you go there You can make Every moment a home And let everything be Let everything be

Let everything be