Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1895: Buggin’ Out

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Julio Rodríguez‘s complex, long-term extension with the Mariners, which wild card contenders Meg is most worried about as a Mariners fan, George Kirby’s game-starting strike streak and the nature of a strike, the new CBA’s impact on midseason callups, and Bryce Harper’s return, follow up on MLB players […]

Music Running over, huntest in the shores. Everybody swimming, swimming in the water. Hello and welcome to episode 1895 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello.

Julio. Julio. Rod Rigue mariner forever mariner maybe it certainly seems like boy this extension i'm still processing the terms here oh yeah we all are we're gonna have to just read some tweets i think ben yeah i think our only option is to read some passing tweets here right yes jeff has a whole thread here. Thread! So let's just read the thread. Do you want to go like every other? Should I read all of them? How do you want to do this, Matt?

Sure, okay. I'll lead off. You can trade off every other tweet. Okay. There's a lot to digest on Julio Rodriguez's extension with Seattle per ESPN sources. The deal could be for 8, 13, 16, or 18 years. It guarantees Rodriguez $210 million. If it maxes out, it will be the largest ever, $470 million. The details are

important. Here they are. The base of the deal is for 8 years and $120 million. It includes this season and runs through 2029. After 2028, the Mariners must decide whether to pick up a club option. The size and length of that depends on Rodriguez's performance in MVP voting. The option is for eight or 10 years on top of the original deal. Depending on how Rodriguez fares in MVP voting, wins and finishes, it can range anywhere from $200 million to $350 million. If the Mariners pick up the option, Rodriguez's guarantee in the deal is at least $320 million. Now, if the Mariners don't pick up the option after year seven, Rodriguez has a player option

after year eight for five years and $90 million, thus the 13-year structure and $210 million floor. He could turn it down and hit free agency right before his 30th birthday, too. Here I will editorialize and remind everyone, Julio Rodriguez, just 21. Yeah. Last tweet. The likeliest outcome, Julio Rodriguez is a Seattle Mariner through 2037. That's not a real year. Is that a real year, 2037?

I am a column of dust. Is that when we get the flying cars finally? And makes at least $320 million, probably much more. And if he turns into the monster that he has shown he is in his rookie season, it could be the most financially lucrative deal in American sports history. Although, who knows what inflation will have wrought by 2037. Oh, yeah. We'll be living on the moon by then. Yeah.

So this is obviously super exciting for Mariners fans and probably pretty exciting for Julio. Yeah. It's hard for me to even analyze the terms here in the way that we often do to try to gauge team friendliness or player friendliness. Like, I don't know. There's just so many moving parts and options and vesting thingies and incentives. It's a lot of money regardless. And I guess it's the most guaranteed money that a player with his service time has gotten or at least his level of major league experience, I guess, surpassing Wander Franco's extension. And he, unlike Wander, has a full year of service time or is just about to because he came up on opening day this year. So I guess maybe he's more of like a one to two service time year player. But even for that, it's a record deal. So it's a record. so it's a record i think we could say that

and how favorable it is to one party or another is sort of tough to assess i suppose i mean we're still assessing who julio is as a player right and who knows what this deal actually ends up looking like and how much he makes when it's all said and done. Okay. Can I do, I'm going to do, I'm going to do a tiny annoyed reaction. It's going to be tiny and we're going to get it out of the way.

Cause it's not the headline here. Cause you're right. The headline here is Julio Rodriguez effectively in all likelihood forever Mariner. I guess as an editor, I would just cut that down to Julio Rodriguez forever Mariner for the sake of brevity that's what a subhead is for ben and like he is just the face of the franchise uh that was effectively true and now it is formally true and what a delightful turn of events this young guy who is just effervescent and so exciting and so talented. And now he's a forever mariner. So we're going to be excited about that part. And we're going to be happy

for him that he is guaranteed $210 million. But I'm going to pick a nit. I'm going to pick a potentially $150 million nit, Ben. I really don't think it is great for voting members of the BBWA to have this much influence over how much money someone makes. And I will cite an example closer to home. I shared on our last episode that I have an NL Rookie of the Year vote.

I'm not decided on how I'm voting in that race and I'm not revealing my vote on this podcast because you get yelled at when you do that. You get some feedback about doing that before the award is announced. But I think that when I learned I was going to have a vote in that race, Michael Harris II had not yet signed his extension with Atlanta. And our listeners will remember that Michael Harris the second was Harris was not up on opening day on Lake Julio. Right. And the way that the CBA works, if you're a top two finisher in a rookie of the year voting, you accrue a full year of service time, regardless of whether of when you were called up. Right. This is one of the measures that they put into the new CBA in an effort to combat service

time manipulation. And I was very uncomfortable with the amount of influence I was at that time going to potentially have on Harris's service time and his free agency timeline. I thought that that was that. I think at the time that the CBA was enacted. I probably didn't say that because there were so many things for us to talk about and I was just so relieved that we were going to have a season. But it just fundamentally isn't the job of writers to have this kind of influence over the trajectory of a player's monetary future, right?

I just don't think that this is what we're here for. It's not unprecedented, right? There are don't think that this is what we're here for. It's not unprecedented, right? There are all kinds of bonuses built into contracts around MVP or Cy Young finishes, right? There is precedent for this sort of thing to a degree, but not generally to this degree, where there might be $150 million swing in Julio Rodriguez's career earnings, depending on how the MVP voting shakes out. And I think that like directionally, this stuff is aligned in the right way, right? Where if Julio is doing as well as we think he will, he'll make more money and the Mariners

will be happy to pay him that because he'll be producing at an MVP level. But MVP voting is sometimes really difficult. Like some years, there's just an obvious MVP and you vote for that guy and you vote for the runners up and you say, job well done. I feel confident in my vote. But there are differences in sort of philosophy in the voting body about what is an MVP season. And they're

just like their differences around Cy Young's and Rookie of the Year and all sorts of stuff. And it opens up writers to, you know, accusations of potential bias, even if they don't exist, which I expect they won't. I think most voters take their responsibilities around this stuff really seriously and try to put forth a vote that is rigorous and defensible and not defensed, but defensible, right? And so I just, I don't know anyone in the association who likes this. Like I think we're all made uncomfortable by having this degree of influence.

And we don't all vote on every award every year, as me revealing I have an NL Rookie of the Year vote probably drove home to our listeners. You just find out sometime in the month of August if you have an awards vote or not. And for you, have you ever had an awards vote, Ben? Nope, because I'm in the New York chapter. And there's so many. There's so many people, and it's just sort of randomly, I assume, distributed among them. Yeah, I don't quite know what that process entails, actually. I guess I should, but I don't. So it's not as if... I imagine that as an association, this is going to be something that we continue to noodle on to figure out ways to safeguard our own reputations, to

ensure that the process that is determining salaries is as as sort of fair and robust as possible but it just feels like it isn't that's not my job like that shouldn't be my circus or my monkeys is that the expression not my circus not my monkeys do they own the monkeys i don't know anyway that's not the point circuses anymore it seems like because of concerns about who owns the monkeys or how they're treated. But I guess. Right. So I just think that that is the one nit I will pick in this because I feel like it is like an outsourcing of responsibility to a body that did not ask for that responsibility and whose job this really isn't.

that did not ask for that responsibility and whose job this really isn't. Like this isn't, shouldn't be part of our job description as writers and editors. I don't think so. So that's my knit that I have now picked. I feel like I've done it enough and we can return to being excited

about Julio Rodriguez's Forever Mariner. I wonder if we'll finally be able to buy a Julio jersey in the team store. Get on it, guys. What's up with that? It's not online. Want to buy a little Julio jersey for my niece? Can't do it.

Yeah. So Julio, who does not turn 22 until the very end of this year. And he has a 132 WRC+. He's been worth three and a half war and just a little more than 100 games. He has power. He has a 132 WRC+. He's been worth three and a half more in just a little more than 100 games. He has power. He has speed. He's a 2020 player already.

Yeah, officially. As I saw, according to Baseball Reference, he's the 10th player in the NL or AL since 1901 to hit 20-plus home runs and steal 20-plus bases in the first 125 games of a career. Only Fernando Tatis Jr. reached those marks in fewer games than Rodriguez, and Tatis got his long extension, and now Julio has his. And Trout was the third fastest, and he got his extensions too. So yeah, you have a player like that, you want to be in business with that player for as long as possible, it seems like. And, you know, I don't know what nits you could pick about the player here. I suppose there's some plate discipline question still. Maybe he strikes out a tad too much and doesn't walk a whole lot

and swings at some pitches that perhaps he shouldn't. But that's not unusual with a 21-year-old player. And obviously he's making it work. And especially since his perhaps umpire impeded slow start to the season he's been fantastic and we know he has incredible bat speed and he hits the ball hard and he's fast and it turns out he seems to be a plus center fielder for the time being too so yeah you can't go wrong just wanting to keep julio around for as long as he possibly can.

So that's exciting because the Mariners have rebuilt themselves into a contender, managed to turn around the farm to some extent, managed to promote a position player and have him actually be great, at least so far with Julio. And you got to feel pretty good about the core of that team these days and how long this particular piece of the core will be part of it. And I think that it's so easy when you're engaged in a dramatic reading of Jeff Passan's timeline to fixate on the big minimum rate. It's 210 as a big minimum. And to fixate on the potentially enormous maximum value that this deal could reach. I have been reminded several times today by people who I assume don't like me personally how old I will be when this contract is done, right? So there's so many things that you can go kind of like, wow.

But I think one thing that's important to remember, and Julio's new deal is already reflected in the Mariners R resource payroll page. So if you're trying to kind of wrap your brain around what this means on a year to year basis, you can go check that out. We think we got it right. This is easily the longest contract description I've ever seen on roster resource. So that's pretty funny but i think that you know you hear those big numbers and you think about what this means and then you look at like what this breaks down to from an average annual value perspective at least for the the first several years of the deal and and i'm not saying this to like you know magnum mariners or like be you know but i feel like I'm Adam Driver in Star Wars just going, more, more. Because this is, if he is the guy who we think he is and who the Mariners clearly believe him to be in terms of the caliber of player he will be, especially over the first decade of his contract, There is nothing here that remotely limits their ability to continue to add to this team, right? And I am saying that from a place of optimism and excitement as someone whose fandom has definitely been rekindled over the last six months where it's like, let's go. If you're the Mariners, let's go.

You have this bright young star. He's going to be on your team for a really long time. You have a bunch of other guys who are good and exciting. You've traded for Luis Castillo. You're making this playoff push. You're in playoff position. You are hopefully, hopefully going to you know finally get the the postseason drought broken and push through and this to me is like a signal of a franchise that is trying to say not only now that they are going to play october baseball in 2022 but to all the potential free agents that are hitting the market this winter. Don't you want to play postseason baseball here in 2023? So I hope that this is far from the last thing that they do, that they say, this is our window. This is our opportunity.

We have graduated the guys from our system who are really good. And now our primary means of talent acquisition is going to be saying, we're a team that's willing to spend money to add the right guys to supplement a core that we're really excited about. And I think that if you're a Mariners fan, that has to feel really exciting. Just think how little any of us have to care about drew lock or Gino Smith.

Those are football players on the Seattle Seahawks, and it's not going to be a very good football team. But who cares? Because for the first two months they're playing, you know what you could potentially do instead? Probably watch Mariners baseball. How cool. Sure.

Yeah. Well, a couple more Mariners questions while we're on the subject. Sure, yeah. So the Mariners' playoff odds are over 90%, right? They are in wildcard position. They are a game behind the Blue Jays. They're in the third wildcard slot currently. Does any of the teams behind them scare you? Is anyone keeping you awake? The portion of you that has come awake as a Mariners fan?

Oh, they're all keeping me awake, Ben. They're all keeping me awake. You've got the Orioles two and a half games back. And really, the either funniest or most tragic outcome of the season would be like the Mariners missing the playoffs because the Orioles overtook them. So the Mariners have one of the easiest projected strengths of schedules remaining. The Orioles have one of the hardest. So there's that. So you have the Orioles and then you have the central teams. So there's that. So you have the Orioles and then you have the Central teams. So the Twins and the White Sox are five back now and the Guardians are sitting pretty at the moment at the top of the Central. So are you more worried about the Central, I guess, just the field there or the Orioles? That's such a... What a weird world where I'm asking you that question on August 26th.

weird world where I'm asking you that question on August 26th. What a good question, Ben. What a strange question. I have had enough experience with this team to be able to spread my fear around. Did you watch the end of that Orioles-White Sox game yesterday, Ben? Yeah. That's so great for Liam Hendricks. Good for the Orioles, though. Yeah. Feel bad for Hendricks, feel bad for Adam Engel. As soon as it happened, what we're talking about to our listeners who were like not tuned into the Orioles-White Sox game because they maybe have better boundaries with sports than we do. There were two outs, if I'm not mistaken, right, Ben?

There were two outs in that game. The White Sox were leading by a run. right right ben there were two outs in that game the white socks were leading by a run stowers was at the plate for baltimore and he popped up in what should have been yeah you know it should have been a foul territory out and adam angle like overran it a little bit and it ended up behind him and he you know he got one of those play in foul territory errors which is when you know you really messed up like you Like you really goofed it bad. And as soon as that happened, I was like, Stars isn't going to hit a home run here, is he?

And then he sure did. He sure hit a home run to tie it, and then they ended up losing an extra. So I think that on the one hand, you could look at the outcome of that game within the context of your question and say, well, we don't have to fret about the White Sox because because they're clearly cursed but you could also look at it and say i don't know about the the orioles they're not a good i've said this yesterday i think like they're not a good team

but they're not a bad team either you know i think that the ideal scenario honestly is for some of the teams ahead of seattle to take a tumble and then for us to get both baltimore and seattle in the wild card like why you know you always make me choose between good things in a way that feels very forced and instead i'm going to reject the premise of your question and say i fear for tampa and toronto because one of them is going to, you know, fall out of favor to these mighty, mighty Orioles. And then we will set up a path for the Mariners and the Orioles to meet in the ALCS and just watch Jake and Jordan be torn apart. Yeah. Finally, something will drive a wedge.

Finally, break up. Yeah. So it's going to spin me to barbecue. Yeah. We're not rooting for it, but that's a thing I worry about. No, I mean, they have an easy schedule they need to win. When you are occasionally dropping games to the Nationals, that doesn't strike you as good.

I have asked before how long the Mets would need to have normal health as an organization for me to stop going, lol, Mets, when something bad happens. And I am now asking myself the question, how long will it take? How many postseason runs? How many years of just being a good baseball team will it take before Seattle losing to a less good roster on occasion, as good teams do all the time?

But how long until that stops filling me with fear? Because they dropped a game to the Nationals that they were in a position to force extras in and then hopefully win because Paul Seawall gave up a home run, which is a thing that he hadn't done. He hadn't given up a hit, I don't think, in a position to force extras in and then, you know, hopefully win because Paul Seawall gave up a home run, which is a thing that he hadn't done. He hadn't given up a hit, I don't think, in a while. And my first thought was, oh, I hope in a month I'm not thinking about this. I hope it's not top of mind for me in a month. And so I'm afraid of everything and also very confident. And I hope that what it really comes down to is Seattle and Baltimore and their improbable March to October.

You know, if we have Orioles and Seattle had decent playoff odds coming into the season. But if we have Oriole players on Twitter being like, Fangraphs doesn't know what it's talking about. Like, that'll be annoying, but I'll be happy to because it'll be like, yeah, man, like, good on you. You did a thing that we did not expect. How cool. Right. My other Mariners related question is actually a question from listener Jamie, which is about the record George Kirby set for the Mariners this week. So Jamie wrote, as I'm sure you know, earlier this week, Master of Command-er George Kirby threw 24 consecutive strikes to begin his start against the Nationals, which is an MLB record since pitch tracking began in 1988.

As a lifelong Seattle Mariners fan, I have learned to be somewhat skeptical of the various records celebrated by this team. Yeah. But this one struck me as interesting for two reasons. One, it felt like a pretty straightforward record, no complex series of qualifiers or anything. And two, it felt like a record that a pitcher could reasonably try to break if they wanted to. So Jamie said, my question to you is this. If a major league starting pitcher one day decided pitching strategy be damned, I'm going to get my name in the record books. Is it unreasonable to think they could just go out and throw 25 straight strikes?

And how far could they reasonably go before throwing a ball or being pulled? Importantly, for this specific record, we're talking about pitch count stats. So all foul balls and balls hit and play count as strikes regardless of outcome. So you wouldn't need to strike out eight batters to do this. Just don't throw a ball outside the zone that the batter doesn't swing at. And that is interesting. So look, it was impressive. Kirby is a strike

thrower, you know, even when it's not a record setting strike throwing performance or he's throwing exclusively strikes, he's a strike thrower. And this was impressive. I think the previous record was 21 to start a game. So he surpassed it handily. The thing is, though, I guess this becomes a pedantic question about baseball. What is a strike? Is it just anything other than a ball? Because hits count, right? Right. Hits on pitches outside the strike zone count.

Like when he did this, he ended up having an excellent start. But the inning in which he did this was not that great. He got a strikeout to lead off the first, but then he gave up three consecutive singles before getting a double play to get out of the inning with only one run allowed. So it is true that he did not throw a ball in this inning, but there were three singles. And I think at least one of them was on a pitch that seemed outside of the strike zone. So it's kind of an interesting thing because whether you're throwing a strike depends in part on you and in part on the batter, right? Because the batter could swing at a pitch that's not going to be a strike and then it is a strike. And that is partly creditable to you as a pitcher for inducing the swing on that out-of-zone pitch. But also you might just give up a hit on an out-of-zone pitch and that still counts as a strike. So is that right or proper? I don't know. I guess my question is like, how impressive is this record? Because I think Jamie's getting at something here where like, yeah, you probably could set this record pretty easily, I think. Like, it's hard to have command and control that allows you to throw that many consecutive pitches in the strike zone if you are throwing at max effort and you're actually trying to

get chases and you're not trying to allow damage, et cetera. If all you were trying to do was set this record, I think that most pitchers could do that. I think that they could throw 25 consecutive pitches either in the zone or close enough and slow enough that someone's going to swing in it. If you're just lobbing meatballs in there, A, you can get strikes pretty easily if the batter doesn't swing, but they're going to swing a lot. And so i guess the other issue is that like you have to throw enough pitches period in the inning to set this record right because like if you're so efficient that you are just i guess it doesn't have to be within an inning right it can be any number of innings it's just right which

is pitches to start the game right so there's how it unfolded for Kirby, right? Right. I don't know exactly how deep he went or how far into his start it was that he finally threw a ball. I think it had been a couple innings, yeah. Yeah, I don't think he threw a ball even in the second inning. Yeah, I think he had gotten to like the third before. Yeah, I think it was, yeah, it was like the third batter he faced in the third finally took a ball.

So yeah, that went a while. But, yeah, like, you know, if you wanted to set this record, you could just take something off and just like get clobbered. It's hard to do actually throwing competitive pitches, but it does rely on like the batter's willing participation in the record. in the record and then also on like the fact that we're defining strikes as you know a hit is also a strike which is sort of strange when you think about it right and you know i think we can point out like he had already given up a run before he had thrown a ball so you know pitching is complicated it's more than just throwing strikes analysis ben analysis but right i think that if you were really seeking to do this you could you could or you could at least get closer than with other arbitrary records that you might try to suddenly break but yeah i was watching that game and i was like he hasn't thrown any

balls yet has he but he'd already given up a run. So I was like, what is this worth, really? Yeah. Yeah. One other thing I wanted to mention just on the subject of incentives and some of the effects that we may not anticipate of those incentives. So you noted that there's a provision in the new CBA that incentivizes teams to bring up players earlier, put them on the opening day roster, and it seemed to work, or it at least coincided with a record number of top prospects who were on opening day rosters this year. But I have wondered, and we've gotten a couple of questions about whether maybe there was an unanticipated effect of this. So we got an email from Patreon supporter Devin, I believe earlier this month, who noted Gunnar Henderson, Orioles prospect, was just named the top prospect in Baseball by Baseball America.

From the outside, it doesn't look like he has much left to prove in the minors and could benefit from playing time in the majors, especially if Mike Elias doesn't believe the team is actually competitive for the playoffs, as he has said publicly. I assume he does now. I assume he does now. The new CBA has a provision that lightly discourages teams from practicing service time manipulation by offering draft compensation if the player gets votes for Rookie of the Year or Top 2. A prospect like Henderson might have a decent shot at Rookie of the Year in his debut year if his playing translates well. Do the Orioles now have an added incentive to hold Henderson and reap both service time and potential draft pick benefits than they did before the CBA, are they less likely to call Henderson up this season because of the potential draft compensation? This kind of assumes the Orioles wouldn't have prioritized service time regardless. My answer to that at the time, I said, so you're asking if they might be less likely to

call him up now because he would lose his rookie eligibility and not give them a chance to get a pick if he won rookie of the year next season. And I said, I suppose it's possible. Not sure how highly the team would value that one pick. Plus, they're only eligible to get that pick if they promote him at the start of next season and forego the decision to hold him back long enough to cost him a year of service time. And I said, I guess they could call him up later this month and preserve his rookie eligibility for next season too. And they have not as of yet called him up, right?

Although there have been maybe some other prospect promotions, the other team in that area, the Nats just called up their top prospect pitcher, Cade Cavalli, right? He's starting. He's been great lately. And I'll remind people, and I don't think that's going to matter for cavalli right he's starting he's been great lately and i'll remind people and i don't think that's gonna matter for cavalli but like a reminder to everyone that september roster days count now so right now you you have to factor that in in terms of backdating it to a point where you can like just sneak them in yeah there was an orioles fan twitter account owes fan therapy that tweeted earlier this month that an august 23rd call-up would leave gunner

henderson eligible for rookie status in 2023 44 days on the active roster 40 games you could keep him under 130 at bats with off days so in theory they could call him up now, I think, and not endanger that. I mean, the relevant provisions here, I think, per the athletics reporting earlier this season, teams who promote players in time to receive a full year of service, which is 172 days, so opening day or very shortly thereafter, have a chance at additional picks in the amateur draft. If an international draft is agreed to, which it wasn't, teams can potentially receive international picks as well. Players with 60 days of service or less who have rookie eligibility

and are included in two or more of the preseason top 100 prospect lists put out by BaseballAmerica, MLB.com, or ESPN are eligible. If in the time before they hit salary arbitration, those players go on to win rookie of the year, finish top three in MVP voting or top three in Cy Young voting. Their team gets an amateur draft pick following the end of the first round. A player can only create one new amateur draft pick for his team over time. But if an international draft arrives, blah, blah, it didn't. A player who has rookie eligibility opens the season with 60 days or fewer in service time and who is included on two of the top prospect list gets credited with a full year of service even if

they were promoted too late in the calendar to otherwise have received it if they finish in the top two in rookie of the year voting in their league so it's kind of complicated a lot of provisions there but i guess that's worth considering. We got that question from multiple listeners. Listener Michael also wrote in to wonder whether this would impact the timing of top prospects being called up, because if a team were to call up a prospect it feels would be a rookie of the year candidate in earlier mid-August, that would be enough time for the player to exhaust his rookie eligibility, but not enough time to garner rookie of the year consideration. So I think that could be true, potentially. I think they're at the point now where they could

call him up if they felt he was ready and that he would help them now without having to worry about that. But maybe there is a little window at some part of the season where you would actually disincentivize a promotion for certain players potentially but i think on the whole it's probably a net positive provisions that they put in there yeah i think that like i don't want to underestimate what a motivated front office might be able to finagle right because we have we have underestimated the that finagling at our peril in the past. But I think in general, this is like directionally oriented in the right direction, right? Direction, direction, directionally oriented.

This is pointing in the, you know what I'm trying to say. Right. Yeah. Michael noted, alternatively, they're likely going to lose a year of service time with Adley Rutschman when he finishes top two in Rookie of the Year. When, and they certainly didn't know this at the time, they could have called him up last year and gotten the same years of control. So that's true too. All right. A couple follow-ups before we go here. First, you mentioned earlier this week, or maybe it was last week when we talked about the possibility of the All-Star game being replaced by exhibitions where MLB

All-Stars would play KBO All-Stars or NPB All-Stars. And you noted that there have been exhibitions and barnstorming tours and trips overseas and that maybe we should see more of that. And now we are going to. So it was just announced this week that there is going to be a Korea series in November as part of the new MLB World Tour. MLB and MLBPA are taking part in this, and they're going to send some major leaguers over to Korea, and they're going to play games in Busan and Seoul in November. So this is the

first time in a century that MLB players will visit South Korea for games. So that's pretty cool. It's the 100th anniversary of that 1922 trip when Casey Stengel and Waite Hoyt and many others went over to not just Korea, but I believe China as well and Japan. And it's the 40th anniversary of the KBO. So they have not yet announced the participants, the MLB participants for this four game Korea series as they are calling it, but that's kind of cool. I don't know what caliber of big leaguer they will get to take that trip in November, but if it's a representative roster,

if there are some stars and appealing players on there, that's kind of cool. So just noted because we mentioned something along those lines recently and the podcast powers have come through again and it is actually happening. Yeah. Yeah. Also, Munitaka Murakami has had another two homer game since we talked about his exploits this season. So he has continued to be fantastic. I think he's up to 47 dingers now.

has continued to be fantastic. I think he's up to 47 dingers now. And we got one response to the defensed versus defended against someone who is defending defense. So Chris in our Facebook group, he said, I'm about to enter really dangerous ground here, but here's his defense. So when someone is playing defense against Christian Walker, they are trying to get him out. They are not defending him. They are attacking him. Defending followed by a direct object means protect. Defending with the indirect object against Walker is a bit bulky. So while it sounds gross now, defense as a verb to mean defend against is a distinct meaning separate from defend.

So he is saying, you know, to defend means something perhaps different. If we say to defend Christian Walker, we really mean, I suppose, to defend against Christian Walker. We are his adversaries in this scenario. We're not defending him. Now, in basketball basketball let's say we certainly say that a player is defending another player right when they're playing defense against them so i think it's really in the lexicon already yes so i don't know that that's such a stretch i think to defense is perhaps more of a stretch but that would be the defense of defense as a verb is that to defend

someone also has another meaning and that that theoretically could be confusing in a way. And so to defense maybe would be like a coinage that would be helpful here for distinguishing. It prompted a lively debate, as you might expect. There are more than 40 comments and comments as we speak. So I think most people were basically on board with like, we know what we mean when we say defending someone and that it's really defending against. But I guess you could also say we know what people mean when they say defense. It just sounds weird to prescriptivist ears we'll just say playing defense then if it bothers you you know he was playing defense against right against but

then you're up to three whole words whatever are we i'm sorry are we worried about column inches here are we trying to fit stuff in on a sports page we're just having a we had time to talk about scoops for like 10 minutes and turns out he has some so you know like we're not we're swimming in time yeah well we had a pedantic response to the pedantic response from richard hershberger our past blaster who said i'm going to go pedantic on your ass for which which I apologize in advance. And then he went deep on the grammar and he said in the construction, defend against Walker. Walker is not an indirect object. Rather, defend against is a prepositional verb. These are common in English, but not commonly taught, even to the extent that English grammar is commonly taught. A prepositional verb

is a compound of a regular verb and a preposition, as is a phrasal verb, which nonetheless is something different. I never said this would be simple. An example of a verb that is only used as a prepositional verb is rely. You can rely on me, but you can't simply rely anything. Moving on, a prepositional verb is often followed by a complement, which is a broad class that also includes objects of verbs. So you can think of Walker as the direct object of defend against. A syntactician would not do it quite that way, but it is pretty close. The key here is to treat the verb not as defend, but as defend against. The argument for defense Walker is brevity, defend against Walker being a bit clunky. Add to this the general argument that English allows words to shift freely between verbs and nouns.

Open a paper dictionary to any page and you will find it. This often leads to duplicates, often motivated by brevity. This can, but does not always, lead to the two forms taking on different meanings. Consider a contract with a contraction. These have clearly different meanings. How about a construct versus a construction? We use them slightly differently, but the meanings are very similar. So he concludes, to defense Walker bothers me not in the least. English does not need to be defended from this, nor does English need to be defensed from it.

Quite the opposite. This is how English works and has for a thousand years. It will be fine. I respect Richard's opinion, but it still does make me do a double take every time I hear it. I feel like Vaskirjian maybe is a defense guy. Sorry if I'm painting with a broad brush here or slandering Matt Vaskirjian, but I believe I've heard him say it. I think that, I mean, sure. I've never heard anyone say this in a baseball content. It's not even one time. My ears are hypersensitive to it, I think,

but you will, you will. Just like warning, you will, you will hear it. It will happen to you too. The more important point perhaps is that Christian Walker does have some scoops this season because we noted that he's listed as having zero scoops on his Fangraphs page. But according to Mark Simon, whom we cited on that episode and who wrote in to respond, he does have some scoops. They are not currently displayed at Fangraphs for whatever reason, but he does have seven scoops this year. And Mark notes that if that seems like a low total, it is. We seem to have had a different standard for evaluating what constitutes a scoop than we did in the past when we counted the handling of most bounced throws. So for instance, there was a year where Paul Goldschmidt had 74 scoops and now elite defensive first

baseman Christian Walker only has seven scoops. So that's a whole pedantic existential question. What constitutes a scoop? Is it just any short hop or does it require some particular difficulty in order to qualify as a scoop? It seems like the scoop standards have been raised recently. Scoops, scoops. And the last thing, or I guess the second to last thing, first, Mike Trout returned last Friday. I want to make sure you don't miss that Bryce Harper is returning this Friday. Yeah, that part I- I'm sure you don't miss That Bryce Harper is returning this Friday Yeah that part I I'm sure you did not miss that because you were not on vacation currently

I didn't miss it But I appreciate you looking out Because you know Sometimes I miss things Sometimes I take a day off and then I'm like why do I ever take a day off Which is why I don't take enough days off And then when I get to my days off I'm very tired And it's this vicious circle

So if I am able to rely on you to keep me appraised of the news then i don't have to worry about that and i'll take more vacation although that makes podcasting harder so who's winning here probably me well the phillies have a two and a half game lead over the padres in the second wild card slot right now and color me surprised i suppose that they have done as well in bryce harper's absence as they have because while he was gone with the broken thumb, they went 32 and 20. Yeah, really impressive without their best hitter, best player. They had a top 10 offense, 109 WRC plus while he was out. They had great pitching, which was even better over that period. But who knew that Bryce Harper would return to a Phillies team that's sitting in prettier position than the one he left. But that's a pretty big reinforcement to get for the stretch run here.

And I suppose the actual last thing and another thing about Yankee Stadium. I continued to get more people just writing in to agree with my negative take on the stadium, but they have added other complaints that I did not even think to mention, but which I also agree with, in addition to the noise level and the difficulty of getting in and the general blasé-ness of the decor. I guess going along with that, Mitch, our Patreon supporter, wrote in to note just the amount of plain drab exposed concrete in Yankee Stadium, which is an issue. You know, you don't get like the nice throwback, like old timey brick that you get in some places like Citi Field.

It's nothing decorative. It's just lots of slabs of bare concrete, which is not great. Like got to do some decorating. And another thing is that it's hard to like figure out where to go up in Yankee Stadium. Like if you're on the main level on the concourse to figure out like how you get up. That's a difficult thing too. Like the signage maybe is not the best. I find myself walking and I worked in the place in multiple capacities and still I'm like, wait, do I go this way? If I'm going to like the second level or the third level,

how do I get up again? Maybe I'm overrating this, but like my friend was having issues with this. It's like the concourse is like sort of separated from the area where you actually go up. Like in a lot of ballparks, it's pretty clear right once you get in because most people do have to go up to get to their seats. And so you want that pretty clearly indicated. But at least for me, I end up walking in the wrong direction sometimes or not knowing where to go. So maybe this can just be a recurring bit that already has become one, I guess, where every episode I have yet another new complaint about Yankee Stadium, Yankee Stadium 3. Yeah, it's like all of this concrete, right? It's like, it's not quite

brutalist architecture, but it is materially similar to some of that, you know? All right, let's do the past blast. This is from Richard. This is episode 1895. And so this is from 1895. Richard is a researcher, historian, author of Strike for the Evolution of Baseball. This comes from the Boston Herald, June 18th, 1895. rather strange sight to see McPhee playing second base with a glove. The injury to his little finger in one of the Baltimore games necessitates it, and it will be a week or more before he discards it. Quote, it feels strange to play with a glove, said Mack several evenings ago. During the 14 years in which I have been with the Cincinnati team, I have never had any protection for the hands, except perhaps in a few practice games played in cold weather and before my hands were toughened. He never felt safe because he was wearing a glove because of how awkward it was. Interesting. No, I will not continue to use a glove, he said, although I may grow accustomed to it.

love, he said, although I may grow accustomed to it. As soon as my finger is again in shape, I shall fire the pad and go back to the old style with which I am more familiar. And Richard writes, McPhee, the Cincinnati second baseman, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2000. Someone who gets in that much after he played usually has a story. His was being the last prominent infielder to play barehanded. Wow. Here in 1895, he breaks down and puts one on due to an injured finger. He will get used to it and will wear it from 1896 to the end of his career in 1899. So he did, in fact, become a convert. We don't have great fielding stats from this era, but we have fielding percentage and range factor.

His fielding percentage was already consistently 20 points higher than the league average for second baseman. So, you know, like you read about like the NHL players who were the last not to wear a helmet or something or even MLB. Like when you had the option not to. You just get attached to the conditions when you came up and perhaps persist in those things too long because it's what you're comfortable with. I saw a highlight of someone, I think it was in Fenway, catching a 108 mile per hour homer barehanded, and it looked like it smarted, even though it would have been traveling much slower by the time it got there. Well, imagine if you're a second baseman. Now, granted, they were perhaps not hitting the ball quite as hard back then and not throwing the ball quite as hard, but still, like, just imagine. It's amazing that, like, bones were not constantly being broken, the little bird bones, right?

But, I mean, maybe they were. But the fact that, like, you would think that you don't feel safe when you're wearing a glove because you're used to not wearing one, wild. Wild. I mean, I just, like, when in the use of it would you start to feel comfortable, you know? Like, when would it transition into, oh, I get the appeal here. Like, it would happen at some point. I guess it did for him because even then he was saying, I don't think I'm going to keep doing this.

But then he did. So he was persuaded. You wouldn't think it would take that long. No, granted, the glove he was wearing, I'm sure, was more of a mitten than what we see fielders using now. But even so, you have a hard liner or a ball takes a hard hop or something and you feel the difference with a glove versus without one. You'd think that would sell you pretty quickly. It would be an easy sell for me, but I guess that's easy for me to say as someone who grew up gloved. Well, and like, you know, to me, the argument for using a cup seems just so obvious. Right.

Right. And that's been around for, you know, they used to make them out of steel or animal antlers. That's not true. But like, you know, they've been around long enough that the materials used in their construction now we look at them and we're like is that a torture device or something that's meant to protect you couldn't say and yet modern players sometimes are like no i'm gonna be like free and easy down here even though like they have heard they know what can happen ben yep they know what can happen to Ben. Yep. They know what can happen to them. And sometimes it does.

And then I think they, I guess after that, like they probably still wear, they probably start wearing a cup, right? There are players who have suffered the pains of not wearing one. Torsion. Right. It's like the very few pitchers who will wear some protective headgear. Often it's the pitchers who have been hit by a wide drive. And then they think, oh, I don't want that to happen again. But cups can be quite uncomfortable, but beats the alternative.

Absolutely. Yeah. All right. So we've got a guest here. We're going to talk about broadcasts and score bugs and flames because a couple episodes ago I put out a call to listeners about the flames that are used on baseball broadcasts to indicate when a pitch is thrown hard. And I wondered whether that varied much from one broadcast network to the next. And Chris Hannell, who has been on the show before, he did the research and he documented which networks used flames or alternatives to flames and where their thresholds are. So he's going to share that research with us, but then also talk to us about score bugs.

Yeah. are. So he's going to share that research with us, but then also talk to us about scorebugs, the graphics on baseball broadcasts that tell you what's going on, sometimes better than others. And he's going to give us the do's and don'ts of scorebugs. So that's an interesting little niche topic that we've never really talked about in depth before, probably, but I'm fascinated by it. So we'll talk to Chris, and I guess this is appropriate because, and I did not notice this until I got an email from MLB about it this morning. But today, Friday, August 26th, the 20th anniversary of the first streamed MLB game. Yeah. On MLB TV or whatever it was called at the time. DOS TV, DOS baseball.

Yeah. That changed everything. I mean, MLB technology has certainly enriched MLB and has powered a lot of streaming technologies just across the internet. This was, you know, maybe like the bellwether. This was like the sign of what was to come. MLB was really got to give them credit or at least what was MLB Advanced Media at the time for being on the cutting edge and out in front of the industry and trends. And we've had it pretty good when it comes to streaming baseball games. We complain about the little hiccups here and there and the app crashes and such, but we're living in the future when it comes to streaming games.

It's pretty great. And it started as just like a 300k stream. There's a screenshot attached to this MLB email, which I will also link to from the show page. It looks like Al Duque pitching for the Yankees in 2002 in that first game. And it shows that the quality was 280 kilobytes per second. It was not HD, I think, until 2009 was when it first went up to 720p. But this really, just like it was streamed to 30,000 viewers at first, and now it's gone on to, you know, they have various stats in here about more than a billion hours of baseball streamed. And it really changed everything. I mean, it changed things for me at the time it arrived at the right time, because I started college in the fall of 2005.

And like leading up to college, when I was like at my most hardcore level of baseball fandom and Yankees fandom, it was like a real concern for me. Like if I go to college out of town, how am I going to watch my team? You know, how am I going to follow the baseball that I watched every day at that point? And right at the right time, things came along that made it possible to do that. So there was XM where I could listen to radio broadcasts out of network. I think I had that for a while. And then MLB Network came along just in time too. And the quality was nothing special, but 2005 was the first year when they had TV quality streaming on MLB TV. It was nothing like it is now, but perfect timing and solution for me so that I could keep watching these games from afar. And if that had come along later or I had gone to school out of New York earlier, that would have been a real absence for me.

I really would have felt the loss of not being able to follow those games the way that I was accustomed to. So technology really bailed me out there. So I'm thankful that MLB TV arrived when it did and that it's become what it is. Yeah, it's just such a, I think for me, it opened up two sort of portals into baseball. two sort of portals into baseball, you know, once I got to grad school and was like an hour closer to the Pacific time zone and, and also just had more time that I could fill with baseball instead of being crushed slowly by finance. And so, you know, it, it allowed me to get really invested in the Mariners again and watch them pretty much daily. But it also it opened up so much more baseball beyond Seattle and I think really facilitated a broader view of the sport

for me in a way that I was pleasantly surprised by where it's like, well, yeah, I am going to tune into, you know, this Max Scherzer start or I'm going to make a point of watching Verlander. I'm just naming former Tigers at this point. But, you know, I want to see what's going on with these crazy Giants teams. And, you know, I got to check in on these Rays. And, and so it, it just allowed for an expansive view, even as I was mostly using it to dive back in specifically on one team. And so, yeah, it's weird to think about the forces, the structural forces that buffet you about. And I think so often we think of those as like social and political, but like they are so often technological where it's just like,

I could watch a couple of very frustrating at times, really bad Seattle Mariners teams. And then when I wanted to keep watching baseball or when I was like, I would like to watch unequivocally good baseball, I could do that too. And that was great. Right. And who knows if that had not been available, perhaps I would have drifted away from baseball. I would not be doing this podcast. And it happened really fast. When I started high school, there was no way to stream games on a market like this. And then by the time I started college, there was.

And it was TV quality. And by the time I graduated, it was HD. Yeah. It happened really fast. Really fast. Yeah. And this email says that minutes watched and total games watched are each up 13% over last season's all-time high marks. Wow.

Happy to hear it. Okay. Let's take a quick break and we'll be back to talk score bugs with Chris Hale. All right. Well, on episode 1893, I led off by talking about the flames on baseball graphics, the flame animations that denote when a pitch is fast and how those thresholds perhaps have not changed as much as they should have, have not kept up with the inflation and velocities across the league. a listener and Patreon supporter answer the call, I put a call out for people to document where exactly the flames come into play. And I should have known who would answer that call. It's Chris Hanel, who is a listener, Patreon supporter, founder of the Effectively Wild Discord group, and also someone who works with professional broadcasts and is very interested in score bugs in baseball, the graphics that tell you what the inning is and the score and the number of outs and so forth.

He has a whole Twitter account devoted to that, at Show the Score. And he was with us on the first of our 10th anniversary episodes, episode 1877. And at the time, we teased that we would have to have him back on sometime to talk about score bugs. So this is the perfect time to talk about that and also share his research on the flames. So Chris, welcome back. Thank you very much. I do want to bring up on my last appearance, I missed a very important thing that I want to back up and talk about real quick.

So the rules to Liar's Dice is that... Yeah, I was a little confused. I was so nervous. I just skipped over that part of it entirely and just like went right in and like, well, everyone knows how this works. This will be fine. It worked out OK. It worked out OK. It was still a good time.

But yeah, I have information for you about fire and flames and how it relates to festivals. Yeah. So this was something that you had not been tracking, right? Because you track all kinds of things when it comes to baseball graphics and we'll share a spreadsheet, if you don't mind, that we're all looking at right now where you've gone through all of the regional networks and the national broadcasts

and you've documented how they do their score bug displays. And so now you've added a row for fast pitch flames to this i have chronicle where the flames start or it turns out that there are some networks that do not flames but maybe different ways of displaying this information and there's some that don't do anything at all that just leave't. That was the thing that I, because when I was listening to the podcast, it was immediate that I was like, I am not tracking this. I should be tracking this. And then I started thinking about it because, so I'm a Twins fan, so I watch Bally. And Bally has a Flames graphic that starts at 95.

And I knew that immediately. So I'm like, okay. But then I started going through. So many of them have no Flames graphics and have just kind of eschewed that all together but you were correct so 95 is still kind of the standard out of the 15 different networks regional and national that have their own unique broadcast package only six have graphics, and three of those start at $95. Bally, NESN, the Boston's broadcast, and then NBC Sports, and they use the same graphics package for all of the regional NBC and then Peacock as well. They start at $95. And then the second most common thing is at $100,

which I think you brought up as would be a good place to have it. I think you were advocating for that. Well, Root and AT&T, which is the same package, and yes, the Yankees network, they agree with you. Start at 100. The odd one out is Fox. Fox starts at 99. Why? I don't know.

But 99 was where they settled on having that graphic and their graphic is that score bug is a very dynamic kind of graphical it's a very unique implementation of a score bug and they have it get the velocity thing grows bigger and a giant flaming baseball goes by and it says 99 and glowing gold letters so they really draw your eye to it. Yeah, there's a lot of animation just generally with Fox's score bug in a way that I'm like, you could do less, you know, you could just do less. I am generally an advocate for dynamic score bugs. And I think a really good example of doing that is ESPN's national broadcast because they will add and subtract information as it is necessary or contextually relevant, but they're not flashy about it. It's like score bugs are to be intuitive,

not to be the star of the show kind of thing. So I think ESPN does that pretty well. It's interesting that Fox does 99 because at least according to Sam's piece and research, it seems like Fox started this trend. They lit the flame when they did this on World Series broadcasts, maybe I think 2005 was the first year that he found it. And they started at 96 and then they went backward to 95. And it's been there ever since on most networks that use this. So I wonder whether they did this incrementally, whether they built up to 99 over previous seasons or whether they just skip straight from 95 to 99.

But that's an interesting threshold. Are there any networks that do maybe like a multi-step process, like a progressive? Because that was a suggestion that we got from some people. Like maybe you do this at 95 and then you do that at 98, whether it's different animations or it's different colors maybe. That was something that I was talking to you about when i was giving you the flames information i was like i think that the way it should be is that 95 it should like the text should turn red or yellow or whatever and then at like 98 you do like a bit of an animation and then anything 100 and above you can really really sell it sell it. Like, no, this is a big deal.

And then, of course, if you did that on SNY and Jacob deGrom is making a start, it's going to get old really quickly. And that's one of the things that was kind of the precursor to this whole discussion is it's like, okay, well, if it's so much more prevalent, what do we need to care about? And then how much do we need to draw your attention to it? Because whenacob de grom is pitching it's very obvious it's very fast you can tell by the look on the batter's face that's a fast pitch like there's no mystery to that but we we want that data and we want to have that immediate feedback on like the the example i like to give a lot about scorebook design there's a line in star trek 4 i going to be a nerd for a second here. Captain Kirk walks into a... As opposed to before. As opposed to before. You're tracking the flames on every baseball podcast.

First time on this podcast that anyone's been a nerd. Yeah, exactly. Captain Kirk goes into a pawn shop and tries to sell some antique glasses. And the guy says, I'll give you $100. And there's this pause and he goes, is that a lot?

And that's kind of what a scorebugbox job is in a lot of places. It's not just that we need to know the ins and outs of the score, the inning, the base runners, the outs. We need to know the stakes. We need to know what we should be caring about in this moment, which is why a lot of recent developments in like, okay, we now show who the pitcher is and who the batter is. We also show how many pitches has the pitcher thrown?

Have they been in the game for a while? Are they starting to get gassed? I think one thing that almost every network does now is that with every batter, they also show what spot in the batting order they are because there's a lot of strategic value to a viewer to understanding, oh, this is the leadoff batter. This is a big matchup. We expect that this batter will be doing better as opposed to the number nine hitter. Those are

little clues that a good score bug is telling you when you first look at the screen. And a good score bug in less than a second, you should be able to glance up at the screen and have a pretty good sense of what it is you're watching. And this is actually a pretty recent development in terms of how we experience baseball. It's only been since like the start of the last 20 years where people have experienced baseball like this. Because it used to be in the 80s and 90s and, you know, obviously going way back. Because it used to be in the 80s and 90s and obviously going way back, it's like you would get those updates very sparingly and then it would be hits, runs, errors. And be like, okay, that's going to tell you the thing. And other than that, you're relying on a commentator and I hope you're not in a sports bar where you can't hear the commentator because otherwise you're going to just be shouting to friends, who's up?

Who's batting? Wait, what's been going on? Right. Yeah. And you noted on your little spreadsheet checkbox here, grid, which we will share. So you said that NBC doesn't really do flashes exactly. It's like golden flashes, kind of, more so than red. Yeah, it's almost like a little scrub. It's trying to simulate flames,

but it just changes the color of the background and it's kind of like a quasi fire thing and then the one broadcast you noted that does not even do pitch speed on the score bug is toronto right does a pitch speed over the robo zone yeah you see this you see the speed on the robo zone showing where the ball was in comparison to the zone and they do the thing where it fills in if it was a strike and it's just an outline if it was a ball they show the velocity there they do not show the velocity on the bug at all interesting and they're the only ones that do that right yeah the one bug that i think is actually the most kind of sparingly with a lot of stuff is nesn nesn doesn't even have

a strike zone yeah they they don't have strike zone. They don't show the name of the batter. They don't show the spot in the lineup. They don't show batter performance. It is very innings, base runners, outs, and I guess we'll give you the pitch count, the pitch velocity. And they have a 95 plus flames, but it's very back to basics with Nesn's presentation. So can you share a little bit about your broadcast background and how you got obsessed with score bugs? Yeah, sure. The way I got started was I was a game designer.

I was working in game design, doing content design for an MMO, and started working in cinematics, and started working on our official games live stream as a part of that process. animatics and started working on our official games live stream as a part of that process. And once that game shipped, I had already gotten really into broadcast design at that point and was noticing that there was a lot, there was a big gap in terms of what you could do with like lower end broadcasts in terms of like the software that was available. And so when the game shipped, my wife and I ended up starting this company support class. And we started working with open source web-based graphics to build score bugs for video game streams and for Twitch streamers and whatnot. And we've been doing that for almost a decade now. And we're now working with really big companies to build their setups for their big live streams and whatnot

and this dovetailed with my love of baseball and basically now when i'm watching a baseball game it's very hard not to just be looking at the graphics instead of the actual gameplay which with based on how the twins are playing right now like that's a that's a blessing that i'm like paying attention to the graphics instead of the gameplay. But yeah, this has been a thing that has kind of become my, it quickly became my calling, so to speak, and started writing about score bug design and broadcast design and especially the UX of it. I think that a lot of people don't think enough about broadcast design

in terms of UX, in terms of, okay, when you're watching a baseball game, you're not really watching a baseball game. You're watching one perspective of that game that the broadcast is providing you and what camera angle they're choosing to show the action and highlight what's going on. A score bug is just another part of that. A broadcast is always partial information that highlights what you should care about in the narrative of the game. And so graphics play such an important part of that, which is also why people always get so upset when anything changes. When Bally came out with the ticker down at the bottom, everyone was so angry. When people see that the number of dots has changed for the outs or how like the color of the to let people get used to things for a minute?

Because I remember when Microsoft redesigned Excel and everyone I worked with was furious. And then six months later, they were fine because they had learned where the menu bar was. they were fine because they had like learned where the menu bar was yeah so how do you how do you think about balancing the feedback that is like oh we need a we need to change this right now because i remember there was like a i think there was an nfl it was probably an espn broadcast a couple of years ago and they had made something on the broadcast yellow in a way that was very confusing because it looked like flags had been thrown when they hadn't been. And they changed it at like halftime. They were like, oh no, we got to nip this in the bud right away.

We're not letting people get used to this. That was, I remember exactly what you're talking about. I think it was, it was a first down. Yeah, the first down marker. The first down would show yellow. Yeah, it just looked like a challenge flag. And everyone was like, oh, it's a flag, it's a flag, it's a flag. Yeah. And I was actually amazed that they changed it at halftime.

That's not usually something that you see a broadcast be that agile at, at making a change in the moment. I think the big thing, and this actually from a game design standpoint, is actually really helpful because when you're doing focus testing or you're doing play testing with a game, a lot of people will come to you and be like, I don't like this, I don't like this. I don't like that. And they, a lot of times they don't come to you with a problem. They come

to you with, I think it should do this. Okay. Why? And you're always trying to get to, okay, don't talk to me about the solution. I want to find out what it is that you think that this is solving. And then you can find out where the divergence and what their expectations are with what it is that you're doing and start to understand that better. I think a lot of times when you're having that conversation, people like, I don't like this. And then you start like with the example that you gave with Microsoft Excel being redesigned. It's like, okay, they don't like it because it's different. But what is it that changed? Okay, well, there's this motivation behind it once you get used to it you're going to discover that this is more

intuitive or this methodology is going to save you time or over time they're going to you know gravitate towards this kind of methodology i think in a lot of those cases it is if you've done the work and you're not just shooting from the hip, you're going to find that you have a pretty good sense of when a change is going to be slowly accepted over time. And when it's like, oh no, we made a mistake, making the first down color the same as the flag color, a communication standard that has been normalized over the past two decades. Yeah, that was our bad. And we'll fix that by the third quarter, apparently. So maybe you've touched on some of this already, but your general do's and don'ts when it comes to baseball score bugs, what do you have to have? What don't you want to have?

I guess this is sort of the same as asking about your pet peeves, but what are your must-haves for a well-designed score bug? My must-haves are, I think one thing that people don't really talk about that often, because every single network has innings, base runners, outs, balls and strikes, score. And it turns out that every single network even has pitch count for the pitcher and the pitch velocity. Every single one has that. I think the layout is so important. And I think it's got to be, I think I said earlier on that you should be able to read a score bug in less than a second. And you might not even realize that you're reading it. It's just, it's omnipresent and it's there and it's telling you what's going on. layout of that in terms of what elements are you making the largest how are you arranging them amongst each other so that you can intuitively say this team has this many runs and this team has this many runs and to be able to do that in like a tenth of a second so you have where the team the team name or the team logo and where their score is in relation to everything else

and the size of those elements how big the how big the base runner dots are, the diamonds are. I think all of that's a very delicate balance to strike. And the one that I thought that did it the best for the longest time was the one that Fox Sports got rid of before this one. It was a very flat design that they used on all of their regional broadcasts i thought that that one was a design master class in scaling size how dynamic it was what information it presented and how it did it that was one of my favorites even though it was one of the least elaborate designs that there's been but they did a lot of work to get i think the font

design and the scaling and then the animation the way that things transitioned in and out to not be intrusive, but to let you know out of the corner, right? Oh, we're showing some new data here and that you should pay attention. And are there persistent, I mean, you talked about like do's and don'ts, but are there persistent pet peeves of yours, things that every time you turn on a broadcast, you notice and you go, gosh, we're still doing this. things that every time you turn on a broadcast you notice and you go gosh we're still doing this colors i this is also a baseball problem because there are so many blue teams and red teams and there's so many red teams and most of those teams are red and blue yep and so i think a lot of times the the broadcast networks don't do it uh they don't put enough effort i don't that that seems like a not a good thing to say but they don't give enough focus to the fact that you know maybe the colors on the

square bug should reflect the colors of the uniforms being worn and also if a team has more than one color maybe we use the color that isn't the exact same as the other team so that it's not blue versus slightly different blue i think if someone's coming into watching a game for the first time or they're trying to get used to baseball i think a score bug should be trying to help that person to be like this is in reference to this team and this is in reference to that team and that's a problem that's not just baseball that's all sports there's so many score bugs where if the uniforms that are being worn are like special one-offs or whatnot or like their third road alternate that's a weird color and the score bug doesn't match either team well you're going to be

spending a solid two minutes trying to figure out wait who's ahead which team what i don't understand so i don't i think there should be more hand-holding going on there. In general, is smaller, better, more compact preferred? I mean, is there like a maximum size that you think should be allowable for a score bug? Or is it all about how you use the space or even the opacity of the score bug itself and whether you can see through it? I guess there are a bunch of factors. I think it should be half the screen, Ben. I think we're watching way too much baseball. No, so this is actually really tricky because this is something that's changed

even in the last few years. And you've seen a few changes that have tried to take into account. Network execs and broadcast execs are trying to think about where are people watching this game? The first time that they had to think about this was when HDd television came

into into play and now they have to build for an hd experience but their score bug has to be in a position where it can still be on the standard definition broadcast then we get to a point that hd becomes the standard and now we can use this space and now people are watching in 720p and 1080p and 4k and in all of those different placements how big of a font is too big how small is too small what is legible to someone watching on a tv in a living room versus on a desktop computer or a tablet or a phone where you know where are they watching this and what are they going to be able to read in all of those positions? And there was also a bit of a trend, and I think it was WGN at one point, and I think Toronto started to do it, where they centered the score bug at the bottom of the screen. basketball because the presentation is a very horizontal experience. So it makes sense to have it centered. Right. That's perfect for social media. If you're going to be sharing a clip, it's going to get cropped. You want the score bug to still be present. And so there was a bit of a

focus for a little bit like, oh, we should have it where the score bug isn't getting cropped out. If someone's sharing this on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok. Yeah, like Bally has had the score strip, right? Like almost an ESPN ticker style thing at the bottom of the screen instead of just a floating thing in the top corner or bottom corner. It's just a ribbon that goes across the whole screen. Made for your sports bar viewing experience,

especially if you happen to be somewhere where gambling is a prevalent activity. They definitely are building it with that in mind but yeah i think that it's it's harder than ever to kind of nail down based on what percentages of people are watching on which device and in which contexts what that score bug needs to be in order to facilitate all of those viewing experiences and not feel less than ideal on one of those platforms and it's going to continue changing over the next few years especially as we're trying to sort out you know the idea of cord cutting we're kind of going through another phase of where there's kind

of the we're kind of rolling back on the idea of cord cutting because now we're realizing that we're now spending more money than ever when they are cord cutting, trying to watch baseball in all of these different contexts. So it's like, okay, if we can kind of stabilize what it is that we're watching and how, and I think if technology gets to a point where they can start building their viewing experience, like, oh, you're watching on a tablet, we're going to give you this viewing experience. You're watching on a TV. Oh, we'll give you this feed. I would like to think that that would be something

that we might see in the next few years. So speaking of score bug size and also gambling information, I just posted a link in our little recording window here for the two of you to click on. And I will also post it on the show page for everyone listening along to look at. But this has haunted my waking mind

ever since I saw this. So this is a thread in our Facebook group posted by listener Mark, and he posted here a screenshot of an MLB survey that he took earlier this month. And it says, in this section, we are interested in understanding your preferences for your TV viewing experience. how would you feel if this were your default experience while watching baseball games? And it shows a window with Shohei Otani hitting, so far so good. But Otani is like a window within the window, and to the left of Otani there's a big box that says,

Shohei Otani is 6 for 12 with two homers and eight RBI versus Logan Gilbert. And then there are three huge stats for both Otani and Gilbert, like velocity and hard hit rate and such. And then below Otani, there's a big box that shows that Otani is batting and what he's done today and that other hitters are coming up next. And so the real estate that Otani takes up on the screen, I don't know, maybe like 60% generously, and the rest is just taking up with numbers and information. And it's almost like maybe what you would see on like a StatCast broadcast at the Home Run Derby or something where there's just like a lot going on there. So this is nightmare fuel.

And it worries me that they're asking about this because I don't think they would actually do this, like have a huge box that's like Otani is batting and Mike Trout is up next and all these other stats and what Otani has done against Lope and Gilbert. But I wonder whether they're asking about this because they are trying to find out whether people would turn off the TV or stop streaming or whatever if that real estate were occupied by, let's say, ads or perhaps prop bets, real-time odds, etc. I wonder whether this is why they want to assess people's tolerance for having this much of the screen taken up by something other than the action. I'm going to go ahead and just steal a Meg line wholesale.

To the surprise of nobody listening to this podcast, I have some notes. Yeah. So, NPB already chose all of this information and does it in a better way that doesn't demand 60% of the broadcast. And that's because there are some NPB broadcasts that have understood that there's enough space for more than one bug. You can have a score bug and then you can have a secondary bug. I can find the screenshot and I can send it to you, but there was one Japanese broadcast I was looking at where they have the score bug and the score bug is really pretty and the it has all of the necessary staples but then in the top left so the score bug is in the bottom right in the top left they show who's on deck and who's in the hall with some stats about them and it's fine it does not detract

from the viewing experience at all i think because of the way that kanji works they're able to get text kind of compressed in a way that's a little bit harder for us in terms of text ranges that affords them a little bit more real estate than we have with the English alphabet in the way that names generally require space. But the amount of space that now batting on deck and in the hole is taking up

and this matchup metric, which everyone understands is statistical noise, I do not want i don't like this i'm always like i get that they want to devote real estate i think you're right ben to probably ads or more likely gambling info like this strikes me as similar to like the horrible espn broadcasts that are prop bet based that I sometimes have to watch when like the mainstream doesn't work for some reason. But, but I guess part of my confusion with this stuff is always that presumably the people who are going to be interested in that content,

not the ad based content, but like prop bets or advanced stats or what have you are also the people who strike me as more likely to be watching baseball on their tv and then having a second screen at their disposal yeah so i i guess you know this is this is in some respects a question for you which is like how do you how do you chris think about sort of integrating that piece of the viewing experience to the graphics you actually have to display on the screen. There's actually been, I'm not trying to dodge the question on this, but I am going to say that there has been a lot of technology that's been worked on in terms of overlay graphics that you

can turn on and off. Like Twitch has Twitch extensions. There's been a couple of companies that have tried, they've basically, their business model has been, we will build an interactive layer over your broadcast in order for people to choose what information that they want to engage with and also to actually have interactive elements of the

broadcast where it's like playing a game similar to like MLB Rally or what Thursday Night Football's done on Twitch in the past couple years where you could try and predict the plays and you'd earn points for doing so like a lot of this stuff that I'm seeing here is something that I think would be something if you could turn it on and off it would be wholly unoffensive like that's fine like if I want to have that information up if I want to choose that viewing experience that's great if you're going to make it the default hell no like absolutely not like that detracts from the experience that's not if I want to choose that viewing experience that's great if you're gonna make it the default hell no like absolutely not like that detracts from the experience that's not what I want if I am trying to watch this on a

small screen and now you've taken away 60% of the screen with information I didn't care about no I'm not gonna spend money on that absolutely not so I think that if if they are going to pursue the angle which you know the MLB.com website when you're trying to watch websites or when you're trying to watch streams on your desktop machine and they have the website where you can turn on and off all of the different stats below

or to the right and you can turn on and off spoilers for all the games up above like that's pretty good if you were to take this kind of thing and try and put that experience there or make it optional or make it configurable, absolutely. I celebrate that. I love it. Give people more options. But please don't dictate to everyone that that's how they need to ingest this information. over time or more or less homogenous? Are there score bug best practices that everyone accepts now? I guess there are more options. So there's more potential variety just because there's more information. I mean, you have real time velocity, you have exit speed, you have the computing power to do real time pitch by pitch probabilities of plate appearance outcomes, let's say, for instance.

We have the technology to show BS stats in the lower right corner. I don't know which network I'm talking about. It could be any one of them that I'm referring to. So there are so many more options. And so you'd think that there would be a broader palette potentially here or just people coming up with different solutions. But do you think that things have gotten more standardized? And do you think that we've kind of, you know, has the arc of history bent toward better score bugs?

I think they have gotten better. And I think they've gotten more diverse over the, especially the past decade, as I think people are getting more innovative and they're experimenting a lot more, especially as 4k has become more and more the standard and has given people more real estate to kind of play around with what data can be shown and when. I think that technology is catching up. I think a lot of times the technology is way ahead of the design and you're seeing a lot of places where they have a solution in search of a problem where you have like okay well we can we can project 3d objects into the stadium what do we do with that how about a giant jackie robinson during the all-star game like we can use that to tell this narrative here but everywhere else we just kind of use it to show

a logo or a couple stats that would just be a full screen graphic that's fine so they have we have all of this technology that people are getting excited about and we're still figuring out what to do with it. And so in a lot of places, this is getting incorporated in really exciting ways. I think Fox has done a couple things over the past few years. Not this package, but the last package

that I was raving about before. They did a really good graphic above the scorebook that would show defensive alignment and it was motion tracked so that you could see where the shift was without having to cut to that shot where they have the floating nameplates over everyone's heads like it was just a really great little shorthand that could show real quick okay the short stop is on the right side of second base and they're they're playing the second basement deep in or shallow right field like little things like that those little touchstones add so much to the viewing experience for me and i think that we're gonna be seeing more and more of that as people figure out

how that can be applied like in terms of we have pitch velocity i would not be shocked if we start seeing batter exit v low the same way that we see pitch velocity right on the scorebook and then i would love to see flames graphics for that because every time giancarlo stanton comes to bat like i want to see their ground ball was super fast i want to see how you know how hard those are coming off because i guess the really great way to think about is think about how many times you're watching a broadcast and you hear the broadcaster have to say the exit velo. Like they show the exit velo on home run graphics a lot of times now they'll show how many feet it went and what the exit velo was, but they rattle off exit velo anytime someone seems to hit a hard ball. It's like, okay, well, if you're saying it that many times, maybe that should be a graphic.

Maybe people would be interested in just seeing that standardized. So yeah, the tech is there and people are just figuring out what to do with it in a way that's not annoying and feels like it's a part of the show. Right. That makes me think about sort of the diversity of audiences that are watching these. And I wonder if you've noticed any sort of difference in the assumed familiarity that viewers might have with the regional sports broadcasts versus the national ones because you know it's not that there aren't look-in audiences for regional broadcasts you know we we still watch the angels because of otani and trout despite them being the angels right but i would imagine that the vast majority of a regional sports networks audience is familiar to some degree with their broadcast parameters.

So do you find that they assume that you're going to know what the two dots mean, what the colors ought to be? My biggest thing, if you'll allow- No, we're about to both go off on rants here. Yeah, if you'll allow me a small tangent. I find the most consistently confusing sport bug, score bug feature to be how they denote base runners. Yes. Because sometimes they fill in the little squares and sometimes they leave them blank. But when they're all filled in or they're all blank, you don't know. You don't know.

You don't know. I mean, these things tend to reveal themselves in pretty short order right because they pan back and you're like oh yeah there are guys there or there are no guys to be had but i wish that we had like a maybe they could do like a little star you know instead of filling in the whole base anyway they have done that there was stars fox used to do that for like the fourth of july broadcast they should do the stars all the time because then you're like oh there's a's a guy on that base. Sometimes they're zoomed in on the pitcher or the hitter and you're like, where are the guys? Don't know if there are any out there. But I imagine that for some issues like that, if you are watching your team's broadcast every day, you know what to expect from

the bug versus not. So do you see any difference there between, say, a root broadcast and an ESPN broadcast when you assume the familiarity of the audience? Well, so there's a lot of stuff that I don't think people get too far away. I don't think networks get too far away from expectations overall.

I think the variance that you see with outs, you either get two dots or three dots, or they just show a number. With base runners, it's either... The way that I always recommend that you do it is if you're going to fill it in, fill it in with a different color than the outline of the base,

and then it's obvious it's filled in rather than just being a solid white color. Because then it's like, okay filled in rather than just being like a solid white color. Because then it's like, okay, well, now I know that if all three are filled in and it's all a different color, the bases are loaded. And then it's pretty obvious. One thing that was the biggest divergence, even just like 2018, was that I think it was Root and AT&T had it where some of their broadcasts, they didn't have the RoboZone overlay.

They had it off to the side. And the one thing that was so nice about that was they could show the locations of all the pitches that at bat. They could show the entire pitch sequence location. And it was so cool, but it took up so much space. And it was like, I would love this graphic sometimes. Or I would like the ability to have this graphic sometimes or i would like i would like the ability to have this in a way that doesn't feel like they have to devote this much

space to it and then put a sponsor logo over the top of it and then it's just like eqc tracer yeah oh yeah man so many screenshots i have taken of that being like what are they doing yeah ben you were asking about what's become more homogenous everyone just has an overlaid robo zone now no one has the inset off to the side anymore so i don't i think in terms of ux things are getting more homogenous but the way that they're executing those things not so much and the way that they're trying to innovate has gotten more varied especially in style and size and placement like no one has a no one has a bug in the top right corner but there's bugs in all three other corners and along the bottom no one has one all the way across the top anymore i missed w wgn's very last year they had such a good broadcast package and i was shocked to discover it's like

they this is beautiful this is i love this package i love this viewing experience and then they got rid of it and went to marquee and i want to want to know the story behind that. I want to know, did they know they were building that and they were just going to go out with a bang? Were they trying to convince the Ricketts to stick with WGN? That was such a great package. And the fact that it doesn't exist anywhere anymore boggles my mind. Did you get your full dot color controversy rant off your chest there no i didn't so two dots is bad and no one should use it i hate it i don't like it at all because it's imperfect information and it is okay i can't remember how many episodes back you had a whole discussion about skeuomorphism and i just spent the entire time shouting at the radio, being like, I want to talk about skeuomorphism. The two dots of that is because stadium scoreboards use the minimum amount of lights possible

because mechanical failure was so prevalent that they didn't feel like they had to have three dots to show three outs. And that language has stuck with us through to today. But there's three outs. There through to today but there's three outs there's not two there's three and so when you only show two dots you don't have only like if someone's watching baseball for the first time okay what are those two dots oh there's those are the outs well how many outs are there three well why is there only two dots because we don't show the

third out well you do there's a lot of broadcasts that show three dots, and they show the animation of all three dots filling in, and then it flashes, and then it goes away. We now understand the context of this is how many outs there are versus the total number of outs that there could be. On a basketball broadcast, when they have dots for fouls to show bonus, they don't cut off the last one.

Right. You want to know what the full set is and so if you're going to do dots instead of an out number just show the three dots and then have a nice animation when the third one gets filled in it is it is a a communication methodology that we have just gotten familiar with for no reason we do it because we do it well i'm looking forward to the bright future for scorebugs, hopefully not the dystopian future for scorebugs that we outlined earlier. So you mentioned some of the innovations that could be coming, whether it's exit speed on batted balls or

maybe real-time motion tracking of base runners, let's say, or there have been some broadcasts that have experimented with showing fielder positioning on score bugs, right? Which might be a little less important if the shift is banned. I want real-time base runners. Yeah, right. I want real-time, like, we got so used to with video games, you can see all the base runners in real time. We have that data. We are capturing that data.

They should have that because the hardest thing to do for a director is showing a runner trying to leg out a triple or when there's a double with runners on base and trying to capture all that data like i want to see is someone trying to round third without having to immediately try and wedge that shot into the sequencing like i want to see that i think that that would be a really fun thing to have on the broadcast well again we will link to the spreadsheet where you've tracked which broadcast display, which pieces of information on their score bugs. But just for a final recommendation, do you want to endorse a current score bug as the best and or the worst? to say ESPNs is still the best. I think ESPNs in terms of the clarity of information, how dynamic the scorebook is in terms of being able to show team records and they'll pull up the pitch sequence and show all of the pitch types and the velocities during that at bat and the way that they fly in and out information. I think that that's still the standard. I think Yeses is very good for Yankees

broadcasts. Bally's has a lot of good things going for it in terms of design, but just the size of it is just like, you know, no one likes the ticker. We've all gotten used to it at this point. And a special honorable mention to MASN for finally updating their scorebook for the first time in 12 years. You've come a long way, baby. 12 years.

You've come a long way, baby. They finally did it, and it was a really good job that they pulled that off the way that they did. I like it. All right. Well, we will link to the spreadsheets mentioned here and the grids and documentation, and you can also find Chris's scorebug Twitter account at showthescore. He has a multitude of Twitter accounts, so you can find his main one at Chris Hannell. That's H-A-N-E-L.

He also has a baseball-specific one at GoTwinkiesGo. And you can admire his work on the Games Done Quick broadcast as well. He works on those, among other things. So this was a pleasure. Glad we could do it after we teased it before thank you for the flame research and thanks for all your hard work tracking and documenting score bug details

and I will use this opportunity to say if you are like an indie league or a minor league team or a college team a bucket list item of ours is to do baseball score bugs and put this information to use we've got a lot of ideas for it and I've got like 20 different designs that I've got sitting around. So reach out. I would love to talk with you. All right. Just at him at one of his multitude of Twitter accounts.

I'm sure I'll check them at some point. Sure. Okay. I should have mentioned that Chris actually has a fourth Twitter account at support class. That's the account for his company support Class, which does broadcast design and development for events and professional live streams. They also have a website, supportclass.net. I'll also just append a few additional details about Julio Rodriguez's contract that came out after we recorded our intro. These details come from Ken Rosenthal, who reported that the extension does have a no trade clause, a full one. As mentioned, the deal has a base of $120 million over eight years. Then it grows to a minimum of $320 million if the Mariners exercise their option

or $210 million if the team declines and Rodriguez exercises his player option. If the M's decline their option on Julio, he can decline his player option and become a free agent as he's entering his age 30 season. But if he's good, they'll want to keep him around. And the option length will be 8 or 10 years based on MVP finishes. So at minimum, it's 8 years and 200 million if he has no MVP votes in his first 8 years. If he has top 10 MVP finishes 2 or 3 times, it goes up to 8 to 40. 4 times, 8 to 60. If he wins an MVP and gets top five another time or top five three times with no win, then it's 8-2-80. If it's two MVP awards or four top fives without winning, then it goes to 10-3-50.

Also, if the Mariners decline their option, then his 5-90 player option increases to 5-125.5, or it can based on all-star appearances in Silver Slugger Awards. His $15 million signing bonus is guaranteed. Just so many wrinkles and contingencies and different awards that could come into play here. One of the more complex contract structures I can recall seeing. So we will all have to figure that out as we go. Dan Saborski has already published his analysis at Fangraphs and concluded, with the aid of his projection system Zips that it was a very reasonable deal for both sides. I had one further thought on our early discussion about George Kirby and throwing

strikes and consecutive strikes and what is a strike anyway. We can of course report zone rate based on the typically called strike zone, but we can't ever say with certainty whether a pitch that was swung at would have been a strike. Now, if we get robo-umps, then I suppose we could. Maybe in that case, we would report pitches in the strike zone. So now in a box score, you see this many pitches, that many balls, that many strikes. I guess we'll still need that, but maybe we should start displaying pitches inside and outside of the strike zone because it would be kind of official. Unless, of course, we get a challenge system. Or maybe what we should have been doing all along is saying this many balls, that many called strikes, and that many balls in play in addition to just saying balls and strikes and pitches,

just to distinguish the called ones, the ones that were in the zone from the ones that were swung at and perhaps put in play and may not have been in the zone. Maybe I'm overcomplicating this. It wouldn't be the first time. I guess it's worth noting that the term strike came from actually swinging and striking the ball. So perhaps that means that putting the ball in play must by definition be a strike. It certainly is in one sense of the word. Final thing in that Orioles-White Sox game Meg mentioned earlier with the home run after the dropped foul ball, there actually was an Elias stat about that reported by Jesse Rogers of ESPN.

It was the first time in the expansion era since 1961 that a player hit a game-tying or go-ahead homer with their team down to their final out in an at-bat which featured a dropped foul ball error. So there you go. I'm sure you were all wondering. Someone did actually email us about that, so at least one person was wondering, and someone at Elias was wondering as well. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, get themselves access to some perks and help us stay ad-free, Manish Goel, Adam Fugate, Caitlin Swieka, Stephen, and Mitch Goldich.

Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group, bonus episodes featuring me and Meg, discounts on t-shirts, playoff live streams, and much more. You can contact me and Meg via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms.

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We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you next week. Never seen such a Summer song Summer song Summer song