Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1992: Hot or Hurt

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a wave of injuries around MLB, affecting Oneil Cruz, Adam Duvall, Ian Anderson, and several other players, the Rays’ undefeated start, the hot starts of James Outman, Miguel Vargas, and Jason Heyward, the sensual stance of J.D. Davis, silly team celebrations, the Rocket City Trash Pandas’ no-hit loss, […]

Otani, 19 innings pitch, six hits allowed, one run to start the year. He walked five tonight and has walked now a dozen in his first three starts. Is he effectively wild? I guess so. He has now allowed two or fewer runs in each of his last ten starts. That's a new franchise record. Number one fan grass baseball podcast. It's that cast, it's that blast. We'll be right back. No notes, minor league free agent draft Burn the ships, flames jumping for a nap Cal Fima, boning on the bat shaft Makers on the buck feet, never say you're hot seat

Games are always better with the pivot table spreadsheet No ads, subscribers will support us Vroom vroom fast on your slog to rigor mortis Hello and welcome to episode 1992 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. How are you? Are you healthy? Have you strained or fractured anything? Are you on the injured list? Only, you know, like spiritually.

Yeah, just the usual chronic nagging issues. But nothing that is going to sideline you the way that so many players. So many. What is going on here? This is like there's a rash of injuries in spring training. And then now season started, suddenly everyone's going down and some real bummer injuries too. Not that any injury is good news, but some particularly disappointing ones, I guess, prime among them, O'Neill Cruz, who I feel like O'Neill Cruz had ascended or was about to ascend to main character status.

Yeah. My arbitrary designation of who the main characters in MLB are at any given time. Yeah. I felt like he was just about there. And now that is on hold for four months, it sounds like. Yeah. It's just such a bummer. Like you said, it seemed like he was really starting to emerge and turn a corner is probably too strong because it's not as if he was always terrible or anything last year. volatility and uncertainty built into it. And I feel like we have spent, you know, the last

year basically, or at least, you know, back half of last year after he was called up trying to figure out like, who is O'Neill Cruz? Who's he going to be? What is he going to settle into as sort of his like baseline of performance? And we were, you know, we were only what, like 40 plate appearances in when he got injured. So it wasn't like we had a complete answer to that question, but it did feel like we were starting to get some clarity and there were some aspects of his profile that were really encouraging. And so it, it just is, it's just a bummer because I was really looking forward to seeing that sort of evolve over the course of the season. And, you know, it's not that he's expected to miss the entire year, but he's going to be out for, you know, a good stretch here. And so it's just, it's really, it's really a bummer. Also, like anytime the word fibula is involved.

Yeah, it was tiny sample, but there were some encouraging sides, right? Because we're all watching his plate discipline and his strikeouts and his walks and some of that stuff that started to improve last season. But in this teeny tiny sample, everything was trending in the right direction and the swing decisions were looking better and the walks were up and the strikeouts were down. up and the strikeouts were down. And with him particularly, just because we know he can hit the ball so hard when he hits it, that the fact that he was hitting it more, that seemed very encouraging because with someone like him, I mean, his WRC plus 107 was basically exactly the same as last year's 106. So it's not like he was off to an incredible start, but with someone like him, you don't have to worry about the contact quality. You have to worry about the contact frequency. And that looked like it was going

to head in the right direction. And maybe a breakout could come. And he can break out when he returns, of course, but he's going to miss most of this season at last. And I'm sure they won't rush him back. So who knows, like maybe he just comes back for the stretch run in September or something, depending on how he heals. But it's particularly disappointing because it seems like for him, like all the physical skills and tools are there. He just needs reps, it seems like. Like he needs to see pitches. He needs plays at shortstop, like for the Pirates to evaluate whether he can stick there, but also just to get that experience. And so now he's being deprived of it. And he's 24 and a half or so. So he's young,

but he's not extraordinarily young. So you want him to see those pitches. And now he's going to not see those pitches for some time. And I know the Pirates are off to a strong start, but you figure that they'll play like the Pirates at some point. And O'Neal Cruz would be one of the draws on a way that, that I was just talking about, like, let's use this as an opportunity to gather information because there are decisions that might need to be made when it comes to Cruz and the position he ultimately ends up playing. And if you can make a determination that you feel confident in sooner rather than later, well, then you just give him more opportunity to transition to another position if he ends up playing a corner. So like there, it's not like they are going to miss him because I expect Pittsburgh to be playing October baseball. At least it does, does the regular season bleed into October again this year? Am I able to say October baseball?

It would be nice if we could, if we could do that, but I think, I think there's still October regular season. People know what I mean though. When I say October baseball, there's always one, there's always one smart ass, but people generally know what I mean. But it, you know, the reason this is a hit to Pittsburgh is not because, you know, they would have otherwise been, you know, in the thick of a race and, and likely to contend for a post-season spot, but because I think particularly if you want to maximize the guys you have, when you do get to a point where you're saying like, Hey, this is our, our next good competitive core, we're ready to try to contend. If you can go into that window of contention with answers like is O'Neill cruiser shortstop or not, is he going to be able to make sort of acceptable levels of contact? If you can go into that window of contention with answers like, is O'Neal Cruz a shortstop or not? Is he going to be able to to make there and they're just they and him will be denied the opportunity to sort of put some

real clarity around those questions this year so it's just a shame plus as we said when he hit that home run it's just it doesn't make sense for a man with levers this length that speed he has so it's just so it's a bummer for Pittsburgh fans, I imagine most keenly, certainly for O'Neal Cruz most keenly, but it's a drag for all of us too. Ben Clemens is going to be doing this thing this season where he sort of highlights a couple of stories

that aren't quite article length, but that are interesting to him every week. And of course he led that off with O'Neill Cruz for his first one. And then like on Sunday, it all came tumbling down, Ben, but at least... Got it in before it was too late. But the last game of the Pirates regular season is October 1st. So they just spoiled it for you. Anyway, Cruz out for a while with the fractured ankle. And that was a weird play, too, because benches cleared, right? There wasn't a brawl. It was just a general milling about. But it was not a dirty slide or anything. It was a bad slide, I think, in the sense that technically

it was not well executed. He sort of realized that, oh, I should slide when he was almost there, which given how long his stride length is, I guess he has to recognize that it's time to slide earlier than most people do. So maybe he was just a little slow on the uptake this time. Anyway, he kind of barreled into the catcher and the catcher was not pleased about that and was kind of like jawing at him while he was lying there with a fractured ankle, which was weird. I mean, I'm sure he didn't know he had a fractured ankle, but there was just a general, we're upset, rabble, rabble. And actually there was another injury on the play because White Sox reliever Joe Kelly strained his groin running in from the bullpen

to do the traditional relievers run in to stand there, right? We're on our way. We're on our way. Yeah. And he was thwarted on his way because, you know, he's, I don't know that he's, he's not old enough to strain a groin running in, trotting in from the bullpen. But that's what happened. So Joe Kelly is out now with that ignominious injury. And then the White Sox already banged up in other ways because Eloy Jimenez was on the IL, as he often is, right, with the strained hamstring. The thought was like, oh, he'll be DHing now and we won't have people playing out of position and then we'll be healthy. And now he's hurt.

Tim Anderson is hurt with a knee issue too. Yohan Mankata's dealing at least with some day-to-day stuff. So they're up to their old hijinks from last season health-wise. And then around the rest of the league, you had Adam Duvall, who has fractured a wrist in not the most serious way. He's not going to have to have surgery, but he's still going to miss some significant time. And he had a wrist injury that cost him a lot of last year, too, right? So that's not a great sign. And he was off to an incredible start, just a torrid start at the plate.

Literally the best start in baseball among position players. Right, yeah. And the Red Sox need him. I mean, we talked about how weird it is that he is now a full-time center fielder at his age for like the first time, basically. We did a sort of a stat blast about just moving to center field late in your career the way that Adam Duvall has successfully. But the Red Sox, I mean, already down Trevor Story for a chunk of the Red Sox, I mean, already down Trevor Story for a chunk of the season. Gosh, I mean, they're like playing Rob Refsnyder out in center now.

Like it's pretty bleak up the middle for that team. They're like calling up Bobby Dahlbeck and people's like, can Bobby Dahlbeck play short? Like they're just, they're up to like the third and fourth stringers up the middle

having lost Xander Bogarts and already coming into the season sort of shorthanded with stories injury so yeah things uh not looking so hot on the depth chart for the Red Sox right now yeah it it does not it does not look good you know when you are sitting there dependent on the idea of him being like a really great center fielder and then he's like pretty good and then you're like oh my gosh I really miss it I center fielder and then he's like pretty good. And then you're like, oh, gosh, I really miss it. I'm Duvall in center.

It's like, what are we doing here? And Ian Anderson having Tommy John surgery now, which, man, pitchers. We used to do this exercise at the Ringer where we would rank the 25 players under 25 every spring. And I used to do it with Bobby Wagner and Zach Cram and Michael Bauman. And Bauman was always higher on pitchers than the rest of us were. So we would always make fun of Bauman for putting Sixto Sanchez up at the top of his list, and then Sixto Sanchez would get hurt. Not that we were happy that Sixto Sanchez got hurt, but we were all very much, there's no such thing as a pitching

prospect sort of, you know, when you're ranking top talents under a certain age, we were having very few pitchers and pitchers very low on our list, whereas Bowman would be bumping them up. But Ian Anderson, I think when we ranked them last spring, going into the 2022 season, we were all pretty high on him and we all had Ian Anderson. We were like, okay, this guy, we can count on this guy. Like Ian Anderson, he's the exception to not trusting pitchers because they always get hurt or something goes wrong. And then look what's happened since then.

Sadly, he was missing a lot of last season, had a five ERA when he was pitching and now Tommy John surgery. So he's going to miss all of this year and probably a good chunk of next year too. Seemingly, yeah. I mean, Atlanta has depth and they have pitchers and they'll probably be all right, but his career, his very promising career has been derailed in a pretty significant way over the past year. Yeah, it's really too bad. I mean, I think given, you know, he didn't start in the rotation, right?

And you noted the underperformance. So you kind of wondered if something was going on, but we didn't necessarily know it was anything quite this severe. But yeah, it's just, it's really a bummer. I mean, like, you know, stuff like that happens. And then you're like, oh, well, Zach Eflin only has lower back tightness. So who, you know, the Rays really dodged a bulletmer. I mean, like, you know, stuff like that happens. And then you're like, oh, well, Zac Efflin only has lower back tightness. So who, you know, the Rays really dodged a bullet there. It's like, yeah. Or Michael Harris also has back issues. Yeah. Yeah. Although I always look, I'm not saying I know anything. I just know what it feels like to be 36.

Yeah. But Michael Harris, the second does not know what it's like to be 36. Well, he has a better sense of it than most young men his age, right? So, you know, it's just there's the absence in the present. And then you worry about stuff recurring. Like, not to say that they will for Michael Harris, but sometimes back stuff is persistent. for Michael Harris, but sometimes back stuff is persistent. Gosh, it's like you might be able to get guys back when they have wrist stuff, but those little bird bones, Ben, they do people in.

They sap people of power. They are so vulnerable, those little tiny dumb bird bones why are we built like this so it's just it's it's really quite it's really quite something it's really uh quite something sort of bummer you know i'm looking at like our injury tracker tim anderson duval and then you know there are the smattering of relievers that you expect in o'neill cruz and you have seth brown on oakland which is too bad because he's like actually a big leader and they need as many of those as they can get.

And Mitch Garver is hurt. And then you have more relievers and we're going to have to wait to see if Andres Munoz's two-seamer works. And then, you know, Paki Naughton is still just on the Cardinals and not the Red Sox, which is not the most important thing

about him having a strained forearm, but is a thing I remember every time I see his name. Yeah. Herman Marquez has forearm issues now? Come on. What is going on here? I mean, I know like lamenting injuries, injuries are sort of just a constant state. I mean, someone's always hurt.

Someone's always getting hurt. It's like when people lament the death of a few celebrities at the same time and people talk about like the rule of three and it's like, oh, yeah, two celebrities. I got news for you. Like all the celebrities are going to die. Like we all are, you know, like I'm not the most morbid person on this podcast in its history. But, you know, I feel like when we're all like, oh, it's three at a time, like, it's a comforting thought to think that it might be only three, because eventually, it's all of them. So it's almost like we're like, not another one. Someone else died? What else? Come on. Like, I thought a couple people died.

I thought that was it. Like, it's not going to stop. I guess O'Neill Cruz has caused me to, like, suffer some existential crisis here. Yeah, you're, what does it mean, anything? Does any of it mean anything? But here we are just lamenting this guy hurt his back. I mean, we could do that almost every episode if we wanted to. Someone's always tweaking something or pulling something.

It's just a constant state of being in MLB. This is a bit of an injury stack. This is a bunch just piling up all at once. And it's always bad news, but it's also not news that, guess what, not everyone is going to make it through the season intact. It's almost like we're treating it as if the baseline is everyone's healthy and it's going to be great and we're going to get to see all the good players playing healthy all season long. That is never, ever the case, which I think is why sometimes at the end of a season, if a team had a ton of injuries, they're always reluctant to use it as an excuse or they're reluctant to cite it as an excuse, but they always find a way to bring it up. They're like, I'm not going to make any excuses

here, but you know, and it's fine to make that excuse. I think I've always said, if you had a lot of injuries, uh, sure, go ahead and use that as an excuse. If you were particularly snakebitten by injuries that year, then that can be the difference between a successful season and not or first place or second place. So I don't have any issue with people saying we had a real rough injury year this year. But the point is that someone is sadly always getting hurt and succumbing to human frailties. Yeah, it just feels like there have been a number of ones concerning guys who either were performing really well or were promising or play important roles on their teams or could. And so, you know, maybe in this moment we feel them slightly more keenly than we do at other times of year where we're like, oh yeah, that guy's hurt. He's hurt again or whatever. And I will say, Ben, I know you have an evolved sensibility when it comes to teams. Maybe we don't

want to say making an excuse, but offering explanations for their underperformance. But I don't think everyone is as open-minded as you. And certainly very few people have contemplated death with the depth that you just demonstrated. So I think that that's why they can be a little wishy-washy about it because they're like, yeah, I don't want you to snark at us. We're snark-proof. And of course, no one is snark-proof.

It's the internet. Yeah. So I think you're right, though, that we feel everything most keenly at the start of the season. And I think that can be true in the opposite direction, too, when things are going great for you. Right.

Like the Rays, for instance, right? Yeah. How about them Rays? The Rays, they've been a bit banged up, too. I mean, they have their injuries as well. The aforementioned Zac Eflin among them. Indeed. Yeah.

And Tyler Glasnow is still not pitched this season. And, of course, Shane Boz is out for the year. I mean, everyone. Jose Series dinged up. Yeah, right. But it has not slowed them down thus far. They are 10-0 as we speak on Tuesday. They'll either be 11-0 or 10-1.

They will have lost a game by the time some people hear this. That is conceivable. But it's sort of in the same genre, I guess, where a 10-game winning streak is good at any point. But if it comes in the middle of a season, you don't make that much of it. 10, it's good. It's special like it's obviously a story surrounding that team it's maybe not national news that everyone is paying attention to the way it is when you're 10 and oh because when you're 10 and oh you're perfect you're undefeated you have not lost no not an error to be found yeah there's something that's much much more impressive about going from 0-0 to 10-0 than going from, I don't know, like 60-45 to 70-45, whatever it is. Like when there are a bunch of tallies in the loss column and you're just tacking

on to the win column, then it's nice, but it's not nearly as eye-catching. So when you have a streak to start a season or even to start a career, right, like Jordan Walker with his 10-game hitting streak to start a career, which I think 17 is the record, well, we know Jordan Walker is good, or we certainly thought he was. That's why he's there. And so this has maybe only confirmed what we thought. And we knew that the Rays were good, right? So have they moved your appraisal of how good they are? Or is this just, well, they're off to a nice start. And also they were playing really lousy teams for the majority of that time.

So, you know, you probably would have like expected them to go seven and three or something during that stretch, right? At least because, you know, they were playing the Nationals, they were playing the Tigers, they were playing the A's, and then they won one against the Red Sox, right? Who are shorthanded themselves. Famously so.

Yeah. So these are terrible teams, which is not to say that they cannot win a game. And the Rays were totally just trouncing everyone. Dominant. So winning up until they beat the Red Sox, won nothing. They won every game before that by four or more runs. They beat the A's in back-to-back games, 11 to nothing.

So as they say, that's what good teams do. They beat up on bad teams, but they don't do it every day and in every game. And the Rays have been doing that. Have been doing that. Now, I have to say something before I answer your question, which is they have, in fact, made four errors. So there are four errors to be found. But really isn't the bigger error mine, me, Meg? I think the following, which is that is it as impressive? Is it as indicative of dominance as it would be if they had gone 10-0 and the teams they had been facing were like the Dodgers and the Braves and the Blue Jays. I mean, it's not as impressive.

I don't know that if a team like the Rays went 10-0 against all very good competition that I would necessarily think that it tells us something new either. I think that 10-game winning streaks are just always going to have some amount of like, you know, like you win 10. Oh, every team wins at least 10 games, Ben. Spoiler alert. And so, you know, I think we get enamored to your point with like the sequencing.

Is it as impressive as them, you know, taking it to teams that are like really good that we think of as really good squads? I mean, no no i guess not um i think the the margins um that they have won by have been pretty impressive and so it isn't as if they are 10 and 0 against bad teams and they squeaked by every time you know like they're like you said apart from that 1-0 victory yesterday like they're really they're really winning you know there's not a lot of doubt involved in in this i do find it interesting that they like the the way they're winning there's like a lot of home runs being hit by this team which has not you know in last couple of years always been like their forte. So like that is a little bit interesting.

Now, again, perhaps it's just like they faced bad pitching. And so they clustered a bunch of home runs together. And well, there's that. But, you know, there's there's a little bit of intrigue for me there. But no, I mean, when you win 10 games like you've been doing something right. And they've been doing a lot of some's right in that stretch of 10 games and i think particularly when you're in a division like the east where you do have a really good jay's team and you have a good yank a really good yankees team and you have like at the very least a pesky orioles team and then like you know a red sox team that i expect

to not be very good particularly now that they're so hurt. It is meaningful to bank wins because they count the same come October, at any point in October. And so you want to build cushion for yourself because you're going to face stiff competition within the division. There are a number of teams in the American league that I think are, are really strong wildcard contenders. Some of which have played like it so far and some of which haven't. And so like, does it mean that they're the best team in baseball? No, I don't think that they're the best team in baseball. Does it mean that they have, you know, a nice little bit of cushion built in after 10 games? Yeah, sure. They do. They can squander that cushion or they can keep building on it. You know,

I think that we expect that division to have some back and forth and to have the first place spot change around a couple of times, but it's not unprecedented for divisions that are thought to be like really strong and likely to yield competition to end up with a team that just kind of runs away with it at the beginning and then you know you still get wild card squads out of it but it's good jeff is gonna be furious because like i'm, I don't really believe in jinxing because if I had that kind of power, why would I use it this way? You know, like, well, why would that be the way that I use it? But it does feel a lot like we are inviting the baseball gods to say,

they're going to lay an egg. It's going to be a stinker. They're going to have a stinker. We should talk about the Diamondbacks. Not right now, but at some point, because I'm looking at the standings and I'm like, you know who has the same record as the Atlanta Braves? The Arizona Diamondbacks.

Your surprise pick, right? That's right. So you're not surprised that they're doing well? You picked them to surprise. I did pick them to surprise. Really? Like the 1-0 win that the Rays had over the Red Sox? That was impressive because it was I did pick them to surprise. guy in that game and he's like their last starter right and he was the weak link in that rotation like he gave up five runs in three innings in his first start and even then it was like okay maybe

they have one weak link in that rotation then they'll get tyler glasnow back and then they'll be golden but then josh plumping pitched great too yeah and everyone in that bullpen so they have done it in a really impressive way just the number of arms that they have and yes the offense which historically has not been their strength right and right so you see wander franco off to an incredible start you're like okay this is the year this is the wonder franco just runs rough shot over the the league season that we've been waiting for so who knows but there's a fairly small sample of teams that have started 10-0 because, again,

we're talking about the very first sequence of the season. And so if you looked up all teams that had 10-game winning streaks at some point in the season, there would be many of them, and their collective record wouldn't be all that impressive because that happens often if you can choose any 10-game slice of the season. But obviously, it's going to be rare to win 10 in a row to start the season. There's just a much smaller pool of potential times that you can do that.

So I think the Rays are the seventh team that have started a season. Yes. 10-0, and they're the first in the wildcard era. The Brewers, right? In like 83 or something. Yeah, 87 Brewers. I mean, case in point, I think the 87 Brewers started out winning 13 in a row, and then they lost 12 in a row.

Yes. They lost like 18 of 20. So who knows? We could be talking about the slumping raise in two weeks. But you look at teams that started 10-0, none of them turned out to be bad teams, but they didn't all turn out to be great teams either. You had the 1955 Boys of Summer Dodgers who won the World Series, and then you had the 62 Pirates who went 93-68 and

finished fourth in the NL. You have the 66 Cleveland team finished 500, 81 and 81 fifth in the AL the 81 A's 64 and 45. They finished first in the AL West and then they lost in the ALCS 82 Atlanta went 89 and 73 won the N NL West but lost in the NLCS. And then those 87 Brewers who went 91-71 and missed the playoffs. So these are not super teams we're talking about here. So getting off to a start like this does not mean that you're going to have just an incredible record-breaking season. But as you said, in this division, with as tight as it was forecasted to be, if we want to play our premature looking-at-the-playoff-odds game

that we did even more prematurely in a recent episode, the Rays obviously are the big winners when it comes to playoff odds changes since the start of the season. They have basically doubled their division winning odds. They're 50-50.

They're like a coin toss now to win the AL East. So they have basically doubled their division odds. And they've basically doubled their World Series odds too since the start of the season. And their playoff odds are way up. They're, you know, at like 91%. So again, I think most people expected the rays to be a playoff team and a contender at least in the east when the season started so it's just that they went 10 and 0 while the yankees went six and four and the blue jays went six and four and so that's

gonna help obviously so yeah they have improved their odds. That is obvious. But as far as is this something that we have to make an enormous deal out of? Probably not yet. Just to kind of put it in perspective, imagine that it was— A medium deal. I'll be aghast at this and hyperventilating. Probably not. So the fact that it has happened here, you know, it makes you dream of, wow, this could be an incredible season. It extends the possibility of having some sort of amazing triple digit win just wire to wire dominant season. But that's still not the likeliest outcome. It's still not the likeliest outcome, but it hasn't been. I mean, not that any team has this really eliminated for them 10 games in, but it hasn't been eliminated as an outcome. No, it hasn't.

And I think you're right that in the middle of the season, we tend to only really note. I think we note win streaks when they get to, let me pick a random number and think about whether i believe it like i think once a team wins like 13 in a row then people like oh and particularly if that winning streak like dramatically alters um their playoff odds then people go oh and then they tweeted us for not believing in their team and they're like why didn't you believe in them and i was like sorry i didn't predict that they going to go like 13 and over that stretch. Like, sorry.

Not Nostradamus over here. So, you know, then we notice, or at least I do, because I got people in my menchies. Yeah, there's like a multiplier effect when it happens at the start of the season. I don't know what the multiplier is exactly, but it just magnifies things. It distorts things somewhat, but yeah, that's okay. We're all excited. We're all, you know, it's the start of the season here. We're in our cups. We're kind of optimistic and we're just buying too much into things and that's fine. It's the early season exuberance. It's just a reflection of how happy we are that baseball season has

started, at least Major League Baseball season. So it's okay to get a little overexcited. I think that's fine. And also, the Rays, their outfield, I noticed, is leading the majors in war. Probably a lot of different Rays units are leading the Major League in war right now, just because they've been so good. But the Rays are on top. The Red Sox are third, largely because of Adam Duvall's efforts to date. The Dodgers are in second in outfield war. Now, part of that is Mookie Betts, so that's not surprising. But James Outman, Trace Thompson. Jason Hayward. Yeah. I mean, look, Jason Hayward has had 20 plate appearances, but also he has hit three home runs.

Three home runs. Which, like, that's almost enough. And he also, I think he hit one, he had like a 112 mile per hour batted ball. It was like the hardest hit ball he'd hit in five years or something. And that doesn't seem like a total accident. So the fact that he redid his swing and he overhauled his whole setup the way that the Dodgers will do with guys, reclamation projects, and suddenly he's off to the start where he's slugging 765 in a minuscule sample. But I'm just saying like one batted ball that he hit that hard is like, is Jason Hayward back? Did the Dodgers fix Jason Hayward? So anyway, any fears of can Trace Thompson keep it up?

And is Jason Hayward actually going to be any good? David Peralta hasn't hit it all yet, but they still have had an extremely productive outfield. And James Altman has looked amazing. So it's like the Dodgers. I mean, look, they're a neck and neck with the Padres right now.

Neither of them is off to a great start. Each of them is six and five. So none of my. I can't compete with those Arizona, Arizona Diamondbacks. So of course not. Can't keep up with those seven and four Diamondbacks running away with the NL West.

But, but I have not changed my prior significantly when it comes to the Dodgers either. And yet you look at James Altman and you look at like Miguel Vargas and you're like, oh, Dodgers magic again, because Miguel Vargas is walking in a third of his plate appearances.

Yeah, he sure is. And as long as you don't look at Noah Syndergaard's line, you'll never have any doubts about Dodgers magic. Yeah. Dodgers, one of the many teams with injury issues. Anyway, just seeing young Dodgers come out of the woodwork. Not that no one had ever heard of Miguel Vargas and James Outman. Miguel Vargas was the top 100 prospect.

Yeah, pretty celebrated prospects. But also, if those guys have great years, and if Jason Hayward especially, like that came up, I think, on maybe our preview pod or at some point this spring, we were like, all right, if they fix Jason Hayward, then this is not fair. Like the Dodgers must be broken up if they fix Jason Hayward. be broken up if they fix jason hayward anyway all signs point to him well not being broken or at least no signs point to his being broken yeah thus far i mean do i expect that james alvin will continue to run a 400 babbit i mean no i don't you know that's not a thing I expect. Do I expect him to have a, you know, does he really have an 800 slug? Good grief. You know, there might be some candidates for regression

if we were to look through his stats, but so far it's working great, you know? And it's, man, has Luis Jr. really not walked at all yet this year? Does he really have a 0.0% walk rate? Wow. Okay, well, that's not the point of this segment, but that's a funny thing.

So, yeah, I mean, like, they have some very good players over there. Will they be enough to weather their injuries? We're going to find out. But, yeah, look, it would be so fun if hayward could have like a even just one sort of renaissance season to kind of reset our collective memory of him i think that that would be that would be great it would be so exciting so yeah it's pretty cool i'm trying to decide who is the most surprising guy for me in our position player top 10 and i have to say i think the answer might be matt chapman matt chapman has a 586 babbitt i don't think that'll last either

that's with small sample size yeah it's like yeah we you know, everyone on here has at most like low 50s plate appearances, you know, of the guys on sort of the first page of our position player leaderboards. So, you know, do I expect Hunter Renfro to be the 28th most valuable position player in baseball this year? No more than I expect Victor Robles to be the 29th. So, you know, there's going to be some moving around in here. But... You know who else is off to a strong start in the NOS with a 421 BABIP

is J.D. Davis. But in his case, I buy it just because of the raw sexual energy of his new batting stance. Have you seen the J.D. Davis? Oh, my goodness. Okay. I really appreciate how open to displaying this part of your personality you are. Because if I do it, it reads differently to people and we get much weirder emails just historically. But it is

an energy I want to be on the pod. So I appreciate. I will represent it. I appreciate you, Ben. We'll get your real-time reaction here to J.D. Davis's new bad experience. I'm ready. Which I am watching along with you. It looks normal at first. Yeah, it sure does.

And it looks normal at the end. Oh, my God. Oh, my. And then there's a thrusting that's happening there. And it's like a sensual thrusting. Yeah, there's a little something to that. Yeah, he sets up in a totally normal way. Like he's just a very standard, just kind of cookie cutter batting stance and then all of a sudden he starts swaying in the midsection only just very like twerky kind of but it's a little

twerky yeah i mean it's no it's decidedly not that actually that exaggerated but but um it it does have a bit of of the sensual to it yeah and i'm sure there's some rationale like i'm sure he's talked about and he's probably like i'm just trying to like stay back or you know like there's probably some boring explanation for why mechanically he is doing this but but come on i mean our minds are going to go in the gutter when we see this, JD. We are but human. Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase rhythm method. It does. I mean, this would get in my head if I were a pitcher and I were throwing to this guy just thrusting at me.

I mean, this would distract me. I mean, in fairness, Ben, he's not thrusting at the pitcher I mean, this would distract me. I mean, in fairness, Ben, he's not thrusting at the pitcher. No, he's... That would be a totally wild stance to have. Couldn't hit if you were thrusting that way. A combination of like a Tony Bautista just like open stance,

like facing forward and the thrusting. That would anatomically be difficult to pull off, guess but but yeah this is it's demonstrative i've not seen many many stances like this it seems to be working for him so i would not change a thing if i were jd davis and i were off to the start he is i'm trying to like make another joke in my mind about something. Random method. No, no. I'm going to leave it be. I do always wonder

because we get new celebrations get debuted at this time of year. We find out what each team is going to do when it hits a homer or scores a run. What they found at Goodwill that they've decided

needs to live in the dugout. Right. We found a shopping cart. I guess we're going to push people down the length of the dugout in the shopping cart. But no, this is the time of year when we were introduced to what each of the celebratory rituals is. And so the angels now have a home run samurai helmet, which was Shohei Otani's idea. So they have this big, heavy, cumbersome helmet.

Like they used to have a cowboy hat. And then at the start of this year, I think they had sort of like a straw hat. And I guess Otani was like, nope, we got to go bigger. So they have a samurai helmet here. And then like the brewers have their cheese head, which I guess makes sense for the brewers. But then the Orioles have their Homer hose, which has become known as the dong bong, which is great. I mean, I like this one, but I just, I always wonder cause like each team has to have its signature celebration and

it's a long season and you got to do this thing for six months or seven months and probably like the pressures on it. And also like you have your, you know, your horns or whatever, you're going to flash. Like when you get on base after doubling and you look at the dugout and you're pumped up and you do some sort of hand signal or you give yourself donkey ears or whatever it is, like there's always something. And so I wonder whether it organically arises or whether it's like put to a vote, whether there's like a, a vote, whether there's like a committee, like here's our celebration, because it's a big decision because you're stuck with

this thing. And sometimes they evolve maybe over the course of the season, or you might abandon it or replace it with something new, but it's a big part of your team bonding and your team identity. And you see a zillion highlights throughout the season and some of these things must get tiresome like when it's the dog days of august and you've put the samurai helmet on like 150 times already and it's like oh here we go like hey i guess we gotta we gotta keep putting the helmet on because we've been doing it all season it's our thing you know it's like it's like when you have an inside joke with a friend or something or like a friend group and, and maybe like one of the friends is more into it than, than you are or than other, they never get tired of it. And you're

like, I think this is played out now. Like we could probably, and then you see the friend and it's like, Oh, we're still doing this joke again, I guess. And so I guess there's probably kind of a collective peer pressure, like we got to keep it going. But I just wonder whether at some point the enthusiasm sort of dissipates. Right. Yeah. And it's like, do we have to keep I mean, this is our thing. So I guess we've established we do the the dong bong, the Homer hose. So we got to do it all season long now. but I don't really feel like doing it today. It's a lot of pressure to come up with something that you're going to want to do all season long. And then I really wonder about the levels of enthusiasm and how players shift in and out of, of,

you know, like socks and beards and all sorts of things, depending on how they're playing. And I get that, you know, maybe you want to keep the, the good times rolling, but surely someone,

someone on your team isn't hitting well. And you could just pretend like, oh, we had to retire the, this thing because he hasn't been hitting and so we we wanted to shift around the vibe or whatever you know like it's it's uh just lie to us i guess is what i'm saying like if you get sick of it you get to you get to change it it's not my business what you do at work i mean it's literally my business what they do at work

a lot of the time but um you know for stuff like that if they don't want to but sometimes they must just keep going through the motions just out of oh yeah it's just like you know this is our thing it's our trademark we gotta keep it up because and some guys on the team are probably like super pumped to do it all season long and then other guys are like still still with this but yeah i i just wonder like do you have to put it to a vote in the clubhouse if you're going to retire it or change the celebration? Or is it just very organic and like, all right, it seems like reading the room here, maybe it's time to switch things up. But I wonder whether there has to be a conversation, whether there's like a referendum, whether it's secret ballot. Like, are we done with the dong pong? Is it time for something new?

I like the dong bong. I mean, clearly. No one's going to go back to calling it the Homer host, guys. Once you put dong bong out there, it's the dong bong, so just accept it. But also, you don't have to do it all year long if you don't want to, but that's a young team. They're full of enthusiasm. They're feeling their oats.

Maybe they'll keep the dong bong up all year. You were going to say they're full of enthusiasm they're feeling their oats maybe they'll keep the dong bong up all year you were gonna say they're full of dongs well i mean i think that another option that is available to them is if they don't want to lie to us they can lie to each other which is you know someone can just be like we left it behind yeah the dongbass lives in we misplaced the cincinnati now you could possibly say where it's gone so you know i think that at some point if it feels like it's starting to wear but there is say a concern about what it might mean you know cosmically to adopt a new uh celebration in this a game that is governed by arbitrary and capricious gods um that it just needs some veteran leadership to stand up and say i don't know i think we left it behind you know

sometimes you go to a hotel you'll leave all your suits there and then you just gotta buy new suits you know we gotta buy a new hat new dong bong new... And since we have to get a new one anyway, do we want to get a new one? Do we want to try it? Does me having lost it... Don't ask why I'm doing air quotes. Why would you even ask me that? But does me having lost it mean that we have to get a new thing

so as not to bring with us the rage of know, rage of the left behind mystical object. It's very complicated. Who knows how those things work? I've done that when it's time for my daughter's bedtime and she gets in her head that maybe she wants to play with a certain toy. It's like, you know, if it's not in her line of sight, then maybe we can just pretend we don't know where that is right now. And, you know, we'll find it tomorrow.

Find it tomorrow. Yeah. So a few other items. First of all, I guess we should give our due to the Rocket City Trash Pandas and their spectacular blow up over the weekend, which was really fun. This was a no hit loss loss unlike any other, right? So the Trash Pandas and Angels affiliate, they lost what was the final score? Was it 7-3?

Oh gosh. What a good... We'll keep saying numbers! Ultimately it doesn't matter because the point is 7 runs is the point. They gave up 7 runs is is the point they gave up seven runs without allowing a hit yeah they sure did do that which is unprecedented at least you know

in the majors there's the andy hawkins game right in 1990 with the yankees where they gave up four runs and lost without allowing a hit but seven runs runs, that's really something. And this was a seven inning game because it was a double header. It was game one of a double header. So they had to then play game two after that game unraveled. But at first I thought, oh, seven innings, that's not as fun because a no hitter is not as impressive in seven innings. But really, I don't think it matters that much. It doesn't really detract from how silly and strange this was because the point was that they gave up seven runs. It doesn't really matter how many innings they did it over.

No hits were allowed, but many runs were allowed. So Bauman has a good full recap of it, and you can find Pitching Ninja did a montage of just everything going horribly wrong. But it started with Ben Joyce, who is this incredibly hard-throwing reliever who looked like he might make the Angels out of spring training, and perhaps he'll be up at some point this year. this year, but he throws like 105, and he is somewhat wild, as you might intuit from the fact that he is not in the major leagues already, because if he throws 105 and had pinpoint control and commands, then he'd probably be a big leaguer, but not so much. But it wasn't even really that much his fault. I mean, yeah, he was wild and he walked a couple guys, but he also could have gotten out of it quite easily. He got a strikeout.

He got what should have been a routine fly ball. And it was dropped. It was dropped like the Yoshida fly ball to Ryan McKenna in that Orioles Red Sox game was that Adam Duvall then followed with the walk off. This was the same sort of thing. The Trash Pandas were up three nothing heading into the seventh the last frame and then yeah it was seven five the final having not allowed a hit so things just went uh horribly horribly wrong so no hits allowed but seven runs i mean there were hit by pitches there were errors there were wild pitches there were wild pitches, there were walks, all the various ways that you can let people on base and let them score without allowing a run. So it was quite special.

I imagine that if you're in the midst of something like that, once you get to probably the third run, to like probably the third run the strangeness of the moment lets up just just enough for you to appreciate other people likely taking note of the strangeness of the moment and then you go i'm gonna talk about this i'm gonna talk about this for a long time like i i am it's bad enough to go to be like a 20th anniversary oral history of this game. Yes. And all you can hope for when that comes around is that many of the guys involved on the Trash Pandas have had long and storied big league careers. So they can look back on it with like, you know, the remove that you can only really enjoy when the rest of your life has like given you the gift of that moment not mattering anymore. But for at least one of those guys, that's probably going to be the thing that they and we remember about their pro baseball career. I don't want to speculate about who though.

Unless you were the person on the mound, it's probably the sort of thing that you can laugh about, right? The rally started against Joyce and then Eric Torres was the one who came on and hit three straight batters with pitches and the last one forced it to run. And then there was a four pitch walk and then there was a wild pitch and then he hit another batter. So he will probably not remember that game fondly unless he goes on to have an incredible career and he can look back and laugh. But probably everyone involved in that game, even as it's happening in that moment with five walks and four hit batters and an error and a wild pitch in that one seven run inning.

I mean, you have to have a sort of a sense of humor about that. Like the trash pandas Twitter account was like, well, we did not give up a hit in the first game of today's double header. Unfortunately, we also did not win. So there's that. They did come back to win game two of the doubleheader and they won in a shutout.

So much for momentum. They rallied quite quickly there. So they couldn't have been too down about the way that that happened because they came back to win right away. Just suggests like a level of being able down about the way that that happened because they came back to win right away. Just suggest like a level of being able to put things behind you that I have never achieved even once in my entire life. Like, you know, we've talked before about the various things that would, you know, stand as barriers to our ability to be professional athletes of any stripe,

to our ability to be professional athletes of any stripe, let alone baseball players. And to be clear, my list is long. But the number of nights I spend thinking about things that happened when I was in middle school that objectively do not matter anymore suggests that the ability to wash it clean and then move on to the next game, I just wouldn't, I don't have it, Ben. I don't have it.

No. Yeah. That is one of the many attributes that it takes to be a successful player. Yep. So I was tickled by that. Also, we got our Rob Arthur spin up at Baseball Perspectives. Spin is down. Spin is down.

So the enforcement seems to be working, or at least the threat of enforcement seems to be working. And you've heard this before. We've been here before. Yes. There's a crackdown. Spin decreases and spin to velocity ratio decreases. And then it inevitably ticks up again. But we will see whether it ticks up again or whether this downturn will actually be enduring.

And, of course, there is a pre-tacked ball being tested yet again, I think, what, in AA this year. So perhaps they will finally crack the code there and get a pre-sticky ball that everyone likes. And then there won't have to be as much sticky stuff. But at least for now, the sticky stuff seems to have abated somewhat. And it's not like you can tell, though, is the funny thing. I mean, strikeouts are not up. They're not demonstrably down either. But the increase in strikeout rate has been more or less arrested over the past few years. There's let's say, when the levels have sunk to almost their low? Or, you know, even if we go back to the first season when enforcement first started and you really saw the bottoming out, I can't tell, you know? Like, visually speaking, I can't tell the difference.

I know there is a difference. Yes. And yet it still seems like we're constantly seeing just otherworldly movement. Yeah. You could tell me that spin was at an all-time high right now and I'd say, yeah, that tracks because have you seen some of these pitches people are throwing? some of these pitches people are throwing. So it's not like, you know, I mean, I know there's a measurable effect and there's probably a demonstrable result when it comes to stuff and strikeouts and everything, but it's not as big as we thought it might be, I think, at the peak of, you know, kind of hand-wringing

about spider attack and everything. Like, guys are still throwing, like, wiffle ball stuff out there, you know, so they don't, they don't need to cheat to be as good as they are. So they're, they're really good regardless. I think that, um, I, I think you're right that it is not a, an entirely easy thing to discern. I mean, I think that there are guys where maybe you notice a little bit but i think the place where i tend to see the biggest difference is isn't so much even in the pitches themselves saying like oh i can tell that that you know is spinning in 300 rpms less than than it was two weeks ago it's gosh his shirt sure is staying tucked in better now than it used to. And his hair suddenly perfect. No need to fuss with it between,

between pitches. So I think all of the, all of the other little stuff, you tend to notice more and there's just less of that other little stuff now with the pitch clock anyway. And so I'm, I'm having a hard time discerning what of that is, well, guys feel like they need to be able to come set and be ready and deliver the pitch within a certain amount of time and how much of it is, Oh, well, you know, he doesn't feel confident. He can go to his gob of goo, um, without it being detected now. So I don't know what my what I'm in. I'm not able to interpret it like sort of intuitively yet.

Yeah. And a little game theory update here when it comes to the running game and pitchers trying to deter runners from going. So Tom Tango did some analysis at his site. This is the MLB StatCast brain trust Tom Tango did some analysis at his site. This is the MLB StatCast brain trust, Tom Tango. And he did some analysis that showed that basically so far, once one pickoff attempt is made, the success rate goes way up. So it used to be that when you made a pickoff attempt, So it used to be that when you made a pickoff attempt happens, players get more successful and try to steal

more often because pickoff attempts are limited. So once you know that you've used up your one, I think runners are thinking, well, many pitchers won't be willing to use their second one because once you use your second one, you're all out. And after that, they'll take an extra long lead and they'll be more likely to go. then i'm in trouble then you could either adjust in one of two ways i guess because if you stopped throwing pickoff attempts altogether because you see these results well then guys are going to go right away once word gets out that you're not even going to try to pick off someone you're john lester basically right then in theory the runners will take longer leads from the first, from, from the get-go. So what you could do then is be more willing to go right up to the edge and play a game of brinksmanship here and use your second free pickoff attempt. So you got to do that, but

there's going to be a bit of a cat and mouse as there is with everything. Like Tango used the comparison of like swinging on 3-0, for instance. If a batter never swings on 3-0, then the pitcher's just going to throw meatballs over the middle because they know they can get away with it. But whatever tendency is causing the batter not to swing on 3-0, well, once you start enticing them with a bunch of meatballs, then eventually they're going to swing in 3-0, and then things will swing back in the other direction because the pitcher will say, Oh, he swung on three Oh, I guess I can't just lay one

in there anymore. Cause he'll make me pay. And so now I actually have to throw some balls on three Oh, so it's that kind of game. And I guess it's going to go back and forth all season long, but it's basically like, you know, once one pickoff attempt is made guys like jump up a tier in terms of like sprint speed like it it basically turns players in one tier of sprint speed into players in a higher tier of sprint speed without any pickoff attempts it just kind of gives them a speed boost basically so it's you know's something to keep track of all season long.

And I will be curious, it seems like maybe the stolen bases have started to tail off just slightly relative to the start of the season. And I don't really know whether it's going to stay at a reduced level or decrease as the season goes on, or whether that will plateau, or whether certain teams or players aren't being aggressive enough. It's going to be fun to watch this as the season goes on. Yeah, for sure. I don't know where I expect it to settle. I'm trying to decide. What do you think? I think Rob Means wrote something recently about how he doesn't think that it will be up as much as you might think because the run environment is not conducive to stealing so much like what with all the strikeouts

and still a lot of home runs historically speaking yeah and not a lot of singles so it's just not sort of a scoring environment that rewards the stolen base in theory. So he thinks that that will sort of depress it. But I wonder whether you've had a reaction like this. We got an email from listener Will, a Patreon supporter, who said, just wanted to share a quick observation on one way watching baseball has changed for me with the rules changes with the extremely heightened stolen base success rate. I find myself way happier when a catcher throws someone out stealing and way less sympathetic to runners getting called out for popping off the bag on replay. Will Myers just got called out on a stolen base attempt on replay

in the second inning of a Reds-Phillies game. And while in past years I'd be sad that the replay call, which wasn't exactly a cheap pop-off call but not too far removed, overturned it, and that would discourage him from stealing again. Now I'm glad that runners like him might feel a bit held in check. It's a big flip from my rooting interest on a steal attempt from the last decade, at least. Can't think of any other rules changes that have adjusted whom I'm rooting for on a given play like this so drastically. So his sympathies, now it's like the pitcher and the catcher are the underdogs

suddenly and we're rooting for them that is so interesting i i don't know if i am quite there if only because i've i don't know if you know this about me but i've like always enjoyed it when i catch her naps a few days dealer but i do like this as an answer because it suggests to me that the rules are doing exactly what i hoped the rule changes would which is like opening up the the range of experiences that we can potentially have of the game where it felt like we were getting more and more hemmed in to a particular style of playing baseball and a particular set of outcomes. And I don't want to overstate the effect that this has had in the early going or anything like that, but it does feel like we've, we've moved maybe from a period of contraction in terms of the, the range of

outcomes we might expect and the different reactions that we might have to them to a sort of unfurling, right? Like that we're back in an opening, like the petals of a flower, you know, kind of expanding to meet the sun. It just feels like there's a lot more potential for different kinds of stuff to be seen. And yeah, I hadn't thought of that, that like you're, you know,

when stolen bases are a relative rarity and when we're all wanting to see like a really gifted speedster be able to just go, that you feel active resentment toward catchers sometimes when they nab a guy. You're like, how dare you? Like we get so few of these and you're taking one away from us? Like what is wrong with you? Don't you know that this is a spectator sport?

And now it's like, oh, he got him. He nabbed him. But maybe that's just me enjoying watching Gabriel Moreno throw some guys out and be like, wow, he can really do that. Yeah, that could be. We talked on an email show last week about ways that teams or fans could disrupt the pitch timer and the pitch clock just by like throwing a ball out from the bullpen or throwing a beach ball from the stands.

We've gotten some questions also like this one from Jeremy, Patreon supporter. How long do you think it will be before we see pitchers run out the clock consecutively to give an intentional walk? I could see a situation where a reliever is warming and needs more time and the manager has the current pitcher repeatedly get pitch timer violations to stretch out this process if they otherwise don't want the pitcher to face the batter. I see this as being most likely when the pitcher on the mound is a reliever who needs one more batter to reach the minimum. I expect this would be incredibly annoying and would probably result in some new unwritten or written rule.

But given the tendency to run out the clock in other sports, I could see it happening in MLB. I do wonder whether that will happen at some point. I think it will probably happen at some point, but I imagine that once it does, that teams will get a little memo. They'll get a little note in their collective mailbox being like, hey, don't do that anymore. Yeah, probably. Because the rules do give umpires a lot of latitude to be like, you're, excuse an expression, you're dicking around within the context of these rules in a way that is meant to sort of blunt their impact. Stop it or you will be assessed penalties. So I expect we will, but I think it will be fairly obvious to everyone that that is what is going on, especially because we have a mechanism

for issuing intentional walks that requires throwing no pitches at all and is very straightforward. And so I'm sure that I would imagine if this happened between innings, the umpires would be like, hey, get over here. Don't do that. And then they wouldn't be able to do it, at least not with that crew. And then again, you'd get your little memo. Yeah.

And you'd get booed at least if you were the visiting pitcher. Oh, yes. Yeah, which didn't stop Bruce Chen from throwing over to first however many times it was when he did that. You'd get booed every time you'd do that, too. And despite that peer pressure and that fear of condemnation, pitchers would still do that. But you'd be the center of attention and everyone in the ballpark would be like, come on. You're costing us time. We're now in this mindset where we don't expect baseball games to just endlessly waste people's time, basically. So we're on a schedule here, come on. And you'd just be standing out there just brazenly doing nothing, providing no entertainment value. I guess it would be kind of entertaining to see it happen once just to hear the booze rain down. But yeah, it would take some gumption, I think, to weather the criticism that you would get for just wasting everyone's time.

Yeah. I mean, I think that if you are a visiting player, you come in assuming you're going to need gumption, right? Because the virtue of your actions has very little to do with whether or not you get booed if you're a visiting player. It's not about that. It's about what you're wearing, Ben. So I think that- We do laundry, it is true, yes. Yes. So I think that visiting players have to steel themselves against all sorts of less than polite feedback, if you want to put it that way. But I imagine that the impolite feedback that would matter the most would probably come from both the umpires in the league office being like, OK, so we know what you're doing and it goes against the spirit of the rule. So don't do it again. Although it's tricky because, you know, you're inviting the penalty that would be assessed to you to try to deter the behavior. And so it would, I think, require clarification

in the rule. And then, I don't know, like, what do you do if you're the umpire? It's not like you're going to assess a ball to the next pitcher. Like, that's not how that works. So, you know, then you're, I guess, just getting ready to eject people or something. Yeah. One rule change that is not having its intended effect thus far is the rule change intended to cut down on position player pitching. Because we've seen an awful lot of that. They tightened the restrictions there.

So you have to be down eight runs or up 10 in the ninth to use a position player. And any time in extras, too. So we've seen nine of them already, I think, in the first 12 days of the season. Granted, one of those was our man Nate Eaton of the Royals, who was the subject of one of our Meet a Major Leaguer segments last year, and he was a pitcher in college, so he was coming out pumping 94. But most position player pitchers are not doing that. So that's a lot. So like on pace for yet another high for the umpteenth season in a row. So it seems like they've got to go further if they really want teams to cut down. like they got to go further if they really want teams to cut down. I don't know whether any,

any of this is like arms not being built up yet and maybe, you know, guys aren't going as deep into games their first turn or two through the rotation as they will later in the year. But given the trend over the past few years, I don't know if we can pin it on that or whether it's just a continuation of the same thing. So sounds like, you know, Joshian was basically advocating for making it a rule that you can only use a position player to pitch if the team is carrying fewer than 13 pitchers, you know, otherwise then you're just not allowed to because you have so many pitchers who are real pitchers already.

And that would have some nice secondary effects of maybe getting more non-relievers on rosters and interesting bench players in different roles. And then also requiring pitchers to actually pitch and maybe getting tired or having to ration out appearances so that you wouldn't be able to throw max effort all the time. I've certainly been in favor of restrictions on active pitchers. Anyway, it's striking because some of these rules changes have worked so well

that that seems to be the exception, though that's obviously a less important one and one that people are paying less attention to. I guess it's largely the pitch clock that is working so well that everyone is like, wait, MLB did something and it worked? It's like an unfamiliar feeling. It's like in recent years, and I don't want to go too far in praising MLB or acting as if MLB does things for the right reasons all the time. But I would settle for just sheer competence out of MLB. Just like, it's been a while since the league, like, I don't know when the last time it was that it had a reputation of like, they know what they're doing over there.

You know, I mean, I don't know that any sports commissioner is really popular ever. I mean, I guess Adam Silver was sort of popular for a while there recently, and then the shine kind of came off him, too. Yeah. Inevitably, like, it's just the job of the commissioner, basically, to be the bad guy. Yeah. And all commissioners are disliked. But it's one thing to be disliked and also sort of respected. Yes.

Like, we don't like you, but you seem to know what you're doing. We get what you're doing, yeah. Yeah. And MLB has not had that for a while. So that would be a refreshing change, even if it was like, you know, Rob Manfred, don't love the guy, but at least like, you know, the things he's trying to do, they're kind of working in some ways. So there are some ways in which they're working.

And that just makes me lament all the more that we didn't put the pitch clock in place prior to the zombie runner being put in place because we might've avoided it. We could have avoided it. If the sequencing had just been different, then I think the support would not have been there because it's like, hey, we just lopped off 25 minutes or 30 minutes. We don't need to go putting in this zombie runner nonsense. But now the zombie runner is just in there, even though we, if we'd just done it in the opposite Yes. concede this point. I know they said it's permanent, but we should still hold the line on this as far as I'm concerned, because the rationale for it was, was first that they had safety concerns related to the pandemic. And, you know, we don't need to litigate those, but I don't think that, um, they're clearly operating in a different risk environment now than they were

then. Like maybe that's the best way to put it. And time savings. And we were always skeptical of the time savings claim anyway, because so few games relative to the rest go, not only go to extras, but go super long into extras. Like those marathons. Those innings slow down with the zombie runner too.

So there are fewer of them, but also you're, you're saving less time than you'd think because it's just a slog. Precisely, Ben. So yes, keep practicing that speech because we shouldn't give up because again, neither of the rationales hold anymore.

They've already decided that they don't care about the first thing in the way that they did before. And we know stuff about outside transmission, blah, blah, blah. So we're not operating in the same risk environment. And we just lapped off all this time. I was at, Ben, I was at a hockey game last night and I'm sitting there with people I know and behind me are people I don't. And they are talking to other people who they know, who again, we don't know. And they were asking, hey, have you gotten to a D-backs game this year? And they brought up proactively without sensing the vibe of me having my ears turned back like a cat, being like, what are you talking about with baseball?

I want to know, I want to know. Praising the pitch clock makes such a difference. You're out of there in two and a half hours. It moves. It's the most fun I've had. And I wanted to be like, isn't some of the fun you had that the Diamondbacks might not be garbage anymore? And that's so... But they, in the wild, I

observed a pitch clock race. Oh, yeah. And I was like, oh. Yeah. Sam on his sub stack, he just redid his 10 years ago exercise. Delightful piece. Well done, Sam. Loved it. He looked to see how many people, also at a Diamondbacks game, right? How many people behind home plate.

Everyone is talking about the Diamondbacks, the most exciting team in baseball. But he looked to see just how many people behind home plate are actually paying attention to the game at any given time and watching the pitch. And it's a big difference. I mean, it's, you know, 15 people in a few half innings separated by a couple, by a decade. Doesn't need to make too much of it. All limitations that Sam acknowledged. Yes, he did. But, you know, it's harder to look away now.

Anyway, I guess the slowdown that we get in extra innings with the zombie runner, I guess that is mitigated somewhat by the pitch clock. But still. But still. I've not forgotten. Yeah, we will never let it go. See my earlier discussion of things that happened to me in middle school. I do think that it's like in much the same way that it is useful for us to distinguish like stuff front offices do versus stuff owners mandate. And there's cross-pollination there, right?

So I don't want to like let people off the hook in a way that's not reasonable. But you're talking about, I'm so unaccustomed to like crediting the, you know, the league with doing good stuff. And it's like, I'm not accustomed to crediting Rob Manbran when doing good stuff. But there are a lot of, I'm not saying you're saying the opposite of this, Ben, to be clear, but a lot of smart capable folks who like baseball who work in the league office my commissioner i don't know why i got some feedback so it's like it's always a weird thing and you know we're clearly not afraid of or reticent to

criticize mlb so that tradition will continue but i'm always like who am i talking about like specifically and part of the frustration is that sometimes you don't know you know you just don't know you're like uh morgan no it's not always morgan sword sorry i don't know if morgan sword listens to this podcast but if he does i apologize for you becoming a minor character because you know you seem nice enough yeah it would be nice to feel it'd be refreshing to feel like there's a steady hand on the tiller. Like, even if the steady hand was like, mostly interested in making more money or whatever, like, sure, I'd take it, you know, there'd be an improvement. So I think the part of the pitch clock success that is really refreshing is that it is about the game being better. And it is about the game being better in a way that is in some respects compromising other revenue generating objectives of either the teams or the league. the teams or the league.

Like, I don't know this to be true, but I was having a conversation with someone the other day about like, is it harder for them to do micro betting stuff now because of how fast everything is moving? Yeah. Like maybe also teams, you don't have to keep selling beer into the eighth inning. I get that you're making less on concessions, but this seems like a very bad idea in ways that are so obvious that I can't

believe we're having to have this conversation. Have you seen this? Yeah. Yeah. That was a bad, yeah. Well, I didn't Manfred say that, like, there hasn't been a difference really in concession sales, right? I think he did say that. In the minors too, they didn't see that there was a difference. Like it's, you know, maybe if you're going to get a certain number of beers or hot dogs or whatever, like you'll just do it in a shorter span of time or whatever. So it doesn't seem like there's a big difference there. Actually, I'm seeing what he said was they think the reason for the lack of decline in concession sales is that people kind of in their head have two and a half hours set aside to do this baseball game. So before the clock, if two and a half hours was at the end of six innings, they were gone. Okay. Now they stayed until the end of the game and we've seen absolutely no decline on the concession side, which is good, I guess.

But yeah, if the Brewers and maybe other teams are extending beer sales into the eighth inning, then you will have people going right from drinking to driving. If the goal is to allow more time for blood alcohol content to decrease, then you should actually be cutting off sales earlier since the innings take less time. Anyway, you mentioned the pace of play. There was something we talked about, I think, two years ago because Rob Manfred said that Adam Silver had advised him, don't monkey with this. Don't yeah right like don't bad mouth the the pace of play because hey it's gonna be a gold mine for you right so the fact that he did

go against that i guess that's to their credit anyway the last thing i i wanted to mention is just uh these royals shifts that are going on here so that the Royals have been the most adventurous when it comes to trying unorthodox outfield alignments. They have been, yeah. Because you can still do some funny stuff in the outfield if you want to, but we weren't sure really whether anyone would because it's quite risky

to monkey around with your alignments out there. And we have not seen a shift violation yet. Have we? Like there, I don't think so. There have been,

there have been some fielders who are so close to the line that they could kiss it. But like, I don't think we've actually seen someone get called for a violation. Yeah. I think maybe, maybe Elvis Andrus had one, which I think it was,

I think it was that he, like he had his heels in the grass or something. It wasn't like he was too deep, I think, maybe. I think there was one, but it took quite a while. Anyway. There hasn't been like a rash of them or anything, though. No, not at all. But the Royals have been trying these, I don't know what to call it exactly. It's not a five-man infield.

It's like sort of a two-man outfield. It's like a two-and-a-half-man outfield, two-and-a-half-man infield, I guess would be the very succinct way to say it. I'm imagining Charlie Sheen wearing roller-coaster blue. Terrible. But what they do basically is like they'll have one outfielder kind of in right center and one outfielder in left center. And then they'll have the third outfielder basically playing where the over-shifted infielder would have been before. So like shallow right field. Yeah.

And they did this, you know, in spring training and, and other teams were doing this in spring training, like experimenting with it, you know, largely against Joey Gallo. Um,

but, but the Royals have done it a whole bunch of times now and not just against Joey Gallo. So like against a bunch of giants. Yeah. So, so Joey Gallo's a, he did it against a bunch of giants. Yeah, so... Joey Gallo's a big guy, too.

But Ben Clemens, he investigated whether this makes sense in theory against Gallo, and he found that maybe, probably, barely, perhaps. But Gallo is extreme, obviously.

And if it barely, maybe makes sense against Gallo, then it will not make sense against the vast majority of hitters. And they're doing it pretty often. They've done it like 24 times now. And I don't know how many of those were against Gallo, but it's often not against Gallo. And like to go back to Tom Tango again, back in December, he wrote a post at his blog headlined, Will clubs use a two-outfield alignment?

And the first word was no. And then he ran through why he didn't think that would happen, because it just doesn't make sense, and it's too risky, and you're leaving open too much real estate. And if something falls, then it's going to be an extra base hit, and it'll really make you pay. And it just doesn't seem to make sense in theory. So the Royals have been doing it and Tango tweeted the numbers. So they've allowed with this shift on the 24 times that they've done it, a 5-10 WOBA. So that is not good. That is like peak Barry Bonds. Roughly that weighted on base average. So that's not good

if you're turning every hitter into Barry Bonds. No, seems bad. Yeah, but, you know, I mean, it's a small sample, 24 times. And part of that is because like three home runs were hit And you might say, well, it's not fair to count that against it because those wouldn't have been caught anyway.

But as Russell Carlton and others have shown, you can't necessarily discount that hitters will do different things when the shift is on and pitchers will do different things. And so those home runs might not have been hit. Otherwise, players, you know, they adjust in unpredictable ways. But even if you ignore the walks and the strikeouts and the homers, like all of the non-ball-and-play outcomes, then they've given up five hits on 14 balls in play. That's a.357 BABIP, which is is still not good that's still considerably higher than the league average and there was one time when it it basically worked like against uh gallo but i think it was mj melendez was playing short right he kind of booted the ball yeah he he boofed it basically

because you know yeah it was like a grounder to him, but he's not, you know, experienced playing in that position and he just bobbled it. But still like, you know, it'd be one thing if in theory it seemed like it should work and it was not working thus far, then I'd say, oh, just stick with it. It'll work in the, in the long run. Like that's the problem. That's, you know, the only rule is it has to work. We, we brought that up in, in the book because it was like, when we did a shift for the first time,

it was like part of that, it had a double meaning, like the only rules that has to work, we meant, well, it can be something weird and strange and unorthodox and all that really matters is whether it works. But also we kind of meant it has to work like the first time we try it because if it doesn't that everyone will revolt yes and i guess to their credit they have stuck with this i don't know if it's to their credit because i don't know if it makes sense but they have at least shown some persistence here but it on paper it doesn't seem like it would be that well advised and and the results haven't been great either so i i wonder how long they will keep this up yeah sometimes you wonder like i appreciate teams like the royals because i do think that they are sometimes like providing a service in a way because they're not like a good team and we don't expect them to do a whole lot this year um but they're not like a good team and we don't expect them to do a whole lot this year.

But they're not like, they're like respectable in some ways, right? Like they're not the worst team in baseball by any means. And so they still have incentive to like try some stuff, but like, they also have, I imagine enough like mental cushion in terms of their expectations for what

their season might produce that they're like well we can stick with it and see how it goes and and so i appreciate teams like i don't know if this makes sense now ben was quick to point out and to admit that like he had to make a number of assumptions in doing his analysis of this and so you know teams have access to more precise positioning data than than we do and so you know there are assumptions in his piece where if you go a different way or you have a more robust data set that allows you to to get in the weeds on some of this stuff like maybe it changes some of the outcome a little bit but intuitively like his conclusion made sense to me when I was editing it. I didn't come away being like, I don't know, Ben, I don't quite buy this. So I can't imagine

the effect would be that dramatically different, but maybe we're wrong, Ben. I kind of feel like if I were a Royals fan, even if this seems counterproductive, I might be encouraged that the Royals are trying it just because it's such an un-Royals thing to do. You know, like the Mike Matheny Royals, I don't think they would have been, you know, trying the strangest out there defensive alignments, right? And so the fact that they have kind of a new field staff and it's like, you know, X raise people and, you know, from more perhaps forward thinking organizations. And everyone's hoping that that will mean that their player development will improve and some of those guys will take steps forward. Like if the cost of that is that maybe they go a little too far when it comes to trying some off the wall shift stuff, go a little too far when it comes to trying some off-the-wall shift stuff.

If that were to correlate with, well, they're open to new ideas and they're putting new things into practice, it doesn't mean that they'll be good at anything else. But it does kind of confirm that, like, this is a new Royals, you know? Like, the old Royals wouldn't have done this. And even if this specific instance is not for the best, it kind of makes you encouraged about other things that they might do differently. Yeah. Just get Vinny and Pasquantino out there to explain it to everyone and

come away so charmed that they'll be like, ah, can't wait to see what they get up to. I don't know why. Royals fans would have that accent. Cause I don't even know what that accent was, but yeah. All right.

Well, I guess we can wrap up with the, the past blast unless uh do you want to tell people about the uh the ball person collision that you've been enjoying well i have to credit our producer shane with bringing this to to my attention because i had missed it live and he saw it in person um but there there was indeed a collision between the Guardians and the Mariners, bat ball children, boys, young men. It's hard to tell in the collision the age of these young people. But, you know, the clip that you can see on the Mariners broadcast is funny to start because first you see a woman look very concerned and you see the man next to her dying laughing.

You know, what are they seeing? What are they seeing off camera? You know, you're looking at sort of an open side view of Miles Straw. And, you know, then George Kirby delivers a pitch and then the Roots logo comes in. And in the foreground, you can see these two ball young men run into each other. They are in slow-mo. They, the, the Mariners ball kid gets knocked down. I mean, you know, this is in Cleveland.

And so both of these young people are employed by the, the Cleveland Guardians. So you do have in some, in some ways like guardian on guardian crime here. But in the rush seemingly to deliver balls quickly in compliance with MLB's mandate, we had a near tragedy. We had a collision. We had, you know, are these kids entitled to workers' comp? Like, how does that work? Yeah, it's dangerous. We can't have lollygagging ball people anymore. So it's an injury risk now. They could be colliding with each other. And I don't want to laugh too hard because at this time, I do not know the current state of either of these young people and how

this might have shifted their perception of baseball or if they sustained any injury that has potentially lingering effects so I hope that that is not true but I will say that if there are any

issues I hope they send the bill directly to Rob Manfred. So thank you to Shane for pointing that out to us because I was like, oh, goodness. Link to that on the show page for everyone else to enjoy and laugh. Not too hard, but a moderate amount. Not as hard as the collision scene to me. Which seems, you know, some of it is that it is in slow-mo, you know. Which seems, you know, some of it is that it is in slow-mo, you know, and some of it is that I think they really got each other. Yeah. All right. So our past blast last time was about detachable bases and having a breakaway base that would perhaps reduce injuries. And just as I was putting that up, Ronald Acuna Jr.

like stole a base, literally like he stole second base and the base detached. Came away with him. Yeah. So even though we don't have those breakaway bases, I guess you can break them away

under the right circumstances. Just have to be as strong as Ronald Acuna Jr. Yeah. He was holding it for a while and Ozzy Albee said, I thought he was just going to score with it in his hands, which

That's great. We got a question from listener Andrew who said, like, what would have happened if he'd kept running with the base in his arms before anyone had called time on the play? Could he be tagged out if he's holding second base? Would he have had to drop

second base before he could touch third base? Or is the umpire simply compelled to declare the play dead at a certain point? And perhaps most important, has this ever happened or been tried before? So, I mean, the bigger bases, I guess, make it a little harder to run around with the bases in your arms. But yes, could you just run away with the bases and say, well, you can't catch me because I'm the Stinky Cheese Man. I got the base in my hands here. I don't know. Oh, do you remember the Stinky Cheese Man book from when we were kids?

Clearly, yeah. The art was really cool in that one. It was. Stinky Cheese Man. Yeah. Oh, see, you get to, I get it because you get to read it again and not feel like a weirdo. That's nice. Well, we have not actually gotten to the Stinky Cheese Man again, so I don't know what made

that come to my mind. have not actually gotten to the stinky cheese bin again. So I don't know what made that come to my mind. But yeah, I mean, I think you can. I remember reading an article a few years ago about whether you could carry the bat around the bases because some players were doing that, right? Like Alex Bregman and Juan Soto, they had in the World Series, I think they had kind of like, you know, Soto they had in the World Series. I think they had kind of like, you know, challenge each other to carry the bases, carry the bat around the bases. And I think it was concluded that in theory, there's no rule against just carrying the bat all the way around the bases on your home run trot. You could do it. Maybe it would be seen as showing up the opposition. Perhaps an umpire would step in, but there didn't seem to be any rule against it.

But when it comes to like making a way with the base, I think that would probably be frowned upon. Is there a specific rule against that? I'd have to check, I guess. I don't know if you haven't committed the entire rulebook to memory, I guess. But yeah, I need to look it up. You know, even lawyers, that's why they have all those books, Ben. You know, they have reference stuff. Yeah, that seems like kind of an obvious loophole.

Like, you know, you can't have a force play if it's like the guy tapping his head meme. You know, can't have a force play if you just take the base and run away with it. Yeah, feels like not touching can't get mad. Yeah, I think probably you could not get away with that. Anyway, that brings us to our new past bless, 1992. And this comes from David Lewis, an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston, who writes, 1992, the league seeks fan input on potential changes. Sounds familiar. Fan input on potential changes.

Sounds familiar. In 1992, while considering a modification to the league's format, MLB's commissioner's office sought fan insight on potential changes. According to a December 20th, 1992 Orlando Sentinel article written by Gordon Eads, MLB mailed surveys to randomly selected season ticket holders asking their opinions on division realignment, interleague play, expanding the number of playoff teams, and getting rid of the DH. Per the article, a cover letter accompanying the survey read, Major League Baseball is currently going through some exciting times. In the years ahead, there may be some innovations that will create greater interest in the game. Fans were presented with a series of options for each topic for playoff expansion under plan B, the top two teams in each of the then four divisions, eight total would qualify for the playoffs. How quaint a mere eight teams qualifying for the

playoffs plan C dubbed more radical by Eads would divide each league into three divisions and send each division winner and one wildcard team in each league into three divisions and send each division winner and one wildcard team in each league to the playoffs. Can you imagine? Pigs would fly. For interleague play, option A called for 10 interleague games, while option B saw each team playing 28 interleague games, two apiece against each of the 14 teams in the opposing league. A third choice, option C, each of the 14 teams in the opposing league. A third choice, option C, suggested more than 10, but fewer than 28 interleague games. Further questions asked whether the DH should be abolished, used in interleague games, or just used in American League games, and what fans thought about league and division realignment based on geography. So this was 1992. This was prior to the most recent two rounds of MLB to the survey were, but he couldn't turn up anything.

And that seems to be the case recently because MLB is constantly polling and putting surveys out. We never seem to hear what the results were. Yeah. How about that? I guess it makes sense that they would want to keep that quiet, but it'd be nice. Yeah. How about that? they probably want to reserve the right to do things that fans might not want. So they might not want to put that out there and advertise that a given rule change is unpopular. And I guess, you know, there could be times where fans are against something and really they should be forced to take their medicine.

You know, I mean, fans probably would have been against the pitch clock at least at a certain point. And maybe that's for the best that they were forced to come to like it. But it would be nice i'm always curious like sometimes you'll hear tidbits like in an interview with you epstein we'll talk about how you know fans want contact and they want triples and they want doubles and that sort of thing but i'd like to see the results anyway i don't know what the results were of the 92 survey but either they endorsed the changes that were subsequently made or MLB

just went ahead and did it anyway. But nothing new for MLB to be taking the temperature of the fan base when it comes to making some changes to increase the audience's interest. Nothing new under the sun. Nope. All right. Speaking of nothing new under the sun, you may have seen a study that was done by some researchers at Dartmouth about the effect of global warming on home runs. Some people have emailed us about this. The conclusion seems almost self-evident to me. We know that the average temperature has increased and we've known for a long time that the ball

carries farther and that more homers are hit in warmer weather. So yeah, it follows that global warming has caused a very small increase in homers. Even according to the study, it's about 1% of homers hit annually. When I got the press release about this, I remembered that Tim McCarver was talking about this back in 2012, although he was exaggerating the effects of warming on the flight of the ball. But Alan Nathan wrote a piece for Baseball Perspectives for me back then showing that, yeah, there is a relationship. Temperatures go up, the ball flies farther, you get a few more homers. Anyway, I don't think we learned a lot from this study. I guess the point is probably using a fun subject like baseball to bring

attention to an unfun subject like the impact and importance of climate change. And hey, if this is the story that gets some people to pay attention to climate change, great. I have enjoyed, though, that every article about this has included some sort of caveat about how additional homers aren't the only byproduct of climate change. Like the AP story said, both Texas A&M's Andrew Dessler and University of Illinois' Don Wubel said, while the rise in home runs is interesting, it pales next to the issues of extreme weather and rising seas. Yes, I would say so. Good to keep things in perspective. A few more homers hit every year. Not the most important byproduct of climate change. Also, speaking of things that are not new, the Rays won again. So

they're 11-0. They have now outscored their opponents 83-20. So that's a plus 63 run differential, which Joshian noted is the fifth highest run differential over any 11 game span since expansion 1961. So not just to start the season, at any point in the season. Although it's funny, the best run differential over any 11 game span, the 98 Yankees plus 74. Also, the 93 Tigers plus 74. The 93 Tigers weren't even particularly good. They won 85 games. They finished third in the AL East. Then you had the 2021 Astros. They were good. The 1979 Angels who were pretty good. 88 and 74 won the West,

lost in the ALCS. Then these Rays and then then the 2019 Astros, who were quite good. So again, a bit of a mixed bag. You don't have to be an all-time great team to have an all-time great 11 games. Pretty great to be a Rays fan right now, though. And even though we called for a cessation of injuries, a bunch more players went on the IL after we recorded. Matt Manning, he has a foot fracture. Marquez, it sounds like, is going on the IL. Seth Brown, an oblique strain. Brandon Woodruff, shoulder inflammation. The aforementioned Joey Gallo, intercostal strain. Enough already. Cut it out, I say.

Finally, we got an email from Polly in Calgary. The Blue Jays started the season on a 10-game road trip. During that stretch, Brandon Belt hit terribly with a 0-43 batting average. Tuesday was their first game in Toronto, and he goes three for four. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Chicken tenders. I'm with you, Pauly. No doubt about it. Today's excellent Effectively Wild intro theme was by listener Jimmy Kramer. You can keep your submissions coming to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can also support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Following five listeners have already signed up

and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks zach faust anton peas justin deeters walter and lugens malort thanks to all of you patreon perks include access to the effectively wild discord group for patrons only we also do monthly bonus episodes for our Patreon supporters. You get access to playoff live streams. You get discounts on merch and ad-free Fangraphs memberships and much, much more at patreon.com slash effectivelywild. You can also contact us via the Patreon site if you are a supporter.

If not, you can email us, podcast at fangraphs.com. You can also rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow effectively wild on Twitter at EW pod, and you can find the effectively wild subreddit at our slash effectively wild. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance.

We will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. Thank you.