Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1991: Mascot Moment

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a Star Wars emergency and (5:17) an nVenue Apple odds update, then (8:57) answer listener emails about how good a team has to be to convince people that it’s cheating, a hypothetical Mike Trout ultimatum about Shohei Ohtani, whether MLB would ban a real-life Sidd Finch, whether not […]

Effectively Wild I want to hear about Shohei Ohtani Or Mike Trout with three arms Hello and welcome to episode 1991 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I am all right. How are you? I'm fine, but I was worried because we were supposed to start recording 25 minutes ago and then I got an urgent alert that there was a Star Wars emergency. Yeah, from me on Gchat, not like a push notification or something. No.

Just to be clear. It could use just a slight delay if you have time. There was a Star Wars emergency. Ben, is everyone okay? Did something happen to Chewbacca? Is Chewbacca even still? In the old expanded universe, Chewbacca died. Wow.

I hate to break this to you, but it's no longer canon, so he's no longer dead, so it's okay. But yes, everyone is fine. Everyone is doing great. Actually, this weekend is Star Wars Celebration. Obviously, you are not among the celebrators, it sounds like, but there's an annual event or quasi-annual where lots of announcements come out, Annual events are quasi-annual where lots of announcements come out. And there were a bunch of announcements and new movies for the first time in years actually confirmed to be coming. So all hands on deck, just scrambling to manage the Star Wars emergency. I mean, I was in the middle of a Mario emergency and then the Star Wars emergency. And then there's a succession emergency.

It's just putting out pop culture fires left and right. The life of a writer slash editor. You just never know what's going to come up. I want to be clear. I'm not opposed to Star Wars. I mean, like, I'm opposed to actual, like, intergalactic conflict. You know? Ideally, we're not, you know.

You prefer Star Peace? Right. I prefer Star Peace. Make Star Peace, not Star Wars. And so, but I'm not like, I'm not an anti-Star Wars person. I have, I think I have reached a Star Wars saturation point, at least for the time being. And so, it's not that I think that it's bad or that, you know, those nerds, they've gone too far. I'm just mostly like I see that there's more Star Wars.

And I think, how nice for you. You know, like, yes, that's nice. It's sort of how I feel about like Formula One and how I feel about wrestling. Like not I'm about to say not real wrestling and that carries with it derision and i was gonna say more derision than i mean and i was like no i think that's a exactly how much derision i mean not like the olympic event of wrestling sure not not greco-roman but the sports entertainment yeah the theater of wrestling um again like it's fine for there to be things that just aren't for me, you know? It's just not for me. If it's for you, it's fine. It's just not for me. You just generally don't want to have to know about the things that are not for you.

appreciate both as a former resident and as a citizen of the united states that like what happens politically in new york is like important because a lot of people live there and you know it's uh it's a one of our great cities um but i do actively resent how much i have to know about mayoral politics in new york as a person who doesn't live or vote in that city anymore it's just like you know i have to know a lot and i I don't think that that's any of the people who tell me about its faults. It's relevant to their lives. I think it's Eric Adams fault, but it just is the most recent example of a long trend. like the Star Wars. People seemed to like Andor a lot, seemed like it was a good, you know, and people like Mando. Sometimes. I prefer my Pedro Pascal to be unmasked and deeply more sad, just for people who know that I followed all of The Last of Us. So, anyway. Pedro Pascal was a no-show at Star Wars Celebration. He did send a video message.

He is often a no- show on the show itself, other than his voice. Is it a different guy in there? Yeah, multiple. Wow. You know what I have to say about that? Good for Pedro Pascal. What a good gig. Way to go, man.

Anyway, if you're saturated in Star Wars, I'm sorry to say that there's more Star Wars coming, but you can catch my Star Wars takes on other podcasts, including the Ringiverse, and I will not burden you or the listener with them here. All these emergencies were relative. However, there is an actual baseball emergency, which is that the in-venue odds are back on the Apple TV Plus broadcast. I've been informed by Hayden, one of our Discord group members, and it sounds like they have not improved, at least based on just this small sample of a plate appearance. I have not confirmed these figures,

but Hayden was reporting the pitch-by-pitch percentages here. Actually, quite a coincidence involving Marcus Semyon, who I believe was a source of some dispute during our InVenue episode. So now this is hit probability. Now hit probability, it's a little more open to discussion, right? On-base probability, that's the one that we were really giving them a tough time about just because hit probability is sometimes they could defensively move in a direction that might seem counterintuitive. It's the on-base probability,

really, that is the issue. So I'll have to study. In this case, his hit probability went down when he got ahead in the count. But again, that can happen because he might be more likely to walk, and then less likely to get a hit. So I've not studied the figures, but I'll just let you all know that the odds are back and you can come to your own conclusions. I'm excited. I'm afraid. I will point out that there is further penetration

by InVenue into sports media because NBA Launchpad, I don't know about this. I don't really know. But they are one of seven companies that are going to be included in this Launchpad initiative. Given the success of the platform and advancing key basketball priorities in its inaugural year,

the 2023 NBA Launchpad has expanded to identify emerging fan experiences at home and in NBA arenas. It's the league's initiative to source, evaluate, and pilot emerging technologies to advance the NBA's top priority on and off the court. And in venues in here,

as an enhancing the fan experience company, sports betting platform that uses machine learning and AI to generate game relevant probabilities and micro bets for fans to engage with in real time yeah our interview our podcast ben clemens's research does not appear to have hurt in venue's business as far as i could tell it certainly has not put them out of business i have no idea how the business is doing i hope the business is doing better because they've improved their model. Who knows? Maybe we'll find out. Did we ever see that study?

I don't think so. Did you ever sign the NDA? I did not. Yeah, I never did that either. Yeah, my legal counsel advised against it. That's not true. I didn't consult legal counsel. Episode 1853 for anyone who's just joining us this season and doesn't know. I thought this was a baseball podcast and we're talking about Star Wars and an NBA company. What are we talking about here? It's just, you know, if you're interested in hearing one of the wildest hours and a half of our respective lives. Go check that one out. Not one of the most effectively wild hours probably, but it was wild.

It was wild. It was a wild time. This is about the real-time pitch-by-pitch odds that appear on Apple TV Plus broadcasts, which we had some questions about. Yep, still do. Some of those questions were not answered. All right. So this is good, I guess, because I had no banter prepared.

Yeah. So here we go. Here we go. Just got some great Star Wars and venue banter for all of you. That's done. So we planned

to answer some emails and do some stat blasting. So we will get to that. Yeah. So here is a question from Robbie in Potomac, Maryland. I was fascinated by your recent discussion of whether cheating is good for MLB because its presence proves that teams are trying to win and thus that games are not fixed. As part of this

discussion, you debated whether a team like the Reds would be more or less motivated to cheat than the Astros were a few years ago. On the one hand, each win might mean more to the Reds would be more or less motivated to cheat than the Astros were a few years ago. On the one hand, each win might mean more to the Reds' collective psyche as they wouldn't earn so many wins. But on the other hand, they are at a point on the win curve where earning a few more wins than otherwise expected would not outweigh the potential consequences of getting caught cheating. This got me thinking, how good would the Reds have to be this year for MLB fans to question the legitimacy and competitive integrity of the season? If the Reds, with their current roster, lead the league wire to wire, win 110 games, and win the World Series, would most fans conclude that they must have been cheating and or that games must have been fixed? Now that preseason

projections are becoming more ubiquitous, would you expect such suspicion from fans to become more common anytime a team seriously outperforms expectations so i think two things about this i still think that the percentage of fans who might automatically automatically go to cheating as an explanation would be relatively small um i don't and like some amount less than 50 and and maybe like meaningfully less than 50 but i do think that the fans who believed that it was cheating would really believe that it was cheating because like do you remember um a couple of years ago ben when the san francisco giants like dramatically bring that up myself outperformed pre-season expectation and you know um they they were a team that was still sort of in the relatively early days of a new um front office regime they were starting to garner a reputation for improved player development and analytics, right? That there was a savviness there that had not been as present in the prior

iteration of the Giants. All these coaches, right? There were other explanations in addition to just the idea that a couple of guys who were at the tail end of their careers were having career years all at once. But I will say, there was a vocal minority, at least that I saw on baseball Twitter, that was just convinced that they were cheating, that they were engaged in some sort of chicanery. Now- I could never quite tell whether some of that was tongue-in-cheek or not, or whether they were actually convinced that the Giants were cheating. I'm whether some of that was tongue-in-cheek or not, or whether they were actually convinced that the giants were cheating. I'm sure some of them were, but... Some of them were tongue-in-cheek or that some of them were cheating. The latter, probably.

But it was like it almost became a meme, like those cheating giants, right? Just because they were defying our projections and expectations by so much. Right. Some people may also have legitimately believed that they were cheating. Yes. So and I don't know whether what happened to them last year then makes you more or less convinced. Right. They were cheating. Yeah. Previous season because when they beat their projections by 30 wins or whatever it was, and then they went back to not really beating their projections and basically thinking that they were who we were, basically being who we thought they were, does that make you think, huh, well, if they beat their projections by so much one year and couldn't keep doing it the next, then they must have been cheating that year.

Or do you think, well, no, if they were cheating that year and it worked so well, then of course they would have continued to do it because they weren't caught. So the fact that they didn't do it again suggests that they were on the level. The latter interpretation seems more logical to me, but I wasn't someone who thought they were cheating in the first place. Yeah. And like, to be clear, I guess we don't know for sure that they weren't. But it didn't. Can't prove negative.

Right. It didn't strike me as the most plausible explanation. But yeah, this is, you know, I think this is one of the unfortunate realities, both of the broader sort of across the history of baseball tradition of both cheating and being kind of like really close to the line as close as you even if it ends up giving sort of marginal utility when it's all said and done. And I think a lot of people were dissatisfied with the repercussions of that scandal for Houston and don't feel like there is sort of sufficient disincentive to try again. And so we're going to keep having this conversation when we have outlier performers, I think particularly when the outlier performance comes from guys like the ones who drove

the outsized performance for San Francisco, where it's like, well, you might have, maybe you have one 30-something guy who has a career year, but several, like that seems suspicious to me. So I understand where that impulse comes from. And so I think it would, you know, to get back to the original question and think about it within the context of the Reds, I think part of it would really depend on like, who was the impetus? Like if, you know, a month from now, Cincinnati has like promoted a bunch of their top

prospects. And all of a sudden you're getting this like really powerful offensive engine on the middle infield driving, you know, wins that you wouldn't expect. Like that probably reads really differently to people than this cast of cast offs who they haven't been able to ship out as they've, you know, systematically dismantled this team. Like if those are the guys who were suddenly driving really outsized performance from our expectation, then I think people look at it differently, right? Like people, I don't think that anyone thought, well, maybe they did. I don't know. But my sense was not last year that people looked at, say, the Orioles and were like, wow, the Orioles have finally, you know, had a better than 500 season and they're winning much more than they were projected to preseason in a competitive division. I don't think most people looked at that and were like, and that's because they're cheaters, even though there's a lot of Houston DNA in that front office.

Right. I think that they looked at it and they were like, wow, they have a lot of really impressive young guys who are starting to be really impressive at the big league level and so i think that that would probably temper or color your perception of a team like cincy like really outperforming um and then you have teams like am i gonna say a really mean thing should i say mean thing this here i'm gonna say i'm gonna say a thing and if you think it's too mean ben then we'll cut this because i'm gonna say i'm gonna say a thing and if you think it's too mean ben then we'll cut this because i gave us a nice little stopping point um like you look at a team like colorado and like if colorado dramatically outperformed expectation i think a lot of people would assume that something weird and fluky had happened but that they weren't

cheating because it's like well they could have been doing this this whole time not not competent enough to cheat maybe is that too mean it's not much meaner than we have been doing this this whole time. Not competent enough to cheat. Maybe. Is that too mean? It's not much meaner than we have been before. Yeah, I guess that's true. You know, like I always want to say with us giving criticism to teams like, well, specifically Colorado, like there are smart people who work for that org and are trying really hard to put a winning team on the field and, you know, then they have bad ownership.

Maybe, I don't know. I hope we thread that needle precisely enough because you don't want to let organizations off the hook for protracted periods of being weird and bad at baseball but also like there are good people who work for every team so i don't know man yeah i think it does depend how you exceed expectations. If you were exceeding, let's say if you had some incredible one run record, if you were like the reverse of the Rangers last year, would you think that that is less or more likely to be an indication that they're cheating? I'd say probably less. I'd say less, right? Because that can just be fluky. We just know that that can be fluky, you know. Right. So if the players were actually performing better and then in what way are they performing better? Like, did every pitcher suddenly gain a ton of spin? Right. Then that might be suspicious. Right. Then you'd be like, hmm. That should be suspicious. Right. Yeah.

But if it were, gosh, I don't know, like if every hitter suddenly dramatically improved their plate discipline, let's say, that might seem a little suspicious. Yeah, that might be kind of wonky. There could be legitimate ways that you manage to teach everyone to swing at better pitches, but you might also think, oh, they know what's coming. But you might also think, oh, they know what's coming. But if everyone suddenly started hitting the ball harder, there are so many different ways that you could improve. And some every time a hitter has a big year, right? Just because people will default to, oh, they must be juicing. They must be taking something, right? And I don't know how many of them believe that and how many of them are just sort of throwing that out there for the sake of saying something. But I'm sure a lot of people believe it and it has happened. so it's not out of the question. So I would think that probably now we are more, I think, clustered in terms of our preseason expectations than we used to be before we had playoff odds. And obviously least, are looking at playoff odds. And I think if you could do some sort of study, it would be actually kind of interesting if you could go back, let's say, decades pre-playoff odds, pre-projections even, and look at surveys of quote-unquote experts, right? And just see whether there is kind of a herding, a clustering that's going on now, because a lot of us are looking at the same inputs and looking at the same sites, right? So I can imagine that in the past, you might have had some wildly different opinion. I mean, you just wouldn't have had that reference point, that anchor of the playoff odds of the projections to kind of keep you grounded.

So people might have been more dispersed, their projections, I would think. I would guess. I'm not sure. I'd be interested if someone wants to do some deep dives and tell me whether that's true. That'd be a great stat blast. stat list. But I think then that because we have that expectation, maybe we would be more likely to look askance at a team outperforming just because we can quantify how big the outperformance is. Right. Yeah. Like if we hadn't had a Giants projection for 2021, we could have said, well, they're a lot

better than we thought they'd be. But because we could quantify that it was 30 wins or whatever it was, and it was the biggest overperformance of the projection era, and we had sort of this hard estimate, this quantitative objective, though obviously not infallible estimate of what their true talent was prior to the season, and then they exceeded that by so much, then maybe it looks extra fishy. Then again, maybe we just have a better understanding of other things that can drive unexpected spikes in performance. And again, like, as you were saying, maybe we believe more in player turnarounds and coaching breakthroughs and front office breakthroughs, and we understand randomness. And so maybe we would be less likely to jump to the conclusion

of their cheating than we would have been otherwise. But I think all else being equal, probably having projections, having some sort of consensus or statistically driven expectation does make you more inclined to think, oh, this is weird than if everyone's expectations and personal projections were scattered all over the map. Yeah, I think that that's right. Anyway, I don't think the Reds are cheating. But if they lead the league in wins and they win the World Series and they just go wire, wire, then, you know,

we'll probably talk about the Reds more this season than we ever have before. Yeah, how about that? Question from Jimmy. I have good news and bad news. Oh, no. The good news is that you're Artie Moreno. Is that good news?

That's how the sentence starts. And you have finally convinced Otani to sign an extension. Okay, that's good news for you as Artie Moreno in this hypothetical. Right. The bad news is that Mike Trout is still incredibly bitter about his embarrassment in the WBC final. And a huge rift has formed between the two angel superstars. Oh, no. Trout just stopped by your office to deliver an ultimatum.

It's me or Otani. You can sign Otani to the first ever $500 million deal, but you'll need to drop or trade Trout before the season starts. What do you do? Oh, man. This team is not big enough for the both of them anymore. It's either Mike or Shohei. Any more to either Mike or Shohei?

It's tricky because I would imagine that part, I mean, part of, a big part I would suspect of convincing Otani to stay would be that you are paying him commensurate to what he views himself to be worth. Yeah. But, like, it seems quite obvious, and I don't think this is a bad thing, that he wants to win. He would like to win. And I would imagine that in his assessment of wanting to win, he understands that, at least for the near term, the presence of Mike Trout is important to that goal. So you're in a real pickle because what do you do? If you trade Trout, does Otani still want to stay? Does that change the way that he interacts with the organization? Can you sign him and then trade Trout and maintain his presence on the roster while meeting Trout's demand? That's a good

question. Yeah. Because if you say, okay, we choose Shohei and you get rid of Trout and then Shohei says, wait, we don't have Trout. I'm not staying either now. Then you would have been better off keeping Trout. But if we assume these events are independent, if that's the spirit of the question, if we assume we can keep one or the other, and Otani will not renege on this if we get rid of Trout, you have to choose between the two. Gosh, why do people torture us with questions like this? Well, because we've asked for it, Ben. We are dramatically asking for it in this particular regard. I think you trade Mike Trout.

Yeah, you got to, right? I think you trade Mike Trout. Yeah, you got to, right? I think you trade Mike Trout. And to be clear, like we project Mike Trout to be like basically a seven win player this year, you know, in his age 31 season. So it's not like we're sitting here going, you know, that Mike Trout sucks. But I think that as you watch Mike Trout, we can acknowledge while still appreciating what he is able to do and what he has been able to do over the course of his career that like, it might be a gentle downslope. It might be very mild. It might not require any signs if you were

hiking to say grade change ahead. But he's not who he was when he was 20. And that's fine. He's still very good. But I don't think he's the 20-year-old version of himself anymore. Definitely not durability-wise, at least. Right. And when you factor in his age relative to Otani's, now I imagine that Otani is going to want a very long deal in addition to a very lucrative one those are not mutually exclusive but i i imagine that like he's gonna want you know he's gonna want a long deal so you know you are looking at potentially decline years on the back end of his contract also but those are gonna come sooner in theory for trout um he's not a two-way player so you

don't get the combined you know one two of otani and uh at some point probably not too long from now trout is going to be a corner outfielder rather than a center fielder and so like you can see value declining there and so i think you pickani, but it would be a really weird day. Yes. And also, I think Otani probably a bigger draw attendance wise these days, which I think if you're Artie Moreno, you probably care about. Right. I'm sure people are still coming out to see Trout. Sure, of course. He's been there for many years.

And also, he doesn't have a day where he pitches and hits, which causes some people to go for Shohei, and then you get the international attention too. So there's some marquee value there. There's some superstar value, a halo effect for the halos that they get because of Shohei Otani that probably has some significant calculable value. So I think so. Yep.

I think you've got to keep Shohei. And it's tough because Trout has been there his whole career and wants to stay there his whole career. And he has elected to remain there multiple times. And so that's tough to trade someone away who has decided that he wants to stay and has committed to you and has probably taken a discount relative to how much he could have commanded or at least how much he was theoretically worth on the open market. So you have to make this Sophie's choice and split the baby somehow. I guess you're not splitting the baby. You're getting rid of one baby and you're keeping the other baby.

And it's not going to be great. And like I will say to what I imagine is Mike Trout's credit, I can't imagine this would ever really be a scenario. No. Make every effort to trade him to Philadelphia, right? Just like let him be where he wants to be, just close to Millville. Let him go watch the Eagles and be in a cold weather place where it'll snow year round. Well, it doesn't snow year round.

I know that. I'm an East Coast person. But it snows much more often than it does in Anaheim. snow year round. Well, it doesn't snow year round. I know that. I'm an East Coast person, but it snows much more often than it does in Anaheim. So you could sell it to him as, hey, you'll be happy here. And if that means that you have a little less leverage and you get a lighter return, then I think you owe that to Mike Trout for his years of service to your organization. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I know the contract is still meaningful, but he is still

so good. If you're a contender... What a hole he would fill on the Phillies, too. You know, he'd fill a hole on the Phillies, but if you think of him as a corner outfielder, you know what other team could really use another thumper out there?

The Seattle Mariners. That's true. I'm just saying, like, you know, like, if you were to pick one, if you were to pick amongst them, that's one that comes immediately to mind for me. Who could say why? Yeah. Not a lot of teams out there that wouldn't benefit from having a Mike Trout. And that's why it's just one at random because, you know, like, there's so many. And so you just pick one out of a hat and you're like, oh, it happens to be the Mariners.

Well, what are you going to? Question from Ethan, Patreon supporter. On the episode I'm listening to right now, you are discussing the great Sid Finch story. And I can't recall if you have ever discussed this as an actual hypothetical. I'm curious what you think would happen if there actually were a player with a skill that was this much of an outlier. with a skill that was this much of an outlier? If you had a pitcher who could genuinely throw 150 miles per hour and you assume a catcher could actually catch it without being injured, do you think baseball would simply let him play,

putting aside the injury risk if a player had a skill that made them genuinely too good? Would baseball permit it or would they have to do something? If a pitcher went out there and was genuinely unhittable, striking out 90% of the players they faced and basically never allowed a hit or run ever, it seems like that would actually break the game. Similarly, if a player were so fast that any ground ball was a hit, something like that, I feel like baseball might need to step in and in some sense ban that player from playing or using his skills. I'm sure we've considered some sort of question like this over the years, but I think if it's one player, it's in some ways easier because it's just one guy and you ban him and then you don't have to worry about him anymore. But I guess this relates

to our first answer about the cheating and about believing someone is cheating like you'd probably have a lot of people just assuming that this is a cyborg right that this guy got some sort of titanium arm and that's how he's doing this it's a terminator do you think people people would think he was a terminator i mean like if someone seriously did show up and threw 150 miles per hour i it might not it's not unreasonable to conclude that they're a terminator, I think. Like, it might be the most likely scenario because that is so extraordinary. Like, if someone shows up and throws 110 or something, okay. Maybe he's just a physical outlier and he has some special ligaments and tendons and flexibility. I can buy that that could happen. But if someone's throwing 150,

I would almost think it probably is the most likely thing that they have been sent back from the future or that they've just figured out some way to augment themselves physically in some undetectable way. Like, I think you would have to x-ray them or MRI them. I don't know if you could compel them to subject themselves to a medical examination, but I feel like you would have to certainly ask for their consent to poke around a little and just establish that this is on the level and then if you somehow could not detect how this was happening then you would have to assume that it's nanobots or something i don't like like i don't know that it's fair to ban them on the assumption that they're cheating but like this is close to maybe you actually are cheating unless you could do some exam and find that they actually do have some extraordinarily elastic ligaments. And that explains how they're able to generate the sort of force and the arm speeds.

So if you could determine some way that this is possible without some kind of mechanical intervention, and I guess there's currently no rule against being a cyborg, probably, right? There might have to be at some point. But, you know, if you can get LASIK, then who's to say you could not be a cyborg in some other way? So, I mean, at some point, they are probably going to have to legislate that because that kind of thing will be more common. And then you might have to have an enhanced league and a less enhanced league for people who have cyborg parts. So, right? See, this is what happens when there's a Star Wars emergency before we record. It influences the, that you would yourself have to be enhanced in some appreciable way if it was really going in at 150. have extra padding just for safety. I feel like they might, maybe they would pass something like a special exemption and equipment. Sure. Exemption for this one person just as a health and safety

protocol sort of concern. But if it's one player, like, does it break the game sufficiently? Like, if an entire team was doing this suddenly, that would so disrupt the competitive balance that it would just make the sport unwatchable, basically. If it were one player, would he be a big enough difference maker? Depends. Like if you put the best player ever who throws 150 miles per hour on the worst team ever, I mean, we could calculate, I guess, what this would be worth. I remember Jeff once did a post about like how valuable could a baseball player be? Like could you have a baseball player who's the equivalent of LeBron basically in an NBA season? Right, where he's enough on his own.

Right, and I think he had a hard time even coming up with some theoretical player who would actually be good enough, but he probably wasn't entertaining the 150 mile per hour fastball. Well, and, you know, I hope it's obvious that I am not about to downplay how devastating a 150 mile an hour fastball can be. But there is, you know, there is more to pitching than just throwing hard, Ben. That is true. Yeah, they always say, you know, these guys at these big league batters,

they can time the fastball. Well, I'm not saying that they could necessarily time 150 miles an hour. No, I don't think they could. I don't think that they could. And I think that we would need to know more about what this pitcher is able to do with that 150-mile-an-hour fastball. Like, are you able to throw strikes with it? Like, would it matter?

Also, gosh, can you imagine if you couldn't throw strikes with it? Then you'd really have to ban him because that's like an actual safety hazard. Can the netting behind home plate keep 150 mile an hour fastball from going into the stance? Yeah, that's a good question. What is the tensile strength of that netting? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know that either. Even batted balls, the hardest batted balls are not that fast.

Right. Yeah. I don't know that either. Even batted balls, the hardest batted balls are not that fast. So, yeah, I mean, it would almost be like Austin Adams in 2021, where it was like of an ethical issue because what if you can't determine any way in which this person is cheating? They did nothing wrong. They just have some freakish ability to throw a hundred and you're discriminating against them basically. And so just out of self-preservation of the league, can you just say, no, we just we will not allow you like on what grounds? Right. You're too good. You're too good. You're not allowed in the league. You have to make a special carve out exemption that says you're allowed to.

could do a best interest of baseball clause kind of just executive decision, just pull rank and say this guy's not allowed to play because it's bad for the sport. I mean, it would be good for the sport initially, I think, right? I mean, this is, you know, Otani basically has been good for the sport for many reasons, but primarily because he's just better than everyone, or at least he's better in a way that no one else is. He can do things no one else can do. But he can still get got, you know? Yeah, he's not game-breaking. Right. He still gives up home runs. He still strikes out. But you're right. And the precedent

for this kind of conversation in sport can be really gnarly in terms of who it excludes and the real basis for that. And so you're right that it would be a very complicated conversation once it is determined that the pitcher in question is A, not a robot, and B, like a present safety hazard because of how hard he can throw like yeah it would be you know it would be something we'd need to think about and think about like what do we mean by fairness in these scenarios and like who's fair bad right like right i'd feel bad i mean i'd feel bad if baseball were broken by this guy but then i'd feel bad. I mean, I'd feel bad if baseball were broken by this guy, but then I'd feel bad if the only way to save it was to exclude him. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like we let Michael Phelps swim in the Olympics and that guy's joints are like, you know, who knows what's going on there.

Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, all of it is unequal in the physical gifts that you're given. is unequal in the physical gifts that you're given. And the players who are in the major leagues are in the major leagues because they have some physical talent that most people don't have. So that's why they get to be there. So on what grounds can you draw the line and say, yeah, but this guy, he's too good. No one else gets to be banned because they're better

than the vast majority of the population. But this guy, he's vastly better than even that tiny elite subset. So he's got to go. I mean, you have, I think this person would be a subject of just watch him utterly dominate and try to figure out the mystery of how it's happening. So I don't know exactly how long that would last before it became boring. And we all just accepted, I mean, it becomes almost like a Ghani Jones, like this person is a witch or a wizard or whatever. But I think people would want to tune in to see that for a while. But then if this person is just repeating 150 miles per hour over and over and over again, and everyone is just swinging and missing or not even seeing the pitch and just taking strikes, that would be pretty boring quickly as a spectator experience. It would still be fascinating as a thought exercise and as what the heck is going on here. But would you actually want to watch it once the player has established that he can actually repeat this skill?

I don't know. Yeah, it would be. Oh, and the discourse, man, the discourse would be really gnarly. But I think that like the real answer to this. I mean, here I am. I'm going to impose a realistic answer on an obviously unrealistic scenario. But I think that this gets taken care of by the fact that no catcher could catch it. And so he would have to dial back.

Right, and that would be the other thing. He doesn't have to be banned, but maybe you say, look, you can't throw max effort. Yeah. Maybe there's a way you could do that. Or you could, right, you could impose an upper bound to velocity and therefore you're not singling him out. I mean, you are in effect. But if you said no one's allowed to throw harder than 110 miles per hour, no one's allowed to throw harder than 110 miles per hour right at least it applies to everyone right and then you can put him on the angels and all the guys who have their own special rule in the rule book can be on the same team yeah all right i guess that's a way to handle it i mean at least you're allowing him to be in the league right as long as he can take 40 miles per hour off and stay in there then you're not telling him he has to go away or retire and you'd have time to sort this out right

because it's not like he would just arrive at the big league doorstep fully formed and we'd be like where did this guy come from right like you know imagine imagine though like as an amateur and he's like some teenager and you're like is that kid throwing 120 miles an hour? And then you look at him, and you're like, does he have room on the frame for more velo? And it's like, does anyone? Once he fills out. Yeah, it would be a really fascinating, like, scouting assessment, right? Yeah, it's the rookie of the year scenario, sort of, except heightened. sort of except heightened but and you'd have to invest in new netting well if you have to invest in new netting then he can't be an angel because you know arty marino barely wants to pay i also wonder whether this would be fun for this person because at a certain point right if if it's

completely non-competitive right then what are they even getting out of it plus if everyone just sort of resents their presence it's like you're just making us look bad and this isn't fun for everyone then maybe they would just be shunned and ostracized and it wouldn't be fun for them to go out and do something that is extraordinarily easy for them so maybe they would just place some restraints on themselves right just to make it more interesting or competitive. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope it doesn't happen because it's a thorny, thorny ethical issue.

It's thorny. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Question from Nicholas. Your past blast about the mound charging epidemic from episode 1987 reminded me of a question I've long hoped Effectively Wild could find an answer to. from episode 1987 reminded me of a question I've long hoped Effectively Wild could find an answer to. For as long as I can remember using the internet, I have seen a common theme in the comment threads accompanying any video of a hit batsman charging the mound. Inevitably, some commenter will say that the brawl was ultimately the fault of the DH rule. Since the logic goes, the pitcher who prompted the brawl by throwing at a batter won't have to bat,

he can be more careless throwing at opposing players since he personally won't face retribution later in the game. The argument makes some intuitive sense, and the comment hive on these videos seems to treat it as conventional wisdom. But is it true? This would seem to be the ultimate example of a testable hypothesis in baseball. For 49 years, baseball was split into two neat categories, a league that required pitchers to bat and a league that didn't. The problem seems to be one about the data set. As far as I can tell, mound charges are not play indexable.

I wish they were. Nor are brushback pitches or bench clearing brawls. Is there a quick way to know if the conventional wisdom is correct? Did the AL have more mound charges than the NL for the 49 seasons that the split DH rules were in effect? Or is the answer still waiting to be discovered by someone with a lot of time and a whole lot of old newspaper clippings? And now that the DH is established law in both leagues, are we on the cusp of a new golden era of mound charging? So, no, we can't answer this for mound charges specifically. So, no, we can't answer this for mound charges specifically. Although, again, if someone wants to dig into the newspaper archives and compile a mound charge database, that would be great data to have.

Delightful, yeah. Please share. But we have hit by pitches. Right. And that's a pretty good proxy here. And Rob Baines has actually looked into this at Baseball Perspectives. So in May of 2022, Rob Baines wrote an article headlined, No, the universal DH isn't causing hit batters. Rob, you're supposed to do the Betteridge's Law thing so that you can get people to click and say,

Is the universal DH causing hit batters? And then they got to check to see if the answer is no and it's usually no but nope he just spoiled it right there in the headline but it's still interesting and he looked at this and as he notes we do have sort of a natural experiment here when we had split leagues split rules so he did plate appearances per hit batter over the DH era, 1973 to 2021. He wrote, the DH rule began in 1973. As you can see, you can't see as I read this, but I will read what he wrote and you can click on the link if you're interested. Once it was implemented, American League pitchers, the red line on this graph hit a lot more batters than National League pitchers, the red line on this graph, hit a lot more batters than National League pitchers, the blue line.

For 21 straight seasons, AL pitchers hit more batters than NL pitchers. So it did seem to be true, at least through 1993. But he continues with another graph. Here's the 30-team era beginning in 1998. So he shows 98 through 2021, and he says, do you see a difference there? Me either.

And I don't see one either. In the 23 seasons since the Diamondbacks and Devil Rays commence play, American League pitchers hit batters once every 108 plate appearances. National League pitchers

hit them once every 108 plate appearances. Same thing. AL pitchers hit their opponents more frequently in 14 of the 23 seasons, but only six of the last 12. He goes on to say, there's nothing to suggest that the presence of the DH had any impact on the frequency with which batters get hit over the past couple decades. And so I assume we can say the same probably applies to mound charges, I would think.

So he wraps up. When the DH was new, my friend's observation was correct. This was prompted by a friend who had made that kind of comment section argument. There were more batters hit in American League games than in National League games. Whether that difference was due to AL pitchers lacking the accountability created by having to bat, who knows? But that difference dissipated. The last several years, there was no difference in hit-by-pitch rates between games with and without the DH.

It's not a driver of hit batters. So I could buy that there was something to this in the past. And maybe we've just become more civilized in this respect. And maybe there's just, I think there's just generally less headhunting going on in MLB than there used to be, or at least the sort of stories you hear about the headhunting, which, you know, sometimes was exaggerated. But I think that happens a lot less than it used to, and it is more frowned upon. It's not punished as harshly as I'd like it to be, but perhaps it's punished more so than it used to be. And there's kind of a general condemnation of it,

not in all quarters, obviously, but I think at least the way that we talk and think about it. So I think it's just, it's less common. And I think it probably hasn't mattered that much for quite a while. But I could buy that it used to matter. And there does seem to be some support for that. So it's not that I have never heard anyone posit this as a potential explanation for what they perceive to be disparate rates of hit by pitch and bench clearing and what have you in the leagues. But I think it is a testament.

I'm having an insight into my own baseball viewing habits, Ben. Because I grew up a fan of an American League team, one that famously had a very good DH, at least when I was young, and thus have probably, on balance, in my baseball viewing life, watched more AL ball than NL ball. Although the ratio, I think, is very even now just because of my professional obligations. This is not a belief I had. This was not a belief I had that needed to be corrected because, you know, they brawl sometimes. You got a DH and then they still are like, we're going to brawl. Also, it seems like it speaks very ill of the camaraderie and team-matery of AL pitchers.

Like, oh, I'm not going to have to deal with this. So I can plunk away. Some other poor sap is going to get a baseball thrown at their behind. And then, you know, you don't have to suffer any repercussions. Like, I think you'd develop a reputation as a bad teammate if that were true, if you showed such indifference to the well-being of your fellows. Yeah. Right. We've got a couple pitch clock related questions. Jay says, more predictions, your favorite thing. Which teams will have the most pitcher and batter pitch timer violations? Which teams will have the fewest? I'm guessing the more analytical teams will have the fewest violations,

like the Astros, Dodgers, and Yankees, because they've done the most to prepare their players. Any thoughts on what would contribute to the best or worst in this category? Well, let's see. The presence or absence of Manny Machado. No. I mean, there are a couple of guys who seem like they have been prickly about the presence of the clock on one end or the other.

Although, apart from Machado, none are jumping out at me right now, but that's just because he had the ejection. I know that like Otani has had a violation on both ends, right? Both as a pitcher and a hitter. Yep, same game. And he worked slower, more deliberately last year on the pitching side.

So I know he had been highlighted pre uh spring training as a guy who we might see rack up a couple just because of how he pitched has pitched historically i'm trying to decide if i i think the general analytical bent of a team matters that much to their likelihood. Cause I could also see, I think that in general, it probably doesn't matter much one way or the other. I don't think you have to be even a team that isn't employing a robust baseball ops department,

like knows how time works. You know, that's pretty, that's just counting down. You don't have to have a PhD to know how to do that. I could see some teams maybe trying to push it like maybe being moderately analytical or even very analytical could backfire yes because you're like you know you're trying to really push the envelope and see where you can press an advantage and does

bringing it all the way down do something good for you in terms of your ability to either be prepared as a hitter or, you know, throw with maximum effort as a pitcher. So maybe that actually leads to a couple more violations as you're trying to press the edge and then, you know, not quite getting there. But I would tend to think that that isn't, I think that player willingness to comply and ambient level of resentment probably has more to do with your success or failure than any broader sort of macro ambivalence or embrace of analytics would. Yeah, it's probably just random, largely.

Or it would have to do, like, if I looked at which teams were the slowest or which players had the slowest pace last season, which, again, probably largely randomly distributed, so they might be the more likely to have violations. I think the only thing that really comes to my mind that might really be predictive is team age. I think team age could be the biggest factor because if you're older, then... pitch clock experience, possibly more willingness or desire to sort of test the limits in that sort of Max Scherzer way. You know, like if you, again, that's related, I guess, if you kind of came up

under the pitch clock, then you're used to it. Whereas if this is being imposed on you, then you might look for ways around it and you might be holding the ball different times and you might be sort of just, you know, white knuckling it and you might run into some issues there. But also, I think it's just, you know, older players might have more incentive to take time because they might need a couple extra seconds to catch their wind at times. Right. And there have been some analyses in the past. And there have been some analyses in the past. Rob Arthur, I know, has written about that where it seemed like older players tend to take more time and also maybe benefited from taking more time than others, either because they needed some time to catch their wind or maybe because they use the extra time more effectively to think through what they were going to do just because of veteran while and experience and such. So I would think team age. So if I had to guess, I haven't looked at how the team age is tracking this year.

But, you know, if the the Guardians are as young as they were last year, that I'd think that they would be less likely to get pitch clock violations. Then again, they have James Caron Jack. So, you know, like you just might have someone who's slow and that might throw the whole thing off. So again, it might be largely unpredictable. But I would guess that if we look at this at the end of the year, that we would find some correlation between age and violation. Yeah, I think so. And like, you might be more settled in a routine, even if it's not a physical, like, hey, I need to recover or I'm stuck in wind or whatever.

Like, you might just have a routine that you're accustomed to and that you've been using for a really long time. And now all of a sudden you have to reconnoiter everything you're doing, which is, you know, I think we saw a lot of guys, even ones who were not, you know, rookies adapt well, right? Like Luis Garcia just stopped rocking the baby. He was fine. Like, I do love how he was like, this will be fine. And then it was fine. But you know, I, I think in most cases, guys seem like they've adapted reasonably well and they've figured things out. And I bet Manny Machado will be fine. I don't want to keep singling him out.

That was just like the most dramatic conflict we've seen, at least. But again, I want to remind everyone that I didn't watch baseball for a couple of days because of family stuff. So maybe there were other big blowups that I missed, but you didn't tell me about them. So I suspect that there weren't. Just the Tim Anderson one. Oh, yeah. Right. but you didn't tell me about them.

So I suspect that there weren't. Just the Tim Anderson one. But yeah. Oh, yeah. Right. So I'll predict the Guardians don't have many because they're still super young. Even with Karachak? Even with Karachak.

And the Mets have a lot because they're old. So it's not ageism. It's about maybe it's even less age than service time or experience, although obviously there's going to be a correlation there. Anyway, that's my best guess. So there are a couple other pitch clock related questions that are very much in the same vein. One is from Joshua, who says, long time listener and unfortunately long time A's fan. In watching their first few games this season, I think I found a potential pitch clock workaround that I'm not sure the league could prevent. I'm a few episodes behind,

so apologies if this has somehow already been covered. It has not. The Coliseum is one of the last stadiums remaining, if not the last, with on-field bullpens. When a reliever is getting warm, it's fairly common for a ball to squeak away onto the field. This has already happened twice through the A's first four games, and I've especially noticed it because when it happens, the home plate umpire has to pause and restart the pitch clock. My question is this. In a high-leverage spot where a hitter or pitcher could use a few extra seconds to breathe,

could a bullpen pitcher and catcher conspire to really uncork one, pausing play without earning their team a violation? Would there be any real value to this, considering both teams would get the same break in action? How often could a team intentionally do this before they were called out on it? And how could umpires or the league even punish or prevent this? So basically, same sort of question, but different variation. Ross says, I went to a Dodgers-Angels spring training game at Dodger Stadium and witnessed a way of skirting the pitch timer. I don't think I've heard anyone discuss yet. It was the fifth inning and it was looking like Clayton Kershaw was struggling with the pitch timer. Kershaw had a pitch timer violation, then gave up back-to-back singles. He was coming close to another violation, but was still collecting himself. So he motioned to Austin Barnes to come for a mound visit. So far, everything seems standard.

So he motioned to Austin Barnes to come for a mound visit. So far, everything seems standard. Then as Kershaw got back on the rubber, a beach ball fell onto the warning track and the pitch timer paused until the ball was removed from the field, giving Kershaw an additional 30 seconds. Is there a world where a team could manufacture breaks from the pitch timer with on-field interruptions in big moments. In a pivotal moment for the pitcher, a beach ball could mysteriously fall onto the warning track in the gap between fielders. I feel like this could happen every third home game and no one would suspect foul play. How often do you think this could work without stoking suspicion? A team could also have an emergency Coors Cat or Cody Bellinger hugger queued up for extreme situations. That seems like it could only work once a season without becoming too obvious, or would it? At a much less scandalous level, what's stopping a fan throwing an inflatable object onto the field as an act of service to the pitcher who seems to need a moment to collect themselves? It would probably get you kicked out of the game, but has a fan ever had this much power to impact the course of a game? Maybe the Dodgers fan who ran onto the field for that

proposal was not actually wanting to get hitched, but was merely trying to reset the pitch clock to help the Dodgers out. So maybe that was what was happening. So both questions concerned a ball getting away and onto the fields. It could be a ball thrown from the bullpen. It could be a beach ball thrown from the stands. But what do you think of this premise? I mean, it is in some ways very normal to have these sorts of interruptions, particularly like if there's a, you know, like there's a long tradition of beach balls making their way onto the field at Dodger Stadium and it being somewhat disruptive. But because of that that we also have a sort of intuitive sense of its of its frequency i think that the the league and the umpires probably have a reasonable sense of like its frequency and so i think that you could do it at the same frequency but if the i mean oh my gosh

now i want this to happen because ben do you know what would be such a fun piece? Such a fun piece would be for someone to track all of the beach ball moments at Dodger Stadium and then the leverage index of those moments on the field. I think it would reveal itself more quickly than you might expect if it always came in a moment that was really potentially impactful for the home pitcher. Yeah, because I would think that traditionally probably the beach ball moment tends to be low leverage. I would think so. I would think so. You're not doing the wave if it's a super intense high leverage moment and probably you're not.

You might be. You're maybe less likely to get people to go along with it at that moment. Yeah. And you might also be less likely to introduce the beach ball. So if you had high leverage beach ball interference, then that might be suspicious. Yeah, I think that you could probably maintain the existing sort of frequency and not have anyone bat an eye at that. But I think that as soon as you start to meaningfully move what is at stake on the field, people actually would catch on to that pretty quickly.

If for no other reason than we have writers who have to write every day. They just write every day, Ben. And so they'd be like, hmm, I've noticed this. And like, how do you orchestrate that? You'd need to have some communication. And then it's like, are they only fans doing it? Are they people in the employ of the Dodgers? Some plant. It's like sign stealing where you have some like mysterious person dressed a certain sort of way. Right. The stand supposedly gesturing. Exactly. And again, you know, people looked at the Giants and they were like definitely cheating. So there are folks who have a sensitive instrument when it comes to these sorts of things.

um sensitive instrument when it comes to these sorts of things um so i think it would you'd be found out probably a little bit more quickly than you would anticipate but i want them to try now i mean cheating is bad i don't i haven't changed my cheating stance like i i still fundamentally think don't do that but also it would be a. Yeah. We still just don't know that this would be that beneficial is the thing. Not only does the other party involved in the plate appearance get the break too, but it's a disruption in your routine. Now, maybe it would be a helpful disruption if you're really laboring, but it might also not be. It might be distracting to have to wait around. It doesn't seem like people are that flustered by this, right? Especially if we're getting to the end of the season, everyone's going to be used to this. No one's

really going to be struggling with the pitch clock. So it's not going to be some huge competitive advantage to remove someone from the pressure of the pitch clock for a particular pitch. And it's not like velocity is down across the league. No, velocity is up across the league again, as it usually is. So and MLB said the same thing about the pitch clock in the minors last year that when the pitch clock was put in place, they didn't see any decrease in velocity. So, which is somewhat surprising because there have been some studies that have shown that

if you take more time between pitches, then you tend to throw faster. But maybe that's only for certain guys who knew that they could take that time and maybe they didn't really need to. So it's not like there's any discernible penalty to this point. There might be times where maybe the game sort of speeds up on you and you're tired and it's a hot day and you're a veteran and you could actually use a bit of a breather and you would benefit from that more so than your opponent. But would you know for sure that it's that time?

Could you pick the right spot? Would you ever be able to determine that it actually helped? I just, I don't put it past them to try just because it seems like it might work or for fans to try because they think, hey, we're helping out our team. But I don't know that there would be any advantage that would make this worthwhile. Yeah. But also, we do have to maintain the teams that have done goofy stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, here's one last pitch clock related question. Sam, Patreon supporter, just a warning. I had a few weed gummies and I'm typing this in one take. I apologize for any grammar boo-boos.

I promise I will never say the MLB though. Thank you, Sam. So my biggest takeaway from the pitch clock is when a battery strikes out on three pitches, it really does feel, oh wait, I guess this is a batter. So there's a, well, spelling boo-boo, at least, but he did pre-apologize. When a batter strikes out on three pitches, it really does feel like a massive flex by the pitcher. Big go-back-and-sit-at-the-kids-table vibes. Now that a clock exists for the first time ever, certain time-based actions can be tracked in a three-pitch strikeout

from the time the clock starts on pitch one to the time strike three hits the catcher's mitt. What do you think will be the fastest strikeout recorded? I would love to see a strikeout from start to finish in under 15 total seconds. So you could track this before because there have been timestamps in the data in the feed that sites get from MLP. There would be timestamps that would indicate when a pitch

was thrown with some degree of accuracy. So that's how we've had pitcher and batter pace metrics, right? So I think you could calculate this. I suppose this could be a future stat blast if we wanted to figure out the fastest strikeout before, but presumably the fastest strikeout now would be faster than it was in the pre-pitch clock era. So how quickly could you dispense with someone? There were some fast ones like the,

I mean, there was the fast inning that Rob Friedman, pitching ninja, put up against the Javi Baez one to show everyone what a difference at the extremes this could be. But the fastest pitcher, according to Baseball Savant, with the bases empty is 11.5 seconds for Brent Suter so far. This is all small sample, but just extrapolate from there. So 15 seconds seems awfully fast, but if you had some sort of quick pitches going on, I guess it could happen, but I would guess that we probably won't see one quite that speedy. I would imagine it'll take longer, but I think that we will see some very quick ones. That lacks the precision that is probably not satisfying.

But I find myself having trouble having a sense of appropriate scale for some of this stuff. I'm still trying to dial in what do I think is really fast versus just, hey, yeah, they're going to go the games. They're going to be faster now. Like, you know, all of the games are going to be faster. So like what constitutes a really fast game? I'm still, you know what I mean? I'm still trying to dial in. It's like when you first learn about WOBA and you're like, well, I gotta, you know, I have to mentally calibrate this. So let's say you throw your first strike and then let's say you're really rushing. So 10 seconds elapses and then you throw strike two. That's another 10 seconds. And then you throw strike three. So there are only two times between pitches, right? pitches right in this three pitch strikeout so could you have a 15 second strikeout i guess i guess i guess that could happen it seems unlikely it seems unlikely but it's not it's definitely not impossible well i will remember this and i will try to make a note to find out at the end of the year. Question was, is anyone keeping tabs on this?

And not that I know it, but yeah, now we are. Now we are. Or we will be. Yeah. All right. Evan says, I was browsing the internet, as one does, and came across an article this morning from polling firm YouGov. I had heard of them for their political polls, often brought up on the FiveThirtyEight podcast,

I had heard of them for their political polls often brought up on the FiveThirtyEight podcast, but their latest poll is something I would not expect them to be focusing on, MLB mascots. I'm going to send you the link so you can read along. Participants were given images of two different mascots and asked to choose which one was better. As far as I can tell, the criteria begin and end with that. The winner was Paws, the Tigers mascot, who was chosen as the better mascot in over 70% of matchups. How is Wally the Green Monster ahead of the Fanatic in this? Some sort of Elo rating situation. The Padres swinging friar brings up the rear at 24%. Well, that's obviously wrong. Yeah.

Who are these people? I'm struggling to understand what exactly the mascots that did well have that the other mascots don't have. Did people just like that the Tigers have a mascot so perfectly fitting for the team itself? Did they not know what the swinging friar is supposed to be? Why did the Philly Fanatic finish all the way down in 10th place? Yeah. And is this a good or bad use of polling? Participants were also asked if the three teams without a mascot, the Angels, Dodgers, and Yankees, should get one.

People who actively follow MLB were more likely to say yes than people who do not. I have no idea what to make of that either so he wants to know if we think this makes sense and okay no nothing about who oh this explains so much about our current political climate that's not true that's like a big thing to level it polarized mascot snap judgments. Okay, so I have a couple of takes just right off the bat here. Mascot preferences break down along partisan lines. I was just about to make a joke about the Braves mascot, but maybe I'll refrain. So it's very strange. There's so much about this that is weird.

Oh, it's very strange. There's so much about this that is weird. Like, it's very strange to me that Clark the Cub and TC Bear, which is the twins mascot, in case anyone was like, what is this about? How are they two and three? That's clearly wrong. Again, Wally the Green Monster being ahead of the Fanatic,

no sense there at all. I am partial to the Mariner Moose, but I don't know if the... I don't know the gender of the Mariner Moose. If the Moose resonates in the same way with other people. I know we like to make fun of Dinger, but I'm surprised that Dinger doesn't do better here. So that's something. Mr. Redlegs being this high is surprising to me,

if only because Mr. Redlegs seems like the eyes are specifically chosen to scare you. I will once again reiterate that the Diamondbacks are cowards for not having a giant snake as their mascot. I know it would scare children. Have the courage of your convictions. What is this Bobcat business? I think that Blooper is an abomination and should not exist. And so I think that about it. The spewing mascot takes, I didn't know you had such strong feelings. Yeah. Yeah. I have really strong feelings about this thing that

I don't actually care about. I'm fine with screech the nationals mascot being so low down because I imagine that people who have strong Nationals mascot takes think of the presidents as their actual mascots, even though Screech is like technically their mascot. So that's fine. I don't know what slider the Guardians mascot is meant to be other than, you know, someone somewhere sitting in a meeting being like, well, people like the fanatic and he's weird looking. So let's have a weird thing. Why is orbit green? You know, never gotten an explanation on that. Famously not one of the Astro's colors.

And I get you can't make him orange, maybe. But why isn't he orange? He should be orange. Why isn't orbit orange? Is he supposed to be like AstroTurf? Was he birthed from AstroTurf? Wow. It's just rapid fire questions.

My head is spinning. I don't know. I can't answer these questions. Yeah, I think that there's also just like very strange, you know, like when prospect people are like doing kind of checks on their list. are like doing kind of checks on their lists. Like it's a common methodology is you group all the guys who are the same play, like the same position. And then you make sure that like within the category of outfielders or

relievers or whatever, that you've sort of prepped them in a way that makes sense. And I wonder if that happened here, because I know that they were doing like this or that, that seems like the wrong methodology to me. Like you should put all of the birds together and then you should decide, do we really like ace the Toronto Blue Jays bird

the best of all the birds? I think that his name is really Fred Bird. That's the Cardinals mascot's name. I think Fred Bird is a superior bird. And I think Oriole Bird, which like, guys, come up with a name for your mascot. Oriole Bird. You don't need to say Oriole Bird. That's redundant.

It's redundant. It's redundant. And so I think you should put all of the birds together and then pref out the birds and be like, are these the birds? Just like you should pref out. It and be like are these the birds just like you should pref out it's like mascot genres just like tier tier ratings exactly you should put all of the baseball headed people together and say do we really like mr met better than mr redlegs and yes i think the answer there is a resounding yes but like and put all the weird creatures like together and then prep them out so like

you know wally the green monster and the philly fanatic and again whatever the hell the guardians mascot is and then do like the animals although what do you do with slugger uh the kansas city royals mascot because is he is he uh a lion like in a royal way or is he a crown because he has a crown in his head there's no differentiation ben it's just like a crown coming out of his head it doesn't seem like it's sitting on his head it seems like it's part of his head what's up with that you know should effectively well just be about mascots what is southpaw also and why is he green is it a he i don't know i don't know what southpaw's gender is either so like mariner moose i have determined uses he him pronouns okay cool so i just didn't know so like you know you want to put you want to

put the uh fanatic with wally the green monster blooperpaw, Raymond, which is the Tampa Bay Rays' mascot, and again, Slider, which is, I don't know, what is Slider? What is that? What are you? What are you supposed to be? Well, I wonder whether that was a factor in the results here, whether people were flummoxed by mascots that defied categorization if you were wondering like what are you like what are you what are you like you know pause is very clearly a tiger right and so maybe everyone was like okay at least i understand what this being is what pause is and is pause is pause benefiting from background goodwill for Tony the Tiger? Right. Yes. Right? I think so. Yeah.

Is there some stolen Tiger valor here? Yes, I think so. And Stomper should be higher. Stomper's great. The A is elephant. You should give, I mean, Stomper's fourth. Stomper's fourth, yeah. And again, clearly an elephant, and Clark the Cub and T.C. Bear clearly bears. So again... Does T.C. Bear wear pants?

Mr. Met clearly is a baseball person. T.C. Bear doesn't wear pants either, so we have... I think people... We have two pervert bears. So Barry knows the job of the rankings. I think people like when there's a synchronicity between your team name and your mascot.

If you're the Tigers. Do you know what logic I was about to offer to this conversation? I was like, but the birds aren't perverts because birds don't wear pants, but they're bears. the bears exposing themselves to them because the bears did very well here although i guess if if the little snapshot that we're seeing is what the people saw them they may not have known that they weren't wearing pants the moose is wearing pants yes and like arguably um a real moose wearing pants much harder than like birds and and so what are the birds excuse i mean bears are also you know they're on four but they're wearing they're wearing a top so they're two of their legs right yeah i wonder so slider was described as a big fat furball that is straight from the creator of Slider, evidently. That's not a creature.

That's nothing. Yeah. That's trash. I don't know what to make of this, really. I guess, I mean, you could question the whole purpose here, which is. Well, I mean, yeah. Well. Yeah.

Are there no more important polls we could put in the field? Well, yeah. backstory. There's how you embody the mascot. There's the mascot hijinks. None of this really can be conveyed by a single still image. So I would question whether this really is representative of mascot quality anyway, but I guess it could be representative of just whether you like the costume. But that's an incomplete picture of just, you know, the complete package of mascotting. I'm so upset by this. Yeah. I have so much more feeling about it than is, I mean, like, to be clear, than is remotely appropriate. It's certainly disproportionate to the thing, but I have such, I get, I get the, with Baxter, Baxter's the bobcat that is the D-Bax mascot.

I've expressed my view about the cowardice of the Diamondbacks to Michael Bauman. And he made the point, and I'm forgetting now which of the, I think, minor league mascots he showed me that is a snake. And they made it a mascot. And it looks like a lizard. It looks like a weird lizard dragon creature um because you know snakes famously don't have legs so that's a problem but um you know lions famously don't have crowns coming out of their heads so you know we're we're already in a realm of shadow and imagination um but i still think they should have tried and if they couldn't make it work

then they should have had like a cactus they could have had like an anthropomorphic cactus and they could have named him Saguaro and it could have been a you know? I know the other issue

the other possible confounding factor here because it looks like they you know, they ask people for all these demographic breakdowns and everything, but I don't know if they normed for team affiliation because the text mentions, obviously for fans of MLB teams, the real favorite mascot is their own. In the instances where someone was a fan of one of the 27 teams with an official mascot and given a matchup featuring that mascot, their favorite team's mascot won 85.5% of the time. The mascot of people's rival team doesn't fare well. It wins 34.6% of the time.

But gosh, even the rival team mascot beat the swinging fryer and slider and Billy the Marlin. That's tough. So I don't know if they adjusted for that. What's wrong with the swinging friar? Do people just not like human? Is it like a sort of an anti-religious sentiment? Is that what's happening here? It could be an expression of, know like uh the the the checkered if we're being

generous um history of missions in that part of the world right are we holding the the friar mascot responsible i mean i guess i guess that makes as much sense as anything as literally anything else and like uh bernie brewer is better than some of the other, I will say is maybe the best human mascot. I think Bernie Brewer's mom is actually the best human mascot. And I like that she also has the mustache. Like, that's funny. Rangers captain as the horse. Why is it? Oh wore they rode horses like the literal texas rangers results were weighted to be nationally representative i don't know if that includes team affiliation because i was just wondering if you have certain fan bases that are overrepresented in this sample of 1 000 u.s adults which included 347 people who said they were very or somewhat interested in major league baseball that might explain why Wally the green monster does so well.

Yeah. And Mr. Met, but that doesn't explain the presence of Stomper. That might just be a pure aesthetic preference. Right. Ben, I got,

I have such, I have such takes. I'm not saying that the Swinging Friar is good. I'm just saying that Blooper is obviously the worst one. Okay. Blooper's weird flesh body. It's like that one, that is actually the one that looks maybe the pervious because it's like a you know like not

all people are that color but there are people who are that color you know and he doesn't have on any pants they could have put him in a full uniform i'm so upset share the results for anyone else who wants to get us up in arms about this as you are you didn't expect me to be so animated about it no extra doesn't have pants on either why do some of the animals have pants but not all of the animals because none of them wear any clothes in the i had the thought i had the thought um this week like what do my cats think about me wearing clothes like what do they think i'm doing they don't know my name ben yeah they probably don't think about it that much no they probably don't think about it that much. No, they probably don't think about it that much. But you're like, you are at times

so expensive and you don't even know my name. All right. I promise the people of StatBlast, so I must deliver. This question comes from Patreon supporter Ethan, who says, I have a silly question that I couldn't find an answer to. Where are the people to come to for that kind of question? Although maybe I missed something similar in the listener questions database. Thank you for looking. Always warms my heart when someone checks the database or the history of StatBlast before sending us a question. What is the biggest difference in velocity between pitches thrown by the same pitcher in a game and the biggest difference in velo between consecutive pitches? I'd love to see DeGrom or Hunter Green follow up a 103-mile-per-hour heater with a 54- 54 mile per hour ephus? I'd guess the

answer involves Zach Greinke or maybe Carlos Zambrano. So I put this to Lucas Apostolaris, friend of the show, sometimes stat blast consultant of Baseball Perspectives and Pitch Info. So he sent me a spreadsheet here and he looked at it a couple of ways. He left position player pitchers in, just in case we wanted to count any of those. He did filter out some data errors and some cases where a pitcher fell down or something, and it was still tracked. And there are also potentially times when a pitch wasn't tracked. It was just so slow it didn't register, let's say. But the biggest differential within a single game,

but not necessarily back-to-back, is Brock Holt. So on August 7th, 2021, Brock Holt maxed out at 83 miles per hour, and he minned out at 31 miles per hour. So it's a difference of 52.2 miles per hour in track pitches by Holt. And then after Holt, you have a couple Christian Bethencourts. And Christian Bethencourt, you know, he's kind of a position player pitcher, a bit more of a legitimate two-way guy than most, but he was at 50.2 in one game and 49.4 in another game. Then you have, I guess the first legitimate one would be Alfredo Simon, August 30th, 2015. August 30th, 2015, he threw a 95.7 mile per hour fastball and he threw a 46.5 mile per hour, what was classified as a changeup. So that's a difference of 49.2 miles per hour. And then Vicente Padilla is right behind him at 49.0. And Vicente Padilla is just the master of this. He's all over both of these leaderboards.

So after Padilla, it goes Francisco Mejia, Brett Phillips, the great position player pitcher, Brett Phillips, Marwin Gonzalez, Vicente Padilla, again, Luis Gonzalez, Garrett Stubbs, Vicente Padilla, Alfredo Simon. So there's a lot of position player pitchers and Vicente Padilla. On this list, Zach Granke, his top game for velocity differential, he ranks 59th.

So he had a 94.4 mile per hour fastball and a 51.9 mile per hour slow curve. So that's a difference of 42.5 miles per hour. That was on September 5th, 2017. So that's his high. And then as for the consecutive pitches, which is perhaps even more interesting. So back-to-back pitches, biggest gap, Vizente Padilla is the top 13 names on this list. He just dominates this leaderboard. So this list he just dominates this leaderboard so the top was july 25th 2008 which is about as far back as this goes this is 2008 the beginning of pitch fx senti padilla threw a 90.7 mile per hour sinker and then a 45.9 mile per hour curveball so that is a 44.8 mile per hour difference on back-to-back

pitches. It's just all Padilla. This is like when Aroldis Chapman used to be by far the hardest thrower, and baseball's had the Aroldis Chapman filter where you could just take him off if you were interested in non-Aroldis Chapman players. You need a Vicente Padilla

filter for this leaderboard. But the top name after Vicente Padilla filter for this leaderboard. But the top name after Vicente Padilla is another name that Ian guessed, Carl Zambrano. October 2nd, 2008, he had a difference of 37.2 miles per hour. But that's how far down you have to go to get beyond Vicente Padilla. And then the top for Zach Greinke is 74th on the list. He had a back-to-back 96.0 mile per hour fastball and a 64.2 mile per hour curveball. So that's a 31.8 mile per hour difference. That was on August 26, 2008. So that's it. It's a lot of Vicente Padilla, some Zambrano, some Granke, some Roy Oswald, some Armando Galarraga, but some of the same names showing up there. So that was indeed fun and silly. So thank you to Ethan for the question, and I will link to the spreadsheet on the show page. an answer that I used StatHead to determine. We got a question from Scott who said Trevor May has three appearances and three decisions so far this year. This probably falls into the extremely

easily StatHeadable category, but I have to ask what's the most appearances to start a season with every appearance leading to a decision? I assume it's from the tungsten arm era, so maybe the answer for relievers is more interesting or relevant. I don't know. I'm not the one with a baseball podcast. It's not too tough to stat head search this, but I did it many different ways, many different queries, and I looked up all time for any pitcher. And then it was mostly tungsten arms.

It was mostly tungsten arms. And you can also look it up within a single season as opposed to across multiple seasons. And you can just limit it to relievers, etc. So basically, if you want to know if Trevor May is unusual, May is one away from matching the wildcard era record for relievers, consecutive outings with a decision to start the season. So that's not super interesting, really, I guess. But probably the most interesting result here is the all-time lead for most consecutive outings of any kind with a decision in every one is Vic Willis had 103 consecutive outings in which he was charged with a win or loss. That's a different era, obviously. If you look, you know, longest streak of consecutive games with a decision

in the regular season, same season, two-starred a season, it's like Luther Taylor for the 1944 Giants had 44 to start that season. And then if you look for like wildcard era, then it's Tim Wakefield had a streak of 26 consecutive games with a decision in 2007. Randy Johnson had a streak of 29, 98, I guess it was. He had a 29 consecutive game decision. That was, I guess, not to start the season. It was within one season, but it was not limited to start the season, which was the question. And then like Bartol Cologne across seasons, he had a streak of 30, 2004 to 2005. So that was the wildcard record for any kind of pitcher over multiple seasons or like wildcard relievers within the same season. Tyler Clippard had seven straight in 2010. But really, Vic Willis,

103 from July 24th, 1903 to April 25th, 1906, Vic Willis got a decision every time out. So back then he is a lead over Noodles Han. The great Noodles Han is second at 94 and then it's Harry Howell and Frank Kitson at 70. So Vic Willis with 103, that's a lot even for a tungsten arm guy. I mean, obviously back then starters went the distance typically and thus win-loss records were more reflective of their performance and they were usually charged with a win or a loss because they were the only pitcher but that's still kind of weird and unusual to have a streak that long yeah i'll link to all the various queries there if you want the permutations of ways that you can stat head that extremely quick one from nat the other day jockock Peterson hit a liner to first and it went through Andrew Vaughn's glove. Do you know what the hardest hit

ball caught by an infielder is? This one was 109. That must be up there. I did some baseball savant searching and it's 118.8 miles per hour, of course, hit by Giancarlo Stanton on June 16th, 2022 and gloved by Vidal Rujan of the Rays. I guess at second base, the ball would have slowed down slightly more than if that had been hit to a third baseman. At a corner, the record is 117.2, hit by Ronald Acuna and caught by Isan Diaz in June 2021. The last one that I will give you comes from frequent StatBlast consultant Ryan Nelson, that I will give you comes from frequent StatBless consultant Ryan Nelson, rsnelson23 on Twitter. And this was prompted by a question that Ryan was sent by Chris Hannell, the founder of our Discord group. And Chris asked him basically, he wanted to know since it's the start of the season

and you say everyone has a chance, in theory at least, has a division ever had every team with sole possession of first place at some point during a single season? And then what is the most number of games you can remove from the start of the season where every team still has had at least a share of first place? So how deep can you go into a season and still have every team in a division over that remaining time be in first place

and have sole possession of first place? So still feel like you're a first place team deep into the season. And if you look at this data, which I will also link to, so 28% of divisions in the divisional era have had every team in that division having sole possession of first at some point, even if it's like one game into the season. quarter of the time, every team in a given division can call itself a first place team at some point in that season, which probably doesn't mean that much if it's like day one, but still technically true. But the longest you can go, so like the max game number as Ryan calls

it here, I'll read what he wrote. Max game number is the number of games into the season that you can go and still say that every team in the division will lead the division at some point in the future. For example, if the max number is 15, that means that between game 15 and 162, all teams in the division will lead at some point. The further into the season you go,

the more likely a team will fall too far behind to ever catch up. The highest number was the 2006 NL West. So the 2006 NL West had the highest max number at 65, meaning that between game 65 and 162, all five teams led at different points. So I guess that was the latest into the season that one of those teams was in first. So the Padres and the Dodgers went back and forth at the end. The Giants briefly had the lead in late July. The Rockies briefly had it in early July. And the Diamondbacks held the lead into mid-June. So the Diamondbacks were the first of the five to drop out. But the fact that they had first place 65 games into the season is the

longest that it took any division to have the first to drop out team drop out. Hopefully that made some sense to people. But that's as far as you can go, or at least as far as anyone has gone. And that's by far the furthest. So 2006 NL West, 65 games into the season before this was spoiled. Second place is the 1974 AL East at 33. So West 16, and 2005 AL West 15. There are only, what, like just a handful of teams, six teams that even went 15 games into the season. So usually someone falls out of it pretty quickly, which is not shocking, I guess. I will link to that spreadsheet as well.

Over time, there have been divisions with different numbers of teams in them and everything. So things are a little inconsistent across divisions and across years. Anyway, we will end with the past blast, which comes from 1991 and from David Lewis, who is an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston. And David writes, 1991, inventor seeks to improve bases. Oh, boy. What else is new? A July 10th, 1991 Associated Press article told the story of inventor Roger Hall, a former college baseball coach who developed a redesigned base with the goal of reducing injuries. known as the Rogers Breakaway Base, I guess that's an obvious thing to call it if you're Rogers and you have a breakaway base,

was designed to detach from the ground when base runners risk injury with a slide that was too fast or too poor. Discussing the inspiration for his invention, Hall said, It happens every day. Someone gets busted up. You have pro players getting hurt under ideal conditions, and then you have millions of Americans playing ball on potholed fields. The AP reported that during a three-year trial period, Hall's breakaway base reduced injuries by 96%. That's a high percent. Yeah. The base connects to a plate that is buried in the ground via a square rod like a typical base.

The top part of the bag connects to this plate via a series of rubber grommets that release when met with enough pressure. Hall, optimistic about his invention, said, I imagine in 20 years when my patent runs out, everyone will be using this base. That does not seem to be the case. I imagine that there are breakaway bases in some places, but we still do not have breakaway bases in the big leagues. We got bigger bases. We do not have breakaway ones. So I guess this is something to put on Theo Epstein's desk and get this tested in lab league because 96% reduction in injuries. It Sounds too good to be true. Yeah. All right. After we finished recording, I did a little more reading and research into Roger Hall and his breakaway base. First of all, that 1991 article that David Lewis sent me said that the Fayetteville, North Carolina Generals, a Class A team of the Detroit Tigers, installed the bases in 1990.

Their general manager said, I think that as contracts go up and up and up and the investment in a player goes up and up and up, injury prevention tools are going to get more of a look than they ever have before. It also notes that the number of grommets varies by level and league. The higher the number of grommets, the tighter the base is held. When the base separates, the rubber plate remains to mark the original spot of the bag. So if the base top should become dislodged from the base plate during live play, the base plate becomes the original spot of the bag. So if the bass top should become dislodged from the bass plate during live play, the bass plate becomes the actual bass for the rendering of the umpire's decision. That piece ended with a quote from Hall, it's tough to be playing Sandlot

when you know you're supposed to be in the big leagues. So I wanted to know what happened, if anything. Obviously these breakaway basses not in the big leagues, but in other leagues. So I searched for Roger Hall and I found a 2014 ESPN article by Steve Wolf, which says, Roger Hall might not make the majors, but it won't be for lack of trying. Now 75 and recovering from a stroke, the latter day Don Quixote has lived to see his patented Rogers breakaway base become the base of choice for youth baseball. It has been used for Olympic softball, major college baseball, and spring training. In 1996, it won accommodation from the chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Says the former Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania college baseball coach started thinking about a detachable base back in 1960 after he waved a runner around first base in a softball game and watched him suffer a horrific leg injury sliding into second. It just seemed everywhere I went, somebody was getting hurt sliding into a base, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer back in 1992. Everything kept coming back to bases and baseball. I see the Lord's hand in it. Breakaway bases has been my calling. I found that 1992 article and the injury sounds gruesome.

The left leg broke in three places. Three years later, it was amputated. Six months after that, according to Hall, the man died from complications. That one has kind of haunted me, says Hall. He was a married man in his 40s with a wife and children. He was a World War II veteran and a survivor of the Bataan Death March, but he couldn't survive a slide into base. Starting in earnest in 1973, Hall traveled the country to get input, drew up designs, built molds, and did his own testing by sliding thousands of times. There's no bark on my backside, he said, because he didn't have glass ass syndrome.

He also spent about $100,000 of his own money while taxing the patients of his wife and daughter. He started selling the base in 1983 only to watch other manufacturers steal his idea. It's a dog-eat-dog world, he said the other day from his Elizabeth Town home. Sporting goods is kind of an ugly business. Hall might have gone out of that business had it not been for Dr. David Janda, who chose the Rogers base for a groundbreaking study at the University of Michigan. The 92 article has the details. In 86 and 87, Janda put stationary bases on half of the softball fields in Ann Arbor. Roger Hall's bases on the other half. Community and college teams were assigned fields at random.

We had 633 games played on breakaway bases, 627 on the stationary bases. Janda says, we had 45 people injured on stationary, two people injured on the breakaway bases. The 45 injured folks ran up health care bills of over $55,000, not including time loss from work. The two from breakaway bases were $700. Janda, the director of the Nonprofit Institute for Preventive Sports Medicine, continued his study. We then changed all the fields at the University of Michigan to Rogers

breakaway bases and ran another study for two years, 1,035 games. Two ankle sprains were the only injuries. Our results did hold up, and it was actually a 98% reduction. Based on Janda's research, the Center for Disease Control has estimated that breakaway bases could prevent 1.7 million sliding injuries annually, saving $2.1 billion in emergency room costs. The American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society recommended that movable bases be installed on every amateur field in America. We believe it will reduce injuries, said the president and CEO of Little League Baseball International. Major League Baseball, however, expressed skepticism. In the 1992 Inquirer article, then-Deputy Commissioner Steve Greenberg said, The last thing you need is in the seventh game of the World Series to have the deciding run slide into third base with one out and have a controversial call because the base pops out.

Absent some really compelling reason to change, it's not going to happen. Well, a 98% reduction in injuries seems like a pretty compelling reason, if that's accurate. Then again, I looked up this Dr. David Janda guy, and he now appears to be some sort of right-wing culture warrior who hosts a radio show and YouTube channel called Operation Freedom that says it presents and dissects information the bought-off, lamestream fake media will not touch. So that doesn't give me a great deal of confidence. I guess the lamestream MLB will not touch the breakaway base. In 92, a spokeswoman for the American Softball Association who was an advocate of Hall's base said, in softball and

baseball, people are very traditional, and he is presenting a very non-traditional idea. We want hard balls and firm bases. In our sport, the climate is against change. We don't care how many knees and ankles are broken. But now we're less against change when it comes to bases. We already made them bigger and more slip-resistant, so why not movable too? That same spokeswoman in the 92 article

said that the bases create a more aggressive game by eliminating a fear factor on the part of the base runners. They don't have a fear of the base injuring them. So maybe there'd be an additional stolen base boost. That 2014 piece said that Rodgers had modified the base to make it even more effective. And that with Rodgers Sports, the company now run by his nephew, Brian Hall, the product has won over Little League International, Ripken Baseball, and the Pony League. And in that piece, he repeated his line about how it's tough to be playing Sandlot when you know you're supposed to be in the big leagues. Sadly, Roger Hall has gone to the great Sandlot in the sky. He has broken away from this mortal coil.

He died last June, and his obituary prominently features the breakaway base, which says it was endorsed by former Major League Baseball player Tommy Davis, was installed at the Little League World Series, the ASA, now USA, Softball Hall of Fame Stadium in Oklahoma City, and the 1996 Summer Olympics Women's Softball Field in Atlanta, Georgia. Many professional minor league baseball stadiums, college, high school, and recreational baseball and softball fields around the world have installed his base system. Thank you, Roger Hall, for your groundbreaking research. If you want to bring Operation Freedom to your bases and allow those base tops to detach, you can find more information at rogersbreakawaybase.com.

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