Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1990: Week 1 Non-Overreactions

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about whether Ben should apply for a full-time job covering Shohei Ohtani, MLB seeking a pitch-clock sponsor, the brilliance of Sandy Alcantara, clock violations leading to ejections, post-Opening Day call-ups for top prospects (most notably Grayson Rodriguez), Alcantara compared to Jacob deGrom, the feud between Tyler O’Neill and Oli […]

Does baseball look the same to you as it does to me? When we look at baseball, how much do we see? Well, the curveballs bend and the home runs fly More to the game than meets the eye To get the stats compiled and the stories filed Fans on the internet might get riled Hello and welcome to episode 1990 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrafts presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, rejoined by Meg Rowley of Fangrafts. Hello, Meg. Welcome back.

Hello. and Lindbergh of The Ringer, rejoined by Meg Rowley of FanCrafts. Hello, Meg. Welcome back. Hello. So I've had a great run at The Ringer, but I think it may be time to move on. I have discovered a potentially greener pasture because... I know what this is. Yeah. You had me going for a second. Well, I mean, am I serious? Am I joking? I don't know. But I was browsing MLB trade rumors this morning, as one does. And what did I see but a headline about a job listing that called out to me, MLBTR seeking a Shohei Otani-focused writer. I don't know that I have ever felt more seen and desired than when I saw this. I mean,

what am I if not a Shohei Otani-focused writer? Shohei Otani-focused podcaster, I suppose. But there's definitely a Shohei Otani focus of some sort. So I've not yet applied, but it's pretty appealing. Just I'll Shohei all the time. It would be like me and the many Japanese media members who follow him around everywhere and also me. The bad news for you, Ben, is that they are seeking someone who speaks fluent Japanese. They are, yeah. My understanding is that does not describe you. But maybe I'm wrong. Not yet.

I could learn. It's not an easy language for an English speaker to learn. But I could do it. I mean, I'm hoping that they would, you know, consider my holistic package, you know, just my other many fine qualities that they'll take those into account. Because, you know, you put desired qualities in any job listing, and then sometimes you're willing to compromise. You know, everything's negotiable. If they don't find the perfect candidate or they decide that I'm perfect in some other ways, maybe there could be some accommodations. It's certainly possible. I was going to ask,

would you really be able to write about him all the time? And I realized before I even said it how silly a question that was. Yeah. I mean, I definitely have the will, I think, and the capacity. And as for the outlet, I mean, there was a time in 2021, which at least up until that point was peak Otani. And it was like, oh, it's really happening and the dreams are coming true. I did at one point pitch just a Shohei Otani recurring column, like a weekly, just what did Shohei Otani do this week? And I think at the time I was not yet an editor at the Ringer then. Now I am an editor. So maybe I could just rubber stamp that through myself.

Yeah, greenlight your own column. Back then, I mean, the Rigger is a very pro-Ohtani outlet. It's not that I've ever been discouraged from writing about Ohtani, as you might glean from seeing how many times I've written about Ohtani. But weekly coverage at that point, I think, was seen as perhaps a bridge too far. Maybe a touch. Yeah. But these days, who knows? So I'm keeping my eye on this. And it's funny that you mentioned, yeah, the first qualification, Maybe a touch. Live blog all of Otani's remaining starts as a pitcher this season. Well, I don't do a whole lot of live blogging, but I mean, I watch all of his starts, so I might as well live blog them, I guess, right? Now, the next one, though you may be a fan of Otani, you will need to write objectively about him. It's challenging, right?

I posted this in Ringer Slack, and I said, it's been nice working with you all. And the first response was from my pal, Zach Krim, who posted that qualification, the need to be objective, and said, it time, so I don't see the issue. I can be pro-Ohtani without being biased. I mean, I might be besotted, but that doesn't mean I'm necessarily biased. Objective journalism about Ohtani is pointing out how incredible and unique he is, right? I mean, I'd be doing a disservice to my readers and listeners if I did anything less. So I don't know that I've said anything that was necessarily not true. You know, I can back up my admiration for the man. I think you worry a little bit about how horny some of it might come off as, you know, just like if you're thinking about things that, know as an editor sometimes you go into a piece

a writer has said hey i don't know how this section worked can you like pay particular attention there right so you kind of go in with your with a flag raise to be like okay i gotta pay particular attention to that spot and make sure that you know the the writer has sort of accomplished what they wanted to you know i would go in to any piece you wrote about Otani being like, is this uncomfortably horny? Is it uncomfortable? So I would worry about that. But you're right. I think we have progressed in our understanding of sort of what bias means as journalists, right?

We don't have a pinched, narrow understanding of it. Yeah. There's no both sides to Shohei Ohtani. I mean, there is in the sense that he's a two-way player, but beyond that, unless you're, you know, Chris Russo ranting about how it's not a big deal that Ohtani struck out Trout, like, is there anyone who's like, eh, you know, like overrated, you know, at this point, I think that chorus kind of died down to the extent that it ever existed. Yeah, he did say that. That was silly. Yeah, yeah.

But anyway, writing experience is necessary. Online writing experience is preferred. All right. Check in, check. Yeah. I think attention to detail, probably over attention to detail in my case, if anything. So I think I've got that covered. Strong knowledge of Otani's history.

Yeah, I think so. Ability to craft intelligent, well-written posts, analyzing and contextualizing Otani news quickly and concisely. Concisely might be a problem. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because, you know, in some ways you'd have to return to like your blog roots. Right. But you'd also, you'd need to self-edit. You'd need to hem in a little bit. And, you know, that might...

It might be easier, though, if I'm exclusively covering Shohei Otani. Right. Like, as it is, you know, I need to keep my powder dry until one of my big Shohei Otani pieces, and then it tends to be quite long and comprehensive. But if I were writing very regularly, if I were just full-time on the Otani beat, then I think probably each individual post could be somewhat more concise. Yeah, yeah. I think that that's a good approach. I worry, though, Ben, I know you write about Otani now, and we certainly talk about him on the podcast occasionally but i i wouldn't want to rob you of your your wonderment you know joy i i know that

in terms of you know if we were to sort of analyze um the the share of the baseball part of your portfolio at the ringer that he occupies. Pretty profound at this point. But you write about other things, right? They keep making Star Wars. Yeah, they do. So many. I know you talked about Mario, I saw. You were talking about Mario.

I was. Ben, I just want you to tell me it's bad so that I can move on and be satisfied. Is it bad? It's not bad. Oh, but Chris Pratt is bad, right? You know. Just give me this. Just give it to me.

Just give me it. He's not good. He didn't enhance my enjoyment of the film. All right, fine. But he didn't dramatically detract from it either. Did he do a voice? Sort of. Oh, see, look, I can say this. Italians, we're fine.

We're fine. That feels racist. Anyway, so don't... Chris? Morgan? The traditional Charles Martinet Mario, also not Italian. I know. So, you know, the legacy of Italian representation when it comes to voicing. But it's

different now. We're in a... Yeah, it's 2023. Come on. Yeah a- Yeah, it's 2023. Come on. Yeah, in the year of our Lord. Come on. Anyway, so you write about other stuff, you know, all of the things. The degree to which The Mandalorian dictates our podcast schedule sometimes of the year, you know, cannot be overstated, right? So you've got other responsibilities.

And I worry that if you were full-time Otani, that you'd start to develop an emotional remove. Yeah, it'd become a job. Right. And he brings you so much joy, Ben. He brings such a light to your life that I would hate for you to lose that because it's a special thing, particularly since you don't feel any sort of real kinship to a team. Right. You've got to maintain your special spot for your dudes.

Yep. You're right. You make a good point there. Yeah. I don't want you to lose the little, you know, the twinkle, the spark. Yeah. Okay. Maybe I'll just keep it for fun, even though it's part of my job as it is.

But it's a fun part of my job. Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. I mean, as teams do at the trade deadline, you know, no one's untouchable. Right. You'll evaluate. Yeah.

I'll listen to offers. Right. You know. but perhaps i will not seek one out anyway if i do would you provide a reference for me yeah yeah okay yeah ben won't shut up about shohei please hire him so he has another outlet for these thoughts and feelings another outlet though like if you were to make such a move, we'd keep podcasting, right? I think so, yeah. Okay. I don't know whether the Otani content on Effectively Wild would be reduced or only increase because it would be my job to think about Otani full time.

On the other hand, I would get it out of my system somewhere else. Yeah, yeah. Much to consider. Much to consider, yeah. All right. So here's something to consider that I saw just before we started recording. MLB is looking for a sponsor for the pitch clock. Right, yeah.

Which is not surprising in any way. I mean, MLB is looking for a sponsor for everything. Sometimes multiple sponsors for the same thing. Yeah, if anything, it's surprising that they didn't just come into the season with one already secured. Yeah, right. But what is striking about it is that this story I'm reading at Front Office Sports is talking about just the great potential here, how lucrative this could be. Right. Because the pitch clock is so celebrated and everyone loves the pitch clock and I love the pitch clock too. But it's amazing that we've gone from so much resistance, so many people saying it's the sport without a clock. You

can't have a pitch clock. It's not going to be baseball anymore. And I'm sure there are still isolated pockets of resistance out there. There are. But the fact that almost everyone seemingly has been sold on this and won over so quickly. Yeah. I mean, maybe the fact that they were not selling the sponsorship prior to the season is because they were worried that there wouldn't be that much interest. Or they thought once people see it in action and it is popular and it works. That's when we can really cash in. Yeah, exactly.

But it's amazing because I just wrote about the history of the pitch clock, which I've talked about on the podcast before, and the fact that, look, pitch timer technology is not cutting edge. Right, not new. No, it's been used in a few MLB games and in a more concerted way at various minor league levels back in the 60s. The 60s was big for pitch clocks, and they kind of caught on but not fully, and there was resistance. And admittedly, there were some technical difficulties back then.

That was quite some time ago. But really, like, we could have had the pitch clock all this time. I mean, we could have had the pitch clock for the past 60 years. You know, they've had the shot clock in the NBA since the 50s. Like, we could have perfected the pitch clock in MLB, and perhaps the need was not as acute as it became in recent years. But we could have had this all along. It would have been so routine. We would not be talking about the pitch clock.

There would have been a sponsor for the pitch clock decades ago. I was struck by that because the story mentions that, say, Timex maybe could be a sponsor for the pitch clock. say Timex maybe could be a sponsor for the pitch clock. And Timex was the original designer of the original pitch clock, according to my research back in 1962 with the National Baseball Congress. I mean, it would kind of bring things full circle if Timex sponsored the pitch clock now after really originating the pitch clock, which no one really remembers. But, you know, they're talking about, oh, Timex and Omega and Rolex, they could be the official pitch clock sponsor. And I don't know what form that would take if it would just be a verbal, you know, they're the official

timekeeper of MLB or whatever, or whether there would be a visual here, like this story mentions that maybe the brand, the logo would be visible behind the batter or something. I don't know how intrusive it would be. But it's just, it's funny that, again, like the technology was there. They did not just crack the code of how do we have a countdown clock that counts down from 20. We didn't need StatCast to figure that out. So we could have had this all log and people were dragging their feet and saying, this will be the sign of the apocalypse and we can't have this in baseball. And nope, you institute it. I mean, even over the past, you know, since the pitch clock renaissance, it's it kind of came out of mothballs and began to be introduced ever so slowly and painstakingly level by level college and this minor league level and that minor league level and the Atlantic League and spring training. And we'll just, you know, have every player be the boiling frog. And next thing they know, there will be a pitch clock and they won't mind. And then you put it

into practice in a standardized way that's actually enforced. And pretty much everyone is like, yeah, okay, this is good. We like this. It just, it makes you wonder how many other potential solutions to whatever ails baseball or is said to ail baseball or, you know, the world at large are out there already just waiting to be implemented and haven't been just out of inertia and adherence to tradition. And we could snap our fingers tomorrow, you know, whether it's some sort of restriction on active pitcher limits or moving the mound back or whatever. Like, some of that's more complicated than I think the pitch clock is, and you could

debate what the effects would be. But it's just striking to me that, again, it's not like there's just some new innovation where it's like, finally, we figured out how to make a pitch clock work. It's just, no, we finally decided to do it. We just did it. And actually stuck to it and pressured the players into doing it, admittedly, because understandably, I think they didn't want to be hurried along. But it just has worked sort of seamlessly,

acknowledging how long and careful the road was to this point. Yeah. long and careful the road was to this point. Yeah. I'm a little surprised that, and I'm perhaps saying this mostly because I'm staring at my Apple Watch as I say this, as not sponsored content. I'm a little surprised that they didn't turn to their broadcast partner, Apple, and have it just be like baseball's Apple Watch, and then they have brand integration. Yeah. Although I guess there is some history of sign-stealing baggage associated with smart

watches. But there's all kinds of class baggage associated with Rolex. True, I guess. I don't think MLB cares about that as long as the check's clear. I don't think MLB cares about that as long as the check's clear. It could be a phantom company that is like vaporware and they'll accept the sponsorship. Or you can be some luxury brand and they'll accept the sponsorship. Whoever the highest bidder is, I think they're probably okay with it. I bet they'll want to class it up, though.

I bet they'll want to point to, what's the watch that James Bond wears? Oh, right. An Amiga? Yeah, Omega, right? Omega. want to point to what's the watch that james bond wears uh oh right uh the uh an amiga yeah omega right omega that's yeah that's a video game console but is it really yeah an old one or a personal computer i guess yes i have weird esoteric knowledge but not so much when it comes to watches but but omega is mentioned as one of the potential sponsors in this story. Is it? I mean, it sounds like they're just naming watch companies. Sure. So I could do that too, maybe.

I mean, we could do, what are the ones that have a little calculator on the face? Yeah, can we get the Pitch Timer sponsored by G-Shock? Yeah. People still, I guess that's a Casio sub brand. I don't know. G-Shock was big when I was wearing watches in, you know, the 90s or the early 2000s. And I have not worn a watch since. G-Shock watch.

They're still around, you know. I don't know if they've come back around like every fashion does after 20 years or so, but I wouldn't be surprised. I have seen, maybe they're G-shocks. I have seen watches advertised to me on Instagram that are Shark Week themed. I really am dying to know what weird click of things I did to find that. I mean, I'm a Shark Week proponent, but this is what happens when I don't watch baseball for like six days because I'm dealing with family nonsense. I'm a Shark Week proponent, but this is what happens when I don't watch baseball for like six days because I'm dealing with family nonsense. I'm like, what happened in baseball, by the way? Was there any?

Who was winning? Oh, the Mariners have not been winning. Here I was being sassy about those Astros. And then, you know what? The Mariners were like. They encountered Shohei Otani this week, and that did not go well for them. I mean, it went okay. It did not go terribly.

Yeah. Could have gone worse. It goes worse for other teams sometimes. But I was not live blogging that one. But yeah, they have a pitch clock now in baseball. What? As you may have seen. Yeah, in fact, they're looking for sponsors. And not just national MLB level sponsors, but also team local sponsors. So we can have official Yankees sponsor of the Pitch Clock, official

Guardian sponsor of the Pitch Clock. It's just a fertile field. I mean, there will be much money made by the Pitch Clock sponsorships. Can't wait until it's no longer pure, but it becomes co-opted into capitalism. It's interesting, though, because I mean, I guess it will get mentioned on the broadcast, but you don't get logo placement, right? Because the whole idea is that we're not supposed to see them. True. Right. So I don't know if it would come with a billboard or one of those digital displays. Yeah. One of those superimposed floating disembodied mound images. I don't know. Ooh, probably. Yeah. Probably.

A lot of ways we could go with this. Can't wait to see. Yeah. I'm just, I'm glad it's been a success so that people want to sponsor it, even though that's not the primary reason why I am happy that it's been a success. Yeah.

So, and I also wonder, like, I guess this is not a case where, like, will the players get a cut of this? I guess they would get a cut of the pitch clock revenue, right? Like this would be. Yeah, I don't know. One would hope because they have been forced to accommodate the pitch clock and go along with it. Is that consistent with your experience of baseball money in the past, Ben? Well, yeah.

I mean, local revenues, I don't know. But owners and teams, they do try to carve out their little corners of revenue that are not baseball-related. But in this case, I don't know that you can argue that. Quite baseball-related. It does certainly seem intimately connected to the baseball. But it's going great, except for occasionally, like we have had some meltdowns and blowups, right? Yeah, Manny Machado has not been happy.

Yeah, we had Manny Machado getting ejected over a pitch clock violation. To be clear, I think he got ejected because he called the home plate umpire a douchebag. Well, yeah, I guess indirectly. I think the douchebag was what sealed it for Manny. Yeah, there's that. See, I did watch some baseball. Yeah, and it's not just that they're mad about the clock counting down.

It's that sometimes they'll ask for time and not be granted it. Right. Which they're being a little less lenient when it comes to granting time now. And so you can't just assume that you will be granted time when you request it, especially if you request it late. So yeah, there've been some blow ups and that's not necessarily a bad thing because we want some theater. Now, of course, if you have arguments, then I guess that causes a delay of

game, which would be what you don't want when you implement a pitch clock. Tim Anderson also got ejected. Oh, did he? Yeah, he was asking for a timeout. He didn't get it. And then he stepped out of the box anyway and then was like nowhere near the plate when strike three was thrown. And he was not pleased about that. And, you know, he claimed he was quick pitched and then Logan Webb was pitching and he said he thought Anderson was yelling at him, not at the umpire. And he defended not surprising, I guess, because every time we make something technological

and more objective where you'd think, okay, you can't argue this anymore because how can you argue with a clock? But as you have noted, players will argue with robot umps, right? I mean, you can argue with anything, whether or not it is sentient, whether it is just a machine,

you can still rage against it. And the person who is in the position of applying the machine's will and expressing that are not granting time. So even though we might sort of standardize this stuff and ostensibly take it out of the umpire's hands, that doesn't mean that umpires won't get yelled at and that they will not respond in kind. Yeah, I think that quite often those moments, they're not about, like, they're not rational, right? They're an expression of frustration. You're venting the spleen. And so the thing you're going for is the satisfaction of the emotional release. It's not like I'm going to make my case and then the judge will rule and I will prevail.

I doubt if you ask any of these guys that they're like optimistic that griping is going to change the result of the call or what have you, but it can feel nice. And since it's really about one's own emotional satisfaction, the sentience of the thing you're yelling at is, you know, it's kind of neither here nor there. In some ways, I would rather that they yell at the clock because the clock doesn't have feelings. It just has a potential sponsor. So, you know, there are ways in which it might end up being better for everyone's emotional well-being. But since the umps are viewed as the enforcers of the clock, I imagine they're going to get their fair share of being called douchebags, you know? They're going to be called douchebags.

And it's not a nice word. There are worse words that can be used. I imagine many of which would also get you ejected. Yeah. It comes with the territory. Always has. Always will. Plus, some players just take it in stride. Shohei Otani, for instance, called for pitch block violations as a pitcher and as a hitter in the same game by fellow effectively wild hero Pat Hoberg of last year's Umpire Perfect Game. Instead of getting mad, he just had a nice discussion with hoberg and then he gave us yet another viral moment by reaching into hoberg's ball bag teehee to pick out a ball and toss it to mariners pitcher chris flexin just to be polite because he was holding up hoberg so

shohei otani what a delight someone should really just blog about that guy as a full-time job anyway you could just forego a pitch clock and just have Sandy Alcantara pitch every game. Oh my goodness. That would probably achieve the same sort of result. Like the tandem effort of Sandy Alcantara plus pitch clock yielded a hour and 57 minute game. And to be clear, Kenta Maeda in his return to the major league mound, he pitched well too until he was forced to leave with some soreness or something, but he contributed to the leave with some soreness or something. But he contributed to the quick pace. But Sandy Alcantara is amazing.

I don't know that he will have as great a season this year as he did last year, although he's certainly off to as great a start. He's someone who defied some of the defense independent stats to some extent. I mean, you know, he fared well via whatever war you use. But just because he's not a big strikeout guy, you might think that what he did last year is a little less repeatable. Then again, you watch him pitch and all of his pitches are so good. Yeah. And he mixes them so well that you kind of think maybe he could keep doing this and maybe it could be a fit beating sort of situation at least for a little while. And it's just fun to watch him work and it's economical.

And with the pitch clock, it's extra economical. And it's just it's amazing that he did this so early in the season, too, which is something Joe Sheehan pointed out in his newsletter that he did this. It took him only 100 pitches. So it was almost a Maddox, right? Against the Twins lineup. And he was doing this so early in the season when not only is it extremely rare

for anyone to pitch a shutout or a complete game for that matter. I think he accounted for like a sixth of the complete games thrown in baseball last year himself. He did not throw a sixth of the innings, even though he threw a lot of innings by the standards of today, but extremely disproportionate representation there. And to do it early in the season when pitchers generally are not built up and they don't have super long leashes, and he didn't have super long leashes.

And he didn't have to have a long leash because he did it in 100 pitches, right? But Joe found that his shutout was the earliest by both date and season day since 2018 when Jose Barrios threw one just to show how times have changed since then. Not as strong a start to the season for Jose Barrios. Since then, not as strong a start to the season for Jose Barrios. But to do it this early in the season is extremely impressive because it's rare for guys to go deep even by contemporary standards in their first start of the season. And he's just like, nope, I'm in midseason form. I will pick up where I left off last year. Well, and I think, you know, one of the things that I really appreciate about his game is that he is this really fun mix of things, some of which we don't see anymore, right? You're right that he is often incredibly efficient, but he does pitch at volume, right? Like he, you know, throws a bunch of innings, which is fun to see. He throws a bunch of innings in every start he throws. He goes deep

into games, but he's not just a volume guy. Like you look at the quality of his pitches and you're like, yeah, those are good. So he's just a fun kind of mishmash of, you know, what we might think of as a more old school version of the game in a modern game. Like it's just he's cool. He's a good. Yep. You know what? He's pretty. He's pretty good.

Yeah. And I know if you asked some 70s starter who, you know, through complete games all the time, they would probably scoff at the idea that Sandy Alcantara is some sort of durable ace, you know. But obviously, by the standards of today, judged against his peers, he absolutely isn't. Yeah. Just to a great degree, it's extraordinary that he goes as deep into games as he does. But again, he does because he's so efficient. It's not even like, it'd be one thing if he were throwing like 120 or 130 pitches every time out, like no one does that anymore. And he probably wouldn't be allowed to do that, but he doesn't need to do that. He doesn't have to. No, because he'll just mow you down with

fewer pitches and he won't even have to work that hard. I mean, I know he works hard, but you know, in terms of the number of pitches. So it's really impressive. And it strikes me that like in this day and age where you have so many pitchers who are in the one inning mold and you know, there may be a few more multi-inning guys than there used to be. And because you have a three batter limit now, it's a little less common to have guys who barely pitch when they pitch. But still, like so many pitchers, because bullpens are so big now, such a huge percentage of the pitchers, just the pitching populace in the majors is like one inning guys. And Sandy Alcantara is like as effective as most of those guys are on a one inning basis, except he will go seven or eight or nine. Like it's, I mean, they're, those are different positions. Like those are, you know, they're both pitchers, I know, but to be able to do it one time,

not even one time through the lineup, just one inning where you're facing three or four or five guys, and to do it going three or four times through the lineup, it's so impressive to me. I guess this is why I'm sort of like a small-haul guy when it comes to relievers. It's like, yeah, that's all well and good, but you would just be trash in this role. The starter could do your job probably about as well as you do it, if not better. You know, some guys may be so suited to relief that they would be better than any starter would be just because they have, you know, one or two unhittable pitches or something.

But still, to be able to be as unhittable as someone like Sandy Alcantara is and to provide the bulk that he does, Yeah. It's so impressive because it's like it's really, really hard to make the majors in any kind of capacity. But that job didn't really exist prior to a few decades ago, just the one inning guy. And so it's opened up the ranks of major leaguers to people who have skill sets that are a little less expensive maybe than you had to have to be a big league pitcher in the past where you were expected and required to go through lineups more times now you still have to be nasty obviously but you don't have to be as nasty for as

long and so you don't have to have as many weapons and so the fact that you still have someone like alcantara who's doing that it's really like just a different category and classification. Like, they're both pitchers, but one is way better at pitching. I mean, I'm sorry. Like, you know, being a really good relief pitcher is impressive, too. But my goodness, it's just it's a different kind of achievement to be able to do that with the length that he provides. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. Reigning NL Cy Young winner, good at baseball. Great analysis. What? Yeah. Ben, no, not being over. And I guess the only other thing maybe we

should mention that occurred while you were away, which I'm sure you are aware, but some of the prospects who were omitted from major league rosters that a week ago we were talking about, huh, should they, could they have made the majors? Well, they have already. So Francisco Alvarez, for instance, has been called up because of an injury to Omar Narvaez on the Mets. But more notably, Grayson Rodriguez already in the big leagues. And I watched. I saw.

Yeah. Well, that was an exciting matchup because you had Grayson Rodriguez going against Jacob deGrom, and they both delivered to some extent, right? It wasn't the most scintillating pitchers duel I've ever seen, but it was pretty good. Neither of them disappointed. Like, deGrom came off of his initial shaky shart. Oh, no.

Oh, no. Oh, no, Ben. You have to leave it in. Obviously leave it in. You have to leave it in. They do tend to be shaky. We're back. Oh, my goodness. Oh, they do tend to be shaky. We're back.

Oh, my goodness. That was, I promise, unintentional. Sometimes it's intentional when we talk about that topic. It was clear that that was a true slip. Understandable mistake, I would say. But after the initial shaky start by Jacob deGrom on opening day, he got through a few no-hitting innings and he struck out 11 over 6. That's the thing, I guess, about deGrom is that he might be more unhittable than even Alcantara on an inning basis when he is healthy and available. But he's not going to go 9.

He's not going to go 8 even. He's probably not going to go nine, you know? He's not going to go eight even. Like, he's probably not going to go seven. Like, he's not a five and fly guy necessarily, but, you know, if you get six dominant innings out of Jacob deGrom, you're pretty happy with that, right? There are only so many guys who can provide six dominant innings and very few who can make them as dominant as Jacob deGrom has. But still. Still.

Sandy Alcantara, I'm not saying either one is necessarily better than the other. But even Jacob deGrom doesn't give you what Sandy Alcantara does in terms of going deep into games. Wow. Take, Spen. Yeah. Let's take here. I mean, I guess as recently as 2021, Jacob deGrom went nine innings and also eight one other time. But that was April of 2021.

So it's been two years. It's been a while. Yeah. It's not his MO anymore. No. Grayson looked good. Grayson looked good. I mean, like he wasn't particularly efficient in that first inning.

It wasn't like it was the most scintillating debut I've ever seen. But like you get it. You know, you I've ever seen, but you get it. You watch the guy pitch, and you can get it. You can see some of the areas that he still has to work on, which I don't mean in like, and send it back to the minors so he can do it kind of way. I just mean he's a young guy, and he's still going to be figuring stuff out,

but we got some nice strikeouts from him. He rebounded from that first inning where he did look like, oh, how many, you know, he was kind of getting to that spot where you're like, how many pitches are you going to let him throw in one inning here, you know? And then he figured his way through. And certainly better than many of their uh alternatives so i look forward to seeing what the what he's able to manage when he goes goes through a second time like i think it'll be good you know it's not like um a particularly easy lineup there's some dudes in there like if you're

making your first big league start and you have to contend with Simeon and Corey Seager and, you know, Dolores Garcia can run into one. So it's, you know, there's some guys in that lineup where you're like, whew, have fun, young man. changed the Orioles' minds. It was more like the Orioles' situation changed because there was an injury, right? Kyle Braddish had a foot injury, and then Tyler Wells had to pitch in relief, and then Kyle Gibson had to take the ball early, and so there was no one left to make that scheduled start, and there was Grayson Rodriguez. Hey, look at that. We happen to have one of the best pitching

prospects in baseball. Convenient. Yeah, and he had a shaky start in his first outing in the minors. Right. He was just kind of meh. Yeah. It was kind of a continuation of his spring trading performance. So it wasn't like, oh, look at that. He's ready. Right. But you could judge that he was ready just based on his performance last season. And Elias's comment on him when he didn't make the major league rotation out of camp was kind of harsh sounding, right? I mean, I only read it in print, but Elias said he was not ready to jump into a major league rotation. He wasn't getting past the fourth inning and we know what

he's capable of. I wasn't expecting this. We were hoping he would show up as a better version of himself. Like, ooh, okay. It seems, I mean, it's your top prospect, at least your top pitching prospect. And, you know, it's a few spring training outings. I mean, let's not make too much of it. So it was weird because, again, you know, he had said earlier that he expected Rodriguez to make the opening day roster before spring training started.

So maybe he was just legitimately disappointed that Rodriguez wasn't dominant there, or maybe he was trying to sell some service time shenanigans that they didn't actually end up doing, I guess, because they brought him up ultimately. Or maybe they're trying to light a fire under him. I don't know if there's some motivation factor there. But when I read that, I was like, huh. Usually it's just like, we think he has a few things to work on. We want him to be the best version of himself or something, but not like he sort of sucked, which is basically what he said.

Particularly after reading Evan's book, nothing about that quote was particularly surprising to me in terms of its tone. Look, I don't know Grayson Rodriguez, so I don't want to assume that I know what would be motivating to him as a person, you know, maybe hearing the general manager of his team kind of shit on him publicly, like did light a fire. I don't know. That could be true. But I think that we continue, particularly in competitive pro sports to underrate being able to speak empathetically and humanely about other people, even in moments where you have to deliver honest feedback that might be critical, underrated as a skill, you know, just because these guys are hyper competitive, which they are. And because you are trying to, in theory, assemble the best roster you possibly can, doesn't mean that there's no value in talking about them as people, because you're right. If everything goes the way that the Orioles want it to with Grayson Rodriguez, he'll be in their organization for at least six, and it seemed like they wanted to try for a seventh year so perhaps they would you know

benefit from like getting along better i mean not that they were fighting publicly but it's just like this is a person who you're gonna see a lot like this guy's your employee this guy's a young dude who's trying to prove himself i'm sure he was also disappointed that his spring didn't go better, that it wasn't a more resounding and obvious decision to have him on the opening day roster. Right now, I don't say that to like downplay the parts of this that were them, you know, trying to squeeze extra years out of the guy. That's not what I mean. But like, you know, there is a version of his spring where they go in saying he has an opportunity to break camp with the big league club. He's lights out in the spring.

And then they kind of really have to put their money where their mouth is or face what might finally be a winning grievance on one of these questions. That wasn't the spring that he had. He had a mixed spring. I still think he was better than some of the guys they broke camp with in the rotation. But it wasn't like a resounding yes. but even given that it's like be nicer about the kid his dad is you know like this is the other thing it's like his parents were there and you know like you know you're gonna see this kid's family at some point right right? Like it's just, it doesn't cost anything to, you don't even have to sugarcoat it, but just to be, you know, considered in the tone. And again,

I don't know the young man. I don't know if it's a light of fire kind of thing and they know enough about his sort of disposition and whatnot to think that, yeah, that's going to work. Maybe. But I still just don't think it costs you anything to like talk about other people like, like, you know, like they or their mom might be listening. Right. Yeah. I was thinking of that in relation to, have you been following this little Ali Marmal, Tyler O'Neill drama? What is going on? What in the world? What are we doing?

Sort of in the same vein, right? A public call out, a very public call out of Tyler O'Neill by Cardinals manager Olly Marmol. And again, this is one of those situations where you have to assume that what we are seeing and hearing is probably the tip of the iceberg, or at least like some portion of the iceberg of something that has happened behind closed doors or something about the relationship between these men or the player and the manager or the organization. Like, who knows what sort of history goes into these things. But there was a play where Tyler O'Neill was thrown out at home and Ali Marmol questioned his hustle and benched him for the next game because he said his base running effort was unacceptable.

Now, I watched the play and it's hard for me to tell how much he was hustling, really, because in each of the replays I've seen, and I haven't dug that deep into this, but in the replays I saw, you could kind of only see him like past third, like after he had rounded third and was heading for the plate. So he seemed to be running fairly hard at that point. I don't really know what kind of jump he got or what the effort level was looking like initially. So I don't even know whether this was max hustle for him or not, because he is quite fast. You wouldn't think he's as fast as he is because he's such a beef boy. Right, you think the biceps would just be weighing him down. Yeah, you would. But he's effective in center field because he's extremely fast,

like kind of in a Mike Trout sort of like, whoa, that looks like an optical illusion that a man that large should be moving that fast. So he was running hard. I don't know if he was running his hardest. But O'Neill very publicly, again, disagreed with Marmol's assessment and said he is always hustling and gives his all and that he just he didn't get a good jump. He just needs to get around the base a little quicker and be in there next time. So he was saying that, if anything, it was maybe not his best base running, but not a question of effort. And then this continued into the next day.

And Marmol said, there's a standard in St. Louis. You meet it, you play, you don't, you don't. And then O'Neill's, you know, kind of fired back about that too. And O'Neal said, you know, I'm trying to do everything I can to stay on the field and give it my best effort. I've never been known to be a dogger in any caliber. So for him to say that is very strong words. I'm a hard-nosed player. I got to the big leagues playing my ass off and that's who I am, et cetera, et cetera. He said, I don't think it should have been handled that way.

I think if there's internal issues, they should be handled internally. We should have each other's backs out there. Sometimes it doesn't go that way, I guess. Live and you learn. So this definitely sounds like there's some hard feelings and some bitterness there, you know? And they ask, like, can you get past this issue? And he's like, I don't know. We'll continue with our communication. But really, I don't know. So presumably they will patch things up or at least appear to have patched things up because they won't want this to be a continuing story. Right. But it is rare. I mean, especially like what five games into the season for something to boil over like this, which is what makes me sort of think that maybe there's more to the story, that this is not an isolated instance. But even so, it's unusual.

It strikes me as particularly odd for two reasons. So here I am having just said, like, you know, talk about people with empathy. And I agree with that. But like, you can also, you can talk about people that way and also treat adults like adults. Right. And I'm sure that if there were an issue with O'Neill's base running, like that's a conversation that they can have in candid terms internally. It was just so it's it's weird to me for two reasons. First, am I right that he was benched during the day game after a night game? I'll have to check. I just know he was not in the starting lineup the next day, but I don't know if it was like a day when he might have been off anyway. So I think that you can just say, oh, we're giving him a day. We want to make sure he's rested,

right. Or something like that. So there is a, an easy way to navigate that publicly that doesn't, you know, bring attention to the internal conversation that you feel you need to have. I watched it. I agree. Like it was hard for me to tell. That sounds like a conversation that a manager and a player should have, right? Like what was going on here? Yeah. It was a day game after a night game. Right. So you have such an easy, you have such an easy out, right? Like, you know, quick turnaround. We want to rest, whatever. Like you can do that. It's also odd because, you know, the Cardinals don't lack for

outfielders. Like famously, they were kind of juggling what they were going to do with that outfield configuration in camp. So at some point, very recently, Tyler O'Neill clearly made a case for himself to play and get everyday reps. So has something changed? Was that contest like more, was that contest more contested? Not great phrasing, but you know what I mean? Like, was, was it as they came out of spring training, was his position less secure than we maybe thought it was? Like, I, it's just a weird, so soon into the season, particularly when they were trying to figure out like what their outfield alignment was going to be. It's just a weird confluence of things.

I don't know. It's just you never you never really need to call. I think there are probably things that it makes sense for the organization to address publicly when it comes to the performance of the player either on the field or off. But like this does not seem like it's remotely in that category of things to me just like have your conversation with tyler o'neill if you feel you need to have it and then move on publicly like i don't it's so it's just odd it feels like such an unforced error to like have this be a controversy when you could just not have it be one yeah right and that's what almost made me think well is there some history here like have they had

that conversation privately already and it didn't have the intended effect and so now marble decided to escalate it again i have no indication that that's the case or that this is a recurring problem. It's just, it seems like going scorched earth sort of like this. It seems abrupt. And that makes me wonder, is there more to the story? And also from O'Neill's perspective, you know, he's had leg injuries in the past. And so I think in his defense, it could be, look, it's a long season and it's self-preservation. I'm very much in the player's camp when it comes to that on, say, runs to first, you know, on potential. I've written many times about how, look, like there's only so much potential to actually rack up extra infield hits here just by busting it out of the box. And so, you know, one hamstring strain undoes all the goods that you might do by hustling out an extra single here. You know, you're usually not going to beat it out, like

preserve your energy. Now it's a little bit different, obviously, if like there's a run at stake, you know, if it's a close game, I mean, that's different. Like there are certainly sometimes when it makes sense to hustle. Like hustle is not just eyewash and false hustle. Like there's good, valuable hustle. And if someone is not hustling, then that's not great. And sometimes you do need to send a message of some sort. But this was really a loud and resounding message. So I just I wonder whether I mean, maybe there's frustration about the fact that O'Neill had such a big breakout 2021 and then last year was not as successful. So I don't know whether again and look at the Cardinals and Marmole. They know more about Tyler O'Neill as a person and a personality than I do.

I know almost nothing. So they would know how he would respond to this sort of thing. Now, it seems like not particularly well, but who knows? Maybe there's a chip on his shoulder now. Maybe he wants to prove Marmo wrong. Maybe he will be more motivated by this. I don't know. There are certain players who might say, well, screw you. I'm not even going to play as hard for you as I was before because clearly you don't value me and I don't appreciate this lack of respect. But there might be also other players who say, I'm going to prove you wrong. And you've labeled me this lollygagger here. So

now I've got to go to greater lengths. I mean, it's hard. It's like a very individual level kind of case by case basis situation. And I can't judge any of that from afar. But really, you know, and it's not even like O'Neal is a super young player. I mean, he's not a wizened veteran, but he's 27. He's almost 28, yeah. He's several years into his big league career. So it's not like this is the way we do things here, sort of. I mean, he's been playing for the Cardinals longer than Ali Marmol has been managing them. So I, you know, I just,

I don't know whether this is like a young manager trying to establish authority or something, because Marmol did do this last year, at least one time with Harrison Bader, I believe, where he benched him. Yeah, I don't think there was as much of a public back and forth, but he did bench Bader for lack of hustle or perceived lack of hustle. And, you know, look, Bader was traded not long after that. And O'Neill has been mentioned as a trade candidate too, right? And I don't know that the Cardinals were motivated to deal him this winter coming off a down year relative to the the prior season but again if

they're looking at him maybe is not a cornerstone of the franchise like he might be isn't that a reason to not talk about him publicly this way that's a good point too yeah yeah why would you want to make him seem like you know a loaferafer? I also just, I don't know. I can't imagine looking at a guy whose arms look like that and being like, not effortful, you know, not a guy who's big on effort. And like, look, you're right. There are circumstances where guys do end up costing their teams, their team runs because of base running, you know, mistakes. I think that you can make the argument about that piece. Like it doesn't even have to be an effort conversation. Just make it about the, the sort of mechanics and, and jump in view of base running. And then you don't have to question the kid's effort. He's not a kid. He's 20. As I said, he's almost 28 but like it's just weird again we always have to assess these situations with imperfect information as you

said like we don't know what their relationship is like we don't know what the sort of vibe in the clubhouse was after you know they're trying to figure out like what do we do with, you know, this configuration of dudes where we have, you know, we have Burleson and we have O you're like, we have Jordan Walker. But who knows? Maybe there was consternation there that we're not appreciating and this is spillover from prior conflict. We don't know. But the way to invite everyone to ask you 101 questions about it is to talk about it like this publicly. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And Marmo, I mentioned that he hasn't been managing that long and he's young by major league manager standards. He's obviously been in the organization for a long time. He was

a player in the Cardinals system and then he came up through the chain and coached and managed. So to the extent that there's like still a Cardinals way. I mean, we have joked about the fact that every organization has its own way. And often those ways are sort of similar. It's like playing the game the right way, quote unquote. And in many cases, the right way is viewed sort of similarly. But if there's kind of an organizational emphasis on this and O'Neill should know that and Marmol thinks he's falling short of that. And also, you never know how this is playing in the clubhouse, which is another thing, right? So the manager has to consider how is the player receiving this, but also how was that like,

is this backfiring because Tyler O'Neill is super popular and everyone thinks, hey, that was harsh. Or is everyone sort of secretly thinking, all right, it's finally about time someone said something to that guy, right? Like, I have no idea. Again, I'm not saying there's like an anti-Tyler O'Neill contingent in the Cardinals clubhouse. I have no idea. But that's the kind of thing where a manager has to weigh how it will land with the player, but then also how it will land with the rest of the clubhouse. So there are times when a manager might lose a clubhouse with a tactic like this

that with a different manager and a different group of guys might actually improve his standing. You know, it's the whole like player's manager versus disciplinarian, hard-ass kind of manager. And often teams go from one to the other. And it's like we swung too far in the player manager direction. Now the pendulum goes in the opposite direction.

And then that can be credited with, oh, this new guy, he's lighting a fire under, you know, everyone got too complacent. Or it's the opposite. It's like, this was an unpleasant place to play. And the clubhouse culture was bad and everyone was on edge. And now everyone's getting along and it's warm, fuzzy feeling. So it's so dependent on the situation. And obviously Marmo must have a read on that. But is it the right read? I don't know. I guess time will tell.

And my sense of his tenure in St. Louis has been that it has largely been successful, right? Yeah. And I think he is largely viewed as a player's manager. I think that's the general... Guys seem to like him. Yeah. It's not like he's viewed as some stickler or someone who's rubbing people the wrong way regularly, as far as I can tell from afar, which in a way just makes these sort of isolated incidents or almost isolated incidents of kind of throwing your player under the bus a bit, that much more surprising. Yeah, I think, again, it's just more odd than it is anything else.

It may very well be the sort of thing that we forget that this ever happened by the end of the season because it's a long season and most likely fences will be mended or at least they will appear to have been and this won't recur again and it won't become an ongoing feud so it's one of those uh it's weird because it's happening early in the season right when you might expect there to be a little more leeway or things to be a bit more laid back you know it's not like the cardinals have had a disaster season or something and it's the dog days and everyone's mad and on edge and no one's getting along and then there might be more sniping it's like hey it's early april and you

know it should be a time of peace and good cheer and yet here we are so i don't know ben they're in the last place in the central yeah time to get worried can can worried. Can we play a fun game? I don't know if it'll be fun. Can we play a game? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to tell you the six teams that are currently in last place in their division, and I want you to tell me how many of them you expect to stay in last place by the time the season concludes.

Ready? Yes. Okay. Red Sox. Hmm. That's actually, I mean, yes. I might actually expect them to stay in last place. Yeah, because I think that Orioles team might be,

not, it might be okay. Nationals. They've got Grayson Rodriguez now. Yeah, they've got Grayson now. Nationals. I am quite confident that they will finish the season in last place. Royals. Man, certainly wouldn't surprise me if they finish in last place.

I mean, I don't know if I'd say the ceiling is fourth place, but most likely not going to be better than fourth. It's funny, like you watch the Tigers on certain days and in certain lights, you know, like... If you squint. Yeah, it's like the Two-Face from Seinfeld where, you know like if you squint yeah it's like the the two-face from Seinfeld where you know it's like you see someone in shadow and it's like oh I don't know that's not what I thought you looked like but yeah the Tigers had an entire season in shadow last year where none of us thought

they looked like that but but some days you know you catch them at the right time and it's like the other day they beat the Astros and yeah Spencer Torkelson and Riley Green were mashing and Matt Manning pitched well. And it's like, oh, yeah, it's like, oh, this was the plan. This is what it's supposed to look like. So, you know, you can do that one day. It's different from doing it consistently. But could the Tigers be better than the Royals? Yes, but I would say probably the odds are that the Royals will not finish in last place. What about the Cardinals? I do not

think the Cardinals will finish in last place. What about the Seattle Mariners? I do not think the Seattle Mariners will finish in last place. What about the Colorado Rockies? I am quite confident that the Colorado Rockies will finish in last place. Yeah, I think they're pretty bad. Okay, well, I don't know if that was a fun game, but it was a game that we played. I don't really understand the practice of opening day overreactions. I guess it's that we've all recognized that we are prone to overreactions early in the season. And so we have leaned into that and embraced the bit and said, OK, we know that talking about anything is an overreaction at this point. So we will just brand it as an overreaction.

And then you can't get mad at us because we'll be acknowledging up front that, yes, we know we're overreacting. That's the nature of baseball. It's April and everything is meaningless. So we still have to talk and write. So if we just call it out, then it's okay because we have called it an overreaction. And yet it still usually is an overreaction. It's hard not to have that be the case. But we are one week past opening day now. Not even really a week full of game action because we're recording before games on Thursday and there have been off days and postponements in the midst of that. So even like all of the analyses of offensive effects, it's fluctuating so wildly at this point. Yeah.

It's fluctuating so wildly at this point. Like, I'm all for trying to discern some signal amid the noise. Yeah. And I'm obviously interested in what the effects of the new rules will be. And I'm always curious at the start of the season, okay, what's the ball going to be this year? Right. What's the effect of the shift? But it's like the first few days, everyone was like, oh, look at this.

Babbips up and more grounders are becoming hits. And then a few more days after that, it's like, eh, not as much anymore. We just have to wait. You know, we just have to wait. And I know there have been a bunch of homers hit. And there's been some indication that maybe the drag on the ball is a little lower. And there have been some quotes to that effect by some players and managers. But again, like, it's just, it's one week.

Yeah, we don't know. All this stuff, especially if you're comparing direct comparisons to 2022 when there was just this compressed spring training like that makes everything different post lockout. And then you had the pandemic. We haven't had like a normal year most of the time lately. And even if you compare like the home run on contact rate to the first week of the season in the past several years, it's all over the place. rate to the first week of the season in the past several years. It's all over the place. It's just too soon, much as I would like to make some grand pronouncements about what MLB will look like this year. But there are playoff odds changes. Now, some people are of the opinion that you shouldn't even look at those. In theory, you can look at changes in playoff odds at any time because the playoff odds are not overreacting, at least in theory. They're not.

Like the playoff odds evaluations of the teams and their respective roster strengths, not swinging much at all based on a few games of action. Obviously, if someone gets hurt or you call up Grayson Rodriguez, maybe that could change your projection a little. Move things around a little bit, yeah. Yeah. Although even that case, I'm sure Grayson Rodriguez was projected to get plenty of playing time this year. So that probably didn't move things that much. So it's tough to move the needle when it comes to how good Zipzer, Steamer or some composite projection system actually thinks the teams are. to a great start or a lousy start, then that can change things because it's like pretend that you were starting the season now with the same strength of the roster in the same projection rest of the way, except that some teams are five and one and some teams are one and five, you know, like there's a little bit of a hole there or an advantage. Some people also argued,

Joe Sheehan has argued, for instance, that there's so much variance and the playoff odds kind of price in that variance. And so if you sort of like look at it day by day and one team has a cold streak and another team had a hot streak and then you take a snapshot of where they stand then, then it might skew things because the playoff odds are sort of pricing in that there's going to be all sorts of variation and there will be hot streaks and cold streaks. And I do see what he's saying. And yet you would think that the system would be factoring that in. Like the system knows it's not that huge a deal even to start 6-0 like the Rays did, you know, against terrible teams for one thing, which will tend to make you look better than you are. Although the Rays are obviously very good. But I think it's fair. Maybe we need a Ben Clemens study of week one playoff odds fluctuations and whether there is actually any meaning to that.

But in theory, there should be. I don't know. So if you go to the Fangraphs playoff odds and you look at the changes since March 30th opening day, you have, for instance, the Braves who started five and one. They're now up 15.5 percentage points in their chances of winning the NL East, which is a lot. I mean, they're up from like 60-ish to 75-ish, and their chances of winning the World Series up 2.3 percentage points, which doesn't sound like a lot, but kind of is a lot given that they have the highest ones and it's only 16.7%. So as a percentage change, that change in percentage points is pretty sizable. And, you know, obviously if the Braves are up, then their rivals in the division are down.

So the Mets are down 12 percentage points to win the NL East and the Phillies who got off to a one in five start, they're down 2.9 percentage points. They didn't have as great chances to win the division in the first place, but their playoff odds are down 10 percentage points. So again, like, should you feel significantly better or worse about a team because of one of these starts i don't know like we've spent years sort of telling people to pump the brakes and saying just relax like it's it's april it's early april still like it's okay don't even pay attention to the standings until, I don't know, when people say it is Memorial Day or whenever it is, right? And there have been various studies about how many

games you need to have for performance to be meaningful and all of those things. And yet, you do have the playoff odds. And since we're all wired to check the playoff odds all the time, there is movement. It's not like anyone's gone from, you know, a lock to a long shot or anything like that. But there's meaningful movement. You know, if you're the Rays and you start out 6-0, even if it was against bad teams, if you're in a tight division, well, then you're up 15 percentage points. So, again, like maybe the magnitude is exaggerated. I don't really know. But it's not to say that there is absolutely nothing to it. Because, again, like if you think the teams are the same teams that they were on opening day, which largely they are, and yet some teams are a few games up on others, then how could that not help or hurt a little bit? Yeah, I think that, like, look, if I had my druthers, we would just hide that page until, like, May 1st. Yeah.

But we can't do that, Ben, because we got a business to maintain here. Yeah. And people do want to look. And no matter how many times we tell them, hey, knock it off. They still look, you know, they still go over there. But you're right that like, it's not that it doesn't matter. And when you do have teams in really tight division, like banking wins against inferior competition is what you need to do to win tight divisions. Like that's part of the, you know, approach to emerging victorious when you have to contend with, you know, two or three other really good teams or, you know, moderately good teams. So it's not that it doesn't matter, but it doesn't matter a lot, you know. And as evidence sp our highly scientific, will this team still be in last place at the end of the season game?

Like half of those teams were like, no. My mind has not been changed in any way by these results when it comes to that. Right. And that doesn't mean that all of the teams that we said won't be in last place will be in first place, right? The Royals still exist but there's still a lot of time uh to to be made up here and ground to be made up and i imagine that at least some of them will do it and you know i think it's always useful to keep in mind when you're looking at playoff odds like sure you're right to say that we had a fair amount

of playing time baked into the Orioles' odds already because for Grayson Rodriguez, that is. Like, we anticipated that Grayson would be pitching a fair amount for them this year, even though he didn't make the opening day roster. And so, you know, like, our playoff odds are aware of that. But they don't know, you know, I'm not even going to name a guy because I don't want to be responsible. You know, they don't know that X star is going to get hurt

and they don't know that, you know, why team in, in response to a player getting hurt or not being very good anymore is going to promote a guy or is going to go and, you know, backfill a position with an all-star at the trade deadline, like they don't, they can't account for that, right? Like they, they still struggle to really grapple with depth in, in a way that, you know, we, we are constantly trying to remind people of when they look at the raise and are like, truly a little bit better. And we're like, yeah, they probably will be better, you know? So for the kind of tool that it is, it's a very good tool, but it has known limitations. And so, you know, I just invite people to like not make yourself feel stressed about it on this literally April 6th. It's almost like watching the New York Times needle during an election. Yeah. Why would you do that to yourself? Yeah. And, you know, there's some signal to the needle, but also the needle will fluctuate as some precinct reports.

And it's like, whoa, oh, no. Oh, yay. But you kind of have to be careful about that and maintain some perspective. And sometimes they will freeze the needle for a while because they don't want people to freak out or there's some sort of data issue or something. I mean, I think it's good that the playoff odds are available all the time just for kind of transparency and accountability and all that. And it is fun and it's hard not to look. But also, yes, we do have to make sure that we are kind of calibrating our early season expectations. And who knows, like maybe there just been so many sabermetric sorts banging that drum for so long now that we've come around to not being so dismissive about just like, you know, writing off everything that happens.

Because I think there was a backlash, a sort of a sabermetric backlash to people who would make too much of early season results. And then there was kind of a tendency to be like, nothing matters, you know? Right. And that was too strong. Yeah. And some things matter. Some things matter. We found a happy medium. It's sort of like spring training stats where the constant refrain was these don't matter at all.

And then some people did some studies and found, well, they can matter a little bit. You know, you make the proper adjustments and you look at certain stats and maybe there can be a little something to this. You know, it's not going to just dramatically change your evaluation, but add it to the stew, add it to all the other information we have, and maybe it improves your signal-to-noise ratio slightly. And that's where we are with the start of the season. ratio slightly. And that's where we are with the start of the season. And also, we have much more sensitive and perceptive tools now, which I think is kind of a double-edged sword, right? And can lead to us reading too much into things, but also can enable us to pick up on things very quickly, you know? And it's like, you have these stuff metrics at Fangraphs now. And Ben Clemens just wrote about this.

It turns out Shohei Otani, he's got great stuff. He's good, you know? No one knew about this. Yeah. This will maybe be my first, my reblog, my repost on the all Shohei Otani beat. The only rule is it has to be about Shohei Otani, my next assignment. I can throw a link to Ben Clemens for pointing out that Shohei Otani has excellent stuff. Yeah, he's good. Comes as a complete shock,

but, you know, yeah. And look, he may have even better stuff than he had before, and maybe his sweeper is amazing, and he's throwing it more. Like, I'm all for tracking that sort of stuff on a start-to-start basis, but also, there might be some guys who are not as famous as Shohei Otani, who were not

preseason Cy Young picks, there might be some guys who are not as famous as Shohei Otani, who were not preseason Cy Young picks, who might have very disturbing signals or very encouraging signals just based on stuff. Because some stuff stabilizes and becomes significant and meaningful very quickly, and some stuff takes time. And we have a mix of metrics now. And so it can be tempting. It can be powerful. It can be something that we get over-exuberant about. So it's dangerous out there, you know. Stay conservative. Stay sabermetric out there. Practice safe sabermetrics at this point of the season.

But you would miss some important signs if you just wrote off everything. Right. Yeah, I think – I hope that people, you know, that we're kind of thinking about things in a careful and considered way. And you're right. Like, exit velocity is a good example, right? Like, you can't fake hitting the ball hard. Like, you either do it or you don't do it does that mean you're gonna have an incredible season as a hitter if you hit the ball hard in spring training well not necessarily right because like what direction you hit it matters how often you actually make contact matters right there's all this other stuff but it is like oh you know if you had a guy coming to

camp and all of a sudden he's scalding the ball and he had never done that before. Well, that's that doesn't mean that you need to completely reforecast him for the coming season. But that's like that's an important and interesting data point. That's mostly I think at this point in the year, what you want to do is have a mental list of like, oh, I got to keep an eye on that. I want to see if that ends up actually meaning something. And if you approach it that way, one, I think you discover things a little more quickly than you otherwise might. And it gives you a fun set of stuff to look at, right? And to say, hey, I was on the ground floor of X player sort of turning a corner offensively,

or I knew to watch that pitch, and boy, it's a good one. And some of those guys will be bad. Sometimes you'll have a guy on a list, and then you can be like, all right, noted, nothing new really to see there, or the changes are real changes, but they aren't ones that are going to or the changes are real changes, but they aren't ones that are going to fundamentally alter the course of this guy's season or career. You know, but it's fun. And I think if we can keep it in that space of it being about it being interesting

rather than it necessarily meaning anything, then you're in good shape because what we're trying to do is distinguish signal from noise. But that doesn't mean there's no signal. It just means that we don't always know, you know, on literally April 6th, what is signal and what is noise. Rob Arthur and maybe others have written that sometimes it takes a single batted ball to know something about a player. The Bill James idea of signature significance,

like you do something one time and it's like, okay, well, at least we know he's capable of doing that one time, which many players are not. So if you hit a ball 120 plus miles per hour or something, yeah, you might be young, raw O'Neill Cruz and you might not do that with enough regularity to actually be a good hitter, but you know you at least have the potential to be.

And we know that you can crush a ball. And that's something that separates you from everyone else. And same thing, obviously, with one pitch, right? I mean, you hit a certain number on the radar gun or the modern equivalent of the radar gun. And that separates you from the pack if you throw hard enough because other people can't ever hit that number or a certain spin rate or a certain movement profile or whatever it is. So sometimes because we have these more sensitive measures now, we can just look at a single outing, a single swing, a single delivery and say, oh, this is someone special. But of course, you have to repeat that and you have to keep doing it. And sometimes that's easier said than done, too.

So you just have to keep doing it. And sometimes that's easier said than done, too. So you just have to properly calibrate. And we've done that even in this conversation when we were talking about the effects of the new rules changes. Like, we've basically declared the pitch clock a success. You know, it's done what it's done. And we didn't need that long to do that. I mean, we had spring training already, but also between that and between the effects in the minor. So it's not just that we've had one week, but even if we had one week of the pitch clock with like our Bayesian prior being, we have no idea what this will do or whether this will work at all, I think one week would be enough to tell you, oh yeah, this is definitely different because we're routinely having days where there's no three-hour game,

you know, and that just didn't happen before. So there are certain things that basically can tell you something in small samples and certain things that can't. And that's why BABIP, for instance, would be in a different category because that takes some time to actually reveal meaning to us. And so that's why we're sort of saying, not sure. We have to wait and see. Need more data, further research required, et cetera. So I guess we're saying we don't want opening day overreactions, but we also don't want opening day underreactions or week one under. We want properly calibrated reactions. We want to be whelmed. We seek to be whelmed. Do you know that movie's 20 years old, Ben? Yeah, gosh. Good lord. And I think that it's an understandable fixation because I think what

it really speaks to is that, especially for fans, you want to not feel stressed, right? You want to be like, my team is good. I don't have to feel stress about that i know what this team is i have an expectation it's been met and now i can proceed into the season knowing what i'm gonna get and in seeking that like comfort and certainty we make ourselves feel so stressed so it's a it's really a human story at the the day, you know, we want to make it about data, but it's about us as humans. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, 10 Things I Hate About You, 24 years old.

Stop it. Really? That is one thing I hate about 10 Things I Hate About You is that it came out that long ago. Anyway, most of our audience has seen seasons before, so we probably do not need to tell you how this works. But I guess occasional reminders can't hurt. Yeah. We're probably preaching to the choir here. You're all practicing responsible week one reactions.

Yeah. You're neither over nor under reacting. So well done. Pat on the back for all of you. All right. So maybe tomorrow we can do a little stat blasting and some emails. We've got some emails piled up, but now we can finish with a pass blast. This is episode 1990, which was 33 years ago, 1990. And this Pass Blast comes from that year. It also comes from David Lewis,

an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston. And this one is about rewinding even further. 1990, the White Sox turned back the clock. The 1990 season marked the last that the Chicago White Sox would play in Comiskey Park, the stadium that had been their home since 1910, old Comiskey. To commemorate the occasion, the team hosted a turn back the clock night in which they transported fans back to 1917. Not 1919. For some reason, they didn't choose that one. 1917 player uniforms were replicas of the Southsiders' 1917 jerseys, and the stadium's

PA system and electronic scoreboard were unplugged in favor of announcements made through a megaphone and a manually operated scoreboard. An Associated Press article set the scene. Popcorn sold for a nickel, general admission seats were 50 cents and reserve seats went at half price as 40,666 fans turned out to see women parade in bonnets and colorful ankle dresses and men wearing bow ties and bowlers. Unfortunately for the White Sox and their fans, the 1990 team was not able to reclaim the success of the 1917 squad, which won the World Series under not tainted conditions at all. The White Sox lost the throwback game 12 to 9 in 13 innings to the Milwaukee Brewers. Since 1990, teams wearing throwback jerseys for select games has become a popular promotion throughout Major League Baseball. So that was before Chris Sale was with the White Sox and

was upset about throwback jerseys and cutting them up with scissors. So they were able to do it safely back then. And the turn back the clock night that David mentioned here reminded me of turn ahead the clock. Which was a promotion that happened, I guess, slightly before 10 Things I Hate About You. That was 1998 that the Mariners started the turn-ahead-the-clock craze. And then it was actually the 99 season, so the same year as 10 Things I Hate About You, that most of the other teams all but ate were the promotional future style, not the throwback, but the throw-forward uniforms.

Sleeveless sometimes. Yeah, which were, you know, there was a lot of criticism. I mean, Wikipedia says the uniforms were widely criticized and the promotion proved unsuccessful. I'd like to think that we would have more fun with that sort of thing today. We did. We did another one. Yeah, it happened. And it was great.

It was greeted more warmly. Oh, yeah. And some of those throwback turn-ahead-the-clock things, you know, some of them kind of looked like uniforms that came later in some cases. So perhaps we have not studied and learned from the example of those uniforms enough. We should be more adventurous. But, yeah, I guess Kevin Martinez, the marketing director for the Mariners. I thought it was Edgar when I read Martinez, but it was not Edgar. But yeah, called them gaudy. And I guess they were gaudy, but nothing wrong with some god now and then. So yeah, I like it. And of course,

you have, you know, when you watch that, it's like, it's Ken Griffey Jr., right? And so he'll make any uniform look better if it's Ken Griffey Jr. wearing it, making it look cool. So yeah, I have fond memories of that. And you don't have to have an answer. We could address it on a later episode. But do you have like a leader in the clubhouse for a guy who you think just makes any uniform he wears look good? Who's an active player? Because I have one. Yeah. Maybe like Francisco Lindor or like I guess Tatis potentially. Who's in your mind?

Starling Marte. Oh, well, he's definitely got the like, looks good in a uniform body. Yeah. You know, like, I was thinking sort of like some swag amount of like a stylistic sort of, you know, accessorizing kind of thing. Some of this is definitely that he happens to have worn a lot of uniforms. Yeah. Right. And so I've had occasion to have this thought multiple times. I don't, I think it was when, maybe when he got to Oakland and everybody looks good in the Kelly green, cause those are just so sharp. But I was like, yeah, you know, he, he's looked good in a

D-backs uniform. He looked good in a Pirates uniform. He looked good in a Marlins uniform. He looks good in a Mets uniform. And then I was just like, you know, I think he just looks good in all the uniforms. There's no uniform he'd look bad in. So, you know, now we're going to get a bunch of emails. And I welcome them because he's not the only one. But yes, he does sort of have like an ideal frame.

Yeah, he's got like the prototypical like selling, we are selling jeans here, baseball body. And so he definitely comes top of mind for me. And again, some of that is definitely that he has worn a bunch of them for various teams. But at some point I was like, maybe this is just a Starling Marte thing and not like all of these uniforms are a good thing. Right. Yeah. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. By the way, if you want to keep tabs on the drag of the baseball, there is a page at Baseball Savant, baseballsavant.mlb.com slash drag hyphen dashboard, where you can look

at the average drag by date in MLB. So that's not whether baseball was a real drag that day. It's about whether the baseball itself had a higher or lower average drag. And it does seem so far that the average drag by day in 2023 has been lower than the vast majority of days during 2022, more in line with the 2021 and 2020 ball, which could suggest that the ball is not back to max juiciness, but maybe has been juiced slightly relative to the debtor ball last year. But again, it's one week and it's not enough to say. And we certainly can't say just by comparing to the debtor ball last year. But again, it's one week and it's not enough to say. And we certainly can't say just by comparing to the first week of last season. So let's exercise some caution, but we will keep an eye on it. Of course, it is handy to have that page.

Although, of course, if you don't trust MLB to control the manufacturing process of the baseball and to report it truthfully and accurately, then I guess you could cast some side eye at a baseball savant league-owned page about the baseball's drag too. But it does generally seem to match the data that other public researchers have uncovered. I'll link to it on the show page in case you want to bookmark it.

Make the baseball savant baseball drag by date your homepage. Wake up every day, have a cup of coffee, check the baseball drag from the previous day. Start your day right. And if you haven't already started a day this way, I'd highly recommend supporting Effectively Wild on Patreon, which you can do 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. Aaron Fennell Chemetsky, Look for Overlap, Frank Myers, Wyatt Curtis, and Milan Kay. Thanks to all of you.

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