Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1952: Slash Diction

Episode Date: January 7, 2023

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and longtime listener and Patreon supporter Jacob Barak banter about Jacob’s baseball-fan background, EW origin story, and much-discussed post about a Shohei Ohtani conundrum in the podcast’s Facebook group, then (10:35) answer listener emails about why we use dashes instead of slashes in displaying hitter’s hits and at-bats, unorthodox infield designs, […]

It's classic on fire, crossfire, with great accelerations, skidding but the expression remains planned. Radiator on, radio, I'm still in control, understand, I have, I have movement. Dash, dot, dash, dot, Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. And we have the pleasure to be joined today by a Patreon supporter and a Mike Trout tier supporter who is cashing in the perk that comes with that tier of support, which is that you get to or have to be or you don't have to be,

but you can choose to be on a podcast episode. And our guest today is Jacob Barak. Hello, Jacob. How are you? But you can choose to be on a podcast episode. And our guest today is Jacob Baric. Hello, Jacob. How are you? Hello. Good. Glad to be here.

Well, happy to have you. And I always ask the customary question of our Patreon supporters who join us on these email episodes, which is what possessed you to support us at this level? what possessed you to support us at this level? What's your origin story with the podcast and how did you decide to level up here? I've listened since probably the first day or two. I've listened to every single episode, so I've loved the podcast. For me, the question is almost like,

what took me so long? Yeah, what took you so long, Jacob? Jeez. So for, I didn't want to make the show worse i didn't think my presence would be something the listeners want to hear and then a bunch of other people started doing it i thought all right then if they're doing it i'll do it glad you vocalized what we were all thinking why weren't you supporting us at the hundred dollar a month level all of these years really just come on but is it at all strange

i guess this is uh you've heard our intro to this podcast almost 2 000 times i guess in your ears so is it weird to hear it in in real time i guess uh slower than you usually hear it depending on whether you're someone who listens sped up or not? Absolutely not. 1x, at least for Effectively Wild. And yes, it's weird. Oh, that's very kind of you. Yes, I'm a 1.2 person. I just can't really go beyond that. But I can totally handle that.

So I have the app that helps me speed it up to 1.2 and then cuts out some silences. So I save some extra time that I don't even really notice. But anything beyond that, that I try to bump it up to the two times people, the three times people who are just out of their minds. I don't know how they do it. I don't know how they retain any information if they do, but I appreciate it. I'm flattered that you listen in real time because I know we sound slow to people who speed us up and then hear us at our normal speed. I'm just so horrified at the prospect of what my squeaky Meg voice must sound like at 3x.

I don't know. I mean, everyone gets to make their choices, but I question that one. I wonder about it. Yeah. Well, what's your origin story as a baseball fan, Jacob? And then how did you find your way to Effectively Wild? So I'm an Angels fan. I kind of started watching baseball a little late in life, like I was maybe 16. And I stumbled upon the 2003 World Series, and I loved it. And I live in LA. And so the next year, I watched both Angels and Dodgers games. And I just thought that the Angels were

more fun to watch. Too bad you missed the 2002 World Series. I did. You came a little late to your Angels fandom. Yes. And you said that you've listened to the pod from the jump but how did you how did you stumble upon it? I think it was just on the top of the baseball prospectus web page. I think it was just on the top of the Baseball Prospectus webpage. Yep, that'll do it, I guess. Were you somebody who was always inclined to the sabermetric mindset as a baseball fan, or did it take you a little while to find that? A little while. A friend bought me a copy of Moneyball, and I read it and I loved it.

And so I started reading fan graphs and then baseball perspectives. And I've been into it ever since. Yeah, you're not alone. A lot of people were radicalized in the same sort of way, I guess. 20 years ago, right? This year is the 20-year anniversary of Moneyball, the book. Boy, we should probably do an episode about that. Yeah, we should probably do an episode about that, Ben. All right, make a mental note in June. So do you feel blessed or cursed as an Angels fan? Because you have gotten to enjoy the entirety of Mike Trout's Major League career

and Shohei Otani's MLB career, but you have also suffered through some losing seasons. So pluses and minuses. Is this a net positive or a net negative? I don't know if I can decide net. I don't really like to watch the games when the team is not doing well. I thought part of that was just aging,

but then the beginning of last season, I was, again, just like I was 18, I was excited to watch every game. And then a losing streak game yeah and then the losing streak happened and then i only watched games that select games yeah so i guess you haven't really watched all that much baseball in the last several seasons i guess if you're if you're only watching what the angels are doing well your your options were kind of limited but well i watch other teams i watch i always watch playoffs. Do you have like, are there exceptions to the winning, losing rubric?

Are you someone who's like, okay, well, I only watch them when they're winning, but I'll watch every like Otani start just to name a thing that Ben does, you know? Right. Yeah. Good. Well, I wouldn't want you to miss that. And what do you care to share about your real life, your non-baseball interests or where you're from or where you live or what you do? I live in Los Angeles and I'm a lawyer. I work as a research

attorney for the Superior Court of Los Angeles. Oh, the Superior Court. Okay. Fancy. It's actually the lowest level court. Oh, you're one of those because I'm in New York where the Supreme Court is the low one, right? Yeah, the low court. Okay. I think New York has it uniquely backwards that way. Yes. Yeah. I like how they give themselves trumped up names. Just like if you're one of the lower courts, you got to give yourself an impressive sounding name, at least.

Superior court. Superior to what, I guess? There used to be a municipal court. Right. To which it was superior. Got it. There is not anymore. Okay. But they just kept the name anyway.

All right. Well, that makes sense. And you also achieved some viral fame or infamy in the Facebook group several years ago because you were the author of one of the most commented on threads in Effectively Wild Facebook group history, 600 plus comments and counting. And you want to summarize what led to all that discussion? What was this, back in 2018, I think, maybe? Yes. So it was 2018, Otani's first season with the Angels. And I'd been very excited as a loyal listener and reader.

I'd been looking forward to Otani coming to the majors for years. And when he chose the Angels, it was wild. And so I was lucky enough to go to his first start as a pitcher at home, which, if you recall, he went six perfect innings. I do recall, yeah. It was truly one of the best days of my life. Maybe that's a dumb thing to say or sad life, but it was incredible. And I wanted

to go to not just watch every single start that I could that year. I knew his UCL, we knew from the start, was injured. And I thought, how long can this last? I need to see all of it. And unfortunately, I had already RSVP'd to a baby shower.

It turned out, Otani's starts ended up every Sunday. Yeah. Yeah. Which meant I could go to all of them at home, actually. Yeah. Yeah. And then the baby shower. Right.

So I wanted to get out of it. Yeah. It wasn't your baby. It was not. It was really my wife's friend's baby, not particularly my friend. Yeah. right. And so the controversy came because your post, this was like a Reddit, am I the asshole type of thread. Because your wife, according to you in the thread, said that you would be an asshole to skip the baby shower. But you were arguing, well, Otani is's uh it's like a baby that's multiple degrees

removed from me i don't feel a connection to this baby distant baby yeah it's not my baby it's not my friend's baby even it's my wife's friend's baby so some things just have to take precedence over that so i don't believe i've met the baby i don't even know its name now years later so yeah show me what that is played a much bigger role in your life than this baby so so how did it all worked out i mean it caused a lot of discussion were were most people in the thread for you or against you and and ultimately did this lead to a rift in your marriage or was it all just peacefully settled? I don't remember the wait, but pretty soon after I decided based on the posts and just reflection that I'm going to go to the baby shower, there was one person in particular who took it very

personally that I was not listening to him or the other saying i should skip the baby shower and it got way out of hand it's out of control but my marriage is fine and it wasn't super disturbed by this uh my wife wasn't happy when i told her that uh there was this comment thread with like 500 comments well glad it all worked out the baby's okay as far as you know shohei otani is doing great your marriage he didn't even finish that day because the schedule got oh all right something yeah okay so so it ended up like best of every possible world you didn't miss anything you didn't end up in the doghouse for a protracted period you you know did have to suffer through the internet being the internet but who among us hasn't like suffered that fate you know

yeah excellent happy ending okay all right well i've got a bunch of emails tucked away here and a stat blast and a pass blast it's been a while since we did an email episode so we will work our way through it and i only have one how can you not be pedantic about baseball type question here. So we won't have a whole section of pedantic emails, but we can start with one. Maybe we don't usually lead off with the pedantic questions, but might as well lean into it because I like this one. This one is from Dennis who writes, this question is extra pedantic and probably won't work well in an audio format anyway, but here goes. Auspicious start, but I think this will be fine. He writes, in baseball, the shorthand for a player's hits versus at-bats in a given game will be written as X-Y, where hits equals X and at bats equals Y.

So Drew Henson, New York Yankees, one for three written as one dash three or hyphen three or, you know, some sort of horizontal line three and then zero RBI, one run, one strikeout or Mark Hendricks in Toronto, one for three with a dash or hyphen, one homer, one RBI, one strikeout, or Mark Hendrickson, Toronto, one for three with a dash or hyphen, one homer, one RBI, one strikeout. This is pretty universally how you'll see it in tickers, broadcast graphics, and plenty of other written contexts. In football, when talking about a quarterback's completions versus pass attempts in a game, the two numbers are separated by a slash in shorthand. Two numbers are separated by a slash in shorthand. So Drew Henson, again, Detroit, one for two, one slash two, 20 yards, zero touchdowns. I believe basketball follows the same conventions for field goals and field goal attempts and free throws and free throw attempts.

So Mark Hendrickson, again, New Jersey Nets, 10 points, three for six, right? Three slash six field goals, four out of four, FT, four rebounds, one assist. The latter is definitely more appropriate, Dennis says. We've been using slashes in fractions since the 18th century. This is a fraction where hits are the numerator and at bats are the denominator. Henson didn't have one hit and three at bats. He had one hit out of three at bats. And it's not that baseball is all dashes and football all slashes. Baseball appropriately used dashes for a pitching record, and football appropriately uses x-y for touchdowns-interceptions, which is not a fraction. So why is this problem unique to hits slash at bats or hits over at bats? How did we end up using dashes in this fraction? Did early newspapers not have slashes?

Why hasn't it changed? And I was curious about the origins of this. I was thinking maybe it has something to do with like 19th century typesetting. Who knows? Like maybe they didn't have slashes or slashes were harder for newspapers back then or something. That could be why I emailed our past past blaster, Richard Hershberger, to ask about this. And he said he had nothing. He had no idea. It's rare that I stump him with any kind of question, but he does not know why it's dashes instead of slashes or or how it started that way.

It's been that way forever, as far as we can tell. But do you two agree that this is weird and wrong? Because Dennis has convinced me that it's a fraction and why should we not present it as a fraction? I guess I have seen it sometimes maybe as a fraction in some places or some sites, some contexts, but usually not. But why? Do we think that it's because, and I don't know why this wouldn't be the case for football. This

is not a good explanation for the football of it all. But do we think it's because the vernacular you use is like a batter went one, four, four or one for five. And then you're just like extracting for, for the sake of space, the, the four there. Is that anything there? Is that anything? Yeah.

I mean, when we, when we calculate batting average, we're all, we all know what we do. We, you know, there's division.

It's a fraction there, but, but yes, you're right. When we say it, we don't usually say one. I mean, we say, you don't say he went one out of three. No. You say one for three. One for three.

So I guess it's less obviously a dash or a hyphen or a M dash or an N dash or whatever it is. Maybe it's different lengths of dash sometimes. But yeah, you're right. You don't say it in a way that suggests division. So I guess we don't present it that way. Do you have any other thoughts about this, Jacob? I agree 100%. In fact, I immediately was myself pedantic and thought,

dashes, does this listener know what he's talking about? These are fractions, of course. They use slash it so now i i was mistaken next time i see this with a dash i'm gonna be pedantic about it too yeah well and it's hard for me as a as an editor you know if i can put my editor hat on because like in copy you would write out one dash the letter four dash six or whatever right like that's the way that you would write it out. At least if you're following the Saber style. So, you know, it wouldn't occur to me to make it a fraction. Like, I don't think that copy has to follow the form

and function of the math behind it, you know? Like as long as we know what we're talking about. Yeah. The real question is why, because when you talk about like a quarterback completing passes i think you know don't you also say like he went you know like he's completed yeah i guess you would say 10 of that's how you say it yeah like we say four so really i think that we're just trying to make the copy emulate the way we talk about it. Yeah. Well, does form follow function or does function follow form here? If you use different-

Do we want to introduce more math into baseball writing? We don't have enough of the math. That's the other thing. You'd think baseball is the most mathy of the sports. So you wouldn't think that basketball and football would be on board the fraction train and baseball not. So it seems like we're going against, we're playing against type here. So literal type. I don't like it. Can I make another argument to try to persuade you?

You know what we would lose? You know what we would lose if we went away from what we've done? What? Couldn't say over you know and don't you love saying over i do like saying over yeah yeah you'd lose that something yeah about i guess we could still say it again like do we have to say it the way that we write it i guess it makes the most sense to be consistent in that way. But now we have an inconsistency across sports. But who cares? But who cares what they're doing over there as football folks? We don't care about

that. Yeah. Like almost all pedantic questions, it comes down to we all know what it means when we see the dash and no one is actually confused about this. And so it is something that I hadn't really thought about before this email. And so like all the pedantic emails, it just becomes something that will forever bug me and lurk in the back of my brain. Anytime I see the dash now, I'll think, should that be a slash? Why isn't that a slash? So, yeah, it's a little weird. It's odd. I wonder if people know the damage they're doing to you with these questions, Ben.

I think they do. And they write it anyway. All right. Josh writes, as we all know, baseball diamonds are not exactly uniform in their dimensions. The infield is always pretty much the same, but outfields have varying distances to the walls, varying wall heights and shapes, sometimes a hill or a flagpole, et cetera. But what if infields could be weird too? What if the Marlins, for instance, added a fourth base,

made their diamond into a pentagon, and opened their field up to 108 degrees between the foul lines? What kind of player or roster construction would benefit from the change? So there's some inconsistency in infield dimensions in the sense that I guess second base technically is not at the same angle that you expect it to be that the other bases are at. There's a little bit of an oblique angle there as Jason Stark has written. And they're changing that, I think. And they're also changing the fact that there was some variation from ballpark to ballpark in some parks when it came to where the dirt ended and where the grass began. So they're standardizing all of that now that was not standardized because of the shift rules and the band that's going to be standing on the dirt or whatever, like you have to have the dirt in the same place. You can't have some teams that get to play back a bit more. So there has been a little bit of variation.

But now I guess there will be no variation or next to no variation. Other than, I guess, maybe like the condition of the dirt and the condition of the grass, there's always been some either intentional or unintentional variation when it came to just how wet things were or just how sodden, how long the grass was, if you wanted to deaden the ball, if you wanted to, there's been some curvature maybe of the baselines and the foul lines. So if you had a team that bunted a lot or didn't bunt, maybe you'd want a little bit of a slope, you know, so teams have done things like that in the past so there has been a little variation but josh here is is asking about more variations and i guess it's it's kind of like the closer you get to home plate into the strike zone the more every inch matters really like the strike zone matters

so much the dimensions of that can completely change the game and then as you go farther and farther out in the outfield it definitely changes the game to have a deeper field or a shorter field or a taller fence or a shorter fence but but less so and we're accustomed to that kind of variation so i guess the issue with the infield variation is that, well, I mean, adding another base would be a pretty, pretty fundamental. We'd end up with like a Pesopalo sort of situation. I don't, it would no longer be baseball. I mean, it would still involve bases and balls, Ben. It would, yeah. But the number of bases is a pretty fundamental thing.

Yeah, it's pretty important. And also the distance between bases, which obviously is changing now with bigger bases. So they're shortening the effective distance between the center of the bases by making the bases bigger, but keeping the baselines the same distance. And of course, there's a lot of resistance to moving the mound anywhere. So if you were to change the distance between bases, then that has a whole lot of implications for the running game. Although the running game is going to change a lot too

with the new pickoff limitations and everything. So if we were ever in an environment that was conducive to monkeying with this kind of thing, it would be now, I guess, when we're already more open to these ideas. But I can't think of a way to just add a base that would not be pretty destabilizing. So you have some aesthetic differences, I guess, with some teams will have a strip of dirt between the mound and home plate, that kind of thing, or just more or less dirt or grass

around the infield. But the actual core dimensions and number of bases is pretty immutable. Yeah. Right. I mean, more bases would just even further increase the value of home runs relative to every other outcome. That's a good point. Yeah. Right. Which is, I guess, what they're trying to de-emphasize right they they want contact and they want people to be on the bases but if there are more bases and and more base paths and distance between them i don't know you'd have to have some sort of like either it would have to be the bases would like extend way into the outfield which uh would have all kinds of implications for positioning, or you'd

have to have some sort of zigzag, again, like Pesopalo's sort of situation. So I don't know how it would work. But yeah, you're right. Like station to station baseball, if there are more stations, then that would be problematic. Maybe we should only have two bases. Oh, only two bases. Okay. Well, that would incentivize trying to get on base by any means necessary and not swing for the fences, I guess, right?

Because, yeah, you're not getting as big a bonus base-wise if there are fewer bases to begin with. So there's a lot to consider here. So, I mean, roster construction or type of player-wise, I guess that would have implications for just, yeah, like your power hitters, your sluggers, your contact guys, your approach at the plate. That would make a big difference. And then would you have to have an extra defender or would you have to have a defender cover multiple bases? Would a base be unattended in this scenario? Or does the shortstop become like the fifth baseman? The fifth baseman! Whoa!

Yeah, or I don't know. Would we call it the fourth baseman and then you still have the catcher at home plate? I guess that, I don't know, it would be, you'd need new terminology. Yeah, that would be the biggest challenge here is what do we call it, you know? Yeah, given us a lot to consider, Josh. So in the annals of if baseball were different, how different would it be type questions? I think this would be pretty different. It would be definitely not the most different we've ever contemplated, but far from the least different. All right. Charlie says, with the Mets having to pay over $100 million in luxury taxes this year, pending Carlos Correa not ending up with the Twins or something. How is there more drama here? It's the free agency that just never stops giving seemingly.

Who knows where, whenever, when the musical chairs ends. Ben Clemens just wrote about how this free agency, this offseason is proceeding faster than almost all recent free agencies in all recent offseasons, right? than almost all recent free agencies in all recent off seasons, right? Just the number of free agents, the caliber of free agents. It's like tied with 2007, I think, just going back to the beginning of the century in terms of just free agent signings that are done by the end of the year. And yet, even though like 45 of the Fangraph's top 50 have signed and like all of the top 30, you still have one of the top five just hanging out there twisting in the wind. Maybe now talking to other teams. Maybe now going back to the Twins.

What if he ends up with a third team? Oh, my gosh. All right. So the question was about the Mets, who may or may not have Carlos Correa on their roster this season. About the Mets, who may or may not have Carlos Correa on their roster this season, but with the Mets having to pay a lot of money in luxury taxes this year one way or another, Charlie was wondering, where does all this money go? I cannot think of a place that it would go besides the commissioner's office, but that does not seem like the right place for it to go. Then we got a related question from Matt, who said, I've been thinking that having an owner who is willing to spend money is a good thing. It should lead to other owners being forced to follow suit. But the thought struck me that the substantial tax payments the Mets will have to make will just go to the owners who have chosen

not to compete, providing them with even less incentive to break their habit of raking in the bucks without spending to compete. Is this a potential bad consequence of the Mets spree? So I think a lot of people have wondered, where does that money go? It's just this nebulous competitive balance tax penalty. Teams pay it, but where does it go? Who actually gets it? So Evan Drellick, friend of the show, reporter for The Athletic, he had an informative couple of tweets about this recently because someone asked him.

So I will just quote Evan. So he said, it's complicated, but the simplest way to think about what happens to the money teams pay for going over the competitive balance tax threshold is a split between players and teams. So from the MLB Players Association summary of the 2022 to 26 CBA, which has still not been published in full, I believe. Right. Give it to me. Give it to me.

Give me it. I'm going to make some off-season reading here. I know. Give me it. So the summary says, uses of CBT proceeds under the new basic agreement, the first $3.5 million of CBT tax proceeds will go toward funding pension improvements for former players. proceeds will go toward funding pension improvements for former players. The balance of proceeds, so the rest of it, will be divided equally between player Vanguard accounts and the supplemental commissioner's discretionary fund referenced above, which then prompts a question.

What's the supplemental commissioner's discretionary fund? What does that do? And Evan followed up on that as well. So if you're wondering what that fund is, he says it's explained in easy and simple terms below it was modified in the most recent CBA. This again is from the MLBPA summary. So here's the explanation of the Supplemental Commissioners Discretionary Fund. earmarked tax proceeds previously returned to clubs that were not disqualified as cbt payers collected from competitive balance tax payers will be distributed to certain clubs through a supplemental commissioners discretionary fund this eliminates one of the previous incentives to stay below the cbt base threshold so that was an issue what matt

is pointing out that this was just another reason for some owners to sit on their hands. So this was a measure intended to reduce that incentive. In furtherance, with the MLBPA's efforts to incentivize clubs to grow local revenue by providing a competitive on-field product, distributions from this supplemental fund will be made to revenue-sharing payee clubs that have grown their non-media net local revenue over a multi-year period. Distributions will be made after consultation with the MLBPA and based on the following factors. One, the club's non-media

net local revenue growth rate compared to other payee clubs. Two, the club's success at reducing the total amount of proceeds it receives under the revenue sharing plan through revenue growth of non-media net local revenue. Three, the club's total non-media net local revenue compared to its average non-media net local revenue over a five and 10 year period. Four, the club's non-media net local revenue in relation to its market score. Five, this is quite complicated, the club's non-media net local revenue in relation to its market score. Five, this is quite complicated, the club's total paid attendance in relation to its market score. limited to initiatives to increase attendance and attendance-related revenue, expenditures and investments in marketing, promotion, and fan engagement, and new business opportunities,

and the competitiveness of the major league team. So the idea is that part of it goes to player pension funds, then half of it is split between players' Vanguard accounts, I guess like just retirement accounts, investment accounts, and this supplemental fund. And then the supplemental fund, instead of just being distributed willy-nilly to teams and handed out to teams that are not trying, there is some effort being made to direct those funds to teams that are trying according to these six different metrics. So that's the answer where that mysterious money goes.

So it sounds like they have thought of this loophole, this potential problem that Matt identified here. So hopefully that answers the question. Wow. Yeah, that was a lot of reading from a CPA summary. So apologies for that. You know that I'm a fan of that pastime. Give it to me. Give me it.

Yeah, it's good to know, though, because we talk about the penalties a ton, and then we never talk about where they go. They just sort of disappear in most people's minds. Right. I don't mean to say that it is surprising, but it is nice that some of the potential perverse incentives are being gamed out in advance and efforts are being made to counteract those perverse incentives. That seems like a win. Yeah. A's.

Sorry. Right. Yes. Just to pick a team at random, you know, like who could say what? Yeah. All right. Here is a question from Taylor. I just heard Aaron Boone say during Carlos Rodan's introductory press conference that he's really looking forward to winning, quote, a championship and then some with Rodan. This wasn't said in a way that implies he meant, and then some more championships. If you listen to the clip, he's clearly saying it in a way that implies there is something they can accomplish together beyond a mere championship.

Something greater, something infinite. To me, this is a bizarre twist on the typical giving 110% type language that really sends my head spinning. Is Aaron Boone planning a world takeover, even though his approval rating is so low? Is he planning a world takeover because his approval rating is so low? I have so many questions. But as an Effectively Wild listener, I know I am weird and that this is literally nothing. I apologize in advance. So I will play a quick clip here of Boone saying these words, and people can judge that for themselves. I'm looking forward to all of it. And it's going to be an awesome journey we're about to go on and hopefully culminating with a championship and then some.

The quote, though, is basically that he says it's going to be an awesome journey that we're about to go on and hopefully it'll culminate with a championship and then some. So if we accept Taylor's interpretation, and I don't know what Boone meant, I think it's quite possible that he did mean we'll win one championship and then we'll try to win some more championships and then additional championships. It's probably what he meant. But what else might he have meant? What could be the best ultimate outcome of signing Carlos Rodan for the New York Yankees over and above winning a championship? I guess maybe they want to break the wins record, or maybe he just wants them all to be lifelong friends. Yeah, yeah. That could be what it is. Maybe it's about the friends we made along the way, I think. You don't typically hear that from the Yankees, where just everything is about championships, and if you don't win a championship, it's a failure. talking about how he's looking forward to working with him and, you know, he's going to hopefully get better and they're going to clash maybe over when Rodan doesn't want to come out and Brun has to take him out. And so there's like a maybe we'll get to know each other.

You know, you've dealt with adversity in your career and you've exceeded expectations. And plus he shaved now. so there's that i don't know whether that's good or bad i think i think it's silly that that you are expected to shave when you're on the yankees but also radon looks pretty good i think clean shaven so it hasn't worked out too terribly for him but yeah i would bet that uh either it's more than one championship or it's like about the relationship. And it's maybe about Rodin's personal accomplishments. Maybe he could get even better than he's been, even though he's already been quite good. Maybe this is perhaps just an extension of the multiple championships, but maybe they're referring to this.

They have dynastic intentions. That would be very in keeping with the Yankees and their prior success, where it's like, we don't want to just win one, we want to establish a dynasty. And yeah, that's like winning multiple, but also comes, I think, with this sense of gravity within the sport that I imagine the Yankees,

if you ask them and they answered honestly, they might feel like there are other teams that have met the definition of that perhaps more fully than them, at least in recent seasons. So perhaps they're keen to be the big bad again. Maybe that's what they mean. Yeah, because it can't just be being a perennial contender because they are that already. So to be a perennial favorite or super team or division winner, that would be something. Or for Aaron Boone to be loved again by Yankees fans, not by his friends and family, who I'm sure still love him. But, you know, the way that Yankees fans loved him in 2003, when he hit a fairly memorable home run, they don't love him quite like that anymore, a lot of them. So that, again, goes hand in hand with winning a World Series, which would lead to him being much more beloved. But yeah, you know,

or it could be like Carlos Rodon's personal brand. You know, he's a good pitcher. He just got a good deal, but he's not a huge name. He's not a superstar. His personality is not widely known in depth and detail. So he could be the king of New York. He could be a big, famous player with endorsement deals. Maybe that'll be the outcome of him being a Yankee now. Yeah. I mean, I think that if I had to put money on which of the current rosters is sort of primed to be king of New York, I don't think I'd pick Carl Trudon, which I don't mean as

a knock on him. I just mean in deference to the literal giant patrolling the outfield that they have. Yes, right. Already the king of New York and now resigned. So something would have to happen to Aaron Judge for Carlos Rodan to, like, maybe Carlos Rodan can be the captain somehow, you know? Like, if something happens to Judge and we need a new captain to step up and serve, has there been a pitcher Yankees captain? Oh. I'll have to look that up. I don't know serve has there been a pitcher yankees captain oh i'll have to look that

up i don't know whether there's a prize just because there have been so i mean i i think a starting pitcher does seem like a natural captain but also as we've established on this pot i don't really understand the captain thing when it comes to the yankees so i'm i'm not i'm not the right person to opine on local custom yeah from the look so there have to the Yankees. So I'm not the right person to opine on local custom. Yeah, from the look. So there have been 16 Yankees captains, and two of them have been pitchers. And in fact, the initial Yankees captain was Clark Griffith, who was a pitcher. So his tenure as captain was from 1903 to 1905. And then the next and thus far last yankees captain pitcher was ron gidry who it looks like was was co-captain with willie randolph man it's already like a ceremonial

position if you're just gonna have multiple ceremonial captains like if you did i mean like there are other sports that have multiple captains on their teams. Football teams have multiple captains all the time. But if there have been multiple captains in the past, why are we so precious about this? I think you're being right. Well, maybe Carlos Verdon can be co-captain with Aaron Judge then. He can win a World Series and then some. He can be co-captain.

All right. David says, actually, we got two questions prompted by a discussion in episode 1943 about using only three baseballs in total. So this one is from David, who says, I was just listening to your discussion of what would happen if the league could only deploy three balls for all games. So not just the three models of baseball that one report suggests that MLB may have been using last season, but literally three baseballs, either for one game, for all games. And heard Ben say that the baseball would no longer be a baseball, and so the game would no longer be baseball. So if baseball had to be played with a ball from another sport,

baseball. So if baseball had to be played with a ball from another sport, which ball would you pick? A football or basketball would be a disaster, right? Would a tennis ball be fun? Handball? Softball? Go nuts. Sorry if you've already discussed this one. If you haven't, I kind of can't believe that you haven't. And I don't recall that we have, although I've certainly forgotten some effectively. But if all the baseballs disappeared and we had to continue to play baseball with a baseball substitute, so it can't be just a replica

baseball. It has to be some existing ball from another sport. What would you want to see? What would work the best or be most entertaining? I like the tennis ball idea i think that would be fun yeah a wiffle ball of course oh yeah yeah i mean david mentioned softball which i i guess would be the the obvious uh that seems right so close that it's not even in the spirit of of the question that would be the obvious, it would be a different game, clearly, but that's about as

close as you could get. And I guess, see, a wiffle ball is, I guess, even closer in size to a baseball than a softball is, but it would be dramatically different, I mean, in terms of weight and movement and shape and all of that. So it would be a treat to see major league players use wiffle balls, especially like major league pitchers throwing wiffle balls. Wow. That would be some really nasty movement. Yeah. Just think about how stuff would cut. That'd be so cool. It would. The issue with that is I guess you could no longer really play outdoors, right? Or you'd have to have perfect conditions or you just have to accept a lot of wildness. So that would be an issue. And I guess almost whatever ball you use, the dimensions are just going to be out of whack because the ball is going to carry farther or less far. Like if you used a tennis ball, gosh, I mean, if you've ever like played baseball with a tennis ball and tried to like throw it really hard, it kind of wears out your arm. It's just like it doesn't have the same heft

to it and, you know, seams and movement and everything. So it'd be very different in that respect so you'd have some balls that would just i mean you could hit them even farther you could have like golf balls and just have like ridiculous drives i guess they're smaller though so that would kind of compensate i guess golf ball might be kind of interesting just you know like it it carries but also has like different aerodynamics and movement profile and then it's it's just a smaller target so that would be interesting in the sense that it's round and it's like close enough to baseball size that that you could play something that sort of looked like baseball, you know, like a basketball is obviously round, but it's so huge that you couldn't really, I mean, you'd have to like lob it instead of

throwing it overhand, I guess, or I don't know, maybe like a dodgeball. Yeah. Like dodgeball, kickball, same sort of ball. Yeah. I would enjoy that for when they play in dodger stadium because we'd get a good round of puns perfect yeah ben you mentioned tennis balls would be hard to throw i guess the defenders should have rackets instead of throwing you would hit the ball with rackets no notes yeah just yeah racket ball or tennis, baseball with tennis. Yeah. Okay. I could get behind that. I kind of like that idea. If you start talking about like differently shaped balls, I mean, if you're talking about a football or like a shuttlecock or something or a rugby ball or, I mean, oh, shuttlecock has a lot of potential for derailing the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. The boners one would make with a shuttlecock.

Oh, my God. Jacob's like, I didn't know that they were really like this. I thought it was like, you know, a trick of editing. No, no. Here we go. Yeah. He's been with us since the start. Yeah.

I'm trying to think of any other weird ones. I mean, like a volleyball, soccer ball, basketball. Those are all sort of in the same size range. What else? What else? I mean, a puck. A puck would be painful, probably. Yeah, that seems obviously dangerous, you know?

It seems dangerous and and also yeah i don't know how well that would carry right yeah yeah hmm it would be hard to you know it's like it's hard it would be hard to see you know imagine trying to pick up a puck with the batter's eye behind you sometimes like that seems like it would yeah right or of course you could use a cricket ball i guess would be an obvious replacement too it's uh again that could be painful they're heavier than baseballs hmm i mean yeah most balls are round i guess it's not it's not breaking news here that's that's kind of what a ball is it's like a round thing so you could roundish so you could you could use uh almost anything and and fake baseball and have it sort of still

look like baseball ish but it would be even more so than messing with the infield dimensions just changing the ball i mean look how big a deal it is when the ball gets slightly enlivened or deadened. How huge a story has that been? So to have an entirely different ball that would carry in different ways or break in different ways or not break at all, I mean, that would be another pretty fundamental difference where we'd have to rethink playing in our current stadia and ballparks or outdoors at all or in different playing conditions so yeah this would it's a fun question i guess i'd go with i like the tennis ball with rackets idea rackets instead of gloves or do you have both do you have a racket in one hand and a glove in the other i guess yeah okay and also why would this happen i guess because

as you once discussed we learned that baseballs are sentient creatures right you'll pay yeah it could be that or maybe we we just decide to be humane and not use leather anymore and they can't come up with a just machine facsimile, some sort of non-organic baseball. I don't know. Something like that. All the baseballs, it's like they just all disappear. It's the rapture for baseballs. I don't know.

We'd have to figure out a way to go on. All right. The other question inspired by that discussion is from Nick, who says, Listener Dave's question in episode 1943 about the possibilities and absurdities presented by a baseball season that could use only three baseballs in total reminded me of my days playing high school baseball for a team that wasn't very good and didn't have much of a budget. We had access to a pitching machine, but the baseballs we had on hand had seen better days. Many were pear-shaped. others bore split seams, holes,

and miscellaneous scuffs. Still others were squishy, like t-balls, in spots that had been struck repeatedly, and of course most of these balls had some combination of two or more of these defects. Due to their eccentric shapes, these balls would break very sharply and unpredictably when fired from the pitching machine, and they wreaked havoc on our hitters, I'm sure you can imagine the wild movement that a lopsided baseball shot from a pitching machine at 80 mph can produce. This reminiscing led me to the following hypothetical. Within certain weight or surface area parameters, what if teams were allowed to design their own baseballs for use in their home games? For example, say the White Sox analyze the deliveries and biomechanics of their pitching staff and decide that using a slightly pear-shaped baseball

would induce more vertical movement on breaking and off-speed pitches, or the Dodgers find that a slightly elliptical baseball allows their hurlers to generate even more movement on their sweepers. I imagine that in this universe, teams must submit their baseball designs to MLB for approval by a certain date in the offseason, and upon approval, those designs cannot be changed until that date the following year. Also, visiting pitchers must throw using the home team's modified baseballs. What kinds of restrictions do you think should be implemented if baseball modification were to become legal in MLB? What are some of the more useful or outlandish modifications you can imagine teams implementing?

What do you think player development might look like in the extremely silly timeline where baseball modification is allowed? Since MLB has demonstrated that fiddling with the designs of its baseballs to favor a specific team

is something it has no qualms about, perhaps, rumors say, I am of a mind that universal baseball modification is one way for the league to level its playing field. So I think we may have answered questions about like if certain teams could elect or if every team could elect to use deadened or enlivened baseballs at certain times and maybe they'd be like different colors or something and you could elect to put a more lively or less lively baseball in play at certain times but this is like you're locked in that team at least in its

home park has to use this uh slightly modified weird baseball all season long and everyone who plays in that park has to use it also i guess like how different is it than the outfield right like how how different is it than an outfield dimension if if both if both teams have to grapple with it how different is it really you know and as long as you know in advance, like how different is it? Yeah, that's the eternal question of the Effectively Wild hypotheticals. So I don't know. I don't know. It couldn't be that different probably or it would be not an advantage to anyone unless you tailored your whole player development pipeline around this thing. whole player development pipeline around this thing and you catered all of your drafting and and trading and player acquisition toward this kind of baseball like if you there are certain

teams that throw more or fewer fastballs or sliders or whatever it is or cutters or you know there are certain teams that that have some objection to throwing certain pitch types because they just they think it's an injury risk or they just can't teach it as well or whatever it is. So it would be kind of like that, except that it would be amplified by the fact that you would have a baseball that lends itself somehow. I don't know exactly how the physics of it would work, but you would either say, hey, look at our staff. We have a bunch of

slider specialists or whatever it is, and we could modify our balls and design our whole roster construction and player development plan around this. As you say, it would be like kind of having dimensions that maybe lean toward right-handers or left-handers, and then maybe you load up on lefty sluggers or something, which the Yankees used to do, at least until recently. So it would be kind of like that, except maybe more impactful, potentially. Yeah, I mean, yeah, seems like it would be more impactful. Right.

And there'd be a bigger home field advantage. I guess that would be the big implication. You'd have huge home field advantage in this scenario because the incoming pitchers, the visiting pitchers, would constantly have to be playing with a different baseball. or like safety concerns also. Like if the size of the ball, if the grip is different. I mean, you hear that even with pitchers coming over from Japan and they have to take some time

to get used to a slightly different size and less grippy baseball. So if you had pitchers just going from park to park and in every park, there's a slightly different baseball, you'd probably have increased wild pitch rates and walk rates and hit by pitch rates and some of those have already been high

lately and then you'd have a huge home field advantage because of each team's pitchers would get to prepare and train with that one ball whereas the visiting team's pitchers they might have to like throw a bullpen session before the series with that new ball but they wouldn't have much time to adjust coming from the ball they were just using on their homestand or their last stop on the road trip so i think that would be the biggest difference probably the mets might want balls that are softer because they were so upset by getting hit by pitches last year yeah that's true's true. Yeah. Yeah. I think that even a softer ball probably still hurts if it's hitting you, though.

Like, you have to be pretty, like, a nerf ball to really, to not ding you. Because, like, even a hacky sack thrown at high velocity is going to sting if it hits you. I mean, it's not as damaging, but still, you know, still. Yeah. I didn't think of Nerf ball as an answer to our prior question.

I guess it's not technically a, is that a sport? I don't know. But yeah, that would work too. So, I mean, I kind of like the idea of having like, oh, we're visiting the whoever this week and we know what we're going to get.

Like it's going to be breaking balls galore because they're the team that has this weird breaking ball ball and has recruited an entire staff of pitchers who throw breaking balls. So you'd have different characters to your teams. It would almost be like the gangs in the movie The Warriors or something where you have the baseball furies and you go to this town and it's like, okay, we're going to be facing the slider guys. I mean, you already have that to some extent and you have teams that throw a lot of sweepers and that sort of thing. I guess you'd have to stick to it though. I mean, you wouldn't want to mix this up every year,

maybe some minor tweaks, but if you're going to build your entire roster and your player development strategy around this, then it would probably have to be pretty consistent. And maybe most teams would elect just to have the standard ball just because it would be easier in a lot of ways, right? Like you'd have to have a lot of confidence that you were gaining a competitive advantage from your specific kind of ball because otherwise it would be tough i mean like what would the trade market be yeah like would you even would you bother to acquire someone at the deadline if like if you need pitching help maybe you'd have a limited pool of pitchers you could pull from who would who would work with that

ball but otherwise you'd probably have such a big with that ball. But otherwise, you'd probably have such a big adjustment that it wouldn't even be worth doing it mid-season because you'd just throw someone off their game. So I don't know how much player movement there would be, which might be good for fans, I guess, in the sense that there might be roster consistency, but maybe there'd be less player movement. Maybe that would depress salaries. So it could have economic implications too. Yeah. Would this increase the gap between the most savvy pitch design teams

and the Rockies? Yes. Oh my gosh, imagine. But if you're the Rockies, don't you just lean in to the atmosphere and say like, give us the juiciest, you know, our our approach here is going to be traumatizing our pitchers and scoring as many runs as possible don't you just

lean into it yeah if it if it's all about just deadening or or making more lively i i guess you could do that but yeah if if jacob's as you're saying like if you're if you have a staff that's set up to exploit these differences and and as the question said like it's all within certain parameters which would be difficult to to do to keep it within certain parameters but have these differences be meaningful but but it wouldn't necessarily be that one team just uses super juiced balls and another team uses super dead balls like they'd all have to behave or carry or have a similar kind of coefficient of restitution, bounciness, but maybe like the grips would be somehow different or like

the shapes would be different, like the movement would be different. But I guess once you hit it, maybe it would behave in sort of a similar way. So I guess you'd have to engineer it so that the biggest effects would be on the way to the plate not from the plate or you know like i guess yeah if you if you had a non-strikeout staff and you just wanted to like pitch to contact with a good defensive team set up then then maybe you could do that but again it can't be like super juiced versus super dead. I think it has to be more about, I guess, like the seam position somehow. Like it would be some characteristics would be the same, but others would be different. It sounds like a tough engineering problem because I mean, they can't even figure out how to keep the pulse consistent

as it is. So injecting additional planned inconsistency into the mix would probably be bad. I don't know that this would be good, but it would definitely lend itself to stocking up on coaches even more so and analysts and yeah, probably the teams that have poured the most resources into that already, you would see even bigger gaps between them, I think. Interesting question. I like this one. All right. Question from Mark R. I just found out about Mr. Richie Martin of the Baltimore Orioles. Not sure if you're aware, but he may have the worst single season I've ever seen by a position player.

In 2019, he put up a negative one baseball reference war in 120 games. That's not the season I'm talking about. He put up negative one baseball reference war again in 2021 in 37 games. My man was on pace for a negative four war season. That legitimately looks like a calculation error or something. Fangraphs isn't much nicer, though, and has him at negative 0.8. negative 0.8. Anyway, my first thought was if I were a AAA lifer shortstop in the farm system of some stacked team, especially if I've never cracked the majors, I'm 100% asking for a trade to Baltimore. I feel like I've heard of people asking for trades from the minors before for the chance at playing time or contract reasons or stuff like that, but it's usually washed up major leaguers. And even then I can't think of any specific examples. I'd love to hear about some cases, if you can think of any. Mostly just wanted to bring up that season from Richie Martin and hear your thoughts. Any other famously bad seasons come to mind immediately. I also thought of Giants World Series ring owner Dan Ugla, but his worst season was at least fewest games played in a negative one war or worse season. And Richie Martin isn't even close. He played more than three times as many games as the most precocious, just most concentrated negative one war or worse season. And it's a tie for the fewest games played by a position player, negative one war, between Fred Wood, who played for the 1884

Detroit Wolverines. So I didn't immediately think of Fred Wood. In more modern times, 2019, I think that the record holder here really, 12 games, Miguel and Duhar for the 2019 Yankees. He compiled negative 1.2 baseball reference war in a mere 12 games. So yeah, he played in those 12 games, 49 played appearances. He hit 128, 143, 128. That is a 271 OPS or a negative 26 OPS plus. And he also was negative four in the field in that very limited playing time.

So that'll do it. So he's kind of your king, your champion of getting a winner or worse below replacement level in the fewest possible games. For pitchers, it looks like the record is three. A lot of pitchers have gotten to negative one or worse in three games, although most of them were 19th century or pretty early on. I guess the only one in the live ball era would be Bill Doak for St. Louis in 1929. He pitched in three games, two starts, nine innings. He allowed 12 earned runs and 15 runs in total. Not so hot. Yeah. And other than that, I guess if you go up to four games, then you get maybe some more modern players like Carl Mathias in 1961 for Washington. He was at negative one exactly. And there are a few others. In 2020, Jordan Yamamoto of Miami, he was negative 1.1

baseball reference war in just four games, three starts for the Marlins, 11 and a third innings. He gave up 24 runs, 23 earned, 27 hits. That's not great. So yeah, those are your lower limits, I guess, for how quickly you can get there. So much faster than Richie Martin did. I will link to those stat head queries. And as for demanding a trade from the minors, I guess the issue is that you just, you don't have a lot of leverage, really. Like, you know, you're you're under team control. You're if you're not a prospect, you're not super highly valued. So there are some release valves built into the system ultimately with things like the rule five draft and minor league free agency. But that takes several years.

So if you're stuck in someone's system and blocked by other players, then you are kind of out of luck. I mean, if they're not promoting you, if they're not using you, then you would maybe have more value to another organization and another organization might try to trade for you. So that could be a bailout too. That could be an escape path for you also. But actually demanding a trade, yeah. I mean, I guess if you have less value to the organization, then they might be more willing to accede to your demands than, say, Brian Reynolds demanding a trade from the Pirates, where they might want to trade him anyway, but he's a good player and has value to them, so they're not just going to give him away because he has to be traded so right lower stakes so so more incentive to trade or i guess less disincentive to trade but also less incentive to trade it's just a kind of a lower stake situation all around at least for the team if not for the player feels like the administrative task that you like can resolve in 10 minutes but

put off for two months because you have other stuff that's more impressive. That feels dismissive of a person's livelihood, but I wouldn't be surprised if teams kind of think about it in those terms where it's like, well, maybe. Maybe if a fit emerges, but you're not hopping two to get on the phones to try to make that deal go through probably.

Right, yeah. I just feel bad for all these players who had such poor seasons. Miguel on Duhart, he was really good the year before that. Yeah, he was. Yes, he was. Yeah. He had kind of famously like in fantasy Yankees fan trades or like when people make fun of Yankees fans concocting trade scenarios where they like give up a bunch of like back of the roster players for some other team superstar.

I'm sure that every fan base does this to some extent, but it's always like, we'll give you Miguel and a few other guys, and you give us your superstar who would really fit our roster. So yeah, he kind of headed downhill quite fast. 12 games in 2019 didn't take him that long. All right, question from Corey, Patreon supporter. Do you ever worry that baseball might be bad for the world? We know there are some rather distasteful things around international recruitment of players. There are ecological concerns for expending the energy to host the vast number of events.

It helps extremely rich people get richer. On the other hand, it brings joy to a lot of people. It lifts some minutely select population into financial security. It provides a neat sandbox to learn about numbers and human nature. But if you were to conclude that the cons outweighed the pros, what would your next steps be? I think maybe limiting salaries. I had this discussion once with my father-in-law, and I said, well, but if you do that, then the great athletes wouldn't play baseball. And he said, yeah, but people loved the 1920s Brooklyn Dodgers just as much, or really way

more than people love the 2020s Dodgers, even though they're far better players. Yeah. So you mean if we decided that our priorities as a society were out of whack and that nurses and teachers and people should be making more money than baseball players and therefore we should redistribute those funds somehow by limiting what athletes make and funneling that somehow to people who maybe generate less revenue from an entertainment perspective, but provide some societal good that is arguably greater. Is that what you're saying? Right, yeah. Instead of 1% of the Braves player salaries, they would have to give 90% of their salaries to charity.

Right, yeah. It would be like a tithe, or I guess a tithe is 10%. It would be like whatever, the opposite of a tithe. An anti-tithe, you keep 10% and you give the 90%. So, yeah, I mean, I don't really think it would be like a net ill, or at least not compared to relative to many other ways that we entertain ourselves. You know, they're like unsavory aspects of MLP, just as there are about any other league or industry. So, and I don't know if I were to decide that it were bad for the world. I mean, I guess I probably do some things that are bad for the world, or at least like not as good for the world as I could environmentally, you know, like if I ever travel or take a flight or something, you know, I mean, you could do some sort of carbon offset sort of solution, which is sometimes bogus, but you know, we mean, you could do some sort of carbon offset sort of solution,

which is sometimes bogus. But, you know, we all do things that are probably like not the most green solutions for whatever we're trying to do. Or we just we do things because we're all at least a little bit selfish and we like to entertain ourselves and not consider their impact on the entire world. But but I think baseball, like it's hard because you have to sum up all the intangible benefits of baseball, which is just like, we like baseball. We all, millions and millions of people get a lot of enjoyment from the sport.

So how do you quantify that? I don't know, but it's a very significant force. Our lives would be worse without baseball. And that's the case for many millions of other people too. So I think it's a net positive, but if it were a net negative, if I decided that it were a net negative, I don't know. I have selfish reasons to try to ignore that and also financial reasons to try to ignore that as someone who has made a living or part of a living on the back of baseball. So I might minimize those nagging concerns consciously or subconsciously. Or I guess try to advocate for ways that it could be better, which I guess we do to some extent using this podcast as a platform.

I guess we do to some extent using this podcast as a platform, but maybe even more actively than we already do maybe and just trying to address issues that stand out as the most harmful in acknowledgement of like relative societal good but then you gotta you gotta like take the teams away from billionaires and also make them not billionaires right like it is a a big you don't want just the labor side to be the one that's constrained because that isn't i think enacting the the broader social change that we would maybe want to suggest but yeah it's tricky i don't know. We are subject to capture, Ben, you and I especially, because I'd have to find another job, you know, maybe. Yeah, right. I'd have to find another job, and that sounds displeasing. I'm not really good at a lot of other stuff.

I'm sure that's not true. I'd have to go back to being an only somewhat successful nonprofit fundraiser, I guess. Yeah. Well, Jacob would be okay. I guess you've got another career already set up, so you'd be fine. I'm sure you would as well. You don't want to go back to finance, I take it.

No, definitely not. I think that if we're assessing one's career based on good done to society, that going back to finance would be at best a lateral move. Yes. All right. One or two more here. I've got one from Nat who says, we know MLB is generally considered the strongest professional baseball league, but we also know that not all MLB teams are created equal. I imagine it's hard to get a sense of exact relative league strength, but if we brought the strongest NPB team to MLB, could we reasonably expect it to outperform Oakland,

let's say, or any of the other hundred lost teams? Would they do even better? So I think it would be reasonable to expect that. I think that, yeah, like Clay Davenport did a post at his website, one of the founders of Baseball Perspectives. He has a site, claydavenport.com, where several years ago at this point, he did just a measurement of league strength. He uses translations and translated stats and players who go from one league to the next and he tried to develop a complete hierarchy of league strength from mlb down to the lowest independent leagues at the time and i'm sure this is built into other projection systems as well but at the time this was six years ago. So, you know, he had like the National League at 1.000 and then the AL was slightly better than the NL and the highest other leagues he had at the time. And this would probably still be the case. The Japanese Central League was at 0.809

and the Japanese Pacific League was at 0.840. So, you know, 80 to 85% of MLB league strength is what he found. And then he had AAA down at 0.759 for the PCL and 0.802 for the International League, which that matches up well with what people have historically said about NPB kind of being a quadruple a league in terms of being maybe between triple a and mlb being the the second highest level league in the world so if you figure that npb teams on average are 0.8 ish of an mlb team but then you have like the a's on the bottom end and then you have the A's on the bottom end, and then you have the best NPB team that's going to be considerably above the NPB baseline I don't know if it exactly works out that way in practice. I mean, you know, you could look at like the 2003 Tigers, right. They won 43 games. I mean, there are MLB teams that are basically replacement level. And replacement level is basically like if you took the best available AAA players, like freely available talent. So if you could compose a MLB team that is no better than the best freely available AAA players. And then you might also have some AAA teams that don't have freely available talent, but a bunch of

top prospects or just former major leaguers who are hanging around. I guess they would be usually fairly freely available, but you could have a very talented AAA team that maybe could even give a truly terrible MLB team a run for its money. that would probably be a stretch. But I think for the highest or second highest level leagues in the world other than MLB, you definitely could have teams that were roughly equal to the worst MLB teams in any given year or some truly historical terrible ones. Yeah, I think that that's right. This would be so entertaining. I hope Oakland gets relegated to npb and they can call up the best npb team yeah i mean we get a lot of questions about relegation there are all sorts of reasons why that's difficult in mlb but teams like that would be in danger of being relegated and a top triple a team getting promoted and i don't know that you would notice a big difference in the talent level

really so we get a lot of questions like this like what would happen if you demoted an MLB player to this level of the minors or indie ball, just like how much would they own, just how much would they rake or dominate? And occasionally, we get some interesting illustrations of that. And we don't really get this, I guess, except for if you look at exhibition games with MPB teams or, you know, the WBC or things like this could maybe give us a sense, just like barnstorming teams, exhibition games of MLB players from the white major leagues playing Negro Leagues players during that era could give you some gauge of the respective league strengths. So yeah, I mean, I would love to see it. And sometimes even in spring training, I mean, MLB teams will play like college teams or minor league teams. So I'd be very interested to see if we had like a long extended series. I don't know how or why this would ever happen, but I would love to see like the best. And we've answered questions before, right, about like the champion of NPB and KBO, you know, plays the champion of MLB. That's different because you're taking the

best team from each league as opposed to the best from one league and the worst from another. But yeah, I'd love to see this run as an experiment. Yeah. All right. Last question. This is from David, who says, I think we're a long way from a team drafting a trans player, what with the right-wing panic over trans athletes in schools and the controversies in track and field and MMA. But I wonder if you think we'll see a player come out as non-binary in the near future. Has trans visibility increased enough that this is a realistic possibility? If it does happen, how do you think the industry will respond? Will other players offer support? Will announcers and reporters and other journalists respect the players' pronouns? Will fans boo, etc.? So we have talked about how some of this like gendered language is kind of built into baseball in a way. in the five-man rotation in the four-man outfield. It's always man, man, man. And even if we're just talking about the potential for a female player to make the majors at some point, you know, like some of these terms I've kind of caught myself and tried to use a more gender-neutral expression at times, should that become more relevant at some point or even just to be less discouraging. So could this happen?

Yeah. I mean, it could happen at any time. I guess the fact that no major league player has even come out publicly as gay, yet while active makes one think that we're not quite there yet know because of clubhouses being the way they are and the incident with the raised pitchers this past year on pride night right and you know refusing to wear the the flag or the patch or whatever it was on their uniforms like there's there's clearly still some institutional resistance and and yeah i mean some of the the right- right wing panic that David alludes to and just the, you know, more than panic, I mean, the discrimination and just the, you know, actively like trying not all Mark Canna, who he's described himself as like the lefty liberal guy in the clubhouse who's, you know, wishes that his teammates were more open to these things. I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. I'm sure many players would be quite accepting, but there's at least a perception that there would be some resistance or ostracizing or

condemnation or persecution or even that word that gets bandied about, distraction, right? It would be distraction, which I think that much at least is sort of silly. Like we've seen just the examples in other sports, right? When players have come out, it's not really that big a distraction and it hasn't been a super divisive thing. Like teammates for the most part seem to embrace gay players at least. And so the fact that like MLB is like, it's basically like the only league at this point,

you know, like the major North American sports. Or at least the major men's sports. Yeah. That has not even had a gay player come out publicly while, while playing arguably depending on how you define out and public, I guess. So the fact that baseball still hasn't reached that milestone makes me think that this other milestone might be a ways off, but I guess it doesn't have to happen necessarily in the set

sequence. You could get one before the other. I do worry about the clubhouses and the players, but I guess the league itself, I think moving the All-Star game out of Georgia is kind of a sign of more progressive politics by the league and I suppose by the fan base. Yeah, I mean, you know, at least cowing to public pressure, you know, I mean, more so than I guess, like, I don't know, the league and the commissioner being personally up in arms about those things. I don't know that that was the issue. And you could argue whether MLB's like place is to weigh in on those things or not. I think it's, you know, you could reasonably disagree about some of that stuff. But yeah, like I think MLB would be publicly welcoming and inclusive, you know, I mean, just like in the messaging and the PR, I think MLB would embrace that. So would you have like some pockets of any fan base that would object? Of course, you know, you would have some sort of regressive, you know, retrograde hateful people in any place or city that would not welcome that. But I think most fans would be fine with it and probably most players would be fine with it.

But, you know, when you have the Brenneman's of the world saying things on live mics and then you have the race relievers of the world's you know objecting to pride night and whatever they see as uh you know unacceptable behavior i mean professing tolerance but not really fully at least in my view i mean anyone would have some natural resistance i think yeah i think there would be a lot of variation sort of ballpark to ballpark i would imagine i would hope at least that at least from the league's perspective and from the perspective of each of the clubs that they would make clear that you know their public statements around this stuff and their announcers would need to fall in line and be respectful and use the person's appropriate pronouns. I'm sure we would have unfortunate exceptions to that. I'd be very curious to voting rights and then gave it to the Rangers at

a time when the state of Texas is like actively waging war against gay and trans people in their state. So I don't know, man, it's, it's the kind of thing where I think the general experience of it would hopefully be a positive one, both for that player and then for fans watching it. But this is sadly not a thing that we are universally together on in terms of making sure that people are respected and treated well and that their rights are upheld. So there would be disappointing variation, I would imagine. But I don't know.

Hopefully we get to a point where people are just able to be their full, complete selves and it becomes unremarkable that they are. Yeah, agreed. All right. So I'll end with a pass blast and a stat blast here. So the stat blast, which will follow the song. Here's to days to past This is prompted by the death this week of Nate Colbert, who the former Padres great who passed away at age 76. And condolences to friends and family and Padres fans who enjoyed his career. But Nate Colbert, he did a lot of things in his career. He was a big leaguer for 10 years and accomplished a lot and played for not just the Padres, primarily the Padres,

but he broke in with Houston and then he bounced around a bit at the end with the Tigers and the Expos and the A's. But most known for his time as a star-level player with the Padres, and perhaps and I both marveled at the fact that Nate Colbert is the record holder. And not just that he's the record holder, but also that the record israfted amateur free agent. It was the year before the draft was put in place by the Cardinals, his hometown team. And then he ended up going to Houston, to the Astros, and the Astros sort of mis-evaluated him. They drafted him from the Cardinals as a Rule 5 pick, and then they kept him on the roster all year, barely playing, so he missed out on some development time. And then they tried to basically turn him into a spray hitter, like a slap hitter, go the other way type guy, even though he was like a deadpool power guy. It was almost like a David Ortiz type story where the team just did not know what they had in him. And he was like slugging in the minors and winningging in the minors and winning awards in the minors

and just didn't hit in his limited time with the Astros because they were trying to turn him into something that he was not. So the Padres drafted him in the expansion draft as the 18th pick in 1968. And it turned out to be a brilliant pick. And Nate Colbert was an original Padre when the Padres became an expansion team

and played in 1969. And for his first five full seasons in the majors and his five first seasons with the Padres, he was a star level player and he was an all-star three times. And he got MVP votes in 1972, which was his career year. And he did hit a lot of home runs during that time, not just by Padres standards, but he actually just did hit a lot of home runs. And he also holds some other interesting records. So in 1972, which again was his best year, he had a doubleheader where he hit five homers and drove in 13 runs. And those are both major league records. He's tied with Stan Musial for most homers in a doubleheader. He's tied with Mark Witten for most RBI in a doubleheader. And then I believe he still holds the record for the highest

percentage of team runs driven in, or alternatively, the highest percentage of team rbi produced by one player so he accounted for almost a quarter of the padres rbi in 1972 or like 23 percent of their runs scored were driven in by nate colbert and and those are still i think records over wallyger for the 1935 Braves. And that sort of speaks to the Padres were bad and he was good. So in those first five seasons, or I guess his entire time with the Padres, six seasons, they never won more than 63 games in a season. They had by far the fewest wins in MLB over that six season span. And he was by far their most valuable hitter, either hitter or pitcher, but he was almost three times as valuable as any other position player. And he was just sort of your standard slugging first baseman. Wasn't going to give you a ton

of defense, wasn't like an incredible all-around hitter, but he was a slugger. He could hit for a lot of power. And nowadays we think of the Padres as just like a cornucopia of stars. I mean, they have stars upon stars upon stars, but for much of their history, that was not really the case. And that period of 1969 to 1973, which was his peak five seasons, he had the eighth most home runs in the majors or tied with Harmon Killebrew for the eighth most homers from 69 to 73, 149 homers. He was 39th in war and 24th in batting runs among position players over that span, but tied for eighth in homers, which was particularly impressive because the Padres Park was very hard to hit homers in. It was a pitcher's park. It still is a pitcher's park. It's a different park now. But when they played before Petco, they played in Qualcomm, which was originally known as San Diego Stadium and then Jack Murphy Stadium, but whatever you called it, it was a pitcher's

park, and Petco is too. And each of those parks over time has been made more hitter-friendly, like San Diego Stadium had deep fences and also high fences, and they lowered the fences at some point. And Petco has been twice revised to be more hitter-friendly, but is still fairly pitcher-friendly. So Nate Colbert, during his time as a Padre, he actually hit 91 homers on the road and 72 at home, which is unusual. In every single season he played for the Padres, he hit more homers on the road than at home, which is indicative of what that park was like. So reading from his Sabre bio here, considered among the toughest parks for home run hitters, San Diego Stadium had a deep 420-foot center field with the 375-foot power rallies, all of which were made even more imposing by a 17-foot outfield wall.

Whitey Weidelman, or Weidelman, one of our coaches, drew an imaginary line on his scorebook on what the dimensions were in most of the other ballparks, recalled Colbert. And then he took where I hit every ball, and he said every year routinely, I would hit 15 to 20 balls that would be off the walls on the warning track in deep center that would have been home runs in another ballpark. So this was like a proto stat cast kind of adjusting for different ballparks. That sounds like an over estimate to me, 15 to 20 per year, but it is definitely true that he was robbed of some homers by that ballpark. And so the fact that Nate Colbert still holds this record with only 163 home runs as a Padre, I wanted to put that into perspective. So I had Ryan Nelson, frequent StatBlast consultant. I called him up on the StatBlast phone and he was able to the spreadsheet on the show page and you can find Ryan on Twitter at rsnelson23. But it's totally an outlier for the career all-time franchise record holder in homers to have 163. The next lowest is Luis Gonzalez holds the Diamondbacks record with 224. So it's

still significantly more. And of course, the Diamondbacks are a much more recent expansion team than the Padres. So the fact that the Padres record was set by someone who played for them in their first six seasons and in the subsequent like 48 seasons or whatever it is, no one has surpassed that is amazing. Like you have Luis Gonzalez has the record for the Diamondbacks at 224. Daryl Strawberry has the record for the Mets at 252. Evan Longoria for the Rays at 261. Giancarlo Stanton for the Marlins at 267. And Ryan Zimmerman for the Nationals at 284.

I don't know if that's including Expos years or not, but all the other franchises have 300 or more by their record holder, all the way up to Henry Aaron, of course, with the Braves at 755. So for this to have persisted all this time, the Padres are an expansion team, but not a recent expansion team. So it's pretty weird because if you look all time and just look at how many players have hit at least 164 homers for one team. So while with one team, 276 players have accomplished that, have had a stint with one team where they hit more homers than Nate Colbert hit with the Padres.

And even if you look since 1975, right, so Colbert was traded by the Padres. He had back issues. He was plagued by back issues. He's one of these, you know, like Don Mattingly types who just was sapped of his power by chronic back issues, which is what made me afraid for Mike Trout when we heard that he had back issues because I was envisioning a Don Mattingly or Nate Colbert type power outage. And hopefully that's not the case. But that's why he declined quickly and they traded him. But even if we just look since 1975, which was the first Padres season post Nate Colbert, every other franchise has had someone hit more homers than Nate Colbert hit with the Padres. So again, it's not even that the Padres are an expansion team and least 203 would be the minimum. Padres aside, Andrew McCutcheon has 203 homers for the Pirates, and that's the post-75 minimum

for a franchise leader. And then you get up to Luis Gonzalez and Darryl Strawberry and Evan Longoria and Stanton again. And if you look at, I said, 276 players all time have hit at least 164 homers with one team. Even just since 1975, 177 have hit 164, A, that there have just been more teams and more games played in that period, but also more home runs hit. And it's just so weird that the Padres have not had someone. I asked Ryan also how many players who have hit 164 or more homers have played for the Padres at some point, and 59 have. So yeah, 59 players who have hit that many homers have had at least some appearance, made some cameo with the Padres, but no one has hit that

many homers with the Padres. And it is just extremely improbable to me that this record persists. And I mean, it's nice for Nate Colbert that he got to hold this record for the rest of his life, because who would have expected that to be the case? It's just, it's not that many homers for a franchise leader, and he wasn't with the Padres for that long. So you'd think that this could have been surpassed. And I guess the reasons why it hasn't, I think one is that back in 2019, when the Padres signed Manny Machado, I described them as a team with one of the game's most perennially nondescript rosters. And I pointed out that they just hadn't had a lot of stars. All of that has changed in recent years. But I wrote, according to Baseball Reference, Machado was worth 5.7 war in 2018. Fangraphs gave him 6.2.

Machado's four seasons of at least 5.7 war matches the number of such seasons by Padres hitters in the past 20 seasons combined. Those four campaigns came from four different hitters. Chase Headley, Adrian Gonzalez, Mark Loretta, and Phil Nevin. And Tony Gwynn is the only hitter ever to have had more than one such season in a Padres uniform. And Tony Gwynn is the only hitter ever to have had more than one such season in a Padres uniform. So they just haven't had that many superstars just even relative to how long they've been around. And I guess you have Tony Gwynn, who's the face of the franchise, the career Padre, and was great, but was not a great home run hitter.

And then you had Dave Winfield, who ended up hitting 465 homers, but didn't hit most of them for the Padres and was signed away by the Yankees. So I guess it's partly fluke, partly chance, partly that their superstar, Gwyn, was not a big slugger and their other superstar, Winfield, was poached and made the highest paid player by George Steinbrenner. poached and made the highest paid player by George Steinbrenner. So you have a combination of a team that is not a big market team and until recently had not been a big spender or a big contender. So they weren't necessarily always in the market for the big homer hitters. So that's probably part of it. And then also there's just some weird timing too. Some players who could have done it came close to doing it, but had their Padres tenures cut short. So if you look at the leaderboard, Colbert is at 163. Adrian Gonzalez is at 161. So he almost made it. He was traded just before he broke that record. He would have done it if he'd stayed with the Padres for one more season. Same with Phil Nevin. He would have done it if he'd stayed with the Padres for one more season.

Same with Phil Nevin. Phil Nevin is third at 156. And he also was traded when he was basically on the verge. You know, he was traded at a trade deadline. I think if he had stayed for the rest of that season, he might be the record holder. And then Dave Winfield is fourth at 154. So the Yankees plucked him away. And then Tony Gwynn is fifth at 135.

Will Myers, who is a new ex-padre, he's sixth at 134. So at one point, it looked like Will Myers would have this, right? But then he declined as a power hitter, and now he's no longer a padre. So it's just like a litany of guys who looked like they were going to do it, could have done it, came close to doing it, but ultimately didn't do it. And there's the Nate Colbert record still standing. So it's just, it's amazing to me. And one more factor, I think, beyond the Padres just not being big spenders historically and perennial contenders and having superstars is that, as I said, they've played in pitcher's parks for the entirety of the franchise. So even though they've made some hit's parks for the entirety of the franchise.

So even though they've made some hitter-friendly modifications, Petco is still not a homer-friendly or offense-friendly park. And I asked Ryan to run by franchise the percentage of home runs hit at home by each team. And as you might expect, can you guess which franchise, either of you, has had the highest percentage of its all-time home runs hit at home in the existence of the franchise? Colorado. Exactly. Yes. And they're the outlier. So the Rockies have hit 58.6% of their home runs at home, at course. It's 31.34 homers at home and 22-10 on the road.

And then it's a big decline down to the Phillies are second at 53.8. And then the Giants and the Cubs and the Tigers and the Orioles and the Yankees, a bunch of teams are grouped together. At the low end, the Padres are not the most extreme, but 47.7% of their home runs have been hit at home. So just like Nate Colbert hit more homers on the road, the Padres all time cumulatively have hit 3,253 homers at home and 3,570 on the road. on the road. However, they're not the most extreme. Below them, Houston, Miami, Texas, Pittsburgh, and at the very bottom, Kansas City, the Royals, 44.6 of their homers hit at home. So it's just a combination, I guess. It's a fluke, partly, and just a product of odd timing and coincidence. It's partly the Padres always having pitchers parks.

It's partly them not being big spenders and having contenders and superstars. And all of that has produced Nate Colbert as really the outlier among franchise home run leaders. And it's really like it's so emblematic of what the Padres used to be, you know, not to insult Nate Colbert, who was a very good player for half a decade or so before he got hurt. But, you know, most franchises in more than 50 years have had a bigger home run hitter at some point. And I always used to think of the Padres as like they haven't had a cycle. They haven't had a no hitter, you know, for years and years and years. They didn't have a cycle.

They didn't have a no hitter. Like they didn't have a World Series, obviously. They still don't. But even those individual player accomplishments, season home run record for a long time until that was recently broken. But it's like you wouldn't think that these things would still be standing. So it's just totally out of step with what the Padres are now, which is, you know, trying to be perennial contenders and division title winners and having so many superstars, you know. So I don't know how long this will last. I guess that's the interesting question. Like at some point, Nate Colbert will be surpassed. So the closest any active Padre is, is Manny Machado and he's at 108. So he is essentially two full, healthy Manny Machado seasons away, assuming he doesn't suddenly go Aaron Judge on us. It would take him two seasons. And again, this might he might end up short of the record too. And if he doesn't stick it out with the Padres long-term, then I guess your best chance is Fernando Tatis Jr.,

right? I mean, if Tatis does not surpass Colbert, then something has gone horribly wrong. But things have gone pretty wrong for Tatis over the last couple of years. So if he comes back healthy, like Tatis is already in the top 20. He's number 18 with 81 homers. So if he comes back from his suspension and is still, you know, and all his injuries and the PDs and he's close to the same player,

then I would predict that he will do it in 2025, which would be the 50-year anniversary of the Padres' first post-Colbert season. So I guess that would be appropriate. But, you know, that's assuming that he's healthy and back and playing every day and undiminished and everything. So that's, again, like a lot of things have to go right for that to happen. Or, you know, maybe Soto sticks around long term and then he does it. Like, you would think that one of those guys would have to do it.

Or who knows? Like, maybe this will just improbably continue to stand. But it's really, it's amazing. I just, I marvel at the fact that Nate Colbert, still the Padres, all-time home run hitter. Rest in peace, Nate Colbert. And good luck to the Padres and Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado. Indeed. All right. Well, we will end with the Pass Blast. This is episode 1952, and this comes... Oh, one more stat before I move on, because I quoted... I missed one stat head search that I ran, which is just the number of players from 1975 on who have hit at least 164 homers. Not with one team.

I mentioned that stat, but with any team at all, it's 344 players have hit at least 164 homers just since Colbert left the Padres. 64 homers just since Colbert left the Padres. So again, some of them have spent some time with the Padres, but none of them played with the Padres long enough to get to that point. It's amazing to me. All right. Episode 1952, pass blast from 1952 and from Jacob Pomeranke, Sabres Director of Editorial Content and Chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. 1952, the 400-man roster. Jacob writes, Bill Veck-owned baseball teams were always notoriously short on cash, and his St. Louis Browns of the early 1950s were no exception. He knew he needed to be creative in order to increase revenue and keep his team competitive.

At the 1952 winter meetings, Veck proposed two changes to shake up the game in profound ways. His first plan was to give visiting teams a cut of local TV and radio revenue instead of that money going solely to the home team, a revenue-sharing plan that the NFL would successfully employ a decade later to tremendous success. American League owners voted that idea down 7-1. Vec's second idea was even more radical in what was then the middle of the bonus baby era, long before the amateur draft existed. Major league clubs were spending more and more money each year signing up all the top amateur prospects and then hoarding them on their 40-man rosters or sometimes with their minor league affiliates for years, leading to them being trapped and perhaps demanding trades, as we were just talking about. Or I guess Nate Colbert being a Rule 5 guy and barely playing. Here's a report by the Associated Press from December 4th, 1952. Quote, the minor leagues today turned down a proposal by Bill Veck of the St. Louis Browns that would forbid major league clubs from signing any players without previous professional experience. experience. Vec's plan also would have made it mandatory for all minor league players to have been made eligible for the Rule 5 draft after their first year of professional ball. The members of

the National Association of Minor Leagues did not even bother with discussion and voted the proposal down with a voice vote. Dallas Eagles owner Dick Burnett charged major league domination of the minors, pointing to a publication by the Brooklyn Dodgers that boasted of owning 400 players. He declared the major-minor contract clearly states no club shall own or control more than 40 players. This action today shows the cards are stacked against us, said Burnett. If they continue this policy, there will be no alternative but to go to the courthouse. Jacob concludes, Vec knew he didn't have enough money to compete with big money teams like the Yankees and Dodgers or his crosstown rivals, the Cardinals, soon to be owned by the Anheuser-Busch Jacob concludes, in St. Louis, he sold the Browns to a group of investors from Baltimore for the same $2.4 million at the end of 1953, and the team became the Orioles the next year. So one of the many ways

in which Bill Veck either revolutionized the game or attempted to, but was thwarted in his attempt. Clever, clever try though. All right. Well, Jacob, thanks very much for supporting us for all this time and at such a high level of late and also for joining us on this episode. Hope it was worth what you paid. Absolutely. It was fun for you, too. Thank you for having me. And of course, for providing all this entertainment for 10 years. Our pleasure. Anything you'd like to plug or promote while you're here? No. All right. How refreshing. Our pleasure. Anything you'd like to plug or promote while you're here? No.

All right. How refreshing. Selfless. Just wants to support the podcast. Not here to get a megaphone to plug his own stuff. Just here to support the pod. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Jacob. I want to promote Patreon. Everyone sign up. Thanks, Jacob. We did not pay him to do that. In fact, he has paid us to do that. Well, after we finished recording in a late Friday news dump, the long-awaited news surfaced, an emphasis on the long before the awaited. The Dodgers did finally designate Trevor Bauer for assignment. Their statement said, the Dodgers organization believes that allegations of sexual assault or domestic violence should be

thoroughly investigated with due process given to the accused. From the beginning, we have fully cooperated with Major League Baseball's investigation and strictly followed the process stipulated under MLB's joint domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse policy. Two extensive reviews of all the available evidence in this case, one by Commissioner Manfred and another by a neutral arbitrator, concluded that Mr. Bauer's actions warranted the longest ever active player suspension in our sport for violations of this policy. Now that this process has been completed, and after careful consideration, we have decided that he will no longer be part of our organization. And that consideration must have been careful because it took them long enough. They waited

until the very last minute or hour seemingly before the deadline, whether because they were exploring trade options or because they really wanted to bury the news late on a Friday or for some other reason, doesn't send quite as strong a statement as it would have if they had released him far sooner than this, in that they had months to anticipate that this was a possibility that he might have his suspension reduced and be reinstated. And it's been weeks since that happened. According to some reports, no teams have expressed interest in trading for Bauer. The Dodgers do have seven days to try to trade him if they want to. After that, he would go on waivers. And if he clears, any team could sign him as a free agent for the league minimum of $720,000. The Dodgers, one way or another, will pay we will see whether any team will go full heel and pick him up for league minimum, or whether every team will decide not to bring disgrace upon itself by extending him a spot. And it would be nice if that were the case, which would force him either

not to pitch professionally or to go somewhere else and pitch somewhere hopefully far away with a lot less visibility. Hopefully we won't have too much more cause to talk about him on this podcast. I have a few follow-ups and addenda and updates here. First, there was a far less consequential designation for assignment, which I bring up only because we had a pedantic comment recently about designated for assignment. This is from Brendan, who objected to the terminology of a player being DFA'd because the designated comes from the first word, from the D. And Brendan concluded, just like with RBI, there's no need to modify the acronym. Both designate for assignment and designated for assignment could be represented by DFA.

I bring up this cursed thought yet again, only because it came to my attention that the Minnesota Twins earlier on Friday tweeted, we have claimed Oliver Ortega off waivers from the Angels. As a counter move, we have DFA Blaine Enloe. Not we have DFA'd, not we have deed FA, but we have DFA. We have designated for assignment. So I don't know if the Twins were listening and paid attention to Brendan's email, but that's what Brendan wanted to see. I don't know if this is new or unprecedented or whether the twins or other teams have done it before, but now that I see it in

print, we have DFA. I don't know. Looks weird. Sounds weird. But there it is. Also, it occurred to me that maybe I should mention that the marine layer out in San Diego has something to do with the Padres parks being pitchers parks. It's not solely the dimensions. It's also just the environment, the atmosphere, the conditions there. So there's only so much you can do to combat that. It also occurs to me that maybe we just invented basketball during our segment earlier about using different balls to play baseball. Although we're not talking about some hybrid ball that is a combination of a baseball and a basketball. It would be using a basketball to play baseball. I'm not sure if that would still qualify as basketball. Also wanted to make sure everyone

knows that the Pirates Rich Hill hype video is out. So we gave them some guff and some grief for putting out the Vince Velasquez hype video. Rich Hill, as we said, is entirely worthy of a hype video and you can watch it now. I'll link to it on the show page. And as a follow-up to our past blast last time, we talked about three-team doubleheaders and one that was played in 1951 and some that were played earlier than that. But the most recent incidence of a three-team doubleheader was actually September 25th, 2000, I believe. Reading from Sabre here, the most recent instance of this odd scheduling occurred on September 25, 2000 in Cleveland. On September 10, the White Sox and Cleveland had been rained out in Cleveland in the last meeting of the year between the two clubs. This game was rescheduled for the afternoon of September 25, causing the White Sox to return to Cleveland for the day and giving Cleveland an unusual day-night twin bill since the Minnesota Twins were already set to play them on that date.

The Tribe won that afternoon game 9-2, but the Twins prevailed in the nightcap 4-3. This is the only time that three American League teams played in one doubleheader. Also, friend of the show, Eric Stephen, responded to our last episode in our conversation about David Vassei, the Dodgers broadcaster who slid down the slide very painfully in Milwaukee, to draw our attention to a Justin Turner tweet from right after that happened. He wrote, hashtag holy crap, hashtag Vassay's chalet. He added David Vassay, had a bouquet of flowers emoji, and tweeted a picture of the area at the end of the slide where someone, I don't know if it was Turner or someone else had put up a fake chalk outline of Vasse on the wall, like a crime scene body outline with the words, holy crap.

Well done. And now, before anyone can make more jokes about using the zombie runner to elect a speaker of the house or whether Carlos Correa will officially sign before we have a speaker, which might happen not long after this episode is published. I guess either of those things or both, potentially. I will wrap up by reminding you that you can be like our guest today, Jacob Baric, and support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. And it is a slash, not a dash. Don't get them confused. Slash stats, not dash stats.

The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Jake Rose, Mitchell Kroll, Michael, Emily Ross, and Sally Gaskill. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Patreon Discord group, a wonderful, thriving, bustling community. You also get access to monthly bonus episodes of the pod and playoff live streams, as well as discounts on merch and ad-free Fangrafts memberships and more. Jacob didn't only get to come on the podcast,

he also got a free copy of The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, autographed by yours truly, and an ad-free Fangrafts membership. A plethora of perks available at patreon.com slash effectivelywild. If you are a supporter, you can also message us through the Patreon site. And if not, you can still contact us via email at podcast at fangrass.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week. of competition Jacob's tales are superstition but siblings

born in equal grace seated at the table place same old chance hit the toss of dice evil eyes look twice as nice blood runs thicker

blood runs cold seize legacy before it's sold