Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1981: An Arrow in the Knee at the WBC

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Edwin Díaz’s season-ending injury at the WBC and the anti-WBC sentiment it engendered, then (20:39) bring on top-tier Patreon supporter Michael Eisen to discuss his history with Effectively Wild and baseball and how his scientific research is analogous to baseball research, before answering listener emails (31:29) about the […]

A baseball podcast, analytics and stats, with Ben and Meg, from Fangraphs. Effectively wild. Effectively wild. Effectively wild. Then do me one Hello and welcome to episode 1981 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Limburger, The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm alright. How are you? I'm tired, but I am well otherwise. Good. Well, we're much better off than Edwin Diaz, unfortunately, which is how we have to begin this episode.

Sadly, we will be devoting most of the episode to emails and we'll be joined by a Patreon supporter shortly. But the big news of the day, Edwin Diaz out for the regular season, unfortunately out for the season as a whole with a patellar tendon tear. And it occurred after he closed out a very exciting game where Puerto Rico advanced over the Dominican Republic in the quarterfinals. And it was super exciting. And he was also super excited. super exciting and he was also super excited. And unfortunately, he was soon not excited because he heard himself celebrating. We just talked the other day when Sam was on, we talked about the history of players entering themselves while celebrating. Didn't expect to see that happen again so soon, but it did. So he was in the midst of a scrum and they were all hopping up and down. And

it's kind of tough to tell what happened exactly in the footage that I've seen because he was sort of in the center. But just in the midst of the hopping up and down, he just crumpled over and couldn't put weight on the leg and was supported as he hopped off the field and then was also in a wheelchair. And I think everyone sort of feared that it was going to be a season-ending injury as soon as we saw that. We've seen that sort of thing before, and indeed, that is the case. So a big bummer for him, for that team. As soon as I saw it, I was like, oh no, because not only is it bad for him and the Mets and Mets fans and the Puerto Rico WBC team and everything, but you just knew that it was going to lead to a wave of anti-WBC sentiments

or at least inflame the anti-WBC sentiment that was already out there. And as someone who's been enjoying the WBC, that was not what I wanted. Yeah. Ben, there have been some takes. Yes. There have been some hot, hot takes. There have been some very bad hot takes. And I like to think, I mean, I am prone to feeling feelings, as we all know. And even given that, I like to think that I am not overly work upable about twitter i don't want to spend

too much time giving keith olbermann airtime but i will say keith your takes are bad and um and really nasty you know formulated in the nastiest possible way, in a way clearly almost feels like meant to be dismissive of the individual motivations of players to participate in this event. It is an unfortunate reality that when you are a professional athlete, sometimes guys are going to get hurt. And I think that we make a certain amount of peace with the idea that they might get hurt in the the doing of the thing they do you know that they might get hurt

actually pitching they might get hurt running the bases you know in the field whatever it feels particularly cruel when they are hurt in ways like this where it wasn't like he threw the final pitch to win the game and he blew out you know that wasn't how it quite happened it was proximate to that but um it wasn't how it quite happened but i think that we spend a lot of time talking about like baseball as an entertainment product and i think that that is true but i think that it's really important for us to remember that like these guys are people and they get to have a variety of needs and wants as individual human beings. A lot of those are going to align with the wants and needs of the Mets.

And it's fine for them to have ones that don't. I mean, if you don't play for the Mets and your wants and needs align with the Mets, that's kind of weird. But like if you're Edwin Diaz, I'm sure that he really wants to win a World Series for the Mets. You know, he made a commitment to stay in Queens. But he gets to have wants and needs that extend beyond that, and they get to sometimes be baseball wants and needs. And if one of them is pitching for the Puerto Rican team, he gets to do that, or he should get to do that.

And sometimes that's going to carry consequences for him and for his big league club but i think that he gets to sort of make those determinations and uh you don't have to like the wbc but i think bauman wrote a piece for us at ferris yesterday this morning sometime recently after this happened where you know he tried to contextualize this not only within the you know what it means for Diaz but like that this is a question of like what does labor get to demand it do in the context of sports and one of those things might be saying it's really important to me to wear a uniform with my country's name across its chest and it

clearly does like it matters to these guys. So, and it matters to a lot of people who watch the WBC. And so to sort of push all that away because an unfortunate injury took place, even one to a star player, like just seems to totally misunderstand what baseball is like. Yeah,

they are in a lot of ways entertainers, but they're people and they get to like i said they get to have their own wants and needs and if one of them is pitching in the wbc you know there might be circumstances where that's not like a reasonable thing to prioritize like i think if if a guy were just coming back from tommy john maybe a club would have more ground to stand on to say hey like you know this doesn't totally make sense within the context of you ramping up and your rehab and whatnot. But I think that those those justifications are fewer and farther between than we tend to allow. And it's a really big bummer, but I don't think it diminishes like the importance of the WBC as an event. So, yeah. Yeah, it's almost like a

worst case scenario, I think, for for providing fuel for the detractors, just in the sense that, yeah, you're going to get some injuries inevitably. You know, like the other day, Freddie Freeman tweaked his hamstring, right, in a game. Well, you can tweak your hamstring anytime. And I don't think he was necessarily more likely to tweak his hamstring in the WBC than in spring training, right? And it seems like he's fine. It's not a big deal. The problem, I guess, with making that case that it could happen anywhere with the Edwin Diaz injury is that, of course, he was celebrating a victory in a way that one doesn't normally do in spring training, right? So if he was just closing out a Mets victory

in Florida, then probably there's not going to be a scrum and guys hopping up and down and everything. And so this specific injury, I mean, sure, you can have a knee injury like Gavin Lux's in spring training, right? I mean, sometimes you just put your foot down the wrong way. And that happens just because he was injuring himself while celebrating in a way that one doesn't normally do in spring training. You can't, I guess, in this specific case, say that this exact injury could have happened in that exact way in a spring training game just as likely. Except, of course, for that time when the Mets practiced winning a World Series on the field in spring training and they all jumped up and down. But I agree that in most cases, like you could call this a freak injury, like he could have hurt his knee doing something else in spring training. And also, like there is a value to the WBC.

And I know that a Mets fan is maybe not going to be super consoled by this. Stay tuned for our Mets preview podcast next time. It'll be a little bit different than it would have been otherwise. next time. It'll be a little bit different than it would have been otherwise. But yeah, you're obviously going to be upset if you root for the team that he plays for during the regular season, and you're not someone who's super into the WBC and regular season MLB is everything to you that is synonymous with baseball, but it's not the sole sort of baseball there is. And it obviously matters a ton to the players. That's why he was celebrating in that way, because this meant a lot to him. It means a lot to people from Puerto Rico to see that victory.

It meant a lot to people from the Dominican Republic that they lost that game. There's a great entertainment value for us, for people who are paying attention to the WBCs that I don't want to say like it's worth some number of injuries. But I mean, injuries are inevitable whenever you're playing some kind of competition. And the WBC has value to me. So easy for me to say as a nonpartisan MLB fan, I guess, and a non-Mets fan. But you do kind of have to just accept there will be some injuries and there may or may not be more. But even if there were more, right, even if we were to stipulate that it slightly increased the injury risk, maybe you just decide, well, it's generating a lot of interest around the world and it's good for baseball as a sport. And the players are into it and people in other countries are into it. And it's generating a lot of revenue if you care about that.

And so there's a price that you should be willing to accept for that tradeoff. And I understand that particularly we talked a little bit about, like, do we do this more often? Do we do it at a different time of year? More often do we do it at a different time of year? Like I understand some of the potential concern around situating this event in the spring when like pitchers aren't fully, aren't necessarily fully built up, even though there are pitch limits in the tournament specifically to try to prevent, you know, injuries related to that. And you have position players, you know, playing in camp and then they go to the WBC and they're

playing at, you know, different times and maybe they're to the wbc and they're playing at you know different times and maybe they're not all the way built up but that to me is an argument to think creatively about when we host the event not to do away with the event entirely like i was really struck i was at chase for usa mexico and i was there all day yesterday and it was you know that that first day game it was raucous and you know sitting there I'm watching Alec Thomas play center field for Team Mexico in what will be his big league ballpark and thinking about how incredible it must be for him to get like what are essentially postseason reps in terms of the intensity and the environment at home right in his big league ballpark there are guys who got signed to contracts out of the WBC there are dudes who

you know you got complex league pitchers striking out Manny Machado, and they're going to tell that story the rest of their lives. So I think that it suggests to me a sort of pinched understanding of what is valuable to say that none of that matters. to win a spot on Toronto's roster and then you go and play in the WBC understanding that there is a risk to you going away from camp and not being there to be seen in spring every day and then you play out of your mind in the field in a team that didn't advance but like you play super well I can't imagine that didn't you know potentially impact the likelihood of him ending up on the opening day roster for Toronto right like there's a lot of different kinds of value to be had here and I think that stepping away from all of that is really foolhardy and I don't say that to diminish or downplay like what this injury is going to mean for Edwin Diaz as a person or like the Mets as an organization or the NL East or any of that like obviously it's going to have ripple effects but I think before we assume the answer to the question, like, we should just ask these guys,

does this trade off feel worth it to you? And maybe that doesn't answer the question for every fan. And maybe you're not persuaded by that. But it seems like a relevant data point in this conversation, right? Because right before he went down, Edwin Diaz looked pretty freaking stoked that his team had just beat the Dominican Republic. You know, he didn't, I don't know, like ask him today, maybe he has regrets about that, but I kind of would be surprised. And I think we should let him be the one who answers that question. So I don't know, man. I don't know. Right. I don't know if he'd regret playing in the tournament. He might regret being in the center of that scrum hopping up and down the way he was. But yeah, that's come up on the show before.

Like who owns baseball? Like who does baseball belong to? Is it the players? Is it the fans? It's probably a little bit of both. Maybe because I'm on the fan side, I tend to side with the fans and the spectators. And we're the ones who sort of justify its existence, I would say. We fund it, certainly, and our interest is why it exists.

And it wouldn't exist without the players either, of course. But I think that if you look at it from the perspective of someone who thinks that just baseball is synonymous with MLB, then you might think, well, it's not worth losing a single player, right? And I think you could broaden your understanding of what baseball is. Like, we always introduce this as a baseball podcast, not a Major League Baseball podcast. We certainly do talk about Major League Baseball more than any other kind of baseball, but we talk about a lot of other kinds of baseball too. And baseball can mean many things to many people. So MLB is the highest caliber league and the best known and most visible league,

but it's not the only thing that we could care about. Like Shohei Otani threw a pitch that was clocked at 102 miles per hour against Italy. And he hasn't thrown a single pitch in MLB clocked that fast. And so part of me was thinking, well, this is awesome. I've never seen him do that before. That's amazing. There may have been Angels fans thinking, save it for the regular season, right? We know that throwing harder is associated with injury. And so you might say, well, it's an undue risk to throw a pitch that

hard against Italy when you have a whole regular season coming up. But also, what about the regular season has given Shohei Ohtani the opportunity to dial it up like that? I mean, he hasn't gotten to play in a playoff game for the Angels. He missed the WBC in 2017 with an injury. So this is, in a sense, like the most consequential game he's played in. Like, this tournament means a lot to him, obviously. And when he looks back on the whole of his career, I'm sure he'll be thinking about his performance in the WPC as much as he's thinking of any particular Angels game he's played thus far. Like it means a lot to him, means a lot to his country. so you could reframe it as just sort of like well this matters a ton to a lot of fans how he does there so it's not like he's risking his performance in some other venue he's just doing the best he

can in this venue that also matters a lot there's nothing inherently more meritorious about one game that this guy plays than another game it's just what we all decide is important and that we care about and what the player cares about and yeah teams are probably thinking we're paying these this guy plays than another game. It's just what we all decide is important and that we care about and what the player cares about. And yeah, teams are probably thinking we're paying these players a whole lot to be available to us in the regular season. And sure, they can get covered by insurance if someone gets hurt in the WBC, but they're not going to be pleased about it if the Mets build their bullpen around Edwin Diaz and then he's not available to them. Contracts have clauses about certain activities that you're not allowed to perform because you could get hurt. But this is an MLB sponsored

event and kind of MLB co-created event and something that's collectively bargained. So even if the individual teams don't love it, the league likes it. The league is boosting it. It may be in the best interest of baseball, even if it's not in the interest of a particular team that loses a player. The entertainment value of it and just the brand boosting value for the sport as a whole justifies the WBC. I spent the beginning of last episode talking about how I want it to be more frequent than it is. And the Diaz injury hasn't changed my mind on that. I do think maybe we need to be careful about how we're celebrating in baseball games. This has happened before. I mean, I don't want to be a buzzkill and be like, everyone just has to, you know, politely shake hands and walk off the guess. Like, I think after the Kendris Morales broken leg, I think Mike Socha banned, like, the gathering at home plate

and hopping up and down. So maybe we just, I don't know, we need a moratorium on the hopping up and down in groups because it can be kind of dangerous. But the tournament itself, I think, is worthwhile, even if some guys inevitably are going to get hurt. Yeah, I tend to agree i ben do you know what i i realized i said in the midst of that i said that i went to usa mexico and i sure did not i went to usa great britain let me tell you vibes very different

between those games why did i say that well you know sometimes your brain it's searching for a thing and it doesn't find it fills in a it a different environment for international baseball. But also the next WBC is scheduled for 2026. So we only have to wait three years, although they haven't really changed the schedule exactly because, of course, this WBC was originally scheduled for 2021. And then the pandemic happened. So if you were to stay on the original schedule, then there would have been one in 2025 coming up. And then the pandemic happened. So if you were to stay on the original schedule, then there would have been one in 2025 coming up. And then they decided that that was too soon and that it should be 2026 instead. So that's something that was agreed to in collective bargaining.

And then after that, it's supposed to be 2029, which would have been when it was originally going to be held if they had stayed on the every four year schedule and held it in 2021. And then after 2029, then it is scheduled to be every four years again. So they have not actually deviated from the default being every four years, but it will be in three years next time assuming that there are no changes in the interim but i'm all for doing it more often yeah although we have to train people better on the tiebreaker rules oh yeah well or change the tiebreaker or change the tiebreaker understand what they are because i'm not gonna i'm gonna name any names don't need to embarrass anyone and they are legitimately confusing so i don't mean like i have a perfect recall and other people are being doofs i don't mean it like that but

the the amount of debate i overheard in the press box yesterday about what needed to happen in uh the the nightcap for usa to advance um despite michael bauman's great little chart still a lot of confusion so i think we need to do a little maybe simultaneous cleanup of the tiebreaker rules and also some advanced education on them. Because, boy, were people flummoxed, you know? They were flummoxed. I didn't even try to understand. I just waited for someone to tell me who was going to advance. It's just too complicated for me.

I just, every now and again, I would be like, what about? And Ben was like, I checked the math. I did. I did check it. I checked it. And I was like, no, I have confidence in you. I just think that this process has really turned people upside down in terms of their understanding of it's just not intuitive. You know, surely there could be an intuitive set of tiebreaker rules or a more intuitive, you know, it doesn't have to be perfectly intuitive, but a more intuitive set of tiebreaker

rules would be good. Let's enter some emails. Okay, so we are joined now by Michael Eisen, who is, among many other things, a Mike Trout tier Patreon supporter or has been, in fact, was for longer than he had to be to qualify for an Effectively Wild podcast appearance. So we appreciate the extra time and we appreciate any time, frankly. So, Michael, thank you for that. And thanks for the time you're giving us today. I'm happy to be here. you're giving us today. I'm happy to be here. So we always start out these Patreon appearances by asking what possessed our guests to support us at all, really, but particularly at that tier. So

if you care to share what motivates you or how you got into the podcast, that'd be great. All right. I got into the podcast, I think I've been listening since almost the beginning. I got into the podcast, I think I've been listening since almost the beginning. And then I worked briefly for a baseball team and was making a little bit of money from it and felt since I had learned so much from you, I needed to give some back to the source of my strength. source of my strength. So I originally joined as a supporter for that reason, and then just felt it was time to up the ante a little bit. Well, we're grateful. Now, is this the baseball team that's mentioned on your Wikipedia page, or is this a different baseball team? Different baseball team. So I have, as I said, a complicated baseball backstory.

Okay, well, share as much of it as you want. So, I mean, it's, you know, it all, it amusingly all dates back to the year I was born in 1967 Hitter, which may or may not be on your memory banks. But it's in mind because although we moved from Boston when I was a kid down to Maryland, my parents, really my mother, who was the baseball fan in the family, had bought a record of the 1967 Red Sox. If you haven't heard it, it's a spectacular work. It combines play-by-play games and a long epic poem about the season. And it's really great. It's available in places online. It's called The Impossible Dream, of course, because that was what the team was known as. And it turns out I was born the day before this near no hitter against the Yankees.

And my mother claims to have listened to that game in the hospital as I was a one-year-old. So I like to think I was infused with baseball from the very beginning. As you may have seen from my various online presences, now I'm a biologist who does a lot of computer programming. And I, as a kid, about 10 years old, taught myself how to program in order to keep track of our stratomatic baseball league that me and kids in my neighborhood played. And then, you know, I'm a lifelong baseball fan, of course, mostly going to Orioles games because of where I lived. And then between graduate school and postdoc, I just finished my PhD in biophysics and got a call from a friend who said, are you sitting down?

He said, I have the perfect job for you. And a friend of his was starting a team in the new Big South League, an independent league in Tennessee. The Columbia Mules. Yep. And they needed a broadcaster. And so, although I had no experience as a broadcaster, I interviewed with the general manager and they liked me. And me and a friend, we went down and spent the summer as the voice of the Columbia Mules. That was awesome.

I know you've done your stint in independent ball as well. So, it was great. I regret having watched what's become of it, not having written a book about it, because it was really – there's so many amazing experiences. It was, as you know, independent ball is a spectacular thing. Yes. I declined an offer to become the voice of some minor league hockey team in Tennessee at the time, choosing, having spoken to people I knew who were in broadcasting and decided it was not my future. And, you know, I, you know, became a scientist. And several years ago, my kids' school, they were organizing a – they had an auction to spend the day with the general manager of the A's. I now live out in California, and I have been a season ticket holder for the A's for a while.

And I thought this sounded really fun. So I overbid and went to the game. And it turned out that Assistant GM was a parent at the kids' school. And we got talking. And I went with a friend who's also a baseball geek and a longtime sabermetricist, as am I. And we got to talking with him and asked him if there were any problems that needed solving, if we could do it. So he said, yeah, we need algorithms to figure out what pitches are valuable based on pitch tracking data.

So I went back to my computer, wrote something up, and showed it to him. And as a result, eventually got hired to do some pitch analysis for a team. I think I'm contractually not allowed to mention who they are, but that was cut short by the pandemic, but it was very fun. So anyway, that's my baseball backstory. Fortunately, Fangraphs now has stuffed grades for pitches right on the leaderboards. Yeah, mine's better, of course. Oh, sure. It's all confidential, so we'll never know.

No, no, it's funny. I'm working on making it public. Oh, excellent. Well, what is your relationship to the game now? Well, I still watch and listen to as many Red Sox games as I can. I go to A's games, although they're making it increasingly difficult to do that, having upped their ticket prices absurdly. I think I went to a game last year where I might have been one of 100 people in the stands. And so, yeah, I'm an avid baseball follower. I pretty much always have a baseball game on in one way or another on my screen as I'm working. I love to go to games. I listen to your podcast religiously, and I still dabble in analysis. I have a franchise in one of the original

rotisserie leagues. I'll do a lot of work for that too. Like the rest of us, baseball is a constant part of my life. You're a professor of genetics and development at UC Berkeley, which sounds fascinating. And your Wikipedia

page, as we mentioned, it has a baseball and biology subsection. So that does include your work with the Columbia Mules and also your history with Strat, as you said. But also it includes some material about the parallels that baseball analysis has with your work or ways in which baseball stats have influenced your research. Can you shed some light on that? in which baseball stats have influenced your research? Can you shed some light on that? It's an interesting thing that in my profession, which is, you know, I work at the interface between experimental biology and computation. And an astonishingly large number of people in this field have a background in baseball stats.

And as kids, and then, you know, in various ways, dabbling. And I started to realize that analyzing data in biology is, you know, it's a process where you have to just accept that there's a lot of variation in things that you can't control. So, you know, biological organisms live their own lives. Evolution does complicated things and weird things and quirky things. And I think baseball stats geeks got used to that. You know, we're used to correcting for stadiums and years and just thinking about stats in terms of all the weird things that can influence them. And I think, you know, having grown up thinking about baseball and dealing with that trains your brain to be flexible in the way that you think about analyzing all sorts of other things.

So, yeah, it's certainly true that a lot of us have that background, and I think that's probably the explanation. Yeah. And so in what ways is the work that you do now, if you can discuss it with lay people like us, even in what ways might it be semi analogous, at least? Yes. So for example, we do a lot of work where we're, we make a lot of, you know, quantitative measurements of a cell or an organism or a tissue or different scales. And we get a lot of measurements. And then it's our job to kind of make a story and learn something about it, try to figure out why is the cell different than the cell? Which cell is behaving differently for the following reasons?

And so we'll sometimes spend time where I've got one screen that's got a bunch of baseball stats and one screen that's got a bunch of biology data. It's a giant table of numbers. And our goal is to kind of organize it and make sense out of the complexity that sits there. So I kind of think baseball stats was the original data science in many ways, sort of dealing with it. I forget the guy's name that you were talking about on an earlier podcast, the guy who had published some papers in the 50s originally on stats analysis. I was very inspired because I think it sounded a lot like he was thinking a lot of ways that would eventually become kind of, you know, the way that computation emerged in biology. Yes. Dick Truman. Yeah. There's a very similar history. Biology was primarily an

experimental field dominated by people thinking like experimentalists. And it took some time for people with a quantitative background and a stats math background to wrap their heads around it. So it sort of came in slowly and in kind of similarly dismissed initially way. And eventually it's now much like baseball. I think a lot of the computational work now dominates a lot of biology. So what is the computational biologist equivalent of a bat flip and are there unwritten rules around it? Yeah.

I've never thought of that question. The equivalent of a bat flip I think think, is probably publishing a paper. Well, it seems like baseball might be one of the less interesting subjects we could talk about with you, but that is what we do here. So we will get to that, I suppose. I should have dug into the mailbag and looked for DNA genetics, biology-related questions, but I didn't really pursue a theme here. But we will start with this question from Brian, who says, wondering if you're aware of Gerangelo Sanche, the ambidextrous pitcher for the Mississippi State Bulldogs. He throws 96 from the right side, 92 from the left, and so far this season has a.6 ERA. My question is this, aren't we doing this whole ambidextrous thing all wrong?

Instead of using both arms for a platoon advantage in the same game, would he generate more value by throwing 80-plus pitches as a righty one game and then coming back two days later and doing the same from the left side? Wouldn't twice the number of starts be more valuable than what he's doing now? Obviously, this assumes some level of effectiveness that approaches what he's doing now, but it would seem like even a 20% drop may still make it worthwhile. His core would have to be fantastic, though, so maybe he starts every three days instead. Still, that's potentially 40 or more starts in a season. Interested to hear what you all think. I mean, I think that if a guy had the repertoire

to effectively start from both sides, he'd just be the best pitcher in baseball. I mean, isn't that the issue here? If you're going to do a full start, having a repertoire deep enough to handle and order multiple times from both sides, that sounds really hard. Yeah, it does. I didn't mention this in my backstory, but I played high school baseball, although poorly.

in our conference had a pitcher who got injured in his sophomore year, I think, as a righty, trained himself to pitch with his left hand and pitched as a junior as a lefty. And then the injury of his right arm recovered. And he did exactly what the caller suggests. He would pitch a game right-handed and then pitch another game left-handed. And they got a dispensation around the pitch limits that are present in high school so that he counted twice as a lefty and a righty. So, I wonder how that would work out for a major league or whether it would be better to do that just from a warm-up perspective. I presume you have to warm up both arms when you're doing this separately, and it's probably easier to do it serially rather than... Yeah. I mean, the problem with Pat Venditti, I guess, was that he wasn't quite good enough even with the ambidextrous advantage. He was barely a big leaguer getting to use the platoon advantage all the time. So if Gerangelo Sánchez is good enough to do this and to pitch

from either side, and it just so happens that he can pitch from both sides, then yeah, maybe it would be best to get the most mileage out of his arms that he could. But that would depend on him being big league quality from each side and not only being big league quality from the two sides together. And then I don't know exactly how much it would deplete you to pitch with one arm and then come back and pitch with the other arm. Obviously, you're still using some of the same parts of your body. I mean, you'd have a different landing leg and push off leg each time, but you do use both of your legs to some extent, no matter which arm you're pitching from. So you'd have some rest required.

I don't know what the discount, I guess, is there exactly and how much you could squeeze out of that person and what sort of toll it would take because you're obviously – you're using some of the same body parts each time. But the arm is the big one, so I guess you could do this in theory if you're good enough. Yeah, it might be better to – like presumably he'd be even better pitching on any given day from both sides at the same time. But if you're good enough that you can do it big league quality on either side, then even if you're taking a small hit on the single start basis, it might still benefit you in the long run to get many, many more innings. You know, if you can be a 300 or 400 inning guy or something like that, or whatever it would be in today's environment of reduced workloads, double that, then that would be immensely valuable.

If you're a replacement level pair in your worst hand, pitching from your worst hand, then you're a free roster spot, basically. So it's got to be worth something. So that's fascinating. How do they use him in Mississippi State? I guess they just, he pitches with both arms. You're asking Ben a college baseball question? Right.

You barely acknowledge its existence. I have heard of this baseball player because he's an unusual case. But yeah, I wonder whether it would help you at all to focus on one arm on any given day because to not have to. I mean, maybe he's just so used to it at this point that it's not like asking some other pitcher to change your release point, which some pitchers do. But other pitchers struggle to just drop down or throw from a different angle. to just drop down or throw from a different angle. So I wonder if for him, if he could focus on just one arm on any given day in any given game, whether that would enhance his performance aside from losing the platoon advantage sometimes, but just being able to repeat the same motion over and over again, or whether he's had enough

practice that at this point it makes no difference. The bullpen catcher can say which arm he's most effective with on that day. Right. I guess it would be cool to have for the other team to not even know what he was going to, you know, when they're setting their lineup, even if he was going to pitch with one arm, if they didn't know what arm he was going to use, they would set their lineup. Yes. Exactly.

He could just decide based on the lineup he's facing. Yeah. It would be like the famous, the Curly Ogden maneuver that Bucky Harris tried in the World Series about a century ago. Just the surprise, right? And yes, you could just adjust, but I don't know. It's the inverse of the old Earl Weaver. Right.

Use some non-pitching pitcher as the DH. I wonder if you blew out in one arm, would you still be able to pitch? Would it interfere with your rehab if you were activating the non-arm and shoulder muscles of your pitching motion? Would it goof up your recovery from Tommy John or whatever? it would goof up your recovery from like Tommy John or whatever? There are some times where a pitcher will use his non-pitching hand to punch a wall or something and will hurt himself and I think can still pitch with that injury. Maybe might miss some time, but not have to miss all the time. So I guess you could do that.

Would you be symmetrical? Well, no, You might have one more muscular arm for a while. Be like a kicker in the NFL where one of their legs is a lot bigger than the other because that's the one that has to do the kicking. You can tell I'm a scientist because I'm thinking, man, we should really generate these kind of

injuries and mass so we can answer these questions. Yeah. All right. Question from Jason, a Patreon supporter. Would it be possible for two teams of amateur baseball slash history hobbyists I mean, a historical reenactment of a specific professional game, preferably one with a full archive broadcast recreated down to every individual pitch and play. Whoa. Yeah. So just treating the original game as a script and following that script and hitting the ball in the same place and throwing the same pitch and having the same fielding play, et cetera, for nine innings like clockwork. I don't, I mean, no, it feels like that would

be impossible. I mean, given enough practice and enough trials, I guess you could do it. Maybe a better way of saying it is, do you think a major league team could reenact their own game? Right under the control here is can you, you know, rather than trying to get alternative people to do something someone else did, could you actually get a major league team to just replay one of their games at this level if you wanted to make a movie or something? Yeah. make a movie or something. Yeah. So it would be hard to do because, first of all, if this is an amateur baseball team that is trying to recreate this, it's like they have to be good enough to, let's say there's a home run in the game.

I mean, they have to be able to hit a home run, right? Like over a fence that is major league distance, which not everyone can do, certainly in a game setting. So they have to be good enough to do that. do, certainly in a game setting. So they have to be good enough to do that. It would be easier in some ways if this is a lower level league where people are not throwing 95. I mean, assuming you don't have to recreate like the velocity and everything. But if it's just like this guy hit a grounder to second base or something, and that's the level of specificity and granularity that we're going for, then it would be easier to do if you're throwing more softly so that you can actually

aim where you're hitting the ball. Because if it's big leaguers and people are throwing max effort, then it's very unlikely that you could place the ball exactly where you happened to hit it the first time. Whereas if you're just sort of lobbing it in there, throwing BP speed, then maybe you could say, yeah, I'm going to roll over and hit a grounder to second here, or I'm going to hit a fly to left or whatever happened the first time. But then you're sacrificing some verisimilitude in that it's not game speed exactly. The advantage of an old game is we don't know enough

to make it complicated in that way. Yeah. Yeah. Depending on how old it is we don't know enough to come to make it complicated in that way right yeah yeah depending on how old it is you might have the hit direction or something but we can just say you can take a retro sheet description and uh and recreate yeah right because now if it's like you need the exact exit velocity and hit distance and well no you can't get all of that it would take many more attempts than we have lifespans that would allow for i think but i think you could i think you could do it if if you were just a little more lax about how closely you have to replicate everything but you'd have to be willing to get it in the ballpark so to speak but not exactly mirror everything it would be kind of fun though like i think that would be fun just an exhibition

if it's like we're replaying some famous game in history and obviously it's great in its initial playing because no one knows what's going to happen and there's suspense and so maybe it would be a little less exciting to just watch a replay knowing exactly what happens. But it can be fun to watch just a replay, a rebroadcast of that game. And if they could make it convincing, then I think it'd be kind of fun to see that if they could pull it off. You don't have to tell the audience which game you're recreating. That's true. Yeah, it could be.

Right. They could keep that as suspense. It could be like, this is a famous baseball game from history, but dealer's choice. And then you could figure it out as they went along. That'd be fun. Some wise ass would look it up on Retro Sheet quickly. Oh, yeah. There's a group here, I assume that this is a fairly common thing, who play sort of vintage baseball in vintage uniforms and gloves. Yeah, that happens. It doesn't look major league quality.

Yeah, this feels like some situation where we're going to get emails like, oh, this happened. These people do it. I'm not aware of it. I wonder, though, so tell me if you think this is too galaxy brain to take. I think that even if you were able to do something like this with like perfect versatility. Help me. It's so hard. Very similitude.

Thank you. That's hard. That's a tricky one. Yeah. It's also hard to spell. Anyway, I think that even if you were able to do that, someone watching it would feel a sense of unease or like something was off just because I think that we,

even comparing the game today to the way the game looked when we were kids, I think we sometimes fail to appreciate the gap between that. And so even though we would be told, like famous game from history, history, right? And even if we didn't know which one, history. I think that our mental, like, the thing we would be referencing against the whole time is baseball as we see it now.

And we'd be like, this doesn't look right. Yeah. And we might not appreciate that that's why we feel that way. And we'd be like, these bums, they have no appreciation of history. They can't even get it right. But I wonder if we would do that and not realize that what we're really comparing it against is like guys who can play big league baseball now.

I found watching these, I watched some of these recreations and I found it was actually pretty easy to slip into the era. Like, you know, they're just a bunch of dudes playing baseball. Unfortunately, it bunch of dudes playing baseball. Unfortunately, it was all dudes playing baseball with bad equipment.

And you kind of, you know, you just kind of quickly get into the game, honestly. Yeah, if you have the vintage uniforms and everything else and we understand that it's supposed to be old timey, then maybe it would work.

Or you could get an uncanny valley situation, as you're saying. I'm not sure. Right. All right. Well, this is a related question from a different Jason, Maybe it would work. Or you could get an Uncounty Valley situation, as you're saying. I'm not sure. All right. Well, this is a related question from a different Jason, who is a Patreon supporter, who says, It's taken as axiomatic now that baseball players today are better than they've ever been. And of course they are.

But how would it change baseball fandom if it were clear that players from the past really were better than modern players. Say, for instance, that baseball ends up so thoroughly out-competed in the 21st century by pickleball and Overwatch that it no longer attracts the best athletes. And this talent squeeze outweighs the gains from training, strategy, globalization, and so on. Aside from making baseball's popularity problems worse, how would fans of this rump sport be different? Would we become even more obsessive about baseball history? Would we lean into enjoyment of baseball's niche weirdnesses and become more like reenactors? Would we talk about this all the time, or would it be impolite to bring up, or would it make no difference at all? After all, when baseball was at its cultural peak in the mid-20th century, lots of people thought that pitching had peaked with Young and Johnson

and hitting with Ruth and Cobb, right? So if baseball were dying, how different would it be? So if it were true and generally acknowledged that Major League Baseball players today were not as good as they used to be because the sport was in decline, it's like the baseball game in Interstellar where you're watching the Yankees. That's just like a barnstorming minor league team, right? Because MLB doesn't exist anymore in this post-climate change world. So how would we interact with the sport knowing that it really did used to be better, at least from a quality of competition way? You're describing being an A's fan. Well, it doesn't sound very fun. Yeah.

Aren't we going to have to grapple with this when Otani retires? Yeah, I am certainly. Yeah, I'm not looking forward to that because I don't know how that could be topped. But yeah, I mean, I guess it's not that unlike fans of a particular team that used to be better, right? And you probably do do a lot of just reminiscing about better days, right? And remembering some guys who were better than the guys you're watching now. So I guess there would be some of that, right? I also wonder whether this, you know, this explains the crotchety old guy phenomenon where he talks about how players in their own brain, they think the players were superior. I don't know. People are always talking about how the greats were greater than the players today.

In Boston, people will think Ted Williams would be a 400-hitter today, and he certainly wouldn't be. Yeah, there are a lot of people who do believe this and have believed this throughout baseball history. So for them, at least, in this scenario, it wouldn't actually be any different. It's just that they would not be wrong about it. Well, and I guess that, I mean, i'm sure that there are exceptions to this and you know i'm i'm nervous to take twitter as like a reliable sample but like the people who seem to be the most worked up about that um they do still seem to watch baseball you know they're not out here going like and that's why i watch pickleball you know

although give it time i guess yeah pickleball it's coming for all of us um they still seem to engage with the game but the way they do it does feel kind of like pinched and grumbly um and i wonder how much of that is performance and how much of it is them sitting in their living rooms when the World Series is going and like a cool thing happens. And they're like, yeah, all right. Like, that was pretty great. Like, I don't I'm sure there's a lot of variability person to person on that one. But I am encouraged that even though they are being very little fun at the party, they do they do still seem to be attending the party, which makes me think that the decline is, to the extent that it happens, will be subtle and slow going. And at some point,

even if it's not getting worse, we will, I imagine, we'll top out. At some point, we will top out in terms of the advancements we can make to the athletic prowess of any athlete. I hope we'll get better at helping players stay on the field, you know, and stay healthy and have all their, you know, ligaments and tiny bird bones intact. intact but we can't keep getting better and better forever although i'm saying that with a biologist on the line so maybe i'm wrong about that you know i i've all i can't remember when you were talking about it but there was somebody who asked the question on a previous mailbag about whether players with long careers are actually constantly getting better. Right. Yeah. In fact, because they're, they're, they're dealing with a more talented opponents. And I,

I wondered whether anybody's ever really tried to quantify in a, well, in a way that a stats geek would be satisfied with the talent pool at any given year. And if there have been times when the talent pool actually did drop, presumably it's not been entirely monotonic, increasing. So how do we know if there's ever been a time when that the actual talent pool was significantly lower, I guess, in World War Two, but that's a bad case. But yeah, there's that or expansion, right? Where it gets a little bit watered down. Yeah. We get a dilution.

And did fans, they didn't flock away from baseball during expansion? Yeah, that's what I was going to say is that in theory, it shouldn't really matter that much whether the baseball players used to be better or worse. Like, does it enhance our enjoyment of baseball now that we know or think that baseball players today are better than they were a century ago? I mean, should that even be relevant? We can't go back and watch baseball from a century ago. So should we care? Like we're watching whatever the highest level of competition in the sport is currently. And that's kind of the only option available to us unless we just want to go back and watch archived games or something. So in a sense, it almost shouldn't really matter. But I think it does matter. It makes me feel like

it's a thriving sport as opposed to a dying sport. I know that people have been saying it's dying for a really, really, really long time. But if you become convinced that it's dying and that there were better days and that it's just sort of circling the drain and it's just going to get worse and worse, then that maybe makes you a little less likely to get invested and people less likely to care. We care because there's a collective caring that induces us to care. So in a sense, it seems like it shouldn't actually matter that much. I think if you have memories of players doing something, you definitely notice this as you watch players at different levels of baseball, that they just can't do something that you know other players can do, chase down a fly ball, make diving stops in the infield. There's probably certain things that if they just no longer happened, you would really notice their absence, having once seen them. Players making catches over the wall, hitting home runs, things like that. If

they disappeared, it would be a discernible thing. That's true. Certainly when you go down, and as you know from your indie ball experience, I mean, once you get down to a certain level of indie ball, then what you might think of as a routine play with a brain that's calibrated on big league baseball is no longer routine. And that might make it more entertaining sometimes, but you're at least aware that it's not the same caliber of competition. But if you just watch two AAA teams playing each other or some foreign major league, and you might be able to tell if it were an MLB team versus a AAA team, and you could see the contrast on the field in front of you.

But if it's just AAA versus AAA, then it might just look like regular baseball. It might not be so obvious to you at all times. Yeah, there might be fewer guys who are throwing quite as hard if you have a radar gun that you're looking at. But generally, it will just sort of look like baseball once you get to a certain level, at least. So if we were talking about the talent level plateauing in MLB or just a slight decline, I don't know that we would be able to detect that really, unless we got to the point where it's like, you know, guys were routinely flubbing what we thought of easy plays and balls were just going through guys' legs left and right, you know, then we would be able to tell

the difference. But otherwise, not necessarily. You probably had this experience in IndieBall too. You know, at any given game or any given inning, you don't notice it because people make errors, they don't make great plays, whatever. It's either the player or just happenstance. But if you watch a whole season, you definitely change your expectation of what's going to happen on certain types of plays. And, you know, being an announcer during this, you sort of had to be prepared for what was going to happen on certain types of plays. And, you know, being an announcer during this, you sort of had to be prepared

for what was going to happen on the plays. And so I definitely noticed the absence of certain types of athletic baseball plays and certain, you know, people were just not as good at hitting. You know, the things that you pick up even without any technology. So I do think people would notice. Yeah.

Well, and I think, you know, it can have its own charms, right? Like this is part of why I keep trying to convince Ben to watch college baseball, because there's something thrilling about not taking for granted. I mean, sometimes even just the catcher catching the ball, you guys. Like sometimes they just don't. Sometimes they just don't. And so that can have its own thrill. But I know like in talking to Eric that he makes a point of seeing big league ball to calibrate, right, and to have not only a fair expectation of prospects but an appreciation of like what does the final form of this look like when it's going well, even for guys who might be utility players or backups or bench dudes or whatever, like it is when you sit and

watch minor league ball for a long time, then you see a big leader, you're like, Oh, right. So you know, I think it doesn't take very long watching the highest level of a thing to be like, all right, like that's, that's better than what I just was watching before. I also think that the, there's part of the thing with college and minor league or high school ball is, you know, that they're getting better. This is, there's, there's a, you're not seeing them at their peak, or at least you can imagine you're not seeing them at their peak. If you were watching a game of, you know, 50 year olds or an old timer game, right. Where you know, they're past their peak. These players aren't getting better. You notice their limitations more, probably.

And it is exciting to stay tuned to see what these players will get up to next. I mean, just to know that they might be throwing harder than ever. They might develop some new pitch, you know, like they're constantly getting good at things that doesn't always make baseball more entertaining. Sometimes it can be just the opposite. But as you were saying with Otani, it's like, how do you follow that? For me, it's hard to get as excited about any prospect because, well, they don't do what Otani-esque in some way and that was the previous generation of players and then the players now were not as good and you felt like, well, everything that a player could possibly physically accomplish has already been accomplished. And now it's just a slow decline from there. Then that would be a bummer, I think. It's more exciting to feel like they're getting bigger and faster and stronger and they're developing new powers. And so I have to keep watching because there might be something new that we've never seen before. Also, just related to what we were talking about with the talent pool, I'd refer people to

episode 1954 when we talked to Adrian Burgos and Daniel Eck about their method for calculating the talent pool in the league at any particular time and how it seems to have risen over time, although they have also accounted for the fact that baseball may not be quite as popular league-wide or country-wide. And so that might lead fewer people to get into baseball, which could offset the greater number of countries participating and people allowed to participate, etc., etc. You'll be unsurprised to know that I downloaded their papers. And that's what prompted me to think of a fundamentally different way of asking that question, which I will try to do someday because I thought it was a little wanting.

All right. Here is a question from Patreon supporter Peter in LA. All right. Here is a question from Patreon supporter Peter in L.A. Hearing the recent discussion on episode 1976 about finding more collaboration between pitchers and catchers, given the likely changes with Pitchcom, hear my idea out. Tinder for pitches. Both the pitcher and the catcher have a device on their arm that shows them various pitches, and they can either swipe right or swipe left. Once the both sides swipe right on the same pitch, it is clearly agreed upon, and both parties will proceed to their date, the ball being thrown. Of course, this is probably an awful idea, would take way too long, and would probably somehow become worse than any dating app,

but just want to throw out the possible option. This is not answering that question but um uh ben clemens recently published a piece of fan graphs about four player crushes he has based on a presentation he did at the saber research conference recently and he messaged me to say that he was quite pleased that the majority of the comments were just people discussing how hot certain players were. And so I, I agree that this would take too long and that we, it seems like have a pretty reasonable mechanism for sorting this stuff out now. But I do,

I do like us advancing the idea of sort of respectful longing, having a bigger place in baseball. You know, you don't want to make anyone uncomfortable and you want everybody to be having a good time. So respectful, but, you know, we should have room for longing. That sounds better than horniness, but. Sure, yeah. Do we think that pitchers are, you know,

routinely throwing a pitch they don't want to be throwing? You know, I guess there's an assumption there, but with the inverse pitch calm and things like that, I don't think you need to have them both paging through options. It's sort of one of them proposes and the other shakes their head. Even if they have only one pitch in mind, you get to the right answer pretty quickly. Yeah. I'm sure there are times, let's say either time pressure with the pitch clock or maybe in the past when the pitcher didn't have the option to call pitches themselves. So maybe they felt pressure to go along if they were younger and you have an established catcher back there. Maybe you're under pressure to follow their lead.

I know that when the pitcher doesn't have full conviction in the pitch that's put down there, that maybe that could sap the quality somehow. And I would guess that it would be an added boost of confidence if you and the catcher both decided on the same pitch. If you both swiped right on the same thing, then it'd be like, all right, we're both on the same page here. And you know that the other person isn't just going along with it because you put down the sign or something, right? They independently decided that that would be the best idea. So I guess that would be a nice little jolt of reassurance. But you're right.

I think probably for the most part, they're already throwing the pitch they want to throw. And usually both parties are on the same page or reasonably close to it. Is the pitch comm want to throw. And usually both parties are on the same page or reasonably close to it. Is the pitchcom data being logged? That's, yeah, I wonder about that. Not publicly, obviously, but I do wonder whether there's even, you know, an impression that is retained, like whether that's stored in memory somewhere. I could see maybe them not wanting it to be but but it would be interesting data to analyze if so for sure well and now that pitch com can operate in the other direction right where in theory a pitcher could call his own game if

there's if there's a lot of disagreement i think you just get a guy who who goes rogue and says this is a bad match on a more fundamental level and swipes what direction do you swipe when you i don't even know i don't even know anymore i think you swipe that's all i know right is the good one i think i don't know i don't know i don't miss that at all i have to assume that there are teams that pay attention to this this seems like a very raised oh sure to track. So I assume that even if it's not coming directly from Pitchcom that they're well, and I would imagine that, you know, it's sort of, it's the kind of thing that I would expect the catcher and the pitcher and the pitching coach and the manager to talk about fairly often.

Like if a, you know, you're standing there in the dugout and you notice that you're, you have your guys getting crossed up a fair amount, or there's a lot of, you know, you're standing there in the dugout and you notice that you're, you have your guys getting crossed up a fair amount or there's a lot of, you know, sort of jockeying. I'm sure that's something you try to address pretty proactively because you don't want to let anyone stew. And how far can we take the bad dating analogy? You know, it's like, are you at brunch and you're like, you should just break up with him. You don't seem to like him very much. All right. Are you at brunch and you're like, you should just break up with him. You don't seem to like him very much. All right.

Here is a question from Michael, Patreon supporter, but a different one, I think. Okay. We'll see. That would be very funny. Yeah. I didn't actually write down the last name, so it's possible. But I enjoyed your recent speculation about a world in which pitchers and hitters each had their own collective bargaining units. Yeah, this is. Yeah, this is...

Oh, this is me. Oh, is it? Okay. Oh, wait. Well, that might have been your question originally. This is a Michael Hoffman, I believe. I see. Oh, that was my question that prompted it. Yes. Okay, good. That's funny. In discussing the various wedge issues and multilateral negotiations this setup would engender,

you stopped just short of considering a fun question. What would happen if one unit went on strike while the other continued to work? So either the pitchers are striking while the hitters play or vice versa. Let's assume there is no solidarity between the hitters and the pitchers when this happens. So the group that isn't striking wants to play. What does the scoring environment look like in a league where all positions are filled by players who are currently pitchers or alternatively by only hitters? Are there enough of either group to sustain play for long? What happens to Shohei Otani's relative value depending on which group he's in, presumably at

Sky Rockets? How quickly could members of each group tune up on the skills of the other group? Which of the two versions of the league, only pitchers or only hitters, is more fun. Oh, man. So, yeah, a lot to consider here. I mean, it would obviously be extremely lopsided either way. We've seen plenty of pitchers hitting and position players pitching, to know that. I did do an article about which are worse at their job or were pitcher hitters or position player pitchers. And I found that pitchers are worse at hitting than position players are at pitching on the whole. So I think that an all pitchers league would be more unwatchable, though pitchers would also be bad at defense or worse at defense than position players are, so that even when pitchers hit, wasn't really valued or practiced at all prior to the universal DH. So I would think that,

yeah, that's my answer. I think pitchers would be worse at hitting than position players would be at pitching, but that pitchers might improve more quickly. But as to how long you could keep it going, I mean, indefinitely, like you could sustain it. It just, it might not be entertaining enough that you would want to watch for very long. Might not be entertaining enough. Yeah, certainly would not be compared to what we have now. This seems like another job for Lab League. Yeah.

Yes. Right. Definitely need a Lab league, you guys. Well, this would be like our earlier question, knowing that players used to be better, right? I mean, this would be a stark example of that. If suddenly pitchers were forced to be hitters and vice versa, then we would be well aware that they were not as good doing half of the jobs than players used to be. they were not as good doing half of the jobs than players used to be. So that would significantly impair my enjoyment, I think. If the talent decline was so steep and so sudden that we knew, oh, these guys are really bad at this. We used to be able to watch players who were much better at

these things. Yeah, that would not be entertaining. I think the other more important question is, is Otani guaranteed to play irrespective of who goes on strike or guaranteed not to play? Because he's part of one of these units always. Yeah, I don't know. If he is eligible to play, obviously he would be even more godlike than he already is. Oh my gosh, correct. It would really be the Otani League. Basically, yes.

All right, here's a question from Chris in Illinois. After listening to a number of baseball podcasts this year, including obviously yours, I'm always just a bit surprised by the afterlife of the Astros' banging scheme. Add to that the continued sticky stuff talk, and it hit me all at once the other day. I'm glad guys are cheating, and I'd be worried if they weren't anymore. Let me explain. Please do. With MLB increasingly embracing gambling interests, I think it's warranted to worry about the legitimacy of MLB games at some future point. Cheating is a clear indication that players and teams are above board and are trying to win, even if every front office or ownership group isn't, and therefore not enthrall to

betting interests. Thoughts. So the idea that everyone is still trying to cheat or some people are still trying to cheat, that means at least that the games aren't fixed, at least in one way. So we can be confident in the results, except for the fact that some of them may have been obtained by cheating, but not by throwing games, at least. I love it. Suggests that we can't just choose to have legitimate games that are completely on the level that are not thrown or involving cheating, which would be nice, right? It doesn't seem like

too much to expect, but I guess silver lining, at least if they're trying to win, that means that, well, that they're trying to win. They're just doing it in a nefarious way. Don't we think there was a lot of cheating in the heyday of throwing games too, though? Probably. Right.

That's the question. Yeah, they're not really mutually exclusive, I guess. No, they're not. Yeah. Because you could still bet on yourself to win and cheat in order to win. Right? So you get the double whammy. And it's probably more a reflection of poor financial conditions for the players.

That they'd engaged. Your incentive to cheat is probably somewhat related to its value to you. Right. To throw a game, right. Well, no, either way. I mean, I assume that even winning, it's like you're more likely to cheat if your career is going to— Yeah, either way, if you're not well off enough as it is. Yeah.

Yeah, good point. That makes me happy, though, to think about these times of cheating in a positive way. It makes me appreciate the 2018 Red Sox a little more. Yeah. At least they really, really wanted to win. They're just super competitive. They just took it too far. I guess that's the extremely positive way to spin it. Yeah. I don't know that I buy it, though. I think they all really just want to win and then not all of them cheat. And I don't think that the ones who do are necessarily

demonstrating a greater commitment to the winning. I don't know if I'm comfortable with that assertion. I mean, I know that there are baseball players who are just like, have you guys seen the movie Center Stage? I don't think so.

You haven't seen the movie Center Stage? I don't think so. Uh-uh. You haven't seen Center Stage, Ben? No. We're going to talk about this on the next Patreon pod. Center Stage, Ben, it's the beautiful story of ballet and what happens when a bunch of dancers come together, some of whom are prepared to realize dreams

and some of whom realize they have different dreams entirely. And one of the characters is a is a dancer named maureen and um it's you know she feels a lot of pressure to perform she is incredibly talented she keeps getting um yelled at by uh what's his name uh the guy who played sandy cohen in OC. Ah, Peter Gallagher. Yeah, eyebrows. So, you know, she's supposed to be the best dancer at the American Ballet Academy. And she, in the course of the film, develops an eating disorder

because she feels a lot of pressure to be quite thin. And then at the end, she realizes she doesn't want to be a dancer at all, you know? And she has a confrontation with her mom. I hope I'm not spoiling center stage for anyone. I'm spoiling it for Ben. I'm OK with it personally. But she has a confrontation with her mom in in the midst of the like the big showcase for all the dancers in the in the academy.

Right. Where they try to go get jobs in companies as like professional full time dancers. And she asked her mom, wouldn't she have rather that she finds something she really loved rather than something that she just happened to be good at and um well in this analogy i would assert that there are some baseball players who just happen to be really good baseball players and don't necessarily have the like ah about baseball it's a strange analogy admittedly um and she she had a bad situation but it's a great movie everyone should watch it it i mean great is well so anyway it's very good though um and so uh i think there are baseball players who who look at baseball as a job you know and they like doing it because you have to do it a lot and so they can't hate it but they don't have the like you

know baseball nerd um reputation that some players do because they're really hate it, but they don't have the like, you know, baseball nerd reputation that some players do because they're really good at it, but it's a job and they want to do other stuff. Why am I talking about this? But in general, I think that most baseball players who reach the big leagues are there because they have a great passion to do the thing and they really want to win and they've wanted to win and they've wanted to win for a long time and that has motivated them through the trials and tribulations of rising through the minor leagues and reaching the bigs and then having to endure this gauntlet of a season that we put them through every year and i want to reject the idea that like

the willing to cheat among them are like of a particular class of want. Because we have a weird relationship with cheating in baseball and there are degrees of it. And I think there's some of it, as we've talked about that we tolerate and other things that we don't. But I, I want us to be able to draw the, the line of like moral consequence around the stuff that is particularly egregious and not say,

well, they wanted it more. Because that puts us in weird territory. That notwithstanding, do we think that players are more likely to cheat for a good team than for a bad team? That is, is the desire to get that win more important if you don't get many of them

versus if they're more valuable? Well, I think it probably changes your calculus around potential consequences, right? Because if you're on a really bad team, let's pick a really bad team. I don't want to pick the ace because that's on generous to our guests. Let's say you're a member of the Cincinnati Reds, okay? Your cheating might bring you a thing that you don't necessarily think you're going to have in abundance, which are wins, but also the potential consequences for being caught cheating are really high and the payoff is relatively low, right? You're not going to win a World Series by cheating. You might not even make the playoffs based on

that. You'd have to all be in cahoots, right? You'd all have to cheat and you'd have to be really good at the cheating and then not have anyone notice. And I think that if you're evaluating the potential consequence versus reward, maybe you're really unrealistic about how effective the cheating would be. And so you deem it worthy of doing despite the potential consequence. But I, I suspect that the, the greatest incentive to cheat is on teams that are already very good in the idea that it might, you know,

sort of push them even marginally toward a world series win, as opposed to again, the reds. I'm not saying the reds are cheating. Bet on the reds and A's games. You know, you're getting an honest, an honest an honest wager you might be you might have and here i'm gonna just like stay entirely away from naming a team

if you're on a crummy team are you more likely to throw games like to intentionally lose because you think no one will notice? Probably, right? Or it would just be easier to lose just because you're more likely to lose to begin with. But yeah, I think you're right. I think that attitude that at least the Astros seem to have of just exploiting every edge and just trying to be constantly on the cutting edge and extract every win you can, it's probably harder to have that mindset when you're bad and you just know that that extra win is going to get you from 60 wins to 61 or something. It's kind of hard to, I guess, have that attitude, I would think probably. But along the lines of what you were saying, I think you could say, yeah, that maybe someone who cheats is not actually less likely to be involved in match fixing and in game throwing, that maybe those things could even go together. to disrupt the competitive integrity of the game by cheating for some sort of personal gain, whether it's improving your own stats or, I guess, the team's collectively, which you're still

benefiting from and participating in. If you've already decided, well, it's more important to do better in some way than to make sure this is all on the level and above board, then maybe it's a smaller leap from that to, well, I'm just going to enrich myself financially by throwing this game. Who knows? I'm not saying they have to go hand in hand, but it's not necessarily the case that they would go, I don't know, whatever the opposite of hand in hand is. Just no hands touching at any time. So I think, yeah, that's probably not even something that we could console ourselves with and say, well,

at least they really want to win. That's why we have cheating. All right. Question from Raymond. The hidden ball trick relies on the runner losing track of the ball, but with the pitch clock starting when the pitcher receives the ball, runners can just stay on the base until they see the timer start ticking. It seems

that, like intentional walk-wild pitches, the hidden ball trick may be another baseball rarity that becomes a casualty of recent rules changes. So, as we have discussed and lamented, it seems like the hidden ball trick is already a rarity. But Raymond's saying if it's already endangered, maybe it's just extinct because you can't really just hold onto the ball indefinitely anymore. And you can just use that as a tip off if you're a runner and you see that the pitch clock hasn't started yet. I mean- Who triggers the pitch clock? The pitcher getting the ball back. But who makes that decision? Is that, because you could easily fool them as well, right? Well, does the empire, the empire is is supposed to indicate it, I think.

Right. But if you fool the umpire and you fake a throw back to the pitcher and you fool the umpire to start the pitch clock, then can the runner appeal because they were counting on the pitcher having the ball because the pitch clock started if you could do that and eke out extra time then i guess that would be another advantage to trying the hidden ball trick even if the hidden ball trick didn't work then you'd get extra time on the clock for your pitcher to recover but i don't know if you could get away with that i mean hopefully the umpire's paying close enough attention and the pitch clock timer person is paying close enough. Because the runner is fooled because he's not looking at the fielder, right? So if you're looking directly at the person, it's hard to be fooled. I mean, if they fake a throw and you don't see the ball go, then that's a pretty good indicator.

So usually when the runner is fooled, it's because they have their back turned. They didn't see it. They just assumed, right? They're fallible people too. Yeah, everyone's fallible. It's true. They are fallible, although I will say that umpires do have a fair amount of discretion within the current rule structure to call a violation if they deem that there is an attempt

to obfuscate the whole process so like if you were doing that and the umpire realized it i think they would assess you an automatic ball for trying to get around the pitch clock well would you be getting around the pitch clock though i mean the the assumption that they would they would reset it once you threw the ball back i I guess. But I don't know. Yeah. Well, I think it's already quite uncommon. Wasn't there a hidden ball trick success this spring? It was described as one in some places, but it was a deke, I think.

It was not really a hidden ball trick. Okay. Yeah. So there hasn't been one that meets my definition, at least for a while. Yeah, Raymond's right. I guess it's going to get even harder. There are those times when the pitcher comes over to play and fields a ball at first, and they might be some sleight of hand that takes place in those circumstances.

But yeah, you never know. All right. Jake, Patreon supporter, says, I am in an old person baseball group, mostly for the opportunity to argue. One of my fellow old men made a casual remark about the 1989 season as back when games were always close. close. I feel like there was once a stat blast about whether or not baseball games were more likely to be close, one to two run difference, say, plus extra innings, or less likely to be blowout, seven plus runs, let's say. I also believe you attempted a definition of the word blowout once. Does this discussion exist somewhere? Were baseball games once closer? Did the sun also shine brighter and were dogs fur softer? Or were we all just once 12? So that's definitely part of it, but it is true in general that when baseball games are lower scoring, they are also closer.

So yeah, relative to the peak of the PED era, let's say, or the more recent juiced ball era, games were typically closer in the late 80s, let's say, after the 1987 rabbit ball year than they are now. So I think that is true. That is a... Closer in runs or in win probability? Closer, I think, yeah, right. It's true when there is a higher scoring era, being down by more runs is not the same as difference, not just because of scoring, but also because late inning pitchers are more effective. I mean, we have good bullpens now and pitchers aren't left in as long. So Rob Maines has written about this at BP and Sam wrote about it as well some years ago. Sam wrote about it as well some years ago. And I think it's generally true that games were closer and also maybe that comebacks are harder now. But it's not like an enormous difference.

And it's just because it's largely a function of just the scoring environment. So it's not like back in the old days in a way that we couldn't easily recapture. Or now that scoring was lower last season, let's say, with the ball being deader and everything, then probably it was kind of true last season too, relative to a few seasons ago. So it's always fluctuating. Is it true if you control for the, sorry, science geek here. Sure. If you control for the talent differential between the teams, that if you take equally matched teams, are comebacks slash different variants in talent. That's true, too. Yeah, in recent years, there have been bigger mismatches. There's kind of been a stratification in the league where you've had a bunch of 100-plus win teams and a bunch of 100-loss teams.

And so you have more matchups of unequal talent. And therefore, you would be more likely not to have a comeback in that kind of game, too. So that's true also. Almost could just do a live stop last year, but it'd probably take a little bit too long. Do people start thinking dogs are less soft as they get older? Did I hear what you said, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think that's just referring to the rosy hue of memory from when we were younger and things used to be better in all certain ways that probably they weren't in many cases. I mean, dogs are probably softer now. On average, they're more hypoallergenic dogs. Yeah, and they're probably better gloomed. People are spending more money on their dogs. We are collectively obsessed with our pets, which I do not say with as much criticism as my tone probably implied.

Here's one from Fred who says, I've got strong feelings on bodily autonomy, and every time I see an established player with facial hair or longer hair Here's one from Fred who says, my head, might deal with it. Anyone signing as a free agent to the Yankees knows what's up, and drafted minor leaguers are denied a lot of choices, so what's one more? But veterans getting traded? Well, that could be something else entirely. The simple and obvious choice in that case is to list the Yankees in a no-trade clause when signing a free agent contract, although that could limit your potential earnings. Yeah, you typically put teams that are more likely to trade for you on a no trade clause list so that you could extract some concession in the event that they do try to trade for you.

Still, definitely an option for someone who's committed to keeping their flow. But I'm wondering how it might play out if a player signing outside of New York asks for a small insignificant clause to their contract simply stating that they are not obliged to alter their appearance at the team's behest. Sure, why not? That's already the default for most teams. What do you suppose would occur if a trade to the Yankees for such a player was in the offing? Do you think any players might already have something similar buried in the fine print for this or some other issue that was important to them? There have been some really high profile players traded to and signed by the Yankees who have hair.

Yes. And we haven't seen this yet. So that makes me think, no. But the fact that we haven't seen it is so wild. I cannot believe that this is a thing that has been allowed to persist. I really, like, there's the personal preference piece of it, but just in terms of like

their continued ability to sort of it just feels like it is racist. I can't believe that we still do this. And like the fact that it hasn't been a problem for somebody on religious grounds as well to me, it just seems really weird. Doesn't this seem really weird? It's amazing that nobody's

made that an issue in a trade when they had a normal no trade clause, right? That they haven't vetoed it for this reason. Right. Yeah. Look, there are players like Carlos Rodan, I guess, being the more recent. I mean, I think he looks good, Sean, but, you would think, right? Because I guess the comp to this might be what happened with the Cincinnati Reds. This did basically play out when Greg Vaughn was traded from the Padres to the Reds prior to the 1999 season, coming off his big 50-homer year for the Padres. He had a goatee, and the Reds at March shot still owned them at the time and relented and was just like, okay, Greg Vaughn, you can keep your goatee. And then I was reading about it just now that apparently, like, I guess because Greg Vaughn got traded

there and everyone was waiting to see whether Greg Vaughn would have to shave, like some of the other Reds were waiting to shave before they showed up at spring training just to see what would happen. And once the policy was relaxed, like a third of the team showed up with facial hair of some sort or something that would have been banned previously. And the Reds had had that policy as like an official policy for more than 30 years at that point and unofficial dating back even before then. So it was pretty deeply ingrained and it was a whole part of the identity of the franchise and the big red machine and all of that. Right. And I think it started with them in like 67. It was like, oh, the hippies and the long hairs out there protesting Vietnam. We're going to be the team that will have everyone have a nice short hair and no facial hair.

It's like kind of a conservative backlash type of thing. And it would be, I think, even harder to get rid of the Yankees policy just because it has endured for so long. I guess it officially started in 73 when Steinbrenner bought the team, but that was 50 years ago now. And because they're the Yankees, right? And there's this at least perception of them being different and special and better and an exception. And probably there are players who would certainly rather keep their facial hair, but they know if they're signing as a free agent, it's like, well, they're going to give me a lot of money and, well, beyond contending teams. And I guess it's worth it to me but it's true like if some superstar were traded there and just said nope i'm not shaving probably like there are some yankees fans who have like internalized the yankees exceptionalism and are like look at us like we're the one team that is uh that has mandated this because we're special and we're the yankees and we insist

that everyone be clean shaven because it's a reflection of like how seriously we we are committed to winning or whatever and we're subsuming our individual identities into the yankee hole right but imagine if i don't know if like uh garrett cole was a free agent but but what if like the yankees had traded for garrett or a Garrett Cole type player and the fans were super excited to get that player? And then that player was like, nope, I'm not reporting unless I can keep my goatee or my beard or whatever it is. Like maybe initially some Yankees fans just kind of reflexively would side with the team. of reflexively would side with the team. But like once the team was like, no, we're going to deprive ourselves of Garrett Cole or a Garrett Cole level talent because of this outdated outlier facial hair policy we

have. I feel like public opinion would turn on them pretty quickly, like especially now in the age of personal individual expression and player rights and all of that, like who would really support them? I mean, if they shot themselves in the foot and were like, no, we're depriving the fans of this great player's talent because of this silly facial hair policy we have, I feel like their own fans would mutiny and like maybe the players too, because they would want the team to get better.

And it's like, why are we still doing this? I remember in 2013, the Yankees were interested in Brian Wilson when he was a free agent and had his big bushy beard. And his agent said, no, he's not going there because he wants to keep the beard. And Brian Cashman said, we could use bullpen help, but you can cross him off the list. That was past peak Brian Wilson. And they didn't miss out on that much because he wasn't actually all that effective in 2014. But what if it had been someone else? I think it would just take one person like the right, super talented player to just draw a line in the sand and say, no, I'm not the Padres 400 million unless you let me grow a beard. Or what about Andrew McCutcheon, who when he was with the Phillies in 2020, he made some comments about when he had been with the Yankees in 2018. He said, I do think it takes away from our individualism as players and as people. We express ourselves in different ways. When I was on the Pirates and I had those dreadlocks, I'd be lying to you if I got traded to the Yankees and they said you'd have

to shave your hair. For me, that would have been a very tough thing to do. That's who I was. That was how I expressed myself. That's what made me Andrew McCutcheon. That's how people noticed who I was. It made me unique. The Yankees traded for McCutcheon after he was past his MVP period, but what if he was MVP McCutcheon and he wouldn't agree to a trade or report to the team unless they let him keep his hairstyle? Would they really say, no, the policy is more important than a superstar player? They're always saying they want to win the World Series and every season's a bust unless they get a ring. So at some point, the way to walk the walk and back up that talk would be to retire the policy if it deprives you of a player who could help you win. Do you think that they care that this forecloses the possibility of certain collective superstitious things?

Like we're going to grow beards for the whole playoffs or until the winning streak is over? And has this impacted Yankees' recent performance in some way? Yeah, you can't have playoff beards, right? Right. So this seems like maybe this explains their drought. We could convince the Yankees fans of the world that this is true. They could turn on the policy. Do we know what the sanction is for violating it? Just not being played? Fine.

What's the – I don't know that – I'm trying to remember whether like anyone has taken it down to the wire and really made a serious threat and held themselves out of the lineup or anything. I mean, there are definitely players who have not been happy about it, but there may have been some case where someone really made a major stink of it. But there's just such a peer pressure, I guess, and just always a pressure with management and labor and everything. And so I guess for most people, it's not important enough.

But what if you're one of these players who's been like curating a beard for years and like, you know, waxing it and doing whatever one does to a beard and you're proud of your beards and you didn't opt in to this policy? You were just traded there? Like, I think it would, you know, the uh superstar to just refuse to do it i think that would be the end of it remember when miguel castro got traded from the mets to the yankees and cut not only had to shave the beard but like they he cut his dreads off yeah yeah just i feel like and it's shocking to me it hasn't happened already. But at some point, it really seems like they will get sued over this.

Like, it just feels like maybe not for those, you know, Castro's maybe not a great example of that. But, like, at some point, it feels like this will lead to litigation. So what if they got out ahead of it? And we're like, you know what? We understand that, like, to be a Yankee, I also, Ben, just resent Yankees whole as a phrase that you uttered. Terrible. Really bad. But like they could say, look, we understand that like being a Yankee means a lot of things and what you have on your face or on your head doesn't undermine any of those things. Like you can personify that like Yankees way of life.

And like they could do a whole thing about it. They have an opportunity to be like, you know, this is outdated. We're moving into a new era of Yankees baseball. We think that we want our understanding of what it means to be a Yankee to evolve past what it was when this policy was originally put in place. Or they could wait until somebody makes it a problem for them, and then they're going to look like jerks because they wouldn't make up jerks. It'll be part of the Wi-Fi, paying for Wi-Fi on the plane rebellion. Yeah, exactly.

How about that? So I just, I... Yeah, speaking of the Reds, right? The other team that makes its players pay for in-flight Wi-Fi. That's at least the Reds got off the no facial hair train. So that's something.

Such a goofy thing. It's just a goofy thing. All these guys let them be. Let them live. Yeah. All right. We'll close with two THC influenced questions here. The questions are about THC or they were influenced by it? Influenced by it.

Yes, under the influence. It's become a pretty reliable subgenre for us. Yes. Okay. This one comes from Luis, who included a PS to say, yes, I'm slightly high, although perhaps we could have inferred that from the question. He says, like most baseball fans, I followed the new MLB rules closely as a musician and generally a very aural focused person. I always look for that angle, how sound is present and used in a situation and how it could be used. For example, in baseball, like how bang-bang plays and tag-up plays would probably time a catch more accurately with some cheap podcast studio gear than with some blurry stills on a monitor.

But I digress. My actual idea for the pitch clock is that a clock sucks, but a clock is not the only way to keep time. What if there were a jingle? We all know from video games, TV, intros, and commercials that with enough repetition, you are able to predict every beat so that you can perfectly time each jump or attack or bathroom

break. What if a team hired a local producer to make a 15-second jingle with a five-second intro so you have the 20-second one with a beat that's a multiple of 60 so it matches the pitch clock, and it's just a simple, predictable melody with a fun beat that everybody can time their actions to. As long as the timing's the same, you could do louder or more muted versions, a reggaeton version, a rock one, a country one, and maybe each stadium has a different one. Everybody knows in Citi Field that the 15 seconds start with the trumpet, and the batter has to stand by the gong hit. But watch out in Atlanta, the batter has to come in an offbeat, so better get in early. Fans dissing each other's jingles. But watch out in Atlanta, the batter has to come in in an offbeat, so better get in early. Fans dissing each other's jingles.

Players blaming a bad performance on the road jingle. Cities competing in a name-dropping arms race for the biggest names to produce or to perform their jingles. Players or umps inadvertently swaying in time.

Dancing gifs, come on, pitch jingle. I think it would have, I wonder if the pitchers would instinctively time their pitches to the beat and that this would give an advantage to the hitters somehow. It seems like, it seems hard to get that out of your head. I know my daughter is a gymnast and has been for many years. And at the lower levels of gymnastics, all of the kids use the same floor routine music. And that gets ingrained into your head

and becomes part of the toxic background. So I guess it would probably annoy everybody. That's the thing, yeah. More than anything. There's great potential for whimsy here, I think. Yeah, if people are caught up in the beat. But hundreds of times a day. I know, that's the thing.

What jingle would you want to hear that many times? I like the idea of having a home field advantage with the jingle or differentiation so that you turn on any given game and you immediately know where it's being played because, oh, right, that's the Petco Park jingle or, you know, you just, you know, it's like part of the scenery and the fabric of the game there. I like that, but I just, I can't think of a jingle I would want to hear that many times that it would drive one mad i just think about how limited the playlists are in big league parks and if i have to hear that morgan whalen up down song one more effing time i'm gonna lose it it came on at chase yesterday and i just i it immediately first of all i immediately

started going up down up down i'm like i hate orna whalen i hate this song so i you know or like think about the it's like any song doing great noises you guys um i uh i just think that it would require such regular cycling to avoid us all going mad that you'd lose some of the value of having that repeated sound there as a cue. That's a more productive way of me saying that than doing the Morgan Whelan impression. Michael, I think you've done a really nice job on this pod and Ben is always steady editing. I don't know if this is one of my best performances, but that's okay. Like, I was editing until 11 p.m. because of the WBC. So, like, I'm going to give myself a pass,

but you've done very well. The Sweet Caroline definitely went from a song I vaguely liked to one that I have a Pavlovian visceral hatred of, so... You know, it's like the hand clap thing and it'll be like i can hear i can make your hands clap and then everyone's like yeah you can i'm like don't we need to do anything else with this right now yeah the jingle could just be in pitch com or in players headsets or something but but then what's the point i guess if it's right it's not part of the spectator experience why are are we just inflicting this on the players?

I haven't heard of – has there been a thorough analysis of the history of stadium jingles and music played? I have very fond memories of Orioles games as a kid with lots of Steve Miller and Chula Clark stuff. But it's gotten worse. I feel like an old guy. Exactly. That's related to our earlier question. So people are always talking about how it's gotten more oppressive and intrusive and louder constantly, right? Which I think people have complained about for a while, but it's probably also still true that it does keep getting louder and more constant.

So maybe each generation complains about it, but also we each have something to complain about possibly. You could run Shazam on the history of baseball broadcasts and sort of do a chart. The amount of bad country, man. It's just relentless. You should have been in the Big South League. Yeah, I can imagine. And here's our last question.

And this is similar to something we were joking about, I think, last time, Meg. But Daniel says, long-time listener, first-time caller. I smoke a lot of pot in general, including frequently listening to your podcast. Here's my question. How much bigger would the big bases be if the big bases were even bigger? Suppose Major League Baseball continues to increase the size of the bases by, say, 40% each year. How big do the bases have to get before baseball no longer resembles baseball? Is there an optimal base size that maybe we don't know about yet? So we have seen people satirizing the many photos of the big bases this spring by photoshopping even bigger bases, right?

Big base. So how big does it have to be before it really is different? Because these bases are not big enough that it's all that different. They're still pretty. They're big. They're big bases. Yeah. You're going to give them a complex, Ben.

You're going to make them feel bad about themselves. But, I mean, obviously if the bases are big enough that there is no space between them, that would be different. Right. That would be very different because then you would always be safe at all times. Right. How do you differentiate? That would be a problem. No more force plays or anything.

I don't know. You'd constantly be on the base. There would be no base path. There would just be base. So that would be no base path there would just be base so that would be different but did anyone else um this is a minor tangent but is anyone else ever surprised by how little give there is in the base you know i expected them to be softer they used to be right yeah back when they were really bags yeah they're not soft they've gone in the opposite direction of the dogs

yes exactly i want to know if this is a thing people are they just sitting around being like Yeah, they're not soft. They've gone in the opposite direction of the dogs. Yes. Exactly. I want to know if this is a thing people are, are they just sitting around being like, Spot, what happened to you, man? You used to be so soft. Now you're not soft anymore. I mean, I guess when animals age, their coats get less lustrous.

Yeah, an individual dog may get less softer over time, but dogs collectively, I don't think they have. Collectively, I think they're just as soft as they've ever been same amount of soft unlike the bases which are not they're not soft you know you you stand on one you're like yeah i understand how guys mess up their tiny bird bone hands on these things what is the what is the just what is the design criteria for the base is it designed to not hurt players as they run through them what's what's what are they optimizing for the current bases they're also different in that they're supposed to be less slippery right so like if it's raining if it's

wet a little bit tacky so that yeah yeah so you don't wipe out on a there's a little more traction yeah and it depends on where how you know the bases can get bigger but not be positioned centrally on the point right so if they were kind of extending into foul territory or into the outfield you'd now have right plenty of space between the bases but more opportunity to uh to be safe and evade the run the something like that. So there's different ways it could be implemented. Yeah. So we'll see what the difference is this year, or really we won't be able to tell what the difference is

because there are other changes that are affecting base running that will probably dwarf whatever changes come from the slightly bigger bases, which didn't seem to have a sizable or measurable effect in the minors when that was an isolated change. So baseball, not that different with these bases bigger than last year's, but how big you have to go before it's really different. I mean, as long as you can't just step from one to the other without ever being off the base, that would be the really fundamental difference. Other than that, I think it's just a, well, no pun intended, it's just sort of a sliding scale, right, of just how big the base is and how short the base path is. And the bigger you make it, maybe the sillier it looks, but also just the easier it is to advance.

So I don't know. How big? Here's a question I may be more interested in being able to answer. Like, how big does the bag have to get before you as a person sitting in the stands without the context of the previously used bases are like, that's a big base. How big does it have to get? Because, you know, we all gave Bob guff for like his decontextualized base picture because, you know, that was easy. But sitting up there, like if you sit in the press box and you look down, you don't look at it and go, that's a big bag, you know?

So how big would it have to to i guess the second base bag is where you're probably going to get the most base bang for your buck in terms of scale because you can look up the middle from home plate to the mount to the bag and be like that that feels like it's taking up more room in the background than it used to i would think it's first base, right? Because you have the context of a player standing at it more, right? Like you see the contrast with their foot and their position more so than at second.

Yeah. If no one had been informed that the bases were bigger this year and we were just watching, would we notice? There'd be some Twitter conspiracy theory and all sorts of videos. Yeah, we joked on the last episode, right? You make it slightly bigger, like below whatever the just noticeable difference threshold is. And maybe watching it at home is different from watching in

the park, depending on how far away from the field you are, when it just looks like a little white square of some sort. So I don't know. I don't know what exactly the threshold is where you would notice versus not notice. I think you're right, though, that having the player there for context, you'd notice eventually, but it might take you longer than you'd expect. Because you start to get a sense of how big. See, now, again, I sound stoned. It's like, you know how you get a sense of how big guys' feet are? Do you? I was about to say that.

Is that true? Do you have a mental catalog where you're like, his feet are different sizes now. His feet are bigger than that guy's feet. You probably don't. I don't think so, no. Yeah. And do the, does your mental map of the size of their feet and the size of the base change differently when you're using THC? Do we have to think about perception? Do we know why they chose three inches? Was it just random? I thought you were going to ask a question about the effect of THC. No, no. I've got enough people who tell me about that.

Yeah. I don't know why this size. Was it justified or did they just do it? I don't know. No lab league where they tested various sizes unless they did test them at various sizes in some other week. I don't really remember. And we didn't know. Yeah.

Nobody noticed. It's hard not to sound stoned when you answer the question from stoned people. I guess that's the takeaway. have a blog, right? Yes. Called It Is Not Junk, which is, it says, a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball, and other important things. So it is a baseball blog. And you're on Twitter at MBIsen, that's E-I-S-E-N. Anything else you care to promote while we have you? No, that's great. All right. Well, thank you for being our Mike Trout tier Patreon supporter. Thank you very much for having me. It was great. All right. Here, thank you for being our Mike Trout tier Patreon supporter. Thank you very much for having me. It was great.

All right. Here is the pass blast, which comes to us from 1981 and from David Lewis, an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston. And David writes, 1981, baseball is a public good. good. In 1981, a Major League Baseball lockout sparked by owners demanding compensation for players lost to free agency led to a nearly two-month stoppage in gameplay. Fans and sports writers alike were eager for a less greedy system of ownership, one that promoted the enjoyment and experience of the game of baseball over profit margins. As told in a July 9, 1981 UPI article, this system could be found in Visalia, California, where the Class A Visalia Oaks of the California League were owned and operated by the city. According to Visalia assistant city manager Dick Anthony, the goal was to get professional baseball back to the community.

The only goal was that ownership should be local. We solve that goal. We happen to be the owners. that goal, we happened to be the owners. The city was left without a team in 1974 after a Mets affiliate departed, but play resumed in 1977 when the city purchased a franchise affiliated with the Minnesota Twins for $14,000. The article reports that the Twins paid for player salaries and some additional expenses, while the city funded transportation, equipment, and stadium costs. At the time the article was written, the city had owned the team for five seasons and had lost just $8,000 on the endeavor. Anthony continued on, explaining that the ball club was financially positive for the city.

We brought in three quarters of a million dollars from the Minnesota Twins in the past five years. That's money in salaries and expenses that came from Minnesota to the local community. There's also food and lodging expenses for visiting teams. If we can get credit for the sales tax and bed tax revenues we've generated, we're more than making it. Of course, we know that sometimes arguments about municipalities raking in money based on ballpark funding, et cetera, can be pretty dodgy. So I don't know if this math checked out either, but this is a little different. At least the city was owning the team as opposed to just ponying up money

for a team that owns itself and just reaps the rewards. It does seem importantly different. Yes. And David continues, as of the time the article was written, the Oaks had an average attendance of 629 fans per game.

As the article pointed out, that was a lot more than the zero that locked out major league clubs were seeing. The Oaks, now known as the Visalia Rawhide, still play in town as an affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks. However, they are no longer owned by the city. David said, I did a quick search and couldn't pin down exactly when the city sold the team. They were most recently sold in 2019, and articles from that sale state that the previous owners, also not the city, had owned the team for 18 years.

The twins' affiliation ended in 1992, so perhaps that could have been when they were sold, but he wasn't sure. He said he did some additional digging and found out that the city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania bought the AA Senators in 1995 to stop relocation and owned the team until 2006. They similarly stressed relocation and owned the team until 2006. They similarly stressed the importance of keeping the team in town. So, yeah, there have been examples of this in the minors, in indie ball, in college leagues, etc. And obviously in other sports, too, with prominent teams in major leagues that are owned by some locality. So occasionally we will get a question about that sort of ownership model.

But this was one case when, at least for a little while, it seemed to be working out in one town for one team. All right. Just to remind everyone, we are soliciting submissions for a theme song. You heard the first entry at the top of today's show, and it's a good one. Sent to us by listener Andy Ellison, who works as a studio musician in Nashville, and it shows. He's a dab hand with the pedal steel and the lap steel and the dobro. I love a good pedal steel and a descending chord progression, so this is right up my musical alley.

A strong start, and just like Andy's submission, figure about one minute of music, maybe 30 seconds of lyrics, and then an instrumental portion that can go under our podcast intro. So you have maybe a couple more weeks. We're hoping to find something by the end of this month and we'll play listeners submissions and hopefully find one that we like a lot and could make a permanent solution for the show. So we look forward to whatever you come up with. Also, one small correction. Last time we did our usual team preview podcast trivia, we asked and answered various questions about players who had played for both the Rays and the Tigers, the two teams we were

previewing on that episode. One of the trivia answers was, however, incorrect. We said that the first pitcher to have pitched for both the Rays and the Tigers was Julio Santana. In fact, it was Eddie Gallard who made his debut for the Devil Rays on April 21st, 1998. He had pitched briefly for the Tigers the preceding year. So he was first and he was followed soon after that by Scott Aldred. Apologies for the mix up there. And finally, we got a message from our pal Dan Brooks, who's one of the organizers of Saber Seminar, which is going to be back this summer after a hiatus that lasted for a few years because of the pandemic. This is the Sabermetric Scouting and the Science of Baseball event. It is scheduled for August 12th to 13th this summer, and it's actually going to be in Chicago. It's been in Boston in the past, but I've enjoyed attending. And Dan wanted us to pass along that their info about scholarships is now posted. So I'll link to that on the show page. And if you're a student and you give a talk, then you can attend for free.

Dan also asked us to note that the submission portal for papers and presentations and talks is open now too. Abstracts must be submitted by May 15th. So I will link to the info and the forms on the show page. Do check it out if you have some baseball research to share. And if you want to be like Michael Eisen and support Effectively Wild on Patreon, you can do that by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. And the following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going get themselves access to some perks and help us stay ad free chris column caleb cabo wes rembaugh kevin philip torres and jonathan tran thanks to all of you patreon perks include access to the effectively wild discord group for patrons only access to monthly

bonus episodes one of which will be coming out this weekend, as well as discounts on merch and ad-free Fangraphs memberships and playoff live streams and other great goodies, greaties, patreon.com slash effectivelywild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site.

If not, you 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 join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWpod

and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with one more show on Friday. We will be previewing the Mets and the A's. So stay tuned and we will talk to you then. Michael, where are you now? Sleeping through the mornings in flannel hair. Getting high in the southern air.