Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1837: The Meatiest Meatball

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about an unlikely grand slam on a major meatball pitch and the hot start of Seiya Suzuki, then answer listener emails about how to make baseball sound most appealing, the effect of using different-colored balls to denote different pitch types, whether umpires would be better at calling balls and […]

Little man felt very bad One meatball was all he had And in his dreams he hears that call You gets no bread with one meatball One meatball One meatball One mean ball And you get no bread with one mean ball Hello and welcome to episode 1837 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. Can I tell you about one of the most disappointing pitches I have ever seen? Oh. It happened on Thursday. I think it was maybe the worst pitch, possibly the worst pitch I've ever seen. I don't know.

That could be an overstatement. But you know I'm always quick to celebrate Shohei Otani's accomplishments. Yes. So I must be honest when he comes up short. And the pitch that he threw on Thursday to Rangers backup catcher Jonah Heim with the bases loaded was probably one of the worst pitches I've ever seen, at least relative to expectations, because this was an 0-2 pitch in the second inning with the bases loaded. And Shohei Otani has been really devastating on 0-2 counts in his career to this point.

And so you come into this pitch and you think, okay, you have Otani. He's up 0-2. You have Jonah Heim, who was the number nine hitter for the Rangers. He's a 26-year-old backup catcher. He entered this game with a career 64 WRC plus in 335 Major League Plate appearances and a 203-251-352 slash line. This is not a time when you would expect damage to be done, but damage was done. Jonah Heim hit a grand slam.

Yeah, he did. And the pitch that he hit it on, it was a splitter, technically. I mean, going by the grip, but it did not split. It did not do anything. It did split one thing, which is the strike zone. It split the strike zone exactly down the center like i have

not calculated it but if you were to calculate the exact center of the strike zone this pitch could not have been more than an inch or two away from there and it just sat there as otani said it hung up there or heim also said that that's an understatement I think and so relative to expectations because Otani on 0-2 entering this game going back to 2018 when he debuted among major league pitchers with 3,000 pitches in all counts thrown over that time 275 of them Otani had the lowest weighted on base average allowed in O2 counts, not after O2 counts, but on O2 counts. He had allowed a 41 WOBA over that time, best in baseball. Yeah. When he threw an O2 splitter, it had been literally unhittable.

He had never allowed a hit on an O2 splitter. And when those splitters had been put in play, or I guess when the at-bat ended on an 0-2 splitter, opponents were 0 for 58 with 41 strikeouts. So again, I can't emphasize enough how unlikely it is that a Grand Slam would be hit by Jonah Heim on an 0-2 splitter from Shohei Otani. Like if the Apple probabilities of a home run here, I mean, who knows what they would have said, probably 20%. 100%. Exactly. We got precogs back there. of a home run here i mean who knows what they would have said probably 20 percent 100 percent exactly we got precogs back there if you had actual accurate probabilities of a home run on that pitch it just it would have been absolutely minuscule but that is exactly what happened there so i just i gotta say like relative to expectations yeah that must be one

of the worst pitches of all time. Maybe Daniel Camarena against Max Scherzer hitting a grand slam last year. A Padres reliever just called up against maybe the best pitcher in the league. But even that pitch, if you go back and watch that pitch, it wasn't that bad a pitch. It was a low pitch. It was below the strike zone, which made it all the more shocking and incredible that Camarena hit a grand slam on it. But this pitch was the meatball to end all meatballs. So sorry, Shohei, you know I love you and you know I will take the slightest excuse to celebrate you. But boy, that was a hanger. Boy, that was a hanger. Well, I think we have arrived at a strange place in terms of my association of a player with a person

because I didn't watch the start of this game. I was watching other stuff and doing other stuff. And then I clicked over because I was like, oh yeah, show me what's going on. And then I was like, oh no, Ben. And that was my first thought that my sadness was was you know like i felt bad for showy but i mostly felt bad for you and that's that's interesting you know i don't know what it means i don't think that it it has to be something that we either make grand pronouncements about

or pathologize but that was my first thought was oh ben's so disappointed right now and maybe that's just because like i know you you know and i don't i don't know otani we are not we are not acquainted you know we don't send each other holiday cards but um but yeah i i was like oh no you know sometimes it happens man like great great players leave bad pitches in the zone and and then less good players do something with them. That's just a thing that happens. I mean, I think the more disconcerting thing, this is perhaps less relevant in this case, given all of the stats that you've just run through.

But this isn't the first time he's thrown a bad pitch. He just gets away with them sometimes. And sometimes he doesn't. What are you going to do? It happens. You're going to be sad. Or I was. But yeah, he just gets away with them sometimes and sometimes he doesn't well what are you gonna do it happens you're gonna be sad or i was but yeah he just didn't have it didn't really have his command or his control last night and sometimes that manifested itself in fairly wild deliveries that were way outside the strike zone and that would have been preferable to yeah this pitch but i don't want to reinforce the idea that every home run is a mistake pitch or that it's always up there because like often there are home runs hit other hits hit on pretty good

pitches or at least hard to hit pitches yeah and I think people often assume oh it must have been a mistake if someone did something good with it but no that, that's not the case. Sometimes the hitters are just really good. They're big league hitters. But in this case, oh boy, that was like the epitome of a mistake pitch. If someone asked me to show them a mistake pitch, that would be the one that I would pick. Yeah. I think you're right that we sometimes, we don't give appropriate credit. Our distribution of credit and blame when the the ball goes a long long way is not always properly calibrated you know sometimes you throw a really great i mean like the scherzer pitch you mentioned was a great example like just went down and got that one you know it wasn't it wasn't a bad pitch sometimes the other guy is just having a moment and does a

good thing sometimes he is presented with an opportunity to do a good thing and he politely declines. And sometimes you get a whopper and you're just like, I'm going to make that ball go a long, long way. And good for Jonah Heim for doing that. All right. Well, we're going to do emails today, I think, unless there's anything else you want to touch on. I saw that Jay Jaffe just blogged a suzuki and yes impressive he has been to start his career so that has been fun to watch yeah i had high hopes for him again like not dissimilar from my hopes from otani which were just that like this guy was the best player in

the second highest level league probably in the world and in in Otani's case, it was at a very young age. Suzuki, not as young an age, but he was the best player in MPB last year, at least going by war, and also in 2019, I think. And so I hoped that most of that would translate. There's always a question with the power, of course, and that hasn't been an issue with Otani, who just hits the ball so hard and so far that you know it would play in any league. That's not always the case with hitters who've come over from Japan. But Suzuki has shown not just power, but also play discipline, which seems to set him up for success. Yeah, you know, you don't ever want to make too much of the beginning, but it is nice when there is sort of a proof of concept,

right? That there is a demonstration of an ability to do some of the things that we expect there to be some, you know, growing pains around when a guy is moving from one league to another. So the fact that he has been able to turn around velocity, that he has been able to do stuff against big league pitching, like that's a good proof of of concept and the next thing that we will monitor is his ability to adjust when the league adjusts to him as it as it certainly will and so you know we await that checkpoint with some amount of trepidation because you just never know how a guy's gonna do but you want to see it having been done the ability to do it the one time is like well you have the capacity let's see how often you can actualize that capacity right so that part's going to be good. Yeah, it was a

big day at Fanagraphs for guys who have been really good in the beginning and us having to say, like, they probably won't be this good going forward, but still be excited about them. So, you know, we had Suzuki, we had Ben's examination of Stephen Kwan with a lovely postscript about whether foul tips are whiffs. So it's a good day of, hey, this is fun. Chill out, but still be excited. You know, we're trying to thread a very specific emotional needle. Yes. Okay. Well, speaking

of being excited about things, let's start with this email from Sean who says, just got into podcast and absolutely love baseball and love your podcast. I'm a high schooler in the Northeast in big lacrosse country. Obviously, there are baseball teams too. I want to get these guys to see what I see in baseball.

They think it's long and boring. How would you guys describe baseball to make it the most appealing? So how are we going to help Sean convince his friends that baseball is not long and boring or it's not just long and boring it is also appealing i find myself at a bit of a disadvantage because i don't know what appeals to lacrosse people you know i famously am from the northwest where there is some lacrosse played but it is not a you know it's not the the big sport so i don't you know some of my assumptions about lacrosse people might not be generous, and I would hate to have them inform my answer here.

I mean, I think that the way that I try to make baseball appealing to people is first to find out what they like about sports, because I think baseball can answer a lot of the things that people like about sports in its own way. So some people are going to enjoy sports as background. And I think if that's your thing, right? If you want to like have sports in your vicinity while you are conversing with a friend or contemplating your own existence,

like nothing better than baseball for that, right? So that's one option. People who are intensely interested in strategy and analytics and sort of data as a way of understanding the world, like obviously baseball, so much to offer there. If they're more sort of like aesthetically minded people, then you start to talk about, you know, like the beauty of the game, right? And the way that it unfurls in front of you and all the different kinds of bodies who can play it really well. So there's that piece of it. Maybe you like beer. Baseball has that, you know? As an aside, I went to my first big league action of the year this week. I saw the

D-backs play the Astros in a day game. And Seth Beer came up in a pinch hit moment like really important he did fine everybody's excited and the d-backs just have beer and they have like a beer as as the like big video board thing for him it's like seth beer and then there's like a frosty beer in the background and i was like i don't know if that's it's just it's it's obvious but we don't have to be clever all the time yeah sure if you're handed a player named Beer, just embrace it, the official cerveza of your team. Yeah, so if you're someone who wants to kick back with some brewskis and your pals, you have that as an option. I don't know.

What do you say to people when you're trying to convince them to like baseball? I feel very strange trying to convince people to like things. them to like baseball. I feel very strange trying to convince people to like things. That's part of, maybe part of my problem here is that I'm dealing from a deficit because it's like, I don't, you know, if you don't like it, that's fine. You can like other stuff. People like lacrosse. Sure. People are into lacrosse. Okay, cool. Good for you. So I don't know how often I actively evangelize baseball, actively persuade people to like it who don't already like it. Mostly, probably the people who read me or listen to me when I'm writing or talking about baseball are already in the fold to some extent. So I guess just sharing my enthusiasm about it

and hoping that people pick up on that and say, oh, he sure seems to like this thing. Maybe I should pay attention to this too. That's kind of the best that I can do. I'm not going to twist your arm to like it, but obviously there are a lot of things that I like about it. I don't know that we should pretend that it's not long. Yeah. And that there are times that it is boring. I mean, that is true. I don't think that we can try to make baseball sound like or be like every other sport or every other high intensity adrenaline fueled kind of competition. There is certainly a time when it's exciting. Yeah. But it is also long. It is a big time commitment. And we hope it won't be this long forever.

But you got to be honest about that if you were trying to get someone into the sport. And it does require a kind of contemplation and appreciation maybe that takes a little time and doesn't necessarily leap off the screen at the first instant the way that some other more intense sports or activities could. So, you know, maybe I guess that the task is to try to persuade people to look beyond that and say, okay, it's not a full contact sport where people are running into each

other and there are breaks in the action and the games are three hours, et cetera, et cetera. So what do you like about it? Well, we like the strategy. We like the numbers. We like the analysis. We like the history. I love the history. That's a big part of how I got into it. Now, I guess that could be a tough sell to someone like, hey, there's 150, 200 year backlog of stuff that happened here. So you can catch up on all of that. I mean, that's like when someone says that they like a certain TV show and it's like, we're in season 11. And it's like, oh, boy.

Okay. Yeah. It's a lot to catch up on now. So that can be a feature if you do get into it. But maybe that is an impediment to your getting into it in the first place when you feel like you're so far behind but i guess i appreciate certain types of baseball highlights a lot i mean relative to any other sport a great defensive play in baseball is just one of my favorite types of highlights across any sport so that's something maybe pitch movement and just the otherworldly pitches that

pitchers throw these days i feel like if you showed people montages of just some of the pitches that are out there right now that might be pretty eye-catching or just like you know i'm not saying lie to them but you know put together a montage of baseball at its best like show them some highlights and say does this look like the sort of thing that you'd be interested in you know just like show some guys hitting homers show some guys stealing bases show some triples and inside the park home runs i mean show the exciting stuff and if they aren't interested in that then maybe it's hopeless but if you can hook them with the highlights and say well this looks cool and fun and this is impressive and this is really hard to do then i think the other things come with time i mean the appreciation for just

the subtleties of the game and the in-game management and the strategy and the tactics and the saber metrics and all of that there are people who get into it through the strategy and the tactics and the sabermetrics and all of that there are people who get into it through the numbers and the analysis and so yeah if you have someone who's interested in that way of looking at life then baseball is a rich text perhaps the richest text so you know maybe introduce them even via moneyball or via some other foundational sabermetric text if you think that their interests lie that way. But otherwise, you know, don't show them Jonah Heim hitting the grand slam off Shoya Yotani in a middle-middle pitch, but show them the opposite of that.

Show them something really impressive, something, not that Jonah Heim's hitting was not impressive, but show them you know something cool and fun and hopefully that they will want to see more of that maybe that's a basic obvious answer but it's hard to go from zero to 60 on something especially if you didn't grow up loving it and you don't have people in your life who are sort of instilling that love in you, it's kind of hard to come to it. So you have to find your way in whatever that is. Well, and like I said, I do think it's important to have sort of a sense of the person you're talking to and what they like about anything. Like what tends to be their entry point to a new hobby or pursuit? How can you kind of meet them where they are with

the thing that you like best i think that when you do it that way it feels like more of a conversation and a give and take rather than like my sport you know like you know that you're you're taking into consideration sort of how they move through the world and how they come to like things and if you can do that then i think your odds are better doesn't mean that you'll succeed, but you might get there. All right. Here is a question from Jacob. I'm a casual fan who wants to better learn to identify which pitches pitchers are throwing. It occurred to me that this would work much easier if the ball were a different color for each pitch. Say that the pitcher got to choose a red ball for fastball

blue for change up green for slider and so forth besides increasing my ability to detect the pitch this could increase offense my question for you is how much better would hitters be at the plate if they got to take advantage of such a visual cue oh i yeah when when this email came across the transom i was like oh that's a good question. Then I stopped thinking about it. I mean, I guess that the most recent example of this that we can point to is probably the Astros, right? They weren't taking advantage of colored balls, but they had the signs. So they knew what in theory was coming. And it helped some, but not as much as people thought, right? Wasn't that the conclusion of a lot of the research? Yeah, some analyses suggested it didn't help at all, which could be, at least in the aggregate, that is. And it seemed like there were some times when they got it wrong and they relayed the wrong sign, and you could see how that would be extra damaging

if you were certain that a certain pitch type were coming and then something else came. So between that and between like the distraction of the banging, you know, in that little window there, there are a lot of reasons why I think maybe it might be less helpful to get the sign than you would think or just the fact that you're not used to having the sign and it's sort of disruptive. But this, it seems like, would be even clearer. Oh, yeah. I got to think this would be even clearer oh yeah this would be i i gotta think this would be a pretty big advantage yeah i imagine that it would be pretty meaningful to know

precisely and that doesn't mean that like the pitcher is gonna hit their spot every time and it doesn't mean that things are you know just because it's a particular kind of pitch doesn't mean you're going to be able to predict precisely how it moves, for instance, but I would imagine it would be a pretty sizable advantage. I will say, if this is not quite what the question was asking, but I think that it's nice. We may have talked about this on the pod before, but it does feel like more broadcasts are endeavoring to tell the viewer

what they understand a pitch to be sort of as part of the score bug i know that the white socks do this a fair amount on their broadcast where in addition to velocity it will tell you i assume it's whatever stat cast thinks the pitch type is right it's how it's being classified by stat cast so it's not perfect i say this in part because i watched matt brash start against the White Sox, and they thought that everything was a knuckle grip, and not everything was, but it was his first big league start. So StatCast had to learn what his repertoire was.

But I think that that is a useful way if you are trying to improve your own sort of visual pitch identification to have the feedback of what StatCast thinks the pitch is. Again, it's not going to be perfect every time, but I think that as you're trying to sort of lock in that pattern recognition, getting that immediate feedback, not only of velocity, but of the actual pitch type itself, because depending on the guy, like your intuitive understanding of where different pitches fall from a velocity band perspective might be really wrong. So I think that if you're trying to sort of hone that,

that's a useful way to do it. It gives you a little more information and you can kind of say, oh, well, this is cutting glove side or arm side or what have you. So that might be a thing to check out. But yeah, it would be, and like where would you keep them? Would you have a basket of balls on the mound where you're like i gotta go get my curveball ball now right yeah or you'd have to inform the umpire what pitch type you were planning to throw so that they could throw you the appropriate ball right yeah so yeah that'd be a huge advantage though because of course

you could pick up on it immediately with a different color, assuming you're not colorblind. And then you could just immediately lock in to hit that. I mean, I don't know what percentage of the hardness of hitting, not knowing which pitch is coming, is. But it's a pretty big percentage. It's also just like hard to hit objects that are moving that fast and moving that much. But a large part of it is that you can't anticipate. And, you know, you talk about the Shohei Otani 0-2 numbers for splitters. I mean, a big part of that is that you don't necessarily know that a splitter is coming

and maybe you don't realize that it's a splitter. And so it looks like something else. And he has a whole bunch of options that he could be throwing in that count. So, yes, I mean, hitters will train sometimes with balls that have some kind of visual cue, like they'll be labeled a certain way so that you can get training and practice picking up pitch types and maybe getting better at recognizing those out of a pitcher's hand.

And maybe they even have different colors too. I wouldn't be surprised if that has been a training tool. But yeah, you throw that out there in a real game and you know what colors correspond to what pitches, you're going to get rocked. So, but it would be helpful for fans who are just getting into baseball to be able to pick up on those pitch types because that can be a really tough thing, especially like in person. I mean, when I went to scout school and just was supposed to like grade pitches or recognize pitches in person, often without a radar gun or anything, it's like, oh boy, that was a pitch. I really don't know. Like, you know, I have watched a lot of baseball in my life

and played some baseball. I didn't play at such a high level that I developed the ability to distinguish pitch types very accurately from personal experience. And so when you're just sitting there, especially if you're off to the side or something and you're not seeing the view that you're used to. On TV, you get a centered or centered-ish view from behind the pitcher. You're looking right at it. You're maybe seeing the signs. You can see which way it moves. You're getting the immediate feedback of the velocity, at least in most cases, which helps you narrow it down at the very least.

But you take away all of those cues and all of those crutches, and boy, it can be pretty tough to pick up on what someone is pitching. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Question from Michael in Chicago. With the new PitchCom system, more people than just the pitcher can have receivers to hear what pitch is being called. Typically, it's the middle infielders and the center fielder, i.e. the players who would have seen the signs anyway.

What if the home plate umpire also had a receiver? How would knowing the expected pitch type and location help or hinder their ability to call balls and strike? So this is sort of along the lines of what we were just saying, that if you know what's coming, then you're certainly able to hit it much easier. Do you think that you would be significantly better at calling those pitches as

the umpire if you could anticipate not just location i guess you already get some sense of location from where the catcher's setting up but you would know how the pitch was going to move how fast it would be that would be a lot more information than you usually have? I think it would help some, right? I think that it maybe would combat, you know, sometimes a catcher will sort of hurt their pitcher's cause by the way that they are receiving the ball where they are getting it in the zone, but they are jerking it so much

that I think the umpire assumes that they are framing a ball into a strike. And so if you knew what kind of pitch type it, if you knew what pitch type it was and so could sort of mentally project where in the zone it might end up landing, I think that some of that stuff might get ameliorated. But I don't know.

I went back and forth on this when I came in because on the one hand, you would imagine that it would sort of help to have the umpire train where they think it's going to go more precisely even than the catcher setting up. Because sometimes catchers set up, you know, in a tricksy sort of way. Like they set up in a tricksy way to try to fool the hitter. And so in that respect, I think it would be useful because you aren't relying on the visual cue of where the catcher is setting up. But I also wonder if, you know, for very close borderline pitches, does it really help one way or the other?

Does it help or hinder? I'm not quite sure because you're still having to make a snap call about something that is very, you know, we're talking about very minute differences in where the ball is relative to the zone. So I'm conflicted about how much I think this would help. I don't know that it, I don't think it would hinder the accuracy of calls any more than anything else does, but I'm not convinced how much I think it would help. How much do you think it would help, Ben? A little bit. Yeah. Meas measurably appreciably sure not like suddenly they'd be robo umps or anything but I think it would help a little bit yeah be able to anticipate that

movement and not be so fooled by the pitch that you're like flustered or that you lose track of where it actually crossed the plate i think that would help so i don't know i wonder whether there'd be any risk of the umpires pitch comm being overheard by the batter like it's apparently not loud enough in some cases garrett cole complained about not being able to hear the pitch comm because of one of those obnoxious sound effects at yankee stadium which granted those really loud. So maybe they should just turn those down instead of turning the pitch comm up. But you would think that in the playoffs, for instance, when there's lots of noise and big crowds, you would want to make sure that those are loud enough to be heard. So I don't know whether there's a possibility that if the umpire had a pitch comm device that the batter could eavesdrop.

But if not, then I could see it being beneficial. Like sometimes we've talked in the past about maybe the ump having some kind of assisted reality device, like some sort of tracker that would show them where the pitch crossed the plate. where the pitch crossed the plate like either it could be just a signal like a visual cue like a light goes on or something so that they're able to see that like the robo ump system the abs system would not be making the call but it would just be an assist for the umpire potentially or that they could just see something in real time some goggles or something so that they could see where the pitch crossed the plate and they would still have the latitude to make the call as they saw it but they would have some sort of visual feedback or assistance there so this would not be that and it would be a little less heavy-handed

and it would still preserve more of the human element but it might help it might help compensate just for the fact that it's an impossible job that you can't actually see where this ball that is traveling so fast and moving so much crosses the plate just with the way the human eye works. Or the zone, yeah, and say, well, it's going to drop because it's a curve or it's a slider or something. And so I don't have to look at the entire zone. I mean, I guess you could get yourself in trouble there, right? If you hyper-specialize, you're like, it's going to go there and I'm going to just focus on there. And then the pitcher misses a spot or something and it goes somewhere else. Then what do you do? Yeah.

Maybe if you're missing by a lot anyway,'s going to be a ball but not necessarily so that could get you in trouble but it could also help it's like with a hitter if a hitter can focus on a certain part of the zone like you know hitters ahead in the count knows that the pitcher is going to try to come into the zone and you can just kind of eliminate a large portion of that real estate that usually you have to control. That makes you better. I think it could do something similar with umpires potentially. I think that you're right. I think the moment for us to have done funny goggles has passed because the real joy of it would have been telling Joe West he had to wear them.

And now he's retired. So what is the joy of funny goggles? I want to be in the room when that gets pitched to the Empire's Union, by the way. As an aside, you know how you get heckled at work every single day? We're going to add goggles. That'll make it better. All right. This one is mostly for you, I think.

This is from Mark. It seems there has been a lot written on Yandy Diaz and his lack of obvious power, despite the size of his biceps. This made me wonder, can Yandy be labeled a beef boy despite his career 134 isolated power? Do the stats need to match the size or is being a beef boy just a physical description of a beefy boy? What a I mean, just a tremendous question. Real banger on this a Friday. I would assert the following, which is that being a beef boy is, well, see, I'm going to potentially contradict myself.

I guess I'm curious if Yandy Diaz understands himself to be a beef boy. Because on the one hand, I'm inclined to think that being a beef boy is a simple statement of fact. It is a descriptor. It carries with you regardless of your performance. You know, not all of the beef boys are big boppers. They're not all succeeding at the plate. Some of them are not actualizing their beef boy potential despite the possession of beef boy tools and that's true of the ones who hit the ball on the ground far less often than yandi diaz but i also

am interested in an examination of beef boy as a state of mind and in that respect i wonder if we are we are perhaps too quick to characterize yandi as a beef boy because he just puts the ball on the ground to a remarkable extent for a guy who is built the way he is. I mean, he has to be one of my favorite players to think about because it isn't sensical. It doesn't track or register or seem right that someone who is that powerfully built in his arms would put the ball. I'm just going to, you know, people know about Yandy Diaz and his ground ball tendencies,

but we're going to spend some time contemplating them. This is Yandy Diaz's ground ball percentage since 2017, 59%, 53.3, 50.8, 66 in 2020, which as an aside, in 2020, which again, this was 138 plate appearances across the 34 games he played in, in an abbreviated slate, but he put the ball on the ground 66% of the time, 139 WRC+, the highest WRC he's had his entire career. And then 51.8 last year, and 50% of the time so far in the early going of this 2022 season. Again, six games, 22 played appearances from Yandy. So he has a nice WRC plus of 69 going into today's action.

But for Yandy, does Yandy know himself to be a beef boy? Is his understanding of his own personhood that i wouldn't dare to speculate because i don't know him and you know beef boy we mean it affectionately and we mean it to describe a vast typology of physiques right there's some beef boys who are like john carlos stanton who look like uh like like baseball aliens, like demigods in terms of their physique. And then I think we would also say that Daniel Vogelbeck is a beef boy, different kind of beef boy. So it doesn't need to be an overly restrictive definition in terms of the aesthetic or the physiology that it is describing. it is describing but in terms of how one understands oneself like epistemologically i i don't know that i want to speak for yandi but it is one of the great contradictions of baseball in 2022 that that man puts the ball on the ground as often as he does it is remarkable right how many what's the record for saying beef boy on a podcast i think think I broke it. Possibly. Yeah.

I mean, in terms of physique, like he's, he's cultivating the beef, obviously, like he's spending a lot of time in the gym building the beef. So he would not mind, I don't think being described as a beef boy. I mean, if we're talking about his build, that is the build that he's going for. I mean, probably the worst thing we could suggest is that he is not a beef boy. If you're a bodybuilder to that degree, like you don't want someone downplaying your gains, right? So I mean, he would, I'm sure, be flattered. He would be pleased to be a beef boy, I would think. So the question is then, is beef boy about the physique or is it about the production?

Because he does not have the production that one would associate with someone his size or with a Beef Boy necessarily. And so that's the question. Do you have to be a slugger to be a Beef Boy or is that purely a description of your physique and your appearance? And there are different types of appearance that could be described as a beef boy too right as we're saying i mean vogelbach is different from stanton is different from diaz they're all just large men so that's kind of the constant there but the specifics of the body composition differ a bit from beef boy to beef boy so it's just you know where do you tip the scales is a big part of it, I suppose. And you can tip the scales

for any number of reasons in any number of ways. So that's the question. Like, do you have to have the power output that one would stereotypically associate with a beef boy to be a beef boy? And I guess that we're saying the answer is not really.

No. I mean, if you look like Yandy Diaz, you can be a beef boy, regardless of whether you hit the ball in the air or over the fence. I think that beef boy is a state of mind, man. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe even for someone who hits like a beef boy, walks through the world like a beef boy, has like beef boy energy. Yeah. Without necessarily. Got beef boy vibes. Looking the part. Right. You, has like beef boy energy. Yeah. Without necessarily. Got beef boy vibes.

Looking the part. Right. You know, let's be broad in our applications of the term. All right. Jacob says, Manfred's decision to give every player a pair of headphones on opening day wasn't the only headphone related tidbit that caught my eye in opening weekend. When watching the Mariners Twins game, the Mariners manager wanted to challenge a call, so he made the motion like he was putting on some over-ear headphones to trigger the review.

But I saw that the umpire was no longer using a headset to review the call, but instead has a small earbud that can be popped in and out with one hand. So should the replay review signal be altered to reflect the new technology being used? If not, years from now, do you think fans will forget the origin of the replay review signal altogether if it continues to no longer correspond

to what the umpires are actually doing? I think it, no, I think it'll be fine because there are still over- ear headphones in the world. It is not as if, you know, Rob Manfred was, I guess, did not extend his generosity to the population more broadly. So we are all still possessed of, I'm wearing over ear headphones right now. I mean, just to record this podcast. It is, I will say the only time I do that because they pinch the top of my head. They become uncomfortable on the top of my head, not on my ears, but on the top of my

head. It is a design flaw in these particular ones. But anyway, no, I think that you don't need to overcomplicate these things. We don't have to have our signifiers be infinitely adaptable to the moment because people know what that means. And I'm doing the motion right now. None of you can see it, but you'd be like,

oh, Meg is signaling with her headphones. Whereas if you are putting in an earpiece, I think that's a much more ambiguous motion. You might be like, is there something in your ear? Do you need to pop your ears? Are you worried that there's something in there? Remember the one time

that an umpire got a bug in his ear and they had to take it out or player had a moth in his ear yeah that happens yeah that happens so like do you need medical assistance or are you trying to to assess whether the call on the field was right you don't want ambiguity in that moment especially if you do in fact need medical assistance so i think it's fine i think people will understand i think it's funny that manfred seemed to pick like i have like bows in ear headphones so i can say this like he picked like the dorkier version of headphones he wasn't like i'm gonna send everyone beats which seems to be a much more popular choice i think he did actually it was initially reported that that they were bows but then there was a follow-up clarification i saw that they were they were indeed beats oh okay so he and now i'm going to

do something wildly unfair are you ready so he went the how do you do fellow kids route not nice of me rob damned if you do damned if you don't yeah yeah there's no one in here but um i think people will know what that means i I don't think it will cause confusion. I feel bad for there used to be a person who had to stand there with the replay pack. What happened to those folks? I know. Hopefully it wasn't like mass layoffs with the people holding the replay thing. I can't imagine that was their only game day responsibility.

No, probably. Yeah. But yeah, what befell those these people we should have a follow-up to know about is a very important and visible role in the recent history of mlb but yeah i don't think there's any confusion about what that is supposed to signify now but i could foresee a time i mean if if that becomes the standard signal for a replay review and we persist with something resembling our current replay review system decades hence

when we're long removed from actually having the over the ear headphones as part of the review I could see like you know maybe like a hundred years from now like people will still be doing that and people on Effectively Wild's episode you know a million will be like

did you know you know I just discovered that this is a relic of how in like 2020 they used to actually have these old fashioned archaic over the ear headphones that they would use to do the, like, you know, the signal could become divorced and separated from the actual meaning so that it just it's a tradition that's how you signal for the replay review but no one knows how or why that started like there are a lot of baseball traditions and traditions in general you know sayings little relics in the language where we say these things and we don't know the etymology so that could happen at some point like maybe as long as we have over the ear headphones in the world and that's like an acknowledged, accepted gesture and people generally know what that means. It's not like putting on a hat or something, you know. People recognize that. I think it's close enough to the in-ear headphones.

Like they're both headphones. We can make that leap together. But at some point in the future, i could imagine that people might still use that symbol and might forget why so like over ear headphones are like pogs or like typewriters this is so upsetting it's just it's it's all happening a lot faster than i thought it would in my own life you know the the aging that's like going at a speed that i was not prepared for yeah i guess i mean won't we all have implants that just you know yeah i mean we won't even have headphones we'll we'll have some kind of like i mean they already have you know bone conduction headphones

they're still headphones but but yeah we'll just have some some chip in our heads that uh surely won't cause any other problems or dystopian outcomes, but we'll just be able to stream everything directly into our brains. I like the optimism of thinking like 100 years from now, we're going to have to worry about what baseball is doing. I mean, not you and I specifically. I think we're realistic about our own lifespans, but just that there will be problems that the league has to address that aren't like it's 190 degrees

on the surface of the earth everywhere can we play baseball today probably yeah hopefully this is what they're worrying about the people of then why do we do that over the ear headphones gesture that we don't know the origin of all right question from joseph i am a braves fan and have been watching their festivities the past few days including including when they honored their Gold Glove and Silver Slugger winners from last year before yesterday's game. That combined with watching Matt Olsen get thrown out twice at home got me thinking, what if there were a third award to celebrate base running, the Ruby Runner? So you got the Gold Gloves, you got the Silver Slugger, you got the Ruby Runner. What type of player would y'all like to see get this award?

The player who steals a lot of bases and doesn't get caught that much? Starling Marte or Whit Merrifield? The player who doesn't steal all that much but runs the bases really efficiently? I'll always be a sucker for Ozzy Albies in this regard. A really adventurous and entertaining base runner? I'm thinking Javi Baez, of course. Are there players who might be surprisingly competitive for this award? Would it matter how the award is decided?

In other words, are coaches and managers more or less likely to pick certain types of players than the rest of us might be? I mean, when we assess base running, like from an analytics perspective, we are trying to account for all of those things. I mean, not the like aesthetic flair piece of it that we sadly cannot put into the stat in part because it's value priceless. But I think that I would want someone who is thought to be like a sort of a good base runner. And I would understand that to be someone

who has both like good base running success from a steals perspective, but also more broadly is an efficient base runner, take second when they should, you know, avoid stubble plays, that sort of thing. So I think I would want both. And I imagine that we would probably understand it to be both in part because like base stealing totals are still kind of low relative to prior eras, right? So like we would probably not be satisfied just with a high number because it would like constrain the field

in a way that might not be fun. I don't know though, because we are sure able to be charmed, like just generally. And so like if somebody posted a really high stolen base total, even if their overall success rate wasn't very good, maybe we would be susceptible to that,

but I imagine the narrative around them would not be, they're a great base runner. Like if you had someone who had an absurdly high, and I'm going to pick a number we wouldn't see. So last year among qualified hitters, Marte led with 47 stolen bases. So let's say that we, I'm going to pick an absurd number. Like let's say that somebody had 65 stolen bases in a year, but they only had like a 50% success rate. How would we talk

about that person? I mean, that scenario wouldn't unfold because if someone only had a 50% success rate, their team would tell them to stop stealing bases.

So like I am acknowledging the absurdity of the scenario that I am laying out, but like we probably wouldn't talk about them as being a good base runner. I mean, you and I wouldn't.

Other people might. This is where I'm struggling. Maybe, yeah. I mean, in earlier eras, there were base runners like that who got caught a ton and also stole a ton, and that was just seen as more acceptable back then, or the break-even point was a little lower. But I think if you were to recognize a runner with the Ruby Runner, I think it would have to encompass more than just base stealing because that is the most visible and obvious and probably widely recognized aspect of base stealing already. who swipe a lot of bags than they are of the players who are just really good at taking the extra base often it's the same players because they're speedier they have good base running

instincts but sometimes it's not sometimes there are players who don't steal a lot of bases but are good at not getting thrown out on the bases i mean you could have an award for that right you could have a tootland award or just like the most spectacular outs on the bases award. But if we're recognizing accomplishments here, and this is not like the Razzies, the Ruby runner is for good runners, then I think it would be most useful maybe to recognize the good base runners who are good in non-obvious ways and who just are good at taking the extra base and not running into outs. So I don't know how exciting that would be,

but I think that would be a case where you would actually be educating people by saying, hey, here's an undervalued skill that this player has. And as you said, a fangrass base running metric or baseball reference or baseball prospectus, they try to incorporate all of those things and they may break it down into components. So you can look up how much of that is from base doing specifically and how much is from other kinds of base running. But I'd be fine with giving a base running award as long as it was not just giving it to the stolen base champion of the league, but being a bit broader or even focusing specifically

on just that less recognized skill. And maybe that is what coaches or managers might pick up on. I mean, I'm always skeptical when it comes to coaches, managers voting on awards because they just don't get to see everyone all the time and they have a lot of things on their minds. And so I don't know how good they were historically at gold gloves. I think those have probably improved now that they have a statistical component too. So again, like no one manager or coach or player or whatever can see every single game and every single player. And often it does take that watching day in and day out and every play to really appreciate base running. Like you might be able to really recognize some instance,

some super Javi Baez incident where he slides around a tag and it's exciting and it's fun and he dekes someone into making a mistake. That's great. But you kind of have to be watching all the time to recognize someone who is consistently taking the extra base and not running into outs. So I think stats

probably do that already about as well as the most observant person could, and no one is able to watch every player at all times. So I think you could probably do it fairly decently with stats already, and that may not capture the flair and the style and the aesthetics of it, but just in terms of the efficiency and the value, I think you could in terms of the efficiency and the value, I think you could get most of the way there. Yeah, I think you could too. And I like the idea of acknowledging that part of the game because we often lament that it does not feel as vital to any team's success as it used to.

I mean, it's still important to be like a good base runner, but in terms of steals, like that's just not as big a part of the modern game as it used to be. And so highlighting the folks who run well, both in terms of steals like that's just not as as big a part of the modern game as it used to be and so highlighting the folks who run well both in terms of base stealing and then just their their general sort of acumen on the base paths would be good i think yeah like last year according to the fangrass base running runs metric starling marte led the majors in that as well as stolen bases but there are some players who are more decoupled I mean you had

Fernando Tatis Jr. was second in base running runs but ninth in stolen bases or Ozzy Albies who was mentioned in the question he was 14th in stolen bases with only 20 but he still had the third most base running runs so you're not going to get a lot of guys who have no ability to steal bags and are really great base runners. But there are players who add much more value in one area or the other. So, yeah. All right. Question from Merit, who says, I'm trying to get into baseball this season. Go Twins as a dependable summer distraction.

And as I've searched for an emotional entry point into the game, I've found myself a little put off by the amount of player movement. Most sports become accessible to me because I get attached to the team chemistry, story, or individual player narratives. But it's difficult to become too attached to any cohesive team in baseball when it feels like players could be gotten rid of at any time. For example, the departure of my all-time favorite, Williams Astadillo. I understand this is how baseball works, and I'm sure it goes back to money on some level, but for a sport which is trying to cultivate fans, and especially women fans like me, I'm curious whether the high player movement

impacts our ability to emotionally invest in the game, or to invest in a t-shirt, for that matter. Second, I know very little about baseball, but per the Moneyball film, it seems like the mental strength of the game is important. You can have talent, but if your mental strength is poor, your whole performance can collapse. With the way player movement happens now, I imagine the players must have to be extremely calloused to deal with the ever-shifting group of people they call team. I imagine it would be hard

to invest or lean on your fellow teammates, knowing they or you might get traded at any time, sometimes because of one bad play or missed catch. As an outsider to the sport, it seems like cultivating this callousness could easily backfire or at least not churn out the best performance. This touchy-feely way of looking at men's sports is probably easy to dismiss, but I think it's hard to explain away teams who have middling talent and excellent chemistry who completely destroy teams with lots of talent but no chemistry. I'm looking at the recent Tar Heels run to the championship as an eight seed. Anyway, if you can speak to this issue at all, I'd be very interested. And I responded to Merritt just to profess my own ignorance of the turnover rates in other sports

and leagues compared to MLB because I don't follow the others so closely and I didn't know what the numbers were. And she actually went above and beyond and educated me by looking up some research on that. So she then wrote back to say, the roster turnover numbers I found for other professional sports organizations were around 25% for the NFL, according to a September 2021 article, and around 35% for the NBA, according to another source, a roster continuity page and another article, and then around 46% for MLB, according to a 2010 to 2018 study by our friend Rob Means at Baseball Prospectus, which has shown an uptick in turnover rate over time. And she writes, it's interesting that there's a lot of noise about the recent increase in player movement in the NBA, but very little in MLB despite the apparent percentage difference. I suppose how the players leave by their own volition or not, or due to graduation or not, might impact the conversation.

So she is interested, she says, in whether continuity is a market inefficiency. Does the clubhouse chemistry and overall performance improve if player movement goes down, and are fans impacted by player movement? A 2010 article that she links to and that I will also link to on the show page claims that for each percentage point increase in the turnover of the composition of the team, attendance will fall by 0.7%. 0.7%. An anecdote for this point was a Twins home game my husband and I attended last season where all of the t-shirts for sale were for players who were no longer on the team. And that kind of study, I imagine there might be some confounding factors there. I haven't looked to see if they adjusted for that, but if there's a ton of player movement, it could also be that the team is in a transitional phase and maybe it's not winning a whole lot and that could cause attendance to fall as well. Yeah, I imagine that. Well, so I think two things. I think

the first is that the nature of the movement probably matters a great deal, right? If you have a bunch of guys say, and I'd have to look at how these studies are sort of defining movement. I know I've read Rob's piece, but I don't remember the contents of it. Sorry, Rob. Right. Yeah, there could be different definitions of turnover rate in these various studies. Right. So it's like, are we counting, say, you know, relievers at the edge of the roster going up and down from AAA? Is that considered movement or is it leaving the organization? I think Rob was looking at like just total plate appearances and batter's face and, you know, how many of the players who accounted for those last year were also on the team this year. Like what percentage of the plate appearances plus batter's face were produced by the same players? depending on the team.

So, and I think that the character of that movement is probably pretty important to how fans feel about it. So, you know, if a team, like you said, is sort of in a period of transition on the big league roster, you might see a lot of guys coming and going as the big league club tries to determine like, is Lamont Wade Jr. good, right? Should we continue to roster him?

Like they, the Giants kept him around, but they had a bunch of sort of post-hype, post-prospect guys in the last couple of years who they sort of cycled through to see like, can we help this guy stick? Can we get something out of him? Is he worth being a complimentary piece as we try to retool the roster. So I think that how fans sort of connect to and view that stuff is perhaps maybe different than, you know, a team like say the Rays, where it's like there is a predictable payroll level at which a guy's spot might be imperiled, not because of his play on the field, but because of budgetary constraints. I think that those things probably read and feel really different to you as a fan. And we've talked about before, I think it is really important, maybe not your entire roster, but I think it is really meaningful for fans to be able to buy a jersey with confidence, right? that Rays fans have Wander Franco now and just be invested in him for the next couple of years. And that doesn't mean he'll be a Ray

for the duration of that extension, but you can buy his jersey today and feel like you're going to be able to wear it on opening day next year and not worry about it, right? It's good that Guardians fans get to be confident that Jose Ramirez is going to be around, right? That's meaningful to be able to have your guy on the team who you connect with so that there is a human face to the franchise and it

isn't just laundry generally. It's that guy's laundry, which is a funny sentence out of context, right? So I think that it does matter having a connection to the team and being able to feel like there's some stability and i think part of that emotional experience is probably what else that stability signifies right like if you have a good big league team that doesn't have a lot of roster turnover because the team has has properly identified the players who can help them win. Part of why that feels good to you as a fan is that you, you know, the dudes on the team and you know their stories and you're invested in

them. And part of that is probably also that your team is winning more than it was when it was going through like the churn phase of, of a roster of roster construction. So I think it matters. I mean, how much it matters, I think it probably, like I said, depends on the character of the movement, the overall fortunes of the team, and like how much that aspect of it resonates with you as a fan.

But if it does, I think it matters a lot. Yeah, the turnover rate obviously has increased over time and it increased a lot post free agency when players had the option to go somewhere different, which is not a bad thing, although it has definitely made for more turnover. And I don't think of it as something that's an impediment to my enjoyment of baseball. Now, I could see how if you were just getting into the game and half the players on the team that you're watching one year gone the next year that could be daunting like if you didn't grow up with some connection to a team then you're not really rooting for laundry you're probably rooting

for the players who are inside that laundry and so if the players are all different the next year then you're gonna say hey wait a minute I liked that guy and now he's not here anymore. So, yeah, as we talked about with the Freddie Freeman situation, like it hurts when someone like Freddie Freeman leaves. It hurts less when you get someone like Matt Olsen to replace him. So it depends. I think first and foremost, fans care about is the team good? Will the team win a lot? And you have to have some consistency

and carry over I mean if it's just you know you're wiping the slate clean constantly and the players who are playing for the team one day are different from the next day then that's an issue and we've talked I think in the past about the idea of like acquiring players in the middle of the season and I think we did a stat blast maybe about just how much of the Braves production in the playoffs last year was produced by players who joined that team in the middle of the year and how unusual that was and how it's kind of weird that like you can win a World Series and it can be a bunch of players propelling you to that title who weren't with you all year at times.

You're usually still pretty happy that you won that World Series. Yeah, I don't think that Atlanta fans are sad about that. No. So I think fans have a pretty high tolerance for that and that maybe, yeah, maybe it is about the way that they leave because in the NBA, I mean, I constantly hear about the player empowerment era, right, and about players just, you know, engineering their way off of certain teams and onto certain teams and playing with other players that they want to play with and forming super teams. And I could see how potentially as a fan, that might be off-putting if you felt like one of your superstars, like, wanted to go and was like, I don't want to be here anymore. And players were doing that often.

want to be here anymore and players were doing that often i could see how the lack of continuity might be off-putting to some degree but if it's just that well guys are getting traded or you know and we've talked about the fact that you have players cycling off and on of rosters and and going down to triple a and coming back up and hopefully with the new length of il stints and option stints that you won't have quite as much of that turnover at the back of rosters. Because I think that is tough. Even if they're not going to a different organization, even if it's just a matter of going back and forth from the majors to the minors, if you just don't know who that guy is,

I've never seen that player before. Who is that who is suddenly pitching for my team? That can be a bit disorienting i think it can be a little harder to get invested in the action if you just don't know the characters i mean it's like if you were watching a tv show and suddenly they like swapped in all different actors and different characters and like the overarching plot were somehow the same but it was just like different figures doing everything. It'd be like, what? I'm lost suddenly.

So I could see how you would have that sort of reaction in baseball. But I don't know. To me, I guess like maybe I'm just, I'm less of a fan of one team. So to me, it matters maybe less than it would to most people because it's like as long as that guy is still somewhere in MLB, I still get to follow his work and enjoy him. So to me, it's probably less important than it would be to most fans of a single team. But even so, I don't know. I think as long as you're winning, fans are generally willing to put up with it. Yeah. I think that you always sort of have to adjust for your general franchise sort of vibes experience, right? Although I don't know, like, there are probably like fans of how would we test this? Like, you know, I'm sure that you could take a franchise like the Yankees, which has been generally very, very good over the course of its entire history,

you know, with peaks and valleys and all that. And I know you guys haven't won a World Series in a century or whatever, but like, you know, you're you a Yankees fan, you root for a good team. And you've seen a lot of good teams. And I'm sure that there are within the pantheon of good teams, even within the pantheon of world series winning teams like probably teams where you're like that was a really fun team and i felt invested more in that roster than i did in the guys on some other championship squads so i think there's still probably variability even within your experience of teams that are very good pretty consistently but i do think that winning tends to cure a lot of ills. And we see that on

the roster itself, right? Guys who get along really well in a year where they're winning are having fights in years when they're not. So everybody is sort of subject to the overarching fortunes of the franchise in some form or another, but there still can be variation sort of year to year, I would expect. almost $4 billion, while the Marlins, Rays, Royals, A's, and Reds are all $1.2 billion or less. Conveniently, the spread between the lowest, the Marlins, and the Yankees is about six times. The median of the five highest valuation is three and a half times that of the median of the five lowest valuations. According to Roster Resource, the median of the top five payrolls is 4.2 times the median of the bottom five payrolls. Clearly, the valuation metric is higher,

but I wouldn't say that it is too much higher than the payroll metric. For now, let's ignore the idea that investing in your team via payroll will increase your team's value. What I want to know in general is, over a five- to seven-year period, what is the right payroll spread for the big market teams versus the small market teams? I don't doubt that every ownership group could afford more than they are spending now, but there will always be a discrepancy in values and resources for bigger markets.

And what should our expectations be for, quote unquote, small market teams? So it's a good question because, yeah, I don't remember what episode it was, but I think I've looked at the spread in the roster resource expected payrolls and noticed that it seemed to be large between the maximum and the minimum. And that has actually increased generally over time. There was a Travis Sotchick tweet from February where he noted the competitive balance tax era has not promoted competition or balance. In 1995 and 1996, the last years before the CBT, the top five MLB payrolls were combined 2.4 times and 2.5 times greater than the lowest five. In 2010, the gap was 3.3 times. In 2021, the gap was 3.8 times, at least when Andrew emailed us. I guess it was even slightly higher than that, a little over four. So the correlation between payroll and winning has been fairly low

of late. So I don't know that this is a problem when it comes to competitive balance, but it is, I suppose, striking that the payroll disparities have grown, especially over this period of time where you have the competitive balance tax and you have revenue sharing and all these measures that ostensibly are supposed to equalize things although in practice that is not really what they do or even really what they're designed to do they're often more about restricting spending than they are about ensuring that all teams are spending to some degree right i tend to think about these things i mean i think that it is it is a good thing to notice and know what the gap really is between the Dodgers and the Pirates or the Guardians or whatever, the A's. But I think that probably a more useful, ideal way to think about optimal payroll for a given team, one, requires some information that we don't have, right? I think it's more useful to think about it within the context of the franchise's capacity to spend. And so there is the

question of the worth of the owner, right? There's the question of the franchise value. I think that those are relevant even if not all of that is going to be sort of a liquid asset that can then be deployed in the service of payroll. But part of what would be ideal for us to know is what is the true capacity of the A's? We know part of it because we're able to back in into how much the A's receive in national TV deals. We're able to back into how much they get in the form of other central revenue. We kind of have an idea of revenue sharing, but I want to know what they really make. What is your actual capacity to spend? And so that's part of why these conversations I think often are put in sort of relational terms between the franchises that do spend and the ones

that don't, because it's hard for us to really answer definitively, like, what is your real capacity to spend? We know that the answer is likely to be a lot more than what they're actually doing, because we know the money that is coming in before they ever sell a ticket or a beer, right? But we don't have perfect information about the other sort of ancillary stuff that allows them to spend or what their real revenue is from ticket sales, that sort of thing. So that's a sort of dodgy way of me saying that I don't actually have a perfect answer to this question because some of the information we need to answer it more precisely, we don't have. But I do think that thinking about sort of the pools of money that we know every team

has access to before you even start to worry about their TV deal or their ticket sales gives you a good floor to operate from. Because while we don't know their revenues and we don't also know a complete accounting of their expenses, it can be striking to look at the gap in like, here's what you have before you ever sell a ticket and here's what you're putting on the field. And to know what that gap is, I think can be sort of informative also. Yeah, I don't know that the gap in payroll should be

as wide as the gap in valuations of franchises. I don't think it should because there are all sorts of things that go into those valuations and it can be the name recognition. It can be other assets that are owned by the franchise. It could be your local broadcast deal. It can be all sorts of things. And there would maybe be some correlation certainly between that and how much you have at your disposal to spend in any given year. attendance and concessions as we saw with the Pirates recently or with just revenue sharing and with the national broadcast deals that are split evenly and other revenue sources that every team gets a chunk of. So I think that there are teams that could afford to spend a lot more than they're spending just based on that really even if they don't have one of the big local broadcast deals. So I think the disparity should be smaller and probably should be smaller than it is.

And I'd like to see it be smaller, not by limiting the teams at the top, but by having some sort of salary floor. And maybe you might have to have some sort of upper limit in exchange for a salary floor to make that work. Not that the players are eager to do that or accept that but if you could bring up the teams that are spending just an embarrassingly small amount i think that would be good and again i think we should note that there still is competitive balance and there still are a ton of teams that have a chance to win i mean more than ever probably not just as a total but as a percentage probably especially

given the 12 team playoff format so there is a lot of hope and faith out there to trot out the phrase that Bud Selig used to use like it's hard to convince people of that I think when they see the payroll numbers and they see that team x is spending four or five times more than team y it's like well how could there be competitive balance but it's baseball and you have weird playoffs and you have all sorts of other factors that make it hard to spend your way to a win and you do have teams like the rays that are just sort of skewing things by not spending and yet still being among the most successful teams and that is hard to do that's a testament to the race front office that they've been able to do that like there are certainly

institutional disadvantages some real some self-inflicted from ownership just not spending as much as it could but like in the long term i think it probably gets harder and harder for the small market teams or the low spending teams to preserve that advantage. Like early in the Moneyball era when you had teams like the A's or Cleveland or others that were quick to embrace sabermetrics or the Rays, you know, they kind of got a lot out of that at that time by being the early adopters. And then the Yankees and the dodgers and the other big teams got on board and sort of stole that advantage away and now it's like well the rays are somehow still managing to win year after year but not all teams are that were in that boat before so i think it's hard because like whatever advantage you have as an early adopter as a team

that's not spending a ton and is looking for other ways to win, they will eventually get co-opted by the teams that are spending a lot. And then your advantage will go away. And maybe you can find a new advantage, but it probably gets harder and harder and the advantages get smaller and smaller. So long term, I think it is good for a competitive balance to have not equality but less of a disparity probably in terms of payrolls and the fact that it is wider than it used to be is not a good thing i guess even if it hasn't really been reflected in inferior competitive balance yeah i agree with all of that i think that like you know you have to be the race, basically, in order to completely, maybe not completely, but to largely foreclose an avenue of player acquisition and talent acquisition and still be as good as they are.

I think that other teams shouldn't test the theory of whether they're as smart as the race in order to do it. An easy way to not do that is just spend some money on good players and then you have good players because you've spent money on them. Yep. All right. And I will just end with this. It's not exactly a question,

but it's a comment from Shana who says, I was just spending some downtime doing baseball trivia and came across this question. How many MLB records did Ty Cobb set in his career? This is a very strange question, right? How could anyone accurately calculate how many records were set? Maybe he has hit the least ground balls to the left side Would that count?

Of course, this leads to the conversation of what is a record and so on But even besides that, is there any player who you can say This guy has set 47 records I've attached the screenshot and here is a link to the quiz. So it was a multiple choice, and it's just how many records did Ty Cobb set, and you had a choice of 30, 90, 70, or 50. What? Very weird, right? Very weird.

So I tried to do some research on this, and I did a newspapers.com search and I looked for citations of 90 records associated with Ty Cobb and that claim appears in his obituary. So when he died some 60 years ago, people wrote at the time that he had said or held 90 records, right? Which is a very strange claim, right? But that did appear in multiple articles, but I could not find an earlier source for that, that that was based on. I mean, there were other earlier articles

during his playing career about records that he had set, but that 90 specific number couldn't, I didn't find anything before his obituary. I don't know what that was drawing on whether someone just made it up certainly would be far from the first thing someone completely fabricated about Ty Cobb especially after his death I mean that happened a lot so it just depends how you define the record so I don't know if that's a reference to some official record of some sort, or maybe it just sounded good. It's like, guy's got 90 records. He was really good. I don't know. It's a weird one.

That is a very strange thing. Because like you want, I mean, the barometer, I guess, is like a meaningful record, right? You care about a record if it's something you'll track in the future to see if somebody else broke right like that is maybe my loose definition of the ones that we would care about like i wouldn't care about the guy who you know i don't know grounded out the most times to the pole side or whatever i mean you might have oddities right you can have oddities that are as as the the name implies like bits of weirdness that you would want to keep an eye on just because it's strange but i wouldn't care to i doubt that he has 90 of anything that i'd care to like keep track of going forward in the game in order to

be like oh well congratulations you you've bested ty cobb and in this very specific weird bit of business like you just wouldn't care to do that probably right no i mean you could come up with an infinite number of records almost right like you could just subdivide it into some tiny splitter sample or meaningless you know he was the best in day games on tuesdays or whatever I mean, you could come up with 90 records about probably like almost any player who's been around for a while. I don't know. I'll issue that challenge to someone who wants to do that work. But yeah, it's very imprecise. I don't really know where that claim comes from, but you do see it repeated here or there around the internet about tycob so it's very vague very

unspecific and not satisfying to me so i don't know where we would sort of set the cutoff for this is a record as opposed to a piece of trivia in fairness this was a trivia question so but still like where does where does that line get yeah drawn between this is meaningless and this is meaningful? Yeah, where does the fun fact end and the record begin, you know? Exactly, yes. Well, we will ponder that, I guess. That's perhaps an unanswerable philosophical question that we each will have to contemplate in our own hearts, but we will end there.

So thanks, as always, for the excellent questions. All right, one follow-up thought on that question about roster turnover and chemistry. I was trying to find an article by Russell Carlton on that subject that I knew existed and that I had actually suggested to him. I couldn't find it while we were recording. I have since found it, and I will link to it on the show page. But it's from 2013, and it was prompted by a comment by Brandon Belt who was asked about the Dodgers at that time and how they had recruited a bunch of new players and Belt said you can't buy chemistry so the implication was that the Dodgers wouldn't be as successful as the Giants because they had a lot of new faces and I think history has borne out since then that the Dodgers have

been decent since 2013, I would say. Anyway, I asked Russell to look into this at the time, and he did, and I won't go into all of the methodology. It's there in the article, but I will share his conclusions here. He wrote, on a hitter's performance to the tune that, under ideal circumstances and assuming that we have a causal relationship rather than just a correlation, a team might leverage a few extra home runs from roster consistency. However, there was no evidence that pitchers were affected, nor was there any evidence that teams performed better or worse than they looked on paper due to high or low turnover, or any evidence that a team whose members were familiar with each other

had any advantage in close games. And then it's noted elsewhere that even the advantage that seems to show up for hitters, it wasn't huge and it could have been an artifact of moving to a new ballpark or age effects, etc. So he notes that all we have here is an association. Turnover in changing teams is associated with other factors that might be in play here. The ballpark issue, for instance. Still, the argument that this really is an effect of team chemistry isn't that hard to make if we assume that low turnover builds friendships sensible and that friendships make people happier very sensible. Science has shown that people show better physical performance when they are happier.

Maybe that little extra spring in a player's step or swing is enough to push a ball over the wall that otherwise would have been caught by the center fielder. But then there's the matter of whether low turnover unto itself is a goal that a team should pursue. Well, if a team has a bunch of Hall of Fame caliber players, then yes, obviously, keeping Hall of Famers on your roster is a good thing. But because we're talking about maybe one homerun of added value, if a team has a chance to add a player who projects to be five homers better than the player he would replace, it will get more bang for the buck if it simply signs the new player. The effects of player talent level far, far outstrip the effects of low turnover on the roster. It feels so satisfying to think that a group of young players might grow into a World Series

winning crew through shared adversity and in the meantime develop great friendships with each other However, he does conclude a team can help the new guy get acclimated and maybe hit a few homers by having some sort of simple welcoming ritual, or having a guy around who is really good at reaching out to people and making them feel welcome. You know, a good clubhouse guy. Maybe through that effort, teams can get all the benefits of bringing in a better player without the penalty that he might pay for being the new kid on the block. So there might be something there, but if so, it's pretty small. There's certainly an effect historically, I've written about this before, if you look at the teams that use the most players and just go through the most players in a given season, almost always those teams will be less successful. But of course, that tends to be because of the reason why those teams have such high turnover. It's very young teams, it's very injured teams, etc. They didn't go into the season planning to have that high turnover. Probably something went wrong or it's a sign of some inherent lack of quality in that roster.

And I've even shown that continuity can be a bad thing at times, or there seems to be a cost to complacency when World Series winning teams tend to bring back a higher percentage of their rosters than World Series losing teams. And historically, the World Series losers have tended to go on to do better in the next season. So you can maybe be a bit too attached to bringing the same players back. And you can see how being in an environment where there's constant turnover might not be great performance, but having some amount of turnover, I mean, maybe that keeps you on your toes, right? If you feel like you have to be at your best all the time because someone might take your

job or they might ship you out of there, there's probably some happy medium where that serves as an incentive and a motivator as opposed to something that just puts you in a bad mood and takes away your motivation. Of course, we're talking about effects on the field, not necessarily effects on fans. But I do think that fans in general care more about winning than the way you win. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get yourself access to some perks, as have the following five listeners. Sam McClellan, A.A., Double A., Troy McClure, Michael Goldfarb, and David Byerman.

Thanks to all of you. And of course, remember, Patreon perks include playoff live streams for Patreon supporters, access to the Patreon Discord group where there is constant chatter during the season, and monthly bonus pods hosted by me and Meg. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Meg via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend. And we will be back to talk to you early next week. I don't need your love. I just need my records. I don't need your love, baby. I just need my record, record I don't need your love, I don't need your love

I just need my record, record I don't need your love, baby I just need my record, record