Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1855: Glass Ass of Emotion

Episode Date: May 28, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley answer listener emails about why we don’t see more hidden-ball tricks in MLB, why big leaguers practice fielding grounders between innings, comparing the careers of Paul Goldschmidt and Freddie Freeman, how baseball broadcasts should discuss domestic-violence suspensions, whether Rickey Henderson would still have stolen bases if he’d been inflicted with […]

My pocket's empty, my socket's dry The jocks are watching, so I can't even cry Gotta tell my soul, cause I'm too big to lie A bullshit piece of pie in the sky I'd sell my soul For a smart A smart ass For a lie A smart ass reply

That's how I saw it A smart A smart ass reply Hello and welcome to episode 1855 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Meg, how are you? Oh, you know, I'm okay. I'm doing all right, too. I'm just coming off one of my overnight Star Wars writing recap marathons, so I am a little tired. It is Friday afternoon here, but sometimes the tired and loopy podcasts can be the fun ones.

So we're just going to do some emails, I think, today. Yeah. I mean, normally it is me being tired and loopy because I have been convinced that you don't really need to sleep. So I can't wait to see what tired and loopy Ben looks like. Let's find out. I did pick some silly emails, so that will give us an opportunity at least. Not all silly, but some silly. And I've got some stat blasts lined up for later on too. But let's start with a question from Ben, yet another Ben, who says,

why don't we see more hidden ball tricks in MLP? It seems like a sure way to get an easy out almost whenever you want it. Of course, it would only work to a certain extent because if your team tries it in every game, your opponent will become wary and it will no longer work. Still, a few times per season at very high leverage moments, it seems like a relatively easy way to get a cheap out is not using the hidden ball trick an unwritten rule i don't think that there is an unwritten rule against the hidden ball trick i think that generally when they are pulled off the the player that has gotten got that has been duped that has been tricked and fooled

kind of has this look like oh you got me i think that the instinct and the question is right which is that if you try to do it too many times people are going to be on the look for it they're going to notice it but i also think how many times this is such a specific way of asking this question specific to the point of perhaps not being useful a theme this week so how many times in a typical game do you think there is even an opportunity to attempt a hidden ball trick? Because, you know, you can't, if you're being cagey about where the ball is and you're just tagging a guy,

but he's on base, like it doesn't matter because he's like, here I am on my base. Why are you touching me? Like, stop it. Stop touching me. stop it stop touching me so i think that there are probably fewer opportunities to attempt the hidden ball trick than we might assume there to be so i think that there's that piece and then i think that there is the if you are the hidden ball trick team like if that's your bit people are gonna be extremely

careful they're gonna be even more vigilant about maintaining contact with the base than they might otherwise be right and also if you do a gimmicky thing you can only do it so many times like even albert pools gets caught stealing which is a funny sentence out of context yeah yeah you're probably right about there not being as many opportunities as you would think. And also maybe we are in a low hidden ball trick opportunity era. Yeah. Just there are so many strikeouts and there are so few singles, fewer singles than ever. Yes. Other things that leave you on first base like walks and hit by pitches and such, but still maybe fewer opportunities than there would have been in some eras. But it does still seem like it should happen more often than it does.

So there must be a bit of, if not unwritten rule, just a bit of bush league to it. Just like, OK, you got me. You used a trick like it literally has trick in the name. Right. Yeah. So maybe people don't want to be tricky. Which is kind of funny because I get that there is subterfuge involved in the hidden ball trick. As you just said, tricks right there in the title. But fundamentally, while you are being tricksy, you're taking advantage of a momentary lapse of a base runner doing a thing that they're really supposed to be very vigilant about doing.

And so I get why it's a trick. I understand. You're like, I don't have the moment. I have the moment. I have the moment. There it is. Right? That's what you're doing.

Probably in exactly that voice. And so I get that part. But also, like, you know, like, the reason you're able to do it is because the guy has wandered a little bit or a lot of it. Sometimes they're kind of a waste. Anyway, so there's that. When was the last hidden ball trick in the Matrix? I don't really remember.

Does Retro Sheet track them? I wonder if they have a page for that specifically. You would think that they might. I have Googled hidden ball trick, and there is a, oh, this is not an, I thought this was like an official MLB, this and that, but it is not. Oh, this is from 2016. There have probably been tens of hidden ball tricks since then. Have there?

Probably. I don't know. I don't think so. I can't remember. Is this another thing where we wish that it were tracked more precisely? Maybe. Do you think that BIS has secret hidden ball trick data that we could bother them for? Maybe.

Maybe. There actually was a hidden ball trick in AA just last week, a week ago, as we are speaking. There was a AA hidden ball trick. So it still happens. It was the first baseman for the frisco rough riders the rangers double a affiliate fielded a throw in from the outfield stuck the ball in between the webbing of the front of his mitt and deviously i'm reading here from bleacher nation trots back to first base with a very specific plan in mind and gets the guy i will link to this play course, it says instead of first and third with one out,

Hare's play made it two outs with a runner on third. The pitcher struck out the next batter and the inning was over. Awesome. And apparently the umpire saw that this was developing and got in a good position to make the call without giving anything away. So that was good. Seems like the base coaches were sleeping a little bit they did not notify the player that this was happening so this is good trey hair kudos to you for keeping the ball trick

alive at least in the majors we will have to do some googling as we go on here because i like neither of us can cite the last time i mean it must be it's not ancient history it has happened within fairly recent memory i guess except that we can't actually recall the specific instance someone is listening right now and shouting to themselves yeah it was this it just happened not that long ago and this other dude it is interesting because there are places like some of you know like a lot of what the rule book is trying to do in any given moment is maintain a fairness of competition so that the game is not out of whack right that it is not advantaging pitchers or hitters in any particular way or

offense and defense more broadly and so the the fact that this is allowable within the architecture of the rules suggests that we should be less fussy about it because we have a mechanism by which to say like that is too much trickeration, right? Like that that is a subterfuge that we will not tolerate, you know, and sometimes in our pursuit of that, it gets really complicated and no one can tell you what a balk is so you know there are instances where the the rules try to intervene on getting one over on the other side but they don't do that here they let you they let you do the hidden ball trick you know and so maybe we should think about it not like as a a trick as in you know a bit of hiding and subterfuge but as like a i don't know how to say a different thing about tricks but you know what i mean like it's like a it's like a cool skill you know like organize your office with this one neat trick like that doesn't have a negative connotation it's a life hack yeah yeah oh so you know like maybe that's the way that we should think about it and then

we would encourage more hidden ball tricks yeah i'm I'm going to say the hidden ball trick, it's a market inefficiency to some extent. I have found a retro sheet page that looks like it was largely collected by the researcher Bill Dean. It says successful execution of the hidden ball trick. And there are hundreds of them. It says an incomplete listing. The most recent one on this list is 2017, which was, I like that the column header is perpetrator and then victim. So the perpetrator was Ryan Goins and the victim was Todd Frazier. Before that, it says 2013, Todd Helton and Matt Carpenter. So it is not something that happens often. It happened twice in 2013, then 2007, 2005. Again, this is not comprehensive, and it's possible that there may have been some that have not been recorded on here.

There's also a list of unsubstantiated possibilities. So it's very thorough. But if that is true, if this hasn't happened in like five years, that's not frequent enough. I don't know what the success rate would be if you tried this with any kind of regularity or even if you tried it without a lot of regularity. I don't know. And maybe you would look sort of silly if you tried it and you're trying to be tricky. Maybe that is part of it is that it's embarrassing if you try to get away with it and you don't. Maybe that is part of it is that it's embarrassing if you try mutually, you know, reduce our stockpiles here and we will just

not do the hidden ball trick. But like, imagine if you were to do it at a really high leverage moment, like if you did it in like a game seven or something, you know, just like the highest championship probability added and you got away with a hidden ball trick. That would be endless news cycles of discourse. So just saying, like, there are times where you should probably break out the hidden ball trick more often than it has been broken out. Do you think that part of the reason that it is attempted less often than we might imagine is because people are nervous that they will look silly failing to get a guy out. Yeah, I think so. I think so. And also, I just think that while there is a concern that if you do it too often, it won't work, like no one is testing that right now.

If it hasn't happened in years, it's not like we're near the threshold of where, oh, if I try it, I won't be able to try it that other time. I don't know if every player out there just like has it in the back of their mind. Like, oh, yeah, someday I'm going to do it, but I'm not going to waste it. I'm not going to spoil it. I'm going to save it for that super important moment. And they never actually get around to doing it. So I don't know. But I think it should happen more often.

It seems sort of smart. Yeah, it seems. I mean, like, I'd like to see. I It seems sort of smart. Yeah, it seems. I mean, like, I'd like to see. I just enjoy people trying it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Question from David. I'm watching the Brewers play the Nationals, and for the first time in my 30-plus years watching baseball, I am asking myself why big leaguers practice grounders in between innings. grounders in between innings. I suppose it is good to stay warm if you hadn't had any balls hit to you all game, but I can't imagine that two throws every 10 minutes really helps major league players that much. How did this tradition start? Was there a time players just stood around in the infield between innings? Do the players find it helpful or do they just do it out of habit? A bit of an obscure question, but something that I can't think of a satisfying answer to. I have not researched the history and the origins of taking practice grounders in between innings, but I assume it's just that, well, you're standing around anyway, right? Might as well.

So outfielders practice throws with someone on the sidelines there. I guess you could say in their case you're warming up again. I mean pitchers warm up, right? The pitcher's warming up. That's why there is that slack time when the infielders are practicing. So if there's some benefit to the pitcher warming up and getting your arm loose, then presumably there might be some benefit to infielders doing it. So if they're going to be throwing anyway, they could just throw a grounder to someone and that warms them up a little and then the fielders get a little practice it's not like game speed generally so it's probably not

great practice but also what else would you be doing when you're standing out there during that time yeah i mean like some of it is just like it's nice to have something to do it's not like you're gonna stand out there and smoke so you gotta have something to do while you're standing around and waiting and you know as we've recently said with the phillies defense maybe some teams do need the practice yeah right unkind meg unkind yeah i would be interested to see if some teams said hey we're not doing practice grounders before innings start anymore it's's like some teams, they don't take on-field batting practice anymore or as much at least because they think, well, this is not a valuable type of practice. It's not a good use of our time. We will just go in the cage sometimes and we'll

hit off high velocity and breaking balls and that sort of thing. This is not that because it's not really any extra time that you're committed to anything you are going to be standing out there on the field anyway so you might as well but if a team said for whatever reason we are going to give up this tradition for an entire season i kind of doubt you would notice like in terms of their fielding percentage or their throwing error rate or anything like that but if you've been sitting on the bench for a while, then why not get your head back in the game and just go through the motions? And maybe baseball players just like playing with baseballs. That is how they became baseball players in the first place. So if you're standing out there and people have gloves and their balls available then why not yeah i don't

imagine that we would notice anything all that dramatic in terms of the viability of their collective fielding if they stopped doing this i don't think it's nice to like get warm again so there's that piece of it i do think that we would get some howlers of takes about this though if a team was just like no we're just gonna like stand here and wait it would be like oh are you too big to warm up are you too big for this moment of practice yeah you're right maybe it's eyewash to some extent too it might just be for the fans it's like hey look at us we're so diligent and industrious we could just be standing here idling around but no we're taking every possible second to practice our fielding and throwing so yeah maybe it's

for appearances sake. It's entertainment. It's something for fans to look at. I guess when I'm at a game, maybe I'm kind of idly looking at that. I'm not like, oh boy, can't look away from the fielders taking their practice. But I might notice if they were doing nothing, I suppose. So what's the harm? It can be a bit fun, but I think that's about it. I don't know that there's that much more to it. And I haven't researched the origins, but I don't know that you could research the origins because I've got to think that this goes back basically all the way. Yeah.

I don't know if there was like an innovator who was like the first to take infield practice a couple of grounders before the inning started. And then everyone just followed that trailblazer it seems like kind of just a natural thing to do probably what if it isn't about the defenders at all what if they're like we have this pitcher and he's so shy and if we all are standing around while he's warming up and i i would imagine that pitchers whether it's true or not probably tell you that those like warm-up tosses are really important right don't want to go out there cold so maybe they're like he's really good but he's very shy and so we have to we have to throw the ball around so that things are visually

distracting on the field and people aren't just watching him warm up maybe it's about that yeah yeah there's no one who is known for doing this because everyone does it whereas with the hidden ball trick there have been some perpetrators who have been known for some expertise, not that they're doing it constantly, but like Marty Barrett, there is an MLB.com article from last year, the master of the hidden ball trick. And he played during the 80s. He only did it a few times, I think. So there's no one who has been a really prolific ball hider. But I think that there are some guys who've done it multiple times, even multiple times within a season. Whereas now I couldn't tell you who is the most adept perpetrator of this because there haven't really been any perpetrators of late. So we need someone to come along and show that it can still

be done and that it can be pulled off with some regularity at least. Tomo says, related to your recent talk about Manny Machado versus Nolan Arenado, I noticed that Freddie Freeman and Paul Goldschmidt could also be an interesting comparison when looking at their career WRC plus and cumulative war. their career WRC plus and cumulative war. What do you think about that? So I looked at this from 2011 to 2022 because Freddie Freeman debuted a little bit before Paul Goldschmidt did. But right now, Paul Goldschmidt has a 49.1 career war per fan graphs and Freddie Freeman

has a 45.6. I will note that they have the exact same war this season at least as we are recording on friday the 27th of may paul goldschmidt's crew wrc plus 142 freddie freeman's uh 139 and here i am going from 2011 to 2010 does the wrc plus converge if i give freddie freeman one year more no it doesn't so quite similar you know two really very good first baseman who have put up quite similar lines paul goldschmidt for his career is at 295 395 23 and freddie freeman has hit 296, 385, 509. They're Woba separated by very little. Paul Goldschmidt, 387. Freddie Freeman, 380.

Paul Goldschmidt has a lot more stolen bases though. Oh boy. Yeah. This is a good comparison. This is a good debate. I'd take either one. Oh yeah. They're both very good, but both very similar and have overlapped almost exactly.

And I guess it is sort of surprising maybe that Freddie Freeman came up before Goldschmidt because Goldschmidt is older. Goldschmidt is 34. Freeman's 32. So if you're doing some career comparison and you're projecting into the future, well, Goldschmidt has a bit of a lead war-wise, not a big one, but Freeman has the edge on age. So I guess I would go with Freeman probably if we had to project who would have the higher war when it's over. But I don't know. Offensively, at least, Goldschmidt is off to a better start this season.

One of the best starts, in fact. He has been great. 185 WRC+. So he has shown no sign of decline. There was that one year, like his first year with the Cardinals. It was like he played in almost every game, but he took a little dip. He was still a decent hitter, but down significantly. And it looked like, okay, maybe he was past 30.

Maybe this is the beginning of the dip or something. Nope, not at all. He is ticked way up again. Yeah, and I remember when he kind of rebounded in the abbreviated season, and it was just he didn't want to put too much store in anything in 2020 because it was like 60 games. In Paul Goldschmidt's case, it was 58 games. But also, I wanted it to be true because I like Paul Goldschmidt,

and 2020 sucked. So I was like, this 147 WRC Plus is amazing. And then last year, he had 138. And as you said, this year, 185. So he's just a good baseball player, it turns out. Yeah, Freeman was the king of the 2020 WRC Plus and everything. MVP, right? But relative to expectations, you'd have to give it to Cole Schmidt,

who was famously underrated as a prospect and an eighth-round draftee versus a second-round draftee for Freeman. So it's a fun comparison. It's sort of splitting hairs because they've both been fantastic and two of the defining first basemen of their era. But I guess if I had to pick one from the beginning of their career until it's all said and done, I guess I would go with Freeman. I would expect that he will age well also, but really can't go wrong with either. No, I would ask like, why am I being forced to choose? Why must I pick just one?

To be fair, Tomo didn't ask us to choose. He said, what do you think about that? What do I think about it? I think they're both pretty good at baseball. Yeah, this is like the other infield corner counterpart of the Machado versus Arnauto debate. It's actually more uncanny now that I look at their baseball reference pages because Goldschmidt has about an eight-war lead on Freeman according to baseball reference war. But they are each other's most similar player according to baseball references similarity scores. So most similar hitter to Goldschmidt, Freddie Freeman. Most similar hitter to Freeman, Paul Gold Freddie Freeman. Most similar hitter to Freeman, Paul Goldschmidt. That's close to true for Machado and Arnauto too. They're each other's second most similar batter. I think Goldschmidt is still underrated. You know, he used to be really

underrated, but relative to Freeman at least, I think he still is. Freeman's maybe more of a bigger public personality. He's a guy who gets miked up for games. That's not really Goldschmidt's thing. I remember in 2013, Goldschmidt's thing I remember in 2013 Goldschmidt's teammates with the Diamondbacks tried to make a nickname for him America's first baseman they tried to make that happen and he was embarrassed about it so he doesn't seem to seek out publicity and I guess he doesn't get it Freeman's got a bit more black ink and gray ink he's earned more money in his career Goldschmidt may be an even better defender more gold gloves which is probably still overlooked especially at first first base. Really close, though. They could both be Hall of Famers.

All right. I'll take a brief deviation into seriousness before we do a U-turn back to silliness. So here's a question from Will, who says, after listening to episode 1843 this morning, the discussion about domestic violence in regard to Trevor Bauer and even more so the issue of domestic violence in general has been on my mind all day. Sorry for putting it on your mind all day. Coincidentally, this evening, this was a while ago, I had the Braves-Mets game turned on and in the top of the second inning when Marcel Ozuna came up to bat, a commentator whose name I do not know said, Ozuna, 48 games last year, a hand injury and a suspension under the league's domestic violence policy. Immediately after saying this, he casually continued on with regular baseball-related commentating.

This caught me off guard, struck me as odd, and left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. While I am in full support of journalists and MLB addressing domestic violence policies and certainly suspending players for it, I do not know how to feel about addressing the issue mid-game like this. I firmly believe it is very important that fans are made aware of players off the field actions such as domestic violence, but also feel that raising the subject mid-game is perhaps not a good time to mention it when time is so limited. Certain league policies that, if broken, result in suspension, I feel are perfectly acceptable to address during a game, something such as PED use.

But something as sensitive as domestic violence, I feel, should perhaps be reserved for a time when the player's actions can be fully disclosed and discussed in full detail, podcasts, articles, even pregame and postgame shows, etc. It's a really tricky thing to get right. I think that it is something that I try to like think about like what would I do if I were in the booth because I think we all know what it sounds like when things are kind of cringy in terms of you know an announcer rushing through something or not mentioning it or using verbiage that isn't

particularly sensitive or careful. I don't really think that the solution is necessarily to shy away from it. I think particularly with a player like Ozuna, you have to account for his absence last year. And some of that absence was the injury, but some of it wasn't, right? Some of it was that he was on administrative leave because he was being investigated by the league for a domestic violence incident so you know i think that if you know a booth wants to take time in say a pre-game segment you know where they can devote you know time and resource to it in a way that doesn't either feel like it's you know being given short shrift or that they are trying to shoehorn in, you know, this somber moment in the midst of like,

you know, getting ready to call a home run or something, you know, like it can it can lead to these very odd bits of sort of dissonance between the seriousness of the subject of domestic violence and intimate partner violence and, you know, the action on the field, which might, you know, isn't going to match up to that in terms of its weight. So I get why it can be kind of awkward and it can be hard to get right. I think that, you know, you want to approach moments like that by informing your audience and being honest about things. And if you don't think that like the duration of an at bat is an appropriate length to like really do justice to, you know, how does a league and an employer intervene on domestic violence? What, you know, rehabilitation steps has this particular player taken? Like, what is the impact that this is having on fans who are themselves survivors or

who are sympathetic to survivors. I understand how you might think about the enormity of that subject and be like, I can't fit this into an at-bat. And I think that that's fine. I think that you want to be honest about why players are absent. And I would imagine that particularly early in the season where you're going to see an you know, an abbreviated sort of truncated line from Ozuna. You have to account for where he was. And part of it was that he got hurt.

And part of it was that he was on leave. So I don't think you want to be dishonest about that. I think that if you're not going to take the broadcast as an opportunity to address it, like it does put pressure on you to be really mindful of how you're talking about that player in other contexts because you don't want the absence of this biographical fact to be overwhelmed by exuberance about the player or you know sort of admiration for their recent performance on the field like it can be hard to balance those things because we tend to fill the absence of mentioning

something with and he hit this many home runs and he's doing this and you know his you know he has this many stolen bases or whatever it is like i remember and i'm not gonna recall the exact contours of what they were talking about but i remember when the reds were in the postseason in 2020 and bauer was pitching and this was obviously before we had, you know, we knew about his sort of instinct to harass people online. And we knew about some of the controversial statements that he had made. We didn't know about the allegations of sexual assault. And I don't recall who the broadcasters were, but they said something sort of off the cuff about how, you know, he can be kind of controversial hot button I'm like we'll either talk about it or don't talk about it right like if you're going to talk about what this guy has done like don't just allude to it and then move on like

engage with it in in the way it deserves or just talk about how he's pitching like you can't have it both ways there so I don't think it's an easy thing to do. It's an awkward thing to do. It can be a hard subject to talk about in situations where what you're saying isn't being analyzed and commentated on by, you know, millions of people. So I have some sympathy for that. But I think that maybe if it were me, the way that I would look at it is I want to make sure I'm being honest with my audience. And so if a player has a suspension and that is relevant to them not having been on the fields this year or not having been on the field last year, I'm going to not shy away from saying he

was suspended for domestic violence or he was on administrative leave pending an investigation or what have you. And then if you're going to about it you know do it do it justice and that might mean moving it into a different part of the broadcast or writing a piece about it later or addressing it on a podcast but you know i i think that where people really get into trouble is that awkward like and he did this anyway yeah what the hell are we doing here yeah i see what will's saying because if you were just listing reasons why someone was absent and it's like you're equating it almost it's like oh yeah he missed uh 15 games with a hamstring strain and then he missed this time with a domestic violence suspension and then he got hit by a pitch and he had a bruised knee you know it's it's kind of weird just to like say it in a list like that but it would also be

weird not to mention it and to it might seem like you were sweeping it under the rug or something or just avoiding it because it's kind of awkward so i'd say if the player is just returning from that suspension, let's say, then you could devote more airtime to it and explain where was he and why. Why was he not here recently? But I don't know that you need to go into that every time you mention that absence at great length and in great detail for the rest of the player's career. But I also wouldn't say that you should not acknowledge it at all, just the same as if it were any kind of suspension, I guess. Like even if it's a PD something, you would probably say what that is. It's a violation of this policy. Well, it's a different policy, but you would still want to account for that absence

there. And it should be known that that happened. So yeah, I'd say look for the opportunities to talk about it in a more substantive way, but also it's okay maybe to mention it in other contexts and not be awkward about it. I think that as long as, and this is perhaps an annoyingly squishy answer, so I'll acknowledge that before I say it, but I think as long as you're looking at those kinds of suspensions and the incidents that precipitate them as serious and deeply impactful to the lives of the people involved and representative of experiences of people who are listening to your broadcast or are watching the game in the ballpark, you know, if you have an appropriate appreciation for the weight of that and are trying to be careful of other people in the way you talk about it, I think that having that as sort of your, you know, North Star is probably useful because, you know, I think that

some of the moments over the years, not just in baseball, but like in sports broadcasting generally, where, you know, broadcasts have done a bad job, what I would describe as a bad job of dealing with intimate partner violence or other, you know, stuff like that is when, you know, you can tell that they feel burdened by the need to address it at all and that results in some real like foot in mouth moments so i think if you view it as an unfortunate part of the fabric of baseball and that you have an obligation to treat it seriously just like you would anything else that impacts the availability of a player only this has the added weight of

being something that is an experience that people watching your broadcast probably have had or been proximate to through people they know in their lives you know you're probably gonna do better than if you're like oh i gotta you know they keep saying we gotta talk about this you know that's sort of the vibe you get sometimes and i'm like i'm sorry that we're burdening you. It's like, I think the person you need to address that with isn't the folks listening to the podcast. It's not our fault that we have to keep talking about this stuff. Just got a response from our friend Michael Bauman,

colleague at The Ringer about hidden ball tricks because I had asked him if they were more common at the college level. Oh, yeah. Because for some reason I thought that they were. And he says he doesn't have numbers, but he feels like he sees it at least one or two times a year in college. But he didn't remember the last time it had worked in MLB, so it wasn't just us.

He said it might be just that there are more college games, but it makes sense that less experienced players are more likely to fall for trick plays. So there's another argument in favor of watching college baseball. Yeah. Maybe it's annoying because the pitcher can't stand on the mound if he doesn't have the ball, right? And so you kind of have to pace around and maybe it disrupts the pitcher's rhythm and

maybe you think, oh, it's not even worth it. I would think it was worth it if I were a pitcher. I'd take the risk of disrupting my rhythm if I could maybe just erase that base runner. But you do have to plan and coordinate it and be tricky and sneaky together. And it's just a deviation from the routine. And maybe it's like, eh, why bother?

Let's just continue to play baseball here. We don't have to get too cute. Yeah, but you should cute yeah but like you should think about it like you're gonna do a heist right think about baseball as a heist movie and then you'd be excited it's a heist that you can unfailingly thwart by just not taking your lead until the pitcher's on the rubber foolproof protection against the hidden ball trick as is i guess just calling for time after you get to the next base. I wonder if it's become more common for players to do that in the instant replay era,

thereby inoculating themselves against the hidden ball trick. Gene Michael was another master of the hidden ball trick. I think he did it five times and Buddy Hunter in the minors. There's a book about it by Bill Dean, Finding the Hidden Ball Trick, The Colorful History of Baseball's Oldest Ruse. Here's a question from CJ who says, Let's say Ricky Henderson was born with a rare disease called, like, glass ass syndrome. Oh, no. He still has all of his other physical tools, including his speed, and overcomes his condition to reach the major leagues. and overcomes his condition to reach the major leagues.

Would he still have had the record for stolen bases if sliding would shatter his ass, killing him instantly? Would he still even steal bases at all, despite his remarkable speed? Let's say he's very good at stopping with his foot on the bag. He hooks it with his foot and rides it to the ground front side, preserving his ass from danger, but putting the front of his body at risk. I have dozens of other questions about how baseball would be played by

a man with glass ass syndrome, but I would prefer to let them come up naturally. Now, I had one question that I wanted to clarify with cj which is can he slide head first or does he also have glass cock syndrome yeah i was gonna say of course how far does the glass extend yeah i mean of course the first sufferer jack glass cock and the disease was named after him. Unfortunately, we remember him every year on a certain day. Well, he had no progeny, right? One would assume not.

Oh, boy. You know, I will admit at least 15% of why it's funny is that glass and ass rhyme. That's at least 15% of why it's funny is that glass and ass rhyme. That's at least 15% of it. CJ responded to my question about glass cock syndrome to say that glass ass syndrome is a very serious hypothetical disease. And my response was incredibly offensive to its would-be sufferers. So I apologize to anyone who has suffered from glass cock syndrome. I did not mean to make light of

your point. Man, this is making me wonder whether a glass jaw for a fighter is more literal than I took it to be. But glass ass syndrome. So Ricky, he's fast. He could stop on a dime, but he cannot slide foot first in

any way that would bring his ass into contact with the ground. So I think it does depend extend to the front, then he could still slide one way. Although he'd have to be careful because what if he rolled over, got tousled or something, and that's the end of him. How far does the glass extend along the sides of his body? Yeah, this is like the M. Night movie. I mean, there was a movie about Mr. Glass. It was not limited to one region, I don't think, but he became a supervillain because of this.

I just spoiled Mr. Glass. Sorry, everyone. Wait, his ass was made out of glass in the M. Night Shyamalan movie? Did he live in a village that he thought was in the olden times but actually it was in the 2000s yeah to be fair i did not actually see mr glass i saw the original i saw unbreakable which is actually good that is one of the good m nights look i will i will stand up for the village i mean i understand why it has its problems but it was fine.

So was science. You know, it doesn't, you don't feel great about cheering for Mel Gibson. I'll say that, but, you know. I guess it was actually called Glass. Glass. Just Glass was the sequel. Did it have a twist? I imagine so.

Hopefully the glass ass syndrome person does not twist because then the ass would come into contact with the glass. Okay, so I have a couple of questions here. We're going to take this, you know, we're going to deal with this with the seriousness that it deserves. So here's my first question. Like what kind of glass? Because there is glass that's like pretty, I mean, it's still, you know, crackable. Oh, no. Right.

that's like pretty i mean it's still you know crackable oh no right i don't want to bring up blown glass in this context either when we're talking about i'm almost 36 and i am laughing so hard at this okay so there are like you know there are different kinds of glass like there are glass there there are kinds of glass. There are kinds of glass that are meant to withstand some amount of impact, that are meant to be strong, not like steel, but not like china either. Tempered glass. Right. It can be tempered. It can be very thick.

It's like you want to know what kind of glass and then i i wonder like what advancements in in padding you could employ to sort of help protect the glass from cracking because you don't want to crack you don't want to crack glasses so glass crack yeah god and i think that you'd need an answer to that because, look, the most obvious source of peril for Henderson, given what we know about his career, is obviously the stolen base stuff. But it's not the only risk. Like, what happens if he gets hit by a pitch on his glass ass?

That's going to shatter his whole glass ass. Even if it's just a breaking ball, I think it would shatter his whole glass ass even if it's just a breaking ball i think it would shatter his whole glass ass and so i think he'd need it's like a batting it's like a batting helmet but for your glass ass or like um you know it's like one of the oven mitt gloves but for your glass ass and then he'd have like a real you know if you have like a really you know like good looking hiney because it would be padded in addition to the glass underneath which would give it like real defined shape you'd be like oh that's some glass ass you got there ricky yeah it might need to be the episode title because like i think that you would

have to you would have to deal with the padding problem to at least provide some amount of insulation. Is the glass replaceable? How does it intersect with his human skin? Is he like a weird glass Borg ass man? At some point, the glass ass has to meet the road and be integrated into his human person, which is not made of glass. And so it's like, can you just replace?

And then if you could replace the glass ass, you'd replace it with something stronger during games and you'd swap the glass back in after, maybe. Yeah, maybe it's like a frame, like a window. It's like a plate of glass that is framed and kind of implanted by his human skin can you see through it into oh that's a really disturbing question that's probably the first question we should have asked. Can you see the inside of Ricky Henderson through his glass ass? Because that seems very intimate to be able to see a person's innards through their glass ass. Well, he's well padded and presumably wearing pants, so fans would not see him when he's in the shower after the game.

Ben, he'd wear pants. This isn't... Be serious. Yeah, sorry. Excuse me. game ben he'd wear pants he this isn't be serious yeah sorry excuse me i think if if the spirit of the question and i don't know what the spirit of the question is the spirit of the question is ricky henderson he's got a glass ass now it's very serious i like how i'm like okay we've had our fun with this now let's seriously consider the glass ass question on the merits. But I think if the spirit of the question is like, could a player who can't slide still be good at stealing bases if he's as fast and adept at stealing bases in other ways as Ricky Henderson was? I think you would not be the all-time stolen base record leader. I think you could still steal

some bases. I don't know what percentage of Ricky steals were standing up, but probably a pretty high percentage of them. Sure, yeah. He was really fast. He got good jumps. So he could still steal some bases. He'd probably still steal more bases than anyone steals these days.

We have, I think, answered the question of would Ricky Henderson still steal bases if he were around today, or would he just be discouraged from doing that because of how teams discourage players from being high volume base dealers? But if he has glass ass, then obviously the break-even point, the shatter even point, yeah, his break-even point, it's- yeah his break-even point it's literal break-even point yeah there'd be a lot of risk aversion here yeah the upside is you steal a base the downside is that you break your butt and you die yeah you break your whole well and so here's i guess this is my second question which is would he die well that was part of the question that it would

be fatal because i'd like to think that with modern medical interventions that he could be saved because like i'm gonna be vulnerable here about and say that i don't know how asses work like i don't from in terms of like the um how the the barrier between you know the barrier that is your ass between the outside and your innards. I'm sure that there's some amount of permeability there, but in Forrest Gump, he was in war, and then he got ice cream,

and they fixed his ass. I think that they maybe trivialized the amount of pain that that would involve. But, you know, it was kind of a silly movie. So I guess what I'm saying is like it would it would certainly be upsetting and it could be potentially debilitating long term. Because, again, we're not sure if you can replace or repair the glass ass. Like, do you just have another crack? To be clear, another crack. Anyway.

Yeah. I think usually, often it's survivable because there is a lot of padding there. Right. Maybe no vital organs right there. How dare you downplay the importance of the human ass. How dare you downplay the importance of the human ass. How dare you, sir. If the entire region is glass, it seems like it would be tough to staunch the bleeding in that case. And you would be vulnerable to some serious injuries there.

Anyway, I think that he could still steal some bases aside from the fact that he would be putting his life on the line and maybe it would not be worth it to him. I don't know that an athletic career would be the best idea for the glass-ass player, but if he's willing to take that risk and has all of Ricky Henderson's skills, then I think he could still steal some bases. Would he eventually fall down and die? Yeah, probably. I mean, he's still human even if he has a glass ass i'm here to tell you that i don't think he'd make the majors i think that it wouldn't and

not because he wouldn't still be a talented player although would running with his weird human flesh glass intersection be comfortable i don't know i don't know but because i think that you know the the vulnerabilities are not limited to base running like he could just i know that there's a lot of standing around in baseball right us too hard or something yeah he could get hit by a pitch in his a lot of legal liability presumably he's signed waivers but still you wouldn't want your glass ass player to be broken on the fields that would be bad that would not be entertaining that would not be family friendly entertainment so yeah like you'd just be staring at him really worried the whole time about like right and wasn't his nickname man of steel so this is hilarious like wasn't that one of his nicknames yeah yeah i just thought of another issue which is what would happen with the butt pat right or the butt

slap which is a fine baseball tradition he'd have to be exempt people would forget all the time because you're so used to just normal butts they just aren't used to a normal butt right and sometimes it can be a pretty tough tap too so you might just forget yourself and next thing you know he's hemorrhaging over there and you'd feel terrible about it so hemorrhoiding hemorrhoid oh no i don't know man we have maybe taken this question to its logical conclusion. And like how would he- Logical. Nothing about this is logical.

Well, no, it's reverent for the glass asked amongst us. How would he feel? You know, like how would he, what if he fell down? What if he fell? And like, or what if he, what if he, you like or what if he what if he uh you know saw a mouse and like jumped back and stumbled and then like sat on it and broke his ass i'm saying if he had no regard for his own safety if he could slide head first and he was also as fast and had the instincts of ricky henderson he could still steal most of the bases that ricky henderson stole until something went wrong and it ended

horribly so it's just really are you willing to take the risk is the team willing to assume that risk assume that risk but i think the skills would be enough because I don't know what percentage is sliding head first versus leg first. And I think he'd be subject to some extra injury risk with broken fingers and such. And I think he slid head first a fair amount as it was. But there's a quote on his Wikipedia page from a 2008 SI article where he explains why he was mostly a headfirst slider. I wanted to know how to dive into the bases because I was getting strawberries on my knees and strawberries on my ass.

That's a different question, Ricky. This is glass ass, not strawberry ass. I was thinking about headfirst versus feetfirst and wondering which would save my body. With headfirst, I worried about pounding my shoulders and my hands. And with feet first, I would worry about my knees and my legs, not to mention the glass ass. I felt that running was more important to me with my legs, so I started going head first. I got my low to the ground technique from airplanes. So maybe this would affect him less than a dedicated feet first

slider. I think you could still steal a lot of bases it's just probably not worth the risk but we can add mr glass ass syndrome to the pantheon of effectively wild weird players with the mole man and vroom vroom guy and the player with the third arm on the top of his head etc don't forget that the thing that is the that it still rankles us about third arm guy is what kind of hair is it is it arm hair is it head hair we don't know yeah you're always really interested in just like the mechanics of it just well yeah what does it look like how does it work how does it work because here's the thing i don't write fiction and part of it is because i think that you have to you know you need to build plausible worlds and so you're sitting there and you're like ah the issue is that he can't

steal bases in the majors and it's like no no it's much simpler than that how does skin interact with the glass like how does it sit with the glass? You gotta go. Because otherwise, your world building is gonna be really, you know, it's gonna be incomplete. And then you're gonna end up like with, you're making up nouns in science fiction and you're like, here's this glass ass man.

And you're like, but why would that be? What affliction? Did he get struck by lightning while he had sand on his butt? And then like, it turned the sand into glass story yeah oh yeah well and and it could really drive home the tension and torture he feels because what if the lightning

strike also energized him and so he could like really go vroom vroom but he has this glass ass right so i don't know i've said too I think. Like a combination of multiple Spider-Man supervillains here, I think. So last, I was going to say last normal question. Because that last one was so normal. So it is from Samuel who says, before robot umps become a reality, let's hurry to take advantage of the next innovation in strike zone contouring technology, gaslighting. First, a hypothesis. Umpires are human. That's not the hypothesis.

The hypothesis is that, like pretty much any human in the normal range of trait agreeableness, people don't like to feel their decisions have upset others. They will feel naturally inclined to make up for mistakes. I believe that if an umpire misses a call and the batter or catcher gets upset and the um-up call, everyone assumes that that exists to some extent, I think. means available, however insidious, shows their displeasure on borderline calls that go against them as a strategy. Batters, pitchers, catchers, the dugout, most of it is subtle. A slight head tilt here, a glance at the ump there, that thing where the catcher has a false start on the throw back to the pitcher at an opportune time. A batter known for his strike zone judgment occasionally makes a big show of arguing a pitch that is on the corner but definitely a strike. For this to work properly, there will have to be positive reinforcement too.

Head nods and a slight pep in energy when a call goes their way. Also, just being nice to the umps can't hurt, see previous hypothesis. I think we tend to assume player reactions to pitch calls are just in-the-moment reactions, but if a team were to systematically do this for a season, what would happen? Would it work? Would it be unethical? So their market inefficiency is just to be nice? Sometimes nice, but sometimes not nice. Just to be very demonstrative in either direction. So if

it's a bad call, they are just riding you the whole game. They're getting on you immediately. If it's a good call, they are providing positive reinforcement there. And I was thinking of this because back when I was an intern with the Yankees and they had just discovered catcher framing and so had I. And so I was endlessly fascinated by it. There was a hypothesis in that front office at the time that maybe this is what Bobby Cox's Braves were doing back then, because the Braves seemingly had an ability to get extra strike calls over that period. I think this was maybe before that particular time period, but they had gone back and looked and it seemed like Atlanta had a track record of just getting better favorable strike calls under Bobby Cox. And maybe that was just that they had Maddox and Glavin and they had these

guys who were able to expand the zone and they had great command and they could get a little on the edge of the plate or beyond. But I think there was also the thought that, well, Bobby Cox, he's always getting on umpires and he's getting ejected. And so maybe he is just badgering them so constantly that they are actually, whether they know it or not, conceding every now and then and just being like, OK, Bobby, I will give you this one. Now, thinking of Dale Scott's book, which we read recently in order to talk to him, he got frustrated by managers who'd be on you the entire game and would be bugging you from the dugout. No umpire likes that. And so you could say that this might backfire because the umpires would just be so annoyed that they would not want to give you strikes. But if the entire team was on you, you'd just kind of feel ganged up on and maybe you would feel some peer pressure to some extent or some desire to just like get them off your back. And if you were just relentless about it, I could see it maybe working.

But like not going beyond the point where you're going to get thrown out, that's the tough thing. Because if you are arguing balls and strikes, you're just going to get ejected. And if you're doing it constantly, you're going to get suspended. So you'd have to be going right up to the line, but not tiptoeing over it. Well, and it strikes me as the kind of thing that would have diminishing returns as you had broader adoption across the league right because if both managers and both teams are just like really giving it to an ump you know i think that the if there were an advantage to be gleaned from this that the umpire was just like enough already fine like yes i will give you that call so that you stop haranguing me

it's kind of like tanking for draft picks right like the utility of the strategy declines over time as other teams start to do it too so i think that maybe you would have like a brief window where you were able to take advantage of this and glean some benefit from it but i don't think it would be a sustainable window and i think it would be a sustainable window. And I think it would be a really hard thing to calibrate like the sass-o-meter, right? Because you're right that like Dale talked about it being irritating, but him trying not to sort of bend one way or the other

either to his own irritation or to their, you know, kind of badgering. But, you know, where that line is for every umpire might be different and their commitment to that, you know, trying to be sort of even keeled and steadfast might also vary ump to ump. So I imagine there would be like a lot of variability to it, but maybe you could like, maybe you could have like a person in your front office who is like trying to study the way that different umpires comport themselves and maybe the answer isn't to have this as a universal strategy but to identify particular umps who you view as like psychologically susceptible right yeah which is terrible so don't do that yeah don't do this

this is like violating lots of norms this is not a good thing for the game probably and yes you would have to have a very finely calibrated red assery yes as opposed to glass assery where you would just not cross the line, see, in glass aster, you're trying to avoid cracks. And in red aster, you're trying to get them to crack. Eh? Perfect. All right. Lightning round, rapid fire, pedantic questions here.

I feel like I'm going to have to ask Jessie if she wants to write a little ditty for how can you not be pedantic about baseball as a segment. She wants to write a little ditty for how can you not be pedantic about baseball as a segment. It's weird that it took until like almost our 10th anniversary for this to be a segment. We've been answering pedantic questions about baseball basically since the start. But there just happened to be a bunch. And we thought, oh, this would be fun. By the way, those T-shirts could be coming sometime soon. Stay tuned.

We will let you know. Stay tuned. Okay. These will be you know. Stay tuned. Okay. These will be fast, I think. Jack says, my fiance and I were discussing the Jose Ramirez contract extension and the term hometown discount. She is irked by this term because Jose Ramirez is not from Cleveland but from Bonney in the Dominican Republic. I didn't have a problem with the term being used, but I am curious to hear your thoughts on the matter. Can we say hometown discount if it is not actually the player's hometown? Oh, this might be one where now it's going to bug me. I was immune to being bothered before,

but now I may be less. I'm sure I used it this way. I said hometown discount in the context of Mike Trout signing extensions with the Angels. That is not his hometown. Right. The only person he's ever signed a hometown discount with was SuperBretzel. Like, I don't know how long it takes until it's just like, this is my home now. It's not my original home. It's not where I'm from. But I've played here for a long time and I've lived here. Maybe it depends on whether you actually live there year round as opposed to just renting during the season. So maybe that matters. Are you an actual resident? Is it your hometown. So I could see where if you're actually living there some portion of the year, if you own property there, it's a hometown of yours. It's not your only hometown, maybe. So I think you could use it that way. So I think you have to have been there for some time for you to use this term. And if you've been there for some time, presumably you probably put down roots to some extent. Like, it seems like Jose Ramirez really likes being in Cleveland. Yeah. I don't know if he considers it his hometown, but I'm sure he considers it a place that he considers home when he's there and he finds hospitable and wants to stay and likes being.

So I feel like it's fine. Ben, the Merriam-Webster definition of hometown is the city or town where one was born or grew up, also the place of one's principal residence. I think that in order for this to apply to a player within the context of a franchise, it's not just that they need to have made maybe their major league debut with that team but i also think that it maybe matters if

they have a long track record in the minor league system of that team right like if you were traded if you're like a an upper level prospect and you're traded and then like immediately debut for another team like we wouldn't call that your hometown team for a while. It would take some time, you know, like establishing your principal residence. Right, yeah. Yeah, I think I'm okay with it as long as you've been there for a while and you have some ties to the community. But maybe it would be useful to be able to distinguish

if someone is actually from there, is a local. Maybe there'd be some extra hometown discount on top of that. But I think in most contexts, in the way it's typically used, we all get it. And I doubt that the players in most of those cases would object. Yeah. You didn't give me the dictionary definition for glass ass. Where was that? Could have used that.

I need a WebMD entry for that then. Yeah. I see some Urban Dictionary definitions, but I'm not going to read them. Yeah. I think we've done enough in that segment. Put it that way. Mitch, Patreon supporter, says, another entry for the wild and wonderful world of being pedantic about baseball. My mom and I were watching the start of today's Yankees game, and she referred to Nestor Cortez Jr. as a phenom.

I can't place why, but that doesn't feel right to me. Oh, I think that it needs to be a combination of really incredible talent and like recency, right? Like Mike Trout's not a phenom anymore because he's like, he's Mike Trout, you know? Like he's the best player in baseball. But I imagine if you're a Yankees fan, you might look at Cortez as a phenom, right? Maybe? I feel like he's too old. How long did it, well, oh, so is it about-

He's not old. I think it's too old. How long did it? Well, oh, so is it about? He's not old. I think it's about age. Okay. Yes, recency-wise, you could call him a phenom because he really kind of came out of nowhere last year, and now he's unbelievable. So he's phenomenal, that's for sure. Is he a phenom? I will quote you the dictionary.com definition. A phenom is a phenomenon, especially a young prodigy.

And the example sentence is a 12-year-old tennis phenom. So that is kind of the way that I think of it. So like Wander Franco is a phenom. Wander Franco is a phenom for sure. Julio Rodriguez could be described as like a phenom. I mean, so it is recency, it is youthfulness, and then it is incredible skill. Yeah. All bound together.

I can see the argument for Nestor Cortez. Like, maybe the rule of thumb is that, like, if you can rent a car without paying extra for insurance, like, you're not a phenom. You're just, like, a good big leaguer. Yeah. But I think recency matters because you're right. Like even Juan Soto, who famously is 23, I probably would not call him a phenom because he's been great for five years now. Right. So he is phenomenal. Phenom to me implies like you just came out of nowhere.

You just had some meteoric rise. You just showed up on the scene. Broken onto the scene. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So I think Nestor may be a tad too old at 27 i think maybe the the phenom line i don't know i guess i would put it i think we've done in the past like what is a young player

what does that mean how old do you have to be to not be a young player so phenom would be even younger than the young line for me. So I probably would put it at like 23-ish. Like is Adlai Rutschman a phenom? He's 24. He just came up. If he goes on a hot streak, is he a phenom? Maybe. Maybe. Yeah.

He has the recency. So maybe it's 24. I think under 25, you have to have just gotten there. You're a phenom. I will give you that. All right. Last pedantic question. Max, Patreon supporter, says, I wish there was a more consistent meaning or usage of the phrases inside and outside corners when it comes to pitch location on the inside corner hit the outside corner etc people use these phrases to mean different things i realize the strike zone is a 3d space but think the corner should represent the edge of the zone in both horizontal and vertical directions it's super meaningless but it grates on me to hear a pitch called on the corner when its location is at the belt on the inner or outer side of the plate. So this is the second pedantic corner question that is actually about the definition of corners.

Last time it was the corner bases other than home plate. And now it is about home plate and the strike zone. So corner, Max is, yeah, he's saying like it has to be the upper and outer corner like it has to be the the juncture of edges as opposed to just one edge like thigh high but on the outer or inner side of the plate does that bother you if someone says on the corner and it's like belt high but it's just out or in i tend to think of it meaning like proximity to the literal corners of like a like if you were watching if you're using a zone overlay as your guide on a broadcast that you would think of it as the sort of something in the upper or lower third on the

inside or the outside. So I think you're with Max there. So you're saying it has to be higher low a bit in addition to in or out. Which doesn't mean that it has to be like literally on the corner. Like, you know, if you break the strike zone down into nine boxes, you just don't want it to be on any of the boxes in the middle, up or down. So what would you say if it were on the horizontal edge, but not on the vertical edge? Would you just say edge or? Yeah.

Yeah. Or I guess. Yeah. I'm trying to think of what I would say. I guess I probably wouldn't usually say corner unless it were like low in a way or yeah, it would have to be both of those things probably. I guess I'm with Max here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if someone says paint the corner, if you're saying like over the black, like the black, I guess, is not technically the strike zone, but often it's called that way because you give a little and so maybe most of the ball is over the black. So you could say paint the black, and that might be an acceptable alternative to painting the corner if it is just like belt high.

So that would work as an alternative. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm with Max here. I don't know that this has bothered me.

It's definitely not a pet peeve. I'm not sure it's even a peeve of mine, but I think I'm with Max here. I don't know that this has bothered me. It's definitely not a pet peeve. I'm not sure it's even a peeve of mine, but I think I agree with his definition. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let me end with Stat Blast here. And as a reminder, the Stat Blast, as always, is sponsored by Stat Head, which is powered by Baseball Reference.

head, which is powered by baseball reference. It's a powerful tool for looking up all sorts of useful and fun stats about baseball and not just MLB, but also other major sports and leagues. We use it constantly. I don't even realize how often I use it. It's like when you see stats about how often on average people check their phones and it's some astronomical number and you don't even really realize you're doing it. If I had stats on how often I use stat head, it would be like that because I will go there almost reflexively when I'm curious about something. Several times a week we get questions from listeners and I will just direct them to a StatHead search that I do for them. But you can do it for yourself. You just have to go to StatHead.com and sign up for a one-year subscription.

$80 list price, but you can get $20 off of that if you use our coupon code WILD20. So again, don't deprive yourself of this data. It is edifying. It is fascinating. It will quench your curiosity. Go to stathead.com. Use the coupon code WILD20. W-I-L-D 2-0. All right, here's the song. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to DASTA+. Day Step Last Okay, First Step Last was prompted by a question from Patreon supporter Reggie, who says, Today I ended up down a baseball wormhole.

I discovered that one of our student workers was born the day Al Leiter became the first pitcher get to the 30 defeated teams club, and it is the very team their respective organizations are facing that weekend. If that is the case, that is interesting. Here is my question, though. I found lists for pitchers who have wins against every team and a list for those with saves against all the franchises of MLB, but nowhere can I seem to find a list of the pitchers who have all lost a game to every team. Do you have any information that can help me with this? And I do, courtesy of

frequent StatBlast consultant Ryan Nelson and his handy-dandy RetroSheet database. Find Ryan on Twitter at rsnelson23. So this is loss as in actually took the loss, was credited with the loss, not just your team lost a game that you started. So I will read you the list of pitchers who have lost a game to all of the current 30 MLB franchises. That is the complete list. Although there are a couple of players who are close, one away. Zach Greinke has lost games to 29 teams the current teams but has not lost to the Marlins and Ian Kennedy has not lost to Atlanta those are the two active pitchers at 29 so I will put those names and lists online if you're interested but that did

kind of get me curious about pitcher losses in general we don't think a lot or talk a lot about pitcher wins or pitcher losses for that matter these days. But I was just thinking you have starting pitchers who get decisions a lot less often than they used to because starters go less deep into games. And we have deprioritized the win and the loss for other reasons. We just have better stats available now. But I think another reason is that pitchers are not having as much of an impact on who actually wins that game anymore just because they're not pitching in as much of it, any individual pitcher, of course. So just looking at the rate of decisions, so the percentage of all starts that produced a decision for the starting pitcher,

a win or a loss, like going back to 1901, it was 99%. It was 98.6% of the time the pitcher was credited with a win or loss, the starting pitcher, that is. It stayed pretty high for quite a while. It was like in the 90s up until maybe the war, World War II, and then it gradually declined a little bit, but it was still consistently like 80-something in the 70s, and then it was three-quarters of the time. As late as 2014 even, it was like 70% of the time the starting pitcher would get the decision. But these days, it's around an all-time low, as you would expect. So this season, the starting pitcher has gotten the decision less than 62% of the time. Last year, it was 59.

The year before that, it was 58. So really, it's less than 60 basically now. And the other interesting thing about this to me was I was thinking, okay, you're less likely to get a decision if you're a starter. You're also less likely to stay in the game long enough to qualify for a win, but you can get credited with a loss without going as deep into it. If you're pitching well, you still have to go five innings to get the win in almost all cases. But if you are not pitching well, you don't have to stay in long at all. It just matters whether you gave up the lead and that was the decisive lead change. So I was curious to see whether nowadays there would be a higher percentage of decisions that were losses relative to wins than there used to be. And that is indeed true. Again, going back to the beginning, it was basically 50-50 almost exactly every year because pitchers were almost always getting the win or the loss.

They were in the entire game. So half of those decisions would be wins and half of them would be losses roughly. And that didn't move all that much for quite a while. But now it's down to wins being just about 46% of decisions for starting pitchers, 46.7 as we speak. And it was really like consistently as late as 2005, it was 50%. And as late as 2013, it was 49.8%. Like it hadn't changed all that much until just these past few years, really. Like 2017, it was 49%, and then 2018, it was 48%, and then 2019, it was 47.5%. 2020, which was weird in every way, was very low. That was 45%. And then last year was 46.6%, and now the same. So not only are you less likely to get a decision as a starter now but if you do get a decision it is more likely that that decision will be a loss so just starting pitchers

on the whole going into Friday's games are 384 and 439 so far this season not so great wow that's not so great yeah yeah and it's just a product of uh the way that wins are awarded as opposed to losses like uh you can blow it in any number of yes yeah you have a lot more avenues to failure than you do to success which feels like one of those things that you say when you're trying to like save something you know it's like yes profundity you were like naming the guys who have a loss to every team and as you were going through i was that you say when you're trying to save something. It's like, oh, wow, profundity. You were naming the guys who have a loss to every team. And as you were going through it, I was like, do I have a list? Apart from bad pitchers, is there... Because you have to be...

Every pitcher is going to lose games. It's a really great analysis that I'm contributing here. But it's like you want to... You have to be good enough that you stick around uh long enough to accrue losses i mean the the kind of nature of those losses and whether it was like a back-breaking like one run or like wow you got blown out early you know would kind of depend but it's like an interesting talent level to calibrate to yeah a lot of counting stat leaderboards are led by great players even if they're undesirable stats like right albert

pujols being grounded all-time leader for yeah double plays he's played forever he has uh made almost 13 000 plate appearances so that will happen especially if you are slow like Albert Pujols. But I think he more than made up for that. One more implication of this evolution in starting pitcher wins and losses that occurred to me and that I tested. This is probably more pitcher wins and losses analysis than I've done on previous stat blasts. But this actually is kind of interesting to me. It seems to me that relative to the past, the percentage of starts that a starter loses might be more reflective of their performance now than the percentage of starts that they win because you can have a good start by contemporary standards and easily not win because you went five innings or you didn't even go five innings.

You pitched really well, but you just didn't stay in long enough to have a lead when you left that was preserved. really well, but you just didn't stay in long enough to have a lead when you left that was preserved. But you can still suck early and leave with a sizable deficit that your team can't overcome. So I thought, well, if you're good on a rate basis, on a per inning basis, you might be less likely to win than you would have in an earlier era where if you had that same ERA or FIP, you were going deeper into games. But if you're bad while you're in there, you can dig a deep enough hole that your team can't climb out of it, and then you can still take the loss, even if you're like an opener who's going an inning or two, which I did not attempt to exclude from the sample. So what I did was I looked at the correlation of wins as a

percentage of starts to FIP and ERA, and then losses as a percentage of starts to FIP and ERA, FIP and ERA, and then losses as a percentage of starts to FIP and ERA, just for starting pitchers with at least 100 innings pitched in each season from 1901 to 2021. And I guess you could do this on a per-start basis in addition to a seasonal basis, but this was easier. And what I found is that gradually over time, these correlations have strengthened. There's an upward slope to these correlations, so there's been a tighter connection between wins over games started and FIP and ERA and losses over games started and FIP and ERA. And my hypothesis is that that is because you have to really pitch exceptionally well these days to win a game because you're less likely to go deep into it. Whereas in the past,

when everyone was constantly pitching complete games or close to it, you didn't always have to pitch great to win. You could just stick it out. You were always going to qualify for the win, so you could pick up some Ws just because you were still the pitcher of record when your team scored a bunch of runs. And I think there is also support for the idea that losses as a percentage of starts have gotten more closely correlated to ERA and FIP than wins as a percentage of starts. Especially if you look, say, for the wildcard era or the 30-team era or over the past 20 years, the correlation between loss percentage and pitcher performance has climbed much more rapidly than the correlation between win percentage and pitcher performance. This may be easier to

grasp with a graph, so I will put the spreadsheets online. But to recap here, starting pitchers are less likely to get either type of decision these days. When they do get a decision, it is more likely than it used to be to be a loss. And how often you get a decision is more reflective of your performance on a per inning basis than it used to be. And finally, that is especially true for the percentage of starts that you lose, because you don't always have the power to win one, but if you're bad enough, you almost always have the power to lose one. So in a sense, it is less useful to look at starting pitcher win-loss record than it used to be, because there

are many more no decisions. But what your winning percentage is in the starts when you do get decisions, that might actually be more tightly tied to your performance than it once was, especially if you've lost a high percentage of your starts. Maybe kind of counterintuitive, but kind of cool. And this one is from Taylor in Tampa. Longtime listener and yet this nonsense is what inspired me to write in for the first time. The first game of the Yankees-White Sox doubleheader yesterday, this was last week maybe, was three hours, nine minutes long, and it started at 3.09 p.m.

So yeah, 3.09 and 3.09. Has this ever happened before? That the time of game and game start time are exactly the same. I've always noticed these data points in box scores, so is this something that has always been tracked? Is this meaningless? Why do I find this interesting? Not sure you'll be able to answer that last part, but if anyone is, let me know because I was also kind of interested in this because my snap judgment was that this can't be that common, at least like you think of the

typical start times these days. And the reason why this one worked was that it started at 3.09 p.m. So if we had tons of games starting at 3.09 p.m., then we would also have a lot of games that had the start time matching the game length, because there are a lot of games that last 3.09. But that is a weird start time, at least in this era. So often you have your one or 105 starts, right? Well, you're not going to get any one hour games. And then maybe you have your 405 starts. So there's some potential there. And then generally you have like your seven or eight o'clock starts, right? And so you're not going to get many 7 or 8-hour games. So I wasn't thinking that this would be common.

And it is not common, but it is also not unprecedented. So Ryan Nelson says, We have game lengths for 98% of games since 1916 and first pitch time for about 50% of those games. 16 and first pitch time for about 50% of those games. Of these 80,000 games, 74 have had matching game lengths and game starting times in local time. They range from the presumably rain-shortened game between the Cardinals and Phillies on April 8th, 1979, which started at 1.18 p.m. and went for 1.18. which started at 1.18 p.m. and went for 1.18.

I didn't check to see if it was rain shortened, but I assume so. It was an April game and it was definitely something shortened. It was a five inning game, which is still pretty speedy to finish that fast in five innings. But that has actually happened. So even the one o'clock start time, it has been done. And it ranges all the way. Oh, that game actually ended in a tie after the fifth. So that's a weird one. It goes all the way to a 7.06 start time, 7-hour, 6-minute game between the Diamondbacks and Phillies on August 24, 2013.

And that game started at 7.06, took 18 innings to complete, and also took seven hours and six minutes to complete. I think that is the fourth longest regular season game of all time, and the longest in terms of duration of any game that was maybe under 21 innings, I think. So that was a really, really long one. And it just so happened that it lasted seven hours and six minutes. So isn't that convenient? So I will put the spreadsheet online as always and link to it on the show page. But

there's a smattering here. Like the next longest is a 5.27 start time in 1968 that went five hours and 27 minutes and then you have to go down to a 415 415 a 409 409 a 406 406 actually surprised that there aren't range. And then there are some like 333, 333 in 1961 or a 330, 330 in 1989. So some of this like 318, 318, 1957, some of this I guess was that game times started at what to us seem like odd times in earlier eras where whatever, maybe you didn't have lights in some of those years you weren't planning your game start times around tv so there just was probably more variability in game start times just over the course of baseball history and so there are some of these that would look weird to our eyes now, but there are a bunch in the like 2-0 something, 2-0 something range or 2-15, 2-20. That's sort of the sweet spot is between that two hours and three hours, three and a half hours, because that's how long most games have lasted.

And there have also been some games that have started then in the 60s in the 70s it seems like there is a high concentration of like 215 or 205 starts so that's why you get that but these days it is kind of rare it's it's tough to do it it's rare just in general but i think given when games are kind of clustered around these days and given the length of the typical game it's not something you see every day so i see why taylor and tampa was interested in this well-spotted taylor yeah yeah i will give you one more and i think this may be my favorite of the bunch because it was prompted by roger angel so this was a comment that caught my eye on Jay Jaffe's remembrance of Roger Angel. Actually, this was not his main Roger Angel remembrance, but this was his collection of

contributions from other writers, yours truly included, who submitted some of their Roger Angel favorites. And there is a comment here from listener Thryn who quotes from a Roger Angel passage in a famous essay of his called Agincourt and After. And this is not the famous part of that essay, maybe the most famous part of it. And you have read this on the podcast before. But if you care to read that passage again, this is from November 75. This is his piece on the 1975 postseason, including the legendary 1975 World Series. And this is kind of an angel greatest hit. And this is a passage that I think you are fond of and many are fond of. What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are

all about. This is what we come for. It is foolish and childish on the face of it to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. And the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut, I know this look, I know it by heart, is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring. Caring deeply and passionately. Really caring. Which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern,

as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete, the infantile and noble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball, seems a small price to pay for such a gift. Thank you. So that is a deservedly famous passage from Agincourt and After. This is an obscure one that you will not hear quoted as often.

But Roger Angel wrote just almost as an aside, comebacks and late rallies are actually extremely scarce in baseball and an excellent guaranteed cash producing long term investment. Roger Angel's like shilling for FanDuel here in 1975. No, he would never. But he says an excellent guaranteed cash producing long term investment is to wager that the winning team in any game will score more runs in a single inning than the losing team scores in nine. And then he says in this series, however, the line scores alone reveal the rarity of what we saw in six of the seven games the winning team came from behind and one of the games the winning team came from behind twice. So he's saying that's rare. That's why that was so special, because comebacks are not actually as common as you think. So let me repeat that again. An

excellent, guaranteed, cash-producing, long-term investment is to wager that the winning team in any game will score more runs in a single inning than the losing team scores in nine. So the Fangraphs commenter Thryn said, I wonder whether that is true. Seems like it could be a fun project to find out. Does that sound true to you? Does that strike you as true or not? It's one of those things that wouldn't necessarily seem true. But also if you told me it was true, I'd be like, huh, okay. You know, I don't have a strong instinct one way or another.

I could see myself swayed by, well, you know, teams win 1-0. And maybe that happens a lot. And so, yeah, I don't know. I don't know that I would have a finely tuned instinct for it, though. Okay. We'll stay tuned for a, hmm, huh, okay, answer then in just a minute. The idea that the winning team will score more runs in a single inning than the losing team scores in nine, that to me sounded unlikely.

My gut reaction was, that doesn't sound right. And I sent this to Ryan Nelson, and he shared my skepticism as well, that this would be true. And from a certain point of view, it is not true. From another point of view, it is actually quite true. So technically, literally, it is only true 40% of the time that the winning team will score more runs in a single inning than the losing team scores in nine. However, because Angel was talking about this as a guaranteed cash-producing long-term investment wagering here, I don't know that we need to take it that literally. We could look at it from a wagering perspective. As Ryan pointed out, it's true 40% of the time. It's false 38.4% of the time. And it's a push 21.6% of the time. Oh, because they score exactly as many as they end up. Yeah. 1908. It was true 51.5% of the time in 1909. It was true 50.9% of the time. And so when Ryan told me that, I thought, okay, that's dead ball era. That must be why it was really paying off back

then. And Ryan's saying over the course of baseball history, it's a winning bet if you look at it that way. But I did want to know more about how it is affected by the offensive environment. So Ryan looked at this by year. He says the profitability of this bet is fairly strongly negatively correlated with run environment, the correlation negative 0.76, where negative one would be a perfect negative correlation, where one thing moves in one direction and the other moves in the other direction. As runs per game increases by one, the profitability of the bet decreases by 7.8%. For reference, the bet has an aggregate profit of 1.6% over the history of baseball,

so a 7.8% swing is huge. So you could say that it has paid off long term, but it has been a very bad bet at some times and been a good bet at other times. So it really matters what the scoring environment is. in 18 of them. And if you bet on every game this century, you would have expected a 2.2% profit. The best single year, as noted in baseball history for this bet, was 1908, when you would have earned 29.6% profit on your investment. The worst year on record is also the first, 1871, if you were going to count that, when you would have had a negative 47 percent profit margin. The worst since 1900 would be the rabbit ball year of 1930 when you would have lost 20.1 percent. The longest streak of infeasibility or unprofitability for this bet was from 1920 to 1940 when only one year was profitable. Pretty high scoring era on the whole. pretty high scoring era on the whole. And I asked Ryan, what's the breakeven point where you would want to place this bet or not based on runs per game scored per team? And he says that it's 4.72 runs per game is kind of the dividing line. So higher than that, this would be a bad bet. Lower than that,

it would be a smart bet on the whole. This year, we are so far at 4.22 runs per game, so we are well under that. So this would actually be a smart bet in our current offensive environment. And I think we've got to give Roger a hand here because when he wrote that, league-wide scoring had not been that high for 25 years, not since 1950. He's writing this again in November 75. Not since 1950 had there been a season when the runs per game level was over that break-even point of 4.72. So when he wrote this for the past quarter century, if we are looking at it in this wagering way, he had been right. So he is still teaching us things, I think, even though he has sadly departed. So this surprised me and educated me, and I think it's really interesting. So this just little throwaway line observation in a classic angel essay. No one really remembers this bit of it, but I learned something about this. So thanks to Thryn for highlighting it and thanks to Ryan for the research.

So I don't think we can fault Roger for the fact that years after he wrote this, it was a bad bet for a lot of the time because scoring was high when he was writing this. It had been a good bet for a quarter century. So I think at that point, you're pretty safe in saying. And I don't know, maybe if we had been around at that time, maybe I wouldn't have been so surprised by this just because I would have marinated in that low scoring period as opposed to growing up like during a high scoring era and then fairly recently seeing a pretty high scoring era. So maybe that was what colored my expectations for this. Maybe people wouldn't have batted an eye at this in 1975, but probably the fact that he was pointing it out as a surprising thing that was true

probably meant that even then people would have been surprised by it. So kind of a cool observation by Mr. Angel. Yeah, our instincts around these things tend to be informed by what we're used to. Well, I hope he made some money on this for his sake. I doubt strongly that he really bet. Do you think he would bet? I don't know. It seems like he enjoyed so many things about the game without

needing to bet, but who knows? Maybe. Maybe every now and then he put down some money. But he was right about this, so kudos to him. Alright, that will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening, and

thanks for all of the feedback that you've sent in about the In Venue interview. And I did want to note on our last episode, I lamented the fact that we don't have a defensive equivalent of TootBlan thrown out on the bases like an income poop, which apparently is in the MLB.com glossary. I did not know that. But I blanked on something like this that does exist, the fart slam. Fielder allows runner to score like a moron. This was coined by Reddit user FunnyID on the baseball subreddit back in 2017. And speaking of being pedantic about baseball, amusingly, it was followed soon after that by a post titled, We Need to Talk About Fart Slams, that goes on at some length to try to define exactly what is and isn't a fart slam. There are almost 1,000 comments on that thread. I will link to those threads as well as a YouTube montage of fart slams. So there is a term for this.

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And we will be back with another episode sometime early next week. Talk to break glass. I don't want to break glass.