Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1841: The Buxton Bops Here

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the unsealing of the so-called “Yankees Letter” and what, if anything, it revealed about the past prevalence of sign stealing, the end of NPB pitcher Roki Sasaki’s consecutive outs streak and Matt Shoemaker’s bid for perfection, the White Sox’s injury-plagued, disconcerting slump to start the season, Michael Conforto’s […]

From the South, South Bronx on out to Queensbridge From Hollis, Queens right down to Bainbridge From Castle Hill to the Lower East Side From 1010 Winds to Lottie 5 Dear New York, this is a love letter To you and how you brought us together We can't say enough about all you Jews Cause in the city we're ourselves and electric too

Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten From the Battery to the top of Manhattan Asian, Middle East, Third and Latin Black, black, New York, you make it happen Hello and welcome to episode 1841 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. Well, we have read the Yanke FanCrafts. Hello, Meg. Hello. Well, we have read the Yankees letter.

It's out there in the world for all to see, the bombshell Yankees letter. So what do you think? Well, I'm already tired of the discourse around this. It's one of the things that I think. So I guess we'll go through the particulars in a moment here i mean my my sort of broad takeaway is that this is largely consistent with what we expected based on prior reporting around the yankees and the red socks sort of tit for tat sign stealing allegations and the run-up to the league saying no really you guys stop now. And so I think that this is pretty consistent with that.

I do think that this behavior clearly inspired Major League Baseball to implement more stringent rules around sign stealing. They felt a need having observed this behavior and whatever they saw in the Red Sox to say, hey, knock it off though. That's not what we mean by what is acceptable sign stealing. So I find the idea that this is somehow acceptable behavior because it was widespread or because it isn't as egregious

as what the Astros ended up doing in their own sign stealing scandal. Maybe the Yankees thought about it, but they're like banging trash cans. To go, shama, do that. Sully the pinstripes. But so I think that like it is probably important for us to acknowledge that this behavior raised alarm bells for people in the league office and said, oh, this could this could get out of hand. This is out of hand.

And if you guys do this after this date, it will carry with it much more stringent punishment. I'm going to utilize one of my few pop culture references, but there was an episode of Law and Order from roughly a billion years ago when the show and the universe were new. The defendant in the case did some, they did a new crime. Maybe it involved computers. I don't know. They did something that was either new or uniquely horrible. Their defense attorney was like, now, now, now, Jack McCoy, not so fast. That's not illegal. And then they like turn to the judge

and they're like, careful, your honor, you're gonna get overturned on appeal. And the judge is like, this is the kind of case that inspires new law. And I think that like, that's the lens through which to view this behavior and the behavior of the Red Sox. Don't worry, Yankees fans,

we think many people were up to no good, but the league clearly looked at this and was like, we can't have this. This is bad. I don't know. I don't want to underreact to things like this. I don't want to overreact to things like this. I don't want to really have a lot to say about how people are talking

about their over or underreaction. to say about how people are talking about their over or under reaction. But this was bad and was made to be against the rules in a much more explicit way. And I hope that we continue to see, that we see very proactive monitoring of the use of new technology and timely intervention. And I will not, I don't know that the intervention here wasn't timely, but you know, we want when we have identified that there is a problem that sort of moves the competitive balance of the game and tilts and sort of knocks it off its

axis. You want the league to intervene very swiftly and to say, here is the, here's the line. And once you cross it, there will be real consequences. And when you're flirting with it we might tell

you to knock off your flirtation but I don't know like we have to continue to monitor this stuff it's not as if we're going to wake up tomorrow and the game is going to be suddenly devoid of incentives to push the boundaries of the rules and sometimes when we are presented with new technology

or use of technology that is new, like it requires making new law. So here we go. Yeah, I'm sure some Yankees fans will interpret this as our good name is cleared and we're innocent. That's certainly how the statement from the Yankees reads. Yes, right. And some Astros fans, I'm sure, will say,

see, everyone was doing it and we are no worse than anyone else. And I don't know that either of those interpretations is entirely correct. I think this is not that big a deal. There's nothing thatkees were fined $100,000 to charity for this behavior here. But really, yeah, they were doing what we knew that the Red Sox were doing later, even. The fact that they were decoding signs in real time during games using the video room and then relaying those decoded signs to hitters or to players who were on second base, right? So that they would have the cracked code, and they could then relay those interpreted signs to the batter. So this required someone being on second base, basically. So it's much more limited than the Astros scheme, but still not what you're supposed to do. They were using technology during games to decode signs and they were passing those decoded signs to players and i guess technically the yankee statement

stresses the fact that they were fined for like illegal use of dugout phone equipment not yeah sign stealing itself which is like what did you use the phone for though yeah right you weren't you weren't calling in a pizza yeah they were not fine for like calling down to get someone warming up or whatever like they were fine for passing sign stealing information using this phone yeah no no one in the dugout was like i was supposed to call my mom yesterday and i forgot oh she's gonna be so mad you know that's not what they were up to. What was illegal was passing this information on via electronic methods, not the actual decoding of it, even though there was already a rule on the books back then that said no equipment may be used for the purpose of stealing signs or conveying information designed to give a club an advantage. And on the one hand, I sort of understand that because, well, if you're just doing your decoding, doing your code breaking in the replay room and you never share that information with anyone, well, no harm done, I guess. Or if you're using that footage to crack the code after the game and prepare you for the next game, also not against the rules.

So it is kind of the real time communication of that intel that crosses the line. intel that crosses the line, but you're really leaving the door open for further abuses there if you say that actually using this equipment to decode the signs, that's not the problem. It's only the problem if you use some electronic means to communicate what you found. Plus the whole situation was sort of obscured and became as much of a subject of intrigue as it did because at the time, Rob Manfred didn't explain what was happening here, what the Yankees were doing. It was just something or other involving dugout phones. Who knew what? Anyway, now we know, courtesy of this unsealed letter from Manfred to Brian Cashman.

This was the Yankees were documented to have been doing this in 2015 and 2016, right? And the difference with the other teams is that we know that the Red Sox continued to do this in 2018. We know that the Astros were doing it in 2018, too. And, of course, they had their much more involved scheme with the camera and the trash cans and everything in 2017. So this is more limited and did not continue as far as this letter establishes beyond when Manfred laid down the law a little bit and said, hey, stop doing this or you're going to be punished more severely. So that's what separates the Yankees from the Red Sox, let's say. I do find it amusing that these teams were just constantly accusing each other of sidestealing. They're like, I demand an investigation. And then the other team was like, I demand a counter investigation.

And so as Andy Martino's report at SNY says, in addition to the Yankee letter, there is a Red Sox letter and many more letters as teams asked MLB to investigate one another regarding sidestealing. So that is amusing that the Yankees were like, hey, they're using Apple Watches over there. You should look into that. And then the Red Sox was, well, you should look into what the Yankees were like, hey, they're using Apple Watches over there. You should look into that. And then the Red Sox was, well, you should look into what the Yankees were doing. And so you just get these warring investigations. But as far as we know, Yankees were not doing a banging scheme and were not using Apple Watches or whatever. So you can draw some distinctions here. And I guess

one potential takeaway is that there were probably plenty of teams that were doing this much in that era just because no one had really explicitly told them to stop and maybe mlb had failed to anticipate the fact that when you have this video replay equipment just down the hall from the dugout teams were going to find some nefarious use for that unless they were explicitly instructed not to and maybe even if unless they were explicitly instructed not to. And maybe even if they were explicitly instructed not to. So, you know, we know that the Yankees were doing this. We know the Red Sox and Astros were doing this. There have been various other accusations that have surfaced about other teams at other times.

And I'm sure it was somewhat pervasive, which doesn't necessarily make it right or moral, but makes it unsurprising. And so clearly there had to be some kind of crackdown here because teams throughout the long history of baseball have always used whatever means were available to them to try to get an edge. And I don't even know what edge this provided. It is possible that there wasn't much of one, if any. But of course, teams were going to take advantage of the resources that were at their disposal if they were not stopped. So this specific method, there have been crackdowns, there have been observers, there has been, you know, cutdowns in the video equipment at times. And so hopefully they have stopped this one way of cheating.

And ultimately, inevitably, there will be some other way that comes up and a whole new scandal for us to discuss. I won't have a name like the banging scheme, though. No. And I do enjoy just the Yankee letter. Like, there was definitely a Streisand effect happening here, right? Because, I mean, the Yankees fought this thing being unsealed for years.

I mean, it was ordered by a judge to be unsealed years ago, and they've been appealing and protesting. And I guess I get why. I mean, obviously, like there are going to be people who are not going to really read the letter or understand the details and are just going to interpret this as, oh, the Yankees were stealing too, basically. So like if they want to avoid just being associated with this in any way, I guess I get why it would be advantageous to them to keep this out of public view. But I think it probably backfired in that there was just this whole mystique built up around the Yankees letter and what are they trying to hide and what don't they want us to know?

Like, I didn't expect there to be any super intriguing revelations in here. Just, you know, so much had been reported already. But the only thing that made me think that maybe there was something to hide there was that they were fighting so hard and i know they said it's like oh the legal principle of the thing and all that but you know that wasn't really why they were fighting this idle thing so probably i don't know if they could do it all over again i wonder whether they would you know, have it come out without all of the hubbub and just kind of die instead of persisting for years and building up anticipation that there would be some bombshell news in this letter. Like we are lucky to have a number of very good investigative reporters who have decided that baseball is interesting enough to them to be the subject of their investigation.

So I was sort of of the mind that if there was some really dramatic revelation here that fundamentally altered our understanding of either the duration of their sign-stealing activity or the scope of it, that we probably would have heard about it before now because you know it seems like we hear about these things but there was a time when we didn't know about the banging scheme either so i was like what's in there what you got what you got so yeah i don't know like i think that we have had so many opportunities in the last couple of years to think about sort of where we want to draw the line in terms of you know what is pressing a competitive advantage versus pressing

it too far to the point of sort of undermining the competitive integrity of the game and i don't know that our understanding of that is is altered all that dramatically by what was reported today but i think it does underscore again as we are embarking on an era of say pitchcom where we have a new technology that we understand and i think with good reason i don't think we need to be you know overly paranoid about it but that we understand to be very secure that you know there will forever be incentive within the game to kind of try to crack the code or press as far as you can before you get your wrist slaps i mean one of the things that we also saw in this piece by andy was that subsequent to the start of the season there has already been a memo issued to teams by the league's vp on-field operations, Michael Hill, that they are not to use their replay room to zoom in on the new Pitchcom devices, right?

So there is going to continue to need to be really strict sort of observation and scrutiny of new tech as it enters the field so that it is being used in the way that it is intended. And, you know, we don't necessarily have to look at the league and say that they have a great track record with this stuff. Like, it at the league and say that they have a great track record with this stuff like it's not surprising to me that they didn't anticipate all the uses of replay they didn't anticipate that we would try to find an out in between you know the base in a guy's shoe so you know sometimes it's hard to see this stuff coming and sometimes there's sort of like an unexplained innocence to the way the league imagines teams are going to

implement and use new tech but we just gotta gotta keep an eye out you know i i don't love the surveillance state but i also think that we don't want another banging scheme on our hands all right well i doubt that is going to be the last word on the sign stealing scandal and uh if evan drelic is still working on his Astros book, then maybe there will be more revelations to come in the future. But that lays to rest at least the long and tortured saga of the Yankees letter. So we can close the book on that chapter, at least of the sign stealing story. So Roki Sasaki, he gave up a hit on his very first pitch of the game and that ended

his 52 batter streak of perfection. This was on Sunday in Japan. So two consecutive perfect starts, nine innings and eight innings, plus an additional batter in the start before that. And there was no suspense on Sunday because he gave it up immediately. And he got shelled by Roki Sasaki's standards, which is that he went five innings, gave up six hits, three walks, two hit-by-pitches, two runs, four strikeouts. Still won the game, but was far from perfect. However, you know who was close to perfect was Matt Shoemaker. Remember Matt Shoemaker, the darling of my minor league free agent draft?

Yeah, I do indeed. I was very upset to hear that he had signed with the Yomiuri Giants. I mean, good for Matt Shoemaker, not so good for my minor league free agent team. But he took a perfect game into the seventh inning in his most recent start and ended up pitching, I believe, a complete game shutout. inning in his most recent start and ended up pitching, I believe, a complete game shutout. And now through three starts for Yomiuri, he has pitched 21 and two thirds innings and he has a 1.66 ERA. So I guess I called the match shoemaker sans. I was just wrong about the league and the team and the continent and all that. Instead of being with the San Francisco Giants as he was in the minors last year. He is with the Yomiuri Giants, and that seems to be working out well.

But I am getting zero credit for that for my minor league free agent team. So it's a small consolation that he is indeed pitching well, although it does make me think so far that some team might have been smart to bring him back because I thought he really had broken out and gotten it back together late in his minor league season last year. But because of the lockout, presumably, he just had to sign somewhere. And I'm sure he got a good deal. And maybe he'll come back in the future. But thus far, it's working out for Yomiuri.

Just not working out for me. Maybe future minor league free agent drafts will Work out some kind of like partial Credit for like playing Time in NPP or something Because that's happened before that Players that someone has drafted Not necessarily me has ended up Signing in a foreign league and thus

We get no credit for them which is Unfortunate maybe you know It's a major league it's quite a High caliber league they should get some kind of credit so not suggesting we retroactively change the rules here but perhaps in future editions i think that you get credit for it in the same way that like i get credit in in properly assessing that like patrick wisdom would be useful I just got the year that he'd be useful in wrong. And granted, even I, blessed with the self-confidence that I am,

would not have thought that he would have turned in some of the seasons that he has. So that's, you know, that's entirely Patrick's doing. But I think you get credit for properly assessing the skill, even if it ended up being deployed in another very good league that just happened to not be MLB. I'll take it. Is that generous of me? I mean, I haven't looked. I think I am doing pretty badly in the minor league free agent draft so far. So I might be trying to work the refs a little bit here to get some

dispensation on the back end. Yes. Yeah. I have not updated the numbers or look to see how either of us is doing i don't know i assume that ben clements will be both of us but oh yeah we shall see in other news michael conforto also not going to be playing in mlb this season although for different reasons he ended up having surgery for that shoulder injury that he sustained at some point over the off season initially when scott boris's agent that, it sounded as if he would be able to work his way back. But evidently, he couldn't really throw, which is a problem for an outfielder. And so he had surgery and he's done for the year and maybe he'll be back to full strength next year.

But sucks for Michael Conforto, obviously, because as we discussed, he did turn down a big extension offer from the Mets previously and also turned down the qualifying offer from the Mets. So that's unfortunate. I mean, that happens at times. That's why sometimes certainty is important. all the time about how often these long-term contracts can be team friendly but there are those cases of players who you know that team friendliness i mean the teams can assume the risk that something might happen to a particular player because they have a whole lot of other players and a lot of money but players uh it's just a sample of one it's just those players and so often they bet on themselves and it works out just fine for them but every now and then you suffer an unfortunately timed injury and you end up maybe missing out on a ton of money which isn't to say that he couldn't come back and get a bigger deal down the road but right now i don't know either he is uh shaking his fist at the universe or kicking himself or just generally

lamenting the way that things work sometimes or maybe he is very philosophical about the whole thing and it doesn't bother him all that much and he's not going to be out on the street or anything but yeah not fortuitous timing for michael confordo yeah it's one of those things where we kind of thought he would that he might end up taking like a pillow contract next year and now he really will be yeah so it's too bad it's just you feel bad for the guy. It's one of those things that with the benefit of hindsight, he would just be a rehabbing Met, and, you know,

what's newsworthy about that really, you know? Might not even talk about it. Yeah. Although the Mets are off to a great start so far this season. They are. And otherwise. But in better, more encouraging news about an outfielder,

I guess Belly's back. I don't know if Yelly's back yet, but Belly seems to be back, right? Cody Bellinger is hitting. He has a 149 WRC plus thus far through 16 games. He is hitting the ball hard. He is in the 91st percentile when it comes to hard hit rate.

He seems to be catching up to some pitches that he would not have caught up to last year. And, you know, there was a lot of concern about him coming off of the disastrous last season. He had so many injuries that it wasn't clear whether the injuries were responsible or not. And then he kind of retooled his swing again. And in spring training, he struck out a ton and there were more fears. But the Dodgers kind of bet on him when they traded A.J. Pollock and committed to Bellinger and Gavin Lux, who's also been great thus far. The Dodgers, I think, are tied for the Mets in runs scored so far this season

among the league leaders in offense. And Bellinger's been a big part of that. So it's still a smallish sample. I don't want to declare him back to MVP form necessarily. He's still striking out a ton and probably will continue to do that. But he is hitting the ball harder and he's overall been very productive so that is encouraging news yeah i think that we have seen sort of fits and starts from him in the last i don't know two three years where we're like oh everything is gonna be fine and then it kind of

plummets so there is precedent for this being a short-lived return to form but it has seemed to be a good one so far and that's pretty encouraging from a guy who notched like just, it's not, it's almost unbelievable how bad he was last year. And granted he was hurt. And so he missed a ton of time. Like he only played 95 games. I think I'm looking now,

350 plate appearances. So he clearly, you know, he was injured and then he appeared to be at times compromised when he even was on the field, but like a 48 WRC plus. I mean, we talked in the offseason. I think the conclusion that we reached is that they wouldn't do it,

but we felt the need to entertain the question, is Cody Bellinger a non-tender candidate? Yeah. And he clearly wasn't, but we had a pretty decent sense of what he was likely to make in arbitration, even with the down year. And this is another place where the Dodgers are the Dodgers, decent sense of what he was likely to make an arbitration even with the down year and you know this is another place where the dodgers are the dodgers and they are able to press an advantage

see this is the advantage that everyone in baseball should try to press right is the is the money advantage what fun that would be we would be over the moon if everyone was like no i'll just spend more than you did that sounds great but like you know a lot of teams faced with cody bellinger's production and a potential 17 million dollar arbitration deal would just like move on and do other stuff and the Dodgers are like it's just money so so far they are being rewarded for that foresight will he continue I don't know but uh it's it's pretty nice so far yeah and as for Yelly Christian Yellich of the Brewers I don't know what to make of him anymore. Because on the one hand, he's been dealing with various injuries. He had the knee injury and surgery, which was pretty serious and seemed to coincide with him no longer being an otherworldly player and just going back to basically being a league average hitter, more or less.

And then he had back injuries and you know kind of like a chronic recurring back issue and that's something that concerns me for a player i mean you go back to like don mattingly there are lots of examples of hitters who have had back issues that have just sapped their power pretty much permanently the thing with yelich is that he is hitting the ball very hard he is in the 98th percentile in hard hit rate right now. So he's hitting the ball even harder than Bellinger is. And he's up there in average exit velocity. He's up there in max exit velocity.

He's up there in barrel rate. And he is still pretty selective, too. I mean, he doesn't strike out a whole lot. I guess he's striking out more, but he doesn't chase much. And, you know, he still walks a lot. So I don't know. Like with him, you would think that if it were injuries, if it were the back, that would manifest itself in him not hitting the ball hard. Right.

But instead, he seems to have gone back to his old Marwan self with more strikeouts where he's just hitting the ball on the ground a lot. And so his average launch angle is higher than it was last year, let's say. But he's still hitting more than half of his batted balls on the ground. And it's just hard to be an elite power hitter when you were doing that. And he seemed to have corrected that i mean when he peaked and when he was mvp and nearly back-to-back mvp like it seemed that he had figured out how to hit the ball in the air a bit more often and that's the part that confuses me i guess is that i could see if he just were not hitting the ball hard anymore because of physical ailments but why

would you continue to hit the ball hard and yet sort of unlearn what you've learned when it comes to like not pounding the ball into the ground constantly yandi diaz style so i guess that could be injury related too i mean maybe like the knee or the back or whatever has restricted his mobility in some way that makes it hard for him to get that loft on his swing but it's like i guess it's a sign of optimism that he is still crushing the ball because if he could just redirect it then he'd be all set but that was something he struggled to do for years and years before he finally broke through and put it together for a year or two right it's like do we have the the most confidence in Guy's ability to change?

Like, which of the things is harder? And I would imagine hitting the ball hard in the first place is a harder thing to do than starting to hit it at a more optimal angle, particularly when you have hit it at an optimal angle before. So it's not as if there's no precedent for that being a component of your swing. It is just a very strange thing. He's hitting it hard enough that I would imagine that even with the increased drag on the ball, it should be going over the fence more if it were just up in the air more than it is now.

Yeah, and his expected weighted on base is 340 right now. His actual weighted on base is 284. But 340 as an expected weighted on base, I mean, that's what it was last year, too. Right. And that is not what it was, you know, when he was 2018, 2019, when it was like almost 100 points higher than that. So yes, he has underperformed his batted ball quality thus far, but his batted ball quality thus far is like, you know, a little bit above average, not superstar. Yeah, if I were a baseball player,

I mean, I know that all ball players have to contend with this because even the guys who are incredible as they age do eventually see skill decline. Like that just happens that's part of being a a human being whose body only moves in one you know temporal direction right but i would i'm just like too anxious of a person to be a pro ball player i think is what we keep we keep coming to when we have these conversations but the idea the idea of a skill that you have previously demonstrated an ability to not only execute on, but to execute on to an MVP degree, right? It's

not like he, you know, he did it okay. Like he was an MVP, you know, he was like, he was Christian Yelich. And we were like, wow, cool, Yelly. And the idea that it can just leave you potentially, I would think about it every day and it would absolutely be to my detriment if it were me at the plate. So I hope you don't listen to the podcast, Christian, I guess is what I'm trying to say because that feels like an intrusive thought. Yeah. Well, sometimes players will have a breakthrough mechanically and then they will revert. And it's weird because you would think would think that well if they figured out how to play at that level whether it's throwing a pitch a certain way or developing a new pitch or changing your swing or your setup at the plate or whatever it is like you'd think that you could retain that like it's one thing if you just don't have the physical skill and capacity to do

it but if you do and it was really just a matter of unlocking it by changing something about how you work physically then you'd think that you could sustain that but that's not always the case i mean sometimes players really will just peak for a year or two and it's not necessarily a fluke but it doesn't mean that they can continue to play at that level forever or even until they really reach an advanced stage of decline physically. I mean, sometimes it's that, yeah, you do have some nagging injury and maybe that's the case with Jelic that makes it harder to execute in that way. Sometimes it could be that teams start pitching you differently and they find a way to counteract

whatever you managed to unlock there. Or maybe you just get into bad habits for some reason and you just forget how to do what you were doing so well or a coach changes or something else about where you're playing or how you're playing changes or something's going on in your personal life that we don't even know about. So you can't necessarily count on these things continuing,

but it is confounding when you have someone like that who played at that level for a couple seasons and obviously the brewers banked on him continuing to play at a very high level because they gave him a long-term contract to do just that so you know i guess there's still some hope as long as he is still crushing the ball then you kind of can convince yourself oh maybe he's just one adjustment away from crushing the ball in the air instead of on the ground. He's done that before. There is some precedent for him making that adjustment. So I guess there's still hope, but it's not something that, you know, he's really provided me with much more faith that he can do in the small sample that we've seen thus far this season.

Yeah, it's like when in 2020 eric cosmer was just like putting the ball in the air right and we were all like oh wow like maybe he finally figured it out and then he was really not very good at all last year although i am now for the first time sort of engaging with eric cosmer's early 2022 line and hey look at you eric good for you friend yeah we aren't friends i don't dislike him necessarily we're just not acquainted friend it was a weird thing to say but yeah it was like he you sit there and you're like okay for 156 plate appearances you had it sort of figured out that you had to like hit the ball even some amount in the air right not you know it wasn't like he had like a crazy launch angle but like some amount in the air

like his average launch angle was like two or something the year before and then you know it was like 8.7 in 2020 we're like okay like he's gonna figure some stuff out and then he was like no i'd prefer not to yeah eric cosmer has a 457. That seems sustainable. I bet that'll go forever. Because, you know, one of the things they say about Eric Hosmer, so fast. This is like famously so fast. Yeah, really a burner there. I have actually, it's funny because you mentioned, you know, now at this point in the season, you'll stumble across slash lines every now and then. Be like, hey, okay, look at you.

Yeah, when did that happen? slash lines every now and then be like hey okay look at you when did that happen and that's sort of the same thing when it comes to team performance because i have not looked at the standings to this point i just why would you yeah i briefly glanced at the standings just before we started this episode because i wanted to look at one specific thing but generally i just don't look at the standings this early because you know not that these games don't count or anything but we're so Yeah. I guess I will start periodically looking at the standings. I have not to this point. However, there are some cases where a team will surprise you in a way that is good or that is bad or that impacts their long-term chances, whether because they got off to a truly awful start where all of their rivals got off to great starts or maybe they lost a bunch of players to injury or something like that. And if you had to pick one team that has gotten off to the most discouraging start, I would say it's probably the White Sox. And I'm disappointed because I thought this might be the year when we would really get to see the fully operational White Sox in a way that we didn't last year. And granted, they were really good last year and they ran away with division. And their underlying numbers were probably even better than their record. But one thing that we lamented about them was that they were missing a lot of core players for big stretches of that season.

Whether it was Loy Jimenez or Luis Robert or Yasmany Grandal or others. And so the thought of, hey, what can they do with all those guys reasonably healthy this season? That was exciting to me because a lot of these players are really fun to watch. And I wouldn't say that I'm worried about the White Sox exactly, worried about them missing the playoffs or even not winning this division. Like they're off to a six and nine start. Not great. But what I wanted to look at the standings to see was, well, how far are they off the AL Central lead? One and a half games.

So, you know, no one is running away with that division. The Twins are on top with an eight and eight record. So there is not a winning team in the AL Central. The Centrals are just scintillating year after year. One of these years, like the Centrals will, like, where it's at in baseball. Like, we'll just be talking nonstop central, but not so much these days. So no one has really seized a commanding lead or anything in this division. And the Guardians have looked decent and the Twins have looked decent and the Tigers have looked okay.

I mean, these are all decent teams at least and maybe better than that. I still think the White Sox are the class of that division, but because they haven't gotten off to a great start and because they have, again, suffered so many injuries, right? So Loy Jimenez is out again now with a pretty severe hamstring strain. He just had surgery for that. Lance Lynn also had surgery as well. Garrett Courchet had Tommy John, right? He's done for the year. Johan Moncada hasn't played. He has an oblique strain. And then there were various other maybe more minor setbacks. I mean, Joe Kelly has not pitched yet. Gialito missed a couple starts. Luis Robert strained his groin and missed a series. So you have a mix of nagging day-to-day things and more serious things and season-ending things, and it's the same sort of pattern as last season.

And it sucks because I just kind of want to see, like, how good can the White Sox be? And there's just not a ton of depth on this roster, which I think has been exposed. a ton of depth on this roster, which I think has been exposed. And so, you know, if you look at the Fangraphs playoff odds and you compare to the preseason odds, the White Sox are the biggest loser thus far. They have lost about 23 percentage points. So they are now down to 60% chance to make the playoffs. And if anything, I'd probably take the over on that again i'm not really concerned about the white socks but i would say that their ceiling has lowered now not just because they're off to a six nine start that doesn't mean that much but because they are going to be shorthanded for a while here so too bad just too bad i kind of wanted to see could the white

socks vault themselves up into that kind of class of the league super team type category or not. And I think they will still win this division, but probably not by as much or as impressively as they might have otherwise. Like they're down to 85 wins projected, which again is higher than any other team is projected to win in the AL Central because it's the AL Central. But still, I think they've lopped off some of their upper limits that they could potentially have achieved. Yeah. And I think that we have had our issues with the expanded playoff fields. But I think one place where you look at the Central and you're like, let's assume that the White Sox win. And you're thinking about which of the division winners is likely to clinch a bye like right now I would I would say that they are a distant third in terms of who I expect to both win and then be in a position to not have to play in the wild card

round so that failure to really solidify either because of stuff that you you know can't fully control for like injuries or stuff that you can like, you know, signing depth to counter those injuries, which inevitably happen because pitchers always break, you know, there there's real consequence to this stuff. You might be looking at an early exit just by virtue of having to play another series or being compromised later into the postseason, even if you make it through that wildcard round, because you've had to play a couple of extra games, you know, this stuff ends up mattering, even if you're it through that wildcard round because you've had to play a couple of extra games you know this stuff ends up mattering even if you're able to win i think this has been our

criticism of both of the centrals the central eye over the last couple of years where it's like there are some very good teams that have emerged from there obviously there have been teams that have gone on to play in the world series that have emerged from those divisions some of the times they even win so it's not as if there isn't a postseason track record to point to, but it does often feel particularly with the AL Central where it's like, we want you to play for October. It feels like you're settling for a division championship and then an early exit.

And it's like, why don't you keep playing? You've got to keep going. Yeah, I mean, they're vince velasquez right now and it's not a long time since we were just kind of lamenting that the padres were starting vince velasquez because they were basically out of options last year and yet here's vince velasquez starting for a team that has aspirations to win this division and go deep into the playoffs and maybe just a stop gap but not great I mean he had like a you know six ERA for the Phillies last year and then like a eight and a half ERA for the Padres and now he's up near seven through three starts for the White Sox so I uh just not sure how much Vince Velasquez has left at this point

particularly as a starting pitcher. I think it's still sort of strange that he has not just been put in the bullpen by someone and let to see what he could do there. But if you're starting Vince Velasquez, like that's not a great sign. And, you know, they've been shorthanded and there just isn't really anyone who is at AAA just waiting in the wings to be called up. They don't have a great farm system And for the right reasons like they've promoted A lot of good players and They've done the things that you should do to put a winning team

Together but unless you're like The Rays or the Dodgers it's hard To have a winning contending team and Also have a great farm system at the same time And the White Sox do not So if they're going to supplement I mean they are also starting dallas keitel who looks pretty cooked himself these days yeah it's pretty bad yeah

and you know they have guys who maybe are on innings limits or you know who knows how many innings you get out of like michael kopeck who's looked good but hasn't racked up huge innings totals before so again i think that they will be fine ultimately. But it is sort of deflating to me to see them come out of the gate this way because I'd really like to see just the White Sox just strutting their stuff and having everyone on the field. And it looks like it's going to be a while until that's the case again. Yeah, I think that that's right.

Also, in the past few days, a lot of discourse about the ball, right? And the level of offense. And we've talked about this once or twice already. And, you know, I haven't written about it, I guess, a bit because I just get Groundhog Day vibes from the baseball at this point. Like we're talking, you know, six and a half years at this point that the ball has been a constant question. What is going on with the ball? And early on, I wrote about it all the time because I felt like not as many people were writing about it or were paying attention to it. And people were still sort of throwing up their hands and saying, what is this? What's causing it? And MLB was still maintaining that it wasn't the ball. And it was pretty clear to me that, no, it's the ball. And so I kind of of capable writers out there who are handling these

things and documenting it all. So Rob Arthur wrote about it for Baseball Perspectives and did his usual analysis of the drag on the ball based on stat cast data and how the flight of the ball and the speed of the ball changes on its way to the plate. And Alan Nathan, physicist par excellence, he wrote about it too. And Eno Saris and Ken Rosenthal teamed up on a piece about it at The Athletic. So plenty of baseball-related coverage out there. And also another reason why I haven't fixated on it myself is that I kind of think like the ball's okay. The ball is not necessarily the problem at this point. It's everything surrounding the ball and so i i guess you could say that it's a problem that the ball is not flying as far now because we have the

other offensive conditions that we have but i feel like if we could keep the ball the way it is right now i'd be fine with that i don't think it's super juiced i don't think it's super dead i think maybe this is like the goldilocks zone for the ball. It's just that all of these other things have happened and strikeouts are up and you have batting average way down. And so offense is historically low and that's not great. So it's weird. It's like, do you pin the blame on the ball because the ball is kind of like the proximate cause contributing to this downturn this season? Or do you look at the larger, overriding, overarching issues that are causing the ball to be a problem? And that's kind of what I was getting at last week

with my stat blast about limiting the number of pitchers on the active roster. They're kind of these other underlying concerns that I think should be addressed, and just juicing the ball just to get around those other issues and kind of like paper over those problems long term I don't think that's a solution so you could question well why did MLB decide to deaden the ball and not make some corresponding changes that could have caused offense to be at a more tolerable level. That I think is fair to wonder, but it's like, I don't know, the ball to me is actually less of a problem now than it was a few seasons ago when we had the highest home run rate

ever. And I felt like, you know, you barely had to hit the ball hard to get it over the fence. If we could keep the ball the way it is now and change some other things, I'd be fine with that. But it does appear that the drag on the ball is higher. MLB said, again, in one of these secret memos distributed to teams that was then later leaked and reported on by Ken and Eno, that they are using only one model of ball this season. So if we take them at their word, which is always fraught when it comes to the baseball,

So if we take them at their word, which is always fraught when it comes to the baseball, then we don't actually have multiple models of baseball in play this season, supposedly the case, the drag is higher. It doesn't seem like it's solely related to the humidor being in all parks. There is maybe some evidence that the decrease in fly ball distance or barrel distance has been even starker in parks that just added the humidor. And that could change as the season goes on and the atmospheric condition changes. It's hard to do the analysis because you just don't know the conditions under which the balls were stored previously in many ballparks. And so it's hard to anticipate the effect that the humidor will have. But if you're imagining or thinking that you might be imagining that the ball is not flying as far this season, well, you're not imagining it. And it's not just the fact that it's April and it's cold

it's even relative to previous April so something's going on for sure I share your sort of long-term consternation with the other factors that seem to be suppressing offense but I think that like the league needs to be conscious of the offensive environment that they're operating in and you know I know that there is debate about how much of a hand they are having in any particular model of ball, which remains like a weird defense to this problem. But I think you have to be cognizant of the fact that your offensive environment is so homer reliant. And so even a ball that, as you say, is sort of like in potentially in that Goldilocks zone in a more in an ecosystem with greater biodiversity right that's not where we live right now like we live in this place

yeah and so i think that there needs to be some sort of you need to grapple with that reality and just accept the fact that like for now we need to have an offensive environment that supports some some amount of home runs or we're going to end up in bad shape. And it's not just the ball. Ben Clemens wrote for us today about the role that the bullpens are having on the downtick in offense. And so these things all interact with one another.

And I guess that my hope would be that the league starts to look at it as like you know it's like a very delicate microchip yeah and all of its little pieces work together and if you throw one of them off then you're gonna be like rob lowe in parks and rec and you just can't stop pooping it's a very delicate microchip you know it is curious that mlb looked at the offensive environment and said what we should do here is deaden the ball. I get that, hey, there are too many homers being hit was also something that people were saying. But if you're not going to make any corresponding changes, then you have to know what's going to happen here. This was not impossible to anticipate. So what I'm saying is, I guess, that I would hope

that the way out of this is not let's juice the ball again just because that's always the easiest thing to do I guess as well let's just change the ball a little bit like we don't have to have the approval of anyone we don't apparently even have to tell anyone that we're doing it until after the fact so which remains wild to me how is this not a collective bargaining issue like I just, I'll never, someone smarter than me is gonna have to explain it to me like I am a dumb little baby. Sorry, babies are cool, but they're babies.

They don't know stuff yet, they haven't been taught things. Anyway, it's wild that they get to just decide this impacts careers in a way that is so much more intense and meaningful and widespread than like the sign stealing stuff which i'm not saying to excuse it but it's like how is this operating in the background is something that they just get to be like here's here's how we're messing with the microchip today stop pooping right yeah no i just i hope that they look at where things stand and survey the landscape and say that, well, oops, maybe we shouldn't have dialed down the bounciness of the ball or increased its drag, which, by the way, they didn't even intend supposedly to increase the drag of the ball. So I don't know why the drag is higher.

is higher. Meredith Wills suggested that it may have been because of the human oar and the fact that the balls were moved from some neutral space to human oars. And maybe that has some effect on just like puffing up the balls or causing there to be higher drag initially. But apparently, like they didn't even test the drag. I mean, that was reported by some sources, at least that they kind of changed the ball and didn't necessarily even know what it would do to the drag, which seems pretty irresponsible if that was the case, because we know that the drag has been involved heavily in the changes in the ball's behavior over the past several seasons. So whether they anticipated that or tested that or not, it seems like it's not just the bounciness of the ball the coefficient of restitution of the ball but also it's drag and so balls are just dying sooner when they are in

the air and so that is potentially a problem but again it's like you know if you are trying to cook a dish for dinner or something and you screw up and you leave it in the oven too long and you just say well i'll just slather it in a bunch of sauce so that you will not be able to taste that maybe i burned this thing a little bit it's like okay maybe that'll get you through this one meal but in the future like uh you know follow the instructions right and to get your cookbook and don't cook the thing too long so like in the short term you could just say say, well, offense is cratering. Let's juice the ball again. But then you're just going to end up with a very juiced ball and still sort of an imbalanced offensive environment. And so I would hope that there could be other changes and maybe it will be roster restrictions on pitchers.

And those are coming at least in some limited way. Right. So it was announced on Tuesday that the restriction down to 13 pitchers has now been delayed. So that won't go into effect until May 30th instead of May 2nd. On May 2nd, there will be a 14 pitcher maximum as rosters reduce from 28 players to 26 players. So you can still pretty much

just cram those rosters with pitchers with a 14 pitcher limit i mean that is barely a limit at all 13 is maybe a little bit better but i do think you have to go down even to 12 or 11 to really make that meaningful because as ben pointed out in that post that you noted like making it so that you can just give relievers a rest between every outing. That actually does improve their performance, unsurprisingly. So we've got to go back to, you know, not overworking pitchers, but also just not allowing them to go max effort constantly and then take a day or two off in between outings. There is a happy medium, I believe, with the ball, with pitcher usage, with everything. So swinging from one extreme to another,

that's not the long-term solution that I'd like to see. Yeah, it's baking. The ball is baking. You're baking a microchip. I've mixed my metaphors. It's not like making sauce, right? There's a precision to this, and you can't just course correct later.

It might still taste good, but you should view it like baking. You have to measure. Do it by weight, you know? Sure. How do you not test the – how are you not like drag? You know, that's pretty important. We should test that.

It just seems – I don't know. It just seems pretty obvious. And it's happened enough times at this point where I'm like,'s still obvious isn't it more obvious now yeah i've heard differing things like the league saying we did test the drag team saying they didn't test the drag you know if they did test it maybe they didn't test it sufficiently or accurately because uh they didn't say that they set out to increase the drag and yet that seems to have been what has happened so anyway i meant to mention aj pollock was another one of the walking wounded white socks although he is back now i believe but he had a hamstring strain as well so anyway we talked so much about like their bullpen and how deep it was right and and they felt comfortable trading away craig kimbrell

and now i don't want to say that the bullpen is thin, but without Kimbrell, without Kelly, with Kopech starting, that doesn't appear to be as much of an area of strength as it once seemed to be. Anyway, we already talked about the White Sox. Just left out an injury or two there. Just wanted to ask, what does a game like Angel Hernandez's game on Sunday, on national TV, Sunday Night Baseball, becomes the punching bag for all of baseball's fans who are watching this broadcast. We are, of course, generally anti-Robo-Ump.

Yeah. But what does this do to your resolve when it comes to that, to have an umpire make a spectacle of himself? And this was not the worst umpired game ever and i think there is a bit of confirmation bias when it comes to one of the notorious umpires who like granted maybe they are notorious for a reason yeah they've earned a reputation yeah it's not entirely unfounded and yet i think when we see that it is one of these umpires whose names everyone knows maybe we read their calls a little less charitably than we would otherwise. But granted, it was bad.

It was bad. It was bad. According to the umpire scorecard, he had an 88% overall accuracy and overall consistency. The average is 94%. He missed a lot of calls and missed some impactful calls as well. It's funny. He missed a lot of calls and missed some impactful calls as well. It's funny, the one that prompted Kyle Schwarber to have a kind of cathartic, I think, for everyone,

a little rant at the plate and meltdown. Big feelings for Kyle. Yeah, get ejected. That was good. He kept it nice and concise, but he certainly got his feelings and thoughts out there. He had his say, and then he walked out. And I think everyone watching that game kind of felt like Kyle Schwarber did in that moment. But it's interesting because often there will be a lot of inaccuracies, but they won't necessarily be skewed toward one team or the other. In this case, according to the UMP scorecard, the calls lent themselves to

the Brewers to the tune of 0.77 runs, and the Brewers won this game 1-0. Now, you can't necessarily say that that was all Angel Hernandez, and it's not like, you know, you can just add up all of those little mini impacts of the missed calls and, oh, that's how the Brewers scored their one run. No. But when it was this close, I think that makes it even more visible. So when a game like that comes along, that's like exhibit A for everyone who's like Robo-Umps now. Do you have a response to that or do you just kind of have to hand it to them?

Like, yep, okay. Not a great look for the human umpires game that we know and love. I mean, that can be true and I can still not like Robo-Umps. Let's show you how. And you tell me if this is just me being stubborn. I mean, I think that what this underscores to me is that there needs to be a better mechanism of accountability within the umpire ranks. Because while the way that we are seeing his sort of questionable work performance manifest

is in something that could be alleviated by the robo ump like the bigger problem here is that it just seems like we are not culling the ranks of umpires with sort of the urgency that we maybe need to and i know that you know this has become sort of a silly argument on the part of those who are like well doesn't this mean the umpire union is too strong it's like no it just means that you need a process by which to remove them like it doesn't mean that they can't be fired and it's weird to be like fire him because i don't know angel hernandez and like it's a baseball game so i do feel kind of weird being like yeah i fire the guy but you know this is like a documented pattern of him just blowing it in really big spots and

doing it with enough consistency that I think that it merits at the very least like further training but I think that you know this is the sort of thing that the the league and the umpires union need to get together on because it doesn't benefit anyone like it doesn't work to the benefit of umpires to have guys like Hernandez who are so bad in such big moments. And I think that you're right, that there is sort of a confirmation bias there and that our understanding of just how bad he is

might be a little bit disproportionate to the actual gravity of these calls. But you don't have to fix this with tech. You just need to fix it with better umpires. And we have them. It's not as if every umpire is this way so no i don't think it means we need robo umps we just need to be able to sort of keep the line moving a little bit when it comes to new and better trained umpires who many of whom are sitting in the

minors sort of waiting for that call up to the big league so yeah it's interesting because we want enough leeway that you can have catchers who distinguish themselves via their skill and a couple good framers in this game too right i mean you had omar narvaez who was one of the best framers last season and you had jt real muto who also was up there the brewers and phillies were two of the top five framing teams in 2021 so i guess we could say well how much of this of this was Angel Hernandez screwing up and how much of it was good framing? I think in some cases, and you can look at some of those highlights or lowlights, as

the case may be, and it was not just framing, you know? So not every umpire mistake is good framing. Not every instance of good framing is an umpire mistake is good framing. Not every instance of good framing is an umpire mistake. Well, I guess the latter is truer to an extent. But, you know, Len Casper pointed out on Twitter that he said it's popular to crush MLB umpires, but in the replay era, bad calls are almost always corrected. And I think he's right that on the whole, umpiring has gotten a whole lot better, not just via replay review, which enables us to overturn some mistakes, but also just the strike zones, the accuracy and the consistency has measurably improved during the period in which we can measure that. And one would imagine, I mean, you know, you don't have to go back to like the Eric Gregg game or others to show that clearly umpires are better on the whole now that they are graded and they get feedback from the technology and they have that as kind of a corrective and so we do want some human element i guess it's just like you know everything in moderation as we're

saying with the pollen with offense like we want enough leeway for catcher's skill and technique to separate them and yet not so much that like you know know, if the umpire is so bad that they'll just call anything a strike, then it's not even like framing matters anymore. It's almost like you're taking away the impact of framing in the other direction because it's like, well, there's no correlation even between what the catcher is doing and what the umpire is calling. It's just umpire mistakes more so than anything. So, yes, when you look at umpires who are consistently bad and like i know that angel hernandez of course he has been at the center of a discrimination suit against mlb right and it could be true that there has been discrimination against umpires and it could also be true yes that angel hernandez is not a very good umpire yeah at least when it comes to calling

balls and strikes right both of those things can absolutely be true simultaneously. He could have been the subject and victim of discrimination and be pretty bad at his job sometimes. Those are not mutually exclusive realities to live in. Right. And you look at the umpire scorecards data, which now goes back to 2015, and there are many ways that you can grade these things, but according to their grades, he's in the 30th percentile for accuracy going back to 2015 and in the 16th percentile for consistency and favor, whether his calls or missed calls tend to favor one team or the other. the worst but not good pretty bad pretty consistently among the worst and so you would hope that there would be some mechanism to say well we will if not fire you at least like sideline you not have you in high profile important games hopefully manage to improve you and target whatever your weaknesses are here and that just doesn't seem to be happening to the extent that it should and you know as older umpires just age out of the umpiring pool

that does seem to produce some improvement not necessarily because of the age of the umpires who are coming in but just because they have come up in this era where they are getting constant feedback from pitch fx and stat cast and they seem to have taken that to heart and they are calling zones that are much closer to the rulebook zones and i think that is generally a good thing so as a defender of this particular form of human element and not just because of the fact that it's human element and nostalgia and tradition but because as we've covered i just really like watching the human element of catchers receiving skills and even of some strategy when it comes to maybe figuring out how to get those calls for certain umpires like this went a bit too far and so that makes me cringe because i just know that there is going to be a whole new chorus of

robo umps now calls and it's hard to refute when you see something like that in a high-profile broadcast that maybe makes the problem look even more pervasive and acute than it is. Yeah, I mean, we are not defending this. No. Like, to be very, very clear, this is a mistake. We don't want games like this. I maintain that it would be good for us to have a mechanism

within the replay system specifically to address egregious calls one way or the other. And I have been told, Ben, by several people who listen to our discussion about that, that I was right. So, aha, there you go.

But that doesn't come close to addressing a problem like this where it is clearly a more pervasive issue, right? So something needs to be done, but I don't think that robo-umps are the necessary or even only intervention that we can have in order to do that. So that's what I have to say about that. All right. Last point, and I will deliver this in the form of a stat blast. So as a reminder, the Stat Blast segment is sponsored by our friends at Baseball Reference who power StatHead, the very powerful tool for looking up all sorts of sports data, not just baseball data, but many sports. And I just used it the other day. And I don't have to come up with some artificial ad read here because I do use it. And we got an email from a listener the other day who wrote in to say, after the Cubs beat the Pirates 21 to nothing, I was thinking about whether or not it's rare for there to be a blowout that's also a shutout.

What are the most runs that have been scored in a shutout? How many other times has one team scored 20 runs or more while not allowing any? That was a question from Mitchell, and I answered it in the form of a link to StatHead, where that was a very easy answer to get with one little search. And it turned out that there have been now six games that had 20 or more runs scored by one team as they shut out their opponent.

And the most was a 22 to nothing victory by Cleveland over New York in August of 2004. So again, very easy to obtain these answers. And I told Mitchell, go to stathead.com, sign up using the coupon code WILD20, and you can get those answers for yourself. So this answer is one that I was prompted to obtain by a tweet from Jeff Passon, who tweeted something about Byron Buxton. And Buxton has just been fantastic, right? And we talked a week or two ago about the close calls

that both Buxton and Mike Trout had with injuries, and they missed a little time, and they have come back, and they've been rip-roaring, and it's been great to have them back. And we've seen, demonstrated time after time, what we avoided, the disaster we avoided there by not having them seriously injured because it's just you know every day something fun with them it's buxton hitting walk-offs and trout hitting like excuse me half swing triples i mean these guys are just awesome they're the best they

are uh now it looks like third and sixth in major league War on the Fangrafts leaderboard. So they are creeping up toward the top and let's hope that they keep creeping up. So nice, Ben. Yeah. So can we just, can we take a moment? I know I don't want to disrupt your set glass, but I want to appreciate what our top five is right now. And again, all of our usual caveats apply.

It is very early. The differences that exist between these players right now are teeny tiny they are well within the error bars for war they are effectively all the same guy whatever you want to say but what a fun top five you ready yeah nolan arenado manny machado wander franco ty france ty france and mike trump yep pretty good yeah pretty good you left that buxton because he is not qualified. He's not qualified. But this is the qualified leaderboard if I drop my number of plate appearances down. Then we have Nolan Arenado, Manny Machado, Byron Buxton, Wander Franco, Ty Franson, and then Mike Trout.

Yep. Wander Franco. Oh, my gosh. He's so good. Yeah. We're going to. So good. And I'm sorry.

We're going to do a further digression here. There are all of these exciting young prospects, and some of them who were struggling earlier, trying to find their feet, and it's thrilling. And Wander Franco is younger than all of them. Yep. Anyway, continue with your stat blast. Anyway, Byron Buxton is awesome.

He is great. He has hit six home runs. He is, as Luke Hooper pointed out in a post at Fangraphs on Tuesday, he's hitting high fastballs now. He's undergone a very Trout-like transformation where it used to be that high fastballs were his bugaboo. And now he is crushing those too. So he's uh fantastic whenever he's on the field I mean he and Trout you you go back a few seasons at this point and on a per game basis Trout and Buxton have been the best players in baseball and that is why we want them to play as many games as

possible so Jeff Passan had a tweet that was based on some research by ESPN's Paul Hembikidis. And the tweet said, since 2019, the Minnesota Twins are 124 and 73. That's a 101 win pace with a plus 233 run differential when Byron Buxton plays. In the 203 games he hasn't played, the Twins are 94 and 109. That is a 75 win pace and negative 97 run differential and it goes on to say in his last 162 games buxton has 8.4 war the definition of impact player and yes so not disputing the idea

that byron buxton is an impact player absolutely he is however all fun facts lie to some degree, as we know. And I was curious about how much this fun fact lies, because this fun fact, you know, it kind of implies that not only is Byron Buxton an 8.4 war player, but maybe he's like a 25 war player or something like that, right? Like the Twins with Buxton are like a 101 win team and the Twins without Buxton are like a 75 win team, okay? And so that is basically sending the signal that, I don't know, maybe like the stats aren't even completely capturing how great Buxton is. And I'm sure that Jeff would not say that Byron Buxton is a 25 win player, but why even put the numbers out there, I guess, unless you are sort of suggesting that, right?

I mean, you are suggesting that the Twins are like way, way better with Byron Buxton than without him. And so I got curious about this with and without and how notable is this sort of disparity really? And I went to frequent StatBlast consultant Ryan Nelson, and the way he did this was he looked for three-season spans, and of course it doesn't have to be a three-season span, but that's basically what this Buxton fun fact was, a three-plus season span. And he looked up basically every three-season span, and that's almost 11,000 applicable spans to qualify for the list a player had to have played

for the same team for three consecutive seasons played at least 10 games in each of those seasons played at least 150 games over that whole span and missed at least 75 games over that span so we're looking for players who actually were consistently on that team as opposed to like, you know, they played for that team one year and then they were gone for the next two years or something. They had to have been with that team all three years and they had to have played in a lot of games, but also missed a significant number just so we could do a meaningful comparison here. And they had to have been present in each of those teams' seasons. So these are reasonable qualifiers, I think.

And so we end up with a split again for Buxton here, you know, from 2019 to 2021. It's actually a 631 winning percentage with Buxton in the lineup for the Twins over that three-season span, 118-69. Without Buxton, 92 and 105. That's a 467 winning percentage. So that is a 164-point winning percentage split. That is actually the 165th largest such split out of almost 11,000. And in fact, Buxton from 2018 to 2020, even bigger split. So, so far, looking like, okay, this is really worth reporting here. This is notable. This is like in the top 2% of all such splits of this kind. So it is actually

pretty notable. It's not like routine. This isn't constantly happening that you have splits this big. However, you do not have to be a superstar. You do not have to be Byron Buxton to have a huge split like this. And in fact, the leaders in this category are basically scrubs. No offense. So like the guys with the biggest with or without them splits where their teams played way better when they were playing than when they were not over three season spans. The all-time leader is Mike Squires. Mike Squires for the 1982 to 1984 White Sox. With Squires, the White Sox went 242 and 120. That is a 669 winning percentage. Without Squires, the White Sox in those years went 18 and 106. 18 and 106.

That is a 145 winning percentage. So that's a split of 523 points of winning percentage with or without Mike Squires. Now, how good was Mike Squires over that period? Now, how good was Mike Squires over that period? Over that three-season span, he had a 66 OPS plus and amassed negative 1.6 baseball reference score. Wow. Yeah. So somehow, Mike Squires was a sub-replacement level player, and yet the White Sox were unbeatable

with him and could not win a game basically without him. These were like the real life Gani Joneses, right? The mythical player from episode 722 or whatever it was, the replacement level player who somehow causes his team to win and no one knows how exactly. That is Mike Squires. And you look at the top of the list and it is actually largely not great players. It's like, you know, Gene Stevens for the 1956 to 1958 Red Sox. Jerry Martin for the 1976 to 1978 Phillies. Gary Reneke for the 79 to 81 Orioles. Raphael Belliard for the 91 to 93 Braves.

Like, not superstars here. Some decent players, but not superstars. And I don't know what to make of this. Like, I thought it was actually kind of curious that the top of the list seems to be so populated by not very good players. And that would explain why there would be this kind of skew. Like, you know, maybe you disproportionately bench your crappy players against good teams or something, but I don't know. I can't come up with anything that would explain 18 and 106 without Mike Squires. I mean, I think that it's just largely random. I mean, Ryan's theory was that it's pretty much random and they're just generally more mediocre players than there are good players. And so you would probably tend to end up with more mediocre players at the top of this list. data set online here and and you can look up you know for recent years i mean while byron buxton was uh working his magic here for the twins supposedly like maybe the the closest streak to his at least among players who were not traded mid-season was like jamer candelario for the tigers like the tigers were way way way better was jamer candelario for the Tigers. Like the Tigers were way, way, way better

with Jamer Candelario from 2019 to 2021 than they were without him. And, you know, he was decent for them. He was quite good for them in 2020 and 2021. But on the whole, during that span, he had a 107 OPS plus and six wars. So like, I guess the fun fact is lying to some extent. It's not a complete lie in that this is actually notable,

this with and without Buxton streak. It's not like the greatest such streak, but it is worth pointing out. And yet it is not necessarily a testament to the fact that Byron Buxton is magic and that the stats are, you know, great as they are, not completely capturing his impact on the twins. I think these sorts of with and without you fluctuations are largely random and you would expect the twins to be significantly better with Buxton than without because he's awesome, but not that much better, obviously. And you don't have to be Buxton to have that kind of split.

And sometimes you could be Mike Squires at a certain point. Like, you must just look at him as like your good luck charm or something. And just like, even if it's irrational, there must be some part of you that's like, hey, I noticed that when Mike Squires doesn't play, we always lose. Maybe there's something that the box scores are not capturing about how Jeff got here. But no, I think it's just largely random. And, you know, like if you look at Trout, for instance, who has been just as good as Buxton, if not better over that span, you know, the Angels, I think, were maybe a little bit better with Trout than without. But notably, not so much that Jeff Passan would tweet about it. And obviously Buxton is no better than Trout when they are both healthy and at their full power.

So that's why the Angels have not been a good team with Mike Trout because it's baseball and having one great superstar or being without one superstar isn't enough to make your fortunes or sink your fortunes. So if you're a Twins fan, you want Byron Buxton to be playing, obviously. But it's not necessarily the difference between winning 100 and winning 75. If you were a front office analyst and you were confronted with that, would you just assume like we are witnessing like the limitations of our ability to measure in real time. Would that be the way that you would look at it, that there must be something of the stats just can't figure out, but there's something there? Yeah. I mean, it would make me think, I guess. It was episode 720 was Connie Jones.

And ultimately, I think we landed on basically he would be burned at the stake or something. People would just decide that he was some sort of witch and he had some hidden power that not even he knew and I think with that it was like you know his team would make the playoffs or win the world series even though he was not contributing a lot if I noticed this over a span of say several seasons I guess it would be worth doing some kind of inquiry and just being like hey are we missing something about this guy potentially but i don't think so i think it's possible to just just happen and it's one of those weird fluky things yeah sometimes stuff is fluky but you would spend i mean some people would be like it's fluky and they probably lead more balanced lives than we do because we'd be like

i will not sleep until i figure out this fluke right gotta find the meaning behind the fluke because it would just make it would make you feel crazy yeah because you don't know it's a fluke until you look into it because in the past like maybe before we had good defensive stats or we measured framing or quantified framing we might have looked and seen like hey this uh crappy catcher it seems like the team wins a lot more with this guy who has you know no war or whatever and it's like oh well actually we were just not measuring something that he was doing counting for an incredibly valuable skill yeah we didn't know how to measure it right now i don't know what that would be in mike squires's case so and if you're wondering who the anti-Squires was, it's John Cangellosi for the 1988 to 1990 Pirates

During those years, the Pirates went 74 and 170 with Cangellosi That's a 303 winning percentage, 180 and 62 without Cangellosi That's a 744 winning percentage, so that's a gap of 441 points in the other direction Not that Cangellosi was good, but he wasn't that bad either. And maybe this would drive home the randomness of it all. Ryan pointed this out to me. From 1913 to 15, with Eddie Murphy in the game, Eddie Murphy the right fielder, that is,

the Athletics went 207 and 147. That's a 95-win pace over a 162-game season. And without him, they went 30 and 81. That's a 44-win pace over a 162-game season. And without him, they went 30-81. That's a 44-win pace. So that's the 13th biggest drop-off of all time. But then from 1917 to 1919, the White Sox went 64-115 with him in the lineup. That's a 51-win pace, but 180-61 without him.

That's a 121-win pace. So that's the eighth biggest gap in the other direction of all time so eddie murphy can't win with him if you're the white socks can't win without him if you're the ace maybe that's the best illustration of how unpredictable all of this is just one of those weird things so thanks to uh jeff's tweet for prompting that investigation. Thanks to Ryan for the research. You can find him on Twitter at RSNelson23. And we will just hope that Buxton and Trout and everyone else just stays in the lineup, whether they have magical powers or not. They do have some magical powers in that they can hit like giant walk-off homers and triples without even hitting the ball hard. So that's pretty magical, even if it's the kind of magic we can measure.

even hitting the ball hard. So that's pretty magical, even if it's the kind of magic we can't measure. It's just really nice to be able to look at the folks who we enjoy watching play baseball and be like, hey, I get to watch you play baseball again tomorrow. What a nice thing. Agreed. All right. Thanks as always for listening. By the way, if anyone was wondering about the run differential split in that weird Pirates-Cubs series where the Cubs lost the four-game series to Pittsburgh but had a plus 17 run differential. That was the largest run differential in a four-game series loss in MLB history. And for the Pirates, it was the worst run differential in a four-game series win. There is one series that's slightly longer that had an even bigger disparity in run differential in favor of the team that lost the series.

The Cardinals went 3-2 against the Phillies in a five-game series in 1929, in which they had a negative 19 run differential. And all of those facts come from Jeremy Frank at MLBRandomStats on Twitter, where if you want to find something that you think might be good stat blast material, but don't want to wait for our next episode or don't want to duplicate an answer, follow Jeremy on Twitter because he basically is a stat blast factory himself. On our last episode, I did a Meet a Major Leaguer segment about Ghost K. Kato of the Blue Jays, and I noted that he had tweeted something about how he eats two bananas a day because a monkey never cramps. And I couldn't place the reference as we were recording, but a number of you wrote in to remind me that this came from a clip of former Blue Jay Munanori Kawasaki, who said this in 2014.

Just a cramp? Yeah, just cramp. So you told me what can you eat to help you make you feel better? Bananas. Yeah, why bananas? Monkeys never cramp. You know, monkeys never cramp. Because monkeys every day day bananas. Two.

So how many did you have today? Three. Our three. So no more cramp for you. I need three banana because monkey never craps. All right. And while I'm clarifying things from last week, I want to leave you with one exchange I had with listener and Patreon supporter Michael, who responded to my stat blast the other day about the fact that the number of pitches in the average game has increased over the decades. So it's not just that the time between pitches has gotten longer.

It's also the number of pitches getting bigger, which has contributed to longer games. And so I suggested that maybe a pitch clock might not be a panacea, because even if you reduce the time between pitches, you might still have more pitches per game than you used to. Well, Michael wrote in to say, I'm generally a fan of your logic, but I'm very confused with your logic in saying that because pitches are up 12% and game times are up 15%

means that pitch clocks won't work. But just because the recent games have increased in time is there more, doesn't mean you have to fix that by reducing pitches. In fact, it makes a pitch clock more powerful, since an n-second reduction in pitch time would have a bigger effect overall on game time, and if the number of pitches hadn't gone up, the power of a pitch clock would have been lower. All if game times are up 15% and that's accompanied by an increase in pitch number of 12%, then a decrease in time per pitch of around 18% would more than compensate for all of the increase in time. So Michael makes a good point here. To be clear, I am not anti-pitch clock and I do think a pitch clock would help. I'm in favor of it. There has been almost a 0.6 correlation between the number of pitches thrown per nine innings and the time of a nine inning game since 1988. But I'm still pro pitch clock. As I wrote back to Michael, I do think a

pitch clock would help, but I think the degree to which it would help depends on whether the current time between pitches is actually long enough and the pitch clock is strict enough for the limit to make a major difference. You, that is Michael, make a good point that the more pitches there are, the more potential time savings a pitch clock would provide, but that presumes a significant time savings per pitch. And what the data on pitch counts and game time suggests to me is that maybe the time per pitch hasn't gone up quite as much as we think. If it had, then I think we would have seen an even greater increase in game time given the increase in the average number of pitches thrown. That is, the percentage change in game time would be much larger than the percentage change in pitch totals,

instead of only a little larger. And to bolster that case, even with the 22nd pitch clock in place last year in the minors, game times were the longest ever. So the takeaway, I guess, is that you need a more aggressive pitch clock. And the one that seems to be working in the minors this season is a 14-second clock. I do think that one would work well in the majors. I'm just a little skeptical that the league will be able to skip straight from no pitch clock to a 14 second pitch clock at the major league level in 2023 without a lot of blowback from the players. So if there's an intermediate stage where say MLB

first implements a 20 second pitch clock just to get everyone used to it, I think that might not shorten game times as much as people expect because there'd still be so many more pitches thrown than there used to be. And Michael wrote back and said, I agree with all of that. My point, which I suspect we actually agree on, was just that the observation that game times have increased because there are more pitches and not because pitches take longer is not an argument that pitch clocks won't work. I get that your point was that the fact that pitch times haven't really gone up means the pitch clocks are not a trivial solution to the problem, but I'd argue that the increasing number of pitches makes it especially important that the average time per pitch be the main

focus of time of game reform efforts, since it's much harder to imagine legislating or tweaking the rules to bring down pitch number than it is to legislate a shorter interval between pitches. And I agree, we came to a nice agreementate a shorter interval between pitches. And I agree. We came to a nice agreement after a nice productive discussion here. The point of the stat blast to me was just to kind of complicate the prevailing belief that games have gotten longer largely or solely because the time between pitches has gotten longer and that if we could just revert to the time between pitches we had in 1988 via pitch clock, perhaps games would last as long as they did in 1988.

Whereas actually, there are just so many more pitches thrown now that if the time between pitches were the same now as it was then, the games would still last longer. However, I agree. Pitch clock is still the most workable corrective. It just might have to be a more aggressive pitch clock than was originally rolled out in the minors, which might explain why MLB went with the even stricter pitch clock this season. And again, that seems to be having the intended effect.

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And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. But the truth is hard to take When your livelihood's at stake Better cover your mistakes And the buck doesn't stop you no more The buck doesn't stop you no more