Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1843: I Think You Should Leave

Episode Date: April 30, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley react to MLB’s decision to suspend Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer for an unprecedented 324 games, then (22:25) discuss Justin Verlander and Ronald Acuña Jr. looking like their old selves and pitcher Tucker Davidson’s critiques of the minor league pitch clock before answering listener emails about the Cardinals and how to […]

Go away, far away, far away, far away Hello and welcome to episode 1843 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined as always by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello Meg. Hello. So we are recording on Friday afternoon, and shortly before we started here, some news broke about Trevor Bauer. And it is not the kind of news about Bauer that has been breaking at periodic increments for the past many, many months, which is about his administrative leave being extended. In this case, it is harder news.

It is more definitive news. Can't call it a resolution, I would think, but it is at least an announcement of a suspension. So let's have the ceremonial reading of statements here. We have a statement from MLB. We have a statement from the Dodgers. We have a statement from Bauer, and that should bring everyone up to speed, and then we can discuss this. So the, and that should bring everyone up to speed,

and then we can discuss this. So the press release that we received from MLB says, Dodgers pitcher Bauer disciplined. Commissioner Robert D. Manfred Jr. announced today that following an extensive investigation by MLB's Department of Investigations, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer has received a suspension for 324 championship season games, representing two full seasons without pay, effective today for violating Major League Baseball's joint domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse policy. In accordance with the terms of the policy, the commissioner's office will not issue any further statements at this point in time. However, there were some further statements, this point in time. However, there were some further statements, one of which was by Bauer's team, the Dodgers, who said,

today we were informed that MLB has concluded its investigation into allegations that have been made against Trevor Bauer and the commissioner has issued his decision regarding discipline. The Dodgers organization takes all allegations of this nature very seriously and does not condone or excuse any acts of domestic violence or sexual assault. We've cooperated fully with MLB's investigation since it began, and we fully support MLB's joint domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse policy and the commissioner's enforcement of the policy. We understand that Trevor has the right to appeal the commissioner's decision. Therefore, we will not comment further until the process is complete. And finally, Bauer's statement from Twitter was, In the strongest possible terms, I deny committing any violation of the league's domestic violence and sexual assault policy.

I'm appealing this action and expect to prevail as we have throughout this process. My representatives and I respect the confidentiality of the proceedings. So that's all out of the way. We are all on the same page here. This is a 324-game, two-season extension starting today. No time served. This is without pay. So Bauer has been paid during his administrative leave up to this point.

during his administrative leave up to this point. He gets to keep that pay, I suppose, but will not be paid if this suspension stands up for the next two seasons, which would take him through the conclusion of his Dodgers contract. But he is appealing, which is unprecedented, right, for a player suspended under this policy. Generally, there is a settlement, there is an agreement of some sort, and often a time-s served component that of describing that. But what we have often seen is that the player and the union will reach a settlement with the league where they do not appeal the decision. And as part of that, often the time that they have spent on administrative leave while the allegations are being investigated will end up being part of their suspension as sort of a time served. And I think we had kind of wondered what would happen here because it is not by any means

unprecedented for a player to be on administrative leave and to be on administrative leave for like a good stretch. Yeah. The previous longest one was one year, right? 162 games for Sam Dyson, I think. Correct. And I don't think that we've ever seen a player on administrative leave for quite that long and so you know the the like the details sort of the housekeeping that

goes on around payroll is like the least important part of this and we want to say that up top but I had kind of wondered like how does the how does the money work in a situation like this? But all of that sort of wondering on my part was predicated on the assumption that I guess that Trevor Bauer is like a different person than he is. And he has proven unwilling to participate in any kind of settlement process. And as soon as he appealed, the possibility of that 111 games being sort of part of any additional time that he would miss sort of went out the window so there is the possibility that this suspension could be reduced on appeal certainly and so this process as you said is this isn't a conclusion but

it is a very significant update to where we have been and yeah i don't know i find myself kind of stunned ben candidly you know i i didn't expect to hear a number and think yeah that seems right because that doesn't feel like how this this sort of thing typically goes in professional sports so i'm kind of at a loss for what to say which is a really great state of mind to be in when you're about to record a podcast admittedly so i i kind of can't believe it i don't know what the number will end up being this certainly if if this number is upheld on appeal if he does in fact miss um 324 games and is effectively done as a dodger and i i would have to imagine you know having said all that like i've been disappointed before but i imagine that this probably signals the end of his career in major league baseball i would have

to think that it would be pretty hard for a team to sign him after this so you know this this puts the dodgers in the position of not having to make some what might be potentially difficult choices about how they balance the moral choice of keeping him rostered versus the payroll aspect of that. But that doesn't mean that this isn't a good decision, even if they don't have to make a trickier one down the road. So I don't know. I find myself kind of stunned. Yeah, if this suspension were upheld, it would have been three years by the time that it expires, right? By the time he would even be eligible to return to MLB. And that alone would be an impediment to any player being signed.

But with this going along with that and whatever else comes out or happens between now and then, I think there would be an enormous uproar because, again, this sort of sets him apart from the rest of the rog previous players who have been suspended who have been, I don't know if they've been welcomed back with open arms, but they are back and they've been back for some time. And maybe some people carry that memory of what they did or what they were accused to have done with them. But they have been employed and will continue to be employed. But no one has been suspended for this length of time after a lengthy investigation. And again, I don't know exactly what will come out about what MLB's investigation consisted of. We know from at least one tweet by James Wagner of the New York Times that this was not only centered on the California woman, but also the Ohio woman who had previously filed a restraining order against Bauer. And that was subsequently reported after the initial accusation came to light. So there were at least two people, two cases, two incidents that this

revolved around. And we don't know what else came to light during that process, but they certainly took their time for whatever reason coming to this decision. And, you know, Bauer, I guess like you, I kind of thought the longer it dragged on, the less likely that an outcome like this was just because you kind of got the sense. Are they just kind of kicking this down the road or are they hoping that people will forget about it at some point? There was a theory going around that they had delayed until this day specifically because they just wanted the news to be buried by the NFL draft and just like a Friday news dump. And I guess it is a Friday news dump, but it's not the news that people thought they might have been trying to bury necessarily. Not that there won't be blowback to this decision from some quarters as well. So either way, there would have been some hue and cry there. But yes, the longer it went on,

the more likely I thought that we would just hear, oh, time served, because at that point, it would have been a considerable amount of time. And so I am also sort of surprised that they didn't, I guess, take what could have been perceived as the easy way out, especially because we know that Bauer is hyper litigious, right? And he does not take anything quietly. And he has sued multiple parties for defamation during this interim. He has sued multiple reporters or media outlets. He has sued the woman. He is not hesitant to sue anyone at any time, seemingly. So MLB, I guess, is putting itself in the crosshairs to some extent. But they have high-powered and high-paid lawyers, I'm sure, including the one

who is the commissioner of baseball. So we'll see what happens with the appeal and what happens with any subsequent protests or litigation or anything like that. But he's now not taking on just an individual reporter or person, let's say, I guess he is taking on the league. And to some extent, I mean, the union, I guess, is in an interesting position here because they, of course, went along with all of the administrative leaves. Those were joint decisions by the league and the union. I mean, typically the union has some obligation to defend union members, right, and to stand up for their rights and support them if they want to appeal a suspension. And in this case, I don't know how many people want to be portrayed as supporting or defending Trevor Bauer, but there are certain duties that you have to union members, of course. And so I guess that is another wrinkle to this whole thing that the union is kind of placed in the position, I suppose, of being obligated to defend a member that many members of the union probably don't have a high opinion of at this point. Yeah. And sometimes that's just the way the

cookie crumbles, right? i think that you can want there to be a robust process by which employees are represented in any employment action and if you trust that those processes are rigorous and that they take evidence seriously and that they are fair you can sort of pound to the table for their importance and also have faith that they will resolve in a way that, you know, is what I would perceive to be a just outcome. So I don't know. I don't struggle to like hold those two thoughts in my head at the same time. And like, I think we talked about this. We've talked about this at various points. Cases like this are hard to talk about. Like, I don't want to sit here and try to weigh, you know, one, you know, person's violation versus another, you know, that kind of accounting is just something that is icky

and that I'm not qualified to do. And so, you know, it's, it's sort of hard to compare the length of his suspension versus others, because you're inherently saying, well, you know, this, this kind of intimate partner violence is only worth this saying, well, this kind of intimate partner violence is only worth this number of games and this kind of violation of an intimate partner is worth X number. And it's like, that's, I don't think a particularly productive way of thinking about this stuff. I have expressed in the past sort of a heavy feeling around being a person who is deeply invested in baseball and is also, you know, a woman who wants other people's sort of agency and bodily autonomy to be respected, to have people who are associated

with the league in healthy and nonviolent relationships with their partners, and often feeling as if that isn't a priority for the league. Insofar as this expresses not only to Trevor Bauer, but to future players and current players and staff members that you will face very severe consequences if you engage in behavior like this, I think that it is a good day. And it's a complicated question

how you construct policies that are sufficiently punitive but do not disincentivize people from reporting, right? We've heard from domestic violence experts that if you have zero tolerance policies, it can actually be detrimental to intimate partners of those athletes because the consequences of reporting are so high that they might be incentivized not to say anything. So it is a really hard and thorny thing to sort out. And so I don't want to minimize the difficulty of doing that in a way that sort of protects victims and hopefully offers therapeutic options to those who are willing to engage with them but like this guy just seems unrepentant clearly and i think that it's important for us to when we have an opportunity and there is evidence and you're right we haven't heard much from the league about either what it found in the course of the investigation of the allegations we know about or if there was anything

else that came to light and i don't say that knowing anything to be perfectly clear but to you know if there was further behavior that this may be revealed but to do that process and come away saying like you know we're going to take this seriously i think is you know i don't want to be overly praising either because that seems like a bar that we should hopefully clear every time and with ease but we haven't always so i'm glad that we seem to have this time because i like cried on my podcast the last time we talked about trevor bauer and i don't have that same sort of hopeless feeling right now so that's a welcome change and obviously like my feelings are not the ones that are the most important here. So I want to say that also. But I hope that this, you know, is something of a balm to people who engage with the game

and maybe themselves have been victims of sexual assault or domestic violence. And I am not counted in that camp, but who, you know, want to love the game and feel like it often doesn't love them back. I hope that this can feel like maybe a turning point in your experience and, you know, is evidence to the league that, you know, doing the right thing around this stuff is really important. So. Yeah. And, you know, I don't think we probably have to tell most of our listeners this, but I think that when the news came out that the Los Angeles DA was not going to press charges against Bauer, various people interpreted that as Bauer being exonerated, right, or Bauer being innocent,

right, because he's not being criminally prosecuted. And of course, that does not mean that. It means that for any number of reasons, the DA just decided not to bring that case. But of course, MLB is not bound by that. And, you know, often with the legal system, I mean, there are just so many ways that these things can go wrong from a prosecutor's perspective, especially when you have a very vocal celebrity like Bauer involved. with MLB, all they had to determine was, did they believe, did they find credible evidence that Bauer had violated the MLB policy? And I'll just read this one little paragraph here from this joint policy. Sexual assault refers to a range of behaviors, including a completed non-consensual sex act, an attempted non-consensual sex act, and or non-consensual sexual contact.

Lack of consent is inferred when a person uses force harassment, threat of force, threat of adverse personnel, or disciplinary action, or other coercion, or when the victim is asleep, incapacitated, unconscious, or legally incapable of consent. Some of the testimony, the sworn testimony that was provided in those court proceedings would suggest that there was a violation or multiple violations of this policy. Bauer has disputed some of the specific claims that were put forward there. But if MLB in the course of its investigation decided that those things happened, that it was convinced that something in that list occurred there, then that is sufficient for them to suspend him under that policy. That's sort of what it's there for to an extent. MLB having a sports league be in the position of trying to like legislate things that kind of fall through the cracks of the legal system and how that's not ideal.

And yet it's also not ideal to have no mechanism for that and just to kind of defer to the courts, which was the case up until several years ago. And very often these things just were wet to slide. So I think it is good that there is some process in place here. And Bauer deserves to appeal and make his case before an independent arbitrator who will rule on this suspension. And we will see what comes of that. But, yeah, just the fact that this was levied at all, I think, probably has surprised people around the game in one way or another. I think just the fact that they went ahead with this, given all of the baggage involved with Bauer. Yeah, I didn't expect, I mean, like, good is such a weird word to describe.

Just, I don't know, talking about this, even as a person who has talked about it a lot and has thoughts on it that I hope are sufficiently nuanced, like we could use a more expansive vocabulary, I guess, but to get news that felt like it was actually proportionate to the severity of what had happened rather than being an easy way out was not what I was expecting. As I've said several times, I was like, oh, they're going to bury this. It's going to suck. So here we are with, you know, hopefully a week that doesn't see this guy on a mound again. So certainly no time soon, it seems like.

And it's pretty hard to imagine a scenario where even after that, that could happen. Maybe he pops up in the Mexican league or something at some point, as we have seen some other players do. But yeah, it's hard to imagine Trevor Bauer being a major league pitcher again. Yeah, and I don't know. I even struggle to think that. I know that we have seen players who have had other either sexual assault allegations brought against them or domestic violence allegations brought against them play in other leagues but I do wonder hope perhaps that the amount that we know and that has been reported

about the particulars of his crimes and also his own sort of litigious nature might be enough to stymie even even uh orgs that might be willing to kind of take a flyer on a guy so i don't know it'll be you know like you said this isn't this isn't done yet but what a what a moment we have reached well now we face the uh question of how to transition to any other subject after discussing this, which we have faced before. There is no easy segue from this topic. Can I say a thing that I also said in the Facebook group? And I'll just say it here in case people didn't see it there, which is just like, I just invite people to be sure that they are being not only respectful of, but sort of careful of their fellow Facebook group members.

If they are deciding to talk about this, I just talked about how the language around it can be hard to grasp at. And you, you know, you want to be careful to be saying the right thing, but I just, you know, you never, you never know what's going on with the person you're talking to, what their own experience of of this might be. And, you know, we want it to be a place where people feel comfortable and cared for. And so just, you know, take a beat before you respond. I don't know that there are many people in our Facebook group who listen to this podcast who are going to have a tremendous amount of like sympathy for Trevor Bauer. But just like, remember that Trevor Bauer is not going to see what you post in the Facebook

group, but other members of the community will, and they might be coming to conversations around this stuff with their own experiences that are hard. And so just everyone try to take care of each other in the next couple of days. And after that, but especially in the next couple of days,

just like take a beat and take good care. So that's what I'll say. Not just in the Facebook group, everywhere. Everywhere. Especially in our little corner of the internet. Yeah, but our corner, we have a little bit more. Various corners. Yeah, we can kind of, hopefully we can put our thumb on the scale in a productive and thoughtful way. So this is me putting my thumb on that scale.

All right. Well, we had planned to do some emails today, and I think we will. Just a couple of things that I had meant to bring up, just very baseball-y on-field things. Do you know who is leading the major leagues in innings pitched at this moment as we record on Friday? Gosh, I sure do not. It's Justin Verlander. What? Justin Verlander is leading the major leagues. Get out of here. With 26 innings pitched, which is just wonderful, really, because when Verlander came back, it seemed quite possible to me that he would still be effective, and he very much has been, I thought that it might come at some cost to his durability, to his just being the ace who constantly takes the ball and is almost like anachronistic in the

way that he has these heavy workloads. I mean, the last time that we saw him in 2019 when he won the Cy Young Award, he led the majors in starts with 34. He led the majors in innings pitched with 223. Of course, he dates back far enough that he actually threw 251 innings in a single regular season. Can you believe such a thing? And he was racking up postseason innings some of those years too. So he's almost a throwback in a sense. But I thought at 39, He's almost a throwback in a sense. But I thought at 39, coming off Tommy John surgery, maybe he would take it easy. Maybe the Astros would take it easy with him and that he might still be effective, but maybe not deliver the volume that he had previously. Well, he is basically.

He has averaged six and a half innings per start, which is almost exactly what he averaged in 2019, the last time he was healthy for a full season. So I just love this. I love that he has been as good as he has been. He also has a sub-2 ERA and a 7 strikeout to walk ratio. I mean, he's pretty much just picked up where he left off, despite the surgery, all the rehab that comes after that, the recovery, his age at this point. I know he's said things at various times about wanting to pitch until he's 45 or whatever, and I've been dubious about that, but he is not really showing any signs of age now, even when it comes to just innings counts. So I love the idea that perhaps even Justin Verlander in this era of just the fallen starting pitcher and five and dives that Verlander might still be kind of carrying the flame here for a previous era of pitcher usage. Not that he's going to be racking up 300 innings or anything. It's still a fairly recent era, but he's almost a man out of time at this point. And I love that that is still the case, even after all he's gone through.

Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. And I think that when he re-signed with Houston, we were sort of of the impression that he would maybe have a diminished workload, but also that if anyone's going to know what's going on with him it's gonna be houston right that they're gonna have the best insight into his rehab process that they're gonna know exactly where he is and so it seemed like a lot of money for an older guy but it made sense that if he was gonna get that contract that it would come from them but i'm just you know i'm just kind of floored by the numbers that he is putting up here i would not have expected it to be quite like this so yeah justin verlander as i as i live and breathe 95.2 average

fastball velocity yeah how about that and of course he is a pitcher who's been famous at points in his career for conserving some energy and some velocity for later in games, which, as we discussed recently, is just not in vogue now. It's max effort constantly. I haven't looked to see if the gap between his max and average is as big as it used to be, but he is someone who has been a practitioner of just pitching in a pinch or at least saving something, holding something in reserve so that you are able to reach back for a little extra in big moments instead of just constantly reaching back for everything you have at all times and just winding yourself, burning yourself out even earlier. So I like that he is still providing a little bit of continuity with an earlier era. So long may he pitch can i just say a thing that

is like a it's not a flaw in my website but it is a i wish that we could hide seasons on here because even though i know in my brain both that 2020 was 2020 for everyone and also that Verlander got hurt in 2020, my little goofy brain is like, oh, my God, I can't believe he had a 40% home run to fly ball ratio. And then I'm like, oh, it was 2020. He threw six innings. It doesn't matter. That number doesn't matter.

And so I wish I could – I just want to collapse that little row and say bye-bye 2020. But, yeah. Well, you know who to talk to to make that happen, I'm sure. Yeah, gosh, yeah. I'm sure that won't lead anyone to mischief at all if we can just hide seasons. No downside there. No, that'd be fine.

I don't like that one. Yeah, let's make that one go away. And speaking of players who have returned from injury looking like their old selves, Ronald Acuna came back on Thursday and he went one for five. It was an amazing return or anything, but he stole two bases. And that was the concern that I mentioned on our last episode. Well, will he come back as the power speed threat that he was before? Or after having a leg injury and getting a little older, would he maybe throttle back a bit? And I don't know if that was like almost a statement of intent, like, hey, here I am. I'm not going to let that slow me

down at all. Or whether he just missed playing baseball and missed stealing bases and just wanted to do everything you can do on a baseball field in his first game back. But I like that. It's like a shot across the bow. It's like, hey, I am still the Ronald Acuna. You remember, I'm still going to be running. And I love that if that's the case. we sort of actively feel when they're gone and the relief that we experience when they're able to return to play after being injured. I think that's a good way of putting it, Ben. He's one of the main characters. It's like when, you know, I remember when Mindy Kaling had her show.

Was it the Mindy Project? Was it a show or a project? You know, all these names sound the same to me. But anyway, she described Best Friend as like a tier. You know, it's like a you don't have a single one. You might have a group of people that sort of occupy that tier. And, you know, I think Ronald Acuna Jr. is's been up and down in the big leagues, and he's currently in AAA. And he posted a Twitter thread about his thoughts on the pitch clock, the more aggressive pitch clock that's been in place this season, 14 seconds with the bases empty, 18 seconds with runners on. And I thought there were some interesting points he made here,

some good points, maybe some revealing points, some points that maybe he thought argued one thing and I thought argued something else entirely. But here's what he said. Some takeaways from the newly installed pitch clock. I've made three starts with it and each time it's been a different experience. Overall, not a fan. Let's talk about the good and the bad. One, pace of play is very quick. The numbers don't lie. Games are shorter. We played two games under two hours last week. We won due to a pitcher not throwing a pitch in time and a strikeout to end an inning due to not being set in the box with runners on. It's been an adjustment. Two, routines and walk-up songs are gone. Holding runners is

nearly impossible. The clock is inconsistent, and truthfully, it makes the game that much harder. The mental aspect of the game is huge. Being able to reset in between pitches is gone. Three, I believe we need some type of clock just so it doesn't drag on. We have some type of pace, but the clock determining the pace and the outcome. This isn't the NFL. If I want to check the runner three times a second and make the hitter call time, I get to do that. Physiological warfare. I think he meant psychological.

Four, how could it improve? With runners on base, more time, but not by much, from 19 to 24 seconds. With nobody on, 14 seconds is quick, but not much of an impact in between pitches. Both parties would benefit from the additional time, so call it 17 or 18. Five, but why those numbers? During my outings, I felt like the majority of pitches left my hand. I had two to four seconds left on the clock. With runners on, the ability to hold runners is very difficult. Multiple looks, long holds aren't really available due to the time on the clock. Six, I felt giving some additional couple of seconds could help everybody out and not feel so rushed, but not letting the pace go

to waste. Seven, the step-off slash pick-off rule is trash. A balk, no explanation needed. Eight, has the quality of on-field play changed with routines and tempo changes? Some guys feel rushed. I know I did my first outing. I felt focused on what the clock was at instead the walk-off home runs, the big strikeout with bases loaded in the eighth inning. Those big moments, the moments you remember from the game, can be taken away due to Mike Trout not being set with nine seconds left on the clock. Taking the bat out of your star's hands will only hurt the game. For me, it's still a tricky subject. So what do you make of his critiques there which are many and varied well i think the one that we probably want to focus on the most is like that should there be a difference in the duration of time the pitcher has when the bases are empty versus occupied i am not unsympathetic to the idea that they might want to be a little bit different there. It doesn't sound like he's asking for something really wild. So that strikes me as something that, you know, part of why I would hope,

part of why you introduce this stuff in a test environment, and we still advocate for a lab league, but here we are with a more immediate test, is tinker right and to to take that feedback and see if you need to adjust things up or down or change the requirements that you have the pitchers depending on the game state and we we saw this happen with the automatic strike zone you did some great work on this right where the shape of the zone did change over the course of the season based on feedback from the folks involved so hopefully what we will see is you know opinions like this aggregated and then there be some tinkering to say oh well yeah i guess we should give you a couple more seconds when there's a guy on base and

i'd be curious to hear from him again after he's had even a couple more starts under his belt to see if his experience of the clock changes additionally when he's gotten even more used to it than he is now because i can imagine it being incredibly distracting in your first couple of turns out when you're not used to doing it because you're thinking about the clock more than you're necessarily thinking about executing your pitches and i could imagine that being distracting but i would suspect that you adapt to that pretty quickly even if you still feel a little bit rushed. You're probably not thinking about it quite as consciously.

I don't know. It would be interesting to hear from him. Yeah, there is a gap between runners on and bases empty, and I think there has been since they started implementing the pitch clock. He wants an even bigger gap or just more time added on both counts, I guess. So this season, it's 14 seconds and 18 seconds. Previously, at least at that level, it was 15 seconds and 20 seconds, I think. At least most recently, it's gone through various iterations over the years.

And then last year in one low A league, it was tested at 15 seconds and 17 seconds with runners on base i think and you observe that pattern if you look at pace data for any major league season that pitchers take longer maybe hitters take longer too with runners on because you know you're checking the runner maybe you're going through an extra set of signs at least in the pre-pitchcom era because you don't want your code to be cracked. And maybe just the stakes are higher. And so you're taking a little extra time there. So I think you do have to have that differential. But if he is saying going up to 24 seconds or something, I mean, that's, I don't know that that's really helping at all. There are certainly pitchers who take

longer than that. but that seems uh too lenient to me there is maybe a happy medium i don't know like i i said the other day i don't necessarily want baseball to be like speed chess or something where you're just like everyone's frantically running around trying to get it over with as soon as possible like there is something to be said for the languorous pace of the game at times we're not managing to zero as we've said before right yeah i think you're right though that three starts i sure i'm interested in his impressions but also we wouldn't necessarily want to make any decisions based on those three starts which i get yeah that's why we need live league maybe but as long

as we don't have it yeah let's bide our time because there's going to be an adjustment period there, obviously. And we're thinking long-term here. We're thinking in terms of seasons and years and decades, not one or two or three starts. So that's part of it. And you could say maybe they should have been eased in in some way or better prepared for it. I don't know. But the fact that it's jarring at first is not necessarily an argument against it. I think what's interesting, though, is that a lot of his comments are just that, like, this is harder. It's like, I don't like this as much. It's like it's harder to hold runners. Well, I'm sure it is. But first of all, that may be a feature. Not a bug. Yeah. As far as

MLB and many fans are concerned, if we want to bring the running game back, then that's okay. I guess I kind of appreciate the cat and mouse and the mind games and checking runners and throwing over and everything, but it's not scintillating stuff necessarily. Just having a ton of pickoff throws or peeking back over your shoulder and then stepping off the rubber that's not why we're buying tickets necessarily so i'm not saying that we should eliminate that but if that leads to longer leads more steal attempts well that's probably part of the plan here and if it's just that he's not able to reset in between pitches again like maybe that's a feature i understand why that could be uncomfortable for him or other players but if that means that maybe they have to take a little off that they're not throwing as hard as they possibly can or that their max velo is not quite

as high or maybe they are a little less effective if we want to bring some offense back to the game if we want to equalize the pitcher-batter balance, then that's, again, not necessarily a bad thing. It might be a bad thing for pitchers from their perspective. I'd be interested in hearing from a hitter with a similar thread about whether they feel this is going pretty well. But that's the thing. It's like we're coming into their workplace and saying, hey, speed up. Come on. Let's go. And I get why that would be uncomfortable and why you would prefer to say, no, leave me alone. I want to take my time here. Sometimes you have to think really hard about the rules around hyphenation and you don't

want anyone rushing you for whatever reason. They won't stick in your brain. You are a professional editor, but still you can't do it on a clock. Yeah. So I'm not a fast writer. I'm a fairly prolific one, I guess, but I put a lot of time in. I almost brute force it. Because you never sleep. Right. So I'm not dashing things off necessarily. I'm just taking a long time to write the things that I write. So if someone were standing over my shoulder with a clock counting down between each word or each paragraph, I would say, no, thank you. And I would probably have a Twitter thread about how I didn't particularly care for that. But that doesn't mean that anyone else necessarily has to care about it. So it just

comes back to that debate about like, well, the players are, is it their game? Is it our game? It's theirs in the sense that they've devoted their lives to it they're the ones providing the entertainment and yet the point of it is for us to be entertained more so than for them to entertain us it's both it's both obviously but like if you have many many millions of fans who are in favor of hey let's uh make this a bit more snappy and then you have the players who are saying no i want to catch my breath. I want to take a little time here. I want to walk around the mound once or twice. I want to adjust my batting gloves, whatever it is.

Well, the needs of the many maybe outweigh the needs of the few here. So I don't know. I'm kind of conflicted about it. Like, I think they should absolutely take into account feedback from players. And if there are problems with like the stepoff, pick-off rule, there were players and people I talked to last year about those various tweaks last year that were not happy with the way that those things worked. But I think that part of implementing the pitch clock is that it is going to speed people

along. It's going to be like, hurry up. Hey, let's get going here. And they may not love that. And I think it does have to be pretty aggressive because, as we noted the other day, there are just more pitches thrown now. So many pitches. And with the 22nd pitch clock in place last year, like minor league game times were as long as they had ever been. So now these savings have come about with this much more stringent and much more aggressively enforced type of pitch clock. And I think that has paid dividends. But maybe you need that.

I guess the part that I'm maybe most sympathetic to him about is the idea of like the automatic strikes that are being assessed. I mean, it's true. Like I wouldn't necessarily want a big moment to be decided by, oh, you weren't ready, you know, at the nine second mark after the previous pitch. And so we're assessing a strike or you took more than 14 seconds or whatever it is, that would be a bit deflating to have things decided that way. And yet you need the policy to have some teeth because if there's no penalty, then why would anyone abide by it? So again, you kind of have to balance those things. And I guess you hope that you just have fewer violations of the policy as you get used to it, right? It'll just be part of the rhythm of the game and you won't have regular infractions like that. Yeah. I think that there will be an adjustment period and then, you know, you get, you get used to stuff, right? For a while,

people hadn't pitched with a pitch clock at all. And I'm sure in the beginning they were like, stop hurrying me along. You know. But that's exactly how they sound. That's their voice. Stop it. I don't like it. And then they got- That's basically if I had to do a voice to sum up this Twitter thread. Stop it. That's the intonation I would use.

I don't like it. Feel rushed. Look, I am super sympathetic in the abstract. I think that the pitch clock is important. And I think that we will get it dialed in at a level that is, you know, where everyone finds it livable. I'm confident that that is true. And that might mean a couple more seconds than we have now.

But I think we're going to get it dialed in. But I've maybe said this on the podcast before, like I have to turn the radio down when I parallel park. So I can appreciate how like having another thing to have to pay attention to would just be like one too many things to have to pay attention to i'm not unsympathetic but i think that i also have confidence in our adaptability as human beings so i think we'll get to a place where it's workable well i appreciate davidson offering his thoughts there and i hope that many other players do because clearly it's on their minds. And if they're thinking about it, then I'm interested in hearing about it.

And I'm sure that the league is too, or at least I hope the league is open to this sort of feedback because players can make valid points. I guess it's just, you know, they can also just be a bit obstructionist perhaps at times because they like things the way they are, which is understandable. bit obstructionist perhaps at times because they like things the way they are, which is understandable. But also sometimes you need someone to intervene and say, sorry, not everyone else likes the way that things are. So you're just going to have to swallow this, unfortunately. All right. Maybe we can answer a few emails here. Here's a question from Jack who says, as a Cardinals fan, I've spent a little of the past few years frustrated by our approach to pitching. At a time when strikeouts and stuff matter most, the Cardinals love to settle for ground ball pitchers.

We rely heavily on guys like Dakota Hudson and even went as far as to draft a sinker slider pitcher with our first round pick in the 2021 draft. This, of course, feels like a continuation of the Cardinals under the long tenure of pitching coach Dave Duncan. Maybe all of this is an oversimplification. There's definitely value in ground ball pitchers, and the Cardinals do have their share of competent strikeout guys. But is it possible the Cardinals are exploiting a market inefficiency by targeting pitchers like these? Or are they truly behind the curve on pitching development in the year 2022? So we can make this Cardinals specific or we can broaden it

out to say if a team is zigging where everyone's zagging, is that necessarily a bad thing or could it be a good thing or might it be both depending on the team and the time? I think it's both depending on the team and the time. I think a lot of it is like how how purposeful is your decision making and how much is your decision making really a reflection of an unwillingness or an inability to adapt? Because I think it's very different to say we like if I were the Cardinals, congratulations, I'm the Cardinals. I were contemplating a more ground ball heavy approach to pitching, I might have some confidence that I can do that in a way that will be productive for my roster because I have one of the best defenses in baseball, right? I have this incredible infield that can really handle this stuff, right? And then if it goes wrong and if a guy misses his spot and the ball happens to make its way to the outfield, well, you have a great set of outfielders too. So I think it's really different for a team to say, we have identified what we think to

be a proactive strength, whatever the strength may be. And we have guys who we think we can maximize to that. And we are confident that it is going to result in outs or runs depending on the situation. And so we are comfortable having an approach that is a little bit different versus saying i don't like fast balls at the top of the zone that's magic right like it's a different i think that it really depends on oh no i'm making a process argument but i think the process by which you arrive at the roster composition you have really makes a difference

and then i think you have to have a willingness to adapt to the information and feedback you're getting from the performance of your players and you have to be staffed such that you can distinguish signal and noise in that but you need to be willing to say oh we we tried a bunch of stuff and we thought it would be great and it turns turns out it was garbage. So we got to go a different way. And I think if you're willing to be sort of adaptable and look at the information that is, you know, that your team is generating and tweak or maybe course correct, that's fundamentally different than being like, you know, we're going to make every guy pitch the exact same way because that's the cardinals way and right even in the face of it not working we're still gonna

make them do it because you know that's how we do things like that is a very different philosophy than being like we think that like yeah fastballs at the top of the zone that's great but we're gonna go with a bunch of sinker guys because we have this great infield defense and yeah you should tailor the strengths of your staff to the strengths of your defense to a certain extent if you are graced with a great defense as the cardinals have been for quite a while now then yeah it plays to your strengths more so than other teams right so you could say that's a market inefficiency, I suppose. Like if some team has a terrible defense, then they probably shouldn't be willing to go and get this pitcher. They won't be as valuable to that team because those ground balls won't pay dividends the way that they will for the Cardinals.

And so maybe the Cardinals could get some value by going and getting a Stephen Matz or something, which does not mean that they shouldn't also or couldn't also be bidding on some maybe higher ceiling arms that I'm sure that many of their fans would have been happy to have them go after. Right. So I also think it's weird that Kyle Gibson pitches for the Phillies. Seems like a weird choice. Yeah. And Matz, these days, he's not even really an extreme ground baller or anything, I don't think. So maybe he's not even the best example necessarily. But I think that you look at their starting rotation depth or the lack thereof, and some of the pitchers they did not sign or were not involved in trying to sign seemingly over this offseason. I think there was some question and some frustration about that. So the fact that you have a great defense,

does that mean that you cannot also get someone who goes and miss bats and they will be good for you too? Yeah. It turns out that they still do just fine. Yeah. But I think you're right. You don't want to get locked into this one size fits all organizational philosophy, at least when it comes to a pitching approach. Like, I guess the Pirates would be the example of a team that maybe took that too far, supposedly, in the past several seasons during the Ray Searidge era where they kind of had their thing of pitching inside

or, you know, throwing certain pitches, not throwing certain pitches, organizational emphases. Like, that whole idea of like, we don't let pitchers in our organization throw this type of pitch, or we try to teach everyone this type of pitch. That makes me suspicious. Not that I'm saying that's exactly what the Cardinals are doing here, but that kind of thing, like, okay, you can recognize certain aspects of performance that you think are undervalued or easier to teach or maybe with the personnel you have in place you know we have a strength we are able to teach this thing really

effectively and so we will stress that but then what happens when dave duncan retires or when suddenly ray searidge's magic doesn't seem to be working so well because the game changed or maybe he wasn't as much of a genius as everyone thought in the first place. I mean, you can get yourself into trouble if you model your whole organizational approach after one guru, right, who may or may not be as great as they're cracked up to be or may just move on. There's a lot of turnover in Major League Baseball. So I think it pays to just evaluate each pitcher on their merits and say, well, what would work best for this pitcher? And maybe throwing a sinker low in the zone makes sense for them and it'll work well with our defense. But maybe with this

guy, we want to have him fire these high spin four seamers up in the zone, whatever it is. So I think if you had all one type, that would make me raise an eyebrow, perhaps. So it could be either. It could be that you have picked up on something that you can do better than anyone else or that you think is out there for the taking. Or it could be that you have gotten overly married to a certain philosophy and you're not thinking beyond that. The Cardinals have been pretty successful on the whole. So that's something. I don't think Cardinals fans can be too upset with how they have performed over the past decade or two. So that's something. But that doesn't mean they couldn't be behind the curve in some respects

as well. Yeah. And I think we see successful organizations that have different philosophies about this stuff or their understanding of what is like an easy to develop trait in a pitcher versus something that is a more immutable characteristic might vary or it might be the same, but how they weight those things can kind of vary org to org, right? You have orgs that are like, yeah, we'll just develop velocity in everybody. We can just develop below if we need it. And you have orgs that are are just really keen on strike throwing, even if it comes with lower B-low, right?

So it's just there are different modes of successful pitching, even as we see league-wide trends. And you just got to be willing to say, that didn't work. Let's do a different thing. And I think you're right that the common thread among all of the organizations that i think of as like being particularly adept at pitching dev is a willingness to sort of meet the player where they are and that doesn't mean that they don't try to improve different aspects of the player's game but that they they are not so committed to saying you know

we have to all you know we have a an approach there a way. And if you don't do that way, you might not have any use to us. You know, they look at a player and say, can we maximize the skill set you have? And that might mean developing another pitch or changing a grip or helping you develop velocity, but like they're, they're willing to kind of work with a guy. And I think those are the orgs that tend to be able to navigate the changing trends that we see across the game, right? They're the ones that are the best positioned when their bright young analyst goes and works for somebody else, because that happens too. I guess it can get you into trouble if you have a lot of success with a certain philosophy, because then you could get complacent or you could say this is working really well for us so why would we go away from it and then under your nose the game changes in some way and maybe you miss out on the pitch design revolution and maybe your old strategy that was working so well isn't serving you so well anymore so in a sense like if you're not constantly just kind of looking out for the

new thing and evaluating new trends and where the game is going, then you could get caught flat footed. You could almost be a victim of your own success because you're like, hey, this is working great. We're the Cardinals. Again, I'm not saying the Cardinals are not investing in those things and doing those things as well, but I wouldn't say that they've necessarily been among the trailblazers at the vanguard. And I guess you can sort of understand why, because they've been quite successful. So, you know, there aren't a lot of teams like the Rays who seemingly are just constantly looking for what the next thing will be or inventing the next thing.

And maybe that's a product of the personnel they have in place. Maybe it's a product of their ownership's spending constraints, just kind of forcing the front office to always constantly be on the lookout. Or maybe that just becomes like your organizational ethos. Like, that's our thing. We're always looking for the next thing. Even if we find something that seems to be working, we're not going to just commit ourselves to that long term. Yeah. And, you know, if you wait long enough, the trend will just come back around to you. Probably. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, there's been like a bit of a sinker renaissance or resurgence lately, right? After that pitch seemed to be on the outs and hey,

then suddenly the ball is dead again and maybe you can bring back those pitches. So yeah, you never know. You never know. All right. Here's a question from Devin, Patreon supporter. In episode 1838, near the end, there was a brief discussion of replay review signals in MLB and Japan and elsewhere. It was suggested that managers look to other signals for requesting a review if over-the-ear headphones

become disconnected from the original act of review. This made me think of the save icon, a floppy disk that people born after 1995 may have never seen or used. Yet the disk remains a universal symbol that seems to be well understood. That made me wonder, are there other baseball symbols or language that are now divorced from their original usage in a similar way? symbols or language that are now divorced from their original usage in a similar way. And I think there are a lot of examples of that just in tech and in other walks of life. I mean,

just the fact that like, I guess, you know, picking up with the save icon being a floppy disk, like the phone icon is generally like an old over the ear kind of phone, like hold it up to your ear. And that is not what most people's phones look like anymore. But we know what the phone icon looks like. And you and I, we're old enough that we grew up with actual phones that looks like that, but not everyone. So I think there is a term for that, I believe. I think it's called a skeuomorph. Skeuomorph.

If that's not the term, it should be. Because what a great word to get to say. It is great. Skeuomorph skeuomorph if that's not the term it should be because what a great word to get to say skeuomorph yeah i'm just uh reading from the wiki here it's a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues or attributes from structures that were necessary in the original skeuomorphs are typically used to make something new feel familiar in an effort to speed understanding and acclimation. So, for example, if you have like electric lights, like an electric chandelier that has like candle shaped bulbs or light fixtures, that kind of thing. You know, they don't have to look like that. It's just that they used to look like that.

They did used to look like that. Yeah. There are a lot of, you know, the wiki mentions pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal or a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar, right? Like if you look at your calendar on your phone, it might be an image of like an actual paper calendar, the kind that you use still. I guess you use a notebook, right? Yeah, I use a planner. I think it is different. It is sort of in the same family, but it is a unique species of thing. Yeah, I don't remember how biology works, but I think that's right. So I don't know if the word skeuomorph only applies to visible things or physical objects and whether you would use a different word for a word or for terminology. But I think there are a ton of these in baseball, and I'm sure that our listeners, their minds are teeming with examples here.

I was just thinking of a couple couple like shortstop, for instance. Why do we call that the shortstop? Why do we call it that? Historically, I guess shortstops tended to be short, but that is no longer the case. And I don't think that is why they were called short. Why are they called shortstop? No one really knows and remembers. I'm reading from an MLB.com piece here. Shortstop is such an everyday part of the game that you might never have stopped to think about what the heck it actually means. According to MLB official historian John Thorne, the position was created by Doc Adams, member of the Knickerbocker Baseball Club, one of the game's founding fathers and the owner of a heck of a beard. At the time, baseball wasn't a nine-man game. The only things

required to field a team were a pitcher, a catcher, and a defender at each base with the surplus players being placed in the outfield. This created some fielding issues, however. The earliest baseballs were handmade and very light, and it was nearly impossible to throw them any significant distance, like, say, from the outfield to the infield. So Adams had an idea. Position a fielder in the short field or shallow outfield to help get the ball back into the infield more quickly and efficiently. It was like a relay man. Since most throws from the outfield came toward third base or home plate and most batters pulled the ball, it only made sense for him to stand on the left side of the diamond. As baseballs became harder, they were capable of being

hit and thrown farther, allowing the new shortstop to move into the infield. So we say shortstop. No one remembers that that's the case or even thinks about why we say shortstop necessarily. So that would be an example. And I think there are many examples of that type, like moonshot, for example, a moonshot, which is, I guess its meaning has morphed in a sense, but it was originally inspired by Wally Moon and the fact that before Dodger Stadium opened and the Dodgers had moved out to the West Coast, that the team needed a temporary ballpark and it used the Los Angeles Coliseum,

but that had not been designed for baseball. And so you had a left field foul pole that was 250 feet away from home plate. And because pitchers hated that naturally, they put up a big fence and therefore Wally Moon, Dodgers left-handed hitter, changed his swing so that he could hit these high fly balls to the opposite field, which were then called moonshots because they would maybe go over that fence. And now I guess we say moonshot mostly just like for any kind of towering fly ball. Like I don't know that its meaning has shifted completely, but it sometimes it's just like, oh, that was a bomb. That was a moonshot. I don't know if people even think about the arc of it as being so specific, but I don't think most people think that's why we call it moonshots or remember Wally Moon necessarily.

Maybe they think like, oh, he hit that to the moon. It's a moonshot, right? So those meanings can change or like the etymologies that we have in our heads, if we have any etymology in our heads at all, those shift over time. But I think there are a lot of remnants and fragments like that in baseball. So yeah. Yeah. We're going to get emails, Ben. We're going to get a bunch of emails and that's fine because I'm sure that there are things that we're not thinking of and we'll go, ah, that, yes. Yeah. I'll link to cut four piece because it it includes some other candidates like that i mean on deck and in the hole right which was probably like originally in the hold i mean these are not because you used to have to stand in a hole right yeah

yeah there used to be a hole and then they were like that's dangerous we should cover that up just make them stand there this is one of these cases where like people aren't even necessarily sure how these migrated to baseball and it's i guess scott boris would be happy with the nautical terminology here and then like bullpen the origins of bullpen are disputed. And what else? Banjo hitter, bush league, like all these band box. I mean, do people think of an actual physical band box when they say the word band box? Probably not. No one really uses band boxes anymore. Or like around the horn, which no one really thinks about why they say around the horn or maybe they think about it and just don't know why. But that was like, you know, another nautical term, probably like cape horn, like sailors rounding cape horn. And so we say around the horn and you don't even think about these things for the most part.

even think about these things for the most part. And I like that. I like that there are just these remnants of earlier times that we all just take for granted and you'll learn them if you're someone who's growing up as a baseball fan. You're exposed to them very early on and you just accept, sure, that's what that's called. I'll never question that until you turn 35 and you realize, whoa, I don't know why that was called that why was that called that so that's always a fun little process i'm still back on thinking about how wild it is that people don't know what the save icon is for anymore oh no yeah i can't say i miss floppy disks particularly i like having a lot of storage space but yeah floppy disks were terrible like and they broke all the time they were very temperature sensitive remember how much more temperature

sensitive the computing experience used to be i mean i know it's not good for them to be hot still but like you really had to i was like taking care of a very particular plant you know yeah even like the the floppy disks that we grew up with were no longer floppy no they weren't by our time originally they were floppy like really floppy i guess maybe my my aunt when i was very young had an archaic computer that really did have the big old actually floppy floppy disks but yeah by the time we got computers we're talking about like the the three and a half inch ones that were not floppy at all and we were still calling them floppy because that was the term that was just still in use anyway if you want to hear more of our

ramblings about technology and how it's changed we did a whole bonus pod for our patreon supporters about that a couple months ago so So that's out there for you. Yeah, where I sung the praises of no longer having to defrag your hard drive. What a good thing. How about that? All right. Question from Matt Hall, Patreon supporter, who writes in response to Miguel Cabrera getting intentionally walked after his 2,999th hit. Should batters be allowed to reject an automatic intentional walk? You made a comment about how Miggy wasn't able to try and reach for one off the plate because of the new intentional walk rule. What if a batter could refuse this and force the pitcher to throw four

balls anyway? I believe there is maybe a Joe Posnanski proposal out there that the batter should be able to reject the intentional walk. And then if the intentional walk is done over the batter's objection, it's like there's a steeper penalty. Like you get an extra base or something? Yeah, you get two bases instead. So what do you think? Should there be either steeper penalties or just the option to say, nope, I do not accept. I declined the intentional walk and I will swing away. I'm struggling to know what my answer would be because I think in modern baseball, how many guys do you think would really take advantage of being able to say, no, thank you, please throw to me rather than give me a base? I mean, first of all, I think that that would be a

decision that would probably be made in conjunction, not just with the player, but with the staff, right? Because if you're issuing an intentional walk, you are doing it because you think that the batter behind that guy, often you're thinking the batter behind that guy has a less favorable matchup, is a less good hitter, some combination of those things. And so I guess it would probably be, on the one hand, it would be dismissed fairly often because you're like, no, throw to me, the better guy. But you still have the advantage of being on base. So I guess, I don't know, how often do we think this would happen? Because I do think that there is something cowardly about it. But there's also obviously good strategy it but there's also obviously like good

strategy in play there and we like strategy we're not huge fans of cowardice though we are all subject to cowardice at points in our lives so we're not especially judgmental about cowardice but we don't want to promote it like as a you know as a base state so i don't know maybe i'm just saying words while i try to decide what I think about this. I don't think it would happen often. I don't think it would happen very often. I think they'd be like, yeah, I'll just take my base. Right.

And they probably should just take their base. Yeah, they should just take their base. As we often discuss, the intentional walk is usually not the sound sabermetric decision, right? It's usually not great. And so it follows then that declining the intentional walk would not usually be the sound sabermetric decision, right? Yeah, it's usually not great. And so it follows then that declining the intentional walk would not usually be the sound sabermetric decision. And so probably teams would just have a policy or maybe there would be a hurried consultation, you know, and you could quickly-

Get their slide rules out. Right. So I think you would usually have it declined and this would not make any meaningful difference. I love the idea of declining it because how much fun would that be? Oh, my gosh. The body language alone. Fight me. Yeah.

The body language alone. That would be awesome. I mean, what would be cooler than that? Saying, no, I am not taking my base or I will take it by force. Yeah. You will not give me this base. I will take this base from you. I love the it by force. You will not give me this base. I will take this base from you. I love the confidence in that.

Just like, nope, I believe in myself to such an extent that I think that my expected outcome here is better than me being at first base and just advancing any runners by one base. So I love that. And it would immediately be incredibly entertaining and watchable. I love that. And it woulding a better player and an entertaining player for maybe a less entertaining or exciting player. And that's no fun for anyone. We want to see the good player get the hit. We want to see the best against the best. The silver lining is that, for one thing, it sort of raises the stakes because you're wondering, OK, will it backfire, especially if it was probably a questionable decision

in the first place? You're wondering whether there will be payback, whether the manager will be made to see the error of their ways. And then also it puts a little extra pressure, well, on the pitcher for one thing because maybe you're loading the bases at times or at least you're putting someone on. There's no margin for error. And the hitter who's coming up and who has just been dissed basically, understandably dissed in many cases, but you have to say, well, okay, you didn't want to face me.

You think you're better off facing me than that guy. So there's a little chip on your shoulder from that too, especially if it's not just like a platoon advantage kind of thing, which is usually involved to some extent. So I like that aspect of it. I would kind of like the option, though, to decline because just every now and then, like once in a blue moon, like the Miguel Cabrera reaching out to hit the intentional ball, that almost never happened. But it did happen that one time. And after it happened, it was possible that it could happen again. So like just having

the option to decline, even if no one ever really took you up on it, just knowing that you could, you know, and maybe players would get asked, hey, did you consider declining the intentional walk there? That would be kind of cool. So I'm in favor. Again, this is an example of if baseball were different, how different would it be? Probably not very different in this case, I think. Unless you outright ban the intentional walk, which you could also do. And then you'd end up with a lot of silly looking unintentional intentional walks that look a lot like intentional walks used to before they were automatic. But yeah, I like giving them the option. And there would be such interesting like body language around it because you'd have guys who would need to like they'd want to just

take their base because strategically they know that that's often the right decision but they wouldn't be able to do it all the time so they'd have to do that thing that like bros do in bar fights where it's like hold me back bro hold me back it would be yeah we get some really great faces and we'd get some i mean the commentary after games would be so satisfying sometimes so i don't know i i think we should do it i think it would be deeply goofy a lot of the time but i think we should give it a go i agree all right and then this one is from peter who says this is a mildly dated question but in the keith oberman is a pedant and didn't read the Lindsay Adler article kerfuffle. And I guess we should catch people up who are not terminally on Twitter at all times. Friend of the show, Lindsay Adler of The Athletic, Yankees beat writer, wrote a perfectly

fine article about Isaiah Kiner-Falefa and his interesting positional odyssey and going from being a catcher to being a shortstop and how unusual that was and how little recent precedent for that there was. And I guess, what did she say? He was like the first in modern baseball or something. And Olbermann quote tweeted her and cited some not very modern counter examples of players who had done similar things, not even necessarily the same thing. Anyway, that became- Many of whom, if I i recall were mentioned in the piece yes right i think he maybe saw the first

sentence or something so lindsey uh defended herself and keith ultimately kind of retracted or apologized not entirely he did a sort of apology yes sort of he did a sort of apology. Yeah, sort of. He did a kind of apology. Yes. Anyway, that was a thing for a day on Twitter. Yep. So Peter continues that out of that, one actually interesting question that emerged to me was when modern baseball began. Plenty of folks online pointed to the fact that pre-1947 baseball was segregated, but even post-47 baseball doesn't really resemble the contemporary game in so many ways. Even post-47, baseball doesn't really resemble the contemporary game in so many ways. And I'm editorializing here, not even in the desegregated, integrated way, right? I mean, you know, one player or a handful of players hardly makes the game completely desegregated or integrated.

So question for you is, Peter continues, when do you consider modern baseball to begin? Not the band, but the sport. Obviously, the question is different for different contexts, but in your common usage, if you say modern baseball, where do you draw the dividing line? I posed the question to my baseball listserv, and here were some proposed results.

1947, the old standard. 1973, the DH added to the AL, and the mound lowered in 1969. 2003, the year Sabermetrics announced its hostile takeover of baseball with Pakoda, Moneyball, and Theo Epstein being appointed GM of the Red Sox. Also, one vote for Gary Matthews' bat flip in Game 4 of the 1983 NLCS at Veterans Stadium. That's highly specific.

Very specific. And I've heard it. This has shifted over time as time has proceeded and has modernity has moved along with it but sometimes you'll even hear it said like modern baseball is like post 19th century so where do you draw that line if you draw it anywhere oh gosh uh You go first. Or like in the past few years, possibly, because modern, I'd probably try to avoid the term to mean any. It's like a sliding, constantly shifting scale with varying degrees of modernity. So I would either just be specific and say a year range, you know, post whatever year, or I might say like the live ball era or the expansion era or the divisional era,

or I guess you could say the integration era or the divisional era, or I guess you could say the integration era or the DH era, although maybe you need a universal DH era too, like the pitch tracking era, the stat cast era, the zombie runner era. Sadly, I guess that is an era. Hopefully it won't be a long lasting one, but I would just say what I meant, I guess, instead of just leaving it up to the listener's interpretation or making it very vague. But yeah, I think if I would just say what I meant, I guess, you know, instead of just leaving it up to the listeners interpretation or making it very vague. But, yeah, I think if I were to say modern, I would mean like baseball now, baseball as it is currently presently played. I think I would probably say modern is. Yeah, I think you have to you have to have an expansive understanding and it needs to be adaptable. I think that for right now, I would go back to 2008.

I would probably say the pitch FX era forward is modern baseball. Part of that understanding comes from the seats that we occupy, where it's like the ball that we are able to measure all of that still fits in the same sort of category of advancement to my mind so i think that that's what i would say because pitch fx is 2008 right yep yeah accident by the way total accident that we have that amazing what a little gift total accident that that is the thing that we have. It's, don't think about it. The public that is, yes. Yeah.

Don't think about it too hard. It'll stress you out. But I think I would probably say 2008 because in terms of the way that I have, both that I understand the game now and the way that my understanding of the game, I think felt like it took a huge leap forward. It was around the writing that that that change facilitated and at this

point i mean gosh we've talked about this before do we have any active big leaguers from before that time yeah justin verlander to name one yeah verlander but it's a short list right yes it is you know the number of guys where we very cleanly have their entire careers in the pitch tracking era is gosh this episode's just about making me feel old i think oliver perez looks like he just dropped off the list because he was just uh dfa'd by the diamondbacks right yeah i was uh hoping he would pitch forever i was kind of did but yeah i mean yeah he effectively did that. He didn't literally, but he effectively did it. So I think that that would be what I would define as modern. And then I think you're right that we have to kind of keep an eye on that and grapple with our own mortality,

just to pick up a couple of different themes from this pod and recognize that that will probably be an insufficiently precise definition of modern in maybe pretty short order. Right. And actually, I think the Hall of Fame just changed its definition of modern, right? Because or contemporary, right? Because they quite expansive their definition now. Yeah, they just reorganized what used to be called the Veterans Committee for the umpteenth time, right? And so now they have the classic baseball era, which is before 1980, and the contemporary baseball era. And can we pause? Everything before 1980. Yeah. That's a lot of baseball before 1980. Yeah, yeah. And they did that for various reasons. We can link to pieces that explain that. Obviously, those earlier eras have been quite picked over when it comes to Hall of Fame candidates, at least white player Hall of Fame candidates.

But that is interesting. I think that they moved that to 1980, whereas previously, I think the Hall of Fame had had that be like maybe 1970 was like the modern baseball committee prior to this change. So they just moved up. And I guess it always should be moving along with the rest of us. It's like in the Marvel Comics continuity, they have like a sliding timescale sort of, which is that like it's not fixed to any date in history it's like the modern era which started with fantastic four just like continuously slides forward in time and it's weird and kind of confusing to wrap your head around but i guess we need a sliding time scale of mlb modernity but yeah 2008 seems like a pretty good place to put it if I had to put it

anywhere. But again, I'm not sure I would even put it there. I would just say pitch tracking era or since 2008 or something. I don't know. I don't know that we need to pin it down necessarily because no one will know what you mean unless you then go on to define it, which if you do that, then you might as well have just done that from the start. Well, and I think that when Jay Jaffe spoke to, I think it was Josh Rawich who he spoke to, the president of the Baseball Hall of Fame, about the changes to the committee structure. Because if ever there's someone who's going to give you all the details you want about that, it's going to be Jay Jaffe. He's so good at this. And I think that that was part of what Josh said was that like, this is a standard that will be kind of reevaluated regularly because what modern means is going to, you know, contemporary

means is going to change because after a while, we're going to all look up and be 50. And then it's like, oh, God, so far in the rear view. You just think about like how old we are, which is not old, even though I have spent this episode talking about how it has made me feel old. It is not old, even though I have spent this episode talking about how it has made me feel old. It is not actually old, but then you think about the distance between big events in your life and the distance between when you were born and World War II, and you're like, wow, those are approaching one another, aren't they?

Yeah. Anyway. It's not going to get easier to contemplate that. No, because we still have to deal with how long bryce harper is signed to play for the phillies and how old we will be when that contract expires and let me tell you it's a while yeah yesterday was the 10-year anniversary of bryce harper's big league debut and mike trout's promotion in 2012 10 years and we're almost at the 10-year point for this podcast, too. So it's been a while. It's been a good 10 years for us and also for Bryce Harper and Mike Trapp. But still, 10 years.

It doesn't seem like that long. Yeah, it doesn't. Sam used to say that 1988 was where modern baseball started. I don't know if he would still say that. And he was always, I think, kind of tongue-in-cheek when he said that. But also that was when the pitch by pitch era started. So recording the outcomes of pitches, if not in the pitch tracking, pitch FX stack cast way. So, yeah, you can delineate that however you want.

But my daughter needs a diaper change and she needs to have that happen where I am currently sitting. So we can end this episode here, I think. Sounds good. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks, as always, for listening. I should note that after we recorded this episode, the Washington Post published a story in which a third woman comes forward to make allegations about Bauer. This is a woman with whom he had a sexual relationship for years dating back to 2013.

And the allegations in the article, very similar in nature to some of the ones that have been previously aired. This is another woman in Ohio, in Columbus specifically, who met Bauer when he was still a minor league pitcher. Bauer did not deny the relationship, did deny the allegations, but the woman says that she decided to share her story after Bauer had denied the similar allegations made by two other women and accused them of lying for potential financial gain. And in the story, she and her lawyer say that they shared their allegations with MLB, which might have something to do with the severity of the suspension. So there certainly appears to be a pattern here. This was not one woman at one time,

not that that would be acceptable either, but this certainly sounds like a repeated pattern of behavior, which as I understand it is not unusual with this sort of assault, which I imagine is something the League took into account. I will link to that story and other related stories on the show page, but of course, content warnings apply. By the way, anyone who was wondering what Meg meant when she alluded to PitchFX data originally not being public, as I understand it, MLB had not intended to make that data widely available and maybe had not even anticipated the demand for it. But some of it was living online in some form. It was powering some widgets and it turned out that it wasn't protected. It

could be accessed and scraped and people did for research purposes. So it was just sort of a happy accident that it got out, and then that set a precedent for at least some of this tracking data being made public. And I think it was mutually beneficial to some extent. There was a symbiotic relationship there where some of the public researchers were able to use the data and validate it and discover some ways in which it was lacking. But it's also been very helpful for fans and for people like me and Meg to have access to that information, and I wish we had even more. It's kind of like how NASA missions to the outer solar system, uncrewed probes, people had to push to get cameras on

those things because you didn't necessarily need cameras for scientific purposes for every mission, but some people had the foresight to say, hey, this will get the public interested, and there actually will be some research and scientific applications of this and it'll make it possible for us to drum up a lot of interest in funding. And it's just more fun when the public, which is supporting NASA through taxation, is able to see the proceeds of that spending. It's been great news for baseball nerds and space nerds, and I am both. Last time when we talked about the Mets Cardinals hubbub and beanball battle, one factor we neglected to mention is that the Mets have a lot of hitters who get hit by pitches. I intended to point this out because Rob Maines mentioned it in an article

that I cited, so let me just read a paragraph from him here. Last year, there were 311 batters with at least 250 plate appearances. Among them, Mark Canna ranked third in hit-by-pitch frequency, and Starling Marte ranked 28th. Canna's been hit twice and Marte four times this year. Neither was a Met in 2021. The other Mets hit multiple times so far this year are Pete Alonso, ranked 54th last year, Dominic Smith, 61st, and James McCann, who wasn't hit much last year but was well above the AL average in 2020 and 2019. As I've written, Rob has written, some batters are clearly more able or at least willing to be hit by pitches than others.

The Mets have several of them on their roster, and the players cited above don't include Jeff McNeil, the 35th most frequently hit batter in 2021, nor Brandon Nimmo, number 104, Francisco Lindor, number 150, ranked in the top half as well. The Mets' starting lineup Tuesday night had those eight players.

So the only player in their lineup who was below average in hit by pitch rate was Eduardo Escobar. And that doesn't even include Michael Conforto, the former Met, who also got plunked pretty often. So it seems to be something of an organizational philosophy or a skill that they've collected. Or maybe the universe just dictates that Mets get hit by baseballs. One way or another, that makes it more likely that the Mets would be the recipients of as many hit-by-pitches as they have been this month. Also wanted to mention, on our most recent episode, I noted that some teams seem to be pursuing a policy now of having catchers set up over the plate and not vary their targets much from pitch to pitch, the idea being, well, pitchers don't really have pinpoint command,

most of them, and so if they're going to miss by a foot or more on the average fastball, well, pitchers don't really have pinpoint command, most of them. And so if they're going to miss by a foot or more on the average fastball, well, you can just sort of set up over the middle and trust to the velocity and the natural movement to take it somewhere good. And maybe it's easier for pitchers to just focus on that one central unmoving target. Maybe they don't try to be too precise. They don't overthink it. They don't vary their mechanics, and now with a slightly deader ball, that strategy makes even more sense. Well, I got a message from a Twitter user, atberryhorse underscore 29, no name given, who pointed out something similar that's happening in another sport, in this case golf, and I'm always interested in how some of these analytical concepts do or don't map on to other sports. So this user drew my attention to something called the Decade System,

which has been popularized by Scott Fawcett, a golf instructor. And the idea, again, along the same lines, even elite golfers are not quite as accurate as has been generally believed. So I'm quoting from a Golf Digest piece about Decade here. Even the best players in the world don't know where the ball is going. They simply don't. It's becoming less frequent, but you'll still hear announcers on PGA Tour broadcasts suggest a player should expect to hit it within 10 feet from 100 yards in the fairway. We now have the data to test that

hypothesis, and it doesn't hold up. From 100 yards out in the fairway on the PGA Tour, just 28% of shots end up inside 10 feet. And so you can plan accordingly, taking into account that lack of precision. So quoting from a message from the Twitter user here, Fawcett and Decade have been extremely helpful for many pro golfers improving their games by choosing a more optimal and almost always more conservative target for their shots. The concept is that even prime Tiger Woods, or in the baseball case, Matt Brash, is aiming much more of a shotgun blast than they are a perfectly precise sniper rifle. This analogy is maybe more violent than it had to be, but I get it.

It continues, and by centering the shotgun blast dispersion pattern straight down the middle of the green, or strike zone, instead of the quote-unquote greedy sniper rifle target right at the flag or at the edge of the strike zone, the trade-off overwhelmingly removes awful shots, shots into hazards off of the green, non-competitive balls and wild pitches, and has almost no change to the frequency of perfectly placed close shots, pitches on the black. Of course, it slightly introduces more risk of a meatball down the middle, but with this

new baseball, this trade-off seems like a no-brainer. Cool comparison, so thanks for that. And thanks to everyone who has supported the podcast on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. And the following five listeners have gone to Patreon and signed up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get themselves access to some perks. Paul Schulte, Mitchell Dixon, Matthew Piseski, Colin Briskman, and Dave Lyne. Thanks to all of you.

Piseski, Colin Briskman, and Dave Lyne. Thanks to all of you. Our Patreon supporters get access to our Effectively Wild Discord group, to a pair of playoff live streams, and to monthly bonus episodes, one of which Meg and I will be recording this weekend. Because as we just rediscovered, much to our dismay, only 30 days in April, and we owe our supporters an April pod. You can all join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effect on itunes and spotify and other podcast platforms keep your questions and comments

for me and meg coming via email at podcast at fancrafts.com or via the patreon messaging system if you are a supporter you can follow effectively wild on twitter at ew pod you can find the effectively wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild thanks as always to dylan higgins for his editing and production assistance we hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. And then if it goes wrong and it happens to make its way, sorry, the cat is being a pain in the ass. You were so good for so many episodes. And now, now in this moment on the day of my daughter's wedding,

all right, you can sit right there, babe. Sorry, Dylan.