Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1962: Championship Core

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about players being in the sexiest shape of their lives, Rockies owner Dick Monfort’s comments about the Padres’ spending, and how Diamond Sports Group’s bankruptcy might affect the future of baseball broadcasting, then (28:09) discuss more ways in which baseball stands out from other sports. After that (35:35), they […]

Llywodraeth Cymru Llywodraeth Cymru Llywodraeth Cymru Llywodraeth Cymru Llywodraeth Cymru Llywodraeth Cymru Llywodraeth Cymru Hello and welcome to episode 1962 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast for Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs.

Hello, Meg. Hello. There is a new way to say that someone is in the best shape of his life. Oh? As we near spring training. Important to point this out. The new way to say it was said seemingly twice on Saturday within a span of 20 minutes, which is just weird. But at 3.08 p.m. Eastern, Saturday, January 28th, Twins beat writers, including Dan Hayes and Betsy Helfand, tweeted this quote. I'll read Betsy's tweet.

Jose Miranda showed up to Twins Fest after changing his diet and an off-season of hard training. Carl's Correa, quote, he looks sexy. Have you seen that body? Okay, that's 3.08 Eastern. The time stamp is important because at 3.26 Eastern, same day, Peter Pratt, who covers the Marlins, he tweeted, Jazz Chisholm was asked about Abisail Garcia, who appears to have worked tirelessly this offseason, quote, he looks sexy. Have you seen that body? Verbatim, exactly the same quote. He looks sexy. Have you seen that body? Verbatim, exactly the same quote.

He looks sexy. Have you seen that body? Carlos Correa on Jose Miranda, Jazz Chisholm on Abiciel Garcia. What is going on here? Yeah. Was there a memo sent out that this is how we're saying this now? I just, I really like it, Ben. You know, I like it because it can, you know, like it, Ben. You know?

I like it because it can, you know, like it can encompass all manner of tastes, right? It can cover a wide array. A wide array? What? Oh, no. Move it in. Wide array of aesthetics, you know, different kinds.

We know that athleticism can sometimes be deceiving, right? Like guys can be sneaky athletic. They can be, and that's, they're in the best shape of their life. Even if we are prone to finding their shape wanting, we shouldn't. You know, sometimes it's really good. So I like it. Although, yeah, the commonality there is kind of surprising. Although, you know, maybe it's like, you know, when you listen to a podcast

and then you start talking like the host a little bit in real life and someone's like, you've been listening to that pod too much. You know, maybe it's like that. Yeah, no, I wondered. I don't think that they have the same agent or something. You know, Correa is a Boris guy. I was wondering maybe Boris started calling people sexy, but it just rubbed off, so to speak, on his clients. But I believe that Jess just was not a Boris guy. So it just seems like a strange coincidence, unless they were chatting and just happened to discuss who's looking sexy and whose bodies they've seen. But yeah, I applaud it.

I think it's nice to have a different way to refer to this, because at some point it became a cliche that you were in the best ship of your life, and then people started becoming self-conscious about saying it, or they would say it sort of tongue-in-cheek, like laughing at themselves for saying it, knowing that these stories are written annually. I once did a study back at Grantland years ago about whether this had any effect, any predictive power when someone showed up in The Best Shape of His Life. And it seemed like on a rate basis, no, but there was at least some slight indication that maybe playing time wise, yes, I think there was at least a little bit more playing time.

I forget. I will link to the study. But it is a fun way to describe it. Although, yeah, we should add the caveat that obviously sexiness is subjective. And this is just Jazz Chisholm and Carlos Correa's evaluations of their teammates. And also, I suppose that sexiness, a conventional kind of sexiness, might not correlate to athletic performance, right? I mean, if we're talking about some sort of aesthetic look here that may or may not actually put you in the best position to succeed over a long season as a baseball player. You know, sometimes baseball players, they start the season with a little extra padding.

And then they get whittled down over the course of the season because it's hard to keep the weight on. Yeah, you're playing every day and it's hot out there and you're sweating. So if this is like, you know, they cut too much and they're looking sexy, they're like, you photo shoot calendar ready here and the season hasn't started yet, then I guess that could potentially backfire. But the same thing happens with best shape of his life where sometimes players will come in in the best shape of their life consecutive springs. And sometimes there's a response where they come in in the best shape of their life, but in a certain way so that they were either, let's say they were focusing on lifting and adding weight and strength and muscle, and then maybe they don't have such a great year.

And then the next year they come in having focused on flexibility and yoga and core work or whatever and they've actually slimmed down a little and now they're in the best shape of their life but it's a different shape so I guess that's sort of subjective too yeah I mean I think that it's hard we have the industry sort of thrives on the idea of profiles and like you know useful heuristics to kind of categorize guys and have us be able to using quick shorthand sort of understand what a guy might do right and that's because there's so many guys ben there's just like so many you know before we even remember any there's so many you know before we have to remember some of them, there's just a lot of them. And so we need these shorthands. But I think that it is useful for us to remember that the process of athleticism is going to really have a lot of variation person to person. And

you might be in a really good particular kind of shape and that might not be suited to the purpose like you know when we think about am i setting myself up for people thinking i'm saying that julio rodriguez is sexy if i say what i'm about to say one ponders but like think about you know the the version of julio that we saw prior to his big league debut season, there was a lot of very justifiable concern about him being able to really play center the way he needed to prior to big league camp that year, because he had gotten bigger to be strong, right? And then he came into camp and he had leaned had leaned out more and he was it's not

like he was in bad shape when he was bulkier you know it's like we need better words because like bulkier has like this value judgment and that's not what i mean at all but like he you know he had he looked like a linebacker he still kind of does look like a linebacker but like a really sleek one right and so he came into Big League camp that year having slimmed. And it's not like we would say he had been in bad shape before. He was in a different kind of shape that was suited to the purpose that allowed him to play center because the leaner body let the speed play, right? So it's a weird thing to try to say generalizably about guys

and whatever their best shape may be and you know this seems true sexiness because to your point it's subjective but i also like it because it just feels like it's a nice bit of like appreciation amongst amongst players yes they're sexy in a way that feels you know like um like you'd say it almost because it's like well this is undeniable look at him so sexy yeah i like it ben i like it too yeah so tired best shape of his life wired he looks sexy have you seen that body so have you seen that body we're about two weeks away from pitchers and catchers reporting and we'll see who else looks sexy right people start seeing people's bodies and we'll see whether they phrase it exactly the same way.

In which case, I will wonder whether there's some sort of pod people scenario happening here. I mean, like it might depend. I mean, like when the catcher's coming, you got those thighs, Ben. You know, you got them thighs. And then it's like part of this may depend on whether Cole Hamels ends up getting a job, you know, because then all bets are off, you know. Supposedly he looked great at his tryout. I don't know if he looked sexy, but his pitches, his stuff did.

I feel confident to say he always looks that way. You know, I've never heard more straight men describe another man as sexy than I have hearing baseball writers talk about how hot Cole Hamels is. It's like, you know, it's just like, it's undeniable. It's just an objective fact about the man. I feel so weird saying this. I hope you and your family are very happy, Cole. We'll have to have Baman on to talk about it.

I'm not longing, right? This is just a statement of fact that I'm attributing to some of my coworkers. If the Cole Hamels comes back successful, we'll have to have Bauman on to talk about the handsomeness of Hamels. Just to name a guy who we might have both been thinking of. I kept him anonymous. You named him. He wouldn't be embarrassed, so I think it's fine. Go, Burtz.

Anyway, leave it to us to find the actual baseball angles, the analysis that we could interpret and overthink players calling other players sexy. I don't think we're overthinking it. I think we're enjoying it. You know, we're reveling in it. It's not overthinking. It's enjoying.

Speaking of quotes that were not quite as sexy. So are we at peak owners stepping in it? Are we going to talk about Dick Monfort? Of course we are. Of course we are. Has there been an owner who's opened their mouth in the past few months without stepping in it, without just putting their foot in there or something else? Because it seems like we've been talking an awful lot about that genre of quote. Because it seems like we've been talking an awful lot about that genre of quote.

And here we had Dick Montfort, who's a prolific purveyor of not great quotes. And in fairness to him, I think this is not his worst work necessarily. But he was quoted as saying, well, so many things. But he was at a Northern Colorado Friends of Baseball breakfast. Now, what is it with these breakfasts and luncheons? Why do they go to these breakfasts anymore? They really should not. I mean, in a sense, I'm glad they do, that they do open their mouths and say these things so that we have something to talk about. But it seems like every time someone speaks to a rotary club or a breakfast or a luncheon, like these things are public, you know, whether they know it or not.

So he's talking to, again, a friendly, supportive crowd, one would assume here. And he says, we have a lot of talent. A lot of good things are going to happen. And I think they are going to start happening this year. And I think we can play 500 ball. So the first few parts of that sentence are like, oh boy, get excited for the Rockies. Exciting things are going to happen. And then the end is, I think we can play 500 ball. Now, he is infamous for saying prior to the 2020 season that the Rockies would win 94 games that year.

And to be fair, I guess that was never completely disproven in the non-pandemic scenario, right? Because the Rockies, if they had played 100 more games and they had gone 68 and 34 in those games, a nice 67 winning percentage, then indeed they could have won 94 games. But as it was, it was a 60-game season. So they could not. And also, they wouldn't have regardless. Yeah, it seems unlikely that they would have done that. Yes.

In the 60-game season, they went 26 and 34. Anyway, you know, since I'm extending plaudits to him for not being so irrationally exuberant as to say that they might win 94 because now he's adjusting expectations down to 500, which is still probably irrationally exuberant. I don't really see how the Rockies could win. I mean, you can have a strange season where everything goes right and no one gets hurt and you outplay your run differential and everything and and you can kind of maybe look into a 500 season more so than you can a 94 win season so it's possible but they're coming off a 68 win season and they just haven't really done much to upgrade i mean i'm looking at their roster resource offseason trackers. Isn't Jose Ureña their third starter? Yeah i mean it's it's

Lynn Pickens they just they really didn't do a whole lot signing-wise, trade-wise, et cetera. So I don't know where he thinks the wins are coming from. He's too low to extend those relievers, though. Yeah, oh yeah. But this is a running theme with the Rockies thinking that they're better than they are. So in a way, again, I'm applauding him for just being more realistic. Not realistic, but more so. Closer to realistic, I guess.

And, you know, he's talking about some prospects who are maybe kind of close and are coming along. I think we have a competitive team and I think we are learning some things that we need to learn to do differently. I would hope so. I think this is really a year where we can really step it up a little bit. This is a year when people need to take a step forward and some of the new kids need to come in and show excitement, et cetera, et cetera. Keep the faith here. I think we were on the right track. I'm more confident now This is a year when people need to take a step forward and some of the new kids need to come in and show excitement, etc., etc. Keep the faith here. I think we were on the right track. I'm more confident now than I was last year.

Last year, he also, he says, thought a 500 record was in the cards after the Chris Bryant signing. I think with 500 in the cards and if stuff goes right and with the expanded playoffs, who knows what happens? That's sort of what we thought. And then as it ended up, Chris didn't play much and we ended up a little worse than I thought. So a little worse. Yeah, 68 wins. Don't put all of this on poor Chris Bryant. Yeah, right.

It's not all Chris Bryant's fault. Good gravy. No, there were some other issues there. But really, if that's your plan, your upside going into the season is who knows what happens. Something goes right, expanded playoffs, who knows? But that's not where he stopped, right? Right. I was going to say, if he had just said, hey, we're going to play 500 ball, we feel optimistic, we have great prospects. That's not true.

But people would have been like, oh, dick's not where it that's not where it ended and he also had vote of confidences or votes of confidence for everyone basically which is kind of the rocky's way bill schmidt general manager i think bill has been a really steady hand he lets a manager bud black and the coaches do their jobs from an organization standpoint. He's done a great job. And then on Bud Black, I like Buddy. I like him a lot. He's done a lot of great things for us. I think it's sort of up to Buddy and how long he wants to do this.

It seems like, I mean, great job security in the Rockies organization. If you want to stay around, you can. That's fine. And everyone's doing a great job, even though it sounds like they need to make some changes and learn things. But also everyone who's there doing a fantastic job and basically can just decide how long they want to stay. But he talked about the Padres. So he complained about the Padres, I think we could say.

In reference to the Padres spending, that puts a lot of pressure on us. But it's not just the Padres. It's the Mets. It's the Phillies. This has been an interesting year. What the Padres are doing, I don't 100% agree with, though I know that our fans probably agree with it. We'll see how it works out. I look at the Padres and they have a really talented team, but they have some holes too. They've got three, maybe four starting pitchers, and then they're sort of like us. They have Musves snell and darvish so i don't know they've spent a lot of money and they will

have to spend a lot more if they want to keep one soto but it does put a lot of pressure on you yes it does so here's the thing about all of that. How silly. What is silly? Okay, look. First of all, to say they have three guys, we got three guys. Aren't we the same other than that? I don't mean to disrespect. There are some good players on the Rockies, so I don't want to say that like everyone is a real mess, but I think a couple of things.

First, like, Hermione Marquez is like legitimately good. And then you have like Kyle Freeland and, you know, you have Urania, which I talked about and like Austin Gomber. And then you look at the, you look at the Padres and they have Hugh Darvish.

They have Joe Musgrove. We are like not enjoyers of Blake Snell from an aesthetic perspective, but they have Blake Snell. They have a resurgent Nick Martinez. They have Seth Lugo. And then you look at their position players, and it's perhaps telling that he started by talking about the rotation, right? Because it's like, oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah, exactly the same, except them having juan soto and manny machado and xander bogarts and jay cronenworth and oh yeah they signed nelson cruz how many roster spots are the padres allowed i think it's more than 26 you know it's like this is not a these are not comparable franchises now i'm sure that padres fans would agree that they wish they had like a bit reinforcement-wise in the rotation. But the thing about them is that they'll probably figure it out. They still have more depth than Colorado does. They don't play baseball on the moon, and they're going to score a bunch of runs.

Plus, they have a good bullpen. So what are you talking about, dick? Yeah. And just seeming miffed that the Padres are putting pressure on them to spend as well as other teams there. It's not like the Padres are in such a dramatically different situation from the Rockies when it comes to like, I mean, I guess the Rockies, they have to compete with other higher level local sports teams. But aside from that, media market wise, ballpark wise, you know, it's not incomparable. So really to be like they had to go and put pressure on us, you know. We used to just like – we used to all just be sort of slacking and you look at the Dodgers and, well, you can't compete with the Dodgers. But now suddenly we've got the Mets and we've got the Padres and all these teams just being spoiled sports, just making us look bad,

making our fans think, wouldn't it be nice to spend some money? Right. Well, and it's a strange bit of business, too, because they have not been hesitant to spend money. They just haven't spent it well. You know, like Colorado isn't spending, clearly isn't spending the way that San Diego is. clearly isn't spending the way that San Diego is. There's a little less than $100 million of gap between the Padres and the Rockies

in terms of their luxury tax payroll. But Colorado's in the middle of the pack when it comes to their payroll. It's not like they're the A's. They're not spending that cheaply. I don't know that they need to keep extending relievers at the rate that they do, right? Or bringing in a guy to play left field whose real value is at third base if he can stay there.

But the spending is only part of Colorado's problem, right? And I think that the fundamental issue with the Rockies is that they have never seemed to be able to properly diagnose just how competitive they are. The contracts that they give out when they spend money don't seem to be ones that are really designed to bolster the club, despite what Monfort says, like their farm system isn't good. So it isn't as if they have assembled an otherwise competitive ball club and are like wow sure would be nice if we could spend money the way that our peers within the nl west and within the nl more broadly have but we just can't do it otherwise we would win it's like no your problems go much deeper than that like you're you're not a you're a weird org you're a weird strange organization and you're not going to be competitive in that division for a

while like you know colorado has to deal with the diamondbacks the diamondbacks are a problem for them and it's not like the diamondbacks are outspending them you know their payroll is like 50 million dollars less a year than than theirs is they're able to be as competitive as they are and to probably play a little bit up relative to where people expect them to because they did develop internal talent. They do have those young outfielders. And they don't play on the moon,

but they play at a higher elevation than most of the rest of the league. So I don't know, man. Just get your house in order before you start worrying about other people. Do your job. I can't believe that we had a lockout with this guy on the committee. I know.

Yeah. I wonder also how the Bally's issues are going to affect the kind of quotes that we see coming out of owners. coming out of owners because owners already, they will seize any opportunity to pretend not to be making money and that owning franchises is terrible business, et cetera, despite the fact that they all want to be in that business and the franchise values appreciate more so than anything else on the other investment you can make. But there was some news recently that the Bally Sports Network, or I suppose technically the Diamond Sports Group, which owns the Bally Sports Network, is heading for bankruptcy, that they're not going to be able to make their payments because there was a leveraged buyout and there was a lot of debt that went toward making that purchase. The Sinclair Broadcast Group is controlling all of this, right? And so these are subsidiaries of that. And they have a lot of MLB and NHL and NBA and WNBA local broadcasts and regional sports networks. And so they purchased this network of RSNs from Fox in 2019, the Fox Sports Network. And it was not a great time to make that

acquisition. And I guess the way in which they did it left them pretty vulnerable, what with the debt and everything and the ongoing cord cutting that is happening and interest rates and who knows what else. Ben Clemens, who understands finance, is a certified knower about business, has covered this at Fanagraphs and explained it in far more depth than I can. But basically, no one knows exactly what's going to happen here because it's 14 teams, right? 14 teams' local broadcasts are affected, plus two more that their minority stakes, I think the Cubs marquee network and the Yankees yes network. So there are any number of outcomes that could come from this. So it could be that there are actual payments missed and there's a revenue decrease, which is not certain to happen, but could happen. And there are some positive, happy outcomes that could come from this too,

potentially from a fan perspective, in that MLB is looking into ways in which maybe we could have local broadcasts that are not blacked out and that can be streamed on MLB TV. And they recently hired an executive, Billy Chambers, who's a longtime RSN person and is now going to be the executive vice president of local media at MLB and will be maybe working acquire those rights and we'll have a happy utopian future where we'll all just be able to stream't spend or that it's tough times for everyone, they could potentially point to this and say, oh, payments are being missed and a big part of our revenue is this local broadcast revenue and now we will be bereft without it. Right. I mean, I think that you're right to assume that ownership will take opportunities to say they can't spend even when they can. I think that a good thing to keep in mind, and Ben makes this point in the piece that you referenced, is that the debt was the issue here.

It's definitely less lucrative to own a regional sports network now than it was in 2019 or 18 or 17 because of some of the forces you've described, particularly cord cutting. some of the forces you've described, particularly cord cutting. But what caused this problem was the degree to which they had to take on debt in order to secure this sale, not that the underlying sports networks themselves were suddenly unprofitable. They were perfectly fine as a business for Fox prior to them having to sell off because of the Disney stuff and regulatory this and that. So I think you're right that there are potential good outcomes here. This will surely be cited as a reason that some team somewhere decides that they can't spend money. It's not entirely clear

what the resolution of this will be. And it doesn't mean that there isn't a regional sports network bubble that might burst at some point. But I think that, you know, when you see this headline, you assume like, oh, it has burst now. And it's like, well, maybe it will. But this isn't really the thing that is going to necessarily point to that. So I encourage people to read that piece. But you're, like I said, you're absolutely right right like ownership will point to anything to say oh we can't buy more money and this will probably be one of the things that they point to because you know so much of well a meaningful amount of their payroll might be

tied into broadcast stuff so yes the rockies are not one of the teams though they are not the diamondbacks the braves the reds the guardians the Guardians, the Tigers, the Royals, the Angels, the Marlins, the Brewers, the Twins, the Cardinals, the Padres, the Rays, and the Rangers. And then to some extent, the Cubs and the Yankees, as I mentioned. Well, and it's, you know, I think that it is useful for us all to remember when we, you know, as we proceed through this bankruptcy and start to see the fallout and what a restructuring might mean and what that's going to mean for payments and whatnot that like while this is getting reported now i doubt strongly that like that teams were unfamiliar with the circumstances surrounding bally and sinclair and diamond sports group and like it didn't stop the padres from spending money this offseason it

didn't stop the rangers from spending money this offseason right like it didn't stop the twins eventually you know so you know and some of these teams didn't but the rays weren't gonna right the brewers weren't really gonna that's not super surprising given those you know so yep all right well thanks to dick monfort for supplying us with material as usual i was i was gonna say it's like the grift that never stops giving, but it's not grift in their case. I think he legitimately does believe that they might win 94 or they might go 500 or whatever it is. That's part of the problem is that he does believe it. He's not just trying to sell you a bill of goods. He believes the bill. He sold it to himself. Right. Yeah. I think that we have long thought that for something to really change in Colorado, it's probably going to require a different owner.

All right. So Zach Greinke re-signed with the Royals. Yeah. We have a plan to do a Greinke-specific segment on an upcoming episode, hopefully, so we can table talk about Greinke until then. But happy to see him back with the Royals and just pitching in general. So that's nice. And today's baseball exceptionalism updates, ways in which baseball is different. So first of all, listener Lee pointed out that these baseball exceptionalism segments are really answering the question, if baseball were the same,

how different would it be? Usually we're talking about if baseball were the same, how different would it be? Usually we're talking about if baseball were different, how different would it be? But in this case, we're talking about if it were the same, if it were what it is now, how different would it be from other sports? And Justin mentions the observation about saves last episode. We mentioned that it's unusual that just the institution of the statistic of saves had a meaningful difference on how games were played and how pitchers were used. The observation about saves made me remember something else statistically different about baseball that I'm pretty sure is completely unique to the sport. Baseball, so far as I can tell, is the only sport that has adjusted

certain stats based on what should have happened from pretty much the beginning. In most sports, if the defenders are somehow inept or incompetent, the attacking player still gets credit for the scoring event. In baseball, we claw back hits due to defensive miscues, differentiate between earned and unearned runs, reward RBI when one out is recorded on the play but not two, and count a sack fly as an at-bat but not a sack bunt. More modern metrics attempt to answer expected or deserved stats, but in a way, this drive for justice on the back of the baseball card

has been in place for over 100 years due to the strange ways in which personal statistics don't always mesh with on-the-field team results. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good one. It's a very good point. results yeah yeah it's a good one it's a very good point and like the the degree to which it is clearly elucidated in moral terms in the rule book is like really fascinating like they when writing the rules around like sacrifices and stuff like they're written in terms of like

reward and valor and you know the valor i don't think is in there specifically but like they are clearly trying to delineate between stuff that is viewed as like good and enhancing the team and stuff that isn't and it is uh i'm not i haven't read um other sports rule books in the same way because i do try to do fun things occasionally. But it is striking when you engage with the MLB rule book, like how clearly they are interested in articulating the intention behind the rule as rewarding certain kinds of on-field play and not rewarding others. And I think that that is a very, that kind of fussiness feels very baseball to me. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To clarify, a sack fly is not an at-bat currently. It is a

plate appearance, not an at-bat. Those rules and designations have changed over time though. And another one is from Harris who says, one thing I've always thought is unique to baseball is how often a key member of the team is unavailable because they need to rest. Even in the most high stakes games, several starting pitchers are simply unavailable because they pitched in the last few days. I can't think of another sport that has such a dramatic change in team composition game to game. As a sort of extension to this, and it's more of a stretch, baseball is also the only sport that I can think of that requires teams to use their team dramatically differently during the regular season versus the playoffs. During the regular season, you need five or six starters, but during the playoffs, you only need three or four, and the top two guys carry a significantly larger

percentage of the innings in the playoffs than they do in the regular season. That's actually always kind of bothered me, and I wish MLB had a regular season schedule that was closer to what college baseball is, with primarily a weekend series and maybe one midweek game a week. I think it would be more fun if the regular season were played more like the playoffs. Additionally, if teams were able to use just their top pitchers more, then there would be a larger talent gap between teams, which would keep the standings from being too random with fewer games. So, yeah, that depends on the postseason schedule, but that is certainly the case sometimes. A couple of things I would say about that. I guess this is kind of connected.

At least the first part is kind of connected to the fact that there are just so many games, which we've talked about as another differentiating factor. So you have players who need rest in other sports sometimes too, but because there are so many games in baseball and because starting a game as a pitcher is strenuous in a way that other activities are not, then they need to be rested at times. And I guess this kind of goes hand in hand with the batting order dictating who gets the chance at a particular high leverage moment. Right. I mean, there's even less flexibility when it comes to the offensive side of things. If it's the big moment and you don't have a great pinch hitter on the bench, and he just doesn't happen to be up at that time. And you're just out of luck. Right. And people always say, in football, the quarterback has the ball and can pass to the best

wide receiver or whatever. And in basketball, you could give the ball to your best scorer. Like you have a choice of who gets the opportunity to try to score. And in baseball, you do not to a great extent. You just have to live with what the batting order dictates. So there is less flexibility, I suppose, in who's available and who you can actually give the ball or the bat to at the moment when you want your best player on the mound or in the batter's box. Right. Like if you, you know, if you're sitting there as the baseball equivalent of the Kansas City Chiefs and Travis Kelsey isn't up, well, he's just not up. Right. And then the Bengals are going to the Super Bowl. I watched a lot of football this weekend, Ben.

I can tell. Yeah. That sounds like a reference to recent football game yeah yeah i picked that up from context yeah yeah you know because they were all hurt and then you know that's the thing i do wonder how the availability thing will change and continue to change, I should say, in other sports, even with shorter schedules than baseball has, but still long ones, right? Like I would not consider myself an expert in the NBA, but I am given to understand that some people are real worked up about load management, right? And then those guys just go full blow come play playoff time right the nba postseason lasts for like 10 years but so there is i think there is some of it in other sports but certainly not

to the degree or with as much rigidity as we get with starters and even you know even relievers are being load managed to some extent, right? Oh, yeah. Much more than they used to be. Sure. You wouldn't load manage someone in a must-win game, though, in the NBA. Whereas in baseball, I mean, yeah, we have seen occasionally a starter will come back on one day's rest or no day's rest, right, to like pitch and relief in a really important game. But often they're just out of commission, even if it's an elimination game. And in the NBA, you rest people all season long because even though the season is shorter in terms of the number of games than MLBs, it still is longer than it needs to be. It's kind

of overdetermined because you learn more about basketball teams in a basketball game than you do about baseball teams in a baseball game. So you rest guys then so that you can have them available in every must-win game, really important playoff game. Whereas in baseball, yeah, some players are just off limits no matter what you do. All right. We have a few emails to answer here, and I've got a couple stat blasts and the past blast as always. So first email. So Josh, a Patreon supporter, emailed about this, but this was just everyone on the baseball internet was buzzing about this on Sunday. There was a big to-do about the fact that at the BBWAA awards dinner, where players' awards were handed out, the Cy Young Award winners,

Justin Verlander and Sandy Alcantara, were photographed holding what appeared to be Cy Young Awards where the word valuable was misspelled. And also they said most valuable pitcher instead of what the Cy Young Awards have said of late, which is the outstanding American or National League pitcher. So everyone dunked on this because valuable was spelled without the A after the U. It was just V-A-L-U-B-L-E. One of the John Boyer accounts tweeted about this. And so everyone was piling on, right, and making fun of the BBWA for misspelling valuable. And Josh was also concerned that they had changed the wording from outstanding pitcher to most valuable pitcher because we have enough parsing of valuable as it is, right, with the MVP. And it's been kind of nice that the Cy Young is not exactly most valuable. It's outstanding. And so we don't have the same debates about whether you have to be with a winning team. Well, I can set the record straight here. This has already gone viral and been aggregated,

and it's too late to close the barn door. But I emailed Brian Hoke, who is the Yankees beat writer for MLB.com, and he's also the New York BBWA chapter chair. And he was emceeing this event and he had tweeted something. Of course, the tweets about the spelling error and how these awards were handed out and there was a mistake on the awards got a zillion retweets. And Brian's tweet kind of clarifying the situation got like almost none. But it's funny how that happens. But he said that these were not the real awards, just to clarify with everyone. This was not a mistake with the actual awards that Alcantara and Verlander will receive in a few weeks. There was a manufacturing delay. And so these were placeholder awards and they were on loan from MLB Network. Yeah. And also the actual awards, when they are awarded the real awards, they will still say outstanding pitcher. They will not say most valuable. There has not been a change in the wording. These were placeholders that were throwbacks to the original 1956 award, Don Newcomb's award. In 56, there was only one Cy Young for both leagues and Don Newcomb won. He also won the MVP, but he won the Cy Young. And at the time,

the wording was originally most valuable. And then it was changed to outstanding, I think some decades later. And I don't think the two leagues changed at the same time because I found it seems like the NL changed its wording before the AL. And so there were AL awards much later than the NL that still said most valuable. Anyway, this was the original wording, but it is not going back to that. Okay. So we are sticking with outstanding. It's not switching to most valuable. And also this was not the BBWA's fault, as I understand it. It was not an issue of not enough copy editing.

It's not the copy editing association of America, but even so, it was not the BBWA's fault. This was on loan from Ebony Network. And what I don't know, some people speculated that maybe because this is a fake replica, that the spelling mistake was intentional to differentiate it from the real original word. I was going to say, yeah, but it's not like an old-timey word. I think we've spelled valuable the same way for the last seven years or whatever. In the last seven years or whatever. Brian doesn't know whether the spelling mistake was intentional or not. But it was not the PPWA screw up if it was someone's screw up. And also, these are not the real awards.

So just everyone calm down. Now, obviously, taking those pictures and putting them out on social media, I think they should have known that there would be some blowback and people saying, hey, you spelled valuable wrong. So I don't know why they didn't anticipate that. And it's not an unfair reaction for people to have when they see these things. But I just want to set everyone's minds at rest here. The mistake was not the BBWA's. And more importantly, they are not the actual awards and they are not changing the wording of the award back to most valuable. So false alarm, everyone. Well, I'm glad we cleared that up.

Me too. No one will hear this clarification though. And everyone will persist in thinking for all time that they just spelled valuable wrong. And somewhere in the trophy room in the Sandy Alcantara, Justin Verlander's houses, there's an award that says valuable and it's spelled wrong, but not the case as far as I know. All right. We got a couple pedantic questions here. So Andrew in Pennsylvania, how can you not be pedantic about baseball? Last episode's mention of unlimited timeouts being unique to baseball got me thinking, why are they even called timeouts at all? Until recently, there has been no clock and therefore no time.

Wouldn't a better term be ball out or game pause or team meeting time? I think the possible alternatives have answered your question for you. Yeah, there may be a better alternative. I don't know that that's one of them. Has it always been referred to as time or timeout in baseball, or is this after the influence of other timed sports like football and basketball gaining popularity in the States? Thinking about other pre-1900 team sports, I'm mostly thinking about soccer, where there are still no timeouts. So I have to imagine they weren't in earlier versions of soccer either. It would strike me incredibly odd for calling timeout to be a term baseball coined despite the lack of time.

And if this is all true, then how did 1880s parents send their kids away to think about what they've done? As a parent, I find this almost as perplexing as time in baseball. So I emailed original Pass Blast consultant Richard Hershberger to see if he had any insight into the origins and the etymology of timeout. He said, this is a good question. I have wondered why time was adopted and don't have a good answer. I do know that it happened early. And he quotes from Porter's Spirit of the Times, December 26th, 1857. Time can be called whenever it is necessary to change a player or if the umpire desires to

ask a question and richard continues the early date would usually hint at a cricket origin but this seems not to be the case here cricket does not use the expression a batsman who doesn't take his position in a timely manner can be timed out by the umpire but that is something different this 1857 citation looks like this usage was generally understood but i have no explanation for it so something of a mystery let us know if you know the origins of time out i wonder though if the the use of the word timely is is a clue here ben right because you're right that we haven't had a clock in any meaningful way but you can still like uh look at a batter for instance goofing around with his gloves or you know a

pitcher rubbing up the ball and say that he did not either stand in or deliver the ball in a timely manner so maybe that's maybe that's where it came from. I don't know. Right. It's possible to imagine it. You can understand from context what it means. I mean, even though there's no actual clock, like time is passing. Well, you're taking time, right? You're taking time. You're saying, I need time to do other stuff that isn't hitting the ball or delivering a pitch. So I think it's probably tied up in that would be my guess. But yeah, it is a little bit funky, isn't it? It is a little odd. Of course, there have been time limits in baseball prior to the clock being

instituted, right? I mean, we're making those time limits. We're formalizing them essentially by having a pitch clock. We already had time limits. They just weren't observed, really. But that wasn't the case in 1857. I don't think so. Anyway, good question. Pedantic issue, we should retire the term offensive environment when what we really mean is scoring environment, which depends on a number of factors, both offensive and defensive. Changes in scoring environment sometimes have little to do with the offense and can include equipment and field changes. While I know that offense can be used as a synonym for run scored, I think in this case, scoring environment or even run environment is more accurate. I'm going to disagree. Oh, okay. And here's why. All right. I think that, well, yes, one of the things, maybe even the most important thing that we are talking about when we are talking about the offensive environment is like how many runs are scored. We mean a lot of things, right, when we talk about the offensive environment and some of them have a lot to do with sort of the shape and distribution of

the offense separate from the scoring itself right and so i think offensive environment which i do not take to mean things that are solely within the control of position players when they're at the plate is inclusive of all of that stuff right so when i think of us talking about the offensive environment we might also we might be talking about you know are we in an era of of three true outcomes are we in a high base running error are we in an era where we're hitting a bunch of home runs relative to other kinds of hits? So I think offensive environment is a and all of that, that some of that is dictated by things that are not the offense, right? Well, sure. The ball, for instance, or how pitchers are being used. Yeah.

And so if you were to say run environment or scoring environment, then that would encompass all of that without giving the credit or the blame solely to the offense. I think in most cases where I say offensive environment, and I do sometimes say something about the offense specifically, and then maybe you would want to use offensive environment. So I think probably there's a little bit of distinction among those terms. They are often interchangeable, but I think maybe we don't have to eliminate offensive environment entirely, that there are some contexts where it might be the best term yeah i just don't i just don't read it as necessarily being solely confined to the offense perhaps my view is more expansive right it's the environment in which the offense operates and of course there's going to be other stuff within that environment than just the offense otherwise you just be playing by yourself yep right you know that's not baseball that's just uh hanging out yeah so maybe it's implied that we're not just talking about the offense we're talking about the context in which the offense is operating

yeah but but if you prefer run scoring environment like okay that's fine oh run score so yeah you you just combine scoring environment and run environment into run scoring environment so maybe maybe my preference then is run scoring environment because I do think you want to leave room within the conversation about the offensive environment for stuff that is a little bit more meta than simply the runs scoring. You know, just those runs. Who cares about those? All right. Question from Ryan. Your mention of foul poles in comparison to goalposts in football and the difficulty of actually hitting them got me

thinking about a hypothetical. Suppose MLB made hitting either foul pole with a batted ball worth more runs due to the difficulty of hitting a ball exactly there. Let's say just for speculative purposes that hitting a foul pole is now worth eight runs. Whoa. Would players put in extra practice and effort toward devising exactly the right angles they would need to strike the ball at in order to hit the poles? Would some hitters become known as foul pole specialists? And would teams pay a premium for anyone able to develop this very specific skill set? Please feel free to speculate on the number of runs that would be necessary for such a feat to be worth it in order to make specializing in it

worthwhile if eight seems insufficient to you. I mean, I think eight would do it. I don't know how probable this is, but I'd love to see it. It would be so fun yeah it seems very unlikely to me that you'd be able to to really like launch it that precisely yeah i think even among hitters who um at this moment are like really strongly polar oppo they're not i mean how many how many foul pole hits happen in a season i would like to know that i mean i know that look they're not trying right now, right? Right. If anything, I would imagine hitters, if they had their druthers, would like to be a couple feet in from the foul pole if they're aiming, right?

Because if you are aiming for the foul pole and you miss, then you have a foul ball and that doesn't do you any good, right? foul pull and you miss then you have a foul ball and that doesn't do you any good right so i think that we don't we don't quite know what the the baseline like true talent level is for this but let's see because you have you have three you have three potential outcomes right like let's say you are a hitter you've you've developed this skill you have three outcomes one of your outcomes is that it's just a foul ball and that's a strike but it's not an out so it's like okay and then you have the eight run option oh eight runs it's a lot of runs and then the other option is that you just hit a home run right if it's if it's sufficiently elevated you just hit a home run and that's not a bad option either.

Or you're aiming over there and it goes off the top of the wall or whatever. I don't think that a team would look at a guy and feel like they have enough confidence that he is demonstrating a real skill for this to inform any signings at all like if it were worth a hundred runs but then like you're not playing baseball at that point right so i don't think that obviously this would never happen but like i think the incentives for it to happen in like the parallel universe where we entertain these things are pretty low because i think it would be very difficult to demonstrate that you doing this, even if you did it a fair amount, is really down to skill and not just variance.

So I think that would be hard. But I am intrigued by some of the math, right? Because, again, assuming that you are elevating such that a foul ball gets into the stands or a ball hit over into the corner that isn't hitting the foul pole and isn't fouled. It's just a home run. Some of that math is interesting, but I don't know how you show someone like, oh yeah, this is really a skill I can do. This is a replicable thing that I have in my arsenal, but it sure would be fun. Yeah. If every team had just a

designated foul pole swinger and if you're getting blown out, you bring out the foul pole swinger to try to even it up. Except if you have a foul pole specialist and everyone knows that he's trying to hit the foul pole and so yeah well you could walk him or you could probably pitch him pretty effectively because if he's just i mean you're sitting dead red and right you know where he's trying to yank it yeah right like he he has no option to go well unless it's a an opposite field foul pole use use all fields pole to pole right right you could have some foul ball specialists who uh can actually go the other way like if you can do that if you're a

hitter that can do that don't you just hit really well anyway and you're just like a guy in the lineup probably yes yeah because if you knew that someone could could do it with some greater than average regularity but could only do it to the pull field. Well, then you just pitch him away, right? And probably he's cooked. Stymied. He's just like, I have my one skill. Right. So it would make you pretty easy to pitch to, I think,

if everyone knew you were doing it and if you could only do it to one field. But yeah, inevitably, it would be a pretty low probability play. But we say that now with hitters not having trained for this their whole lives. So if the incentive were there and you took swing after swing after swing, and it was like when you get in the cage, instead of laying down your bunts and then trying to hit line drives up the middle or whatever, you just try to rip one and hit the foul pole. Like, I don't know, maybe. Then again, like if everyone's trying to hit the foul pole, then pitchers would respond to that and pitch everyone differently.

And then that would be difficult. So yeah, if you know what the hitter is trying to do and it's something that specific, then I think that makes them more vulnerable. And also it would be just tough. I assume that there is a specific diameter that the foul pole is allowed to be and that people aren't like cheating by having a slightly thicker foul pole than other foul poles. I don't know how rigorously the measurements are done there, but you might have some teams. Well, you have the little great two, right? Yeah, there's the netting often.

Yeah. So I don't know whether teams would try to have fat foul poles. You'd have to really measure that. I'd love to see the data on how often the foul pole is currently hit, like what percentage of home runs. I guess StatCast, I don't know whether StatCast could tell us that. Maybe. Probably. I have not seen the data on that that but you'd think that we could

figure that out these days so that might be instructive yeah i think yeah it would it would definitely we they should develop that technology to answer this very specific question that doesn't really have any real game value but like i think it is illuminating of one of the central goals of rulemaking in baseball which is that you never want to tilt the scale too heavily in favor of one side or the other, right? So you never want to introduce the nuclear scoring option into baseball, because if you do that, then the game gets all out of whack. Things get cattywampus if you are going to come back from an eight- deficit. Like we insist that you earn that and we give you a mechanism to do it with efficiency in the home run.

You don't have to then juice that further, right? Because, you know, you can already, in theory, score four whole runs in one go if the opportunity presents itself. And that feels like a sufficient like clawback to relevance option. But yeah, it sure would be fun. Like who would, who would we enjoy seeing, see doing this the most?

It would be the most fun with the tiniest guy. You know, you want the tiniest guy hitting the eight run shot. Like that's what you want. The tiny guy. Yeah, tiny. All right.

Another outfield related hypothetical. This is from John in Deadwood, South Dakota, who says, regarding pits, whenever professional bull riding comes to my town of residence, Deadwood, South Dakota, there are advertisements to get tickets for the Shark Tank, which is a dugout pit in the middle of the arena that is caged in for fans to be at the center of the action. Nope. Well, I'm not sure about player pits, I think this could be an interesting player obstacle where instead of box seats, you could purchase cage seats randomly dug into the outfield that players could climb for a height advantage to catch a ball or an obstacle in play.

Absolutely not. So I watched a couple of videos of these shark tanks in the bull riding arena. Why do they call it a shark tank when it's a bull riding thing? Yeah, it's like you see in Shark Week. I mean, when they lower the tank and they have the camera people in there and the sharks like bash their head against the cage and rattle the cage. It looks like that, except you're sitting in it and you're not submerged in water and it's bulls instead of sharks but same sort of idea enough damage to those poor bulls really yeah well that's the thing i i guess right it's not so dangerous to you the spectator in the cage assuming that the the tank is uh well constructed sometimes those shark tanks they will come apart

but i assume it is guess, a little added dangerous to the bull and the rider, but it's already so dangerous that maybe it's just like, eh, what's a tank in the middle of the thing, right? Or maybe the bull will avoid the tank more often than not. I don't know. It would be tough if you had this in an outfield because, well, usually, I guess the bull can see what's in front of them, right? Whereas the outfielder cannot always. If they're going back on a ball, then they cannot see the tank. Now, of course, they could learn where it is if it's in their home park, but then if they're a visiting player, they have to familiarize themselves with where

that tank was. It would be like in old Yankee Stadium when they used to have Monument Park in play, or there would be like a flagpole out there on Towles Hill or whatever. Right, yeah, that random pole. Right, and those things would be like in deep, deep center where they were rarely a factor. But these would be, I guess, spread around the outfield or would be closer to in play.

Now, these would be, I think, very in-demand seats. I mean, if there were like a tunnel that went under the field and then you just pop up and you could sit or stand and basically you're looking at things from, I don't know, like outfielder knee or waist high vantage point, right? And you're looking in as if you were standing in the outfield yourself. It would be kind of hard to see through the cage, I guess. And then you wouldn't have the same perspective that you have if you're sitting somewhere with more elevation, but you'd feel like you were in the action. You were on the field because you would be, basically. So it might be fun to be in the cage as a fan but i gotta think that the

danger the outfielder safety issue now yeah you could use the cage to your benefit i mean you could jump on it and snare a fly ball potentially and that would be a great highlight reel catch but i think much more likely is that you would run smack into it yeah and you'd end up breaking or spraining or concussing yourself yeah i think there's no way that players would ever want this and a lot of ballparks kind of split the difference between you know shark week like peril uh and having to sit in a in a As an aside, I think people, they shouldn't want to be in the camera shot so much. I would find this very stressful.

You're in the camera shot the whole time. Yeah, they couldn't really see you though, probably given the angle and the cage. Then why would this be a good viewing experience? Wouldn't you rather just have an outfield seat and be able to visualize the whole field? Probably. Probably, but here's the other thing novelty value there are ballparks that have you

know like seats out there right yeah and they're ones that have them right behind home like a lot of them have them right behind home like at field level like i um i think those seats are probably pretty expensive but like i wouldn't want to sit in the seats right behind chase i'd be on tv the whole time and i've i've made i've made a lot of words out of people making faces there's no way my face doesn't get screenshotted and shared on twitter for a whole game there's no way it sounds terrible but yeah it would be even if you padded it it would be would feel dangerous i mean i'm i'm all for funk in the outfield. I think we could be a little looser with how we think about ballpark construction,

but this seems like an obvious safety hazard in a way. I don't think that those seats, I don't think your view would be good enough to feel like it was worth it because you know they'd be wildly expensive. What if you have snacks and the cage gets rattled and you spill beer and then there's beer in the outfields you know like or what if what if you get some jerk in those seats and they are on the field effectively heckling an outfielder and oh yeah and like throwing stuff at

them they'd have a way better angle on it i think it's a disaster waiting to happen oh yeah you know i'd never do the shark thing either that seems scary it does seem scary it seems like i would you know i know that they're fine most of the time but i am convinced that they would break when i was in there and then people would be like yeah that great white it got it got meg or like a megal shark those are the fast ones right yeah it's like in deep blue sea some of the shark movies are called meg so it would be appropriate but yes meg yeah i am merely a meg i am not the meg you know yeah right i think uh we've entertained some i vaguely remember some early effectively well hypothetical about like outfield seats uh where the outfielders would have to go under the seats it would be like a

raised platform of sorts and then the outfielders would have to go chasing under the fans who were sitting above them. So there could be like kind of like, I don't know, maybe one of those concert setups sometimes where you're like sitting in the middle of the band or something or like, you know, it's like the platforms are extending in all sides and you can have a seat in the middle of the stage sort of or you can be like right where the the performers are striding out and soloing and hamming it up so something like that maybe would be a little less dangerous potentially i don't think i need that i don't think i need that either you know i um i don't think I need that either. You know, I don't feel the need to be that a part of the action, I think, is part of it for me. You know, I like to observe and have a low stress, you know, experience where it's like, if they're running around underneath you, you're like, I can't see that.

Yeah. Well, some people will pay a lot for danger. They are thrill seekers, you know, and so they want to have that experience of being in danger without perhaps actually being in danger. I'm not one of those people. I'm anxious enough. I don't need that in my life. someone suggested that there should be a little house in center field and there should be the outfielder has to go to the house and knock on the door and there should be an elderly person who inhabits the house out there and they have to ask the occupant politely for the ball back as in the sandlot. It's sort of a sandlot rules sort of hut. So we've had all sorts of suggestions, but I don't know that we've had the cage before this.

And, you know, it's kind of creative if the Savannah Bananas or someone want an idea. Seems like they're selling plenty of tickets as it is. But someday I would not be shocked if we saw the cage come to baseball or the shark tank. All right. Question from Andrew. I was listening to some old episodes of the pod from 2019 and made special note of a couple of comments made about the Twins and the Guardians, particularly in episode 1381. Within, Sam proposed a rhetorical question noting Cleveland's performance to date in the 2019 three true outcomes environment to ask if more strikeouts and fewer balls in play are not fun, is Cleveland the least fun team in baseball? This struck me in relation to the 2022 Guardians, who carried the opposite reputation, at least

on the batting side. Alternatively, Ben and Sam described the twins' sudden shift toward progressive management and fun play, noting the hiring of Wes Johnson and Rocco Baldelli in the team's shift to strikeout pitchers and home run hitters. This is all to ask, what do MLB teams do that most definitively or rapidly changes their vibe in terms of fan perception? Are there factors other than performance, since obviously get good and get worse would be pretty powerful here, which teams have the steadiest reputations and vice versa? So what can a team do to change its vibe, to change its reputation when it comes to fan perception? And I was thinking, because you noted earlier that the Rockies just might be Rockies-like as long as Dick Mont vibe of the team or the way that the team operates because

the owner, the buck stops there, right? And so the owner will often hire a new front office and then the new front office will hire a new coaching staff and then they will do things to change the way the team plays. So I think there's only so much you can do with the same ownership. Now, then again, I guess if the Guardians are an example of a team that changed to a different vibe or a more fun vibe, well, they've had unfun owners throughout, right? And it's the composition of the major league roster that has changed and the style of play and all of that. So they've done that despite having ownership continuity.

So it's not necessarily prerequisite that you change owners to change the vibe of the team at all, but that is something you can do quickly. Steve Cohen buys the Mets and suddenly it's not the Wilpon Mets, it's the Steve Cohen Mets. That's a pretty big overnight difference, right? Or you talk about the Padres and Peter Seidler and all of that. That can kind of change things on a dime. So that's, I think maybe the quickest way, which is not to say, I mean, it's not a guarantee you get a new owner and things change. Sometimes it's meet the new boss, same as the old boss, but it can be a rapid shift. Yeah, it definitely can be. And I think, you know, if for some reason,

for some reason, if somehow like the rockies emerged with like a vibrant and really great front office and a bunch of players who were good like there have been good rockies teams in recent memory and some of those teams were like super fun and some of them were pitching driven which was weird and we liked that right they had a good vibe despite the fact that ownership was still a mess like ownership has been a mess as long as ownership has been there right so i don't think that having a bad owner is necessarily a barrier to to good feeling about a team or a fun team that's enjoyable to watch like there have been fun guardians teams despite the fact that their ownership refuses to

really invest in payroll. But I think that you need to have a couple of the things working at once. We want to see a team that is fun and good, or we want to see a team that is promising and has a baseball operations and scouting apparatus that might push it forward. Or we want a team that maybe is like on the downswing, but we have confidence that the ops group and ownership are like investing and figuring out how to drive it forward, right? Like we, you need a couple of the things and ownership, like I don't want to focus too much on the ownership piece because I'm skeptical of most ownership ever being really good. You know what I mean?

So it's like you can have bad owners and be a fun team, but you need the other stuff. You need to have a fun team. And I think most of it is just are you good or not? That goes a long way toward whether you're fun or not. It's possible to be a more fun bad team than other bad teams. But I think the baseline funness for a good team is going to be higher than for any bad team, probably. Even if it's a fun bad team with a bunch of characters, it's still probably more fun to watch a boring, good team in most cases, I would imagine. But I think a manager might have something to do with this. I mean, a manager may or may not have a huge impact on the actual on-field performance, but I think can have a pretty big impact on the vibe and whether players feel comfortable and what kind of quotes you get to the media. And do they do fun ice-breaking team building type of stuff or not?

Or is it just kind of all bland and corporate and by the book? So I think manager can play a part in that. And then, I don't know. I mean, it's tough to entirely remake your roster in a short span of time, but that will happen at times. Or if you're just like an older team that becomes a younger team, I think that's a big thing that can happen fairly quickly. Like look at the Orioles last year, let's say, and they also became a better team. So again, like you can be very young and bad or you can be very young and good. It's actually more common to be very young and bad.

It was unusual that the Guardians were so good despite being so young. But if you are coming off years of non-contention and you start sprinkling in some promising prospects, even if you're not yet good and contending, the vibe is much different because you can start to see the contending core forming. Right. And you get to just see some new guys instead of the old guys who are going nowhere. You know that these new guys might go somewhere at some point. So I think that's a big way that it can happen in a span of a season or two. Yeah, I think that that's right. And this might sometimes go together with an ownership change, but one of those big statement signings by a team that traditionally hasn't spent big or hasn't contended or hasn't been able to lure big free agents and then splurges on someone,

the Nationals signing Jason Wirth or the Padres signing Manny Machado, it's like a shot across the bow of the rest of the league. Like, hey, we're here. We can go get the big dogs too. And whether that deal works out or not, maybe it gives you some credibility. It's kind of a corner turning marker where you show, hey, we can splash around in the deep part of the pool too. And because the question asked about the teams with the steadiest reputations, I think it's got to be the Cardinals, right? For better or worse, mostly for better for Cardinals fans, I would say. I mean, ownership's been the same since the mid-90s. John Moseylak has been in that organization since the mid-90s. They signed Yadier Molina in 2000. Sometimes it seems like from afar, the Cardinals just have been sort of the same team

for 20 plus years now. They're always kind of in contention, but usually not the best team in baseball. They often have some once unsung homegrown guys. Even now, they have Nolan Arnauto, they have Paul Goldschmidt, they have some superstars, butgrown guys. Even now, they have Nolan Arnauto. They have Paul Goldschmidt. They have some superstars, but they still seem Cardinals-y. There's some stable essence there. So we'll see if that's the case post-Molina and eventually post-Wainwright, because another way that a team's vibe can shift is when a team leader who is very closely associated with that franchise departs or retires.

It's like losing the soul of the team. The Mookie Betts trade. That was a big vibe shift. All right. Question from Michael, Patreon supporter. Your discussion of era adjusting the pitch speed in Rookie of the Year got me thinking about how top pitching speeds change over time. That is, can we presume that one day a 110 mile per hour pitch will be thrown in MLB? Can we project from historical data about when that will occur? And I don't think we can with any great degree of accuracy. For one thing, there's a lot of dispute about how hard the hardest throwers used to throw because the measurement methods weren't

consistent with today's and maybe weren't as accurate as today's. So we have some data for recent decades. And again, there was also the change with radar guns and where they were actually measuring the pitch. Was it right out of the hand or was it somewhere halfway between the mound and home plate? But we do have data, certainly good data since PitchFX in 2008 for every team or 2002 with the BIS tracking, or even earlier in some cases when I wrote about the Red scouting reports and we looked at their velocity readings going back to the 80s or early 90s. I mean, you can tell that the average velocity has increased substantially over those decades, but

we don't know for sure that there's been a steady increase over a longer time frame that you can necessarily extrapolate back in time all the way. And also, I think the important thing is that it's not really clear that the outliers speed increases at the same rate as the league average. Like you'd think that there'd be a little bit of rising tide lifting all boats and that if the average is 92 instead of 88, then the hardest thrower might also be a harder thrower in the latter era than the earlier, but not necessarily because the fastest pitch on record still is Aroldis Chapman's 105.8. And whether that was completely

accurate or not, he had a number of other pitches that were clocked at very close to that. But that was 12 years ago. So that was, what, 2010, I think he threw that pitch. So it's not as if there's been a steady uptick at the top of the scale. And in those years, the league average velocity has increased, but we haven't seen someone come along and raise the bar at the top end. So there are some people who've said that they don't think throwing 110 is anatomically possible, that it just can't happen. I wouldn't go that far. I wouldn't rule it out, but I think it might take some sort of physical freak or someone with sort of a non-standard physique and anatomy that enabled them to do that and endure the stresses that that would require. So I would not bet against some real-life Sid Finch coming along and being able to do it. But I don't know that we can project and say, well, Nolan Ryan threw this hard and Rollins Chapman threw that hard. And therefore, we can conclude that in the year 2030, whatever, there will be someone who can throw that hard. It doesn't quite work that way. Yeah, I think that I think that that's right. All right. Michael, a different

Michael says, I was listening to yesterday's episode while watching the Australian Open, and it got me thinking about the point that baseball is played on two different surfaces. Obviously, in baseball, there is either grass or turf plus the dirt infield. But what if baseball was like tennis, where there were three distinct playing surfaces, grass, clay, hard court, and players who were better on certain surfaces than others? Obviously, tennis courts do not have multiple surfaces on the same court, but it would be interesting if, say, some outfields were entirely dirt instead of grass, and certain center fielders made more plays when playing on the dirt than on grass. Of course, the change in court surface and tennis is sort of

seasonal. So if baseball followed suit and played on entirely dirt fields in June and then had entirely grass fields infield included in July, I wonder how or if that would impact the way front offices build their team and if there would be meaningful differences in defense between surfaces. I bet that some players would be more comfortable on particular surfaces for whatever reason. But I don't know how much it would matter in the long run. That would be quite entertaining if there were tennis courts that were like grass on one side and dirt on the other. And it would give advantages to certain players in certain games and sets and not others. I don't know if that exists anywhere in the world, but that would be fun.

But a baseball equivalent of that, where we don't really have that now. We have distinct playing surfaces on every field, really, but more or less the same amount of different playing surfaces. I mean, some will have strips of dirt here or there that others do not, that kind of thing. But for the most part, you don't have all dirt fields or all grass fields or fields that have sort of predetermined patterns of different surfaces that would benefit certain players other than, I suppose, turf, right? Turf would be one way. And Bauman just wrote about that. Yeah. Bauman wrote about whether the teams that have turf fields, replica turf fields, or I guess the Blue Jays turf, which is the closest to old school turf, even though it's more modernized and meant to be more lifelike, When they put the ball on the ground, like the Rays, for instance, if you're a team that plays on turf, some sort of turf, then maybe there are

teams that have kind of cracked that code somehow and figured out how to use that to their advantage. And there are stories about players back when turf was more common and it would benefit them, right? Because they could just smack the ball up the middle or whatever and it would bounce fast and it would get past the infielders or certain infielders would use the turf to bounce their throws over there so maybe that's the closest equivalent that that we used to exist or sort of still exists yeah i feel like that's that's certainly the closest it would be really funny if it was like we had a baseball equivalent to the clay hardcourt thing with pitchers. Like, oh, he pitches well off the natural mound, but once you put him on turf, it's a disaster. I don't know what the...

That would be kind of cool. It would be cool. It would be an interesting wrinkle. Yeah, yeah. Cool. It would be an interesting wrinkle. Yeah. advantage more than most. That's something that people say about Todd Helton, that you can't necessarily do the typical home road sort of splits with him or park adjustments with him. For one thing, it seems like Rocky's players are disadvantaged on the road because of the altitude change. But for another, it seems like he made hay in course more so than most Rockies. And so if you do the standard park adjustments, it might underrate some special ability he had to take advantage of the dimensions of that park or the conditions there. So it does exist to some extent. It's harder to pin down maybe what it is that enables players to be good in certain parks. And of course, there's a sample size issue that comes into play there. But you definitely do say, I mean, the old like lefty pitchers in Fenway Park kind of trope, you know, just like, well,

you don't want that kind of player in that kind of park. And often that can be a bit overblown, but there's a little bit of truth to it potentially. Yeah, I think that that's right. All right, question from Scott. While I'm excited about larger bases as it relates to lead-offs and steals, have you discussed the impact on bang-bang plays at first? Does the new size and orientation of the bags make it a slightly shorter path from the batter's box?

If that is the case, to whom do I complain? Like I said, you've got to decide whether this is something worth complaining about if it were true in the first place. And I think that is somewhat debatable, too. Yeah. I mean, it'll make it a little bit, a tiny bit shorter, right? Just because it's a bigger bag. But I don going from 15-inch square to 18-inch square. And so we're talking about a difference of inches here. Now, there is a Pinstripe Alley post about this by Joshua Diemert, hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly, last March, who did the math on how this affects the home-to-first difference and basically found, I mean, he's saying, you know, it goes from 1,065 inches to 1,062 inches. And so the time is going from 3.2870 seconds to 3.2778 seconds if you're talking about moving 324 inches per second on average. And he's using some stat cast metrics here. And it would be just like the tiniest little fraction of a second. And it might not even make a difference in like how many strides you take. I mean, it would be probably the same number of strides. And so I guess maybe you might actually get your foot down. It's 0.0002 seconds of difference he's finding.

And I don't know whether the math is quite correct or not, but a very small difference. I mean, he said, we're shaving off some time on these splits, but just a little bit. It's pretty difficult to manually measure that 0.0002 seconds of difference. But that is the bang bang play at first. 30% of all challenges from 2018 to 2020 were that exact play. Giving the runner these extra three inches means that virtually all of these challenge plays will become hits again, adding about 240 hits a season to the MLB cumulative total, 430 or so challenges a year with a slightly less than 50% chance of calls being overturned. This is a marginal effect. The league-wide batting average would rise literally one point

by adding in all those new hits. So that's one potential way to do that math. The other thing, though, that I don't think that this accounts for is that the first baseman can stand slightly closer to the fielder who is throwing the ball right so the ball has to travel a little shorter distance too to reach the first baseman's outstretched glove so i don't know whether that completely equalizes things yeah probably partly right because you know the runner can get to the bag a little quicker but the ball would get to the first baseman a little quicker, too. So maybe that kind of cancels out. Cancels it out, yeah. that would not have been bang bang now be bang bang right like would we have fewer bang bang plays or would the scale just slide a little so that we would have different bang bang plays but

potentially just as many of them right like right the ones that you beat out by half a step before maybe there would be a wider margin now and so it wouldn't be bang bang but then you would have other plays that uh that wouldn't have been bang bang that now you would be closer and it would be bang bang so i don't know that the actual number of bang bang i'm saying bang bang plays a lot but bang bang i don't know that the number or the rate would necessarily be different. Bang, bang. Thank you. I don't think it'll be that different either. Yeah. Yeah, I would be surprised if it moves dramatically as a result of this.

I think it'll kind of equalize around where it was. And I also like infield hits. Infield hits are fun. And if we're trying to incentivize contact, and this is a small, small way we can nudge things so that it might be more advantageous to put the ball in play, especially if you're a speedster and a slap hitter and you think you have a better chance to beat out a play at first. That's all to the good, I would say. Again, I don't think we would necessarily be deprived of close plays.

We might just have a different kind of closeness. All right. Question from Linder, Patreon supporter. If a team had nothing but 1.0 war players throughout their major and minor league rosters, could they immediately trade their way into being a super team? If not, could they at least trade their one war players for enough high variance prospects that they would be a super team later on? What sort of deals would

you expect to see this team making? So no high ceiling players on this team, no stars, but also everyone is at least a little productive. It's just one more players all the way down, like throughout your minor league system, I guess. So you have a lot less of the elite talent that other organizations would have, but you also have extraordinary depth. So anyone who needs a warm body who can give you one war at a position, you can meet their needs and not even notice you're trading from strength there. So can you red paperclip your way to actually having a good team and not a team that is just like worth 26 war in total which would not be a good team that would be like a 70 something win team probably uh well i mean if you trade prospects maybe you can maybe if you combine them with guys worth a win prospects. Yeah, if you had a team that

had a sore lack of depth and this is, I guess, assuming that everyone evaluates these players as one-war players and doesn't think that they're significantly better than that or worse than that for that matter. But if everyone knows that this is just

like the one-war store and you can just say they have an unlimited supply of one war players. Everyone needs one war players. Like every team needs that. So like even the best teams in baseball, probably the worst player on their roster, the 26th man, probably not a one war guy. Or maybe if you're talking about like a great Dodgers super team or something. But almost everyone else is devoting playing time to someone who is not a one-war player. Now, some of those players you might hope that they could be better in the future and that they'll be worth more than one more.

And so you wouldn't necessarily trade them straight up for a one more guy. But if you could target every team that needed one more players and also like you could get respectable, like every team could get to. I mean, if 48 wins is your baseline roughly for if your entire team is replacement level and then you add 26 wins to that, like you could be a 74 win team. Suddenly that's better than some actual teams are. And then you add 26 wins to that, like you could be a 74 win team suddenly. That's better than some actual teams are. So you could get out of the basement quickly if you wanted to and put a competitive product in any given game out there. Or at the trade deadline every year, you could probably find some team that was trying to contend, but had a position where it was getting replacement level production and they would give you something for a one war guy and the certainty of a one war player in the short term.

That's the other thing. If you can count on them to be one war players and you know you're getting something. I assume this means a one war player like playing full time. So that's a little less valuable, obviously, in a part time role. But still, you could probably if you're not currently contending, you could get some contending team to give you real higher ceiling prospects. Ceiling guys, yeah. Yeah, in exchange for the certainty of the short-term one war guy. And because you have an unlimited quantity of them somehow, then maybe you could package enough of them together to actually get

some blue chippers maybe i just you're always going to be limited there by unless you have a team that's like really keen on accumulating depth that just hangs out in the high minors you're going to be limited because teams can only roster so many guys. So they're only going to want to- Except for the Padres who get actually first. Except for the Padres, right, because they get unlimited roster spots as we've established. But assuming that even if there is some divergence in that team's evaluation and yours, and they

view one of the guys who you have assessed as like a one-war guy as like a two-win guy, one of the guys who you have assessed as like a one more guy is like a two-in guy you know the amount that you're going to be able to bundle in order to bring back a player who is really good is going to be limited by the fact that you only get 26 spots right and then you get your you get your high your high minor step so i think that you would bump up against the ceiling of what you could do in relatively short order. But what if you were willing, Ben, you trade some guys and you get some guys back who you have evaluated as being worth more than a win.

And then you package some of those guys with one more guy and then you get other guys. Maybe that way you can do it. But I think it would be hard. Right. Teams would value having these guys for organizational depth to play their prospects against, I think, because if you had major league caliber but below average players and you could stock your whole minor league system with those guys, you could maybe accelerate the development of your hopefully higher ceiling prospects by having them get regular reps against big league level talent. So there might be some value in that. But also, yeah, it's not like you can just trade 10 of them for a superstar, right?

I mean, that's your kind of classic fantasy baseball trade where it's like, I'll give you this garbage guy I don't want and this other guy, this guy, and you give me your star. I've been on both sides of trying to make that trade or someone trying to make that trade with me. And often it doesn't really work because it's like, well, there's only so much value. I don't want to tie up all my roster spots in these one more guys. I need to get more production than that. So it would be tough. I think perhaps it could be done. It would be tough to trade your way into a super team, but I think you could trade your way from your 74 win like to suggest a Shohei Otani hypothetical. Let's say Otani eventually tires of his current pitcher DH combo and announces he'd like to play the field again, but he doesn't just want to play a position. He wants to play all of them. He announces he will only consider signing as a free agent with a team that will allow him to play all nine positions in every game. If he is not going to be allowed to play every position, he will sit that

day out. But if he's going to play in a game, he has to face at least one batter at every defensive spot. My questions are as follows. Would he still be rosterable? Would a non-competitive team that might not previously have been able to get Otani actually be more inclined to bid under this scenario to get attention for the spectacle of it? What kind of strategies would you consider to maximize the benefits and minimize the potential pitfalls of playing every way Otani? First thing I would say is that he would be playable at all those positions if he set his mind to it like wow do you have any doubt that shohei otani if he trained to be name a position here that he could do it i mean catcher might be a stretch yeah i was just about to say he doesn't have catching experience he's a little bit bigger than the typical catcher and that would be dangerous and everything so i i don't necessarily want him to do that i

mean look joe mauer 65225 right shohei otani listed 64210 like it can happen but without real catching experience as pro that would be worrisome but he has the athleticism to do whatever the heck he wants on a baseball field as far as I'm concerned. He has actual outfield experience and he was a perfectly fine outfielder and he stopped doing it really for rest purposes and fatigue purposes. But does anyone doubt that he could be a good outfielder if he played regularly? I don't. Now, infield is a bit of a different story. But I mean, just look at the guy. Look at him field his position as a pitcher.

Like, he's a natural. I don't have any concerns about, like, whether he would be playable if he actually committed himself to playing that position. Now, it's a little bit different, obviously, if he's playing every position at the same time because there is an adjustment, as Russell Carlton has found. time because there is an adjustment as Russell Carlton has found if you're switching positions like even if you're playing the same position every day and you switch positions to a different position you're playing every day there's still I think he's found like a third of a season or something it takes for you to actually get your bearings there so to do the stunt that some players have done where they play every position in the same game, but to do that in every game, that would take a toll even on Otani. So the fatigue factor would be the big thing.

And if he has to pitch in every game, that's going to be an issue too, just workload-wise. Like he would no longer be a starting pitcher, right? He'd have to just relieve and you'd have to use him very sparingly. I mean, you'd have to use him, gosh, even if you used him an inning every game might be kind of equivalent to his starting schedule. Yeah. In terms of innings pitched, but not in terms of recovery time and days off. You wouldn't have a day off unless it was a scheduled day off for the team.

you wouldn't have a day off unless it was a scheduled day off for the team. So I don't know how to figure exactly the strain of, let's say, throwing six or seven innings and then getting to rest for several days or rest your arm at least versus throwing an inning a day or less than an inning in a day, but never having an off day on a day your team was playing. That would be tough. As you said, teams have load managed relievers now where even if you're an inning at a time guy they are much more hesitant to pitch you on back-to-back days or at least back-to-back-to-back right so that would be tough i doubt that even he would have the stamina to do this i think he has the physical ability but i think even he would wear down fairly quickly and would probably get hurt yeah i think

that it would probably exceed there there are two issues there's his ability to do it and while i also have great faith in otani i don't mean to there's no besmirching happening here ben so you just relax okay yeah i think that the the toll that this would take on his body would deteriorate his play in a noticeable way and in a way that that certainly curtailed his value and then there's the the piece of it that is like having to accommodate such a strange schedule and you know teams can can do a six-man rotation right but this i think probably pushes and and can do a six-man rotation, right? But this, I think, probably pushes and can accommodate a two-way player, as we have seen. But I think that this would be burdensome to the point of not being workable,

and that would be fine, right? It would be fine to say, this isn't workable. It would be okay. You know, we'd survive that. Well. He, you know, has never struck me as an unreasonable person. No.

And so I'm sure he would say, yeah, it's a lot, isn't it? Right. And then it wouldn't happen. In a sense, it's unreasonable to even think that you could be a two-way player in the major leagues or NPB for that matter. But it is reasonable if you're Shohei Otani and you actually have the talent to be able to do that. Yes. This is different. This is every way Otani.

Right. Granted, I grant that premise. But yes, I think it is a different level that would just inspire people to go like, hey, it's okay. Just chill. Yeah. If you were to do it,

if it were the only way that you could sign Otani, I think a team would still do it. Just Otani's talent is so tantalizing. I mean, he's the best player in baseball, probably. So if you can get the best player in baseball and he insists on playing every position and he has the athleticism of Shohei Otani, this is not like if Mike Trout insisted on doing this, well, you wouldn't want Mike Trout pitching, right? Whereas when Otani's pitching, he's one of the best pitchers in baseball. So I think he could hold his own. And I think that would make him rosterable. It would be very complex and it might be causing clubhouse issues. issues and it would be a lot of work for the manager to figure it all out and keep track of okay has he played every position now you'd have to have like next year lineup card you'd you'd have to just have some sort of like list of positions and check them off as he got there right and it probably would be a draw as long as he stayed healthy it would be a spectacle it would sell some tickets even if he could handle all those positions though the players he displaced might not be able to so you'd have other players playing out of position and maybe there'd be a compounding penalty. And I think you could try to minimize the strain. Like, I don't know, let's say

you have him pitch the first inning in one game and then maybe you have him pitch the ninth the next game to just the maximum rest and number of hours between outings and then you could have him dh for most of the game still probably and then you could just cycle him around as quickly as possible right so he can knock out all three outfield positions in one inning right or or even faster than an inning if he only has to be out there for one batter right now as a pitcher he may have to be out there for one batter, right? Now, as a pitcher, he may have to be out there for more than one batter because of the rules about changing pitchers, unless it's the last out of the inning or something. So you could calculate that. But you can just move him around batter by batter. So he's in left for this batter, and then he's in center for this batter, and then

he's in right for the next batter. And maybe the is over if it's not then you know like you could knock out every position in theory in two innings maybe two to three innings right and so he could actually still dh for most of the game and thus you can get him the maximum amount of rest and the minimum amount of time at every other position. So I think that would probably be the way to do it. Right. And you could also, if you think he is not as strong as your regular option at any particular position, then you could do some some math. Right. And try to figure out when would be the least costly time to deploy him at each position so yeah you can look at the spray charts and the picture and all of that and try to figure out okay this batter is uh less likely to hit the ball to right field right now so we'll move otani out this is this is the matchup we want for otani and right field right so i think you could still have a dh for like six innings or something and and then you could just get it all done right and either at the beginning and then have him rest or or at the end and have him rest at the start so

i think it could be doable it's a terrible idea but it could be done it yeah but like i right but so here's the thing though about here here's one thing about otani that i think we have established which is that like he he knows he can do the two-way thing and the reason he is committed to doing it is because doing it at the level he has like is it benefits his team yes and helps them to win and i think that that is in addition to proving that he can do it and can do it as well as he has is is a big part of the appeal for him is that he would like to win and so i find it hard to believe that he would adopt a convoluted structure that would make things challenging for the team to win because he seems to want to win

and and you know maybe he could be like the best or at least just a playable catcher maybe he could but i think that he does these two things really well and we know that. And so he would say, hey, let's keep doing that though. Yep, I think so. Yeah. All right.

Let me wrap up with StatBlast here. data sets sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting data, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to DASTA+. Okay, so I got a few things to touch on here. First, Darren O'Day has announced his retirement, a staple of bullpens around baseball. He has called it a career, and quite a career it was. a career it was. Just narratively speaking, his farewell tweet starts out, as a lightly recruited high school player to a college walk-on to an undrafted free agent to a non-prospect entering pro ball, I'm extremely proud of playing with the best players in the world for so long. Finally, after 17 seasons in professional baseball, it is time to go home. And every athlete, they like to say, nobody believed in me, you know, and nobody thought I was

going to be this great. With Darren O'Day, I think it's a pretty accurate label, right? It's impressive that he came from those humble baseball beginnings to last as long as he did and not just pitch as long as he did, 15 major league seasons, but also to be as good as he was, 2.59 ERA. seasons, but also to be as good as he was. 2.59 ERA. He has a 167 career ERA plus. And this is just a very simplistic, just ran a stat head query here for highest ERA plus in a career with at least 600 innings pitched. He had only 609 career in the regular season. It goes Mariano Rivera, Billy Wagner, Craig Kimbrell, Jonathan Papelbon, and Darren O'Day. He's fifth all time in terms of ERA plus in the AL and NL minimum 600 innings pitched. And the save totals for those five guys, starting with Rivera and Wagner, Kimbrell, Papelbon, O'Day, 652, 422, 394, 368, 21. And he's actually tied with a 167 ERA plus with a Roldis

Chapman who himself has 315 saves. So one of those things, not like the others. So really just a kind of a cool, extremely effective on an inning printing basis setup, man. I do just want to mention, though, that fifth on the list, if we include not just AL and NL, but also the Negro Leagues, which you can do on StatHead, is Dave Brown, who would rank between Papelbon and O'Day with a 169 career ERA plus. And he was a Negro Leagues player, 1920 to 1925, short career and actually mostly a starter, but very effective. And I will tell you why he had a short career. So reading from his baseball reference bullpen page, he started 1925 with a win despite seven walks and seven hits. He allowed one run while striking out eight. He then ended his career by killing a man in a barroom fight. Fellow Negro Leagues players Frank Wickware and

Oliver Marcel were present at the scene. He then fled law enforcement afterward. Living on the run, he played under the name Lefty Wilson. Reportedly for an otherwise white team in Minnesota in 1927 in Sioux City, Iowa in 1929 and in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1930. He was apparently arrested in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the FBI found that his fingerprints matched up. A different account has it that the police in Greensboro remembered his wanted poster and contacted the NYPD. Despite this, New York decided not to extradite and charge him. Brown is rumored to have died in Denver. While his career was bookended by violent acts of crime. In the beginning of his career, he was involved in a highway robbery.

I don't know whether he was doing the robbing or being robbed. But yeah, cutting short a magnificent pro career. His teammates described him as gentle, kind and jolly. So there's Dave Brown. And as the baseball reference bullpen page noted, he might have trouble with Cooperstown's character clause, given the way his career ended there. Also didn't play long enough to meet Hall of Fame standards, but he was on the preliminary ballot for the 2006 special committee on the Negro Leagues election. So quite a player while he was around. That's Dave Brown for you. Now, the actual stop-loss I want to give you here, I just happened to see that O'Day was retiring before we started recording,

but Jeffrey Springs is getting extended by the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays are on a little extension spree, seemingly. Not just Jeffrey Springs, but also Pete Fairbanks and Yandy Diaz, it looks like. It's extension season, right? We saw the Mets with Jeff McNeil and the Braves extending their manager, Brian Snitker.

We'll get more and more extensions as opening day approaches. But I was intrigued by Jeffrey Springs. Hard for me to separate in my mind his performance from the fact that he was one of the Rays who opted out of Pride Night. Right. But he did have a very solid season on the field in 2022. And the interesting thing about Jeffrey Springs is that he became a starter for the first time in the majors in 2022, his age 29 season. And it went remarkably well. So he debuted with the Rangers in 2018. He was with them for a couple of seasons and then with the Red Sox and then with the Rays for the past couple of seasons. And he had been exclusively a reliever aside from two opener starts in 2018

with Texas. He was just in the bullpen every year and wasn't even always effective there. He had started some in college and in the minors, but not in the majors. And this has been a longstanding interest of mine. I wrote back in 2010 for Baseball Perspectives. R.J. Anderson still makes fun of me because I was so flabbergasted that the Astros had decided to use Wesley Wright as a starter, even though he had only been a reliever to that point. But Wesley Wright, when he started four games, he was only in his third season and he was 25, never started again after that year. But the spring situation is even more unusual. And I'm always intrigued by people who do the reverse conversion, right? Because it's usually you become a reliever when you wash out as a starter. And typically,

pitchers pitch better in the bullpen than they do in the rotation. If it's the same guy at the same time, Tom Tango has what he calls the rule of 17, which is basically that like all your rate stats improve by like 17% is kind of the average boost season and nearing 30 and already is 30 at this point. Darren O'Day, by the way, is 40. But Jeffrey Spinks is 30 now. So unusual to make that kind of conversion. And so I just wanted to know what the precedents were for that kind of established reliever being made a starter after really being solidified in a relief role. So I went to frequent StatBlast consultant Ryan Nelson, rsnelson23 on Twitter, and I asked him to come up with a list of pitchers who had made a similar career shift to springs. So the criteria were, and I think he started with World War II. So this is post-World War II players, which would probably get most of the qualifiers anyway, because there weren't that many regular relievers prior to that. So if we look for players who had at least three plus seasons to start their career as relievers. And over those three plus seasons, they pitched at least 95% of their games in relief.

So those are the criteria. At least three plus seasons to start the career with cumulatively at least 95% of those games coming in relief, which we use that cutoff to account for Springs' opener starts. If you do that, and then you look for guys who had, following those reliever seasons, a season where he started at least 75% of his games, which was the case for Springs in 2022. And we looked for players who satisfied those criteria. Since World War II, there are only 21 of them. Jeffrey Springs is the 21st to make that kind of change. So it is quite unusual.

Hoyt Wilhelm was the first to do it. So he debuted in 1952 and he had seven reliever seasons until his first season as a starter in 1959. And then Bob McClure and Steve Bedrosian, Ken Howell, Mike Jeffcoat, Craig Lefferts. Craig Lefferts actually went nine seasons before his first starter season. Kenny Rogers, Woody Williams, Darren Dreifurt, Paul Bird, Ron Vallone, Danny Graves, Braden Looper, who had a very interesting career, Justin Dukeshire, CJ Wilson, Jeff Samarja, Neftali Feliz, Esmerling Vasquez, and JC Ramirez, and Josh Lindblom, actually, and then Jeffrey Springs. So Springs was the first to do it since Lindblom coming back from overseas, I suppose, in 2020. And it's quite

rare. And the other thing that makes Springs' conversion rare is that it was successful. He actually got better pitching primarily as a starter than he had pitching exclusively as a reliever. So he had a 2.46 ERA in 2022 while making 25 starts in 33 games. So we limited that initial sample of 21 to guys who had a better ERA in their first seasonling the sample down even more here. And that limits us to Wilhelm, Ken Howell, Darren Dreifurt, Paul Bird, Ron Vallone, Justin Dukeshire, CJ Wilson, Jeff Samarja, and JC Ramirez, and then Springs. I guess that's actually not a bad rate. That's like almost half of the guys who did make these unusual conversions had a better ERA in their first year as a starter than they had as a reliever prior to that point. So I suppose that means or suggests that teams are picking the right people when they anoint someone to make this odd conversion. But here's the really extraordinary thing about Springs. This was his best ERA in any year yet. So not just better than his career ERA to date prior to the conversion season,

but also his ERA in 2022 was his best single season ERA of his career. And that has been accomplished by only one player prior to this, JC Ramirez. So JC Ramirez, he started in 2013, or he began his career in 2013, but he did not start in 2013. He transitioned to starting in 2017. So that was his fourth season and it went well. So 2013, he had a 7.5 ERA and then 2015, he had a 5.3 ERA. And I should say, I think Ryan tossed out seasons with 15 and fewer innings. So there was some innings limit here that was also applied. And so Ramirez, 7.56 ERA with Seattle, I guess that was also applied. And so Ramirez, you know, 7.56 ERA with Seattle. I guess that was in

a partial season. 2016, he had a 4.35 ERA. And then 2017, he starts with the Angels, 24 out of 27 games, and he had a 4.15 ERA, that you're above average, better than average ERA plus. So it went okay. And that's really the only post-World War II, at least, precedent for a pitcher making the Jeffrey Springs conversion and having it go as well as it did relative to his previous career. And the Rays will hope that the rest of Springs' career will not be like J.C. Ramirez's because 2018, he started two games and two appearances and had a 9.45 ERA. And then the following year, he was back in the bullpen for five games and then he was done. I guess he got hurt and it did not presage a long and successful career as a starter, but at least

for one year it worked. And I guess he was still pitching in AAA in 2022 in the Venezuelan Winter League. So he's still bouncing around out there. But Springs, really an outlier, almost unprecedented to have someone who fits quite these qualifications. So it's a bold move and it worked out for him. Well, to reference a name that you said maybe 20 minutes ago, because Ben, you have said a lot of words. I think the important thing for all involved is to know when to hold them, when to fold them. Yes, exactly.

I was like, oh, maybe that'll be the last set of names. And then there were like five more sets. And I was like, I'm doing the reference anyway. Yeah, it worked. So yeah, four-year contract extension, $31 million over the course of the deal with the club options and other incentives and such. And if you're wondering, well, how did they decide that Jeffrey Spings would be a candidate for this unusual conversion? Well, I asked someone with the Rays. I won't say who. I could chat with anyone who

works for the raise, really. I don't know who might come to mind for podcast listeners, someone who is currently employed by the raise, but I'm not specifying who it is necessarily. But they had a bunch of guys hurt, which is basically why they started doing the opener was that they were just short-handed. So Shane Baz was hurt, and Patino was hurt and Yarbrough was hurt and Mazza was hurtussen and they were like, we need someone else here. And no one wanted to trade at that point in the year. And some of the coaches thought maybe Springs, maybe we could stretch Springs out. And they were intrigued by that possibility. And also Springs himself expressed enthusiasm unprompted for starting. So that always helps when the player is on board. So it seemed to make some sense. And the coaches were intrigued by him as a starting candidate because he had three pitches and he threw strikes and he had been pretty successful as a reliever with the raise. And he has a controlled delivery, nothing too yeah, maybe he could have done this. He had no serious arm injuries in the past. Sofi classic The Core, which will turn 20 in March. Now, The Core has been back in the news to some extent because the real life Earth's core has stopped rotating. Yeah. Scientists have determined that the core has stopped or is stopping and is maybe reversing

direction, which is basically the plot of the 2003 sci-fi classic, The Core, right? The Earth's core is not spinning anymore or is stopping, and this is going to be disastrous, and the Earth's electromagnetic field is going to be destroyed, and so they have to go and nuke the core to get it started again. It's kind of a fun movie if you watch it in the right spirit without too many scruples and being a stickler for sci-fi accuracy or scientific accuracy. But here's the thing. We got an email from listener Andy in Portland. Andy said, in light of the news that the Earth's core may be slowing and reversing, I decided to watch the

2003 classic, The Core. The film starts with a space shuttle flying over Dodger Stadium during opening day with Sean Green in the box and Mike Hampton pitching. Two questions from Andy. One, does this make it a baseball movie? Two, is this the most 2003 at-bat imaginable? The answer to question one is absolutely, it makes it a baseball movie by the effectively wild definition of baseball movie. It's like a 20-second scene. The space shuttle, it's on re-entry and it's burning up and they've got to reroute over Los Angeles. And I think Randall Munroe of XKCD fame actually interrogated whether the space shuttle part of this is accurate, whether the space shuttle could do this and land like this. And the answer is no, probably not, which is not particularly surprising.

That's the answer to every question about the core, probably. But there's this 20 second scene where the space shuttle with not very impressive special effects flies over Dodger, and Mike Hampton is pitching to Sean Green, and Sean Green looks up because there's a sonic boom as the space shuttle passes overhead. This is on YouTube, so I will link to it on the show page. Guidance is bad. You are now one two nana miles off course. Roger, Houston, we sort of noticed. Is that? Los Angeles, that is confirmed. We are one five thousand feet. We got maybe two minutes of glide time left.

Does that make sense? The guidance, the deacons, they're all wrong? We are heading straight for downtown. We're not gonna crash into Los Angeles. They're gonna hit downtown LA at 300 knots. Bob, you know LA? Because I have an idea. Houston, those buildings are getting mighty big. Can you clear a freeway? Okay.

Come on. Come on. It's rush hour, Commander, and it's bumper to bumper. Sir, I have an alternate. If you turn to heading 175... That's Houston's call. Houston? Computers are still prodding.

Come on. computers are still prodding come on Houston we are running out of time here. I happened to, on a whim, look up what Mike Hampton versus Sean Green, what their actual line against each other was. And it turned out that it's pretty extraordinary. Sean Green owned Mike Hampton. He went 18 for 29 against Mike Hampton. He went 18 for 29 against Mike Hampton. I don't know whether that's 18-29 or 18-29 or 18-29, but 18 for 29 with five homers. So that is a 621-647-1207 slash line in 34 plate appearances, not an insubstantial amount of plate appearances. It's easily the highest OPS Sean Green had against any pitcher he faced 15 plus times and easily the highest OPS of any hitter who faced Mike Hampton 15 plus times. And prior to 2003, when the movie came out, he was 13 for 19 against Mike Hampton through that point. There were already

articles being written about it. I found a Los Angeles Times article from April of 2002, headline, Hampton isn't much of an ace to Green. And it's about just how Sean Green owned Mike Hampton already at that point. So I have to wonder, like Sean Green, good player, underrated. You know, he was a top 10 position player by war from 1999 to 2002. And Mike Hampton was already not at his best by the latter part of that period. But this is extreme, extreme ownership. And so I have to wonder if this was a complete coincidence that it happened to be Hampton versus Green in this matchup, like one of the shots looks like it could be actual game footage potentially, others maybe not. So I have attempted to reach out. I have contacted both Sean Green and Mike Hampton and also the two screenwriters of the Corps. And strangely, I have not heard back from any of them yet. Very, very odd. You would think that I would receive immediate responses about how this scene happened and whether it was a coincidence that it happened to be Hampton versus Green. I have not oddly heard back yet from any of them. But if I do, I will certainly update you and everyone else. But odd, right? Weird coincidence. This is extreme, extreme ownership. And so I had to know whether this was historic, whether that level of ownership of one batter versus one pitcher is actually anomalous or unprecedented. And so for this, I went to semi-regular stat class consultant

Kenny Jacklin of Baseball Reference, who is also on Twitter at his name, Kenny Jacklin, J-A-C-K-E-L-E-N. And he was able to give me a list of the highest OPSs in batter-pitcher matchups of 30-plus plate appearances. So it turns out that the highest OPS any hitter has had against any pitcher on record in 30 or more plate appearances is Albert Pujols versus Odalis Perez, which I think some people have pointed out. And Pujols, 6-0-9, 7-19, 13-91. That's a 21-10 OPS against Perez in 32 plate appearances with five homers. Then you have Ryan Howard against Chris Volstad, 2075 OPS. Ralph Kiner versus Steve Rydzik,

and this one was 2025 OPS. Jack Fournier versus Tony Kaufman, 2011 OPS. Jim Tomei vs. Rick Reed, 1981. Barry Bonds vs. Jose Lima, 1942. Henry Aaron vs. Don Gullet, 1929. Paul Goldschmidt vs. Tim Lincecum, 1916. Jim Tomei again vs. Bobby Witt, 1865. Daryl Porter vs. Mike Kruko, 1859. Willie McCovey vs. Bob Moose, 1865, Daryl Porter versus Mike Kruko, 1859, Willie McCovey versus Bob Moose, 1855, and at number 12, Sean Green versus Mike Hampton with that 1854 OPS.

So all of these are in 30-something plate appearances except Willie McCovey versus Bob Moose, which was in 42 plate appearances. So this is absolutely one of the most extreme batter versus pitcher OPSs of all time. And this is not era adjusted. So obviously, like, you know, it's a high, what are we saying? High offense era scoring environment, run scoring environment. Don't want to offend anyone with my offensive environment. But it is one of the most extreme cases ever and it happens to be preserved for posterity in the 2003 sci-fi classic the core how are all

of these people in this movie that remains the the wildest part which i think that if we did talk about this which it feels like a thing we would have talked about because I have like 14 references and half of them are from the David Lynch Dune. But like, how do you get all of these folks and then you have really a, just a really bad, a quite bad movie, Ben. Like, as I recall, not a winner. A movie I've seen more than once. Critically acclaimed, no.

But not a a winner uh a movie i've seen more than once no but but not a you know it's it's kind of surprising that bruce greenwood hasn't had a a better career you know i mean he's had a good career he's like had a stable career i doubt lately that bruce greenwood has been like i'm gonna how am i paying these bills because he's got that Star Trek money? But like, you know, how did he not have a better career? Maybe more popular appeal than critical appeal, but it's got 39% on the tomato meter, the critic rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and 34% audience score. I'm shocked it has even that.

Yeah, 34% audience score. I am shocked that it has even that. There are people melting at one point, right? And then the birds die. Those things happen out of sequence, how I just described them. So his third plate appearance on May 30th, 2001, through his first plate appearance on April 17th, 2002. And this was a span of five different games. Here's how it went. Green against Hampton. Double, double. Home run, home run.

Single, walk, walk, single. Intentional walk. Don't blame him. Single, single. Before finally he struck green out swinging so 11 straight plate appearances i was wondering how weird that was it turns out from the data that baseball reference has and of course we're missing some play-by-play data for early eras that might make it tough to answer this comprehensively but the longest on-base streak that Kenny could find one batter

versus one pitcher is Pinky Higgins. I'm not a real person. Love it already. Pinky Higgins reached base in 17 straight plate appearances against Roxy Lawson. Refuse to believe that either of those are real people. Yeah. No, this is not science fiction, unlike the core. That actually happened. So Pinky Higgins, starting I guess on May 3rd, 1938, he went walk, walk, walk, single, single,

single, single, single, home run, walk, single, double, single, single, single, walk, single against Roxy Lawson. And then finally september 4th 1939 there was a a batted ball of some sort that led to an out so wow i mean that's you know he must have felt like he was the curse of pinky here but that's that's tough so 17 seems to be the longest on record and uh he found some other long ones like the extremely real names of ferpo marbury versus goose goslin they had a 14 plate

appearance streak joe knox hall versus don hoke 15 gavin floyd versus joe mauer 15 vick sorrell versus babe ruth 14 walt masterson versus Ted Williams, 15. So yeah, there's been only one 17 plate appearance streak. There have been no 16 plate appearance streaks. Three 15s, two 14s, eight 13s, 13 12s, and

then 36 11 plate appearance streaks like Green and Hampton. The most recent being Adam Eaton versus Zach Wheeler, which ended on April 7th, 2019. So thanks so much to Andy in Portland for sending me on this deep dive about the 2003 sci-fi classic, The Core. And I'll remind everyone that the fact that the Earth's core is really perhaps no longer spinning or is reversing in direction, not disastrous. In fact, this seems to happen periodically

and it's okay. Do you mean to say that that movie was not scientifically accurate? I do mean to say that. So we do not have to nuke the core. We don't have to do anything. It will fix itself and it's fine. Okay.

Well, you know, I'm just, I wish someone had told Aaron Eckhart sooner because all those people didn't have to die down there, you know? That's right. Yeah. I mean, the most Babe Ruth owned any pitcher was Babe Ruth versus Bob Hastie, 1785 OPS, and that's 17th on the list. So again, Sean Green dominated Mike Hampton more than Babe Ruth dominated any one pitcher he faced 30 plus times, at least on a rate basis. So truly historic. And I'm glad that you can witness that whenever you watch the core, if you are so inclined. Though in the core, we see only one pitch and we don't actually see where the ball goes. We see the swing and then Green gets distracted. And the way it shot, I think the implication is that Green swung through the pitch. And that's perfectly in keeping with the Corps' accuracy as a whole, because Sean Green failing to hit a pitch from Mike Hampton is about as far-fetched as the consequences of the Corps

stopping. All right, to conclude with the Pass Blast episode 1962, and this comes from that year and also from new Pass Blast consultant David Lewis, who is an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston. He writes, the final Negro Leagues East-West All-Star Game. The game was held on August 26, 1962, at Kansas City's Municipal Stadium. Several former Kansas City Monarchs were recognized during the game, including Satchel Paige. None, however, received more praise than Robinson. As reported by the Chicago Defender, Robinson received a key to the city, two plaques, and a Chamber of Commerce Certificate of Appreciation from Kansas City, Missouri. Monarch centerfielder Willie Hardwick powered

the West team to victory with a three-run homer in the second inning. His Monarchs teammate Sherman Cottingham started the game for the West and was credited with the win. The Negro American League disbanded in 1962, making this contest the Negro League's final all-star game. So that's the bittersweet part of the integration of the AL and NL is that it spelled the end for the Negro Leagues eventually. And they hung on in some form for a while. But 1962 was when they finally gave up the ghost and had to pack it in. And we can pack it in too. All right.

By the way, speaking of opting out of Pride Night, we mused on a recent episode about Jeff Kent's character and things that could keep him out of the hall based on the character clause. We noted that there didn't seem to be many publicly known transgressions as there have been for some other candidates. A couple people directed me to one thing I either hadn't known or had forgotten about Jeff Kent, which is that back in 2008, he gave $15,000 to backers of California's Proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage,

which passed and was later overturned. Not surprising, perhaps, that those would be his politics, given that he famously said when he was on Survivor that the million dollars he might win on the game would be 600 grand by the time Obama takes it. You know what pisses me off? Because I think I've made about 60 million dollars playing baseball, and I want this freaking million dollars in this game. And it's not even a million bucks, it's 600 grand by the time Obama takes it. I'm a Game 7 World Series loser. You know, I've played in the biggest games in the world and the worst games in the world, but this just sucks. According to Baseball Reference, he actually made more like $86 million playing baseball,

but I guess after a certain number of millions, maybe you lose track. Or maybe $60 million was what he had left after Bill Clinton and George Bush took it. Anyway, this does not make me think well of Jeff Kent. Then again, even Barack Obama himself did not support same-sex marriage yet in 2008, and I shudder to think of how many plaques would be left in the Hall of Fame if supporting same-sex marriage were a criterion for induction. Definitely doesn't make me root for him, but boy, if you support same-sex marriage and you don't want to think ill of baseball players, then we might be better off with a don't-ask-don't-tell policy when it comes to baseball players' politics, because those with a more liberal bent would

probably not find their beliefs mirrored to a great degree in major league clubhouses. It's not a blanket statement, just saying, on the whole, a lot of players have probably leaned more toward the Kent side of the spectrum than the, let's say, Jean Doolittle, Mark Canna side of the spectrum. You will probably not be surprised to learn that Frank Schubert, who managed the Yes on 8 campaign in California and similar campaigns in other states against gay marriage, told the LA Times in 2008 that he did support Jeff Kent's candidacy for the Hall of Fame. Schubert said, He has had a stellar career and will no doubt one day be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

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We will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then but it's over now To the core I must say It started out the dark But it's over now