Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1955: Upshift, Downshift

Episode Date: January 14, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a “Dear Abby” baseball column, Andrew McCutchen’s return to Pittsburgh, Nelson Cruz signing with San Diego, the Dodgers reacquiring Miguel Rojas, catcher deking and the ball-strike challenge system, and inaccurate outfield-fence distances, follow up on Toronto chicken tenders (and how a new Canadian law could affect the Blue […]

He was no good for you, try to warn him now Now they tell me you moved to California now Won't you try to remember me, my baby dear Abby, won't you try to be surprised Every day, where's my dear Abby today? Someday, maybe real soon'll think of you as a friend But I know, I know in my heart, I won't be the same with you again Hello and welcome to episode 1955 of Effectively Wild, a Fangrafts baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you? I'm doing well. I need your advice. Okay. Actually, I don't need it, but some guy who wrote into the Dear Abby advice column needs advice. His name is striking out in San Francisco.

That is what he goes by. This was just published this week and was shared in our Facebook group. So the headline on this Dear Abby column is, Wife's Baseball Infatuation Puts the Squeeze on Marriage. Okay. Here's the letter to Abby, Abigail Van Buren, real name Jean Phillips. I guess this is the daughter of the original Abby. Anyway, you don't need to know that. Epo babies. Yeah, exactly. My wife and I have been together 25 years and had an ideal marriage.

She has recently become a dedicated baseball fan or, should I say, obsessed. She has season tickets and attends wearing her team outfit. She got a team license plate and scours the daily sports page for team news first thing every morning. She talks baseball with anyone, anytime, including me, incessantly, despite my lukewarm interest. At home on game day, she has multiple TVs on, as well as her laptop and phone dialed to the game, lest she miss one second of play. She can talk about every player on a first-name basis and their family in minute detail. When her team misses a play or loses,

she gets irate and loudly curses at the TV. I worry she takes it too seriously. She's now bringing her portable TV into bed for late games. Needless to say, thinking about baseball in the bedroom has thrown a curve to our marital bliss. When I bring up the interference, she argues that most husbands would be thrilled to be married to a quote-unquote gamer babe. Now, I was mercifully unfamiliar with this term, gamer babe. It is apparently a way that Giants broadcaster Mike Kruko has referred to female fans. I don't think he still does. I would hope not. Yeah, but he used to refer to at least some female fans as Gamer Babe, and then there was understandably blowback to that. And I think it's just been shortened to Gamer. I don't know why we need a different term at all, but there it is.

This is a letter from San Francisco. So that's where that comes from. And the end of the letter just says, can you referee this disputed call? So pretend this is dear Meg instead of dear Abby. What do you say to striking out in San Francisco? Well, I mean, in some respects, like this is a baseball question, right? Because the seeming object of her obsession is baseball. But like, this just feels like a bad communication and a marriage question, right?

Like if you're bringing up to your partner repeatedly, like, hey, I don't want screens in the bedroom or whatever. Like it's tricky because on the one hand, you want to support your partner and their interests, right? And I think it's healthy for folks to have interests that are separate from those of their intimate partner, right? To have stuff that is theirs and isn't about like a common experience of it. But you have to come together commonly eventually, you know, because that's what being in partnership is. So I don't know i mean i think that one thing he could consider is like are there ways that he can like participate in the baseball stuff that would allow him time with his wife that might otherwise be solitary you know

provided that she's interested in that i adhere to a like don't have screens where you sleep because i think it just makes you less likely to sleep well that's my experience of sleep anyhow i know that it doesn't bother others so you know whatever works for you but like it seems like you could have some boundaries around like communal space like your bedroom and say like hey we gotta we gotta negotiate this together since we both occupy this space that seems fine like i think that you can do that piece of it and still be deferring to your partner's like ability to have their own interests but also you know sometimes the converts like they burn really bright for a while but then it then it tapers to a a more mellow level you know they stop being quite so interested in communion as it were so you know maybe also try giving it a little bit of time

just to see like what the trajectory of the interest is because it could you know kind of taper on its own potentially yeah and we should have them on the show to do some relationship counseling. I don't know if we can get in touch. We should absolutely not do that. No. I just want to know the backstory. I want to know the backstory, but I don't want to be responsible

for the well-being of someone else's marriage. That's none of my business. I mean, I guess this guy has made it other people's business by writing Dear Abby. Yeah, we only want to meddle in the baseball scenes I mean, I guess this guy has made it other people's business by writing Dear Abby. Yeah. We only want to meddle in the baseball scenes of various film and television productions, more so than people's relationships. But I wonder, after 25 years of marriage, for her to suddenly be just a massive baseball fan. I mean, what caused that?

Was it the magical 2021 Giants season? Maybe. That got her hooked? Because if so, maybe the interest will die down naturally as every other season goes in comparison to how exciting and surprising that was, potentially. But the portable TV, that's an old school move. Yeah. Does that even work anymore? Is that like over the air broadcasting?

Do they even still do that? They don't still do that. I don't know. Do they need like a laptop and a phone and a TV? Did they not have a TV in the bedroom so she has to bring the portable in? Or is he watching something on the main TV so she has to bring the portable in so they have a second screen or a third or fourth screen? It seems like a lot. I mean, it's nice when people share interests and it can be a relationship hazard or obstacle when one party is extremely into something and the other is not so much. And if you can find ways to indulge that interest, like you don't have to be in lockstep with your partner about every interest. I mean, my wife is interested in baseball, but not to the degree that I am. And that's fine. I don't need to talk about baseball constantly with her. She Right. discussion. I talk to you about baseball for hours every week. I don't necessarily need someone at home who's talking to me about baseball. It's okay. I know most people don't host baseball

podcasts and write about baseball and everything. So that's maybe a me thing. But I was worried that suddenly it was going to be, and then she listens to this podcast in bed when I'm trying to go to sleep. Talking about pedantic baseball questions. Because we do have listeners who use the podcast as a sleep aid yeah just to kind of keep them company when they're falling asleep or can't sleep or something and i imagine there's there might be some people who would potentially write into dear abby about that yeah yeah i mean yeah i would have been horrified if we had emerged as a source of discord in someone's marriage. Like that would make me feel overly involved. You know, I take a real, that's none of my business approach to a lot of that stuff. It's just not my, it's not my concern.

You know, that's going to surprise some people who I am friends with and listen to this podcast. You know that I also enjoy gossip very much, but like sometimes I'm just like, that's none of my, that's a, that's a you over there thing, not a me over here thing. We don't need to have... You really call them gamers? That means like a whole different thing too. I never understand.

This is not related to the marriage thing, but I'm not going to be able to resolve their marriage. Wait, actually, before I have my gamer thought, what was the publication date of the column? Just this week, I think January 12th, because some people in the Facebook group were saying, is this from decades ago? Because she's scouring the sports pages and portable TV and dialing in a phone like they were thinking, is this like dial up or something? But I think it's just older terminology.

Maybe it does seem to have been published right now. Yeah. Well, I'm going to suggest the following, which is that actually, you know, there tends to be a lag, you know, between when these things make their way to the publication and when they actually come across our transom. So I think there's a that carlos correa's lower right leg saved a marriage because you know if she's a giants fan it could be that she came into this offseason you know she's so optimistic aaron judge is going to be a giant and then carlos correa is going to be a giant and now like you know no offense to michael conforto and mitch hanegar but like you know now it's now it's other guys of a different caliber. So it could be that this, to your point, this issue has just sort of resolved itself naturally. Maybe it brought it to a fever pitch for a short time.

She was probably pretty irate and cursing about the deal falling apart. So, you know, Carlos Correa saved a marriage. That's interesting. I don't understand the instinct to try to like fuss with fan. Fan is a perfect word, Ben. It's perfect. It's gender neutral already. So you don't have to do any of this weird cutesifying man cave.

It's just fan. You just have fan. You have it. It's right there for you. It's already perfect. You need not mess with it. Particularly when you're going to call people gamer babes. I want to know what that meeting was like where they were like, so, hey, you know, don't.

Yeah. Hopefully it's just that. Right. I mean, fanatic, which is obviously what fan comes from, was originally derogatory, I think. And then it was quickly reclaimed, right? Yeah. And now it's a badge of pride. Or we don't even think about it as being fanatical anymore.

Well. It just means not necessarily. It certainly still is the case for some people and maybe even for this person. I don't know. But you can be a fan without being fanatical now in the modern usage. Anyway, would you like to know what Dear Abby wrote back? Oh, yeah. What was the advice?

Oh, my gosh. I forgot that she responds. That's the whole bit. Yeah. All right. Tell your sports-obsessed wife that while most husbands would be thrilled to be married to a gamer babe, she isn't married to one of them. Tell her you love her, but you are oversaturated with statistics and need her to dial it back. Explain that the portable TV in the bedroom is interfering with your sex life. And if she values your marital relationship,

she will respect that. Don't wait. Take your stand now before baseball season starts again. P.S. In self-defense, arm yourself

with new interests of your own because I have a feeling you are going to need them. I don't know what that means. I guess she doesn't think this is going to go over that well.

Not a passing fad for a new gamer babe. Right. I mean, sometimes, look, people grow apart. That's why there are divorces, right? Sometimes you get suddenly obsessed with baseball after 25 years of marriage and the other person doesn't. And it's just irreconcilable differences. But I hope this is reconcilable. I think it could be.

Either her enthusiasm will fade out or maybe he can meet her halfway somehow. Or I hope that she finds her people and finds a community, right? Because she doesn't necessarily, I mean, she doesn't have to inflict this on her husband if he's not that into it. There are many other outlets for that, right? So she could just become a poster. She can get in our Facebook group or our Discord group. She can find some giant fan community, right? I mean, maybe that would send her even deeper down the rabbit hole, but that would be an outlet at least where she could express these emotions and interests and not subject her partner to them in quite as acute a way. Yeah. She needs to find an online community because that is always a perfectly healthy space. Exactly. It's never any problems. No. Yeah.

Like, you know, it's not a realistic expectation of another person to say you're going to satisfy all of my emotional needs. Like, and admitting that is not saying like and that means i don't love you that's not what that means it's just a reality of human beings like it's good to have multiple emotional feeders as it were right you know so you still have to negotiate these things within the course of a relationship but i don't know we're learning a lot about what meg thinks about being in love ben yep all right. Being in love. Well, we could start a Dear EW column where people write in with their baseball-related relationship questions. Maybe. Maybe not.

Maybe we've already done some of that. Anyway, glad to get your take on that for striking out in San Francisco's sake. Oh, man. What if, like, I just, I don't know. Like, it's weird to say I hope it works out for them because, again, here's a Meg take on love. Like, you know, sometimes relationships don't have to last forever to have been successful. But, you know, if they want to have a-

They've had 25 years of ideal marriage. That's great. Regardless of what happens now. Yeah. That's something. Yeah. But, like, you know, if what they are aiming for is coming together again, then, you know, I hope it works out for them. Yes.

Stressful. So later on this episode, we will be joined by Mike Petriello of MLB.com, who has been doing some analysis on the upcoming limitations on defensive positioning, the so-called shift ban, and how that may affect certain hitters and not affect other hitters. So we're going to talk to him about that and just about the league-wide effect that those new rules, that rule and all of the other new rules may have and what his feelings about them are and what we can expect from StatCast in 2023 and more. A bit of banter and stat blast before we get there. First, I guess we should celebrate the fact that Andrew McCutcheon, once and present and future Pittsburgh Pirate, he's back in Pittsburgh. This is great. Yeah. I want to take a moment because we have had our things to say about the Pittsburgh Pirates. And I will say a lot of them have not been positive. I love this so much.

This feels like a, I don't know if we know the terms of this deal yet. One year, five million. That's, yeah, take a, yeah, bring back a hero, a guy who meant so much to that franchise. Also, I think that maybe the Suspitous guys pointed this out on Twitter. Like, the Pirates have very quietly assembled a really just good group of veteran clubhouse guys. And I don't think that any of them in isolation or even maybe in concert are going to end up moving the needle all that much for Pittsburgh.

I don't think that they're at a point where they're going to really challenge even for a wild card spot. But they got a lot of good dudes for the young guys, really good culture guys. And they still have some baseball left in them, too. I don't want to disparage it too much in the other direction. But they have McCutcheon. They got Rich Hill. They have Santana, they have G-Man Choi, they have Austin Hedges, right? Like just guys who it feels like a good veteran backbone to like set a culture tone. I don't mean that like the last year's clubhouse culture has been wanting. I have no idea if it

was, but this is just, I like this piece of it. I want Pittsburgh to get to a place where we really are like, no, you gotta, now you really have to spend money. You got this great young group, you know, but if they either aren't there yet or refuse to be like, this is a good way for them to deploy resources that I think, you know, we're not going to see every night in the box score, but that we'll do some good stuff. So, you know, all of my prior criticisms still stand. But today I say, well done, Pirates. Yeah, I'm legitimately hyped for the hype video. Oh my gosh, we're going to get a good one.

I'm excited. I'm excited for the folks on that team you know on the on the social media and pr team because i'm sure they're like oh we got it you know think about how many great mccutchen highlights they're going to get to watch in the next day as they put together that hype video how can you pick amongst them they'll have to watch so many yeah oh we have to do with vince velasquez and now we have rich hill and Andrew McCutcheon falling to our laps. So yeah, this is great. I wish that this sort of thing would happen more often. And you see players, of course, will do the ceremonial signing with a team like to retire should be some sort of financial incentive for this to happen. There should be some sort of fund where just the reunion, the end of career reunion for a player who meant a lot to a franchise and that fan base should just extra incentive to the team

to sign him and for the player to sign there again. I guess by default, there sort of is in the sense that the Pirates have more incentive to sign him because they might actually sell some tickets from pirates fans who are happy to see Andrew McCutcheon again. And that means they could maybe offer Andrew McCutcheon more money. I mean, I know they're still the pirates, but in theory, that would mean that they could offer him more money than someone else might be willing to. Plus, he gets to go back there and get the adulation of everyone. So maybe there already is some incentive for this to happen. But I'm just happy that it has. And also happy that I don't think we drafted in the baseball Twitter draft.

But one of the great things about baseball Twitter is that Andrew McCutcheon sometimes will just tweet furries. Just no context. I think he's done it three times. But each time the context has been that there was a furry convention where he was because there's a regular annual furry convention in Pittsburgh. And when that's going on, he will just tweet furries. Not everyone knows why he's tweeting furries. So he did that, I think, back in 2014 or something was a well-known one. And then I think he happened to be in Pittsburgh as a visiting player when the furry convention was happening recently. But I checked and the furry convention Anthrocon is taking place from June 29th to July 2nd this year.

The pirates are home. So I think we can look forward to a furries tweet potentially from Andrew McCutcheon. Wait, it's called Anthrocon? Anthrocon, yes. Oh, boy. Wow. You know, again, not here to judge. I'm just, that's, I don't know. I'm a little surprised

by that. That's what it's called. Anthrocon. They should call it, I don't know. Your Google is going to be goofy for a little while. Maybe. And a couple other minor transactions, NOS transactions. Speaking of older guys being back, although much older in this case, Nelson Cruz back for one more rodeo here with the Padres. Just a one-year, $1 million deal. And he gets reunited with Juan Soto, I suppose. I saw someone suggest that maybe Juan Soto has a clause that you have to sign Nelson Cruz wherever he is so that you cannot make Juan Soto DH because Nelson Cruz will be doing that. Although I guess Juan Soto was a gold glove

nominee, right? That was the thing? That was the meme that happened? So maybe he's not- that did happen yeah yeah in danger of dhing soon but can't if nelson cruz is there and matt carpenter and yeah man the padres they just they're fun they just they have a lot of really notable players whether they're still good or not they're just players i enjoy and speaking of clubhouse presence and mental types, Nelson Cruz is the ultimate. Even if he's not on the team anymore, he's still mentoring Louisa Rice with the twins. So I don't know what he has left as a hitter. I'm always seduced by the eye surgery, like the LASIK surgery guys. And I know that there have been some studies that have suggested that

it's hardly a slam dunk that you get LASIK and suddenly you hit better. And I don't know that there have been some studies that have suggested that it's hardly a slam dunk that you get LASIK and suddenly you hit better. And I don't know that that's what he got. But as the season was ending, he said that he was going to have some sort of eye surgery because he was having some inflammation that was blocking his vision and that it had been affecting him for the past year and a half, which just so happened to be when he stopped hitting so well. So there is at least a narrative you could cling to to suggest that there might be a little left there. It just like seeing is so important for a hitter. I had LASIK and it's really, I mean, it's been transformative for me. It was, I don't know, it was like 10 years ago or something at this point. And just one of the great decisions that I made was to overcome some apprehension about eye stuff and lasers in my eyes to get that done. In your defense, that feels like a deeply rooted logical apprehension, you know? But to not have to wear glasses or contacts for that span of time has been awesome and amazing and life-changing for me.

And I don't even have to see that well to impact my performance. Whereas a hitter, that's everything. So sometimes it's just upgrading already good vision to otherworldly fighter pilot vision. But if he couldn't see that well and suddenly he can see again, it at least suggests, I don't know, maybe. So father time is undefeated, I know, even though he fought him to a sandstill for some years. But who knows?

Maybe. And it's obviously just a small financial commitment. And the Padres have a lot of hitters and a lot of people who could potentially DH, I suppose. So it's a fun little flyer. It's the sort of thing where I continue to wonder just how many roster spots the Padres have. Yeah, I know.

Do they have extra ones? I think they might have an extra one. You know, they might. They might have a spare that they are being allowed. I guess Carpenter can play other positions, theoretically. So there's that. But I don't know. It's like, yeah, too many cooks, too many padres.

I don't know. It's weird. I guess some of them end up having just injuries befall them and suspensions befall them. And then they're happy that they had too many padres because then they have just the right amount of padres after that. The exact correct number of dads. Yes. And lastly, I suppose, unless you have Shintaro Hujinami thoughts, the Dodgers have reacquired Miguel Rojas. I forgot that Miguel Rojas was ever a Dodger. Yeah, I had to.

Because it's been a really long time. Yeah. Speaking of getting guys back, by the way, I guess the only way the Pirates could bring down the mood is that they traded McCutcheon for Brian Reynolds. Right. And now Brian Reynolds wants out. So if they bring back McCutcheon just in time to trade Reynolds, I guess that would put a damper on the situation. But they were maybe going to do that anyway. So at least you have Andrew McCutcheon.

But the point is, Miguel Rojas was once a Dodger. And I think he was like a minor league free agent guy, I think. He was like the Reds signed him as an amateur free agent. And then I think the Dodgers maybe took him as a minor league free agent. And then he was with them briefly. And then they traded him, gosh, eight years ago now in that big deal with D. Strange Gordon and Dan Heron and Austin Barnes and Chris Hatcher and Andrew Heaney and Enrique Hernandez, Quique Hernandez. That was also the Miguel Rojas deal. And he's been with the Marlins ever since. So now he's back and he's certainly not Trey Turner. No, but he's not bad. No, I mean, as we noted,

he was the lone qualified Marlins hitter, qualified for the batting title. And he's a really good fielder. And he did not hit last year, but he had wrist stuff going on and maybe still has wrist stuff going on. So I don't know whether he'll hit or not, but a stopgap, I guess, and a good glove guy.

So a one for one for Jacob Amaya. Yeah, I do find this to be a little bit of a head scratcher. And I want to caveat that by acknowledging that it is, as we are recording Friday the 13th, oh, Spooky Ben. And so there's off-season remaining. Who knows what other moves might go on? But we had heard a lot about Los Angeles wanting to stay below the first luxury tax threshold

so that they could reset their penalties in potential anticipation of really going hard, say at Otani this coming off-season. And that goal was made more difficult in a self-inflicted way by them being on the hook for a good deal of Trevor Bauer's salary. They will now be on the hook for that, right? Because he is just a free agent. He is on the market, as it were. And acquiring Rojas makes that harder to do, to stay below that luxury tax threshold. In fact, I think we have them slightly over now officially at Fangraphs, if I recall correctly.

And so it's like, if you were going to go over anyway, right? Like why not go over in a way that feels more sort of targeted and intentional? Like I have spent a good amount of time talking about, and so have you, and so have other guests on this podcast, how they manage to really deftly manage their payroll, and they have years where they are over, and they're comfortable with that. They make big, splashy decisions, and then they dip under like they were going to this year,

and then they're in a they were going to this year and then they're in a better position to spend more later and you know it could be that they just ended up backed in a corner but it had seemed as if their assessment going into the offseason was we're higher on gavin lux as a shortstop than the rest of the industry we're defying consensus there we're fine with him as like one of the guys we're gonna let some of the other young dudes sort of find their way and see how it goes. And then they went over for Miguel Rojas and like Miguel Rojas is a fine player. They might have been over a little bit before they made that trade actually, but he's like a fine player and he definitely gives them a ton more flexibility on the infield than they had before. But if you're going to go over, is that the way you want to go over?

Like acquiring Miguel Rojas for a good prospect and an infield prospect to boot, right? So I have a little head scratch when it comes to the Dodgers. I don't know if I want to give them as much credit or benefit of the doubt as I usually do when it comes to how they sequence this stuff and think about their payroll, just because it does feel like there's a little bit of maybe a bit of fumbling that went on here. And maybe it's as simple as they were just really, really sure that they weren't going to be on the hook for Bauer and then his suspension got reduced.

But that seems like a bad miscalculation. I don't know, Ben. I'm a little, I'm a little, I'm scratching various parts of my face. You know, my chin and my, do you, your chin, it's a chin scratcher, head scratcher. I guess those are sort of the same thing. Yeah. Your chin's part of your head. It's part of your head.

Technically. It's on there, you know. I think so. It's right there. I'm banging on it right now. Going bum, bum, bum. Yeah. Usually you probably of your head. Technically. It's on there. You know. I think so. It's right there. I'm banging on it right now. Going bum bum bum. Usually you probably scratch the top of it I would say. But you scratch the bottom

of it too. Effectively wild. We'll talk to Mike a little later about the Dodgers and how the shift rules could impact their position and the edge that they might have there. But there's also been some news and we will talk to Mike a little later about the Dodgers and how the shift rules could impact their position and the edge that they might have there. But there's also been some news, and we will talk to Mike about the announcement about the RoboZone. And this circulated this week because I think ESPN

reported it. I believe Hannah Kaiser of Yahoo Sports had previously reported it last week. You are correct. And it didn't get as much attention. But they're going to be using the RoboZone in AAA in every park in 2023. And it sounds like they will use two different systems and they'll use one and then they'll switch to the other and they'll see what the difference is maybe. But they're just going to be using the full-on RoboZone for part of the time. And then the other part of the time they will use the challenge system. And Hannah wrote a really interesting article about the impact that a full robozone at least would have on the catching position and catcher defense, which we have certainly talked about.

And she spoke to a couple of catching coordinators and, you know, they said all the usual things about how there's a lot that catchers have to handle, and they worry that this would dramatically change the position and it would make it so that defense is not much of a priority for catchers. And, you know, there are some upsides and some downsides. But one really interesting part of this that I had not considered is that there could be some gaming of the challenge system that goes on. is that there could be some gaming of the challenge system that goes on. And I don't know whether you saw anything along these lines in Arizona when you saw the challenge system in action. So quoting here from Tucker Frawley, who is the Minnesota Twins catching coordinator,

he says the challenge system is an upgrade over the full-blown ABS. In fact, Hannah writes, Frawley sees a future in which a challenge system could actually enhance the importance of framing. In fact, Hannah writes, So Frawley says the catcher is now tasked with not only tricking the umpire, but also the hitter in the box and honestly, the dugout as a whole. Because while you can't challenge from the dugout, sometimes there's going to be some guys there that give you the heads up that it's clearly down or clearly up. You're not just tricking the guy behind you, but also the guy in front of you and the players to your right or left. you, but also the guy in front of you and the players to your right or left. And Tom Tango of MLB.com quoted this on Twitter and made the point that this could affect where a catcher sets up and how he receives the pitch.

Because on the one hand, if you still have some partial framing ability because it's a challenge system, it's not full ABS, then you do still have to set up in the usual place you would think and try to receive the pitch in a way that makes it look like a strike but tom said imagine the catcher sets up way inside and you get a pitch that is in the strike zone but that the catcher has to dart out to catch by major exaggeration the umpire correctly calls a strike. Then the batting team is like, tap your head to the hitter, right? The batting team is like, oh, he had to move so much, you should challenge, right? Because they saw all that glove movement or body movement, but that was actually deceptive because the pitch was in the strike zone. So then they burn

a challenge there. And if the umpire is also fooled by the catcher's body movement and incorrectly calls that a ball, even though it was in the strike zone, then the catcher can just tap his head and get the challenge and the call will immediately be reversed. And if your challenge is upheld, then you don't lose the challenge. Right. So you have nothing to lose. So you have nothing to lose. So Tom is suggesting that the old practice of not darting out to receive a pitch could become the new practice of do darting out to receive a pitch. Catchers will play a game of dare, he suggests, because you're trying to fool the hitter, you're trying to fool the dugout, and you have nothing to lose because you can always challenge if it was in the strike zone. So we might see some shenanigans, I guess. I don't know if this is good or bad, but some extra just like strategy and kind of mind games that might go on. But then I guess you also have to think about the pitcher and the target that you're setting up, right? So if you set up way inside, but you actually wanted to pitch in the strike zone, can the pitcher still hit that target? Will it affect the control or command? so there's a lot of considerations here yeah i am so excited

ben i didn't see a lot of that gamesmanship i mean there were some but you know a lot of it seemed to be pretty clearly initiated like from the the hitter himself rather than in consultation with the dugout and you know you got to move quick on this stuff right so there is sort of a natural time limit to how much like jawing and back and forth there can be but yeah like this is why it's this is one of the reasons it's cool right like it's an ancillary benefit because the real the real meat on the bone to argue in favor of the challenge system is that it allows you to address egregious miscalls so that a game doesn't end because of a really bad miscall, but it preserves sort of a probabilistic understanding of the strike zone, which I think is how we, you and I tend to think of the strike

zone, right? It maintains a lot of the benefits I think fans don't really think about in terms of like, you know, an umpire subconsciously keeping a batter or a pitcher in an at bat in a way that ends up being pleasing. You know, it does all of those things. And like, that's good. And, you know, I think allows us to reap the benefits of the system without being overly dependent on it in a way that I think the tech doesn't really support right now. But also it gives us a cool thing to talk about, Ben.

And so that's going to be fun. Yeah. Yeah. The piece by Hannah mentions that in the Arizona Fall League, only a third of challenges were successful, which was lower than what it was in the minors. But even in the minors, it was still fewer than half of challenges were successful. So it can be tough to tell.

Of course, players might get better at challenging over time as they learn the contours of the automated zone. So, yeah, it's a lot to analyze. All right. Another little follow up. We talked about the Tigers fence changes in Comerica Park. They're moving in the center field fence and they're lowering other fences. And the effects of that will be fairly modest. And Tiger's president of baseball operations, Scott Harris, he said, we feel it's very dispiriting for a hitter to barrel a ball to dead center and make it a 419 foot out.

And so if a few more of those end up being homers or extra base hits, we feel it'll have a positive impact on our hitter's psyche and ultimately a positive impact on our team. So they're doing it more for the psychology of it than for the direct effect, it sounds like. He said they did a study and they found that it would have a modest impact on home runs and run scoring without changing the profile of the park, which is a pitcher's park, but not an extreme pitcher's park. It's just an extreme home run pitcher's park, basically. Right. It's a real, real big outfield. Right. And Tango noted that the most batted ball outs on barrels by far were at Comerica. And the difference between Comerica and Kauffman, number two, was the same as the difference between Kauffman and the league average. And Comerica was the only park whose Woba on 400 plus foot batted balls was below its ex-Woba, where you end up feeling like,

I got jobbed here. And Miguel Cabrera did, in fact, do Instagram comments about how he was like, he was like, finally. That's great. Yeah. And he said he might play a few more years now, Oh, that's great. Yeah. And he said he might play a few more years now or he might want to play a few more years. So, yeah, that was amusing. But someone else on Twitter just looked at all the close batted balls and found that, according to his analysis, Chris Brown, this was that 12 homers would have been hit last year that were not hit because of where the fences were. And again, there might be more home run robberies. So that balances out the fact that we're getting more homogenous dimensions and maybe fewer of other extra base hits. Tango estimated that 12% more homers would be hit there now. So it'll still be below average, but not the hardest park to hit homers in. But the reason why I bring this up again is that former Effectively Wild guest Evan Woodbury, who covers the Tigers, he reported that the fences were not actually where they were supposed to be. Yeah, because when I read about this, or I guess they were where they were supposed to be, but it wasn't labeled correctly. Because what confused me when I first read this was that they said that they were moving the center field fence in 10 feet, but that the new depth would be 412 feet.

And the label, the paint out there, said 420. If it was 420 and they were moving it in by 10 feet, then it should be 410, but it will be 412. And the reason for that, according to Evans' reporting, is that they determined that the fence was not actually at 420. It was at 422, according to, quote, highly accurate laser measurements. And also the... I'm sorry.

I don't know why I felt that's so funny. Of course, but like, that's funny. Yeah. And left field, which is labeled 345, they're not moving left field, but it's going to be relabeled as 342 because the highly accurate laser measurements determined that it was actually at 342. So the dimensions were two or three feet off. And you hear this kind of thing about like olden days baseball, about how like maybe

it wasn't that precise or they just like paced out the difference or maybe it was even deceptive and they were trying to hide the real distances or something. Comerica Park is not like ancient olden days park and they have moved the fences before, I believe, since that park opened. So this just makes you think, what can we trust if we cannot trust those numbers out on the outfield fences? And I think Mike Petriell, when we were about to talk to him, he made the point on Twitter that some people get up in arms if StatCast says that the estimated distance was something and the fence distance is shorter than that and it looks like it should have been out, but it wasn't. And people questioned StatCast. And of course, StatCast could be slightly off too, but maybe the fence is not actually as deep as it purports to be. So who knows? Who knows how much leeway there is here? We need a full inspection. We need highly accurate laser measurements of every ballpark immediately.

Yeah. I mean, like, you know, and if you, in theory, you can just keep having the distance between yourself and the outfield wall and never reach it, Ben, you know, so that's something to also consider. Just asymptotically approach the outfield wall. Yeah. Tiny, tiny. Another follow up is about the famous chicken tenders of the Toronto Ritz Carlton that may have played some small role in inducing Brandon Pelt to side there or at least made him happy that he would be in closer proximity to the tenders. We got an email about this, a personal testimonial from listener Brian, who wrote in to say, wedding. The ceremony and reception were both at the Ritz-Carlton. Adults were probably fed some sort of steak with port reduction or whatever, and the kids ate chicken tenders. At the time, and with my 10-year-old palate, I greatly appreciated the tenders, and through the years, I have thought of them more than once as a sort of ideal version of chicken tenders. I still

remember them today. All of this is to say that while we are missing a ton of data between 1988 and 2022, it could be that the Toronto Ritz's chicken tenders have been good for a very long time. So I don't know if there's continuity in the tenders or if it's the same person making the tenders or with the same recipe all along. But at least according to Brian's memory from many years ago, the tenders were great then. They're great now. Nothing has changed. I imagine the price has increased. So I looked up the menu and they are listed for $25. Now that is $25 Canadian dollars, which is $18.64 US according to the current exchange

rate. And they come with French fries and plum sauce. So I don't know if that's a great price for tenders or not, but these are not your average tenders. These are special tenders and it's open late and they taste so great that I guess you pay whatever they ask. So they're asking $25 Canadian dollars. Wow. Okay. This could be like the avocado factor that Sam used to talk about where he would suggest that free agents should sign somewhere because if they really like avocados, they got to go somewhere where the avocados are good. And I was contending you can get good avocados anywhere or wherever. He's kind of a fruit snob as a Californian. And I was suggesting that in this global society we have maybe the regional differences are not so marked and you can get good food of most cuisines in any major league city, but the Toronto Ritz-Carlton chicken tenders are only them potentially. So we got an email from Matt,

who noted this little mention in a hockey article, but would have a similar impact if there is an impact on the Jays. And this is from Sportsnet. With the arrival of 2023 came a new Canadian law banning non-residents from buying homes until 2025. There are exceptions, such as Canadian citizens who live elsewhere, refugees, and workers on temporary visas, as long as they've filed taxes in Canada three of the past four years. And the person writing this article noted that in hockey, as in baseball, many entry-level players would rent, so it wouldn't have a huge impact for them or for someone who signs a short contract or gets traded later on in a long-term deal. But potentially, if the Blue Jays were to sign someone now to a very long deal or next offseason, let's say,

that player could not buy a house. If Brandon Belt wants to buy a house as close to the Toronto Ritz-Carlton as he can so he can get access to the tendies, he could not do that. He could not. As a non-resident, he can't buy a home. He can't just set up shop and plant his roots next to the tenders until 2025. So I would guess this wouldn't be a significant disincentive because if you're signing a really long-term deal, this is only until 2025 and probably they wouldn't be signing anyone to a really long-term deal at least until next season who's not already playing there. And if you are, you're probably on a temporary visa or you would be renting anyway if it's just a short-term arrangement. So it's probably not that big a deal, but you would be renting anyway if it's just a short-term arrangement.

So it's probably not that big a deal. But you can put it up there with the bagged milk and whatever else is just another thing that might make it slightly harder for the Blue Jays to sign someone than other teams. Yeah, like there's definitely, you know, it's another source of friction. But I think that when you're, you know, if you're playing in the part of the rental market that he is, it's probably fine. It's probably fine. Yeah. And one more follow-up. This is from Paul, who wrote in, we were talking the other day about the idea that we tend to look at things from the batter's perspective, and we talk about baseball from the batter's perspective. And Russell Carlton brought this up in his forthcoming book, The New Ball Game.

And Paul wrote, I was very interested in the discussion in episode 1950 of why we see the game from the perspective of the batter rather than from the perspective of the pitcher. It got me thinking about baseball metaphors or idioms. I suspected that more of them were batter-centric than pitcher-centric, and it looks like I'm right. Wikipedia's glossary of idioms derived from baseball has 73 unique entries. Of those, 38 are from the perspective of the batter. Compare that to only six from the perspective of the pitcher, three from the base runner, and three from the fielder. I classified 23 as other, for example, inside baseball or out of one's league. So he

actually made a Google sheet here, which I will share. And, you know, like we talked about the defense robbing a hit the other day and how you could actually say, well, the batter wasn't any more entitled to that hit. Why do we frame it that way? But for example, like from the perspective of a pitcher, you know, he has a few terms on here, a beanball, a brushback, a closer, a pitch, a shutout, relief pitcher, screwball, or the fielder. You have cover ones, bases, out of left field, triple play, but just a much longer list of hitter-related idioms, heavy hitter and four-bagger. And we actually got a pedantic email the other day about whether we can still say four-bagger because there are not four bags, right? The plate is just a plate. Plus, none of them is really a bag anymore, right? They're all

bases. But I said, you know what? I like four-bagger. That's a fun term. Yeah, it's a good... Yeah, I agree. I said, you know what? I like four-bagger. That's a fun term. Yeah, it's a good—yeah. But anyway, Paul documented this and backed up Russell and said, what do you think accounts for this level of difference? I suspect it's that we often feel we are reacting rather than creating action in life, but I'm open to any other ideas. And I told him what Russell said and what I mentioned on the show, which, you know, he said baseball is a points game. So I naturally described the way in which baseball's points are scored. You can't score if your team is pitching, but also sports and its fans are products of the culture that

produces them. And the batter is the hero on a quest. There are brave hero stands alone in the right-handed batter's box with a simple wooden weapon and must face 98 miles per hour fastballs and elude nine different monsters in an attempt to both hit the ball and make it to the next station unscathed. The hero's journey is the storyline to every non-sports video game I played and every movie that I saw growing up. So I instinctively viewed the game of baseball from the batter's box because the batter always feels like the hero in the story. I thought though, as I wrote back to Paul, I wondered whether it might have something to do with the fact that when they learn to play baseball, most people aren't pitchers, right?

Yeah. I wasn't a pitcher. I never pitched in any kind of competitive way. So my experience of baseball, my firsthand experience as a player is from the batter's box, which would be the case with most people, right? So I wonder if that has something to do with it. Because then Paul wrote back and because he said he feels like the pitcher has just as much of a hero's journey as the batter, because, you know, you have to get past Ricky Henderson and then face Mark McGuire, and you have to figure out how to do it several times, or at least you used to. And if you make a mistake, you have friends who can help you win on defense or at bat against an adversary.

It's a longer journey with more diverse adversaries than a batter faces. However, he was a pitcher when he grew up and he said in his brief baseball career, he couldn't hit a lick and he could pitch with reasonable control. So he often found himself on the mound and only found success and enjoyment there. So maybe that's why he looks at it from the pitcher's perspective. And most people look at it from the batter's perspective. That's a theory, at least. I think that that's a very compelling explanation. I think that all of this stuff kind of goes into the soup, as it were. But I find that to be a quite compelling explanation. It's like how people who play youth soccer seem to like soccer more than I do. I think your early exposures in particularly when they're firsthand tend to be

pretty formative. And you're right. Most little kids, I don't pitch. When do you even start pitching in little league? It's later, right? Because you're just doing- Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're hitting off the tee for the first part of it, right? Yeah, coach pitch or whatever, yeah. Right, so I think that that's a, you know, it doesn't explain all of it, but I bet that that's a prevalent ingredient

in the soup, right? Or, you know, if we want to use a cooking metaphor, so it's like there's a lot of pickles in the big baby salad, right? And these are those pickles. Yes, exactly. If you're a Patreon supporter,

I don't sound unhinged. Well, maybe I do. You learn a lot about my culinary habits beyond Brussels sprouts. I've thought a lot about that salad. I think about that salad at least once a week since you told me about it. And well, I'll save my feedback for the next time we do a Patreon episode. But I have further thoughts now, Ben. You know, I have more thoughts. I sent you a photo of it the last time I made one. I know. And then I realized I had forgotten to put the tomatoes in,

so I was missing an ingredient. Anyway, one last- One of the 90 that are in the Big Baby South. Yes. Topic the last is we got just a few more suggestions in our ongoing Ways Baseball is Weird and Different and Possibly Unique series. I've lost track of how many there are now. We need like an Effectively Wild wiki page to keep track of all these. Yeah, just to do these.

I'll just do a lightning round here. I'll read you a few nominations and you can tell me whether you think these are legitimate additions to the canon. So here is one suggestion from listener and Patreon supporter James, who says in baseball, the offense and defense have mandatory differences in equipment. Other sports that have separate offense and defense either have no equipment, basketball, soccer, dodgeball, or the offense and defense have the same equipment, hockey, football, lacrosse. Baseball famously has bats for offense and gloves for defense. Yeah, that is a difference. I think that's a pretty good one. I'll have to think about whether there are exceptions. There are always other sports that might have something similar that don't come to mind immediately. But yeah, I think that's a pretty good one.

We'll add it to the list. All right. Another one from Shane, who says, one unique feature of baseball is that there are two distinct playing surfaces, dirt and grass, and starting in 2023, player positioning is restricted by these surfaces. I recognize that golf features multiple surfaces, but player positioning is not influenced by the surface. I mean, I guess it is if you hit into a sand trap or something or a lake and you have to stand in the pond. But we've talked about one of the differences being just the variety in dimensions, which is not unique but is unusual.

But the playing surfaces, the dirt and the grass, and I guess you could lump turf in with grass, I guess. It's the same sort of idea, even if it's different in practice. And that is unusual, right? I mean, in hockey, I mean, on a rink, you just it's all ice. It's all ice. Basketball, it's all a court and football is all grass, right? So to have two distinct surfaces that are on certain parts of the field and impact play and even determine positioning to some extent. Again, like I'm sure there are some similarities here, but, you know, soccer, it's just it's all it's grass all the way down.

Right. How do we think about platform diving, Ben? Right. Because like the surface you're diving into uniform. But you're starting on the platform. Yeah. Good point. And it does matter. Is it a good point, Ben? I think it is. I was going to just say that to yes and you, but also I think it might be because it matters

how you leave the board, but it also matters how you enter the water. Yeah. My anxiety during the Olympics is very familiar with that concept. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll take this one into consideration. And then the last one was from listener Steven and a fellow Patreon supporter who suggests, in the line of baseball is different because it's different. Players get ejected for arguing balls and strikes, slamming their helmets down too close to the umpire, even just saying choice words can get you ejected. In soccer, you can get a yellow card for dissent, but I've never

heard of a sending off because of it. In basketball, you can get a technical foul, you can foul out, but not just one outburst and you're gone. But in baseball, some person can be like, leave, you're being mean mean and you have to go. Is there anything else like that in sports? I'm sorry. I really want every umpire to now say, leave, you're being mean. Yep. We've talked, I think, about baseball is weird because it's the coaches and managers wear the same thing as the players.

And also the players wear pants and belts. And also just the managers and the coaches trespass onto the field they come onto the field during the game but this is one i hadn't really considered like i assume that most refs in other sports have the power to just eject someone because they feel like it or because they didn't like what they said to them but maybe it's not a norm to the same extent or it would be looked on as an abuse of power, which it is if you have an ump show situation. But it's accepted that there are certain things you can and can't say. So it's unusual, I suppose, probably. Well, I think it is.

But I do think it's important to acknowledge that there does tend to be, I think, an escalation to the point of ejection in baseball like there are definitely guys who just either fall victim to an um show or who just really lose it and you know they throw their stuff they're mean and then they are asked to leave because they're being mean you know but often there's like back and forth back and forth between uh like say a batter and the home plate umpire over the course of several at-bats. And then it escalates to the point of like, get out of here, you're being mean. Right. Yeah. to the difference here is that that structure seems less formal and more subject to discretion

than it is in some other sports. I get that there's discretion in basketball when you're calling technical fouls and whatnot, but there seems to be a more regimented series of steps to the point of like, get out of here, you're being mean, right? Or like in football, for a player to be disqualified for doing something naughty, that tends to have a very set. Right. But you still have that as like a trump card in your back pocket if you're the referee or judge or whatever. Right. I'm trying to think like tennis is up there when it comes to famous tirades and arguing with line judges and chair umpires. And you can be fined for those things. to it but but it is odd that in baseball like in theory you're not even supposed to be able

to argue balls and strikes at all just just saying i think you made the wrong call there now in practice unless you right there's there's you know there's like a hey don't you have but you know like if you do it in the but i think you tend to get you get some leeway there. Right. But yeah, to have it like in the rules that you can't even argue or you're subject to ejection. Maybe historically this is because of all of the abuse that umpires have been subjected to. I mean, especially like in early baseball when they were afraid for their safety oftentimes and fans would rush the field and people would yell, kill the ump and all this stuff. You had to build in these protections and the players were very rowdy at the time. And so if they inflamed the passions of the fans

by arguing about things, then that might lead to fans piling on the umps. So maybe it's just for their own protection and for historical reasons. Anyway, I'm not quite as convinced of this one, but we'll toss it onto the pile. Yeah, I think there's something there, but it's just like a little more nuanced than, yeah, it's a little, there's some wrinkle to it. Okay. Lastly, I will close with a stat blast. Okay, so first I wanted to do a quick stat blast follow-up in honor of Brandon Belt leaving the

Giants, because way back on episode 1616, we did a stat blast about the most prolific put out tandems ever. So just one guy throws to another guy and it's the same guy. Just how many times did that happen? And it was just looking for assist and put out. So not anyone else involved in the play, like not a double play or anything, even if they were on the back end of the double play. It's just two parties involved, one assist, one put out, and it's the same players just as a prolific combo. We were talking about Brandon Crawford and Brandon Belt because they were the active leaders and they were ascending the all-time leaderboard. And at the time through 2020, they had 1,580 put outs as a tandem, and that ranked 34th all-time. So that stat blast was performed by former frequent stat blast consultant Adam Ott, who now works for the Guardians. And so I asked Ryan Nelson to just run an update on this. So this is kind of an assist from Adam Ott and a put out from Ryan Nelson here for this stat blast.

But they got a couple hundred more of these assists put outs over the past couple of seasons. So now Crawford and Belt have finished, presumably, unless they reunite again, with 1,766 all-time plays where the two of them teamed up for an out. And that now ranks 21st all-time. And I believe that they're way ahead of any other active duo. No one else is close to the top of the leaderboard, but the all-time leaders, as we mentioned at the time, Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell at 3,056, which is way up there. I don't know if that record will be broken, but Crawford to Bell is up there now. They are just behind the 20th place combo, the legendary duo of Alcides Escobar to Eric Hosmer. You could write poems about Escobar to Hosmer.

Sure, like as an exercise? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's Biggio to Bagwell, Lazeri to Gehrig, Bill Russell to Steve Garvey, Ryan Sandberg to Mark Grace, Pee Wee Reese to Gil Hodges. Those are the top five. I'll link to the old spreadsheet, but just wanted to let everyone know where Crawford and Belt finished. But the main stat blast here, this was something I had thought to ask Ryan about, but we actually got a question about it this week

from listener Mike, who said, Joe Posnanski noted in his newsletter this week that J.J. Hardy played every inning of his career at shortstop. That comes out to 13,386 and a third innings, all at short. I wanted to know, what's the most innings for a player who spent his entire career playing just one position? Or maybe if it's not a daunting task, what would be the answer for every position on the diamond? Most innings by someone who only played center

field, most for someone who only played first base, et cetera, et cetera. And I had read that same piece by Posnanski and had the same question and sent it to frequent stat boss consultant Ryan Nelson, who's on Twitter at rsnelson23. And so he dug into this. And then I got a further assist from Kenny Jacklin of Baseball Reference, who is a semi-regular StatBust consultant, because Baseball Reference had more complete data on this. Ryan was using RetroSheet, and RetroSheet is lacking some play-by-play info for early years, but Baseball Reference from the Chadwick Bureau has some season totals for players we don't have play-by-play for so that we can get complete innings totals.

So Kenny sent me a really handy-dandy spreadsheet, which I will share for everyone. But J.J. Hardy is certainly notable with his innings number at the same position for his entire career. He ranks 30th all-time, and that's pretty good. But there are 29 ahead of him. That's how that works. And this, actually, I wanted to look into this. Posnanski was writing about Hardy because Hardy is on the Hall of Fame ballot this year. And so is Scott Rowland, the only guy who might actually get in off of the BBWA ballot. And Scott Rowland is another all-time single position guy. He played every inning of his career at third base, and it was a lot of innings, 17,479 and a third. So Scott Rowland is actually

eighth all-time. And Fred McGriff, who just got into the Hall of Fame, he is actually fourth all-time at first base. He played 19,402 innings in the field all at first base. However, the top three is all shortstops, and it is Derek Jeter, Luis Aparicio, and Ozzie Smith. Hall of Famers all, as you would expect, I guess, if you stayed at shortstop that long. Now, there's a bit of a differential in the actual performance at shortstop between Jeter and Aparicio and Smith. But Jeter, 23,225 and two-thirds innings all at shortstop, surpassing Aparicio at 22,408 and two-thirds and Ozzie Smith at 21,785 and two thirds. Now I thought at first it's sort of strange that the hardest position to play would be the one that has the most prolific players at it, right? Like you'd think that they'd be more likely to have to move at some point and they'd

have more options for places to move to because if you could play shortstop, you can probably play almost anywhere. But I guess, first of all, Aparicio and Ozzy especially were just elite talents and were good at shortstop until the end of their careers, so they didn't really need to move. And then Jeter, not as much, but I guess it also becomes sort of a status thing at that point. It's like, hey, I'm the shortstop. I mean, it was for Jeter, clearly, and people who want to say, well, was he so selfless and a great team leader? Or was he kind of selfish, actually, because he kept playing shortstop even though he wasn't that great at it. And then they got A-Rod and he was better and A-Rod had to move, etc. So it was kind of a point

of pride for Jeter. And that's how he did it. But that is the answer. So I'll give you the top 10 is Jeter, Aio smith mcgriff lou whittaker another extremely underrated player who should be a hall of famer he spent all of his career at second base joe cool which is just the coolest name joe cool it's spelled k-u-h-e-l and i thought it's probably like cool hell or something you know not as fun as cool but no it is apparently cool. Joe Cool, like the Snoopy persona. So that's fun.

Yeah. Next is another first baseman, Jake Daubert, then Scott Rowan. As I mentioned, John Ulrud is next. Another favorite, underrated, quite close to Hall of Fame caliber, arguably Hall of Fame caliber player. And lastly, in the top 10, it's Chris Chambliss. And a lot of first basemen there below the shortstops. Actually, 11th all time is actually Elvis Andrus at shortstop. So he's moving up the list. And then AJ Pruszynski is after that. Now, there are two ways that you can

classify this. You could specify that when you're in the field, you can only have played one position, but you can have DH'd. Right. Or you can restrict it to people who never even DH'd. So whenever they played, or at least whenever they got innings, they always got innings. I guess there might still be pinch hitting and pinch running and that sort of thing. But you wouldn't be in the lineup as anything other than a player playing a defensive position. So if you do that, then that disqualifies Jeter because Jeter did DH. So that would leave Aparicio and Smith at the top of the all-time leaderboard. McGriff DH'd,

Whitaker DH'd, Joe Kuhl and Jake Daubert and Scott Rowland never DH'd actually. He was mostly an NL player. And Ulrud and Shambliss DH'd, as did Andrus, etc. So if you were to include the DH specification, then some other guys would creep into the top 10, like Bobby Doerr or Wally Pipp actually is on here. Famous for not playing. Yeah, I was going to say. For being displaced, right? Which is ironic, but he's actually one of the all-time. He had 16,049 innings at first base and never played any other position. And unfairly, everyone knows him for just not playing that day that Lugarig played and then getting displaced by Lou Gehrig. Or at least that's the popular conception of that.

But he was something of an Iron Man himself, I suppose. But he was just tethered to first base. And then Rick Farrell is on there. Larry Doyle, Willie Cam, Eric Karros. Actually, Eric Karros DH'd. The positions that stand out here are interesting because it's like short stops and then it's like first baseman it's like yeah opposite sides of the defensive spectrum so i mean i guess if you're a first baseman you have nowhere to go right other than dh or other than dh

yeah yeah maybe a an outfield corner or something like that you could yeah you might get shunted out to the left or something but right i am struck by the by the prevalence of big names on your list and you know some of that is like of course you can have a long great career when you're like literally a gamer but i i wonder you know you think about jeter i wonder if some of it too is that you're you know you're i don't want to place a value judgment on it but you're more likely to be deferred to, right? Like there's, there's more likely to be a seating of, of the way from another player who might, you know, potentially at points in your career make better sense defensively, but either isn't as big a name or is as big a name, but it doesn't have the same tenure on the team. You know, maybe I'm just talking about Derek Jeter. isn't as big a name or is as big a name but it doesn't have the same tenure on the team you know maybe i'm just talking about derrick jeter you know there's a possibility that all i really mean

here is jeter but i do wonder if you know part of it is you when you've had such an illustrious career you are maybe granted the grace of being able to kind of like go out on more of your own terms uh than than other players might be right yeah i mean he was the captain right even though i don't understand that distinction yeah yeah it's like and there are some guys who are just you know they barely missed because maybe they played another position for one game or something right. Like another guy on the Hall of Fame ballot. Currently, Jimmy Rollins played one game at second base. And in fact, I think a third of an inning he was at second base. Yeah.

So like barely one game. In 2002. And other than that, that was it. So he would have made the shortstop list, but he was disqualified there. So I think it's impressive when you do it. I mean, not that it makes Jimmy Rollins any worse because he played an out at second base one time. No, he's garbage now. Yeah.

I guess, obviously, if you're at the top of one of these leaderboards, you just played a lot, period. So you're probably pretty good. But it doesn't diminish you at all if you were a multi-position player. And I think that we will see that more and more often. It might be less and less common. It's less common to have a player be with the same team his whole career. It's probably less common to have a player be at one position his whole career because you have more multi-position players and more Zobris types and shorter benches.

So everyone's got to have a few different gloves and people come up now in the minors, they're playing four or five positions. It's just, it's looked at as the norm and you do have your Zobris and your Chris Bryant's and guys who are actually stars, but play multiple positions. So I think we've kind of shifted away. It's like not positionless baseball exactly, but a little less of the, I own this position and I will never move. Like it's okay. It's not an affront to play here or there, but like you have to, I guess a lot of, it's kind of

fluky that you would never in a very long career, if you have some defensive talent, just be shunted over because someone got hurt or someone needed a day off or you know it's it's easy to be removed from contention here yeah and i think that you know the way that teams think about it there's obvious value in having a true standout at a given position who can really sort of hold down the fort there in the field for years and years and years but you know i think we we view versatility as an asset to a player particularly if they are able to sort of play a couple of up the middle positions competently right where it's like oh well that guy's gonna have a long career because you know you you always need a guy who can shift over at a short stop in a pinch right like the

way that we're conceptualizing that i think is purely in the language of like it being a bonus or a positive attribute to a player's profile rather than, well, you know, he's kind of crummy everywhere, but you can hide him over there, you know, like that's a, it's a different thing now. Yeah. So quickly I'll give everyone the positional leaders. So shortstop, we've covered Jeter, Aparicio, Smith, Andrus, and Hardy. And of those guys, only Jeter and Andrus have DH'd. And then I named some first basemen, so I will give you the first base top five. Fred McGriff, Joe Kuhl, Jake Daubert, John Ulrud, and Chris Chambliss. And Ulrud and Chambliss were DHs at a certain point.

Then Will Clark and Derek Lee and Wally Joyner. This is a fun remember some guys kind of list. No kidding. Second base, I said Lou Whitaker was the leader. And then Bobby Doerr, Larry Doyle, Luis Castillo, and Frank Bolling and Glenn Hubbard of those only Whitaker ever DHed. Third base, so Scott Rowland, all-time leader and not particularly close, 17,479 in the third innings, I said. And the next guy, Willie Cam, is atado climbing the list. He's at fifth right now, although he has DH'd evidently. And then Kevin Kuzminoff is next, and he also DH'd. Sometimes

there's a big drop-off. There's a very large drop-off from Nolan Arenado to Kevin Kuzminoff, like in every possible way. But also in this way, it's like 11,655 and two thirds innings down to 5,633. Now, catcher, it's going to be fewer innings for the top guys, but still a lot. So AJ Pruszynski, real Ironman, 16,335 and a third. Rick Farrell, Ray Schoch, Bill Dickey, and Ernie Lombardi round out the top five. And only Pruszynski was a DH among those guys. Then we have the outfielder. So center field, it's Billy Hamilton, but not the new Billy Hamilton, the older Billy Hamilton. He's the leader at 13,876, followed by Brian McRae, who did DH.

Johnny Rucker, Byron Buxton is actually fourth on this list. Interesting. Yeah, who has DH'd. Would not have expected that. So old original brand, Billy Hamilton at 13,876. Byron Buxton only down at 4,436. So giant gap. But I guess if you're going to have Byron Buxton, why would you have him play anything else? He's really good at playing center field. So Tom Oliver is fifth. And then so the outfield corners, not as distinguished a group, really, because you don't typically think of someone as like, oh, yeah, he's a left fielder, like he owned left field. I mean, obviously there were guys who are known as good left fielders, but if they were

really good as left fielders, they probably played right or center at some point, at least. It's just a little more flexible, a little more transferable, a skill set. So the all-time leader for innings at left field without ever playing another defensive position, Chris Davis. Chris Davis. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. yeah wait which one though the the one who had the same batting average every year okay yeah KR as an aside it would have been kind of funny either way but like

that's what I assumed oh that's oh boy only 4209 innings so just not a lot you don't have any like I was only a left fielder. That's all I've ever done. And Chris Davis, of course, did DH. And then next up, Eloy Jimenez. Interesting. Down at 1,957. So I mean, if you're stuck at shortstop forever, other than maybe Jeter, who was at least perceived to be a good fielder by many people, you were probably a pretty good fielder. But in left field, not so much.

I guess it's kind of the, well, we got to stick him somewhere. And that's the least damage he could do unless we could teach him first base or something, which, as we know from Moneyball, is incredibly hard. Incredibly hard, Ben. Yeah, it goes Chris Davis, Eloy Jimenez, Willie Calhoun, Christian Stewart, Jordan Alvarez, Dan Thomas, all of those guys DH'd at some point. So the leader among people who only played left field and never DH'd is the immortal Napoleon Hairston. Hairston. Yeah, I guess of the famous Hairstons. There are a lot of Hairstons. I don't know if this Hairston is related to the other Hairstons. Yeah, I guess of the famous Hairstons. There are a lot of Hairstons.

I don't know if this Hairston is related to the other Hairstons, actually. But Napoleon Hairston, okay, Napoleon Hairston was a Pittsburgh Crawford of the Negro Leagues, the Negro National League. So if we wanted to keep it to only AL or NL, then it would be Bunny Roser, who played in 1922. Again, and these guys had fewer than 300 innings. So there just aren't really a lot of left field lifers, which I guess is not that surprising, probably. Who do you think of when you think of left field defense. I guess I would think of Barry Bonds, maybe. And Barry Bonds, he played 171 games in center and he played one time in right field, right? I mean, there are other great defensive left fielders, but they would have played something else at some point. All right. Last position then is the other corner right field. and this goes to harry lumley who played i think in the turn of the the 20th

century and uh he had 6029 innings in right field only and then the gap is is so big that the next highest total is say a suzuki after one season exclusively in right field for the Cubs, 905 and a third innings with a little DH-ing. But Vince Barton, George Washington, Oscar Gonzalez. Yeah, just it's notable that certain positions really have lifers and others do not. So really fun spreadsheet. Thanks to Ryan and Kenny for the help. And we will put this on the show page as always.

And I will just read you the pass blast. This is 1955, the episode and also the year that we are pulling this pass blast from. And it comes from Jacob Pomeranke, who is Sabre's Director of Editorial Content and Chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. He writes, 1955, head-hugging hats. The idea that batters should wear some form of protective headwear has been around for more than a century. But it wasn't until 1955 that the major leagues finally got around to requiring hitters to wear a helmet at the plate.

A series of high-profile beanings, including Carl Furillo of the Dodgers and Joe Adcock of the Braves, pushed National League owners to enact a rule requiring helmets after the 1955 season. But the rule was not without controversy. AL owners waited two and a half more years before finally making helmets mandatory in that league. Frank Gianelli, sports editor of the Arizona Republic, was one of many writers who tried to both sides the question of helmets. In this column from December 8th, 1955,

quote, the National League voted Tuesday to enforce batting helmets when men are at the plate. This could lead to the greatest session of mass nosediving in the history of baseball. Helmets are a great idea as skull insurance that give the batter a degree of safety and confidence. They also give the pitcher something to throw at. There's nothing so positive in loosening up a batter at the plate as a pitch zeroed in on his left nostril. After a couple of belly flops trying to gopher out of the way, a batter stands up there shaky as jello and three feet from the plate. Objectors to helmets have feared they would encourage pitchers to brush back hitters if they thought batters were fully protected. Joe Adcock, Milwaukee first baseman, certainly is a disciple of safety.

He still fondly displays a dented helmet. He credits with saving his life the day he was hit on the head in Brooklyn in 1954. I think Branch Rickey had done some earlier helmet introduction and other people had experimented with it before it was adopted and required on a league-wide level. Jacob concludes, a few months later, a batting helmet may have also saved the life of Don Zimmer. The Dodgers infielder, who had already suffered a near-fatal beaning in the minor leagues, was hit in the head for a second time on June 23, 1956. He missed three months of the season with a concussion and fractured cheekbone. But Zimmer recovered and went on to a long career as a manager and coach over the next 50 years. And it's one of those things that you figure, how did they ever not do this? I mean, I guess everything has to be invented at some point.

And of course, they didn't throw quite as hard in those days, but really should have had helmets probably required before 1955. People got hurt in some serious ways before that. But it was not, I think, an unreasonable caveat, I think, that the idea that pitchers would maybe be a little less wary of throwing in on guys if they felt they were more protected. There's something called the Peltzman effect, which is, I think, specifically having to do with seatbelts in cars. If you have a seatbelt, drivers will maybe be just riskier drivers because they feel more protected. So you'd like to have everyone think, okay, great, I'm safer have risky riding behavior because they figure my brains are a little less likely to get scrambled if something bad does happen here, which is sort of silly, I guess. But that is how the human psyche works. Yeah.

Although the human head also gets smacked around pretty good when it flies off a bicycle. So on balance, you probably wear a helmet. Oh, yeah. Definitely do. It's still absolutely worthwhile pretty good when it flies off a bicycle. So on balance, you probably wear it. Oh, yeah, definitely do. It's still absolutely worthwhile to wear the helmet. But I take your point. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break. And we'll be back with Mike Petriello of MOP.com to talk about the shift in defensive positioning and the impact of new rules changes in one.

All right, we are joined now by our pal Mike Petriello of MLB.com, who is here primarily to talk about the impact of the shift or the shift ban, quote unquote, in 2023. Hello, Mike. Hello. Happy to be here. Happy to have you here. So we have not been, I think, the highest on the shift band, just in terms of rule changes we would like to see or would not like to see. Mostly, I think, boiling down to two reasons. One, just some philosophical objection to telling people what they can't do. This has never really been a thing other than

pitchers and catchers, I guess. And so limiting fielders in that way was something that made me kind of queasy, at least at first. And then secondly, I guess, was the idea that if the underlying problem is a lack of contact, maybe, which stems probably primarily from pitchers just all being wizards at this point, then maybe there would be other rules changes that would be more expeditious if you want to address the root cause of that problem. But am I right in thinking that your thinking on this has evolved somewhat to think more positively and look more favorably upon these new limitations on where people can and can't stand? I think that's a little bit true. I'm with you that I've generally been very much against this

idea. And I know people think, well, you write for the league's website, you have to promote every idea. No, I've said it many times on many platforms. I was not in favor of this idea for all the reasons that you outlined, Ben. And as I thought about it, the reason that my thinking has evolved on this, I guess, is just kind of comes back to there's nothing I like in baseball more than great sources of content. And this is going to be fun to watch. I may not like it. It may not matter for the reasons that you said, like pitchers are wizards. But there's a lot of interesting content you can get out of it. You can try to look ahead and see who's going to be affected. And we are all going to be able to talk so much a year from now about how people will be shocked that guys't get like 80 points of batting average, which I think everybody thinks is going to happen. And it's interesting. I'm fascinated to see not only how fans take to it, but how the players themselves will approach it. Because the more I looked into this, the more I realized every left handed hitter is not the same guy. And some guys will approach this in very different ways. I just

think it's going to be fun to watch. Yeah, I guess it's a good source of short-term content, some of which you have produced already and we will be talking to you about today. But maybe long-term, it hurts content, I guess, if there's just more homogeneity in positioning. Now, maybe we were evolving to that point anyway, where everyone was just going to be shifting all the time, and so it would just be a different standard alignment, basically. And it would be what we used to call the shift would just now be sort of the standard. But there was at least more potential for variation, I suppose, and in the outfield and also in the infield to some extent. So there's been a lot to analyze over the last decade or so, just looking at teams shifting more and more and what has been the impact of the shift and certain teams shift more than others and is the league as a whole

shifting more or less. So if you kind of artificially suppress the variation to some extent, then I guess you could say that in the long run, there's potentially less to analyze. That's the glass half empty view of this, I guess. Yeah, I think there's some truth to that. I actually think people will be surprised at how little shifting there has been. Like, I feel like if you were to ask, I don't know, my uncle who's a Mets fan, how often is there shifting? He'd probably say 95% of the time. If you actually look at the numbers, it was like a third of plate appearances last year overall.

Like, it's just not as much of an impact as people thought. Half the time with lefties up, right? Right, right. And do you attribute that to teams sort of naturally course correcting as they better understand the nuances of the efficacy of the shift, which we don't have to go through like every single article that Russell has written on this question, but there are a lot of them. So what do you kind of attribute that maybe stabilization is a better way to phrase it? Yeah, no, you're right. Russell has written probably dozens of great articles. Tom Tango has done a lot of work into it. I think part of it is just the realization that the shift against righties is never going to be as effective and some teams probably overshifted.

I think a lot of the issue here is we, and I'm guilty of this too because this is is how I wrote about it. We think about the shift as this binary on off thing, right? Like either you're shifting or you're standing in these traditional spots where guys have been for 100 years. And that's not really true. Like there's still positioning that happens whether you call it a shift or not. But yeah, I think it just kind of comes back to the fact that most righties shouldn't be shifted. Not every lefty can be shifted. And if everything is driven by these PhD math majors, then you get to this tipping point. And it kind of felt like maybe we got to that point. Yeah.

I wonder if you were to assess once all is said and done, once the dust settles on the 2023 season, let's say you're at the commissioner's office or you're at the players association or you're just some analyst, which you are, and you want to see, did this work? Did this achieve its goals? How would you do that? Like what kind of criteria would you establish? Because it's complicated, right? Because there are always multiple factors changing, right? And there are multiple major rules changes coming. So it's not that

clean an experiment. It's not like we're changing only one variable and we can see exactly what that variable did. So it's more messy than that. And the effects might be more subtle than some people are imagining. So if at the end of the season, you want to evaluate, did this work? Should we scrap it if it didn't work? Or should we expand it if it didn't work or should we expand it if it didn't work? Should we bring in the pie slice rule or some other even more strict measure? How would you determine that? How do we decide did this work or not? I like that question a lot because it gets to kind of an interesting thought, like what is the actual goal? Is the goal here to increase batting average for lefties by a couple points? Because if so, that'll probably work. Is the goal here to increase batting average for lefties by a couple points? Because if so, that'll probably work. Is the goal to just make it an aesthetic thing where baseball sort of looks like the way it did until, I don't know, 2014 or so? Then yeah, that'll work. Is the goal to massively increase offense? Well, then no, that's not going to work because like you said, pitchers are insane.

because like you said, pitchers are insane. So I think if you want to look at it in the sense of, hey, did we see fewer of those balls that were hits for 100 years turning into outs? I think that'll happen. And maybe what criteria is that? I don't know. Batting average on balls in play on grounders from lefties maybe is the way you'd look at it. But you're still going to have the ball right up the middle. That's still going to be an out because you can still have a shortstop standing just to the side of the second base. So it is kind of fascinating. What's the goal? I don't think it's just hits. I think it's aesthetics. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder maybe before we shift, I know that we have a couple more big picture questions, but before we shift into the individual hitters who might- Is that not intended?

It was not intended. It's just second nature now. I'm seeing a doctor about it. But before we transition into the individual hitters who might be the beneficiaries of that 20 or 30 points of batting average, can you just for our listeners remind everyone, what are we actually talking about in terms of what will and will not be allowed relative to 2022 come opening day 2023? Yeah, for sure. You're not going to be allowed to have three fielders on the right side of second base or the left side if you wanted to. So you have to have two infielders on each side of second base, and they have to have

their feet on the dirt, and you cannot have a four outfielder set up. Now, that still leaves a lot of really interesting strategies you can have. Like if you want to take your left fielder against Anthony Rizzo and you want to park him in short right field, you can do that still, you know, but now you've got left field like wide open. So there's some, there's more cost to it. Someone had tweeted at me and I can't remember who it was, but I really liked it a lot. It was like, you can still shift.

It just comes at a higher risk, which I thought was a really interesting way to think about it, which is kind of cool. I think teams won't do that, but they can. And then to finish your question, the other part of the rule is you can't have your infielders like shifting, switching spots back and forth. You can't always say, okay, well, Nolan Aronaut is going to go here for this batter and here for this pitch. Like you got to keep them where they are. That's the way the rules are. Yeah. So as I think you noted in one of your pieces, maybe it's a misnomer to call it a shift ban because you can still do some shifting, just not the full shift, not the over shift. So what do you think we will see then? Is it just that we'll see more of what we would

have called a partial or strategic shift, which is basically just get as close to the other side of the infield as you can without actually crossing the bag? Or are there other ideas? I mean, people have suggested some more experimental, more risky alignments, as you said, but maybe statistically, strategically, I know Tom has looked into some of those on Twitter at least, and it seems like maybe they don't make that much sense probably. Yeah. Again, if people think this is going to be take your four regular starting spots and there's dots painted on the field and that's where you have to start now, hey, maybe that's the future. I don't think anybody wants that, but that's not what's going to happen. You know, when Rizzo or Kepler or somebody like that come up, you will have your shortstop pretty

much right up the middle, like as close to being on the other side of the bag as they can be. So it's not that much different. It's obviously different enough. But you know, if you hit the ball up the middle, if you have that grounder through the box that was a hit forever, it's still not going to be a hit. You're still going to have the shortstop right there. Yeah. I almost hope that we'll see runners in motion football style. I don't know that that would happen, but that would be visually interesting at least. But do you think then that there will be enough of a difference that if you were a hitter or a hitting coach, you would actually be thinking about anything differently or giving people different instructions? Because you do have the ball being deader than it was a few years ago. And then you have this measure, which is intended to make putting the ball in play more rewarding. So those things combined, is that enough to say, maybe you should shorten up

with two strikes? Maybe you shouldn't swing for the fences so much? Or is that still sort of probably the optimal strategy most of the time anyway? Because yeah, pitchers are wizards. And I think that's driving a lot of what we've seen, the increase in strikeout rate and everything. But it's partly hitters just adopted that strategy too, because it made sense, especially when the ball was really lively. Yeah. Doesn't that feel like a highly hitter specific question? Yeah, probably. If you're Jeff McNeil or Freddie Freeman or Louisa Rise or one of these lefties with elite bat to ball control skills, you can

probably say, hey, go find the holes, go find the hits. Joey Gallo can barely hit the ball at all. Imagine trying to tell him, here's where you need to hit it. That's his problem. He strikes out 40% of the time. Forget trying to aim it. So I do think if you're Joey Gallo, you're not even going to pay attention to this. You're going to go up and say, I am here to hit the ball as hard as I possibly can. I don't even care about the singles. They're not paying me for batting average. Obviously, that's different for other guys. I also think it's different situationally. I didn't really write this that much about Anthony Rizzo, but when I looked into it, I think he is one of the guys who changes his approach in big spots or on two strikes.

Whereas sometimes I do want the hit. The single is the right play here. But a lot of the time, I play in Yankee Stadium and I just want to pound the ball into the short porch, you know? So like situations, players, it's not a one size fits all answer. And that was, I think one of the issues or things that you had to account for when you were trying to think of the guys who might be beneficiaries of this, that, you know, we don't know there's this big looming approach question and it's probably going to take a season's worth of data to be able to have any kind of an answer. And then of course, you know, there will be adjustments that go back the other way where teams refine their, their alignments and kind of move guys around again. So I wonder like to Ben's point,

I don't know if we're going to know after a season, like, should we abandon this project or not? Because there are going to be moves and counter moves that we should probably allow some amount of time for, right? Yeah. And I think you're going to have to look at it on an aggregate. I don't think you can really look at it that much on a single player basis because I think people really underestimate how much, you know, BABIP, batting average on balls in play kind of bounces around the season anyway. You know, if you at-bats and you want to add 20 points of batting average, like if you go from 240 to 260, that's 10 hits. That's like one a week. And that could be so many things. It could be dumb luck. It could be health. It could be your hard hit rate went up. It could

be new ballpark. It could be the fielders did a terrible job against you. That could be a million things that's not the shift. So if you look at it on a single guy basis, I'm not sure you're going to get the signal you want. But I do expect if you look at all lefties as a total, the batting average on grounders will probably go up. And I think that might be meaningful, a way to look at it. Well, having said that, it's difficult to look at this on a single batter basis. Let's look at this on a single batter basis. Let's look at this on a single batter basis. Do it, Mike. Do it. So you've written a few articles here highlighting some of the best candidates to benefit from this

and maybe some other ones who surprisingly might not benefit from this. But how do you figure this out? And I know that the folks at Sports Info Solutions have done some analysis on this also, but there are a lot of factors here. You have the StatCast data that you can draw on, but how do you determine who's going to benefit? Yeah, we used the best flawed method we could come up with, honestly, because all you can really do is look at the past season's batted ball data and try to apply where the fielders might be. But again, that throws out hitter approach. You know, will guys approach this differently when they see fielders differently? So it's like,

you have to go into this knowing that this is kind of a flawed approach. And to that end, I talked to an analyst who is working for one of the, let's say, very smart teams who kind of had the same task. And he said, yeah, I kind of had Max Kepler coming out a lot higher than you did, but also I couldn't model for approach and who actually knows how any of this is going to go. It's the best bad guess that you can come up with. And the way we did this was, yeah, looking at the stack-ass metric. So I think everybody's familiar with hit probability or expected batting average, which generally is just exit velocity and launch angle. Well, Tom Tango has been working on applying some other layers to

that, which we haven't put out anywhere yet. You know, you can include the horizontal spray angle, you can include where the fielders generally are or actually are in all this. And so basically for each play, I can get to like seven different numbers in terms of what was the expectation of this batted ball, right? So what I did was I looked at the actual outcomes, which are always either a zero or a one last year, and we included the horizontal spray angle. And what was interesting about that is the first thing you have to do is you kind of have to come up with a subset of plays you even care about looking at, right? Because if you look at all the plays, let's say like Corey Seager had last year, he came up to the plate like 660 times. But how many of those are

strikeouts or walks or home runs or hit by pitches or deep flies or times he wasn't shifted? And I know as Russell has written, the shift does impact walks and strikeouts to some extent. I was just looking at batted balls. Basically, what I came up with is of his 660 times, there's only like 38% of those ended up with a potentially shift impacted batted ball, which i think drove the numbers down a little bit and then we compared the actual outcome to the expected outcome based on uh exit velocity launch angle and uh spray angle and you know kind of gave the little increments here and there and i was very pleased when it came out the top three were seager schwarber and carlos santana because like i needed a smell test right away yeah okay yep that passes

that's there's something here right yeah and what's the magnitude roughly of what kind of difference we're seeing here potentially I had 20 hits for Seager and I don't think I had anybody else over like a dozen and a lot of that was just because you know Seager played almost every day doesn't strike out that much he hits a ton ground balls. So will he do that again the upcoming season? I don't know. But a lot of that is just he hit a lot of those balls into the shift. And more so than that, a lot of those balls came out. I think I had him with like six hits against the shift last year. And I think it's important to tell because Matt Olson is a guy who did not pop up very high in my list, but I've seen him on other lists where people are saying, oh yeah, he's going to benefit a lot.

And I think the difference there is that the reason for that is Matt Olson has hit a ton of hard hit ground balls into the shift more than like anybody, except last year he actually did really well on them. Like a lot of those turned into hits. So it's like, well, you know, you can say he hit a lot into the shift, but A, they weren't always outs, and B, a lot of those would have been outs anyway. And so that's why it was important to kind of do it on this ball-by-ball basis. And, you know, you mentioned that those guys helped you feel confident that this list passed the smell test, but who were some of the hitters who surprised you for their inclusion? Every right-handed hitter.

That popped up on my list. And like you alluded to a couple of weeks earlier, Sports Info Solutions had done a similar idea with a very different implementation. And when I saw Tyrone Taylor popped up, he was like the fourth Brewers outfielder, I'm like, oh, that's kind of weird. But he was also very high on their list too. And I thought, okay, well, that gives me a little bit of confidence here. And when I looked into him, it actually turned out that it was pretty simple.

He was shifted almost half the time and his backup against the shift was like a hundred points lower you know so like the shift worked really well for him he pulls it on the ground a ton it doesn't necessarily mean he's going to be a great hitter but I do think he's a guy who will benefit when there there's not three fielders on the left side there's only two fielders so even though it was surprising that righties would pop up above like Anthony Rizzo, Max Kepler, the more I looked into those guys, the more I at least understood why it popped up that way. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what sort of changes in approach there are, if any significant ones, because one of the reasons why we have this quote unquote shift

ban is that there weren't really that major changes in approach. We were all kind of thinking, well, there will just be an equal and opposite reaction and the hitters will just start going the other way or they'll start dropping bunts down. And then it turns out that's really, really hard to do. And very few of them could do it or could do it successfully. So there were some maybe almost subconscious changes that they made that we've been referring to that Russell Carlton has documented where, for instance, lefties seem to strike out more when the shift is on, maybe because they're swinging for the fences or just trying to lift the ball. And then righties, it seems like the opposite. And then, yeah, there are more walks maybe because pitchers are nibbling or trying to induce batted balls into the shift, that sort of thing. pitchers are nibbling or trying to induce batted balls into the shift that sort of thing but because there weren't that many guys who were just like okay i'm just a slap hitter now i'm just

gonna go the other way every time those were really isolated examples of anyone who was able to do that with any kind of consistency or success then maybe it's not so much about i'm gonna go back to what i used to do or do something different now as it is just I'm just going to continue to be the hitter who I've always been, but it'll just work a little bit better for me maybe. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And then that's kind of why I go back to Rizzo. It's like, what is his goal when he's up there? Is his goal to get singles or is his goal to be productive? And you look at the way he changed his game, like career low Babbitt last year, sure, but career high pull rate, the career low ground ball rate, is that a reaction to the shift? Or is that just an understanding he plays in Yankee Stadium, which is perfectly suited for him? And I would have a really hard time imagining, aside from these high leverage spots where even just a single winch of the game, that's fine.

That's fine. The Yankees hitting coaches are not going to Anthony Rizzo and saying, yeah, more singles. Forget about trying to hit for power. We want more singles. It's not really baseball in 2023. It Santana is going to be a beneficiary of these new rules. Like how, how do you think teams were balancing the potential impact that that could have versus what they know, which hasn't changed that much about the relative sort of underlying value of these discreet batted ball events? Like you'd still rather have a home run than you would a single. So. yeah not that much i mean do i think it'll help carlos santana yes like he popped up on my list is it going to change the fact that he's 37 years old and not that fast probably not you know like i don't think the pirates are looking at him and saying yeah we're going to get peak i don't know 2016 carlos santana uh because no one's going to be able to shift against him i think they're they're happier that the defense will be less optimized than they would have been otherwise, but I certainly don't think they think, oh yeah, this is going to found a youth over here for our 37-year-old Carlos. Right. Yeah. So you mentioned a few of the guys who should benefit and you have a longer list that we will link to on the show page. One of them is a former and future pirate,

Andrew McCutcheon, who might benefit from this, it turns out, and Alex Bregman and some other righties you might not imagine. But who are the hitters you thought this was going to help? And it didn't actually that much. You mentioned Max Kepler, who really could use all the help he could get when it comes to BABIP. We've shared that unbelievable stat before about how he's just like tied with Rod Barajas for just the lowest career BABIP of the higher BABIP era, which is just unbelievable given the kind of hitter that Max Kepler is and the kind of player compared to Rod Barajas. Just doesn't seem like it should be possible, but it seems like this is maybe not going to be the boon to him

that Twins fans might hope. Yeah, I think there were two classes of guys, very different types of hitters that I thought maybe it would help and then it turns out it might not. And the first is that kind of hulking, strikeout heavy, power hitting slugger, the Rizzo. Matt Olson, like I said, is a great example just because Matt Olson was so successful against the shift. And Kepler, I'm not even satisfied that I got the right answer against Kepler. It's just even when he wasn't shifted, he had low BABIPs. Like I kind of cherry picked two years here, right? 2018 and 2022, basically the same batting average,

very similar BABIP, three times the shifting in 2022. And it's like, I'm not trying to say the shifting doesn't matter. Of course it does. But that just, it seems like he pops the ball up a lot. I know Aaron Gleeman has done a lot of work on just the quality of his contact is down. So do I think it'll help? Yes. But I'm very excited for him to get traded to like, I don't know, Houston, have a smaller ballpark and different hitting coaches and have his batting average go up and people will be like, oh yeah, that's the shift. There's definitely the shift. The other class, Jeff McNeil, I think is really fascinating because

there are so many Mets fans out there who are like, oh, you can't position the way you want against Jeff McNeil. He's going to hit even better next year. And when I looked into it, he actually showed up on my list as a guy who might lose hits. Like I'm not really comfortable saying, oh yeah, he's going to lose a dozen hits next year, even though that's sort of what the number said. And it's kind of funny when you look into it, he destroyed the shift last year. He had like a hundred points advantage of Babib against the shift without it. And there's some really funny videos out there where he will do this perfect, like just roll the ball to the left side for an easy hit against the shift. And if you watch those over the course of the season,

the SNY broadcast gets more and more exasperated. Gary, Ron, and Keith start losing their minds like, why? Why would you still shift him? It's not working. Why? Now, obviously, they can't shift him. And I do think he's a great example of a guy who will change his approach. He's not just going to go up and hit the ball as hard as he can. He will find the holes, which makes it hard to model because what's his approach going to be? But I do think it's interesting. Will he benefit more from a little more room on the right side or will he be cost because there's not a giant hole on the left side for him to put the ball through? I think that's going to be something fun to watch. Do you think this will have any impact on a team level? You haven't looked at that, I guess, or you haven't written about it at least, but on either

side, maybe if certain teams had a disproportionate number of guys who got shifted or were susceptible to the shift, or on the other side, if some team was especially adept at defensive positioning and now is not able to separate itself from the pack by as much, then is that a factor that we should be looking at when we're trying to look at races and standings and team projections? To some extent. I didn't look at this super closely, but I do think one of the changes in the game where everybody's become kind of Homer happy over the years is that you can put these guys at second base and shortstop who maybe you wouldn't have a generation ago. Like Max Muncy,

for example, has been able to play a lot of second base and he's been a good hitter for the most part. And now if he's not able to be positioned so perfectly, can the Dodgers get away with that? Corey Seager was a great example too for a while. Can he be a shortstop or is it just they're putting him in the right spots long-term? So I do think the Dodgers are probably the first team that this comes up with because of their changes. Like Miguel Vargas might play third base. It questions about his glove. Max Muncy may play second base. If they can't be positioned as perfectly as you'd want, especially with Lux at shortstop, will that hurt their pitchers? Because they had a couple of guys like Gonsolin and Urias who just got away and like every ball in play was an out for the most part. And I'm curious to see if that's still going to happen with the different positioning.

And I'm curious to see if that's still going to happen with the different positioning. So obviously, the shifting rule changes got a lot of headlines, but they weren't the only rule changes to get headlines. So Mike, I want to ask you kind of rapid fire, what are your takes on the other rule changes that we're going to see implemented at the big league level come opening day? Okay. I'm going to throw these out to you and then you can tell us what you think. Okay, you ready? The pitch clock.

Love it. I have wanted this for years and years. I saw it in person at a Brooklyn Cyclones game last summer. Everyone's going to love this. Okay. What about the bigger bases? I'd like to say I care, but I don't care. I don't think you'll be able to see the difference that much. The impact on stolen bases will be minimal minimal it's it's fine it's aggressively fine what about the pitch out rules and like the the pickoff attempts to limit pickoffs i like it because i think you need them for the pitch clock to actually work yeah we saw in the minors they didn't really work without that and i think it's going to add some really interesting strategy to the game when you do get you know you're on your third pickoff you still can throw it but you better

get them and if not it's a free stolen. That's going to be some interesting strategy. And now a rule that is not going to be at the big league level in 2023, but is sort of slowly advancing. So we've seen reporting that AAA is going to have the automated balls and strike system. Half of the league will have just their zone called by that. Half the league will have the challenge system, which I find to be superior. What is your take on the robo zone and the challenge system as a potential alternative? This is one I've sort of changed my tune on. Oh, no.

When we first started talking about this a couple years ago, I saw the robo zone. It's like, well, if we're going to do it, just do it. Like, get all the calls right. And then they started working on the challenge system. And I kind of into that because it's like, yeah, you can still have framing, right? I talked into that same change of mind. I think it's perfect. You can still have framing.

You can still have the umpire calling his own and you just get rid of the aggressively bad calls, like the embarrassingly bad calls. And having seen it in action, it's actually really fast. They play the animation on the screen. It takes like four seconds. So I'm into the challenge system more than I thought I would be. Yeah. We got a question from a listener named James who wanted to ask about just effects like

on a team level, what players and teams stand to gain or lose the most from the 2023 rules changes. And I told him that we were going to have you on to talk about that, which we were already planning. And he noted that fantasy baseball writers and fantasy baseball players are spending a lot of time on these things as they're doing drafts and just trying to figure out who's going to be helped, who's going to be hindered. Do you think that those other rules changes will have a greater or lesser impact on individual players or teams than the shift rule that we just talked about? Like, will some pitchers just be so flustered by the pitch clock that it will be an issue for them because they were slow pokes previously? Or will there be teams that take advantage of the pickoff limitations in big ways? Or is all of this like we have a running tradition

here where we indulge listener hypothetical questions and it's always, if baseball were different, how different would it be? And very often we conclude that it wouldn't actually be that different. Like it sounds super different, but then when you actually play it out, maybe not all that much changes and it still kind of looks like baseball down to the core and the same essence of the sport. So this is like a lot of changes all at once, you know, by baseball standards, right? Which is typically kind of slow to make major rules changes. So some of these are a bit off-putting to me and others I really like and others I'm kind of on the fence about. So it's just, it's really interesting. I don't know what the effects

will be both aesthetically and analytically just in terms of competitiveness and contention. One area of pushback I've seen on these rules changes, which I think is totally correct from a scientific point of view, which is that if you're implementing all this stuff at once, it's really hard to isolate what any one thing actually did. And I think that's fair. But I also think that if you tried to roll these out one per year over the next couple of years, that would just annoy everybody more who always wants to say, oh, they changed

the game too much. You know, so from that point of view, and obviously I think, you know, the timing is such there's a first year of a new CBA and all that. I think that makes sense. From a strictly fantasy point of view, I don't think the shift change will matter as much as fantasy players want it to because, you know, most guys will have their batting average change by 10, 15 points or whatever, which may not matter. I think the stolen bases will go up for certain guys for sure.

And I think the pitch clock is going to be interesting because you're right, there are going to be some guys who are going to absolutely lose their minds. Is it that hard to see, I don't know, Kenley Jansen getting bombed in the ninth inning because he's trying to be slow and they won't let him? I could totally see that happening, but it's going to be so hard to measure until we watch it because everybody's too slow. So it's hard to know who's going to really be hurt. That's why we need Lab League. Lab League, yeah. Some safe place to test these things. Although, yeah, I have mentioned on the show before that if you look at the baseball savant page with the pitch tempos, it makes the point that you can't just straight up use the entire time between pitches,

which will tend to be longer than the new limitation because there's time that it takes for the pitcher to deliver the ball to home plate and then for the catcher to throw it back. And the clock is not running during that time, right? And I think the savant page says it's like six seconds or something on average, which sounds long to me. But if you do deduct whatever time that is, then it seems like it's not going to be the majority of pitchers who are routinely going over that limit, right? I mean, you might conclude that if you just looked at the average time between pitches. Yeah, I know. I think it's going to be probably just the guys at the very bottom, like the Giovanni Gallegos. I think Chris Bassett might be down there somewhere.

That's going to be funny to ask. Meg, may I ask you a shift question since I have the managing editor of Fangraphs here? Oh, sure. Yeah. I was looking at the site this morning and I realized there is a Rotographs podcast called Beat the Shift. Are you going to force them to rename that? Oh, man. No.

I mean, but I feel like an explanation is in order they could change it to beat the newly optimized but not shifted infield alignment that's kind of positioning ban yeah that might be long i wonder if there are going to be pitchers who having been vocal opponents of the shift in the past because you know a ball leaked through where a fielder wasn't who were like, oh, man, I missed that thing. That was great. Well, that's kind of a different question too. Like what is a ball into the shift?

Because when I was doing this work, I watched a lot of videos. And I can't tell you how many times I saw a ball go to short right field and get thrown out. And the broadcasters would be like, ugh, another hit loss to the shift. And it's like it just went through the second base spot. Like it would have been an out anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

Now if you're a pitcher, I guess you don't get to blame your defense or the fates or whatever, or your infield positioning coach anymore. But I guess also you could just blame Rob Manfred or something and just say, oh, if only they hadn't put these shift bands in, then we would have had a fielder there. So there's always someone you can blame, some excuse you could use, I guess. But all right. So lastly, is there anything that you can or would like to tease about upcoming goodies for 2023? StatCast stuff, Baseball Savant, Tom Tango at his blog has been doing a lot of really interesting posts and divulging little tidbits and teasers for things that could

be on the way. So what, if anything, can you tell us about that's coming down the pike? Yeah, absolutely. The different versions of the hit probability I kind of talked about before is something we're going to be thinking about how to use because everybody gets angsty that spray angle hasn't been included. There's good reasons for that, but that's something we're working on. The next couple of things we have coming out will be about catchers. First one we're working on soon is a metric for catcher blocks. And I know that's been done before. Baseball Perspectives has that. But there's a really cool visual that's going to come along with it that I think people will really like. And we have it from the pitcher's point of view too, like who's been

helped or not helped by their catchers. And then after that, the other catcher thing, and I think I wrote about this in the Hardball Times annual like eight years ago. I'm excited we're actually getting to do this, is for 100 years, catchers have been judged on caught stealing percentage, even though everybody on the planet knows you steal off the pitcher. So we've got the distance of the lead and we've got the speed of the runner. And we've got the distance of the lead and we've got the speed of the runner. And we've been working on like an expected stolen base kind of thing for catchers just to see who's been put in good positions

by their pitchers or vice versa. Like, I'm so sorry, whatever catchers Noah Syndergaard threw to, who would you throw out the runners? Like deeply unfair to those guys. So that's something I'm pretty excited about. And then yeah, tons of stuff after that as always. Yeah, I'm happy about the spray angle thing. That's the horizontal angle. We've always

gotten the launch angle, the vertical angle. And I know that in the aggregate, it seems like maybe there's not that much predictive value to that from what I understand, but I think it's handy to have both at least because there are some applications where that's useful like if you're looking at a specific game like in the past i've looked at how unlikely was that no hitter that kind of thing right and and if you just use the the expected hit probability that's based on vertical angle but then you watch the highlight and it's like oh but you know it was hit like right to a guy or whatever like i think there are certain times when when it's handy to be able to bake that into yeah that's that's what we're struggling with a little bit is just the presentation because like i do think it's important for writers and researchers like yourselves to have that

but also i don't think we can throw out like six different percentages for every batted ball to like you know the broadcasts and everything true um so that that's always our issue is how how and when and where and to whom. But otherwise, the work is done. It's pretty interesting. Man, we're going to lose the entire genre of tweet that's like the expected batting average on that was 500. And then you look at it and you're like, I shouldn't have done that.

RIP to those tweets. We'll miss them. Twitter will find a way to complain. All right. Well, on that note, you can find Mike on Twitter, sometimes complaining, but not always, at Mike underscore Petriello. You can also find him on the Ballpark Dimensions

podcast and often on MLB Network, including right now in the midst of the Top 10 Positional Rankings series. So thanks, as always, Mike. Thank you, Ben and Meg. It was a pleasure. All right. Hey, if anyone was wondering why Jimmy Rollins played second base for one third of an inning in his whole career, the only other time he played a position other than shortstop, well,

so was I. It happened in 2002, his second full season. August 5th, ninth inning, Tomas Perez had been playing second base, and then he swapped positions with Rollins for one batter and then swapped back Two batters, I guess, one out And according to an old ESPN game recap, it happened shortly after Rollins had been hit in the right elbow with a pitch The story says Rollins sustained a bruised elbow The injury was significant enough for Larry Boa, Philly's manager, to move Rollins to second base in the ninth inning and Tomas Perez to shortstop, Jimmy couldn't make the long throw, Boa said. Rollins moved back to shortstop later in the inning when the forced play at second was available, and Perez went back to second base. So that's why that happened, and it never happened again.

Although he was taking grounders at second, he was playing second in spring training when he was trying to make the Giants just before the end of his career, but never got into a game that counted at another position again. Also, listener Sam wrote in in response to our conversation about handedness in baseball and the impact that got me thinking, independent of the player's handedness and how that comes into play, is baseball unique in that it has an intrinsic handedness built into the rules? By that I mean, no matter how you bat, the rules of baseball say you have to cross the bases going counterclockwise as opposed to clockwise. I can't think of another sport, even including cricket as far as I understand, where this is the case. Another way of saying that is that if you watched a game of basketball through a mirror, a really observant fan might wonder why the majority of players

seem more comfortable dribbling with their left hand rather than their right. But if you watched baseball through a mirror, you'd be wondering why the batter is running toward third base. Also, just letting you all know that the Andrew McCutcheon hype video has been tweeted by atpirates on Twitter. I'll link to it on the show page. It would be really cool if this weren't just a feel-good season, but also a bounce-back season,

and he played really well and looked like his old self. It was also reported that McCutcheon was offered the same deal that he got from the Pirates, from the Twins, and more from the Mets, but the Pirates guaranteed more playing time, and he wants to be home. So it wasn't exactly that the Pirates outbid everyone else. I think we can still say that nutting is nutting. That'll do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively

wild. The following five listeners have already done so. They've gone there, they've signed up, they've pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and help us stay ad free. And in the process, they have gotten themselves some perks. Joshua Cunningham, Thomas Bailey, Ryan Topp, Ben Marcini, and Christopher Barron. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group, which is marching toward 1,000 members. All of our Patreon supporters are entitled to that. Some of them can also get bonus episodes that we release every month, plus various other goodies and discounts and deals. Patreon.com slash Effectively Wild.

If you are a Patreon supporter, you can also message us through the Patreon site, ensures that we'll see it. But anyone can contact us via email at podcast at fancrafts.com. You can also rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Now when you swing When you swing You're gonna die

Yeah, you can tell the way It's alright to dance all night Cause you're working on the swing, yeah When you swing When you swing You're gonna die When you swing in his way Gonna fly to the way That's all night Cause you're working on his way, yeah

Hello and welcome to episode 1955 of Effectively Wild. Ba-ba-ba-da-da-da-da. Hello and welcome to episode 1955 of Effectively Wild. I hadn't goofed one in a little while. It's been a second. Let me take that again. Sorry, Dylan.