Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1865: Slide Rule

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about whether changing managers is at all responsible for the Phillies’ recent success, the Yankees’ almost unparalleled winning-percentage pace, the Royals’ historically terrible pitching performance and the pressure on their pitching coach, another Taylor Ward/Tyler Wade broadcaster slipup, Anthony Rendon’s season-ending surgery, Michael Lorenzen’s comments about baseball slipperiness and […]

Oh, can I have my balls back, please? Can I have my balls back, please? Oh, I can't really feel it, man. Look at me, I'm down on my knees. Yeah. Oh, and I don't know how much longer I can live my life like this news, we've got debuts, we've got great teams, we've got terrible teams, we've got pass blasts, we've got stat blasts. But I have to start here. Riddle me this. The Philadelphia Phillies are 14 and 3 since they fired Joe Girardi and elevated Rob Thompson, their bench coach to manager, right?

14 and 3. Now, when we talked about that firing, our prior, I would say, was that this would not make a major difference, right? That whatever ailed the Phillies would not be fixed by firing Joe Girardi. Well, now we have a couple weeks, a few weeks of performance. We have a team that was 22-29 when Girardi was fired that has gone 14-3 since. They're not quite in playoff position, but they are close. Tell me this. If they had not fired Joe Girardi, what do you think their record would have been over those 17 games?

Basically, I'm asking you, do you give the change from Joe Girardi to Rob Thompson any credit for any of those wins? Or are you going to take a hard line, managers don't matter that much stance, and say, eh, they would have had exactly the same record. Everything would have transpired the way it already has. Can I split the difference? Sure. That's such a cheapy answer, maybe maybe that's the answer i want i mean like i think that if you were to replay those same 17 games 10 000 times you know if you could if you could

create that you know set of alternate timelines do i think that there is some like appreciable number of them that involve Joe Girardi and still have this record? Yeah, probably. I don't think that managers don't matter. I just think that they don't matter as much as other things related to the roster, namely the roster itself. Right, yeah.

Even the places where they interact most directly with that sort of baseline roster in terms of how it's deployed, particularly when it comes to pitching, even then we're talking about like fractions of a win. So, like. The question is, how much do you split the difference? Do you split it down the middle? Do you split it just a tiny bit toward one end of the scale or the other? It's kind of a tricky question when I put you on the spot on a podcast.

It is a tricky question. I guess that my instinct is to say that things wouldn't change all that much because they are still over that 17 game stretch playing the same teams, right right like they are interacting with the same teams now here's the thing that ben if i had known you were gonna ask me if i had known that you were gonna ask me i would have looked up in advance but instead i'm gonna see if i can do it quick here because like we're you know what no i'm gonna put you on the spot, Ben Lindberg. I'm going to make you.

Turn the tables. Yeah, I'm going to turn the turntables. Were there wins in that stretch that were particularly fluky? I guess they had two. Let's see. The last 17. They had some close ones. First of all, I should mention they have not been playing great teams during this stretch.

So those wins, they played the Angels. They played the Brewers. Good team. Not a great team. Diamondbacks, Marlins, Nationals. Right. So more bad teams or mediocre teams than good teams in that mix. Well, right.

Because what day did they fire Girardi? They fired him before the Angels series? It was right before the Angels series, yeah. And when did the Angels fire Joe Maddon? Not long after that, maybe. Oh, boy. So how do we account for how those two variables interact with one another, right? Maddon was still managing the Angels when they were playing.

That's true. So let's see. In that stretch, they had a walk-off win against stretch they had they had a walk-off win against los angeles they had a walk-off win against the marlins two walk-off wins against the marlins right they had two games go into extra innings yeah so another one run win or a couple one run wins it looks like during that stretch right and so i would say that you know if they had it to do over again like those probably well not probably but those might break another way because we know that that kind of stuff can be sort of fluky but i don't know how much i attribute it to the manager i mean unless

here's the here's the thing that we we don't seem to know at least i haven't seen it reported anywhere if there has been hot phillies gas that i have missed please send it my way listeners but i'm not given to understand that like and hand the phillies players came out after gerardi was fired and were like that guy sucked we hated him he was terrible like there was probably some like reading between the lines that could be that could be done with some of their comments, I imagine, but I don't think that there was a mass rebellion. Now, that isn't to say that there couldn't have been a deep-seated dislike of Joe Girardi and just the sheer freedom and relief of being free of him might not have inspired them to play better. I guess that's possible, but I think that this is probably just a fluky thing i mean i've had times in my life not in my current job to be clear where i

have like had a bad boss and then that bad boss has left and like i was a lot happier after that but i have a feeling that it it's just a function of them having played the angels and like a kind of slumping brewers team and a middling d-backs team and a middling Marlins team and a very bad Nationals team that has largely contributed to their good fortune lately. Which like I don't say as a knock on Girardi. I mostly say it as a credit to the Phillies players who kind of went and did what they were supposed to, you know? Yeah. Phillies players who kind of went and did what they were supposed to, you know? Yeah.

So if you were going to take the extreme position and say that the Phillies under Girardi were what their record was and the Phillies under Thompson are what their record is and the difference between those two is the difference between Girardi and Thompson, then you're talking about a difference of, let's say, six or seven wins, I guess, over that 17-game stretch, right? If you just take the Phillies' winning percentage entering that stretch, their winning percentage during that stretch, that's a difference of about seven wins, and that's over 17 games. So extrapolate that over a full 162-game season, and you are saying that Rob Thompson is a 60-plus win manager. So I don't think anyone is going to say that, right? But I kind of don't think that anyone, well, most people, some people are certainly going

to say, yep, they would be exactly the same record if they had kept Girardi. Everything would have happened, and they would be 14-3 over that stretch regardless. I think some people would stick to that stance. Others are going to come down somewhere in the middle. I just don't know where in the middle because I was inspired to ask this by a poll that Joe Sheehan put up on Twitter when the Phillies were 8-0 under Thompson. And he said, had they not fired Joe Girardi,

what do you think their record would be in their last eight games? And he put up four choices, eight no, seven and one or six and two, five and three or four and four, or three and five or worse. And I don't know that I've ever seen a more even distribution of poll responses. There was like almost an equal response to each option there where no one option had more than like 27 percent of respondents saying this one and no one option had fewer than like 23 percent of respondents choosing it you know so people were very evenly split there and you gotta figure that joe's twitter audience is probably skews stat head right and maybe a a little less managers make an enormous difference.

So that was kind of curious. And I think Joe was semi-surprised by the results there. And this has gone on a little longer. So I wouldn't think that Rob Thompson's true talent as a manager is that much greater than Joe Girardi's. Like Joe Girardi is not an incompetent bozo, right? He's won a World Series as a manager. He's been doing that for a while. It's not like you put me in the manager's job or someone who knows nothing about baseball, right? So how big could the difference be really? And it's not like the roster has entirely turned over anything. However, there

has to be a bit of butterfly effect going on here, right? Where, like, if you had kept Girardi, presumably he would have made a few different decisions, right? He would have filled out lineup cards slightly differently. He would have gone with this reliever instead of that reliever. It probably wouldn't have been anything drastic. But obviously the buttons that Thompson has pushed, the levers that he has pulled, those have worked out really but obviously the buttons that thompson has pushed the levers that he has pulled those have worked out really well for the phillies and maybe if you would had the lineup be written out slightly differently then this guy would have been up with the bases

loaded instead of that guy right and maybe he wouldn't have gotten a hit that the guy actually got in our timeline right so if you have the multiverse timeline here where Girardi is still managing, then there are going to be different hitters at the plate and different pitchers at the plate in some situations. And given that the Phillies have had everything go in their favor almost during this stretch, 14 and three, a lot of things have to go right, probably things would not have gone as right if Girardi had been there. And whether he actually would have made worse decisions or not, they might have worked out a little worse.

So I would say maybe the Phillies win, gosh, I don't know, two fewer games. Is that too much? At least one less game over that stretch. Two almost feels like too much. But I'm not saying that like Thompson's decisions were two wins better in expected results or anything. I'm just saying that in terms of actual results and the ways that his decisions may have differed from Girardi's in the way that they seem to have worked out, that probably things would have gone a little worse for the Phillies if someone else had been calling the shots. It's like if you have a manager, also there's probably some regression,

some slight regression that you can expect because if the manager gets fired, things are probably going terribly, and they were when he got fired. They had a bunch of tough losses in a short span of time, and so maybe you would expect some bounce back, some slight regression anyway, so you factor that in. But I'm not saying Thompson is way better or even attributing that much of this to like the motivation effects or like Philly's players didn't like Girardi or they had a fire lit under their butts or whatever it

is, like all those motivations that you could ascribe to this, like not completely dismissing that there could be something to that. But i would say the biggest factor is just changing anything at all when things have worked out really well probably if you change things they would work out a little less well i think that that's perfectly fine to argue i guess like we don't know how opposing teams might respond to those moves in the alternate timeline. So that makes it hard to pin down a specific number. I mean, I think we should entertain the possibility that the Phillies think that they're playing for Rob Thomas and have smooth featuring Santana stuck in their heads and it has lifted them to new heights.

I mean, who knows what inspires any of us in any given moment. I also think that like if we you know could more precisely pinpoint exactly when the removal of a manager would lead to a protracted run of success that we wouldn't be hosting this podcast and probably would be working for a baseball team yeah well aren't you all glad that we know nothing then you get to be entertained by our prattling on and that i have really relevant cultural references to uh put toward you and uh think inspire the phillies so yeah and look i haven't watched every phillies game during this stretch so i don't know if there

is something that thompson has meaningfully done differently like if he totally changed the bullpen hierarchy or something like i'm not saying that there could be situations where, let's say, an old manager, he's sticking with some struggling closer in high-leverage spots or something, right? And then the new guy, for whatever reason, comes in and doesn't feel that loyalty and is just like, nope, you're demoted and you're the bop-up man now and we're elevating this other lights-out guy to high-leverage spots. Or Or I don't know, let's say Joe Girardi was like, you know, this Bryce Harper guy, I don't think he can hit. You know, I think I'm going to bench Bryce Harper. And then Rob Thompson comes in and is like, gee, I think this Bryce Harper guy, he won the MVP award last year. We should probably be playing him.

And if it were a situation like that where there were a really meaningful difference in usage or personnel as a result of the manager change, then I would be more inclined to give the manager some credit. But just because you don't typically have managers making extremely self-destructive, counterproductive decisions like that, especially because you have the front office with a ton of input on those things. And that doesn't change when the manager changes that much. I think probably that is fairly limited. So again, I'm going with like, I want to say two. I almost feel like I'm going too far to say two. But again, it is mostly not because I'm giving Thompson so much credit for being better than Joe Girardi.

It's just that in this timeline, things have worked out for the Phillies. So change anything and maybe things would not have worked out as well. And I think that that's perfectly reasonable. I'm not sitting there saying that you're, you know, that you're irrational to think that things might have shifted around a little bit. I just don't have a tremendous amount of confidence myself in being able to put a number to that. No, me neither. I mean, I'm sure there are Phillies fans who are like, hey, this team looks completely different and they're running around with a spring in their step and the attitude is different and everything. And who knows if that's because they're 14-3 or that's

why they're 14-3. I'm sure if you were watching that team and it was super depressing and they were finding just new and creative and depressing ways to lose and then suddenly the manager changes and they win constantly, it would be pretty easy to buy into like, hey, this is an actual meaningful difference here. The new boss is not just like the old boss, but I don't know. You could buy into that too much probably if you are living and dying with the team every day. You might also pick up on something that I'm not seeing because i'm not watching the team every day so

i don't want to completely discount that well and i think that in my interaction or at least observation of philly's fans on baseball twitter uh during the course of gerardi's tenure they were at times very exercised about his managerial choices. But I think that we always have to discount observations of fans being really exercised about managerial choices. And here we have to discount them three ways. We have to discount the Twitter of it all. We have to discount, no offense Phillies fans, the Phillies fans of it all.

And then just the struggling team part. Plus all fans go through stretches where they really don't like their manager and sometimes that is rooted more in like actual um data than it is just being frustrated that the fortunes of the team are poor so who knows is all i'm saying when will i stop thinking that rob thomas is managing the phillies i mean it could be years, Ben. At least it's not Nickelback. Like, they got that on the Angels. I don't remember if we considered that when we were trying to determine which of the franchise's fortunes would turn around more quickly.

Since we had that conversation, the Phillies have said, hey, it's us, at least in the short term. And I do wonder if some of that is that, like, you know, Nickelback, Ben. Right. They're thinking of smooth instead of Nickelback. Right. Could be. Could be that.

Could be, you know, sometimes baseball is really complicated, but other times it's simple. Well, as great as the Phillies have been, they're no Yankees. Wow. Them Yankees. They're 50 and 17, as we speak, going into Tuesday's games. Now, that is the 1998 Yankees pace, exactly, through 67 games. They are on one of the best paces ever, actually, and really only matched or exceeded by the 98 Yankees and the 2001 Mariners in recent years, I think just in the expansion era, right? So they're on an extremely historic pace. My baseball reference stat head newsletter relayed that to me on Tuesday morning and pointed out that there are only 11 teams, let's see, only 11 other teams have accomplished winning 50 of their first 67 games in the AL or NL since 1901.

And yes, the 2001 Mariners and 98 Yankees are the only other teams to do it since 1955. That's pretty incredible. We were talking last week to Fernando Perez about how everything went right for the 2021 Giants and how they beat their preseason projections by the widest margin on record. Now, they beat their Pocota projection by 33 games, I believe, 33 wins. And right now, the Yankees are playing at a pace that if they sustained it, they would beat their Fangraphs preseason depth charts projections by almost that much, by about 30 wins. Now, they're not going to do that because in order to do that, I think they would end up with about 121 wins on the season.

I don't think that's going to happen, but that is how good they have been. They have raised their projected full season win total, according to the Fangraph's playoff odds report, by about 13 wins. And that is a conservative estimate because I think the playoff odds still don't think that they are necessarily the best team in baseball, even though they have the best record and are on pace for the most wins. So they have raised their projection by a lot more than any other team. And right now they are on pace to outplay their projected preseason win total by almost twice as much as any other team. So they would be 30 wins higher than their preseason projection. The Reds would be 20 wins under. The Mets would be 17 wins over. The Royals, who I'll talk about in a second, would be 17 wins under. And the Nationals would be about 15 wins under. And it's easier, I think, to go from mediocre team, like say the Reds or the Royals were projected to be or the Nationals to truly terrible, which is what they have for the most part been thus far.

Easier to do that, I think, to have the bottom completely fall out than to do what the Yankees are doing, which is going from being projected to be a pretty good team, like a playoff team probably, and still exceeding that projection by that much. Like it might not stand out as much as like what the Giants were doing last year because the Giants were projected to not be very good and not be a playoff team. And then they went from that to like having the most wins in baseball. The Yankees are going from a higher projected baseline, but they are still clearing that bar by almost as wide a margin so it's really pretty

impressive what they have managed to do well and just the like the completeness of this team right like there are a lot of ways to be a good baseball team and sometimes a roster will lean on concentrated strength on one side of the ball or like a couple of stars but they're just so good in so many different ways jay jaffee wrote about them in comparison to the 98 yankees earlier this week when they you know when they had uh uh but a lowly 49 and 17 record you know like who even cares about that like what kind of what kind of slubs are those and you know you have to of course like context adjust this team versus 98 to really appreciate um what they're doing now relative not only to the 98 squad but to the to the offensive

environments and and sort of scoring environments that each of those clubs are in but it's like the starters are great and the bullpen is great even though the bullpen has you know has lost chad green to tommy john surgery and jonathan lewisica has a shoulder strain and aroldis chapman has been hurt and not as dominant but it doesn't matter because clay holmes is incredible and michael king is really great and then you know we watched garrett cole like carry a no hitter into the eighth inning last night and then you have you know we've already sung the praises of aaron judge so i don't think we really need to do it again but it's not just Aaron Judge right like they have so many great players with the exception of the production

they're getting out of left field and shortstop they're just really really spectacular so it is it is the completeness of this team right it's like you have Judge, and you're like, wow, he's great. And then you're like, but Anthony Rizzo is also being spectacular, and Giancarlo Stanton is good, and Gleyber Torres is good, and he's in part-time duty, but Jose Trevino has been fantastic. And so I guess center field hasn't been the best either. But still, it's really something, Ben. They're just really very good. And so a lot can happen as we

approach october and certainly this team appreciates both this season and in prior seasons the effect that injuries can have on the squad and how it can require players to step up and when they don't bad things can happen but gosh they sure do look very good and very complete and it's not like you know i think that early on there was this perception that they had played teams that weren't particularly good like when you look at the recent stretch of performance they had it's not like they've been playing schlubby teams like they've been playing they've been playing teams like in playoff positions so yeah it's uh it's pretty good the surprising part of it i think is that it is mostly the same cast of characters as, say, last season.

Not that that was a bad team and not that they were expected to be a bad team. But if you just go to their baseball reference page and you know how baseball reference has the headshots of the players with the highest war, the top 12, I think 10 of them were Yankees last year, other than Jose Trevino and Josh Donaldson. They're all holdovers, right? So it's not as if they just dramatically remade their roster. It's that a lot of the players they had, who I guess were underperforming by many accounts last year, are now overperforming. So whether you want to credit that to the coaching and their new hitting coach, Dylan Lawson, or whatever, they seem to have just improved almost across the board and not necessarily by changing the personnel, but by improving the personnel. So it is pretty impressive. And you mentioned the center field hole, but

these days, very often, Aaron Judge is filling that hole and he is a big guy and he's just playing center very often. Now he's basically the starting center fielder because Aaron Hicks has not been what they hoped and they have sometimes had the all beef boy, all giant outfield. Yeah, we did love the all beef boy outfield it is our favorite outfield of all the outfields there are i'm sorry that's our favorite one it's pretty great on friday they had gallo and left judge and center and stanton and right now i guess the concern has always been like well if you play judge and stanton in the outfield are they gonna get hurt more often but at least stanton i think has had some history of hitting better when he is playing the field, which is not unusual if you look at patterns of DH performance. And so they are running those guys out there and they have more or less stayed healthy. And I like it.

I mean, maybe we'll talk a little bit about O'Neal Cruz in this episode and players who don't fit the archetype of their position. Well, Aaron Judge doesn't look like a center fielder, but he can hold his own there. I mean, he's a plus right fielder. He's not a bad center fielder. And if you can get that bat in the lineup and he's certainly not going to embarrass you out there, well, you hope that he won't pull anything when he's chasing after fly balls. But I like the idea of, hey, we want to get as many good bats into the lineup as possible and

guys like gallo and judge and even stanton like they don't necessarily look like great defenders but they're not bad some of them are actually quite good out there yeah yeah i mean i i think that like it doesn't always work right like we tend to hew to these archetypes for a reason they are useful heuristics but you don't want to like hude them to the point of not playing a guy when he can just be good out there. And so sometimes they happen.

Well, yeah, it turns out that you don't necessarily have to go get the biggest names on the market if all of your existing players just play better. Particularly when they are themselves big.

Yeah, that too. So the question is, if Joe Girardi were still managing this team, what would their record be? No, that too. So the question is, if Joe Girardi were still managing this team, what would their record be? No, that is not actually the question. I will not ask you that. Although many people were pretty sick of Aaron Boone, as it happens too. And maybe they're feeling a little bit better about him these days.

Brian Cashman as well. So the Yankees are the class of the American League. The dregs of the American League, that sounds mean, but it's not inaccurate. The Kansas City Royals, I guess if we really want to say who the dregs are, I guess it would be the Oakland A's. And I don't pin that on their players. I pin that on their ownership. But the Oakland A's have the worst record in the league. The Royals have the second worst record in the league.

And they, I guess, have kind of been the mirror images of the Yankees. And the Yankees are well-rounded, firing on all cylinders. Royals firing on very few cylinders. But there was a tweet that made the rounds this weekend and really miffed Royals fans. And then there was some follow-up to that tweet. But Aaron Ladd, who is, I believe, a Kansas City sports anchor, he tweeted a quote. What he said was a quote from the Royals' Dayton Moore, and he wrote it as, Cal, that's Cal Eldred, the Royals' pitching coach, Cal's doing an amazing job, and I appreciate the question. This was at a press conference Q&A. He was asked about Eldred. Questions like that need to be asked. Cal's doing a tremendous job as far as his attitude is

concerned. We're seeing some growth. So this got many, many quote tweets from angry Royals fans who were focusing on, I guess, the Cal's doing an amazing job part. And to a lesser extent, the Cal's doing a tremendous job as far as his attitude is concerned. Now, the Cal's doing an amazing job part. And to a lesser extent, the Cal's doing a tremendous job as far as his attitude is concerned. Now, the Cal's doing an amazing job part has kind of come into question. The Royals GM has subsequently said that that was taken out of context, that the question was about Cal Eldred's attitude during this tough time and that he was speaking specifically about the attitude. attitude during this tough time and that he was speaking specifically about the attitude. I did listen to whatever I could of that interview, that clip, and I didn't hear the Cowles doing an amazing job part. I heard the Cowles doing a tremendous job as far as his attitude is concerned part. Anyway, I think what Royals fans really wanted to hear was Cowles fired

and Cowles no longer the pitching coach of the Kansas City Royals. So anything short of that, I think they probably would have been disappointed. And look, we could play the how much better would the Royals pitching staff had been with a different pitching coach game, right? Who knows? The fact that a pitching staff is underperforming does not necessarily mean that the pitching coach is doing a bad job or is responsible for that. But I think a lot of Royals fans had seen enough of Cal Eldred before the season started for various reasons. And the results do not give one confidence. And Dayton Moore not coming out and saying we're going to make a change or his job's in danger or anything like

that and sort of downplaying the idea of making a change. Now, short of just actually dropping the axe, I don't know what anyone expected necessarily because Dayton Moore's not going to come out and say, yeah, this guy is completely biffing it. Terrible job, Cal. You're not going to hear that probably from most people running a front office and not from Dayton Moore, certainly, specifically. Yeah. But I did want to just note that the Royals right now, their staff, I think this is an extremely unfun fact for Royals fans, but it is a notable fact. So one of my favorite, perhaps underappreciated parts of the Fangraphs leaderboards are the plus stats tab. Yes. So that's where you can look up things just kind of you know in the the hundred is good higher is better lower is worse whatever scale adjusted for the league

environment there so you can compare one team's strikeout rate from their pitchers to the league average in that year and then you can compare that to all teams just in one handy dandy leaderboard for all seasons. And it'll just automatically adjust for the league average in that year. Well, the Royals K percentage plus. So that is their staff strikeout rate relative to the league is 84. low is bad in that case their walk percentage plus in this case high is bad is 126 and when you pair those things together there is also very conveniently a column called k per walk plus your strike out to walk ratio plus 66 you want to hire one of these this is a lower one and in fact it is the lowest ever um or at least i don't know i went back to 47 i went back to the quote-unquote integration era

and 66 k to bb plus is the lowest that any staff has managed granted we're not at the halfway point of the season yet it will probably improve but it is the worst ever to this point in the season. So I don't think many Royals fans care all that much about what Kyle Eldred's attitude is. I mean, I guess it's good that he's maintaining some positivity and everything, but I don't know what the growth that Dayton Moore says that he's seeing is. And I don't know that this will placate many people in that fan base who don't care so much about Cal's attitude as about the results and whether he is actually helping Royals pitchers improve because they've spent a lot of their draft picks on pitchers and they have really tried to build up with pitching.

And there are some successes here and there, but for the most part, it's been pretty depressing. Well, and it's one of those things where I think that from the perspective of fans, like, you know, it is not as if the major league pitching coach is the only coach that is going to have the capacity for intervention on the direction of pitchers. He's the guy that they're going to be interacting with probably the most on a day-to-day basis, but there's an entire player development apparatus that exists. And so those guys are going to be talking to big leaguers too, but it's not as if these guys arrived and were immediately good and then regressed under the direction of a new pitching coach like the the fact that these guys have not been able to actualize what is thought to have been like very good talent is partially you know the responsibility of the player partially

the responsibility of the big league coaching staff partially the responsibility of the player dev apparatus that the team has and so i think that if you're a fan, like the guy you know is the pitching coach, and that's going to be where you direct your ire. And I don't mean to suggest that there's no responsibility to be had there, but I think probably the more depressing thought for Royals fans is that why stop there? Like that is likely not the, you know, you're not getting to the bottom of the issue if that's the only name that you have at your likely not the, you know, you're not getting to the bottom of the issue if that's the only name that you have at your disposal. So, you know, it's not like the guys they've taken have been dudes where the consensus, at least on the public side has been,

these are bad. These are bad pitchers. Like these are, you know, these are a bunch of 40s. That's like, that hasn't been the way that they've been viewed. And so there's some disconnect somewhere. I think we've talked before about whether this organization really has the infrastructure and expertise it needs to help those guys actualize on stuff in CourseCorrect when things aren't working, right? So I unfortunately think it's probably indicative of a broader problem. But also, this is the name that fans are going to know. And I understand feeling frustrated because the idea was we have this group of young prospects.

They're really exciting. You know, I think to the Royals credit, like I think more than any organization in baseball, they really just don't goof around with service time nonsense with these dudes. Like it is a I think an admirable and stated principle of the organization that when they perceive a guy to be ready they promote him and they put him in the big leagues and like that's what they do and that's really great and also that doesn't mean that all of those guys are going to pan out or be as good as they necessarily could be and so you wonder like in an organization that is better at actually developing pitching or helping guys to fine-t, whether it's changing their pitch mix or that's hard to say,

changing their pitch mix or changing the characteristics of the pitches that they have. Like, I don't know that this is a team that has demonstrated an acumen for that. And so it's a weird thing because like, I think there's a lot that Kansas City does that just in terms of treating people well, we think is good and is something that we wish were not noteworthy, that it isn't something that we had to praise them for because that's what every organization does. But there do seem to be some issues here that suggest that they might be

a bit behind the ball when it comes to pitch design. So that seems bad. Yeah, I guess part of it is that Eldred doesn't really talk the talk that you kind of want to hear from a pitching coach in this day and age. Not that there's only one way to do that job and not that it's like, well, he's not the new young hotness, you know, he's not the hot shot just coming up. Like you could have Brent Strom, who like Cal Eldred is also a former major league pitcher who's almost 20 years older than Cal Eldred. And Brent Strom has been reputed to be one of the best and most progressive pitching coaches with the Astros, now with the Diamondbacks. So there's no telling just based on age or background or anything. But I guess they haven't heard what

you would want to hear necessarily from Cal Eldred that you would think that he's going to be keeping up with the Yankees of the world. And it is tough, yeah, because we have praised the Royals for their people management. And we've even suggested it could be a competitive advantage for them, right? Like their loyalty to their players and their personnel and paying minor leaguers during the pandemic and all of that. And there is, I think, a loyalty that maybe speaks well of Dayton Moore in a way to like his decency as a human being. And yet part of having a job like that is knowing when it's time to make a change and maybe let someone go who you're close to or you like personally or who has a great attitude, you know? So it's tough. You know, I still, even after all these years,

I don't know that anyone has really reached any kind of consensus conclusion about Dayton Moore. Like, is he good at this job? I don't know. I don't know. Is he good at player development? Is he good at building a team? I don't know. He won a World Series.

He won a couple pennants. But those were just, like,, but also like surprising teams. And those were kind of the highlights of what has largely been an undistinguished run, to put it charitably, at the major league level. So it's hard to say. But all I know is that my biannual review at the Ringer is coming up soon. And I'd like to think that my output has been better than the Royals pitching staffs. But if not, I hope my boss says I'm doing a tremendous job as far as my attitude is concerned. Anyway, that stood out to me. And what also stood out to me is that despite

my just relaying those stats about the historic lack of success of the Royals pitching staff to this point, they did hold the Angels to two runs on Monday. So when I looked at that stat before Monday's game, they had one of the worst ERA pluses of any staff since 1947, one of the 10 worst. Now they're merely one of the 20 worst because they held the Angels to two runs on Monday. But that put me in mind of the Angels, and I have a couple things to say about them. One is that my new beat is keeping an ear out for broadcasters who stumble over Tyler Wade and Taylor Ward. Wait, I once again want to register my complaint. I need a new beat, Ben. He's like, you got this beat.

And Clemens has weird intentional walks. That's his beat. Got all these fun beats, and then I'm stuck here with poop. People love the poop beat. They want you to post about poop more, I think, than you do. I think that I post about it just the right amount, which is not very much at all. Yeah. Well, I probably will not be

that active on the Tyler Wade, Taylor Ward beat either. But last week I played a clip of Joe Davis, the Dodgers broadcaster, who is among the best baseball broadcasters there are. And he confused Tyler Wade and Taylor Ward. Now, at least he is a Dodgers broadcaster. He's not calling those guys games every day. But here I have a new clip for you. And this was pointed out to us by a listener, Kyle Kishimoto. And we now have people who are being my ears listening to Angels broadcast for Wade Ward Stumbles. So this is Angels broadcaster Mark Gubiza, and I am playing this clip not to show him up on a gooby Tuesday, but just to point out strike zone, and see if Tyler Taylor-Wade can drive that one to right center field. He's been in pull mode a couple ground balls. So you heard Mark Gubiza, who calls all the Angels games,

and even he is not safe from screwing up Wade and Ward. So you heard him maybe say Tyler and then trail off and then say Taylor Wade, which is not right either. So he tried to switch from Tyler to Taylor, but he forgot to switch from Wade to Ward also. So it was actually Ward at the plate as he was speaking, although in his defense, Wade was on base, maybe making things even more confusing. Oh, boy. But anyway, you can call every single Angels game and still not be safe from making the Wade Ward mistake. Just saying. We can all fall prey to this thing. But more relevant maybe to the Angels, first thing is that Anthony Rendon is out for the season.

Yeah. So that's a big bummer for them. That's a problem. Not that he was playing the way that they wanted Anthony Rendon to play necessarily when he got hurt, but he had wrist surgery. He's done for the year. He has not covered himself in glory during the first few seasons of his Angels tenure here. You know, early in his career, he had a reputation for not being very

durable and being somewhat injury prone. And then it seemed like he had kind of put that behind him late in his Nationals career before he reached free agency. And since it has kind of come back, so they have not gotten as much Anthony Rendon as they thought they were signing up for, and maybe not as good Anthony Rend, as they were hoping for either. Mike Trout does have a career-best WRC Plus thus far this season, but there is only so much Mike Trout can do, as we know. There is only so much he can do.

Gosh, I just had a grim Ward-Wade mix-up thought, Ben. Are you ready? Yeah. So Taylor Ward, I mean, like, I know that June has been sort of a down month for him but like his season stats are still incredibly impressive hopefully he rebounds do you think that we are gonna get down ballot mvp vote mix-ups huh i'm just saying to our fellow bbwa members if you you know if you uh if you get an mvp ballot in the american league you

just you really need to double check very carefully because dramatically different seasons yeah that's the the one thing i don't think anyone will be making that mistake based on their stats no but but maybe based on the names be careful yeah they don't show you don't show you stats when you enter your ballot they don't show you that you just have to put the names in, so everybody watch out. I feel badly that Rendon has had the time that he's had because we were so excited when he signed with Los Angeles that this would be the piece that would help really propel them forward that Mike Trout and then Otani would not have to shoulder

the burden of their offense alone and he's just never really had that stretch where you look at him and say oh this was his good angels time like can you can you 2020 was that i mean it's not his fault that that was a shortened season like 52 games he played that year 153 wrc plus two and a half four wins yeah yeah that's what they paid for that's what they signed up for. Right. It's just, it was a short season. And since then he's been hurt and or ineffective.

So. Right. It's really hasn't been the best. I mean, hopefully, I guess it's better to, if your wrist situation is as bad as it is, as his is to get the surgery out of the way and hopefully be able to come into 2023 fresh and fully healed and on the mend. We've talked before about those weird little bird bones. And I don't know which weird little bird bones of his or if it's ligaments or what, but that stuff can linger in a way that I think surprises people, the effect that it can have on hitters in particular and how much thump

they have and what have you. So I think that it's good to get it sorted but obviously they prefer like a you know healthy and productive anthony or andone because um when he is both of those things it's it's quite a sight to see sometimes so yeah and the last angels related thing although it's really related to the league as a whole is that there were some comments that Angels starter Michael Lorenzen made about the ball and his grip of it or the lack thereof. So I will just read his comments or at least some of them. This was after he hit Justin Upton in the head with a pitch in his most recent start, which was a scary moment. Poor Justin Upton gets back to the big leagues with the Mariners now. And what does he get? He gets a beanball in his head, basically. But this was unintentional, I think, pretty clearly. But Lorenzen said that the ball slipped out of

his hand because the balls had not been rubbed up sufficiently. I think Angels reliever Ryan Tappara had said something similar. And Lorenzen said, I don't know what Major League Baseball is playing with these baseballs, but that fully slipped out of my hand. It's just crazy, man. As a kid, you feel like Major League Baseball is the greatest thing ever. And you get here and you realize, what are they doing? All of a sudden, they're going to change the baseballs. I know Kevin Gossman had an issue in Toronto, so it's a league-wide thing. These baseballs are slick.

They did get someone hurt, so that's on Major League Baseball for sure. I don't know what's going on. These baseballs are straight out of the package. Every single one of them, every single one of them. So you can throw them out all you want. It started last night. Throw them out all you want to get new ones. But they're all like that. It looks like league wide. It looks like a planned operation, which is ridiculous. Now, Lorenzen, I think he didn't use this as an excuse to explain why he didn't pitch well in that game. He gave up seven runs. He only brought it up when he was asked about hitting Upton. Since then, and this is supposedly unrelated, but MLB has sent one of its famous memos that then get leaked instead of just revealing the memo instead of just issuing a press release yeah so espn leaked this memo to all teams

that was sent on tuesday about the process for muddying the baseballs for putting mud on them and rubbing them up and for when you're supposed to put them in the humidor and take them out and the technique required for painting the surface of the ball with mud using two fingertips and then a very precise rubbing motion with the ball in between both hands to get mud into the pores of the leather

and how long you're supposed to muddy each ball. Basically, it sounds like they maybe looked at video of clubhouse attendants rubbing up their balls and they were not all rubbing their balls in the same way. Therefore, they decided to standardize the ball rubbing and they sent a memo around to explain precisely how you are supposed to rub your balls. So see, you have the opportunity to talk about like muddying the balls. Right. There are so many verbs that were at your disposal. And I'm quoting from the report here. This is all from the report.

Maybe I said rub your balls a few more times than the report said or that was strictly necessary. But I think that the emphasis we can claim is yours, though. Yes, I can safely say that. Here's the thing that perplexes me. So, hey, I'm all for getting good grips without enhancing performance with some foreign substance and everything, and I want people to be safe and not get hit in the head. What kind of confuses me is, though, like in that very game, when Michael Renzen is giving up seven runs and walking three guys and hitting Justin Upton in the head, he's facing the Mariners.

Robbie Ray in that game gave up three hits, one run, one walk, 10 strikeouts in seven innings. Two Mariners relievers came in and pitched scoreless innings. I don't think there were any hit-by-pitches by Mariners pitchers in that game. To say that it's every ball or to say that it's a league-wide issue, and even league-wide, since they banned sticky stuff, the hit-by-pitch rate is not up, seemingly. It's still high. It's still almost as high as it's ever been but it was very high before they've been the sticky stuff so that's the thing that confuses me it's like if it were just a baseball here or there that was not mudded properly okay but if some pitchers are saying this is really a pervasive issue and yet it hasn't seemed to produce any kind of league-wide difference in players getting hit by pitches.

And then within that very same game where presumably the balls were stored in mostly the same way and rubbed up in mostly the same way, how can you have these varying, dramatically varying results? That's the part that perplexes me, I guess, is that I don't know how much it is just a league-wide issue or not. I mean, presumably, like, look, a lot of pitchers have come out and said they're too slick and they're too slippery and I can't get a good grip. But what I can't figure out is, is that just because they were used to rubbing the balls up with whatever they brought out to the mound with

them that they weren't really supposed to be bringing out to the mound with them? And basically, it's just like, hey, I missed my not even spider tack, but just whatever less advantageous but still a legal substance I was using. Is it that or is it really a problem? Is it just an adjustment period? Is it a problem? How urgent is it that we actually get some sort of legal substance or tacky leather covering for the ball because I just can't really figure that out yeah it seems like how many different oh god how many different ways are there to rub balls so bad many different ways different strokes for different folks on their balls help me find the thread again i'm lost now and is this a league-wide safety concern or is it

a subset of pitchers who missed the way things were when they had certain substances, perhaps at their disposal that they no longer have. I think that it's more likely to be that than a league-wide concern because I think you're right that if it were something that were a systemic problem that was immune to the vagaries of ball rubbing and god and uh specifically related to the ball surface variation that we would we would see that reflected in league wide hit by pitch rates we would see that in like we would be able to look at heat maps which can themselves at times look pornographic candidly and see that you know guys throwing inside with greater regularity. I just think that two things can be true simultaneously.

We can recognize the fact that we do not have greater consistency and control over the ball. See, if we call it the ball, then we're in very different family-friendly territory yeah then if you refer to them as balls even safer right like right you know you know we i mean we don't you don't have to feel badly about balls like you know anyway um uh like i think that we have bemoaned many times on this podcast and will continue to that like it's it's just very strange that we have such little control seemingly over the ball whether it is its bounciness it's only how mudded or not mudded it is, how hydrated or not hydrated it is, the height of its seams.

That's really weird. It continues to be deeply strange. I want to not think about the ball really at all. I'd like to have thoughts that are free of consideration of balls in any given moment but that doesn't mean that these particular variations are directly leading to issues with control or grip i think that if that were a bigger problem than it seems to be now we would see evidence of that in the stats and i think that you're right that like what evidence there is of guys having trouble might have as much to do with other stuff besides mud that they may have historically been putting on their balls.

I have two more thoughts about balls. One is prompted by Astro's rookie, JJ Matyshevich, who hit his first major league home run and was held up, basically, by the 16-year-old kid who caught the ball and proved to be a very tough negotiator. Held up? Maybe that's too strong. Too strong. He met his match. That was delightful.

Yeah, met his match. There you go. That's much better. Who caught the ball, and rather than just hand it over out of the kindness of his heart, he decided to hold out for a higher price. So Matashevich said, I was planning on giving the kid a signed bat because that's all I would have wanted. But man, he's the best negotiator I've ever seen. So what he ended up getting for the home run ball is a package that included six tickets, six batting practice passes, a ball signed by Jose Altuve, and a jersey signed by Justin Verlander. So Matashevich, I guess, is casting a little shade on the kid here and saying, hey, if it were me, all I would have wanted is a signed bat, right? And

I guess probably most people would have given it up for something like that. But look, this kid can't fault him, have to respect the hustle here because not to slight JJ Matyshevich, but I don't know what his signed bat will be worth on the open market. Hope he turns out to be a great player and that it's worth a fortune someday. But, you know, he's a 26-year-old rookie. I'm not sure that will be a priceless artifact to anyone other than him, perhaps. And so this kid made the most of his opportunity. And he's like, hey, I'm not going to just content myself with a blue chip bat here, take a flyer on a Matashevich signed bat.

I'm going to go with Jose Altuve and Justin Verlander signed memorabilia. Seems like perhaps a safer investment, as well as a bunch of tickets and BP passes. And I guess you've got to tip your cap. You've got to hand it to the kid, right? I mean, there is an element where it's like, just give the rookie his home run ball, right? I mean, there is an element where it's like, just give the rookie his home run ball, right? I mean, it's a special thing to him. It's much more valuable to him than it is to anyone else. It's a weird thing where like, if the kid had auctioned off this ball or something, he would have gotten very little for it, right? There aren't that many people in the world other than JJ Matyshevich and his family and friends who would have paid a fortune for the home run ball.

But he had kind of a captive market here. He had the one person who would pay probably any price for that ball because it's very meaningful to him. And he made the most of it. So you got to think that that kid probably has a future as I don't know what, like an agent, a finance person. That kid will make much more money than I will probably in my lifetime. Like I'm buying stock in that kid. I don't know if the kid has like scruples or morals or anything. And I'm not sure if that is helpful for a business person. Probably not in many cases. So he's starting young.

I gotta say, he got a great deal here. Okay, but so Ben, were you watching this game live? I was not. Okay, so my sense of it, having watched the broadcast, was that the negotiation proceeded in stages. And that, well, I don't want to take anything away from this kid's negotiating acumen. Part of what seems to have transpired there is the Astros realizing after Buster Olney went into the stands and interviewed this kid and his family

that they were like, we got to give this kid what he wants. Because the timeline to me seemed to be that he got the Jose Altuve ball and he got the tickets and he got the batting practice access. And ESPN put a very delightful little trade graphic up on the screen when this happened. And I was like, that's that's adorable. And he said in that exchange that he had wanted a Verlander signed jersey, but that the team had said, no, they can't do that. And then he had also asked for something from Ariel and they're like, no, we can't do that. And he conveys this to Buster Olney and they have a little exchange and then buster departs and

buster i will say also left his notes behind and the kid's little brother like ran after him to give him his notes back so i was like this family seems cool i'm surprised the kid didn't uh ask buster oh no he was like i'm on it he he scooted up there and made sure buster got his notes back and so then then and i will also say as we as this is transpiring that eduardo perez is like ask for more ask for more ask for more it was great he's like get more get more out of the team and you know what eduardo's right and then later they come back and we come to find out that the astros amended their trade and got him his verlander signed jersey. And so I think some of this is the kid starting high, knowing perhaps that they would reduce the offer.

Although if you're a baseball kid, and this kid seems to just really love baseball. He was wearing a t-shirt from either his little league team or his travel ball team. He's there with his dad and his brother you know he seems very enthusiastic about baseball in a way that was cool you know being able to be on the field for batting practice with your friends like you are gonna be you're gonna be a hero they might throw you a little parade in your hometown for that yeah but he started high it's like i want a verlander signed jersey because he probably knows as a baseball obsessed kid that like you know verlander's like hall of fame bound like that's like, I want a Verlander signed jersey because he probably knows as a baseball obsessed kid

that Verlander is like Hall of Fame bound. That's a big, that's a cool thing. I doubt he does sell that. I bet he'll frame it and put it on his wall because that's a really cool thing to have. And then the team was like, oh, we can't not give this kid a Verlander signed jersey because we're going to look like jerks,

even though we gave him cool stuff. So he used his public platform wisely as well yeah so i i think that the negotiating acumen seems present because he started with a big ask and then got something very cool when they initially said no and then because espn decided that they wanted to talk to him the astros were probably like well we gotta give him that because because as he is talking to Buster, maybe immediately preceding that, you can see like a disembodied arm carrying the ball through the, you know, catacombs of Minute Maid. So I think that, you know, he played his hand well,

and then he ended up playing it better with an assist from ESPN. Right. Yeah. You got to think that the going rate, like, people are probably going a little easier than they could if they really wanted to be cutthroat about that with like milestone balls, right? That has a huge meaning to the players involved. If you really wanted to just ring every little bit of value that you could out of that, you

could probably hold out for more because really, like, is it going to hurt the Astros' bottom line to give this kid some tickets and BP passes? It's not like they're selling out every single seat for every single game. And Jose Altuve and Justin Verlander, I'm sure they sign tons of stuff as it is. It's not like signing one more item a piece is going to dramatically depress

the value of their signature. So really, ultimately, they're not giving up a whole lot. It's just that most people, you know, they're probably just going to hand over the bat or accept whatever the first offer is, whether because they don't feel like negotiating with a major league player or because they just feel some sympathy. And it's like, hey, if I were in that spot, I would really want that ball too. So I'm not going to just hold out for the maximum I could get. But if you wanted to just play it out from the economic theory aspect of just trying to extract the highest possible price, probably fans have been underselling themselves when it comes to the value of the memorabilia for those milestones that they claim.

Yes, it seems as if like verlander i'm sure that like you know they're in the dugout they're doing the game like they're not paying attention to the broadcast i guess he it seems as if he maybe found out that this kid had wanted a signed jersey and then was like oh i'll do that and like he wrote nice catch on it like and this kid's a pitcher i'm given to understand from brian mctaggart's twitter so i had to have been a very cool and and special day he seems so enthusiastic about it i'm surprised he didn't end up like owning the team by the way i guess that i guess that we have a a new baseball owner and his name is rylan freeman rylan okay okay. We're doing Rylan. That is a baseball kid name.

That is a College World Series kind of pitcher name, Rylan Freeman. Well, maybe in, let's say, six or seven years, we'll be doing a Meet a Major Leaguer segment about him. Who knows? And maybe there will be some kid in the stands who extracts some high price for his first milestone ball of some sort. So we will see. But nice of Verlinder and Altuve, I guess, to help him out

or to help out Matochevic with their more valuable autographs. Yeah, that's the other thing. It's like, you know, we can attribute some of this to this kid's negotiating acumen and then some of it is attributable to the Astros involved. I mean, let's be clear they probably have like a jose altube sign ball just sitting around like i'm sure they got a cabinet full of those but you know you want to you want to help your teammate out i wonder what the most extravagant exchange has been yeah because you're right you don't want to be the

person who becomes known as like really driving a hard bargain right but like some of these you know milestone balls are like really valuable they'd be very valuable at auction care about that stuff yeah i mean there have been uh some examples i think there have been cases of like uh what there was a yankees fan i think who got derrick jeter's 3,000th hit, right? And that was worth a lot. It was a home run. And ultimately, I think he just gave it to him or something. It was valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he just ultimately kind of handed it over, I think, for a pretty low price. Or not that low, I guess, now that I'm looking at the story. His name was Christian Lopez. He said he had $100,000 in student loans, now that I'm looking at the story. His name was Christian Lopez.

He said he had $100,000 in student loans but would rather pay it off the old-fashioned way than rob Jeter of his memento. So what he did get was tickets to the rest of the Yankees' 32 home games, which supposedly were valued at almost $45,000. So four tickets for the Legends section for one game, four tickets for each of the rest of the games in the championship section, pretty good seats. Also three signed bats, three signed balls, three signed jerseys. So not nothing. So there is that. I mean, look, if it were a case like that, it's a little bit different. I think if you're talking about like Derek Jeter, as opposed to JJ Matyshevic, right? Like Jeter, he has many milestones and he has many millions of dollars and perhaps he could afford to give up a little bit more than the rookie who just got there

and who knows how many highlights he will have in the course of his career. So I might not hold out for as much from him. And obviously he wouldn't be able to because he wouldn't have the leverage of like this thing actually being valuable to other people who aren't that player. yeah anyway good for him i guess and maybe he can red paper clip his way to the top somehow using this these items that he has obtained the other ball related thing is a highlight that we both saw and made a note to talk about. This was tweeted by Trevor Huth, who is a writer for the Tiger site, bless you boys. And he tweeted a video of an appeal. This is in A-ball in the Florida State League

where they have the challenge system set up. So in AAA this year, they have the automated ball strike system in operation at all times. In A-ball, the catcher and the batter, I believe, can appeal the umpire's call to the robot ump. And I think if you appeal successfully, you get to keep that challenge. But the human umps are still making the initial calls. And in this case, it's the Yankees minor leaguer Richard Fitz, and he throws a pitch. It's called a ball.

The catcher calls for a challenge, and it is overturned. And the hitter, Alexander Ramirez, strikes out. So he thought it was a ball, and all of a sudden it's a strikeout, and he's headed back to the dugout on the appeal. And all of this transpires, just to give you a sense here, this entire clip from just before releasing the pitch to the end of the sequence is eight seconds long. So it all happens in that span. I mean, the actual like overturning the call is just a few seconds essentially. And the umpire turns around to signal to the crowd what is going on here. And he like taps his head, I guess, where he has the earpiece or something.

And then he makes the strike call. So that's something. That's something. I think, and I said this to you when we were talking about how we'd have to talk about this. I think the speed with which this progresses in the clip is just an argument that i am right and yeah we do not need an automatic zone all the time we just need the ability to in moments where it really matters overturn calls that are obviously wrong and if it can be done this quickly now the the catcher being the one to do it and sort of the rapid nature of this might slow down in like a big league context

right if like the if the manager has to get involved if he's the one who has to initiate the challenge maybe it's not quite so speedy but it seems like it's a workable system that would address the worst uh errors while still not rushing tech that isn't quite ready to the big leagues what do you think ben is it just me being right as always? I was impressed. I was pretty persuaded by this, I think. Now, the call is available right away, it seems like, so it's just a bang-bang thing. Now, based on this, if it were to work like this, then yeah, I might be on board with that, at least certainly as a preferable alternative to having only the zone and just zone all the time. Because initially my reaction when you brought that up before was just like, well, if you're going to have the automated zone, then you might as well just let it do its thing. its thing. Like if you think it's more effective and more accurate and all of that, then why build in the possibly incorrect call from the umpire and then have to appeal to get the correct call?

Why not just get the correct call initially? Now I'm on board with this maybe because I do like having framing and defensive skill and catcher technique and all of that. And many people don't, they don't care about that. They just want the correct call. And so for those people, I would think they would say, well, let's just have the call be correct the first time automated and then we won't need to appeal at all. So I don't know if this will persuade those people. No.

But it does sort of persuade me that this might be a good middle ground, happy medium or at least less unhappy medium for me. might be a good middle ground happy medium or at least less unhappy medium for me yeah i think i like framing and i tend to think of the strike zone probabilistically and so being able to continue with that while also taking care of the pieces of it that really do seem to both inspire the the least confidence in the system generally and address the calls that are wrong in moments that are really critical to the outcome of a particular game. This seems like a good marriage of those things. I'm sensitive to us needing to not continue to add bloat to games,

but if it can be done this quickly, I think that we just stumbled upon a perfect solution Ben it's perfect yeah it doesn't give you the aspect that the Hawkeye challenge system does in tennis where there's kind of like a collective spectator aspect to it where you like see the little graphic and you can all see where the ball hit and whether it was out or not in this it's just relayed right away but if your concern was that it would slow down the pace and it would take too long, well, this certainly helps with that. So I am more persuaded than I was initially, and I should have listened to you all along. Yeah, well, it's like that and then balls.

And last week, Rob Manfred talking to the press seemed to pump the brakes a bit on the timeline for the automated strike zone in the majors. He said that it hadn't yet been presented to the league's competition committee, which would have to happen for it to be implemented in MLB. Not that he's any less resolved to do it long term, but probably not next season, it sounds like. And I wonder if part of that is because of this challenge system. Maybe it's because they just want to work all the kinks out and make sure that the system is fully baked

when they finally do introduce it. It's also possible, though, that they're so intrigued by the challenge system that they want to evaluate that more and figure out if that is the solution that they want to advance. We will see. So I mentioned O'Neill Cruz.

We did get a glimpse of him. He did debut in the majors last year. He played a couple of games, but then he got sent down, most likely for Pirates-related service time-y reasons, although he did struggle initially at AAA before turning it on. But he's back. Riley Green also got promoted with the Tigers, who was maybe the highest-ranked prospect in the game when he came up, although all I could see when I saw that news was, oh, Riley Green, the Car Shield spokesman. That's how I think of him now. That's his claim to fame. He's in a Car Shield ad. But he's up and he's done pretty well. But O'Neal Cruz really just stole the show and put on a stat cast clinic in his first game with the Pirates.

I mean, he was showing off tools left and right. So he threw a ball from shortstop to first base at 96.7 miles per hour, which was the hardest track throw by any infielder this year, and I think any infielder other than Fernando Tatis Jr. on record in the StatCast era. He also hit a ball 112.9 miles per hour and he had a 31.5 feet per second sprint speed. I think all of those things immediately set 2022 Pirates records. So in the span of a few innings, he bested every other Pirate in all of those respects. So he showed off the arm, he showed off the bat, he showed off the wheels. Not that any of that is a surprise, I guess. We knew he had those tools, but to show them off in

quick succession like that and that throw, I mean, to basically throw as if he were a pitcher throwing from the mound, but Cruz as a shortstop are not like he's too slow or he doesn't hit the ball hard or he has a weak arm. So like whatever nitpicks you could make about him as a player, I guess these don't directly address. Like I guess the bigger concerns would be about plate discipline or strikeout rate or range, let's say. But he seems to have held his own in those respects too, at least in the minors. And he played mostly shortstop down there, even though they were talking about getting him acclimated to left field. He ended up not playing all that much left field, fortunately, because I want to see the 6'7 shortstop play shortstop and not be short at all, the tall stop.

So he's up and he is flashing impressive skills left and right so kind of awesome to have him not only come up but make an immediate impact and all the high reels all at once yeah i mean that was just like you know i imagine that there aren't a ton of games where you can necessarily say this but what a what a lovely evening pirates fans got to have like it was just a very cool time because he wasn't the only um you know player to debut in that game and so they just are getting to see you know some you get some glimpses you get he overshadowed uh blimey dress yeah the uhyear-old rookie who is the first MLB player of Palawan descent. Yes.

I believe the small island in the Western Pacific. Yeah. And so it's like you both got hits. They both had impressive defensive plays. There is definitely a reason that Eric has an 80 on O'Neal Cruz's arm. You are right to say that the concerns around him being able to stick there are not related to his arm his arm is is quite excellent so i think that you know there are just days where you get to see like hey if it all comes together right if the young guys all sort of can gel and and play up then you might have something exciting here and that doesn't mean that crews

won't have struggles later and that you that some of the stuff that was causing him to sort of scuttle in the early part of the season for him in the minors won't resurface. And I think that other than his arm, there are still some times where you can see the sort of limitations of his frame playing short. And it's not to say that that stuff won't manifest, but it sure didn't yesterday.

So that's pretty exciting. It is just very cool to get to see like the future potentially manifesting and we we love we love like uh is here's a question for you sonia oh no cruz a beef boy oh i think he's too wiry yeah i think you're right yeah i mean he's he's giant obviously but he doesn't have the girth at least not yet and if you want him to stay at shortstop you probably hope not for a while yet right so you know like but he is he's just he's so tall he's so tall so it's just like a cool thing and i hope that uh it continues to to play to like the best potential outcome he was a guy who had and i think probably still has like a good amount of variance in terms

of what his future role might be but if he keeps having games like that then we'll all feel very smart for having had him on the hundred yep right and i guess in with the new out with the old just a quick little salute to lorenzo kane who hasn't officially retired as we speak, but was DFA'd by the Brewers, although that seems to have been a mutual thing. And they seem to have kept him just long enough for him to qualify for 10 years of service, which is nice. Yeah, that's classy. Everyone loves Lorenzo Cain and enjoyed watching him during his career, especially during his time with the Royals. But pretty good hitter and just great glove and good runner and just a really entertaining player who everyone seemed to really like. And surprised everyone and surpassed expectations as someone who got into the game quite late compared to most major leaguers so just a good story a good career if he doesn't catch on somewhere else then yeah happy trails to lorenzo king yeah it wasn't so

long ago that he looked like really really good and so you know time comes for all of us but it does yes waiting until he had hit the 10-year mark, which has, like, it has pension implications, if nothing else. Like, that's good. Good. All right. Ending here with the stat blast. 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 Daystablast. As always, the Stat Blast is presented by our friends at Baseball Reference and specifically by the Stat Head tool at Baseball Reference. The very, very powerful tool to look up stats not just about baseball but also about many other major sports. As I noted last time, they have recently upgraded the Stat Head tool and they have given it new capabilities and made it faster and quicker at querying. They are constantly upgrading the thing, but even as is, it is extremely useful. We say it all the time. We're not just saying it because they are sponsoring the StatPlus segment. We're saying it because we used to say it even when they weren't sponsoring the StatPlus segment. So really, they never needed to sponsor us at all because we would have praised them regardless. Hopefully, they do not hear us saying that

because it'd be nice if they kept sponsoring us. But we love it. We use it all the time. I use it for this segment sometimes. I use it to answer listener emails. I use it in my writing. I use it to satisfy my own curiosity. So you would too.

And you can go to stathead.com, sign up using the coupon code WILD20, W-I-L-D 2-0, and you can get a $20 discount on an $80 one-year subscription. Okay. This stat blast question comes from Raymond Chen, who is one of our longtime listeners, Patreon supporters, and wiki maintainers, the Effectively Wild wiki. His fingerprints are all over that thing. He says a ship of Theseus can be reconstructed in a single game if all the starters leave the game. So this is the idea of the ship of Theseus, right? And when you replace all of the component pieces of something, is it actually the same thing? We've done a couple stat blasts actually related to this theme.

1709, we did a stat blast about, I think, the quickest starting lineup turnover within a single team in a season. So how quickly did a team go from starting a bunch of players on opening day to not starting any of those players? I think it was episode 1771, we did a Ship of Theseus that was postseason themed, so highest postseason usage of players who had recently joined the team. Well, this is the single game Ship of Theseus. So a Ship of Theseus can be reconstructed in a single game. If all the starters leave the game, the game is now being played by a completely different set of nine or ten players, but wearing the same laundry.

So Raymond wants to know, has this ever happened? What were the circumstances? What is the earliest in a season a full lineup replacement has occurred in a game? And what is the earliest in a game that a full lineup replacement has occurred? So it's a different team, essentially, when the first pitch is thrown to when the last pitch is thrown. So frequent stat blast consultant Ryan Nelson looked this up and he found, I'm quoting here, this has happened 52 times since 1901, most recently on September 14th, 2019 by the Cubs. However, this has never happened outside of September or October. So presumably these are all let the kids play substitutions late in games. For example, that 2019 Cubs game had almost all of the subs come in

in the seventh or eighth inning when the Cubs were up by 12 or 13 runs. So the earliest in a season that this has ever happened is on September 2nd by the 1970 Cubs. The earliest in a game this has ever happened was on September 28th, 2014 by those Royals. They substituted the DH, Billy Butler, batting fifth, and the shortstop, Alcides Escobar, batting first during the top of the fifth for a pinch hitter and pinch runner, respectively. The pinch hitter struck out to end the inning, so the Royals substituted every other player before the bottom of the fifth for a pinch hitter and pinch runner respectively the pinch hitter struck out to end the inning so the royals substituted every other player before the bottom of the fifth no starters appeared for the royals in the bottom of the fifth so this has only happened in september

or october and i would venture to say in all cases or almost all cases probably after roster expansion right so i don't know that this can happen anymore yeah because post 2019 we haven't had the expansion of the active roster to 40 players after september and given the construction of bullpens and benches these days it would be tough to do without that like you need enough just reserves to turn over your entire team. And if you're not expanding to 40, like technically I guess it could be possible now that we have the 13 pitcher limit in place and we do have some slight September roster expansion to 28. Right, you have a little bit but not much.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, if you do the math there, I guess, you know, if you have 28 players on your roster and a maximum of 13 pitchers, so you have 15 position players. So could you do it? Maybe. I don't know. It would be tough. Like you could, I guess, technically replace all of your starters, but it would not be easy to do. I don't know that you really could do it or that we will see this happen again unless rosters expand again or the pitcher restrictions get even

tighter than they are now. So it has happened, but it may not happen again. So we became aware of it perhaps after it has ceased to happen forever. Although never say never, it could potentially theoretically happen again at some point. Yeah, I was trying to decide if I think that that number is surprisingly high or surprisingly low. I guess it's probably right where you would expect it to be. But something that you're right, we're not likely to see again unless roster rules get changed. Maybe not dramatically, but meaningfully yet again. Because, I don't know, where would you

get all the people? Right. Yeah. All right. And then the other question is from Patreon supporter Russell Goldstein, who says, here's an interesting question courtesy of none other than Michael K on the Yankees broadcast. In the first game of a doubleheader between the Angels and Yankees, Shohei Otani got the loss, as a pitcher that is, but also made the last out of the game, And you wouldn't think this would be common because if you're losing, then you'd think that you'd want a real hitter up there, right? If you want to try to come back, and Otani, of course, is the exception. He is a real hitter, but you wouldn't think that this would have happened all that often in the course of normal events. Well, Ryan did the work on this one too, and I will urge everyone again to follow him on Twitter at rsnelson23. Ryan says, for the years that we have play-by-play data since 1916, this has actually happened 180 times.

It used to be somewhat common a long time ago. For example, seven times in 1916, five times in 1917, five times in 1918, et cetera. 34 times since 1950, 14 times since 1980, and only nine times since 2000. So it makes sense that it would have happened more often in the dead ball days because back then you had, first of all, pitchers who generally went the distance. And then also you had more two-way players or at least pitchers who were competent hitters. There was less of a distinction between pitchers as hitters and hitters in general. But it has become increasingly rare. Ryan says most recently before the Otani game, it happened with Tyler Chatwood for the Giants on August 18th of last season, 2021. Chatwood came into a 1-1 game in the top of the 11th and allowed a run, but his team got the run back in the bottom of the 11th to push it to the 12th. But in the top of the 12th, Chatwood allowed four runs. In the bottom of the 12th, Chatwood was due up third,

and the Giants went down 1-2-3, ending with a Tyler Chatwood strikeout. It seems this was an instance of throwing up the white flag down four with two outs. It happened twice in 2019, once by Luis Perdomo for the Padres on July 13th under very similar circumstances. The other time was a different situation. On August 2nd, 2019, Roman Quinn came in as a position player pitcher in the top of the 15th, allowed a run, then struck out to end the game in the bottom of the 15th. Okay.

Now Ryan says, I think the thing that makes the Otani case seem more interesting than these other examples is that he started the game as well. He didn't pitch the entire game, but due to the new rule, he got to stay in as the DH. So if we look for examples of a starting pitcher who got the loss and made the final out of the game, it slims the examples down drastically, at least recently. The last starting pitcher to do that prior to Otani was Bob Forsh for the Cardinals on September 13th, 1980. So it had been some time. And Ryan writes, this one seems inexplicable to me.

Forsh was facing some guy named Steve Carlton that day, and it was a true pitcher's duel. Carlton allowed a single in the second, and following that, there was a pass ball and a throwing error by the catcher that allowed the runner to go from first to third. The next batter's single gave the Cardinals a 1-0 lead, and it would stay that score until the sixth. In that inning, Forsh allowed a double to Bob Boone, a single to Steve Carlton, hit Pete Rose with a pitch to load the bases, and then hit Bake McBride to play to run. Following that was a Mike Schmidt sack fly to make the game 2-1. Going into the top of the ninth, the score remained 2-1, with both starting pitchers still in the game. Different era.

Seventh place hitter Ken Reitz started the inning with a fly out. Sensing that time was running out to score a run, Cardinals manager Red Shane Dienst wisely pinch hit. Eighth hole hitter Mike Ramsey, who had a 70 OPS plus with Bobby Bonds, who actually only had a 71 OPS+, but was Bobby Bonds. Ramsey was a switch hitter who did much worse against lefties like Carlton. Bonds hit right-handed, but all that cleverness didn't matter as Bonds struck out anyway. So up comes Forsh with the game on the line. Ninth inning, two outs, down only one run, and they let him hit for himself. Ryan writes, Forsh was a good hitter for a pitcher in his career with a 53 OPS plus,

but surely there was a better bat on the bench, right? Gary Templeton was on the bench. He had a 108 OPS plus that year. So was Ken Obergefell, holder of the 119 OPS plus, or what about Dane Orge, 116 OPS plus, or Leon Durham, 100 OPS plus, both of whom were available as far as I can tell. Nope, Forsh hit for himself, and he struck out. Now, I did look up a game story for this game in the Wilmington News Journal, and it said Carlton needed no help in the ninth, finishing flamboyantly with two strikeouts for a total of five to raise his Major League leading total to 257, the last victim, surprisingly, was Forsh. However, it says the Cards pitcher is hitting 301. And with three homers in 74 at-bats, he is a superior long ball threat compared to Terry Kennedy and the other right-handed hitters on the St. Louis bench. So Forsh was a pitcher-hitter, but he was hitting.301 at that

time with three homers. He was a pretty good hitter for a pitcher, and that was that, I guess. So also in that game story, Shane Dienst said, we were horse bleep. I doubt he actually said horse bleep, although it would be funny if he did. It would be funny if he did. That's why we're where we're at, fourth place fourth place 14 games back they don't have their bleeping minds on the game it's somewhere else i've seen it all year baseball is a workshop you put the uniform on and it's all business you don't typically hear managers uh come out and say that their teams were horse bleep or that they didn't have their bleeping minds on the game. You don't hear that all that often. So anyway, I guess they bought into the small sample Bob Forsh slugging.

So that's why that happened. But it hadn't happened for more than 40 years until Otani. I did happen to see while I was browsing newspapers looking for game stories about that game that there was an item in the papers on September 14th, 1980. NL may approve designated hitter. Oh boy. The National League was supposed to hold a special meeting of club executives Wednesday in Chicago to again vote on the designated hitter rule. And Atlanta Braves executive VP Al Thornwell predicts the measure will pass. Well, Al, I hate to break it to you. Took a little longer.

Yeah, it did take a few more years. In your examination of the archive, did you notice if anyone had ever used force out as a punny headline, or did editors back then have more restraint than I do? I did not notice, but it would be a real missed opportunity if they had not. Yeah. I mean, obviously, this was not an example of a forced out. No. Well, it was.

It was, but not. It was not forced out. Yeah. It isn't maximizing its pun potential. So maybe that's why they held back because they're like, look, it's close, but it's not quite where we need it to be. Yeah. So that vote, had it been held, would have been the second one in two months on the DH. And the previous time Atlanta, San Diego, New York and St. Louis voted for the measure, Cincinnati, Chicago, Montreal, Los Angeles and San Francisco voted against abstaining were Philadelphia, Houston and Pittsburgh. So it was close. And Thornwell said he thinks Pittsburgh and Philadelphia will vote in favor of the proposal

this time. However, I did look a few days later, September 16th, 1980, and the headline was Senior League Shelves Designated Hitter Plan. The National League has apparently shelved plans to adopt the designated hitter rule once again. And the president of the league announced that the clubs requesting an NL meeting on the DH withdrew their request and that there will be no league meeting following the joint meeting. So spoiler, there was

no National League DH in 1980. It took a minute. Yeah. All right. And lastly, the past blast. So this is 1865, episode 1865. And we have a fact from 1865. I suppose that is appropriate for our first post-Juneteenth episode here. But as always, this comes from Richard Hershberger, historian, saber researcher, and author of the book Strike Four, The Evolution of Baseball. So here is our fact from baseball in 1865. Richard writes, now this is an anonymous letter that was sent to the Philadelphia Inquirer, published June 24th, 1865, condemning a growing practice that could have been the ruination of the game, sliding. Sliding had been invented and people were not pleased.

So this letter writer wrote, You will appreciate my motive in calling the attention of first-class players of the game of baseball to a notorious custom practiced by players of the present day. It is a well-known fact, even to those having a limited information of the game, that a player in running the base cannot avoid the ball in the hands of the player by running to either side of a direct line between the bases. The system of which I disapprove, and I am confident I will be upheld by the majority of players, is that on the field we notice the slide game, quote-unquote, or when a player in an effort to gain his base will throw himself on the ground, feet foremost, sliding for fully a distance of 20 feet. Seems like a long way to slide. It is not only the unmanliness of such a proceeding, but...

These are so weird. The unwritten rules of sliding is unmanly in 1865. But, and I guess this is more fair, the danger encountered by a basekeeper from his opponent by dashing at the base feet first, convincing you, put him out. Half a dozen steel spikes may enter your hands or body, hence the necessity of abolishing such an unfair practice, benefiting only the party in play and angering and intimidating the base players. Yes, the sliding only benefits the runner who is sliding. It is almost impossible to put a player out who is determined to enforce this manner of avoiding the ball. Unless you are willing to risk the severe injury of your hands, it is not only an improper play, but destroys the spirit of the game. The thing summed up amounts to this, either prevent the use of spikes or stop the

slide. I desire the members of the baseball convention to attach more importance to this general complaint and in future by rule prohibit such a contemptible and dangerous game. A little prompt option on the part of the umpires would soon rid us of this practice. And Richard writes, The rules cited are a scattershot attempt at arguing that sliding was illegal. The most substantive argument is that some slides would take the runner outside the base path, which was defined as the direct line between the bases. The call for further legislation shows that the writer knew this argument was weak.

Sliding seems not to have destroyed the game game but the book is still open on that uh unmanly yes boy stay on your feet keep your feet keep your feet just sliding just trying to get around the tag come Come now. Be honorable. Do you ever spend time thinking about how lucky we are that old-timey baseball people didn't get so in their own way that you and I would have to have different professions like 100 years later? Yeah. I think about that a lot. It's like, this is all made up. It's informed by gravity, but not a natural law like gravity. And in a lot of respects, we're just lucky to be here. Yeah.

They did really have a point about the spikes, though. The spikes were ridiculously dangerous. Like people were like seriously injured, like everywhere. And they didn't have antibiotics back then. Like, you know, that's why you have like high socks, right? Sanitary socks. It was like to prevent those wounds from being exposed and being infected. did away with like steel sharp spikes till like the 1970s or something i mean there was a period where it was like really like close to lethal sometimes so i i do have some sympathy for that

argument at least not so much for the unmanliness or the fact that it only benefits the base runner yeah i mean like at some point you just gotta let uh dudes be bros and bros be dudes you know you gotta just let them gotta let them play as it were but um yeah when you're living in an era where like you know if a a rock looks at you the wrong way you can get an infection that kills you instantly like i have some sympathy for that part but the rest of it seems very silly you're like oh i might trip over that rock and scrape myself the mere anticipation has given me a blood-borne disease that i'll never recover from right and richard did note because we talked about diamond right and why it's called a diamond instead of a square or rhombus or whatever.

And he noted, as I think I did, that the usage is old. It's from the Boys' Book of Sports published in 1835, his one old citation. He said it is used because the square of the four bases is conventionally depicted with the corners at the top and bottom. The version of baseball played in Boston in the late 1850s also had four bases, but was conventionally depicted with the sides along the top and bottom, and so was called a square. These conventions in turn existed to plate the batter at either the bottom, as in modern depictions, or the top, as was often found in early depictions. The Boston version used stakes driven into the ground for bases, which would interfere with the batter if that was where he started. So instead, he was placed halfway between fourth and first bases,

hence the depiction of the square. And he sends some pictures, which I will post on there. So that could be why it's called a diamond. Although, as we have noted, it is technically, I guess, not a square because second base is not where most people thought it was, but they are going to be moving second base. And so it actually will maybe be a square, but it has kind of technically been a diamond. It's complicated. Anyway, he notes also that the fact that stakes used to be driven into the ground instead of actual bases might be why they talked about making the base versus touching the base,

because we talked in an earlier past blast about how they just decided that, yes, you actually do have to touch the base. So he notes that if there are physical stakes, then there is an unambiguous area to run around. That is to say, if you cut a corner, you would be running on the wrong side of the stake, which would be pretty obvious. The version of pre-modern baseball played in Philadelphia had stakes. There is some evidence that they did not touch the stake as they went by. When the New York version was introduced, it took the Philadelphia players a while to internalize the requirement. So there's a reason for everything. It's not always a good reason, but there's a reason. Generally a reason. Yes. All right. That will do it for today. I guess we should have mentioned

that if sliding had been banned, that would have been great news for our hypothetical player with glass ass syndrome who can't slide without endangering himself. Every other player would have been in the same boat. No such luck. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

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Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. I turned my head and I looked below

And there was something that I know Suddenly I began to fall I looked around and I tried to call Standing in a slide zone Yeah, I'm stepping in a time zone Standing in a slide zone Bye.