Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2001: Open the Podcast Bay Doors, HAL

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the podcast’s naming conventions, the EW reverse jinx boosting Byron Buxton, the stress of observing Jacob deGrom’s high-wire act, Drew Maggi’s first major league hit (off of Hobie Harris!), high-scoring, high-altitude baseball in Mexico City, MLB editing (and later restoring) an A’s highlight, White Sox fan unrest, Jazz […]

Where do you go in a world of bad takes? For the good takes on baseball and life With a balance of analytics and humor Philosophical music Effectively wild. Effectively wild. Effectively wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2001 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 Ringer.

Ben, how are you? I'm good. I wonder if it's good or bad that our episodes are now preceded by numbers. That big? That's a really big number. It's part of the headline. It's part of the episode title. I guess it doesn't have to be.

I just, I wonder what the effect of that is psychologically. If someone just stumbles across the website fangraphs.com or they hear, hey, I want to look for a good baseball podcast, try Effectively Wild. And then they look it up and it says episode 2001. Do you think that might be slightly intimidating? Do you think they might feel like maybe I've missed too much? It would be tough to catch up on this one. Oh, yeah. I mean, like, I wouldn't even, how would one, you know, like. People do. People have, but you don't have to is the nice thing.

You don't have to. Yeah. We could include a previously on Effectively Wild before every episode and it would be like several hours long. But I don't think you need that. We endeavor to allow people to just jump right in. And when we refer back to things, we try to explain it as much as we can without boring everyone who has been following along. everyone who has been following along. But yeah, I wonder just from sort of a discoverability perspective, because some podcasts, they'll say like, that was season one, and this is season two, and then they will start counting up again. Even non-narrative ones that have actual seasons and breaks, just so I guess it doesn't get too onerous and the numbers don't get too big. But that ship

has sailed a long time ago for us. It's handy, I think, to have episode numbers. If you want to look up old episodes or cite old episodes, we can just cite a number and then it's easy to scroll back to that episode number. So, you can find old episodes more easily, I guess. And plus people know we're not going to go away. We're not like, you know, I don't want to get too attached to this podcast. It might not last. There might not be staying power in this podcast. I mean, they know that we're proven, obviously. Like, we've stuck around for 2,000 episodes.

It can't be that bad. I do wonder, like, what are people's impressions? And if you're going, you know, if you do start going back through, well, presumably you would have listened to, like, maybe a a current episode and you're like, oh, I like this. I'll go back to the beginning. And then I wonder when people do that, they're like, wait, who is this Sam guy? And where does he go? You know?

Why does Ben sound like that? And also, what year was this? 2012? You do kind of sound like you've taken a second on those first couple of episodes. It's a very drowsy version of Ben. You're much more up now than you used to be.

I wouldn't say I'm high energy now, but I was definitely low energy back then. Anyway, hopefully people are not too put off by the fact that there's a big backlog. Hopefully that's a selling point just in case you ever want to go back. Our back catalog is extensive.

So there's that. Plus, it's like the Joe DiMaggio line about how he wants to play well every game because there's always some kid who may be seeing me for the first or last time and I owe him my best. So that's what we try to do here too. There's probably someone who's listening to us for the first time in every episode. If that is you, listener, hello, welcome. We don't talk about the episode numbers at the top of every episode. This is a one-time thing, but we want to do the DiMaggio and give people our best every time, just in case it is the first or the last, I guess. But if we're really good, then hopefully it won't be the last because they'll want to come back for

more. I just can't believe that we've gotten this far in and neither of us has made a 2001 Space Odyssey joke yet, really. Right. Seems like it's in both of our wheelhouses. So, our powers of juicing players' careers by noticing that they're not doing that well continue unabated because we talked last week about Byron Buxton and we wondered, well, is he going to hit as a DH?

They've now kept him healthy by keeping him off the field and just DHing, but it seems to have backfired slightly in that he's been available, but he hasn't been himself. He hasn't been hitting like his old self. And of course, he's not offering any defensive value. Well, since we talked about that, just four games, but he has the fifth highest WRC plus of any qualified hitter over that span.

He has hit a few home runs, three to be precise. He's batted 333, 412, 10,.1067. That's a.294 WRC+. And now his season WRC+, is up to.130, which is a lot better than the.98 it was then. And it's basically what he hit last year. So, our powers. It's the opposite of the SI coverage inks. It's the Effectively Wild's, I don't know, blessing. It's when we talk about how you're not doing that well, suddenly you start to do well. It's worked before for Bryce Harper.

It's worked many times. Yeah, we had a lot to do with Bryce Harper, you and me. Yes. You know, like unsung heroes in the Bryce Harper odyssey. Absolutely. Yeah. So we've now conferred the Effectively Wild blessing upon Byron Buxton. So if he keeps hitting like this, then he can be very valuable, even as a DH.

Even as a DH. And, you know, I think that we have talked before, and it is something that we continue to noodle on internally. It's like, is the DH penalty too, is it too much? Is it too much, Ben? I don't know. It's a little too much. Is it too much, Ben? I don't know.

It's a little too much. So, you know, but yeah, like I just want a good version of Buxton to be on the field and healthy. And, you know, ideally, ideally that involves him playing center field just because it is so electric when he does. And he is so, although I will say, have you had this experience how much how much of the twins have you actually watched uh ben a few games a few games so here is an experience that i've had when i've watched the twins this year and i feel very conflicted about it because again like i i love watching buxton play center like i think that I haven't tried to come up with a comprehensive list of my favorite individual tools in a while because there's so many. There's so many tools in baseball. Wait, that's not what I mean.

But it's hard to narrow it down because so many of these guys are so good. And they're good in like multitudinous ways right that is exciting but i will say this when byron buxton plays centerfield at least once a week at least once a week there is a time where you're like byron no because he does something so athletic and incredible, but also, like, tinged with danger. And you're like, he's going to hurt himself. This is the one. This is the play.

This is the time he's colliding into the wall. This is the time when he's doing that thing. And it's going to derail his entire season. And unfortunately, we have a great deal of precedent to that end, right? And so, I will say, as much as it is not you know i wouldn't call it like early effectively wild sleepy uh we're not at ben in like episode four sleepy levels of buxton but it is like a more relaxing experience to just watch him dh because well it is not without its perils, right? He had that scary collision at second base the other week. And so there's still risk attendant with playing baseball, whatever you're doing, because it's a very hard little ball going very fast at you. So apart from anything else, you have to contend with that but this is a more like mellow buxton viewing experience because i'm not sitting there going he's gonna get hurt he's gonna get hurt he's gonna get hurt

and and i wonder if after a while of dhing and him remaining healthy and now him kind of seeming to like have settled in and be on his way to having the kind of season at the plate we know him to be capable of. If when he eventually returns to the field, which I assume he will do sometimes, right? Hopefully, yeah. They haven't said, yeah. But, you know, like eventually, I imagine if for no other reason than everyone in baseball is still getting hurt except for Byron Buxtonxton and here i'm like throwing salt over my shoulder

and like you know doing a prayers hands you know like at some point someone in that outfield is gonna need a day off or might get dinged up themselves right and need to um have buxton out there moonlighting i wonder how i will feel if i will have settled into a place of comfort and ease. But it is nice to not be constantly worried that he's going to just like eat it out there and then we're not going to see him for a couple of weeks. Pete Well, it's funny that you mentioned that because I was going to mention that I'm having the exact opposite experience with our old pal, Jacob deGrom.

Kate So, I'm going to interrupt you briefly. Pete Yeah, yeah. Kate I'm a little worried that other ben is a witch uh-huh um because i don't know if people have noticed this i hope they have that he he kind of debuted this new column um this year that's like uh modeled off of zach lowe's very good column at espn where he like highlights a couple of things a week that he really likes but that were maybe not quite long enough like meaty enough of a subject to merit a whole article, but are still cool to highlight. And he has now jinxed O'Neill Cruz and Jacob deGrom.

And I'm a little worried about what he might possess in terms of powers. O'Neill Cruz, maybe we can blame Ben Clemens for. I don't think we can blame Ben Clemens for Jacob deGrom because Jacob deGrom is constantly getting hurt or just returning from getting hurt or maybe he's hurt, but we're just going to be careful. It's always like you use the same language about Jacob deGrom that you use about, like, pandemic preparedness and, like, social distance.

It's all, like, out of an abundance of caution. Like, it's just always, they're always doing something out of caution. And I understand why Jacob deGrom is not doing anything out of caution, seemingly. He is not, say, throwing slower, which I have wondered whether he'd be better off doing that in the past. But it's just over and over. As much as I love the results of Jacob deGrom when he is pitching, I'm sick of the Jacob deGrom experience. It's not even like he plays for a team I root for or something, in which case that'd probably be extra agonizing. But just following him and feeling like he's always on the verge of breaking and not wanting him to, but just being like, gosh, just put us out of our misery.

Just get it over with. If you're going to get Tommy John again one of these days, just do it already. Just stop putting us through this. I don't want him to have to do that, obviously. But he was pulled, what? I mean, his first spring training outing was delayed, right? And that was like an abundance of caution situation. And then he was pulled from a start recently because of a wrist thing.

And that was just out of an abundance of caution. And then he was pulled from his most recent start just as a precaution. But now he's going on the IL with elbow inflammation, which doesn't sound great. It doesn't sound great. You know, like, uh, it sounds pretty bad. It does. GM Chris Young, we're going to play this very cautiously. Oh, we're just going to see how he responds. And then we'll see what the next steps are. When he's pitching, he's still as good as ever. I mean, he is the best pitcher in baseball when he is pitching. Minimum 30 innings, he has the lowest FIP of anyone. He has the highest strikeout minus walk rate of anyone. He's throwing harder than anyone, as hard as he ever has,

averaging 99.1 miles per hour, which is a full tick higher than anyone else with at least 30 innings pitch. So it's not like his magical powers have gone away. Whenever he's healthy, he's still extraordinary, but he just doesn't go deep into games. They're always careful with him. There's always something that is nagging that is possibly going to cause his demise. It's just, ah, I can't take it anymore. I just, I want him to either be healthy or just like, I don't know. I don't want him to like go away and stop pitching, but I want him to just be healthy, I guess. Or be like a little less extraordinary, but more available again.

I don't know if he could just easily take a couple miles per hour off and whether that would actually make any difference, but it's getting to the point now where like try that at least not that he's not still valuable if he pitches a hundred innings or 90 innings or something. If, if this repeats itself throughout the entire season and he just makes a couple of shortish starts and then he takes one off and then he comes back. And as long as he's healthy, come playoff time,

now I don't know if the Rangers will be in the playoffs, but that's a big part of why they want him to get there, but also because of how valuable he could be if they were to get there. But man, it's just, it's so stressful. Just, I'm sure more for Rangers fans and obviously more for him than for me. But even for me, I'm just like, I'm worried when he's pitching that day. Instead of being excited, I'm like, what's going to go wrong and what's going to

give him pain this time? It's concerning, right? And it does, you're right that it doesn't make for a, a pleasurable viewing experience, which is weird because like, if you would think if you're the Rangers or a fan of the Rangers, that this would be, this would be a nice time. Like you're in, you're in first place in the West, right?

You have city connects that some people are really enthusiastic about. I still feel mixed about them, but you know, it's like it's starting, in theory, to gel the way that it was supposed to, and you're ahead of the Astros. And so you should be riding high, you know? You feel like you should be riding high. And then stuff like this happens, and you're like,

oh, well, it feels bad. And then you look at their play playoff odds and you're like wow the the playoff odds are only they're a little less than 50 percent and the astros are so much better and the astros like odds of winning the division are almost 60 percent why are so low and you're like right this is and so it doesn't feel great, I would imagine, you know? You're like, we watch baseball at a Costco. Yeah. You could probably figure out some break-even point for like, how much more available would Jacob deGrom have to be at a lower level of performance on a rate basis? Like, how, what's the trade-off there? If there were some world where Jacob de

Grom could, instead of averaging 99, average 97 or something, he'd still be a good pitcher in theory. So how much worse could he be as a pitcher and still be more valuable than he currently is if that led to him going deeper into games or just being available for more starts. I don't know exactly what the break even is. And maybe he just has this mentality where he always has to be max effort and he always has to be doing his best. Maybe it's not as easy to take a little off as it seems like it should be, but he's just, he's better than he has to be.

I mean, it's not like he's not continuing to get benefits. I don't know if there's a diminishing return there once you get below a two FIP, but it's okay if you have a two FIP instead of a 1.65 or a 2.5 would still be pretty darn good. Or if you made 30 starts and you went deep into games, even a three Ffifth would

be swell. So I just, I don't, I can't, some part of him has to think that, right? No, like when, when some other part of him is barking every time he's out there and he's throwing harder and harder and harder, harder than he did, even in his incredible, like in 2018, which was his career year. I mean, he was worth nine wins according to Fangraphs then. And he was sitting like 96 at that time. That's three miles per hour slower than now. And that was five years ago. And he's 34 years old now.

Like we know that he can be the best pitcher in baseball throwing 96. So does he have to throw 99 and be even like his fit that year was, was a 1.99. You know, he could do that. Granted the rest of the league maybe has gotten better and thrown harder than it was in 2018, but if he could succeed at that level, or if he could back then and was healthy that season and three seasons in a row, he threw 200 plus innings, right? Just at an elite level, but averaging 96 or 97 instead of 99. It just seems like discretion is the better part of valor. Like there's just such an Icarus vibe to everything he does these days

that I just wish he would fly a little lower. But I don't know. I hope he stays healthy. It's just agita. It's just like putting me through like the strain. I feel like Jacob de Crom's elbow when I'm watching Jacob de Crom. I'm inflamed.

It's tough. Anyway. I am inflamed. Yeah's tough. I am inflamed. In better news, maybe, or I guess it's somewhat bittersweet news, but Drew Maggi got optioned to AAA. And we knew that was going to happen, right? And I'm sure he knew that was going to happen and it wasn't going to last for a long time. And he got in that first game and he got the standing ovation. And then he got a start and he hadn't gotten a hit yet.

So it was a feel-good story. But it wasn't a feel-great story until he got that hit, I think. Especially because we knew there was an expiration date. And then it was announced that he was going to be sent down. But that he was going to be the 27th man for the Pirates doubleheader on Saturday. So there was still a chance that he might play. And he did get into the second game. He came in as a replacement in the seventh inning and he got a hit. He singled off of Hobie Harris. Yes. Hobie Harris, just a meeting of meet a major leaguer candidates. I mean,

I don't know if that was the effectively wild blessing that we made this happen, but what are the chances? Hobie Harris, whom we recently delighted in giving up the first hit to Drew Maggi. And then Maggi doubled before the end of the game, too. So he went off on a high note. I don't know if he'll be back this season or ever but he gets that ball he got another nice moment so if he had to go and we knew he was going to go at some point that at least he went out like that you want it to be i don't know on the one hand you it's perfect but on the other hand you're like this is a give him else a cookie kind of situation right because

we initially were like well he's got to get in a game were like, well, he's got to get in a game, you know? He's got to get in a game. And then our goalpost moved, Ben. He's got to get a hit. Now, do we need him to get a home run? Do we need him to be up for a longer stretch? Like, are we the mouse with the cookie? Yeah.

I'm sated now, I think. You're sated? Okay. Yeah. Obviously, I'd like You're sated? Okay. Yeah. Obviously, I'd like him to continue to get chances. See? This is how the mouse and the cookie gets you. Well, yeah.

I was never rooting against him getting more than one game. I mean, I really wanted to get one game. The one is more important. Going from zero to one, way more important than going from one to two or two to three or three to four. That's fair. So I was never anti-Drew Maggi getting more than one game in the majors, but sure, I'm rooting for him. But I feel like he could call it a career now or whenever now and feel like, I did it.

I made it. I got hits. I showed that I could be a big leaguer and that I could hold my own there at least for a few plate appearances. So really nice. Just one of the very nice stories surrounding the Pirates these days. Agreed. So we have a couple more things to discuss before I do some stat blasting here. On Saturday, we saw the first ever regular season game in Mexico City. And boy, it did not disappoint. It was as advertised offense-wise.

This was a Giants-Padres game. We are recording on Sunday, which is unusual for us. We're recording on Sunday prior to Sunday's games. But on Saturday... It's my fault. Well, yeah, it's a scheduling conflict. We record when we can. But the Padres beat the Giants 16 to 11 and 11 home runs were hit, which is too short of the record, which was back in the Wilds juiced ball year of 2019. of 2019. And there were all sorts of fun facts and weird stats and things that happened. Like each team went back to back twice at two different times. So it was the first ever case of both teams in a game having multiple distinct home run streaks, according to the Ulysses Sports Bureau. So that was what it was like.

And that was kind of what we thought baseball in Mexico City would look like. We talked about this back when these games were announced. It was episode 1897. I think it was last September we talked about that. We did so many episodes. See, I could just cite a number. And now if you want to go back and listen to which episode, all you have to do is scroll back in your feed. 1897, way back in 1897 when we had merely done almost 1900 episodes.

But in that one, we talked a little bit about what baseball could look like in Mexico City because the games had been announced. And we talked about how it could be a total Homer fest and slug fest. And I was citing some research that I did for an article at The Ringer back in 2017 when Rob Manfred had been talking up Mexico City as a potential expansion spot. And I ran the numbers and I had the park factors and the league factors and just concluded that if you thought Coors Field was wacky, just wait for baseball in Mexico City. And that's what was happening here. It was like pop-ups basically going out. I mean, contact that you never would have thought would be out just off the bat was just carrying and carrying and carrying. So there were so many long home runs hit. There were seven 440 plus foot home runs. So many. Yes, seven.

That's so many. The StatCast era record was four. And all the times that four had happened were at Coors Field. That's the most combined in a game in the StatCast era. Just wild. Like, some of them were hard hit, and others were like, that got out? And then it was like 440 feet. It's just amazing. Well, did you see Susan Slusser's tweet to this one? So, Susan tweeted, I learned after the game that the humidor here is not set at Colorado levels or lower.

I learned after the game that the humidor here is not set at Colorado levels or lower. It's set at the same 70 degrees and 57% humidity as the 29 non-Colorado parks. Yeah. That's a joke, one member of the Giants traveling party said. And I was like, was this like a purposeful decision or was this a whoops-a-do? You know, what's going on? Well, when I saw that, yeah, I thought that is malpractice. Like, either that or they thought, let's really lean into this. If we're going to play baseball in Mexico City, let's show what baseball in Mexico City could look like.

But then I went back to my article and remembered that there is actually an issue with using the humidor in Mexico City. So, I don't know if this is why they weren't setting it at some extreme setting or not. Perhaps they just didn't anticipate that this would happen. But here's what I wrote back in 2017. Nor can a humidor help as it has at Coors and in Colorado Springs, where the Brewers AAA affiliate plays, and as it would in Chase Field, where the Diamondbacks hope to install one next season. This is before Chase Field had one and before every park had one. The air in those environments is dry enough that a humidor set to 50% relative humidity

has a significant effect on the ball. In Mexico City, the relative humidity during the summer months is considerably higher than 50%. So if a team were to store baseballs in the same conditions that the Rockies do at Coors, the balls would dry out and fly farther. Oh, boy. So they need to make them wetter? Oh, no.

I'm about to say a bad sequence of words. That's the problem. Nor could a Mexico City team keep cranking up the humidor to, say, 90% or higher in a bid to dampen the ball. And then I quoted Alan Nathan, the physicist, a standard MLB baseball stored at 100% relative humidity, 70 degrees, absorbs enough water to increase the weight to 5.6 ounces, which is way outside the allowed range

of five to five and a quarter ounces. A humidor could not be used to mitigate somewhat the elevation effect as was done at Coors without increasing the weight an unacceptable amount. So, either you have a ball that would paradoxically go even farther, or you just have the wettest ball. Just a sopping, wet, just dripping, just droplets would spray off the ball, whatever you made contact.

All right. You know, I think, Ben, I'm going to offer us a note on air, which is like, you know, we got defensive. Like, the show is horny too, relative to other baseball podcasts. Maybe we could, it should be

a more organic one. I feel like we're reaching for it sometimes now. I mean, this time, look, I'm just talking about how wet the baseball would be. Alan Nathan said it. I didn't say it. Oh, no. The altitude, though, it's like 7,320

feet. Yeah. And that is a lot higher than Coors Field, which is famously mile high-ish. Right? So, it's thousands of feet higher than Coors Field. And we already joke about Coors Field being like baseball on the moon. Yeah, we do.

Yeah. This is, I don't even know. This is like, I don't know whether you could, like if there's no great humidor answer, I guess you could like introduce a different ball for Mexico City. Yeah, I guess you could, like, introduce a different ball for Mexico City. Yeah, I know. Oh, boy. We got that suggestion

from a listener, Patreon supporter, Reggie, who wrote in to say, why don't they just have, you know, like, a high-drag ball that you should use there. A special ball, yeah.

But with MLB's hand-stitching baseball process and the fact that they can't seem to get their act together anyway as it is with one ball in theory. And they've had multiple baseballs in use in the same season, but they haven't manufactured multiple baseball models at the same time, as far as we know. So that seems like it could be an issue, but you'd almost have to do that because otherwise,

what can you, can you play baseball in this environment it's just it it doesn't look like the same sport like chris bassett was tweeting that pitcher stats shouldn't count if you were to play there but but if you were to play if there were a team there full time i don't know that any pitchers would want to play there. Like, they play baseball there, obviously. Like, they play in Mexico City. There's been a successful team whose park the MLB teams were using here. It's the home of the Diablos Rojos. So, like, they can play baseball, and they've been a successful team. But it really would look a lot different.

Like, there are a lot of Mexican league parks that are at a high elevation, not this high, but still higher than anywhere other than cores in MLB. So it's a little less extreme relative to those other parks, but it's still really extreme. So there are a lot of reasons why Mexico city would make sense for expansion. And I understand why there's some interest in tapping into that market more. Like, I wrote about this, again, back in that same article.

I noted just why it's appealing. I said Mexico City makes sense as a site for a few reasons. First, it's enormous with the largest metropolitan population of any North American city, with the possible exception, according to some sources, of New York. Second, it's a largely untapped market. As Manfred told Jason Stark in an ESPN story, a team in Mexico opens up the Mexican television market, which is significant in ways that are much broader than the arrangements that we have there now. He also noted that a team based in Mexico would help us improve the flow of Mexican players into Major League Baseball, which would in turn help us in the Hispanic market in the United States.

So also, the closest MLB team is like a thousand miles away. So that would be bad from a travel perspective, potentially, but also no current Major League owners are going to make much of a stink about the team. They don't have competition in the... I don't know, I'm blanking on the official name for it. Like, there's a word for it in one of the many documents about this. I was going to say sphere of influence, but that's not quite right. Yeah, right.

So there are a lot of upsides there, but there are downsides. I mean, there have been some safety concerns, but also travel. And then this seems like the big one. We got a demonstration of it on Saturday. It's just like that's what baseball would look like unless you took some sort of extreme steps and and the altitude that it tires players out like everything the the course field hangover effect and the way that pitches move differently there and going back and forth can yeah extract something from

players there like oh all of that would be exacerbated yes again the diablos rojos have been quite successful the rockies have not so right i don't know that you can extrapolate from the rockies and say necessarily that it's impossible to compete at altitude because it hasn't helped i think but also the rockies have not done themselves any favors and no there may be even ways you could potentially take advantage of it, at least in theory. And it has done nothing but hurt them seemingly so far. But man, that was a wacky, wild demonstration of what baseball would look like there. Yeah, I mean, it's a cool challenge, though.

It's a cool challenge, though. Yeah, it could be. It would be a very cool challenge to be one of the people who helps to crack that nut open, you know? Yeah. Boy. Yeah, I don't know. You can't fight altitude, though, especially if the humidor is not a recourse thing. Right, yeah.

Whew, man. Yeah, it could be quite challenging yeah it was it was fun for for a day at least just to be like whoa this is like your baseball with with moon shoes so look at this this is it's like weightless wow every ball goes out moon shoes it might be tiresome after a while i don't know anyway we'll see but i guess we should also talk about a home run that was hit in Oakland that if you were to watch the replay of that home run, you would perhaps receive a distorted impression of what the surroundings looked like. So in Oakland, there were signs demanding that John Fisher sell the team, complaining about John Fisher's ownership for very valid reasons. And there were people chanting and there were a bunch of banners hanging out in the outfield by fans who brought them. And there were some balls hit in that vicinity, right? And you could see these things on the broadcast live. There's nothing you could do. You had to show where the balls went. But if you tried to look for the highlights for a while after the game, it was edited. The footage was edited.

It was zoomed in so that you could see the ball go over the fence, but you could not see the signs and the banners hanging out there. And people noticed this and were like, huh, isn't that interesting? The rest of the clip and the highlight looks the same, but this one shot. How curious that this happened to be zoomed in so that you could not see those signs. Isn't that an odd coincidence? And of course, it was not a coincidence at all. And

it has been restored, I believe now, after everyone noticed this, and it probably, MLB probably strides and affected itself here because it called a lot of attention to this highlight. I think that there was a quote, Matt Kawahara, who was our guest on the A's preview segment. He tweeted that the MLB site now shows the unedited clip of Noda's home run with right field fan signs visible.

And MLB spokesman said, we were unaware of the edit. signs visible. An MLB spokesman said, we were unaware of the edit. When it came to our attention, we corrected it as it isn't consistent with our policy. So here's the thing. I, on the one hand, I do find it plausible that someone would kind of go rogue and make this decision. But I also feel like it's not plausible and like you don't somebody somebody somewhere made an active choice to trim down that highlight right and i don't know if that person was doing it at the behest of someone more senior who said let's get that stuff out of here or if they looked at it themselves and were like oh that seems bad yeah and and we're like i don't want to get yelled at for putting this in the

highlight so i will preemptively take it out self-preservation right and so i can't decide which of those i find more plausible i find both of them plausible but it is a a bad uh look right because these fans are in dialogue with the team and the league right and if rob manfred is going to say stuff about the fans in oakland i think it is only fair that the fans in oakland get to say what they want to in response, which is pretty, you know, unequivocal and seems to be, um, if not unanimous, certainly a majority view, these signs were in compliance with the ballparks policy and you gotta, you gotta eat it, man. Like you have, you have allowed this situation to linger because the league is so reticent to do anything that might look like trying to curb the, you know, voracious profit appetites of its owner. So

this is the consequence of that, that people are going to be mad. And those people spent money to go to that game, which is, you know, quite a solid that they did to the league and to the team. So it's just a very bad look. You never want to evoke censorship as a strategy for dealing with people who have a very legitimate gripe. They get to express that, and you have to eat it. If you don't like it, you have recourse to do something about it. But you're not interested in that.

So you can't tell people to shut up about it then. Right. Yes. It's almost like the Marlins Bartman promotion that we talked about the other day where they sent out this advertisement for a Bartman weekend. And then they were like, oh, that was a mistake. That was a mistake. Yeah. That's not how these things happen, right?

If there is Photoshop or cropping involved, a person is doing that. So, again, I have no idea how senior that decision is, right? Like I said, I don't know where that decision gets made. I doubt strongly that the commissioner is calling someone at the league office on the weekend going, hey, cut that out. I'd be surprised if only because it just seems too small a thing to be involved in. be involved in. Even if it's not the commissioner, I would just appreciate it if more of the league's communication with the public treated us like we are not the dumbest kids in school. Because a lot of it feels like that. It's like, no, we're not. Come on. Somebody made a choice. Explain that decision. And I'm not saying that like somebody needs to, you know, if a junior person made that decision because they're trying to avoid getting yelled at by someone more senior,

like I'm not saying that person needs to lose their job. I'm not calling for heads. I don't even necessarily need to know the name of the person who did that, but like a person made that choice. So what is the procedure you have in place around decisions like this and can we feel confident that other stuff won't get you know futzed with after the fact because you're the repository of our visual access to the game so kind of important yeah it's maybe sort of like a plausible deniability sort of situation where they they insulate the more senior people perhaps from these decisions. Or maybe there's a tacit instruction or it's just like, hey, if this were to happen, do this, but don't tell me about it. I don't want to know so that we can say that we didn't intend to do that.

And it's not our policy. It's just someone employed by us did that without explicit instructions or knowledge of the most senior people. Without the express written consent of Major League Baseball. Exactly, right. Oh, man. While I'm talking to you now, the Peacock broadcast is currently talking to Jazz Chisholm while he is batting.

No, no. Stop. No. Stop with this. No. Stop. They had him mic'd up in center field, which is bad enough, They had him miked up in center field, which is bad enough.

But at the plate, while Justin Steele is in his windup, they're asking Jazz Chisholm the batter questions. No, please stop with this. Did you watch the Martin Maldonado inning where he was miked up while he was catching? It was tough because he was very muffled. Right, because of the gear. Yeah, because he's wearing a catcher's mask and he's catching. He's in a game right now. Maybe it's not the best. So I couldn't understand everything he was saying because sometimes it would come in clearly and then other times I could kind of hear words, but not really make them out very well. And he's catching and it's distracting and it's just like, don't do that.

Yeah. And now a batter batting again. Yeah. No. In exhibition games, it's great. In real games, no, please. No. Even if the players are willing participants, which they are to some extent, they're not

doing this against their will, but like it's hard enough to hit Justin Steele while not answering like multi-part questions for a broadcast. Come on. It has to be a safety issue to some extent if you're distracted and you're about to get a fastball fired at your head a second from now. But also, it's just – it's a hard job. I just – I don't know why you would want to do it. I mean, look, he's a charismatic guy. It's not that I don't want to hear from him.

Right. Yeah, totally. But just not in that context. Yeah. I suspect, I'm not optimistic about sort of putting this particular genie back in the bottle. Like, I think that as much as we don't like it and we really don't like it it is likely to persist even in games that count against something but it does feel like maybe the union should try to like put some better bumpers on it because i assume that this is a thing that like they have to do

with the consent of the the players association and maybe they want to be a little more specific about and for all i know like this is either already in process or the union knew exactly what it was signing up for. And this is all above board, but it's, it does seem like particularly if a guy is in the batter's box, that that could be, and not in a fussy way,

like an actual safety concern. So it feels like they should do something about that. I just, you know, I don't want to, cause like, it feels like they should do something about that i just you know i don't want to because like imagine how terrible the worst case scenario is there right you're talking to a batter i'm gonna anonymize it because i don't even want to like contemplate it specifically with jazz chisholm

like you have a batter in he's talking to the booth he is some level of distracted which might not be a huge level but it is some amount of distraction and then like he takes a fastball to the face and and we're gonna hear that sound ben we're gonna hear it and it's going to haunt us forever and it will be horrible for that guy and we'll never have a satisfactory answer of like how much that you know amorphous distraction contributed to that happening so let's nip it in the bud i will say ben i'm gonna admit to something though because i don't like this and i want it to go away in games that count and we are aligned i'm not abandoning you in your position but the parts of what we could hear

from martin valdenado were kind of cool i will think that was true and so i was like maybe they should fix this mic but also i don't i it's good that it's muffled because then maybe they will rethink this endeavor but i think that what will likely happen is just improved microphone technology right yeah yeah there were some things he was saying that was kind of cool about yeah selection everything which, which I couldn't figure out how he could say them without tipping off the batter. Mike was like down at his chest protector, it seemed like, because there were times when he would move his head. And I think it like created enough clearance between the bottom of the mask and his chest protector. I love that I'm making this motion right now and no one can see me, you know, like there aren't even any cats in here.

Yeah. I just put jazz Chisholm into Twitter to see what, if anything, anyone was saying about this. Couple positive comments. Someone said Jazz Chisholm is mic'd up and it's fantastic. Someone else said pretty cool seeing Jazz Chisholm mic'd up. But otherwise, it's pretty

universal in the condemnation. So I don't know. It's not just me. Also, why TF would you try to interview Jazz Chisholm mid at bat? This is a disaster. Jazz Chisholm micked up is a disaster. Don't talk to the batter while he's hitting. Disaster. A Cubs

fan account said, we appreciate Peacock making Jazz Chisholm talk to them while Steele tries to get him out. Other one said, terrible. Announcers literally talking to mic'd up Jazz Ch tries to get him out. But other one said, terrible. Announcers literally talking to mic'd up Jazz Chisholm during pitches. So this is in all caps. These Peacock in-game interviews are absolutely insufferable.

Got Jazz Chisholm giving one-word answers because the announcers are asking questions in the middle of the at-bat, microphone barely working, just unbelievably bad coverage. The announcers talking to jessism while he's in the batter's box is crazy terrible job with jessism macked up not going very well no effing way they're trying to talk to jessism as justin seal is in his wind up lmao and it goes on from there so and people talking about him trying to answer questions while he's in center field and then there was a strikeout so so he couldn't answer anyway. Plus, with the pitch clock, there's not even as much time in which one theoretically could answer or talk or confess. So I thought

that might do away with this if nothing else did, but apparently not. I do think that we need to think more carefully about how we are using broadcast time now, because the pitch clock has worked and the things are zipping, they're moving, we're happy, everything's great, but we do have like meaningfully less time. And so those broadcast minutes are precious. They're more precious now. And so I think that if for no other reason than there are fewer of them we should like try to ensure that their quality is is as good as it can be and i think the best way to have good quality on a baseball broadcast is just to like show that baseball you know like controversial take but that seems to be that would be my preference

like yeah baseball nice so it's been a month exactly since opening day as we were speaking here. And I think last year we did monthly check-ins on playoff odds changes, but we basically did that last week. And we talked about the teams that were way up and way down. The White Sox since then have gotten even more depressing somehow. I mean, speaking about fan chants and demands for change, there have been some of those at White Sox games, too, and people calling for Jerry Reinsdorf to sell the team. Or there was a very memorable seven-minute White Sox fan rant on sports radio in Chicago that I listened to with pleasure. And boy, the vibes are bad.

They've lost a bunch of games even since we talked about how slow they had started. And then Luis Robert was not hustling on a play and Pedro Grafal benched him. And then Robert said that he was being careful because he was nursing something or other and had a hamstring issue that he had not told the team about. So that was an interesting excuse for not running that hard. It's like, well, I actually had a tight hamstring that I didn't tell the coaching staff about. I didn't tell the coaching staff about. So, I mean, usually I'm all for defending players who are nursing some injury or trying to preserve themselves and not hustling on a particular play because it might be better in the long run, but also not great if you then didn't tell the team about that issue

that you were dealing with. So just a bad all around, just not so good with that team right now. Yeah, it inspired, you know, so like, I don't, I don't edit every piece of fan graphs, like I would collapse. Like, that's why we have John. John is our wonderful assistant editor, and he does such great work. And so, but what will happen as a result of that is that sometimes like a piece will go up and I won't have been the one to edit it.

And then I get to see the headline and Jay wrote about the White Sox on Friday. The White Sox are utterly terrible. Yeah. And I was like, it's good that we're not holding back. You know, you got to give the people the truth. Unlike MLB with Oakland, no censorship here. Right. So just because we already did that exercise,

I thought I'd just shout out a few names from the top of the Fangraphs Combined War leaderboard. And if you want to do any, you can too. But just to mention that thus far, again, through Saturday's games, obviously Shohei Otani and Mike Trout are in the top 10. They're neck and neck as we speak at seven and eight. And I would guess that one or both of them will probably climb from there. So that's what you sort of expect to see. Maybe you don't expect to see Matt Chapman leading the world. Yeah. How about that? I mean, even when Matt Chapman was not hitting so well, he was still quite valuable. Yeah. Even like post hip injury, because he was still a good defensive player.

Like last year, the metrics were down on him, but down to the extent that he was like only a little bit above average instead of like the best. And now it seems like he's back to being good on defense, full strength again on defense, perhaps. It depends on the metric you look at. I know he had some throwing issues. So regardless would be just dandy. So if you're Matt Chapman, that's pretty special. So, man, even his down years have been like four-win player, and his good years have been more like six-win player. So he's just really good. Yeah, and a tremendous time for him to be putting up a season like this because he will be, I mean, he was already going to be one of the better free agents available this winter.

And if he is doing this and demonstrating he can reach this level again, like, I think that that will be a lucrative campaign for him. Yeah, I would think so. And second on the list is Ronald Acuna. Yeah. And second on the list is Ronald Acuna. Yeah. On our Bold Predictions preseason podcast, I threw Ronald Acuna 50-50 out there just for fun. And I thought he might have a to get there with either, but the idea of like 50-50, I mean, he does have 13 stolen bases through Saturday. So it seems like that's not going to be the issue. He is running wild. He's on pace for, I don't know, like 80 or something at this point. He's only had four home runs, but he appears to be pretty fully back. He's not striking out a lot, even as much as he

did when he was great. And he appears to be just kind of firing on all cylinders. The base running's good. The defense has been pretty good too, like fine at least. So he appears to be pretty fully recovered and that's nice to see. So hoping he can pick up the power pace a little so that that 50-50 or at least 40-40 comes within range because in 2019, he had 41 homers and 37 steals. And then it's been one thing after another since then, whether it was injuries or the pandemic that prevented him making another run at that. But he could now if the power picks up a little bit. Yeah, and it would be so fun.

Because, you know, we – I'm about to say something so snarky. You know, it would just be nice to have like a that we're we're excited about and driving toward that doesn't involve any maris's you know like just like no maris's to be found and then zach gallen yeah third the top pitcher he's been fantastic he has been fantastic ben he has been so good it's almost as if someone picking him for Cy Young preseason, fantastic choice. What a smart girl she was. Fourth is Xander Bogarts. And it's so funny.

Man, they've really needed him to be that good. When they signed Xander Bogarts, it was like, really? You need Xander Bogarts on top of everyone else? You have all those other shortstops. But the way that the rest of that lineup has hit and Tatis being absent for most of the season until recently and then looking a little rusty initially and Soto still struggling with the surface stats. They really have needed Xander Bogarts just kind of carrying that team. So it was not surplus and excess and, hey, we have this money. We might as well spend it on someone.

There's Xander Bogarts. He's been propping up the padres so far when the padres came through um i guess gosh was that only last week last week um i went to one of those games and um he looked great ben and i i i think i And I think I have to have seen Bogart's play in person prior to that because I have gone to series where, like, the Red Sox would play the Mariners. But I was wondering if that's the first time I've seen Bogart's play in person. And, you know, he looked great. He looked really very good. I was like, wow, that's cool. Nice for them.

Yeah. And Wander Franco is 10th, I think. The prince who was promised. Yeah. It feels like we were waiting a while for Wander Franco, but not really. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, he's just turned 22 in March. So he is extremely young and he hasn't had a full season. Of course, he had injury issues that were holding him back last year. But even so, when he was playing,

he was still an above average player and hitter and was like, you know, league average war in 83 games, basically. And now he's well on his way and he's hitting for more power. He hit six homers in 83 games last season, seven homers in 70 games in his rookie season. He's got five homers in 27 games this year. He still makes plenty of contact. The defense has been fine. He's getting on base. This is what we were waiting for.

He's doing it. He's doing why he was the number one prospect and why he got that extension so that's fun yeah he is playing so well it is very fun and like it's cool when a guy does the thing you want and then it's cool when a guy does that and also has like cool highlights like that catch he made in val territory. Yep. Yeah, that was so cool, Ben. I was like, wow, that was cool. Like, it's just, you know, I'm a person who sometimes falls out of her chair. So, like, the idea of body control, like, completely unfathomable to me. I'm like, oh, human beings can do that? Wow.

Did you fall out of your chair when you watched him do that? Just in shock, in excitement? Did you fall out of your chair when you watched him do that? Just in shock, in excitement? It's like, I think what happens is sometimes if I'm sitting for a very long time, one of my feet will fall asleep. And then it's like I'm trying to get up to go, you know, move around in the world and get water. And then I am betrayed by my sleepy foot, I think is what. It's only happened like twice.

It's not like I'm not like, it's not like i love lucy around here or anything but there have been a couple times where i'm like ah to be fair i don't if you're in the process of getting up i don't know if you can count it as falling out of your chair all right that's like that's a good that's like that's like when a fielder drops the ball during the transfer right you fell during the transfer, right? You fell during the transfer from seeded to standing. That's a good note. I accept that note. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And the rest of the top 10 that we haven't mentioned, James Outman, we talked about what a great start he was off to on a recent episode, just a dodger dodgering. And Garrett Cole is fifth overall. I picked Shohei Otani to win the AL Cy Young, and it's not like that has been a bad pick thus far.

But Garrett Cole has also been like, hey, remember me? Even with a sticky stuff crackdown, he's been great. The strikeout rate is lower by Garrett Cole standards. So it's kind of like, I mean, he hasn't allowed a home run yet right in six starts so it's not even one not one so really like his uh his ex-fip is worse than it was the past uh gosh i mean since 2017 since his pirates days right so it's like maybe garrett cole was if anything underrated or or kind of his bugaboo was a slight gopheritis, at least for an ace like him. He would not allow a lot of contact, but when he did allow contact, there were a lot of home runs.

I mean, you know, almost one and a half per nine innings last year, which was kind of his undoing sometimes and made him less ace-like. undoing sometimes and made him less ace-like. So usually we expect that those things will regress and be a roughly league average home run per fly ball rate. And he had a high one last year, and now he has a 0.01, which also probably will not last. So is he doing something different to avoid allowing home runs that is also leading to fewer strikeouts? Or is it that there's going to be some regression now when he does start allowing some home runs and the rest of his peripherals will not be as impressive as they have been? And, you know, he has a 245 BABIP so far. So, yeah, he's been incredible. I don't know whether I'm more or less optimistic about the rest of the season

than I was when it started because there are some things that are perhaps slightly concerning about the profile. Not concerning like he's not going to be good, but he's just not going to be the best pitcher in baseball, perhaps, if some of those things stay the same. Well, sure, because Zach Allen exists, Ben. Right. Yeah, well, there's that. Yeah. And there's the, I haven't checked the Garrett Cole spin rates recently amid the recent league-wide downturn with the crackdown on sticky stuff. But obviously, he's doing pretty well.

I think he's happy with his results thus far. Yeah. Esteban wrote a piece about Cole for us last week that folks should check out. You know, there are some changes to where he's releasing the ball. And so that's kind of interesting. And he's been a little more dynamic in terms of how he's attacking guys with his pitch mix. And, you know, the way that he's sort of adjusting his usage game to game has changed. So folks should

check that piece out. It's really good. You might've heard the Yankees broadcast mentioned it, but, um, you would expect some amount of regression from this if only because, you know, if we look at the way that he was giving up home runs and thought that that was a little bit extreme relative to what we might expect, like clearly this is extreme in the other direction. clearly this is extreme in the other direction um and he does still have to deal with the reality of playing in yankee stadium and that is a place where you know sometimes you give up some home runs there sometimes you know it's been known it's been known for that so we we might expect some some uptick in that regard i would be remarkable if you didn't allow any home runs. That would be incredible. I think we'd write about that a lot.

We would remark on that for sure. Yeah, I think we'd have some stuff to say, but it's pretty cool to see what he's doing right now because it looks incredible. He's always been one of these guys, but there were times last season where you would watch a start of his and it would get to the point where it would fall apart because of home runs and then it felt like you had watched two different pitchers right because you would get glimpses of what we knew to be you know dominant

good garrett cole and then it would kind of fall apart and it would be bad it would just suddenly be quite bad and now when you watch a gar Cole start, you're like, holy shit. Yeah. Like his opening day start was, which I think is the only one I've watched like front to back of his. But it was like, whoa, okay. So that's, we're doing that now. That's what we're doing right now. Cool.

Yeah. That sighting has worked out well. I mean, I think Yankees fans have been hard on Garrett Cole at times or have been a little bit disappointed by what they've gotten out of him at times. And maybe that's just because he was so dominant, especially in his last year with the Astros. When you're like a seven and a half win pitcher, according to fan crafts, and you have a two and a half ERA and you're striking out 14 per nine and you're throwing 200 plus innings, tough to do that every year. And then of course you had the sticky stuff crack down, which is part of his story, but he was still one of the very best and most valuable pitchers over his

first three seasons in New York. So even if he wasn't the best pitcher in baseball, as he clearly was before he went to the Yankees, I think they were still getting their money's worth out of Garrett Cole. And so whether or not he sustains what he is doing now, even if he does allow a home run at some point this season, I think they have to be pretty satisfied with what they've gotten. You know, any home runs, like it would just, it would, um, we should send Garrett Cole to make a start in Mexico city and see what

happens. No, we don't need to do that. And it's, it's good for the Yankees because, um, that offense is kind of sputtering. Yeah. Well, I meant to mention Aaron judge is is not a name you see very close to the top of the combined horror leaderboard he's 63rd and he's been fine he's been good but he's basically morphed back into pre-2022 aaron judge thus far which is not to say that uh he couldn't

recapture some of what he bottled last season. Right. And obviously, pre-22, Aaron, we have a really good player. Good player. Great player. Grounded player. Yeah. But that is basically what he has been thus far.

He has a 138 WRC plus within spittin' distance of where he was in 2019 and 2020 and even 2021. instance of where he was in 2019 and 2020 and even 2021. Like those years, he was like a 140 to 150 WRC plus guy who would also get hurt and miss some time sometimes. Right. And that's what's happening now. Right. He's a day to day may or may not go on the IL with a hip injury now, and he's got a 140 ish WRC+. Like, that's who he was. Right. And I just, I kind of wondered, after he had the otherworldly season last year and then signed a big contract, whether Yankees fans would have their expectations properly calibrated, you know, famously just forgiving and charitable and keeping things in

perspective. It's better for you to make comments like that than for me to do it because, you know, you're talking about family and I would be not talking about family. I'm a New Yorker. I'm a former Yankees fan, so I can say it. You get to say it. Yeah. Now he is still playing some center fields this season and doing so quite competently. So, look, he's still, he's really good. But that was kind of the expectation I think you had to have when you brought back Aaron Judge.

It was like, well, we have to. I mean, he means so much to this team and this fan base and this offense. And what would we be without him? But also, I'm sure they didn't expect him to be Barry Bonds-ish Aaron Judge and hitting 62 bombs again. So if he just morphs back into what he was before, that's fine. But I wonder if Yankees fans might be a bit disappointed in the same way that they were by Garrett Cole being merely one of the best pitchers in baseball, but not the best, perhaps,

if Aaron Judge just goes back to being what Aaron Judge was before, which was an all-star, but not an MVP, maybe. But, you know, then you put his line next to Aaron Hicks' line and you're like, he's the best player in baseball. Like, what a— Did you happen to catch Garrett Cole's reaction to Aaron Hicks flubbing a catch in the outfield? No. He's just like, oh, man, it was good. Garrett Cole, he's a good interview, like good press conference guy. Yeah.

He's got that kind of amusingly higher voice than it seems like it should be because he's such a large person. Yes. And he will be frank sometimes. Yeah. And I like that. And you could see on the mound that he just like. He was not happy.

Yeah, he basically eye rolled he's like get this guy out of here like what is this guy doing here which you know if i were a fielder i wouldn't be i wouldn't appreciate being showed up in that way like i do appreciate a pitcher who will not show that even though they're obviously feeling that being a courteous teammate part of that is is kind of keeping the blank face even though inside you're like come on yeah but also it's kind of funny when sometimes they can't restrate it and you see that come on surface on the face especially if it's aaron hicks where i think garrett cole was sort of emoting for all of yankees fans at that moment so negative three wrc plus Ben. Oh man.

You know, when you have a, when you have a negative. Yeah. Yeah. It's not good. It feels impossible. Yeah. The first name you get to on the combined war leaderboard, I guess, other than Outman, who we had previously noted was really good. But Tyro Estrada is 11th.

That was the first that made me think, okay, it's still early. Aw. I mean, look, I wish him the best. Perhaps he will stay there, you know? I was just like, I'm just sitting here, man. What the heck? It's off to a great start. And Jorge Mateo, 14th.

How about that? I mean, that's almost like causing a bit of a log jam there because it seems like Jorge Mateo can hit now. Yeah. He made some changes. He's been a good glove who was a well below average hitter. And now he's off to a great start offensively. And even the quality of contact and everything is pretty strong. And now it's like he's almost blocking Gunnar Henderson.

It's like you have to play Jorge Mateo now. And they called up Joey Ortiz. It's just a lot of talented players in that infield. And suddenly Jorge Mateo is one of them. So that's not a problem. It's your classic good problem to have, I guess. But also you want Gunnar Henderson to be playing short or getting those reps every day. Anyway, there are still some names at the top of the leaderboard that remind you that it's early.

And then you got Jacob deGrom. They're sitting at 16th. And Jared Kelnick, whom we discussed, he's keeping it up. 18th now. That's fun. Spencer Strider has been just dominant, amazing. He's at 22nd now. And there's Yandy Diaz himself yeah meatloft

launch meat launch angus whatever we're going with he's at 29th now i think i'm still not satisfied with what really you know don't encourage people we got so many submissions i know we've gotten so many emails i just haven't had the like, aha, that's it. You know, I felt so, I think I'm facing a moral dilemma, Ben, because I like ground beef so much that I'm kind of wanting him to- Wanting him to go back to it.

Which would not be useful. Jeff is going to be like, what the heck? It's going to be like a flowers for Algernon situation where he figures out how to hit fly balls for a little while and then you watch him lose it. But at least we could go back to calling him ground beef again. We make children read that book. That's intense. Yeah, it really is. I like that book, but it's wrenching.

Yeah, it's intense that we do that to kids. You know, I look back on some of the books that I was like instructed to read as an elementary school student. Didn't you read that in elementary school? Yeah, I think so. What's the reading level on that book? Yeah, that's like a fifth grade book, right? I don't know exactly. But yeah, it was pretty early. It was pretty early.

And I was like, wow, we're assuming a degree of emotional intelligence that some of my classmates who still eat paste maybe don't have. Right. All right. Well, always fun to look at the top of the leaderboard, see some surprises, and see some expected names. Brent Rooker. Oconese Brent Rooker at 33rd.

I can't believe that you skipped over Geraldo Pordomo, 20. Ben, those D-backs, they're exciting. They're exciting. They are pesky. They are frisky. They are... Randy Rosarena in the top 20. Yeah. Brandon Marsh. Yeah. Very exciting.

Very exciting. Yeah. Cody Bellinger at 28. You know what? Good for Cody, man. Like, what a nice thing. Skipped right over Brandon Nimmo, who's six. Oh, yeah. Less surprising, but just wanted to give him his due here. Yes.

You look back, you know, at their offseason, and, you know, it's not like this Mets team has been bad, but it is not, you know, I don't think that it has clicked into gear in the way that people expect it to it's not it's not playing like a juggernaut yet this Mets team and you know a lot of that is due to early injury and right I think yeah if anything Mets fans probably pretty pleased that they're 15 and 12 yeah yeah without Berlander and with you know Quintana and and just many guys. I mean, Scherzer suspended. And it's just so the whole pitching staff, the whole worry was like, can they keep the pitchers healthy?

Can they ever have that starting rotation together and active at the same time? So far, the answer is no. No, but also they're still doing decently. Right. They're still doing decently. But like we expect at some point to see like, you a fully operational mets death star that will like lay waste to the national league right and we haven't gotten that yet and so boy are they happy that they were able to resign brandon yep yeah he's doing great nelson cruz is is one of the many

players who homered in mexico city he's up to 306 323 516 516. Nice. You know, 127 WRC plus for Ole Miss. Nice. I wonder what the park adjustments will have to be for Mexico City for those two games causing a real headache for David Appelman and Sean Foreman and everyone else. It's not enough data, really, to adjust based on those couple games. So I wonder how they will handle that, knowing that it is the moon. It's like, can it be higher than the moon? Are we like on it? Yeah, it's got to be.

We're a different planet now. We've broken free from. Yes, we're not in Earth's orbit anymore. All right, so I will wrap up here with a little 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's stat blast So, the stat blast brought to you by Tops Now.

And I would imagine, you know, we haven't gotten the new Tops Now cards for the day yet because we're recording so early. Yeah. Yeah. for that occasion. Who knows, perhaps some Mexico City home run action as well. So the things that we talk about, it's not like we're catering our banter topics to tops now. We don't even know what the cards are yet

for the day as we're speaking, but it just so happens that the notable things that we are interested in, that we talk about, oftentimes you can go get a baseball card of those things which is amazing i mean great for drew magi that he could get himself a card of himself getting a hit and for fans of drew magi and also non-drew magi occurrences so we

like tops now and we think it's a cool product and we encourage people to go to tops.com. Check out the offerings each day. There is a direct link to the tops now page that we have on our show page at, at fan crafts that will take you right to it. The tagline sort of says it all your hero, your team, your moment, so many moments, so many heroes,

so many teams, at least 30, just go check out what is available at Tops Now for a limited time. I wonder whether there are Tops Now error cards. We were talking about error cards last time. I don't want to impugn our sponsors, Tops, by suggesting that they might ever make a mistake. But as Sam was saying, I mean, you treasure the error cards.

Yeah, you do. They're extra valuable. So if you had a Tops Now error card that was available for a limited time only and in a limited quantity as it was, that might be even more special. So I'm not saying that they will make mistakes. But if they ever do, then you might get yourself a bonus value there. But even the ones that are perfect and have no errors, also wonderful. Check out Tops Now. So our stat blast for today, I have a few.

One is actually a listener-submitted stat blast, which, hey, I welcome. If people want to save me some research and do some cool research and supply us with a stat blast from time to time, feel free. But listener Anton, who is also a Patreon supporter, and he's writing in with stat blasts, he's doing it all here. But he wrote in response to a previous stat blast, he said, in episode 1963, you discussed players with the highest career war who never led their own team in war for the season. This got me thinking about the reverse, players who did lead a team in war for a season, but ended up somewhat short for their careers. And then he sent us a list of those players sorted by lowest career war, which we will link to on the show page. This is baseball

reference war and post integration. And just looking at the top names here, he notes in his email, the results tie into another episode, episode 1952. I think when we were talking about Nate Colbert maybe in the Padres home run record, we discussed those early 1970s Padres and how they weren't really rich in star power. And Anton notes, surprisingly, players from those teams take up three of the top four spots. There is one player post 1947 who was the best player on a team, but ended up with negative career war, Cito Gaston, who led the 1970 Padres with an impressive 5.1 baseball reference war and ended up with negative 0.8 for his career. And he's come up on previous stat blasts too.

Cito Gaston, he's like one of the most commonly stat blasted players just because of what a weird outlier that was in 1970 he is like i forget like the the highest uh single season war by anyone who finished with sub replacement level i think was one or maybe he had like the the highest single season war by anyone who was sub replacement level to that point in his career. He's come up a couple of times, but he was a five win player that year. And every other

year he was replacement level or below basically. It's just one of the greatest outliers of all time. It's just 1970 all-star got MVP votes and was never that kind of player again. So he tops this latest list as well. And then you have Dave Roberts with the 1973 Padres, not the current Dodgers manager, Dave Roberts, the other Dave Roberts. The one that makes it so that I have to manually tag the Dodgers Dave Roberts. So he was the 1973 Padres leader and ended up with a.4 career war. 2012 Astros war leader, Lucas Harrell. Oh, boy.

What a team that was. The 2012 Astros. Who could forget? Was that, I think that was the team with the Yakety Sax, Benny Hill infield play. I think you're right. I think it was. There were multiple terrible Astros teams during that time. Yeah, it's hard to keep them straight, candidly.

That was peak tanking Astros. I mean, 2011, they won 56 games. 2012, they won 55 games. And then 2013, they won 51 games. So who can choose among your terrible taking Astros teams? But Lucas Harrell led the 2012 Astros in baseball reference war. And then one more Padres team, early 70s Padres team. The 1974 Padres were led by Dave Friesledden, of course, the household name. It's just, that was the Padres, like pre the recent signings and Machado and Soto and Bogarts and all the stars that they have these days.

Of course, you had Gwynn and you had Winfield, but it was a very star-deprived franchise, historically speaking. So you had Cito Gaston, Dave Robertson, Dave Friesleben leading those early 70s Padres team. Then 61, Kansas City Athletics,

Jim Archer, 79 Mariners, Mike Parrott, 73 Phillies, Wayne Twitchell, the 2006 Royals. Twitchell! Were led by Mark Teehan and the 65 Mets, Johnny Lewis. A lot of bad teams and expansion teams and tanking teams, obviously.

A lot of good names, though. Great. Yeah. Great names. 71 Senators. Bill Gogolowski. Gogolowski. Yeah.

Sounds like a hockey player. Yeah. And then the 2020 Orioles, Anthony Santander. The 2020 Mariners, Dylan Moore. Yeah. 2020, some weirdness. But really, I guess that's the saving grace of having a truly terrible team is that you can have someone who maybe you've never heard of or maybe never had another good year can be your best player. They get their moment in the sun. So other names here, Brad Bergeson, Billy Gardner, Ryan Dries, Wally Burnett, Albie Lopez, Garrett Jones, Fred

Valentine, Eric O'Flaherty was the leader on the 2011 Braves. Man, he was good that year, but tough for a reliever to lead your team. You never want that. That's never a good sign. Even historically good relievers. You're like, something went terribly wrong. Something is ration. Yeah. He had a sub one era that year he was great but but still well sure but like you know like uh like edwin diaz was really great he was worth three wins and that's like the very tippy

top of this is last year yes um you don't want that to be the war leader, even though that's incredible. You want to be able to appreciate it for being incredible and not be like the rest of the team is bad. Yep. Yep. Some familiar faces on here as Anton notes, Satchel Paige with the 52 and 53 Browns at his age was impressive.

Matt Harvey for the 2013 Mets. Tanyan Sturtz for the 2001 Devil Rays. I enjoyed Tanyan Sturtz. Jeff D'Amico. What a great name. Yeah. As you said, most of the lists are players who had career years on poor teams and then never replicated that success. But there are a few 500-plus ball clubs. Yeah, I guess the first 500 team on the list is the 57 Orioles who had Billy Gardner as their leader, and they were exactly a 500 team. So the first winning team appears to be the 2004 Rangers who had Ryan Dries lead them with a 4.9 baseball reference war, and he was 3.4 for his career. So how about that? Pretty good team with Ryan Dries as their leader. All right.

Good one. Fun list. Thank you, Anton, for sending that our way. Also, we got a couple emails last week about a game when the Tigers used four shortstops. So we got an email from Joel about this. We got an email from Scott about this. It was funny. They came in like two

minutes apart. Like one came in at 4 Eastern and one came in at 4.02 Eastern. I love our listeners. You know, it does become a little easier to have your finger on the pulse of at least things that we would be interested in talking about because we have listeners and we have a community. And so we can dip into the Discord group or the Facebook group or the Reddit or wherever and see what people are talking about. Or people will just email us. I wasn't watching the Tigers that day, confession time. I wasn't watching the Tigers game. I didn't realize that they had four shortstops. Would I have heard about that somewhere else? Maybe, but maybe not. But hey, as soon as it happened, we got rapid fire emails coming in, klaxons sounding, we're sliding down the stat blast pole here, the alarms are going off.

So I immediately went to Stathead, of course, because both of those listeners asked whether this was a record. And it's not really. I mean, it did tie the record for nine inning games. Shortstops, four is the most in any game there have been as many as five but uh the five were were longer games so i'll just give you the max number of players at the same position in any game so this is, including extra inning games. Shortstop is five, catcher four, first base five, second base six, third base five, left field six, center field five, right field six. So

six players at the same position in the same game. That is the most that anyone has done. For nine or fewer inning games, shortstop catcher four first base five second base four third base five left field five center field four right field four so in a nine inning or shorter game max out at five players at the same position in the same game for any length you can go up to six and i will include a link to all of these stat head searches if you want to look at the individual games. But a lot of ones here that you may know because they were games where like someone played every position, you know, like there was Shane Halter or someone was like playing every position in that game. And or Scott Sheldon did the same thing, play all nine positions in a game. And so when that happens, then everyone is constantly moving around and switching positions.

So that's one of them. Or like with the sixth left fielder game, there was one of those. There was a Burt Campanaris played all nine positions game. That was in the sixth right fielder's game. The sixth left fielder's game had a Waxahachie swap. Paul Richards, the wizard of Waxahachie, wasder's game. The six left fielder's game had a Waxahachie swap. Paul Richards, the wizard of Waxahachie, was in that game. And so first baseman was playing, like the pitcher was playing first base and then moving back to pitcher. I miss that. That was a casualty of

the three batter minimum. It didn't happen often, but when it did, it was great. Yeah, it was like, ah! Yeah. Oh my gosh, here we are! So, now everyone knows if it's weird if you have a certain number of players at that position. So, the Tigers tied the all-time record there for shortstop. So, here's my last one, and this I'm writing about at The Ringer 2, so you can check me out there if you want even more depth and detail. But I've been curious about, we know that the length of games is shorter this year, of course, by a wide margin. And so everyone's been talking about how we've rewound 30 years or 40 years or so.

You know, we've kind of gone back to like the early to mid 80s when it comes to the average length of games. But I don't think it's just the length that is notable about the pitch clock. It is also, I think, the predictability and the lack of variation in the game times this year that really sets this apart.

So it's not just that everything has lopped off half an hour and that the games are shorter now and that they were three hours and three minutes last year and they're two hours and 36 minutes so far this year. There is really like a standard length now where there's just not a lot of variation because of the pitch clock primarily, also to some extent, the zombie runner, right? So we've cut out the longest games with the zombie runner because extra innings don't go as far anymore. more. So we've kind of cut off the upper end, but then also there's just less game to game variation I was sensing because even when game times were shorter, when the average game was shorter in previous pre-pitch clock eras, you might run into a slow worker someday, you know, like there was more variation because not everyone was being kept to the same pace. I mean, we're all marching to the beat of the same drum. Now there's like a metronome basically that's going on. So you can't stray from that. Whereas in the past you might've

happened to have two slow pitchers match up who, who might've violated the pitch clock if there was a pitch clock. And so there was, I think, more fluctuation. So I wanted to check whether that was true. And it really is true. It's like extremely true. It is notably true. And it's probably clearer to convey this via graph. So I will link to a graph. And again, it will be in my article. But really, I think like if I had to pick one day so far this season to sort of sum up the pitch clock experience, it would be last Tuesday, April 25th, because every team was in action that day. There were 15 games. The average length of game was two hours and 36 minutes. So bang on the seasonal average. But there was so little variation.

The shortest game was two hours and 16 minutes. The longest game was two hours and 52 minutes. So every game was within a span of 36 minutes. So it wasn't like you had some four-hour games here or there. You didn't even have a three-hour game. Some four-hour games here or there. You didn't even have a three-hour game. So in the past, like, you would have a lot more variation on any given day or throughout the season because there'd be some speedy games. But then there'd also be a three-and-a-half-hour game, and then there'd be a four-hour game, and then there'd be a two-hour, 40-minute game, right? So the spread, the range was much wider.

And, you know, I picked that day because it happened to have all the games kind of coincide, but that is the trend on a full season level. So if we look at just average game time, we're back to like 1981, I guess would be the closest equivalent to where we are now. So that's impressive, certainly. And if we lop off all the extra inning games and just do the average time of nine inning game, then we're back to like 1984 when it comes to the average. But if we look at the standard deviation of game times, not the average length, but the standard deviation, which is a measure of the spread, just basically like how closely clustered around the average are all of the various

observations. So is it like a big puffy diffuse cloud or is it everything kind of clustered together because all the game times are fairly close to the average or not? If we take the standard deviation, you have to go all the way back to 1942 to have a season with a standard deviation this low. And that was like a one-year blip. Before 42, you have to go back to 1922. And then before that, I think like 1909 or something, like only in the, like the dead ball era,

like the first years of the 20th century, was it like standard for the standard deviation to be this low, but not since 42 and then 22. So basically like a century, at least like back to the twenties. And, and I was just comparing the first 400 games of each season. So I was trying to keep things consistent here. So we've had just over 400 games have been played this season so far. So I took the first 400 games of each season and tried to just compare like to like and apples to apples. And yeah, it's shocking just how little deviation and spread there is. And there's also like the gap between the max time and the minimum

time. It's not quite as shocking a decline, but that you have to go way back also. Like the longest game this year has been three hours and 50 minutes. That's the absolute longest that we've seen thus far, even including extra innings and everything else. The longest game thus far was a Tigers-Giants game on April 14th that went 11 innings, and it was 7-5, and like the same length. I mean, you had a few shutouts. You also had a few high scoring games that were like eight to seven, eight to six. Even so, they were all just like in that same range. Like, I don't know what you'd have to do to have a four hour game at this point. Like, it would have to go deep into extras and be in Mexico City. Like, it would.

Right. Yeah. Super high scoring and, and, and right. Yeah. So that's the way in which I think this season is even more of an outlier. Like, yeah. Okay. The, the games are significantly shorter, but they've been this short in like living memory. I mean, not our living memory, but a lot of people's living memory but basically in no one's living memory has have games been this just standard this just like all conforming to the same sort of length and that i think is is even more going against like the the standard nature of baseball like the idea that

in theory a game can last forever still true theory, a game could go on forever, but in practice, they really don't go on very long anymore. So it would have to be really extreme for that to change. So, and I looked back and we could talk about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, right? I look back just in the newspaper archives to see people talking about the unpredictable length of baseball games. So not just complaining about them getting longer, but also just not being able to anticipate how long they were. And I found this article in 1969 in the Kansas City Star headlined, Can Baseball Save Itself? Right. And it was, you know, coming off the year of the pitcher and people talking about how baseball was boring and there was no scoring and they were changing the rules very much like now.

And this says the success of any professional sport today depends heavily on its exposure on nationwide TV. And the unpredictable length of baseball games is a serious handicap for baseball in this respect. a serious handicap for baseball in this respect. Quote, don't use my name because I'm not supposed to admit that there's anything wrong with baseball, says the director of one major league team's local telecast. But let's face it, the popularity of any sport today is no longer measured by the turnstile. More people now watch one pro football game than all the people who saw all the games at Notre Dame during all the years Newt Rockne coached there. And baseball hasn't been pushed as network TV attraction

because how can you schedule a baseball game for a network time slot when you don't know how long the game is going to last? A while ago, NBC was all set to put Major League Baseball on its network. The day before the deal was to be closed, the Mets and the Giants played a Sunday doubleheader game that lasted until 1130 at night. Imagine what that would have done to scheduled TV programs across the country. The next morning, NBC dropped the whole idea. If you want my opinion about what's wrong with baseball, that's it. Baseball teaches kids a great moral lesson. The

game is never over until the last man is out. Unfortunately, those same words give cold chills to the television networks. So, I mean, now we're fully into cord cutting. And I guess if we're moving to a streaming only world eventually, then maybe that doesn't even matter so much. But you'd think, I don't know whether Rob Manfred has explicitly stated, like, we want to have, you know, sort of Stepford baseball games, like we want them all to be the same length or not. But you'd'd think because most entertainments, we know how long they will be going in, right? Like an Effectively Wild episode might be lengthy, but you know when you press play how long it's going to be, right? And you can set aside that

time or decide whether you want to, right? But when you go into a baseball game, historically speaking, you couldn't really do that. Like you didn't know if it would be nine innings, even if it was nine innings, you didn't know how long it would last. Like when we watch stuff, when you watch a movie, when you watch a TV show, we know exactly how long it'll be. If you watch most other sports, you have a pretty decent idea, right? I mean, there's a clock counting down, so you kind of know how much action there will be in it. It's not going to vary that much generally. But baseball is the exception. Like, other than baseball, you know, video games, I guess, are similar in that they don't tell you how long they're going to be. And there are websites where people go and kind of crowdsource, like, this is how long it took me to play it so that you know how long it'll be.

Baseball, video games are weird. I've written about that in that respect. But baseball also. Video games are weird. I've written about that in that respect, but baseball also. So in the sense that like probably consumers, there's so many competing entertainment options that I guess probably most people would appreciate getting to set aside a certain amount of time and know, okay, not only is it on average two and a half hours, but it's almost certainly going to be between, you know, two and three or some even narrow range as opposed to this might go four hours and I might still not know who won. I feel like I get the trepidation and the like, what am I in for? But sometimes I think that was to baseball's benefit because sometimes you know how long a movie is and you're like, I don't know. Well, yeah. How is that three and a half hours?

What is this? Lord of the Rings? Right. I mean, yeah, there's still no guarantee, but you can be confident that it's going to be shorter. You can make a strongly educated guess. Yeah. And now, again, for us, for the sickos, I feel like there has been something lost here. Not that I miss the nine-inning, four-hour game that's just a slog, but I do miss the rare, extremely long extra inning game where it just becomes a war of attrition, like an endurance exercise.

And it becomes increasingly silly, and you have to start moving players to different positions. And it's going late into it's like in the wee hours. And, you know, if you stick it out as a fan or if you're watching. And also, I appreciate it as a night owl on the East Coast, knowing that there would often be baseball when I was up very late. Whereas now I can almost guarantee like games are going to be done. You know, very rarely am I going gonna like look up at 1 30 in the morning and there's still a baseball game going on so i do think there's been something lost at least for people like us because those like an 18 inning game i mean that'll stick in your mind forever like you remember where you were and what you were doing especially if you were at the park

that will be a lifelong memory that could even get you hooked potentially, but I guess it could also drive you away if you're like, what, this is twice as long as it's supposed to? I thought it was nine innings. It's 18 now? You suddenly sprung this on me and I can't leave? Or if I leave, I won't know who won? This is ridiculous.

I got to go to work the next day. But this is the thing. You always had the escape hatch of just leaving, right? Yeah. But this is the thing. You always had the escape hatch of just leaving, right? Like, I get the sense of like, I won't know what has happened. Or like, there have been times in my life when baseball wasn't my job, where I have gone to an extra innings game. And I have been like, I do have to go because I have to work tomorrow and I need to not be a zombie when I do. And then like you step outside the ballpark and something happens in the game. And so you're like, oh, I should have just stayed a little longer. And so I get the reticence to leave. But you can always leave. You know, they're not like locking you in there.

No, they're not. Yeah. And I should mention, I also did, I cut out the short games when I did the nine innings only analysis. I cut out the shortened games like the Braves and the Mets played a five inning range shortened game the other day. So I didn't want that to skew anything. Yeah, you got to get rid of the ones that don't go like regulation. Yes. So, man, it's really, really striking though.

And I didn't really hear people talking about this as a plus or a minus. It was always just like, let's get the game shorter and also improve the pace. But people talking less about just because like you could have sort of the same lack of variation, but have the games be longer, I guess what really matters to people is that the games are just shorter, period. But also now, you can be really confident, not just that all games collectively will be shorter, but that any given game is very likely to be shorter. It's not just the era of Manfred Ball, it's the era of Standard Ball. Yeah, right. I mean, it really is just like going back a century. It is a very striking change. It is maybe like less like what we think of as baseball in that respect than in the just game length respect. So I'll put this all online and you can check out my article.

I just it's probably, you know, I didn't give many numbers here because if I were to say that the standard deviation is 18.1 minutes, which it is, I don't know whether that would mean that much to anyone. Well, you got to leave something for the peace, Ben. Yeah. I mean, like in 2018, the standard deviation was like 30.7 minutes and now it's 18.1. So, like, think about that because we've lopped a lot of time off the game, but as a percentage, it's not that much, right? I mean, like, if you take 27 minutes off of three hours, it's significant savings, but it's still, you're taking a small part of the total game length off. Whereas here, like, 2018, the standard deviation was 30 plus minutes and now it's 18. I mean, you're talking about like the standard deviation is like just a little more than half as big as it was back then. So the variation has really, really been cut down significantly.

So that's the most striking thing is that it's like it's shocking when you look at a bunch of games start at the same time. They'll all end at the same time generally too. Usually I'm used to them diverging, and I'll look and one game's in the fourth inning and one game's in the seventh inning. Now, not so much. So I do wonder maybe whether we should stagger start times more. Maybe there could be other ramifications there, but just from

a spectator experience, like if all the games are going to be sort of the same length and starting and ending at the same time, I'd, I'd rather that they were staggered so that there would be some that were earlier or later so that I could actually see them all, you know, or see more of them. It does. Um, it does give you a more reliable sense of weather delays, though. You're like, oh, that must be in a delay because it's three innings behind. Like, what's going on in there? Yep. All right. I'm back a little later, and I've got a pass blast for you here, courtesy of David Lewis, who is an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston. This is episode 2001. So, of course, the pass blast comes from 2001, and David writes,

Twins Expos on the Chopping Block. At the conclusion of the 2001 season, MLB owners voted to cut two teams from the league. As a result of a 28-2 vote, with only the teams that would be dropped dissenting, the owners approved a proposal that would remove the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos from the league. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig voiced his support for the vote, saying, It makes no sense for Major League Baseball to be in markets that generate insufficient local revenue to justify the investment in the franchise. The teams to be contracted have a long record of failing to generate enough revenues to operate a viable Major League franchise. The proposal, if it had gone through, would have been the first time since 1899, when the National League shrunk from 12 to 8 teams,

that either the AL or NL had removed franchises. MLBPA head Donald Feer referred to the situation as most imprudent and unfortunate. Feer continued, over this last season, and especially over the last several weeks, we have been reminded vividly of the special place baseball holds in America. And, of course, this is the worst manner in which to begin the process of negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. We had hoped that we were in a new era, one that would see a much better relationship between players and owners. Today's announcement is a severe blow to such hopes. This was, of course, coming less than two months after September 11th, 2001. David concludes the owners had hoped this plan would help avoid a work

stoppage as the players' labor agreement was set to expire that week. The plan to eliminate teams was eventually sidelined after a judge ruled that the Twins must honor their lease and play at least one additional season at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. In early 2002, Expos owner Jeffrey Loria sold his team to Major League Baseball and subsequently purchased the Florida Marlins. Shortly thereafter, the plan to eliminate franchises was officially abandoned. Of course, the work stoppage was avoided nonetheless, and the Expos, a few years later, moved to D.C. The Twins remain in Minnesota, where after we finished recording today, Byron Buxton homered again and doubled. We fixed him, folks. You're welcome, Twins fans. Also, after we recorded, both the A's

and the White Sox won in dramatic walk-off fashion. Big comeback by the Pale Hoes. Honestly, it's just nice to see a couple AL Central teams winning, given that, as Jeff Passan pointed out on Saturday, through that point, the AL East had a collective 636 winning percentage and the AL Central had a collective 389 winning percentage. So the whole AL East was playing at 103 win pace. The whole AL Central was playing at a 63 win pace. And out of division with the balanced schedule, the AL East had a 691 winning percentage and the AL Central was at 367. Run differential, plus 158 for the AL East, negative 153 for the AL Central. Not so hot.

Then again, even though the Twins and the White Sox won, the other three AL Central teams lost on Sunday. So continuing their not so winning ways. And when Buxton hit that homer, the Twins unveiled their new Land of 10,000 Rakes celebration. So Buxton put on a fishing vest and then posed with a toy fishing pole. It's something unique that makes up our team and stands for Minnesota, Buxton said. Pablo Lopez, who came up with it and bought the Paw Patrol fishing pole, said the twins had seen the proliferation of home run celebrations around

MLB and knew they needed their own for the good vibes. With that decided, a brainstorming committee involving Lopez, Kyle Farmer, Michael A. Taylor, Ryan Jeffers, the clubhouse staff, and baseball communications senior manager Mitch Hestad convened to work out the details. It's like the party planning committee from the office. This is so formal now. This has caught on so quickly. This kind of choreographed home run ritual. We got to figure out which team was patient zero for this.

Was it the 2019 Nationals and their dugout dance parties? And Baby Shark and then revving the engines and all the rest of it? Were they the instigators and then the Red Sox with their laundry cart? We've got to trace this back to the source. It's become incredibly contagious. Sam has done articles where he traced the evolution of the World Series winning dog pile and also the practice of piling on and faux beating up a teammate who just had a walk-off. Those things didn't always used to happen. They started in the TV era. And maybe we're watching a similar celebration evolution now.

It didn't used to be obligatory that you would have a team home run celebration. And now everyone's got one and everyone's trying to one-up other teams. If you heard me on episode 2000 before I realized Sam had departed and I asked him whether he thought this was an example of baseball players trying to be funny and not being funny, it does seem a little like they're running this thing into the ground if every team has to have one, especially if they then keep it up all season. I don't know. It was fun when it was rare, isolated, organic, spontaneous, performative, but not quite so self-conscious when it actually said something about a team that they had one of

these things. But if it's now more or less mandatory that you have to have one, it doesn't really tell us much about chemistry anymore. I wonder whether it's just burning hot right now and it'll extinguish itself. This craze won't continue indefinitely. Or whether this is just a permanent feature of Major League Baseball. Every team has to have some elaborate home run celebration. Still, if you have to have one, Land of 10,000 Rakes is pretty strong. In that A's game, the great Brent Rooker homered again. The A's still do not have a win this season by a starting pitcher, though. They have set the record for most games to start a season without one. But I'm sure they're happy to get a W no matter which pitcher gets the credit, given that the entire team had five wins entering Sunday. And there are individual starting pitchers

on other teams, Garrett Cole, Clayton Kershaw, Shane McClanahan, Joe Ryan, who have five wins entering Sunday, and there are individual starting pitchers on other teams, Garrett Cole, Clayton Kershaw, Shane McClanahan, Joe Ryan, who have five wins each. Also, the Angels won, and not only did Shohei Otani hit a skyscraping home run, but Jose Suarez pitched great after Shohei Otani picked up on his pitch tipping in Suarez's previous outing, as we discussed last week. So you gotta give Shohei a little bit of credit for Suarez's performance too. There was another game in Mexico City and the Padres won again. This one though, a mere 19 hits, 10 runs, and four homers hit. Comparatively subdued. Ageless wonder Nelson Cruz tripled in that game, showing off the wheels his first triple since he was a twin. I meant to mention when we talked about the Mexico City series earlier, that friend of the show, Jesse Thorne of Maximum Fun and Bullseye and Jordan Jesse Go and Judge John Hodgman had texted me from the games. He was at

the Saturday game and he just sent, I'm at the game and I thought you should know the Diablos Rojos' mascot is a bull who lifts his shirt to show his furry six pack. A devil bull. Then about 20 minutes later, I got another text that said, there's also a sexy devil cow. Overall, very horny experience. And as I responded, mess with the bull, you get horny. Oh, and speaking of that series, after we recorded, the Tops Now cards came out. And of course, there's a Drew Mag times were staggered more so that there would be baseball on more of the time. And I mentioned that there would be ramifications there. And one of them is probably that players would rather not do that. They certainly don't want to start games early. It's a CBA issue that I think MLB is only allowed to schedule eight games a season between 1030 a.m. and noon currently. And the league tried to get more morning games, but couldn't.

Players play a lot of night games, so they aren't morning people, not during the season at least. So, currently, and the league tried to get more morning games, but couldn't. Players play a lot of night games, so they aren't morning people, not during the season at least. So yeah, that might be an issue. Just saying, as a fan, it'd be nice if I could count on baseball being on during more of the day without the games being as long as they were. Maybe something for the future. It's also potentially an issue for local attendance if you start the game too early. Today's Effectively Wild intro theme, a new one, was submitted by listener Guy Russo, who channeled the late David Crosby for some sweet CSN-style harmonies. Sending us a theme song is one wonderful way to help out Effectively Wild, but it's not the only one. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to

patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free aside from our StatBlast sponsorship, and get themselves access to some perks. Tippi Jackson, Christopher Lim, Lena Gordon, Matthew Killian, and David Kim. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the exquisite

Effectively Wild Discord group for Patreon supporters. You also get access to monthly bonus episodes, one of which Meg and I recorded and published this weekend. We did an AMA episode, answered some fun questions. You also get access to playoff live streams and discounts on ad-free Fangraphs memberships and merch and much, much more, patreon.com slash effectivelywild. If you are a supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site.

If not, you can contact us via email at podcast at fangrass.com. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EW pod and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We will be back to talk to you a little later this week. Romantic, pedantic, and hypothetical. Semantic and frantic, real or theoretical.

They give you the stats and they give you the news. It's a baseball podcast you should choose. Effectively Wild is here for you. About all the weird stuff that players do. Authentically strange and objectively styled, let's play ball. It's Effectively Wild. It's Effectively Wild. It's Effectively Wild. I'm