Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1910: Broken Record

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the fight for the third wild card in the National League and the way in which the expanded playoff format shifts attention toward middling teams, appreciating postseason success and regular-season success, the regular-season dominance of the Dodgers, home-run-record derangement syndrome (17:52) and a middle ground between the warring […]

So listen, oh, so listen, oh, don't wait, don't wait. Hello and welcome to episode 1910 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. How are you? Well, I'm better than the Philadelphia Phillies. Boy, yeah, it's getting interesting. It's getting, you know, you know, Ben, this is a time that they would say, it's getting interesting. It's getting, you know, you know, Ben, this is a time that they would say,

it's getting interesting. It's getting interesting. The Phillies are, at this very moment as we record, tied with the Milwaukee Brewers for that final wild card spot. They have lost five games in a row. Yeah, who has the tie break? The Phillies have the tie break, I'm going to say, I think. Oh, what a good question.

Tie breaks are complicated. It's so complicated. It really has made it so much harder. I mean, it seems like half the numbers you see are not accurate because they don't take into account some- Right. They don't take the tie breaks into account. up season series it's just before we could just count on a tie being a tie and you might have to play a tiebreaker game and now not only do we lose out on tiebreaker games but also we lose out on just the ease of intuiting who is actually ahead or behind or what the odds are here so it's a quite a complicated system now it's a complicated it's a complicated system ben you know so okay so so okay let's see if we can let's see let's see if we can figure it out are you ready

so what day did j jaffe publish this this was september 23rd how much could it have changed since then probably a lot so on september 23rd the the Philadelphia Phillies were 4-2 versus the Brewers. So they, on that day, had the head-to-head. They were 4-2 against the Phillies. And have they played in the interim? I don't remember. Have they played? I don't think so.

Have they played in the interim time? I could have done this before we got on, but you know what? We're going to do it live. what we're gonna do it live we're gonna do it live i don't think that they have since september 23rd they have not they have not played since september 23rd so they have the tiebreaker which is useful for them at this moment because ben they're tied yeah yeah they're doing their best to blow it as the mariners did it looks like the marin' best will not be enough to blow it. You're still not allowed to say that. They're so close now.

Come on. They're so close. Oh, sorry. I won't make you say it. They're so close, but it's not there yet. The Phillies are making everyone nervous, and it actually does matter, I feel like, to that organization. I mean, it would matter to any organization, obviously, whether you make the playoffs or miss them. That's not a bold statement. But especially for the Phillies, because they've had done their darndest and it just has not been enough prior to the season. And it looked like it was going to be enough and it still will probably be enough.

Probably be enough. It will probably be enough. I don't know if it might be enough. Did you enjoy that register? Yeah, you went pretty high there. Yeah, did we know that my voice would go to that spot? I didn't know. I think it might be the lingering effects of the cold.

Did we know that my voice would go to that spot? I didn't know. I think it might be the lingering effects of the cold. By the time this episode is over, there will probably be a result in the Brewers-Marlins game. So that will give us a little bit more information. But yeah, I poo-pooed the remaining stakes of the standings on our last episode. And still would in a general sense. But there's some intrigue here.

It's coming down to the wire here at least. Yeah, so they have their situation coming down to the wire. Meanwhile, the AL picture is like rapidly resolving itself. We'll return to the NL in just a second. But if the Tampa Bay Rays win today, they will clinch a wild card berth if they beat the Guardians. Earlier today, the Toronto Blue Jays clinched a wildcard spot. The Mariners' magic number is down to two because they have a tiebreaker over the Baltimore Orioles. So any combination of two Mariners' wins or Baltimore losses

will result in them clinching their first playoff berth in quite some decades. And they still have yet to play the Rangers today as we are recording. So that situation rapidly resolving. Meanwhile, the Phillies and the Brewers are trying to say, no, no, you go to the postseason,

and we still do not have resolution at the top of the NL East, although we will get a head-to-head series between the Mets and the Braves in the coming days here. So for a while, all the uncertainty felt to me at least like it was in the AL, although I should, Mariners, adjust my amount of interest in the interest of fairness and not being biased. But now it's getting spicy in the NL. Getting pretty spicy.

Joshian often makes the point that we end up focusing on the wildcard races because there's still some uncertainty there at the end of the season. Especially this season when a lot of the divisions have been relatively locked up. And so we end up fixating on not very good teams, really. Like we end up looking at the Phillies and the Brewers and the Mariners and the Orioles. I don't want to insult every team of every fan base who's listening to this podcast now. But, I mean, we end up looking at these kind of middling competitive teams that are just trying to squeak into the playoffs because that's the thing that's still unresolved, whereas we don't really pay that much attention at this stage of the season to the best teams in baseball. And Joe is someone who really prioritizes the regular season and doesn't care at all for the expansion of the playoffs. And so he laments this change. But I

guess it does go to show that what people really care about is the suspense and the unknown. I mean, that's why we watch the playoffs, right? Because the playoffs don't tell us that much about which team is actually the best and whether this team is better than that team. It just tells us whether this team will advance or that team will advance and who will win the World Series. And we're really into that. And we've been into single elimination, win or go home wildcard games that tell you next to nothing about the relative strengths of the team. But there's a ton riding on the results of that one game. So really, that's why baseball, I guess, is fighting an uphill battle in some respects, just given that

you can't really square those things. You can't really have a short series in baseball that also tells you a lot about the respective talents of those teams compared to, say, the NBA, where you can play the same number of games, but it is much more telling and it's harder to have an upset. And there's a lot less that is just down to randomness, essentially. So baseball, you kind of have to pick your poison or pick your pleasure. Just you can't really have both. You can either have the giant sample of the regular season that actually tells you a lot about the strengths of the teams, or you can just have the small sample. It doesn't tell you much, but is a lot of fun because we've collectively decided that it does mean something, that it is actually worthwhile

to try to win a short series, even though it doesn't tell you that much about the talent of the team. So I don't really lament this the way that Joe does, but it is true that I'm thinking much more right now about the Mariners and the Orioles and the Brewers and the Phillies, et cetera, than I am about the Dodgers or the Astros, right? I mean, some of these teams, they still maybe have something at stake like home field in the World Series, let's say. But once your playoff spot and your division title is sewn up, then the spotlight gets a little dimmer, at least for neutral fans as opposed to your own.

Right. And we could be taking a moment to like marvel at, say, the Los Angeles Dodgers. We really should. Who have won 107 games. Yep. And counting. Yeah. There have been, Ben, I don't know if you know this, but there have been a lot of very,

very good Dodgers seasons throughout the history of that franchise. All of them recently. Yeah. And yet, here we are with a Dodgers team that has set a franchise record for wins. This is the most wins they have ever had in a season. And as you just said, you know, they still have to play some baseball games. They're not done yet. They have, you know, like, run differential tells you stuff.

Sometimes other things help to clarify the run differential picture even more. They help you to sort of tease out what that means. And then sometimes, Ben, a team puts up a plus 322 run differential, and you just have to sit and be bowled over by how that is possible. They have scored, as a team, they have scored 816 runs. As a team, they have scored 816 runs. They have scored exactly, as we are recording this, at 4.16 p.m. Pacific time.

Well, it's 4.16 weird-ass Arizona time, but that's not the point. On Thursday, they have scored 100 more runs than the Houston Astros, who have also won 102 games. They're just like a really, I think, quite good baseball team. And I am still terrified about their pitching depth come, you know, the postseason. But let us take a moment. 690 winning percentage. And it somehow doesn't feel like I should be more impressed than I am.

I guess that's why we're talking about it. And I'm trying to reach that high register again to impress upon you how we should be impressed by this. Quite impressed. Yeah. I take it for granted because it's the Dodgers. Right. And because last season they won 106 games and 2019 they won 106 games. And in between they won a World Series and we're on pace to win 116 games.

Yes. If the season hadn't been shortened. It's almost like the fact that they can't get to 116 this year. It's like, well, they're at a measly 107 and maybe a few more depending on how many more they win before the end of the season. It's unbelievable just like the number of seasons that they have sustained at this level. Like once you play at that level for this many, like four straight seasons, not to mention all of the division titles that preceded that and all the great teams. But that's their true talent now. It's not like, oh, a lot of things went right for them. No, that's just who the Dodgers are. They just win 106 games every season.

And no one really bats an eye. And doing it at a time when you have just an incredibly competitive environment. I know that not every team is trying every year, obviously, but there are a lot of smart teams out there and there's a lot at stake and money riding on these things. And the Dodgers are just dominating like to a greater extent really than any other team I've certainly seen some stats and some articles that have shown just like the sustained elite nature of what they're doing and having the highest run differential post integration I believe of any team and just like the most runs scored the fewest runs allowed it's ridiculous and yet yeah you think about like the weaknesses of the roster somehow like it just it doesn't feel like a juggernaut maybe just because the dodgers are always great and we just compare one dodgers team to another dodgers team but yeah you just look at like oh worried about the pitching tabs i mean there are reasons to worry but also this team is just like unbeatable on most days they lead the league in wrc plus they are

you'll perhaps be unsurprised to learn that the yankees lead baseball in home runs sure helps when one guy hits 61 all by himself but they're fifth they're fifth in home runs they lead the league in era i think they're like fourth in fip when you go down to the starters their starters lead in era here we are worried about their pitching depth but that's true like they are great from a perspective like it's just a very very good baseball team and so here i am joe if you're listening we're taking a moment to like appreciate the dodgers with the phillies and the brewers but yeah but we're but we segued very quickly like we can i can i spend a moment with you ben to talk about some of the the hitters of the los angeles dodgers just to really appreciate this so did you know ben that

freddie freeman has a 158 wrc plus well i did not know though that doesn't surprise me he is Freddie Friedman did you know that he's been worth 6.9 wins at least by fan graphs for I did not that's a lot that's a lot did you know that Mookie Betts has a 14 130 WRC+, four wins. Trey Turner, 129 WRC+, 5.9 wins as he prepares to embark on free agency. Justin Turner, we have talked about how he just really turned things around after a quite slow start and is now up to a 126 WRC+. Max Muncy's season line is a 107, but he's been much better lately, so how exciting is that? And then there's Cody Be 107, but he's been much better lately. So how exciting is that? And then there's Cody Bellinger, but that's fine.

You know, that's fine because guess what? When you- It's the exception that proves the rule. Yeah. And like the thing about it is one of the great things that I would imagine about being the Dodgers is that you're like, it's fine. Whatever. Like we've got Freddie Freeman.

We had all that consternation in the sort of, what, first third of the season about Freddie Freeman and how he was fitting and the return to Atlanta and the crying and the controversy and a lawsuit about his, it kind of sounded like Jimmy Stewart for a hot second, like the lawsuit around the agent stuff and there's defamation and, you know, it was all this, 15 at WRC plus seven wins.

Like, it's, it's, they're amazing. Like, they're amazing. They really are. You know, and I think that the really, one of the really fun things about the postseason that I think recommends it as an experience, and I totally understand the argument that Joe is making, and I do wish that we

put a greater sense of primacy on the regular season because i think that the sport would benefit tremendously if people cared more about their regular season win total and the nice thing about the playoffs is that all like you said a lot of the stuff that makes the playoffs fun it's not mutually exclusive with us caring about the regular season more. We can still enjoy all the goofy stuff about the playoffs and appreciate more teams really striving to win as many games as possible in order to get there. I don't view those as sort of exclusive from one another.

So I get what Joe is saying. And also, it's really fun to think about a team like LA competing in the postseason because one of two things will happen. Either they will just sort of steamroll their way through the NL field. They'll reach the World Series. They'll battle whoever emerges from the American League. They'll win a World Series. I mean, they could make their way to the World Series and not win,

but they could be this force in the postseason. And we will come away from the end of it, even if they don't win the World Series, as long as they're representing the NL, being like, wow, those Dodgers, they're so great. They were the best team in baseball in the regular season. They were one of the best teams in the postseason. Maybe they win, maybe they don't, but they they're sort of really showing us what the best team can do. Or they will

meet a still very good, but less good than them team, either at some point in their quest to reach the World Series again or when they get to the World Series. And, you know, as long as it's not the Astros or you're going to feel very evenly matched and maybe they lose. And then some plucky underdog is like, we are the best and it'll be like Atlanta last year,

even though it's weird to think of them as plucky underdogs because they have Ronald Acuna Jr., but they didn't have him for a lot of last year, you know? So neither thing is bad. Both things are good. You know, either

the really good teams perform like really good teams or a less good team performs like the really good teams for a couple of weeks and then they get to take a ring home. I think both of those are fun. Yeah, right. And there's no extra baggage attached to them anymore about their previous playoff problems, really, or not nearly as much as there used to be. So, yeah, we can have maybe the best of both worlds. Yeah.

We can celebrate the Dodgers as just a dominant regular to be. So yeah, we can have maybe the best of both worlds. Yeah. We can celebrate the Dodgers as just a dominant regular season force. Incredible. Whatever happens next, well, it matters to Dodgers fans and fans of other teams of the playoffs, but it needn't tarnish what they have accomplished, I think.

So yeah, we can appreciate both small sample and large sample for different reasons. Yeah, I think that they both have things to recommend them. And as long as we aren't confusing our enjoyment of them for the significance of them in terms of what they tell us about which teams are good and which teams are bad or less good, then I think that you can hold your enjoyment for both of those things sort of simultaneously, right? You can have one in each hand, double fist baseball. Right.

Which kind of reminds me actually about the conversation that is happening right now about the home run record, which I'm afraid to even invoke. I've been monitoring myself all day for symptoms of home run record derangement syndrome. And so far, I have not detected any. I'm taking my pulse every couple hours just to see, you know, I think about pitchers not throwing strikes to Aaron Judge. And I see if my pulse picks up if I start to hulk out or anything. It hasn't happened yet. Or if I suddenly lose all knowledge and memory of the existence of Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa or Mark McGuire and the home run totals that they may have posted at some point. I just remind myself that I remember that they all still exist. So thus far, I think I'm doing OK.

If you experience any of those symptoms, please consult a doctor. But it seems like that has really reached a fever pitch all of a sudden. I guess it's not a surprise that it would happen now when Aaron Judge has 61 as we speak and is on the verge of setting an American League home run record. home run record. One question I have is, do you think it has been a net positive or a net negative for the arguments about this that Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds were all national leaguers so that there is a record involved here so that people who want this to be a record, they have a record, they have some kind of record. And so maybe they can just say okay he got a record it's something significant it is a real record even if it's semi-arbitrary about who played in one league or the other or would it be better if he hadn't said any kind of record because now it's like oh

he's got this dinky league specific record well if i believe that he is the legitimate one true home run king then i'm even more insulted that he has to be saddled with this inferior subset of the overall record to me like it's kind of convenient i think that that he's maybe going to have the american league record so that that's still something like you can say that without really angering either camp, I guess, maybe like you can sort of split the difference sort of like if one of those other guys had been the American League, then what would you even say? Like, well, he beat Roger Maris. OK, that doesn't sound quite as impressive. So the fact that like he has a league record, that's something, you know, he can hang that on his wall. He can take that to the bank. You can write that in the

first line of the obituary. Not that I'm hastening his death or anything. I'm just saying like, that's a real accomplishment, I think. Not that just like hitting 62 would not be a nice accomplishment, even if it weren't any kind of record but to me it's like kind of handy that it's still something you know even if you don't want to erase the previous home run totals you could still just say it's the american league home run it's almost like a neutral statement that is still significant but it seems like it it maybe annoys some people even more that he has to settle for that. So I think a couple of things about this. I sure dislike discourse for someone who works in media, don't I?

It's sort of an interesting insight to have about yourself. You co-host a podcast. You do a lot of discourse yourself i do a lot of i i engage uh i engage in discourse quite often i guess what i find sort of like and i don't want to be overly fixated on tone like i'm not like a oh we meet civility person i mean like it's nice to be nice when you're talking to people but you know that way can lie a lot of nonsense but i think that mostly the part of it that i find frustrating from both camps is how like grinding and exhausting it can feel because i think that like the single season home run record was set by Barry Bontz.

That is my understanding of the record books. And I understand why people have a fixation around the PED part of it. I can understand maybe in particular why Roger Maris Jr., who it's not the first time he's hung out in a ballpark waiting for someone to break his dad's record, right? Might have some reticence to recognize other players whose accomplishments were sort of in some way tinged with the PED stuff.

I get that. I think that we should probably all be better at acknowledging that while, yes, we know some particular users of P peds are up and down that leaderboard like baseball players have always used stuff not every single baseball player but like to identify the ped era as like really meaningfully distinct from everybody being hopped up on greenies strikes me as like kind of disingenuous so there's that piece of it i think that these these lines between eras around you know trying to gain a competitive advantage through the use of some substance like they're not as cleanly delineated as we would like them

to be because it's it's useful for us to be able to look at that era where we were all suddenly reinvested in baseball after the strike stuff and feel like particularly aggrieved but i think that a lot of that is just that like that's the moment of aggrievement that our generation remembers right where it's like i don't remember people taking greenies like i was alive then or i was but i wasn't you know in on baseball so i think that like it's useful for us to recognize that sometimes the way we talk about the PD era can be kind of a historical in a way that doesn't really track with how baseball has been played since it became a professional endeavor so like there's that piece but I also understand people feeling like they thought that

this was a record that did not involve any kind of shenanigans and then it did and they feel a sense of disconnect from the joy that they had versus what they know now so i get that piece of it too and also like i just mostly i'm going to say a lot of words in the punchline it's going to be i find a lot of people annoying about this on both sides that's the kind of both sides ism i can support you're all annoying i think you're right like it's nice that there is a an american league record that has stood for a long time and that is now tied and could be broken so that there is room for aaron judge i think mostly what i wish we could be focused on is less the record piece of it and more the like, wow, this is an incredible season piece of it.

Because this is an incredible season that he is putting up. And whether you're invested in the home run record aspect of it or not, I think is like kind of missing the point in a lot of ways. Because even if you aren't thinking about the home run piece like Aaron Judge at least by our version of war today is worth 11 has been worth 11 wins this season he is having an 11 war season that's incredible right yeah he's hit 61 home runs and that's a big part of his offensive value but he's also hitting 313 right now right like he has a 696 slug he's a 20 part of his offensive value, but he's also hitting.313 right now, right? Like, he has a.696 slug. He has a.209 WRC+.

He is playing a credible center field. I mean, he's not having to do that as much now because of Harrison Bader, but he was playing a credible center field as, like, a demigod-shaped person, right? He has his 61 home runs, and the next closest player in baseball is Kyle Schwarber at 42. And as we've talked about, the next couple guys on that list aren't, they're boppers, right? It's Schwarber at 42.

It's Pete Alonzo at 40. It's Jordan Alvarez at 37. It's Austin Riley at 37. The next couple guys are guys who, they bop the ball, and he has has 61 and there is a sizable gap between him and Schwarber right so I can appreciate why in a sport where we are so concerned with baseball's history and we feel like a sense of reverence for particular numbers that we're gonna get in it with each other around this stuff like there are gonna be people who insist that Aaron Judge is the home run record holder. I think those people are wrong.

I think that there are some ways that they get there around Barry Bonds that are kind of yishy. But I also think there are ways where you can kind of come to that conclusion and I get it even if I disagree with it. I think that Aaron Judge is still having a spectacular season. A spectacular season.

And even if you only think, as I do, that he is endangering the American League record, I still think it's pretty incredible for a human person to hit 61 home runs in any season, let alone one with a slightly less lively ball. So let's just be excited about Aaron Judge, maybe, because that seems like an easy thing to do that doesn't require us relitigating the PED era again.

Yeah, I guess I object almost as much to, well, there are two objections, I guess. I object to all the objections i object to this whole court runs out of order banging my gavel here in my mind but right i think people who say end of story barry bonds is the home run record and these other guys have more home runs than aaron judge and that's all that matters. Yeah, that is the bottom line, basically. I'm not advocating rewriting the record books, but also let's not pretend that those records aren't somewhat tainted, that you think of them a little bit differently because of the circumstances and

what we know or suspect about what those players were doing at the time that they were hitting those home runs. And I've written before about how I think much of the high offense that we talk about during the PED era was not the product of PEDs necessarily, that it may have been about the ball and other factors as well. That said, I think that some of the real outliers in that era were probably doing something. And while I don't think that steroids are magic beans that make you better at baseball for everyone or that make you hit 70 homers, obviously, I think that it is not unreasonable to say that those players probably hit more home runs in those seasons because of what they were

doing than they would have otherwise, even just like looking at the aging patterns, etc. Right. So I don't want to pretend that those records are just like any other record where they're all completely above board. You can't think of those records without thinking of what we know or suspect about what was going on there that may have influenced those records. So any record, there's always going to be something, whether it's the league run environment or expansion year or pre-integration or whatever it is. In those particular players' case, it was individual cheating.

It was things that we think of when we think of those seasons, and you can't really disconnect those. So I don't think it's just an argument ender necessarily to say they have the record end of story. I agree that they have the record and you can't take the record away. But still, like, yeah, Aaron Judge is coming along. And as far as we know, he's not doing what those players were doing. We can't prove a negative. You never know that a player didn't do something. You only know that some players did do something. But there's PD testing, at least in this era, which is not to say that you can't beat that.

least in this era, which is not to say that you can't beat that. Anyway, I think until proven otherwise, like it's going to stand up as, yeah, this is done by a player who, as far as we know, was not using some kind of chemical enhancement that those other players were doing that may have helped them hit more home runs. So yeah, you're going to think of it a little differently. I have no problem with saying that. It's just when you actually talk about rewriting the record books, that's where you lose me, I think, because how can you? You don't know what the effect of those things was. You can't know that someone was clean. How can you ever adjust for all the different factors that affect these numbers. So when Roger Maris Jr. says, and look, he has no authority here any more than anyone else does. He happens to be Roger Maris' son. So we pay attention to what he says, but it's just one man's opinion, just like what I'm saying right now. But Maris Jr. said the judge should be revered for being the actual single season home run champ. That's kind of where

he loses me. He says that's really who he is if he hits 62. I think that's what needs to happen. He went further. He said, I think baseball needs to look at the records and I think baseball should do something. I think it means a lot, not just for me. It means a lot for a lot of people that he's clean. He's a Yankee. I don't think that anyone other than Yankees fans think that this record needs to be held by a Yankee. So I think we can strike that from the record for most people. He plays the game the right way. OK, if that just means not cheating, fine, I guess. Sometimes that cliche is used to refer to other things. And I think gives people a chance to look at somebody who should be revered for hitting 62 home runs and not just as a guy who did it in the American League.

So that touched off this whole round of debate. And I guess people who felt the same way said, hey, Roger Maris said so, Roger Maris Jr., and this is how I feel. And other people reacted strongly in the other direction. It's impacted strongly in the other direction. So I'm with people who say that, no, the records are the records and we know what we know and we'll bring that knowledge and that context to when we consider these questions and how we perceive these records. But you can't change the numbers. You can't remove the numbers. You can't erase the numbers. So I guess that's kind of a middle ground where I'm just like, he's hit 61 home runs. Maybe he'll hit more. If he hits more, it's the American League record. Right. And either way, it's a ridiculously impressive season and it's been really fun to follow. And it'd be nice if we could kind of just enjoy it and not have these same fights again.

these same fights again. But also, let's not dismiss the grievances entirely and that people are reacting to something real when they are saying that there's something about the actual records that leaves them with a sour taste in their mouth. So, of course, I get it. So, I suppose I'm saying that I see what both sides are reacting to, but I can't get on board with just the kind of binary absolute. It's either the record and stop worrying about it or it's not the record. I just either end of the spectrum there is just too far for me. Yeah, I think that that's fine. Like, that's a good nuanced position. fine like that's a good nuanced position now if there weren't questions about and concerns about the guys ahead of him would we be like breaking in on you know monday night football to watch

aaron judge maybe hit his 61st home run i mean like honestly probably not, right? So I get that it can kind of feel like we are trying to get a do-over for something when we have a record. And it was set in 2001, and it's 73. We have a record. And Stanton hit 59 in 2017. So it's not like it's been 30 years since we've had someone sort of in this territory right like we've had big home run chases not in the american league he was with miami when he did that but like you know it was 2017 it wasn't i know we've had a pandemic and we've all been brain wiped in between

because of that but like it wasn't so so long ago but it it's still notable. Like it's 61 stupid home runs. That's crazy. From a guy who's having an incredible season. And I think that we'd all be well served to be less sort of fixated on the clean part. Not because I don't mean that like I know or suspect or think that Aaron Judge is juicing, but like, you know, we've all been fooled before, right? So I think that it probably serves us well to like understand knowing what we know, this is really exciting and we can just be really excited about it. And hopefully this all stands up to the test of time. I don't think it won't. Like you said, these guys get tested now.

It's not like everybody fools them, right? Like Fernando Tatis Jr. is not playing baseball for a couple of reasons, and one of them is that he didn't. So, you know, we have some mechanism to try to police this stuff, but we can just be excited about it without it having to, you know, supplant a more complicated, but still standing record. Right. And I think you're right that it feels dismissive to me to say, well, none of that stuff matters, like, because it does matter to some people. And I think it matters to people who aren't just like writers who feel like they got fooled you know it matters to people this was a crisis in the sport for a reason and i'm not saying that

the players were the only ones responsible like you know i think it's really weird to like bun ceilings in the hall of fame but you know it was a crisis in the sport for a reason i think that we should acknowledge that without saying that like the 2001 season didn't happen i mean i think part of why when i am not in a posture of just being exhausted by twitter which is often part of why i think that it's important for us to like have that stuff stand is like baseball happened when we were children you know baseball happened when we were in high school like baseball happened and we all watched, and we all got really excited. And I know that some people still feel sore about realizing later

that those guys weren't, you know, completely clean. And I get that if that's your vibe. I also think that, like, it doesn't really change my enjoyment of Barry Bonds having hit 73 home runs to know that he was maybe juicing. Like he was an incredible baseball player before we know him to have been taking steroids. So like, it's a complicated story.

And I guess maybe what I'm, what I'm pleading for here is that we like allow the nuance on both ends because what people are really experiencing here isn't actually about the number it's about the feeling of the thing and that's always going to be kind of messy for people and that's always going to be kind of like unclear and that's okay you know and you can just like we can all just sit with that and be like you know i really wish that these guys just had never done that i wish that there had been no juicing would Would they have hit 66 home runs or 70 home runs or 73? I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe. Who knows? Like they were good before. So,

you know, I wish that we didn't have to have that part of the conversation. But I suspect that if all of those records still stood without any objection, if all of those guys, you know, if Bonds and McGuire and so, so like, imagine they're all in the Hall of Fame and we never had the PED stuff and there were no hearings and we didn't have any of it. I think we'd still be really excited about Aaron Judge hitting 61 home runs. Yeah, it's been a while, so. In the American League, it's been a real long while, right?

So I don't know. I don't know that I've like been the most articulate I it's been a real long while, right? So I don't know. I don't know that I've been the most articulate I've ever been on the podcast in the last couple of minutes, perhaps because it is a complicated soup for me too. But I don't know. It just seems like there's been a lot of squawking about how fundamentally this makes people feel. So maybe what I really want people to do is just make more I statements.

Like, can't we all go back to being pyramid eaters and be like, here's how I feel about this. And then it gives other people permission to have how they feel about it. And maybe we don't have to fight so much. So I don't know. That'd be nice. Well, Aaron Judge is having a day off on thursday but i'm

sure that the discussion will not take a day off no the discourse never sleeps no he's been playing an awful lot lately and the yankees do have to play in the postseason and as we noted that matters too so if he's like coming down to the wire to try to hit 62 and he's gassed when October starts. Well, I guess American League home run records fly forever. But still, you know, he has a lot of money at stake, obviously. But the Yankees have something at stake there, too. He must be pretty tired because not only has he been playing constantly and leading off to get more plate appearances and everything, but also the pressure and the attention and just the media frenzy of it all. So, yeah, the guy deserves a day off, I would say.

Yeah. Although, really, like, getting to 61, I guess you wouldn't want to take your foot off the pedal at 61, right? Like, if you're at 61, 62 is just as important as 61 was, if not more so. 61, 62 is just as important as 61 was, if not more so. So I would still feel strongly that I would want to maximize my chances. But I did want to mention also another example of everyone just getting completely up in arms about this, which I meant to mention on our last episode because we were talking about pitchers ceasing to throw strikes to judge much of the time.

There was a tweet and a video by the governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, who put a video out after Tuesday's game when Judge walked four times against the Blue Jays. Ned Lamont tweeted from at GovNedLamont and said, His official account. Yes. Nothing more boring than watching a slugger like Aaron Judge get walked by opposing pitchers four times in a game. Come on. We all tuned in to watch him break Roger Maris' home run record.

It's time for a rule change. Here's my thought. And then there was a video with him standing with hand on hip and also hand on piano and proposing his solution, which is, and I will say, like, look, it's not the worst and wildest suggestion I've ever heard. I'm sure we get something in the same kind of class every day or two in our podcast mailbag. If this had been sent in to us, I would not have looked askance at it. into us. I would not have looked askance at it. And it makes a certain sort of sense, but it's also just a wild overreaction in my mind to Aaron Judge getting walked a bunch of times in a game by a team that had not clinched a playoff spot yet. And the proposal is basically that if you walk twice in a game, then you get to take two bases for a walk for the second walk. If you walk three times in a game, then you take three bases.

And if it's your fourth walk, then you just score. It's a home run, essentially. And I assume that this means that all the other runners, if there are other runners, advance as well. So I think that to Lamont's credit, this would achieve its objective in that I think that pitchers would be much more likely to throw strikes to a hitter whom they've walked already because the penalty would be quite costly. However, I think this would more than is warranted. And not only because of those extra bases, but because pitchers would be pressured to throw many more strikes, which I guess that's the point, but they would be throwing many more hittable pitches and thus those pitches would be hit. So not something I would support, not a measure that I would implement

just based on an extremely rare season like judges especially because pitchers were throwing him strikes quite often until very recently this hasn't been happening all season long and when the blue jays are doing it when they're still playing for something it is more palatable to me so i don't think we need to rewrite the rules in quite so significant a way just so that we can slightly maximize Aaron Judge's odds. And plus, like, a lot of players walk twice who are not sluggers who are going for a home run record. I mean, many players walk a lot and do not hit for power. So suddenly you just have everyone who just draws a lot of walks would be drawing two and three and four base walks.

So you wouldn't get that many four base walks, but you'd get a lot of two base walks. Yeah. This would really ramp up scoring quite a bit and lengthen games. Oh, yeah. You'd have fewer walks and you'd have more scoring and you'd have more contact. And I guess those are things that maybe people want or profess to want. So again, it's not the worst suggestion I've ever heard, but it seems to me to be just a great overreaction.

I guess he's probably pandering to the base a bit here of Connecticut Yankees fans. So I'm sure that it went over okay with at least some of them. So I don't know if he assessed the electoral impact of this proposal, whether he put it out in the field, put some polls out there to market test this thing, see how this would be perceived. But he tweeted it at 10.04 a.m. the day after the game.

Yeah, he really wanted you to see. Yeah, he wanted to win that news cycle. So anyway, it's not often that you get a governor tweeting out a video about a weird rules change that we might have talked about on effectively wild regardless so there you go yeah i think that this is like obviously deeply silly and you know for a lot of the reasons that we often talk about when we contemplate rule changes where it's like it's disrupting too much the balance between pitching and hitting, and it would have, I think, a lot of consequences that he's not really contemplating.

I think that particularly, as you said, because he had been getting pitches to hit for a long time and he just happened to run into a team that actually had postseason stuff to fight for and thus had to approach it perhaps a little bit differently but like it's not the same thing as him getting a raw deal mostly i want to know why the governor of connecticut has so little respect for on base percentage like do we need to send him money paul do we need to help him appreciate how silly this is no yeah i don't mind uh politicians expressing the occasional opinion about something silly and frivolous either i i know that like they open themselves up to the obvious like why are you

thinking about this when you could be enacting whatever, you know, insert policy change here or like tackling some serious problem facing our nation or your state or something. The gray people of Connecticut. Sure. Yeah. You know, of course, that is true. I guess that he could have put this 40 seconds that it took to record this video or however many minutes it took to formulate the tweet towards solving some sort of serious problem potentially.

But no one can concentrate on the ills of the world 24-7. I don't know what the breakdown is for him between ills of the world and Aaron Judge not getting enough pitches to hit. Maybe it's out of whack, but people are going to have thoughts about silly stuff, even if they're politicians and people in power so you kind of have to weigh like do i want to put this opinion out there so that people will be like hey go you know actually focus on like something that makes a difference in the world instead of this weird baseball rules change that will never happen well here i have a question for you ben Ben, because you're from the Northeast, right? And I imagine that there are particularly in the suburbs that are proximate to New York City, a great many Yankee fans. But I would also imagine

that the state of Connecticut is home to a fair number of Red Sox fans. Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. I believe it's roughly split down the middle-ish, I think. The New England adjacent portion of the state is obviously very heavily Red Sox fan-centric. Mike Schur, well-known Red Sox fan, is from Connecticut originally. So yeah, that is a good point. I don't know if he studied, did he break it down on the county level and the polling place level? Does he have enough support in the Red Sox-centric portion of the state that he felt like, I'll shore up my Yankees fan base here. What of the good people of Putnam, sir? What of the good people of Woodstock, Connecticut? You know, here you are catering to the hedge fund managers of Greenwich and Stanford.

And what of the normal people? No, I don't know. I don't know what the split is. I don't know where the people have people decide these things but it was interesting to me that he would like take a stand on something that so clearly benefited a yankee when he right is in a he's in a baseball battleground state you know it's a yeah it's a purple state baseball wife for sure yeah like you know can people tell that i'm looking at a map of Connecticut right now to name towns in Connecticut?

Is that obvious to everyone? The only parts of Connecticut that I really know are the parts that are in Gilmore Girls. So, you know, my knowledge is deeply rooted in a fictional town. But it seems striking to me that you would make that choice. If we are going to make rules to benefit only one player, it better be Ohtani. Yeah. Right. rules to benefit only one player it better be otani yeah right that's the the one thing that can unite everyone in our polarized political landscape yeah we all we all like shohei otani yeah we all like otani yeah so a couple follow-ups here on our most recent episode we debuted the

idea of the combined cycle or the relay cycle as you proposed, which is when a player who gets part of the way through the cycle gets replaced for whatever reason, and then the player or players who replace the original player in the same lineup spot completes the cycle. Right. So this is rare, but it happened this week and has happened some points in the past. Well, many people, Patrick on patreon and josh on twitter and other

people too many to name frankly we got a bunch of submissions of connecticut yeah right a lot of people wrote in to propose that there was a better name just sitting there that perhaps we should have come up with like you know eric steven gave me props earlier for coming up with debacle when I was talking about the three box for Richard Blyer. And I was feeling good about that. But now I'm not feeling so good because we didn't perceive that bicycle, bicycle. bicycle as yeah joseph patreon supporter also wrote about this bicycle right there for a two person cycle and tricycle if you get the rare even rarer three person cycle and if it goes up to four people i don't know what you call it but car at that point it's just a car so but that hasn't actually happened yet i believe so we'll worry about that when and if it happens.

But probably we should have just come up with bicycle and tricycle. It makes sense to me. Sure. Yeah, yeah. I'm game for that. But, you know, we went for a bit of wordplay that was, you know, less obvious perhaps. You know, it wasn't quite as pedestrian. No, I'm kidding.

I think that those are much better than what I came up with. And I recognize the motion. I second it. And I will tip my cap to all of our smart listeners. Well, yeah. Kudos to everyone who was screaming at their app as we were talking. I assume if we get, you know, five emails about something, then that's the tip of the iceberg. Sure.

I mean, 10 times as many people who are thinking of it and not bothering or remembering to email. So kudos to all of you for your creativity. Now, sometimes it would behoove us to acknowledge when two people say something. Like, for instance, the two people on Twitter who noted my Rodney Dangerfield brain fart the other day. I called him Harvey. Who's that?

Who's that, Ben? Harvey Danger is a band. Maybe that's what you were thinking of. We'll go with that. Seattle band. Yeah. Yeah, that's generous of you. And I could have played it off and been like,

no, that's the joke because Rodney Dangerfield, he couldn't get no respect. And then I said the wrong name. But no, I just had a little brain fart. So, you know. Yeah, well, I had a brain fart in the last episode too that someone pointed out because I think I wish casted an extra Joey Manessis home run because I was talking about

that Jacob deGrom game where he was going great and then someone hit a three run homer and things fell apart. I believe that was O'Neal Cruz who hit that homer, not Joey Manessis. We talked about that game recently when we were talking about O'Neal Cruz. I think I kind of conflated them or just gave Joey Manessis a homerun that he did not actually hit just because, you know, I want him to hit all the homers if possible. You just want nice things for him, you know. Yeah. So it was not enough for me that he homered off of Sandy Alcantara. I also had to fabricate a homerun that he hit off of Jacob deGrom. He did not actually hit that one, but he's still quite good.

And another follow-up. So have you yet heard the Carlos Correa quote that is making the rounds here? No. Did he say he really liked our podcast? I don't think he did, but I will. I bet he does, though. I bet he would if you listened. Give it a chance, Carlos.

Yeah. Seems like we're up his alley. He's analytically inclined. He is. I'll play a quick clip for the listeners and then I will read it. I go to the mall and I go to the Dior store and I want something, I get it. I ask how much it costs and I buy it. So if you really want something, you just go get it. So, yeah, I mean, that's, I'm the product here. And if they want my product, you know, they just gotta come get it. So, yeah, I mean, that's – I'm the product here.

And if they want my product, you know, they just got to come get it. So Carlos Correa was asked, I believe, about the possibility of signing an extension with the twins. I think this was not just about the opt-out decision. This was about whether the twins could maybe sign him long-term. And here's what he said. whether the twins could maybe sign him long term. And here's what he said. When I go to the mall and I go to the Dior store, when I want something, I get it.

I ask how much it costs and I buy it. If you really want something, you just go get it. I'm the product here. If they want my product, they've just got to come get it. As you may recall, Carlos Perea is represented by former Effectively Wild guest Scott Boris. Now, there are two possibilities here, or I guess three possibilities. One is that Boris was feeding him this line, that Boris deserves a writing credit, because this really does sound like his handiwork. It really does. It has all the hallmarks of a Scott Boris line. The other possibility is that his close contact with Scott Boris has just rubbed off on him.

Yeah. And perhaps unintentionally he is mimicking his agent or he's just, you know, he's learned from the master, right? He's observed the master at work he remembers the the scott bors c4 line yeah he trotted out for carlos correa and then remembered on our podcast or it could be just a complete coincidence and maybe this is how carlos correa talks and has always talked and it has nothing to do with scott bors so door number one door number two, door number three. I don't know. It seems like quite a coincidence that he is – I would believe he was parroting Scott Boris if someone were to tell me that. Sure. If they had workshopped this together, let's say.

Or, you know, if Scott's sending around just like a daily newsletter to his clients. Like if someone asks you about signing a long-term contract today, here's one thing you could say. Sure. Just something that was bouncing around my brain today. So I don't know. Joke of the day, but for contract terms. Right, exactly.

It feels to me like there must be some Boris fingerprints on this one somewhere. I mean, like, maybe he is wordplay inclined and that's part of why he selected scott boris for his agent maybe he's like this guy really gets me you know we are we are kindred spirits because we are both inclined to weird you know there are times when you realize that someone like you know makes a lot more money than you do and like uh i haven't been to a mall in a while actually i was gonna say i guess he's close to the mall of america is that the mall oh yeah is there a dior store there i mean ben here's here's perhaps the more prudent question what isn isn't there there? What do they lack at the Mall of America? I actually read a really good book about malls lately

and the social history of the mall that I will remember the name of as I look at my... It's called Meet Me by the Fountain. It was very interesting about the social history of the mall. It should have been called Meet Me at the Dior Store, the Carlos Correa story. It looks like there's a Dior Nordstrom at the Mall of America

what? that sounds like a thing do you mean like a Dior shop within a Nordstrom? yeah, Dior boutique at Nordstrom I guess Caitlin Tiffany is the author of that book I really liked that one so I will recommend that to people but when I would say

I went to the mall and then it's like and then I got a pretzel. Yeah, right. Might have browsed at the Dior store maybe. No, no. Not even. No, because like, you know, I'm realistic about stuff. I'm not fancy in that way. And I don't say that like I don't say that with judgment.

It's just like that's not, you know, I'm in sweats a lot of the time. I work at home. Oh, me too. You know, I work from home. You could give me an unlimited amount of money and I would still be in sweats most of the time. Yeah, they might be like really, maybe they would be to your sweats. I don't know. Maybe.

Probably not though. I feel like, you know, there's nothing about a sweat, pair of sweat pants that can't be satisfied by Target. How much can you improve upon some soft pants? Soft pants. You could double or triple the price, but that's all I want in life, something soft to sit in. Soft pants. Yeah, just some soft pants.

Anyway, so are people like they're trying to decipher whether this means that. So it sounds to me like he is open to the idea of staying in Minnesota for the right price we're to refer to oneself as a product you know i'm not gonna right and also i feel like he he spelled it out too plainly to just say i'm the product in this analogy you know like i feel like if if boris have some faith in your audience right that they can figure it out right i think if if boris had written this out verbatim for him there would not be a line so obvious as I'm the product here. In case you were not following, you go to the Dior store and I'm the expensive product that you can attempt to bid on here. Right. So the fact that he felt the need you think it's him. Or at least that he just did not have complete confidence in the delivery. He's not the practiced deliverer that Scott Boris is.

He's been doing this for decades. He knows that he's going to get his point across or at least will fail to in such a mystifying way that we'll all talk about it anyway. So I think Cray just he doesn't have the reps. He doesn't have the same experience. So he felt like he had to spell it out more plainly but that does not mean that he crafted the whole thing on his own I don't want to insult his intelligence here

I'm not saying he's incapable of coming up with this I don't know if it even is a sign of intelligence to use Scott Boras style metaphors and analogies and similes and such it's just those of us who appreciate the wordplay like we should not put on airs about that. We should, you know, it's fine.

We're happy to be tolerated is I think what we should come up with. Right. So he has the requisite mentality to come up with something like this himself, I'm sure. But would he have? I don't know. I don't know. It's just, it's awful suggestive that he is represented by someone who speaks exactly this way. Anyway, I don't know that we'll get to the bottom of this, but I just want everyone to know I have reached out for comment.

I do have Scott Borch's phone number, having talked to him on this podcast. So I felt like I would do my journalistic duty, and I did reach out to ask, and I do not really expect a response. But if I get one, probably I will relay it here. I just, you know, someone has to ask the not at all tough questions about this. See, stuff like that is why I had to clarify when I told people that we had talked to Boris for the podcast. I was like, but we asked him real stuff too. Don't worry. I was like, don't.

We understand. Like, you don't always get an hour with Scott Boris. So you need to like ask him real questions also in addition to the wordplay. We get it. Maybe he'll, you know, maybe he'll have a gap between games and be like, I'm going to let that Ben Lindbergh know about stuff. Maybe so. Maybe. Although really, like, I don't know that it would be in his client's best interest to confess to having ghostwritten this line for him.

Right? So I don't know that he would tell me even if he wanted to take credit. It would be hard for him, I'm sure, not to take credit just because if he had come up with this i'm sure that he would be quite proud of it but part of the agent's duty you got to make your clients look good and if that comes at the expense of taking credit for your brilliant dior store line analogy then that's the sacrifice that you have to make i think that what i am gonna assert as the most likely is that that Correa just enjoys wordplay. And he feels a sense of comedy and kinship with Scott Boris as a result of that.

They are fellow punsters. Maybe they sit around in the offseason and text each other puns. Maybe they're puns maybe they're like puns right maybe they're pun they're maybe they're maybe they're pun pals all right maybe that makes up for missing bicycle and tricycle we whiffed on that but got pun pals or you did pun pals comedy yeah it's like how everyone needs to learn the difference between compliment and compliment. Yeah. That's an important one.

That's an important one. value as a base stealing suppression person, which often he gets a ton of credit, as he should, for really limiting the running game. And people have probably seen some version of the graph where it's like the Cardinals compared to every other team. And it's like a bar graph. I think maybe Craig Edwards did one of these for Fangraphs back in the day and Russell reproduced it here, but showing like the success rate on steals against every team over Molina's career and then the Cardinals. And it's like way, way, way lower than every other team. And then the attempts or the attempt rate also way, way, way, way lower. So Molina gets credit for that as he should. But one interesting thought experiment that Russell ran down here as Molina perhaps winds down his career and as I'm sure entirely civil and not at all heated hall of fame debates about Yadri Molina pick up even more than they have. I think he should get a ton of credit for this and he does just both reputationally and statistically but one point Russell made is that while he gets a ton of value and accrued a ton of value for throwing out runners

as often as he did you could argue that preventing runners from going actually sapped some value because according to Russell's calculation like for a lot of baseball history it was actually a net negative play to try to steal second like currently it's about break even like teams have kind of figured it out they've gotten to the point yeah where it's like we're only gonna go when it makes sense and that's one of the reasons why you have fewer stolen base attempts now, but higher success rates. They've kind of ended up at roughly the statistically recommended point of this is how often you should steal. And it doesn't hurt you more than it helps you if you get caught. But now during the course of Molina's career, though, it has on the whole been a net negative play.

his career though it has on the whole been a net negative play and so in theory and Russell ran the numbers and calculated all of this like Molina may have helped his team to the tune of something like 55 runs I think he has it like you know several wins worth of value just from cutting down base runners but maybe gave back a win or more of that value by suppressing the running game and preventing runners from going and thereby depriving the cardinals of chances to throw those runners out which is interesting like it it might have been more beneficial if somehow like he had not intimidated all those runners into not going and thus he had lulled them into a false sense of security somehow and they had gone and then he would have had the opportunity to throw them out. And I guess if you take into account the fact that he was so much better than the average catcher

at throwing out runners, then the value of those runners going to the Cardinals would have been even better because he would have thrown them out at such a high clip. But I guess you can't really have one without the other, inevitably. Like if he throws out tons and tons of runners, then inevitably he is going to discourage runners from going. So you can't really separate those things. It's like, you know, if you have someone in the outfield, like I guess Arcedis Aquino, you have someone in the outfield like i guess our status akino who threw out a ton of runners from the outfield this year you get a lot of value for that but if you get a reputation for throwing out runners all the time well they're not going to go and they're not going to take the extra base

against you and there's some value maybe in keeping them from trying to take the extra base or they don't get as good a jump and they don't score as often but you don't get to throw them out and get those outs as often either because they're staying put so there's kind of like a little bit of a push pull there where like i guess it would be double counting essentially to give melina credit for suppressing attempts to steal and then also getting tons of value for for throwing those runners out it's interesting I just I hadn't thought of that yeah because uh it's true like the Cardinals would have been better off if somehow all of those runners had had gone and allowed Molina to yeah throw them out not that there's really a world where both

of those things could have happened at the same time. But it is really striking to see those graphs and just to see how much. And it's not just Molina. It's maybe partly just the Cardinals were pretty good at preventing the running game, even if you look at other catchers who played during Molina's career who were his backups or whatever when he gave them the rare chance to play. But even compared to other Cardinals catchers he was clearly better than that they were so yeah the stats totally back up the reputation that he is elite and maybe the the best ever at suppressing attempts and also one of the best ever at suppressing success rates on attempts yeah there's a lot that i appreciate about his work but like one of the things is like

yeah i just hadn't thought about it that way before you know i feel like russell has a really high rate of yes it does me going like huh that's really interesting and yeah those are sort of inseparable skills but it just makes you appreciate that like baseball is quite complicated in like very cool ways so yeah that's what i have to say about that yeah and i guess maybe we should acknowledge the news, the report that Tony La Russa will not be returning to the White Sox next season, seemingly for health-related reasons. Yeah. It has been recommended that he not return to manage. And we talked a little bit, you know, when he was first out and it looked like he was going to come back because the white socks had played quite well in the early going they have not played quite so well lately they're done now yeah they don't have much to play for at this point but yes some of the air

has kind of come out of that but it did seem like you know anecdotally or anonymous quotes or whatever that that they were having a nice. They were playing a little looser. They were getting good results initially. Who knows if it was the absence of La Russa or if it was unrelated or if it was just any change would have produced some effect. Who knows? But anyway, the point is, I hope he's okay, obviously. You know, hope the health is fine.

But I guess that closes the book on La Russa's White Sox career. And one would have to imagine his managerial career. Yeah, probably. I don't know. You know, I guess you can't put anything past Jerry Reidsdorf if he's still around in a couple of years. No, but also. Yeah, it seems likely that we've seen the end of Tony La Russa, the manager. And that is quite a career.

I don't know that he necessarily added to the luster of that career in this late career comeback. Probably not. No, but I guess he did get the White Sox to the playoffs that first year and did not this year. Things did not go so great. But compared to the expectations coming into 2021, if you were to look at both 2021 and 2022, I think it's safe to say that the White Sox have

fallen far short of that. But there have been a lot of factors potentially to blame there and a lot of injuries and everything that I don't think we can lay at LaRusse's feet. But I think this probably ends the era of the one-two intentional walks and so forth. So, you know, with Joe Madden and Larissa out of the dugout for the foreseeable future, I guess we've got a lot less wackiness and a lot of what happened? He walked who with what in what situation? I can't imagine if it doesn't end it? Yeah. I mean, I guess we've lost a little idiosyncrasy, a little distinctiveness when you have a manager like La Russa who dates back in the dugout to 1979 as a major league manager. It's a long time ago.

Yeah. You know, different era. They did things differently back then. I don't know how often they did that specifically not very often but i think both of those guys you know they they felt a little more authority to to do kind of wacky things than maybe and not just authority but also desire to do those things i think in the first place but someone can wear funny glasses you know maybe they can come up with a cool handshake there are other ways to replicate whimsy it's such a weird thing because you're like you i don't you

know i don't wish the man ill from a health perspective i think that um you know this sort of perhaps afforded everyone an opportunity to save some face because it did appear like it was time to go in a different direction and i think that we took issue on the front end with the process to his hiring and i hope that when chicago goes out and you know i i don't they might just be content with their current situation but if they do embark on a formal process to to hire that they will do that in a way that's broader and more rigorous right and allows you know people who don't know the owner to participate and so we had issues on the front end and you're right things did go better than we expected in the early going but there there emerged some, I think, quite legitimate notes.

Yes, you could say that. And so, you know, maybe this lets everybody walk away sort of having saved some face, which, you know, your mileage can vary on how much you care about that. I think that hopefully that allows the organization to move into a new era of sort of its approach to hiring and these sorts of things. So anyway. In other news that is encouraging, though, Rich Hill, podcast legend, he's coming back, it sounds like. His existence dates back almost to the beginning of Tony La Russa's managerial career, early 1980. But he has said, I think think a couple of times he's confirmed that he plans to pitch next season which is good i think we're all heartened by the fact that dick mountain is not ready to leave yet because we will all be bereft when he does finally walk away but he said that you know after shutting down the orioles for for six in. He's feeling good about himself. Struck out nine no runs. And then

he came out and he said, yeah, I'm going to run this back and we'll be back next year. He has suggested that he might pitch a partial season. He might do like the Roger Clemens kind of model of just like being a mid-season reinforcement. The cavalry comes in. I don't know if I would recommend that i mean obviously like if he wants to spend time with his family and everything and that's the only way that that he'll stick around i'll take whatever rich hill i could get but yeah at that age you know i don't know if like use it or lose it applies or like teams might be wary just of like picking up rich hill at mid-season because he's he's not so dominant now that Clemens was at that point

where it was like you thought that inning per inning you were basically getting the best pitcher in baseball at that point, whereas Rich Hill at this stage, much as we love him, he's still an effective starting pitcher, but not an ace the way that Clemens was. So I don't know if he'd have as many takers if he were to sit out half the season and then who knows if there's going to be rust or what that sets in at that age but look i i just hope that he plays for as long as he derives any enjoyment from it because we derive a ton of enjoyment from his continuing to play dick mountain rides again all right well I figured I've got a little lightning round here maybe that we can end on here of pedantic questions that I think are pretty decent ones. So be pedantic about baseball, but I thought I'd write just in case. In the opening game of Thursday Night Football, where the Chiefs played the Chargers at home in Kansas City,

after coming back from a commercial break, there was one of those sweeping overhead blimp shots showing the packed stands and city below. Al Michaels welcomed folks back to the broadcast by saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, as we have this great shot of the gorgeous Arrowhead Ballpark. And I'm paraphrasing here as we have this great shot of the gorgeous Arrowhead ballpark. Now, the Chiefs play in Arrowhead Stadium. So fine. Setting aside these multiple problematic statements for another conversation. But ballpark. I've never heard a stadium outside a baseball stadium referred in is a ballpark, I guess. But we have football and soccer stadiums, basketball arenas, et cetera, et cetera. And yes, sometimes you will say baseball stadium. But unpedantically speaking, I believe that a ballpark is where you play baseball and only baseball. Full stop. What say you?

This is conjuring some memory in my mind, which may be about ball player. I think maybe this is something Sam and I discussed at one point. Oh, maybe. A ball player. That's a baseball player. We wanted to reserve that for baseball. Can we also reserve ballpark for baseball? So, okay.

I only ever use the word ballpark to refer to a place where baseball is played. I'm going to the ballpark. It's about baseball. Now, those silly little yankees gum up the works here because there are like you say yankee stadium and you and so do the dodgers right dodger stadium oh yeah and that has always struck me as i'm gonna say weird because i think of you all playing in a ballpark and and i know that like that it's not like no one at a Dodger game says, oh, it's a nice day at the ballpark.

People say that. But I tend to associate that very strongly with baseball, ballpark, and stadium to be like a multipurpose facility. Yes, right. And some ballparks are multi-purpose facilities. And even the ones... Well, I guess we don't have any more two-way sport facilities anymore, right? Because now that the Raiders have moved on.

Right, I think so. I think they were the last ones where there were two. But all of them play host to concerts and stuff. So it's not as if there isn't other stuff that goes on there when the the big league season isn't in process and and during the big league season for that matter but i agree with the sentiment of this i would feel weird enforcing it particularly since there are two big league ballparks is it just the two with that have stadium yeah i think it's uh it just the two? That have stadium? Yeah.

I think it's more than that. You have Dodger Stadium. You have Bush Stadium. Oh, Bush Stadium. That's right. I'm trying to count here. So the number of parks, we have Citizens Bank Park,

Comerica Park, Fenway Park, Great American Ballpark, Lone Depot slash Lone Shark Park, Minute Maid Park, Nationals Park, Oracle Park, and ballpark lone depot slash lone shark park minute maid park nationals park oracle park oriole park at camden yards which everyone calls camden yards yeah petco park pnc park t-mobile park yeah truest park i lost track at some point i think that was 14 or 15 it was about half of them have park and do we think that and we think that this is like a purposeful invocation of something pastoral. Yeah, I guess you could say that.

But you have, I think, five stadiums. You have Yankee Stadium, Kauffman Stadium, Dodger Stadium, Bush Stadium, Angel Stadium. And then, of course, you have some fields as well. stadium angel stadium okay and then of course you have some fields right as well you've got your your american family field your chase field your city field your cores field your globe life field your guaranteed rate field yeah progressive field target field choppana field wrigley field i've named all the ballparks at this point i think so well i guess i haven't named roger center and ring central coliseum so we've got a couple that don't fit in. But Coliseum is, you know, that doesn't count.

Anyway, I think that if you say ballpark, and Al Michaels has called some baseball in his day. So maybe it's just instinctive for him to say that. But I think it's weird. It's definitely discordant. You would perk up and say ballpark i don't think so right yeah yeah i feel like baseball can claim stadium it's not weird if you say a baseball stadium i don't think it's i think they're like two-way players or three-way players field is fine too baseball can claim them all i guess like baseball can go either way but i think baseball should kind of have ballpark to itself i mean you know like there used to be a ballpark

like you know what kind of ballpark they're singing about in that song right yeah you got the song that's not a good reason but it's a reason you know yeah yeah i think ballpark easy for us to say i guess maybe we're we're biased but uh well sure i think but it's our podcast so it's fine for baseball yeah all right and then stewart patreon supporter says have you ever noticed how many times an announcer refers to the 3-2 pitch as the payoff pitch only to see it fouled off. Maybe it's just Joe Castiglione on Red Sox broadcast. I don't think it is. But pedantically, the first 3-2 pitch is very often not the payoff pitch, which is a fair point. This is reminding me of another previous discussion. I think episode 1603, there was a Jerry Seinfeld complaint about how when teams say or when broadcasters say that a team is down to their last strike, they often aren't because you could get a hit and then you get three more strikes.

And so Seinfeld was saying that you should say that the defense needs one more strike. And I think we were pretty indifferent about this one. And I think it was fine. We were talking about match point as an alternative, maybe something like that. Just because like a single plate appearance arguably can contain more than one match point. So I think that it's, you know, as so often these things fall into the, well, we know what they're saying. They're saying full count. But I guess it's more accurate to say full count than to say payoff pitch because it may or may not be.

There's a pretty decent chance that it won't be. I love a younger, less pedantic time in the podcast history. And then do we get line judges who sit up there and go, quiet, please. Thank you. Right. Tennis is weird, man. They do weird stuff in tennis. We might get Hawkeye replay reviews sometime soon.

Why is there not Hawkeye in football? This is a different conversation. But we're out here with these chains and we're like, this is precise. No, it's not. You've got technology for that. Yeah. I don't mind payoff pitch. I don't either. It is true. There is like, you know, it gets you ramped up. It's the that. Yeah. I don't mind payoff pitch. I don't either.

It is true. There is like, you know, it gets you ramped up. It's the potential. Right. It is. Yeah. But it is a little deflating when, oh, payoff pitch, and then we'll do it again. So maybe it shouldn't be payoff pitch.

But I like that term. I like the phrase payoff pitch. That's a cool one. I wouldn't want to retire that one. But it is true that it's not often or like the phrase payoff pitch. That's a cool one. I wouldn't want to retire that one. But it is true that it's not often or not always the payoff pitch. So if you want to be a stickler, then just say it's 3-2 or say full count. But then we'd lose the fun of saying payoff pitch and hearing payoff pitch. Not worth the tradeoff to me.

I agree. I think I agree. Lastly, Connor says, I'll keep this brief or short in parentheses. Why do we say the teams hit long balls when they hit home runs, but play small ball when they bunt? Why not hitting big balls or better yet, playing big ball? The reverse would be fine with me as well. I'd love to hear broadcasters tell me they miss how many short balls you used to see in a game. To me, the status quo seems grammatically inconsistent. I'd love to hear broadcasters tell me they miss how many short balls you used to see in a game.

To me, the status quo seems grammatically inconsistent. It also feels like a missed opportunity for the sport. Do you agree? I'm going to do a thing I don't normally do on the podcast, and I'm going to accuse a listener of really just sending in an email so that they can hear you say big balls. Yep. I think that that was the purpose of the email. I don't think that you actually care about this.

I think you just wanted Ben to say big balls. And I played along. And then you wanted me to laugh about it. And guess what? We're giving you what you want. Yeah. I think if this were a serious good faith question and Connor really wanted to know

why we don't say big ball or big balls, it would be because it will make people laugh like Meg did. And we will all titter and giggle and get distracted. That's why. But playing big ball, I don't mind it. That sounds like something I could imagine becoming a team slogan. Oh, yeah. it that that sounds like something i could imagine like becoming a team slogan oh yeah you know and like the catchphrase for that team and everyone's wearing like their big balls t-shirts or whatever oh yeah i mean have you have you paid attention to the like little inside celebrations that

baseball players do with one another 90 of those are explicitly sexual i'm not saying that they are engaged in any of that behavior amongst themselves, although maybe, and we support you. But they are meant to evoke just a lot of activity that results in bodily fluid, is all I'm saying. So absolutely. I can't believe that there aren't T-shirts with that already.

Because some of the gestures, I'm like, there are children watching, and I hope that they have learned something. Yeah. Oh, and did you see the news about the Grand Junction Rockies changing their name? You mean the Grand Junction Chips? Well, should we start a write-in campaign here? Oh, my God, no.

We're in the BBWA, Ben. Come on now. I'm in the BBWA. We should encourage our listeners. I was just in the clubhouse yesterday interviewing Sandy Alcantara. And so far during this podcast, I have said big balls. Big balls. I texted Scott Boris to ask if he came up with Carl Scarborough's Dior store analogy.

Now I'm suggesting that we end up with some Bodie McBoatface kind of result here for the Grand Junction Rockies. But to be fair, they opened themselves up to it. Oh, yeah. Now, I don't think they said that they're definitely bound by the crowdsourced results here, but the Grand Junction Rockies— So they've learned something about the internet since the last time we've had this conversation. I guess so. And since the last time they insisted that their name is not the Grand Junction Chubs and never would be.

But they're no longer affiliated with the Rockies, right? They were a Pioneer League team and lost their affiliation, I think. And so it doesn't really make that much sense for them to be named the Rockies, or at least not because of their former association with that parent club. So now they're looking for a new name. They're in the market and they're asking for suggestions and fans can submit suggestions. So I think they will get a lot of write-in votes for Chubbs. Yes.

And I'm not discouraging that. No. I guess I will stop short of encouraging. Sure. I guess I'll stop short of organizing a writing campaign to stuff the ballot box for Chubbs as the name. But I would not be upset if they were deluged by Chubbs' suggestions. And frankly, they should know what they're in for here. Delusion.

Chubbs shouldn't sit next to each other in a sentence. That's a mistake. I would simply tell people to follow their hearts, you know? And people have started letter writing campaigns over far sillier things. So, I mean, not a lot sillier. Yeah. But still, well, maybe a lot sillier. Not many, but some.

There have been some. So I think that you should make your voices known. Although I will remind our listeners that, because they play in Grand Junction, Colorado, and Colorado is a legal weed state. So I'm just saying, don't limit yourself. There's a lot of wordplay that will never see the light of day actually, but just expand your mind.

Do what feels right and tell us about it. If you have no idea what we're talking about, go back and listen to episode 1396, which was one of the high points of the podcast, I would say. I think maybe the first time that my voice reached that register that I got to earlier. Yeah, probably. Could be true. All right.

Today's past blast comes to us, as always, from Jacob Pomeranke of Sabre and of Black Sox expertise. This is episode 1910. And thus, the past blast comes from 1910. And Jacob's headline is, Heaver's box is too lofty. So, he says, many baseball insiders were fed up with the dominant pitching of the deadball era. By 1910, the league-wide batting average had remained under.250 and league OPS under.650 for seven straight years. Not that anyone was necessarily talking in terms of OPS at the time. One Los Angeles Times writer suggested a change to the pitching mound, make it flat again. This

story appeared on December 28th, 1910, with the headline, Heaver's Box is Too Lofty. When the box was on a plane with the plate, there was plenty of first-class pitching, but the records show that the batting was heavier and the runs were more plentiful. The raised box, it is said, was originated by the old Baltimores of 15 years ago, and it has been a growing evil ever since. The Times writer went on to complain about too many pitchers on the roster. In 1895, three or four first-class pitchers were sufficient, whereas nowadays a major league team is not considered well nearly 50 points in 1911, with the largest single-season increase in runs per game in the 20th century. So, there were people complaining about not enough offense and we should do something with the mound. And hearkening back to the glory days, the halcyon days prior to 1893 when you had the raised mound at its current distance. 1893 when you had the raised mound at its current distance so you get the same sort of suggestions regardless of what century it is whenever offenses at high tide or low ebb nothing new under the sun

just not much not any single new thing oh one more suggestion that we received from a listener oh this is uh in response to another fun conversation that we had. This was from Andy, who just is catching up on episode 1885 in our hypothetical with the slowly descending pitcher's mound relevant to this mound-related pass blast. So Andy says, just catching up on that one, got him thinking about a possible pitcher safety solution. Could we repurpose the slowly descending pitch clock? As people recall, the idea was that you would have the pitcher's mound start to slowly sink into the earth when the pitch clock was up. And so the penalty would be that you would just be slowly lowered as you transgressed on the 15 seconds or 20 seconds or whatever it is.

So Andy's saying, could we repurpose the slowly descending pitch clock or pit clock, as he calls it, to quickly drop and protect pitchers from a comebacker? So this could be a pitcher safety method. Some quick back-of-the-envelope math, a.k.a. searching online, reveals a good estimate of four-tenths of a second for a ball to reach the plate. And we'll keep it simple and say four tenths of a second to return. Although sometimes the ball is hit even harder on the other way back. The mound is 10 inches above the plate, but at the pitcher landing location is more like five or four inches above.

Randy Johnson was six foot 10 or 82 inches tall. Not using one because he's dead was because gravity almost certainly has taken a toll. And I think we can take Johnson's height as the max, even if it's not. By my estimation, this means we would need to drop the mound at an acceleration of 22.65 feet per second if we drop the mound as soon as the ball is pitched each time. If we wait until we know the trajectory of the batted ball, I would say that we need to drop the mound at 118.37 feet per second, assuming 0.4 seconds to reach the mound and 0.05 seconds to calculate trajectory. Unless my calculations are horribly off, which they probably are. It's been 20 years since Physics 101 for me. only suffer about 3.7 Gs at the fast drop, only dropping when we think the ball is coming toward them,

or just under 1 G for the slower drop, but every time we would stop the mound at a slower rate so as not to subject them to any significant impact Gs. I realize Randy Johnson can use his grill lid as a shield, but not everyone else has such a luxury. Might this be a more palatable solution than the protective caps that most pitchers can't get their heads around? What issues am I missing?

Is my math horribly wrong? This is quite creative. So drop them into the earth, not as a penalty, but for their own protection. Do you think that we are underestimating the degree to which guys would like fall over and whack into the side or like bang their hands on the edge of it yeah i'm envisioning it's like it's like get tom cruise from top gun maverick to like design a sufficient g for i finally saw that movie ben i enjoyed it yeah it was good yeah Yeah. It looks great. Yeah, but he pulled a lot of Gs, many more Gs than pitchers would be pulling in this scenario.

Yeah, they blacked out a bunch of times trying to do it. We don't want that. That seems like it would be counterproductive to the purpose of player safety. Yeah. This is not entirely safe, but then neither is being a pitcher and having comebacks come right at you. pitcher and having come back sure come right at you well and i guess that if you know you get to a point where you've accepted we're gonna lower the mound as you know pitchers transgress the pitch clock you've already opened just a a real can of worms to what you're willing to entertain so sure throw this in the mix why not yeah yeah who could see a downside plus if the whole point of the the shift restriction is that we want to boost babbip right well removing a fielder from

the field sure yeah yeah that helps even more you know all the the comebackers that the pitcher gloves now would just sail over their heads as they're in the pit well but what but would they though because like what happens if the ball goes in the pit? Then what happens? Yeah, see, that is a potential problem. Oh, never mind. We can't do it because that, you know, the ball could. We found the one weakness.

Yeah, we found the one weakness in this idea. Sorry, we have to do something. All right, that will do it. Well, for a while there, it was looking like I was going to lament having recorded this episode before Shohei Otani's start on Thursday night. As it was, seven and two thirds, no hit innings before he gave up a hit and then another hit before finishing the eighth. Although I will note that he also recorded two hits at the plate. So technically net no hits through eight innings.

I don't think it works that way. Anyway, that was fun. Was he facing one of the lowest batting average teams of all time? Yes, he was. Was it still a pretty impressive performance? Also, yes, though I was wondering as it was going on what a no-hitter would do to the MVP discourse, speaking of discourses, especially if he did it while that slacker Aaron Judge was taking the night off.

Anyway, he should have one more start coming up before the end of the season, on the last day of the season, in fact, against the Oakland A's again. So maybe he'll no-hit them that time instead. All he has to do is pitch one more inning to qualify for the ERA title and become the first double-qualified player, which would be a nice feather in the two-way player cap. I don't think there is anyone you would rather have for a single game. If you had to win a single game, you would want Otani, right? Because he's one of the best pitchers in

baseball, even made a good defensive play in this game. And even if there is something to the recent stat blast about him maybe not being quite as good as a hitter when he is pitching, still a pretty darn good hitter. He had two singles in this game. And purely on an entertainment level, I don't think that there's anyone I would rather watch in a single game. He's a ton of fun to watch as a pitcher just because he has so many pitches and adding more all the time. And he's so expressive and you just get to see him more. You get to see him hit. I am really going to miss my weekly Otani starts. That is must-see TV for me. I wonder if there was a single person in the world who was not rooting for Shohei Otani to get that no-hitter. Even A's fans, like, come on, nothing at stake. Mildly embarrassing,

I guess, to get no hit, but you're already the Oakland A's this season. That's embarrassing to begin with. For the A's, that is, not for their fans. It's not their fault. There was probably some Grinch out there. I guess the friends and family of the Oakland A's hitters would probably be rooting for them to get hits. Anyway, good game, Shohei. By the way, the Brewers lost to the Marlins, just to circle back to the beginning of this episode. So they could not make up ground on the Phillies. I think one of the things that Joshian was getting at when he lamented that so much of the spotlight is on those teams that are not that great at this stage of the season is that it seems like none of them wants it that much. Obviously, they all want it, but they're not playing particularly well. It's not like anyone is really charging down the stretch in these wildcard

races. Brewers, Phillies, Mariners, et cetera. Someone's just kind of back into the playoffs, which doesn't necessarily pretend anything when it comes to their playoff performance. It just hasn't really been inspiring to watch. It's not like someone's coming from behind and making up a ton of ground in these races. They're just continuing to play like middling teams when we're all following their performance from day to day. Also, I should have followed up on my triple crown request for suggestions about which traditional stat could replace RBI in the old school triple crown. You got batting average, you got home runs, what could be the third leg that would be a little less redundant than RBI.

We got a few suggestions. Some people suggested doubles, some suggested triples, although then I think they also suggested it should be called the triples crown. Also walks was an interesting one. All of these would be very hard to get, of course, but thank you for the feedback. And also apologies that we did not discuss Frankie Lasagna at some point during this podcast, the fan who nearly came up with Aaron Judge's 61st home run. He did say, by the way, that if he had caught it, he would have kept it and tried to make some money off it. So I guess Judge is happy that that didn't happen, that it eluded him and bounced into the bullpen. I'm just

speechless when it comes to Frankie Lasagna because I just have not recovered from the shock of learning that there was a fan who nearly caught Aaron Judge's home run ball in Toronto named Frankie Lasagna, and it was not a New Yorker. It was not a Yankees fan. What an upset. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have signed up and pled some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, get themselves access to some perks and help us stay ad-free.

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Hope you have a nice weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week. I've got big balls I've got big balls They're such big balls And they're dirty big balls And he's got big balls And she's got big balls

But we've got the best Balls on the Balls