Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1847: We Want a Catcher, Not a Belly-Scratcher

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Josh Naylor’s record eight RBI after the eighth inning and the hot-hitting Guardians, José Ramírez taking a hometown discount to stay in Cleveland, Rangers manager Chris Woodward’s seemingly misinterpreted joke about Yankee Stadium, the perils of interpreting text-only quotes, Mets hitting coach Eric Chávez’s theory about MLB selectively […]

All I know is what I know And don't I know it was meant to be So see me move like jelly on a plate Like jelly on a plate when you're close to me All I really want Is to be with you With you, yeah Hello and welcome to episode 1847 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from VanGrafts presented by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of VanGrafts. Hello, Meg. Hello. How are you? I'm well. I want to run. Well, first of all, before I get down to business, how are you, Ben? Thank you for asking.

I am also doing well. Just to set everyone's mind that he's, how's Ben doing? He's okay, too. They're like oh that ben we don't know how he is um okay i have i want you to tell me if this is a fun fact okay i want to be clear this is not being presented in a fun facty kind of way but i think this might be a fun fact so ben are you familiar with the goings on in in yesterday's Guardians White Sox game? Yes, I am. There were some goings-on that went on.

Yes, there were. And the main character of those goings-on is one Josh Naylor. And so this has come to me via a piece written by Mandy Bell, who herself got it from the Elias Sports Bureau. For those who are not familiar with the goings-on of this Guardians-White Sox game, which the Guardians won 12-9, we should say, Josh Naylor first hit a grand slam in the top of the ninth

to tie the game. It was a grand slam that scored Stephen Kwan. He's not a friend of the show because we don't know him but we'd like to think he likes us because we honorary friend of fan graphs yeah we talked about him so glowingly and jose ramirez and uh owen miller and then uh the game went to the 10th where both teams managed to score and then it went to the 11th where Josh Naylor hit another home run, scoring three that would prove to be decisive for the Guardians. The White Sox would not come back. And so it made Naylor, and here I am quoting from Mandy's piece,

the only player since RBI became official in 1920 to knock in at least eight runs from the eighth inning on in a single game, according to the Eliias sports bureau yes i think that's a fun fact i think that's a fun fun fact and in fact i i think you're shortchanging him because he had a double in the eighth to drive in a run that's right the first homer that's right so yeah no i think that's a very fun fact yeah you're right. He had quite an evening, Josh Naylor did. This could be described, I think, as the Josh Naylor game, three for five. He also walked. What a guy. Yes, he did. Yeah. No, I think that's a lot of fun. It's funny. I mean, there are certain stats

that we don't use anymore for analytical purposes, but can sometimes lend themselves to fun fact purposes, and I don't mind them being used in that context. Not that you need to use RBI, you could use some other measure probably for contributions after the eighth inning. But just that, I mean, that's an impressive fun fact, I think. Yeah. Eight runs batted in after that point. That's impressive. That's unprecedented. Yeah. mandy provides us with some further fun facts and your mileage may vary on how fun these are relative to the ones we just talked about but here i am quoting he became the first player this is nailer in mlb history to hit two homers of three runs or more in the ninth inning or later of the same game nailer became just the third player in

cleveland history to hit two homers in the ninth inning or later, joining Willie Kirkland and Earl Averill. And it also marked Cleveland's first victory when trailing by at least six runs in the ninth inning or later since May 25th of 2009. So quite an evening, quite a fun night for Guardians fans, less fun for White Sox fans. They've had a couple of those lately, but we won't dwell on the lack of fun they're having because that feels rude. We will instead say, hey, good for you, Josh Naylor. You know, he had a pretty gnarly injury in his right leg and had sort of, I think it took him until pretty much the end of March to get back into spring training action. And so it took a little while to make his season debut. So has had a long road. And I imagine that night would have felt pretty incredible for him,

regardless of the injury history. But when you have come back from something like that, I imagine that it feels particularly special. So good for Josh Naylor. And hey, good for the Cleveland Guardians, I guess. Yeah, good for the Guardians on the whole, really, because they have the third best offense in baseball thus far by WRC+. What in the world, Ben?

Which is not something I envisioned. And they also have a top 10 outfield by war, which I guess Naylor has been a small part of. He's mostly played first base. But still, they are in second place as we speak here on Tuesday afternoon. But the hitting, the hitting has been quite impressive. Who knew? I mean, we all talked about how inactive the Guardians were over the offseason.

Aside from extending Jose Ramirez, they didn't really add anyone in particular. And this was part of a pattern where they just never seemed to go out and get a competent outfielder. But they've played well. They've had productive outfield and a very productive lineup on the whole. Yeah, a very productive lineup by our estimation at Fangraphs. They are actually slightly underperforming their Pythagorean expectation and their base runs records. They should be one or two games better depending on which of those you put the most stock in. So yeah, a pleasant surprise in the early going here it's it turns out that it was

better for them to have extended jose ramirez than to have traded him that's wild but yes to your point a team that has been underperformers in the outfield to the point that i had posited that they might have been cursed by their unwillingness to back when he was a soon-to-be former Cleveland Guardian, well, I guess they weren't called that then, but we'll use it now, that their unwillingness to extend a qualifying offer to Michael Brantley when the time was ripe was something that had resulted in the outfield perhaps being salted or otherwise a hex being laid. And here they are sitting with quite a productive outfield, thanks in part to the aforementioned Stephen Kwan.

But what a nice thing to get to watch. Yeah, I was going to bring this up later in the episode, but this is a natural segue. Jose Ramirez is, as we speak, leading the American League in war. He has just edged ahead of Mike Trout for now. But there is a story published about Ramirez last week by Alden Gonzalez of ESPN that prompted some lively debate in our Facebook group. That's how I will describe it. And there were some quotes in there about how Ramirez took a hometown discount or at least thought he was or his agent thought he was in order to stay in Cleveland. And it seems to maybe have sort of spooked him that they were actively

talking about him in trades. Because remember, like, was it the day before he signed that extension? He was like seemingly on the verge of getting traded to the Padres. Rumors were flying around. So it seems like he really was motivated to stay in Cleveland. Not that earlier players who didn't end up staying with Cleveland were not, but they were maybe less willing to just sign on the dotted line with whatever the Guardians would give them. Like Francisco Lindor, for instance, he said he wanted to stay in Cleveland. I have no reason to think he wanted to leave Cleveland, but also he

didn't seem particularly interested in giving them a discount, which is understandable, nor should he feel obligated to. But Jose Ramirez did feel obligated to or just motivated to. He just really wanted to stay. And I don't know what to make of that because his agent says, Rafa Nieves, says that the Guardian's front office told him they can't afford what he's worth. And he told them that he didn't care. He wanted to stay there and they made it work. He knows, this is Nieves again, that he left money

on the table, but he says, $150 million or $200 million, my life is going to be the same. I'm happier with $150 million in Cleveland than $200 million somewhere else. And he says, his agent, that he tried to talk him out of it. Everyone tried to talk him out of it, but that he was not willing to go or to draw a line in the sand and leave over the extra whatever it was. And I guess we could quibble with how much money he actually left on the table here, right? Because this wasn't a dramatic underpay probably. I think if I recall correctly, maybe Ben Clemens did the transaction analysis at Fangraphs and he had the Zips projected contract and it wasn't dramatically higher than Ramirez actually got because he's at the point where when you hit

the market at 32 or 33 or whatever he would have been, maybe the big long-term deals aren't out there so much anymore. So it's possible that Nieves or others were overestimating how much he could have gotten on the open market. Like in this Alden Gonzalez story, Alden writes, had he waited two more years to hit the open market, Ramirez, whose leverage was limited by the club options that remained from his prior extension, likely would have attained Rendon's $35 million average annual value. Had he been traded, people in the industry believe his new team would have immediately offered an extension that neared $200 million. And he ended up signing for five years and $124, I think, was the extension on top of whatever he already had coming to him. So maybe he left something on the table there. I don't know whether he would have gotten $200 that day if he had left or not.

gotten $200 that day if he had left or not. But what do you make of the idea that a very prominent player, one of the best players in the majors, just said, hey, I really like it here and money is an object. I'm not going to hold out for every last dollar here because I really want to get this done. And that is in response to the guardians telling him, truthfully or otherwise, that they couldn't afford to give him more. I want to stay here. I'd like to have my entire career played here, but I just can't go lower than this. I imagine that there is a point under which he would have been like, go ahead and trade me.

I'm not going to sign for that. I think that it's the way that we should think about these things is like, is it within the realm of something reasonable? Is it within the realm of something approaching an acceptable contract for the value that this player brings? And a player can have their own understanding of value, right? And I'm sure that a large part of that value is going to be made up in the money of the deal, but you derive, you can derive value from other things in your experience of your life. And if Jose Ramirez likes being in Cleveland and he likes being part of this organization and he you know maybe wants

to be part of bringing you know winning playoff baseball back to cleveland and a potential world series to cleveland like he he is allowed to ascribe value to that that may not manifest itself in dollars in the contractor on on his check, right? So I think that as long as a guy isn't in a situation where he's getting bad advice from his agent or the amount that he is accepting is low enough such that it can have sort of a deleterious effect on the market generally, he's within his rights to do that. I do think that players have expressed, especially in recent years, an understanding of how their contracts affect the broader market. And that seems to be a responsibility that they take pretty seriously, right? will sort of limit the ability of future players who are similarly talented

and might be sitting out there as sort of natural cops from getting deals that their value suggests they should. So I think that it is useful for them to have a broader sense of what the market is. And you obviously wanna see their representation sort of doing right by them and making sure that they are maximizing their earnings potential to

the extent that they can but like i get that sometimes you just like a place and you want to be there and you you know i think that that's fine provided it's sort of clearing that bar where we're not in gosh i never want there to be another deal for us to have as a comp but i feel bad that we bring him up all the time like we want to stay stay away from Ozzy Albee's territory, right? Like we want to be away from that. But I think that this clears that bar. And like I said, you get to decide. Like part of the idea of free agency,

a big part of it is obviously finally maximizing your earnings in a way that you can't when you are cost controlled. But part of that is also getting to decide, like, here's what's important to me. Here's where I want to live. Like, here's where I want to be. And I think that as long as the balance on those things isn't wildly out of whack, like, OK, is that reasonable, do you think? I don't know what would have been the reaction at the union when they read this story.

And, you know, obviously, they probably don't want most of their superstars to have this attitude of just, hey, yeah, give me whatever you can scrounge up from the couch cushions, Dolans, and I will happily just have my hand out and I will take whatever you put in it. Obviously, they want a player like Ramirez to help set the market and raise the tide that lifts all boats. But yeah, what is his obligation to be bound by that if that means that he has to go somewhere where he won't be as happy or leave somewhere where he is really happy? Because he's right, of course, that the difference between $150, which is what he got if you include his 2023 option, and 200 is basically meaningless to his quality of life or even his family's quality of life. And, of course, he's been dramatically underpaid. He's been one of the most underpaid players. We did a stat blast where he came up, I think, about that.

But even so, he's made a nice little chunk of coin and we'd all be happy with that. So if we are picking causes to cry about in the world and injustices and suffering and so forth, Jose Ramirez getting $150 million instead of $200 million would be pretty far down the list. On the other hand, could the Guardians have afforded to pay him more? Probably. Yeah. Right? I mean, they have, even with Ramirez on the payroll, they have the fourth lowest payroll in 2022. And looking ahead to their future commitments, I know they also signed other players to extensions like Klasse and Myles Straw. But even so, their future commitments beyond this year are like mostly Ramirez and not much more than that.

like mostly Ramirez and not much more than that. So they had room to spend probably, and they have been one of the franchises that has nickeled and dimed, even though they have managed to remain pretty competitive for the most part. So on the one hand, you want to think, well, Ramirez is saying, I don't need this extra $50 million over however many years. Well, the Dolans could certainly say that too, right? And They could say it even more so than Jose Ramirez could say it because they are rich, like all MLP owners.

And so someone's going to get to keep that money. And maybe in the grand scheme of things, it would seem more fair or just if it would be Jose Ramirez. On the other hand, I don't know that there's a victim here necessarily, unless, like, there's some future player who would have used Ramirez as a comp and will get slightly less when they hit the open market, something like that. But, like, Ramirez is happy. Guardians fans are happy.

Most people are happy that he stayed. I guess there are fans of some other fan base that would have been happy to have him too if he had been traded to that team and signed an extension there. So maybe it's just sort of a zero-sum thing in terms of happiness produced. But I don't know. It's hard for me to get worked up about this because, right, the terms of this particular extension don't seem to have dramatically undervalued Jose Ramirez, as far as we can tell. Earlier in his career, the extension he signed and the way he was paid just by the pay structure of baseball, then he was dramatically underpaid. Now, not as much,

and I'm happy that he's happy. Right. And I don't want to suggest that we shouldn't continue to... I think we should always assume a posture of skepticism when we are confronted with the claims of ownership about what they can afford, particularly one that has been as committed to low payrolls as the guardians have been historically. So I think we can, but I think we can have both of those things simultaneously, right? where we can insist on sort of a citation being needed in terms of your actual ability to pay more and say, you know, this deal does not feel like it is dramatically undervaluing a guy who has been really good for a really long time and he gets to be in the place he wants to be. And so that's fine. Like, i think we can we can hold those thoughts in our in our heads simultaneously even as we continue to say oh excuse me excuse me sirs we we require

a bit more in the in the form of evidence for your assertion that you can only afford this much we request more than that like we can do both of those things at the same time right and it is something that we prize like the desire to stay somewhere where you've meant a lot to your fans or or that place means a lot to you like it is nice all else being equal when a player can play his whole career with a certain franchise and the fans can follow him from start to finish that's nice now chris antinetti of the Guardian's front office here, he says, and this is just coming from the team side, of course, but he had pretty clear objectives that he wanted to try to accomplish. He wanted to finish his career in Cleveland. He wanted to have his number retired by Cleveland. He wanted to go to the Hall of Fame representing Cleveland,

and he wanted to win a World Series in Cleveland. Those were his objectives from the beginning. Now, if that's accurate, if I'm a Cleveland fan, I'm thinking, what a great guy, this Jose Ramirez. He really likes it here. I like having him here. This is wonderful. And so there is kind of a conflict where on the one hand, it's great when it works out this way and you do get this continuity and fans get to continue to appreciate a player like that. And there is part of you that as a fan, as a partisan rooter for a franchise, wants to think that, oh, the players really just love this city and they love this town and they love this team and they love the fans and they're not just hired mercenaries.

This matters to them as much as it matters to me. And yet you wouldn't necessarily want every player to just take a hometown discount if you're someone who cares at all about the way that revenues are distributed in MLB, which many fans don't particularly care about. But if you want to see that be semi-fair and balanced, then it wouldn't be ideal if every player took the negotiating approach or non-negotiating approach

of just give me whatever you can afford and I'll take it within reason at least. So those things are, you almost, right, it's like having to hold two ideas in your head. It's like, I don't think that a player who does leave because they want to be paid market value should come back and be booed. I mean, sometimes you see that. Sometimes you see that even with the player was traded and it's like they didn't even have a choice. Right. Yeah. They didn't decide to leave.

It doesn't make any sense at all. Yeah. So that's silly, I think. And it is worth celebrating, I think, when there's a special relationship between a player and a team and a town. But I guess there are certain limits when it comes to like, well, don't make yourself a chump or don't bend over backward for the owners who could afford more. Like, don't let them get away with that, I guess, is one way that you could say it. So it's why it's prompted such an interesting debate and a lively one in the Facebook group where I think some people were like, the owner should spend more. This is bad.

And some people were like, hey, I'm happy that Jose Ramirez is happy and that Guardians fans are happy. Yeah. And I think that we can we can sort of work to reconcile all of those things right so you know i'm sure that we don't have any reason to think he doesn't that like jose ramirez does take that responsibility seriously if anyone can appreciate what it feels like to be under compensated for a long time relative to your value i doubt we have to like educate him to what that feels like. I'm sure that Ramirez is wildly familiar with that.

Unfortunately familiar with that, right? But he gets to sort of balance these things. And I think once we get past the point of sort of acceptability with the contract, then he gets to decide what matters to him. Like, you know, I don't know. I'm not going to say what any of them are, but like if I were a major league player

and I got to choose where I lived, there would be some places where I would say, no, thank you, not for me. And other places where I'd be like, yeah, that sounds great. And the money could kind of probably tip you one way or the other on some of those spots, but there would be ones where I'd be like,

no, I'm good. So, you know, I think we get to have those priorities and perspectives and sort of we get to have our prep list. Yeah, we answered a listener email not long ago about I think the gist of the question was why do players always take the highest offer when they're free agents? And we kind of quibbled with the premise because we don't know that that's necessarily true. We don't know all the offers that are out there. But even if it is generally true, I think we were talking about how, well, once you get to a certain level of wealth, then maybe where you live or at least where you play for part of the year doesn't matter as much because you can always afford to live in a nice neighborhood, in a nice house and get good food delivered or whatever perks that you want in one place. If you're wealthy enough, you can often get them in another place.

But there are sometimes other factors that matter. It's just like if you're a free agent, you're just baiting whether to sign with a certain team. Well, you don't know if that team is going to be good. You don't know if that team is going to hold up their end of the bargain. Are they going to bring back the teammates that you like playing with? Are they going to put a competitive roster around you? You don't know. And Jose Ramirez doesn't know either. I guess he has some faith or he just likes playing there

that he doesn't care as much, although it seems like he really does want to win a World Series. But he does seem to be one of these players who just really loves playing baseball and cares about that more than anything else, at least according to this story. And again, this is, you know, partly PR and it's coming from him and his agent. And who knows, maybe this is just the message that they want out there, the man of the people who just signed the $150 million extension. But it sounds like he is a baseball rat, as they call it. You know, someone who is just totally focused on baseball. It says he is a man with no hobbies. I love this game. Ramirez said, I don't do it for money.

And there is some of that. Like we certainly saw Shohei Otani come over instead of waiting to come to the U.S. He came over when he stood to make much less money from doing that. Or Mike Trout, who wanted to stay with the Angels and sign multiple extensions when it seemed like maybe he could have gotten more. And again, like those guys in the grand scheme of things, they're pretty well paid and most of us would happily trade paychecks with them. So it's easy to say, I don't care about money when you are making a good deal of money, even if it's just a little less than you could potentially be making. But that attitude, it's like, you know, on the one hand, I want to sort of celebrate that. I don't need every player to be a super hardliner necessarily with the good of the entire players association in mind. And yet, it shouldn't be pushovers either. It's just,

I guess it's not a one size fits all thing. Everyone, as you said, has their own prep list. So we know something more about Jose Ramirezirez's yeah exactly and you know like he's he's got a young family they might really like it there there's just all sorts of stuff and i think that again as long as you're not out here ozzy out that's not fair we shouldn't call it the ozzy albies deal like it is about him but we should like really what is his agent's name like you should you know this is like let's let's put the emphasis on the right syllable as the case may be. But anyway, I am happy that he is making a good amount of money. And I am happy for Guardians fans that they get to buy a jersey with confidence.

So it seems like a win-win. I believe Obby's agent, at least at the time, was Sports Meter. That was the agency. Yeah. All right. I wanted to say I am happy that we are not famous enough that the things that we say get taken out of context. I mean, they do because there is an entire Twitter account devoted to things that we said that take things we said out of context. No Context, effectively wild, at no context, EW pod. However, that Twitter account has a fairly limited audience. I was just thinking of this because were you following the whole Chris Woodward, Yankee Stadium is a minor league park saga that popped up this past week?

I saw that it existed. And that is as much as I know. Yeah, that's really as much as you needed to know. But it was sort of a silly controversy that came up because Rangers and the Yankees, they were playing a doubleheader the other day, and Glaber Torres hit a big walk-off homer for the Yankees. And Chris Woodward, the Rangers manager, said after the game, that's an easy out in 99% of ballparks. He just happened to hit it in a little league ballpark to right field. It just, you know, small ballpark. That's an easy out in 99% of ballparks. So, you know, the wind wasn't helping today, obviously, but, you know, just three-one count.

Probably going to, you know, King is one guy that you put him back out there, you know, okay, he's not going to give up a homer. Just happened to hit it in a little league ballpark, you know, to right field. Now that got the Yankees fans quite riled up. Why? Well, so it gets sort of sillier. So the response initially from Yankees manager Aaron Boone, I appreciated. This was tweeted by a friend of the show, Lindsay Adler.

And this was kind of a how can you not be patented about baseball moment. But Lindsay wrote, Aaron Boone was asked if he had any thoughts on Chris Woodward's comments that Gleyber Torres' game one home run would have been an out in 99 percent of ballparks. Boone said, not really, but noted that Woodward's math is off because there are only 30 ballparks, so it can't possibly have been out in 99%. As it turned out, his math was much more off than that because, in fact, like in the annals of Yankee Stadium cheap shot homers, this was not really one of the worst offenders. According to StatCast, at least, this would have been out in 26 parks. So this was not really a Yankee Stadium special. I know the expected stats, according to StatCast, are kind of weird2 feet, something like that. And it was not hugging the right field line down the short porch. It was more toward right center. And as many people pointed out, there was an Eli White home run, Eli White of the Rangers. He hit one in game two of that

doubleheader that actually would have been out in only two parks, according to StatCast. So that is funny because apparently Woodward was kidding about this all along. Oh, really? I don't know. I mean, I guess he could have just been saying that. But according to another friend of the show of The Athletic, Levi Weaver, he wrote about this and he reported the Chris Woodward quote. And Levi wrote at The Athletic, if you didn't know Woodward and couldn't detect the dry slash wry humor in his intent, it wouldn't be difficult to think that he was legitimately whining about the stadium, blaming it for the loss. If he had been, that would have been very newsworthy.

He didn't mean that literally. But more than a few members of the New York media took it that way. And by the time the second game, blah blah blah, Woodward was trending on Twitter. It was a joke, Woodward said, shaking his head slightly. Listen, I love this place. This is like one of the cathedrals in all sports. It's obviously, everybody knows it's got a short right field. It was more of a joke than anything, parentheses, laughing. We hit one of our own in the second game, so I guess karma's funny that way. But no, I love this place.

It's a beautiful ballpark. So I didn't actually hear the comment, and I don't know that I could have interpreted the tone of voice, but Levi covers Woodward in the Rangers, and he says that he thinks that Woodward was joking, and Woodward says he was joking. So if he was joking, then it is sort of silly

how these things get bandied about. I get why that turns into bulletin board material, because your team hits a walk-off and it sounds like the other manager is saying that it was cheap or unfair, even though, of course, you were playing under the same conditions that day that your opponent is, of course. But that was just passed around. And I saw so many viral tweets about this and kind of like dunking on Woodward. And apparently it was a joke all along. But this sort of thing happens all the time, not just in sports media, but in media in general or in every walk of life,

because we all just see a tweet and then we rage retweet it. And then it gets passed around. And maybe the actual thing, if you go and listen to what was said, either the tone of voice makes it clear that it wasn't serious or there was more context or something that came before or after the quote that actually makes it less inflammatory. But that part doesn't really get aggregated in the same way. It's funny how these things happen. I guess you can't joke. in the same way. It's funny how these things happen. I guess you can't joke. It's dangerous to joke if you are the manager of a major league team and what you say may just be reprinted and circulated on Yankees Twitter for everyone to use you as a punching bag. They need to do that thing where, remember, I won't, Ben, I won't pretend to know if this is still a popular meme format.

It's not even a meme tweet format. How does Twitter work? How old am I? Anyway, I won't pretend to know if this is something that the kids are still doing, but it is something that I do quite often on Twitter. You remember when everyone used to do like extreme kidding voice to clarify? Extreme leap something voice. Yeah.

And I do that both in an excruciating amount of the time and to an excruciating degree in a vain and fruitless attempt to fend off replies that i will find irritating and it doesn't actually work i mean we should acknowledge that from the jump that it doesn't actually work but i wonder if he shouldn't just do that going on like extreme i'm kidding voice in real life just so that yeah you know we can leave that part of the quote out yeah i know and then what do you do then you're a guy then you're a guy who has brought the internet into the real world in a way that people will make fun of and and resent and you probably still don't get the full quote the way you need it to but you know maybe

someone you know levi would do it levi would include that in there and i you know lindsey lindsey would do that too part of that is that we are all too terminally online but you know it might help to clarify things i get i get it when you're like ah it's a cheap shot but it's like a cheap shot at your cheap shot. I don't know. Like, you know what your ballpark is. I never understand people getting fussy about this. Like, there are plenty of very well-struck home runs at Yankee Stadium. Home runs that would, as you might see here, be home runs everywhere in every park.

In fact, the Yankees' official account, I believe there was a John Carl Stanton home run, and it was, you know, a John Carl Stanton home run. Sure. And the Yankees' Twitter account said, like, we think this would be a home run in 30 out of 30 parks or something. So they were putting it on the action, too. Yeah. So, like, you know your ballpark. You should be realistic about it and say, like, yeah, that was a wall scraper, but it counts the same. That's fine because here's the thing about being honest about your ballpark.

Then when you lose on a real wall scraper, then you can go, yeah, whatever. We'll get them next time. That wouldn't have been out anywhere but here. It's just like, it's fine. You built the the park you got to live with it now man yeah i assume that whenever the rangers visit new york for the rest of uh chris woodward's tenure you will be hearing it from fans who are throwing this back in his face this possibly joking and totally not serious comment i even saw people noting that like chris woodward was interviewing for the Yankees managerial job back when, you know, before Aaron Boone got it.

And it was like, well, you didn't mind managing in the Little League ballpark then. I just, you know, here's the thing. We have talked about fandom as a concept on this podcast many times. And I think that our general conclusion has been that there are great fans in every fan base. There are stinkers in every fan base. There are people who are chill. There are people who are self-serious.

I don't want to ascribe anything special to Yankees fans in part because I think it would make them crazy. But, you know, it would bother them just so much. But I would just say like your baseball team that you like the best Yankees fans as we are recording here on Tuesday afternoon is is leading the American League East you have a 20 and 8 record you are possessed of a plus 49 run differential. You are a very good baseball team. You're pretty spot on in terms of what we expect you should have when it comes to a record based on your underlying performance.

Great fun. Such times. I think that maybe, maybe you can let these ones go sometimes. Sometimes you can let these ones go sometimes right sometimes you can just let them go because it's so early to be so worked up and you know i imagine that while the standings are what they are right now that like this could this could tighten up on you at any point right that it's not as if the blue jays and the rays aren't knocking around out there it's not like those aren't still good baseball teams.

And at some point, the Red Sox have to be better than they are right now, even if they are pretty bad, as Jay Jaffe wrote at Fangraph. So I would offer that you are both in a position of being gracious because of your existing record and also save your sass for when you're only a game up on the Blue Jays or the Rays, and the team that's in there is a division rival, and the controversy is huge, and there is real stakes involved.

It's sort of early to be spending these chips. It's too early for that. Anyway, I'm sure you all react to that with a lot of rationality and ease because it's not like you're prone to dramatics. As someone who grew up rooting for the Yankees, as a former Yankees fan, a lapsed Yankees fan, a reformed Yankees fan, I wouldn't say that graciousness is a quality that is often associated with the fan base. I don't think Yankees fans are really any worse than any fans. I think all fan bases are basically the same, or at least the loudest. Yeah, being a fan makes you, it does something to you.

And some of the something isn't good. But being a Yankees fan, you don't just let these things go. You don't just say, hey, we won 27 World Series. We can let these little slights from the manager of the Rangers go. No. No. No, you can't let anything go. You must defend the pinstripes. So've been there i guess i guess and like we've said you know it isn't as if the new york sport fan experience

understood sort of in toto is universally good right like some of you root for the jets on purpose for years for reasons that are really between you and god probably i mean in much the same way that i might understand my attachment to seattle baseball we all have our weird reasons and so i i don't mean to say that you have had an easy time all the time you know some things have been rough but your your yankees 20 and 8 your your rangers are in the nhl playoffs then probably will be for the next 10 years based on how long the playoffs last i don't mean that the next 10 seasons i mean that these playoffs might last for 10 years because they seem to just go on forever you know the bills the bills are good the nets i don't know how many of you are actually Nets fans,

but if you are, things didn't go perfectly, but you did make the postseason. So I'm just saying that like- Yes, you've conveniently left the Knicks out of this conversation. Well, the Knicks exist, right? And so do the Jets and the Giants for that matter. So like, I get it. There are other things in your life

that have gone less well lately than the Yankees have. And I and I get you're looking you're looking over at Queens and going, I don't know, this might be we're not the only game in town. So I understand all of those things. But I still think you're in a position where granting grace should be relatively easy. So just think about it. You know't have to, but you could think about it. You could consider it as an option. Well, shifting burrows for a second to that other first place team with 20 wins as we speak, I wanted to just bring up, I think the Mets lead the league in conspiracies about the baseball because the Mets had previously advanced the idea. I think this was Pete Alonzo had the theory, right, that MLB was manipulating the behavior of the ball in order to

suppress salaries, right? And so if there was going to be a free agent class coming up with a bunch of big hitters, then they would deaden the ball. And if the pitchers were going to be leading the way in free agency, then they would juice the ball in an effort to get them paid less. We've discussed this theory in the past, both the He has a theory here that was proposed to him by some unnamed Mets hitters. So maybe this was Pete Alonzo striking again. But Eric Chavez said that these hitters had heard that the balls in nationally televised games, in Sunday night baseball specifically, had been juiced. So I'm reading here from a Newsday piece. In late April, two days before they played the Phillies on ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball, several hitters gave Chavez a heads up.

Watch how the baseballs traveled during the premier nationally televised game of the week. They had heard that the balls in those games were in some way different. I thought for a second, you guys are full of it, Chavez said. And then what happened? The ball was traveling farther. Balls that weren't hit as hard. And I'm like, wait a minute, that shouldn't have happened, Chavez said. The ball was just traveling better. That was the eye test, but then we lined it up with what the analytics were telling us.

So I think this theory has been advanced by other players or personnel at other times. And I'm always somewhat skeptical of ideas like this, times. And I'm always somewhat skeptical of ideas like this, partly just because I kind of doubt that MLB could get its act together in order to actually do this in a predictable fashion. But this is the kind of conspiracy theory that flourishes in this environment where we can't really trust anything about the baseball. So what do you think about this particular theory that MLB is juicing the ball, putting juiced balls in play before these showcase Sunday night baseball games? So I think it seems unlikely. I mean, we could look at this, right? We could go back and look at all of the nationally televised games and we could adjust the run scoring for you

know you'd want to take like weather into account and yeah and probably the fact that the yankees and the red sox are playing in a disproportionate number of those games that sort of thing right and so and like the you know the yankees have scored a lot of runs per game this year and the red sox have not done that and so you'd want to adjust for all of those things and then you could arrive at an answer i mean i think that the the larger problem that this speaks to is the one that you've highlighted which is that we just we don't have a lot of confidence in the decision making around the ball we don't think that it has been particularly transparent and i think that when you have that denial on the league's part

that they have had an active hand in shaping the offensive environment and then you have sort of aberrant, what you perceive to be aberrant results, you don't have that sort of natural instinct in the back of your mind that says, but it's probably nothing, right? That probably is just like a fluky thing. Circuit has been short-circuited to a certain extent. I would be surprised if only because

wouldn't we all say something about that? Like wouldn't we in a game where we're all watching be like, is there any data to suggest that this is a real thing? I haven't seen any. Now, Dane Perry in the CBS Sports piece that I'm reading here, he says, indeed, the ball tracking data from this game don't particularly back up the perceptions of Mets hitters. I haven't verified that myself. We know that there have been multiple models of baseball in play. So it is possible, whether that's just last season or this season too,

it's possible that this could have happened by chance that maybe the more juiced balls were in play in those games. It's also possible that there's nothing to it. And this is just small sample and confirmation bias and hitters feeling robbed or whatever it is in certain games and not in others. So as you said, I would want to do a more rigorous study here to see if there is any truth to this. And then because we're talking about one game a week, it's just inherently a small sample anyway. So I'd be skeptical. I guess I'm also skeptical

because, well, if MLB wanted to do this, wouldn't they just build the whole plane out of the more juiced ball? If they thought that the more juiced ball was more entertaining and they want the juicier ball in the more prominent games, then why would they have deadened the ball in the first place? I guess they could have deadened it and then not realized that it would work so well and then regretted it and said, hey, when these games are on TV with a national audience, we better slip some of those old balls back in so that it's less glaring and boring or whatever. So I guess you could come up with an explanation there. And it's not like it's impossible if they have multiple models of baseball that they could distribute that in a

non-random way. So it's possible that a lot of these conspiracy theories, like with the idea that Alonzo had previously suggested, well, that is taking a lot of things for granted. The idea that MLB is actually capable of deadening or enlivening the ball the way that it wishes and then planning ahead and then like factoring in who are the free agents in this upcoming class, which sometimes changes as players sign extensions. So it's hard to plan on that far in advance anyway.

And then would that even work? Because, hey, teams adjust for the level of offense and the ball and everything. So if the ball changed, it's not as if teams would suddenly say, oh, these pitchers are all terrible now. I mean, they are able to adjust for these factors. So I don't know that that would actually cost the pitchers less money anyway. So I get why players in general are just skeptical. Sure. anyway. So I get why players in general are just skeptical. I am also skeptical of the ball and MLB's handling of the manufacturing of the ball. I am yet also skeptical of some of the players' conspiracy theories when it comes to this, just because the mechanics of it don't make that much sense to me or the motivations maybe. But again, you're going to get this kind of thing for as long as we just can't trust the ball.

I know that there was another fan graphs analysis just published on Tuesday, right? That showed that, yeah, the ball is not carrying as well and there's more drag and all of that. So as long as we get these fluctuations and I know that there must always have been some fluctuations and we just couldn't detect them because we didn't have StatCast and these other ways of analyzing these things. But the home run rate really has

fluctuated to an unusual degree in recent years, even compared to historic times when we didn't have this level of data. So there's something weird going on. It's not just that we are making more of it because we can analyze it in new ways. Right. I think that the place where these always fall down for me is that they do not present like a coherent theory of what the league's preferred run scoring environment would be. Right. So that's where I tend to have some amount of skepticism, but I think you're right that like looking at them, I'm never like, well, the league wouldn't do that. It's like, well, the league probably would do that. Like if they, if they thought that doing that would do something that they think is good, there isn't, like I said, sort of a coherent theory of what is the league's preferred run scoring environment.

Because if they wanted more runs and more home runs, they would just use these balls all the time. Even though I am sympathetic to the idea that they do not seem to have good handle on this fundamentally important piece of manufacturing process. Maybe they don't have a coherent philosophy themselves. Right. And that could certainly be true. But it seems unlikely to me. My primary and sort of default assumption with all of this has been that we should just attribute most of this to incompetence rather than malice, which isn't, as an aside, is not in any way a defense of the league. That isn't good either.

It's just a different kind of bad. But I tend to think that they just, for whatever reason, have not been able to get a more precise handle on this, even as they have generally been of the mind that balls in play equals good and run scoring equals good. But we will not think about how those things might be in conflict with one another in our current run scoring environment with the current distribution of offense and also the current quality of pitching but anyway runs yay is sort of like

where they have landed and they don't seem to have landed that way in in a way that would actually achieve those goals and then there's the original sin of having been sort of you know lies may be strong but it's not totally off base that like they haven't been fully transparent with some of the changes they have made and now they can't say that they that they've made them because they have spent the last couple of years telling us that everything's fine and within normal parameters so that original fib man or lack of detail or something has made things they've sort of put themselves in a corner. They put themselves in a bit of a corner.

There's a lack of credibility there. And I read something else this week that made me just reinforced how screwed hitters are and how taking away the power that they had from a more juiced ball really puts them at an even greater disadvantage. And that was in an interview that David Laurel of Fangraphs did with Shelly Duncan, former Yankees and Cleveland legend Shelley Duncan, who is now the analytics

coordinator for the White Sox. And he talked about something, I'll just read a quote here, Shelley Duncan, a Fangraph subscriber, apparently. Who knows, maybe an Effectively Wild listener. If so, hello, Shelley. But he said, what we are going to see, what we're starting to see now is that a lot of teams are utilizing Kinetrax and Hawkeye, giving them an ability to really analyze the biomechanics of a swing. We're getting to the point now where we're not going to be attacking hitters. We're going to be attacking swing profiles. We're going to be looking at people's swings and understanding how to attack them. Hitters are starting to learn that they're going to need different types of swings in their toolkits and what swings work with what type of pitches. We're going to see all-around pitchers. We're going to see pitchers who master two types of fastballs and hitters that have the

ability to hit two types of fastballs. The game is growing and the technology and information is helping it grow at a faster rate. So it's not a brand new thing. We don't really have public data on this, but I know it's been privately available for a while. And there are several companies and systems that can actually track the bats and provide the bat position so that you can see not just that a hitter missed the pitch, but did they miss high? Did they miss low? Did they miss early? Did they miss late? And maybe that tells you something that could help the hitters potentially.

But with all of these advances, almost always they help the pitchers more, or at least they help the pitchers more initially. And so these are just more weapons in the pitcher's arsenal where you're not even just saying, you know, matchup stats, this guy is a three for seven against that guy. You're lumping them in against similar batters and similar pitchers, and you're using all of this data about swing planes and how your pitches move. And that just tells me, A, there's a lot that we don't know when it comes to analyzing certain matchups, you know, whether it was the right decision to pinch hit or not, or to put in this pitcher or not.

Teams will have projections that are really tailored to the individuals there. So if it's on an iPad or in the older days, a binder of some sort that is prepared by the front office and then the manager, the bench coach or whoever in the game can look at that and say, what's the projected outcome of a plate appearance of this guy versus that guy? And it's not just how good those guys are in general or what they have done against each other in some small sample of previous play appearances. It is just based on really granular,

breaking down exactly what their weaknesses and strengths are and how they might play against each other. So there's this whole level of information and projection that is kind of invisible to us in the public sphere still. And I don't know how much of a difference it makes, but if you ever see a curious matchup decision, you never know if it was motivated by something like that. But also now pitchers have that information

with all of these tracking systems where you don't have to go in a lab and have a bunch of markers strapped on your body anymore. This is markerless motion capture that is just taking place in major league parks. And you're getting these detailed breakdowns of all the joint movements and all of that. And so you're able to see, oh, well, this guy, he can't hit a pitch with this vertical approach angle or whatever it is. And you can do this like extremely detailed advanced scouting that in the past you just would not have been able to do. And it's just another tool in the toolkit of pitchers and defenses and run prevention units in general. And yeah, maybe hitters can kind of catch up, but it's tough. Like Duncan says, I would say that maybe 25% to 30% of hitters

have the ability, a good ability, to make the adjustments on completely different type of pitchers. Like they might be able to have two different swings. Like I've heard Alex Bregman or other hitters talk about how if you know that you have a high spin pitcher coming up, then you have to swing a little higher than you would otherwise, because you know that the pitch, it's going to look deceptive. You're going to be expecting it to fall more than it actually will. And so you can actually adjust your swing plane a little, but that's a hard adjustment to make. Like the ball looks like it's here to be, but I know it's actually there. So I will elevate my swing a little bit. Like that takes a rare type of talent

to make that adjustment. I think even if you know that you should, so there's just more and more information and hitters are just going to be on their back feet because they're not going to be able to take advantage of it quite as much or quite as early as pitchers. And so that's why I am generally in favor of some sort of intervention that goes beyond juicing or deadening the ball. But you have to actually tie some arms behind teams' back when it comes to which pitchers are available

to teams and managers at any given time or any of the other measures we've talked about because it's just hard out there for hitters. So anyone who blames the hitters for the offensive environment, I just don't get it. I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding that has the relationship backwards. Yeah, I think that that is exactly right. I don't have anything to add. Sometimes I think I should say more and then I'm like, but Ben already said all this stuff, so I could just be in agreement. And I think I am. Well, if you ever disagree, please do vocalize your disagreement. No, completely wrong.

When have I ever? Ben, get out of here. Yeah. I can't believe that you would base a good argument on an interview that one of my writers carefully reported and that I carefully edited how dare you yeah people like disagreements they do rare occasions when we do disagree we will disagree yeah but uh it's not one of those like crossfire type shows where it's no because you know what you start with a crossfire show and then one of those guys is just really committed to the bow tie and it goes wildly wrong after that ben yeah yeah it's not even like a harold reynolds brian kenny dynamic here but there are times when we don't

see quite out of eye and uh i cherish those times as well yeah we always enjoy and uh have respectful disagreements but did you see emergency catcher josh Meter of the Pirates this past weekend? Because if you haven't, I'd recommend going back. And it seems like a Meg article waiting to happen there. I saw that it was happening. I saw it unfolding. I had the crushing realization and dread that I was like, they're going to have to bring someone up. And then I went to Roster Resource, which is this really great part of Fangraph of fan graphs.com and i was like they don't have any more they don't have any other catchers on the 40 man we're gonna have to make a roster move to accommodate this

and they did they did have to do that and so i felt bad for that reason i'm sure that andrew napp didn't realize what i'm gonna do is where what he was stirring when he got ejected there and poor roberto perez got got banged up too but yeah i think that you know we are often presented with moments where we realize like just how hard being a professional athlete is right and um you know i think that for whatever reason people tend to have a misunderstanding of their ability to sort of plop down in the middle of a of not just a professional baseball game but like a big league game and look be able to fake it you know be able to have someone come away thinking like yeah that that person there they're a professional athlete

and then we have moments like this where we're're forced to reckon with, that guy is a professional athlete. And it seemed to have gone badly for him in this particular moment. It did not go well at all. And yeah, we are losing the ability to appreciate how good MLB players are by being presented with players who are just way over their heads and out of their depth because we still see that with position players pitching, which is common, but we don't see it with pitchers hitting anymore, which I'm not sorry about, but I do sort of miss that aspect of like, this is just a walk-on. This is someone off the street who for some reason is being expected to do this thing in a big league baseball game. That was very common. We don't have wakasahachi swaps anymore with the three batter minimum

where you got to see every now and then a pitcher out in the field. Could conceivably still happen every now and then. But these things have gotten more rare, and it is rare to see the emergency catcher pressed into service. And in this case, as you noted, Andrew Knapp, he was not even in the game. He got thrown out for arguing a check swing call from the bench. And at that point, he did not know that his services would be needed later in that game because Roberto Perez, who was in the game, he got hurt running the bases. And then it was like, uh-oh, because our backup got thrown out of the game already.

That means we have to put in Josh Van Meter. him already. That means we have to put in Josh Van Meter. Josh Van Meter had not caught since high school and not even late in high school. When he was 14, I think, was the last time he had stepped on the gear. Imagine that. Catching seems terrifying to me regardless. I was trying to think, what is something I last did when I was, and now if I were called upon to do it at the highest possible level, how would I feel? Keep a Tamagotchi alive. know, strapping on the gear and being target practice, basically, for someone who's throwing really hard in a major league game. Not easy under the best of circumstances to do it, not having done it since he was 14, and he's 27 now. So it's been a while. And it was really interesting. I went back and I watched the entire half inning, and it was a long, long half inning.

It was about a half hour half inning, and it just kept going and going and going. And I felt bad for him. I felt happy for the Reds because they actually won this game. And it seemed like in large part, they won this game because of Josh Van Meter being pressed into service as an emergency catcher. So otherwise would not have gone back and watched a late inning of a Pirates-Reds game in 2022. But this was pretty fascinating because in a way, like before the play began, Van Meter looked more qualified than your average pitcher-hitter or position player-pitcher. Sure.

With most pitcher-hitters, you can tell, like even when they get into their stance, if they even bother to, that they are not hitters. They're not looking hitterish up there. And position player-pitchers mostly aren't either, at least when they go into their windup and delivery. They're barely putting any oomph into it for the most part unless they're Brett Phillips or someone.

Lobbing. Whereas Josh Van Meter, like before anything happened, he looked like a catcher. Sure. He was wearing the gear. He was crouching the way that catchers crouch. And even when there was a ball right down the middle, he looked like a catcher. You know, he was able to catch a ball right down the middle. He, for the most part, fulfilled the primary role of the catcher, which is to catch. He did catch most of the pitches. Not all of the pitches.

Not all of the pitches, but most of the pitches. But most of the pitches. You know, that's more than we would do, I'm sure. Oh my gosh, yes. But it was striking, like once you really got into it, just how much worse than your average catcher or even your below average catcher he was. And look, this game, it was tied going into this inning. It was 2-2. And it was very quickly no longer 2-2. And in fact, the Reds scored seven runs in this inning.

And I don't know how reflective of that, of like the true talent of Josh Van Meter catcher is, like a catcher ERA of 63. Is that his true talent here? Probably not. Probably not. It was interesting, though, because like as bad as he was at catching, and he was bad. He failed to block a couple balls in the dirt, and he dropped one or two, and he couldn't frame for, Dylan, I'm going to do a swear, he couldn't frame for shit. Leave it in, Dylan.

Leave the swear in. Don't you dare bleep it. It's like seeing Bigfoot in the situation. But he was unbiased and he did not give any extra. But there were some borderline strikes there that Van Meter, because he like pushed them down, you know, he either had the very obvious like the glove dips down and then way up again, or it just goes down and follows the ball out of the strike zone like he was not a framer. And so there were no close calls. But like it seemed like the pitchers were almost more out of their element than Van Meter was, which was the interesting thing. Because the pitcher when Van Meter entered was Will Crow, and he'd been pitching fine.

He'd been in the game already, and he got four outs and faced the minimum, I think. And then as soon as Van Meter came in, Crow looked like completely discombobulated, like he looked totally uncomfortable because it was like he was kind of babying Van Meter, like he didn't want to throw anything in the dirt. He didn't want to give him a hard time. He just like he had no confidence in his battery mate. And suddenly he was wild and he was hitting guys and he was walking everyone, as was the pitcher who replaced him and everything just like got wildly out of hand so it was interesting it wasn't even like van meter was so bad that you know every ball was to the backstop but it was like the pitchers just had no confidence whatsoever in him and you know how could you even be confident like they didn't have pitch calm like poor van meter like what does he have to learn the signs and he's flashing signs and it's like are there going to be cross-ups and they did have a mound meeting which was like mostly for van meter not for crow it was just it was really interesting how like he looked more like a legitimate catcher when the play started and then very quickly it became clear that he was not. He was, you know, doing a game job. He was doing what he could. He was doing as well as any emergency catcher could do in that situation. But boy, I mean, this was probably the worst catching

since the Ryan Domet era of the Pirates. You know, is this what we're going to see when it no longer matters how you catch the ball? It still matters that you do catch the ball at times, but if it won't matter your technique of receiving or framing, then we might get more catchers who kind of look like Josh Van Meter. But boy, I would recommend going back and watching just for people who appreciate the finer points of catching. This was not a catching clinic. This was the opposite of that. So this leaves me with a couple of thoughts.

The first of which is you should watch more college baseball, Ben. Because if you enjoyed this, you would enjoy just, enjoy just you know sitting there get a weighted blanket an average of your choice you know bounce your daughter on your knee and watch the receiving and some of college baseball because it is yeah you know the van meter-esque yeah i mean he didn't even catch in college it's probably a little bit better than him hopefully but yeah well it depends so that's the first thought I had. The second thought is, you know, this question occurred to me as you were talking about sort of the experience of watching a pitcher

have to engage with a catcher he doesn't have a tremendous amount of confidence in because I wonder this. Like, we have established that we would both be just, you know, god-awful. We would inspire so many more swears than Josh Van Meter has. But imagine you're Josh Van Meter for a second. You're like, oh God. And you're getting set up back there

and you're trying to remember being 14. And then you're realizing that maybe dwelling on what it was like to be 14 will actually make this a worse experience. I don't know what Josh Van Meter's 14-year-old year was like, so maybe he had a great time, but I think that it's often a low point for many. You're sitting back there,

and you've got the tools of ignorance on, and you're like, I look okay, except that I got to catch these. Are you more freaked out by the prospect of high heat or breaking stuff. What thing fills you with greater dread? The idea that you might have to catch 97 at the top of the zone or that you might be dealing with a crazy breaking ball

that just swoops, whirls, sweeps, whatever the kids are doing these days. Which thing fills you with more dread? Because I imagine that both things seem pretty intimidating. It's almost a tie for first. Once again, we're kind of picking on Josh Van Meter here, but we are not meaning to pick on Josh Van Meter. We are merely discussing the foibles of

josh fan meter because it is incredibly incredibly hard even for a professional athlete this is really about how amazing catchers are even as we were talking about how not amazing this particular catching experience was yeah right yeah i mean i would be terrified of both and i'm sure both would be catastrophic in some way. We're like, we are dust. We are ghosts. We are, you know, we are walking into the sea when this is done. Van Meter definitely had some bruises because there was one ball in the dirt that bounced up and hit him in the arm or the shoulder.

And then he also took a foul tip in the mask once. Like, poor guy. in the mask once, like, poor guy. I would think, like, I'm pretty good at catching baseballs generally, not as a catcher, but just if we were playing catch, I am good at that. I would like to think that I would be more likely to actually catch fastballs, whereas breaking balls, I would often whiff potentially. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't have a lot of experience catching 90-something mile per hour pitches, no matter how straight they are. So if I were to miss a 90-something mile per hour pitch completely, which is certainly within the realm of possibility, then I guess that would hurt more, most likely, than a slower pitch that bounced, although that could bounce up and hit you who knows where. Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is I think I'd be more likely to catch the fastball.

And so even though I would be more terrified potentially, I don't know, because some breaking balls, I mean, they're going 90 these days anyway. So like at that point, would I even notice the difference between 90 and 97 or something or would I just wet myself either way? I don't know, but probably I would be more likely to intercept the fastball and thus less likely to be dead after the pitch. Yeah. I'm skeptical that I would catch either, candidly. I think the odds of me correctly positioning my glove are better for a fastball and thus like the odds of me at least knocking it down and then having it right in front of me are reasonable as opposed to like good major league breaking stuff where i would just be i just be back at the backstop constantly and i wouldn't you know it'd be one of those things where i wouldn't know where it was and i'd be

looking around desperate like someone please point out the ball and yeah the old Bob Uecker line just wait for it to stop rolling yeah like where is it can I see it you know and like a pop-up oh forget a pop-up I would be you know and I would be throwing my mask off and running to the netting every time and it would be like 20 rows back and people would be like in addition to not being able to catch like she doesn't have good depth perception maybe and so i just i think mostly like my heart goes out to josh van meter i think that he should probably win an award like i think that you know there should be a special award for like extraordinary services rendered quite poorly you know yeah because it's still amazing that he did it,

even though he didn't do it particularly well. This is one of those moments where, like, you know, I know that there is a certain slice of humanity that sort of takes umbrage to participation trophies, but even that slice would probably look at this and go, that guy should get a medal or a little trophy that has, you know, like one of those little trophies that has the plastic piece on the front that says your name. And then there's like a little hitter standing on top of a little stand. Like you should get one of those.

Yeah. It could just be like him going, who me? With like a catcher's mask or something. Yeah. Like at the very least, Andrew Knapp should be taking him out to dinner. Yes, for sure. And again, Andrew Knapp, I'm sure that if he had known. Yes, he was quite contrite after the game.

Oh yes, extremely. And so I don't want to, you know, this entire segment feels like we're picking on people and we're really trying to say some nice stuff about them. I'm sure that if Andrew Knapp knew what had happened, he would have just, you know, he would have just you know he would have just eaten it and and not gotten thrown out yeah yeah friend of the show russell carlton did a piece for bp about four years ago where he tried to quantify how bad emergency catchers are yeah and

he found that there's something like 50 runs worse than average defensively over 162 games. That doesn't feel like enough runs. Yeah. As he acknowledged in his piece, he was probably picking up some non-emergency catchers who crept into the sample. And also, I would think that most emergency catchers even are probably more qualified than Josh Van Meter. Maybe they caught in college or even professionally at some point. So I think that Van Meter was certainly worse than that. And also I think sometimes you might end up with an emergency catcher in a situation

where you have a blowout or something. And so maybe the runners aren't going to be going anyway. So I think that Russell's method, as he noted, probably underestimated how bad they would be. But watching Van Meter made me wonder, is it worse to have a true emergency catcher than to have a position player pitcher? Which before watching this, I would have said, well, no way. Having a legitimate major league pitcher, that's got to be better, even if the catcher

is not catching the pitches. But if you are kind of defanging the pitcher because the pitcher has no confidence in his catcher and thus he loses his command and he's not throwing his best stuff anyway, and also the catcher can't frame anything and is dropping balls and can't throw anyone out, it made me wonder. Maybe those things are kind of comparable. Maybe it would be worse to have a major league pitcher and a catcher like Josh Van Vietor than it would be to have a major league catcher and a position player pitch. So interesting debate, thought experiment there. Yeah. Yeah. Because 50 runs doesn't seem like,

it seems like too few. I think you're worse than that. Yeah. I felt sorry for multiple players lately because there was a pitcher for the Rays, Calvin Fauché, who I met. I met that major leaguer and he kind of had a deer in the headlights look because he had the misfortune of making his major league debut on Monday. And it was, well, it was memorable. It went a little bit better than Josh Van Meters. I guess he has a 63 catcher ERA. Calvin Forche for the Rays has a 45 ERA after his one inning of work. But, you know, it was one of those things

where it's like record scratch. How did I get here? You're probably wondering how I got here. He came in in the bottom of the seventh and he faced Chad Wallach first and then Andrew Velasquez. And it's like, okay, I can probably handle Chad Wallach and Andrew Velasquez, but Wallach singled, Velasquez walked, then Brandon Marsh comes out. Okay. A little more imposing here. He singles. So then you're Calvin Fauché making your major league debut for the

Rays at 26 years old. And you are facing Mike Trout with the bases loaded with Shohei Otani on deck. Like, I don't know which situation I would less want to be in. Josh Van Meter strapping on the gear, getting behind the plate. Probably that one. But close second, bases loaded, no outs with Mike Trout and Shohei Otani coming up. And, you know, he did not do much better than I would have done in that situation really because Mike Trout walked walked in a run and then Shohei Otani hit his first professional grand slam he never even hit one in Japan so this

was a first for Otani his second digger of the game he is raking now and suddenly going to the opposite field and it's fun to watch. I think he is on the verge of maybe a torrid streak. But boy, I had to feel for Calvin Fauché, who facing like MVPs back to back with the bases loaded and no outs. That is a trial by fire. And he found himself in the fire very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't believe that we're already an hour in and you're just now getting to this. Your restraint is really admirable, Ben. Do you ever have one of those moments where you haven't checked in on someone's stats for a second

and so then they really kind of turn a corner? They're not where you imagine they will be when it's all said and done, but it's like all of a sudden, Shoya Ohtani is a 124 WRC+. Yep. Yep. When did that happen, Ben? That one game went a long way.

I want to know the precise moment. Yeah. Yeah. When you go three for five with two home runs, it turns out the stats like it. Yeah. Plus his game-tying ninth inning double the day before. Oh, boy. Yeah.

I know that we spent the beginning part of this episode talking about Jose Ramirez, and I love Jose Ramirez, and in fact was one of two brave writers at Fangraphs to say that he would win the MVP. So I'm invested even more than usual. But I will say we're really, really close to Mike Trout leading the American League in position player war. We're sure getting there, Ben.

We're real, real close. Yep. Those angels are pretty fun these days. So I will end here with one more note on a Major League debut, although this will not be a meet a major leaguer segment, but a stat blast. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA minus or OBS plus. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's today's stat blast. All right, the stat blast is brought to you today, as it always is these days, by our friends at StatHead, which is powered by Baseball Reference.

these days by our friends at StatHead, which is powered by Baseball Reference. It is one of the most powerful tools for looking up statistical information about not just MLB, but also many sports. And I'll give you an example prompted by an email we received as we were recording this podcast, and I actually did a StatHead query while we talked. This is related to what we began this episode with. The listener asks, I was watching highlights of Josh Naylor's remarkable comeback heroics on May 9th, wherein, with two home runs in later extra innings, he lifted the Guardians' win probability from 4% to 39%, then again from 32% to 89%, for a total of 92% of win probability added. Actually, 94%, according to Baseball References calculations, I believe. This has me wondering, with late- game bombs and zombie runners wildly swinging win probabilities

back and forth, could a player end up having more than 100% win probability added in a game? Say, for instance, the White Sox managed to tie the game up again. Then in the top of the next inning, Josh Naylor came up and hit another 3-4 run homer. Have there ever been greater than 100% WPA performances in the past? This is signed, Joe, an expat Mets fan in Toronto who should probably sign up for Stathead. Well, Joe, you saved me the trouble of saying that myself. Yes, you should sign up for Stathead because you could very quickly query, as I did, the highest

single game win probability added performances ever. And if you did that, you would find that, of course, yes, you can have values over 100%. Players who single-handedly increased their team's win probability added by more than a full win and just had their team's fortunes dragged down by their teammates. At the top of the list is, of course, the famous Art Shamsky with his game on August 12th, 1966. Art Shamsky, I believe, was the subject of a proto-StatBlast segment, the play index segment that was the precursor to StatBlast by Sam, in episode 468, where he discussed how Shamsky did not enter that game until the eighth inning, and he had three homers and three at-bats, very famously. He

actually hit a home run in the next at-bat of his next game, so he had four homers and four at-bats, much like our recent guest Charlie Maxwell. So Shamsky playing for the Reds in another Reds-Pirates game, he had a win probability added of 1.503, one and a half wins worth of win probability. And yet his Reds lost that game in the 12th inning. And if you're wondering where Josh Naylor ranks, he is down at 195th all time among batters. It's the highest single game WPA

since Jet Lowry of the Athletics won a walk-off game against Cleveland last July 16th. I will link to those results on the show page, but you don't have to rely on me to do searches like this. You can do it yourself by going to StatHead.com and using the coupon code WILD20 to get yourself a $20 discount on an $80 one-year subscription. Again, StatHead.com, code WILD20. I imagine that you saw Sean Jelly, the picture for the Giants. It would be hard to miss him. He is listed at 6'11".

Mammoth man. Very, very much so. He's listed at 6'11", although he says that he is 6'11 1⁄2", and reportedly was measured at the all-important half, which does make him the tallest player in Major League history, or would if we accept that. John Roush was, of course, 6'11 as well, but Jelly says that he has a half inch on Roush. Anyway, he's huge. They even showed his wife and kid in the stands, they look very tall, too. So he pitched for the Giants, made his major league debut, and it went much better for him.

He had a nice, easy one, two, three inning, I believe. But the headline was that, hey, this guy is huge. And I think he was subsequently optioned after the game already. So this was brief, but maybe he'll be back soon. Anyway, we got a question from Andrew who said, I'm probably not the only person to ask this question, but just in case, is 6'11 Sean Jelly to Submariner or Submariner, the eternal debate that I still have not resolved,

Tyler Rogers, the greatest difference in release point between two pitchers pitching back-to-back in MLB history? And Andrew was not the only person who asked. We also got a question from listener Evan who asked about that. And I saw some people on Twitter who were wondering the same thing. Multiple Giants beat writers, including Andrew Baggerly, speculated that that had to be the greatest release point differential from one pitcher to the next in Major League history. Now, we can't answer that for major league history because, of course, we do not have release point data prior to 2008, but we can answer it since 2008. And I'm here to

tell you, maybe somewhat surprisingly, maybe somewhat disappointingly, that no, in fact, this is not the greatest release point differential from one pitcher to the next, even in the pitch tracking era. And the interesting thing is that as huge as Jelly is, his release point is not that extreme. Because if you watch him, he has kind of a funky motion, which I guess you would expect for a 6'11 and a half pitcher. But it looks like it's going to be kind of over the top, and then it's not. And it ends up being sort of a lower arm slot, kind of like a three quarters release. And so his release point is not actually that high or as high as you would think it would be based on his height.

So the average pitcher height so far this season is 6'2 1⁄2". Sean Jelly is 6'11 1⁄2", if we take him at his word here. So he has 9 inches on the average pitcher, but his release point is only 6 inches higher than the average pitcher. So the average release point this year is 5.8 feet above the ground. His was 6.3 feet, so that's a six inch difference. And that probably actually, you know, you would have submariners. I'm going to go with submariners on this episode, although maybe I'll change to submariners next time. That average release point is dragged down by sidearmers and submariners. So really his release point probably isn't even six inches higher than the typical non-submariner or side armor.

So if you take that into account, it's actually not that shocking. Now, Tyler Rogers, the Giants' submariner, he does have the lowest release point of any major league pitcher this year. However, Sean Jelly, you would expect he'd be close to the top of the leaderboard, but no, he is only 70th actually in average release point among the 578 major league pitchers I come up with when I do this baseball savant search. Tyler Rogers is last at 578. He does have the lowest release point of anyone, but there were 69 pitchers. Nice number of 69 pitchers with higher release points than Sean Jelly so far. Tower Rogers is 1.4 feet, basically, and sometimes it looks like he's about to scrape the dirt here.

So I did some math with help from Lucas Apostolaris of Baseball Perspectives, effectively Wild Listener. We had to do some geometry to answer this question because we didn't want to just do height differential or vertical release point differential, but we wanted to look at the distance in release point in space. So there's a vertical and horizontal component to that. So we had to trot out the Pythagorean theorem here and find the hypotenuse, basically. And we came up with a list of the greatest distances in release point. And, you know, you'd think it'd be even more extreme because I think that Rogers all the way over to the right side of the rubber, and I think that Jelly was on the left side. But even so, we broke it

down two ways, one with back-to-back pitchers of the same handedness and one with opposite handedness, where you would expect a greater release point difference. And I will put these spreadsheets online as always. But as far as we could tell, this was only the 15th greatest release point disparity of the pitch tracking era since 2008. So that is somewhat surprising to me and maybe to the people who asked us about this, but the greatest difference, according to the stats, was 2009, April 12th, Hideki Okajima followed by Javier Lopez, and there was a difference of 6.5 feet between their average release points on that day, whereas Jelly to Rogers was only 5.6 feet. So that's a couple of lefties. Then after that, you have a bunch of righties, and it probably would not be too hard to guess whose name shows up all over this leaderboard.

It's Chad Bradford. Chad Bradford is everywhere on this leaderboard because he had probably an even lower release point than Rogers did. In fact, yes, he did at least some of the time. So after Okajima and Lopez, it goes Chad Bradford and Jim Johnson, Chad Bradford and Jeff Neiman, Chad Bradford and Steve Traxell, Chad Bradford and Randor Beard. That was all in 2008. And then you have Oliver Drake, former podcast guest, and Ryan Thompson, Adam Simber, another weird one, and Rafael Delis. Then another, Chad Bradford and Dennis Sarfati. Danny Jimenez and Tyler Rogers. So Rogers does show up on the leaderboard, but it's actually Danny Jimenez who is not super tall but is much more over the top than Sean Jelly is. He actually has the greatest disparity with Rogers, and that's ninth overall.

Then another, Chad Bradford. Chad Bradford and Lance Cormier. Another, Adam Simber and John Edwards. Sean Anderson and Tyler Rogers. Matt Wisler and Tyler Rogers, Adam Simber again and Hunter Wood, and then finally Sean Jelly and Tyler Rogers. So only 15th. That is surprising, but it speaks to the outlier nature of Chad Bradford, who he really was. I mean, he must have gotten his knuckles dirty sometimes. It's like, you know,

you see the drop and drive pitchers who get some dirt on their knees sometimes. Bradford, he must have scraped up his fingers at some point because he was really, really getting low. And if you're curious about opposite handedness, the greatest disparity that we could find, and we couldn't find video for this because it's the dark ages. It's 2008, but it seemed to be reasonable to check out. But Alberto Castillo and Cam Micolio in 2008 for the Orioles, I think, that was a lefty-righty combo or a righty-lefty combo that had a difference of 10.05 feet between their two release points. And then more recently, Andrew Triggs and Patrick Schuster, they were at 9.3 feet. That was in 2016. So I'll put the full list online there. But yeah, there you have it. The answer is that that was not as historic because as much of an outlier

as Sean Jelly is, he is not all that weird in terms of his vertical release point. And because he drops down a bit and has that three quarters delivery, then that also reduces the distance to Rogers's submarine style delivery. So not as big as one would think. Huh. That is very interesting. If you have like sort of not staked your claim, but if you're one of those people that everyone's like, oh yeah, very weird. And then it's like a little less weird than you thought like what is your understanding of yourself after that yeah i mean he's still very much an outlier just in terms of appearance like just his his socks were like as tall as i am yeah i don't know if he had to get like special socks that were that

long like his socks looked as as big as like just some people's legs. I mean, if anything, like I would think the high socks makes you look taller, right? Probably to me. And you'd think, I mean, I guess Sean Jelly doesn't mind standing out as someone who's super tall because he had the high socks going as well. So definitely striking appearance wise. It's just that, you know, if he were going over the top, then he'd be releasing that thing from, I don't know how high. I mean- 20 feet. Yeah. You have like Ross Stripling, I think, former podcast guest, has the highest average release point this year, just over seven feet. And he's 6'1", which is below average height for

a pitcher. It's just that he throws over the top. So I think it almost matters more what your arm angle is, what your release slot is, than how tall you are. Sure. It's just funny that there's this sense of there are some guys where to get a real understanding and appreciation of scale, you don't need to just see them next to other big leaguers where you're like, wow, for a big leaguer, that guy is tall. It's like it would be useful to see him next to other big leaguers where you're like wow for a big leaguer that guy is tall it's like it would be useful to see him next to like an nba player and be like that guy is normal sized yeah right and i'd be like wow that's very tall i happened to come across just a day or two after sean jelly's debut or maybe even the same day this old clip about how Bill Veck wanted to sign

an eight-footer. One time, this was from a 1951 newspaper article, not long after Veck, who was then the owner of the Browns, had signed three-foot-seven Eddie Goodell, of course. And this story says Bill also is looking for a giant. He figures an eight-footer would be as much of a problem for opposing pitchers as the three-foot, seven-inch Goodell. I have to question that logic. I would think that an eight-footer, at least an eight-foot hitter, it might be intimidating. It might throw you for a second. But part of the point of Eddie Goodell was just minuscule strike zone, right? Right. How can you not walk him?

Whereas if you have an eight footer up there, then it's like, you know, Aaron Judge plus a foot and a half or something like we've seen the strike zone that he gets. I mean, everything would be a strike. You wouldn't be able to reach anything. So I would think that after you got over the initial shock of someone who was a foot taller than Sean Jelly being up there at the plate, that would not be an advantage for the offensive team. Yeah. Yeah. It would reach a point where you would say, oh no, we've made a terrible mistake. And you'd have fights about it. There would be manager rejections. Maybe it would be fun, but it would be a real mess, I think.

Well, that one never happened. Beck never went ahead with that one. So maybe he left that on the cutting room floor and he realized that it wouldn't be such an advantage after all. Too much even for him. Yes. All right. Well, we can wrap up there. All right. Meant to mention a tweet by Alex Pavlovich, who covers the Giants. He said that the release

point gap between Jelly and Rogers doesn't feel like an accident. Gabe Kapler this afternoon said, different creates some discomfort, and discomfort is a good thing for the pitcher on the field. Gabe Kapler this afternoon said, different creates some discomfort, and discomfort is a good thing for the pitcher on the field. I imagine that that's true. On the other hand, these pitchers came in sequentially, and so they didn't actually face the same hitters in this game,

so it wouldn't have been that disorienting for the particular opponents they faced. But in general, yeah, I could see how different release points and just different arsenals and so forth would be of value in the middle of a game. There's been some research on that. Also, a few follow-ups from last week when we were giving examples of baseball skeuomorphs. I forgot to read this excellent suggestion by Dennis, who said,

I'm sure you're flooded with emails on the topic, but one anachronism that always jumps out at me is stirrups. There's no longer a reason to wear them, but players still do for aesthetic or traditional reasons. I'm sure you already know this, but it used to be the case that players didn't wear colored socks because it was believed the dye in the socks was harmful and could cause infection if you were to suffer a wound to your leg. That's true, that did happen. Thus, if the Red Sox wanted to wear red socks, they'd actually wear red stirrups over their white sanitary socks. This is obviously no longer a concern, but stirrups have survived nonetheless. Good point, and I'm glad that they have. We also had a few people write in in response to a discussion we had last week in our little pedantic corner about an email we had gotten from a listener who was upset that the chyron on some broadcast said, pitches this at bat instead of

pitches this plate appearance, given that many plate appearances don't turn out to be at bats. And we noted that we are generally a pro plate appearance podcast, and so we were in favor of saying plate appearance instead of at bat. But a number of people pointed out, you can't even be confident that it will be a plate appearance, because the plate appearance has to be completed for it to count. If a runner is picked off or caught stealing while the batter is still at the plate, well, that's not a plate appearance until he comes up again the next inning. So we got a suggestion from listener Jake, who said, perhaps it should say, pitch is seen since batter began facing pitcher, this time through the order. Perfect, really. Rolls right

off the tongue. I should also note I mentioned last week that Max Scherzer had a very long streak of his team winning his starts. It was up to 18 and the record was 23. Well, that streak was snapped. The Mets lost his most recent start 3-2, just barely. So that was the first time that Max Scherzer's team had lost one of his starts in about a year. And lastly, thanks to everyone who supported my take on Olaf from Frozen. I maintain that Olaf is an abomination. I feel vindicated in my Olaf phobia. A few people suggested that I should have used

Do You Want to Build a Snowman as the outro song to that episode. but the answer is no, I do not want to build a snowman. I'm more of a skiing, skating, and sledding guy. Some people asked how I feel about Frosty. I'm fine with Frosty. I think snow people make me sort of sad in general because they're reminders of our mortality or meltality. Eh, is that anything? But Olaf is in a class of his own as far as the degree to which he disturbs me. It would not disturb me at all. In fact, it would comfort and encourage me if you were to support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild.

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EWPod and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance and we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. So give me an emergency exit Gets me out of here And give me an emergency exit

Gets me out of here Gets me out of here Gets me out of here Gets me out of here