Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1989: Baseball Goes Back to the ’80s

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Noah Woodward of the newsletter The Advance Scout discuss Noah’s front-office career, the impact of the MLB rules changes on pace/time of game, the running game, and hitting and defense so far, how players may adapt, the questions Ben and Noah still have about the rules’ long-term effects, Rob Manfred’s characterization of […]

How can you not be pedantic? A stab blast will keep you distracted It's a long song to death, but the shore to make you smile. This is Effectively Wild. This is Effectively Wild. This is Effectively Wild. Hello and welcome to episode 1989 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined today by my co-host Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs, who is on the road.

She'll be back next time, but filling in for her is Noah Woodward, whom I'm very happy to have. Noah, welcome to Effectively Wild. Thank you, Ben. So people who've been listening regularly probably have heard me mention Noah's name a few times this spring. He's leading the league, I think, in citations on Effectively Wild so far this year because he is the author of a substack called The Advanced Scout, theadvancedscout.substack.com. And he's been breaking down baseball and he's been writing about the rules changes and forecasting what we might see. And now that we're a few days into the season and everyone is dissecting what is working well and what is not and how players are adapting and responding, I thought you would be the perfect person to talk to because this used to sort of be

your job. So we should talk a little bit about how you got to this point because you're no longer working in baseball, but you used to be a blogger. You used to write at Baseball Prospectus, among other places. I edited you there. And then after college, you worked a little bit in consulting and then you went into baseball and you were an intern for the Orioles. And then you worked for the Braves for four plus years and you rose up to be their senior manager of major league operations until you left in 2020. Am I more or less getting that right? Is there anything else you care to share about your baseball career and trajectory? What did you do for Atlanta?

That's right. Yeah. So I think that the concept is probably best called advanced scouting. Uh, and that is a kind of loosely term, just preparation for a major league game. So it's, it's preparation on the, the opponent, but I think in recent years it's, it's expanded a lot more to kind of lining up, uh, your own players and trying to put, you know, your own, your own team in a better position to execute on what they do really well. So you'd be breaking down advanced stat stuff, which is what you used to do at BP, but also using your eyeballs, presumably, and looking for things and looking for tendencies,

things that you could identify about players, predictable traits, pitch patterns. Are there, I don't know if the statute of limitations has passed, but are there any examples you can give of what kind of work you were doing those days or things that you might notice that might be helpful for a player? Yeah, it's kind of really all over the map. And you, I think, see it written about and that's all accurate. It's, you know, a combination of video, some stats or some trends that may not fall in the R&D department kind of perspective, but are more recent buys. I don't know if that's the right word, but I think it's just an effort to balance what everyone is seeing in the clubhouse

with data that's there to back it up or not back it up and kind of just being there to help facilitate a little bit. And so clubs have moved away from in-person advanced scouting to a large extent, right, where you used to send people on the road to sit in the ballpark and watch the team that you're about to play. Some will still do that in preparation for the playoffs, for instance. If you know that you're likely to face a certain team, then you might have someone follow them around for a while. But a lot of this has moved to stats and video because just so much of that is available at the major league level. So you were, I suppose, doing the sorts of things that someone might have done on the road previously. Did you ever go on the road? Are there still some things that you can glean in person that are tough to tell from afar? Yeah, that's a straight question. I think people might have different perspectives on that. I think, you know, in at a computer, you can just watch so much video in a compressed

amount of time. And so imagine a bunch of people sitting around a room clicking through video clips, that's a little bit more efficient. I think there are a few things you can see at the ballpark that aren't picked up on the camera angles you would get, particularly not in your home park. So there were times that that was helpful or that is helpful. It's also, I think, more enjoyable. So, you know, if there's ever a chance to do that, I think it's a different look to add. I think just watching the dugout or watching the field level from the scout seats just gives you a different perspective whenever you can get it. So you left Atlanta in 2020, and I should have mentioned you also briefly consulted with the Astros, too, after that, before you moved on from baseball. So we have talked to some people who've been in front offices and working in baseball was their dream job. Louis Paulus was on the podcast talking about this. He was with the Phillies. And then it turns out that a lot of things

are really great and wonderful about the job. And then some things also aren't everything you hoped for, or maybe it's just too much, more than you hoped for in some respects. So was that similar with you? What ultimately made you want to do different things? Yeah, I really recommend what Louie wrote for anyone who hasn't read it. If you're thinking about working in baseball, I think if you had

told me that when I was in college, you know, the sacrifice that would come with it in terms of, you know, the time that you spend, you know, in the office, the events that you miss, you know, at home, those things, I still would have really wanted to work in baseball. I was too hard headed at the time. So I definitely understand, you know, if those types of things don't sway you. But for me, after a couple of years, I really, that began to make it really difficult to kind of justify the time in the office and the things that you have to give up to be there. So I think the timing of the pandemic, probably for a lot of other people as well, was a good time to reflect with everyone being at home.

And I've started to really appreciate some more balance that comes with not working full time in that role. So if you were with a team now and you were doing for that work what you're doing at your substack and sort of breaking down the rules changes and how players are going to adapt. Do you think this would be an especially busy time? Do you look at these new rules as an opportunity for players and for teams to innovate and differentiate themselves? Or in some ways, is it kind of a crackdown on previous innovation and differentiation? You know, you have a more limited space of places on the field that you can stand, for instance. But does that mean there's actually less variation among teams and players and the strategies you employ? So, you know, going into the season, I think

GMs and coaches and managers were asked, are these new rules going to dictate your offseason strategy and who you sign and how you play? And they tend to downplay the impact of it. But of course, if they thought there was going to be some big impact, they probably wouldn't have talked about it publicly. So how busy would you be breaking this stuff down now or in the lead up to the season compared to in a year when there weren't so many sweeping rules changes? Yeah, no, I can't, I can imagine. I think it'd be a really busy time. I think, you know, everyone in the office is already so busy to start with. And then you throw these changes on top of that. I think there's certainly not anything you would have to do differently to adapt. But if you wanted to try to find a competitive advantage within the new kind of framework, there's a lot going on right now. I think the dynamics changed even since spring training these last couple of days, we're seeing even with the same rules, different dynamics play out on the field. And so it's would be I would imagine a stressful time. I like it's

selfishly fun to write about and talk about all the things that you might need to be thinking about. But in the in the position of working for a team, I can imagine it pretty stressful. Yeah. Great content for the author of an advanced scout newsletter. What have you seen that's been different since the game started counting, quote unquote, because you were breaking down all sorts of stuff in spring training about players holding the ball and what they could do and what pitchers could do to make the most of the pitch clock and also the restrictions on step-offs and then should catchers be backpicking. And now that we've seen, again, small sample but meaningful nonetheless, what have you seen that differs from exhibition games or at least ideas that people were tinkering with that now have either been ditched or fully employed?

Yeah, I don't know what you've noticed, but one thing I probably underestimated is how little we noticed the pickoff roll or me particularly. I didn't think it would blend in so well in these first couple of days. I think there are pitchers that have struggled with it. I think Sam wrote about the example on opening day of Patrick Corbin, maybe even forgetting about the two throws and throwing over the second time. And I think if Ronald Acuna Jr. is holding up the number two, maybe that's an indication that you've maybe not used your pickoffs to the best of your ability there.

But other pitchers, I think, I haven't even really noticed sort of a count or the way that they've been used as a liability. But one thing I think has been really interesting is this concept, J.T. Romito referred to it after opening day, of momentum on the pitching side. And I don't know if you've seen outings like this one, but the Phillies kind of had some pitchers unravel on opening day. And I saw James Karen check opening night in Seattle and with a loud packed crowd,

kind of throw a couple of pitches to the backstop and see things get away in a really short amount of time. And I think, I don't know what your reaction to momentum in baseball is. My first reaction is that I'm skeptical. Is that somewhere how you feel? Yeah, because, you know, usually it's applied either, let's say, with teams coming out of the regular season into the postseason and people will say, oh, they ended the season hot or cold. And then there have been various studies done showing that that doesn't seem to be the case or studies also showing within

the playoffs, you know, you lose a tough game. Does that have any bearing on the outcome of the next few games? Like that kind of momentum, everything I've seen at least has failed to find a signal there, which I suppose doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But if it does exist, it's probably a bit overblown. So yeah, my knee-jerk first reflexive reaction is always prove it, I guess. But maybe it's more plausible in this sort of scenario. I noticed what you're saying with Karen Chak, right? He looked a little flustered seemingly after he had a violation and then things went south for him. But then it was in a subsequent game when he was pitching, Mariners fans got really into it and they were doing a countdown chant along with the pitch clock, which was fun. I doubt that's something that we will see sustained all season.

I think probably the charm and the novelty of it will wear off and it would be probably pretty annoying to even participate, let alone listen and chant after chant after chant after chant. But they were doing it with him on the mound and it didn't seem to bother him at all. And he said he just enjoyed the energy and he pitched completely fine. So I guess it'll maybe come down to that age old debate about like free throw percentage, like when basketball players are shooting penalties and the unfriendly fans are behind the basket and they're doing stuff to distract the player and everyone argues about whether that works and does analyses about that. I guess we're sort of in the same bucket here with baseball. Yeah, I think that's interesting to bring up the countdown the way i hear or read something like real middle talk about it it's the analogy i

thought it was you know that that olympic sport where you ski around and then you shoot a rifle at targets right yes so with the pitch clock it's and i think karen check pitch well right after that opening day outing but if you can think think about, and this is again, not from personal experience, but just from talking with, with players and coaches and pitchers. And, you know, after you make a bad pitch, the experience of seeing your heart rate jump and kind of needing to bring it down to baseline. But with the pitch clock and limited opportunities, you know,

to take that, that deep breath, to bring your heart rate down, I think it's been interesting to see some pitchers kind of struggle with command after one bad pitch and seeing one bad pitch become multiple. And, you know, I would normally be skeptical of something like that, but I think, I think we saw it play out a couple of times so far. And I think the, the kind of mechanisms you would have to slow things down, whether it be a mound visit, which Real Mudo said, you know, that works for a couple pitches. If a pitcher is struggling or feeling that stress and not bringing your heart rate down, that only works temporarily.

The other mechanism might be pickoffs. And I think those being limited, pitchers would feel discouraged from potentially just stepping off the only pitcher i've seen i don't know if you've seen others do that is just to step off and take a breath is zach ranky and uh the umpire had to remind him you know that that counts to step off and he just looked back he's like i know you know i'm using it for that reason so yeah i just think that's interesting to be interesting to follow that. Yeah. Biathlon is what we were looking for there with the cross country and the rifle shooting. But I meant to ask, by the way, how much of your job as an advanced scout for a team involved talking to coaches and or players? Was this more sort of doing data analysis and video

analysis and then synthesizing it, distilling it down into a report that would then be passed along? Or were you working in a more hands-on way with the field staff and the players and applying these insights? Yeah, for a couple of years, I was the kind of the embedded advanced scouting person in the clubhouse. So it was directly kind of that point of contact for a few years. And staffs have grown a ton since the last five years or so. So there was still that interaction after that. But I think one thing that teams have to manage at this point in time is just the number of people making contact. But the short answer to your question is yes, it was taking information and making it as translatable or as easily digestible as possible. And were you often impressed by just

how perceptive players were? I mean, were they often tipping you off to things that they saw? Were there certain things that players are more or less likely to pick up on? I mean, certain things that players are more or less likely to pick up on? I mean, what's sort of the area where advanced scouting by a non-player, someone like you, could most fill in the blanks? And what are the areas where players often know these things themselves? That, I think, was the most rewarding experience was what players brought to it and what I think I brought almost nothing to the table in terms of insight or view into any kind of competitive advantages that are out there. I think I wish we'd hear from players more in the public, but players really bring an

interesting perspective. And each one I think that I've worked with has something that they brought to augment uh or something that could have been looked up or pulled you know from a database and made available um just if somebody took the time to sit down and listen to them uh kind of the rationale behind it so i i think it's it's should be uh primarily player driven so the headline so far just threw a handful of days into the season here, which we don't want to make too much of, but obviously something's happening here. The rules changes are having, I would say, largely the intended effect, although not everyone wants the intended effect. But I think even people who weren't on board in many cases have been

persuaded, at least by the pitch clock, which has been extremely effective. I mean, just comparing to the first equivalent number of games last season, let's say it's something like a half hour shorter, which is, I think, even more than I would have expected, more than was saved in the minor leagues or spring training. And we'll see whether that holds up. But I think people were won over largely fairly quickly. Not everyone. There are some anti-pitch clock holdouts there, but it's hard to watch games to get the same amount of baseball in 20 to 30 minutes less to not have these four-hour games to have things be moving along. And the violations have not been too bad, right? It's been like 40 violations in the first 50 games. It's 0.8 per game, less than one. And you would expect that rate to fall as the season goes along.

So positive outcome thus far, right? I don't know whether you were a big pitch clock advocate or whether you were sort of neutral and just interested in all the strategic implications, but what has been your impression just of the aesthetic dimension of it just as a spectator? Yeah, as a spectator, I loved it. I think as a staff member, I would have loved it even more, you know, to get home 30 minutes earlier every night. But yeah, no, it's been great. I think I was curious how much the game would speed up on me. It might be funny for fans to hear that players and coaches talk about the game really speeding up, you know, at the dugout level or the major league level. And I kind of felt like that

when I first started working in baseball, like this game that takes four hours can feel really fast, but I haven't felt like it's been too fast in any way. I don't know if you'd feel like that. No, I definitely don't. The only negative, I mean, it's, it's hard to come up with any kind of negative, just like as a total night owl, I'll say that I sometimes miss having the late games on very late, right? I mean, just because, you know, it's kind of nice if I'm up past 1 a.m. Eastern, let's say, and I'm working on something. Nice to have a West Coast game just for company. I know you're not in my time zone, so this is perhaps not as relatable. And a lot of people don't stay up as late as I do. And

I'm also not suggesting this is in any way an argument against the pitch clock. I love the pitch clock. It's great. I'm just saying I like baseball keeping me company super late or super early as it happens. And between the pitch clock and the zombie runner, there's just less very late baseball on, which again is probably a good thing because it means that the games are over and people got to see the whole game before they went to bed or they get to go home at a reasonable hour. But as someone who's up at an unreasonable hour, I kind of miss having my night owl baseball on. Yeah, I guess you'll see fewer of the A's games, but you'll also see fewer Angels games. So I guess that doesn't work out well for you.

Yeah, no, right. Yeah, but the cadence of it has really been good. Yeah, no, right. Yeah, but the cadence of it has really been good. And I am kind of curious to see whether this holds, like whether there's even more offense later in the season, then that will just take more time. That won't necessarily make the pace any slower, but it might make the length a little longer. But do you expect that there will be some loosening or people will find loopholes or just the there will be a general relaxation of kind of keeping things moving? Or do you think that just the way this is set up with a timer that can't really be violated, that there is no recidivism that will happen here and this will just hold all season long? I have no idea. But I think one interesting thing to follow might be the leeway that older veteran players get.

One example from opening day I saw was Jacob deGrom. His Pitchcom device wasn't working, and there was a long delay. I say long. It was probably only a couple minutes to get a new one out of the dugout. probably only a couple minutes to get a new one out of the dugout. And things like that, I think that are allowable. But I think there's a certain amount, I mean, you saw this in the past with, you know, say somebody like Max Scherzer waiting 15 seconds before throwing a pickoff. I think a younger pitcher doesn't get that kind of leeway, you know, just with the flow of the game, a hitter would step out on somebody

who's younger, but maybe not against Max Scherzer. And I think that kind of that effect might persist with some of these gaps in the rules, I think, with, you know, whether your pitch calm doesn't work, or you want to try to back pick or take a long time to tie your shoe. I don't know, I think veteran players could could find ways around it and probably will. I just don't know. Like you said, umpires. And so you would expect that maybe it would spring some leaks. But again, just having the timer, it's harder to get around that. It's actually enforced and it's the same for everyone and it's consistent and there's real authority behind it. So perhaps they have figured out a way to actually hold the line here. I was just thinking, like, if you could do the Mariners fan scenario and have

everyone in the ballpark counting down, if you're actually counting down in sync with the pitch clock, I could see why that might not necessarily work in the sense that it might not throw a pitcher off their game unless it got in their head and they get psyched out. But if anything, it could help remind them how much time is left so that they don't run afoul of the timer but if you could get the entire stands just to be off sync with the timer if they could be like a few seconds ahead of the countdown or behind i guess so that you could kind of deke the pitcher into thinking that he had more time left that he actually did then you could sort of lure them into a pitch clock violation. But I guess that would be tough to fool players like that. And also to get the entire fan base on the same page about just like being offset from the clock for a few seconds. But

if you could manage that at a big moment, I would be interested in seeing you try. Yeah. I mean, sometimes the wave even seems hard to get right. Right. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think even if fans were on there synced up, I hadn't thought about kind of intentionally misaligning the clock, but even if you were on sync as a, I can just try to imagine being a pitcher and trying to take a deep breath while someone's counting down the clock, it seems like it would be very difficult to calm down, but these are also, you know, world-class athletes. So again, it doesn't seem to bother most, but I would think just the presence of a clock, you know, when you are actively trying to do something that, you know, you would be much easier on an on-time format would make things a little more stressful.

Yeah. Once we have a bigger sample, I'll be interested to see if we can study when there is a pitch clock violation, whether there's any discernible effect, some hangover effect from that of players being flustered. Perhaps that would be interesting to study or whether we see players' times kind of conform, you know, whether if you use as much time as you possibly can without going over that, maybe there would be some advantage to that, right? Not only disrupting the base runners timing, but also getting yourself some extra rest or time to think things through. So potentially if you're going too fast, I mean, you might get winded more easily, or you might just

pitch better if you take as much time as you can without taking too much time. So I wonder whether we'll see pitchers as a group just sort of settle in the same range of a few seconds, or whether we will see certain guys who are regularly delivering in 10 seconds or 12 seconds, and then other guys who are going 19 seconds every time. I guess you don't want to cut it too close, but maybe the more time you wait, the better off you are as long as you don't go over. Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And I think you hit on something that, you know, if you're on an advanced scouting, if you're looking at what kinds of things you now

need to worry about, that's the kind of data that would be really interesting to have. You know, if you're looking at a pitcher that is consistently to be in rhythm needs to be you know delivering at the same time on the clock that's a big liability once you have a runner on base so you you would need to be looking at something like that i think any pitcher who's going to control the running game needs to vary timing and needs to be comfortable delivering you know not to the extent if we're going to saw Max Scherzer in spring training, maybe not to that extent. That's really extreme. And I think it maybe was difficult for him to manage, but just to be able to vary within

a certain window to not allow a runner to time you up. As for the stolen bases and the effect on the running game, that has been a huge effect. Again, not shocking if you saw what happened in the minors or in spring training, but it has absolutely kept up and we're heading for historic territory here. Ben Clemens did a comparison just of the first 50 games of 2022 versus the first 50 games of 2023. And it was like last year, teams were 33 of 47. So that's what a 70.2% success rate. And this year, it's 70 out of 84, I think, which is not only way, way more steals, but also a much higher success rate, 83.3%. percent. I mean, it's gotten to the point almost where I've seen the beginnings of some backlash of it's too easy now to steal bases, right? Because we all like more action on the base paths and more running and more stealing. But also, I think the idea that we like stolen bases and we

want more of them, it's kind of predicated on the idea that there will be some tension in any individual steal attempt, that it will still be seen as an accomplishment and not just a free base. So what do you think? Are teams just kind of testing the limits now and they will go up from here or they're testing the limits and they will go down from here? Like we've seen some players steal on the base every game, like Anthony Volpe. We've seen the Orioles with their back-to-back five-steal games. You know, these are historic sort of paces. And I wonder whether you think it will also just sort of stay stable from here or whether it will head upward or downward significantly. Yeah, that's a good question. I think what you mentioned there with the amount of just no contest

stolen bases is interesting interesting or maybe not interesting right stolen bases that are not close maybe don't add much to the excitement of the game but and i think those are those are kind of the ones that are on the pitcher i think what we're seeing exposed in in some cases and then i don't know what you've seen when you've watched if you felt like certain pitchers are really really hurting right now, more so than others. I think that's what I've seen. And I think that pitchers who, you know, take a long time to deliver to deliver a pitch, that's a real liability. And a catcher has, in this environment, pretty much no chance to throw out a runner. So we're seeing pitchers, if they won't be able to develop a slide step to get that time down, I think it could go up. I think we are just seeing things, like you said, the water is being tested. And

I think the ability to develop a slide set for a pitcher is not something we should just assume is something really easy to do. Yeah. And I would think that coaching and advanced scouting would play a big part in how willing teams are to take advantage of this early on because it goes against your instincts probably as a base runner to take longer and longer leads and to know that that you can do that with impunity because maybe a pitcher has already used their pickoff attempts or if you're a pitcher maybe you're overly cautious and conservative this is something that you've written about how often will pitchers be willing to use both of their pickoff attempts and just

let themselves be vulnerable to a runner taking an unlimited lead. I mean, it harkens back to John Lester and his problems throwing the first base, right? Where back then we saw some base runners not really take full advantage of that very strange situation because they saw a lefty on the mound and they thought, I got to get back. I got to stay close. Even though in his case, you knew with near certainty that he could not throw over and he was not even going to try. So I think it kind of just requires some relearning and reprogramming really. And probably some teams are ahead of others when it comes to instilling that in their players or having players who are wired to take advantage of that quickly. Yeah, yeah, I think the Lester example is

interesting when that could be a case for, you know, maybe teams, maybe we don't see the envelope push, because there's no reason it shouldn't have been for Lester. And you would always kind of highlight that and point that out. But players just are wired a certain way. So, you know, I don't know if we'll see leads kind of grow, you know, inch by inch, maybe. I don't know if teams are working on that in spring training, just try to push it as far as you can. I think that really would have been the time, right? To push it and see how big a lead can you take before you get picked off. I don't even know how many people we saw picked off in spring training, but it probably wasn't many. So, you know, maybe it's more gradual

that we see the kind of the envelope get pushed a little further and a little further on the base running side. And as for the positioning, it's hard, I think, in this sample to tell what the effect is. And BABIP is up, but also BABIP on grounders doesn't really seem to be up, at least compared to last season's full season number. Again, it's just a minuscule sample when it comes to something like BABIP. And even though offense is up relative to the start of last season, I don't know if you can do a direct comparison because weather will affect things. And also you were coming off of a short spring training last year and post lockout and it's just different conditions. But as someone who worked closely with positioning, I wonder what your take is on just how effective advanced positioning has been, at least advanced positioning of the sort that is no longer allowed or as favorable now because of course there's been a big debate about how advantageous it actually was to defenses so are you expecting this to be a big deal in terms of just juicing league-wide babbitt and offense in general yeah i guess so i think jeff passon

in tweeting you know differences between you know first X games this year and last year saw that the Babbitt change is mostly due to singles, I think. So I think that makes sense that there will be more singles hit. I think, you know, if you're trying to limit damage as a defense, you're more willing to give up singles than looking to limit extra base hits more so so i i think the the limitations are what they are i i think there's a limit to what you can push things to on the defensive side i think you know you might see things one thing i saw in spring training situationally you might see some interesting things with the infield and that with a left-handed pull hitter up if you have you know a stolen base type of situation and a short stop needs to cover the bag where should the third baseman be playing and does it make sense for the third baseman to get awkwardly close to the short stop when you know that there won't be a ground ball hit to the traditional kind of third base area or even the five six hole so maybe as we see those

types of things play out we see these unconventional alignments that look awkward, create awkward interactions between infielders. But yeah, I think we'll see more of those singles, more ground balls get through, which I don't know if you think that's more interesting or less interesting, but I guess we'll see. A lot of people will say, well, it's about making things look like they used to look. And that is having that effect, again, when it comes to running or just the time of game. I mean, we really are just kind of rewinding to the 80s in a lot of ways here. And the idea that people were frustrated when someone would hit a ball hard in a way that typically, traditionally, historically would have been a hit. And then it was not. And that was always jarring. Now, give it enough time and you would not expect that to be a hit anymore.

And then it would look weird to go back to this way of doing things where those things are hits again. And also, even now, you know, you can still have someone almost directly up the middle, right? So if you crush a ball up the middle and someone's standing an inch to the side of second base, that may still be an out a lot of the time. So unless you implement the pie slice idea, let's say next season, then you're still going to have some things that traditionally might have been hits that will be outs now.

But there have definitely been a lot of times where something that I was sort of conditioned to think was now an out was a hit. And I was not unhappy each time that happened. You know, I mean, I was not sorry to see, oh, that was actually a signal. Now, I bet last season that would not have been a signal. So even as someone who was not really on board philosophically with this ban or discouragement of shifting. I can't say that it has negatively affected my enjoyment of watching just on a game-to-game level. There's still something about it that rubs me the wrong way, but I'm not sorry that, oh, that was not a routine out anymore, and now there's a base runner. All right,

this is more exciting than it would have been otherwise. Yeah. I don't know. This may not be a popular view, but I see what you're saying. And I guess I'm just wired a different way after working with that, wanting that work to mean something. To me, I see a ground ball that should have been an out in the shift. And I see a pitcher that executed a pitch most likely, and people can disagree with me on that, but Zach Reinke had a couple of those in his opening day start, you know, weekly hit ground ball from a right-handed hitter that would have been a shift up the middle, a shift out up the middle. And we won't see those. And I know that is what it is. I guess I'm on a different side though, where I feel like maybe it's the pitching side, right? The pitching, pitching side might be

a little, I feel a little differently about that. Right. Do you think we will see any unorthodox, adventurous alignments? I guess we saw a couple examples in spring if someone weird like Joey Gallo is up, let's say, but some sort of risky alignment? Or do you think most of the risky kind of fun alignments probably don't make sense for most hitters? Yeah, i don't know i think you know there might be a handful is what i would say back of the envelope a handful like gallo or fewer where that might make sense to to do that extreme example i think gallo had one on opening day where the ground ball was hit right to that spot but then the mj melendez made an error fielding it which i think you know highlights another highlights another issue is who's out there fielding that ground ball and do they have experience as an infielder? So yeah, I don't know how much. I wouldn't say we would say that much, but we'll see.

Games are now, I guess we can do away with this zombie runner nonsense. We don't actually need this anymore. Games are short enough. I don't expect that to happen, but that would be a welcome byproduct of all this. It looks even less necessary now that you could just lop off half an hour seemingly by just making the game faster. We don't need to artificially end it sooner. Anyway, I guess that ship has sailed sadly. Anyway, I guess that ship has sailed, sadly. But I do wonder the one aspect of things that does not look retro now is that you're still,

of course, seeing lots of the three true outcomes. You're still seeing as many strikeouts as ever. And granted, as we speak now, not every team has had the weak underbelly of its pitching staff even appear yet. So these stats can be a bit skewed and deceptive early on. But, you know, as we speak on Monday afternoon, it's a 23.4% league-wide strikeout rate, which would be roughly tied with 2020 for the highest ever. And that was kind of one of my gripes with the positioning ban or rules

was that if really what we want is more action and more base runners, yeah, you can influence that somewhat by having more of these ground balls get through the infield, but it'd be great if there were more balls put in play in the first place. And thus far, at least, it doesn't seem like there's any dramatic effects, whether it is people speculating that, oh, the pitch clock pitchers will be tired, they won't throw as hard and they'll be more hittable, they're more hittable or batters will be more incentivized to put the ball in play because there are more holes in the infield.

And then other people would say, no, actually, you're taking away any incentive to try to go the other way. And now you're just giving free reign to pull hitters to pull to their heart's content. So they're still going to be swinging and missing a ton. And they do still seem to be swinging and missing a ton. I mean, I guess you can say progress is incremental. And if we can fix this and that, that's great. The fact that it doesn't address this other problem might not be a reason not to do it. But it does still seem like based on the very early returns that if you want more balls put in play and fewer strikeouts, then you might have to do something else, whether that is

stricter limits on how many pitchers you can carry or moving the mound back or whatever it is. We're still seeing, you know, it's the 80s maybe in some ways, but it's very much still the 2020s in that way. Yeah, no, that's interesting. I didn't realize that's where strikeouts were right now. I wonder if what's going on is that we're kind of seeing a coinciding of this other major shift that's going on. And that's, have you seen this, it's even a new pitch classification now, the sweeper? Yeah.

Yeah. And I don't know how you feel about it. I was originally conflicted with this kind of new classification, making it official. But, you know, we're seeing a lot of them. And I think breaking balls have gotten so good. You know, you could say you'd have to ban breaking balls to lower strikeout rates. you could crack down on sticky stuff, I think, which makes breaking balls a lot better. And I don't know that, have you seen anything to that effect? I know we read about it, that it would happen in the early going, but I haven't seen it so much. Right. And as you forecasted, maybe then the reaction to that is more change-ups and people throwing seam shifted weight change-ups, which is fascinating to me now that you can get this change-up effect without pronating in the way that you often used to have

to, to throw a change-up. And so maybe that lowers the barrier to entry to that pitch and people start throwing that pitch more. So it's just, it's a constant cat and mouse, of course, as it always has been and always will be. And now we see MLB just step in and say, the cat's not allowed to do this anymore, and the mouse is not allowed to do that anymore, but they'll each find something, right? And I also wonder just from having watched some games and seen some steals, I mean, I was of the opinion that the bigger bases wouldn't have much of an effect when it came to the running game, that it's all well and good for safety. But when we saw this introduced in the minors, it didn't seem like there was any tangible effect there. But it is true so often that when you make

it as a base dealer, you're just barely making it. And when you fail to make it, you're just barely failing to make it. And it does seem like when you watch the super slow-mo replays of base runners being safe or not safe, that it's like, gosh, a few inches might have actually made a difference there. So you'd think that by far the bigger effect would be the restriction on step-offs and throws over. But seeing it in action, it's hard not to think that, huh, he might have been out there if the base hadn't been just a few inches bigger. Yeah, no, that's a good point. I mean, I think some of the some of these stolen bases are more no contest, but anything is close enough. We're talking about fractions of a second, right, with a catcher with a, you know, above average pop time being, you know, a tenth of a second better than one who doesn't. Right. Do you think that we will see catcher's arms prioritized anew? Because this was always, of course, that was kind of the carrying tool defensively. Did you have a great arm? It was always about stopping the running game. And then there was less of a running game and more of an

emphasis on framing. And suddenly arms weren't as necessary. But now, and let's say we keep the challenge system so that there's still some value to framing. Do you think that now we will go back to catchers have to have great arms again because people are running wild? Or will the onus be on the pitchers to stop the runners more so than the catchers? Because, of course, the pitcher's hands are tied to an extent now. Yeah. And by the challenge, do you mean with an automated strike zone? Yes. Yeah, I think that's interesting.

I think when I think about the automated strike zone, I think we definitely could see the arm become a lot more important. I think a few things have changed in a short amount of time. One of them is the introduction of PitchCom on the pitching side allowing pitchers to call their own games and i think one thing you can't quantify with a catcher

so much as game calling which i think is extremely important but may become less so you know with this development of pitchers kind of running the show there if you if you don't have that and you don't have the need as much for, for a good framing ability, I think you could see some really, you could see the position change completely. I think, I don't know how catchers will be, will they be mandated to have, you know, two feet on the ground or be mandated to sit in a certain box to not be in sort of like a shotgun start position to throw runners out. But I think the envelope can be pushed there. And to me, the arm becomes the most important kind of aspect of that scenario. Do you think teams are doing a lot of work when it comes to trying to isolate the effects

of each rule change? Or from a team perspective, does it matter more just to see how the league environment has changed? Because, you know, it can be kind of frustrating to try to figure out, OK, is offense up? How much will be up? Why will it be up? The same with the running game. Is it the clock? Is it the pickoff cap? Is it the shorter distance between bases? You know, if they were to introduce each of these things one by one, then we might have a cleaner experiment and we could tell, okay, this is how much this affects things. This is how much that affect things. Because all these things were put into effect in tandem, we can't really untangle them, or at least it's

tougher to untangle them. And I guess if you feel like, well, this needs to happen and maybe it'll be easier to get these things in if we just do it all at once. I don't know. Instead of trying to ease everyone in slowly. But it's not clean from a sort of scientific perspective. So I wonder how much teams are trying to untangle all these things as they figure out, okay, what is offense going to look like now. Yeah, I think not clean is the phrase that comes to mind to me too. I think it'd just be really hard to isolate the impact. I think not just from the rules changes, but you see the group of players that we see, you know, in the game this year is different. Every year, there are differences in, you know, the playing surface, the weather, fall, even this year. I mean, even if we looked at spring training stats and with how cold it was in Arizona, you know, is that if we try to isolate the impact of the rules changes, we're missing things that we are not smart enough to consider as these extra factors that play in. So I don't know. And I don't know, you know, what point it

would serve. There's certainly cases where, you know, isolating would help. But, you know, and I don't know, I think another question might be how long is it going to take in the regular season before you can develop, you know, an understanding of sort of what the combined changes will bring? Yeah, we haven't even really talked about the ball because who knows as of yet, but what was that like for you on the team side working for teams through maybe a couple of ball evolutions? How much time or effort went into studying that or being flummoxed by what was going on with the ball? Because certainly a lot of the time and effort of public analysts did. Yeah, that's definitely a topic I was not so much interested in,

I think, to spend time and effort on that. I don't know. I don't know that I have much to say on that. I think the physics angle is something that's beyond me. I think, you know, over time, we just, you know, players talk, coaches talk. And I think it's just really difficult to try to really isolate. So it's, you know, on the factor of the list of things that drove me away from wanting to work in baseball, the amount of time it took to research the ball might be a high on that list. Yeah, I guess there's only so much you can do with that information from a team perspective, assuming everyone is playing with the same ball at all times, which maybe is not always safe to assume. But if it's not varying in a predictable way, at least,

you know, it might be interesting, but you might not necessarily be able to derive some advantage from it unless you determine that the ball is carrying in such a way that I guess you shouldn't throw certain pitches or you should throw them in a different location or you might just have players who are more or less prone to having damage done against them or doing damage with a certain type of ball. But again, by the time the season starts, I guess your options are kind of limited when it comes to actually responding to that new information. Yeah. Yeah. I think like executing good pitches is always a good way to go. proper positioning. And now that's all just been wiped away. Right. And I guess that makes me think of a quote that came up this past week because Rob Manfred was reporting some owner, an unspecified owner. I don't know if it's Dick Montfort or not Dick Montfort. He didn't say, but some owner who

said that he became convinced that analytics and who knows how the owner is defining analytics because that becomes just a boogeyman and a buzzword, but analytics is an arms race to nowhere. And Manfred said, it's become one of my favorite lines because I think it's actually true. And he went on to say, the competitive advantage piece, I think there was a point in time where if your analytics department was more developed than somebody else's, maybe you got that little edge. Right now, everybody's playing that same game. Once everybody's doing it, that little margin that maybe you're getting,

I'm sure that whatever that margin was at one point in time, whatever it is today, it sure as heck is not worth the damage that was done to the game over a period of time. So I guess that's two separate questions, right? Is the difference big between teams? And then the other question is, is it worth it? Is it good for the sport?

So, I mean, before you left the game, you were working for very analytically advanced and progressive front offices in Atlanta and Houston. So does that match your understanding of things that there's close enough to parity that the differences are not so big? Or would you dispute that? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think, would you say it's an interesting time for that quote? I just thought it was really odd timing given so much changing in the game right now. I guess, you know, part of the point he's making is just that maybe this did not serve the sport so well because teams have their incentives to find and exploit these competitive advantages. And so they will.

And then it's up to him and the league to sort of step in and say, well, this is all well and good for you, but it may not be good for the sport as a whole. I mean, I think there's something to that idea. You know, I don't know that you can lay all of the spectator unfriendly aspects of modern baseball at the feet of analytics or sabermetrics, because again, with something like pace and the length of game, you know, that has been inflated

since the very beginning of baseball, basically. But certain things certainly have been at least accelerated by that movement. So I guess maybe that's the way in which he means it, that it's a race to nowhere in the sense that it's making your sport worse in some ways, but whether that means it's a race to nowhere in the sense that teams themselves are not

or were not deriving an advantage from it, that I'm less certain of and would be interested in hearing your perspective on? Yeah, on that piece, I mean, this might sound dispassionate, but I, you know, I would say it almost doesn't doesn't matter in a way if a team, regardless of what, where the gaps were at this point in time, if the next step of that argument is to somehow limit the impact of teams trying to find edges, I don't know first how you do that. And I think if you try to limit it, and these teams that or teams try to stop, I think then you immediately kind of fall behind. So, you know, I guess it's more that I feel like I just don't know. And this is

not as entertaining, but the impact of that, I don't know where you go based on, you know, one conclusion or the other, whether or not there is a gap right now. I just, you know, you can, you can do something like ban a shift, which is, you know, easy to do based on where players stand in the field. But I don't know how you ban the impact of teams trying to find competitive advantages, which is, I think, broadly how I might define analytics. Yeah, I guess, well, you could either try to take away certain advantages that they have found already with something like a ban on where you can position fielders, or you can try to counteract the effects of it. So if teams determine that you should only steal bases when the conditions are just right,

and so they try to steal fewer bases, then you change the rules so that suddenly it's more advantageous to steal more bases. So even though teams are still doing that arms race, now the conditions change and maybe the analytics will favor a different tactic, which might be more entertaining, right? So you can kind of counteract whatever the effects of that might be, if not actually counteracting the continued search for some advantage, which I don't know that there's any way to stop that, but you can kind of combat some unintended consequences of that. Yeah, I think that's right. I think, you know, that cycle that we're seeing, it seems really

natural in a way, you know, that if an advantage that's found is detrimental to the entertainment value of the game, which at the end of the day, you know, is what drives the growth of it, you can ban that and you can allow those impacts or those advantages that are entertaining, like you're saying. So I think, yeah, and I think the changes themselves are entertaining. Players seem to embrace them. So, you know, I don't see any reason why you couldn't introduce new rules changes. I don't know that that's a road to nowhere, but. Yeah, it's in the sense that it's a road to nowhere. in that sense, you know, you discover some advantage and then a few years later it's wiped away. And if that didn't actually make the game more fun for anyone, but it just led to

that particular team winning more over that span of time, you know, like as an intellectual exercise, it can be rewarding for the people involved, certainly. And also for people like me, just following from afar and just being interested in this stuff like there is an entertainment value to just the back and forth and the finding some way to exploit some rule and then someone else finds some way to to close that loophole like that's fun to follow but maybe ultimately it's less fun than just having more action in the game let's say if that's you know if the some some product of all of those machinations is less action in the game. So I do think it's the place of the commissioner to step in and say, you're all very smart and you're all doing things that serve you well, but perhaps don't serve the sport.

That's why you need someone who, at least in theory, has the best interest of baseball in mind, you know, if not always in practice. But in this case, I think largely that is the case. And I think it's having the effects that they want it to have. And I don't think they've backfired thus far. Yeah, I think you've won me over on that quote. And the shift, I just think, is such a different example. And the shift, I just think, is such a different example, right? Because it came first.

It's been around so long. And it's not consistently used across the board by every team. But it's the closest thing that was in place that was like that, that did have a negative impact on the entertainment value. Yeah. And it gets less interesting over time because when the shift was new and experimental, it was kind of cool to see it. Wow, look at this. I mean, I know that the origins of the shift go back decades and decades, centuries. Individual players were shifted, of course, there's some satisfaction to seeing teams do something seemingly smart and obvious. How could they not have been placing their fielders where the ball was more likely to be hit? Duh. And then it just looks a little different. It's visually stimulating for a while.

But then that becomes the new default, right? And the new standard defensive positioning is what we would have called the shift before. And then there's less variation because there's kind of a default way to position players in sort of a data-centric way. So I guess there was getting to be less variation in how teams handled positioning as it was. And so they've kind of artificially clamped down even further on the amount of variation that's allowed, or at least that would be rewarding. Anyway, I wonder now, again, we're just so early in the season here, what are some of the things that you will be watching in closing here? What are some of the

questions you still have that have not been answered by the first few days of baseball? And what are you hoping to see? Or what are you hoping to see or what would you like to see what are you curious about what we'll see for the rest of the season yeah me personally i'm interested to see how pitch usage shifts if it does with the last five ten years that how many more breaking balls we're seeing will we see that continue i think the impact of driveline on the game is you know it's bigger than i've ever seen it with these new breaking pitches that pitchers are developing you know will we see what what will the the fastball usage rate be uh this year will there will there be a rule put in place

to you know a minimum number of fastballs that you need to throw per plate appearance that that's that's something I think will be interesting. And I think also just the cumulative impact of this clock on pitcher command, the ability to execute pitches for pitchers coming out of spring training into these stressful environments that will only get more stressful as we get later into the season. And I think, you know, if we start to see pitchers become quicker to the plate to manage the running game, that will affect all of these things that will have an effect on pitch usage and maybe in favor of the fastball and fewer breaking balls,

it'll have an impact on pitch command. And I'm curious to see where walk rates will end up. I have no idea, you know, will they be a lot higher? Will they be lower? I think that depends on pitch usage as well, though. Well, I can't recommend any better way to monitor the developments in all those areas than to subscribe to Noah's Substack. It's called The Advanced Scout. Again, theadvancedscout.substack.com. It is free.

So that's a great bargain. Look forward to your writing there. You can also find Noah on Twitter at WoodwardPS. Thank you very much, Noah. It's pretty common for writers whose work I enjoy to go behind the paywall at major league clubs, and for us to lose the benefit of their analysis and their insight and their knowledge, it's maybe a little less common for them to come back out again and start sharing the benefits of their added expertise. So I'm selfishly glad that that has happened with you. So welcome back to the internet. Thanks, Ben. It's been pretty fun so far.

All right. Thanks to Noah. And I've got one more interview lined up for you here. It's with LJ Rader, creator and operator of Art But Make It Sports, one of my favorite sports related social media accounts. There are a lot of great accounts that are useful in some way. They're the good kind of bot, like Umpire Scorecards or Would It Dong? Then there are some that are just amusing, like MLB Closed Captioning at MLB underscore CC that just shows funny instances of MLB Closed Captioning gone wrong, or baseball images that precede unfortunate events at Unfortunate MLB, which just shows screenshots of baseball games right before something bad

happened. And in that genre, I think this may be my favorite. It's not baseball only, but there's a lot of baseball and we'll talk some baseball because LJ is a big baseball fan. But Art But Make It Sports juxtaposes sports scenes with famous images from art history. And it is so cleverly done that it never fails to thrill me. Often there's not only a great visual match, but there's a great thematic match, something that might even illuminate the sports scene, bring out some unsuspected pathos or joy.

And hopefully this next conversation will thrill you. So I'll be right back with L.J. Rader of Art But Make It Sports, followed as, by the Pass Blast and a few closing thoughts. It's the zombie runner, Bobby Shands, Bobby Shands, Bobby Shands. Effectively wild. Joey Manessis. No. Walk-off three-run digger.

Stop it. Walk-off three-run shot. Oh, my God. Meg, he's the best player in baseball. Effectively wild. Wild, wild, wild, wild. Well, last week, Meg and I were talking about the proposal gone wrong at Dodger Stadium, and we were trying to describe in evocative terms what it looked like when the guy who was making the proposal got tackled from the side and absolutely leveled by security. And hopefully we painted a picture for you. But what we did not do was

comp that moment and that scene to The Young Martyr by Paul De La Roche from 1855. And that's the kind of comp that you can only get from one of my favorite social media accounts, Art But Make It Sports, and from its proprietor, and I'm just going to say the artist behind Art But Make It Sports. His name is LJ Rader, and he joins me now. Hello, LJ. Hello. Thanks for having me. So I've read various profiles of you over the years, and so I have some sense of the backstory, but just to share that with our listeners, I guess we've got to go through the origin story of, A, why you know so much about art, and B, how this turned into a popular Twitter account, or first, an unpopular one, an Instagram, before it became popular. So take us through the genesis of Art But Make It Sports.

Yeah, sure. So it definitely started as somebody who knew a lot more about sports than art. And over the years have kind of self-taught myself art. I enjoy going to museums and took a class in college in art history and realized I was probably better off focusing on something else and teaching myself the ins and outs in my free time versus spending spending college time doing that but yeah i've worked in sports since the start of my career and always been a sports fan and tend to see things through a sports lens and around the time of Instagram becoming popular, I realized I wasn't much into posting pictures of myself or pictures of food or things that I was seeing other people do. captions related to sports and oftentimes geared towards something stupid and funny and, uh, something that I could get my, my friends to chuckle that, uh, went on for a number of years until over time, you know, I would do like kind of story series when I'd go to museums and have

friends be like, Oh, you should, you know, make this it's its own account. I was fairly resistant at first, but then over time decided, you know, why not? I think I was pretty sick of seeing the same content on my social media feed and figured, you know, this would be something fresh and give me something to do. It happened to coincide. It was just a few months before COVID lockdowns. to coincide it was just a few months before covid lockdowns uh and so definitely you know people are cooped up in their apartment and uh not much else going on it was a great way to to spend my time but yeah like you had mentioned for the longest time very much an unpopular account was just uh sort of sort of posting into the abyss uh outside of friends and family, co-workers, and a handful of other followers.

But yeah, it's changed a lot now. Yeah, we've talked to some people who run accounts that are similarly entertaining. Like on episode 1928, I talked to Ian Arujo, who runs the No Problem Gambler TikTok account. the no problem gambler TikTok account, the guy who looks up obscure sports stuff that's in the background of other shows and he'll dig deep and find out what game is that little bit of footage that you can barely find from. And that just started out of something he was interested in and something that he used to entertain his friends with, which it sounds like very much was what you were doing. It wasn't like, I know this is going to go viral and this can become a cool side hustle

in a very popular account for me. It's just, this tickles my fancy at a few friends and so I'll do it. And then it turns out that other people are interested by the same things. Yeah. And to be honest, it's the reason why I still do it. Because it's still, I do it because it makes me laugh and keeps me entertained and keeps my

friends entertained. But I guess the circle of so-called friends has now evolved from people I know to a whole host of people that I don't really know. Yeah. How did you decide on art but make it sports instead of sports but make it art? So when it first started, it was very much going to museums, getting 50, 100 pictures maybe, depending on the museum, and then coming back to my into the sports side. If you have the time to scroll back through Instagram, eventually you'll hit a point where you'll see the shift. It's over time, but it originally was literally pictures of artwork. And then on that, I would just like write on the pictures. And so in that case, it was art, but make it sports. But realized that what was starting to resonate with people and sort of what challenged me more was the comparisons. So the sort of side by sides of, you know, comparing the sports and the art.

And then what also seemed to resonate more was images in the moment. So if you're watching a live game, like the proposal happening, I think I did that one the day after, but I was asleep on the East Coast. But you have a big moment, and Caitlin Clark putting her hand up to her ear, a big moment and Caitlin Clark and putting her her hand up to her ear or Angel Reese uh doing the uh pointing to her her ring finger the yesterday two days ago those are things that people are talking about in the moment and so if you can use those sports images and sort of inject it into the timeline those tend to uh pick up the most traction but I've just I guess, too lazy to change it to sports, but make it art. It just, it is what it is.

Yeah, it's a brand now. And baseball's your favorite sport, right? I read somewhere you grew up in Westchester, you're a Yankees fan? Yeah, I'm a big time Yankees fan, but also just an absolute baseball junkie. I'm a diehard out-of-the-park baseball player. Nice. I spend lots of time watching and consuming baseball. I think ever since as a kid reading the box scores, league leaders, and transactions in the New York Times, and then just sort of having baseball always on. I mean, I love every sport and all things sports. And I definitely consider myself a huge Yankees fan. But

if you were to say, you know, you can't be a Yankees fan, you have to just be a baseball fan, I'd be fine with it. Yeah, I made that transition myself and I survived. I'm still enthusiastic about the sport. And I course, I'm always jazzed to see a baseball post from you. I enjoy any of the other sport posts just as much, even though in some sports that I'm less well-versed in, I might not even know exactly what the scene is. I still enjoy just the tableau, just the visual of it and how closely it often matches, but there's a little extra juice when there's a baseball post. So is baseball well-suited to what you do and what percentage of what you do does it constitute roughly? Yeah. So I'd say it's definitely on the lower end. Um, and it's hard because so basketball tends to play the best just because you, you've got a lot of sort of figures you have

different movements and they're all kind of combined in one frame whereas baseball tends to be very you get sort of similar scenes all the time and that's why something like i know it's not quite baseball but the the proposal was great because it was, you know, not something you usually see. This is what I've I kind of laugh to myself now that it's that people are people like actually care, which is funny. Like, I'll get people to reach reaching out. Why don't you do hockey? Like, you don't do enough hockey. It's like I do this account for like what I watch and like what I see.

Yeah. Like now I guess there's some sort of obligation that the account has to cover all sports all the time. And like it's against it's my hobby. I wish I did more baseball. If you're listening to this, please tag me in any and all baseball pictures that you see uh it just tends basketball gets a lot of run a lot of soccer as well i try to you know i'm a big fan of women's hoops as well and sort of women's sports and just try to give like blanket play across the board to you know somebody tweets in a picture of cricket and it it draws inspiration I use it, but yeah, definitely want to do more baseball.

So tag me, please. Is any part of the calculus what you think will be popular or is it just what you enjoy? Because obviously baseball, it's something of a regionally followed sport, right? And so I don't know what your feed, what percentage of your feed is a baseball fandom, but you're probably going to have a lower Q rating when it comes to some baseball scenes and stars. Again, I don't even need to know necessarily what the scene is to enjoy one of your posts, but I wonder whether there's a performance difference that you've noticed. Yeah, so I don't want to be the one to say it, so I'm glad you did. But yes, I think regional

is a nice and friendly way to describe baseball in the current landscape of media consumption, especially on Twitter. Although, I mean, it still has a massive and rabid fan base. It does just tend

to, you know, you post something about, you know, the NBA playoffs. And it's not just people that are based in the U.S. that, you know, pick it up. It's everywhere, which has also been kind of an interesting thing that's happened with the rise of, you know, lots of people now following the account is i'll get people tweeting and and you know commenting and it's in just completely different languages and i have to click the the translate button uh that happens a lot which i think is really cool because it just means it's it's been picked up everywhere but yeah baseball tends to be a little bit more niche and yeah i think it probably would surprise people that follow the account that baseball is by far my favorite sport. But yeah. Yeah. Yes. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that as I was prepping for this. But you do have some baseball recently. And yeah, sometimes it'll

be the Dodgers proposal. Sometimes it's Megan Thee Stallion throwing out a first pitch. Right. But sometimes there are ones that are pretty obscure. Like you wouldn't think that a David Bednar from behind would perform all that well, but you found the right image, right? You found an Iranian statue from between the ninth and seventh centuries, right? Which just posed from behind

looks very much like Bednar pitching in the World Baseball Classic, almost like a fertility idol type dimension so people enjoy that i've seen that you know people will call it art but with two t's make it sport whenever there's a butt involved yeah there uh it pains me that it tends the lowbrow stuff tends to do much better than what I'd consider highbrow. I think Sean Murphy got hit by a pitch last season. Somebody clipped it. And there's this Degas statue of a woman with a rather full behind and paired those two together.

And that did very well. Yeah. I was going to ask, I don't know if David Bednar responded to that, but I saw on Instagram that David Bednar's brother, Will Bednar, had replied to that post just to say thick, which was amusing. And that made me wonder how often you do get responses either from the athletes themselves or from friends or family, people connected to the athletes or teammates. Yeah, he also tagged him in his story, which I thought was funny. Little jab at his brother. There's a handful of athletes that follow. Every once in a while I'll get like a like maybe if it's an athlete

the US Women's National Team players they're great about liking and sharing anytime I post about them which is cool Matisse Theibel in the NBA he just followed which I think is another interesting layer just because

of his name and there's i did a pairing of him and a matisse's icarus uh nathaniel low or lau i don't know how to actually pronounce his name but yes uh he he follows and i think he takes his he takes uh photographs himself yes that's right and i reached out to him and I said, if you take any that are baseball related, you know, send them through, uh, like he takes like more stadium, um, landscaping. Uh, it's like, if you take any, like the athletes and, you know, like a sports photographer, send them and I'll try to use that. But, uh, yeah, it's not a ton

of athletes, but a lot of like the teams now are following and they're sort of social media staff behind the scenes as well. Yeah. Nathaniel and his brother, Josh, are low. Brandon is low, which I say just because I have to keep it straight in my own mind. And you will try to credit the photographers who are responsible for the photos often. And I assume that that has brought you into contact with some photographers. Will they nominate their own work for a comparison? Or is that just, hey, if you're looking for something on this, I got a good shot? Yeah, so that whole community has been great and been really interesting for me to start to learn more about. What happens usually is I'll see something on TV. If I need to, for some reason, do it immediately, I'll literally take a picture of my TV

or I'll see somebody that's taken a screen grab on Twitter and posted it. But oftentimes, if it's a big moment, you can wait for the sort of professional photograph to come out. And those tend to be light years better than what you'd be able to grab from your television anyways. from your television anyways. The account has definitely made the rounds in that community and now have a bunch of photographers that send in images, tag me in things. I've become friends with a handful of them. I think what they do is fascinating and is as much,

I'd consider as much to be, you know, the artwork is, is the artwork that the historic artwork that is, is used in, in posts. I am, I'm, and this is where it's, I don't quite know, like the, the account is my hobby and I don't quite know where it's, where it's going. But one of the things I want to start to explore is you know getting the photographer's perspective on pieces that that I use and of posts that I do a whole bunch every day it feels like but for ones that you know are are especially good and do well trying to figure out how to you know maybe have the photographers be able to write a little bit about

what their process was in capturing that image, because I find that whole side fascinating. Yeah, I guess, unfortunately, most of the time, probably the artist that you are citing is no longer around, or at least is not easily reached for comments, but I would love to know their reactions. It seems like that's part of what amuses you about this is the idea of having some perhaps long deceased artists and their work juxtaposed with something that didn't exist in their day that they never could have imagined their work being repurposed in this way. So it would be great if you could get comments from people who are still with us you know like for instance you did a a great one earlier this year of trey turner as he was celebrating in the wbc and you had uh

just behind him there's like this uh spray of sports drink as i guess he was getting dunked in celebration and you compared it to a dale Chihuly work, which was perfect. Like it looked exactly like that. So I guess, I guess that's one option. He's a baseball fan too. So you never know, maybe, but most of the time unavailable for comment. I was going to say, if you're, if you're listening, reach, reach out. I would love to chat with you. I did one of his, there's like a lime green, looks like a super tall, skinny Christmas tree in the Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts. Compare that, like one of James Harden's pregame outfits,

and that one did really well. I think his work especially, maybe because he is more recent and um and modern people have sort of seen i think that's the part part of what i think resonates with people is like they learn something about art but then another side of it is people when they see things that they recognize i think gets them gets them excited so what are your specialties when it comes to art, certain styles or eras that you draw from more often or are overrepresented or underrepresented in art but make it sports? I'd say it's not a professional term, but the old stuff tends to make its way into the account more often than anything else.

I will say, however, that the ones that excite me the most and are the most fun and challenging to do are more of the abstract pieces. Because, I don't know, the old stuff's got already pictures of people. Or, you know, pictures. It has figures in them but if you can take a sports photo that has a figure and somehow match it to something that doesn't to me those are the most the most fun to do right yeah I was gonna ask because it almost seems like magic just how closely some of these images match and how often you're able to do it. So I would guess that maybe it's not as surprising as it seems just because most art probably features humans, right? I guess we

most often make art of ourselves and we're sort of self-centered as a species in that way. And you're usually dealing with some sort of dramatic scene in much well-known art. And of course, you're pulling from dramatic scenes of close-ups on people. So I guess it's not that surprising that often the composition of a sports photo would echo or mirror in some way the composition of some famous piece of art. It just, the way that you do it, it almost seems miraculous. of some famous piece of art. It just, the way that you do it, it almost seems miraculous.

But I guess the subjects of much great art would map pretty well onto sports scenes, right? It's a similarly heightened moment of human figures doing things and being in action. It's all the same. Yeah, I mean, you'll get scenes of the lamentation and those happen all the time and in sort of sporting events um so those tend to be they're more like baseline at this point now so yeah when i can do the abstract ones when i can do ones that people would never have thought of in seeing it initially but then sort of do a post around that. I think

those are what keep me going, I guess. Do you find that you're particularly adept at pattern recognition in other ways, or even maybe prone to pareidolia, that tendency to see patterns in places where they don't exist, you know, to see a man on the moon, a face where there isn't a face. Do you often do things like this? Even before you started this account, did you notice this tendency in yourself?

I don't think so. I think this is just a very, if we say baseball is niche, then this is extremely niche. Just thing that has sort of just happened. I will say in kind of creating these, I do sort of catch myself sometimes being like, how did you do that? In terms of like memorizing, you know, artwork that I've seen and knowing parallels to pull, but it doesn't really manifest itself anywhere else in in my life so

and sometimes you won't have a specific image in mind immediately or even in your camera roll because you saw it in a museum and snapped a photo yourself but you'll just know something in that genre or something by this person seems like maybe it'll work and then you'll take that template and browse to find the right image right so it's not always like lightning strikes and and you know exactly you know inspiration tells you exactly which work to use sometimes it is that sometimes it's just like immediately knowing uh or knowing i've taken a photo of this and this this would work well sometimes it's recognizing the theme in art history uh and saying

you know this this could be you know the lamentation of christ and then sort of looking through paintings of the lamentation and seeing which matches but then yeah the ones that are the most fun uh to to build uh are the ones where it's like okay i think this is like a certain artist style um but i'm not quite sure you know which of their pieces like the the chihuly for example like i looked at at the photo of trey i was like wait a second like this reminds me of a chihuly i don't know which exact chihuly let me see if i can find you know a yellow slash orange Chihuly. And it sort of worked out. So it was less about, you know, knowing something immediately in mind and more just being like, oh, like that is a Chihuly. And I think that's kind of where I catch myself sometimes being like, how did you do that?

Like, how did you know that? But then getting that feeling, right, that sort of hit of dopamine of being able to draw from that and compare is why I keep doing posts. Yeah. And how often now that the account is pretty popular, do you get tips, whether it's explicit comparisons or just people sending you images or pieces of art that you're able to use in some way? Yeah. So people tag the account a lot in pictures of sports. I don't get a ton of people tagging in art photos. I do get people sending in comparisons. They tend not to be very good. Or they tend to be kind of just super well-known pieces of art. The Scream, for example. Everybody, every sporting event has that happen at some point.

But, I mean, I appreciate people sending things in. The tagging on sports photos is the most helpful just because I can't watch sports all the time. I do some for work and I do some for fun, but you know, I can't have eyes on everything. So yeah, there's like this nice little community now that sends stuff in. Yeah. Even just the fact that you can recall where to find the photos on your phone, because you have several thousand images that you have taken yourself and you have to actually dig through a folder to find one once you decide that you want to use it. So even just remembering where that is, that must be a task like a image recall task that is somewhat similar to just what you do with the account. Yeah, they're in one folder.

just what you do with the account. Yeah, they're in one folder. I have a few folders. Some are just like random clippings, but one main folder on my phone. And then they're all just sorted by upload date, which tends to almost directly coincide with like location. So they're sort of split by museum slash gallery that I took them at. And yeah, I should change that. Should become a lot more organized.

I just, I'm not. Yeah, well, it seems to be working for you. You have a, there's a method, there's a process here. And it seems like because it seems so miraculous and magical when you're able to come up with one of these comparisons, people assume often that you must have help other than friendly tipsters, but some sort of AI help, right? So your pinned tweet right now is my colleague at The Ringer, Roger Sherman, just

having a brain-exploding moment when he realized that you are not cheating, quote-unquote. You're not using AI of any kind to help you make these comparisons. So how often do you get that? I'd imagine that you get that often now just because AI is everywhere. It's in the ether. Everyone's talking about it constantly. But I guess it's also kind of a compliment because people assume that a mere human mind could not conjure these images. And so there must be some kind of computational help. Yeah, it happens all the time now. And I think when I shared that post from Roger,

a whole bunch of people responded and reached out and were like, wait a second, I've been following this whole time and it's actually just been you and not AI. So yeah, it is a compliment. It is both a compliment and gets a little frustrating or just frustrating that AI is a thing in general

that is seemingly going to take over everything and render us all obsolete. So every single time somebody writes in, like, oh, this is ai is there you know we don't believe you it's just like a very sobering uh sobering moment just in general for me right yeah have you even experimented to see if ai would be good at this or will you just not even cross that line so there's the google arts and culture app came out with that like art selfie feature where you'd like take a picture of your face and it would do like facial comparisons to yeah art

but no i haven't experimented with with anything i imagine you know i i worked with a lot of engineers in my my actual job and they're always telling me like, oh, you need to start tagging your photos, uh, and we'll throw them in a database and we'll do X, Y, and Z on top of it. And, uh, I was like, I don't really have time for that. And I don't think I need that. And I also think it would probably take a lot of, it would take a lot of work to create an AI to match these things. But I'm sure one day it'll come for us. Yeah. So you have in your Twitter bio now, no AI used in all caps. Just to answer all the questions, though, I'm sure very few people actually read that.

But you mentioned your day job. You work in sports and sports data at Sports Radar, not Sports Raider, that's your name, but Radar. And so is this just a sideline that is just fun for you? Do you have aspirations to build it up into anything else? And how much of your time does this occupy currently? Yeah, so very much just a hobby. currently yeah so very much just a hobby i guess i've been thinking about other ways to grow it even though i don't really know if i want to um i just for for fun i i like set up a shot

set up a shopify store with some some merch but i never i never like tweet about it or like mention i need to like once uh so that's just like sitting there but that was fun to to make a with some merch, but I never tweet about it or mention it. I think I did it once. So that's just sitting there, but that was fun to make a little store and set all that up. It kind of just kills my free time that I have, and a lot of the time I'm watching sports anyways, and sort of on Twitter anyways. We'll see how things change

if Twitter officially melts down, as it's been threatening to do for seemingly months now. But yeah, it's just, I don't know. It'd be fun to do it full time, I guess, but I love my actual job and spend a lot of time doing my, my actual job. Yeah. Can you watch sports now without some part of your brain constantly going,

is this anything just freeze frame? Is that something? Uh, no, it's, it's, it's ruined. It's ruined any, uh, any sports viewing that I, that I do now. I was with some, some friends, uh, for March madness. And I was just sitting there the entire time, just like making content. I'm like, can you just watch the games? I was like, no, I can't anymore. It's, it's, I need to do, even though I don't need to do this cause I got no, I have no obligation to, to anyone other than myself. But I guess it feels like I do now. But yeah, I mean,

I don't, I'm never going to like, I'm never going to have ads on the account. I'm much more into like the integrity of what it is versus some sort of money grab. Yeah, more art than commerce. But I was going to ask just because you're on social media and your portfolio is somewhat diversified and that you're on multiple platforms and maybe Instagram is even a more natural fit for a photo-based account in some ways. But you are, I guess, subject to the algorithm, subject to the whims of Elon. You never really know what's going to happen on these platforms that are kind of out of your control. So is that a frustrating experience to know that whether people are actually seeing your stuff, it's down to some decision made by someone who might just do something without much forethought or you never know whether things will survive that you have put all this labor and love into. Yeah. So in the current state, right, I don't I don't really care who sees and who doesn't see so long as it's the people that follow. So when it comes to manipulation of of an existing algorithm and like showing up on for you pages, I don't care about that. I care like I'll make content based on who already follows, but not on trying to get more followers. But the other side of it is right. I am nothing without the platform that I post to. because I had people say like,

you've got these followers on Twitter, how are they going to find you if Twitter goes away? I think Substack gives you people's email addresses for a newsletter, so I could do that. But I don't think it'd be, it wouldn't really be fun for me if Twitter disappeared because part of the fun of it is being able to like interact with people on Twitter. So if there's some sort of equivalent that comes up,

I think it would be great, but I don't know. It's I'm already on Twitter. And so I just do these to be part of that conversation. But if Twitter disappears, I mean, Instagram is more, it's a little more museumy and,

and meant for, for, you know, maybe a post a day. Um, but it's fun to fire them off rapid fire on Twitter during the day. So who knows?

Every day it seems like it's going to completely go away and then somehow we're still here. And on your website, artbuttmakersports.com, you do have some merch, but it's mostly text-based. And I was wondering, are there rights issues? If you wanted to make, let's say, a coffee table book, which would be wonderful, or just have some images emblazoned on something, could you do that? I mean, is most of the art, I assume, public domain,

but maybe the sports images aren't? What would be the complications there? Yeah, exactly. So most art that's, I want to say, older than 100 years or the artist has been deceased for 100 plus years is considered part of the public domain. You can do whatever you want with that. The sports images, you cannot. And I think there's multiple layers as well. Even if you get the editorial rights to some of the images, there's additional commercial rights, and then there's additional player likeness because you're dealing with athletes. So it's fairly complex. And yeah, I think part of, you know, if I were to do something like a coffee table book or, you know, make even just prints for sale, it's like that's crossing a bridge that once I cross it, I think it'd be great. But the inertia required to get me to that point, I need some pushing. Right. So lastly, I guess, if you were to, let's say there were no rights issues and you could just choose a greatest hits selection for a book or for merch, what would be on it? I was particularly wondering about any favorite baseball images you may have made. And I

know it's probably hard to cast your mind back over the years that you've been doing this and come up with individual ones. But what have been the most instrumental in the success of the account, I guess, would be one question. Which ones have gone the most viral or catapulted you to some new level? And then, I guess, are there others that maybe you're personally fond of, particularly of the baseball variety? It's all the dumb ones that end up blowing up the account. There was a, I think it was Jose Siri sliding into home plate that I paired with a Joan Miro that did really well.

I think that was from last year. I don't think it was anything special per se, but I remember that that one blew up. I mean, the Trey Turner one was awesome. Yeah, that's a great one. Oh, every year on the day that it happened, I think it was in August, the Noel and Ryan, Robin Ventura fight. I guess fights are usually two-sided, but I don't know.

What do you want to call that? There is a sculpture. I think it's called Child Playing with Goose. Like a cherub-looking kid choking out a duck or a goose. And every year I post the same one. And that does well and always makes me laugh. Every year on Bobby Bonilla Day, I do a special Bobby Bonilla one. So for the baseball ones, there have been a few like reoccurring ones that are fun.

So if you're listening, get ready for Bobby Bonilla Day and Nolan Ryan, Robin Ventura Day. Right, yeah. And what's been maybe the most popular of all time or one of the most popular or one of the ones that elevated you to a larger audience than you had had before? There's a famous picture of MJ called the Blue Dunk that I paired with a Clifford Still

image. And it's an abstract one. That one's my favorite, just like very visually pretty. And like, you can just kind of get it just by looking at it. But then it's got layers to it. That one's fun. At this point, I think I have like there's so many that I've done. And I don't know. It's it is like asking me to pick a like a favorite child or something. Yeah.

And I think if you if you ask on any given day, it probably changes. There's like the Western Kentucky mascot, Big Red, eating a cheerleader with Saturn devouring his son by Goya. That's a classic that always comes up during college football season. Do you get more people who aren't into art, but enjoy sports and say, this is great, I'm learning about art? Or do you get art people who aren't that into sports and say, this is great, I'm learning about sports? I guess, maybe there are just more people who are into sports in general, but which, which, I guess, which sub subgenre, which community kind of gets exposed to the other more so? Yeah, when it first started, I think I probably had a handle on the answer to that.

But now there are just like, there are so many people that follow that it's very hard to track. I keep doing it is because of the feedback that I get from folks on sort of both ends of the sports fandom and art fandom spectrum, where you'll get people that say, you know, I'm an art history professor and I, you know, hate sports, but I love this account and it's given me a greater appreciation for sports. And then people on the other side that huge sports junkie never been caught dead in a museum but you know this is has changed the way that i i view sports and hearing that and knowing kind of the it just gets people thinking is part of why i why i keep doing it well i hope you do to do it. It's brought me a lot of joy and entertainment and it will do the same for you, listener, if it has not already.

So go check it out and follow Art But Make It Sports on Instagram and Twitter, where it's at Art But Sports. You can also find the website, artbutmaketsports.com. We've been speaking to the mastermind behind it, LJ Rader. LJ, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. And yeah, send everybody, send in baseball pictures so that I can make art comparisons for them. All right, let me leave you with a past blast

followed by a few final thoughts. This is episode 1989, and so today's past blast comes from 1989 and from David Lewis, an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston. David writes, 1989, money ball before money ball. Well, Billy Bean was still playing in 1989. He didn't retire until after that year. He joined the A's the following year as a scout, although the A's won a World Series in 1989 under Billy Bean's mentor, Sandy Alderson. Back in those days, the Oakland A's actually spent some money. In fact, a few years later, 1991, the Oakland A's had the highest payroll in the league.

In both leagues, for that matter. But I'm just riffing here. This is not actually about the A's or Moneyball, though it is related. So let's continue with David's words. In 1989, Lawrence Hadley, a University of Dayton professor, was developing a new analytical approach to baseball. An April 13th, 1989 Dayton Daily News article told the story of Hadley, who, along with econometrician Elizabeth Gustafson, developed a complicated equation that could predict player salaries. Hadley, a lifelong baseball fan, was called something of a Nolan Ryan with numbers by columnist Tom Archdeacon. And the pitch he now serves up, continued Archdeacon, and the pitch he now serves up,

continued Archdeacon, matches performance against payroll. Hadley and Gustafson's findings quantified how much statistical performance impacted a player's salary. According to their equations, if a player performed above their career average in a statistical category, they could expect a pay increase of, and this is, I believe, for free agents in their walk year, $4,291 for each home run above their career average, $2,951 for each win, $890 for each save, $791 for a.01 improvement in ERA, and $409 for each strikeout. Archdeacon reported that Hadley had sent the research to a number of major league ball clubs and that two unnamed teams were interested in using his work during contract negotiations. Perhaps the A's were one of them. When asked about the inspiration for his work, Hadley said, I thought I could help baseball fans become more familiar with salaries. I know a lot of people have trouble sympathizing with players when they see the average salary for

hitters is almost $550,000 and just shy of $500,000 for pitchers. The article concludes with the thought many obsessive fans must have had once or twice relaying the stories of his research. Hadley asked Archdeacon, damn, that makes me sound like a real dork, doesn't it? Reassuringly, for all of us who've spent too much time going down a baseball research rabbit hole, Archdeacon dissented, writing, not really the way Lawrence Hadley can mix the lingo of logarithms with his rhapsody on the long ball. You don't see a dork, just a diehard baseball fan who happens David notes that the article briefly mentions that Hadley would be presenting his research at the 1989 Sabre Convention, but the Sabre Convention history webpage does not mention him and neither does the convention journal from that year. I reached out to past Past Blast consultant Jacob Pumrenke to see if he might know anything additional about Hadley or his research. Luckily for us, he was able to track down the paper Hadley presented,

linked on the show page for the podcast. Jacob also sent another couple papers that Hadley and Gustafson wrote in the early 90s, which follow up on their additional research. There's one from the Baseball Research Journal in 1993 called An Alternative to Salary Arbitration in Major League Baseball, a Modest Proposal. Then there's one from the same journal, 1992, titled Who Would Be the Highest Paid Baseball Player? One way to answer the question, how much would the babe be worth today? Jacob says that Hadley did continue to do work on baseball salaries and economics, publishing various articles in the Baseball Research Journal and presenting at multiple Sabre conventions until his death in 2007. I did go back and look at the 1989 paper, The Determinants of Salaries for Major League

Baseball Players. And in the conclusions, he writes, the predicted salaries generated from my earnings equations represent a statistical method for presenting an analytical overview of the entire salary process. I believe that this overview includes most of the important aspects of the salary process, but no statistical method can encompass all aspects of a real-world market process. Missing from my equations are intangible and or immeasurable factors like team leadership, the ability of a veteran to instruct young players, the durability of a player, a player's mental toughness, his ability to execute in some of the more subtle aspects of the game, for example, sacrifices and moving base runners, and or the excitement associated with a certain

player's style that brings fans to the ballpark. It should be noted that my equations explain 81% of the variance of hitter salaries and 88% of the variance of pitcher salaries. This is an excellent result by statistical and economic standards, but a small portion of the variance of hitter salaries and 88% of the variance of pitcher salaries. This is an excellent result by statistical and economic standards, but a small portion of the process remains unaccounted for by my equations. Therefore, it is not surprising that some players are paid salaries that are very different from their predicted salary. On the other hand, severe departures from a player's predicted salary, especially in the upward direction, should lead owners to carefully examine the reasons for such salaries. He goes on to talk about some quote unquote underpaid and overpaid players whose salaries fall short of or exceed the predictions of his model. listed above, still an owner or fan can legitimately question whether Ozzie Smith is worth $1,425,347

more than his predicted salary, or whether Rick Sutcliffe is worth $1,133,036 more than his predicted salary. So it's funny, or maybe not so funny, how quickly statistical analyses became applied to salaries and to people playing GM and deciding who was overpaid. Before this, Bill James was involved in the salary arbitration process as a consultant. So there was barely a time when sabermetrics was just for fun and for learning about baseball. Pretty quickly, the math gets applied to economics too. And in some cases, that could have a suppressive effect on salaries, at least for certain kinds of players.

It's easy to go from developing a model to say how players are paid to talking about who's overpaid. Then again, I'm sure as soon as free agency started and player salary figures became public, fans would have talked about what players were quote-unquote worth and whether they were overpaid with or without any solid statistical grounding. All right, before I go, a couple quick observations. One more material for our long-running bit here about broadcasters mispronouncing names. We talked about another Taylor Ward screw-up last week, but we have a new entry to the genre, also Angels-related. We've got a mix-up between Tucker Davidson and Tyler Anderson. Here's a clip from the Angels radio

broadcast on Sunday. Yeah, Shohei goes six innings. Yesterday, Patrick Sandoval, five, but they had to piggyback that. And Tyler. I almost called Tucker Davidson, Tyler Davidson. But they had to piggyback those two guys yesterday and obviously a fantastic job by Tyler Davidson. But they had to piggyback those two guys yesterday, and obviously a fantastic job by Tyler Anderson. And it's gone beyond the Angels. Here's another clip from the Tigers radio broadcast the day before,

featuring Spencer Torkelson and Spencer Turnbull. To review the repertoire of pitches, this is a guy pitches off the fastball. It's mostly fastball slider for Spencer Torkelson with kind of the occasional curve and change. Change up in the nerd and Spencer Turnbull is in big trouble here in the first inning. I'm surprised we weren't getting reports about Torkelson-Turnbull screw-ups last year, but Turnbull was hurt last year, so I guess they didn't overlap on the active roster. So strap in, brace yourselves. We might be hearing more Turnbull-Torkelson screw-ups this season. Both of those clips were slightly edited, by the way, just to trim out some dead air.

Get to the good stuff. Also, in another recurring bit that we've all but abandoned because it recurred so often that it lost its appeal, players predicting things. We always hear about successful predictions. We rarely hear about unsuccessful predictions. We rarely hear about unsuccessful predictions, which gives us the sense that players are all soothsayers and prescient. We stopped even reporting most of these because there are just so many examples, but this one was interesting. This was from April 1st, quoting from the MLB.com story here.

The Braves started the game with Ronald Acuna Jr. and Matt Olson hitting back-to-back homers, and the quote goes, just so you know, we called it in batting practice, Acuna said through an interpreter. Orlando Arcea was the first to say, I think today is the day we're going to get our first back-to-back home runs. Told of this, Olson said, I don't know, he might have made that up, which was interesting to me. Now, this was April Fool's Day, but it does suggest that if Olson thought this might have been made up, that perhaps a high percentage of the supposedly successful predictions are, in fact, fabricated after the fact. However, the story says, when asked, Arcia confirmed he predicted that Acuna and Olsen

would go back-to-back in the first inning. Now, of course, he might have made up that confirmation. Who knows? This was the seventh instance of back-to-back homers to begin a game in Braves history. The first since 2018 when Acuna was also involved. Anyway, MLB.com reports, you decide. But thanks to the tipsters who alerted us to those name mix-ups and also to that prediction. At Shortstoppin on Twitter, Patreon supporter Braxton, and Bailey Freeman of Foolish Baseball. Also, thanks to those of you who offered me condolences on Trey Turner being mic'd up live on ESPN during a Phillies Rangers game. As longtime listeners and readers know, this is a peeve of mine. I'm all for players being mic'd up in exhibitions, spring training, all-star game. Give me more.

Can't get enough of it. But in postseason games, Shudder, or even regular season games, it gets my goat. And I think that's even more true in the pitch clock era because there's just a lot less time for chatter. And Trey Turner is playing shortstop in this game. One problem I have with it is that they always ask the most generic questions. What was free agency like? What was the WBC like? So you rarely get any great insight into what's going through a player's mind as they're in a game.

What are they picking up on? Some of that advanced scouting stuff that we were talking about earlier. I'd love that. We've gotten some of that in all-star games, say when Alec Manoa is mic'd up or Jose Trevino and we're getting insight into pitch calls. That's great. But these general kind of talk show type questions while a game's going on? Come on. Let the man play.

Let's not make the game seem like a sideshow. Turner was trailing off before every pitch because he's getting into the mode where he's ready to field. Just makes me uncomfortable. Obviously, he's not doing it against his will and he's a personable sort, but make up someone who's on the bench if you must make someone up. The reason to do it is, hey, this guy's actually on the field. He's in the game and he's talking to us. But it generally doesn't lead to entertaining talk,

and it does seem to diminish the competitive aspects of things, at least to me. But maybe I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to this. I was just sorry to see that this was not something that the pitch clock killed. Lastly, maybe the most entertaining game of the season thus far, at least the most entertaining ending, was the Orioles-Red Sox game on Saturday. Orioles have been fun and dynamic. They've also allowed a lot of runs. And on Saturday, they lost just a killer game to Boston. 9-8 on a walk-off in heartbreaking, embarrassing fashion. Because with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and the Orioles up by one and no one on base,

Masataka Yoshida lifted a lazy fly ball to left and Ryan McKenna out there just muffed it. McKenna's muff. Just an easy play, clanked off his glove, and then the next batter, Adam Duvall, took Felix Batista deep for a walk-off two-run homer, which was incredible because the broadcaster was even saying, like, he hits a home run here mckenna's gonna feel lousy and i'm sure he did oh my the red sox have life mckenna dropped it i was gonna say twilight so you might not see it but that's not even twilight he just dropped it oh boy you gotta be kidding me this is a home run after this this is one that could just break you down. It was actually the second straight game in which Batista was on the mound and Yoshida

was up and was in line to make the last out. But then there was a fielding error and Duvall came up. On opening day, Duvall struck out against Batista. On Saturday, he took Batista deep. This is notable because Duvall ended up with one of the highest single game win probability added scores for a batter ever. 1.259. So he was worth more than a win himself in win probability added. Because Duvall had hit a home run earlier in the game, a two run shot, and he also hit a double that scored a run.

So he was just a one man wrecking crew in this game. No wonder he was named AL Player of the Week. So he is seventh all time, according to Stathead, in single-game WPA for a batter, but he's second all-time in a non-extra innings game. So the highest WPA of all time, we've talked about the legendary Art Shamsky game in 1966. Three plate appearances, three homers. Then there was a Brandon Crawford game in 2016. That was a 14-inning

game. The Shamsky game was a 13-inning game, although he wasn't in the whole game. I'll link to the list, but the only non-extra inning game that produced a higher batter WPA, just barely, 1.287 to 1.259, according to Baseball Reference, Jim Pagliaroni, September 21st, 1965, Mets versus Pirates, and Pagliaroni playing for the Pirates. He walked in the second inning. He singled in the fourth. He struck out in the fifth. He singled in two runs in the bottom of the seventh when the Pirates were down four to three. And then he came up bottom of the ninth, Pirates behind four to five, and he hit a two-run walk-off. So Adam Duvall, second to Pagliaroni. That is historic. And I asked frequent stat blast consultant Ryan Nelson to look for comps to the

McKenna mistake. And he found that there are 182,169 games with play by play data. Of those 19,386 were walk offs. 8,151 of those were walk offs with two outs. This includes both plays where there were already two outs when the winning play occurred, as well as games where the second out was made during the winning play, but not the third. Of those 8,151, 298 walk-offs were immediately preceded by an error. So that's about 0.15% of games. However, in some of those, the play preceding the walk-off was an error, but never really had a chance to end the game. Maybe it just allowed the runners to advance an extra base. So Ryan found that of those 298, only 173 are the McKenna type of game that we're looking

for. 162 fielding or throwing errors on balls in play that could have ended the game. 10 dropped foul flies or pop-ups that could have ended the game. And one catcher's interference that could have ended the game, and one catcher's interference that could have ended the game, all of which were immediately followed by a walk-off, although the catcher's interference was with one strike. So Ryan said, I suppose the game wouldn't have ended on that pitch. Anyway, I will link to a complete list of the McKenna games, the errors on plays that would have ended the game, but instead prolonged it just long enough for there to be a walk-off immediately after.

McKenna can console himself. He has plenty of company in that club. Quick PSA from listener and Patreon supporter John, who writes, It's that time of year again when DC and Baltimore Effectively Wild fans gather for their annual Except for 2020 meetup at the Bowie Bay Sox. This is Sunday, April 16th. There's a 1 p.m. first pitch.

Costs $12 if you get the tickets from John, or $20 day of from the box office. They'll be on the third base side, and John is planning to raffle off a D.L. Hall bobblehead and maybe other Orioles-related stuff. I will link to the Facebook event for the fifth annual meetup at Prince George's Stadium. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast

going, help us stay ad-free, and get themselves access to some perks. Langendorfer, Lightpole, Shane Lance, Dylan McQuirt, and Kyron Savodny, thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, as well as access to monthly bonus podcasts, playoff live streams, discounts on merch and ad-free Fangraphs memberships, and much, much more. Patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. We will know that that message comes from a Patreon supporter.

Anyone can contact us via email at podcast at fancrafts.com. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. And you can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EW pod and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. And thanks to the composers and recorders of today's theme songs, all three of them. The intro song was by Justin Peters, who's a musician based in Chicago. He also plays in a baseball themed steel drum band called Caught Stealin'. Perfect name, no notes. The interstitial theme came from Xavier LeBlanc,

who said he came up with the lyrics while he was high and he stands by them and the outro that you're about to hear is by an artist who wants to be known as beat writer this one was a little long for an intro so we'll have it play us out you can submit your theme songs to podcast at fangraphs.com and meg and i will be back with another episode a little later this week talk to you then effectively wild effectively styled distilled over chilled beats effectively mild follow the plot samson in his garage bed put the reverb at 20 in his menage and after 2000 episodes we got more inside jokes than carrot tops prop box before he got yoked. Lab League, Banging Ski, Planted Trees, and Trampolines. Minor League Free Agent Drafts, Stat Blasts, and Pass Blasts. Minimum Inning,

Hall of Fame Donation Shaming, Tyler Wade and Taylor Ward, The Rot Slaw to Rigor Mortis. Answer a couple of emails. Do a play index. Call Ned Garver, Eddie Robinson, Johnny O'Brien, Ron Teasley, Charlie Maxwell, Bobby Shantz, Kiki Hernandez shit his pants Dilly, I'ma make a swear, too late, fuck it, no one cares Chris Davis 247 tattoos are the new mnemonics Scott Boris nautical analogies are tragedies, keep them honest Vroom vroom, here's your primer I'm Beef Boys, Baseball's in, Roger Angel and Super Pretzels

Williams asked to deal in Mike Trout Hypotheticals, waiting for the perfect bat from a volcanic eruption. Ladies and gentlemen, the Effectively Wild introduction.