Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1966: Joe West, Young Man

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Effectively Wild listener/Patreon supporter Alana Crockett banter about Alana’s baseball background, pitcher representation in the MLB and MLBPA logos, and former umpire Joe West allegedly editing his own Wikipedia page, then (26:44) answer listener emails about a “cheap team tax” in trades, a pitching coach superpower, trading for the Rays’ […]

If you cheat on me, you'll be out at home. If I catch you playing the field, you're going to be long gone. You better play it safe and don't do me wrong. Because if you cheat on me, you'll be out at home. Hello and welcome to episode 1966 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. And one of the aforementioned Patreon supporters is with us right now,

representing all of the Patreon supporters. Alana Crockett is with us today, a Mike Trout tier Patreon supporter. Alana, welcome to Effectively Wild. Hi, Ben. Thank you so much for having me. I suppose we're going to get into this later, but I'm not quite the Mike Trout Patreon level supporter. My wife Ivy is, and she's been good enough to give me this session for Christmas this year.

That's right. Yeah, I usually start off by asking what could have possibly possessed you to spend enough to join us on this podcast, but you didn't. Your wife did. And that makes you a multiple Patreon supporter household, which in my mind, I mean, that is relationship goals, I think, when both members of the couple are effectively wild Patreon supporters, because you were a pre-existing Patreon supporter, just not at the highest tier. And when I initially got the message from your wife, Ivy, I thought that that meant that you were not a Patreon supporter or that she had just upgraded your existing account. But no, a whole new second account, which in my mind is the best way to do it.

So tell us, I guess, a little bit about your history with the show and what made Ivy think that that would be a good gift. Yeah. So I have been listening to the show for a long time and have been a Patreon supporter for several years at this point. I used to have a really long commute to work. I've still got a pretty long one, but I had a 70 to 90 minute each way commute for about two years. And that was when I really got into the podcast. I think you and Jeff were doing daily podcasts at that point. And that really helped get through my commute a lot, which is when I started being a Patreon supporter as well. Nowadays, I've got 35 minutes each way. And as a result,

as I'm sure you've noticed from reading my messages on Patreon, I'm not always caught up on the latest bits of stuff because half of your replies are, well, we talked about this yesterday. their commute or have a shortened commute or maybe they started working from home during the pandemic and kept working from home. Makes it tough to keep up on podcasts, which I can testify to from personal experience as a worker from home, longtime worker from home. What is your baseball fan origin story? Are you a fan of a particular team? How did you get into the sport? I am. ball fan origin story are you a fan of a particular team how did you get into the sport i am and well and just to finish up on what i was saying before the uh we still listen to the vast majority of episodes just not in order and not right when they come out because we have gone on a lot of road trips uh we went to maine this last new year's we drive to oklahoma and missouri quite a bit

to visit family. And since we're based in Maryland, that's a lot of hours in the car. Yeah. And so we'll listen to a lot of Effectively Wild. We listen to audiobooks and some other podcasts. But now whenever there was a big transaction or something, Ivy has turned to me and said, what did Ben and Mick say about this? She knows that I've caught up on the episodes. I'm a big Astros fan. transaction or something. Ivy has turned to me and said, what did Ben and Mick say about this?

So you know that I've caught up on the episodes. I'm a big Astros fan. I was born in Houston. I was going to Astros games in diapers and at the Dome and just never really stopped rooting for them. I didn't get the traditional childhood exposure to baseball because we've moved overseas and grew up overseas quite a bit where there wasn't a lot of baseball. But then once I moved back, got into watching it a lot more in high school, particularly the whole city was really into the Astros in the mid 2000s when we were making deep playoff runs after sneaking in on a wildcard spot, because I don't think we ever quite caught the Cardinals. What was your experience of their rebuild like? I'm always impressed by fans who, you know,

it takes a hearty bit of fandom to weather the tanking run that Houston went on there. It was really tough. And it couldn't have been more inconveniently timed for me, because everybody who's gone to grad school for science, particularly bench scientists, will tell you that in your experiments, there's always big, long stretches of not doing anything or of doing something that requires very little mental effort. And mine in particular required a lot of very intense effort to prepare the experiment, but then the experiment would run for 9 to 16 hours, depending on how lucky I got with the preparation.

And so I would watch or listen to on the radio the Astros games as I was doing that. And I was doing those experiments between 2011 and 2014. So I was listening to 150 games of 110 lost teams, torturing myself. And I was doing this in St. Louis while they were going to two world series and were're our big rival and just, it was painful. It was painful for a lot of, a lot of different reasons. So how have you handled the reversal of fortunes in the past several years of being one of the,

let's say two, at least most successful teams, most successful American league team, while also being hated by every other fan base? Let me tell you, it's been, it's been great. I love that answer people are so coy about it it's like nah it's just really fun to watch your team well and you kind of run into some stuff like i when i was living in st louis i would go to games

in my astro stuff whenever they came into town and you'd get some playful ribbing from people elsewhere in the stands because they knew that the Astros were terrible and weren't going to be a threat at all and were probably going to lose that game by five runs but they liked that I was there you know the Midwest nice also plays into that I don't know if I've been in Philly or New York a a similar reaction, especially now. But you can't bring that plucky underdog attitude to now being dominant. If I were to do the exact same thing, go to St. Louis for an Astros game, wearing Astros jerseys, much different experience, guaranteed. Nowadays, I'm living closer to DC, which meant I got to experience the 2019 World Series run from as soon as we lost all of the parades, everybody going out in the street and celebrating,

as I'm very bummed out. I had a similar experience in 2015 when I flew to my sister-in-law's wedding, landed in the Kansas City airport the day after we got eliminated by them. Yep. But it's been great. Having to follow it from afar is always going to be less fun, but I try to always go to a game

whenever they're in Baltimore or DC. And it's been really fun. It's been a really fun ride to watch them finally be good as As a fan of the Texans and the Rockets and Texas A&M sports, I don't get to root for good teams very often. I have to latch on to my wife's Chiefs fandom in order to experience some glory. But nowadays, the Astros are supplying enough for both of us, which is nice. Right.

Well, glad you've gotten to experience some success with your major league team and glad that you discovered the podcast and that your wife was kind enough to fund this appearance. And I hope that she has not been forced to endure too much secondhand podcast listening against her will. Hopefully Effectively Wild has grown on her too, or she has at least learned to tolerate it, but we appreciate her generosity as well. She's generally been really happy listening to the podcast. It's been good.

Good. Well, we're here to do some emails and pass blasting and stat blasting. Just a bit of banter before we begin. One thing I wanted to point out, the MLB Players Association updated its logo this week. And I don't know that I could have told you what the MLBPA logo was before seeing this story. I guess it looks sort of familiar now that I look at it, but it's just a batter. It's sort of a shield-shaped emblem, and it says Major League Baseball players in red, and then there's a blue background, and then it has a white silhouette of a player. And they didn't make any major change here. It's the same sort of template. They just kind of changed little details here or there. And this made me think, and so did an email we got from a listener named Luke, who wrote in to say, you have mentioned

recently a lot about how we tend to view the game from the batter's perspective. And I realized that even the logo for MLB is that of a batter. While not new, I think it came into being in 1969, how much of our viewing the game from the hitter's point of view is affected by the logo depicting the offensive portion of the game. So we all know the MLB logo, and it's supposedly based on Harmon Killebrew, although Paul Lucas of UniWatch did a deep dive on that and found that it probably isn't even the way that Jerry West is supposedly the model for the NBA logo, but that's not 100% confirmed the Killebrew origin story, maybe even a little shakier than that. But it's an iconic logo and everyone knows it. I think that it probably works

the other way around where the logo for MLB is the batter because we think of things from the batter's perspective, not that we think of things from the batter's perspective because the logo for MLB is the batter because we think of things from the batter's perspective, not that we think of things from the batter's perspective because the logo is the batter. I guess it could be a bit of both. But it strikes me that especially with the MLBPA logo being a batter now, it's not fully representing the membership of the union anymore, right? Because not everyone bats in the universal DH era. Oh.

Right? Most players still bat, but a sizable subset of players, namely pitchers, do not bat anymore, aside from the occasional weirdness that happens in Shohei Otani. So is that odd to have your logo for the union especially or for the league as a whole, just representing one kind of class of player? Because like the NBA logo, which is sort of similar in that it's a silhouette of someone doing something scoring related, just dribbling a ball on the way to- Noted basketball fan, Ben Lindbergh, doing basketball. Yep. That was a natural way to phrase that. But everyone scores in basketball,

like even defensive specialists. I mean, there are games where a defensive specialist will not score, but they score at some point in their career. Whereas now you could easily have entire careers. And really in the whole DH era, you've had careers where people didn't bat, you know, aside maybe from the odd interleague game or that sort of thing. So is that weird? Like the MLB logo is iconic and recognizable, and I think there's value in keeping that the same. And I think there's value in keeping that the same. But for the MLBPA logo, which I really don't know if I could have even summoned to mind before I looked at it, I wonder whether anyone feels slighted by this. I am a pitcher. I'm not represented by my union's insignia. It's hard to say. I know that MILB does not have a union, but they have a logo.

And it also features a hitter and not a pitcher. So that's three for three, I guess. Yeah. Well, now they're in the MLBPA, right? So they're sort of represented by that logo, too. But yes, you're right. The minor league baseball logo is also a batter. It's just batters all the way down. I will admit that my first thought when I saw these next to one another, and like, it's a, you know, a richer color set, right? Like the, the colors are richer. It's more compact. I will admit that my first thought was,

what's her name in the office being like, it's the same picture. Like this doesn't look meaningfully different to me i am also disappointed that they got rid of the stirrup socks on the yeah that's true that is one of the changes yeah give me the i feel like i'm i'm in a what was what were those magazines that we all read as kids that you'd get in like the the highlights highlights remember on the back they'd be like what are the seven differences between these pictures right i kind of feel like it's that where i'm like how different are these really i don't know i mean you can't you only have so much real estate on a logo is the thing so i would imagine if you're trying to figure out which of these two groups of players to prioritize on the logo while it would be ideal to have both you know position players like they play

every day right and so maybe that's the the thought is we got to pick we got to pick a thing you just had like a baseball right but then it's not about the players and that's sort of the whole thing with unions right it's about the people yeah, we've talked about the sentient baseball hypothetical. So that would be for the sentient baseball union. They would have just baseballs on there. But you could like the NFL and the NHL. I mean, they just have like the shield, you know, right? It's not a player. It's all about just the league and the logo and the letters. So you could do something like that. I like having a player performing a baseball activity as the logo, but it's not as inclusive as it could be anymore just because some people, they don't bat.

So I don't know what the solution is unless you just want to put two figures on there and maybe a pitcher is pitching to a batter. As you said, there's not a lot of real estate. You could have maybe a pitcher and a batter back-to-back doing their respective things, or we could just make the model Shohei Otani, just exclusively and explicitly Shohei Otani. Identifiably Otani.

Yeah, just make it Otani. And he, in a way, represents no one because he is in a class of his own, but also everyone because he does all the baseball things. Well, but even then, when you're capturing Otani, whatever activity you have him doing, you're only going to capture half his value. Right. Yeah. If you just have him standing there, it's just Otani just standing in a baseball uniform. The logo for the MLBPA should be the FanGraphs Combined War Leaderboard.

There. Solved it. Done. All right. Well, there's some food for thought for any logo designers out there. We did get an email from Robert on the topic of looking at baseball from the batter's perspective. And Robert wrote, I wanted to respond to your discussion from episode 1950 about experiencing baseball through the offense's point of view rather than the defense's point of view. I think baseball's game structure actually defines the offense as the protagonist

and the defense as the antagonist. The goal of the offense in baseball is to score runs. The goal of the defense is to prevent the offense from scoring runs. of the defense is to prevent the offense from scoring runs. The defense has no independent goals of its own. Sounds almost like a slight, but I guess you could say that that's true. Its entire raison d'etre is to stop the offense from succeeding and to get the offense onto the field. The defense cannot advance toward its own victory conditions. The offense is therefore the driver of the plot, so to speak, and it would be difficult to coherently view the sport from the defense's point of view. So when someone claims that the defense takes a hit away from a batter, I don't think any entitlement is conferred to the hitter. I think it is really acknowledging

the skill of the defense in achieving its goal in the sense that without a terrific effort from the defense on that play, the offense would have advanced closer to their goal and therefore to the defense's defeat. I thought I would weigh in on this as I'd been ruminating on it for a while and it felt like there was more to this than just familiarity or path dependency. I suppose that is a good point. Yeah, I think that that is well stated. I'm still in favor of a logo that just encompasses every possible player. I'm still in favor of a logo that just encompasses every possible player. Graphic design is not my passion. It's not something that I'm very good at.

But if someone wants to make a mock-up, I will share it. I think the issue is that they tend to be fairly literal with these things, right? I think you need to embrace a more abstract understanding of what baseball and its players are. And then you could go in any number of ways. But yes, it is certainly beyond my skill to affect in any way that would be useful. Ben, let me ask you a question. The MLB logo has a batter and the ball, which at the very least implies the existence of a pitcher. Unlike the MLBPA and the milb true thus the batter

could be in bp could be just posing does that help i think it does help yeah we don't know where that ball is coming from but but someone had to propel it unless the batter tossed it to themselves which we might have an email about later in the show. But yes, I can only see a duck now when I look at the MLB logo, unfortunately, since I read the thing about how it's a duck. And now I can kind of only see the duck. So that's a problem. But maybe it can be like a batter and then a third arm coming out of the batter's head that is throwing the baseball. And that would, yeah. Yeah. But Ben, what kind of hair would be on the third arm?

Is it head hair or is it arm hair? I feel like this is a conundrum we cannot possibly resolve. Yeah. The only other thing I want to mention here is my favorite low-stakes scandal that I have become aware of as we are recording here on Wednesday. There is a popular post on the Baseball subreddit that alleges that Joe West is stealth editing his own Wikipedia page. Oh, I want it to be true even if it isn't. Exactly. That's where I am too. There is some corroborating evidence here. It is certainly suggestive, but this is one of those things that I just just I want it to be true and I don't want it to be debunked.

Although I suppose in fairness to Joe West, it should be if it's not true. But this is from Redditor New York Metzelhead. Entitled, Joe West is spending his retirement editing his Wikipedia page to remove things that make him look bad. his retirement editing his Wikipedia page to remove things that make him look bad. So the text reads, on January 31st, an account called Crew Chief 22 made a series of edits to the Joe West umpire Wikipedia page. The first removed information about an altercation with Joe Torrey with an edit summary of my changes corrected the lies that were in the incident with Joe Torrey. The edit was not immediately reverted. So the next day, Crew Chief 22 returned, first making an edit that removed information about West's suspensions, next making various changes, and finally making a small edit summarized grammar spelled G-R-A-M-M-E-R, which arguably made the sentence in question make less sense.

These changes stayed up until February 3rd, when another user noticed them and rolled back the article to the version before CrewChief22 showed up. Undeterred, on February 8th, that account made another edit reinstating most of the previous changes it had made, and although that was reverted within 10 minutes, CrewChief 22 made two more edits quickly afterward. After these were rolled back, Crew Chief 22 made one more edit changing the details of the incident between West and Torrey, which as of now is still up. I think as of now, now it is no longer up. As this is just circumstantial evidence, it's fair to ask, how do we know this is Joe West and not just a fan if fans of Joe West are a thing? The first thing that clued me into this is the account's name.

West was a crew chief, and as we can see here, he wore 22 on his sleeve. But I guess if you were a huge fan of Joe West, that would probably be the account that you picked as your name. However, the real clincher is one edit made by a logged out editor on Crew Chief 22's talk page after they were warned to stop editing disruptively. It says, quote, I constructively corrected the bullshit that was on this page. There was never a shoving match between Joe Torre and West. I should know. I was there. And the federal court order MLB to reinstate the umpire just as I wrote. If you aren't going to leave my page alone, please remove it completely.

I don't need anyone knowing anything about me, and I certainly don't need anyone reading things that are not true. Either reinstate what I wrote or erase the entire page. I'm tired of correcting your lies. This post is signed Joe West. Now, I suppose it could still be someone posting as Joe West and just being very committed to the bit. But just knowing what we know about Joe West, I mean, the part where he wrote, I don't need anyone knowing anything about me, that doesn't really seem in character with Joe West, who seemed very much to want people to know about him. But this is the new UMP show is editing your umpire Wikipedia page. So Joe West, famous country artist and singer of standards

and also historically long tenured MLB umpire, possibly editing his own Wikipedia page. I mean, who among us? editing his own Wikipedia page. I mean, who among us? Yeah. I mean, not all of us have a Wikipedia page to edit, but we have effectively wild wiki pages, some of us on this podcast. I don't know if I've ever edited my own effectively wild wiki page, not that I recall. But yeah, I mean, if my Effectively Wild wiki page said that I had shoved Joe Torre and I hadn't shoved Joe Torre, perhaps I would edit it or bring that to someone's attention. But I kind of love just the image of this being Joe West and the detective work that

went into this. So if it's not true, if we confirm that it is not true then i guess we will follow up and acknowledge it but this is one case where i kind of hope just no one even tries to confirm it because i love it wow i mean you wouldn't would you spend time that much time i mean look the internet lends itself to time wasting i think we have all looked up and been like, I've been down this rabbit hole for two hours. I got stuff I got to do. But the amount of feeling that seems to be implied by the word choices makes me think that it has to be him. I just can't imagine generating that much feeling if it weren't you no unless uh they're attempting to frame him in which case great job if they realize just how funny it would be if joe

west was editing his own wikipedia page and decided to make it look like that i didn't consider i didn't consider that possibility. You're right. I should have thought about it from a sneakier angle. Yeah. Listener Michael Mountain in our Discord group noted that one of the edits appears to be changing. On September 28th, 1988, West was on the field when Oral Hershiser set the MLB record for consecutive scoreless innings pitched.

Two, on September 28th, 1988, West was behind the plate when Oral Hershiser set the MLB record for consecutive scoreless innings pitched. Two, on September 28th, 1988, West was behind the plate when Oral Hershiser set the MLB record for consecutive scoreless innings pitched. But per RetroSheet, he was actually umping first base during that game and was not behind the plate. So I don't know if that would be an argument against this being the authentic Joe West or if it just means that he has misremembered where he was on the field when that happened or he is trying to further burnish his credentials here, have some stolen valor when it comes to being behind the plate for that game anyway. Real mystery. This is just like the ideal of an off-season subreddit post that has quickly accumulated many comments and upvotes and signs of appreciation because we are not the only ones who are enjoying this scandal. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Crew Chief 22 has exclusively edited the Joe West Wikipedia page, by the way. So if it is Joe West, he's not editing any other pages out there i like the idea that he is simultaneously affecting very like great amounts and absolutely no guile at all

right like it is a fascinating mishmash of approaches here yeah and as some commenters pointed out like if this becomes a story you know if he's asked about it or if this goes beyond the subreddit, then you might have to edit the Joe West Wikipedia page to include the news that Joe West in retirement was editing his own Wikipedia page. I think you'd be obligated. Yeah. And then if Joe West is the one doing these edits, then he might be tempted to remove that from his own Wikipedia. So we'll see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Anyway, this is not remove, at least reframe it as a crusade against misinformation. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. He was coming for all the fake news. Exactly. Yeah. Even if he was inadvertently introducing some of his own. So and I like that he's just like my page. I mean, it's Wikipedia. It's the people's internet encyclopedia. It's like, just delete my page if you're not going to get

it right. I don't think he can do that exactly. Anyway, great story. Great story, regardless of whether it turns out to be true. All right. Let's answer some emails here. Here's one from Connor who says, while listening to episode 1964 and the conversation about the Sean Murphy trade, I had the thought about Oakland getting seemingly quite little for Murphy even compared to the Brewers. The question is,

does Oakland's history of cheaping out and not extending high quality big league players essentially impose a tax on the returns they get for trading them? Does the perception that they, quote unquote, have to trade them because franchises like the A's will not extend them impact the level of return they get in these trades? Oakland is a bit of an outlier in this. Not sure if this could also be seen in trades from the likes of Pittsburgh or Miami or Cleveland or Cincinnati or other teams that like to cry poor when players enter their primes. Some of those teams like Cleveland certainly seems to have done quite well in trades historically. But yeah, does the fact that everyone knows, oh, it's the A's, they're

definitely going to trade this guy because they won't want to pay him. Does that lead to them getting less of a return? Do the Braves get twice as many prospects as anybody else? Because they extend everyone. Yeah. I kind of think that even though you know that they are probably going to trade them, you're still competing against the other teams that are trying to trade for that player, right? So yes, you know that I guess you have them where you want them in that they can't just decide, we don't like this prospect package, so we're just going to hold on to this player if it means that they're going to get more expensive and thus their payroll will rise.

But if it's a desirable player and other teams are interested in that player, then you still have to beat their offer, at least in theory. So you're not competing against the A's own desire not to pay the player so much as you're competing against other teams' desire to trade for that player. Well, and I think that, and this is probably going to bum out A's fans, I think the larger problem isn't that they, I mean, it's a problem that they never want to extend or pay any of these guys. But, you know, it would be one thing if market forces were what was constraining the quality of the players that Oakland is getting back. But I think the more damning and probably more likely issue to your point ben is like they are competing against the 28 other teams that might be trading for that guy it just seems

like the evaluations that oakland is doing are out of step with sort of the the broader understanding of player quality and like that's a much bigger problem than you know hey, we are trying to trade this guy and we just aren't getting offered, you know, very good prospects in return. No, no. They just really like Estuary Ruiz. And like that's a bigger issue potentially for them than anything else. Now, we could all be wrong about Estuary Ruiz. Maybe he'll end up being awesome.

And I think as we've seen from some of their other trades recently like the cole irvin deal they they have entertained some guys who are higher variance and a little further away and have sort of breaking broken from the mold breaking from the mold yeah that's a sentence have broken from the mold of what they've done in the past with higher variance guys but also you know they really like estuary ruiz so I don't know what to make of that. Yeah, I could see in some particular case, if you're a contending team or at least in theory a contending team and you don't really have to make a move where you could just say you better blow us away with your offer or else we will just keep this player and be happy to have him. and be happy to have him, then you have more leverage than the A's might have in a situation, especially with a player like Murphy, where a lot of teams would want him and he's really good. And also he's going to get expensive and you know that the A's are going to deal him and everyone in the world knew that the A's were going to deal him. Then yeah, maybe you're

slightly undercutting yourself, but I still think the fact that you still have to best or better another team's offer that probably keeps it up. Or at least in theory it would. I don't know if it did in this case or not. We will find out. One other factor that we haven't really discussed yet is a lot of times when you're trading for a player, you're really trading for them for the remainder of their contract. You're trading for them because you really want them on your team this year or for your post-season run. And because the A's are the A's, they can't stand the thought of paying even an arbitrary ARB2 salary to anybody. They are trading away people constantly. If teams are acquiring them for the short term, their extendability is not really an

issue in how much they're offering for them. I go back to think about that Astros trading for Justin Verlander took several blue chip prospects, but they were trading for him to get them through August, September and October of 2017. They weren't, you know, hope that they did extend him, but that wasn't why they traded for him. And that's not why they had to give all of their blue chip prospects. It's because they really, really felt like they had a chance at the series that year. Right. Yeah, true. Right. Yeah, for sure. All right. Daniel says, I am not high as I write this, but I did think of this when I had an edible. Do you ever believe people when they say that, Ben?

Because we get a fair number of emails that are like, I will admit to being chemically altered right now, which to be clear, bring those emails on. There is no judgment here. But sometimes people are like, I'm not high. And I'm like, aren't you a little though? Yeah. People are like, I'm not high. And I'm like, aren't you a little though? Yeah.

I like Daniel's discretion here. Thought of this when he was high, but then decided to just wait to send the email. Sometimes it's more fun if you don't wait to send the email. You might come down from the high and decide, actually, this isn't worth the email. Or you might phrase it in a less entertaining way. But still a good question, I think. Daniel says, you are a completely average major league pitching coach. Perhaps your name is Wheat Woodworth. Pete Woodworth, right, is the Mariners pitching coach. One evening, the ghost of Gani Jones visits you in your sleep. He says, I will bless you with a latent ability. Every

time you visit the pitching mound in the middle of an inning, you grant the current pitcher one of the following abilities, an added three miles per hour to their velocity or 50% better command relative to the pitcher's current abilities. This power will last until the half inning is completed, at which point the pitcher will then return to their pre-mound visit state. You will lose this power if any person sincerely asks you if you have supernatural power. You must choose only one of these powers. So again, you visit the pitcher's mound in the middle of an inning. The pitcher gets either an extra three miles per hour or 50% better command relative to their typical command. And the power wears off at the end of that half inning and if anyone ever suspects that this is happening and questions the wizard of a pitching coach then they will lose that power so you have to kind of keep it you know subtle so that no one will

notice that they always get immediately better after your mound visit. And are we to understand that you only have one of them like forever or just on that day? Are we, we're picking between, betwixt and between them? Yeah, it doesn't really specify. I, I guess I would say it's probably you only get one ever, but if you think it would change your answer to be able to pick and choose answer it that way yeah i mean i think that if i were going out to the mound to talk to a starter and i'm making some assumptions about the starter so we can interrogate those if we want to but i think i would rather i'd rather be able to bestow excellent command than i would feel the need to pump velocity. And I'm sure that there are starters

for whom the other answer makes better sense. But here's my rationale for that. If you have a starter, they are presumably working with a starter's repertoire. So they have a, theoretically, at least a usable fastball, right? It might not be like superlative. It might not be the best in the league, but it's at least a usable fastball, right? It might not be like superlative. It might not be

the best in the league, but it's at least like workable. It's playable for a starter's repertoire. And I think that Ben, you correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that often when we talk about a starter starting to be less effective, the deeper into the start that they go, like one of the things that you worry about is the command faltering first before the velocity. Although there are times when the velocity falters because a guy gets tired or he gets hurt. But I think that if you could improve a starter's command and really, you know, give it something that seems like it would have broader uses beyond just like the heater that they throw, right? You can weaponize potentially more of the arsenal and keep them going longer into a game because you're improving everything, at least a little. But if

it's a reliever, maybe you just want to give them the extra juice so that they can throw the hard fastball and then a slider and get out of there. So those are some thoughts I have. Yeah. There are some thoughts I have. Yes, I would say generally you would want the command absolutely 50% better command. I mean, that's a lot, right? Maybe that's, it's just, it's too much. Like there would be some breakeven point where it would be better to have the VLO than the command, but adding three miles per hour to your velocity as a percentage change is a lot smaller than making your command 50% better.

smaller than making your command 50% better. And just in general, having great command enables you to get by with much less significant velocity, right? That's how the Kyle Hendricks's of the world have done it, right? So 50% is a big boost. So I think I would almost always prefer to take that. I think that also helps you avoid that trigger of the power disappearing. If you get asked about it. Exactly. Yeah. A lot harder to prove. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Right. If you step off the mound and suddenly the pitcher is added three miles per hour, that would be quite suspicious. But if it were just that they were hitting their spots, that would be tougher to detect. Yeah. Yeah. They think you'd given, they think you'd given him something. But if it were just that they were hitting their spots, that would be tougher to detect. Yeah.

Yeah. They think you'd given, they think you'd given him something like that. You can put something on the ball, maybe even. Yeah. I mean, I think you could get away with the juicing their commands indefinitely. I don't, I don't know that anyone would ever say, oh, wow, when that pitching coach leaves the mound, suddenly they're just walking fewer batters or they're putting it exactly where they want it. I don't know that you would be able to tell. I know that one of Russell Carlton's to-do list research topics is trying to figure out who's good at mound visits, basically. And I think it's tough to do because maybe the data doesn't specify when the mound

visit happened or the data he's been working with in the past. And you can't tell when the mound visit happened. And some mound visits by catchers, for instance, might not even be logged. But to be able to tell if certain pitching coaches had some great ability with mound visits and whether it's that they come out and they're able to identify and fix mechanical flaws or whatever they say is just so calming and reassuring that it puts the pitcher in a better headspace after that. It would be a valuable ability, even if it were not a supernatural ability, just to get that guy to be better. But yeah, I would absolutely take the command every time. All right. Question from Andrew. I was curious what you thought would be fair value in a trade for the Rockies to receive the Rays' front office. Given the Rockies' extreme environment and relatively low budget, I'd have to imagine the front office would be more valuable to the Rockies than any other organization. Since we're not living by normal trade rules in this scenario, you can include things like draft picks. I'd also assume the owners would be the ones negotiating the trades since the front offices have an obvious conflict of interest. The front office might not want to be traded en masse to Colorado, although Colorado

is very nice, so who knows? But yeah, I guess I would take one issue with the premise of the question, which is that this suggests that the Rockies have decided that change is necessary or desirable, right? Like in order to endeavor to trade for the raised front office, you would need Dick Montfort to decide we should get better at what we're doing. We're not doing a good job currently. So I don't know that he has made that connection. So if he were to decide that we would be better with another front office or maybe a front office that had more quantitative analysts and more of an infrastructure behind the stats, then that mindset change alone would be valuable without actually going through the having to trade for the raised front office. Like if you decide that that's the case, then you could hire your own people and upgrade your own front office. So that might get you most of the way there. But if we stipulate that the only way that Montfort will agree to do this is to just import the entire raised front office. And the idea here is that the raised

front office, given the specific circumstances of the Rockies, would really have a field day because there's so many quirks to pitching at altitude that having the front office that is able to find the greatest edge, maybe the edge would be potentially largest for the Rockies. Edge would be potentially largest for the Rockies. What a grim assessment of a franchise to be like, the first thing still is to acknowledge that you have some issues. Yeah, I mean, right. We get so many like wackadoodle emails and you're like, I don't know, this might be a bridge too far for me that he would like acknowledge that there's a problem. What a sad thing to say about colorado

goodness yeah yeah well it could be immensely valuable right i mean to to get a progressive cutting edge front office that seemingly has a track record of consistently being able to get more relative to its payroll and and win more most teams. And then you have the Rockies who are kind of the opposite of that. Well, I mean, that would be a big upgrade. So, and if this is the only condition on which Munford will agree to make changes and overhaul the organization, then it's even more valuable. So, I mean, that could be worth in the long run. Now, of course, but typically front office contracts are pretty short term. So it's not like you get them for the rest of existence. You only get them for a little while if they even agree to go.

So maybe front office workers need to unionize so that they cannot be traded as a group to another organization. But yeah, I don't know. What would you, I mean, it could be worth like a lot, right? Like it would be worth more than getting some young cost-controlled superstar, right? Because you're giving yourself the ability to develop more of those in theory, at least, right? Like the Rays just keep minting major leaguers i think you're right about the limitations of it still being dick monfort who owns the team right i think if he if he makes a big trade for this out of a sincere belief that this is a way

to get better we need to be better and can be a playoff team i think that would be good i i think if he makes the decision from a place of this will be a get you know this is our get rich quick scheme this is we'll do this one thing and then everything will be rosy but then doesn't listen to them or use any of their approaches in signing or approving their contracts to players or how they run the team, what's going to change? Yeah, I guess it's a question of just how much the desire to make this move at all means that Dick Montfort has had a total change of heart and is a new man and is you know scrooge post visits from ghosts right but will that last who knows we don't even know if uh scrooge's changes stuck the the story just ends so for all we know he goes back to being a miser now which three ghosts would visit him that's a good question well and i haven, and I haven't even Grimmer thought.

I haven't even Grimmer thought. What do the Rockies have to trade that would net them the race front office? Right. Yeah, do they have enough? They have a nicer stadium. That's true. They sure do. But you can't trade that, really.

Yeah, you can't send that to St. Pete. No. As much as as the city might appreciate it i mean i think that i have had a conversation with a front office person who works for a smart team that is not the rays i'm not just telling you a conversation i had with jeff this is with someone else entirely totally different team their take on colorado was that it really would be a very gratifying and rewarding problem to solve as a front office person right if you if you thought that you could go in there and really have the run of the place and get to do what you want and not have monfort sort of

involved to the extent that he seems to be, like, it would take a while because the organization isn't in great shape. The farm is pretty light in terms of the talent currently in the pipeline. But if you could crack baseball there, like, you'd be famous, right? Like, you would be talked about with reverence within the game and i think take a lot of satisfaction from being able to say like no i i figured out how to make how to make this work in a sustainable way and now we're one of the you know preeminent orgs in baseball because it is a beautiful ballpark and it's in a beautiful city and uh it is a cool place so yeah like i think that there would be appetite within the industry to really take on that problem but the conditions you would need to feel like you

could actually do that are being limited and curbed by the current ownership situation i think pretty profoundly right like tampa's not gonna be oh, yeah, give us Chris Bryant. Your entire minor league system. And then it's like, okay, maybe you could, but you know who you would need to get something out of that? The race front office. So then where are you? Right.

Yeah, that's the problem. There are good people who work for Colorado. I don't want to say that everyone who works for that org doesn't know what they're doing. They just, you know, they're dealing with some real baggage, you know, to try to make something of their org is all. Yes, their hands are tied at times. to negotiate this trade, maybe the raised front office just gets tired of living in St. Petersburg and playing in an ugly dome. And they just say, we will trade ourselves on a sweetheart deal so we can live in Denver. Could be, yeah. Or do they have to recuse themselves from the negotiations here? I don't know. I'm sure that there are a great many people who live in St. Pete who like it a lot. if i were given a choice between

those two cities i i know which i would pick and it would be the one that's right yeah i'll stand up for the trap i have not been there myself but there are people who appreciate the trap i haven't been there but i'm sure it's great i think that if it were my home ballpark, I would feel protective of it and find quirk and charm that I would try to like evangelize for. But since I am not currently burdened with that situation, I can just say that I'd probably rather live in Denver. As a steadfast Tal's Hill defender, I know exactly what that's like. Update on the Joe West saga. So I mentioned that it seemed that one of the edits had made his Wikipedia page less accurate because he had edited, Crew Chief 22 had edited the page

to say that Joe West was behind the plate for Earl Hershiser's scoreless innings streak game, whereas Retro Sheet and Baseball Reference said he was umpiring first base. But someone now in our Discord group has posted a video of that game, some highlights, and it looks like it is Joe West behind the plate. It looks like it's a 22. It appears to be a Joe West-shaped umpire.

It's a diplomatic way of saying that. Yeah. So it could be, in fact, that he was right about that, that his memory is better than baseball reference and retro sheets. And maybe we should have Joe West just editing all of Wikipedia. It should just be like the ombudsman for all of Wikipedia. Hold on. Pump those brakes. It could be that in this one specific case, at least, he was, in fact, correcting the record.

So I don't know whether he shoved Jotori or did not technically shove Jotori, but it does look like he may have been behind the plate for that game. So he is perhaps qualified to weigh in on the subject of where he was umpiring in that game. So just putting that out there. This could be one of those cases where the home plate umpire gets injured in some way and has to recuse themselves yes yeah you know joe moved maybe at like the seventh inning or something and could be listed at first all this this looks like late in the game he's still out there and it looks like the other umpires are still out there i'll have to do further research here. But yeah, what an umpire mentality, just like, you know, trying to make errors in your Wikipedia page correct. Although umpires, they make mistakes, but they try not to, at least. I'm not impugning any Wikipedia editors who do very valuable work and uncompensated and often unrecognized that it's a very valuable resource. It's just that you're not supposed to edit your own pages, they think.

Okay, so I mentioned that we might have an email that was related to players self-tossing and tossing up the ball in the air, hitting it themselves. This is a question from Chewy, Patreon supporter in DC, who starts off by saying, this is partially THC thoughts. And there's another one in that genre. And partially being inspired by questions about how different baseball would be if it were different. So what if instead of a pitcher, batters had to toss the ball up at least as high as their head and then swing at it on the drop? Batters would get up to seven tosses per at bat.

What would a home run season high look like? Who would have the most strikeouts? Is this still baseball? And this is basically like Pesopolo rules almost, I guess, where they don't toss themselves the ball, but it is tossed up. It has to go over their head and that it has to be over the plate. It would have to land on the plate if it were not swung at. So it's sort of similar. And we talk about that as a variant of baseball, I guess. So if there were no pitcher at all, would it still be baseball? I don't know. I think the pitcher is pretty essential to it being baseball.

Now, in the origins of the sport, it almost worked like this in the sense that the pitcher was just there really to enable the batter to hit the ball and even put the ball where the batter requested it, high or low, and was tossing it underhand. The idea was not to get the ball past the batter. It was to make it so that the batter could put the ball in play. And we've evolved away from that, where now the goal is to keep the ball out of play as often as possible. But this would be bringing it back to the origins of the sport to some extent, where it would be more about putting it in play and then base running and fielding would be the emphasis but it would change i mean exit velocities right

and and how hard yeah how far you could hit the ball like it's not true that the pitcher adds that much to the exit velocity most of the force and the exit speed is still supplied by the batter, and a little bit is supplied by the pitch, so that a pitch that comes in faster does tend to go out harder, all else being equal. But most of the oomph is put into it by the batter. So you would think that maybe most of the exit fuel would still be there, except for the fact that you have to toss the ball up.

And so like the mechanics of it, you wouldn't really be able to take a full forced swing the way that you can now. I don't think if you have to toss the ball up accurately and not very high and then do the whole recoil and swing, like you just, you wouldn't be able to get as much momentum behind it, I don't think. Would there be a single, how many home runs? Right. Could we possibly ever have if this were the, could you even?

Could you even? I was just wondering about that. I mean, I think that big leaguers, they can hit a home run off a tee, I think. I think they can do that. It would be hard. At least some of them could. Yeah, some of them could. It would be harder to do it.

But yeah, you could do it. Now, hitting it off a tee, I think, would probably be harder than tossing it to yourself, right? Because, A, there's some uncertainty about location right unless you're perfect at tossing the ball up like you know if it's on a tee you know exactly where it is it's not moving you still have to time the toss and also the swing if you're self-tossing but that sounds like that's just sturdy i know something about self-tossing, but... That sounds like, that's just, it's dirty. I know, something about self-tossing sounds, yeah, but I would think that you wouldn't be able to get quite as much force behind if you were tossing the ball up and then having to hit as if you could just take your time and take a full

backswing and full follow-through. Yeah, right, Off a tee. So I think it would be even harder than that. But one thing that you could really do easily, especially from a tee, is aim it. Yes. The power alleys. Exactly. If every ball you hit is going to the Crawford boxes, you don't have to worry about getting it 400 feet. Right.

Right. Yeah. Or you could even not swing for the fences, right? Right. because it's really hard to aim where you're going to hit the ball if you have to worry about the pitcher throwing the pitch in. But if not, if you can just take your time, you can hit it roughly where you want to hit it. So I think it would be very hard to defend against this. Even if they weren't hitting homers, you could still pretty reliably like Babbitt would be high, I think. Oh, yeah. BABIP would be high, I think.

Oh, yeah. Even if exit VELOs were lower across the board, I think probably BABIP would be quite high just being able to hit it where they ain't. Yeah, I think so. Tommy John's surgery frequency would certainly go down. That's true, too. Yeah. Yeah, gosh. But all these, well, see, in this future, it doesn't matter that it's only a batter on the MLBPA logo. Right.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, but you would have to eliminate a lot of players probably from the union. I mean, I guess you could still have a pitcher out there who's just a fielder, right? They just don't pitch anymore. It's just – Oh, fascinating. Yeah. Hmm.

Huh. I actually have to care about pitcher pitcher gold gloves right i mean yeah that would be the whole job basically so and then the profile of the person you put out there totally changes right because if if they never have to throw a pitch you know and it's just another person in the infield to really see now it's a lot more fun. I mean, it would be really weird baseball, but it would be fun for a second. Because you could put that fielder anywhere, right? Because there's a restriction on where the pitcher can stand currently, but that's because they have to stand at a certain place to pitch.

Right. But if they're not pitching, then I assume you could probably put them anywhere. The catcher still has to be in the catcher's box, I suppose. But even so, there would be one less hole, I suppose, on the field or a less obvious-toss? Like, I guess you could bunt. Maybe that would—I don't know how well you could propel. I think bunting on a self-toss ball would be very hard. Like, I think you would end up putting it in prime position for the catcher to field it more often than not. Probably, yeah, because you'd almost have to swing a little bit. You'd have to do like a butcher boy kind of thing just to propel it. Because in that case, at least you are kind of using the velocity of the pitch to some extent rebounding off the bat. Right.

So if you were able to angle it in a way that it would go out to the field, I guess you could kind of do it. I don't think anyone would strike out. I'd like to think that no one would strike out. I mean, that could be- It would be so embarrassing. It would be that that is embarrassing. Like, you know, I've done that just like playing in the park with friends. Right. And and one person is just kind of hitting fungos and everyone else is out there. If you don't have enough people to play a full game, maybe someone's just hitting you pop ups or fly balls. And when they miss, it's a little embarrassing. I think, you know, even Joey Gallo, I think if he were self tossing, I don't think he would strike out, I would like to think. But, you know, if he's still swinging for the fences, you might swing through every now and then. Maybe a strikeout in this scenario But if it were one swing and miss, I think probably most big leaguers wouldn't have a problem with it. But you might have to temper your ferocity of your swing just a little bit in that scenario. Would you keep the mound?

I guess not, right? There's no real reason to have a mound. It would be like an appendix at that point just like a leftover part that serves no purpose man it would really i don't know i am i mean clearly we would never do this but like are we under utilizing the celebrity softball game as a lab scenario right because like if if ever there were a time to try something like this, I think it's when there really are zero baseball stakes at all. So maybe the lab league we've been looking for is like the celebrity softball game. Yeah, good point.

It's not a good point, Ben. You don't have to flatter it. It isn't actually a good point, but it is a good point. It clears the bar for making a point on an effectively wild email show. All right. Yeah, I think offense would be up on the whole, but there would be fewer home runs. Maybe this is the version of baseball

that MLB is working towards, right? Fewer three true outcomes, just more contact. You know, no one would walk. So it would just be a lot of action. So that would be a perk. It would be a lot of action. So that would be a lot of something. Yeah. All right. Jeff says, I may be dating myself with this question, but one of my fondest childhood baseball memories was watching the Saturday morning TV show The Baseball Bunch, hosted by a then still active Johnny Bench with Tommy Lasorda and the San Diego Chicken for comic relief.

If the show were revived today, which active or recently retired player would host? So the Baseball Bunch, just reading from a Wikipedia page, presumably not edited by Johnny Bench or the San Diego Chicken, says the Baseball Bunch is an American educational children's television series that originally aired in broadcast syndication from August 1980 through the fall of 1985, produced by MLB Productions. The series was a 30-minute baseball-themed program airing on Saturday mornings, which featured a combination of comedy sketches and major league guest stars intended to provide instructional tips to little league-aged children. So who would be the modern, the reboot of the baseball bunch who would host? I mean, the easy answer is Shohei Otani so that he could teach pitching and

Yes. Right. And he's a beloved and who wouldn't want him? He's very wholesome. So I think he would be a role model for kids on the baseball bunch. Sure. Maybe I guess Joey Votto is another pretty obvious answer. Just, you know, he's he's pretty into the the influencing these days. He's he's wearing top hats and fake fur now and he's going around and playing chess. He's he's like it's on the border between like this is delightful and maybe he's like verging into trying too hard now. I don't know. Like the nice thing about Joey Votto in the past, he was so understated, like he was so effortlessly fun and charismatic and engaging.

And now he's he's trying, you know, he's he's kind of thirsting for the likes out there. And it's fun, but it's it's a different kind of Votto persona here. But I think he would be good for this. And the questioner also suggested maybe Andrew McCutcheon would be a good fit. I could see that. I mean, there are so many young, compelling, charismatic players in baseball now who could fit for this. I'm trying to think of other, like among active players, like Lindor strikes me as a good fit for something like this because he's like fun and charismatic and i like want it this is such a this is such a weird

sentence i'm about to utter but it's like you know who are like the dads we've observed being good with their children that's weird and none of my business but you know it's like there's there's being charismatic in a way that reads as such to like us as adult people and then there's like people who are good with kids and those aren't necessarily you know perfectly overlapping in the venn diagram right but like lindor is just so fun Like he seems like he would be good. And I'm trying to think among like recently retired guys. Yeah. You could like put Cece in a show like that. Like Sabathia would be great.

Right. The other advantage of that, he's huge. And so I was thinking like just having a giant do this would be fun. Like if Aaron Judge were to do this and, you know, it's just like kids were clambering all over him. Right. Yeah. You know,

having a guy who's six, six, like CC is like really. Right. Yeah. How many kids could Aaron judge hold at any one time would be just a fun segment. A game show.

Now this is just becoming a challenge show. Right. Yeah. There's no shortage of great candidates for this i would think yeah let's let's bring back the baseball bunch i like it and then who are you i feel like there would be a temptation to bring in a mascot to participate in this right like don't you end up with a mascot generally for something like this i mean mean, the San Diego Chicken was involved in the original. So, yeah. Who's the obvious

kid-friendly? Because you wouldn't want one of the mascots that's scary, right? That would creep out kids. Isn't that all mascots? I know. That narrows down considerably. yeah, but you would still want one. It's interesting. The Baseball Bunch Wikipedia page lists Gary Cohen as a producer.

Gary Cohen, the Mets announcer. I don't know if that's accurate or not. We need Gary Cohen to edit this page to authenticate that. Interesting. Interesting. Hmm. Hmm. All right.

Yeah. Nominate your your baseball bunch potential hosts here and and we will report back. Yeah, this is let's see. Gary Cohen. Yeah, it looks like there's a Washington Post article here. Hold on. Is this the Gary Cohen or is it just a Gary? It is the Gary Cohen. a Gary Cohn. I think it is the Gary Cohn. Meg, while we're looking this up, you mentioned best baseball dads. So Adam LaRoche immediately springs to mind, but he retired instantaneously as soon as they asked him to be a worse dad. So he wouldn't be an active player at that point. Yeah. I don't know how charismatic we find Adam LaRoche, but yeah, he sure was like, I don't know how charismatic we find Adam LaRoche, but yeah, he sure was like, no, I'm going to be a dad right now. Yeah.

I haven't thought about Adam LaRoche in a hot minute. Yeah. Drake is all grown up now. So I guess Drake has aged out of baseball bunch age group, but still. If we can include managers, you just made me think of Dusty Baker. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That'd be fun.

Another famously dead baseball man. Or Joe Madden, not an active manager anymore. Could be good at baseball. Yeah, but he's going to yell about the analytics to the kids. He can't be having that. Oh, my God. Drake LaRoche is married now? Oh, no. Dylan, you got to leave all of this in because I need other people to have the experience that I just had.

He was 14 when that happened? Wait a second. I am sorry. We're talking about this now. I had a memory of him as a tiny child, but he was 14 when the Adam LaRoche stuff happened? Yeah. Maybe him being 14 was part of the reason they didn't want him in the clubhouse anymore, because he was a teenager.

Yeah. Wow. Now he's married. For anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about, look up Drake LaRoche. There have been some fun retrospectives on the White Sox saga where there was something of a player revolt over the fact that Adam LaRoche kept bringing his kid to work. His kid. It became a controversy and Kenny Williams got involved and it was just one of the weirdest stories. It was one of the weirdest stories.

I wonder if Drake LaRoche ever really played baseball because it would have been a heck of a thing to have to send send an amateur scout to be like oh you gotta you gotta daddy you gotta watch out for he's gonna be involved right man yeah he does play baseball oh my god where does he play so this is from an athletic story from 2021 which i have clearly not read all of because I'm just Googling around. But so he might have done other things now. He might be doing other stuff. But he was at Neosho County Community College in Kansas, Chanute, Kansas. I feel like I am butchering all of these names. My apologies to both that school and that city where he lives on campus and pitches

on the baseball team. Wow. He has unusually high baseball IQ. My stars. Wow. I need more reporting on this post-haste. I'm going to go bother James. Go. Go find out about how young

must he have been when he got married. Wow. Anyway, we're learning a lot of stuff about the LaRouches. Yes, indeed. All right. Question from Colby. During last year's All-Star Game, the booth asked Jose Trevino to guess the pitch coming in when he was batting. Hypothetically, say all batters were the equivalent of a pitch-com device and were required to log a guess before each pitch over the course of a season, and you had access to the data. We could stipulate type and location or just pitch type to control for variance in pitcher

command. I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of these questions. First, what do you think the league-wide accuracy would be on batters' guesses? Two, how would accurate pitch guessing correlate with certain batted ball events? Contact rates, hard hit rates, barrels, homers? My instinct is to say that you'd be better on accurate guesses, but the banging scheme seemed to show this didn't matter that much. Perhaps a bigger sample across a wider population would show something different or let us answer some questions the banging scheme couldn't? How wide would the variance be on accuracy, especially based on different player populations? Would some positions be better? Would some teams be better? Would the skill actually be valuable? Could it be used on a player-by-player basis to help hitters improve? And finally, there would be a possible observer effect that could be studied. When players are forced to make

guesses on every pitch, some players might improve because they become more intentionally aware of what they anticipate. However, being forced to commit to a guess might make a player overly focused on a pitch that they're only slightly more confident will come their way. So what do you think? How good would players be at guessing? Some players don't like to guess. So if they were forced to guess, like there are guess hitters, guess hitters do not,

I mean, they guess, but there are other hitters who, who just do not guess and do not think about it. Right. And they just try to react in the moment. So if you were to force a non guess hitter to be a guess hitter, I guess it might turn out that they became better,

or it might turn out that it impaired their performance in some way. Yeah. I think on that note, this is one of those things that makes me realize that not everybody overthinks things as much as I do. If I had to be distracted by whether my result was right, I would not be able to pick the bat off of my shoulder at all. Yep. I find that answer so deeply relatable. My goodness. That is true.

Yeah, I would celebrate when I got a pitch call correct, even if I just missed the pitch entirely. It's like, all right, at least I knew which pitch was coming. That's a small victory. Even if it was strike three,'d sell yeah huh i don't know i don't i feel like it would be a a bigger detriment than anything else because it does take you sort of out of it you know you're having to articulate what you see in a way that you can just sort of lock in and you're articulating it to yourself i'm sure on some level but i don't know how many batters get up there and are aware

like that is a fastball like they say it they they're recognizing it or trying to right but they're not i don't know if they're articulating it like if their internal monologue is like i forgot to turn the stove off i need to pick up dry cleaning. Oh, that's a curveball. Right. Like mine would be. Yeah. I think that we would find that there is a skill to it that some players guessed more accurately than others. The thing about the banging scheme is that sometimes they guessed wrong even so. I mean, there were times where the signal was relayed incorrectly. So that was part of why it wasn't as big an advantage because they maybe couldn't have 100% confidence and also sometimes it was wrong. But also it was distracting, I think, maybe to have to hear the banging and then internalize that, right? It was just a departure from some players' routines. And of

course, it's just, it's hard to hit a pitch, even if you know which pitch is coming. But I think it wasn't perfect. They didn't have perfect information, which is part of why statistically, it doesn't seem to have conferred the advantage that you would think it did. So if in this situation, you are guessing correctly, always in the back of your mind, you're thinking, I might be wrong. And so you can't have complete faith in it. So I think unless you're fully committing yourself, and maybe some players do, like once they guess a certain pitch is coming, they just, it's all or nothing, right? Like if they guessed wrong, then they will just look terrible. But if they guessed right, then they are fully committed to it. But could they have complete conviction that it will in fact be that pitch? I don't know. So I don't know that it would be a pure reflection, even so, of the advantage of knowing which pitch is coming. retrospectives about somebody badly missing on a pitch and then looking up at the scoreboard to see

what kind of a pitch it was and then grinky turning and calling out to him that was a change up right yes yeah so i would think that most players would not actually have a consistent skill at this like if you were to adjust for just say like whatever the the non-informed version of this would be like if we were to come up with some some estimator that just spit out you know based on the count and the pitcher tendencies let's say and then just randomized it within that that i think that would probably be about as accurate as most major leaguers would be. Like they're taking into account, hopefully, the scouting report and some research they've done on the pitcher, although that would certainly vary by team and by player.

And then, of course, they're taking into account the counts and their own tendencies and what they're good at hitting or not. So they know all of that. But if you built a model that factored those things in, just like what the pitcher is good at and their tendencies, what the hitter is good at, and the count, I think you could probably be about as accurate as the typical big leaguer

when it comes to estimating this. And I do think there would be some players who were better, and maybe it would be something where you could see a difference by age, you know, like savvy veterans maybe would be better at this than young players who've just seen fewer pitches and have less of a sample to draw on. And then there might be certain teams that are better prepared, that really study the scouting reports and know the data better. are better prepared that really study the scouting reports and know the data better. And I guess there could be something to the idea that a catcher might be a little bit better prepared because they're used to thinking through pitch calling. And so maybe they would have some leg up when it came to knowing what was coming. But I don't know. That doesn't help

catchers be great hitters on the whole. So I think you would detect some signal there if you had a large enough sample. And I think you would also detect some signal probably on times when they guessed correctly versus incorrectly. You'd be able to tell based on outcomes of the pitch. Yeah, I think that's right. All right. And it would also be a useful thing. Like if you could see that someone was guessing wrong all the time, then that might make it easy to help them improve. Right. Either guess better or stop guessing because you're really bad at guessing. So just do something different.

Right. Or if there's a hitter on your team who's really great at guessing then maybe they can try to tutor other players and they do to some extent i think right like veterans already do that that's part of like being a good veteran mentor is imparting that knowledge to other players so probably the players who have some skill at this are already trying to pass along that skill to some extent to their teammates. But yeah, this would be fascinating information to have. So I'm all for it. It would be probably a further delay of game to make the batters have to contemplate what pitch is coming and then enter that.

But it would be a great science experiment for those of us playing along at home. And I wonder how bad fans would be at this too. If fans could estimate this, probably they would be quite bad, I would think. All right. I'll answer one more related question here. This is from Jay, Patreon supporter, who says,

with so much recent talk about the potential robocalled strike zone and the future of catcher framing, I've been thinking about another catcher skill that seems incredibly valuable but difficult to measure, catcher game calling. Catcher ERA is readily available, and there's an article by Harry Pavlidis from 2015 for ESPN about catcher game calling runs saved. But another way to measure this that's maybe for fun would be the middle-middle strike three called-looking strikeout. This seems like a baseball event that owes as much credit to the catcher's pitch selection as the pitcher's execution. It's like a good joke.

The setup is as important as the punchline. If we have to give this kind of strikeout a name, and we do, I'll pitch RDTDK, which stands for right down the dick, backwards K. It's probably a small data set, but here are the stat flash questions anyway. Which catchers lead in RDTDKs? Do you think this is a repeatable catcher skill or is it more pitcher dependent? Which pitchers lead in RDTDKs?

A fastball RDTDK is even more surprising than a big loopy curve ball that fools a batter. Can this data be parsed by pitch type 2? So, yeah, you can look up all of this at Baseball Savant. And I did look up some of it just to answer Jay. And I just looked for 2022. I didn't look to see if this is a consistent repeatable skill over time. But we have talked about this.

We had Harry Poblitas on the pod to talk about that 2015 article that was episode 686. And then more recently, episode 1793, we talked to Cameron Grove about his 2021 game calling research. And by the way, Cameron just recently was hired by the Guardians. So another one bites the dust. Another great public analyst and studier of baseball who's put really fun resources out there for fans like us. Now going behind the paywall. Not the first time that the Guardians have stolen such a person from us. Former StatBlast consultant Adam Ott or Max Markey, formerly of Baseball Perspectives. Just Guardians snapping up all the smart public researchers and we don't get to enjoy their work anymore.

But happy for them that they get to live their front office dreams. Anyway, I think game calling is a repeatable skill, but I think it would be tough to pick up on it just by looking at down the middle called strikeouts because you only have so many of those. But it is searchable. And would you believe that the 2022 catcher leader is Gary Sanchez? Yeah. Not someone you think of as a defensive specialist, but he had 14 of those. It's interesting because Gary Sanchez had 14 of these last year. Martin Maldonado, who you do think of as a defensive specialist, he was second at 13, but with thousands more pitches.

So Gary Sanchez, and to his credit and to the Twins' credit, Gary Sanchez did seem to become a more capable defensive catcher last year with the Twins, and his framing improved. It's not the first time that the Twins have done that with a catcher. Of course, he didn't hit that well, and he is still a free agent as we speak, right? Gary Sanchez, still out there. So maybe he has this skill for anyone who's interested in signing Sanchez. So here's the somewhat surprising answer to that question. If you want fastballs only, Sanchez is tied at the top with Alejandro Kirk. So there's a tie for first.

Those guys each had 10 of those. So most of them are fastballs. Most pitches are fastballs, period. And if you are interested in the pitcher leaders, obviously there are fewer of these because any pitcher is not involved in as many pitches as a starting catcher is. But the 2022 leaders among pitchers, Kyle Wright, Alec Manoa, and Fran Brevaldez, they were all tied with six last year. So I guess the larger question of, is this more a pitcher skill or a catcher skill? Like when you see this, when you see a hitter just completely caught looking strike three on a

ball right down the middle do you think oh great pitch call or do you think great pitch or do you think just bad decision making by the batter like terrible guess right to go back to our our previous question like you were just expecting something else and then you got that and you were totally flummoxed. Yeah, I'd say almost always the latter of those, like blending it on the batter. Although I have to say, as somebody who has to watch a lot of Martin Maldonado at bats,

like knowing that there's some measurable way in which he's good at defense and it's not just like Nichols' law getting me right caught up and thinking that he is is nice yeah yeah no there's something to that so yeah i think when a batter looks completely fooled it could be any one of the three it sometimes it's the pitcher like even if it's a pitch down the middle maybe there's some deceptive element of their delivery or there's some sort of tunneling going on, or it looked like another pitch and you just didn't pick up on the fact, or you expected it to drop or something because

it looked like a breaking ball coming out of the hand or whatever. So it could be still a credit to the pitcher. And often it could be a credit to the catcher just, you know, completely confusing the batter or yeah, it could be the batter's fault. So there's probably a little bit of all three of those there. And I guess I would bet on the catcher probably having more of a role than the pitcher in that the catcher is usually the one calling calling the pitches although that could change in the the pitchcom era as we've discussed so yeah i don't think this is the best way to measure it it's a fun little stat but there certainly is something to to catch your game calling that is one of the the nuts that

hasn't completely been cracked at least publicly and one of the ones where people say i wish we had a stat for this or what's one area of the game that hasn't been fully publicly quantified? Game calling is often one of the first answers. Yeah. All right. Alana, would you care to stick around for the stat blast or pass blast, or do you need to get going? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah?

Okay, great. All right. So let's start with the stat blast. StatBlast. Here's today's stat blast Okay, so this stat blast is prompted... It is weird to not hear the music. Yes. Yeah, we don't play the song for ourselves or for our guests if we have one.

Everyone at home just heard it. Maybe you're hearing it in your head a lot. I feel like I was prepared for it mentally, but also just like a gut reaction of what happened? Yeah. So we have a stop last here that is prompted by some news. So Fernando Valenzuela's number has been retired by the Dodgers. Some people would probably say belatedly. I was going to say, how is that not already true? Yeah. Well, I will tell you, the Dodgers are one of the teams that has a fairly formal policy that

they only retire Hall of Famers numbers. There's one prior exception to that, Jim, a.k.a. Junior Gilliam, whose number was retired because he died unexpectedly. He had a brain hemorrhage late in the 1978 season, and he was a coach still with the team at the time. And this was right after, like a day after the Dodgers clinched their pennant that year, Gilliam passed away. And just because there was a lot of grief and sentiment and outpouring of affection for him, they made an exception to their typical rule about it has to be a Hall of Famer to have their number retired. And so now they are bending that

rule once more for a great reason for Fernando Valenzuela. And everyone is happy about this, obviously. He's beloved. We've podcasted about his significance to that franchise and especially the Mexican-American fan base. And of course, he meant a ton to that franchise and Fernando mania, et cetera. So that is probably overdue, if anything, but that made me curious about the other most overdue number retirements, players who have not had their numbers retired, who seems like they deserve that honor. having that formal or informal policy to keep it to Hall of Famers only for each individual team to make its decision based on are you in the hall or not? I'm not a fan. I think it's entirely possible for players to have a huge impact on a franchise as Valenzuela did without, you know, eventually putting up the kinds of counting statistics in a career that gets you in the hall. Although I am shocked that Fernando Valenzuela isn't in the hall as well. Yeah, he could be. Yeah, he worked so much as a young pitcher that I think it hurt his arm and

his production late in his career. Although he was around for a while, he wasn't quite as good later in his career because he just racked up such huge innings totals as a young pitcher. But yeah, certainly as a trailblazer, as someone who's significant to the sport and a really good pitcher and player period, especially early in his career. But yeah, I agree with you. I think it's silly to be bound by this. Yeah, I think Alana's right. There are guys who are just, they're meaningful. And I realize there has to be some bounds put around it, right? Because otherwise you're the Yankees and you're going to have to start putting like wingdings on the back of your jersey soon.

But I think that it can be localized, right? It doesn't have to be that a guy is Cooperstown bound. We already have a bunch of rules and standards and nonsense related to that. And it is an imperfect process. And so I think that if you have players who have meant something really significant to a particular team, you should have wiggle room to acknowledge those guys, even if they aren't going to get a plaque somewhere else. So, yeah. Why would you want to outsource this decision to another body entirely? Right. And and also you would think that the standards on the whole would have to be higher for the Baseball Hall of Fame. Right. I mean, you're drawing from every team and for an individual team, then you're also only

saying that they have to be good enough to clear our bar for our particular team where you didn't have as many legends. So yeah, I don't see why you would abide by a league-wide standard. Seems silly. Seems like you're depriving yourself of being able to celebrate players. I think you still have to have some sort of standards, as I think with Hall of Fame voting, just in order to preserve this being an actual honor. You can't just give it to anyone or it won't be as special anymore. But it does seem like, yeah, why would you not make that individual decision? And right, it can come down to not just stats, of course, and how good a player you were, but yeah, your significance to that organization and to the fan base, which is certainly a factor for Valenzuela. 23 to develop a metric that we could use for this that is sort of like a team-specific

version of JAWS, basically, where it's like JAWS in that it's an average of your career war and your seven-year peak, but it's just for that individual team, not for your entire career as JAWS is. So it's like a team-specific JAWS, basically. career as Jaws is. So it's like a team-specific Jaws, basically. And if you go by this metric, then Fernando Valenzuela was a deserving inductee, right, and number retiree, but maybe not the most deserving for the Dodgers organization. Now, one issue you get into with this is that, of course, some players predated numbers, right? Jersey numbers. Some players did not have numbers, so you can't really retire their number if they didn't have one. And so numbers came practice of number retirements, I guess, came in a decade after that. Right. With Lou Gehrig. So you had several years, you know, a half century or more of Major League Baseball history where the players didn't have numbers or there just wasn't a practice of retiring numbers. And so do you want to bother with the backlog of players? Some teams, Ty Cobb's initials are retired by the Tigers. He didn't have a number, but they have TC out there. So you can

do that. And of course, some teams or all teams have halls of fame, right? They're individual halls of fame, but it's usually, I think, a separate honor. So it's not like you you automatically get your number retired if you're in the team hall of fame, although there's some overlap there. So, for instance, if you look at the Dodgers, Dazzy Vance is actually the the most deserving number retiree whose number is not retired and who is no longer active because Clayton Kershaw would, of course, be quite deserving, but he is still active. So Dazzy Vance, you know, he didn't play in L.A. He played in Brooklyn or Zach Wheat is second on that list. Zach Wheat predated numbers. So it's kind of like the further back in time they played, you know, if they didn't have

a number, then that's an obvious reason why you wouldn't retire their number. And also if they played in a different city, if you're a franchise that has changed locations and maybe your current fan base doesn't really have an emotional attachment to that player, then would you even really bother doing that? You know, and I guess even Dazzy Vance probably didn't have numbers early in his career and was playing for Brooklyn anyway. So if you go by more recent players on the Dodgers specifically, then Ron Say shows up at the top Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, et cetera, et cetera. So it sounds well close to the top of the list. But if you're going to make an exception for him, and you should, then maybe there are other players that you should make that same exception for. And it shouldn't even be an exception.

That should just be the law of the land. So if you're going to look league-wide at who should be retired, their number, who's most deserving by this sort of team specific Jaws metric? Well, number one on the list would appear to be Walter Johnson. And again, Walter Johnson, one of the best players ever, but no number and also played for the Senators and not for the Twins, right? So are the Twins going to lay claim to Walter Johnson in that way and put a WGA out there or whatever? Well, they could, but they haven't. Number two on the list would be Roger Clemens, right? So Roger Clemens and the Red Sox, he statistically, should certainly have his number retired, but he is not in the Hall of Fame. And we know why he is not in the Hall of Fame, maybe multiple reasons why he's not in the Hall of Fame. And those reasons may be also preventing his number being retired by the Red Sox. So there's that. And then going down the list,

it's again, mostly old timey players. After that, Nap Lajue, Jimmy Fox, Tris Speaker, Kid Nichols, Adele Hanti, Arky Vaughn, Cy Young, Harry Heilman, Eddie Collins, Tris Speaker. Then you get to the first modern player who at least doesn't have PD stuff associated with him, Andrew Jones. So Andrew Jones for the Braves ranks very high here and has not had his number retired. There's domestic abuse stuff on Andrew Jones's record. He is gaining support for the Hall of Fame seemingly. And I would imagine that if he is eventually a Hall of Famer that he will have his number retired by the Braves, but he is not as of yet. So he's high up there. Chase Utley is next for the Phillies. Again, about to be on the Hall of Fame ballot. Could be also have Buster Posey. I imagine Buster Posey's number will be retired fairly soon. Lefty Grove, Sammy Sosa, similar reasons why Sammy Sosa's number has not been retired by the Cubs. And you can check out the spreadsheet that Ryan has provided here.

Now, one interesting thing, I asked him to look at the baseline by organization, because some organizations are more liberal with retiring numbers than others. And it really does vary. So the Braves, who have not retired Andrew Jones's number, they have the highest average team-specific JAWS, whatever we're calling this metric. The average is 45.8 and the Braves is 58.3, their average. And the low among teams, well, it's the Marlins at zero. They have not retired a number yet. Poor Marlins. But other than the Marlins, and of course, not counting Jackie Robinson, whose number

is retired for all teams, it would be the Rays at 1, 1.0, because that is Wade Box's score for the Rays or the Devil Rays, I guess, during his day. They retired his number, so the Rays are down there. But among other teams, it would be the Padres at 24.4 and then the A's 29.3, the Mets 29.9. 0.4 and then the A's 29.3, the Mets 29.9. The Yankees, despite how many numbers they have retired, they're actually like right in the middle of the pack. In fact, closer to the more restrictive end than the less restrictive end. They're at 47.6. So their average is higher than the league wide average, even though they have retired so many numbers. I mean, they've just had a lot of great players, right? And frankly, maybe they're the team that's doing it right. I mean, they sort of started this practice in baseball. And, you know, if you want to retire Paul O'Neill's number, what the heck? Go ahead. He's not a Hall of Famer, but he means a lot to Yankees fans and

he was a good player. So who's to say that most teams are not under-retiring more so than the Yankees are over-retiring? Because most teams, they haven't been around long enough and had enough great players that they really have to worry about running out of uniform numbers. Most of the major leaguers who will have played one day have not yet played as we speak. So if you want to be conscious of that and be future minded and want your organization decades or centuries down the line to still have uniform numbers, then I guess you could hold the line now and say we can't just hand these out to everyone or else in the future they will all have to be playing with triple digits or something. So maybe that's part of the consideration but i think that's an episode of futurama where they have to all play with fractions because all the integers got used yeah so that could happen but yeah the most restrictive teams the the toughest graders here it's the braves the giants the mariners the tigers the pirates the orioles the red socks the cubs the Braves, the Giants, the Mariners, the Tigers, the Pirates, the Orioles, the Red Sox, the Cubs, the Reds, then the Yankees. And yeah, some of these teams, it's because they have this rule about you have to be in the hall in order to get in. Now, the least deserving number retirees, you know, sorry to pick on people, but that's kind of a fun question to answer, too. Sorry to pick on people, but that's kind of a fun question to answer too.

So people who have their number retired, who by this metric at least don't do so well. So I mentioned Wade Boggs with the Devil Rays slash Rays. Frank Robinson's number is retired by Cleveland, actually. So you have this genre of great players who played maybe late in their careers with an organization and had their number retired basically because they were great, but they weren't really that great for that team. Like Willie Mays' number was just recently retired by the Mets, right? And I think the most amusing one is Steve Garvey's number is retired by the Padres. So Steve Garvey's number, not retired by the Dodgers, but retired by the Padres, obviously did not nearly as associated with the Padres.

He did hit a big playoff home run for the Padres, but you don't think of the Padres when you think of Steve Garvey. So that is amusing that his number is retired for one and not for the other. And then, yeah, you know, sometimes there's like a tragedy associated with this. Like Jim Umbricht, his number is retired by the Astros. And Jim Umbricht, he was a player who actually died pretty young while he was playing for Houston. He had melanoma and he was playing through it for a while and then it got worse and he passed away. But he played for the Pirates and then for Houston.

They were called the Colt 45s at the time. And he died in his early 30s after having played for Houston until they retired his number. So you have that sort of genre too. One of the original Astros, Jim Umbracht. Yeah, well, that's another reason to do it, I guess. And, you know, then like Bruce Suter, number retired for the Cardinals. I mean, you know, there's that kind of, and, you know, players who didn't have a long time with a certain organization, but made an impact while they were there. I mean, you know, Raleigh Fingers, number retired by Milwaukee, Rod Carew by the Angels, uh, Fingers as well with Oakland, Roy Halladay with the Phillies,

et cetera. So you can go down that list, but I'll just, uh, I'll give everyone just, I'll, down that list. But I'll just I'll give everyone just I'll go quickly team by team and give you your most deserving player whose number should be retired, who is who's no longer active, but should have their number retired. Again, just going by the stats here. And of course, there is much more to this than stats. So for Arizona, it would be Brandon Webb, slightly edges out Curt Schilling, who might be a problematic number retiree. Then for Atlanta, already mentioned, it's Andrew Jones, Kid Nichols also, if you want to count Kid Nichols and Brian McCann and Freddie Freeman, who is no longer active with the Braves, at least. After Atlanta, we have Baltimore.

Mike Messina's number not retired by the Orioles. Did you know that? That is surprising. That's weird. It is weird. He went into the hall with no team insignia on his cap because he just didn't want to choose between Yankees and Orioles. So I don't know if this is like miffed that he departed for an AL East rival or what, but Mike Messina, come on. You got to get your number retired by the

Orioles here. The only problem is that Adley Rutschman is now wearing Mike Messina's old number, so they may have missed their chance. Red Sox already mentioned it's Roger Clemens, and then Trish Speaker and Cy Young Young and Dwight Evans would be a good one. Dustin Pedroia, high on the list too. Cubs, Sammy Sosa, as noted, and then Stan Hack, Rick Russell. White Sox, well, Eddie Collins has mentioned, Ed Walsh, Red Faber, Eddie Seacott, one of the Black Sox, probably not going to get his number retired.

Robin Ventura would be a more modern choice. Cincinnati, Bid McPhee, and more recently, George Foster. Cleveland, again, I mentioned, NAPLajewetris, Speaker Cy Young. Sudden Sam McDowell would be the more modern choice. And then Stan Kowalewski and Kenny Lofton, a Hall of Fame snub as well. The Rockies. So for the Rockies, Troy Tulewitzki would be at the top of the list. Carlos Gonzalez, Trevor Story, Matt Holliday. The Tigers, you have some older ones here. So we have Harry Heilman, Mickey Lulich, Sam Crawford,

Norm Cash, Tommy Bridges, Dizzy Trout, Astros, Lance Berkman, and Roy Oswalt, Cesar Cedeno up there too. Interesting to see Lance there because there was a whole bit when he signed with the Cardinals that the Cardinals put out this ad to promote it where he's trying to pick a new number because he came in wearing number 17 from the Astros and the Yankees. And he runs through like six or seven numbers that he thinks up. And I think it's Chris Carpenter just keeps shooting down his ideas. No, that's retired. That's retired. That's retired. Royals, Kevin Apier, Brett Saberhagen, Amos Otis, Mark Kupiza, who is an Angels broadcaster these days. And speaking of the Angels, they are next. Bobby Gritch, not in the Hall of Fame either.

Tim Salmon, number not retired. They must be one of the Hall of Fame or bust teams because otherwise I don't see how you could not have those guys retired. Dodgers, we mentioned already. Marlins. So the Marlins, Giancarlo Stanton is the all-time franchise leader. So I guess you can't retire Giancararlo Stanton's number with the Marlins while he is still playing for the Yankees, probably. But after him, it would be Hanley Ramirez, Luis Castillo, Dan Ogla. Can we have a Dan Ogla day, retire his number? Clayton Kershaw and Albert Pujols and also Giancarlo Stanton. Oh, and Mike Trout.

Mike Trout would be the active leader. I think it's like Pujols and Trout. It's like Walter Johnson and then Trout, I think, would be like the most deserving, just going by the stats. So that shows you just how accomplished Trout already is. The twins, we mentioned Walter Johnson. just how accomplished Trout already is. The Twins, we mentioned Walter Johnson, and then you have Camilo Pascual would be next, followed by Goose Goslin, Sam Rice, Joe Cronin. After the Twins, we have the Mets. Dwight Gooden is at the top of the Mets list. And really,

come on, how can you not have Dwight Gooden? I guess I get two of the top three, Dwight Gooden and Daryl Strawberry. So, okay, they've had their off-the-field issues, one could say, and maybe that's why their numbers are not retired. But in terms of significance to that franchise, come on. David Wright is second on that list. I would imagine that that will be happening sometime, even if he doesn't get a ton of Hall support. After that, it's Jose Reyes and Carl Speltron. Yankees. So who's the most deserving Yankee who's not had his number retired, even though so many have been? A-Rod. So there's that. After A-Rod, it's Red Ruffing, Tony Lozzeri, Willie Randolph. Willie Randolph really should have his number retired. I mean, come on. You could argue he's a Hall of Fame snub. So Willie Randolph, if Paul O'Neill's number is retired, Willie Randolph's number should be retired really too. Then you have Charlie Keller, Craig Nettles, Joe Gordon, Earl Coombs, Roy White, another unsung player. Oakland's leader, we mentioned Jimmy Foxx, Eddie Collins, Lefty Grove, Al Simmons, Eddie Plank, some old

timers. But the late Sal Bando, who recently retired, is close to the top of the list too. So he'd be a good deserving candidate. The Phillies, we have Ed Delahanty, Chase Utley, I mentioned, Sherry McGee, Bobby Abreu, and Jimmy Rollins. Some good choices there. Rayu and Jimmy Rollins. Some good choices there. Pirates, Archie Vaughn, we mentioned. Barry Bonds, number not retired by the Pirates. Bob Friend, Max Carey, Andrew McCutcheon. Andrew McCutcheon is using his number still, but after he's done using it, maybe that could be retired. Padres, Jake Peavy. So I was making fun of the Padres for having a low average and for retiring Steve Garvey's number, but not that many great choices, I guess. Jake Peavy, Andy Bennis, Brian Giles, Chase Headley, Adrian Gonzalez are the leading Padres candidates. The Mariners, Felix. But that's happening this summer. Yeah, that's happening. Okay. And then after Felix, Ichiro.

That'll happen. Don't worry. Yeah, and he'll be in the hall soon enough. I don't know why I feel defensive on behalf of the Mariners. It's going to be fine. Yeah. Randy Johnson, A-Rod again, and then Kyle Seeger. Which they should, speaking of guys who mean a lot to a franchise and who they should put in the Mariners Hall of Fame, even if he's not a Hall of Famer, you know, it's Kyle Seeger.

I should do that. Yeah. Jamie Moyer after that. I thought Jamie Moyer is in, maybe his number. He might be in the Hall, but not number. Yeah, I think that's right. Okay. Okay.

Giants, Buster Posey, we mentioned. Roger Conner, George Davis. The Cardinals, Jim Edmonds would be the leader. Ducky Medwick, Joe Medwick, Johnny Mize, Ray Lankford, Frankie Frisch. Ducky Medwick. The Rays, Evan Longoria. That'll happen. He's the franchise leader for the Rays.

I imagine that will happen when he's done, followed by Carl Crawford, Ben Zobrist, Melvin Upton Jr., and the Rangers, Buddy Bell, top of the list, followed by Rafael Palmeiro and Ian Kinsler, who just returned as a front office person. Jim Sundberg would be after them. Toronto leader is Dave Steeb, the great Dave Steeb. Perhaps a Hall of Fame snub, also a number retirement snub. Followed by Jose Bautista, Carlos Delgado, Tony Fernandez, Jesse Barfield, Jimmy Key, Lloyd Millsby. Carlos Delgado, Tony Fernandez, Jesse Barfield, Jimmy Key, Lloyd Mills it. This is a fun resource because, you know, if you Google this, you can find best players whose numbers are not retired, but it's often just kind of based on feel. And this is a nice little objective way to judge it. Although,

again, like what you mean to that fan base in that city, that's something that we can't quite quantify here, but has a big impact. All right. We will end with the Pass Blast. This is episode 1966, and the Pass Blast comes from 1966 and from David Lewis, who is an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston. Now, I will give you a quick follow-up. First of all, the 1963 Pass Blast from David, if you recall, was about MLB sponsoring an amateur league for the first time because the minors had been reduced. And so they were looking to have another pipeline. And so they sponsored the Central Illinois Collegiate League. And I wondered, I wonder how many players from the Central Illinois Collegiate League in 1963 eventually became big leaguers because

there were quotes in the article that David highlighted there. There was one scout, the most optimistic scout, said he doesn't believe more than 10 players in that league have major league potential. Another major league scout said there's no more than there are fingers on one hand, if that many. So between five to 10, I guess we could say, was the estimate there. And as it turned out, we were hipped to a page here that actually tracks this. This was an email from listener Michael, thank you, who sent us to prospectleague.com slash MLB underscore alumni. This was formerly the Central Illinois Collegiate League and tracks all of the players who played

there and were for future big leaguers. And there were eight in that inaugural season who went on to be big leaguers. The best of them by war, at least, would be Doug Rader, who was an Astro for years and a pretty solid player, a five-time gold glover, although the modern metrics don't match the reputation there. So there was some talent in that league. So for 1966, David writes, Oakland gambles on Coliseum. Isn't that always the case? On September 18th, 1966, the NFL's Oakland Raiders played the Kansas City Chiefs in a game that officially opened the newly constructed Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. While Oakland was excited to have a new stadium in which to host the

Raiders, the city knew, as San Francisco Examiner sports writer Art Rosenbaum pointed out, that a stadium cannot be profitable on seven or eight games a year. The key to profitability, Rosenbaum suggested, was bringing a Major League Baseball team and their 81 home games per year to the city. In a September 18, 1966 examiner column, Rosenbaum astutely identified the key for a city to attract a major league team and keep them there writing until now, the pattern for stadium building has been clear. If you want a major league franchise,

you build a brand new facility or you show the wherewithal to do so only with such a guarantee. Is it possible to get in the expansion or franchise transfers? When the article continued by suggesting a few possible teams that could be targeted for relocation, including the Kansas City Athletics, the Cleveland then Indians, and even the New York Yankees. The fans learn to care with more heart when they have newer seats for their bottoms, Rosenbaum wrote, concluding Oakland is ready if the American League is. The city's gamble paid off a year later when athletics owner Charlie Finley announced plans to move his team to Oakland for the 1968 season.

And now we are back in the same boat about trying to figure out if the A's will stay in Oakland and if they'll play in the Coliseum. So it was ever thus, I suppose. All right. Well, that takes us to the end of this. I will mention one clarification, which is that the Gary Cohen, who was a writer, producer on The Baseball Bunch, not the same Gary Cohen, who is the Mets announcer currently. It's a different Gary Cohen. So the Gary Cohen should edit his Baseball Bunch Wikipedia page so that Gary Cohen no longer links to the Mets broadcaster. Or maybe someone else can do that because, you know, Gary Cohen's not supposed to.

So Alana, thank you very much for joining us. I meant to mention this at the beginning, but if you want to share anything about yourself or what you do or where people can find you or plug anything, we gathered before we started recording that there are some aspects of your work that perhaps you cannot talk about in this forum, but anything you would care to share about yourself or what you do, please do. Sure. Thank you so much for having me on. This was so, so much fun. I would encourage everybody listening to join the Mike Trout Patreon here and get your own episode. That'd be great. It's really, so much fun. I would encourage everybody listening to join the Mike Trout Patreon here and get your own episode. It's really fun. As you said, I, so I'm a national

security analyst. I do sabermetrics, but for the army and trying to analyze how they do things, how they're going to need to do things in the future, how we get there, particularly been working on like how to adapt operations and training and equipment for climate change. And what's it, what are we going to need to build in order to be able to continue to meet our strategic goals in a warmed environment, you know, in an arena where the ice caps are gone and that's all of a sudden navigable? It's really interesting questions. And doing similar kind of blending of numerical analysis and qualitative analysis and talking to people who know more than me, which is generally most of the people I talk to. That's often the case with our podcast guests too, including you.

Certainly you know more than we do about those topics. So you are like an independent analyst of those things? So I work for a research center that's affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. And we are a nonprofit set up to do this kind of work for the military and it's something we've been doing since World War II and we also do a lot of technological development inventing new types of missiles and radars and all kinds of cool stuff wow okay well I understand why you can't get into all the details. Yeah. Wow. Thanks again for having me on. I can't wait for six weeks from now when we get on a road trip and I finally listen to this episode.

Yeah. Right. Well, I guess Ivy's got to listen at least, even if you don't want to listen back to it. But anything you'd care to plug your Twitter account, we will link to that on the show page, but that or anything else you want to share? So just while I have this microphone that's going out to so many people, I feel the responsibility to say that all over the country, trans rights and trans people are under legislative attack in a very serious way. And we need your help. Everybody who can listen to this, everybody within the now-amplified reach of my voice, if you're in a position to write or call to your state legislature, your state legislators, and tell them that you support the humanity of trans people, you support their right to medical access, you need to do so. You need to pick up the phone

and call. If you are a person of means, just find a non-profit or mutual aid program. The National Center for Trans Equality is a great one. I'm sure you can find one in your area. And if you do, just know that we're all going to be really grateful and that we really need all hands on deck right now. Hear, hear. I don't really have anything else to plug. So I guess I will plug my dog's Instagram. It's oh snap, it's nugs. If you want to see some pictures of a 17-year-old chihuahua toddling around.

I definitely do. Yeah. That's great. And we will link to that. All right. Well, shout out to Nugget then as well. It's been very good and very quiet the whole recording. Yeah.

We haven't had to stop once. All right. Well, this was fun. Thank you very much, Alana. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thanks very much. Bye, y'all.

Well, the person with the Wikipedia username CrewChief22, who may or may not be Joe West, is now threatening to sue because his changes were reverted and he's now been banned from editing that page. Still no conclusive word on whether it is or isn't Country Joe slash Cowboy Joe, but someone on Reddit pointed out that the IP address used to make those edits does appear to point to the area in Florida where Joe West lives. In one of the threats of legal action, there was also an email address cited by this person that was formerly associated with Joe West's website. Make of this what you will, and if we never know for sure, I'd be fine with that. Baseball subreddits really have in itself a week. I meant to tip my cap earlier during the

StatBlast segment to another thread I saw. Possibly the most rigorous, elaborate, esoteric baseball research I've ever seen. A user named Glanville underscore 041804 posted a thread titled, I had a theory that former Phillies GM Matt Klintak signed a disproportionate number of guys with two first names, so I analyzed all 30 MLB rosters over the last 16 years to see if I was right. Several thousand words followed, including a table and about a dozen graphs and equations. Supposedly 100 hours of work went into this. And according to the analysis, it turned out that, yeah, it does seem he was right. Former Phillies GM Matt Klintock did,

in fact, sign a disproportionate number of guys with two first names. Now we know. I think that one would have been too frivolous even for a stat blast. And I say that with great respect. Also, while we're amending things in the interest of accuracy, just want to clarify when we talked about the core, the 2003 sci-fi film in a recent stat blast and a couple of follow-ups, that was prompted by some news stories that the real life Earth's core had stopped spinning or maybe even reversed direction. That is how it was widely reported at reputable outlets, but that is not in fact the case. The core has not stopped spinning

and it has not started to spin the other way. In fact, that was just about its speed relative to the outer layers to the mantle of the Earth. Sometimes the core spins faster than the mantle, sometimes slower. So perhaps it has slowed down relative to the outer layer. It has not actually stopped, because that would be bad, as that incredibly accurate film told us decades ago.

Finally, our recurring segment about ways that baseball is different from other sports has largely run its course. But I will mention this addendum from listener Manuel, who writes, Late to the party, but something that makes baseball or at least competitive baseball and MLB unique to other sports is that teams play series during the regular season instead of playing one game with a team and then moving on to a different team. Something I just randomly thought of while watching the Serie del Caribe and realizing how it differs from MLB. Yeah, this one kind of goes hand in hand with the MLB season just being incredibly long, just more games, which we've mentioned, but it is unusual to play consecutive games against the same opponents. Has happened at times in other sports. I know the NBA did that during the pandemic, but it's the norm in MLB, which is a little weird when you think about it. That'll do it for today, and we will be back soon with another preview

podcast. We will be covering the Angels and the Red Sox next. In the meantime, you can emulate Alana Crockett and Ivy Love by supporting the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged Thank you. include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group, as well as monthly bonus podcasts and playoff live streams and discounts on merch and ad-free Fangraphs memberships and more. Or if you really want to show your support, you can come on an episode. Just join the Mike Trout tier. Patreon supporters can also message us

through the Patreon site, but anyone can contact us via email at podcast at fangraphs.com. You can also rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at Ecrafts.com. You can also rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit

at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with the next preview pod soon. Talk to you then. I feel right all the time. I am right all the time. Run away forever. Outro Music