Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1845: Bang Bang, Maxwell’s Sunday Homers

Episode Date: May 5, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a Madison Bumgarner ejection, players having to be held back, and sensual sticky-stuff inspections, the historically slow start of the Reds and Joey Votto’s response to a FanGraphs article about his season-opening slump, and a study on which teams improve pitchers. Then (24:10) they discuss how John T. […]

You Can't hold me back You can't hold me back You can't hold me back You can't hold me back Hello and welcome to episode 1845 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. How are you? Well, I didn't get ejected in the first inning of a baseball game, so I'm doing better than some.

Has anyone had to hold you back today? As I said to you before we started recording, and I don't want to impugn anybody's character, but if there's anyone in baseball who might genuinely need to be restrained because he seems very serious, it might be Madison Bumgarner. He seems like he's committed to the bit. Yeah, we didn't talk to Dale Scott about that situation specifically last time. We didn't ask about foreign substance inspections and we didn't ask about players being held back. But he does mention in his book that often he thinks that's performative, right? That when a player's like, hold me back, I must be restrained by my teammates here to just contain the force of my fury.

That usually it is purely for appearances and that the player doesn't actually want to be released. Or if they were released, that they wouldn't actually do anything because A, they'd be suspended more. B, they might hurt themselves. C, maybe they're not actually that angry underneath the facade of it all. Occasionally, it will break down and you'll see real raw emotion and anger and actual assault happen on a baseball field, which is not so fun. not so fun. But yes, it is true that if anyone means it, if anyone is actually like, I have to be held back or I might just charge you here, it would probably be Madison Bumgarner, who did not take kindly to something that happened in the midst of a post-inning foreign substance inspection by umpire Dan Bolino. It was a lingering hand feel, right? I mean, usually it's kind of a cursory,

I'll just wipe my fingers on your fingers and maybe it's like awkward because we're feeling each other in the middle of a game on a baseball field. And I don't know how comfortable men in general are with public displays of feeling each other's hands. Touching? Yeah. So often it is very quick. It's just like a little swipe. But in this case, it went on for a little while. So I don't know if that is what Bumgarner objected to or whether it was like the eye contact. There was a lot of eye contact.

Yeah. You can't look directly in Madison Bumgarner's eyes or he will activate his inner monster or something. I don't know. Maybe there was backstory here. One of the interesting terms in Dale's book that we didn't talk about in the interview is the idea of surveying a pitcher who looks in, you know, kind of questioningly after a call. They call that surveying, the umpires do. So I don't know, maybe there was some surveying going on or maybe there were some words exchanged here or some calls that one or the other parties wasn't pleased with. But yeah,

I don't know what set him off. And he was asked about it after the game and he didn't really clarify. He said he would probably only make things worse or get himself in more trouble if he said what it was. So maybe something will come out. If not, we can all just imagine in our minds what prompted that confrontation. But I always think when I see that sort of thing, like, I've never been that angry about anything in my entire life, at least not like in a physical way where I just had to be restrained. Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's been a moment where I have really merited being held back, bro. I mean, listen, if you are willing to engage in rodeo sports, I'm not saying that his sense of risk and reward is bad.

I'm just saying that it might be fundamentally different than mine. Yes. So there's that piece of it. Have you spent a lot of time watching the hand checks? Have you been paying attention to the hand checks? Not closely. You know, I've noticed them, but I haven't done a study,

a taxonomy of the hand checks. What have you picked up on? I just, they have been far more cursory than I anticipated them being. And I don't know if that is a mistake of expectations on my part, you know? I think that when we initially talked about them, I made the comparison to like whenever, not whenever, but you know i think that when we initially talked about them i made the comparison to like whenever not whenever but you know sometimes you get you get pulled aside for like special screening at tsa and they like spray the stuff on your hands and then they rub the

strips and then they look at the strips and i guess they're trying to see if there is a chemical that indicates that you have recently handled explosives or whatever i imagine that's what they are for and so i guess that sometimes when you are kind of a weird person like i am you get a particular image stuck in your your mind and then when that doesn't happen you're surprised by it i did not imagine that there would be a spraying of the hands and a chemical i didn't think there'd be science done on the field. But I maybe thought that they would do a little bit more. I mean, I understand that there is something sort of intimate is maybe too strong, but certainly personal about handling another person's hands like that.

And I think you're right that some men do get a little antsy about it in a way they could perhaps examine to their own benefit but um you know just to be relaxed about stuff it's all fine but i thought there would be more to it like i think that i anticipated being able to get like 1500 words out of the hand checks at some point you know and i don't know that there's anything that remarkable about it, which is probably an indication that it's pegged at the right level most of the time, right? Although, as we saw last year, when a certain amount of predictability was introduced to the process, spin rates suspiciously rose again. So, you know, maybe they need to mix it up. Maybe the stairs, the latest distraction

that they are trying to initiate. And I guess it's clarifying in another way, because I had thought that it would be both a visual and tactile examination. And this suggests that perhaps the tactile is the most important part. So anyway, Madison Bumgarner got mad about something. Hardly the first time. A mad bum indeed. But it was sort of illuminating to me that I perhaps had a failed expectation or I was misapprehending how this would go. And so we've learned about it. But if it were me, I wouldn't recommend getting tossed after the first inning of your game. That seems like it's not the best.

And he said that in his comments after that he you know he kind of put his his guys in a hole and and the d-backs rallied to beat the marlins so yeah maybe he fired him up right yeah i mean bum garner he's throwing about 91 these days so he's not handling anything all that explosive at this point in his career but i guess on the inside, at least. And I don't know, maybe Dan Bellino, just he wants to look you in the eyes and take your measure as a man. Can you meet my gaze here?

Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you're not using sticky stuff right now? But I would imagine that there's some history here, maybe some recent history here. But it is true that on the whole, like there was that freak out for a day or two when they first started doing the sticky stuff inspections last year where it was like, oh, this is a farce and baseball will never be the same. Sergio Romo took off his pants or started to.

Right. And various people were upset and then everyone got used to it. And maybe the enforcement got lax, which I guess is just a lesson that applies not only in baseball, but everywhere. Like any precaution you take, people will find a way around it or the enforcement, the standards will slip. And that's why they are feeling each other's hands at this point, right? This was a corrective measure put in place to do away with those cursory, perfunctory,

pro forma type of checks. And now maybe this type of check has devolved into basically the same thing. So there will have to be another step, another layer that is imposed here. But that's really the whole thing, right? I mean, that's like when they try to impose pace of play restrictions and everyone cracks down for a season or part it. And lo and behold, game times go up again. And so you need to have something that there is no way to get around, you know, an actual clock that counts down. Let's say not that there aren't ways potentially to game that too. But you can't have a human there who's just going to say, oh, I don't want the confrontation. I don't want the pain of doing this right now. I'll just let it slide.

I don't want the pain of doing this right now. I'll just let it slide. Yep. But we did get another veteran player who I think had a healthy reaction maybe to being questioned about something, which was Joey Votto, right? Joey Votto, social media star. Yeah. Not performing on the field as he would like to this season or as anyone would like him to. But Fangraphs published a post on Wednesday by one Dan Szymborski about whether we should worry about Votto. Is this the end for Joey Votto?

The headline was. And Dan went through some disturbing, some concerning stats in there. Troubling. Yeah, not just about the surface performance, but about how hard Votto is or is not hitting the ball these days and which pitches he is swinging at and so forth. And Dan, much to his dismay and regret, came to the conclusion that he wasn't really feeling a Joey Votto bounce back based on what we've seen so far. But Joey Votto, he quote tweeted, right?

He is extremely online these days. And I'm sure there are probably people out there saying, oh, he's on every social media. No wonder he's in a slump now. And I don't know that we would recommend being on Twitter, but I'm sure there's no correlation there. Anyway, he tweeted out the article and he said, five months to go. Enjoy the show. Now, shortly after that, he was placed on the COVID IL, unfortunately, so the show will have to wait a little longer but that was a good response I think right yeah I'll say Ben he didn't just quote tweet the article he tweeted a link which suggests to me that he visited fangraphs.com and I'm sure he does regularly yeah yeah we've we've heard that from him before and um I just want to say uh Joey if you are out there

and you happen to be a listener of the show if you want to tweet all of our articles that'd be fine I wouldn't object I'd hold myself back from objecting you wouldn't have to hold me back at all I have so much sympathy

for how strange it must be to have random people on the internet constantly appraising your performance at work you know like accountants don't have to deal with that you know like i guess like maybe there are yelp reviews but they're not get audited yeah they're not sitting there every day you know if you're if you're the ice cream scooper at an ice cream shop like you know you're probably not getting your performance reviewed every day. We're not gauging the efficiency of your scoop or the similarity of

the scoops you serve. We're just eating our ice cream. So I try to keep in mind how I would feel if someone were constantly evaluating my performance at work on the internet, which does happen from time to time, Ben, but it doesn't happen with a great deal of regularity, and it can feel kind of icky, even and perhaps especially if someone is right about something. And so when players get worked up about something they see at the site, I don't do this perfectly, granted,

but I try to take it in stride because I'd feel uncomfortable if someone were talking about me on the internet and have in the past so i really admire people who can kind of take it in stride and are able to like acknowledge that it exists without getting defensive about it or snippy at the person writing it i mean i'm sure it helped that like dan just seems devastated this entire post at what he is finding this is not a gleeful excavation of the stats on his part and so i'm sure that that probably greased the wheels for this particular reaction from vato but yeah he

was very gracious he's uh he's an interesting guy and one who i am thrilled to learn reads the site and i hope that we can in the future, talk about the great turnaround that he exhibited as the season progressed. It would hardly be the first time that he had turned around a season midstream. And I won't go into all of the analysis Ben did or my own, which would be inferior to his, but I am certainly surprised that he has started the season this way and that the Reds as a whole have. Not that I expected them to be good after the offseason they had but Ben it is it's been ugly it's really quite

grim shall we spend a moment on this because you know we've we've talked several times in the last couple weeks about how we're not really paying attention to the standings yet and you know we check in every now and again but it's not really our focus i i oh man so cincinnati is last in baseball by wrc plus they have a 68 team wrc plus you listeners will be unsurprised that they uh trail the league in war offensive war we haven't gotten to the pitching yet we will get there but they don't just trail they trail by like quite a quite a little bit to the point that i'm like i know that war has error bars but like they are far behind uh the second worst team in baseball by offensive

war which we should you know remind everyone um this is the war for position players so it includes fielding as well it's not just one's performance at the plate, although as we have recently covered, not so great for Cincy on that score. Negative 0.1 for Detroit. Negative 1.9 for Cincy. They have won three games. They are already 12 and a half games back in the Central.

Wow. Yeah. That's pretty far to be behind less than a month into the season yeah that's that's pretty grim that's not the best they are not last in the league by pitching more that honor falls to texas this is including starters and relievers but it isn't great great they are second to last uh in starter war and hanging on to 26th uh by by reliever war they have a 437 reliever era they have a 813 total staff era no yeah rotation era it's a fib in the fives though so you so things are headed in the right direction. But it's pretty grim right now.

It's a pretty grim bit of business for Cincy, so that's a real bummer. Yeah, 3-20 is a historically terrible start. 3-20? Not played yet on Wednesday as we record, but yes. And for Votto specifically, I'm just surprised to see him start this way because of how he ended last season. I mean, he was one of the best hitters in baseball down the stretch after he made some tweaks and he had his new model, his new approach of hitting at the plate, a little less selective, a little more just going for it, just trying to hit the ball hard. We've talked about that before. I suppose that it could be that he just lost a bunch of bat speed all at once.

It just hits you like a ton of bricks when you're 39 maybe. But it could also be the fact that, well, maybe the ball this year is a little less conducive to that approach or maybe the league adjusted in some way. Or maybe it's just a slow start. I guess he's not 39 yet. He'll be 39 in September. Maybe it's just a slow start. I guess he's not 39 yet. He'll be 39 in September.

But he was just so good last year that, I mean, I expect some bounce back, whether it's a bounce back to just being decent, to being OK the way he was in, you know, 2019, 2020, when it looked like he was on the downside before that last resurgence. I don't know. Everyone loves Joey Votto. So we're all hoping that he can get it together. Oh, yeah. That goes for people blogging about him at FanCrafts as well. But I just thought it was a healthy response. It was not like, hey, you nerds, what do you know about the game or something? I mean, Votto seems to be a nerd himself, so that would be out of character for him. But a lot of players do do that, right? And sometimes on Twitter in response to Fangraph's articles. And sometimes they are taking objection to some system that is, you know, objective. I mean,

it's a projection system. It's not someone who was like putting their thumb on the scale, or maybe it is positional power rankings, let's say, not naming any names here. But there are people who, you know, get mad at the numbers in a way. And obviously, someone designed the system that the numbers produce, but it's not like someone was sitting down and saying, what can I do to screw over this guy? But some players, they use that as motivation. And sometimes that happens on the team level too, where your team gets bad projections and you use that as your locker room material and you have the chip on your shoulder and you say nobody believed in us. And whether that's actually true or not, and usually it isn't, you can use it as motivation.

And sometimes it is questioning the very basis of the numbers and the standing of the people who issued them, right, and their expertise and their qualifications. And Votto's not doing any of that. He's just saying, hey, enjoy the show. Like he's confident in himself that he can turn this around. He's not denigrating the numbers or the analysis. He's not disputing that he hasn't been good so far this season. But he's just saying, I think I can be good again. And I hope he's right.

I hope he's right, too. I did see speculation from some quarters that this was an indication that he was retiring at the end of the year, like only five months more to go. And I don't know that we have any support for that particular interpretation, but it did make me think I was like, all right, Joey Votto is new to Twitter. He doesn't know that people will like interpret the meaning of what he has to say. But yes, I thought it was, it was, uh, it was a cool response. I, I, uh, I appreciate, I appreciate your page view, Joey. I hope that you are an ad-free member. And I just wanted to shout out a tweet from Cameron Grove, former Effectively Wild guest at pitching underscore bot on Twitter, who does tons of interesting analysis on Twitter and at

his site. And just the other day, he posted something that said, some teams have a reputation for improving players, which they acquire from other teams. But is that supported by the data? And then he has a little graph here. And he notes, using my stuff model, the Rays stand out from the rest of the league at improving pitchers. So he has a graph here where one axis is the estimated effect of the pitcher's stuff change on ERA when they join the team. And then the other axis is the estimated effect of the pitcher stuff changing when leaving team. And basically, yeah, when players go to or from the Rays, seemingly, they're like the outlier here. And I will link to this, but it's interesting because it is kind of the teams that you would

expect. Like if you had asked me which teams get more out of their pitchers when they acquire them from other teams. And it's the usual suspects on here. It's the Giants. It's the Yankees. It's Cleveland. It's the Dodgers. It's the Astros. Right.

It's Milwaukee. I mean, you would expect to see this. And so it is not surprising. And I guess going along with what we were just saying, the outlier in the other direction where pitchers leaving the team show the largest increase in stuff quality, it's the Cincinnati Reds. So sorry, sorry, Reds. I guess the Rockies are out there too, although that is a park effect. And this is based on stuff. Cameron has a whole model that's just based on the characteristics of the pitches, not the outcomes. But how fast is it? What's the release point? How much does it move? That sort of thing. So it's not just the results. In fact, it's not at all the results. It's just do pitchers have better stuff when they leave this team or go to that team? And maybe that's a change in pitch selection. Maybe it's a change in pitch quality. Maybe it's a combination of both. But that perception that pitchers do just seem to get better when they go to the Rays or get worse after leaving the Rays, it is borne out by these numbers. And it's also the other teams that you would expect that are kind of at the forefront of pitch design or this, you know, tech-driven progressive player development. It's's just it's almost surprising to see how unsurprising the results are yeah you know these teams develop reputations positive reputations

for a reason and i think one of the things that is always amazing to me about these is how some of the teams that don't change year over year over year over year because you have staff that moves around and teams adapt to what other teams are doing and they start to mimic that in their own player dev and then you have a couple that just year after year after year after year seem to be really getting the most out of their guys so yeah and you'd think that like if you had a reputation for doing that that everyone else would just be able to reverse engineer what it is that they're doing. Or the pitchers would change teams and you'd ask like, hey, if you were just with the Rays, what did they tell you? Because obviously the pitchers still want to

be successful. They don't want to turn into pumpkins when they leave. And so you'd think they'd be willing to share whatever insights they have. Or you would hire people from that organization, which I mean, the Rays have been plundered, right, from a brain drain perspective. Former Rays executives are running half the teams in baseball, it seems like these days. So you'd think it would be hard to sustain that advantage, and apparently not, at least for this period that Cameron's measuring. I don't know exactly what sample this is, but it seems to have been persistent at least over the past few years. And this is not like a new thing.

I mean, these are the teams that you might've thought of a couple of years ago. And so you'd think everyone else would have caught up by now, but not necessarily. And he did this for pitchers, not batters. It's harder, like there's no equivalent for stuff exactly for batters,

except I guess exit velocity or launch angle or that sort of thing. And I think he tried to look into that, and it wasn't as clear or easy to do that analysis. But it is very striking. And so I will link to this if we get questions every now and then, like which team is good at development. And it's hard to say from the outside sometimes. We're not privy to everything that they're doing or not doing. But these are the results, at least, and they kind of match what you would think. I do wonder, I think we talked about this recently, but I always wonder with stuff like

this, you know, there's the obvious player development approach piece of it. And I wonder, too, if part of the effect that we see with stuff like this is, you know, the pro scouting folks being good at identifying pitchers, not only who have deficiencies that their player dev would be in a spot to help remedy and sort of course correct. But also, you know, whether they are doing any of the work to determine like that particular guy is receptive to this kind of feedback versus that guy who's not, you know. guy is receptive to this kind of feedback versus that guy who's not, you know, and I do wonder if sometimes why we don't see players as they shift organizations being able to either carry those gains over or translate their own gains into something actionable for the team that they are joining is like, they're like, I can't tell you how or why it works. I just know that they told me to do this thing and now I'm better, you know? So I think that I wonder, you know, how much of it is good identification of potential new members of

the organization, not only for their actual underlying pitch characteristics, but for a willingness to sort of buy into a process. So I was wondering about that too. Yeah. And I guess you'd want to validate this to make sure that the results improve too, that it's not just the stuff like you're throwing harder, but you lose your command or something, but I'm sure there's a correlation there. Anyway, I want to tell you about something I learned this week, which was fascinating to me because I'm always really interested in the roads not taken when it comes to baseball history. And sometimes someone will have an idea at some point, and for whatever reason, it was not adopted at the time. Maybe it was ahead of its time. And you wonder the alternate history, if they had to actually embrace this and started doing this, how would that have changed the course of history? And not just baseball history. There are lots of non-base of pitchers on active rosters. And I was corresponding a bit

about it with an author named Richard Hershberger, who has written a lot for Sabre and done a lot of research. And he had a book come out a couple of years ago called Strike Four, The Evolution of Baseball. He's really an expert in 19th century baseball and how the game evolved. And so he was complimentary of the article, but he told me about something that I did not know about, which is that there is an example way back in the 19th century of in baseball and other fields in general, because this experiment lasted for about a week until it was summarily ended. But it's really incredible that it happened that early and fascinating to think of what would have happened if they had stuck with it. So I'll give you a little information here and I'll link to all the appropriate citations because Richard sent me some articles from the period. So this was something that happened in 1889. And the starring figure here is John T. Brush, who at the time was the owner of the Indianapolis Hoosiers, who were a National League club, Major League, National League club at the time.

And he later went on to own the Cincinnati Reds and part-owned the Orioles and then most famously owned the New York Giants, where he had a lot of success. And Brush was a very smart operator, and I'll link to his Sabre bio, which has some information about it. Although I've got to just read you the end of the first paragraph of his Saber bio here. So it says, this was written by John Sackerman, he says, Brush was not well liked by players or the press. Quote, Chicanery is the ozone which keeps his old frame from snapping, wrote one critic,

and dark lantern methods, the food which vitalizes his bodily tissues. So if we translate that into 21st century English, chicanery is the ozone which keeps his old frame from snapping, wrote one critic, and dark lantern methods, the food which vitalizes his bodily tissues. I'm just shocked to learn that Scott Boris has been alive for such a long time. Yeah, I know. Right. He's immortal.

Yeah. I don't know what they thought ozone did at that time or what they thought an absence of ozone would do. But basically they're saying chicanery was like keeping him alive. Like he was chicanery was coursing through his bloodstream basically and dark lantern methods i guess you know like a band name yeah it's like the dark web of of the early 20th century i guess was was what he was into i mean he's skulking around you know he's cutting corners he's willing to do whatever it takes. And he was very smart, Richard was telling me. And he wasn't a baseball guy. He was a clothing retailer, but he was one of the smartest people involved in baseball. He was a Civil War veteran, and he got a piece of the Hoosiers baseball team

in 1884, and it was just an advertising move. He did it for his retail clothing business, and then he kind of got interested in baseball, but he didn't have any knowledge or firsthand experience of baseball. He's actually, I think, come up on the podcast before because of the Brush classification plan, which I think we talked to Emma Batchelary about when we talked about the Players League, the splinter league that the players started because Brush had this classification system for players that would determine how they would get paid, you know, like class A players, right? And they could earn a certain amount per year and players objected to that and that caused a backlash and that led to the formation of the Players League. So he was that kind of guy. He had that kind of

mindset and mentality, and he would sometimes swindle the other owners, although they apparently respected him and just had to hand it to him. It's like, yeah, you cleaned our clocks again, John T. Brush. So he was an outsider, and so he seemingly noticed something that the insiders hadn't picked up on, which was the fact that players' pitchers got less effective as the games go on. And because he was kind of ruthless and didn't really care for appearances and didn't care if anyone liked him and, you know, his dark lantern methods and the chicanery that was sustaining him here, he was willing to do something that was very unorthodox and even unpopular at the time. And so what he did just midway through this 1889 Hoosiers season was he decided that they would start changing pitchers in the middle of an outing, regardless of how well or unwell the pitchers were pitching. It was basically what you see now, right, where pitchers get yanked whether they're pitching or not, whether they're cruising, because people know that they get less effective as time goes on. So I will link again to some articles here that Richard sent me, both from the Sporting News and also from the Indianapolis Journal. But I'll just quote here. The system went into effect on June 12th,

1889. This is when they started it. So June 13th, the Indianapolis paper says this, a result of good playing. The home team happily interrupts its line of defeat and wins a game. Manager Bancroft's new tactics begin with a fine showing on the right side of the scorebook. And it continues. The Hoosier ball team went into yesterday's game with an evident determination to win if possible. And by a vigorous use of the stick, coupled with some good base running and admirable head work, downed the lusty league infants in handsome style.

So the lusty league infants were the Cleveland Spiders. They were playing and that was their first year in the league. They were not yet a truly terrible team at that point, but they were infants in the league because it was their first year. Due credit, however, should be given Burdick, who pitched the first five innings, and Getzine, who pitched out the game. Both did splendidly. Burdick had fine control of the ball and was especially effective at critical points. Getzine was also in great form The former sent only one man to first on balls and the latter none

Four of the hits were made off Burdick and two off Getzine As the team has been losing games in the seventh inning Generally through the inability of the pitcher to hold up Manager Bancroft yesterday concluded to make a change at the end of the fifth And for that reason, and not because Burdick was being hit hard, Getzein went in at the opening of the sixth. The scheme seems to have worked well and will be tried again today with the same men, though the order will be reversed. So it's still 1889. They're still like using the same pitchers on Pac-12 days.

But they're not pitching complete games. So the press was totally into it at first because they won the game, because it worked. And the reliever was effective. And so well done you. And this was Frank Bancroft was the manager at the time and player manager, I suppose. So he's getting credit because it worked this first time.

And June 12th, the Hoosiers beat the Spiders 10 to 3. Okay. So that's that day. Brilliant tactics. Everyone is totally happy with this. Now let's fast forward a couple of days. So this is June 15th, the same paper headline, result of bad judgment. A brilliant game the Hoosiers should have added to their victories. And now it continues. Boyle pitched well up to the fatal seventh when a base on balls, two singles and a double sent three men across the plate. The terrific hitting of the Hoosiers, however, would have pulled them through had Boyle been kept in the box. through had Boyle been kept in the box. In the eighth, Whitney was put in, and the change, while it could not be foreseen and was thought to be the best thing to do, was a great mistake. Whitney was

both wild and ineffective. His poor work had a demoralizing effect upon the team, and the only inning in which he pitched netted the visitors six runs and the game. The Hoosiers both outbatted and outfielded the Pittsburghs, yet lost. So in this case, it backfires, right? And now the press is starting to question, huh, you had this guy who was pitching well, and you took him out and you put in a fresh arm, and then that guy gets shelled. I don't know about this relief pitcher strategy. Not sure if this is such a great idea.

Okay, fast forward a couple more days. June 18th, right? Okay. Here's the headline. Same paper again. It's unbylined, but I imagine probably the same writer. Headline, a game given to Pittsburgh. The Hoosiers had it in their keeping, but a foolish order intervened.

After a brilliant beginning and excellent playing maintained throughout six innings, the crowd leaves in disgust. Oh, my God. Here's the lead. Probably the maddest and most thoroughly disgusted crowd seen at the baseball park this season was the one that filed out of the gates after the game yesterday afternoon. It was mad through and through and made no attempt to conceal its ill feeling over the result of the contest. It was a hard game to lose because it looked like a sure victory up to the sixth inning and would have been. Had not manager Bancroft, acting upon a standing order to do so daily, changed the pitchers and turned the tide in favor of the visitors.

The opening game with Pittsburgh was lost on the same account. The absurd plan of changing pitchers in the middle of every game, no matter how well the man who starts in is doing. Can you believe this? Just, I mean, what a plan. Absurd, absurd to change horses midstream. That this plan caused yesterday's defeat cannot be doubted for a moment. It may be well enough to take a man out of the box if he is being hit freely, but to do so when he is pitching remarkably well, as was the case with Getzein yesterday, is, to express it mildly, stupid direction. That's the mild version. That's the fit for print.

Stupid. The German, that's Getzein, was doing great work and expressed a desire to remain in the box. This was pitcher's box, right? This was pre-mound. So they had a box out there in the field. But was not allowed to do so. The visitors earned one run in the second inning, but after that, they could not touch his delivery with any success. Only four hits being made up to the time he retired. The team was supporting him in fine form and was hitting Galvin with great freedom. That's pod Galvin or Pud,

I believe. I think that's because he turned hitters into pudding. I think that's why he's called that. We should have more people whose nickname is Pud because of pudding. There used to be other puddings and pudding has gone out of vogue, unfortunately. Not to me. I love pudding. Continue. It was almost a sure thing that the Hoosiers would win until Burdick went into the box at the opening of the sixth when he was hit for three singles, a double, a triple, and a home run in quick order. This with an error by Glasscock.

Yes, this is the team of the great Jack Glasscock. Allowed five men to cross the plate. After this, Burdick settled down and pitched fairly well, but the game had been lost and his good work availed nothing. Under the circumstances, it was no wonder that the team was discouraged, though the men all made a commendable effort to pull out of the hole and did tie the game in the ninth, but could not hold it, etc., etc. So it goes on to say, Just when the home management discovered this new plan is not very clear, and it is not altogether probable that it will be abandoned, at least it should be. The players do not like it, and manager Bancroft is also strongly opposed to it.

Which is funny, because manager Bancroft got all the credit when it worked the first time. But now maybe manager Bancroft's like, hey, this wasn't my idea. Yeah, he doesn't want to get yelled at. He knows how this goes. Bob's like, hey, this wasn't my idea. Yeah, he doesn't want to get yelled at. He knows how this goes. He very sensibly argues that if a pitcher cannot hold up through nine innings when he is in good condition, he is of no account and does not earn his salary. If a man weakens and the opposing batters hit his delivery hard and often,

then and only then is there any sense in making a change. The Indianapolis team would have won three games instead of one from Pittsburgh had it not been for this new idea. So they would have gotten away with it, if not for these darn newfangled kids. But the best managers in the country say it is an unwise thing to take a pitcher out in the middle of the game when he is doing even average work. And it says that it is true many games have been lost after the sixth inning when the pitcher has done good work up until that point. Okay, so they're acknowledging that, that if you're cruising, you don't always keep cruising. And President Brush, hoping to turn the current, concluded to try this plan. It is a failure. It's been less than a week. It's just been a few days, a few games here, but it is a

failure. And the coda to this plan comes from the national press here, the Sporting News, a few days later, June 22nd of 1889. The management is being severely roasted for this new scheme it has started in changing pitchers at the fifth inning. No matter whether the pitcher starting the game is doing excellent work or not, the club directory, that's like the directors, the leaders of the club, although basically that was just Brush pulling the strings at this point. So he is the club directory, made this an imperative rule as it was claimed that always after the sixth or seventh inning, the pitchers seemed to weaken and the opposing clubs to get on their deliveries and pound out victories.

Yesterday, Getzine was in the box against the Pittsburghs and was doing phenomenal work. The Smoky City Sluggers, being unable to touch him and up to the fifth inning, had made only two runs and three or four scattering hits. In the sixth, he was taken out. Burdick substituted, and then the fun began. The Pittsburghs lit into him for five runs, and in the ninth, one more was made, which was the winner. The home team had a lead of four runs up to the time Burdick was put in. Nobody is to blame for the silly rule but the directors, and it is a question whether it will stand. Manager Bancroft is very much against it and tried to prevent it being enforced, but President Brush was obstinate, and so Bancroft had to obey orders.

I wonder who the source for this story was. Could it possibly have been Manager Bancroft? Who could say? Anyway, that's the whole saga. And after that, it's about a 10-day period here from the first time this is mentioned in print to Manager Bancroft, poor put-upon Manager Bancroft and silly, stupid director Brush. It's about 10 days there and just, you know, few games, but it just, it didn't go well. And that was that. And it was over. And I just love this because it is so emblematic of how these things happen, even today. I mean, it's funny because Brush was onto something here, right? And he was not a baseball person.

And so maybe not being in the tradition of the game is what allowed him to notice and to think, hey, maybe you shouldn't pitch all nine innings every single time. Maybe these pitchers are actually getting less effective as the game goes on, which I believe, like, we don't have data on the times through the order effect for 1889 because we don't really have a great play by play for that era. But Rob Maines of Baseball Perspectives has looked back to like the 60s and 70s when pitchers used to routinely go very deep into games. And he found that times through the order effect was, if anything, more pronounced back then than it is now. So it's not just that that exists now because pitchers are not being conditioned to go deep into games. It's that they were not going deep into games and they were maybe holding something in reserve and it wasn't going well. And hitters were seeing them three, four times or more in the same game. And so they were subject

to the same penalty that we see today. But even in 1899, someone, a keen observer who had a different kind of mind was able to pick up on this. And yet it didn't go well initially and that was that for you know another century plus it's so fascinating to me because i think that we have a lot of instances of this throughout the game's history where even if they couldn't articulate it in mathematical terms where you know people who have been around the, either who have a fresh perspective from being a new observer, right, and not being entrenched in the institution, or who have been in the game for a really long time and seen years and years and years of players coming and going and being good and being bad in the circumstances under which all of those things are true. And sometimes,

even if they can't articulate it the way that we would articulate it now, or even the way that public-facing analysts would have articulated it at the beginning of the Moneyball era, they could find their way to more optimal versions of the game. They could select players for a skill set that maybe they are observing, and they don't even know they're quite observing it. But we've had this conversation around seam shifted wake, right? That there were pitching coaches who could tell you like, that guy's fastball plays like there's something about the way that that, you know, breaking ball plays that is fooling guys. And they, they were, you know, through their experience, sort of intuiting their way to something that would get refined and sort of harnessed to much greater effect once it could be measured better or you know once we like had computers and electricity and you know indoor bathrooms and that sort of

thing because it's really helpful to getting your your analytics staff off the ground and so you know there is that stuff and it persists through baseball. And I'm always fascinated by the ones that do. And then the ones where it's like, no, they yelled at us for a week and we really didn't like it. And so we let it go for a while. And, you know, it could have been that if they had just had like a really like great luck or if all the players had been like i don't know this is cool

let's give it a try or they had had a less colorful like beat writer covering them who knows they might have just like written this for a long time but i don't know i love that stuff where it's like i do think that we tend to i think one of the failings of analytics types is that we tend to have too much confidence in what we can precisely measure and then time will go by and we'll realize that we were under appreciating a skill for a long time like we just didn't know how valuable framing was but like baseball people would have told you that how a guy receives the ball and how soft his hands are and how he moves that slider in the zone is really important to him being a good catcher and so i don't know just where those i think we really

don't like being shouted at in public is a big part of it. Yeah, right. And John T. Brush couldn't care less. And that's why Richard says he calls him the evil genius of the National League. Just like, you know, he didn't mind if people hated him. And as long as he thought he was onto something, and for the most part, I guess he was onto something, both in business and on the field, even though he was not a baseball person originally. And it's really fascinating because, I mean, it goes back to the title of my book with Sam, right? The only rules it has to work. What we were getting at with that is on one hand, it has to be a good idea. If it works, then it doesn't matter what it looks like. It could be a wild idea. The only thing we care about is that it works or that there's a reason to expect it to work. But then the secondary meaning of it was, no, it actually has to work like the first time

you try it. Because if it doesn't work that time, then you're going to have a mutiny on your hands, which is, I mean, we wrote about that in the book. We wanted to do the shift at that level and unorthodox shifts, which are now not as unorthodox at the major league level, but your five-player infields and your four-player outfields and all that sort of thing. We were on board with that because we thought it would work. So, okay, that's the only thing we care about. On the other hand, the first time we did it, we were just on tenterhooks because we knew that if it backfired, we'd never get to try it again because the players would say these guys don't know what they're doing which might have been true but at least in some cases i think we did and that's

what you see here too right like the first time they tried this scheme and they removed the pitcher and it's interesting uh amos russi who went on to be a Hall of Famer, made his home debut for the Hoosiers during this stretch. So they were using at least some pretty good pitchers, too. But, you know, the first time they did it, it worked. And manager Bancroft is a genius and they're going to keep doing this and it's great. And then they lose a few games and it backfires in that not only do they lose, but they lose because like the guy who came in didn't have it that day. Right. And then it looks so bad.

And it's like, I mean, you know, if you updated the language a little bit, which you shouldn't do because it's wonderful and we should have a whole segment where we just like read 19th century game stories and just delight in the language. But if you updated the language like that same sentiment, you could just copy and paste it into an article about Kevin Cash pulling Blake Snell and it would be exactly the same. It's like if you're winning, then you assume that if you don't do anything, you will keep winning and that guy will keep pitching well. Whereas if you bring someone in who was not good, then that's why you lost and you are the one who made the mistake. then that's why you lost and you are the one who made the mistake and to be fair i guess in 1889 when no one was expecting to come in in the middle of the game that might actually have been jarring

for players it's like hey you need to warm up in the middle of the game and come into this thing yeah you are a relief pitcher here's what a relief pitcher is you are one today so i can see how that might have been maybe not putting those players in the best position to succeed. If you didn't give them some warning and time to prepare mentally and physically for doing that sort of thing, then on paper, maybe it would have been a good idea. And in practice, not so much. But, hey, if they had reeled off five wins or something, then maybe that becomes the Hoosiers strategy for the rest of that season. And then maybe everyone copies them. And then we end up

with bullpen games in 1890 or something. I'm not saying I wish that that had happened necessarily, but it's interesting, right? Because the type of person who has this insight, like John T. Brush, doesn't sound like he was necessarily the most pleasant person or the one you would want to emulate from a personality standpoint. And I guess we've seen that in baseball too, where often the people who like get the edge, you know, they're just kind of, they don't care what people think about them. And then maybe they take it too far. And, you know, we evaluate our own reactions to these things. Cause I love the idea of like doing something new and novel and unorthodox and daring. But then if it works, maybe it works too well. And then you take it so far that we end up with where we are today,

where you have, you know, 14 pitchers on a roster at one time. And this is like, it's the, you know, taking it to the logical conclusion, but it's just taking it to a conclusion that isn't actually good for the game. It's just, it probably would have been good for the Hoosiers maybe over the long run. So you can see why it happens. Yeah. I mean, I think it just goes to show you really, really, really need a guy named Pudding as your PR guy. If you convince Pudding, they're going to be home free after that. I mean, we see this, we still see big leaguers who are grumpy about the shift and they're not grumpy about it because they read Russell and are convinced that it is being deployed in moments where the team would

be best to just have their guys in a traditional alignment they're annoyed because you know they're not remembering all the outs they did get they're just remembering the time it snuck through or the time that a guy was able to get a bunt down and get on first base right like the we still see those guys get frustrated and i you know i get it i don't think that their reaction is an irrational one like you you you almost had it we don't we don't take anything quite so personally as the like oh we almost we almost had it we we had it in our grasp and we let it get away. We feel terrible about that. I think we feel worse about the almost win than we do about the blowout because you just get numb to it after a while. But if you're like, oh, if I had just been there,

I could have fielded that and we would have been out of this inning. I imagine that this will continue to be a conversation we have in so many different aspects of the game. That's true even though I think, this isn't universally true of players, but it's less sort of freighted with skepticism than it was in the past, you know, plus they have, they all have electricity. Yes, they do. Yeah. It's a little easier to justify your strange new tactic that you want to try when you actually have data on like, hey, do pitchers actually get worse as the game goes on? I have the numbers right here.

It's not purely anecdotal, right? So I did. And there are so many examples about this even now. I wrote an article a few years ago about how Tony La Russa basically invented the opener in 1993, and they tried the opener for like a few games and it was the same thing. You know, it just it didn't work out initially and they retired that. But it was the same idea. And there's just almost nothing new under the sun. I mean, the idea of limiting the number of pitchers on the active roster, that is new. I don't think there's any precedent for that. That's why I think that doing it the way they've done it thus far with 14 pitchers being the limit or 13 at the end of the month, that's pretty toothless. But just the idea of doing it, I don't think there's any precedent for saying you can have this many players and you have to limit this type of players to that

many. So it is both groundbreaking and conservative, that new rule, I think. But just whatever brilliant idea we think we have, someone probably had it in 1889 somewhere, and we might not know about that. And according to Richard, this isn't even like a well-known story. You know, this isn't in John T. Brush's saber bio. It's not something that 19th century baseball scholars are even super aware of, and I certainly wasn't aware of it. But if you dig into the archives and you know your history, then you come up with these things and you think, oh, yeah, people, they did a lot of dumb things then. People today do a lot of dumb things. People then did a lot of smart things.

You know, they were basically the same people that we are today. And they had some good ideas at times. I did ask Richard what he thought would have happened if this had worked, like if the Hoosiers had reeled off a bunch of wins and this idea had caught on. And he wrote, the limiting factor was that baseball finances of this period only supported a roster maxing out at 15 or so. A typical roster would be the seven fielders, three or four pitchers, three catchers, and one or two utility guys. The number of catchers would come down as protective equipment improved, but at this point they were banged up pretty hard. Often a specific pitcher and catcher were paired together. There wasn't room to go crazy with pitchers. Neither were the pitchers available. The complaint was not new that there weren't enough good ones, meaning that the quality drop

off from the top guys was rapid. I can imagine an 1889 team with four pitchers, two pairs, alternating games, but it is likely that the fourth best guy was significantly less good than the top guy. While Brush clearly was correct about batters doing better later in the game, the question remains, are you better off sticking with that guy or putting in an inferior pitcher? It is only within my lifetime that we have the concept of a quality specialized reliever rather than a guy being in the bullpen because he isn't good enough to make the rotation. Upon reflection, I think that this is one of those good ideas so far ahead of its time that it can't be put in practice until its time finally comes. So maybe there was no way

that this really could have caught on and been implemented at that early formative part of baseball history. But still, Brush was really onto something there so i thought that was really eye-opening yeah extremely and i'm kind of amazed that we didn't know i'm glad to know now i wonder what other what other what other things are out there that we're not aware of yet we look back and be like oh that was dig deep into the newspapers.com archives maybe it's stuff that hasn't even come to light again and its time has arrived. That's all we need. More of an excuse for Emma to just spend her time endlessly on newspapers.com. Yeah. Well, thank you to Richard for bringing that to my attention. And I will link to those articles. And please do check out his book, Strike Forward, The Evolution of Baseball, because it is chock full of fun facts like this and things that you did not know.

So we will do a little stat blast here. And they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's today's Stop Blast. So the Stop Blast, as always, brought to you by StatHead, which is powered by Baseball Reference. And we always sing the praises of StatHead. I will just tell you, if you're interested in StatHead, if you're just subscribing now, if you've been subscribing for a while and you feel like you don't completely know your way around it, there is a StatHead baseball webinar that is going on this week, Thursday, May 5th at 8 p.m. Eastern. It will walk you through all of the ins and outs of StatHead baseball.

So I will include the link here. You can RSVP and just listen in and learn and do a deep dive into how StatHead works. If you're like us, we know our way around the ins and outs of StatHead. Not that it's hard to look up certain things, but sometimes I'll surprise myself by realizing that, oh, they actually have that now, and they're constantly upgrading it too. But you can find just about any baseball info you want on there,

and you can go to StatHead.com, use the coupon code WILD20, and that will get you a discount, $20 discount on the $80 one-year subscription to the Baseball Stat Head tool or any of the other sports if you're interested in those as well. But a lot of times it takes me just a minute to answer a listener's email using Stat Head and I can send them a link to Stat Head. For instance just this week listener Mark emailed us to say that he had noticed that in 2005 Mariano Rivera's ERA plus

308 was higher than his number of batters faced 306. And so he wanted to know whether Mariano Rivera's 2005 was the most batters faced any pitcher has had in a season when his ERA plus was higher than his batters faced. Well, that is tailor made for a stat head query. And the answer is no. Mariano Rivera ranks seventh on that list. Number one, former Expos closer Tim Burke. 354 batters faced in 1987, 356 ERA+. Jacob deGrom's 2021 was a fairly close second. So thanks as always to the folks at StatHead for sponsoring us and also supplying us with wonderful information. And one of those folks sent me some information for this StatBlast, or at least the beginning of this StatBlast,

because we got a question from David who said, it's been a weird Mets week. When has it not been a weird Mets week? Between the bean brawls and the no-hitters. But I was thinking about Kyle Schwarber. Was Schwarber's performance in the game in which the Phillies got no hit by the Mets when he had three walks, a stolen base, and an outfield assist the best ever by a hitter in a game in which his team was no hit? So best offensive performance or just best overall performance by a player on the losing side in a no hitter.

And I went to Kenny Jacklin of Baseball Reference for this answer, and the answer is yes. The answer is yes. As far as I could tell, that was the best game that anyone has ever had on the losing side of a no-hitter. So again, yeah, Schwarber, this was Friday, right? And the Mets had a combined no-hitter with, what, six pitchers? I lose track at this point. Combined no-hitters are not my jam exactly. But they did hold the Phillies to no hits. And Schwarber got on base a bunch of times. He did not make an out. He walked three times.

He stole a base. He had an outfield assist. And there are a number of ways, I guess, that you could quantify this. And Kenny sent me three different lists, which I will link to on the show page. So whichever one you're interested in, you can look up. But he sent me the top WPA scores by players, win probability added by players on the losing side of no-hitters. He sent me the top RE24, which is a run expectancy-based stat for losing side of no-hitters players. And he sent me a leverage-adjusted RE24

version, which I think is the best one to use for this exercise. I'm getting into the weeds here, but basically WPA and RE24 are both context-sensitive, right? So WPA takes into account the game situation and what's the score, whereas RE24 takes into account who's on base and so how likely are you to score runs when you come up. And so Kenny gave me kind of a leverage-adjusted version of RE24, which is sort of taken that context out of the equation a little bit. I believe baseball reference refers to this stat as situational runs. So that's what you'll see if you look it up on StatHead. And by that metric, Kyle Schwarber is on top. And that, I believe, that doesn't even take into

account his outfield assist. That's just offense-based. I think that would count his stolen base, but it's basically just what you did on offense. And he ends up with a 1.303, which means nothing to anyone really. RE24 is not really a scale that is all that familiar to anyone. But that tops the list, and it tops Sparky Adams, who was the previous leader, and he was on the Pirates. And what even year is this 19 do they have electricity or inside toilets they did have some of those things at least in some places i believe it was the 1929 pirates sparky adams and bill hall more recently with the 2007 brewers in a game against the Tigers. They were toward the top of the list.

Anyway, I will put these links online, but that's basically it. If you want the trivia question of who had the best offensive game or overall game on the losing side of a no-hitter to the best that I can determine, it was indeed Kyle Schwarber. And, you know, he had a pretty good game.

I would say steal a base, draw a few walks, get an outfield assist. The one thing is I wish we had, and people ask us sometimes, like, what stats do you wish were available? Yeah. I wish we had single game war going way back. And I know it's very difficult to do, especially because you don't have play-by-play and you don't have advanced defensive metrics for most years of baseball history. and you don't have advanced defensive metrics for most years of baseball history. There are all kinds of reasons why it's difficult to implement and you'd have to estimate certain things for earlier years. But that is something I wish we had.

And it exists in some forms. Like at Fangraphs, you can look up a span of performance on the leaderboards and it'll give you war over that span. And so you could look up war in that way. And it's kind of, as I understand it, because David Appelman and Sean Dolanar, they've sent me day by day war at times. And I think it's kind of like prorated. It's like, here's your defensive rating over the full season. And so here's what it would be over that number of games. So it's, you know, just, it's kind of a kludge. It's the best we can do. Maybe we get to the point down the road where you have stat cast and you're, just the way that war does, it would be really

handy to have just single game war. And even these metrics I was just using are offense based. And so, you know, it doesn't account for Schwarber having an outfield assist and maybe someone else had an incredible defensive game that this method is not even accounting for. So that's at the top of my wish list and probably could never even be satisfied. Baseball Reference does have a log of daily war for every player on every date, at least going back a certain amount of time. But it would be nice to have that. There are a lot of times I wish we had day-by-day war. I think that what we should do in instances of combined no hitters is look for other stats like this because I know that people's mileage varies

and it was clear that the combined no-hitter meant a great deal to the Mets players involved and I saw a lot of their fans really excited and they don't have a long franchise history of no-hitters. So it's like, oh, this is so exciting. But for the rest of us, we were kind of like, oh, you did that again. And the bloom is for the rest of us we were kind of like oh you did that again you know and the the bloom is off the rose as it were but if you turned that no hitter around

so that i am now thinking about the very strange offensive achievements of kyle schwarber well that i'm more interested now which i imagine mets fans would find very insulting you know because they're like hey this is about us this is not about kyle schwarber who's you know whose team famously didn't win yes so i get that perspective also but for the rest for the rest of us who are um you know secretly not caring so much about the combined no no it's just like hey you had a good night but yeah not super excited this is this is exciting yeah yeah Schwarber must have been looking around and thinking hey come on guys hold up your end of the bargain I'm having a good game here I can't believe that the Mets I mean the Mets

waited like 50 whole years for their first no hithitter. That's a long time. Thank goodness for Johan Santana because that was a long time to wait. And then the Padres won even longer. Yeah. And aside from the impact that may or may not have had on Johan Santana's career, I'm glad for their sake that it came in that game as opposed to this game because if this was the one that was their first franchise no-hitter you know terrible combined no-hitter with several pitchers it just it doesn't hit the same so to speak so it's uh five it was five five hitters five only for pitchers rather five pitchers because mcgill mcgill started and then drew smith julie rodriguez seth lugo and

edwin diaz i'm pretty sure i saw a quote about how one or more of the relievers did not know that a no-hitter was in progress, which seems to be a staple of the combined no-hitter, which kind of gives you a sense of why I can't get that into it either. If the pitchers are not aware that this is happening, how excited am I supposed to be? I don't know if I agree with that perspective. I think that sometimes

and and like i get it i'm not arguing that you have to care about combined no hitters this is not a thing you have to care about you're not obligated to like you know weigh this down with historical significance that's not a requirement but i think sometimes when you don't realize the stakes of something it's like a survival mechanism. Yeah. Because like, you know, I started here's a here's a terrible comp. Are you ready? When I started in finance in 2008, like I knew that we were in trouble, but I should have been more afraid than I was. And I'm so glad I didn't know enough to be as afraid as I ought to have been, because I probably would have not gone into the office or hid under my desk or something. So I don't think, Ben, you'd look at the 2008 financial crisis and say it wasn't a big deal just because I didn't know the stakes. No, would you?

You wouldn't. What a fair comparison I have made. Brought to you by StatHead. Yeah. All right. I'm just going to wrap this up with a – this is like a potpourri, this stat blast. So listener Michael wrote in to say, as of today, and this was April 29th, Juan Soto has three runs batted in in 91 plate appearances. All three of his RBI are from solo home runs. What's the longest a player has gone either in

plate appearances or number of RBI with their RBI only coming from solo home runs. As I type this, he just hit another solo homer, so make that four. Well, according to frequent step-last consultant Ryan Nelson, the record is a four-way tie with five. Vince DiMaggio, 1940, Barry Bonds, 1988, Jerby Burnett, 2000, and Adam Dunn, 2004. And the record for plate appearances was Niger Morgan in 2012 with 175. He hit two solo homers in that time and had zero other runs batted in. He started the season with 58 straight games of no non-solo homer RBI, and his two solo homers came in back-to-back games bookended by 45 and 12 game stretches of zero RBI. So five solo homers, five RBI, that is the record. As for Soto, would have liked to see him claim that record

because he is far and away the best hitter in that nationals lineup even though there are a few guys who have hit well too a couple other odd or interesting things that happen and some of these came up in the stat blast channel of our effectively wild discord group for patreon supporters which is fun because ryan nelson our frequent stat blast is in there, and he's fielding these questions at all hours. So we had a question here from Jscape2000 who said, and this was on April 30th, all of tonight's runs in the 3-0 Yankees-Royals game came on outs, two sack flies and one grounding into a double play.

What's the most runs in a game where all runs came on outs? So Ryan was able to look into this and he found that the answer is that from 1900 to 2021, there have been 936 games where all runs were scored on plays that also went to outs. The most runs ever in one of these games was during a 4-2 Red Sox victory over the Pirates on June 26, 2011. This was six runs, 4-2, so six runs were scored all on outs. The first run was a fly ball out, plus an advance to home on a throwing error, then a sack fly, then a score with an out trying to advance to third, then a sack fly, then a sack hit slash ground out then another sack fly there were two other games one in 1945

and one in 1987 that had five runs scored on outs four has happened 15 times three has happened 91 times but uh j scape 2000 actually guessed that it might be sick so he was right on the money that is the upper limit of how many runs you can score at at least to date, on plays that all led to outs. So that was interesting. Did not know that. Didn't know that. The other one is someone asked about, I guess it was a Reddit thread, about the fact that Max Scherzer's team is now 18-0 in his last 18 regular season starts.

So Max Scherzer's team has not lost any one of the last 18 games he has started. So again, this is not wins and losses in terms of being credited to the pitcher, but just team wins and losses. And he's getting up there too. He's getting up there toward the record. The record is 23, which I think I actually remember because Chris Medlin did this for Atlanta from May 20th, 2010 through the end of the 2012 season. And during that time, Atlanta went 23-0 in his starts and also 35-21 in his relief appearances.

So, you know, he did pitch and they lost some games when he was coming out of the bullpen. This is just starts. He also missed almost all of 2011 due to injury. There was also the incredible Jake Arrieta run from July 30th, 2015 through May 25th, 2016. He missed no time with injury. He made zero relief appearances. So if you want to consider this the record, the Cubs also won 23 straight starts over that span and he had a 1.05 ERA. So maybe that is the more legitimate record. But with 18, Scherzer's tied for 15th all time since 1872. There have been 447 streaks of 10 plus. And there have been some other notable ones in not too distant history. Roger Clemens had 20 in a row in 2001, as did Aaron Seeley. He had 19 in 2001. Garrett Cole just recently in 2020, he had an 18-game

stretch. Clayton Kershaw had a 17-game stretch in 2019. So these are fairly recent. And I will put, again, all of these links and stats online. But it's pretty interesting. Since 1900, Scherzer's is tied for 10th. So that is something to watch if you are a Mets fan. Obviously, you want this streak to be sustained and to keep climbing. And the Mets have won a lot of games lately, including all the ones that Max Scherzer has started. Yeah. I mean, they're winning all the games.

The Reds are winning none of their games. It's, you know, it's a time to be alive. Yeah. Maybe next time, because next time will be about a month exactly into the regular season. Maybe we can finally actually look at the standings for once and just survey our surroundings other than the Reds and see where things stand. But that's another thing that Richard Hershberger mentioned, that if anything had changed because of the John T. brush replacing pitchers in the middle of a game strategy, maybe it would have been a different conception of pitcher wins because the idea was just forming at that point of assigning wins and losses to the pitcher.

And that probably would have been pretty untenable if a pitcher only threw half the game, right? If baseball had always looked like it does now, we probably never would have been talking about pitcher wins and losses. It would be silly to do that because they're only pitching a fraction of the game. So that came out of the fact that complete games were expected. And so if Brush had disrupted starting pitching in 1889, maybe we never would have had pitcher wins and losses. So there's some food for thought. I had to look up when John T. Brush died because I was worried that I was dramatically misremembering the history of like direct current electricity.

But I think I'm okay to have been skeptical that most of the people involved in the John T. Brush pudding baseball experience, which is what I'm going to call it now, would have been, you know, living in homes that had electric power. I bet they didn't. I bet it was fine. Yeah, he died in 1912. There was, you know, Edison and co were around for a while before then, but it was not widely in place in all places. So, all right. Well, we are going to try something here because last week we tried, if you will recall, as part of the stat blast to cold call the player Charlie Maxwell was basically the answer to what was a two-episode stat blast, which was about whether Byron Buxton was unusual or not in the sense that the twins have won a lot more with Buxton in the lineup thanron Buxton, will come in as a defensive replacement when the team is already winning. And so that skews things. But when we unskewed them and just looked at starts, Charlie Maxwell was the new leader for the Tigers of the late 50s. And really, like any three-year span we looked at during his time with the Tigers,

the Tigers just happened to win a ton more games with Charlie Maxwell in the starting lineup as opposed to not playing or not in the starting lineup. And so we tried last week to call Charlie Maxwell and he was feeling a bit under the weather then and he told us to try him again and we did. And this time he was feeling better and he was ready to talk. So we did a little cold call here. So I think this is the perfect payoff to any stat blast is that we discover a 95-year-old player who had a really interesting life and career and is fortunately still with us and who has a listed phone number who we can just call out of the blue and bug about their baseball career. It has never not been delightful when we have done this, and this is no exception. So let's talk to Charlie Maxwell. Okay. Hi, Charlie. This is Ben again, and I'm here with my co-host Meg Rowley. Do you want to say hi, Meg?

Hi there. We host a baseball program called Effectively Wild, and I'll tell you why we wanted to talk to you. We were looking up some stats the other day, and we were looking up players whose teams played much better when they were in the lineup than when they were not. And we found that your Tigers teams that you played for did much better, won much more often when you were in the lineup than when you were not. And we thought, oh, well. That's true. So you were not. And we thought, oh, well. So you knew that. Well, you know, the saying is, before you get too far, I come to Detroit in 55. Of course, I was with Boston for four years, which I didn't play.

I was with Ted Williams. But it always amazed me, before you get into your questions there, that Detroit never built their team after left-hand hitters. They's all right-hand hitters. Had you ever looked that up? No, but maybe we will now. Well, yeah, you will, because I think I hit 31 that one year, and Vic Wertz had the record for the most left-handers at 28.

Of course, Hank Greenberg, those guys, they had a lot of right-handers, but they never, with a poor, you know, like 315 it was, they never built their team on left-handers. Okay, so I'll let you go. Well, we were impressed that the Tigers won so much more often when you were starting, and then we looked into the rest of your career, and of course you had a fascinating career in life. And I guess maybe a good example of the Tigers doing better with you than they did without you is, of course, the famous story, you know, May 3rd, 1959, right? The Tigers had started out 2-15. Jimmy Dykes had just replaced Bill Norman as manager. Norman asked his coaches what the problem with the team was, and they told him the wrong guys were playing and the right guys were sitting on the bench, right? And you were one of the right guys. So what happened next when he put you in?

Well, yeah. See, when Jimmy Dice came, he says, what is wrong with the team? And the coach says, he's got a better team on a bench than he did on a field. And so the coaches actually made the lineup for that doubleheader we played. And why were you not starting up to that point in the season? Well, I guess I was not one of Norman's favorite players. In fact, I don't think he ever knew my name. He always called me Lady Buck. You know, if I pinched it or something like that, I don't think he ever knew my name, I don't think.

Here we went to Spring Friends, and I've been there for a while, but he was a different kind of manager, put it this way. So he put you in the lineup, Dykes did, and of course you hit the four home runs that day between the two games, and then the Tigers went off on a hot streak, and I guess you were set in the lineup for a while after that. That's right, that's true, Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask about early in your career, because I know you joined the Army when you were 18 in 1945. Now, did you enlist or get drafted? And was that before or after the end of the war? No, I was going to Western Michigan University, and I got drafted. And so I think a few months after I got drafted, they dropped the draft. And I hated, I just hated the Army.

I never shot a gun. And that was one place I did not want to go. And I already had a contract to go with Boston. And here I had to go in the Army. And I didn't like that at all. Yeah, I can imagine. Was that before V-Day and V-J-Day or after that you were drafted? Well, no, the war was still on.

Yeah. And I think it was, or maybe it was just going off. I can't remember exactly. But shortly, I think five, six months after I got in there, they stopped the draft. And so they started letting them out. So I wasn't in there very long. I was sure glad with that.

And then after your service, you mentioned you had already signed a contract with boston you went through their minor league system and you mentioned you didn't get a lot of playing time at the big league level because of ted williams what was it like to play around him or be near him in that time well i come up a league in 1950 and i was the first rookie to make the team a number of years and of course uh i was left- And, of course, they didn't build a team around left-handers, you know, but I had a lot of good years in the minor leagues. And I've become real good friends with Ted Williams. And if we got way ahead and Ted went out, then I'd come in. And if Ted went out, I always come in.

He showed me how to play the wall because that wall is different. You know, it's about 12 feet up. It's a mat. And the rest of it's sand, so you've got to know how to play the wall because that wall is different. You know, it's about 12 feet up. It's a mat. And the rest of it's sand, so you've got to know how to play that. So people only go to first base instead of second base, you know. But I never got a lot of playing time. But in 51, I don't know if you've done a little research, my first three home runs was off Hall of Famers.

Yes, Bob Feller, Bob Levin, and Satchel Paige. That's right. All pinch hits. That's right. Pinch hits, that's right. Yeah. Did you feel like baseball was pretty easy at that point? Well, see, I come from a small town and only about 1,000 people.

And I thought, man, here I am one of the 400 best ball players in the major leagues today and for me come from a small town like i did i thought that's a real honor to get there and i sure i wanted to play because i always played every game in the minor leagues and hit third fourth and fifth and then i come up there and of course the module was playing center field guy named zero was playing right and uh williams was playing left so i Guy named Zarrello was playing right. And Williams was playing left. So I never really got to play except for pinch hitting and stuff like that. And then I played defense because I was a real good defensive player, too, along with that. Right, yeah.

Ted Williams was an incredible hitter, but you were probably a better outfielder than he was, I imagine. Oh, yeah. And I think that there are only three men still living who got hits off of Satchel Paige. And it's you and Willie Mays and Carl Yastrzemski, I believe, the only living former AL or NL players who got a hit off him. And I think you faced him twice once he struck you out and once you got the Grand Slam. Yeah. Well, we had a big row. I come up the day before and he struck me out on that hesitation pitch. He stopped the motion.

And we had a big row about that. And, of course, the umpire then went to the deal. And the next day, I thought, man, here I come again. And I said, he's not going to give me two days in a row. I know that. And so he threw that. And the next day, we took Ken Morris Carter Carter, and we'd walk in the ballpark, Satchel come along, because I live here in Pawpaw.

He said, you know what, Pawpaw? As long as I'm in this league again, he said, you'll never see that picture of you yesterday. I mean, Satchel was a great player. But also, you kind of had him a friend because he was, he was friending with everybody. Yeah. Right. And how hard was it to hit when you weren't starting?

You were just playing, coming in for Ted? It was tough. Yeah. It was tough. Yeah. Yeah. It was tough. You know, well, I think all players have the same problem, you know, because you don't,

you get just hit in bad practice. You know, you never get to see the players that, you know, like to do when they're playing every day. And so it's kind of hard, you know, to do that. It's a tough profession to do, being a pin shooter. And your regular playing time came, I think, in 54, right, when Williams broke his collarbone, and then you were put in his place while he was rehabbing.

Is that right? Yeah, 54 is my last year and then then they traded me to uh ballamore and then of course uh richards was the manager there and i had a great spring but i was not one of richard's favorites i guess either and so that's when they sent me to detroit and when i got det Detroit and I started playing, I just, Richard would get up on top of the bench, and he started on me, and I had great days against Baltimore.

And I think he was, you know, and then I have to tell you, the end of the story was, 64 was my last year, and I was 38, and so it was time for me to go on, because I'm an engineer, industrial engineer, so I didn't mind getting out, and the phone rang one 38, and so it was time for me to go on because I'm an engineer, industrial engineer, so I didn't mind getting out. And the phone rang one day, and it says,

you won't believe who this is, and it was Paul Richards. He was the manager at Houston, and he wanted me to come down and play, be a pinch hitter, and work on the hitters and stuff like that. And my wife and I, we talked it over, and I said, well, I think I've had my time. Because I could see my back speed was where it was. Things I used to pull, I couldn't do that. And I thought, well, it's time for me to move on.

And that's the best thing I ever had. I read that you used to throw batting practice to Ted Williams. What was that like? Oh, man. Well, I can't remember the coach's name. See, back then, we only had a couple coaches. And there's a coach in charge of, he was in charge of the bullpen,

in charge of the balls. And so Williams' locker was next to mine, and we was real good friends. And he says, hey, Papa, can you come out early tomorrow? I don't know what to say. We're going to play somebody tomorrow, and a left-hander's going to pitch. And so, I could come out, and I could throw exactly like 80 miles an hour right down the middle to Williams.

And so we'd come out early, and the coach would give us a whole bag of balls. And that coach, he started on me, and he says, oh, God. He says, I wish you hadn't done that, because the end up was, Williams lost that whole bag of balls. And, boy, that coach, he didn't like that. He said, oh, God, should have never done that. Yeah, I guess he hit him all over the fence. Well, oh, man.

I tell you, I built up his confidence because when he went to play that day, I mean, he was ready. He was ready to play. Maybe he wouldn't have been so good without teeing off on you in batting practice first. Actually, I think he hit some of my balls in batting practice. I hadn't landed yet, I think. Did you learn anything about hitting yourself from him? Well, yeah, we talked about hitting.

And see, the thing is, I went to Spring Trend my first year of 51. Or sixth year. 51, yeah. And William took me off the side, and he says, You know, you left-handers, you know, you're the left-handers. You know, you guys are odd. You know, you're left-handers are something different. And he says, you and I are going to play catch. And I said, well, I'll play catch the way you want to. And he says, when you show the ball to me, he says, I want everything chest high, right glove high, right there.

I said, well, yeah, I know that all the time. He said, you can't do that. And then, of course, we take the spin on the ball, too, because if it spins just right, the balls will go farther. And so him and I used to practice that all the time. And he said, you know what? You and I are going to get along real good. Because we used to warm up all the time and we'd get pilot part, and that was the biggest thing because he says,

if you do that in practice, you'll do the same thing again. And then when you're in the outfield, the relay guys, they want it chest high so they can take and relay it on to where it's going to go. But when you throw to the bases, you'll want to hop it. So he showed me all that stuff. I already knew that, but it's nice to hear him, you know, talk about that. Yeah. And you had a reputation for being a clutch hitter, which is true.

You look at the stats, you were better with runners in scoring position than you were at other times. So what was the secret to clutch hitting for you? Well, I love to get men on base. I think Detroit done a big saying there some time ago that i was the best clutch either after the seventh inning i won more games and tied more games than anybody else did after that you know so uh i just i don't know i always try to do my best all the time because it's your living and when you go to the plate nobody can help you except you

and so yeah you don't want to make yourself look bad and so i always tried to do that but didn't always work out but most of the time i did but i have to tell you this the day i hit the four consecutive home runs against the yankees i come up the last time i come up and i don't remember who the pitcher was and the ump and I don't remember who the pitcher was. And the umpire, I don't remember who the umpire was. Yogi come out, and he says, hey, Papa. He says, I hate to tell you this, but he says, you're done for the day. I said, what do you mean?

He says, we ain't going to pitch to you. And the umpire says, Yogi, you got to pitch to him. You can't do anything else. He says, I was told by Casey, he says, if we let him hit another home run, Casey's going to send me to Cannon City tomorrow. So he says, we're not going to pitch to you. And the umpire says, well, you've got to do something. And so they threw four balls, one didn't close the play.

If you know Yogi Bear, that is Yogi. And the umpire just sat there and he'd sit there laughing all the time because him and I had a big conversation. And back in those days, that was before free agency, so you couldn't leave, you couldn't decide where to go, right? And so when you were stuck behind Williams, what did you do? Did you want to get traded or did you try to learn another position so that you could get more playing time or anything like that?

No, no, no. See, when I was in Chicago, I played loud first base in Chicago. Did you try to learn another position so that you could get more playing time or anything like that? No, no, no. I'd left that. See, when I was in Chicago, I played a lot of first base in Chicago. And so I liked to play first base. And so I enjoyed that. But they had, I can't remember the first, well, Dropo, I think, was the first baseman at Boston at that time. Then they had a guy named Goodman, I think was. You know, and they had plenty of first basemen. So I just, I wouldn't say I'd fit in if I got a chance to play what's on the outfield.

Yeah. And of course you were teammates with many great players over the years and often you had to compete for playing time, not just with Williams, but Larry Doby, Rocky Calavito. I mean, they were always bringing in great legendary players who you had to fight off for playing time, I guess. And, of course, you were in the outfield without Kaline. Well, you know, the same was, too, that I had a good year, and they traded Harvey King for Calavito. And that year, Calavito went to right, Kaline went to center, and I went to left. We all hit, I don't know, we had like 90-something-mile rides. We all had a year. But the thing was, the next year, I went on the bench because K-Line didn't want to play center field because he had to go against Maddow. So K-Line went to right, Calavito went to left, and they traded Frank Bowling for Bruton. Bruton went to center, and I went on the bench,

and that was my career in Detroit. And shortly after, I went to Chicago. Yeah. And I think you have more nicknames than any player I've ever heard of. I mean, you mentioned that Norman called you Ladybug, right? But you also, you're called Pawpaw, and Old Pawpaw, and the Latin Larriper, and Smokey, and the People's Choice, and Sunday Slugger and Sunday Charlie and Sunday Punch. Every time I read an article about you, there was a new nickname. Did you have a favorite one?

No. Well, it's just old Papa. That's where I live. Yeah. And I'm in the Hall of Fame. And we brought all this stuff from Detroit now here in Papa. And they gave me a day here. And they got a big statue downtown.

And Papa was really taking care of me. We're about 10,000 people here. and they got a big statue downtown. And Pomplett's really taken care of me. We're about 10,000 people here. We're in Van Buren County. We're the county seat. We're about, I don't know if you know where it's at. We're about 18 miles west of Kalamazoo on 94. And this town's been great. But the thing is, I've always been listening to phone books, you know.

I've never had no problems with anybody. And I'm just, people here in town, which I like that, they just consider me as another taxpayer. I like that. All my kids went to school here. The only problem is you have people like us call you up every now and then, probably. How did you get your nickname Smokey? Where did that come from? Oh, that was in high school because I used pitch, and I played four years of varsity, and I could really throw hard, and I was really good, and I had a scholarship to go to Western, too, so I pitched at Western, Michigan, and then also I hit fourth in the lineup, so I was always a good hitter, but I could throw real hard,

and then I got in, when I went into the the pros I went to the pitcher outfielder and I just drove the manager crazy pitching and so they had to open in left field they put me out there and I was glad of that I never went back on the mound that's the best thing that ever happened because I really enjoyed hitting and so I was glad I got rid of that. And I know that this opening day was your 95th birthday at Comerica. It was Charlie Maxwell Day and you got to be celebrated there. What was that day like for you? And what do you think of this current Tigers team? Yeah, I didn't know, you know, with that, I didn't follow the strike and I didn't know what was going on with the strike. And there's a guy that I know with

Detroit and he called me up and he says, you know, you know what you, what are you doing on your birthday? And I said, I don't know. I didn't even think about it. He also and he says, you know, what are you doing on your birthday? I said, I don't know. I didn't even think about it. He said, well, we're having an opening day because of the strike and they opened up against the White Sox. And he said, well, what makes it good is you're the oldest Tiger and the oldest White Sox. He said, well, you want to come down on your birthday.

And so some of my kids still go to school here, and they went to Florida. So my youngest daughter's the only one left. So we come, and I took some of my grandkids. And I thought, man, that is great. And I put a video and stuff like that. And I said, well, now I know where I celebrated my 95th birthday. It was great to put me on the scoreboard. Actually, Michigan and Detroit have really been good.

I enjoy it here. Do you still watch a lot of baseball, and what do you think of the Tigers' team today? Well, right now, I have to tell you this. I put on mute because I don't like to hear those guys talk everything that I see. So I don't need anybody to tell me what I see. And so I hope that's

not hurting your profession at it but you know because these guys you know they have three more guys in the booth all i want to do is talk well i don't need that i just want to watch the game yeah and so and then the thing was i said they're watching it and uh pittsburgh won the first game you only won the first game three two uh p they won the first game 3-2? Pittsburgh makes three errors. That's how they go on. Yeah. And they're in the fourth inning now. It's 2-2.

So, yeah, it's a beautiful ballpark. I feel the same way. I don't always listen to the commentary either. Now, who do you write for? Well, we're with a website called Fangraphs, and this is a show we do for that site. But I feel much the same about some of the commentary. We're not that kind of broadcasters or media members. But the game that you went to, I guess it was a good one, right?

The Tigers won in a walk-off. Yeah, they come out in the back of the night and won the game. Yeah, it was a sellout. It was a beautiful day. It was like only 49 degrees. The sun was shining, and I just started to scratch. It was cold for people sitting out there, but it ended up being a beautiful day, sun shining, which is good. They kept all the people there, and they come back and night's in and won the game. Super game. Well, they were there for you. They had to stay for Maxwell at least but it's it's been tough times for the the Tigers lately do you think there are things looking up for them well I don't know they got I see here they've got they got four or five guys hitting less than 200 and you can't have

guys that many guys hitting uh the goal anywhere if you got five guys hitting less than 200. And they've got no power hitters at all. That's true, yes. They've got two or three home runs. So normally the outfielders or the first baseman or third baseman have always been power hitters. Like when I was there, Ray Boone, this is the father. He played third base. He had a lot of home runs, and I did too.

And then, of course, Norm Cash came along after that, after I left. And he had his first baseman hit a lot of home runs. And so the outfielders was always supposed to be the RBI guys and hit the home runs. But they just don't have that today. Well, this year, the league as a whole is hitting about 230. So every team seemingly has some guys hitting under 200. It's not like when you were playing and now there are so many strikeouts. You used to run back to the dugout after you struck out.

We always had a saying, it's your weight. You had to go home and get a job. Exactly right. And you used to run back to the dugout after you struck out, I read. Is that right? Because you'd be running a lot these days. Yes, I did. I used to do that.

I always started that because I was embarrassed because I let the fans down that come to the ballpark want to see me hit the ball, and I didn't hit it. And so I was embarrassed. And so as soon as I get back to the dugout, so they could think about somebody else. Well, maybe that's why the games were over so much faster then because you used to run back to the dugout, and now they just walk instead.

So that could be why. Well, they spend more time fixing their gloves than they do anything else. That is true. See, we didn't wear no gloves back in our days, you know. We didn't wear no helmets. It was a totally different story. And the thing is, I'm not sure, but I played a lot in the 50s and 60s, and I always wondered, you're a sportsman you look back and see what

it was a time that we played nine innings back in those days compared to what you're playing today oh yeah and it seems like we used to start at seven o'clock and seem like many days we was done at nine you know so we're against what the score was yeah today at nine o'clock they're on the third or fourth inning you know so i don't know if anybody's ever done that to see what the planned time was back in the 50s and 60s i can tell you right now yeah you know the starting pitchers stayed in the game they only had four starting pitchers right they stayed in the game a lot because they they got paid for wins losses. And so they stayed in the game. So very seldom did the manager ever come out and talk to the starting pitchers,

you know, because they kind of controlled it. Them and the catchers controlled the game. Like now the managers control all the pitchers and everything. So it's entirely different the way they play the game. The game is the same, but they just play it differently. I can tell you right now that the year you came up in the majors, 1950, the average game was two hours and 19 minutes. That's a nine-hour game.

And then by the time you retired, 1964, your last year, the average nine-inning game was up to two hours and 30 minutes. Now this year, so far, it is three hours and five minutes. So they've added about... Oh, they added an hour. Oh, so everybody... So it just didn't seem like it was that long. I thought it'd be less than that. I thought it'd be a little over two hours, but I didn't know it'd be two and a half. Yeah, by the end of your career. Yeah. But it's definitely gotten a lot longer. Yeah. When I came up in the league in 1950, the salary until, I think, 54 or 55 was only $5,000. Yeah.

We all had jobs in the wintertime, so when we'd come home, we all went to work back in those days. What did you do? I was an enologist. You know what an enologist is? Here in Pawpaw, where we live, Welch's has a lot of grapes in this area. Welch's has big plants here. Minute Maid has big plants here.

And so we have a lot of wineries here. And so in the wintertime, the grapes are from like September to mid-October or so. So I got home in October. And what they do, they blend wines all winter. And so the winemaker, he always needed help in the wintertime. And so I was an assistant enologist. And that's a winemaker. If you look it up in the dictionary, it means I was an assistant winemaker. I just blend wines. It wasn't my favorite thing to do, but at least I had a job, you know, and so I didn't have to spend the money I made in the summertime.

Right. And after your career, you didn't stay in baseball, right? You did other things, and I know you have a big family and everything, but what was your career after baseball? Well, like I say, I'm an engineer, industrial engineer. I run manufacturing plants and die casting business. We made all the generators and started a house and stuff for General Motors. We've done a lot of General Motors stuff.

We made stuff, chainsaws, lawnmowers, and stuff like that. I had three plants to run all the time. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed being competitive. I got tired of being competitive in sports because I'd done that for 20-some years. And then I liked the business part of it because I like to be competitive, you know, in the business field. So I really enjoyed that. Well, we've really enjoyed talking to you.

It's always such a pleasure to talk to someone who played in your era and always has such great stories. You know, we've had other people on the show, like the late Ned Garver and Eddie Robinson. Yeah, I knew Ned, and I was good friends. had other people on the show like the late Ned Garver and Eddie Robinson. Yeah, I knew Ned. Ned and I was good friends. Ned, because he didn't live too far from us here down in Ohio.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, we were good friends. Ned was one of the greater guys, too. Yeah. Everybody liked Ned Garver. Yeah, and we liked him, too. And we talked to him. We talked to Eddie Robinson.

We talked to Johnny O'Brien. Just lots of great stories from that era. So I'm so glad we We talked to Johnny O'Brien. Just lots of great stories from that era. So I'm so glad we could talk to you today, too. And it just so happened that you showed up on this list because the Tigers did so much better when you were playing. And we didn't know that, but it sounds like you knew that. It sounds like you knew that already. At my age, I thought I knew all the answers, but you told me something I didn't know. How about that? Well, you didn't sound so surprised when we told you. You guys are smarter than I am, and I can't believe that.

Well, happy 95th, and we hope for many more in the future, and it was a great pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Okay. Have a good day. You too. Thank you. Well, Meg, I cannot get enough nonagenarians.

I wish we could talk to a nonagenarian every time. Every day. It's the best. If I were to start like a Splinter podcast that was a little bit different from Effectively Wild, it would just be me like calling the oldest players or baseball people that I could find every episode. Because they've just, I mean, they've got great perspective. They've got great stories. They've got great stories. They're like living history. Often they are kind of characters and they don't mince words.

And it is wonderful. And we have been very fortunate to talk to some players like this. And you mentioned them and the late Arnold Hano, who we got to talk to about his great book and A Day in the Bleachers. And just, I mean, lots of players and figures we have talked to who sadly in some cases are are no longer with us and i'm glad that we were able to talk to them and document their memories while we still could so it's just the best it's just the best i love charlie maxwell i love all these guys so i'm so grateful that we were able to get in

touch with him and i bet that every single one of them knew at least one person who went by the nickname Pudding. Yep, probably. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Charlie Maxwell, he's been around the block. He doesn't date back to the John T. Brush days. No. But yeah, I mean, the data for him during his Tigers time or I guess during his whole career, at least in the seasons when he had 50 or more starts, which I think was six seasons in his case, his teams had a 536 winning percentage when he was starting and a 407 winning percentage when he was not starting. And, you know, we could attribute that to his clutch hitting or his great timing, or we could call it kind of fluky or whatever it was. But he really had a lot more success. His teams had a lot more success when he was in the lineup and he became known for being a Sunday slugger because he hit like 27% of his home runs on Sundays for whatever reason. And because we like to satisfy curiosities that may not even exist here at Effectively Wild, I did ask Ryan Nelson to look into it. As noted in Charlie's Saber bio, he did hit 40 of his 148

career big league homers on Sunday. That's 27%. And of the 920 hitters who've hit at least 100 big league homers, that's the 23rd highest percentage of homers hit on any particular day of the week. It is the 19th highest percentage of homers hit on Sunday particular day of the week. It is the 19th highest percentage of homers hit on Sunday. So as you can tell from that, Sunday is by far the most common day to have hit your most homers on. And that's because Sunday is the day with the highest percentage of homers hit. 17.6% of all homers have been hit on Sunday. And that tracks, right? Because Sunday's never an off day. There have often been doubleheaders played on Sunday, including the famous Sunday of May 3rd, 1959, when Charlie hit his four homers and four bats. So it ranges from 17.6% of all homers hit on Sunday to 10.4% of all homers hit on Monday.

So in descending order, it goes Sunday, Saturday, Friday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Monday. And Thursday and Monday are the most common off days, at least in this era of baseball. So there you go. The real Sunday homer king was Eddie Ust, a contemporary of Charlie's, who hit 35.1% of his homers on Sundays. But Charlie did indeed hit a disproportionate number of dingers on that day of the week. And as he once said, when asked why, I don't know, but I sure wish I could find out so I could do it on the other days of the week.

Just like a really interesting career. I mean, any time you can talk to someone who was like Ted Williams' defensive replacement, hit homers off satchel page. I mean, what could be better than that? Yeah, threw BP to Ted Williams. That's a cool person to get to spend a couple of minutes talking to. Yep. And I got curious just to wrap this up. Yep. And I got curious just to wrap this up because he mentioned the idea of hitting your weight, right? And not hitting your weight is something that was seen as embarrassing. If your batting average was not as high as whatever you tipped your scales at, that was not so good.

I asked Ryan to look into just how the rate of hitting your weight or not hitting your weight has changed over time because hitting your weight or not hitting your weight actually has become quite common right now, right? At least so far this season. So really, no one who qualified for the batting title failed to hit their weight in the 20th century until 1982. And it was probably whom you'd expect. Dave Kingman was the first player who did not hit his weight. And caveat here, we're using the retro sheet listed weights, right? Which do not change over the course of a career. I think that one could take listed weights and even listed heights with a granite, a boulder of salt. A whole salt cellar, a salt lick. Yeah, right. And they don't change. Players' weights do change.

So I wish we had that, right? I wish we had that source of data too where we actually had like this year he weighed that much and that year he weighed that much. Anyway, we have the one number, but it is reflective, I guess, of the fact that players on the whole over time have gotten bigger and heavier and batting averages, at least lately, have gotten lower. So 1982, Dave Kingman listed at 210 pounds. He batted 204. So he was the trailblazer here, the canary in the coal mine, the Kingman in the coal mine. Then 1983, Gorman Thomas listed at 210, batted 209. And then Rob Deere, 1990 and 1991. And also he actually exactly hit his weight in 1989. Mark McGuire in 1999. Those are the only five 20th century examples. So Rob Deere, I guess you would expect, you know, someone who inspired the term three true outcomes. And, you know, he was someone known for getting on base, but not having high batting averages and maybe not being svelte either. So Rob Deere, as Ryan said, kind of the, you know, the Mendoza, the Mendoza line. This is got to tell you, so far this season, 24% of players have not hit their weight.

23.7% of players in 2022 have not hit their weight because the league batting average is close to 230. And there are some players who are pretty big these days. So, you know, generally it's been low, though. Like last year, it was only 2.44 percent of players. And the year before, a small sample, but 6.6 percent. It's been like 2 to 3 percent of players basically for the last decade. So this is an outlier. It's going to go up.

Weights will not go up as dramatically over the course of the season. And listed weights will not go up at all. Batting averages will go up. Weights will not go up as dramatically over the course of the season. And listed weights will not go up at all. Batting averages will go up. So by the end of the season, I would guess that it will be far, far lower than 24%. But just because I was thinking about that, and then Charlie actually mentioned that little yardstick there, that is not uncommon these days. So times have changed. So we will wrap up up there and if you want to nominate a nonagenarian for us to talk to next ben would love it more than anything that's not to say i don't enjoy speaking with them but i don't know that i've ever derived as much satisfaction from

something as ben does from speaking to uh the living legends among us. So let us know. Yes. Yeah. I was a history and English guy in school, if you couldn't tell. So get a kick out of stories about 1889, people who discovered the times through the order effect, and then Charlie Maxwell, the great Charlie Maxwell, who's a Tigers fan favorite. He really meant a lot to that franchise and still is popular with Tigers fans. And I will link to a lot of stories and data about him because, of course, we could not cover a life that long and rich in a short conversation. Well, thanks again to Charlie for tolerating our cold calls in his 14-year major league career, which again got started late because of his military service and because he was blocked

by Ted Williams. He wasn't an everyday player for the first time until his first full season with the Tigers when he was 29 years old. But even so, career 117 WRC plus, about 20 war, a two-time all-star, got MVP votes in three seasons. Just a very accomplished career that probably would have been even more accomplished had he gotten an earlier start, had he been on a different team at a different time? I believe Charlie is the 13th oldest living former American or National Leaguer. I've got to say, I've got my eye on a couple of the other top 20 as potential future cold call recipients. I will work on that. The reigning number one at 101 years old is George Elder.

And number 19 is Bob Oldis. Elder and Oldis. A little on the nose, guys. Maybe that's nominative determinism at work. We should all name ourselves Centenarian. I was very sorry to read that Charlie had lost his wife Anne just a little more than a year ago. Charlie made the majors in 1950, married Anne in 1950, and they were married for more than 70 years. Which is wonderful, and I believe that Anne and Charlie had something like 14

grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren, possibly more now. So thanks again to the pride of Pawpaw, Mr. Charlie Maxwell. And thanks also to everyone who sent us yet another example of a player predicting something in a game. In this case, it was Dylan Cease of the White Sox who was miked up when he predicted that Tim Anderson would hit a home run and that he would go oppo and that he would hit it over the Sloan sign. And so he did. And Lucas Giolito and others in the White Sox dugout were amazed at Dylan Cease's predictive powers. This is not baseball weather.

I can't feel my faith in this weather, and I hate it. Lucas, prediction for this at bat. Base hit to right field. All right. I'm going to go home run. Bro, there ain't going to be any home runs today. I believe in him. I'm going to go home run over to Sloan and right field. Off a home run.

Are you kidding me? That's the most legendary mic'd up moment ever. Oh, my God. Are you f***ing kidding me? That's the most legendary mic'd up moment ever. Oh my God. I die a legend now. That's all I can say. Wow. We're just out here predicting the future.

No big deal. You know what we've said many times about not knowing about all the predictions that don't pan out. But hey, so what? It's fun, especially when it's so specific. I think you've got to give him some credit for saying that it would be opposite field and that it would be over the Sloan sign. Although, granted, that's kind of where Tim Anderson hits most of his homers. He does hit almost all of his homers opposite field. But hey, Dylan Cease knows his teammate.

I wonder whether pitchers or batters are better at predicting the outcomes of plate appearances. Not that either of them is that great. And I should mention that after we recorded the Brewers beat the Reds 18-4, so those dismaying stats Meg cited earlier, those were the before numbers. The after numbers will not be better. They're now 3-21, which is tied for the second worst start in MLB history through 24 games, and they're 1-19 since Phil Castellini's comments. The curse of Castellini.

You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon and fund our continued cold calling by signing up at patreon.com slash effectively wild, as have the following five listeners, Robert Nishkean, Kenneth, Silverhand, Andrew Simpson, and Matt Hawkins, thanks to all of you. Like them, you can go to the site and pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and help us stay ad-free aside from our StatHead sponsorship and get yourself access to some perks,

including the Effectively Wild Discord group, a couple of playoff live streams later in the year, and monthly bonus pods hosted by me and Meg. You can also keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms.

You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with one more episode before the end of the week. There is a non-zero chance that we may mention Shohei Otani versus Rich Hill, the most Effectively Wild matchup ever, perhaps, at Fenway Park on Thursday. So you can do some homework and tune in for that game if you want to prep for the pod. Talk to you soon.

So much more than Charlie's waking me To my quarrel And Charlie's shaking me Tell my story And Charlie's making me And Charlie's making me smile Love