Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1839: Gas Rationing

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about exactly how many feral cats have infested the Oakland Coliseum and exactly how few fans have attended A’s games this season, Miguel Cabrera’s impending 3,000th hit and the potentially long time that may elapse before another player joins the 3,000-hit club, the recentism of MLB.TV highlights, the Guardians’ […]

If you want it to last But don't you know, honey You can't get it so fast But of course You know it makes no difference to me Oh, you'd better Cool it down You know you'd better

Cool it down You know you'd better Cool it down You know you'd better Cool it down, you know you'd better Cool it down Hello and welcome to episode 1839 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello Meg. Hello. You were wondering last time just how many feral cats have infested the Oakland Coliseum.

I now have an answer for you, or at least an estimated answer. It's an estimated 30 to 40 cats and kittens who have made the 130-acre property in East Oakland their home, according to a story at oaklandside.org. So 30 to 40 cats, far preferable to 30 to 50 feral hogs, even if the cats are also feral, but still seems like too many cats, apparently. I don't know what the appropriate number of cats would be for any given 130-acre property, but if it's a ballpark, probably not 30 to 40. Yeah. I feel like it's a lot of cats. You know, I think that I worry about the wellbeing of the cats. I worry about there being sufficient, even in a place that is probably abundant in terms of its trash and those potential food sources, like they're getting like the proper nutritional balance and you know they

don't have a reputation for proliferating with anywhere near the frequency or volume as say rabbits or rodents whether rats or mice but they do make new cats you know they famously are in the cat making business at times so uh it's not like it'll stay a stagnant population even with some fall off on the upper bound of life so i think it's too many cats i think that you're right that it's better than hogs apparently the hog thing in california is a real problem they're like yeah not just a meme not just a funny viral video it's like an ecological disaster of sorts i am given to understand but it seems like too many cats it would be better to have fewer cats because like if you know if there were just like if there were two or even three

which is you know everybody has to live their own cat owner life the way they want to but i'm proposing three as sort of the reasonable upper bound you know if there were three then they could become the front office's cats you know they could be he could be cute and named. We've gotten several emails in the last couple of days about good baseball cat names. It is a, it's a rich text in terms of finding names.

But 40, you can't take care of that many cats. That's too many cats. Yeah, seems like too many cats. And Anne Dunn, director of Oakland Animal Services,

she estimates that it's actually not 30 to 40, but 40 to 50 feral cats and she says if you see that many there are probably more so it's like a tip of the iceberg situation and that's the thing you say about like mice and cockroaches is that true of cats are they in the walls where are they hiding i mean cats i don't know cats will hide in your house and terrify you for not being found like this is a thing i might have some experience with and you're very nervous

and you're worried and then like you're calling for the cat and suddenly it's like hey here i am were you were you looking for me but how are there that many that are hidden they are not tiny they are not i mean they might be tiny to begin with, but they are not like roaches. I'm a dog guy and dogs are hard to hide and they don't try to hide. For the most part, they always want to be with you. Whereas with cats, sometimes they will make themselves scarce. Sometimes they are like I have on we and need to be away from you. Yes. I'm not saying all cats are French, but some of themui and need to be away from you. Yes.

I'm not saying all cats are French, but some of them are. Yeah, they seem French, many of them to me. They seem French. And Dunn also said that there is another feline colony just across the canal from the Coliseum on Hagenberger Drive that easily has another hundred cats. that easily has another hundred cats. And this becomes a problem because most adult feral cats are not socialized and therefore are not adaptable to being a family pet. So that's a problem.

Yeah, that's a problem. So they are working with various adoption services to sort this out. And if anyone is interested in acquiring a cat, as you said, we did get some listener emails and suggestions about this. Some people who introduced us to cats who already cohabitate with them, such as Rick, who emailed us and introduced us to Eckersley, called Eck for short, who was a former feral cat born in Fremont, California. So it can be done.

It can be done. We had some other suggestions. Jose Catseco, Kitty Henderson, for instance. You got your Catfish Hunters and your Mudcat Grants, Permando Catis Jr., if we're not sticking with A's, Max Perzer. Max Perzer, I think, was my favorite one. That was really very strong. Very strong. Anyway, another problematic thing, I think, is that the Cats probably represented 1% to 2% of the total attendance at the most recent Oakland A's game.

Yeah. Yeah, that's an issue. And that the average attendance per game is right around where it was in 2018-2019 pre-pandemic, or at least that was the case before that Oakland game that just skewed the average dramatically downward. drew a crowd of 17,503. Since then, it has been downhill and steeply downhill to 3748 in the second game, and then on Wednesday, 2703. That's not great. That is historically terrible, really. That's the lowest crowd count at any game at the Coliseum since 1980. It's the lowest at any major league game without COVID restrictions since August 2019, when there were 5,297 fans at a Miami Marlins game.

This is dramatically lower than that. And this is the announced attendance. So it's possible that there were even fewer fans actually in attendance and this is not great and it's also not surprising i guess it's pretty predictable and understandable why this is happening i mean for one thing the orioles were in town so we got to give them that yeah some of it is that yeah but it's not mostly that i think it is mostly an understandable response to the a's alienating their fans seemingly intentionally i mean this seems like what a's ownership wants or at least what their actions have incentivized have led to and you have not only a team that tore down over the offseason although they're off to a decent start seven and six but they traded just about all of their recognizable

players yeah and they hiked prices just across the board yeah not only single game ticket prices but parking prices and season ticket prices i I mean, they are just aggressively repelling their fans while, of course, talking about leaving Oakland and how if they don't get the ballpark situation they want, they're going to go elsewhere. So I get it. I mean, this is like almost a Rachel Phelps in Major League sort of situation at this point where it's like, well, yeah, I mean, baseball is still fun and it can be a an interesting atmosphere at the coliseum even if there are plumbing problems and feral cats but if you're

not going to put a great product on the field and you're also going to charge a lot more for that product which uh by the way anyone who thinks that player payroll is responsible for the price of tickets in mlb these days this is yet another argument in what is a very compelling case that those things are not closely coupled. The A's have lowered their payroll and they have raised ticket prices. So this is what you get. Yes, it is. And I can't imagine anyone would come away from what you have just said, having drawn

any other conclusion but this. But we will just reiterate it because sometimes it's useful if people were doing dishes or changing a load of laundry and weren't paying close attention to your... We are in no way impugning the devotion of A's fans or their commitment to baseball or calling them fair weather or anything like that. It's just, this is, like like you said this is what happens when

you drive seemingly an intentional wedge between your team and the fan base and then hike up prices as part of the privilege so it's really too bad because i don't know like we've talked about this before i've only been to a handful of games at whatever it was called at the time. It wasn't Ring Central. Yes. Someone else suggested that they should call it Ring Worm. Oh. Now that it is currently infested by cats.

With cats, yeah. So I've only been to a handful of games there, but one of them was the A's were playing the Yankees. And so it was a well-attended game because the Yankees were in town, but it was not as if the only people there were Yankees fans. There were boisterous A's fans. They were into it. It had a great vibe.

People were there to see baseball, and they cared about it, and they shouted down the Yankees fans. And it was just, you I was I was like this is a great this is great this is a great baseball atmosphere and so it is just so discouraging that you know when you are gifted with that with a with a fan base that clearly wants to care about your team and does care about your team to disregard that that prior sort of emotional investment because you're not willing to make

a financial one. It's just really, it's just a shame. And they deserve, those fans deserve better. And so the people who play for the A's right now and the people who work for the A's, you know, and are trying to do their best to put a winning team on the field despite just wild budget restrictions, everybody involved here deserves a lot better than what they're getting. And it's a real problem. Yeah, the projected payroll, according to Roster Resource,

$50 million for the A's, which is the lowest in MLB. So I don't know what the endgame is here. I mean, if this is what ownership wants so that they can say, well, fans are not supporting the team and therefore that strengthens our case for leaving or for prying a ballpark out of Oakland. And they can argue, oh, it's because we have this old ballpark that is infested with feral cats. Which, granted, I mean, just because it's old doesn't mean that it is necessarily infested with feral cats. I haven't read that Wrigley is infested with feral cats or that Fenway is infested with feral cats. So that is not necessarily a product of its age. But that ballpark has

problems. And despite the vibe and the atmosphere you noted, like, sure, they could use a new ballpark. It's just the conditions under which they are expecting to get it and not just the ballpark, but also the whole real estate kitten caboodle, kit and caboodle, but in this case, perhaps, all right, you get it. Wait, is that expression kit and caboodle? Have I been saying that wrong my entire life? Yeah, it's not kittens, although in this case, it could be. I mean, but you say kitten caboodle. Yes, it sounds the same.

As like a, you know, to signify the and. The joining makes an mm sounds. Right. So it's... Mm. So I don't know what to say. I wouldn't say that A's fans should be supporting this team and this effort and the lack of investment that ownership has made in this payroll. They should be voting with their feet and with their butts being on the couch instead of in the ballpark but does that just further the aims of ownership it's like a lose-lose situation sort of so it just it sucks it just generally sucks yeah it genuinely sucks and i get that when teams

relocate they take baseball from one place and they put it in another place that didn't have it at that level although it's not as if there isn't baseball in and around vegas but setting that aside like i you know i just hope that if the team relocates that we are able to hold on to like what i don't know i don't know it's just really too bad like this is a storied franchise you know this is like and they have great uniforms and all this hair you know and they have smart people working for them and they have good players and they used to have a lot more of them than they do now it's just doesn't have to be like this and i i wish that we had better mechanisms in place to say like we can kind of rework all of this so that we have owners who are in a position either

you know even if we take the ownership group there at their word where they they can't afford to spend more like even if we believed that which we don't but even if we did like we should be able to demand that they do spend more like we've talked about before there there are only 30 teams. Like we are unfortunately lousy with billionaires. Like surely we can find someone else who can buy a franchise and say, look, we're going to really commit to this thing and, you know, sort of pay back what we have already received in time and treasure from the fan base. And we just don't have that. And it sure feels bad. And we just don't have that. And it sure feels bad.

There used to be feral cats at Shea Stadium. And I'm looking at a story here from 2008 before the Mets moved to Citi Field. And there was someone, an organizer for a local group called Neighborhood Cats that claimed that there were 20 to 40 cats who called Shea Stadium home. Although a parks department spokeswoman claimed that there were only a couple of cats and that when they were caught they're taken to a shelter so there is a history of feral cats at ballparks and perhaps old dilapidated ballparks that will soon be abandoned anyway worried about the cats more worried i guess about the franchise just in general so 2703 the number of announced fans at that game that is lower than the number of of hits that Miguel Cabrera has recorded in his career. How's that for a segue? Oh, boy.

As we speak, he's still sitting on 2,999 after he had three in his previous game. The Tigers are playing as we speak. He is 0 for 2 thus far, but maybe he'll get to 3,000 while we're recording or soon After or if not any day now And that is I think Usually an opportunity to Appreciate someone's career And we can do that especially with someone Like Miggy who these days

We kind of only talk about him when He reaches a milestone you know It's kind of the pool hole situation where When a counting stat Increases or goes past some milestone We talk about them and otherwise we don't so much. Although both of them are off to pretty hot starts this season. And of course, Pujols has the storyline of returning to St. Louis. But Miggy, I think, is interesting for a few reasons.

First, well, 3,000 hits. It's impressive even if it's an arbitrary number. First, well, 3,000 hits, it's impressive even if it's an arbitrary number. It's more impressive, I think, that he is part of various even more exclusive groups,ujols and Eddie Murray and Alex Rodriguez and Rafael Palmeiro, of course, who could forget. So that's an exclusive group. Even more exclusive is the 3,000 hits, 500 homers, 300 batting average club, which once Cabrera is in there will just be Aaron, Mays and Miggy. And that's pretty cool. So Pujols, of course, was in that club, I guess, and is no longer because his average fell below 300 in his age 40 season, I think, which is where

Miggy will be next year. But I don't think Miggy will fall out of this. I mean, if he plays to Albert Pujols' age, then I guess he would. But assuming that he does not play that long, he only has one guaranteed year left after this one on his contract. So if he were to call it a career after 2023, after his age 40 season, then I think he will still comfortably have that 300 average because he's at 310 now. And even if he gets, say, 800 more at bats over this season and next season and hits 250, which is about where he's been for the last couple of years, his average would only fall a few points to 306 lifetime. So he has a bit of a buffer there. So I think that he will retire as a member of that club. And that's pretty impressive, especially in this era.

I mean, much of McGee's career came during a higher batting average era than the one we are currently in. But still, his averages are impressive. Like a lot of the players who have the highest career averages are from earlier eras where batting averages were higher. So he's kind of a throwback in that respect. And, you know, he's in some other exclusive groups like the 3,000 hits, 500 homers, 600 doubles club will be just Aaron and Pujols and Cabrera. So it's a really impressive career. He and Pujols are among the best right-handed hitters of all time. And they are both winding down at the same time

and so we should appreciate their prowess when it does pop up and you know we're getting at least occasional feel-good sentimental moments with each of them whether it's because of a homecoming in Pujols' case or because of this milestone and Mickey treated us to his 500th homer last year and very soon he will get that 3,000th hit. So congrats to Cabrera. Yeah, I feel this way, I guess, a bit more with Pujols than I do with Miggy because even though he hasn't been the guy he was for a while, we've had recent good seasons from Cabrera.

He put up five wins in 2016. We've seen the good version of him in relatively recent years but I know that when like Pujols has has approached milestones or he returned to St. Louis there's also just it feels like an important opportunity for for younger fans for us to be able to say like hey we have a moment to remember this guy who was incredible at the peak of his powers and we need you to like understand what that looked like yeah like i need i need the youths to to get it i need them to like look on albert pools's numbers as like a fan of a team that isn't the cardinals in despair right like i i have need of that in my life i ben last night i watched

did you know that on uh netflix has a new documentary about the the rise and fall of abercrombie and fitch yes the clothing brand and there is a moment in that documentary where a human man explains the concept of the mall like what a mall is and first of all i guess we could press the the documentarians about how necessary that is because like malls still exist. They are just not as culturally central, I am given to understand upstate often with grandparents or family members. There was a house up there. And so that was a big mall area, spent a lot of happy hours and Spencer's gifts and such. So, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, like this guy takes a moment to like describe what a mall is to, I guess, the young people who are watching this and are somehow interested in Abercrombie and Fitch as if it's going to be as culturally resonant with them

as it was with our generation. And I just felt myself turning into dust, becoming a pillar of salt. He's like, imagine a search engine you can walk through or like an online catalog that's an actual place. And I was like, is this necessary or is this elder abuse? And so sometimes I feel that way about, you know, guys like Pujols where they've managed to sustain themselves in the big leagues, even though their glory days are behind them and i sometimes think that like very young fans look on us you know more seasoned fans as if we are fabricating the pleasure that you were able to derive from watching them and it's like no they're really good yeah and so i need i need them to keep being really good temporarily so that we can look back on the times when they were really good for longer stretches so that I don't feel like dust and don't have to describe impactful World Series moments

as an online catalog that's an actual place. Yeah, I'm doing a weekly Better Call Saul recap pod on the Ringer's Prestige TV pod feed with Joanna Robinson, and that's another strong source of mall content, Better Call Saul recap pod on the Ringers Prestige TV pod feed with Joanna Robinson and that's another strong source of Maul content Better Call Saul that's not the main reason I would recommend it but nice to see Maul's there too yeah I mean Pujols is like historically

like his decline phase is incredibly prolonged and we've talked about that before and so it's rare for someone who was that good to fall so far i mean that sounds cruel and then keep playing for so long right and so it's a really really long time and a lot of people who have come of age as fans who know albert pooh holes you know it's not like they missed albert pooh holes but they missed the first

cardinals go around of albert pooh holes and they know only the angels albert pooh holes, it's not like they missed Albert Pujols, but they missed the first Cardinals go-around of Albert Pujols, and they know only the Angels' Albert Pujols. And it's not quite the same guy. So, yes, and Cabrera is kind career, which came back in 2006 against Chris Young. And Cabrera has been joking about maybe laying another one down one of these days. I don't know if it is entirely a joke. But, yes, it's good to have the opportunity to appreciate them and to see those old highlights. And to see those old highlights. But also, it's going to be quite a while, I think, before we see another player reach the 3,000 hit threshold, like a really, really long time, potentially. The last time we saw one was Pujols, who got his 3,000th in 2018. So it hasn't been that long since then. And before Pujols, it was Beltre in 2017, and then it was Itro in 2016, and it was A-Rod in 2015. So there's a whole flurry of them, but there's not going to be one for quite a while. active players with 2,000 or more hits is like basically at an all-time low unless you go back to like the World War II post-World War II era where players lost a lot of peak years or before

that I mean you know you just had fewer games and fewer teams back then of course fewer players in general so we just don't have a lot of active 2000 hit guys at this point i mean you have cabrera you have pujols and yadier molina who are on the verge of retirement you have robinson cano and joey vato who have chances although they are what 40 and 39 at this point or 39 and 38 and they are batting a combined 153 thus far this season. They're not off to the strongest start. So I don't know who's going to do it, but barring some improbable late career resurgence, and I wouldn't put anything past Joey Votto at this point in that respect, but it's probably going to have to be one of the younger players and it'll be someone, but no individual player looks like, I mean, forget a lock, but like even likely to do it. projected likelihood of getting there and he was at 34 probability at the time and after that it was freddie freeman and then you know tatis and soto and acuna guys like that who are just so far

away from doing it that obviously they could but there's just you know many years to transpire before that could happen so right someone will do it like dan said zips projected that i think 1.6 currently active players would eventually get there so it's not like the 300 wins conversation where like you know people have been kind of false alarm like are we going to get another 300 win guy for decades and we have but at this point we really might not just because of the way that pitcher usage has changed we'll get another 3,000 hit guy but it might be a decade or more I mean unless like Cano or Votto does it it's just going to be a really long time and probably the longest gap between players getting to that threshold since just eyeballing the list i guess it was like a 12-year gap between

stan musial and aaron 1958 to 1970 and that was because of the post-world war ii gap in players getting to that point but since then we've never gone you know 10 years or or even close to that and i think we will so yeah just settle in i guess enjoy it i mean we're not like super milestone centric people around here at least when it comes to counting stats and round numbers but it can be a cool thing and it's going to be a while before we see it happen again well and i think it you know my thought on the milestone chase is a lot like my thought on hall of fame stuff which is that like it is not the most important thing to me but i think it really really matters to the players involved like i think it is quite

meaningful to these guys when they are able to sort of say i am part of this you know this part of the baseball pantheon is now open to me and i'm i am stepping into that role and i think that means a lot to them and so in so far as I care I think a lot of it is just like I bet it you know it'll mean something to Miggy like it'll really mean something to him when Pujols got his 3000th hit he did it in Seattle against the Mariners and I happened to be at that game and like he you know he was a an opposing player reaching a milestone and they stopped the game and they like put stuff up on the video board and everybody's like he got a standing ovation in an

opposing ballpark to mark this moment and you could tell it meant something to him that like these fans who want they were like you are actively working against our interests here and the angels won that game and so everybody was kind of annoyed but like we stopped and we stood and we clapped and it's like i think that outside of the postseason we don't always do as good a job as we maybe should in like marking the moments during the regular season that are not just like that wasn't an angels moment right like that was a baseball moment like a capital b baseball moment and i think that milestone chases give us an opportunity to do that to be like wow i just saw like i saw history that was so cool you know i've

gone to a ballpark a lot of times and seen i mean not nothing but nothing good right like it was just like a day i spent and this was a day where I was like, I got to see this guy like notch his 3,000th hit. That's really cool. And it was nice that, you know, everybody seemed to have an appreciation for that. Nobody was booing him. Like we all stood up and cheered for an opposing team's player.

It was nice. So I think that, you know, it affords us those opportunities too to kind of pause and be like, huh, this is part of a story that people are going to tell about this game and the players involved for a long time and i got to see it and that's neat yeah i'd say so and you know of course we're in a low batting average era now historically so and also a high walk era which does make it harder to get to 3,000 hits.

I mean, there are some really great all-time hitters who don't have 3,000 hits. And you do a double take and you're like, oh, that guy doesn't have 3,000 hits. Well, yeah, it's because they walked so much that they didn't accumulate enough plate appearances to get the hits while walking so much. And, you know, you look at like Juan Soto, for instance. I mean, obviously he has the skills to get to 3,000 hits someday, and he might. But he also walks just so much that it will be harder for him to do. But there could be changes in the game that cause a batting average bounce back at some point over the next several years that does make it more feasible for someone to get there. So right now, we're looking at it and saying, oh, boy, it's going to be years and years.

But who knows? Things could change. Someone could have a a breakout someone could have a bounce back and we could be talking about this sooner than we think it's hard to anticipate the future but yeah speaking of poo holes i keep seeing on mlb tv like the mlb tv flashback and i get excited because oh i going to see some fun highlight. And then it's like Pujols hitting his first home run back in a Cardinals uniform like a week ago or a little more than that. It's like the monkey's paw curled

because like I always want them to add more highlights because they just like, they have the same highlights on very heavy rotation from the last few years or even last year alone. And now they have refreshed the lineup lineup except that it's stuff that happened like a week ago and it's very fresh in my mind it's like yeah please dig into the deep vault of highlights that you have that we have no access to that we would all like to see i just i don't know explore the studio space people i don't know why they limit it so much to just extremely recent events and so few of

them. Just show me a broader cross-section of highlights and memories, please. Yeah, we have years and years and reams of tape. Well, you don't even keep it on tape anymore, but we have terabytes of highlights. I don't know if that's a good way to describe it either. But yeah, we have the resources to have a more diverse rotation, both in terms of eras represented and the players. I don't mind if the footage is grainy. Show me more old stuff.

I don't know. It's weird. All right. And we got an email. This is not a long or in-depth enough answer for a stat blast, although I will have a stat blast later in this episode but this came from tom and it's a question about gabrielle arias who debuted for the guardians this week the latest big prospect to be called up a top 100 fan graphs

guy top 100 baseball america guy he came up on wednesday and made his debut in a double header he didn't get his first hit until the second game but he did reach base twice in the first game in an unusual way and tom asks gabrielle arias is playing in his first major league game today for the guardians in his first at bat in the second inning he reached on a throwing error by tim anderson nine batters later no outs had been recorded it was a bad day for dallas keichel that is an understatement and res reached on a fielding error by you guessed it tim anderson maybe this is a two qualified fun fact but it feels like there's something interesting in there has anyone ever reached base in their first two mlb at bats

or plate appearances for that matter on errors how about with any of these qualifiers by the same fielder in the same inning with no outs recorded between those at-bats? Well, no qualifiers needed, at least when it comes to the first two plate appearances of a career. Frequent StatBlast consultant Ryan Nelson did look that up and found that at least according to the play-by-play data that we have no one has ever started their career with two plate appearances that were too reached on errors and i wonder what you're thinking if you're gabrielle res in that situation it's like i heard this league was

good like is this it's gonna be this easy every time they're just gonna throw the ball away baseball what like it's hard right yeah i i would be i don't know that i'd know what to think because i'm sure that they have a sense of his profile coming in despite this being his debut but it's not like you're like we gotta respect the speed and rush the throw like you're not doing that for a guy who's up in his first game so yeah it would be a very strange thing and then you'd have do you have like an emotional comedown when you're you know going into future games and you're having to like face the grind of along at bat and striking out and more sure-handed like plays it's weird from tim anderson he's normally good about that stuff so i don't know it would be a very weird way to start but i think you'd probably be like oh i got him i i'm on base here i am this was the this was the goal even if it was right

achieved in a weird way that i had less to do with than i might like i feel like it would loosen me up like it would take the pressure off me it's like oh look at this back-to-back play appearances the big leaguers screw up too and a good established player like tim anderson okay errors are permitted up here you don't have to be perfect can anybody here play this game so ryan also looked up and found that there have been six players who reached on an error in their only plate appearance ever of their major league career so this distinguished group includes, this is the same size club as the 3,000 hits 500 homers club, six players. It's Cal Crum from 1918, Icehouse Wilson from 1934, Barney Muscle from 1940. That is M-U-S-S-I-L-L, sadly. That is M-U-S-S-I-L-L, sadly. George Enright, 1976.

Rick Garecki, 1997. And most recently, Aquilina Lopez in 2005. So four of these players were pitchers. Enright is a catcher. Icehouse Wilson was a pinch hitter in this lone plate appearance of his major league career. And I'm sure everyone is wondering why Icehouse, as I was. And of course, he has a pretty comprehensive Sabre bio, 3,000 words or more.

I mean, thousands of words on Icehouse Wilson, who had one major league plate appearance. And according to this Sabre bio, which was written by Chad Moody, it was during Wilson's breakout 1933 season on the gridiron, he was an accomplished football player as well, that he received the nickname by which he became forever known. In an ongoing attempt to boost the image of the football program at

St. Mary's, the school was prone to quote, bolstering players' reputations with nicknames that promised to titillate the fans and writers in distant cities. In distant times, even. We are still being titillate the fans and writers in distant cities. In distant times, even. We are still being titillated by this nickname decades after this. As such, Wilson was given the colorful moniker Icehouse.

Exactly how he received it remained somewhat murky, however. One account has Coach Madigan, a large, cocky Irishman with a booming voice and a louder wardrobe, labeling Wilson with the nickname due to his coolness under competitive fire, which would be a good origin story. Another, perhaps more amusing account, has prominent St. Mary's publicity man Bill Stevens simply pulling the name out of a hat. But whether it was pulling it out of a hat or it was his coolness under pressure, he became Icehouse and still is, as far as I'm concerned.

He had like a hat full of nicknames? I guess so. Were they all like food adjacent? Were they all home appliance adjacent? Cooling adjacent? I don't know if they were themed or what. I'm reporting breaking news, which is that Miggy has struck out swinging. Okay.

Yeah. I mean, like Icehouse is a great nickname and it does imply. reporting breaking news which is that miggy has struck out swinging okay yeah i mean like i saw this is a great nickname and it does it does imply like you have to keep your wits about you in a moment where you might be able to press the advantage as a result of a fielding error right you want to take advantage of of that mistake i can't believe that we're as far into this podcast as we are and you haven't brought up showy otani yet i don't have a transition here but i'm like we're at 38 38 minutes and change and i know showing impressive restraint here yeah we're talking about prospects making their debuts and guys who reached on an error in their only plate appearance like i mean i'm glad to have known about ice house and of course there's a 3000 word saber bio about some of these guys because they just do such an excellent job but like hey ben do you want to talk about shohayotani i do i have uh i have one more thing to say before

shohayotani well two i guess one is that it was uh also a throwing error in icehouse's case and he ended up on second base but then he was stranded over the next two tigers batters and then the game was over and so was his big league career. Poor Isos. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to say, you brought up on a recent episode the idea of there being a lot of rainouts and weather-related postponements this month and that does seem to be the case. So we got an email response from listener Brock who said, I just listened to your most recent episode and wanted to chime in on the issue of weather postponements. I'm what you might call obsessed with the issue of climate change.

Also, being a baseball superfan leads to a natural interest in the intersection of these two topics, an area that I feel has been under-discussed in baseball-related media. I agree. Yeah. So the trend in weather postponements is something I like to keep my eye on. This is always especially relevant in April, where we, of course, tend to see significantly more postponements than in any other individual month. To answer Meg's question, yes, we have indeed been seeing a higher than usual rate of postponements this season. The record for most postponements in a single month, this is what I was thinking of as we were speaking, had previously been held by April of 2007. Before that was broken in April 2018, when we saw 25 weather postponements.

That was wild, including six in a single day on April 15th. That record will almost certainly continue to stand due to not getting a full April this season, but on a rate basis, we are indeed tracking close to that record, and he gave me a little breakdown of recent April. So 2018 was 25 postponements, 0.83 per day. 2019 was 14, 0.47 per day. 2021 was 15 postponements, 0.5 per day, not including COVID-related postponements. And this season so far is 10 postponements in 14 days. So that's a rate of 0.71 per day.

Brock continued, it is perhaps worth noting that teams seem to be more willing to preemptively postpone games in April because they have more opportunity to make up games later in the season. Nevertheless, the trend has been and will likely continue to be toward more weather-related postponements. I would be remiss to not mention that in addition to more April postponements caused by increased rainfall and winter weather destabilization we will certainly continue to see other climate related postponements as a result of wildfire like we saw when two games were postponed or relocated in september of 2020 due to fire or air quality as well although not all not all the games that should have been postponed or postponed that month perhaps not yeah as well as due to hurricanes, in my opinion, Brock says,

it is also only a matter of time before we see games regularly postponed due to heat, when conditions may be unsafe for players in outdoor environments, not to mention unsafe for fans and stadium employees, which is a depressing thought, but perhaps a necessary one. And yeah, I mean, we saw the Rangers with their retractable roof stadium have an emphasis on the heat, the temperature at games and fans being unwilling to go to those games,

which was probably an issue there even before the recent ramp up in world temperature, but not getting any better. And there was actually not a postponement, but a game that was curtailed just this week that ended early due to rain, the game in Chicago on Wednesday. And looks like Brock says that there's another storm system rolling through the Midwest and South over the weekend. So there's potential to disrupt that weekend series in Kansas City. So, yeah, it's a bleak thought, but obviously this is an issue that is much bigger than baseball.

And we don't want to end up in a situation like the movie Interstellar, where the Yankees are just a bunch of scrubs who are on a travel team and play at some little local field in the middle of a dust storm because society has been decimated. But yes, this does seem to be, and I don't have full historical data here on postponement rates, but would what is the future of play like in the acl i imagine like an underrated problem for the state of arizona just generally is going to be water rather than heat but you know how do you schedule around the increasing creep of temperatures here like what happens in florida when you have sea level rise so it does seem like the the kind of thing that it's weird we don't talk about more like i think there is i know there have been some reported pieces on it but it feels like there's good reported work to be done there about the various disruptions that we are likely to encounter as time goes on you know there's a reason that like there's a retractable roof at

chase and that they pump air conditioning into that place. Like you don't want to have an August day game without those things in the middle of the desert. So there is some mitigation now, but I don't think that any of us would deem it sufficient. So that's fun. Yeah. And this is timely, I guess, because Friday is Earth Day as it happens. And I got a press release this morning from MLB touting the league's measures when it comes to sustainability and so forth.

MLB to highlight environmental awareness and sustainability on Earth Day and continuing throughout the season. And the email does tout the various accomplishments of the league and not just the league, but also a contingent of players called Players for the Planet, which has been organized by the former MLBer Chris Dickerson and others. So they've made some strides. I mean, they've done some stuff, and I don't want to discount that. So just quoting from this email here, 22 clubs practice e-waste recycling.

22 clubs have installed LED field lighting. 19 clubs operate food donation programs. 12 ballparks utilize on-site gardens. 10 ballparks utilize solar power. 10 ballparks utilize on-site gardens. 10 ballparks utilize solar power. 10 ballparks feature EV charging stations. 10 clubs activate regular season green teams. Seven clubs have permanently eliminated plastic straws from ballparks. Six MLB ballparks are LEED certified. So, you know, there are some efforts and obviously like it's a drop in the bucket and MLB in general is a drop in the bucket of just like the total corporate carbon output and the US carbon output in the context of the world. I mean, it's all just, you know, it's our tiny little corner of the world that we talk about or care about professionally.

And so every little bit hurts, but also every little bit of help doesn't help that much in the grand scheme of things. Not that it's any less important, but yeah, I think it will become a greater area of emphasis, whether it's out of genuine concern or out of PR, either way, hopefully it does some good. And there was a piece about this. I was thinking about this because Hannah Kaiser wrote a piece about this i was thinking about this because hannah kaiser wrote a piece about this for yahoo last december and she talked about some of these efforts or some of the efforts that could be made and she was talking about the impact of travel because i mean that's a big thing like teams are constantly crisscrossing the country in charter jets and

everything and there's a lot of emissions that come from that. And, you know, she dug into like the record of the league's political donations as well. And some of the politicians that they have donated to who are, you know, taking actions that are contrary to the idea that MLB cares about the environment, et cetera. But I'll just, yes, any number of things. But quoting from her piece here, and she is quoting from Seth Wines, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University in Canada. When people talk about sustainability in sports leagues, a lot of the time, maybe they'll talk about recycling. Maybe they'll talk about how their players did a tree planting program on the weekend. A lot of those things are pretty close to greenwashing.

those things are pretty close to greenwashing. You're doing an action that looks nice, but it's not really substantial. It's not making a huge dent in your admissions in any way. What can make a huge dent, Hannah goes on to say, is drastically limiting travel like all the major sports leagues were forced to do in 2020 as a response to the pandemic. In a study recently published in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, Wines calculated the drop in carbon emissions per game for MLB, the NBA, NFL, and NHL based on their specific schedule alterations, which amounted to significantly less travel across sports. Travel accounts for about a quarter of the league's total emissions, according to that study. And so in 2020, baseball, which already has an advantage in that you have multi-day series that are played against the same opponent, which cuts down travel to some extent. But in 2020, teams only played opponents in their own division and the corresponding geographical division in the opposite league.

And so there was a 22% drop in carbon emissions per game, which is nice. But it seems like that will probably be set to go up, I guess, next year, right? Because there's going to be a more balanced schedule that will be put in place. And in principle, I like that. I like more balance to the schedule. So quoting from an MLB.com piece about this, teams will face their four division opponents 14 times each season, seven home and seven away for a total of 56 games. They will also face the other 10 teams in their league six times apiece, playing a three-game set at each ballpark. So rather than 16 interleague games, teams will have 46 such games on the schedule, four against their geographic rival and three each against the other 14 teams alternating ballparks annually.

And so the upshot is that teams within the same division will have 91% of their games in common, up from 84% under the current schedule system. And schedules among teams in the same league will feature 76% of common opponents, up from 52% in the more unbalanced schedule. So I like that. I like the fairness that comes from that, but I guess that also will inevitably result in more travel and more missions, right? So that's just a downside, a negative byproduct of what could be a positive change competitively speaking. How much would we benefit from more tightly constricted divisional

realignment i wonder yeah i mean right if it was a 22 reduction in emissions in 2020 and you did that more often like this is breaking down one of the few remaining differences between the leagues which are now almost essentially the same post-Universal DH, I don't care about that particularly. But I guess you would get a similar reduction in admissions as you got in 2020, which would be nice. So it's tough. I guess you do. Maybe there's some happy medium where you could get a balanced schedule that was also sort of geographically locked a little. I mean, there's also like, hey, it's an entertainment product and some variety

in the teams that you play is nice too, right? Like if you played all your games against the same handful of teams and you just didn't have to travel that much, well, it'd be good for the environment. Wouldn't be so good for baseball fans yeah and you know i think that we're right to point to travel as the primary sort of spot where this can make a difference i mean the plastic straw thing man it just doesn't matter but that's uh greenwash eyewash a combination of i don't know that i had heard the expression greenwash before but that makes all the sense in the world i think that you're you're never going to be able to get it just dialed in just right if you want to have teams play in places that aren't you know geographically concentrated but like it's weird that the mariners are in the

same division as the rangers and the astros if what we want is to sort of minimize travel and i mean you still do have sort of an East Coast bias when it comes to where teams are located, right? Just because of the geographical patterns of when expansion to the West Coast happens. Right, and we derive benefit from that, right? Like it's good that there is the concentration in the Northeast and the sort of upper Midwest

because it does, I imagine imagine do a good amount to to minimize travel it's those pesky west coast teams i tell you yeah i don't know if i want to just contract the west coast that's that's what the okanays want us to do well they want to move to las vegas probably yeah still it's a real it's a real monkey's paw situation for me a sometimes mariners fan to be like real line things for closer geography and then be like go play the dodgers a bunch of games a year see how that's gonna go well yeah but yeah it's it's a thorny issue there's like the the day-to-day what is the league doing to sort of minimize its own carbon footprint there's the sort of business continuity planning aspect of it.

That is, how are we going to play games in places that are subject to extreme weather events or might be underwater, you know? So there's, it's thorny. It's almost as if we need broad, impactful, regulatory solutions in any number of aspects. are just taken out of the hands of major league baseball i don't you know the travel isn't great like i don't want to discount the amount of impact that that can have but i think if we're pointing at industries that perhaps have

contributed the most dramatically to the climate crisis baseball's probably not super high on that no no it's just that this is a baseball podcast so but yeah i meant to mention by the way with the a's and with tracking their attendance and wondering how low it can go we did get an email on april 1st from a disillusioned a's fan named jacob who wrote to us one thing i'll be keeping an eye on is if Oakland's two-year-old soccer club, Oakland Roots SC, which plays in the American Second Division, USL, will actually outperform the A's in average attendance this year. Jacob says, I went to the Roots home opener a few weeks ago and it was positively buzzing with all the great and wild vibes that come from Oakland sports fandom. In a stadium with a 3,500 seat capacity and 5,500 for standing room,

the game had an attendance of 5,508. So those extra eight people must have been sitting on the other standard shoulders or something. Compared with the minimum 34,000 capacity of the Coliseum, the average attendance for the two teams shouldn't be particularly close.

One is a brand new, still mediocre second division soccer club. The other, a four-time major league champion with a 54-year history in Oakland, adding a further dose of schadenfreude, at least toward John Fisher, A's owner. The Roots play at Laney College, the initial site the A's pitched a few years ago to build their new stadium without, of course, you know, consulting with or asking the community college district. Suffice to say, Oakland fans are diehard sports lovers, though not quite as stupid as Fisher would hope. So monitoring the 2022 average attendance at the Coliseum versus Roots games at the local community college football stadium is just another sad, inglorious chapter in the long saga of the utterly draining ownership of John Fisher.

I'll keep you updated. And yes, please do. I would like to hear about this because last year in the Oakland Roots season, they maxed out at 5,044 fans and they averaged 2016, which is just below where the A's were in their most recent game. And again, this was the third home game of the season. So the Roots really might give the A's a run for their lack of money. So we will see. We'll give you updates as Jacob provides them. is that Charlie Blackman became the first MLB player to have some sort of sports betting-related endorsement deal, which is now permitted under the new CBA.

So he became the first MLB player to endorse a sports book called Maxim Bet. And this is something I think you noted after the CBA came out that this was now allowed. It's weird. Yep. It's weird yep it's weird i mean in the sense that like blackman is endorsing a product that he can't use at least when it comes to betting on baseball i guess he could use it in other ways but he's a brand ambassador for something and and he can't be like yeah i use it to bet on baseball all the time. So I don't know exactly what form his endorsement will take. And he's not the first in one of the big sports. Connor McDavid, the Edmonton Oilers great, recently announced a partnership with BetMGM.

I was wondering, I was not aware of Maxim Bet and Charlie Blackman seemed like an unlikely trailblazer. I was wondering, like, is Blackman the best player they could convince to do this? I mean, no shots at Blackman, but his best baseball days are perhaps behind him. But it's actually that Maxim Bett is a Colorado-based company and only operates in Colorado currently. So it does make sense in that way. But it says he will take part in future marketing campaigns, fan events, promotions, and social media posts. And, you know, look, I guess this was inevitable and we are not against players getting theirs.

You know, as long as leagues are certainly getting theirs, then players might as well cash in on this too. It's just the state of affairs that we have now. Although, you know, it's the sort of thing that, like, if you had told a fan about this or the league about this several years ago or decades ago, they would have said, no way, no how. But here we are. So, you know, it made me think, I mean, in the wake of this news, a bunch of people were like, oh, Pete Rose, like revisit Pete Rose.

We do not have to hand it to Pete Rose. we do not have to hand it to people and and this says nothing about pete rose as far as i'm concerned pete rose bet on baseball like right if if charlie blackman bet on baseball then he should be punished too this is different he is endorsing betting on baseball but not endorsing players betting on baseball, which is an important distinction. You could say it's a slippery slope. And, you know, there was that NFL scandal about the player who was not currently playing, but did make a small wager and was suspended for it. So, you know, there may be more of this. And we've talked about the danger of potentially throwing games, even in the minors, perhaps, and the fact that micro-betting and the advent of being able to bet on any outcome at any time would make it basically undetectable in all likelihood.

So these are concerns, but Pete Rose, in addition to just being a generally reprehensible person who I'm not really rooting for, but beyond that, what he did is way different from this. I think the better comp is the situation in like the late 70s, early 80s, where Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were briefly banned from baseball. They were placed on the permanently ineligible list because they were the spokespeople for casinos in Atlantic City. Yeah, they were like greeters, right? Right, yeah. Yeah. You know, they got some lucrative deals, and they were prevented from holding jobs with the league at the same time.

I mean, they were allowed to go to old-timers' days and things like that, but they couldn't work for the league in any kind of official capacity. Buikun, the commissioner at the time, banned them. That is a much closer comp to what is happening here. I mean, that's sort of the same situation. So that shows you how much attitudes have changed. I mean, those bans were ruled back by Commissioner Peter Gruberoth in the mid 80s.

So they didn't last that long. But the fact that like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, literally Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle could be banned from baseball for just like, you know being the the public faces of a casino a legal casino now you have Charlie Blackman you know just under the terms of the CBA just being the face of a sports book yeah times have changed not necessarily for the better and always I think that having the reaction to this of like, I don't like it. I think it's weird.

I think it's a strange blurring of the lines. It doesn't seem to be particularly good for the game that there is this hyper fixation on betting. I think that's a perfectly defensible position. That is a position that I hold. I think that you're right to draw the distinction between what Blackman and Rose did and we just don't, like, you don't need to get exercised on Pete Rose's behalf, right?

Like, the gambling is one of the less reprehensible things that that guy has supposedly done, right? He is, you know, he's like an alleged statutory rapist, right? Am I getting that right? I want to cut it if my understanding is wrong. Like like sex pest doesn't seem like a strong enough descriptor for what he is accused to have done so like we don't have to help rehabilitate that guy we just don't like there is a very clear difference between the gambling stuff that he did versus what is being allowed from an endorsement perspective now and And even if you felt for some reason,

like he got a raw deal out of that, which I think is a strange position to hold given what it would mean to allow players to bet on games. Like there's other stuff going on with Pete Rose that makes him icky. So you don't have to waste your emotional energy trying to help the guy out. Right, yeah.

He has denied that allegation, but his excuse was that the woman the girl that he had some sort of sexual engagement with was 16 at the time which was the age of consent not 14 or 15 so you know when that's your defense yeah so yeah all right so i don't have a ton to say about otani surprisingly other than marvel at how amazing he is for the umpteenth time yeah he's pretty great yeah ben did you know that he's really great i yeah i every now and then i do have a moment where like you know he's not off to the best offensive start he's been okay but not great. And I'll catch myself thinking like, oh, this is not the greatest start for him. And then I'll remember that like literally a two-way player, like just playing every day, leading off, taking regular turns in the rotation, never allow ourselves to like just become complacent about this or not just marvel at how semi-miraculous it is just like on a daily or weekly basis and he gave us a good reminder on Wednesday because he started a game as a pitcher against the Astros

although he made history even before he took the mound right because he batted twice in the top of the first so he became the first ever and probably last ever, unless there's about to be another two-way player who hits leadoff, to bat twice before taking the mound. So the Angels batted around in the first inning. They scored six runs. They knocked Jake Odorizzi out. Otani contributed to that. He walked and scored and then doubled and drove in runs. And then he took the mound for the rest of his day's work.

Then he took the mound for the rest of his base work. Then he took the mound. So this was like a classic tungsten arm O'Doyle type of fun fact, although in this case the lead did hold up and that score ended up being final and the Angels won. But a big reason why they won, not only his offensive contributions, but his contributions on the mound where he was perfect through five and a third and ended up going six allowing one hit one walk striking out 12 astros by the way tough team to strike out generally

even without Altuve in the lineup and he was just dominant I mean he had his game face on he was grunting and clapping and his stuff was nasty oh my god so nasty like not only throwing hard as usual but just going heavy on the splitter heavy on the slider and man i mean we've talked plenty about how nasty the splitter is but the slider now is like right up there in nastiness because as ben clemens just documented in a post published at fangraphs as we have been speaking with the headline Shohei Otani is getting better, which is right up my alley. That's music to my ears. I talked about the likelihood that he could or would get better before the season started. And at least in some respects, he is because that slider, which he has tinkered with and improved over time this sort of started last season

and now it is even more of an outlier like he gets so much horizontal movement on this thing for a pitch that is thrown as hard as it is it's just it's kind of a unique offering at this point and so he has the slider he has the splitter he has the heater he'll just drop in a curve every now and then or a cutter i mean he has so many pitches to throw at you and now much improved control and command so he can put it where he wants it often and it's just nasty so he has been better on the mound probably than at the plate to this point and that could persist i mean we talked a lot about his two-way efforts last year but we probably talked more about the hitting good as he was on the mound and as good as he got on the mound during the season now he's just kind of consolidating those

improvements and you know he had a shaky second start of the season so not saying he's going to be unhittable every time but boy that was fun to watch so i knew he was starting and i was doing other stuff and then i tuned in as he was taking the mound in the bottom of the first and my first thought was oh boy they're already up six oh like what happened to jake o'dreezy is he okay and then i don't know if you have this experience, but there are guys who I if I know that they're in the lineup and I have a sense of them as being like a pros pro, like the hitter that your favorite hitter likes to watch. They they can be a good sort of canary in the coal mine for how a guy is going to look on a given night. Like you watch an at bat and you know, like it's one at bat, whatever. It might not mean anything, but it can be an a good early indicator of a guy being on i don't know if you have that experience but i have

that experience and one of the guys on that list for me is michael brantley because like michael brantley is just he's just a great hitter he's just one of my very favorite hitters to watch he's fantastic and otani did him so dirty it was and he was pissed he was yeah because he's also like an even-tempered guy you know he's like ice house brantley right yes but he he slammed his bat on the ground and like a little chip flew off it yeah and otani of course politely pointed to the chip because you know knowing him like he would have walked over there and picked it up himself yes to someone oh oh boy and he just he just got him with that splitter and i was like oh wow like otani maybe has it he's got some cool stuff going on and then you know and then bregman flew out and i started navigating around to other games because i i wanted to see what other folks were doing i know i'm sorry i i see

the thing about it is ben i have this safety net when it comes to otani because i know that no matter what happens if i've missed it you will tell me and i will feel i will feel as if i know what's what and so i navigated around to some other stuff. And so I missed, let's see, I'm embarrassed to admit this. Now you're going to think that I was derelict in my duty. So I came back in the fourth. I came back in the fourth because somebody had noted that he was maybe up to something. He was maybe doing a little something. And so I came back in the fourth in time to watch him strike out in order Jeremy Pena, Michael Brantley, and Alex Bregman. And I was like, oh, we're going to settle in for a little bit of fun here. And then the fifth happens, and that's all well and good. And then the sixth comes up, and he bumps to get on in his own perfect game that was the best i mean a bunt to break up a perfect game or a hit that's a common

thing right but how often do you have the pitcher who is throwing a perfect game bunt for a hit while he has the perfect game going that was the best and then in the bottom of the inning nico goodrum of the astros he lays down a bunt it went foul but he got booed he got booed in his own ballpark right because like presumably these are fans who are like you know we want to see Otani go for this or like unwritten rules or whatever which is even more ridiculous because you know generally I'm fine with uh working your way on however you can it's not like this game was wildly out of hand anyway or that it was super late in the game. But beyond that, the pitcher just did that himself. How can you be mad at an Astro for just responding in kind?

But that was immensely amusing. So, yeah, he's, I mean, just every skill he possesses, he was showing them all off in that game. Yeah, and he's, like, booking it down the line for that bunt single just yeah booking it down there and then like they were throwing over and he was like diving back to first and you know i don't know whether they're trying to tire him out or whether it was just hey he's a legitimate stolen base threat so you gotta throw over there but oh man it's just the best it was the best and it was a funny thing because i had stepped away for a minute and then come back i had sort of lost track of where the angels were in the in the lineup and so you know

i i watch jordan alvarez fly out and i watch kyle tucker called out on strikes and i see yuli gurel go down swinging and he's another one where it's like this guy puts together really good at bats gurel is another one of those guys from like if he is able to do something here like if anyone's going to be able to it's probably going to be a guy like him and he goes down swinging and then i thought to myself okay i can like spend the next half inning getting part of the edit that i have to do down and i couldn't do that because there was otani ready for me we're just we've said it before on this podcast with respect to otani we've said it about mike trout we've said it about any number of guys we just get to watch some really fantastic baseball we are so lucky to

be able to watch these guys these guys are incredible and uh it wasn't a perfect game but boy he it was a special outing it was still a special outing even if it wasn't perfect so yeah i feel bad for jeremy pena who by the way is off to a great start and is like dramatically out hitting carl's career thus far and just like he looks good he looks like a good player to me but the pitcher he has faced most often thus far in his brief big league career is shohei otani who he's faced five times and he struck out four of those times and he has looked completely helpless against that otani slider so rough introduction to the big leagues but generally things have gone quite well for him yeah he's i think i mentioned that i i ducked out to see the d-backs play the astros when when

houston was here and that was the first time i had gotten to see pena in person and he looked great you know i'm gonna do i'm gonna do the stereotypical scouting trope he's just he looks like a ball player you know know, like the body's great. It's funny, though, because he has had various, like, little winter ball stints, including in Lidom. And so whenever he comes to the plate, I hear his name in the Lidom announcer voice, Jerry Pena. And, like, that's neither here nor there, but I think about it every time.

All right. Well, this is a good segue into the way I want to end this, which is with a stat blast. Stat blast. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Daystablast. Okay, as a reminder, the Statblast segment is sponsored by StatHead, which is itself powered by Baseball Reference. You all, I hope, know and love StatHead, the most powerful collection of sports research tools on the internet.

As StatHead puts it, you can go to StatHead.com and you can look up virtually anything you want to about not just mlb but also other sports leagues if you are so inclined so you can look up which season had the most 30 30 players or what pitcher had the most 10 strikeout games or who hit the most homers in any 100 game span you can do all of those things and more with stat head which we avail ourselves of often whether we are sponsored by stat head or not so please do go to stathead.com and use the coupon code wild20 that is w-i-l-d-2-0 and you can get 20 off of the 8080 annual subscription to StatHead. And you will encourage Baseball Reference to continue sponsoring us. It is obviously up the alley of our listeners and us, for that matter. We use it all the time and recommend that you do as well.

So StatHead.com, code WILD20. In fact, it's so second nature for me to use StatHead that I forgot that I already used it once today because we got an email from a listener, Eli, who wanted to know whether Dante Bichette, who has 5.7 career baseball reference war, has the lowest war total for someone with that many all-star game appearances or with multiple appearances at least. I looked that up in a second on StatHead and the answer is no, actually. at least I looked that up in a second on StatHead and the answer is no actually there are four players who have made four or more all-star appearances who had lower career wars than Dante Bichette although they were all catchers in fairness so maybe they had some extra framing value that's not accounted for Raleigh Hemsley was a five-time all-star with 3.8 career war so he's the record holder there. Or among players who made multiple

All-Star games, in his case three, he made two in one year when they used to have two All-Star games in a single season. Hal Smith, another catcher, he had 1.9 war. But Bichette, certainly unusual among non-catchers in recent years. Defensive stats and ballpark adjustments are not kind to him, but there you go. A little bonus stat blast from Stathead before the actual stat blast, which starts now. So this Otani outing, coupled with a few pieces that have been published this week, have driven me to a conclusion, an epiphany about baseball. I now know how to fix it. I know how to fix all that ails the sport in one fell swoop. So here's what I'm going to say. One thing that Otani has done this season is throw harder,

which Ben noted in his piece. He didn't go into how or why he's thrown harder. What's happened is it's not that he has upped his max velo. It's that he's upped his average velo. So this season, his hardest pitch has been 100.3. Last season, his hardest was 101.0. So it's not that he has found deeper reserves of velocity. It's just that his average velo, which is up more than two miles per hour from 95.7 to 97.8. That is because he has not taken anything off. And last year he did that regularly, actually more than anyone, maybe anyone other than Carlos Rodan. I wrote about that in an end of season piece about Otani.

He had sort of a Verlander-esque pattern of taking something off, or if you want to put it this way, adding something on in tight spots in high leverage moments with runners on base etc he would throw harder he would reserve his best stuff for then now it seems like he's just kind of going all out and that could be a result of the fact that well he feels stronger and healthier now it could also i think be a result of the otani rule because he no longer has to worry about the angels being shorthanded in the lineup now right when he gets pulled from the game because he gets to stay in as dh so before he had even more incentive to try

to lengthen those outings now he can just kind of go all out and he is and so that might be another reason why he could be more effective on an inning per inning basis this season and so this start that he had was kind of emblematic of a start in 2022 right because he was nasty but he only went six and he was pulled after 81 pitches and you know you talk about uh Roki Sasaki being pulled from his perfect game attempt after completing his first perfect game and then Clayton Kershaw of course and just generally looking around the league you have all sorts of pitchers who were being pulled at points of dominant outings where in the past they might have been allowed to go longer and so I was thinking

about this this week because Russell Carlton friend of the show frequent former guest he published a piece at baseball prospectus which was great i think it sort of summed up something that we're all aware of but maybe haven't put into words and he wrote that basically like all pitching is relieving now even starting pitching is relieving to a greater extent than it has been and just quoting for him here there's been for a while an unspoken shift in pitching usage that we need to talk about everyone knows that the average start now lasts just a bit more than five innings and even if you control for the opener effect and look for the pitcher who recorded the most number of outs for each team that doesn't move the needle much either it's a relievers league but i don't

think that fully captures what's going on here. I think that this normally gets labeled as pitchers aren't as able to sustain as they used to be, when that's not the case. If you want to understand modern pitching usage, you need to remember seven words. Everyone is a reliever, even the starters. And he goes on to say, I'd argue that the idea of a predetermined endpoint to an outing is what really launched the reliever evolution. You know, as he's written before, we now have this invasive species, not feral cats, but one inning relievers who've kind of become the dominant mode of relief pitching. And Russell writes, they were pitchers who didn't start, but they were failed starters and they pitched like starters. The modern reliever is a new species of baseball player. We're now seeing those predetermined endpoints moving into the starting rotation.

It might be six innings or 18 batters or 100 pitches, but the effects are going to be similar. With an end in sight, a starter can ration the energy meter to fit the job. It's a much larger job in terms of innings covered but there's an end point if end points were what made pitchers into relievers then just about everyone is a reliever now and so speaking of the clayton kershaw outing he says we're going to have another one of these at some point a pitcher being pulled after five or six no hit or perhaps even perfect innings i mean we did have that with you darvish right or yeah yeah so that's happened and then it happened with mania right right after that so this happens and while it will be a rarity

he says there will be the more common days when a starter is shown to the shower after five or six innings of one run ball the fans will wonder why the answer is that if you have an end point you have to stick to it and what they'll probably miss is that the end point might just have been the reason for the good outing. In the third inning, maybe the pitcher reached back for a little extra to get that key strikeout in a situation that might have spiraled into a three-run inning. But knowing that it was going to be a five-and-dive anyway, the pitcher might have said, well, why not here?

So if you're one of those people who saw the Kershaw decision and thought that the end was near, you were probably more right than you thought. Everyone is a reliever now, and it's the end points that have changed everything. So if you know you're not going to go more than five or six, then you're just going to go all out. And so it's not that you can look at someone who is lifted after six and say, oh, well, he could have gone seven or eight or something and could have kept up that pace. The reason why he was so dominant for those five or six innings might be that he knew that was all he needed and so he used up everything in the tank right and justin choi wrote for fan crafts

at the same time about the boost in pitcher velocity that we've seen this season which is something i brought up on our most recent episode that we thought we had reached a velocity plateau but it doesn't look like it that was uh just the base camp or a point along the ascent. And there will be a new summit in our future when it comes to velocity. And some of that is that the hunter greens of the world come along and they're throwing super hard. Some of that though, is that established pitchers are able to gain velocity, whether it's through some sort of a velocity development program or whether it's this whether

it's that they are not pacing themselves anymore they are just going all out now and so i wanted to try to quantify that and with some help from lucas apostolaris of baseball prospectus i did so with otani last year it was really notable that the difference between his like 95th percentile velocity and his average velocity was 3.3 miles per hour. And that is a very large gap. So, you know, his average fastball was more than three ticks slower than when he would really reach back and dial it up for some of his fastest fastballs. This year so far, it's under two. It's 1.95.

So he has really changed his pitching pattern. And that is emblematic of the league as a whole. And if you look at the trend over time, and we have this data going back to 2008, and I will post the data and the graphs and the spreadsheets online and link on the show page hard to describe a graph on a podcast well there's one line that is going down at roughly this angle and then there's another line in a different color that is going down slightly more steeply yeah but basically there has been a decline almost every season of the pitch tracking data era between the average pitcher's 95th percentile four-seamer and his average four-seamer. And the same pattern shows up if you look at the gap between the 95th percentile four-seamer and the fifth percentile, so the fastest and slowest, like the full range between max and min. So the fastest and slowest, like the full range between max and min. And we're using percentiles here, not like the literally fastest and slow you know, this is weighted by playing time, by the number of four-seamers thrown, but

the average gap between the 95th percentile four-seamer and the average four-seamer for starting pitchers was 2.21. This season, so far, it's 1.61. And yeah, smallish sample, but it's been below 2 every year starting with 2019. And it was above 2 every year on record prior to that. So again, 2.21 to 1.61, which might not sound huge, but on a percentage basis, that is a pretty big difference. And it's gone down almost almost every single year there was a little bit of a rebound last year sure but prior to that it's basically been you know either steady

or or just creeping down year after year after year and the same if we look at the the full range the the max versus min like 2008 for starters the average difference between 95th percentile four-seamer and fifth percentile was 4.7. This year so far, it's 3.3, which is a huge drop off and a small sample, but it's been under four each of the past four seasons. And you could say the same about, you know, the other metric that I just cited. It's just been consistently lower and lower. And the gap seems to be shrinking more, especially in recent years, for starters than relievers. So this is true to some extent with relievers as well, where, you know, in 2008, the gap was 1.87. This year, it's 1.45 so far.

So again, it's lower, but it has decreased even more for starting pitchers because, you know, relievers were already kind of one inning arms for the most part in 2008. But we've seen a really drastic change in starting pitcher usage, even just during this period of, you know, 15 seasons or so. So this is intensifying, this is proceeding, and I think it is going to continue to. And I think that is dangerous. I think that is bad. And I think that something should be done to change this. And so let me quote from yet another piece

that was published this week, which is Jason Starks. And he did his 10 numbers to know for the season. And a couple of those numbers were about pitcher usage and just, you know, the shortness of spring training and the injury risks and the use of relievers. So quoting from Jason here, we're coming off the most injury riddled season in history. So no one should be shocked to here, we're coming off the most injury riddled season in history. So no one should be shocked to learn that we're headed for one just like it after the second shortened camp in three years. According to Derek Rhodes, who monitors injuries for baseball prospectus, there were 159 non-COVID injured list placements in the first 12 days of the season,

an average of more than 13 per day. That's nearly identical to last year. Shoulder and torso injuries are up. Upper leg injuries are down, but the trend remains the same and it's won every team fears. And the greatest fears are reserved for starting pitchers. So an anonymous AL executive said,

our concern is starting pitchers. I don't think there's any doubt that would be the biggest concern of every team with very few exceptions. We didn't have enough time to get their pitch counts up stark continues you know what almost everybody in baseball seems to agree on there are too many freaking pitching changes you know what everybody in front offices around baseball is willing to do about it pretty much nothing yeah because it's so

easy said one exec to play plug and play and go get another arm. So what MLB is doing about it, Stark says, two new rules, both aimed at this bullpen epidemic, go into effect next month. Roster limits, no more than 13 active pitchers on a staff, which we've been waiting for for a while, and a cap on how many times any player can be freely optioned to the minors in a given season five. So will the new rules work?

Quote, Schedule stark says then that last arm in the Bullpen guess who's coming up and guess Who's going down quote as much As the commissioner's office may try to dissuade Us from doing things said the same exec There aren't enough guardrails In place even five options is Still a lot you can still move a guy up And down once a month and that's what's going to happen Most teams are building

Pitching staffs around relief pitching now not Starting pitching said one exec i know The commissioner's office is trying to find ways to incentivize letting starting pitchers go five, six, seven innings because those great starting pitcher matchups are what fans want to see, but it's not working. I watched minor league games this spring where it seemed like every pitcher threw 70 to 80 percent breaking balls. If you do that, you're not throwing six or seven innings, and that's where the game is heading in the age of Trackman and Rapsodo. You're not throwing six or seven innings, and that's where the game is heading in the age of Trackman and Rapsodo. We mentioned that on our last episode, that this is the first season on record with more non-fastballs than fewer fastballs. Another executive in this article says, every team wants starters who can go deep.

There isn't a manager in baseball who doesn't want Max Scherzer. No manager is rushing to replace his best starter after five innings and put in his fifth best reliever except for Dave Roberts I guess but that's just a fact but there are only a certain number of guys who can actually do that have great stuff that doesn't fade our matchup proof can give you both quality and bulk the problem is that starting pitchers are having a harder time than ever staying healthy and carrying bulk and I don't know what the answer is we've tried just about everything we haven't found anything concrete that we know is going to work I am here to tell you what the answer is. We've tried just about everything. We haven't found anything concrete that we know is going to work. I am here to tell you what the answer is. And the answer is that we have to have even stricter limits and caps on the number of pitchers who can be on the roster at any one time. I think 13 is a start. I mean, it gets the idea out there. It sets some precedent,

but I don't think that's going to do it. You're still going to be able to carry five starting pitchers and eight relievers at any given time, and you can still shuffle some of those relievers, right? I think it needs to be stricter. I think it needs to be 12, 11, you know, maybe 10 is too strict, but I think we need to get down to that point because in my mind, that would fix everything. Like this, more than any other single thing you could do, I really think that this would address a lot of potential problems. Like it would be something that provides solutions on a lot of fronts at the same time. So one is this idea of pitchers just not pacing themselves, which we've been talking about here.

That's the subject of this step last. Pitchers are just going max effort. And as further evidence of that beyond just the numbers that show that to be the case, let me play a quick clip from an interview with rookie and top prospect for the Mariners, Matt Brash. Who just did an interview with Rob and top prospect for the Mariners, Matt Brash, who just did an interview with Rob Freeman, the pitching ninja.

And here's about a 30-second clip of him. That's kind of when I got to the Mariners too. That's kind of what they're telling me. Before, I'd been trying to like spot up my fastball in corners and throw my slider down and away every pitch and stuff. And they're just like, you don't have to do that. You just have to fill up the zone, have your catcherer set up middle and you're not going to hit middle every time you're going to spray the ball so I pretty much have the catcher set up middle and I throw my stuff full effort like I don't take a pitch off I don't baby anything like I'm throwing it as hard

as I can every pitch so that's brash just saying yeah I'm throwing as hard as I can on every pitch max effort. And that's what the team is telling him to do. So it's not just like, you know, some brash young rookie, so to speak, who is just heedless of the future. Like, this is what pitchers are being taught to do. I hear you saying. No, I'm just really proud of you.

You know, I just, I don't know if I've been a good influence. Your habits. I don't know if they're good or bad habits, but yeah. I'm proud of you. You know, I just, I don't know if I've been a good influence. Your habits. I don't know if they're good or bad habits, but yeah. I'm proud of you. So this is what pitchers are being taught to do. You can't blame the pitchers for doing this because for one thing, like it works. It makes them more effective. Matt Brash, pretty nasty and he throws hard.

And also it's on the teams who are telling the pitchers to do this. But this is a problem in a number of ways. It's a problem because pitchers are gassed earlier because they expect to be gassed and they're OK with being gassed and their teams tell them to be gassed and empty out the tank. That's one thing. But also, I really think that is responsible for the increase in injury rate that we've seen here. I mean, yes, maybe it has to do with the compressed spring training and the pandemic shortened years and all of that, but it's not just that. I mean, we've seen injury rates rise

even as teams have been more responsible when it comes to workloads and when it comes to innings limits, right? And yet guys are still blowing out their arms constantly. And I think it's because if anything, like if I had to choose between the old model of, you know, maybe you throw 120 pitches, but not all of those pitches are max effort versus you throw 90 pitches, but all of them are all out at all times.

I think I might choose the former. I mean, yes, like you could abuse pitchers, you know, when they had no regard for pitch counts, obviously, like you could abuse pitchers, you know, when they had no regard for pitch counts, obviously, like especially for young pitchers and there were many careers ended. But I think we've gone so far when it comes to like a hundred pitches being a hard limit that we have kind of ignored the stress and the strain produced by these pitches disproportionately on a per pitch basis. And there's an article at the driveline baseball research blog from a few years ago that goes through the research up to that point about velocity and injury risk. And generally the thinking, at least at that time, was that yes,

throwing harder tends to correlate with higher injury risk, like from pitcher to pitcher i mean if you just look at like average velocity versus you know average days on the il or whatever some very blunt tool like that you will find that on the whole harder throwing pitchers tend to suffer more injuries or more arm injuries but the effect is much more pronounced when you look at individual pitchers and when they throw toward the top of their own velocity range. That's where the real danger is. So quoting from this piece, when you're watching a pitcher throw at the high end of his velocity spectrum, you can assume that he is experiencing higher levels of torque than usual. Velocity is a risk factor for injuries in professional pitchers because it is likely that the harder one pitcher throws, the more torque he experiences. It's difficult to compare torque among pitchers, but as one pitcher throws harder, he'll experience more stress. So in this AFSMI study that was referenced in this piece, it was recommended that pitchers should vary their velocities because the more they try to throw at high intent, the higher torques they're experiencing.

And as this driveline piece notes, asking pitchers to throw slower often means asking them to give away a competitive advantage for an unmeasurable and unknowable gain in health, which they might not be able to benefit from because throwing at lower velocity could mean worse statistics and a shorter career. So yes, if you're Jacob deGrom and you're unhittable at 99 do you need to throw 100 maybe not necessarily but no one else is jacob de grom and so for most pitchers hey they need to worry about like game to game you know they can't do long-term planning and nebulous benefits they have to just be all out

all the time because that's what they're being told to do. And that's what they think will make the money and what will keep them on the roster. So I get it. That's why you need the league to step in and not say, well, you can't throw hard. miles per hour or something like you you have a automatic ball assessed or something i don't think that kind of idea is really workable but if you just put this roster restriction in place if you say that you can only have 12 pitchers or 11 pitchers or whatever you determine the best number to be that could address so many problems because on the one hand pitchers will be forced to pace themselves right you will have to hold something in reserve to go deeper into games because you know that there won't be just an enormous bullpen with an endless parade of hard-throwing arms behind you. And so you will have to hold a little bit back, which will give a number of benefits. One, starting pitchers will last longer in games, which we like and which we miss. We like starting pitchers going deeper into games and not having the parade of relievers every

time. So that's a benefit. I think it would decrease injury risk. Even if you had longer outings and you threw more pitches cumulatively, if you were taking something off and not throwing max effort every time, I think that would actually help with the injury risk. And, you know, not having the break of pitchers hitting now, which I'm all in favor of universal DH, but you don't get to take that plate appearance off anymore. Right. So you kind of have to be more max effort because of that too. But if you know that you have to pace yourself, then you will take a little off. And I think it might actually save your arm. And there might be other benefits, too, right? Because if pitchers are not throwing as hard, well, maybe there's more contact, right? Maybe there are more hits, higher batting averages. So you might have positive effects when it comes to offense as well. You'd have fewer pitching changes. And so it helps you with time of game i mean just like every trend that we talk about as potentially off-putting and worrisome i really think this just like cleanly and neatly

and efficiently and with a minimum of heavy-handed intervention can actually help you and it's something that i think you could sell more easily than, say, moving the mound back, which I've been an advocate of. And, you know, I think the effects of that are a little less clear. And also there's just more resistance and, you know, less recent precedent and all of that. But I think this you could sell. Like if they put the 13 pitcher limit in place, well, you know, then it's just, okay, we're knocking that down a pitcher or two, right? I mean, you can do that. It like uh with the three batter minimum or something i mean you know you always had some minimum where you had to face at least one batter well now you have to face at

least three like it's it's workable and i find that less distasteful than something like the shift for instance which is meddling with in-game strategy right with this you know and it's like oh you can't stand there you have to stand here with this it's like you can only carry a certain number of this type of player now what you do with those players how you deploy them in games that's up to you you can manage your staff however you want to manage it but you only have this number of pitchers available to you that to me like sure if there were no problem i wouldn't say we should limit that you know just uh have it be you know the market decides right which worked for quite a while but now it doesn't seem to be working as well if you

did that then i think there could be issues i guess with like you know pitchers losing their jobs you know i don't know their jobs. You know, I don't know how like the union would feel about this. I mean, you're not taking away roster spots, but you are maybe taking roster spots away from pitchers and you're changing the balance of roster composition. But that balance has changed as it is. I mean, it's already changed in the other direction, right? So like, you know, hitters have lost roster spots now to pitchers. So now you're just, you know, the pendulum swings back in the other direction. So I don't know.

Am I off base here? Like to me, this is as close as you can come to a panacea that is like not something that would make the product worse in my mind and might actually be something you could sell. Ben, you just said so many words. I feel strongly about this subject. You said a lot of words. I think I agree with most of them. I like the idea of having some understanding of our roster because I think you're right that like 13 is probably not a tight enough restriction to really curtail the behavior that we have seen from teams lately. And that really tamping down on the number of available pitchers is probably right. I do fret about the injury component of that.

injury component of that and so i wonder if one solution is to have like that tight restriction as you say on like an active game day roster but have more pitchers than that available who aren't subject to option shenanigans right so have have it be more like the nfl where you have like your active big league roster but then you are on any given day sort of declaring here are active guys this day and only a certain number of them can be pitchers so that you have more sort of day-to-day optionality in terms of the guys that you're using and you're not worried about overtaxing anyone and you can sort of rotate guys through. And teams already do this to some extent by saying that like some guys aren't available because of usage,

but like we could maybe formalize that process. I don't know if that is an unnecessary step or if it would even really address the problem that I'm a bit worried about. So I do think that like the research at a driveline tends to be good. Like we probably should note that like the place that makes guys throw harder

is probably not going to tell you it's bad for guys to throw hard. Yeah. We could say that. Is that unfair? Well, except in this case, they are kind of saying that. Yeah, I guess they are. I mean, they've contributed to the rise of velocity for sure.

Like, you know, they're not innocent here. Like they have contributed to this. Right. I'm not saying they're guilty either. Right. Yeah, we probably need tighter restrictions on the number of guys because absent that, they will just always have 13 on there, and that still affords a fair number of pitching changes. But I don't want there to be other knock-on effects of that

where you have guys that get used a lot of days in a row, and maybe they'll just manage that. But maybe we just have active game day rosters and then we worry about it less. So you say like, that guy's tired. He can't pitch today. Yeah. Put in the non-tired guy.

And you still have those dudes. They still get to float around, but you're using fewer of them in game. That doesn't lead to deeper benches. So that's a downside. Because we do love a deep bench. We want the vroom vroom guy. I mean we want we do we want the vroom vroom guy i mean we don't want specifically the vroom vroom guy because that's bad strategy but we want

the potential for offensive specialists in a way that if the roster spots are still being filled by pitchers even if we are curtailing the number who can appear in any given game that doesn't achieve that goal but we still maybe see fewer guys pitching i don't know i'm right another way you could do this is just to like you know have the same roster size or as you said kind of a floating roster and a taxi squad or whatever and then you could have limits on the number of pitchers you can use in a single game you know you can only make this number of pitching changes let's say to me maybe it addresses some of those concerns you brought up. But it's also, I think, like more intrusive or interventionist or like, you know, to say like you can't change pitchers here because you already changed pitchers X times in this game.

And then, you know, you'd get some weird ones where like just some guys got hurt. Maybe you'd have an exemption for injuries, but then that could be manipulated. And then like, you know, maybe it was just a day where a few guys didn't have it. Right. And then do you just have to let someone stay out there to just wear it for a while because you have that limit? I just I kind of like just having the broad limit of you're only allowed this many players and, you know, do with that what you will. You know, you have this many toys in the toolbox and you can arrange them however you want but that's the constraint and i also think that that would actually add some interesting strategy too right like right now there's not that much strategy surrounding like pitching changes you

know and i don't think there was that much even when pitchers hit really but it's often just like you know third times through the order or guys out of gas or whatever it's just like automatic you're not surprised when someone is pulled but if you had this situation then every decision would not just be how it affects today's game but how it affects tomorrow's and the day after and september right i mean you'd have to weigh those workloads and there'd be a lot of thought that goes into that, a lot of cost benefit analysis that we could kind of play armchair managers along with at home. So I think that is another perk of this. So I think there could be a risk in implementing this like overnight, you know, like mid-season. And 10 feels like a very small number oh yeah i

mean you you'd want to go one at a time i think 10 is too few because you got you have to carry five starters some teams carry six so then you only have four guys you only got your that's too few yeah i mean you know there were eras of baseball where that was the case or there were fewer relievers than that even but you couldn't go from where we are right now to like doing this tomorrow because pitchers are conditioned now to go all out all the time so you would have to have some period of like easing them into this and being like hey throughout almost all of baseball history there was the idea of you know the christy matthewson pitching in a pinch right you'd take a little off here and put a little more on there and you would pace yourself.

And that allowed players to go deeper into games and to pitch more often on back-to-back days. And yes, there was abuse that happened then too. But I think we could find some happy medium, maybe, between having like a lot of very short outings and long breaks in between them and you know just piling pitches and innings on guys arms in an irresponsible way i think there is a happy medium and i think we need to do something to curtail this max effort all the time and that it could really have some broad benefits and i think i've read this quote before from the David Halberstam book, The Teammates, which I like a lot. And this quote is the former Cardinals pitcher Harry Brickine, who is talking to the younger Cardinals pitcher Murray Dixon. And he says, Murray, times are changing. You can't do what you used to do anymore. You've got to go out there and throw as hard as you can for as long as you can. That quote was 1947. So this idea, you know, like you've had to be probably more max effort as the caliber of competition has increased year after year after year. But I feel like that last part of what Brokine said back then, for as long as you can, like that's out the window now.

It's just as hard as you can for not long. And you know in advance that it's not going to be long. And there are all kinds of knock-on effects that come from that. So again, this is my new position. This is what I'm advocating now. If I were commissioner for a day, if I could make one single rule change that I think would have some sweeping positive effects on the sport, it would be this, a stricter cap on the number of pitchers you can carry on your active roster. Yeah. Okay.

I'm here for this experimentation. We have to start small and work backward. I have to bring some breaking news to the pod, though. Mickey? Are you ready? Yeah. Ben. Yeah.

So Mickey did not get his 3,000th hit. Okay. But can I tell you why? Why? Okay. I'm going to read out what happened in this inning, and then you're going to – I want to hear your honest reaction.

You tell me what you think. Okay. So this is the eighth inning. This is the bottom of the eighth. So Victor Reyes doubled and then robbie grossman singled and then jonathan scope walked so we might conclude from that that the bases are loaded and in fact they were no outs right okay okay so then heimer condolario grounds into a double play victor reyes was out at home robbie grossman made it to third scope toope to second. Candelario out at first. Right? Okay. They threw Reyes out at home. They got

a hammer Candelario at first. Then, two outs. They intentionally walked Miguel Cabrera. Oh, no. Boo. Yeah. So, they intentionally walk Miggy. And then, as if to say

on the part of the baseball gods,in brun i did not care for the cut of your jib austin meadows doubled and robbie grossman scored and jonathan scope scored and miggy made it to third and then eric haas grounded out and that concluded the inning and the tigers would hold on to win three to zero but first of all i am not convinced that this was even sound strategy but even if it were look we spent we spent a good part of a podcast not long ago talking about how your role as a baseball player is to try to press your advantage you are trying to win you're trying to win and you should try to win if you're blowing out the other team and you should try if you are you know on the wrong side of a no-hitter or a perfecto you know we probably

wouldn't have booed nico goodrum you know he's just trying to get on base that's his job as a baseball player i hate this it makes me feel very angry i am surprised by the amount of anger that i feel and so i'm sure we will um noodle on that more and i cannot wait i have already bothered one ben clemens to write about this for fangraphs.com but uh it is that it was a choice it was like a very active choice and i feel like the baseball gods have spoken about what they think about it. Yeah. And, you know, if this were 2006, Miggy could have reached out and gotten his 3000th hit on the intentional ball. Right. But it is no longer 2006 and he can't do that anymore, sadly. So he just had to walk to first.

But, yeah, that's deflating, I'm sure, for the fans in attendance. It's spoil sport, no fun. Although it is kind of nice, I guess, that Miggy can command that kind of respect at this stage of his career. Whether he should have is another conversation. But kind of nice that even now, as he is, you know, in the latter stages in the Twilight here, they still didn't want to face him in that situation. I guess that's kind of cool. But yeah, okay. I don't know.

I think it's terrible. I think it's a crime. I think that Aaron Poon should go to prison. He got booed in a profound way by the Assembled Tigers fans. People were very angry about this choice, quite exercised. And so I can't believe it. David Borla of Fangrass.com tweeted that miguel cabrera hasn't been intentionally walked in his last 625 plate appearances

wow it's a lot of them anyway i just felt like we had to bring some closure to this saga i know that tomorrow let's see tomorrow they play the rockies at home but that is an evening game so we are planning to record earlier than the evening tomorrow so we will have to take up hopefully a celebration of miggy's uh 3000th hit next week and the decision to intentionally walk him at the 2999th will probably still be reverberating around baseball Twitter. Boo. Yeah.

Okay. Well, thanks for your indulgence as I evangelized my new pet rule change. I will probably write about this at some point, but thanks for helping me workshop it in podcast form first. Meant to mention, by the way, a pretty good way to sum up Otani's singular dominance on Wednesday is maybe that he reached base in the first inning as many times as he allowed his opponents to reach base in six innings. It's not a bad little fun fact. In Ben Clemens's Otani blog, he says, I'll make a ludicrous comparison here. Recent vintage

Otani looks like a high velocity version of peak Corey Kluber. So Corey Kluber, to refresh your memory, won multiple Cy Young Awards. Otani, like that, but throws harder. Not a bad comp. And that's just the pitching part. An update on attendance at the Oakland Coliseum, 4,429, not counting cats, paid to see the A's beat the Orioles on Thursday.

I should also note we talked on our last episode about whether the Canadian vaccine mandate and the trips to Toronto would produce more vaccinated players. We talked about some of the players who did not get vaccinated when they made trips to Toronto. But it does appear that some, at least, have had this function as an extra incentive to finally get the jab. So it would appear that the Yankees' last couple of holdouts have gotten vaccinated. that the Yankees' last couple of holdouts have gotten vaccinated. And so Aaron Boone has said that all of the Yankees will be eligible to make their trip to Toronto in the first week of May. So that's nice.

Nice to hear that that is working in at least some cases. The second episode of Better Call Saul that I recapped on the aforementioned podcast this week is called Carrot and Stick, and it's all about which one works better, punishing people for not doing something or incentivizing people for doing something. Better Call Saul seems to suggest that the punishment tends to work better, and I suppose that this tends to suggest that too. And lastly, we got a bunch of responses to our discussion of replay review signals, and I will read this one email here from listener West, who says,

Listening to your follow-up on the overhead headphones gesture being the current symbol for replay review and the mention that in NPB it's drawing a screen. A couple of other examples in sports that could be used. In soccer, the referee also draws a box in the air to indicate that they are going to use VAR, the video assistant referee. Managers can't challenge in soccer, but instead the referee who is off the field watching the game on TV monitors can buzz down to the referee on the field that they should look at something that was questionable. In the NFL, of course, you have throwing a red flag. In the NBA, the universal sign for when a referee will do a video replay review for a challenge or a close call is to

twirl your index figure as you point up, I think signifying rewinding the tape for review. Wes says I haven't watched enough NBA to know if coaches make the same motion when they are issuing a formal challenge. So thanks to everyone who wrote in about the way that that works in other sports. 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, Tim Collingwood, Penelope Maddy, Oz Jensen, Devon Brannon, and David Harris. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include a couple of playoff live streams,

access to the Patreon-exclusive Discord group, Discordantly Wild, and monthly bonus pods hosted by me and Meg. You can contact us via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod,

and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. I had planned a double-barreled stat blast today, but this one went long, so I will get to the next one probably tomorrow. And we met Gabriel Arias today,

but he's too good for a major leaguer segment. He's too highly touted a prospect. So we will probably bring back that segment with some more obscure major leaguers next time. And we'll answer some emails too. So we'll be back with one more episode before the end of this week. Talk to you soon. Out of car, I don't know how I'm gonna go in. I had a drink the other day. Opinions were like kittens, I was giving them away. I had a drink the other day. I had a lot to say.

And I said, you will come down soon too. You will come down too soon. You will come down soon too. Soon enough, you will come down.