Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1905: Strikes While the Aaron is Hot

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about pitchers throwing a perplexing number of strikes to an unstoppable Aaron Judge, Judge’s sensational September, upcoming contract, and more, Shohei Ohtani’s pitching prowess, new pitches, and switch-hitting potential, Oneil Cruz’s recent surge, Yordan Alvarez and how much of slumps can be explained by nagging injuries, Max Scherzer and […]

Hey, everyone. Just so you know, we recorded this episode before Aaron Judge hit his 60th homer, because honestly, who can keep pace with the guy? We did anticipate that he might have more than a mere 59 by the time this podcast was published reliever Will Crow, who threw a couple of quite tasty pitches to judge. That will be relevant to our banter today, which will begin now. Hello and welcome to episode 1905 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm perplexed by something. Oh. Yeah, maybe you can explain this to me, Meg. So in September, Aaron Judge has a 334 WRC+. Okay.

That's not the thing I need you to explain. I was going to say. That is also pretty inexplicable. Yeah, don't you just need me to go, wow. Yeah, the explanation is he hits the ball really hard and he's very good at baseball. Okay, the inexplicable part is the league average zone rate in September.

So that is the percentage of pitches that are thrown in the strike zone, theoretically, 50.5%. Do you know what Aaron Judge's zone rate is during this month of September when he's been about as hot as any hitter ever? I'm going to assume, based on your being perplexed, that it is higher than that in a way that is confounding. It is exactly that, 50.5%. Still seems too high. It seems too high. Still seems too high5%. Still seems too high.

It still seems too high. It still seems too high. The man is molten right now. This is a bold strategy, Cotton, and it does not seem to be paying off for them. Like, it's fun that they're pitching to him, so I can't complain about it. It's good. It's juicing the record chase. But if I can't complain, I can still be confused. Why would you pitch to him at this point? Our pal Craig Goldstein had a thread

the other day of some recent pitches that Judge has hit for home runs. And he was pointing out that there were some middle, middle meatballs that he has hit out. and people were giving Craig some grief as people tend to do. We've all been there. We've all given Craig grief. We have. And often he deserves it. But in this case, I think he was making a pretty decent point, which is that people are still pitching to Aaron Judge. Now, that's not to say that it's not still hard to hit homers on middle middle meatballs or that other hitters aren't seeing lots of middle middle meatballs too.

Swinging right over under him sometimes. Yeah, right. It's just that most hitters miss them sometimes. And this month Aaron Judge does not miss them. So it is maybe more glaring. But at the same time, he is still seeing them. Which is kind of confounding to me. If I were a major league pitcher, I don't presume to tell professional pitchers how to do their jobs. And yet I'm going to do just that.

Maybe pitch less to Aaron Judge. Maybe give him fewer hittable pitches to hit. I love that you just did like the nicest possible version of a meme. You didn't dare say say if i were a major league pitcher i would simply not pitch to aaron judge you did a nice and qualified version of that it is pretty confounding i mean like some i imagine that some amount some amount of it ben is probably pitchers being like i yeah i didn't mean to leave that there but i left that there on accident you know like when you leave your coffee cup on top of your car

and then the next morning you're like, this is gross. I didn't mean to do that. You know, it's sort of like that or like you leave it in the microwave. I leave coffee cups places, I think is our other takeaway from this segment. But I'm sure that some amount of it is like error on the part of the pitcher. They're like, I didn't want to leave one right down Main Street to the hottest hitter in baseball. But some of are maybe like oh i'm you know i can be sneaky i don't know what the distribution of of intense is there that would be interesting to find out someone should go ask all

those guys did you mean i'm gonna do a tiny story a little a little tiny story did you mean to leave one right down the dick to aaron judge they should phrase it exactly that way because i'm sure they'll get a nice answer but it is kind of confounding i mean i think that our our general consensus is that often well this doesn't happen very much anymore we've sort of seen like you know intentional walks start to be far more strategically deployed than they used to be throughout the game's history right like teams have it kind of they have it dialed in they know when it makes sense to intentionally walk a guy and when it doesn't and there there isn't perfect execution of that strategy but you know like i think that we don't have to keep saying it right it's not like it's 2001 or anything like that but part of me is like she's just always walk and like, she's just always walk. She's just

always put up four and be like, send that. And he is getting intentionally walked to be clear. There are definitely times where they're like, we don't want any part of that nonsense. Yeah, and I thought that might be part of the reason that maybe he's just getting intentionally passed at all the times when it actually matters.

And so those plate appearances are just being stripped from the sample. But even just looking at bases empty situations where in theory that would not happen, he is still seeing more pitches in the strike zone. Again, like it's roughly a league average amount. So he is being compared to mere mortal hitters. And also it's more pitches in the strike zone than he has seen earlier in the year in any preceding month, I believe, which is weird because it's like he has reached an even higher pinnacle and everyone's just deciding, I guess, well, maybe it's like a counterintuitive, like, well, we'll confuse him. We'll just throw him some strikes and he won't be expecting that because

why would we do that? It's some sort of strange game theory thing but if so it's it's not working out also i want to retract i said earlier hittable pitches to hit and i have been ruining that redundancy ever since apologies to the pedants please don't email me maybe you already have it's okay if you did you didn't know i was gonna say this it is amazing to me like i don't mean this is criticism we just have very enthusiastic listeners but we do get a not small number of emails that are like i'm dashing this off as i'm listening wait your mind oh no i should have waited a few minutes for yeah and i it's not a it's just funny it's a funny thing it's not a i'm not being being annoyed i'm just like oh you got just wait a second it's just funny. It's a funny thing. I'm not being annoyed.

I'm just like, oh, you guys, just wait a second. It's going to get there. I promise. Sometimes we remember. People being really active listeners and responders. Yeah. I asked RJ Anderson if he had any hypothesis about why Aaron Judge is seeing so many strikes. And he said male ego, which is a pretty decent answer.

I think RJ's onto something there i mean maybe maybe i would massage it a little bit not the male ego i'm not given to massaging those but i would imagine that if you are a pitcher and you are psyching yourself up to see you know someone who is just as you said on fire, that you would have to get to a point where you could say, no, I can do it. I can do it. I can even do that. I can even do that, you know, hardest thing, which is giving him an incredibly hittable pitch right down the middle. I can do it because otherwise, like, I don't know if you could walk out there at all. You know, I don't know if you could even take the mound. So maybe it's more trying to process

anticipated failure in a way that is productive and allows you to do your job because otherwise, maybe it's just impossible. Yeah. And I applaud it. I think intentional walks are sort of unsporting. I mean, we've talked about alternatives to them before. You can't stop pitchers from pitching around people. In this case, they should be pitching around this person. But again, I'm entertained that they're going after him. And I guess if I were out of it, and the Yankees maybe have been playing and will be playing some teams that are out of playoff contention. So maybe at that point, you just want to be a part of the Aaron Judge experience as a pitcher.

It seems like most pitchers typically don't want to give up milestone home runs, but maybe they just want to test themselves against the best. And he is the best hitter right now. So, again, if that's it, if it's competitive spirit, that's great. But if it's just not realizing what is happening here, I don't want to- Just realize that, guys. You should, right? I don't want to dispense valuable advice for free here. I don't want to single-handedly sway the pennant race just by putting this out there, but consider throwing fewer strikes to Aaron Judge would be

something that my advanced scouting report for Aaron Judge would say these days. I mean, he is basically Barry Bonds-ing, and Barry Bonds did not see strikes. I was looking back at the zone rate data we have for him, which is pre-pitch FX, but we still have it from stringers. And in every season from 2002 to 2004, he had the lowest zone rate of any qualified major league hitter. People were not throwing him strikes. And obviously, he was intentionally walked a ton back then. But even when they were pitching to him, they weren't really pitching to him. And clearly, not because they thought they could get him to chase, because he wouldn't do that either, just because they were deathly afraid of throwing him anything he could hit. And Judge has reached the point where they should also be deathly afraid of throwing anything to hit to him. So, again, like pitchers will just screw up sometimes. They do not have perfect command. So some of these meatballs or some of these pitches that are within the borders of the strike zone may not have been intended to be. And it's only 70-something plate appearances this month. And I suppose there could be some randomness at play there. But boy,

I'm not taking away anything from his accomplishments here because he's been completely amazing. Craig has had a little bit of a day. Right. People thought that that's what he was trying to do. I'm not saying that people are taking it easy on him. I'm saying they're treating him as if he is a regular batter. That's all.

They're not like serving up more meatballs than everyone else is getting necessarily. They're just pitching him as if he is human, as if he is not a six foot seven giant who hits homers every day. So I'm just saying they should be more wary of the scary giant who hits homers every day. Yeah, I think that like we understand hitting to be a reactive business, right? And that isn't to say that there isn't some strategy to it and that guys don't train and think isn't some strategy to it and that

guys don't train and think and, you know, have an approach and all of that. I don't want to take away anything from hitters, but the number of decision points they have is like, here's the ball. Am I going to swing at it or am I going to take it, right? Like you are inherently having to react to another person's behavior before you can do something so we're only ever going to judge a guy based we're only ever going to like judge a hitter's outcome based on what he does with what he's offered and like you know it's not like judge needs to increase the degree of difficulty and the record won't count if he you know says oh no i i would not possibly hit a meatball i'll only hit like a really hard one a foot outside the strike zone that's not how anybody

is thinking about this what we're saying is our pitcher's okay you know like this is in some ways like very much about judge and not about judge at all it's like i would simply encourage you to stop throwing him strikes you know stop throwing him especially like one's middle middle seems like a fool's errand i suppose so there's like the male ego slash like psych oneself up explanation and then there's like a failure to truly appreciate just how good he is and and what maybe your other options are and then i think maybe maybe there's a third explanation ben maybe all of these pictures care deeply about the fan experience yeah and so they're like i shall not intentionally walk judge i shall not throw him garbage i shall throw him my best middle middle stuff and see what this behemoth might do with it maybe that's the explanation yeah well it's been fun for us not so much fun

for them i know he has a big zone but it is possible not to throw him strikes even so right and it's not like the yankees lineup has been killing it around him either. That's the other part of it. I mean, like, Glaber Torres is his lineup protection most of the time these days. And Glaber's been okay this month. But he's not Aaron Judge. Like, Aaron Judge has ascended to a higher plane of existence. And Glaber Torres is Glaber Torres. And I know which I would rather face. And we're not usually the people who are like, put people on. It's not a smart decision. But this is Aaron Judge in one of the best offensive seasons ever. I don't think that's an exaggeration to say. So yeah, take it easy, opponents of Aaron Judge. Anyway, it's been a lot of fun to see him continue to do what he does. And for all I know, by the time people are hearing this, he may have feasted on someone else's hittable pitch or not so hittable pitch.

But it's been a ton of fun to watch him. It's also been fun to watch Otani more on the mound. It seems like you always have to mention one when you mention the other these days. And I did want to mention that just over an extended period now, over a period of 16 starts, Otani has led the major leagues or at least led the American League in Fangraphs War. So basically for the past half season or so, he has led the league. I think it's June 9th was when I started that somewhat arbitrary point after maybe his bad Yankees start, I think that was. Since then, he's been totally dominant on the mound. He has like a 1.7 ERA with a very low two's FIP.

It's been pretty impressive. 2.02. That is a span of 16 starts and 102 thirds innings pitched. So that's kind of incredible. And also he has incorporated two new pitches during that time. Also, he just was like, yeah, I was pretty amazing, but now I'm going to be more amazing. And I'm going to throw this like 100 mile per hour sinker that gets this ridiculous lateral movement. And then in his most recent start, he started throwing like a new slider

variant that has different movement. He basically is you Darvishing now where he just will like invent new pitches periodically and just add them to his vast repertoire. So that's that's been a ton of fun. And I'm kind of looking forward to him going into next season with all of these extra weapons that he's added during this season. Having them for the full year next year should be pretty fun. I say all this after the Angels have been eliminated from playoff contention. So we won't have to talk about that. But Otani specifically, been pretty fun to watch on the mound as well. Yeah.

I mean, I'm not going to ask this in a gambling way. But like Ben, if you had to ballpark the odds, what do you think the odds are that shoya tani is in a different uniform come opening day next year oh man hmm well the odds for opening day 2024 extremely high the odds for opening day 2023 gosh what with all the uncertainty about ownership it's hard to forecast now right i gotta think there is a significant chance. I don't know if I want to go as high as 50-50. That seems maybe too high just because having Otani is pretty valuable to your team, even if your team is bad and not contending because lots of extra eyeballs and sales and attendance and just interest in your team. As depressing as the Angels are, imagine how depressing they would be without

Otani and without Trout. I guess in a way they would be less depressing because they'd just be a generic terrible team. Whereas now they're a team with two great superstars who are still not good, Whereas now they're a team with two great superstars who are still not good, but they would be completely unwatchable all the time, not just when those two guys and maybe a couple others are playing. So I think there's a lot of incentive to keep him even more so than there would be for just your run-of-the-mill really good player, just because he brings so much intrigue and attention that a typical excellent star does not. So I'm vamping here and I don't really know exactly where to put the number. But I guess I'll put it at like 40%. Okay. That feels, you know, that feels kind of right, right? You know, I'm not advocating for it.

I think Angels fans have so little even as they have so much. What a weird team they are right they're just like but you know the ownership thing clouds the picture and you're not quite sure and you think about what how they can maximize return for it but you know you have in addition to having a new ownership group that's going to want you know butts in seats they might and i don't say this knowing anything or wishing that anyone loses their job but like they might bring in new front office staff of their own they might want to have their own folks right and that might complicate a trade i don't know i've just been noodling on it like in my

mind's eye this winter whose uniform should i picture him in? And it'll be Angel's until it isn't. But, you know, I don't know that that will end up being quite right. Yeah. People have written in lately about the Otani FTX ad, which has been upsetting people for multiple reasons. A lot of reasons. One is that Shoya Otani is in an FTX ad, which is a cryptocurrency exchange. So we have the umpires wearing FTX logos and we have Otani plugging that too. We've mentioned that before.

It is one of his few imperfections, perhaps. But people are also upset because at the end of that ad, which has been on heavy rotation lately, he bats righty in one shot. Yeah, what's up with that? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if that's an error whether they just reversed the footage yeah by accident which seems like it would be hard to not to do initially maybe but to still be running it that way if it were just an oversight i kind of like to think that maybe he was just messing around and actually hitting righty. I got to look at it more closely to see if I can tell if it was just reversed or if he was actually standing there. But I would think that as a right-handed pitcher and a left-handed hitter, how hard could it be for him if he wanted to be a switch hitter in addition to a two-way player would that not be doable for him i mean he already has the ability to use each of his arms to do something pretty impressive so can't he just combine them

i love that you're like i'm not satisfied with the unicorn i have i have to make him a different kind of unicorn than he already is another magical unicorn this. This one is not enough. I know that's not what you're saying. You love him with the whole part of your heart that isn't occupied by your family. But I don't know. It's probably pretty hard. A lot of people who switch hit aren't very good at it. Yeah, but how many of them pitch at an elite level with the opposite hip? Sure, sure. Not any, but I mean, just like how many things do you expect him to be able to do? A lot.

Pretty much all of them, I think. Until proven otherwise, I expect him to be able to do everything, except steal bases at a high success rate, I guess. Or persuade you to trade crypto, apparently. Yeah, that too. He has not had a whole lot of luck with that regard either. You're not keen for us to take on like a crypto sponsor? Nah, I admire him very much as a person and as a player, but not so much as a spokesperson.

I do like when we get those PR emails. They're like, we want to talk to you about NFTs. And I'm like, no, you don't. No, you don't. Well, well you might but it's not mutual yeah so I'm not suggesting that he should do that or that this is something that's missing from his game it's just if you're gonna put that footage in front of me sure how can I not dream a little bit yeah speaking of giant unicorns I wanted to give an update on O'Neill Cruz. Yeah. Because the thing has happened where we talk about someone not doing so well and then he starts doing pretty well. Yeah.

So we talked about him on an episode that was published on August 24th, I believe it was episode 1893. He had something like a 76 WRC plus through that point. something like a 76 WRC plus through that point. And the crux of our conversation was that he had shown really impressive tools and he'd been a stat cast star, but he was sort of exposing that you need more than that to actually be a valuable baseball player because he was a sub replacement player, I believe at that point and just was struggling defensively and was struggling plate discipline wise.

And it's just not quite enough to be the best in class at speed and throwing arm and power and everything if you don't also have these ancillary skills, which turned out to be pretty crucial. Well, since then, he's done pretty well. Since that point, he has a 152 WRC plus in 94 plate appearances with seven dingers. Not bad. Has he struck out upwards of 39% of the time? I mean, yes. Yes, he has.

Of course he has. Does he have a 378 BABIP over that period? Also, yes. But he's been pretty impressive and he's always impressive, I guess. But he's been impressive in a slightly more well-rounded way. He still makes his miscues on the field for sure. But he doubled and dingered against Jacob deGrom the other day, and it looked like he barely swung at the homer he hit off of deGrom, which is kind of a common theme with a lot of his homers. which is kind of a common theme with a lot of his homers. In a previous game, I believe also against the Mets, he hit one into the river in Pittsburgh,

which I think somewhat surprisingly was a first for him. And he was like leaning and almost off balance. And to see it, if you could somehow transpose that swing onto any other person, it would have looked like probably a lazy fly out or a pop-up or something. And it went out of the stadium. So sometimes he hits the ball really hard and it looks like he hit the ball really hard. Other times, it really doesn't look like he hit it that hard and he still did hit it that hard and it still goes really really far so it's been fun to see him play at that level for a little while even if it's perhaps still unsustainable with the strikeouts and

everything but the plate discipline really has improved he's he's chasing a lot less over that period too so even if the strikeout rate hasn't really moved in the right direction the improvement in plate discipline does give you some confidence that it could yeah i mean like you never want to make too much of you know a limited sample it's not like it's five plate appearances but it's not it's not 200 it's not a season's worth right it's a slice but i think at this stage and in a player of his experience levels career you want to see, you want to see adjustment and improvement. And then the next thing you want to see is those adjustments and improvements sticking. And you want to see what the guy can do in response to pitchers adjusting to his adjustment.

Right. And so I think it's fine to look at this and view it positively. And I wonder, I don't have a good answer to this. Like, I don't, I don't know of a study that looked at this, view it positively and i wonder i don't have a good answer to this like i don't i don't know of a study that looked at this but it would be an interesting question like i'm curious if when you have a guy like o'neill cruz where he is such an outlier in so many ways you know both in like his physicality and in his tools and how his tools manifest. It wouldn't be surprising to me in much the same way that we looked at him as a prospect and thought his range of outcomes, his distribution is really wide and he might boom or bust and it could be a supernova in either direction. Is there larger vacillation around adjustment and improvement and how far you like kind of dip back

down and then figure it out again and you dip back up i don't know i don't know if that matters at all maybe it's just like you figure stuff out as you figure stuff out and it doesn't matter if you're like from a baseball planet far far away seemingly but yeah i don't know it's cool like i want you know there are things you just like want to see like i want i want the big man to stay a short step i want big man short step right like he's i wouldn't i know i don't know if it makes sense for him to but i don't know i want it but i want it to yeah right and in anticipation of a question i would not call o'neill cruz a beef boy i know people are gonna ask i think he's like leaner in his physique than many

of the beef boys so just in case you're like i'm gonna ask meg if he's a beef boy i wouldn't put him in beef boy territory he's definitely like in a whoa territory right where you're just like how does that guy play shortstop and sometimes you're like not very well but sometimes he like rockets a ball and you're like well we should i want see it. We should let him keep trying because it's so cool. Right. So, you know, I want that to work. I want someone I want to keep seeing a guy. And this seems like it is not like consistently replicable skill.

But I want someone to hit the ball really far that low on the regular and like just out of reach. Like, it's so cool. We want there to be like aesthetic diversity within baseball. We want all kinds of diversity in baseball. And that's one of the ones we want. Because otherwise, if everyone's Aaron Judge or everyone is Jose Altuve, it's less exciting. Yeah. I meant to say one more thing about the other giant, which is that he had a five barrel day

the other day, the first five barrel had a five barrel day the other day, the first five barrel day of the stat cast era. So a barrel is basically just a ball that's hit on basically the optimal trajectory. It's hit in such a way with such a speed and at such an angle that it is likely to produce a very positive outcome for the hitter. Everything he hit was a barrel. He just hit five barrels. Like for most players, they're not that frequent. He is just barreling constantly these days. And I think it's pretty impressive that he is finishing so strong with like what's shaping up to be maybe one of the most impressive offensive months ever.

I guess it's only two-thirds over, but still, at a time when there's a lot of pressure on him in multiple ways. There's pressure on him because of the home run race. I mean, there's no pressure in that no one is chasing him. No one is pushing him when it comes to the home run title, but he has a lot of attention on him. Can he get to 60? Can he get to 61? Can he get to 61? Can he get to 62? Can he get beyond? And he's doing it despite that. And he's doing it despite the fact that he's basically been carrying the Yankees for a while. And they were looking like they were on the verge of squandering a huge lead in what would have been a historic way. So there's that pressure. There's

the pressure of the playoff race. There's the pressure of his personal race. I suppose there's been all along the pressure of his contract year and his upcoming free agency. I mean, there's a lot of weight on his shoulders and he is, well, I don't want to say rising to the occasion because it'll make it sound like I'm making an all riser and judge joke, but I guess you said judge in a way that you didn't intend earlier, too. I didn't. It's hard not to. It is. Yeah.

So the fact that he's doing all this while the spotlight is trained on him in this way, it's pretty impressive on top of everything else. Oh, and by the way, like he might win the Triple Crown, which like we talked the other day, at least I opined that I don't think the Triple Crown in Goldschmidt's case, let's say, is really worth celebrating much over and above the fact that he's just having a fantastic offensive season, right? Like that he's just been great. But in Judge's case, the fact that he is threatening to win the batting title while he's doing this, like, that's not something I saw coming for him, you know? Like, he's neck and neck with Louisa Rice. Like, I remember talking earlier in the year about how Louisa Rice was, like, chasing Ted Williams' adjusted batting average just because his average was so high at that point and the league average was so low.

And obviously, Arise's average has fallen since then. But I really did not expect all rise to overtake Arise. And that was intentional. Sorry. But just saying, like, that is kind of amazing. I think, like, in a way, the batting title is the impressive part of the Triple Crown in addition to the home runs. Like it's the RBI part that makes me yawn kind of like even though batting average has been discounted in much the same way that RBI has. It at least tells you something different about a player like stylistically.

Right. like stylistically, right? So like knowing that Aaron Judge has hit a ton of homers, that's impressive. But knowing that he's a high average hitter, that's impressive in kind of a different way. Whereas, you know, then finding out, okay, he has a lot of RBI. Well, yes, if he hits for a high average and he hits 60 homers, then he's going to drive in a lot of runs probably. So that part doesn't impress me so much, but kind of amazing that he has now become perhaps the more likely triple crown winner at this point than the guy we were kind of tracking as the likelier candidate all along. Yeah. And I don't think we should underrate the background pressure of having turned down the extension. And I don't think you're doing that. I do think that the way that

you talked during that segment suggests that I have not always been a positive influence on you because i don't know that you would have wordplayed quite that much without knowing me but you know it is an like an incredible thing to have to do what he did right and to have the confidence in yourself that you are going to at the very least be able to match the terms that were offered to you by the yankees. And I don't know Aaron Judge personally. I don't know how he reacts to pressure. A lot of writers I know thrive in pressure. It's the only way they can file is if they're writing right before deadline, right? But I think that it is- Couldn't be me. Right. It had to have been a constant strain, especially in the early going. And then I would

imagine that the way that he has performed throughout this season, I'm sure that that is still a background stressor. And I know that he gets asked about it, and I know the team has gotten asked about it. But to have been able to do what he did, I'm sure he's had a lot more moments this year where it has been about something else than the contract

than he maybe be anticipated given where he started but i'm sure it's still sitting in the back of his mind like oh gosh i have to be free agent this winter and now it's like i get to be a free agent this winter right let me add it yeah right i know there's a part of me i mean i guess aaron judge's free agency will be a big off-season podcast topic but oh yeah we. We're going to talk about that. We're not done talking about Aaron Judge. No, we'll just continue to talk about Aaron Judge, just in a slightly different way. But, yeah, there is a part of me that just feels like whoever ends up with Aaron Judge is somehow going to get disappointed at some point during the life of that deal.

Maybe that's unfair of me, but just because he's setting the bar so ridiculously high this season, it's like it's almost like if he went back to doing what he used to do, which was like, you know, have a 150 WRC plus and get hurt sometimes, that would be like, this is just another star, you know, as opposed to like someone who is having a 10 win season, if not better than that. And given his age and his lack of durability in the past, like it kind of feels like this is just like a magical year where absolutely everything is going great. And he is just performing at the peak of his powers and just firing in all cylinders. And who would not want Aaron Judge on your team after this season or even before this

season, but especially after the season. And yet whoever it is will have to somewhat restrict their expectations, right? Just because he's probably not going to do this again. And you're probably going to have to sign him to quite a long term deal, I would imagine, at this point, unless he's amenable to a extremely high dollar shorter term deal. So, you know, you might have to live with a 40 year old Aaron Judge and who knows how he'll age and everything. That's a conversation for another day. age and everything. That's a conversation for another day. But just because it seems like he is adding to the contract that he can command with every swing at this point, I don't know, it would give me misgivings, I guess, to be the person who has the winner's curse contract with

Aaron Judge. I don't want to make it sound like a negative thing to get Aaron Judge. Whoever gets Aaron Judge should be extremely excited that they signed Aaron Judge. And like if it's the Yankees, then who cares how much they spend on Aaron Judge because they're the Yankees and they can probably afford to spend like give him a blank check, which is basically what they might have to do at this point. But I've just been thinking about that. Like what would the expectations be going into Aaron Judge's next contract coming off what is probably the best walk year ever I'm gonna say I haven't actually looked that up or anything that would maybe be a pretty good topic yeah there can't be many better than this because there just haven't been many seasons better like this yeah yeah i mean it is gonna be how do i want to engage with this idea that you've

put in my brain that i will not be able to stop thinking about you know it's like juan soto hasn't really been himself this year and we would all you know well i mean you and i would be thrilled if we were being the juan soto of 2022 because like because who knew that we could do that, Penn? Good for us. But I think that our general reaction to Juan Soto's year has been to be like, this is weird and aberrant and Juan Soto is going to be fine and amazing

and even if it's not happening to the degree that he would want it to right now and even if Padres fans are feeling nervous, probably going to be fine. And in some ways like the potential letdown is similar even though I don't imagine that going from this to like a 150 WRC plus and like you know one or two IL stints is actually as big a delta as what am I trying to say anyway don't worry about it i think is what i mean yeah but

you know it is hard because these guys just get compared to themselves and when you're really really incredible in all likelihood the only place you have to go is down even if you're you're achieving something that is still great and remarkable and i'm not saying that like i mean once i was not having the same kind of year and judges obviously if he were then uh we wouldn't be talking about him as like a you know compared to himself disappointment but i think it'll be fine and i think he'll be really good and uh you know the back half of that deal probably will look not great but who cares go in a world series now and then you're not going to worry about it i I think is what I think about that. All right. So I mentioned that DeGrom game where he was really cruising and he ran into Cruz and that

I did it again. Oh, man. What happened? Did we have a freaky Friday, Ben? No. Did we? Did we switch lives? Or at least a tiny part of our brains?

This comes from podcasting together probably a lot. Maybe it's just inevitable. Anyway, after the DeGrom game, there was a Max Scherzer game. Max Scherzer returned from the IL, and he pitched six perfect innings. And we talked earlier in the year about comparisons between Verlander and Scherzer. And this was another little resonance there because when Verlander came off the IL, he pitched five no-hit innings and then he got pulled

and Scherzer got pulled here too. And I don't even get worked up about this kind of thing anymore. They've just broken me, I guess. They have just silenced any objections that I once might have had to someone getting pulled in the midst of a no-hitter or a perfect game. Now, a perfect game is a bit of a different beast than a no-hitter. But even so, I saw this and I shrugged. And of course, there are all kinds of

very reasonable explanations for why Max Scherzer would get pulled here. I don't know if people were even upset about this. It's just like, yeah, of course Max Scherzer would get pulled here. He's older. He's coming off an injury. He's a very important player to this team. They need every outing here as they try to stay ahead of Atlanta and then enter the playoffs. You don't want to jeopardize Max Scherzer. the same time he had thrown 68 pitches and he looked great and he's never thrown a perfect game although he came extremely close once and so yeah as you may recall yeah you know he's had a couple no hitters and it's six innings like six innings I mean yeah okay you put your little banner on the at bat app I guess at that point but the odds are still extremely against you getting there.

Right. It wasn't like it was, you know, he had one inning to go. Right. No, not even close. But, in fact, three times more than one inning to go. But to calculate it precisely. However, I just don't even bat an eye at this. Like this would have still been a story at some point, not too many years ago. This used to be like emergency podcast, Rich Hill gets pulled or some on this. So I looked for starts by season where a pitcher, and I went for no hitters, which again, I'm not as into, but still, I looked up starts where no hits were allowed, where innings pitched were between four and eight. So four or more and eight or fewer because I wanted to eliminate, say, opener games or games where someone got pulled really early. Like maybe someone had noticed that they had a no-hitter going and they still got pulled. And also that these were nine inning games. So it wasn't just games that got rained out early. So there have been 15 of those this year.

And that's a record. Last year, there were 12. That was a record. And 2020 sort of screws things up because it was 2020. There were five that year. But before that, there were 10 in 2019. There were 11 in 2018. There were 10 in 2019. There were 11 in 2018. Prior to 2018, there had never been more than five of these sorts of starts in a season. And now, just a few years it is now. This is the way it's going to be. Like, we're going to get quite a few games in a season where someone who has a no-hitter going or even a perfect game is pulled.

And it's just de rigueur. It's just, yeah, you know, that happened again. Like, there have been 53 starts fitting these criteria since the start of 2018. So that's just five seasons and one of them was short. There had also been 53 of these in all of history that is stat-headable through 1992. So this is different. Now there are all sorts of ways that we could express changes in pitcher usage. I'm sure this is not shocking to anyone, but still, ways that we could express changes in pitcher usage. I'm sure this is not shocking to anyone,

but still, just the magnitude of the change, this is a pretty decent way of summing it up, how quickly it has happened in just the last handful of years. And you can't blame them, but you can kind of lament, I guess. And some of these games, I should acknowledge, could have been injury-related. I couldn't screen for that. It's just if you got removed, why you had a no-hitter going and you were within those other constraints. But most of these were the real thing. And it just happens almost routinely now. It's just, it's like, no big deal. It's like, we've gone from five alarm fire, what is happening here? They're destroying the sport to just like, eh, it's a bit of a bummer i guess but that's the way things work now well so like i remember you were very worked up about kershaw

getting pulled like you were pretty worked up and i was pretty not worked up yeah if i remember and that i was like bad dodgers right or i was like this is disappointing it was disappointing if inevitable right yeah you you understood the rationale and also you wished that that rationale had not prevailed in that particular moment right but you understood the rationale and i wonder if part of this is just that like we are all as you said so conditioned to be like well there's this injury thing and here's his age and here's the usage they're envisioning for him i mean like i think with scherzer i'm sure that there were mets fans watching who were like please don't leave him in because we all remember how he pitched

last year during the postseason and you could tell that like he didn't have his normal stuff right so i'm sure that there were Mets fans who were like, please, for the love of God, pull him, pull him. I'm sure that that's what some of them were saying, and then I'm sure there were others who were upset that he didn't get the chance to try more. But I don't know. I think that there do exist sort of silly preemptive pulls.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that there are guys where it's like oh let him go come on now let him go this isn't one for me it doesn't sound like it really is one for you either but but i think that they that they can exist and often and sometimes do exist and um and that's why we should save our panic for those ones so that when we're like, this is a, isn't it a four alarm fire, five alarm fire, four alarm fire? I went with five. Five alarm fire. Because it's the number of fire engines that are going to a fire, right? Right.

Right? Okay. Just wanted to make sure I understood how, you know, fires work. I think that's the unit of measure. Yeah. Yeah. See? Oh, okay.

So I don't have anything more to say about Max Scherzer. He's great. And I hope that he is all the way better and that he is delightful for the Mets in the postseason. And I'm glad that we got this like proof of concept. It just happened with Joe Ryan, right? That was the other one. That was a seven inning one where it was like twins.

Well, sadly for them, probably not going to the playoffs at this point. Joe Ryan, younger guy, et cetera. More more pitches i forget how many he was at the point it was i just read like oh joe ryan pulled after seven no hit innings yeah you know yeah yeah exactly yeah but i think that we have discovered a more important thing here ben we should stop referencing the defcon scale that no one understands and just talk about alarm fires because even if like the the thing is is actually four and not five we know what it should be directionally so i'm like oh that sounds like a lot of fire engines right because you can count up instead of down down when it comes to severity yeah exactly so let's be done with the

defcon scale because no one ever remembers it except for the people who have to worry about it for real. And then we'll be good to go. That's what I think. Yeah. I did want to mention one more giant. There are a lot of giants just striding over the sports landscape these days. Jordan Alvarez, who is back to hitting like himself from earlier in the year. So he has had himself a September too.

He has hit 370, 460, 833 with six stingers this September. And that's, I guess, a little better than he had been hitting through July, essentially. But he was amazing through July, and he's been amazing this month. He was amazing through July, and he's been amazing this month. And he had a lousy August where he hit 234, 326, 312. And I was just struck by the fact, and I think I've made this observation before, but during that time when he was not hitting, he had injuries. He had right and left hand injuries, I believe. And he just seemingly was unable to hit for power and he was just playing through it anyway. And play through, I wonder just like how much of slumping it would explain, you know? Because some slumping is just randomness. It's not process so much as result.

randomness. It's not processed so much as result. And then some slumping might just be mechanics and just getting out of whack that way. Or it could be psychological or it could be that your hands hurt. And these are all different reasons why someone might not be hitting. But we can't untangle them really. And so when we run studies to try to figure out, oh, is getting hot or being cold, is this random? Well, how can you account for the fact that Jordan Alvarez was hurt and playing during that time? If he was on the IL, that would be one thing. Then you could fit that into your model in some way. Or even if he was day-to-day, maybe he was day-to-day at some point during that span. But if someone is playing hurt and with him it was apparent and it was reported and it was known, with a lot of players, it's not known. It might not be known to their teams in some cases, and it's certainly not known to the public. And so I just wonder how much of the variation

would be explained if we could perfectly account for just your physical health and I guess your mental health is sort of a separate category that's related. But like if you could just divvy up how much of perceived slumping is pure randomness, how much is just bad habits, just your swing is off or whatever. You're just not in the swing of things the way that you usually are and then how much of it is just some concrete cause that if the player could just like annotate all of their games for their whole career like if we had data like like sam and i tried to do with the stompers where we just like handed out surveys and we're like, how are you feeling today? If players would do that and answer honestly and just like keep track. Like if a player would just like write in his diary every day, here's how I felt and here's what I was dealing with. And then after his career is over, would just donate the diary to science or something so that we could just like analyze, okay, what was the correlation here? Like when you were not hitting well, how much of that was because you were nursing and nagging

something or other? It's just like something we can't really account for that I wish we could account for. And the farther back you go in baseball history, the harder it becomes to account for it because you might not even have like injury list data. And then it's just like, huh, he just wasn't hitting. I have no idea why. Or maybe he just wasn't playing for a little while and I have no idea why. There's no like indication if you go to their player page, you can maybe dig into the newspaper archives and see if you can come up with something. But there isn't at least an online indexed data source for that. It's just something I think about often when a

really apparent case of a player playing through an injury, suffering because of it, and then as soon as he gets healthy, getting good again. It's like, well, if he'd been healthy that whole time, can we just pencil in a 200 WRC plus in August for him? And will we remember that down the roads when we look back at this season? Will we know that that was what was happening then or will that be forgotten? And obviously projection systems probably can't account for that unless it is officially recorded in some way. And maybe they should account for it in the sense that, well, if he hurt his hands, maybe he'll hurt his hands again or something. still like you might discount the weak hitting while he had his hands hurt so just some musings on your down

alvarez i suppose well and you know it would be interesting obviously every body literal body is different and so you're going to react to and be sort of affected by different injuries to different degrees. And some of that's going to depend on the magnitude of the injury. And some of that's going to have to do with your, you know, like I said, your particular body, your mechanics, how those things interact with one another. But, you know, it would be really interesting to see, you know, if we had even greater precision in that kind of injury tracking, like what insights we'd be able interesting to see, you know, if we had even greater precision in that kind of injury tracking, like what insights we'd be able to glean, not only in terms of what you

ought to have done or might've been capable of doing absent that constraint, but also, you know, what is the real effect of this stuff? Like, I think that we have a sense of some injuries, right? Like when you hear like, oh oh he broke his hamate and he has to have surgery to remove it like you and i and the folks listening to this podcast like have a sense of it it's like okay so there's the surgical recovery time and then he's probably not going to hit for power in the same way he is normally capable of for a couple of months because we have seen this injury manifest enough to know that like it can kind of sap you of power for a while right and we have that sense but i'm sure that teams probably have a better idea of this than than we do yeah but it would

be interesting for public side analysts to sort of be able to dig in on that stuff more and like you know there'd be other limitations to historical data like even if you opened a chest in somebody's attic and you're like actually i've complete like injury like physical injury records for like the last hundred years amazing it'd be kind of creepy if you had that in your attic but maybe you have it you're like wow treasure trove like there would be things that i imagine over time would start to be reported either more precisely based on the technology we have to diagnose those injuries. Right. So we can be more precise than like your leg fell off. That's how I imagine medicine being like, ah, your leg just fell right off or or, you know, stuff that like there might be some stigma around that you're less inclined to report.

So, like, I think you're right that it would be really useful. It would also be invasive and weird. So there would have to be some of that, right? Like we'd have to navigate the ethics of that. But, you know, I would imagine that players today would be much more likely to report. Here's the way that I'm like struggling with my mental health than players from gosh even like 20 or 30 years ago let alone 100 right like Austin Meadows right now with the Tigers yeah right being able to say like you know this is impacting my performance on the field every bit as much as my physical health is and it's important for me to say that so that people know that like they can say that you know I thought it was really admirable that he did that so it would be you know there would definitely be gaps in what we could analyze and understand and again we'd have to figure out like how do you ethically treat very personal medical data this is always i was talking to talking to my my stepmom about a player injury and i can't even remember what now she's like you know that about him? It might have been Mitch Hanegar.

Yeah, probably. She was like, how do you know that? I was like, oh, it was just the thing they told the beer writers, and she's like, Everyone knew it. She's like, that's wild. Yep. So, you know, it does raise some questions, too.

But yeah, it would be really interesting to be able to dig in on that and have a more precise sense of it. Yeah. All right. A few other pitchers who've been performing well whom I just wanted to shout out here. I noticed that when I set the Fangraphs leaderboards from 2020 to 2022, minimum 250 innings pitched. The lowest whip of any major league pitcher over that span is one Clayton Kershaw.

Wow. He has a.95 whip over that span. We don't talk about whip all that often. We don't. But just about any stat that we could talk about, he would be close to the top of the leaderboard over that span. I think if we chose say park adjusted fip let's go with that he is sixth over that span and perhaps tied with max scherzer it looks like and a little bit ahead of shohei otani the pitcher yeah it's corbin burns

carlos rodan shane bieber zach wheeler kevinossman, Clayton Kershaw in park-adjusted FIP. I believe in park-adjusted XFIP if we really want to get wild here. I think he is fourth behind Corbin Burns, Shane McClanahan, Shane Bieber, and Clayton Kershaw. I was just thinking of this because he had another fine start. because he had another fine start. And I continue to think that as someone who just agonized over when we passed the point of peak Kershaw, I was just paying way too much attention to that because post-prime Kershaw has been not nearly as durable, of course.

But man, when he's been on the mound, he does it in a different way, obviously, and with a lot less speed than he used to pitch-wise. But inning for inning, he remains in quote-unquote decline just on the short list of the most effective pitchers in baseball. So sometimes with the Dodgers, just because at times least, they seem to have such a wealth of starting pitching. And you almost factor in and pencil in Clayton Kershaw to go on the IL a couple times a year. And you just hope it's not going to be at a pivotal postseason time. It's like, oh, you know, they'll be OK without Kershaw.

And then you just see how good he is when he pitches. Like more than 100 innings this year, 2.39 ERA, 2.49 FIP. Like he's fantastic. He's still so good. So this is not like a lion in winter sort of situation. It's not like an Albert Pujols like, oh, wow, he has one more run in him sort of situation, although that's a ton of fun too. It's like Kershaw has just never not been really good whenever he's healthy or healthy enough to pitch. So that's pretty impressive.

By the way, Dustin May of the Dodgers, another guy who was pulled from a no-hitter recently, just to continue with the theme. Yeah, but he was coming back from Tommy John. They have to manage his- There are good reasons yeah i know i keep implying that you find these like a lot more upsetting than i think you do right it's just that like these reasons these good reasons probably existed in earlier eras too right it's just that

like it was basically an ironclad rule it was like well yes we are aware that your arm might be about to fall off but what can we do yeah you're throwing a no-hitter, so I guess get back out there, kid. Yeah, there's just no choice in the matter. Anyway, Kershaw is great. Kershaw is great. Kershaw is great. I hope that Kershaw, you know, we have fretted and with good reason over the Dodgers pitching depth this year. It has been fretful.

It has been a fretful time when it comes to Dodgers pitching depth. it has been fretful it has been a fretful time when it comes to dodgers pitching depth and i think that even if you get like a very good version of kershaw come october like it'll still feel you're still gonna be like everybody you all stay healthy now don't mess around out there but i think that if you know we see like a really good vintage kershaw people will probably like drop their shoulders a little bit plus it'll feel nice to us because like what percentage of you would you say is kind of over feeling really nervous for Clayton Kershaw in the postseason? Oh, yeah. I would say like nearly 90% or something.

Yeah, you've moved past it. It's not an active concern. He got the monkey off his back. I'm not gonna put it back on yeah okay yeah that's where i am too but then you know sometimes i'm like i'm electing to not worry about something is that wrong i feel so natural when i'm worried about things ben it feels like you know my resting pulse is in the worry zone so okay so that i feel better now i feel i don't feel like i've abdicated my

responsibilities to clayton kershaw a person i've never met nope the other pictures i meant to shout out here by the way dustin may did not know he was throwing a no-hitter so see he wasn't even upset about it no was he upset about it after the fact i don't think so i don't think you could be really if it's like i didn't know i was throwing a no-hitter and then someone tells you and you're like what how could they pull me how could they pull me i mean i think that when we discussed the kershaw of it all earlier in the season that this was my primary argument which is that he did not seem fussed about it and neither did the dodgers and like that doesn't mean you know we get to we just

you feel your feelings and then you decide what to do with them but that for me was like an important and useful sort of milestone in my own off-ramp to not caring about something super a lot because i was like well he's not mad about it you know he felt like oh i this was my last shot ah then i could muster some amount of like no but it didn't seem like that was the case so yeah same with roki sasaki when he was pulled from his attempt at a second consecutive perfect game and he was like yeah this is okay this makes some sense yeah so like you know we can let their reaction be something of a of a guide a uh a load stone is that a word load stone touch stone am i trying to touch stone yeah load stone oh my god this is from final fantasy is that a reference

i had yeah i didn't think that was what you were going for oh my god wow well i don't know what it means in final fantasy you don't have to explain it to me. It's fine. I guess it's a type of mineral. You probably were not going for that either. I wasn't. I meant like a, I think I was, I don't know where that came from. Wow. Brains are weird. Anyway, continuing on.

Yeah. The other picture. So we have not really talked at all. I don't think about the Frambois Valdez quality start streak. Yeah, it's so cool. Which is just like, it sounds like an inherently unimpressive thing because I'm so-

No, it's a cool thing. No, it is. I have to overcome my resistance to the quality start just as a concept, as something particularly impressive just because the range of quality starts can be broad. Although in his case, it hasn't really been. He's just been like really good.

He's just been really good. He has an active streak of, I think, 25 now quality starts. And, you know, sometimes he's testing the six innings pitch, three earned runs constraints here, but often not. Often he's not getting near either of the rails there. Just to be that consistent over that period of time and taking the quality start streak out of it. Yes, obviously, if you threw the worst possible quality start every time out, you would not be a great pitcher. Right. You would be an employed pitcher.

Oh, yeah. And at a certain point, you would, I'm sure, inspire effectively wild emails about which craft was happening here, et cetera. Like everyone would want you if you did that probably, but we would not be paying quite as much attention to it. It's like if you have a great hitting streak, but you're going one for four every day or something. It's like, well, it's kind of cool, but you're not actually hitting that well despite the long streak. But that's not the case with him. He's just been pitching really well for a really long time and is just basically one of the best pitchers in baseball and maybe should

get his due more often than he does. So if the quality start streak is the thing that propels him to greater attention, then I think that's a good thing. Because the thing with him is that he does not have a high strikeout rate by the standards of this era for an elite starting pitcher. And so maybe people tend to discount him a bit because the FIP is not quite as superlative as other pitchers are. But he has like a 70% ground ball often. He's just been an absolute metronome of quality pitching performance, clearly, for a whole long time now, for basically the entire season, just about. That dates back to almost the beginning of the season.

So even though inherently I think the quality of start is sort of a strange concept and really can vary from one quality start to the next. In his case, he just hasn't varied all that much. Like he's just been really good for a really long time. something right like it is information that is useful sort of directionally and you're right like if this even a worse version of what he is doing imminently employable people will be like oh yes let's have that lodestone where did it come from ben not where did the lodestone come from i don't care about that why is that in my anyway in his first two starts of the season, I guess before the streak started, well, I guess he's only had maybe one or two, I guess, non-quality starts all season long. So his second start of the season, he went three innings and gave up one earned run. And then his third start of the season, he went four and a third and gave up six earned runs. That's the worst start of a season so far. And then it's just quality starts all the way down the rest of the time and looks like a lot more non-three earned runs totals than threes in the earn run column. So yeah, pretty impressive. Although I suppose I should caveat this not to diminish Fran Pervaltez's achievement,

but he has the record for the most quality starts consecutively in a single season. He surpassed Jacob deGrom. However, if we carry streaks across multiple seasons, then he is still one quality start behind both deGrom and Bob Gibson, who did it from 2018 to 2019 and 67 to 68, respectively. And if we go even further back, Jack Taylor, who had 28 consecutive quality starts from September 26th, 1901 to August 14th, 1902,

when no one was talking about a quality start though I think he might also have the record for consecutive complete games which was 39 that's a lot anyway back to Valdez to link him to a couple of other pitchers who've been on really nice runs and who will be fronting playoff rotations but have maybe been a bit unsung Joshian had this stat in his newsletter the other day the pitchers who have the longest streaks of starts of at least six innings pitched. So not necessarily quality starts, but just going that deep into games. So Valdez is at 25.

Shane Bieber is at 12. And Hugh Darvish is at 21. So those two guys, I feel like they've been slightly under the radar just because maybe they've been even better before. And just given injuries that they've gone through and Bieber losing a little velocity and everyone was concerned early this season. Oh, this doesn't look like the same Shane Bieber. Like, can he still be effective throwing this hard? Yeah, looks like it. Yeah.

So Darvish has been awesome for almost as long as Frambois Valdez has and Bieber, even if he doesn't have quite as long a quality start streak, he's probably been just as good as if not better than those other two guys. So don't sleep on Bieber or Darvish and Valdez heading into the playoffs. All those guys are going to be a part of that, it looks like. And they're going to be pitchers that you do not want to face. Yeah. Well, and also, don't sleep on them because that might be uncomfortable for them and then they won't pitch as well.

Hey! And for you, probably. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't speculate about that. But yeah, I know Dan wrote about Shane Be beeper and also aaron nola yeah in terms of guys who have been quite good particularly lately so should check that out i mean not you specifically ben i imagine you did but in case anyone listening hasn't but yeah one of the best things about october is when you get there and you're like oh yeah that guy's really good yeah

you know we have fretted over the padres and the Guardians have been in this at times tight division race, although they're kind of pulling away now. And, you know, like you said, I think that people who are maybe skeptical of the quality start as saying all that much. Maybe we're like, well, what does this really mean? But I think we're going to see all of those guys pitch in October and then be like, well, they're all really good. Yeah. And just because they, in some cases, have reached even higher heights in the past. Right. Does not mean we can't appreciate what they've been doing.

But really, lately, they've been about as good as ever. Ever, yeah. It's just that maybe we're not noticing as much because the early season stats weren't quite as impressive. Right. And so maybe we wrote off their seasons to a certain extent and were slow to notice. I should be using I statements here, but perhaps I was slow to notice

that they had regained their full former form. So yeah, they're really great. And we should pay attention to them, even though our attentions are occupied by some of the other guys who might be more likely to win awards. Although I suppose these players probably in the running as well. They'll get down ballot votes, I bet.

Yeah. Oh, for sure. I was going to say, would we all be better off if Otani and Judge were in separate leagues this year, you think? I mean, I'm not saying we'd be better off if we were not talking about the current NL. It's got a weird energy to it now, though. It does. They're like in opposition in a way that I wish that they were not. I wish they were not. I don't think we're putting them in opposition, but I think many people are.

Like, can't praise one without finding fault with the other or comparing them, at least. And if they were in separate leagues, then we could just enjoy the fact that they're both having amazing, fantastic historic seasons in different ways. Yeah, and surely I don't want to diminish what Paul Goldschmidt has done because he has had a fantastic season also. And so if we were to shunt one of them to the National League, then Paul Goldschmidt would be like, what do I have to do to win an MVP award around here?

He'd suddenly sound like Jerry Seinfeld. So what's going on with Shohei Ohtani in the National League? That's exactly what Seinfeld sounds like. But it does seem like people are, I don't know. I guess it's unsurprising that the Yankees fan base, which is quite passionate, and the show of tony fan base which i am purposefully distinguishing from the angels fan base is also quite passionate and that people will be like we want to give these guys their due and that that might lead to i don't

know craig having to like fight with people on the internet but it doesn't take an it doesn't take an MVP race for that to be true. No. We love you, Craig. Anyway, but yes. Speaking of accomplishments that have taken a long time to play out, we got an email from someone who was gassed that we did not mark the occasion of Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright passing Mickey Lolic and Bill Frien when it came to the record for regular season starts by a pitcher catcher battery. Yes, we did get that email. It's true. And it is true that we did not mention them. As the emailer noted, we had forecasted this some time ago because it had been the subject of a stat blast maybe last year, if not earlier than that, when I looked ahead and saw that they were climbing that list and that they had a chance to get to the top.

I'm sure other people were paying attention to that, too. So it was just a long time coming, clearly. And so there was not necessarily the day-by-day intrigue that there is with Aaron Judge. Let's say where it's, is he going to do it? How many is he going to get? Is he going to clear this threshold? Like it was clear that Molina and Wainwright, as long as they stayed healthy, were going to do this.

You could just look at the calendar. And so each day you just checked off of another start and they got a little bit closer, just didn't have the same sort of suspense. It was more of an Ironman record or an Iron Men record. But they should still get to take their victory lap because I think this is a really cool record. And even more so than Molina's racking up records left and right, just about most whatevers for a catcher. Just like he's at or close to the top of basically all the catcher playing

time leaderboards or the, you know, catcher with one team leaderboards. He's breaking one of those things every other day, it seems like. And that's all impressive, too, especially for a catcher to have that durability and longevity. But the duo, I think, is really impressive. And Lulich and Frian were really great players and I guess sort of sad that they get overshadowed, although they've gotten a lot of attention because of this record, because they got Eclipse. But so much has to go right for this to happen. And it's got to be

more unlikely now than it was for Lulich and Frian to do it in the pre-Free Agency era, because there's just so much more player turnover now. Yes, there's so much movement. Right. And just with all the factors that make it less likely that this would happen and, you know, pitchers making fewer starts in general and just like a lot of things that would make you think that this would have been an unbreakable record. And now it's been broken.

that would make you think that this would have been an unbreakable record. And now it's been broken. And now I think it's just about unbreakable now, the new record as well. But it's really amazing to have two players who had that kind of professional relationship and personal relationship for that long. Like, I hope they write a book about it someday. You know, that would be cool. I mean, I'd love to hear more about their recollections of this when it's all over. There was a good, I think it was an athletic article by Katie Wu, where she had both Melina and Wainwright sit down

and watch their first ever start together, like the first inning of it, and just reminisce about what that was like, which was a cool idea. So I mean, that goes back a long way. And it's really like a pretty intimate relationship. Yeah. I mean, pitcher and catcher on a baseball team, like more so than just being a teammate. I mean, that's just like such a interdependent type of thing where at least one party is so responsible for the other's success and so invested in the other's success.

I don't know what the best analogs for that would be. Maybe podcast co-hosts, but just like, you know, being in a band, like being the songwriters in a band maybe like just to to have had this relationship for so long and not have had something go wrong with that relationship not end up in some sort of like simon and garfunkel relationship where you hate each other after a while or something you know like i don't know what their personal relationship is or what the state of their friendship is but like clearly they've been able to maintain this very close bond for a really long time. Like it's, it's really kind of cool. And it is, it is perhaps a testament to, I mean, it is absolutely cool and perhaps a

testament to like how the esteem I hold them in, in terms of their ability to reach this goal that like we got that email and I was like they hadn't already done that and I remember us talking about it on the podcast and I think part of my brain was just like yeah they did it already like right you know because it's hard to imagine once you know new contracts were signed and those guys were going to be back for another year I mean like I guess we'll be without them at some point soon here but like you know it's hard to imagine them not doing it. That's just how reliable it has been over the course of their career. So, yeah.

Yeah. I'm just trying to analogize it to something in my own career, which would, I guess the closest thing would be like book co-author, podcast co-host, writer, editor. I mean, you know, that's sort of a similar thing writer editor I mean not in a physical sense but but sort of similar right like in that you're getting in the other person's head like you're trying to help them perform to the best of their abilities and make them look good and obviously the writer is trying to make it easy on the editor I mean it's uh it's sort of similar so you know you and whoever the longest tenured

fancrafts writer is, it's basically Wayne Might Molina. Yeah, it's exactly the same, except that I'm not getting stuff stuck to my chest protector and people wondering, how's it sticking there? Yeah. But otherwise, it's identical, you know. And a couple last updates here. So I have found out something about the flame animations on Fox broadcasts, still setting the minimum for 95 miles per hour for flames to indicate a fast pitch on baseball broadcasts, even though 95 mile per hour pitches have become far more common. And it seems like we should just raise the flame minimum to keep pace that there's been flame inflation. And we talked about this a bit with listener and Patreon supporter Chris Hannell when he came on to talk about his flame-related research and score bugs on episode 1895. And

at the time in his research, he had looked at every type of baseball broadcast and had tried to figure out where they set the flame minimum. And at the time, he thought that Fox's minimum had climbed to 99, which was where it was for the majority of last postseason. So it had bumped up from 95 to 99, which seemed almost too extreme. I was thinking maybe we need to go to 96 or 97, but it didn't seem like anyone was really willing to go there. There were some people that had some sort of multi-stage thing where 100 miles per hour would get you something extra potentially, but no one was really going like 96, 97. And I thought that we were all just too enthralled to base five and

base 10. I wanted someone to break that barrier. Well, it turns out that Fox has. So Fox has been using 97 miles per hour for almost this whole season, it seems like. And I was very curious about the decision process here. And I reached out to a Fox producer who I believe wishes to remain anonymous here because he's not directly involved with the flame settings. But he asked around and he talked to some people who did, even though it was not his specialty. And he found out that this was an intentional decision, that they raised it to 97 because it was felt that 95 was just too low in this day and age, that there were just too many 95-hour pitches and that they needed it to go up. So Fox has followed my advice before I even offered it. They anticipated my advice. That is exactly what happened here.

So that's what you will see for the most part, it seems like on Fox broadcast these days, no flames at 96 and below, flames at 97 or above. So that's kind of cool. I think that's about where it should be these days. Yeah. I mean, like if I recall, I had advocated for 100 as the number, which, you know, after our conversation, I realized, do I actually think that that's what it should be? Or am I just conditioned by the route broadcast that the Mariners are on to think that because I watch them so often? And if I recall correctly, their threshold is 100 and they don't do flames. They just make it red. But this seems like it's moving in the right direction.

So I'm in favor of that. Right. And there was apparently some confusion because the producer told me that the change was made to 97 miles per hour during the 2021 postseason and that's where it had stayed and that anything else had been done incorrectly. And I was doing some research and Chris was doing some further research.

And what we were able to determine, mostly Chris, is that it actually was set at 99 for most of the last postseason. But then there was a change actually in World Series Game six mid-game the flame minimum changed to 98 oddly so in the first inning of World Series game six a 98 mile per hour pitch got no flames then in the third inning a 98 mile per hour pitch got flames so that change was made then possibly because there were no pitches at exactly 99 I think, in the first few World Series games. So maybe that spurred them to make that change. And then it seems like the minimum stayed at 98 for the first FS1 broadcast of this year.

On April 9th, we found one where the minimum was still at 98. But then by May, at least, it was down to 97. And it seems to have stayed at 97 since. So that was kind of curious because it differed a little from what the producer had been told by other graphics producers and executives who said that this decision had been made and implemented sooner. And so I shared this research with the producer and he said something interesting, which is that apparently where you set something like this becomes kind of a state's rights issue with

each individual broadcast crew. So he said, not surprised by the variants, both last postseason and even this season, there is a lot of tweaking even during live broadcasts when changing parameters or integrating new technologies into live sports coverage, no way to tell what things are actually going to look or feel like until used during a live event. And then the fine tuning really begins. Plus, we all have differing opinions and some opinions count more than others. As you know, I imagine that was going on during the 2021 postseason. 2021 postseason. Regarding 2022, my guess is that it's a function of having a large number of shows with many different operators and different Foxbox machines being used and shipped around the country, many variables, not everyone has the latest guidelines, things change and sometimes end up

on the air. And he mentioned that he had a boss at a previous employer who would just be driven to distraction by the fact that on the over a thousand college hoops games that the network covered, the score bug didn't have the consistency he wanted from show to show. But apparently he said it's like herding cats when you have over 50 different score bug operators with all sorts of experience and backgrounds. It's like, you know, you can have a fan graph style guide, but people are still going to hyphenate the way that they feel is right. And then it falls to you to change it or not. So yeah, so that seems to be what's happening here. But yeah, the Fox Flame minimum is at 97 these days and seemingly has been for most of the season. And that's good. I think that's about where it should be.

And I applaud the change. I think they should only like monkey with it in the way that I do, where I will sometimes see a hyphen. We will not discuss who it doesn't matter. And I'll go, oh, come on now. And then I'll, but otherwise, I think that there can be some something left to the personal style of the writer, you know, maybe we need more consistency on the

Flame stuff, but maybe not. Yeah. And the other update I wanted to give is that I wrote a piece for Grantland back in 2015, and it did well at the time. People liked it, and it's remembered fondly, certainly by me. I enjoyed working on this one. It was about twins.com, the website, the URL, which was owned by a couple of twin brothers, Derland and Darwin Miller, who are not residents of Casa Doom. They are residents of Southern California, and they're twins fans. And they've essentially been squatting on the URL twins.com since the mid-90s because they're just twin brothers. And it turned into this really fun story because I just showed up on their doorstep basically when I was in the area for another reason because they had not responded to my messages. And I just showed up and found out that, yeah, they were twins and they were also

twins fans and they had twins.com and the story just had a lot of layers and it turned out they had been in a rock band and I found the song. It was fun. They had multiple hummers, which is what kind of piqued my interest at first because the website listed an address for them. And when I put it in Google Maps, you could see that in the driveway, there was a black Hummer and a white Hummer. And I thought, are these twins who live together and they each have a Hummer, like a yin and yang situation here? And yeah, that's what it was as I discovered when I showed up. So that was really fun. And there had been some talks, they had been offered money in the past by various

places, perhaps some potential pornographic sites had expressed interest in twins.com. I will leave it to the imagination why that might have been. And they had refused these offers and they'd kind of had some interaction with the twins and with MLB because MLB had been in the process of buying up many URLs and not just team sites. But MLB.com itself was originally a law firm's website. And so they had managed to snap up almost all of these things, but not yet twins.com. And it turns out that finally I was alerted by Durind and Darvin just this past weekend that they finally sold. They finally sold Twins.com to MLB. And now if you go to Twins they had put it on sale because there was

a message on their site that I think they were interested in selling it. The text had changed and I was shocked to see that. And they confirmed that, yes, they had put it up for sale and they were hoping to work with the twins on that. And then I followed up and they said that the twins had apparently, you know, were driving a hard bargain or they said they don't really have a need for the domain unless they wanted to pretty much give it away. I mean, I think domains and homepages are a little less valuable than they used to be in general because a lot of people will just access those pages in other ways or they'll just have the app or whatever. And so it's not as vital maybe as it used to be. But that was in May. And then they just emailed me this weekend to say that they did sell and then it was switching over and now it is. So it's really, yeah, the end of an era. So now I think there are still three holdouts. There were three holdouts when I wrote this back in 2015.

One is Giants.com because that belongs to the football team. Oh, sure. So that's going to be tough to dislodge them from that one, I think. And then there's Rays.com. And that is still a holdout. That does not take you to the Tampa Bay Rays site that takes you to the website for the restaurant Rays Boathouse

oh yeah which is not conceded in Seattle yeah and now there's guardians dot com oh isn't there an insurance company called Guardian well yeah I think that there is I don't know what their website is,

but I think theirs is guardianlife.com, it looks like. I think guardians.com may have been the roller derby team that had the name before Cleveland switched over. Now it seems like it has been put up for sale. It doesn't seem like anyone owns it right now. If you go to guardians.com, it says it's recently been listed in the marketplace at domainnamesales.com. I would imagine that the Cleveland Guardians will be bidding on the site, one would think. So perhaps they will be able to get that and cross that off the list and then they'll be down to two. But it was sort of sad. It was almost bittersweet.

I'm happy that the twins finally got their website and Durlin and Darvin told me. I did inquire about the terms of the sale, which they did not divulge. Yeah, I would like to know. But they told me that they were able to find a broker that helped both parties come to reasonable agreement. So happy to hear it. And they will always have each other and they will still be the twins. But I'll link to that story if anyone wants to check it out. I'm sure I must have talked about that on the podcast at the time.

That was during the Stompers summer, I think. So that's when I was in the area. And it was like, maybe I just- I was going to say, how did you get to a place where there was a driveway, let alone two Hummers? I know. Yeah. I was in California anyway. And probably my now wife chauffeured me to Darlene Garvin's place.

Yeah. I had backup when I showed up because I did not know what I was going to find there. But they were quite friendly. They just had a lot of people who were inquiring about twins.com and they couldn't answer all the messages. So that's what it was. But it's nice because now you have to type in fewer letters to get to the twins website. So good news for twins fans. When I go to my browser and type in M, it still gives me mntwins.com, which is at least one of the

addresses that it was before. But now I can just lop off a couple of letters. Well, that sounds good. I love the idea that you're like, well, you know, they still have each other. It's like, well, they didn't stop being twins just because they don't have the domain anymore. They remain twins. Yeah. But they said they liked being known as like the twins like

when you would type in twins.com it would be twins if you search for twins online it would take you to their website they were like synonymous with twins in a way it's like we're the twins twins.com it's official but i guess they got over that eventually man also. Also wanted to note that Ozzy Albee's broke another bird bone. Just after he came back from breaking the one bird bone, he broke another bird bone. Yeah. So he had broken the bird bone in his foot, right, in a way that was disturbing to me because it didn't look like he did anything that would lead to a foot fracture. And then he finally came back after being on the 60 day and having surgery, etc.

He came back on September 16th. And then the next day, he fractured his right pinky while sliding into second base. And now he's gone again. So yet another bird bone. I don't know if that qualifies as a bird bone. Pinky is pretty small. You know, it is pretty small. But it's, you know, I don't know if it's quite the same

but it's big for a bird i guess yeah i mean like there are big birds ben not yes like big bird they're they're real big birds not that they're really big some of them are really big but i mean that they are actual birds not you know muppets yeah he's had lousy luck it's uh yeah that's too bad and chris sale who's broken basically every bone in his body at some point this yeah but asialbis doesn't like break other stuff in the process so he's got that right for him at least yeah those. Those guys, as soon as one bone heals, it seems like they break another. Just star-crossed seasons for Chris Sale and Ozzy Albies, I'm sorry to say. All right. That takes us to the past blast, which comes these days, as always, from Jacob Pomeranke, who, of course, is the director of editorial content for Sabre and a leading Black Sox researcher. He also tweets

from at Sabre as well as from his own account. And this is episode 1905. And so this past blast comes from 1905. And the headline here is Glove Love Helps Decide A.L. Pennant. And Jacob writes, With one week left in the 1905 season, Connie Mack's Philadelphia A's and the Chicago White And Jacob writes, in the bottom of the seventh inning, here's how the winning run was scored, as reported in the Chicago Tribune. So simple a thing as Hartzell's glove won the game. If you want, the result sifted down to a microscopic diagnosis. While Topsy reposed on second base in the seventh inning, his fielding glove lay palm upward in short left field. Harry Davis poked a liner in that direction and Topsy dug for home. The ball struck the glove, which checked its speed an instant. That instant saved Topsy

for left fielder Nixie Callahan took the ball on its belated bound and shot a beautiful throw to the plate. Catcher Billy Sullivan missed Topsy by the narrow margin of a Nat's heel as he sped over the rubber with the winning run. Interesting. Called home plate the rubber in that case. Jacob continues, the A's beat the White Sox 3-2 and ended up winning the pennant by a two-game margin.

For the first half of the 20th century, he explains, defensive players were allowed to simply drop their gloves in the field at their position while their team was at bat. simply dropped their gloves in the field at their position while their team was at bat. So you often see old photos or film footage of infielders tossing their gloves into the grass after the third out was made in an inning, and sometimes those gloves would get in the way of a batted ball. Before the 1954 season, baseball established Rule 3.10, requiring players to take their gloves and other equipment off the field and into the dugout while their team was at bat. Just clean up after yourselves, guys. And that has come up on the podcast at some point before, I believe, because I think I'm remembering this right.

Maybe I'll look it up and include it on the show page if I'm not making this up. if I'm not making this up. But I think Richie Ashburn was upset about this at the time, and he was mad that they were changing this rule and that they were making fielders take their gloves off of the field and into the dugout and didn't think that this would actually be a problem and that there would be bad bounces. But at least this time there was. It had happened.

There was precedent, and it helped decide the pennant in 1905. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah. It seems strange that that ever would have been allowed, I guess, in retrospect. I mean, during this past series, we've come across all kinds of things that might prompt one to say that, and some of them were more outlandish than just leaving your glove on the field. But it's like, this is not a scrimmage, fellas. This is, you know, not just a sandlot ball here. We're playing a professional game.

Like the ball could hit a glove. I know the odds are against it, but someone could stumble over it. Who knows, you know, how much trouble is it really to just go throw your glove? You're going there anyway. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Saving yourself a tiny bit of time and effort. But really, you'd think, like major league conditions. Anyway, fields, I'm sure, were not quite as well manicured back then.

And maybe they figured there are a lot of lousy hops as it is. So what's one more? But that actually did matter for a while. But all kinds of things. I mean, just like monuments in play and flagpoles in play and gloves in play, just very lax attitudes about things being on the field compared to today. And never a pit to be found. Yeah, no pits, not enough pits at least. There actually was, I saw the Twitter account that I

followed and recommended people follow recently, old Timey Baseball Articles, which is at Old Baseball News on Twitter and which is run by an Effectively Wild listener and Patreon supporter. Just one old kind of funny or surprising, usually, baseball article every day. day. And the one that was tweeted on September 13th says, a batter in a Boston-Brooklyn game hits a ball into a six-inch wide pit filled with water in the infield. The second baseman Corcoran plunges his arm in, grabs the ball, dekes the runner by appearing to search for it, and tags out the runner as he passes by. So he pretended that the ball was lost in the pit when in fact he had fished the ball out of the pit already and was just trying to deke him. But we've talked a lot about dekes and hidden ball tricks and we did not consider the potential of a pit when it comes to hidden ball tricks. There's

a great place to hide it in the pit. Yeah. I mean, put it in the pit and then see what the mole men do with it. Exactly. Yeah. Well, that pit on the field story was from 1906, so I suppose I could have saved it for next episode's Pass Blast, but maybe it's appropriate to responded to our email answer from episode 1904 about whether one could physically swing twice at one pitch and what would happen rulebook-wise if one did. Richard writes, I was gravely disappointed by your discussion questioning the legality of swinging more than once at one pitch. This question was answered in the 1946 Cinema Verite documentary Baseball Bugs, my main source for 20th century baseball, in which Bugs threw his slow ball, striking out the side with one pitch,

three gas house gorillas each taking three swings at the ball. I consider this definitive, and the question closed. Eh, I think I'll perplex him with my slow ball. One, two, three, strike, you're out! One, two, three, strike, you're out! One, two, three, strike, you're out! Thank you, Richard. Can't believe we didn't discuss that strong evidence.

Also, I found that Richie Ashburn quote I mentioned about the future Hall of Famer being aggrieved when the no-leaving-mits leaving mitts on the field rule was changed. This was from March 20th, 1954. Ashburn said, It's a silly rule, and it makes our work just that much harder. It means a lot more running, and believe me, especially when the weather is hot in the dog days of August, a major league ballplayer has to conserve his strength.

You can't do that by running to the dugout to get your glove all the time. Amazing that he managed to make the Hall of Fame despite all that extra running. A few other follow-ups from episode 1904. These are from Patreon supporter and effectively wild wiki keeper Raymond Chen. He notes that on the question of double or nothing runners from 1904, Pesopalo sort of has this rule. If you hit a home run, which in Pesopalo is always inside the park, you score a run and are placed on third base, creating the potential for a second run. You also score a run if you hit a straight triple, so in practice you just run to third base and stay there. Also, he says on the question of what to call steals of home, which are the back

ends of double steals, since a solo steal of home is called a straight steal of home, the less exciting stolen base is obviously called a crooked steal of home is called a straight steal of home, the less exciting stolen base is obviously called a crooked steal of home. I'll allow it. Can't be too crooked or you'd go outside the base path. And finally, Richard says, as for intentionally passing the runner, we answered a question about whether one could intentionally pass the runner after hitting a ball so that the runner would no longer have to tag up. He says you must tag up when the ball is quote unquote legally caught. This includes catches that do not retire the batter, such as those created by the infield fly rule. Intentionally passing the lead runner does not remove the need to tag up. No

loophole to exploit, sadly. And one final follow-up from listener AJ who says, recently you discussed some toilet flappers being the size of a baseball and you were questioning whether it was a good analogy. I'm not sure you realize this, but the U.S. Army actually had these exact same discussions when they were trying to develop an easily usable grenade in World War II. Nicknamed the Beano, the U.S. Army, in combination with Kodak, developed a grenade that they decided should have dimensions that matched an American baseball in circumference and weight. Because they felt that any young American man would be able to throw a baseball. It turned out that design sucked, and in 1968 the U.S. switched to a new grenade called the M67 that is slightly smaller and slightly heavier than a baseball, but is still colloquially known by soldiers as a baseball grenade to this day. Hilariously, they investigated developing larger grenades as anti-tank weapons and initially thought it would be similarly useful to make them football-shaped.

I'll include a photo of that attempt if you're interested. And finally, message from Patreon supporter Luke, who says, not sure if this counts in the Marsh-Walsh-Ward-Wade mix-ups, but in the second inning of Saturday's Phillies Braves game, the Phillies TV broadcast dropped a Brad Marsh. I'll let the listeners decide whether to count that one, but it's been a while since we had one of these, so what the heck, here you go. Rob Thompson asked today, Brad Marsh, five hole? He said, he's hot. He's swinging the bat great. Brandon Marsh is swinging it pretty well too. That will do it for today. 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. Marcus, Alex Bussey, Amy Mantis, Ryan McCarthy, and James S. Beecher. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the active and welcoming Patreon Discord group, plus monthly bonus episodes and playoff live streams, and discounts on merch and more. Please consider signing up. You can also contact me and Meg via email at podcastwithfangraphs.com

or by sending us a message through the Patreon site if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. And you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you a little later this week.

Sad because I know Shouldn't try so hard Laughed when I was told Thought that I knew more Sad because I know That I tried too hard