Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1852: Roger, Over and Out

Episode Date: May 21, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley pay tribute (for the umpteenth time) to the great Roger Angell, who died at 101 on Friday, then banter about which underperforming hitters are most in need of the kind of breakout game that slow-starting Trevor Story had this week. After that (21:41), they bring on listener and top-tier Patreon […]

🎵Roger and I'll be your buddy🎵 🎵I feel you in the air today🎵 🎵I know you gave for your country🎵 🎵I feel you in the air today Hello and welcome to episode 1852 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Well, I was doing okay and then we got some extremely sad news right before we started recording. We've recorded most of this episode.

We will be joined by a guest, but we are doing our intro here, and just as we were preparing to start, we read that, very sadly, the legend Roger Angel, the New Yorker writer and editor and consensus best baseball writer ever, has died at age 101 of heart failure in his Manhattan home. I suppose you can't say that it comes as a shock when someone who is 101 passes away, but regardless, it's a big blow because he's an idol of ours and he's someone who has given us so much and influenced our work and influenced so many others' works. He is your favorite baseball writer's favorite baseball writer, basically. And to have him leave is just kind of shocking. He's been a constant, not just for us, but for people who are a generation or two older than we are, right?

He's been there for so long, doing it at such an incredibly high level, even into his late 90s. So we are really, really sorry to see him go and condolences to his wife and his family and everyone who cared about him, which includes not only us, but I assume a lot of people listening to this podcast. Yeah. I don't know, man. It seems, I mean, one of these references, maybe not as emotionally resonant for everyone listening to this podcast, but I find myself thinking it's very stupid that we have to live in a world without new words from like Roger Angel and Joan Didion. I feel unmoored so it super sucks i hope everyone will take this as an opportunity to revisit their favorite work of his because it'll i don't know it's like a warm bath it'll just make you feel better like it's perhaps telling that his prose

was as good as it is that like the way to feel better after learning of his passing is to engage with his work so yeah i have said that, that it just sort of centers me. It brings me back to the way I want to be writing. Not that I try to imitate Roger Angel necessarily because that would be a fool's errand. Yeah, but there's just something about his prose, whether I'm writing about baseball or about not baseball, there's something about just picking up any Roger Angel book. You know, like sometimes people ask us like,

well, where should I start? What article should I read? Which book should I pick up? It's like anywhere, you know? Yeah, whichever is at hand, whichever is close. Yeah, and there's something about that. It just sort of reminds me like, oh, this is good writing. This is what writing should be.

We each have to find our way to our personal best way of writing. But he found his. And it was just as good as anyone else's and probably better in the baseball sphere. So I guess the title of world's best baseball writer is vacant for the first time in 60 years or so. But he's just had an incredibly accomplished career, not just as a baseball writer, but as a writer about other topics. And as a fiction editor, he just went back. He was like the New Yorker's institutional memory, just going back to just times untold. So it really is a loss.

times untold. So it really is a loss. And I guess the saving grace here is that he certainly had the ability to hear and read a ton of tributes to him. I don't know if he was someone who liked to do that, but it was out there. So it's not a case of, oh, they probably didn't even know how good they were, how many people cared about them, you know, and people like having the funeral ceremony before the funeral so that you can actually hear what people thought of you. Well, that was out there for him and that was out there on this podcast. So if you're interested, I feel like we've already done all we could do from a Roger Angel tribute perspective because we've devoted entire episodes to that and many segments on various episodes to that. I just went to the Effectively

Wild wiki and searched Roger Angel and just got so many results, sometimes just a bit of banter or a brief recommendation or sometimes an entire episode. So if you do want to immerse yourself in Effectively Wild Roger Angel content, there are a few places you could start. You could just search for times he has come up. But I guess episode 1372, Sam and I talked to the author of a book about Roger Angel and got into what made him specifically just so great at what he did. And then episode 1592, the Roger Angel centennial celebration when Angel turned 100 in September 2020, we devoted an entire episode to our

remembrances and tributes for Angel and just dozens of other writers. So if you haven't heard that one, I think that is probably as good an illustration of just the impact that he had because it was just many, many baseball writers weighing in on their personal favorite angel or how they discovered Angel or what he meant to them or how he influenced their work and just really great accomplished writers in their own work. So episode 1592, we will link to that on the show page and i think that will function as maybe the best remembrance of angel that we could have of him but it just it's a huge loss i mean it just feels like you know we lost a titan to the baseball writer that everyone really looked up to

including all the baseball writers yeah i mean i guess like one thing I'll say is that in 2020, like one of the things that I found myself kind of robbed of was the attention span to read for any great length of time, I think because of just everything that was going on in the world. And one of the exceptions to that was revisiting Summer Games. So it's just going to be a bummer for a long time. But luckily, there is quite a catalog to revisit. Yeah.

And even in his old age, I mean, he wrote really eloquently and insightfully about being old. But he also just wrote about baseball into his later years. He would do playoff blogging at the New Yorker often. And it was even like sometimes his dispatches were like a paragraph or two. But like there was always some delightful turn of phrase in there or he would like compare a player in the mid 2000 teens to like someone he saw in the 30s or something. And it was like no one else could do that. No one else has those memories still in their mind's eye and can summon them the way that he could. So we don't have to rehash all of what made Roger Angel special and wonderful here, although I'm sure many people will be in the coming days, and I hope that they are.

But we've done that to the extent that we can, I think, on this podcast already. But just the perspective that he brought to covering the game, not just the literary way in which he wrote about it and just the great facility with the language that he had, but also just the perspective he brought where he was a reporter and deadlines to go incredibly deep and talk to a lot of people and chew over everything and just produce these masterworks. And often kind of from that perspective of not just the ink-stained scribe who's doing the game stories every day, but looking at it like someone looks at it from the stands. And I guess that's kind of the way that we are as writers and talkers about baseball, probably in no small part due to Angel's influence. And that's sort of the whole spirit of Effectively Wild. Like, yeah, we talk about the games and we talk about the pennant races and all of that, but we also just talk about the culture and fandom and just the nature of baseball and society and all of that. And those are things that Roger Angel helped really bring to the fore and covered so incredibly well. So it's a huge loss, but we

lose the man. We don't lose the man's work. And that will sustain all of us for the rest of our lives. Well, I am sure that Roger Angel would want us to continue talking about baseball. If he were here, he would not want anyone to stop caring about and discussing baseball. So just very briefly, we are going to be joined by Effectively Wild listener and Patreon supporter at the highest Mike Trout tier, Aaron Hartman, in just a moment. And we will answer some emails and some pedantic ones and some statplasty ones. But the only bit of banter, Trevor Story finally looked like Trevor Story again. He broke out of his deep funk. He had started his season with the Red Sox really not hitting at all. And on Thursday, he finally broke through in a big way.

He went four for four. He hit three homers. He walked. He stole a base for good measure. And with that one game, he raised his OPS on the season from 613 to 730. That's a pretty big boost in mid-May. And he had already started hitting a little bit in the week or 10 days leading up to that. He didn't hit his first homer of the season until May 11th. And he had hit two

prior to this three homer outburst. But basically, he needed that. He needed that about as much as anyone needed that kind of game. And so we were thinking, who else needs their Trevor story game now? Who else is out to an extremely slow start, perhaps has some extra pressure applied to them because they are with a new team or they just signed a big contract? All of those things that make it tough to be slumping at the start of the season. Anyone who caught your eye who's just like really in need of their own personal Trevor story game so i think that in the spirit of sort of similar to story where you're starting with a new team perhaps you have signed a very big contract i would maybe point to marcus semien yeah so one way to answer

this is simply to look at like year over year changes right and i would point our listeners to the season stack grid at fangraphs this is a fun tool that i think people probably don't make good enough use out of where you can you can look at changes over time for a bunch of guys at once you can do that on their individual player pages but let's say that you were interested in who among the hitters who had at least 400 plate appearances in 2021 was off to the worst start in terms of the change in their wrc plus year to year to 2022 and at the top of this list and i don't want to steal anyone from you ben so if he's one of your guys you can jump in and say oh no that was one of my guys but you know who the biggest decliner in wrc plus from 2021 to 2022 is min 400 plate appearances in 2021 is i do not it's eddie rosario oh and he was a slightly below league average hitter last year

he had a 98 wrc plus on the season this of course does not include his hot hot hot postseason run but um he he is uh it hasn't gone well for him but is very small a number of plate appearances because as we know eddie rosario is currently getting work done to help solve a blurred vision problem and swelling in his right retina so we're going to discount him because he probably is not actually going to post a negative 20 WRC plus when he is able to return. That was only in 49 plate appearances. Behind him is Joey Votto, also not off to a great start and injured. But then right there, Marcus Semien,

who had a 131 WRC plus in 2021 and now has a 40 WRC plus. And we will remind our listeners that 100 is league average and every point below that is a percentage. So it's not great. He has not homered yet and has a 175, 236, 231 line entering Friday. Yeah, it's been ugly, at least in some ways. Like in other ways, he's not striking out a ton. It doesn't seem like his plate discipline has completely collapsed. But he's someone who I don't know that anyone thought he was really a 45 dinger guy necessarily. He's not a huge guy. He kind of maximizes his power and pulls his flies. And as people have pointed

out, Robert Orr did a good piece about this for Baseball Prospectus recently. Seems like he could be someone who is affected disproportionately by the deadening of the ball. So he may have to make some adjustments there. Or maybe he'll just break out Trevor Story style and he'll make up for all of the home runs he has not hit. But yeah, that is kind of concerning. I don't know that there's a better choice, a better candidate for this award that one does not want than Marcus Semyon. I searched just minimum 100 plate appearances, so I may have missed some small sample players who have struggled. Javi Baez is not off to a good start with Detroit. He's at a 62 WRC+, 204, 244, 310.

He's at a 62 WRC plus, 204, 244, 310. Now he's going to give you good defense and he's going to give you good base running to the extent that he is on base at all. But he does fall into that category of a lot expected high profile acquisition, not up to a strong start with his new team. You know, his strikeouts haven't been out of control in a Javi Baez way. He's only struck out in about a quarter of his plate appearances. He's not walking as usual. But I would imagine that he will pull out of that. But it has not been what you want, as they say. No.

And we might add Jesse Winker to that list. We might pick on Jesse Winker if we were inclined to, because he was, you know was someone who the Mariners wanted to the point of being willing to acquire a Eugenio Suarez's contract. And it hasn't gone great so far. Not terrible, but not great. It's going okay for Suarez. Yeah, that's true. And then part of this list drives home for me just how good the Dodgers are, because we could say Justin Turner, or you could say Max Muncy, but you don't have to because it doesn't matter. Yeah, it really doesn't. Yeah, they're like Yosemite Grandel is off to a very slow start with the White Sox, 69, WRC+, not nice. I mean, look, there are players who have hit worse than all of these players. Sure, yeah.

Christian Pache, right, with the A's. Now, no one really expected him to hit. That is kind of his rep is the great glove, no bat at least so far. And the no bat part has certainly held up. He's hitting 155, 197, 233. That's a 29 WRC plus. And he is with a new team and obviously was a big piece of a high profile trade. So I guess that's a little extra pressure, perhaps, even if it doesn't come with the salary of some

of these other players. But yeah, I mean, if you just sort the leaderboard, it goes Christian Pace at the bottom and then Jonathan Scope, Martin Maldonado. Again, like, you know, Maldonado, Pace, like these are very much glove first players who don't have high offensive expectations. Well, and like in Maldonado's case, again, sort of like with Turner and Muncy, but with low expectations of the bat, like it doesn't matter. The Astros are just really good. Yeah. Whit Merrifield. Yeah, Whit Merrifield.

43 WRC plus. That's a weird one. And I guess Bobby Dahlbeck, who was a fairly popular— Yeah, a couple of Red Sox on this list here. Might be something to that, them struggling. Who knew? Bobby Dahlbeck has a 48 WRC+, and he was a somewhat popular breakout pick because he had a great second half last year. And I think when we had Zach Kramer and Bobby Wagner on to preview the AL East this year, they were at least one of them. There was a lot of

skepticism about whether he actually was a good breakout pick and whether he'd be able to maintain that. But yeah, he has completely fallen apart thus far. Maybe we just thought he was a great breakout pick because of how baby-faced he is you know we were like oh he's baby-faced bobby dahlbeck so he's got to be bound for a breakout i i'm just like right now grappling with a ohanio suarez's line and a ohanio i'd like to apologize for uh the slander that i perpetrated earlier average but not bad but yeah not bad getting on base 128 wrc plus well done a ohanio i take back some of the things I said about your hair. Jackie Bradley Jr., another red sock who has not been hitting.

But again. Again with him. Yeah. It's like, well, Jackie Bradley Jr. is not hitting. Okay. Well, it's not the biggest shocker. Today is a day that ends in Y. Man, there are a lot of red socks on this list.

Yeah, there are a lot of red socks on this list. Look at Alex Verdugo right there. Yeah. It's not been good. It's not been good. They have struggled. So what we might say is that all of the Red Sox need a night like Trevor Story's night. Yeah.

That might be helpful to their pursuits. Maybe it will be contagious. Yeah, Nelson Cruz, finally, maybe, I don't know. I don't want to be on a vigil for Nelson Cruz's bat because I want it to be everlasting, but it has failed to catch fire thus far this season. He has a 59 WRC plus, and he's obviously someone who is only there for his hitting. So it's Carlos Santana also down in the Whitmerfield zone for the Royals. But I guess, I don't know, Abisail Garcia with the Marlins by Marlins standards was a big free agent addition.

And he's down at a 62 WRC plus so far. Yeah. Yeah. Jacob Stallings too. Yeah. There are a couple here where they're waiting for it to click as it were. Yeah. Well, you can all sort leaderboards too so yeah we won't

read all the names but we hope that everyone gets their trevor story game sometime soon and you know someone else who could use a trevor story game tyler o'neill with the cardinals yeah 63 wrc plus 195 256 297 he's now on the il with a shoulder impingement. I don't know how like all of his limbs are not just like impinged by his muscles at all times. It's like a muscle, like a bicep impingement. He cannot move his arms. But no, it worked well for him last year and it has not. So I don't know if this is like legitimately like his shoulder has been bothering him and that's not why he's hitting or whether it's a he's not hitting and we're just gonna il him for a while but something has not been right there and he's been striking out a ton too the silver lining though is that tower o'neill's absence has given way to a couple of promotions and call-ups yeah contemporaneous call-ups of the cardinals maybe second and third best prospects, right? So infielder Nolan Gorman, who has some swing and miss in his game but also plenty of power, he'll be coming up and should be seeing some time at second base.

And then pitcher Matthew Liberatore, whom the Cardinals got from the Rays in the Randy Rosarena trade, he'll be coming up and making the start on Saturday. And those guys are lifelong friends and teammates. Not only are they both 22 and from the same draft class and from the same draft round, the first round in 2018, but they've been friends since they were five when they were on the same neighborhood coach pitch team in Arizona. And then they played on travel ball teams and other programs later, minor league roommates. Kind of amazing that it worked out that way. So it's cool for them. And for the Cardinals, that's exciting to have two top prospects coming up on one team at the same time. That is really exciting. That's like Lefty Grove

and Mickey Cochran, I think, in 1925, they debuted on the same day for the Philadelphia Athletics and went on to be Hall of Famers, of course. I don't know that Gorman and Libertor will debut on the same day because Gorman might play on Friday, but close enough. Not that I'm saying that they are going to become Hall of search, we could come up with other examples of two really prominent, at least hollow, very good level players debuting for the same team at the same time, exactly the same time or roughly the same time. And that can be super exciting because it's like it's all happening. And suddenly you get to see them playing at the same time in the same lineup, potentially. So exciting times for St. Louis, but not for Tyler O'Neill. And we will take this opportunity to shout out Mauricio Rubio, who used to write for Baseball Perspectives, who was Nolan Gorman's signing scout. So congrats, Mal. All right.

So let us bring on our guest. Well, we are joined now by Patreon supporter, Effectively Wild listener, Aaron Hartman. I believe an original and OG Patreon supporter who has recently leveled up his support to the Mike Trout tier, which entitles him to join us on this podcast episode. I guess it was redundant to say Patreon supporter and Effectively Wild listener. I don't know if we have any Patreon supporters who are not Effectively wild listeners, though I welcome that if for whatever reason they just want to give us money for a podcast they don't listen to. Anyway, Aaron, hello. Hey, Ben. Hey, Meg. How's it going? It's going well. So I know you go back quite a ways with this podcast. So as usual, I will ask the standard questions here. What got into you? What inspired you to support us on this level to do something so silly, but also just what's your effectively wild origin story? How did you find us? Because you've been with us for a while. Yeah. So first of all, thank you so much for having me. This is

something I've been meaning to do for a little while. I think I started listening to the podcast definitely in the original Sam days and I think in the BP days. So it was a thing that I just kind of Googled or looked up different baseball podcasts when I first started my job, when I graduated college. And this was one of them and I picked it up and kind of have been listening ever since. And when the Patreon thing came out, I felt like it was the least I could do to to kind of contribute the 10 bucks a month and I do have a somewhat somewhat of a confession to make about why I can afford to to pay for this and that is I paid for it with gambling winnings from the beginning of the season which I know I'm. I promise that I gamble responsibly,

but I did hit it pretty big in the first couple of weeks of the MLB season. And I took that money and I said, I can probably afford two months of the Mike Trout tier. With that, it's been something I've been meaning to do. I almost asked for it for a Christmas present like a couple of people did, but I found a way to do. I almost asked for a Christmas present like a couple people did, but I found a way to self-fund in a way. Wow. I want to apologize because I feel like gambling is a common villain on this podcast. Suddenly feeling pretty good about it, actually. You can be responsible, I promise. Wow. I feel like this is a moment where, you know, if I, in the afterlife, am shown footage of the pearly gates of like a moral conundrum that I had to navigate, what will I do? I mean, wow.

All right. Well, I'm glad that you won. That seems great. It doesn't always happen. I start with a set amount, and if I lose it, that's it for the year. That seems like a good approach. Yeah, right. You know, you can be responsible about it. Yeah, we're fine with responsible sports betting. No problem with that. Yeah.

So what was your big winner, if you care to share? Honestly, it was a number of big winners. I think I went 6-0 on opening day and then 5-2, so 5 out of 7 on day two. Just betting on teams to win or some sort of spread or something i don't know how gambling works yeah pretty much baseball gambling it's you get like odds on money line or you can bet with a run and a half either way and the favorite gets minus one and a half which means they have to win by two or more but i pretty much just bet straight money line and i am aware that i don't really have a skill. I just get lucky. And occasionally you get lucky six times in a row.

So that's what I did. All right. Wow. Wow. Well, I mean, I think that just to put your mind at ease, and I hope that this will not come across as placating you. It's really we're in dicey territory here because I want you, Aaron, to feel good about your support of the podcast,

but I don't want to go back on anything I've said. I mean, I think mostly we object to just how inundated we are with the gambling stuff. I do have concern for the ability of everyone to be able to responsibly enjoy as you seem to be, but mostly I just don't care about it and I resent being forced to think about it as you seem to be. But mostly I just, I don't care about it. And I resent being forced to think about it as often as I am. But you're lovely.

We can't even have Patreon supporters on the podcast without thinking about it. I know. I know, I'm sorry. We appreciate that we were a recipient of your largesse. So thanks so much. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll say, as far as the moral conundrum goes, it's not the

only thing that baseball does, right? Like baseball has a ton of alcohol, you know, ads and stuff. So, you know, it's not the only thing. And I think it's the new morally questionable thing, which probably gives it more attention. But I think eventually this will probably just kind of be a mainstay and it'll be a little annoying to everyone, but we'll get used to it in a couple of years. It'll fade back into the existing soup of vice that we swim in. That's exactly correct. So that's your podcast origin story and your rags to riches Patreon support story. What's your baseball fan origin story? Sure. Yeah. I remember a couple months ago, you mentioned that you don't understand folks who find a team later in life. And that's kind of where I stand. I have always been involved in

sports. I played baseball as a kid, but I kind of had to quit due to anger issues, right? Like, you know, you strike out a lot when you're playing baseball, you get out a lot. And I just, I had to stop playing. But I picked it back up when I moved to baseball. You get out a lot and I just had to stop playing. But I picked it back up when I moved to college and I went to college near Pittsburgh. A bunch of my friends were Pirates fans and going to college in 2011 to 2015 is a pretty good time to become a Pirates fan. I've stayed a fan ever since. However, I'd say my fandom has waned a bit in the recent times with the Pirates not being as good. And I've really kind of just enjoyed, you know, you get the MLB TV package. You can flip around.

I try to watch as many Otani starts as possible, of course. I even rooted against the Pirates when Rich Hill was trying to throw that perfect game. I was very upset when that did not happen. So, you know, just staying involved in baseball through that. I wrote my thesis for college on Tommy John surgery and kind of the actuarial aspect of Tommy John surgery and how you could apply some actuarial concepts to the probability of injury and the value that a team may incur if that were to happen. So I've kind of stayed involved from a numbers perspective and just enjoyed it as a hobby ever since.

Cool. Yeah. You are an actuary, right? A marketing actuary at a reinsurance company. I suppose you don't know that much about how actuarial stuff works in baseball and insurance and all that because we get questions sometimes about that, insuring contracts. And I don't know all the details myself. That stuff is kind of shrouded in secrecy to some extent. But I'm always curious about how giant contracts get insured and that sort of thing. Yeah, I don't know the ins and outs. And it's actually something I briefly considered trying like, you know, briefly considered trying to make like a startup idea as I was leaving college. But that's a pretty risky venture. And also, you know, speaking of morally questionable things, kind of a little more morally questionable than I was interested in diving into.

But I will say that the concepts of what actuaries think about apply to a large spectrum of things. So if you just think about injuries, right, injuries happen at a certain rate that is relatively well known based on all the data that we have. And you can project over a large enough sample, the likelihood of injuries for a given cohort of people, and, you know, kind of base the losses you may incur, whether that be wins or dollars or however you want to translate that into some present value of losses. And that would give you kind of an idea of how much you could insure, how much you would want to pay for some kind of insurance. So those core concepts are really applicable to tons of different topics, whether it be lives, which is what I work in. I work in life insurance,

or whether it be baseball injuries or even the likelihood of any real probabilistic event. Yeah. Well, to be clear, I do support anyone finding fandom later in life or having rejuvenated fandom, reinvigorated fandom, or- And all our takes are coming home to roost on this pod. Developing an attachment to a new team. It's something that personally, I think I would have a hard time doing, but we got a lot of responses from listeners who have done it seemingly successfully and happily. And we got a lot of great stories, some of which we shared on the pod. So I think that is wonderful just because

it's something that is kind of inculcated in people from a young age very often. Doesn't mean it has to be that way. So I think examples to the contrary are great. So let's answer some emails. I've got a few general emails here. I've got a few pedantic emails. I've got a few statblasty emails. Let's see what happens here. Let's start with a question from a fellow Patreon supporter, Eric, who says, I appreciate the discussion about what will be lost with the coming of the automated strike, smooth catching, a demonstration of skill, etc., and agree that it will be a net negative for the game. But what about the umpire's punch-out call as a potential aesthetic loss, especially since they're all different? I have to think that if the ump is just making calls based on what he's hearing in his earpiece, he'll be less inclined to be animated and calling a third strike.

It feels like the punch-out call is an expression of conviction that I'm calling you out and being present in the action. So will the conviction be gone when the presence is mediated by technology? What will Tom Hallion's punch-out call look like in the context of the automated strike zone? Hadn't considered this, but this is another potential ramification. I think Dale Scott, our recent guest and author of a memoir, he mentioned in his book that he thinks this sort of distinctive punch-out call has already fallen by the wayside to some extent, just as umpiring has gotten standardized. And maybe there's a bit more oversight from the league in how umpires ump and what they look like when they do that. So in sort of the same way that maybe we talk about player mechanics getting kind of homogenous now for various reasons, maybe it's better instruction

and closer oversight. Maybe it's just the fact that everyone can grow up watching players all the time and has access to sort of the standard stance or swing or wind up. But Dale said sort of the same thing has happened to umpires relative to when he came up. But this idea of the ABS system of robo umps taking away some, I don't know what to call it, some flair from the umpire punch out. Is that a concern to either of you? So I was an official for a year. And one of the things that we were taught in our officiating was to be firm with your calls, but not to be showy with your calls necessarily. And the reason we were taught that is because that incentivizes you to want to make a type of call. And I think about charges in basketball, where refs sometimes get incredibly animated when they make a call and that may color their,

bias them in some way to how likely they are to make a specific call. And so I think that maybe this could be a good thing and taking it out of the ump's hand and just, you know, essentially giving him the option to make a big call without it being biased in any way. Yeah. I guess the other thing I think about is this depends on the implementation of the automated strike zone too. If there's some kind of red green light, right? Red for strike, green for ball or something, well, then it really does take away the punch out. But if it's an earpiece thing or some kind of signal given to the umpire, well, I don't think he is really held back from making a call really.

And I think that it would increase the, it would keep the entertainment value the same if they were allowed to do that. I feel like this opens the door to two possibilities first if you are simply reacting to the call in your ear and i think that you know when i have seen the the automated zone in action it has it has been an earpiece and the umpire is still calling what the zone tells him but is is back there and is actually doing it the only time i've seen it announced was when it was in an instructs game and there wasn't a home plate umpire so they just did the the announcement sort of over the pa but if this is just sort of the manifestation of the robo zone well now you don't have any downside to a demonstrative umpire right

because the incentives don't matter right you're just communicating what the robo zone has told you so maybe we will embark on a golden era of of umpire call outs maybe maybe they will suddenly say i am free you know i the this entire robo zone is is my palette now but i think the more exciting possibility is the introduction of the anti-call, right? Because you're still going to have the guy back there assessing whether that was a ball or a strike because, you know, the array might go down, something might happen, they might have to call a zone on their own. So they're going to be paying attention. And so this presents us with the option of the like, you know, like the face, they could make a face to say, I don't agree with that call.

Or no, they could shrug. So we might have a new expression of individuality, the anti-call. Yeah, just like expressing your reservations, your personal, yeah. I'll go through with this. I have to follow orders here, but I'm not on board personally. Yeah, I could see it going either way too, because Eric is right that I think some empires might feel a bit bashful about really selling a call that they are not themselves making. They're just the mouthpiece big part of your mental bandwidth is occupied by watching the pitch and processing the pitch. You might not have as much time to really fully go into your wind-up when you're doing the punch-out, and there might be a bit of a delay there, and you're in a hurry, I guess, to get the call out because everyone's waiting to see if it's a strike or not. I guess, to get the call out because everyone's waiting to see if it's a strike or not.

So in this case, if you can just sit back there and you know if it's two strikes, you can say to yourself, OK, this is a called strike. I'm just immediately just transitioning right into my full-fledged punch-out call. Then I could see that being even more seamless. And maybe if the umpire is feeling a little less useful back there, maybe there would be more pressure to add sort of a showmanship aspect to it to sort of justify your presence. Not that calling balls and strikes is the only thing that a home plate umpire does. But if you are feeling like the robots have come for your jobs and you're looking like a figurehead out there or something, then maybe you'd be more inclined to say, well, I'm an entertainer now. I'm here for the entertainment value of conveying this call. So I could see either thing happening. Although I guess there's another thing, which is that if there is a slight delay after the ABS system relays that call, maybe a longer delay than you

would have with a human ump, then I guess there might be more pressure on you to convey and communicate that call quickly, right? More quickly than you can do if you're going into the full windup. So maybe you would want a more efficient strike signal just so everyone knows what the deal is. So lots of factors here, lots of ways that this could go. I am interested to see what happens. Not that I want this to happen anytime. If they're going to clutch situations and don't freeze up or choke. Therefore, separating guys who are clutch from guys who aren't is very difficult in

MLB since guys who lose focus in pressure situations get weeded out at lower levels. So would it then be easier to measure clutch performance at A ball, where you have more players who are just there on raw talent and haven't yet been filtered out for hitches in their swings, difficulty picking out types of pitches, or performance in clutch situations. I know clutch has been discussed ad nauseum, but I thought this may be a different approach. up something similar to this many years ago when I first started listening to this podcast, perhaps. And that is that there's a disconnect between what matters in MLB and what matters to you growing up playing baseball. And a good example of that is strikeouts. Strikeouts in Little League are a really good way to tell who's good and bad at baseball, because the people who strike out are simply just incompetent or not as good, right? But when you get so good, strikeouts, especially because the incentives of striking out kind of, you know, there's different incentives there,

it becomes less obvious. But I do believe there's a lot of people who equate kind of their fundamentals they were taught growing up to the major league game, which doesn't really apply in a lot of senses. And I do think that this is exactly correct, right? That some players who just won't ever be able to handle a clutch situation just won't make it to the majors unless they have incredible skills to overcome this. So yeah, I do think that this makes a lot of sense and probably can be studied in some way. Yeah, I would think there'd be a greater variability in true talent clutch performance the lower you go. I guess the difficulty is actually being able to suss that out given the samples involved, right? Because players are constantly moving up. Minor league seasons are shorter.

Even if, I mean, unless you just completely fall apart in clutch situations. And even to get to the minors, you had to have some ability to perform in the clutch with people watching, right? I mean, even if it's in Little League or high school or college. with people watching, right? I mean, even if it's in Little League or high school or college. So there must be some bare minimum level of competence in the clutch even there. And I just don't know that you would have enough of a sample. Like in the majors, yeah, it takes forever to try to find any differentiation, like an entire long career before you can say anything. So it's almost pointless to try to analyze it. Now in a ball, maybe the differences would be big enough that you could detect them in a smaller

sample, but could you detect them in a single season or two seasons or however long it takes for someone to not be a prospect anymore if they're not playing well? I have my doubts about that. Like unless someone is visibly shaking in their shoes out there or something, which maybe that could happen at that level. I don't know. Maybe it would just be more obvious just to the eye test at that level, possibly. But in terms of doing it with actual stats, I don't know. It would be tough. In the minors, I guess there are fewer restrictions on the use of in-game technology. And because there's no minor league players union, teams can kind of impose various types of monitoring, sometimes in an opt-in basis, sometimes not. But if you were to, say, strap your players with some kind of like heart monitor or something, you know. Which teams are doing now.

Right. I mean, they're doing that at least to monitor exertion and nutrition and sleep schedule and preparedness and recovery and all of that. So if you had that in games and you could measure a player's heart rate, which who knows, maybe we'll have that in the major someday, or maybe the union will say, no, thank you. We would rather not have Big Brother taking our pulse while we're playing. But if that were happening, then in theory, yeah, I guess you could say this player, whether it's mirrored in his performance or not, he's getting out of his game because his adrenaline is really ramping up in these situations. And we think that that would be harmful in the long run but i could also see a guy having a shot of adrenaline in moments like that and that being a good thing yeah and then

doing just fine so who knows if that's even a super reliable measure but yeah i would be skeptical for the same reasons you are ben that we would have enough information to feel confident that we could say something. Like we might have indicators one way or another, but I doubt we would feel confident. Plus like the level of competition is going to be more variable in the minor leagues. So like, is it really something that would be a useful indicator for big league performance? Like is he clutch or did that fielder who's not good just boot the ball? Who could say?

Right. Yeah. And maybe with the more sensitive metrics we have available now, even in the minors, it wouldn't take quite as long to be able to detect some difference. Like, if you're just going by results, it might take forever. If you're going by quality of contact, maybe not quite as long. If you're going by swing decisions. Like if someone in clutch situations is suddenly chasing twice as often, something like that, and it's clear that they're just in their head and they're really reaching for pitches, those kinds of things do tend to stabilize fairly quickly. So if you had that at that level over a full season or two, maybe that would be enough to be telling at least. And maybe it's

not that you cut the player. Hopefully it's not just that. Maybe it's that you talk to them, right? Maybe you have them go see a psychologist or something. Maybe someone who's not on the team's payroll, ideally. Someone who could talk to them and say, hey, we noticed that maybe you're getting a little jumpy in these situations and maybe we can provide some sort of treatment here, some sort of mantra, whatever it is, something to kind of get you back to your regular performance. Not like raising your game in the clutch, just your regular game. I think that is what most players have. If they're clutch, it's that they just do as well as they usually do in those situations

in a lot of cases. Yeah. All right. Question from Sean, Patreon supporter. And you may have a personal opinion on this one, Aaron. Which is the most tortured fan base in MLB? Detroit Tigers, who I'll remind everyone have not won a World Series since 1984, despite playing in two and making the playoffs seven times in that span, including winning a pennant in 87 and finishing second in 91, only to lose on both occasions to the eventual World Series champion twins. Maybe just argued against your own case there, but who's to say? Yes, perhaps. But it's probably the Rangers, Sean says, for not even we managed to get within the final strike of winning one.

And the way that he's framing this question, I guess he is presuming that getting close and not winning is more tortured than not getting close at all. That is the eternal debate. But there are a lot of contenders for this crown, this crown of thorns, including your pirates, probably, Aaron. But I guess like just listing teams that would be in the conversation, obviously the Guardians, the Mariners, they're going to be close to the top. The Brewers, the Rangers, the Padres, teams that have not won a title and have been around for

quite a while, they're going to be strong contenders. The Orioles have not won in a long time and have been falling on hard times lately. The Rockies have not been around as long, but I think you could make a convincing case. And then, yeah, the Tigers, the Twins, the Mets. I discount the Mets candidacy personally. I think many Mets fans would make the case for the Mets. I don't know that I would.

The Reds, the White Sox, I feel like are a dark horse candidate for a franchise that's been around as long as they have. They just have not had a lot of sustained success. But I don't know. I guess the Guardians and the Mariners are maybe the most obvious candidates. Yeah, Ben, you just mentioned half of Major League Baseball. Yeah, I basically did. It's just a lot of torture happening apparently i will not say the pirates because i feel like tortured is the wrong word i feel like hopeless is a lot of the the feelings torture can be self-inflicted too right it's it's there in free agency is no fun for pirates fans because we can't get any free agent you know the the maximum free agent contract i believe is 39 is 39 million. And I know that extensions have exceeded that, but a free agent, they basically sit out every free agent season.

So I feel like hopeless is the feeling that more so happens in Pittsburgh. That's a form of torture. Just despair, built-in despair. I have an answer that you didn't mention, and I think the answer is the Phillies. And I know that they won a World Series somewhat recently, but after that, they got one step lower every time. And there's a feeling of torture in that. that and i did just look at on reddit right before um we were on here and the our baseball subreddit has something that says the phillies are 10 and 10 in their last 20 games 25 and 25 in their last 50 games and 100 and 100 in their last 200 games which is probably fun stat blast material in the future but with their payroll and their resources and the fact that they underwent a rebuild that just didn't work or, you know, has not worked to date, I feel like that's a good answer.

And I feel like you do have to include some recency in that, right? the more tortured closer to now has a larger outsized impact than, you know, tortured 20 years ago, or maybe haven't won a world series, but have had some good seasons and stuff like that. Well, here's the thing. We all feel feelings and our feelings are emotionally resonant to us.

And they make us feel like we have a unique perspective on things like we are perhaps singularly aggrieved and i don't want to discount that for anyone like if mets fans feel like they've had the hardest time i don't need to harsh that vibe i mean i they're wrong but like they get to feel that way you know because like remind me when did the mets last appear in the world series 2015 i believe yeah yeah that's right but they lost yeah sure sure and you know i think that there's a reason we have debated for so long the question of whether it is truly better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all yeah we are still in pursuit of an answer to that most pressing of questions but i think that like

one way to think about this and and aaron your your statement of like for pirates fans free agency just like doesn't matter that is a that is a blank for you on the baseball calendar like that might be a good way of helping to categorize the different kinds of despair because it's not that Mets fans haven't felt despair it's just that I would say that like within the hierarchy of despair there's is a less profound despair perhaps than um than say like Mariners fans and so I think maybe a useful way to think about this, and it might yield some surprising candidates, is like what fan base is just experiencing a sensation of irrelevance for large swaths of the baseball calendar? So not just during the regular season,

but during, you know, off-season times as well, during heightened moments like the trade deadline, right? During October, maybe we, you know, we October adjust these questions and considerations and assessments to make that worth more. And I think that the answer might not be the Mariners for all of that, right? Because there have been periods of excitement, say, during the off-season, and then it wanes very quickly. periods of excitement say during the offseason and then it wanes very quickly so i think that sort of gauging it by how how profound and protracted is your sense of your franchise's irrelevance is a good way of thinking about it and i think that that disqualifies like the mets and it might even disqualify the rockies because even though the rockies are not good

they have made postseason appearances here and there in the last little bit. They went to a World Series. The Rockies have gone to a World Series. They didn't win, but they went. They haven't won a division title, though, and they are just so aimless. And also, they seem to have some institutional structural disadvantages just because of where they play. I think that it might be useful to think about this question less in terms of finding a specific winner than in a tier

like best friends right you have just the you have the tier of teams that are really mired in it you know they're excuse my swear they're like in the and i think that despite what i just said like the rockies fall there pittsburgh falls there I think that the Reds probably fall there now. They have not over the course of the life of their franchise, but they're there now. I feel like Oakland falls there pretty often. Yes, the Mariners. I'm going to reject the Guardians,

even though there are institutional issues with that team from a budget perspective. They've also very recently been in the World Series. The White Sox have won a World Series like in our lifetime even though I might ask a different question. Is there a more forgotten World Series win than the 2005?

I know. That's the thing. The White Sox, even when they finally broke their curse, it was like an afterthought. It was like, oh, we were all still thinking about the Red Sox and then everyone was like ho-hum, when will the Cubs win one? I think that part of why that World Series gets kind of memory hold, too, is that it was won against a team that is now in the American League. And so we don't think of them as facing the Astros in that World Series. I think that's part of the problem.

Yeah. It was also a sweep. It wasn't a super exciting series. It wasn't a competitive series in that respect. So I think that it might be better for us to think about this in terms of like a tier of team where you just, you know, they're like the tier of team where if you met someone for the first time, like in a sports bar and they were like, I'm a fan of this team, you go, oh, you know, like they're like, oh, I'm sorry, tier.

Right. And the Mets are not there. I'm sorry. I know there has been institutional dysfunction. I know there has been bad ownership. I know there has been injury to the point of confusion. I know that they have done some very naughty things. But like your team was in the World Series in 2015.

And despite the fact that they have lost Max Scherzer for the next little bit and have yet to see Jacob deGrom, you're in the driver's seat in your division. So you need to hold your horses there, holding Scherzer. A lot of it with the Mets is relative to expectations. It's like, hey, we're in the big market. We should be spending with the big boys here. Which is true. During the Wilpon years, they weren't.

However, they were still outspending other teams right so the question is like are you more tortured because you feel entitled to more spending and more success or are you more tortured if you don't even feel entitled you've been conditioned not to feel like you deserve that you've been told that you don't deserve it so there are a lot of different wrinkles here I think you're right that it's probably right to answer this in a tear type of way And I bet if we could quantify the suffering somehow, if we could stick every fan in an fMRI machine or something and just quantify the chemicals that are going on in their brains or which regions are lighting up or not and track

that over time, maybe it would be indistinguishable. Maybe it's like if you have a certain type of loss, there's like a maximum amount of unhappiness that you can derive from that. It's like they say that beyond a certain amount of money or net worth or whatever, you don't actually get any more happy or satisfied with your life. Maybe it's sort of the same thing with being a fan of a team that hasn't won for a long time. It's just like, eh, we might argue that one is worse than the other, but ultimately our actual feelings are roughly the same. And then I think Aaron is right that recency is relevant just because it's like, well, how long have most of your fans been alive? So if you're a franchise that won a lot in the distant past before most or all of your fans were actually alive or fans of the team, does that really make you happier or less tortured? had a World Series since 1948. Most of your fans haven't actually been watching The Guardian since 1948. So if you look at just the average age across fan bases, and granted, baseball fans,

pretty old on the whole, but still, I think many franchises would be in that boat. So like the extra length of that drought, I don't know that it actually personally impacts most of your fan base at this point, but maybe there is sort of an inherited torture that comes with being a point of pride and then suddenly you win a bunch and you don't know what to do anymore and you're happy but you feel like you've lost a sense of yourself or something so not that i'm suggesting that red sox fans or cubs fans like didn't want to win because they just treasured being the losers or anything like that but there is a certain kind of gallows humor commiseration that can come with that and maybe help buoy your spirits a bit even if you're losing a lot because well it happened again that's our lot in life yeah i also think the world series win really i think we overrate the world series

win in both directions like if you told me that the dot before 2020 that the Dodgers were one of the most tortured teams, I just wouldn't believe you because they've been so good and so exciting. And I know they did win a World Series very recently. But before then, they were still fun and exciting. And I would never call Dodgers fans tortured. And on the flip side, I do think you know, I picked the Phillies and we haven't heard them be talked about at all. But I do think and the White Sox fit this bucket, too, right? Like just because you won once in a long stretch of time, I don't think that necessarily disqualifies you from feeling like a tortured fan base. So I think it goes both directions. So you get the benefit, too, of like you get the benefit of everybody rooting for you when you do make it. We all were excited for the Cubs. We were really excited for Red Sox fans, and some of them are very annoying, but we were still really excited for them. we would have been amped for Cleveland too. So you have this swell of support from the folks

whose teams aren't on the other side of it. I imagine when the Mariners do finally play in a World Series, everyone will be rooting for the Mariners except for the fans of the team they're playing against because it's like, oh, guys, you got to win this one. And it'll be really stressful for everybody, which might make us dislike them. But we will feel like the swell of sympathy and support for the other team or for the team that hasn't won rather and want them to finally, you know,

climb that mountain and be maybe even just be quiet about how they haven't. That might be part of why we have that swell of support. Like, oh, stop talking about this but i don't know it that that feels nice you know i i felt like at the end of last year people were really pulling for seattle to finally make the postseason like they felt disappointed for for mariners fans and for the mariners themselves when they didn't and that's kind of nice to be like oh my my favorite team's past failures is now a point of commonality with strangers. That's cool. Yeah.

I don't think you can go wrong with the Mariners as your choice here if that's where you want to go just because they combine career suffering and peak suffering. Right. It's like when we evaluate a player for the Hall of Fame or something, you want to look at both of those things. The Mariners, they check both boxes. And granted, they have not existed as a franchise for quite as long as the Rangers or the Brewers or the Padres, but they've been around for 45 years now. And not only have they not won a World Series, they have not made a World Series. And of course, they have the historically long postseason drought.

So whether you want to go with lifetime achievement or lack of achievement here, or just recency, I think they score quite well on the torture scale in either category, as you know well. Yeah, although I like your point, Aaron, about the Phillies, because that postseason drought is sneaking up on people. It's not as long as Seattle's, but it's longer than you'd think. And they should have made it based on all of their resources. They really should have. Right. Well, we've mentioned all the leading contenders, I think, although if you think we snubbed your torture and erased your suffering,

then please write in and make your case for the unlikely most tortured fanbase. All right. Let's do a little how can you not be pedantic about baseball corner here. Aaron, how pedantic about baseball are you? Oh boy, this is another one that I think I disagree with you guys on.

You made the, this is a small ad for the Patreon. The little bonus episodes, I love those. You made one with like mini rants. And my mini rant is like specifically when I say I could care less and you correct me, I get very upset because you knew exactly what I meant, right? And like language evolves and phrases evolve even if they don't grammatically make sense. You knew what I meant. And so I love this segment, but I am not very pedantic about

baseball. All right. We got a descriptivist with us here. I have some new rants, by the way. I have some new rants. Stay tuned for a bonus episode coming sometime soon. All right. Well, Erin, you can be the voice of the non-pedant here, but you can play along with our pedantry. So here's a question from Ben in D.C. I've got another pedantic baseball issue. Curious to hear your thoughts on whether it's too pedantic to care about. The answer is almost always yes. Although we've had a couple where we're like too far.

Yeah, yeah. Announcers and everyone really refer to a batted ball that bounces over the fence as a ground rule double. A ground rule is something specific to that stadium. Rules about the catwalks at Tropicana, for example. There are some universal ground rules, though a ball bouncing over the fence is not one of them. And he links us to MLB.com slash ground rules. A double for a ball bouncing over the fence is based on rule 5.06 b.4 f. A better term for these is automatic doubles or rulebook doubles. So have we been

mislabeling the ground rule double all along? I mean, maybe, but I think I don't care about this. Yeah, I think I'm in the Aaron camp with this one. We all know what it means. It doesn't bug me that much. And even if it's not technically a ground rule, I guess it's kind of a universal ground rule. It does govern what happens when the ball hits the ground and bounces over the fence. I know that's not what ground means exactly in this context. But yeah, I mean, it's so established. It's not like a neologism or anything. It's just like, we all know this. We've all been saying this for so long. It would probably be news to most people that this might technically be incorrect. So I'm kind of okay with it, I think. I actually, when I was a kid, I thought it was the ground, like literally the ground rule. And I did not know that it wasn't a universal ground rule, which I suppose if we're going to be pedantic about things, universal ground rule doesn't

make sense under this pretense either, because ground rules, I guess, are specific to their own parks. I just thought it was a universal rule that applied and was under the ground rule segment in the rulebook. Yeah. The baseball reference bullpen page says a ground rule double is a double awarded by the umpire because a fair ball became unplayable according to the ground rules of the ballpark. The ground rules technically only cover ways in which the ball can become unplayable, such as becoming lodged in the ivy at Wrigley Field. The rulebook specifies that the award is always two bases. The only exception to the two-base rule is in the now very uncommon case of overflow crowds placed in cordoned-off sections of the playing field, in which case the managers may agree on other base awards. Ground rule double is also colloquially used for doubles awarded because a fair ball touching the ground bounds

into the stands. The colloquial usage is technically incorrect, the best kind of incorrect, as the ruling is applied equally in all ballparks and has nothing to do with ground rules. Some commentators will use terms such as bounce doubles. I don't think I've ever heard that. Never heard that. Which commentators? Rulebook doubles or, as John Miller prefers, automatic doubles in lieu of the misappropriation of ground rule double. Until 1931, balls bouncing over the fence were counted as home runs in this difference in playing rules as respected when tabulating historical statistics. So, yeah, I don't know. I guess it just doesn't bother me. We've been using it for so long and it's kind of close enough that it's okay. And I think just in the interest of comprehensibility, like if I said automatic double, if you want to say automatic runner for the zombie runner, which I think is the technical term or one of them at least, that's okay. I would accept that. I think we would know what

that means probably. But if you said automatic double, I don't know that anyone necessarily or everyone would know what you meant that you were referring to a ball that bounced over the fence. So I think at this point, language has evolved that this can be a ground rule double in my book. I feel like I have heard announcers say automatic double, but very rarely. And I think that you're right. We strive for comprehensibility above all else. So I think that a shift now would be pretty confusing to people, just like we'll keep doing double earmuffs to signify replay review even after we no longer have over the head headphones. So yeah, sorry.

Yeah. Andy says, I hear so many, maybe all broadcasters describe a 0-0 game as a game with no score. This has always sounded absurd to me. There is most definitely a score and it is 0-0. What there are none of is runs. I have been demanding for years that these games be described as games with no runs instead of no score. So Andy's demands have largely been ignored. But what do you think?

Should we heed his demands? No. I think no score is fine. I guess technically scores is a synonym, so you could say no scores. But I think I hear no run ball game all the time, which makes sense. But I feel like you'd be fine with that. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like no score, although technically correct because there is a score. Yeah. There's something on the scoreboard out there the chiron doesn't just have blanks it says zero zero yeah but there's been no scoring there's been no scoring it is true it's which i imagine is i would suspect that that is sort of the origin of this of this saying right that there has been that no have scored, and so there is no scoring, and so we just say there's no score. But I think that a lot of broadcasts will do,

like as they go to break between innings or between halves of an inning, they'll specify that no runs have scored, and it's a 0-0 game, right? 0-0 game, are we fine with that? I'm not generally bothered by this one, but I think that I get what you mean. But I think this is another one where it's okay. Wow, this is unusual for us.

We normally fuss about something. It's been Aaron's influence here. I know, I'm biasing you guys. His non-pedantic powers are just rubbing off on us. Yeah, this one, I'm more with Andy on this one than I was with Ben about the ground rule doubles. I guess I would prefer saying no score, 0-0, something along those lines. But it's not egregious. There are many bigger complaints that I have about things that broadcasters say.

All right. Question from Judah. Why do we call runners on first and third runners on the corners? Is second base not a corner of the diamond? Why is runners on first a corner and second a corner, not also runners on the corners? So someone sticking up for the cornerness of second base. And I see what Judah means here. I mean, it's a diamond. It's just got points. And second base is no less a corner than first and third. So again, technically kind of correct here.

I think I have an explanation for this. I think the reason we think about first and third as corners and not second is because we are considering them like sub corners of the bigger corners that are the outfields. I think that we think about this as a continuous line from home down the left and right field lines. And we refer to say the left fielder and the right fielder as corner outfielders because they are playing in the corners of the outfield.

And so I think it's a continuation of that logic rather than, I mean, technically, you're absolutely right. You're not wrong. But I, again, wow, three for three of us being like, this is fine, actually. I think that that's why, that we're thinking about it as a continuation into the outfield corners and that these are points along that same line, maybe. I don't know. That's why we're thinking about it as a continuation into the outfield corners. And these are points along that same line, maybe. I don't know.

And I think if you say you hit the ball up the middle, you could hit second base while hitting it up the middle. And I feel like having a corner up the middle feels odd. So that just further supports your point. Although I literally, while Ben was reading, was like, oh, yeah, I guess second is a corner. So I hear it. I understand this one, but I still think it's also another one. You know what we mean. Well, and I think that we tend to think of home plate as the pivot point around which we, the whole thing rotates, right? So from the perspective of home, second base is up the middle. And so I think that that's probably why we don't think of second as a corner spot because if you're going from the perspective of

of home plate it's it's not though right and yeah i mean first and third are along the lines which kind of mark the edges of fair territory and so they're kind of the corners of the playable part, the part where you could get a hit. So I think that is why we think of them as the edges, right? The field is oriented from home out to center field, right? You could orient the field some other way, and then if you just turned on your side or something then second would be a corner maybe now instead but the way that we are facing that the field is facing that the players are playing I think it makes more sense to call first and third corners and also maybe the reason why we don't really think of second being a corner is just like if you look

at an overhead view of the diamond or just a diagram of the diamond the second base part tends to be kind of rounded because the infield dirt is rounded and so the second base area of the infield dirt that is just rounded whereas the infield dirt does reach a corner behind first and third. So those look more like corners kind of. Second is a corner within a rounded region. That's my explanation. I think that that is right.

I like that. Okay. Two more pedantic questions. Justin from Patreon says, something for the pedantic pile here I feel extremely strongly about from a statistical and historical standpoint. I think it's time we stopped keeping postseason statistics separate from a player's career numbers. For example, it seems unlikely Albert Pujols at 681 home runs as of writing will get to 700 this season. But if you factor in his 19 postseason home runs, his latest home run was actually his 700th

big league bust. I don't think regular season and postseason numbers should be combined in the stat line year by year, that is, factor into league leaders. I think a running tally of postseason totals should be factored into a player's career numbers after every season, when one considers milestones and such. With this, I'd love to officially welcome Fred McGriff and Lou Gehrig to the 500 Home Run Club, as each now has 503 by my count. Do you see any harm in adopting this measure? I think it only stands to better illustrate the breadth of a player's career.

So we era adjust based on lots of things. And one of those things is number of games played we don't necessarily consider certain players to have you know fewer counting stats because there were fewer games in in the season and you know i i they did hit the home runs i i think this definitely makes sense i and and perhaps we could do regular season only and regular season plus postseason. But I mean, they are definitely are major league home runs or singles or hits or whatever they are. Even more impressive because they're against higher caliber competition and colder weather and all of the above. weather and all of the above. So yeah. And people may say, well, then you're kind of rewarding the player's team in that they got to the postseason and gave them more opportunities.

But we kind of do that anyway, right? A leadoff hitter hits five times in a game on a better, in a better lineup than on a worse lineup. So you can't really get around that. And so to this, I say, yes, we should be doing this at least as a toggle right to say regular and postseason or just regular season i don't think we should do it okay i mean i think that the answer is to make it easier to find postseason statistics which remain very squirrely they remain so squirrely those post remain so squirrely, those postseason stats. It's really remarkable. It's sort of like with how it's hard to calculate

whether or not a prospect is still rookie eligible. It shouldn't be hard, but somehow it is, and we end up counting stuff by hand. Why are we doing that? It seems wrong. We've been to the moon. I think because every player doesn't necessarily get the opportunity to play in the postseason for reasons that are far more removed from their own talent

than say whether or not they get regular playing time in the regular season i just a regular a lot that i'd like having the discrete stat that is regular season performance and we should just have a line that indicates what they did in the playoffs and call it a day that's what i think i'm with you so qualified agreement with justin in that these stats should certainly be more accessible even at fangraphs we're fangraphs podcast we can point a finger at ourselves right there are no postseason stats i know i've asked and i yeah i don't have a good explanation for why it's hard, but apparently it's hard. Yeah. It's just generally hard to find them at basically all sites. Our friends and sponsors at StatHead have made them a little more accessible, easier to search as of

late, but it's tough. So that I don't think should be the case. I'd love to be able to look up postseason stats with the same ease that I can with regular season stats. But I just I do have that same concern about just, you know, and Aaron, you're right that no one really has a completely level playing field, even when it comes to playing time opportunities because of team quality. to playing time opportunities because of team quality. But there still is something to, are we going to give Luke Gehrig extra dingers because the Yankees were always in the World Series? And granted, he played a part in propelling the Yankees to the World Series, but it's just an avenue

that is off limits to a lot of players. And I want to value that postseason appearance. And we do to some extent. There are certainly cases of players who have Hall of Fame candidacies. And if they're great postseason players, they get big boosts for that, as I think they should. But if we're just comparing, how would you even do? You know, you'd have to have like a different war baseline for the playoffs. How do you do war in the postseason yeah that would be complicated because the quality of competition just the different conditions there the way that managers manage differently during the postseason so that would be kind of a headache and justin's suggestion of not really counting it for single season stats but then kind of updating career stats after every season.

That just sounds like it could be confusing and complex and kind of a headache to do that that way. So I don't know. I guess I would like to be able to go to the tab on the player page and see postseason stats listed there or have a sortable leaderboard of postseason stats. And if we could have some kind of value, I mean, we have WPA and we have championship WPA and all of those win probability stats, but it's harder to find war type value stats. So I wish all of that were easier to find and that maybe we paid more attention to it. But especially now, I guess

you could make the case in this era, because the playoffs are so long and there's so many rounds and so many teams make the playoffs, it's just going to become a greater component of overall player performance, which maybe makes the case for what Justin is arguing here, or maybe makes the case in the other way, because again, there's such an era effect when it comes to postseason playing a time just because the playoffs used to be the World Series and that was it. And now it's a month-long marathon. So how do you compare across eras?

It's a sticky subject. So I just I wish we could find all of this stuff easily and then decide what we want to do with it ourselves, I suppose. I still go back to, as far as counting stats go, I hear your points on the rate stats and the kind of more advanced statistics. Those would be more tricky. But as far as counting stats go, I still go back to like, they hit the home runs. Like, you know, those are major league home runs that they hit. So I find it hard to say that they just don't count because they're in the parts of the season that matter the most. It's hard for me to get there.

I guess the counter to that, though, is that when we tell the tale of Albert Pujols, when it comes time for Jay Jaffe to write his Hall of Fame novel about Albert Pujols and his fantastic career, it's not like he's not going to talk about the home runs he hit in the postseason. That stuff is going to be part of the story of Pujols

when we tell the story of Pujols. So I don't think we're in danger of losing sight of any of that. So that's another thing I'd say. All right, last pedantic question. This one comes from Peter, who says, I have a question that I think fits into the how can you not be pedantic about baseball canon regarding the term walk-off. According to a New York Times article, the term originated thusly. The term's first published citation was in July 1988, according to William Sapphire, who was the New York Times' longtime language maven and who wrote about it a decade ago.

The Gannett News Service wrote, In Dennis Eckersley's colorful vocabulary, a walk-off piece is a home run that wins the game and the pitcher walks off the mound. However, as evidenced by this video that he links of 2021 walk-offs that MLB posted to YouTube and Merriam-Webster's definition, the term has expanded to include any hit or event that ends a game by scoring a run rather than by recording an out, even if that event involves a close play at the plate. My opinion is that this definition is over-inclusive because it includes plays that require the defense to continue playing after the ball is put into play. For example, a shallow sacrifice fly in which the winning run scores on a close play at the plate should not be considered a walk-off.

When the ball is hit, the defense could still prevent the run from scoring and therefore cannot walk off the field. A play in which a runner is sprinting home and an outfielder is trying to nab him at the plate cannot accurately be described as a walk-off. Another example is the Brett Phillips-Randy Rosarena play from Game 4 of the 2020 World Series, a walk-off by the modern definition. How the term walk can be associated with a play that exciting is beyond me. I understand the counter-argument that immediately after the play, the players literally walk off the field, but as far as I can tell, the players walk off the field after every game, even those that end with an out rather than a run being scored. Therefore, to me, the only way for the term to have any meaning or is for it to only include plays where after the ball leaves the bat

or the batter is awarded first base, the defenders don't need to attempt to play anymore. They can simply walk off the field knowing they have lost even before the winning run has literally crossed the plate. This includes home runs, walks, balks, or hit by pitches, and hits where it is obvious the defenders will not get to the ball and the winning run will score easily. Close plays at the plate or errors should not count. What say you? Where he lost me was the hits where it's obvious because that brings you to a subjective kind of take on you know how it was the ball quite deep enough where it was

obvious uh you know maybe maybe to some yeah well if there's a play like if there's a throw let's say that's not obvious like if the players consider it competitive, if they're still trying to make an effort, then you could use that as the dividing line. Whereas, I don't know, if the bases are loaded and the ball is hit over someone's head or something and the outfielder just doesn't bother chasing after it. I think baseball is unique in sports because sometimes the game ends before standard regulation is over, right? Like sometimes you don't need the bottom of the ninth. Right.

And so I would categorize a walk-off as any play where the game ends before the bottom of the ninth is over in standard baseball, where that includes pretty much every walk-off that we call it now, right? Because you walk off the field before the inning is over. That's what I would think. Uh, no, though, because then... Oh, geez. So here's where I think that the perfect is becoming the enemy of the good here.

We want to distinguish the situation where the home team has managed to win either by breaking a tie or pushing ahead when they are behind in the final frame of the game from, say, you know, like they are ahead. They are ahead by one run in the top of the ninth and their pitcher does what their pitcher does and their defense does what their defense does and then they don't have to play the bottom of the frame to try to score. So I think that this objection is correct in that whether the hitter at the plate that scores a walk-off that hits a walk-off hit of some stripe,

regardless of whether or not the defense has to field or not, they do end up walking off the field, it's fine. But we are not worried about confusion amongst those scenarios we are we are trying to differentiate walk-off hits from go-ahead hits that end up being game winning hits yeah we want a run scoring play that is decisive that ends the game that is final where you don't get a chance to try to come back. That is the play state that we are trying to distinguish from other runs that are scored within the course of the game. Because if you're writing your game summary

and you are describing a hit that is a go-ahead hit that is then decisive, you are distinguishing that from the moment where you have to do a rewrite. Right? distinguishing that from the moment where you have to do a rewrite right so i think that that's the that's the category differentiation that we're trying to to get to and now if we change it again this is another one where we just even if if people were to find a more precise way of saying this we just have to live with it because if we changed it midstream now people would be like what are you talking about right whereas like when i say oh he had a walk-off home run you know exactly what i mean by that yeah well walk-off home run that even fits peter's

definition i know but like he had a walk-off sack fly you know exactly when yeah well maybe you don't know exactly when but you know who hit it. You know what team hit it, right? You have a sense of that. term catch on so that walk-off would be more limited and this term would be more inclusive maybe i would i don't know maybe it's just like a goodbye when a game over when uh that's all folks it's it's over when he's about to back his way into keepy uppy yeah we'll have to give this some thought but i could imagine a better term sure that conveys the idea that, hey, you don't get to try to come back now. It's all over. We scored this run. Everyone gets to go home immediately. there are many walk-off plays and walk-off wins where there's not a lot of walking going on, at least initially, and the play is very much contested and the outcome is still in doubt. So if we could differentiate and distinguish between a walk-off homer and a walk-off play that comes down to the wire and it's nail-biting and there's a play at the plate, maybe that would

be a useful distinction. But ultimately, what we are trying to signal is that basically you won, the home team won in the bottom of an inning, right? Like with a play that just ended the game, a run scoring play that ended the game. So that does get the point across. As you said, we all know what it means when someone says it's a walk-off whatever. All right. I think we did well there. Let's wrap up with some stat blasts. And 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, as always, by our pals at Baseball Reference and specifically Stat Head, which is powered by Baseball Reference, a very powerful tool for looking up all sorts of statistical information about baseball and not just about baseball, but about many major sports, including those elusive postseason stats. You can find them on StatHead. You can sign up for a full year at $80 per, or you can

use our coupon code that has been provided to us by the fine folks at StatHead, WILD20. Enter WILD20 at checkout, and you can get a $20 discount on that $80 sub. Just go to StatHead.com to find all the stats that you could ever desire. Okay, so here are a few questions of the Stathead kind. Here's a question from Sam, Patreon supporter, who says, this was from a few weeks ago, I just noticed Mike Clevenger is facing the Guardians. This was Clevenger's first start in his Padres debut. He was facing his former team, the Guardians, who are likely going to run out a lineup with three players he was traded for, Austin Hedges, Owen Miller, and Josh Naylor. Is this historic? What's the record for a pitcher facing a lineup, including players they were traded for? What's

the record for lineups with players from every trade in a pitcher's career combined? And I got an answer to this question, or both questions. The answer to both is four, according to, I remember it like it was yesterday. Cardinals pitcher Bob Harmon, he was traded with third baseman Mike Mowry and first baseman Ed Konecci to the Pirates for shortstop Art Butler, infielder Dots Miller, outfielder Cozy Dolan, right fielder Owen Wilson, and pitcher Hank Robinson. right fielder Owen Wilson, and pitcher Hank Robinson. Six times between 1914 and 1915, Harmon faced the Cardinals with Butler, Miller, Dolan, and Wilson in the lineup. And then this happened again. August 11, 1954, Harry Bird of the Yankees faced off against the Philadelphia A's. Just eight months prior, Bird, along with four other players, was traded from the Athletics to the Yankees for six players, Don Bolweg, Johnny Gray, Jim Robertson, Jim Finnegan, Vic Power, and Bill Renna. So on August 11th, 1954, Bird faced his former A's with Bolweg,

Finnegan, and Power in the lineup, as well as his pitching opponent that day, Johnny Gray. So 46 unique pitchers have started a game against the lineup with well as his pitching opponent that day, Johnny Gray. So 46 unique pitchers have started a game against the lineup with three players for whom they were traded. That's a total of 111 starts entering this season. But before this Clevenger game against the Guardians, it had happened only once this century, and that was Matt Latos' start against the Padres on July 5th, 2012, when he pitched against Edinson Volquez, Yasmany Grandal, and Yonder Alonso, all of whom were traded in a one-for-four deal on December 17th, 2011. So there you go.

Matt Latos. Man, I haven't thought about Matt Latos in an age. Isn't he still pitching? I think he's still pitching professionally somewhere. He's been bouncing around IndieBall for a while. Do we know if Kat Latos is okay? I don't know. Yeah, Matt Latos in the Atlantic League. Who knew? Wow.

Southern Maryland Blue Crabs. He is pitching and seemingly pitching pretty well the last couple of years. So good for him hanging on, I guess. Because there haven't been a lot of these occurrences lately, I did ask Ryan to look at the rate of multiplayer trades as a fraction of these occurrences lately, I did ask Ryan to look at the rate of multiplayer trades as a fraction of all trades by decade. And there's no really clear increase or decline over time. But the 1950s and then also the 1910s and 20s, which are the decades that these two record setting trades came from, they had the highest number of players per side per trade on average. So the all-time high for that stat, 1.57 players per side per trade in the 50s.

Now it's about 1.35. And the same trends are seen when you look at the percent of all trades with three or more players on one team or more in the 50s, 14.7% of all trades were like that. Now it's just about 6% or 7%, which is more typical. Then was the outlier, not now. I guess in those earlier eras, you had more fire sales, maybe, more teams that were not really trying to be competitive, just dumping players, franchises acting as farm teams for other franchises, etc. And I guess you had fewer teams in general back then than you do now. Maybe you had to buy in bulk, do all your dealing in one trade instead of spreading it out. But yeah, it's got to be a strange experience, I suppose, to be a

pitcher who's facing a bunch of players you were traded for. Maybe there's kind of like a show me element to it, like prove yourself. I was traded for these players, so I have to best them in single combat or triple or quadruple combat, four on one in some cases. I don't know that there would be any advantage there. I have found in the past that there is a slight advantage when catchers face their former battery mates, when catchers face pitchers whom they've caught in the past. It's not huge, but it seems to exist. I doubt that that would exist for just any former teammate, but it must be a little weird, I guess, to be facing players you were traded for. I wonder how many of the people know that

they're facing players that they were traded for, because I imagine a lot of them were prospects at the time, and you probably just lose track unless you- Yeah, they were just some slapdick prospect they knew nothing about yeah they have to keep tabs on the people you traded for also remind me was this traded for in a single transaction or traded forever both okay there was something about those cases yeah got it okay because yeah that's the other thing right you'd have to be traded either a number of times or for a lot of people which probably just

doesn't happen all that often. And I feel like a one for one type trade, you might actually hype yourself up more, maybe like a one for two, but a one for many prospects. I don't think this probably, I feel like the players wouldn't even know. Yeah, that's a good point. That comes up with a lot of stat blasts where we look up something strange and then I wonder, did they notice that? We're noticing that decades later. But did it even occur to the players at the time? And actually, this one is very much in that genre because I'm curious about whether this was noticed. But we got a question from Josh, Patreon supporter.

Josh, Patreon supporter. Luis Arise and Carlos Correa hit second and third, respectively, in the Twins lineup during Minnesota's game on Wednesday, May 18th in Oakland. I have both of them on my fantasy team, so I followed the game pretty closely, although I've been known to watch the Twins instead of doing my work on other occasions.

Here's how their first five plate appearances went. First inning, Arise single, Correa single. Second and third inning, Arise fly out, Correa fly out. Fourth inning, a rise single, Correa single. Second and third inning, a rise fly out, Correa fly out. Fourth inning, a rise RBI double, Correa RBI double. Sixth inning, a rise walk, Correa walk. Seventh inning, a rise ground out, Correa ground out. A rise doubled off of a position player in the ninth inning, but Correa was lifted for a pinch hitter before he could come up to the plate for a sixth time. All told, though, a rise in Correa went five consecutive plate appearances back-to-back

where the plate appearance for each player had the same end result—single, fly out, double, walk, ground out. This seemed uninteresting to me at first, but the more I thought about it, the more unlikely it seems for five consecutive pairs of plate appearances involving the same two players to have the same end result. In this specific case, given the distribution of single, double, walk, ground ball, and fly ball that Correa had coming into the game, I did some quick math and I believe there was about a 0.0036% chance that he followed each of Araiz's plate appearances with a plate appearance that had the same end result. I have not checked the math there. So my question is, what is the record for consecutive pairs of plate appearances with a plate appearance that had the same end result. I have not checked the math there. So my question is, what is the record for consecutive pairs of plate appearances involving the same two players that did have the same end result? My immediate thought is there

probably a handful of replacement players who have struck out back to back in more than five consecutive pairs of plate appearances. So the leaderboard might be uninteresting. But if there is a long stretch of PAs with varied outcomes, I'd love to know. Well, you are about to. So again, we are talking about players who are batting back to back two instances. The first involves the 1956 Cardinals and their number one and two hitters between August 15th and August 18th. So this was over multiple games. Second baseman Don Blassingame and shortstop Al Dark. Starting with the last at bat in the game on the 15th, they both had a streak of ground out, fly out, ground out, ground out, ground out, ground out, fly out, ground out. It ended when Blassingame got a double, but Dark followed it up with a fly out. Very exciting stuff. Number two, between June 11th and June 13th, 1978, the White Sox five and six hitters were first baseman Lamar Johnson and catcher Bill Nahrodny. Starting with the sixth inning of the game on the 11th, the two had a coordinated streak of fly out, fly out, single, ground out, fly out, fly out, single, single.

So that's interesting, right? And then it finally ended when Lamar Johnson got another single, but Naharadny grounded out. So if we look for outcomes matching when all of the events were getting on base, then the record is four times. Four times players have gotten on base in exactly the same way in consecutive player appearances. That has actually happened 11 different times. So do you think that this is something that players would notice? It's almost it's like the Groucho Marx mirror routine from Duck Soup or something. It's like one player does one thing and

then another player does exactly the same thing. I wonder because it would be kind of eerie after a certain time. I don't know whether this would stick out in any player's mind. I feel like I would notice this. So my guess is that they would and i i find it particularly interesting that this can span over multiple days um because yeah not only do they have to do the same thing they have to be playing you know multiple days and be in the same you know consecutive spots in the order so i find it interesting i think i think i would notice i feel like this is something that i would comment on yeah i could see that especially if you're on base and you're watching the plate appearance if you just made an out and you're going back to

the dugout and you're taking your helmet off and your gloves and you're putting your bat back in the rack or whatever maybe you wouldn't be paying close attention and you wouldn't necessarily notice what the player after you did and if it's over multiple games then you might just forget right i mean the fact that this happened five times in one game that is why it was noticed by our listener here and i don't know whether it's happened any more times than that in a single game ryan didn't mention it if so but obviously you don't very often get more than five played appearances in a game. So I might forget over the course of a couple of days, but I'd like to think that I would notice this because it would be weird. Be like, hey, stop copying me.

Do your own thing with your play appearance. I think you would definitely notice. I think you'd be like, that's really weird. This looks familiar. You'd have a sense of deja vu even. Yeah, maybe so. I think the fact that Correa got pinch hit for suggests that they don't try or care that much about it happening. Because he got pinch hit for in that sixth at bat. And I feel like if he really wanted it to continue, he would have. Unless he was injured such that he couldn't play. I didn't watch the game. If that happened, then maybe not. But I think that if you were really trying to push, let's see how long we can keep this going, you may try to push to history in the making. But yeah, maybe you're right. Right.

Okay. Last question comes from Brendan, who says, a question and realization at 3 a.m. Pacific time. First, I've always been bothered by the fact that inherited runners count against the first pitcher. It makes more sense than the alternative, but it feels wrong when an inherited runner on first with two outs ends up getting an earned run because a reliever falls apart. So I was wondering which pitcher has been most affected by having a terrible bullpen allowing their inherited runners to score or a great bullpen putting out their fires.

Is it ever enough to significantly increase or decrease an ERA over a season or career? Or do I not have to feel bad about this anymore? Don't have any clue how to find this data or how far back it would go? Well, Ryan Nelson has found that data and it goes back quite far. So the answer is that it can sometimes make a significant difference. There are times when a pitcher is bailed out or victimized by the relievers who come in after them. So I will put the full spreadsheet and all the results on here. Obviously, it depends where you set the innings minimum if you want the bigger

ERA differences. But in 2007, relievers coming in after Eric O'Flaherty stranded 11.3 fewer runners than would be expected based on game state and run environment. And I should mention here that Ryan really went all out here. He did a season-specific baseline of how often runners scored from each base and each base out configuration in that given season and calculated it that way. So Eric O'Flaherty, 2007, stranded 11.3 fewer runners than would be expected based on just where he bequeathed runners to relievers who followed him. So because of that, his actual ERA was 4.47. His expected ERA was 2.53. So that's the single

biggest difference for a player in a single season with 50 plus innings. So he left the game with 21 runners with two outs, 23 runners with one out, and three runners with no outs. That's 47 total. You would have expected 14.7 of them to score on average, but 26 actually did. So if I had been Eric O'Flaherty that season, I'm pretty sure, like, if we're talking about do players notice this, pretty sure he noticed that because I've heard players that I remember Brandon McCarthy talking on the podcast once about just like how grateful starters are when they leave runners on base and their relievers don't allow them to score and just how like irrationally upset they are when those runners do score and get charged to them so I gotta think and poor Eric O'Flaherty that was his rookie year his first full season and he had a slightly below league average ERA because all of the runners that he left on base scored and we know that Eric O'Flaherty he was with the Mariners then, but he went on to have some excellent years

where he had ERAs as low as or even lower than his expected ERA in that year. So, you know, he had a great year for Atlanta in 2009 and in 2010 and in 2011, as you may remember, he had a sub one ERA in more than 70 innings and we could go on. So he was a really effective reliever. And I guess he was more effective maybe than people realized even in that rookie season. It was kind of masked by the fact that all the runners he left on base scored. So sucks for Eric O'Flaherty that year. I'm sure that he took note of that. In the other direction, 1997 Jesse Orozco, who had been around forever by that point, but his actual ERA was 2.32. His expected ERA was 3.51. So he left 13 runners on with two outs, 11 runners on with one out, 10 runners on with no outs, that's 34 total, would have expected 11.6 runs to score, and only 5 did. So he had reason to buy his relievers a watch or something.

So I guess this is worth paying attention to. It can matter, even in a season of 50 innings or so, at least for a reliever. You know, you're talking it could add a run or two to your ERA if you are not paying attention to this. I guess for a starter, I think, you know, you're going to get a more muted ERA difference, but I think it would be Gene Brabender in 1970. He had 29 appearances, 21 starts. His actual ERA was 6.02. His expected ERA was 5.13. So not quite a one run difference there. He had a 4.25 fifth that year, but no one knew it, unfortunately, for Gene. And that was his last year in the majors. So for all I know, the fact that he got bad bullpen support did him in as a major league pitcher. as a major league pitcher. So it's tough. It's tough for a player who started the majority of his outings, 1962 George Brunette, actual ERA 4.5, expected ERA 5.32. For a player who started exclusively, 1994 Roger Salkald, actual ERA 7.17, expected ERA 7.76. Not great either way. Expected ERA 7.76.

Not great either way. For a player who only started and wasn't terrible, 1983 Mark Davis. Actual ERA 3.48. Expected ERA 4.05. And in his Cy Young year, 1989, he only got a.06 ERA boost from his bullpen. He earned his very low ERA that year. And over the course of a career, it's hard to find any big difference, really. It's pretty negligible because it tends to even out or it just isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. But I guess it looks like the biggest difference for at least a 500-inning career would

be poor Gene Brebender, again, who had an actual ERA of 4.25 career and an expected ERA of 3.95. That's a difference of 0.3. So, yeah, it doesn't make a huge difference. Scott Ayer in the other direction, 649 innings pitched, and he had a 4.23 actual ERA and a 4.52 expected. So about three-tenths of a run is the most difference it could make over a full career, and that's even just like a 600-something inning career. I bet it's something that you're able to, like if the bullpen allows runs that you put on to score,

I bet like most of the time you're kind of, you let that slide off you, like water off a dolphin's back because it's like you put them on there you shouldn't have maybe done that assuming you're the one who did it and it wasn't like bad defensive play and you know sometimes those guys are going to score but i bet that there are a couple of times a year where like you don't want to talk to that reliever the next day in the clubhouse where you're like for one day only freaking hate that guy you know right especially if it was like a run around first yeah two outs or something yeah where it's like look i shouldn't i shouldn't have put that guy on first base but also like he was just on first base and there were two outs you couldn't get one lousy out you know how often batters get out most

of the time they most of the time get out and you couldn't get one lousy out so i bet that there are times when it really really rankles but most of the time you out and you couldn't get one lousy out. So I bet that there are times when it really, really rankles. But most of the time, you can probably let it go because if you were someone where it stuck with you every time and it built animosity every time, you probably couldn't be a professional baseball player. Like so much of them being able to do their jobs well is just being able to let stuff go or they would get all up in their heads. One of the reasons I could never be a professional baseball player because I can't let anything

go. And we've talked in the past about whether there is a fairer and better way to do this. And I think Joe Piznanski maybe has proposed a method that we discussed where basically you would adjust for where those runners were or how many outs there were, sort of similar to Ryan's expected scoring method here. It gets complicated because then what do you do? Do you do fractional runs assigned to the reliever who inherited the runner as opposed to the pitcher who bequeathed the runner?

That's kind of why we do it the way we do it, I guess. And you know what? Maybe it doesn't matter that much anymore because ERA is not really a primary evaluatory tool these days, especially for teams. It's not going to end your career if you have a bunch of bequeathed runners score. Teams are not looking at ERA for relievers especially. I mean, you're looking at expected outcomes and strikeouts and walks and FIP style stuff and quality of contact and all of that. So it's probably not going to control like whether you get paid more

or whether you get playing time necessarily. But I assume that it would still affect your mood nonetheless. And players still certainly look at it. Yeah, I was going to say. And like your uncle at thanksgiving yep you know your uncle's gonna give you the business and he's not gonna be satisfied when you say well but they let and i tried and he's he's still gonna be like oh you're a big leaguer i gotta bring you down a peg i don't know just to name one family dynamic you would ask why you put him on yeah I think that the person who has the relievers give up runs on their behalf would definitely remember it.

And I think they would definitely notice it. The other thing I wanted to bring up is that it's not surprising to me that the guy who had the most negative effect had a high ERA because he's probably more likely to put runners on and probably more likely to have a bad reliever come in after him because they're probably losing. Yeah. Good point. Good point. All right. Well, great work from our questioners this week. Great work from Ryan Nelson and great work from you, Aaron. And just a little behind the scenes here, Aaron didn't have these questions in advance. This was all off the cuff.

He's a natural. So would you care to plug anything anywhere people can find you? Or do you want to try to sell some people life insurance while you're here? Well, I sell the reinsurance. So if there are any actuaries

that need to expand their pool, they could reach out to me. You know, and there frankly might be, but that's okay. I have an Instagram account. It's park.photos. I take photos of Major League Ballparks, National Parks,

and amusement parks. Oh, wow. All three of them. So if you follow that, that would make me feel good. I don't have a ton of followers, but I take all these pictures and I have to put them somewhere.

So that's really the only thing I want to plug other than the Patreon for you guys. So I think that, you know, you guys do a lot and you entertain me and seemingly a lot of other people. And I think a couple bucks a month really goes a long way into, you know, kind of making it worth it for you guys. So I would just say if you aren't a patron, right? That's the word. If you aren't a patron, you could become one, just a small amount. And I found this very fun. So if you have the means to, you could try this.

So that's what I'll plug. We appreciate that. You're not obligated to plug the Patreon when you come on the podcast, but you are certainly welcome to. And if you have any sports betting winnings or any other kind of winnings, feel free to pay it forward. Exactly. We're not so principled that we will turn down your money. Although I think we would all encourage people to take Aaron's approach to sports betting and

set reasonable limits for yourself and then adhere to them. That sounds like a good way. Did you stick to your original limit, even though you had a bunch of winnings? Did you say, okay, I'll give myself a little more rope here? Or did you say, nope? No, I stick to the limit. You get 100 bucks a year and you put it in. And if you lose it, well, you're not betting that year. But I'm still doing okay.

Still have some fun money to play with. And, you know, it's not – I don't do it every day. I do it every once in a while i kind of we have a we have a chat it's actually how a couple buddies of mine and i stay in touch we'll just be like does anybody like a game this you know this evening and we'll see you know and it's just a fun way to stay in touch and and do that so you know i agree set limits you know do not over indulge in this and i think it can be okay. But I understand why you guys don't love the advertising. Do you bring any of your actuarial expertise to placing your bets,

or do you just kind of go by gut because it's fun to do that? It's not necessarily actuarial expertise, but I have built models before. I mentioned I built a model to project the likelihood of Tommy John surgery. So you can do a lot of that type of thing. The best model that I've built is actually a NASCAR model. I've had moderate success with that. That's a hard sport to bet. And I've heard from tons of people that trying to build a baseball model is essentially impossible with the way they baseball so random. And I just don't have the means to increase my sample size enough that I

could actually beat the system. So I'm well, you know, I'm very aware that I got lucky to win all those at the very beginning of the season. But hey, I'll take it. You're like a nightmare for sports betting apps where you're like, I'm a reasonable person with normal expectations. Yeah, I'm not their target demo. No. Yeah, I can see the ads now, like the ads where someone who won is like sitting on a pile of cash or something. We'll just see like the Aaron version of that ad where it's like, I got to go on a baseball podcast. You can too.

All right. Well, thanks very much, Aaron. This was a pleasure. Thank you. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening. And if you're interested, please do check out our Roger Angel episodes that we mentioned in the intro. I will link to those on the show page along with some other writing about Angel that was produced in response to his death. I'm glad I got to meet him a couple of times. Certainly didn't know him on a personal level. And meeting him in person, I think, for me at least, was less important than meeting him on the page. And there, at least, we haven't lost him. In fact,

we even have a Patreon tier, the Roger Angel tier, that has borne his name for some time now, in honor of his impact on us and on the podcast, so that will remain just a tiny tribute among the many that have already rolled in. You may have heard one well-known quote from Angel, I believe this was from the summer game, since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly. Keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us, Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass, swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner,

and the end of this game may never come. And the end of the game always comes, unfortunately, whether via the zombie runner in the 12th inning or congestive heart failure at 101. But Roger Angel's game lasted a really long time, and it was a great game. He did succeed utterly, and if he didn't defeat time, he held it at bay for a good long while. And even if some may dispute the definition, I think we can call Angel's game a walk-off win. One quick follow-up from listener Andrew in response to our discussion on our preceding episode about the takeover of Tylers and Taylors among major leaguers' names. Andrew writes that the Taylor-Tyler trendy takeover is dwarfed by the Jason takeover of the 90s and 2000s. 96 MLB players with the first name Jason, per baseball reference, only won before 1989,

but indeed the most common name in all of 2003 to 2006, with a greater prevalence than Tyler Taylor combined. Both had a similar pattern of almost no Jasons slash Tylers, and then all of the Jasons slash Tylers, then a quick drop back down. There was a peak of 37 Jasons in 2003, now down to six Jasons, and Jasons Castro and Hayward may be nearing the end. We will probably soon reach the end of Jasonsasons as the peak dropped down hard to be a very uncommon name in 1990 or so. On Fangraph's board with almost a thousand prospects, there is only one Jason, Jason Foley, so the Jasons are unlikely

to be replenished. There are still 13 Tylers slash Taylors on the board, so that takeover will continue for a bit longer. But he links to a Vox piece from 2014, which determined that Jason was the trendiest male name in all of the data. And he also links to a cool tool from Time magazine where you can plug in names to see when they peaked and how high they peaked. And when you do that, you can indeed see that the Jason peak dwarfed the Tyler Taylor peak in the general population. Good point, Andrew. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon,

at the Roger Angel tier or any other, by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Take Aaron's advice, follow in his footsteps. The following five listeners, like Aaron, have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks while helping us stay ad-free. Robert, Kevin Rust, Joel Gillespie, Nick Holcomb, and Nathaniel Heater.

Thanks to all of you. Of course, our Patreon supporters get access to bonus pods hosted by me and Meg every month, as well as the patron-only Discord group, a couple of playoff live streams, and in Aaron's case, an appearance on an email show. Among other perks, you can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms.

Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod, and you can find the Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks as always to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Everybody's watching Come take a look Heartbreak on the 101

Everybody watch Everybody love Heartbreak on the 101 Heartbreak on the 101 Heartbreak on the 101. Heartbreak on the 101.