Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1997: This Time it Pitch Counts

Episode Date: April 23, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the podcast’s semi-official new nickname for Yandy Díaz, what Mookie Betts playing shortstop says about the Dodgers, and Andrew McCutchen’s hot start, then (15:29) answer emails about the Reds’ many mascots, why we stop at “Quadruple-A,” how good today’s 26th men would be if they traveled back in […]

Each time we listen, something's learned. When we need motivation, ships get burned. We don't care about the average number of runs that are earned. That is a stat that can't be trusted. Unless it's properly adjusted. Effectively Wild, the only podcast that effectively quenches our thirst for stats. Hello and welcome to episode 1997 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ring Room. Ben, how are you?

I'm relieved because I believe we have found Yandy Diaz's new nickname. We've gotten some really good ones. Our long national non-nightmare that absolutely no one has been worried about is over, I think, or it's about to be. So as we have covered on earlier podcasts this week, certified grade A beef boy Yandy Diaz no longer is hitting the ball on the ground. He's hitting the ball in the air and often over the fence. And so we can no longer call him ground beef, which is what we had dubbed him because the combination of beef boy and ground balls. And so now we're looking for something that conveys his beefiness, but also his newfound tendency to hit the ball in

the air. So we have dangled some possibilities in a previous episode, but nothing seemed to click. So the submissions have kept coming. Yes. I'll give you a few before we get to the winner, I think. There are two that I think are in the running here, but here are just some also rants, some honorable mentions. Exit Velo, V-E-A-L-O. Yeah. It's good. It's one of those ones that's like if all we ever did to communicate was write things down, then— Yeah, that's the thing.

If I have to spell it, it's just it's not going to be a great thing. So it's good. I want to spell it, it's just it's not going to be a great nickname. So it's good. I want to be clear. But it is maybe more limited in its application than what we're looking for. Air cud instead of air bud. But like who wants that, you know? Like gross. Air cud.

Are we just describing projectile vomiting? Prime cut. Good. Because I guess he's taken better cuts now. That is pretty good. I like that. Beef up. Beef buoyant. Beef kebab.

Yeah. Instead of kebab. Yeah. Those are all, you know, at least some of them. Good. Pretty good. Prime cut. It's not bad.

Prime cut. It's not bad. Prime cut. But, well, here's one we got from listener Lee that I think is in the running. Yeah. I don't know if you've seen this one. Oh. Meat Loft. Wow. Wow.

Wow. Wow. Ben, wow. Not Meat Loaf. Loft. Meat Loft. Loft. Meat Loft.

Yeah. So that's a strong contender. Yeah, that's pretty strong. But there is another strong contender that was submitted both by Lee, who's splitting the ticket here because he has not only Meat Loft, but this other one. And also independently, I believe, was generated and submitted by listener Ross. So Ross and Lee came up with launch meat. Yeah. Yeah.

Not lunch meat. Lunch meat. This is me going, this is me going, chef's kiss. The first one sounded like I was blowing a bubble, but now I've clarified. Yeah.

You know? When I saw launch meat, I thought that's the one. Yeah. Meat loft is really strong. Prime cut is good. The only hesitation I have with launch meat, like meat is something you might say, you know, like Crash Davis might call Nucleoluche meat. It's like a dismissive, you know, like a Bush leaguer, minor leaguer kind of thing. And that's the opposite of what we're trying to convey here with, I mean, he's a meaty man, but he's not meat necessarily in the baseball sense. So that gives me pause, but launch meat, I just, I really like launch meat. Yeah. And one of our emails pointed out, and now I'm struggling to find it, and so I apologize for that.

But someone pointed out, isn't he just a beef boy now? Are we overcomplicating this process? Because, you know, the distinction we were drawing was like the beef boys, you know, the Stantons, the judges, the Anthony Rizzo's, you know, the men of beef who send the ball far with their beefiness, you know, the Tyler O'Neills, right? And so don't we have a term already for Yandy? He is no longer ground beef. He is just a beef boy. Yeah. He just hits the ball like a beef boy would, like you'd assume a beef boy would now. And I'm sympathetic to that, you know, like that probably. But Launch Meat. But since ground beef was so popular and caught on nationwide, he can't just not have a nickname now.

So it has to be replaced. It needs to be replaced. I was so proud of you. You can't just not have a nickname now. So, it has to be replaced. It needs to be replaced. I like launch meat. I really like meatloft too. I'm agonizing over this one. I think launch meat is stronger. And it's importantly different than like the cud one because like a cud is a, you don't want to envision that, you know, you don't want to do it because it's gross. But launch me. I mean, that might also be gross for a lot of folks. Like a lot of people are like, why are you committing to this bit? Gross.

And to that I say, it's funny, you know. Yeah, at least to us. It's funny to us. All right. Launch me to this until we get a better submission or change our minds. Or until I watch even one more episode of Yellow Jackets and then can't think about it in a different context. Oh, yeah. And I watched the first one and I have been asked since, like, are you ready for the second one? And I'm like, no, I'm not. And it's not that I, I just think it's going to be a real slow roll because, wow, those soccer girls, this makes me happy I never played soccer. I feel like I got, I got away with one, you know, I escaped it. Inevitably, it leads to being stranded in the wilderness and turning to cannibalism. And let me tell you, you're like, you know, because I knew, I knew.

Sorry to spoil Yellow Jackets for people, but like I had heard cannibal soccer players, right? I had heard about it and I was like, that's going to take a while for us to see. No, no. It's not much of a spoiler because it really doesn't take very long. First scene. Yeah. First scene. Dead teen.

Wow. Wow. Anyway, here we are. More about meat next time, perhaps. Maybe. Again, maybe. Let's talk about a not so beefy boy who is also excellent and beloved by us. And that's Mookie Betts, who did make his debut at shortstop.

He didn't start at shortstop, but he came back from paternity leave just in time to come in as a shortstop later in the game. And his first chance, he turned into a just brilliant, smooth double play, just took the ball himself, made the throw, looked like he'd been doing it forever. Of course, he did grow up doing it and was drafted as a shortstop, but he hasn't done it for a really long time, at least not in a game, not since 2013 in low A or I guess for a couple innings in the Arizona Fall League. And he made it look easy. So that was fun. But I think there are two ways you can look at the fact that Mookie Betts is playing at least a little bit of shortstop

for the Dodgers. And one, the glass half full interpretation of this, I think, was expressed in a fan graphs post by Leo Morgenstern, who pointed out how many other teams could lose Trey Turner and Gavin Lux in the span of six months and still have an MVP playing shortstop. That's the Dodgers for you. Yeah. So that's one interpretation that this is a sign of the Dodgers strength that they are down to their third or fourth or fifth string shortstop. And lo and behold, it's Mookie Betts, one of the very best players in baseball.

So that's one way you could look at it. The other way you could look at it is that Mookie Betts hasn't played shortstop for a decade and they're throwing him out there. They must be in dire straits and they must be extremely shorthanded if they're going to do something seemingly extreme and desperate, like move a superstar to shortstop for the first time in his big league career at this advanced stage of his big league career. So that's the glass half full, glass half empty. And maybe you'd be more inclined to glass half empty after watching the Dodgers almost get no hit or perfect games on Friday, if not for an extremely funny way for the Cubs to

lose a perfect game, which is basically by David Peralta, just having a little, excuse me, squibber the other way, and then catch her jumping on a pitcher and just sort of sitting on his shoulders. It looks, it's a funny thing because, so I'm going to, we'll, we'll, we'll pull the, we'll pull the curtain back a little bit here, Ben. We were supposed to record earlier in the day, you know, we're recording this on Friday afternoon. You're listening to this on Saturday, you know, like we were, we were going to record a little earlier and then you had some stuff come up. And so then I was like, don't worry

about having stuff. I get to putter around the house. Yeah. You know, I, I could write a whole book in defensive puttering. It's like the best thing. So I, but then I started puttering and then I had to finish a puttering project. And so I was puttering Ben, you know, and now the slider, uh, the sliders are clean, you know, like the slider doors, they're, they're sparkling. I worry about birds, you know, like that's how sparkling they are. And so I had puttered, we were preparing to record. I was like, I should probably check in on mlb.com, see what has happened in the course of my puttering. And if you had, you know, when I opened MLB.com, the headline, what a way to lose a perfect game is below like the scrolling part, right? Like I have to scroll down to get to it because apparently Chris Evans and Ana de Armas are in a movie, and the ad for it is taking up half of my screen.

And so I thought, wow, he did it, you know? Because this looks like a celebration gone slightly awry. Like, you know, Jan Goms is stoked for Drew Smiley. I'm going to jump on top of his shoulders. We're going to be held aloft in victory. And they were victorious, right? They did win that game. Oh, yes, by a wide margin. By a wide margin. 13 to nothing. and victory. And they were victorious, right? They did win that game.

Oh, yes, by a wide margin. By a wide margin. 13 to nothing. But also, they did not throw a perfect game. And so, would it have been successful were it not for their collision or was this always going to be a hit? Well, that's a good question. It would have been a tough play, I think, regardless.

So, I don't know if Jan Gomes briefly riding on Drew Smiley's shoulders was at fault, was the reason why. But yeah, it was one of those just wonky placements that can happen. Gotcha. And if you do it intentionally, then people will get mad at you and say you broke an unwritten rule. But if it's by accident, then that's just the way the ball bounces. Anyway, the Dodgers are not off to a great start, but then most teams in the NL West are not. So the Dodgers, except for the Diamondbacks.

Except for the Diamondbacks. Yeah. So last last night, but still really good. You might say that the Dodgers are sort of in extremis here that they're forced to use Mookie Betts at shortstop. Or you might say, look at that. The Dodgers have Mookie bets at shortstop. So I don't know which is the correct interpretation, but they are quite shorthanded, obviously, with Gavin Lux out for the year, with Miguel Vargas out for now, with Chris Taylor a little bit banged up. Basically, Mookie bets, you know, like it's either him or Luke Williams right now. And that makes Mookie Betts look pretty appealing. I have no doubt that Mookie Betts could play a passable shortstop, if not considerably better than that. Now, it might take him some time to acclimate and get the reps, but physically speaking, he could do that.

I have confidence in Mookie Betts to do almost anything athletically, so I could see that working out just fine for them, except the fact that they got into this situation. It sort of speaks to the lack of depth that is uncorrectoristic of the Dodgers because we're always used to them having several reserves and layers of redundancy and other lines of defense before they get to the last line of defense. And now they're kind of down to the last line of defense and it just so happens to be Mookie Betts. You know, sometimes we look at baseball and we want to be delighted. You know, we want to be moved. Sometimes we hold baseball up to ourselves and learn who we are as people. You know, like you learn a little something about yourself. You learn who you are. And I think that interpreting Mookie Betts at short is one of those moments. Maybe they just wanted to be challenged. Maybe the Dodgers looked around and they were like, signing guys is too easy. Let's see what we can really do analytically. Yeah, let's let Trey Turner leave so that we can have this fun scenario where Mookie

Betts plays shortstop come about. I just think that baseball is like really hard. You know, it's just like every day is really hard. You can be an incredible squad. You can be a team that we all think is going to win 100 games. And it can just be really hard. You know, your guys get hurt and bad teams beat you every now and again. And you look up and suddenly you're the Dodgers and the Padres and you're like

under 500, you know, you're the, you're the Mariners, you're under 500, you're the Astros, you're under five. The Astros are, the Rangers are 12 and six, Ben. What the heck? What the heck is going on? The Cardinals are eight and 11. I don't know about baseball. Very confusing. But so it's hard enough. Like you don't have to up the degree of difficulty. I think that when you have the resources to just like make stuff a little bit easier on yourself, you should just do that because it's going to be hard even if you do, you know. Mookie Betts does make pretty much anything he is asked to do look pretty easy. Yeah, he's pretty great. You know, of all the players, he's one of the better ones.

Yeah. So is Andrew McCutcheon. Andrew McCutcheon is off to a really vintage, classic McCutcheon start. I love that for him. What a treat. I love that for us. I love that for everyone. Yeah. Love that for Pirates fans. Pirates are off to a fine start as well. And Andrew McCutcheon has been part of that. has been part of that. Imagine if he just kind of just kept that up all season, if he just maintained his current stats over the course of an entire season, how wonderful would that be? That this would not just be a farewell tour, sentimental, oh, isn't it nice to see Andrew McCutcheon back in a Pirates uniform? But actually, he played like Andrew McCutcheon used to when he

was in a Pirates uniform previously. That'd be great. Yeah, I would be into that. I would perhaps offer a no-nuts. Yeah. All right. So I've got a few emails and then some stat blasting and past blasting. So maybe we can start with some emails here. So here's one that is related to mascots, which we've talked about a bit lately. And this is a question from a listener named Tyler Malley, and he clarifies he is not the Twins pitcher. Isn't that what the Twins pitcher would say? Yeah, it might be, but it is spelled that way.

I guess anyone could have created that email address to have an elaborate ruse where he has Tyler Malley's name, but also maintains that he's not Tyler Malley. I don't want to insult Tyler Malley. So, like, I want to be clear that that's not what I'm doing. But, like, would you, if you were going to impersonate a major leaguer, you probably have not given this even one second of thought before in your entire life. Cause like, why would you, who would you impersonate Ben? Why would you, you wouldn't pick. So that makes me think that the listener is telling the truth, but I do kind of wonder a little bit like, you know, he would not be high on the list. The question is your mascot talk has had me laughing over the last few episodes, but it did bring up a question.

I'm a Reds fan. I know this may be too much Reds talk on the pod. Yeah, you're pushing it here, Tyler, already. Look out. Just saying you're a Reds fan. Also, if he's a Reds fan, Tyler Malley was very recently a Red. So you're telling me that your name is Tyler Malley, spelled like Tyler Malley, and you root for the Reds, and Tyler Malley was pitching for the Reds? Suspicious. So many coincidences. Suspicious. Overlapping here. Anyway, Tyler Malley says, I am a Reds fan. And they actually have four mascots.

What? They have Mr. Redlegs, Mr. Red, Rosie Red, and Gapper. The first three are all baseball head people. And the last one is a monster. I was wondering if this is just a Reds thing of having multiple mascots or if other teams have multiple mascots and how many mascots are too many. Is Mr. Red related to Rosie Red and Mr. Redlegs? Like, is Mr. Red the demon son of Mr. Redlegs and Rosie Red? Are they a family? I'll read you what Wikipedia says about the Reds' various mascots.

Gapper is a monster. Whoa. Yeah, Gapper is one of the current mascots for the Cincinnati Reds. He was first introduced as the furry companion to Mr. Red, the longtime mascot in the winter of 2002 as the franchise was preparing to move to its new home, Great American Ballpark. The mascot was created by David Raymond's Raymond Entertainment Group, the founder being the man inside the Philly Fanatic costume from 1973 to 1993. A young fan won two season tickets for submitting the winning name. He is named after the gap in the stands in the seats of Great American, which provides a view into and out of the stadium. The term gapper.

Well, we know what the term gapper means. According to a recent Cincinnati.com poll of the Reds for mascots, not of the mascots, but about the mascots, I assume. It wouldn't be very scientific if you're just polling four people, you know. Gapper is the least popular among fans. He received 6% of the vote. That's a very poor showing by Gapper. Mr. Red received 23%. Rosie Red received 34%.

And Mr. Redlegs received 47%. So like his fellow mascots, Gapper wears a Reds jersey, but with the backward cap. So this is just, you asked how many mascots is too many. This is too many mascots. It's too many. This is very clearly too many mascots. He's a companion to Mr. Redlegs? Is this like when you watch old episodes of The Muppet Show where, like, one parent will be a human and another parent will be a Muppet and then they will have a mix of, like, Muppet and human children? Maybe, yeah.

Are they, like, together? I don't know. It's a whole cast, extended cast here. There's a deep bench of Red's mascots because Mr. Red was the first one. He was the original. And he goes back to like 1955, at least when he appeared on a patch. And then you had Mr. Red Legs came along and was introduced in 2007 to play a supporting role along with Mr. Red. Wait, Mr. Red is the crazy-eyed one though, right?

Mr. Red and Mr. Red. Oh, wait, I'm going to MLB.com. I'm going to get clarification on this. Okay. Mr. Redlegs. Mr. Redlegs is the one with crazy eyes. Okay. The humanoid Mr. Red retired in 2007,

leaving Gapper, Rosie Red, and Mr. Redlegs. Man, this is what a tangled web these mascots weave. Oh, a new version of Mr. Redd was unveiled at Redds Fest 2012. Just too many mascots. I'm confused just reading the entries here. We don't need this many mascots. What? It's like a sitcom cast.

I guess you can do a lot of things with this many mascots. Ben, have you seen the MLB.com slash red slash fan slash mascots page? No. Okay. They're doing stuff here. There are choices being made. Okay. Okay. Why?

First of all, why does it matter how tall any of them are? Why does it matter their weight? Specifically, what choices are we making here? Mr. Red Legs, a lean 200 pounds. Mr. Red, 215 pounds without equipment. What does that mean? Rosie Red, 101 pounds of fun. Why?

Why? Why do we have to do weird stuff with Rosie Red's weight? What are we doing here? Why do we sexualize female mascots in this way? The Mrs. Met, I mean, that's a whole. She's got a keister. Yeah. She's got a, and here's the thing about it.

We've talked about this before. A meeting was had just to be like look how sexy do we make them because clearly they want to make them at least a little bit sexy they want them to be like alluring in some way but they're like we can't make it obvious that we know that some people excuse my swear want to fuck the mascot you know like they've clearly decided that there is like a limit past which they cannot go because otherwise they're going to be on SportsCenter or something. But Mr. Redlegs, height, three Louisville Slugger bats stacked.

And it's like you are assuming a directionality with that that I don't know that you can't. Mr. Red, 19 mitts. What are these measures? And then Rosie Red is 5'11". 5'11 and 101 pounds? Again, I don't want to. It just feels uncomfortable.

It feels like choices are being made that education. Rosie went to cheer college for high energy and entertainment routines. I don't know what we're doing here, but I don't think I like it. Reds, I don't know what we're doing here, but I don't think I like it. I think that something is going on here that is suspicious, Ben. Too many mascots. There are some other secondary mascots. So the Cardinals, in addition to Fred Bird, have Rally Squirrel.

He's a secondary mascot, an anthropomorphic squirrel who wears the team's uniform. Yeah. And then the Pirates at least used to have a secondary mascot called the Buccaneer. They had the Pirate Parrot and then they had the Buccaneer. And gosh, there's the Buccaneer. After an audition involving 30 prospective mascots, 23-year-old Tim Beggy was chosen to portray the buccaneer. Beggy was arrested along with a woman in July 1995 while skinny dipping after hours in a closed public swimming pool. Oh, okay. I started out very concerned and ended up with, like, probably not great, but of all the things, it could have been worse.

Sure. Like, probably not great, but of all the things, it could have been worse. Sure. There was a secondary mascot for the Blue Jays, Diamond, alongside Ace. Ace and Diamond replaced BJ Birdie in 2000. Just asking for jokes. Yeah. Wait, was BJ Birdie named after BJ Ryan? No, I guess BJ Ryan joined the Blue Jays after BJ Birdie.

It would be funny if BJ Ryan was named after the mascot, though. Yeah. I don't know if the dates work out quite that way. But yes, there are teams with secondary mascots, but I do not think there are other teams with four mascots it's just so many and again just so many choices being made here you know it's just a lot of choices also the gapper looks a lot like the weird guardians mascot it's like if you're gonna do, like do differently weird, at some point you're just doing the same thing with slightly different colors. Even the pose they have rosy red doing on the little pages like, hey, you know, it's a little like, hey. Yeah. I just, you know, and again, I'm not here to shame, but I just, and why does his, why are his eyes so crazy?

Are they meant to look crazy? Probably. That's a that's a mascot characteristic. Wait a minute. We got other things to talk about here. I'm sorry. We're going to be done with mascots in a second. Likes the big red machine, mustaches, grand slams and shutouts.

Fine. Dislikes strikeouts. OK. Being hit by pitch. Sure. Showering after gapper. What? What? Because he's hairy and leaves a bunch of hair behind? Okay.

I don't know. I mean, it doesn't say that, but I'm trying to. Yeah, I don't need to know this much about the mascots or I don't need there to be that many of them. There just don't need to be that many of them. There could be so many fewer mascots. You could also count the presidents as mascots, the racing presidents or the sausages are sort of secondary mascots in addition to Screech and Bernie Brewer, respectively.

But the Reds are really an outlier here. I mean, there are three teams without mascots. We could just give those three, three of the Reds mascots, just distribute, and then everyone would have a mascot. Yeah, I think the Yankees are like, we're good. Thank you. No, no. Right.

All right. Here is a non-mascot-related question. This is from Tyler, not Tyler Malley, but Tyler, a different Tyler, Patreon supporter. Yeah. I'm sure you're probably getting lots of sticky stuff questions again after the Max Scherzer ordeal. I've been seeing lots of posts exclaiming that MLB needs to fix the ball and make a tackier ball. And that by creating a tackier ball, pitchers won't use sticky stuff because it effectively wouldn't be needed. And there is a ball being tested like that.

One of the minor league levels, the Southern League, perhaps. Am I in the rung here believing that a new tackier ball won't fix anything with the sticky stuff issue? Why would pitchers just stop altogether? Would a tackier ball not just be enhanced with sticky stuff? To me, it's like the argument that MLB owners would lower ticket prices if they didn't have to pay big contracts, when in reality, they're going to charge as much as they think people are willing to pay, because why wouldn't they? Wouldn't, or at least couldn't, a tackier ball just lead to pitchers combining the new

ball's tacky surface with sweat, rosin, pine tar, sunscreen, etc.? I'm not looking for a ball that is more slippery, but am I crazy for thinking a tackier ball might just make the problem worse? Would it make it worse? I think the advantage of having a tackier ball is that any substance could be banned. So we wouldn't have to fight about rosin and this is legal, but it might be too much rosin and it might be in the wrong place. It'd just be anything. Right. There'd be no ambiguity.

Yeah. You wouldn't need rosin in theory. You wouldn't need anything sticky. There'd be no ambiguity. Yeah. You wouldn't need rosin in theory. You wouldn't need anything sticky. You still have sweat. You still have sunscreen. So there might be some amount of stickiness involved. And could you possibly... I see sticky a lot. Yeah. Could you possibly have additional stickiness just from your own bodily fluids, just the sweat ones. I'm not implying anything else. You just did. I didn't mean to.

I just knew that people would take it that way. So the sweat and the sunscreen could combine to create additional tack, I suppose. But maybe that would be more obvious than rosin. I suppose. But maybe that would be more obvious than rosin. So that's the theory, I think, that there would be nothing legal and you wouldn't have to have a rosin bag. And so in theory, at least there'd be less controversy because you wouldn't have legal substances and non-legal substances. They would all be illegal except for, I guess, the ones that are just emanated from your skin and also on your skin to protect you from being burnt. Right. And, you know, you could process of elimination it at night because then we wouldn't have the delightfully comical like, hey, you know how it's

8 p.m. and there's no sun out and you clearly have sunscreen on? What's that about? You know, 8 p.m. and there's no sun out and you clearly have sunscreen on, what's that about? You know, you would just have fewer excuses to offer that could be credible. But I'm sure someone would try because of course they would. They always try. Yeah. So if you could get away with it now, it might be a little harder once there's just a blanket ban on all sorts of substances. But would I put it past pitchers to say, great, you gave me a head start on my sticky stuff with this tacky ball, and now I'm going to make it extra tacky? No, I would not be shocked if that happened. But hopefully, maybe it would just be more obvious and harder to do. I don't know. Yeah, I think that there will always be at least one person who's like, what if I am as crafty as I think I am?

And, you know, whether they are or not, I guess we would find out. But you definitely have somebody try. Absolutely. Yeah. And they do have tacky balls elsewhere. Right. International baseball. Somehow worse to say tacky balls than sticky balls, isn't it?

That's not funny. Yeah. I just discovered funny. Yeah. I just discovered that. Yeah. I just discovered that. So I don't know whether the problem has been bad over there. I haven't heard really a whole lot about sticky stuff controversies overseas, places where there are pre-tacked balls that seem to be acceptable to everyone. So it does seem to minimize the problem at least.

But does it eliminate it? Can you ever eliminate it? Probably not entirely. Probably not entirely. All right. Here is a question from Kirk. I was listening to a recent episode where Jared Kelnick and the concept of a quadruple A player was discussed, which got me thinking, why do we stop at triple A when

classifying skill levels? Seeing the Fernando Tatis Jr. numbers from his minor league stint this week has me wondering how many more A's his level would be. Is he a quintuple A player or a sextuple A player or septuple A player? Not entirely sure how you would go about making these classifications given we don't really know how an A or AA level minor leaguer would fare in regular season major league competition to use as a basis for extrapolation. Except, I guess, for some Rule 5 guys who can carry it all season. But if there is a way to sort this out, how many A's would a league featuring only Mike Trouts and Shohei Otani's need to be classed at for them to be replacement level players. So within the body of major league players, how many subsets would there be? Like the, if we took the, the average difference between triple A player and MLB player, and then we applied that to the ranks of MLB players. And we said, well, there would be a similar so different from the AAA MLB gap.

Maybe they'd be smaller. But I think you could definitely have at least two or three, I think, levels within MLB that would be kind of akin to the difference between AAA and, let's say, a replacement level MLB player. There's research that says AAA's league strength is about 0.8 times MLB's. It's like four-fifths the caliber of play. So, yeah, I think the difference from AAA to MLB replacement level is definitely not bigger than the gap from MLB replacement level to superstar to Mike Trout or something. He's obviously in a different league, even though he is not literally in a different league. So how many subdivisions would there be? I guess maybe we could figure that out mathematically somehow with the standard deviations.

Yeah, you can kind of think about it like in 2080 terms, probably. Yeah. So how many A's is Spike Trout? Is he like a octuple A player? Something like that. Yeah. Probably. We have like other nomenclature to think about this, right?

Like once a guy is an established big leaker, we talk about guys in terms of being like, you know, like regulars. And we talk about them in terms of being all-stars. And we talk about them in terms of being MVPs. And we talk about them, you know, as like utility guys and bench roles. Like we have other words that we regularly deploy to kind of try to differentiate between those levels of, you know, you are a big leaguer, but like, how good a big leaguer are you?

Well, we have all these words for that, but we could put it in, in a terms. I just don't know. I mean, in some ways that might be more descriptive because like every team gets an all-star.

So there is always a little bit of all-star ambiguity, right? There's a potential for a little bit of slippage there. Yeah. But we have other words, so I think we tend to use those. Okay. Mike Trout, octopole player. Maybe we can popularize that.

That's also just like a lot of syllables. It feels like a lot of syllable for how many words you're getting and how much descriptive power it has, which is probably why we just say, like, future Hall of Famer, you know? Yep. Well, here's kind of a version of that question. This is from Monty, a Patreon supporter, who says, I was watching the Cardinals pregame show and a former player made the statement that Brendan Donovan and Tommy Edmund are so good

they could have played in my era. My first thought was anyone playing today could have played in the 80s simply because of improvements in training, not having to work off-season jobs, etc., as we all have discussed. But maybe a more interesting question is how far back do you have to go before a replacement level player in 2023 could be an all-star? Mike Trout is an all-star in any era, but if we assume baseball is currently the best it's ever been, how far back in history do you have to go before the 26th guy on a roster today would be so far ahead of everyone else just because they regularly eat protein and lift weights?

And drink water. Yeah. Wear sunscreen. They would be an all-star caliber player. So I don't know if you'd ever get to the point where just like the last guy on a roster today would be better than everyone because there's always going to be an outlier in any era. And you don't want to over correct, right? Like there were really good players in prior eras. It's not as if...

We're still the same species. Right. It wasn't a bunch of chumps back then. There were a lot of really good players who would have a place on a big league roster today if they were suddenly transported. Yeah. All of these questions always come down to just arguing over your terms and your ground rules here. And are we talking about a time travel scenario where you are transported back and no one gets to prepare or grow up and be nourished and exercise and use all the tools available to that era? You're just sort of stepping onto the field from the past into the future or vice versa, or you are ported forward so that you were actually born in that era and you get all the

same advantages. It's two different questions, but. Right. But like, remember when we, you know, when we watched the Willie Mays documentary, I think one thing we were both struck by watching, getting to watch him, you know, we had seen clips of him obviously, but like getting to watch him and then seeing him like move around in his body, you're like, oh, that guy just looks like a big leer. Right. You know, and I'm sure that there are guys who were not literally Willie Mays for whom that could be said. Right. So, you know, you never want to you don't want to overcorrect in the other direction and then end up being kind of a like revisionist jerk. Right.

Yeah. Don't want to be too recency biased, too presentist, too exceptionalist about today. So I think you could say, I guess, that maybe like the last guy in the bullpen who has some pitch that didn't exist in an earlier era could actually be literally unhittable, at least for a while. at least for a while, right? If you just send someone back who throws a slider before there were sliders or throws a sweeper or whatever, and they're just like, what witchcraft is this? And also he throws harder than anyone else,

then that might be a little bit different where that guy actually could be a star. Maybe wouldn't have the stamina to work in that era because you'd have to be a bit built up. But then maybe also could just blow everyone away. But I think when it comes down to like the last guy on the bench or your fourth outfielder or your utility infielder type, you'd have to go back a ways before that guy is like a star, I think. You know, like you might not have to go back that far before he gets a starting job.

I think if you went back to the 80s, let's say, then maybe your bench guy today would be a starter back then. Yeah. But I don't know that he would be just like breaking records and wowing everyone necessarily. Again, it's not that long ago. So there are ways you can try to get at this statistically. It's always tough. It's why this is always a good question and a good debate topic because there's really never any definitive answer

and you can never settle it to anyone's satisfaction. Some people think players used to be better and other people are like, what are you talking about? Obviously they're better now, but people can't kind of find common ground on this question and so the debate rages on forever because we will never know the answer

at least until we do invent time travel and use it for this purpose. Right, because when we invent time travel, the very first thing that we are going to do, answer this question. People are very curious about this. So it would be somewhere on the list.

I don't know how high, but it would be on the to-do list. Let's figure out how much better the athletes are now than they used to be. I think that we'll be really bad at time travel as a species. I'm worried about us doing that well. Yeah, I don't think we'll have to worry about it for a while. You're like, Meg, I don't think this is a thing that in your lifetime you're going to need to contemplate with any kind of specificity. Probably not. Probably not.

So how far back in history do you have to go before the 26th guy on the roster today would be so far ahead of everyone else? Really, really far, probably. Probably like everyone else, you know, probably like, I don't know, 19th century or something, maybe. But to be a viable starter, maybe a few decades, let's say, I would say. Yeah, I think that sounds about right. All right. Here is a question from Andrew. Do you think MLB would ever privatize the data it provides via StatCast or PitchFX or any technology you can observe or calculate through game action? It seems silly to think in horror of public baseball analysis in 2014, but what would be the consequence of such an action?

Could MLB ever perceive a benefit, justified or not, in making StatCast data private or the inverse, making more data public? I remember hearing of team-side data about things like SwingPath that aren't public, but I don't know if it is distinct from types of league data that would be beneficial or of interest. So there is a hierarchy of the data that's available. Some of it, we get every pitch, and some of it, we just get little morsels, and we get little tastes. Swing path data, that's something that we've gotten little tastes of, but we don't necessarily have everything or throws, let's say. You can look up some some of that stuff or you get some of that stuff,

but you can't necessarily look up every throw. There's just certain things that are limited. We know that they exist and we get some morsels and they get parceled out more and more liberally over time. You know, we have gotten more. They have opened up the vault as opposed to closing it when it comes to the stats. So we're a bit behind, obviously, what is available to teams. We're way behind what's available to teams. And there are things that teams have had that the public hasn't really even been that aware of, all the biomechanical data and everything. I mean, we might see some stick figures in animations, but we're not really getting the raw data and it's like terabytes and we wouldn't be able to store it and we wouldn't

know what to do with it for the most part because the teams are still sort of figuring that out in some cases, just how to house it and how to work with that amount of data. But I don't think we're going backwards. I don't know if, I mean, the gap between what we know and what teams know and what we're able to analyze and what they're able to analyze, that may be widening or not shrinking, but we get more year by year. We get better and greater information. So it's trending in the right way. Yeah. I mean, we have stack cast data for AAA now. How nice. That's right.

Yeah. And sometimes it's just sort of summary stats. It's not like every single play that we can dig into. And it'd be great to get our grubby hands on everything. But they give us something and we say, thank you. Can we please have some more? Because we're desperate and we'll take whatever. And it's nice to have the fancy stats.

You make us sound so dignified, Ben. Yeah. You know? I know that Fanagraphs is a proud partner of MLB when it comes to certain StatCast stats, at least. It's not an Oliver Twist begging sort of situation, as I understand it. It's a partnership. Oliver Twist begging sort of situation, as I understand it. It's a partnership.

You put me in such a spot because it isn't like that. But now, whatever I say to indicate, no, it's not like that. I'm going to sound like, you know, my it's not an Oliver Twist situation with MLB t-shirt. Right. Yeah. Initially, as I think we have mentioned it, it was more or less seemingly an accident that PitchFX data was publicly accessible. It just happened to kind of be out there unprotected and public analysts sort of found it. And then it turned out that it was valuable in some ways for MLB and for teams for them to have it because it was a lot more eyeballs scrutinizing that data and doing interesting things with it.

And then, of course, teams snapped up a lot of those analysts and brought them behind the paywall. But also just the validation of the data, at least in the early days, just to sanity check it all and make sure it was all working as it should and improve it and everything. And obviously it's good for public outreach and not everyone's into the stats the way that we are, but it enhances broadcasts, I think, in a lot of ways. And it teaches us things about baseball and it enables us to explain the game and provide cool information with highlights. So I think MLB sees the upside and the value in it.

I'm sure that some teams would prefer that we know nothing, and they would love to put it under lock and key, at least some of the more advanced stuff. They would love to keep it all to themselves like stack cast misers but i think mlb understands that there is some value to putting it out there in the public and obviously baseball's uh always been a trailblazer and a leader when it comes to quantifying stuff and categorizing stuff so yeah i think they have harnessed that strength, even if it's a turnoff for some folks who are like, this is too much information. But for us, it is not enough. Bring on the information.

Well, and I think that, you know, candidly, the teams, I don't know that there are that many teams that are like, don't give them anything. Because to your point, like the stuff that they have that we don't have, they have so much more stuff, you know. And I think that a lot of the teams that are really starting to push the envelope in terms of the next wave of analytical advancement, like they are doing stuff with biomechanical data that, you know, there are public facing folks who could do something with that. But candidly, like a lot of that information is so far beyond the capacity of public side analysts to really do something within a, in a meaningful way, the people who are able to do something with that in a meaningful way, like a lot of those people get hired by teams. So I think that there is a comfortable gap on the team side, both team side to public side, and then candidly, like team to team. Like we, we have come to think of, there was this great leveling that happened where all of these teams kind of caught up to one another. And I think that when it comes to some kinds of information that remains true. But I do think that the gap is starting to widen again in terms of the teams

that are really able to utilize to the benefit of their clubs, biomechanical data in a way that, you know, has sort of opened up that space a little bit more and where the difference isn't just like the Rockies in Oakland versus everyone else. Like there are, I think, more gradations now than there had been for a while. It all got, now I'm imagining like rocks and sediment layers and like some of the, there's like a new kind of Cambrian explosion going on. Yeah. Cambrian explosions, fun to say.

Yeah. I don't think they're going to take all our data away. So. No, I don't think they will either. Like, why would they? You know, there would need to be like a really weaponized pettiness for that to make good sense. It's just like you don't need to. You're fine over there.

I would not put pettiness past MLB, to be clear. No. Especially if there were some profit to be made. But I think there's some profit to be made by publicizing this information. Right. I think that they have a good understanding of the sort of symbiotic relationship that can exist by giving public-facing analysts enough sort of grist for the mill to fuel the Cambrian explosion.

What? Sure. Meg. All right. Let's do some stat blasting. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Deist of Blast.

So, as we told you last week and plan to tell you next week, the Stat Blast segment is sponsored by Topps Now. Our listeners were no doubt aware of Topps even prior to our podcast last week because they are well-informed fans and because Topps is a well-known baseball card company. They've been in the biz for quite some time. In fact, decades ago, I spent much of my allowance on their products. And now I suppose they are finally paying me back by sponsoring our podcast. But purchasing their products was a reward enough for a young Ben Lindbergh. And it can be for you too. Specifically, a product called Tops Now. And the tagline goes, your hero, your team, your moment.

We're not big on taglines. We just, we give it to you straight. We tell it like it is. And it's very simple in the case of Tops Now. A baseball player does something cool. Tops snaps its fingers and conjures cards of that moment out of thin air or possibly cardboard just because they sponsor us doesn't mean we're privy to the proprietary details of the the tops now production process so it could be baseball card fairies it could be baseball card elves i don't know how it happens we don't have detailed pulp opinions over here all i know is the cool thing happens in the game and then you can buy a card of it the next darn day with free shipping but it's available for a limited time only because the next day a bunch of new cool

things happen and then there's a new batch of cards it's like the messages in the spy movies that say this note will self-destruct the tops now cards don't do that they'll last a long time if you take care of them but you have to act quickly to get them before they disappear and they fade away like in eternal sunshine, eternal sunshine of the of the tops list mind. And the number of Tops Now cards can vary by the day depending on how many games there are and how many cool things happen that day because they're not going to force it. Either it's now worthy or it's not. It's like Elaine on Seinfeld deciding whether a guy

is sponge worthy. Is it now worthy? So like a few of the now worthy moments. I did not run that comp by the people at Topps. Yeah, we might get notes. But a few of the now-worthy moments

this week were things that we talked about. We talked about Cody Bellinger's first five-hit game. That was a card. We talked about Clayton Kershaw winning his 200th game. That was a card. We talked about Mookie turning a double play in his first MLB appearance at Short Step. That was a card. So go to Topps.com,

click the link on our show page, sign up for their mailing list, whatever it takes to commemorate these moments. It's called Topps now, not Topps later. So act now. So we've got a few stat blasts for you here. The first one kind of concerns a former Effectively Wild guest, Ross Stripling, who joined the podcast on episode 1397. And Ross Stripling has always been a swing man, right? He's always gone back and forth between the starting rotation and the bullpen.

Right. And I kind of thought this might be the year where he would just be a starter because he had a really nice year for the Blue Jays last year. Yes, he did. Career year. It was really good, but still back and forth a bit. And then the giant signed him and it seemed like they had some vacancies in their rotation potentially, and maybe they can find a way to make him even better. And he started the season in the rotation and he did not last long there. He made one start and it didn't go great. And then he was moved to the bullpen. So I saw that headline back on April 14th, Giants planning to use Ross Stripling primarily in relief. And I thought, here we go again. Ross Stripling relegated to again, but this is his fate, just to ping pong back and forth from bullpen to rotation for all eternity, seemingly.

And so I wondered whether there was any more swing manny, a swing man than Ross Stripling. Is he just like the platonic ideal of a swing man? Right. Has any man ever swung the way that Ross Stripling has swung? Not since the 70s. So I think there are a few ways you can look at this. The way I looked at it was just to set some minimums for games relieved and games started because Ross Stripling's ratio is almost one at this point. It's almost a perfect swingman ratio because he has started in his career he might equalize at some point this season. And you can't get much more even than that.

But because he has met the 100 games started and 100 games relieved minimums, I set those as the minimum. So I filtered out anyone who did not have 100 starts and 100 games in relief. And there's only one guy who meets those minimums and has a perfect one-to-one ratio of games started and games relieved, and that is Wade LeBlanc. Wade LeBlanc, he started 129 games. He relieved 129 games he relieved 129 games so you might say that that makes him the perfect swing man and i would accept that argument but he was not quite as swing manny as ross stripling because the thing about ross lipping is he has not had a single season where he was exclusively a starter or a reliever every single season season, he did both at some point. Wow.

Whereas Wade LeBlanc was exclusively a starter some seasons and exclusively a reliever some seasons. In others. Yeah. I mean, he was still pretty swing manny, but you have some guys who just are full-time starters and then full-time relievers or the other way around, and that's not all that swing manny at all,

although it might look like that in retrospect. But Wade LeBlanc, pretty swing manny, but it doesn't quite meet the stripling test of are you a swing man in every single season of your career. So I looked for other guys who were very close to a one-to-one ratio and also had the Ross Stripling condition of swinging in every single season. Delightful, Ben. Delightful. Sorry, Ross.

So there were some guys who came very close, like Steve Gromek. He was eliminated because in 1942 and 1943, he pitched 17 games in relief without any starts in those seasons. Or like Eddie Rommel, who blew it in his last season, 1932, he had it going. And then his last season, he pitched 17 games in relief with no starts. Or Benny Fry, he blew it in his first year, 1929. He pitched three games, all starts that season. And that was it. He was swinging every season after that, but.

What a jump. Yeah. And it's just, it's three games and he didn't know he was destined to be a swing man for the rest of his career, but. He didn't know. Spoiled his, his swinging. So I think, I think the answer is the guy who is right next to Ross Stripling via ratio here and also satisfies the Stripling condition of having swung in every season. And that is Bill Champion.

Bill Champion is the champion of the swingman sweepstakes here. So Bill Champion, he pitched for the Phillies and the Brewers from 1969 to 1976. And he ended up, now the only reason, you know, he barely meets the minimums is the thing. So he started 102 games and he relieved exactly 100 games. So I guess it's not surprising. Often the people who are the outliers, they just satisfy the minimums because it's easier to do it over a smaller sample.

So you might say it's a little cheap that he just barely cleared the thresholds here. But technically, at least, Bill Champion is your guy. And Bill Champion also had a 78 ERA plus and a negative 0.9 baseball reference war. So he was not the greatest and most effective pitcher. And that's probably why he was swinging every season because they just kept shifting him from one role to the next.

So I think he is probably the answer. You know, you could go with someone like John Cerruti, who is also satisfies the stripling conditions. He started 116 games and relieved 113 and he swung in every season. So these are the swing men to beat for Ross Stripling, basically. I don't know if he aspires to stay a swing man and be the swingiest swing man of all time, but it is well within his reach. And the thing is that it can go away just like that because if you have a single season where you're in a single role, then you're not the Russ Stripling sort of swingman anymore. But he's clearly up there with the all-time swingiest swingman. So now I just hope that the ratio equalizes and that he never just swings too far in either direction, right? So I kind of

want him to like, oh, he's in the bullpen. Oh, a starter got hurt. He's back. I mean, that's the life of a swingman. So that's how it happens. I just hope that he, you know, finds happiness in whatever role fits his life the best, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Like the closest guy to Ross Stripling in the other direction of ratio to build champion is Dustin Hermanson. And just, yeah, I don't really think of him as a pure swing man because he had a bunch of seasons where he started exclusively or almost and then other seasons where he relieved exclusively or someone like a Calvi Meskabar, you know,

like sometimes he was just a reliever and sometimes he was just a starter. So it's really a Bill Champion. It's John Cerruti. It's maybe Carl Drews, another candidate. Drews. Or Wade LeBlanc if you just want the perfect ratio, which is within Stripling's reach. I'm just so delighted to have a reason to think about Wade LeBlanc.

I also got an email here and a stat blast question from Patreon supporter Joseph Payne. So he sent this in two messages. The first one said, I saw this post, which I can't currently find, remarking that both the 2023 and 2008 Phillies were 0-1 after the first game of the season. And it got me wondering about potential duplicate complete seasons. Have two teams ever had identical seasons in these terms? I mean,

0-1 after one game, 1-1 after two games, 1-2 after three games, etc., up to 35-43 after 78 games, etc. Identical after each and every game for the entire season. Maybe this is super common, but maybe it's super rare. I really have no idea. Has the same franchise ever had identical seasons? How many possible seasons are there? How many have happened? Maybe this could be considered separately with 162 game seasons and 154 game seasons. So his imagination was just running away with him here. Running wild. And then he followed up with another email and said, actually, now that I think about it a little more, it seems basically impossible that any two teams would have had identical seasons.

It seems basically impossible that any two teams would have had identical seasons. I believe there are two to the power of 162 possible team seasons. And given that there have been only a few thousand team seasons played, the odds are minuscule. So maybe a better question is how long into the season two teams have ever had identical seasons. Or how long on average does it take to get to a never before played season? Or how long on average does it take to get to a never-before-played season? Like a version of the usually-after-X-moves-in-a-chess game you're playing a game that's never been played before. And what about identical windows that don't start the season? Like perhaps two teams had identical records between their 26th and 73rd games of the year.

So I put this one to Ryan Nelson, Frequent Stat Blast Consultant, RSNelson23 on Twitter. And I think we've discussed something similar when it comes to a sequence of plays in a game and found that there haven't really been identical games for very long either when it comes to, say, like certain types of outs recorded or batted ball events or retro sheet events. outs recorded or batted ball events or retro sheet events. Anyway, Ryan crunched the numbers here in a way that is way beyond me. And he was able to determine the answer. He says it appears that the longest stretch that two teams have started identically to each other over the course of baseball history is 25 games. history is 25 games. So the 1895 Louisville Colonels and the 1928 Philadelphia Phillies both started the season with the following results. Win, loss, loss, win, loss, win, loss, loss, loss,

win, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, win. I may have inserted one too many losses there. And then like loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss. So that was a lot of games. That was 25 games. They followed exactly the same sequence. And that's the max to start a season. So every team in baseball history has had a unique first 26 games. So we're coming up on that point now, I guess, in the 2023 season.

Oh, yeah, I guess that's true, isn't it? Beyond the threshold where you might, in theory, mirror or in practice mirror some previous team. Weird. So the second question, though, about at any point in the season, so not just your first to your 25th, but your second to your 26th or your 40th to your 80th or whatever, the longest sequence, according to Ryan, for that is 29 games between the notorious 1899 Cleveland Spiders and the 2016 Tampa Bay Rays.

So starting with game 64. So this is game 64 for both of them. So using the same game numbers, those two teams went loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, win. Loss, win. Loss, loss, loss, loss, win. Loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, win. Loss. So that was...

Did you practice? No, that was off the cuff. But 29 game streak. And I expressed some surprise that without the constraint of it having to start the season, it's only four games more than the longest season starting streak. And Ryan said, well, a 25 game streak is 16 times more likely than a 29 game streak. Sometimes math is strange and counterintuitive. So those appear to be the answers,

that 29 games is the longest anyone's gone with the same win-loss sequence at the same point in the season as any previous team. So I don't know if anyone was watching the 2016 Tampa Bay Rays and just had an inkling sometime that summer, gee, this sure reminds me of when the 1899 Cleveland Spiders did this same thing starting with game number 64, How Uncanny. It's really, it's not a favorable comp when you get comped to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. The 2016 Rays were not good, but they were not Cleveland

Spiders bad in 1899. The Spiders that year, they were 20 and 134, whereas the 2016 Rays, they finished 68 and 94, quite respectable by comparison. But at least for that sequence of a few weeks, they were just as bad as those 1899 Spiders. Now, there is a third way that you could try to look this up. You could look up any sequence of a certain number of games at any point in a team season compared to any point in another team's season and see how long a streak you could get there. But that becomes much more complicated computationally. So Ryan said that his best process for figuring that one out would have to compare one schedule to another 33,722,187,500 times, which he calculated would take about 121 days to run.

So he's going to keep thinking about that. So we might have an answer for you in a few months. Or perhaps he challenged the audience to come up with a way to optimize this query and shorten the search. This is like the traveling salesman problem or sort of analogous to that. So if you have a recommendation to Ryan about how he can run this more quickly, then he is all ears at rsnelson23 on Twitter. But I'm satisfied with the answers that he has provided here now i have one last app last and this one has sort of been obsessing me for a while here and i don't know that i have a definitive answer we might get to the end of this and say blast we have not actually

blasted sufficiently but i wanted to put it out there just for the listeners and the podcast hive mind here for their interpretation and their advice. So I saw a tweet the other day by Graham Macri, formerly of Vox and SB Nation. And Graham tweeted, it's weird being a millennial baseball enjoyer because I'm still like run the starters pitch count up, get into the pen when every reliever throws 130 miles per hour and has a breaking ball that starts middle, middle, and then hits you in the dick. I think we've all thought that. And that made me remember a piece that I had read a few weeks earlier in late March at mass live.com, which was about Justin Turner and his insights into hitting.

He's a smart hitter. He knows his way around a bat in a batter's box. And he says some smart stuff in this article. For instance, he's talking about chasing and the count. He said, I think a lot of the time chase comes from a little bit of a predetermined notion that you're going to swing, especially ahead in the count.

You work and you get count leverage. And then you kind of let off the gas and just assume that because the count's in your favor, they're going to lay in a good pitch to hit versus keeping it turned on and staying locked in and hunting your zone. That's a conversation I have a lot around the cage. You see guys who are 0-2 and then they battle and fight and they spit on some tough pitches and work their way up to 3-2. And then because the count flips to 3-2, the hitter thinks it's back in their favor and they have that letdown. And now they think, oh, it's 3-2, they've got to throw a strike. But if you go and look at the numbers, the strike percentage on 3-2 is really low. So controlling that mindset is important. And I think that is a smart thing that he is imparting to the Red Sox hitters there.

I've seen Tom Tango calculate the same thing analytically. He had posted his site last December where he said, by and large, batters are overly aggressive on three and two counts. While the full count

is a batter's count on par with the two one and one O counts, the batter approach to the three two count is on par with all two strike counts, including O two and one and two, the two one and one O counts. The batter approach to the three, two count is on par with all two strike counts, including O two and one and two, the two best counts for a pitcher.

Clearly the batter is driven by the two strikes. Part of the three and two count fearful of getting called on strike three, the way Beltran was on Wainwright. The batter is giving almost no weight to getting a called ball for, for a walk. So Justin Turner knows that. I mean, maybe he's looked at the numbers or maybe he just knows that implicitly because he's good at hitting and he's wise. And this is why you have a JD Martinez or a Justin Turner around in that. Hopefully they will his stats, but he knows hitting. But here he also says,

that's kind of the culture we need to create. Make the other team work hard with 27 outs. I think getting a starting pitcher out of the game by the fifth inning should be a goal every single night so we can get into those 11th, 12th, 13th guys on the roster coming in to pitch innings in the sixth or seventh. I think that's how you win a lot of baseball games. So when I read this, I wondered, is that still true?

Is that still as true as it used to be? Or is Justin Turner himself just a millennial baseball enjoyer? Maybe. I mean, he is for sure. But also like maybe like in a spiritual way, you know. Yeah. I mean, the man is 38 years old. So maybe when he came up, that was true.

And maybe now it's less true because it's a different era when it comes to pitcher usage. And we've gotten this question occasionally just like, is there still really a benefit to seeing pitches just in the sense that it will run up a pitch count? Like, is that still good? Should we still be aspiring to do that now that there's so many relievers in the bullpens and they're so good? So I have wondered this for a long time, too, because I think post-Moneyball, we kind of had that, like, work-the-count mindset, and that can be valuable just to produce, say, a better play appearance.

But does it have that extra value in getting a pitcher out of the game? And I've tried to look at this a couple of ways here. So one way I asked Lucas Apostolaris of Baseball Perspectives to send me some numbers just on what team's winning percentage is by season when the starter does not complete five innings. So what he found is that it is basically been the same. He took this back to 1954 and from 1954 to like 2017, it hovered basically between like winning 28% of the time and winning, gosh, like 19% of the time. So like a one 90 winning percentage to a, a two way. It's like, usually like you win about a quarter of the games when your starter does not complete five innings. So it's, it's definitely not good when, when that happens. And the interesting thing is that there

has been a change just in recent years, as I was sort of suspecting. So starting with 2018, which is, I think, when the Rays really pioneered the opener, and then that kind of caught on, then the winning percentage went up to 29.4%. And then in 2019, it was 32.4%. And then in 2020, it was 36.1%. And it's been well over 30% every year since. It's been like 33% this year. So definitely something going on there that the last six seasons are higher than any previous season in the sample. But also, it's still quite bad

when your starter doesn't complete five. Usually, you will lose. I think probably the change is that we have had more openers. It's just like it's part of the plan often for the starter not to go five. And maybe even it was disproportionately good teams or forward-thinking teams that were doing openers at first. Maybe the Rays are overrepresented in the sample in those years. So I think that probably accounts for the uptick in teams' fortunes when starters don't go five. But it's still really bad when they don't go five just in general. But that's maybe too obvious because some of those times will be because the guy just got shelled right

and then it's not really a case of like the other team you know running up your pitch count and getting you out it's just like you know you got knocked around the park basically and then obviously if you leave for that reason then your team is likely going to lose because you allowed a lot of runs. So this is not really a precise way to look at the question. So I tried to come up with a slightly more precise way with the help of pitches that a team threw or that the batting team made the other team throw through five innings while also accounting for the number of runs scored. So just like was it no runs allowed through five innings or was it one? And we went up to six plus, just cutting it off at five innings pitch. And then we tried to see all else being equal, like number of runs

allowed being equal. Is it still advantageous to drive up pitch counts? Does the team that allows the same number of runs but had to throw more pitches to do it through five innings. Is that bad, basically? Is there really something to what Justin Turner is saying here? And best as we could determine thus far with Robert's help, there is some truth to it, but it doesn't seem to be a very pronounced effect. It kind of depends how you look at it, I guess. So, so first we sort of separated it into high pitch count outings and

low pitch count outings, just like above the median and below the median for that number of runs allowed through that number of innings. And then we just kind of compared, you know, if you threw above the median number of pitches, are you less likely to win than if you got through it economically? And he found that basically being in the high pitch count bucket gives about a 28 point bump in win percentage for the offensive team. So if you do make the pitchers work and you get into the high pitch count bucket, then maybe you get like a 28 point bump in winning percentage, which is what, like five wins or something over the course of 162 game season, which is not nothing. You know, it's something.

And then, though, he looked at it just since 2015. And so I was expecting, okay, this won't work as well in recent years because you don't expect starters to go deep into games and you have these great big bullpens where everyone's good. And so if you get into the bullpen, there isn't as soft an underbelly of the bullpen, maybe. You can't really prey on those pitchers the way that you used to. But Robert found 2015 and later, the benefit seems to be, if anything, slightly stronger, like a 32 or three point boost in winning percentage. So it has been more advantageous for batters to run up pitch counts lately, which kind of perplexed us a little bit. and look at the extremes. And we thought maybe this would really show itself on the margins

more. And if you really make a pitcher work or you really don't make a pitcher work, then that would come back to bite you. And there does seem to be something to that. So the difference between being in the highest and lowest quartiles when it comes to running up the pitch counts is 81 points of winning percentage from 2015 to 22 and 67 points over this whole sample, which goes back to 1988. So that does suggest that at the margins, there's a bigger effect. So if you can really do the Justin Turner and make that pitcher work, then you will derive a bigger benefit. That's more like 11 to 13 wins over the course of a season. And the difference between those buckets in pitch counts is something like 22 pitches

or probably random games picked from the high and low pitch count group would be about 30 pitches apart. So say six extra pitches seen per each of those first five innings. Plus, I guess there could be some carryover effect in subsequent games of the series. If you deplete a team's bullpen in the first game and those relievers aren't available in subsequent games of the series, or you've already seen them, so you might be better against them. So there could be some unquantified cumulative benefit too.

But again, the confounding part of this is that the effect is stronger in recent years. It's stronger for 2015 to last season than it is over the whole 1988 to last season sample, which was the opposite of what I was expecting. Expecting, yeah. I thought it would be less pronounced now. So I don't really know what to make of this, you know. And he was running all sorts of regressions and, you know, he was using Z scores and trying to come up with more precise ways to find this. And if you don't do the quartiles, if you just do the whole sort of lump of the data together, then it's, you know, like 16 extra pitches translates to like 20 points of winning percentage. So unless it's like at the extremes where you're really taking a lot of pitches or you're not taking many pitches at all, the effect is, is tempered. You don't see a strong signal there, but there does seem to be something a lot less muted when you really do grind out the plate appearances and you make the picture work.

Even if you're not scoring any more than some other team that scored the same number of runs, but didn't drive up the pitch count, there still is something to that, but I'm still perplexed. And this is why I throw it out to the audience because I'm wondering why it's not less true now than it used to be. Cause it seemed to me like it should be less true now. Because I was all ready to say, Justin Turner, you, like us, are a millennial baseball enjoyer, and you have to reframe your understanding

of how baseball works. But if anything, it appears to be even more valid than it used to be, and certainly no less valid. So I think a couple takeaways is that most of the time, most games, it probably doesn't make that big a difference. If you really can grind it out or if you really don't make the picture work, it can make a significant difference. But the confusing thing is that this has not changed.

I really expected to conclude this doesn't matter as much anymore. But I guess if it's true that it still does, I'm heartened by that because I like counting the pitches. I like seeing the pitch counts go up and thinking that that's meaningful. And the other reason why I thought this wouldn't be as meaningful now is that I've seen some research that says that the more pitches you see in a plate appearance early in the game, the bigger the times through the order penalty is just because you've seen more of the pitcher's stuff.

Right. And so you're just better acclimated to him the next couple times you face him. And I thought, well, now you don't even get that benefit as much because you don't get to face the same pitcher three or four times that often, right? So I thought that would also make it more muted, but you don't get to face the same pitcher three or four times that often. Right. So I thought that would also make it more muted, but it doesn't seem to. So this is a little bit of a baseball mystery. I'm glad that we at least confirmed that there is something to the

Justin Turner approach, but I do not know why it is just as valid as it's ever been, if not more so. So I put that to the podcast listeners. doing a better job of upfront identification of like who has the skill or the repertoire depth or the stuff or the deception or whatever to like be a starter and so they are able to like be a countervailing force to the use of relief i don't know like i'm trying to there's there's always some kind of confounding factor that is hard to isolate. And then someone will point it out and I'll think, eureka, of course, or I'll just be mystified forever. So, yeah, there might be something along those lines. And we didn't adjust for the hitting team's quality or the pitcher quality. It should be kind of consistent across the years and different samples that we're looking at.

But if we want it to be really rigorous, then we would do that. And I don't know whether that would help us tease something out. But yeah, probably maybe someone right now is thinking of the answer and the solution and is emailing us. And I can't wait to read it. But hopefully it's not everyone thinking of the same solution and sending us the same email because occasionally that will happen too. Yeah, but, you know, it keeps us humble.

All right. Well, I enjoyed doing a deep dive into that, even if I am, if anything, more confused than I was when I started. But that's okay. That's how science works, if I can glorify what we're doing here by calling it science. All right. So we will wrap up with the past blast, which comes from

1997 and not from David Lewis today, our usual past blast consultant. I'm pitch hitting for David today. And I discovered something about 1996 just a little too late to include it in our 1996 episode. I wish I had realized this a few hours earlier. But I learned shortly after we posted episode 1996 that we were talking about the A's moving in Vegas. Vegas. Were you aware that there have been major league games played in Las Vegas by the Oakland A's no less? Yeah. I mean, maybe this is common knowledge for A's fans, but here we are thinking, how is this going to work? Major league baseball in Las Vegas? Well, it happened. It happened for six games in 1996. At the start of the 1996 season, there was an issue where the A's were not able to play in the Coliseum in their home park because of construction. So I'm reading here from a March 1996 piece, A's to play first six games in Las Vegas. The Oakland

Athletics found a place to play opening day, 9,334 seat Cashman Field in Las Vegas. Two days after announcing that renovations on Oakland Coliseum will not be finished on April 1st, the A's on Wednesday chose to play at Cashman Field over the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans. chose to play at Cashman Field over the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans. And the Las Vegas Convention Center and Visitors Authority guaranteed the A's $900,000 to come to Las Vegas, which is probably a little less than they will be offering them now. And they opened the season in Las Vegas against Toronto on April 1st, played the Blue Jays, and then the Tigers came in for four games from April 4th to 7th. Cashman Field was the home of the AAA Las Vegas Stars of the Pacific Coast League, at the time San Diego's top affiliate. And this piece says, A's players said the field is not of major league quality, the locker rooms are small, and the wind makes Cashman Field a pitcher's nightmare.

And there was a lot of hubbub about, will this be a big league quality park? We were talking about, well, what will happen if, I mean, will the A's have to play in a AAA park for a few years while they wait for some new ballpark to be open? Well, this happened happened again, only for six games, but the same sort of concerns about what this would look like. And everyone was like,

this is big for Las Vegas. This tells baseball that Las Vegas is a player in this. This is the adult Disneyland. This is where everyone wants to come. And they sort of spruced up the place a little bit, did some superficial improvements. They admitted the ball jumps, but they said there won't be any more home runs. I don't know if that is the case, but they jumped at the chance to get the A's homestand after failing to lure the Colorado Rockies there for spring training. And it's all about tourism and the tourism dollars allowed them to put their money where their mouth was. And so all these concerns about how the ballpark would play and would it be big league quality

and whether it was a travesty. And it was reported that this was the first time that a big league ball game had been played in a non-big league park since the Brooklyn Dodgers played the Phillies in Jersey City on September 2nd, 1957. franchise move, which led to renovations to increase the Coliseum's seating for the Raiders. And there were like Mount Davis adjustments. And so the park was just not ready. And I found this one article saying hitters were looking forward to friendly Cashman Field just because of the dimensions and because of the environment. There were condemnations about it not being big league. And this columnist was fretting about how records could be broken and it could be an embarrassment for baseball in a town known for gambling. Baseball is betting its record book.

The thing that separates it from other major pro sports won't take a big time hit in a too small ballpark where the ball carries much too easily. won't take a big-time hit in a too-small ballpark where the ball carries much too easily. It would open a gaping wound in baseball and its record book if an all-time record such as for homers, runs scored, or time of the game for nine innings was broken. Really? Would that be a gaping wound? I don't even know what the records for those things are offhand. Gaping wound. Yeah, records in other sports are nice.

In baseball, they're the fabric that holds the game together. And just very, very upset. There were a bunch of homers hit. And A's manager, Art Howe, said there might not have been a legitimate homer in the bunch. So there was definitely some grousing about this. Cashman Field is a very nice AAA ballpark. But it's not one of those big league special places. By the way, that columnist, Steve Sneddon, for the Gazette Journal, below his column, it says, Steve Sneddon is a Gazette Journal columnist. You can call him at 788-6358.

I think that a lot of newspaper folks still have a voicemail box. I know that Divish does. I think that a lot of newspaper folks still have a voicemail box. I know that Divish does. That's nice. Just give them a piece of your mind, I guess. Anyway, the A's, they turned to triple play when they were there. Their first triple play since the 1983 season. But they only won two of the six games that they played there. I looked at the offensive stats.

There were 83 runs scored in the six games. That's 13.8 runs per game or 6.9 per team. The average league wide that year was five. So that was a lot of scoring. 23 homers were hit 3.8 per game, 1.9 per team per game. The average that year was 1.1. So that was a lot of homers, even though it was early April. And even though the A's opponents, the Blue Jays and Tigers finished 23rd and 26th in WRC plus that year. So they were not great offensive teams, but there were a lot of homers hit and a lot of runs scored. The park did have 20 foot fences, but it was 328 down both lines, 364 to the power alleys, but you could not put money on those games.

Betting for the games was also taken off the boards at the local casino sportsbooks, although casino advertising was allowed to remain on the outfield billboards for the series. And then on April 9th, I found an article, the AP headlined, A's are happy to be leaving Las Vegas. Hmm. How the turntables. A's are happy to be leaving Las Vegas. Hmm. How the turntables.

Attendance for the six games was in total 54,986, including sellouts in the last three. So there were a few games that were above capacity, but there were grassy hills down both of the lines where fans could congregate. So people did turn up to see the first big league games played in Vegas. I don't know whether that tells us anything about whether they will turn up now that there will be many, many, many more big league games in theory played there starting a few years from now. But there was precedent and I had no idea. So now, you know, Cashman Field still exists, by the way, You know, Cashman Field still exists, by the way, but now it's used for soccer and football, the USL and the XFL. Now, in 1997, the pass blast that I came up with here is there was a radical realignment plan. So this is something that you hear about all the time now. Right. And there was precedent for this, too. Radical realignment was being discussed in earnest in 1997.

This was a big Bud Selig hobby horse. He wanted to realign baseball's leagues and divisions by geography. So quoting from an August piece in The Washington Post, there's growing sentiment among team owners for a sweeping realignment unprecedented in the history of the sport that would, in time for next season, move seven teams from the NL to the AL and shift eight from the AL to the NL. Among the teams that would switch leagues is the Cincinnati Reds, a charter member of the National League in 1876. All their mascots would have had to go with them, or at least the ones that were around at that time. Baseball's six divisions would be reshuffled back into four and teams would be grouped geographically. For proponents of the plan, realignment is not so much a break from the past, but a return to it with modern

day benefits such as reduced travel and more fan-friendly television schedules. 85% of all games will be played within the same time zone for fans to be able to watch and listen to games at reasonable times, said Boston Red Sox general partner John Harrington, chairman of the owner's realignment committee. The benefits are in the schedule making. We're trying to get back to the way it was in the old days with the eight team leagues. Every game meant two games in the standings, and your fans knew everyone on the opposing teams because they saw them all the time. Will such a radical realignment plan be put into effect? Will the Reds, the Phillies, the Mets, the Expos, the Braves, the Marlins, and the Pirates play in the American League next year?

While the White Sox, the Royals, the Brewers, the Twins, the Rangers, the A's, the Mariners, and the Angels compete for the National League pennant? It depends upon whom you ask. If you ask me, no, that would not happen. But Bud Selig really wanted it to happen. No, that would not happen. But Bud Selig really wanted it to happen. He said, the more we've gone through it and the more we've analyzed the schedules and everything else, the more it becomes clear that if we're going to solve our problems, we're going to need to do drastic radical realignment plan, which was part of the expansion of 1998 because the Diamondbacks and the Devil Rays were coming in. So there would be 30 teams. So Arizona was guaranteed a spot in the NL and the AL owners wanted the added revenue of a new team in their league. Also, that would have caused both leagues to have 15 teams, which would have meant year round interleague play, which we do have now.

And so Selig wanted to realign things basically into an Eastern conference and a Western conference. The AL and the NL would just be the Eastern and Western conferences, similar to the NBA and NHL's conferences. And the AL would be 14 Eastern time zone teams split into two divisions of seven and the nl would be 16 central mountain pacific time zone teams split into two divisions of eight and this uh did not happen as we know and one issue was the the different dh rules at the time and owners had the right to refuse a change of league and you had to have like a majority vote and all sorts of things, all sorts of problems. So the Mets and the Cubs and the Reds and the Pirates and the Giants and the Braves and the Padres ownership were all against realignment. Edgar,

Edgar Martinez said he would retire if the Mariners moved to the National League. So that would have been bad if that had happened. I mean, yeah. And I think Julio Franco might have had to because the Brewers did move. So with this deadline looming with the 98 season coming up, only one team changed leagues and another changed divisions. So the Diamondbacks got their spot in the NL West. The Devil Rays joined the AL East and the Tigers switched from the AL East to the al central then the royals

had the option of moving to the nl central they declined and then bud sealings brewers would move to the nl so even after that they kept talking about future realignment but nothing on the order of this has happened but i think we're coming closer to something like this happening because Rob Manfred has sort of surfaced this idea. He said he's wanted to resolve the ballpark issues with the A's and the Rays before they figure that out. And maybe one of those is coming close to being done now. So I think we might see something like this soon because league distinctions basically are meaningless now. No different rules, really. them like this soon because league distinctions basically are meaningless now. Yeah. No different rules, really.

So tradition was a big stumbling block and everyone was like, oh, the AL and the NO, we can't change. And these affiliations, they go back to the beginning of baseball. And what do we have if we don't have tradition? But now I don't know that that would really be that big a deal because people don't really feel league loyalties and there aren't different league rules. So we probably are heading for something like this in the not-too-distant future. And there would be some advantages to it when it comes to travel and televising and time zones and such. There would indeed.

Mariners still have to fly a lot, but what are you going to do? All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks, as always, for listening. And congrats to Liam Hendricks on being cancer-free. Can't wait to see him back out on the field. I talked last time about how I think it might be beneficial to see exit speeds for batted balls more often than we do on baseball broadcasts, just to kind of calibrate our expectations for the results of those batted balls. And some people said that they have done that and that they have found that useful in ballparks because there are quite a few ballparks that will show that live on various boards or screens. And it seems to be almost instantaneous. And it can help you suppress the urge to stand up and scream about a shallow fly ball. That's sort of what I was saying.

We have now played all of the Effectively Wild intro themes that we've been sent. Today, as some of you may remember from about five years ago when a bunch of our listeners got together and pitched in to commission an Effectively Wild intro theme by Matt Farley of the San Francisco Sports Band. So that's what this one was. And now I don't know what we'll do. People can keep sending in themes if they want to record more. Otherwise, maybe we'll start cycling through them. People have liked a lot of them, so I don't want to deprive people of hearing some of them by playing the same one every time. But this has been a lot of fun. And if you haven't done one yet but want to, you can send it to podcast at fancrafts.com. I'll leave you with this email from Eric G., who says,

I was wondering if you've ever thought about making an Effectively Wild bingo game to follow as you're watching a baseball game. Every Otani at bat, a mention of how different baseball is from other sports, baseball gastrointestinal discussion, etc. I may have consumed something on my commute home, so I don't know if this is a good idea, but would love to hear your thoughts. I'm into it.

I don't know what should be on the bingo card. If someone wants to suggest something, make a bingo card. I'll link to it. Let people play along. Of course, the best way that you can support Effectively Wild is to become a patron of ours on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild, signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount and thereby helping us continue to do the podcast, helping us stay ad free aside from our stat blast sponsorship and getting yourself access to some perks as have the following five listeners, Mitchell Delaney,

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you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild you can follow us on twitter at ew pod you can find the effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early in the week. All things, all things are grand. All things are grand with you, my patron saint, my patron saint, my patron saint, my patron saint. So using the same game numbers, those two teams went loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, win. Loss, win.

Loss, loss, loss, loss, win. Loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, win. Loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, win. Loss. So that was. Did you practice? No, that was off the cuff.