Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2022: Three Strikes, You’re Out at the New Ballgame

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Russell Carleton of Baseball Prospectus banter about the return of Joey Votto, the suddenly exciting Cincinnati Reds, the NL Central and NL West races, and more, then (25:45) discuss several of the developments chronicled in Russell’s new book, The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball, including the impact of the […]

number one fangrass baseball podcast the stat cast is that blast tops plus when the stats need contrast zips and steamer for the forecast coming in high big boss on a hovercraft no notes minor league free agent draft burn the ships flames jumping for a nap cal fema boning on the bat shaft Hello and welcome to episode 2022 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined today by Meg Raleigh. Meg is on the road. And so I have the pleasure to be joined by the third most frequent guest in Effectively Wild history, who is here to narrow the leads of Eric Langenhagen and Grant Brisby. It's Russell Carlton of Baseball Perspectives.

Hello, Russell. Hello. And not just of Baseball Perspectives, but also of a new baseball book. Your second. It is called The New Ball Game, The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball. Some of you may remember Russell's last and first book, The Shift, The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking, which came out in 2018. And contrary to what some people believe, it was not entirely about the defensive shift. If it had been,

then it might be slightly outdated now. I guess we'll get into that when we talk about the new ball game, because you had to make some midstream edits when some of the rules of Major League Baseball changed while you were writing about them. But we'll get into that and many other things about the book. The important thing to know is that it's out now. It came out last week. I read it. I liked it. I recommend it.

And I hope you're having success with the launch. So far, so good. Yeah, I never, ever write a current events book about baseball because really quickly those events become not so current. And I had already turned in my first draft to my publisher when they banned the shift. So yeah, I was like, okay, well, I guess we're going to handle this. So got to rerun some of those numbers now. Yeah. They say, people say, I've been meaning to try to check into this, that baseball, Major League Baseball, changes its rules less often than other sports. That it tinkers less often.

That I think the popular understanding is that, say, the NFL will just change rules surrounding passing every year, every other year. You know, there will be new penalties or different kinds of enforcement because they want the game to be the most entertaining, intelligent it could be or as injury averse as it's possible for football to be, which is not very much. But they're constantly changing things, it seems like. And the NBA changes things a lot, too. And MLB, the perception is that it's slower to change, that it's more resistant to change. And it does seem to be true, at least when you're talking about major rules changes. There hadn't been a whole lot over the previous couple of decades. And I think maybe things had gotten out of hand, which again is one of the subjects of your book, which we will get to shortly.

But I guess in general, you could have written a book over the past 15 or 20 years and not have expected major rules to change that would have invalidated or significantly altered your research. But you picked the year when they decided to do a whole bunch of stuff at once. Yeah, I know how to pick them, apparently. It was, I mean, if you think about for the last, I don't know, when was the last, you know, major, major set of rule changes in baseball? You know, we kind of had the opening of the door with the three batter rule for relievers. And, you know, that was kind of, there was a little bit going on there.

Yeah. But past that, I mean, we're talking about the DH. I mean, now, realistically, the game had just been allowed to move on and just kind of go as it was. So, I mean, we are in the middle, and I make this case in the book of, I think MLB is fighting back against some of the things that the way that that period of benign neglect, if you will, altered the game. And they just kind of let it go for a while. And now I think we are in that period where I think the next 10 years is going to be defined by how MLB is fighting back against some of those changes. And they are going to start tinkering with the rules. And, you know, from what I understand, they're testing new things and coming up with new ideas. So, I mean, it is an interesting time to be a baseball fan. Yeah. So far, mostly so good this season, it seems. And I don't mean to suggest that there

were no new innovations or changes, obviously. The introduction of replay or certain slides prohibited. I mean, there have been changes, definitely. But paradigm shifting, that pun always seems to come up unintentionally, rules. That has been a little less frequent, I think, of late. And one of the reasons cited often is how much stats matter in baseball and how much that continuity across generations and eras matters and how upset fans get when things get out of whack because something changed about the scoring environment. We will get into all of that because it's a big part of your book, The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball. Some of those are the ones that demanded rules changes and may demand subsequent rules changes. But I have to start this episode the way I've started so many episodes of Effectively Wild over the years by saying we have to talk about the Cincinnati Reds. I mean, I know people get tired of just how much we go on and on and on about the Reds on this podcast, but in all seriousness, they are a team that demands to be talked about now. And this is not

the first time. Meg and I have brought them up quite a few times. And each time we marvel at the fact that we are mentioning the Reds, which historically, I wouldn't say we've been loathe to do. It's just that they haven't given us much of a reason to talk about them. And suddenly, they're giving us so many reasons to talk about them, one of which is that as we speak on Tuesday, they are a first-place team. No, it's a first-place team in that division that they play in the NL Central, which is not the most competitive or in some ways, I guess it is the most competitive. But it's not the highest caliber of play, I guess we could say. But they are in first place.

They have won nine games in a row. And they're doing it in really interesting fashion with a bunch of young, fun players. And also one very old, by based all standards, and fun player, Joey Votto, who returned this weekend. And that's actually going to be the subject of the second segment of this podcast. I am going to be talking about the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame because the induction ceremony for the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame was this past weekend. One of my favorite players ever, John Ulrood, was inducted after having been elected during the pandemic. ever, John Ulrood, was inducted after having been elected during the pandemic. And I would imagine that Joey Votto will be a future electee and inductee of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. So between that induction ceremony, Votto's return, and the promotion of Bo Naylor to the

Guardians, probably baseball's best Canadian prospect, everything's coming up Canada. I'm half Canadian. I figured I had to devote some part of this podcast to that. But let's talk about the Reds and Joey Votto. And you have followed the Reds. You're not a Reds fan, but you've kind of kept a close eye on the Reds. And, you know, you grew up rooting for Cleveland. I don't know if there's a lot of animosity between the fans of the Ohio teams or whether there's some kind of camaraderie there, but you've kind of kept your eyes on the Reds even when we weren't bringing them up all that often on the show. Yeah. I mean, I've done a couple of radio hits for their pregame show on their network. And so, you know, I kind of have a weird Reds beat in my head. And, you know, growing up, Cincinnati's

four hours away and they were in the National League at the time. There wasn't a lot of interleague until I was a teenager. So, you know, it was just, it wasn't a thing. But yeah, I mean, I remember I went on their show before the season started, and we had just released Pocota projections that said, oh, you know, the Reds are going to lose 100 games this year. And the host said, well, where would you put that? And I'm like, eh, you know, I might go a little bit north of that, but, you know, not all the way to Columbus. And it's the sort of thing where, you know,

just kind of everything found a home. You know, Nick Senzel finally found something that worked. Jose Barrera has been an actual competent shortstop, but then they found another one who looks like he's pretty good. Multiple ones, yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah. Yeah. You know, Jonathan India, the good Jonathan India came back. And, you know, Andrew Abbott gets called up and, you know, there were questions about whether he would find the third pitch. And things seemed to be going okay for him. And, I mean, it's a case study in how, you know, sometimes you have, you catch those little runs of luck. And, you know, everybody talks about, oh, that was the year where we looked like we were going to be great and then injuries hit all over the place and not

just bad luck. Well, there is the other side of that in baseball. You kind of get those Reds moments. And I don't know how sustainable this is, but the central divisions are just awful this year. So they got a puncher's chance at this point. And that is that is part of what makes baseball a lot of fun. Yeah, I was on that same Reds pregame show with Ken Brew just a little more than a month ago on May 18th. The Reds at that point, I think, were 19 and 24. They were five games out in the division and they had, according to fan graphs, at least a 1 percent chance to win the division and a 1.7% chance to make the playoffs. So the tenor of that conversation was very much, OK, the Reds are on the upswing here. They're on the right track.

You know, it's more entertaining to talk about the Reds. It's a little less depressing, more uplifting to talk about the Reds than it's been in a while. But it wasn't like, are the Reds going to win the Central this season? And that was a month ago. I mean, it was like, are the Reds going to be a contender next year? Are they a dark horse next year? Will 2025 be the year? That was kind of the tenor of that conversation. And now, a little more than a month later, it's very much like, hey, could they do this? Could they pull this thing off? And Votto coming back, I think this is one of the best storylines of the rest of this season, really. I know there was some contingent of Reds fans, and maybe it was just some people on Twitter.

I don't want to invent a straw man contingent here, but that seemed to be uneasy about Votto's return because they felt like, hey, everything's firing on all cylinders here. I saw some concerns about like, is this going to screw up the clubhouse chemistry or something? You know, all these young kids trying to do it for the first time together, which I thought was sort of silly because, A, who wouldn't want Joey Votto around? He's great. But also, he's been around the team, you know, even when he wasn't traveling.

Obviously, when he was on a rehab assignment, he wasn't with the big league club. But a lot of the time when he wasn't actively rehabbing, he was traveling with the team during games. So it's not like he's some total stranger who would be showing up. But then there was also the concern about, well, is he going to be blocking players who should be playing here? You know, we're doing this youth movement. Not that Red's first baseman have been extraordinarily productive this season, but, you know, they've got Spencer Steer established there and he was doing pretty well. And then you have Christian Encarnacion

Strand, who is maybe the next prospect to come along, who's tearing it up in AAA. And so I think the concern was, well, if we're going to be playing Votto because he is an institution and he's the face of the franchise, is he actually going to be productive enough to justify starting? Well, in his first game back, he certainly seemed to be. He hit a home run. He had multiple hits. He walked in classic Votto fashion. He drove in runs in a one-run game that the Reds won. And, you know, he got ovations and it was heartwarming

and it was wonderful. And so there is a bit of a logjam there. And you do have Stier and you have Encarnaccio Strand. And it seems like if anyone, Will Myers might be the odd man out because he wasn't really hitting. And the other guys, Stier and Strand,

have played some outfield. And Coronaccio Strand was playing right field in a recent minor league game. So he might be the veteran displaced as Votto plays. But I just think it's so sentimentally satisfying for Votto in what could be his last season, for him to make a run with this new good young Reds team. I mean, kind of bringing things full circle to early in Votto's career. And he's had so few cracks at the playoffs in his long career when he has stayed with the Reds and is the rare player who seems set to play his entire career with one franchise.

I mean, there was 2010. There was 2012 and 2013. There was 2020, if 2020 counts, right? But 2020 never happened, Ben. 2020 never happened. So the Reds with Votto, they've never made it past the division series. They've been knocked out in the wildcard round the last couple of times they made it. I mean, he hasn't hit much in the playoffs, but he hasn't had many opportunities to. So for him just to be like the veteran, the wily veteran, who is the link to the last or last couple Reds, good teams and contenting teams for him to have one more shot at the playoffs and to be a productive part of that, if he can, if his

shoulder and everything is repaired enough for him to do that. That is super exciting because we thought coming into the season that it might be sort of sad, like playing out the string with a team that's going nowhere. Or maybe there would even be a conversation about will he be trade bait at the deadline? You know, would he want to go? Would they trade him to Toronto, let's say, to finish out his career? And Nick Kral, the Reds GM, said they would consider that if it came up. And instead, it looks like he's the veteran presence that is sort of seasoning this young, exciting Reds roster. So I'm really into it. There's a theory that I have heard thrown about. There's no way to prove this one at all.

But that a guy like Votto, you know, and we know he's toward the end of his career but there's a point you get to and in honor of meg not being here i'm going to do a swear where you can just say kind of bleep it and i'm you know i'm you didn't do a swear at all you said you know i didn't even make our producer shade insert a bleep you did it for him but you get a player who gets to that point where, you know, maybe he's been holding back a little bit because either he's been hurt or he's got to think about his own future and maybe he doesn't want to push too hard. But now, you know, you kind of get to the end here.

There's a point where you say, you know what, I'm just going to go for it. And I wonder if, you know, Votto has reached that point. And, I mean, we're making all these assumptions after maybe one or two games. But you've got to wonder if there's still some of that old Joey Votto magic that he can throw in there. And that's a nice piece to add to a team that's already streaking a little bit. I mean, somebody might come back to this in three months and this may not age well, but it feels kind of nice to be giddy about the Reds for a little bit. So, you know, it's fun.

Yeah, there's definitely a little irrational exuberance here. There's a pent up wanting reasons to talk about the Reds because they've given us so few for so long. And yeah, this might not last. I mean, if you look at the base runs standings, I think they are outplaying their underlying numbers by a good number, right? They're six wins up on what their record, quote unquote, should be. And the Marlins are right there with them at plus six and the Orioles are at plus seven. Then again, the Brewers, who they're neck and neck with, are plus five and they've kind of lucked out too. The Brewers, who they're neck and neck with, are plus five, and they've kind of lucked out, too. But really, it's like the Reds, they have one of the youngest hitting teams.

They're fifth in average hitting age this year, according to baseball reference, although Joey Votto might pull that up a bit. They're third in average pitching age. So they're young and good. I mean, in that sense, they're like the Guardians last year who were even younger and they were surprising and fun. I mean, when a team turns the corner, to use an old Effectively Wild cliche, this is the most exciting way that it can happen when the youth movement arrives all at once. And it's most exciting, I think, when that youth movement pays dividends immediately, where it's not just, well think, when that youth movement pays dividends immediately, where it's not just, well, this is a lousy team, but at least we're getting to see some guys who

might be part of the next good Reds roster. No, they're actually ahead of schedule and they're contending right now, aided by a weak division. So you look at the roster and like almost top to bottom now. I mean, Votto is the only old player in the regular lineup. Like everyone else is in their 20s, in some cases in their early or mid 20s. And then you have Votto who's pushing 40 at this point. Then in the rotation. Now, the rotation, I guess you could say they haven't had everything go their way because the three young aces who started the season in that rotation are all on the IL right now. Nick Lodolo, Graham Ashcraft, and Hunter Green. Of course, they've called up Andrew Abbott, who's been great thus far.

So then you can start to sort of envision and roster bait a starting rotation down the stretch where you have Abbott and those three guys healthy potentially. And then you're watching McLean and Ellie De La Cruz and Steer and all these guys and Encarnacion Strand and Jonathan India is good again. Like, just it's a fun team. I mean, it's just unfamiliar territory for the Reds to be fun. So they've said recently that they would be looking to supplement at the trade deadline. Again, I don't know how much is really going to be available at the trade deadline, but

they have said at least that they're looking to add that they won't be held back by payroll considerations, which is always a concern with that ownership group. So for now, the vibes are just great. And the contrast between how the vibes have been for the last several seasons, I think, makes it even sweeter. I mean, it didn't even look at us. We've been talking about the Reds for, what, 15 minutes at this point? Yeah, making up. What would have been the over-under on that like that for the entire season when we had opening day? So, yeah, if baseball hasn't humbled you, it's because you haven't been around very long. And, you know, this is one of those things where, you know,

at least right now a lot of those early season predictions of, you know, there's a team in Cincinnati, we think, you know, that might play some games. You know, those are all looking really silly. And, I don't know, maybe they have it tacked up on the bulletin board in their clubhouse. And, hey, well, that is baseball for you. And I, I will say that it is a game that has surprised me and made me look like an idiot more times than I care to count. Well, not in your book, which we will talk about in a second.

Your book makes you sound very smart, but I just want to say like, Meg and I have talked even recently about how much the quality of a division affects our perception of how fun a pennant race is. And the NL Central is not a strong division. And yet it is kind of a fun race right now because some of the individual stories are fun, even though these aren't great teams, like you have the Reds who are barely ahead of the Brewers, who are a few games ahead of the Pirates, who are barely ahead of the Cubs. And then you have the Cardinals, who we anointed as maybe the most disappointing team of the season last week. And yet they're only eight games out. Every team, I guess the team with the worst chance to make the playoffs in this division, the Pirates, at 8.5%, that's still a meaningful chance. And you might take the over if you think that they're surprising. But also, every other division has at least one team, and in most cases, multiple teams, who are far below the Pirates' playoff odds, right?

I guess other than the AL East, where everyone has a decent chance to make the playoffs and almost everyone might make the playoffs. The other divisions, and it's not even just the playoff odds, really. It's the division odds, I think, that sets us apart. Because the Pirates' chances to win the NL Central are at 7.8% right now. And there is no other division where the team with the lowest chances of winning that division is anywhere close to that high, right? I mean, even in the AL East, where every team is decent, at least, the Red Sox are basically given no chance. In fact, four of the five teams have a lower chance of winning the division than the Pirates do, according to the playoff odds. And then you look at the AL Central, which is similarly weak, but there are three teams that have worse chances of winning the division than the Pirates do in their division, including the Royals, who are way, way out of it. In the AL West, you have two teams with worse chances than the Pirates do in their division, including the Royals, who are way, way out of it. In the AL West,

you have two teams with worse chances than the Pirates, including the A's, who are, of course, way, way out of it. In the NL East, you have four teams that have worse chances, despite the somewhat surprising Marlins, four teams with worse chances, including the Nationals, who are way out of it. And then in the NL West, which is fun and interesting these days, too, at least you have the Rockies, who have a 0.0 chance to win that division. So there's at least one team that's totally out of it and usually multiple teams, whereas you can't say the same about the NL Central. And, you know, you have the Reds and the Pirates who are coming out of periods of non-contention. And then you have the Brewers who are perennially a contender, but never a super team and seem especially vulnerable this year. And then you have the Cers who are perennially a contender, but never a super team and seem especially vulnerable this year.

And then you have the Cubs who are also kind of coming out of a period of non-contention. And then you have the Cardinals where everything has gone wrong and suddenly the Cardinals can't play defense and the world is upside down. So even though there's no great team in this division, I've got to say I'm kind of into this NL Central race because it's really up in the air. One of the things I talk about in the book is that we have, you know, baseball is at its best when it's telling a story. And I think that that's one of the things that has gotten lost in the last, you know, 10, 20 years about the game is that it's really, it's really cool. I mean, you're talking about a case where when the NL Central, nobody knows what's going to happen. I mean, there's genuine tension of, you know, I mean, obviously someone's going to win it.

But, you know, sitting here right now, I don't know who that's going to be. I don't know that I'd hazard a guess right now who that's going to be. And having those moments of you don't quite know what's going to happen, that keeps you watching a TV show, keeps you watching a movie, and it will keep people watching a baseball season. And I think that that particular dynamic is what we're seeing play out right now. And I think even if we're going to say that the Central, the teams aren't as great, but the narrative that it does produce from just entertainment value is really compelling. And I think that that's one of the things that I really did try to bring out in the book is that there's been something of a loss of appreciation for that particular effect. Yeah, and whichever team ends up coming out of the Central obviously won't be a favorite when we get to the postseason. But, of course, you would have said that about the Phillies last year. We know anything can happen in the playoffs, so you just got to get there, et cetera, et cetera. Insert cliche about October baseball here.

But I think we're attracted to novelty and to surprise. and to surprise. And so a team that's always good or that was expected to be good being good, that's in some ways less interesting than a team that we haven't had reason to talk about in a while,

suddenly giving us oodles of reasons to talk about them. So it's the central. And I guess these days, to some extent, the NL West, too, where the Giants are

streaking as well. They've won eight in a row and they keep winning games in almost 2021-esque fashion. And they just had a successful series against the Dodgers. The Dodgers are 39 and 33 now. I mean, they are starting the freeway series with the Angels and the Angels have a better record than the Dodgers. The first time that that's been true in a matchup of those two teams since 2014. So that division's kind of up in the air these days too. I mean, the Diamondbacks have, I think, the most rookie war, rookie position player war this year,

according to fan graphs, and the Reds are second or tied for second. And that's a good way to make yourself exciting. If you have a bunch of rookies or young players who are productive and just catapult your team to a new level, that's going to be exciting. So when you have the Diamondbacks, who we've talked about a ton this year, and the Giants? And I said, well, you know, they were expected to be 500 and they're 500 and they were 500 last year. Well, they haven't lost a game since that email came in. So they're now 40 and 32 and they have leapfrogged the Dodgers. So suddenly that's, I don't know, a four team race in the West. So that's really interesting too. Anyway, baseball's fun. So let's talk about your

book here and we will talk about it by talking about some of the hidden forces that you explore in the book and also have explored in your writing at Baseball Perspectives. And again, they say you can't judge a book by its cover, but the cover of your book has a picture of Shohei Otani and a blurb by me. So, I mean, I don't know how you can beat that. I mean, me and Shohei together on the cover of this book. So I would expect that our listeners, if they like me or Shohei Otani, and if you don't like either or both of those things, I don't know how you've tolerated this podcast this long, but check out the book because it has a lot to recommend it and not just my recommendation on the cover. But let's talk about some of these hidden forces. I asked you to

identify five that we could focus on and maybe we'll see where the conversation takes us. But one theme that you have returned to over and over in your writing at BP and also focus on in the book is the invasion of the one inning reliever. And it really is an invasion in a sense. You have classified one inning relievers as an invasive species that has disrupted the ecosystem of the sport. So in what sense is this sort of a hidden force? I mean, obviously, people are aware that we have more one-inning relievers than there used to be, but maybe the magnitude of the change and just how dramatically it has affected everything in the game, not just late-inning bullpen usage, but sort of the sport as a whole. That's what you do a good job of chronicling here. Yeah. And the thing about the one inning reliever is that it was kind of, it's, it's, it's a new way to be a pitcher. You know, one of the things I, when I pitched the book to my publisher, I said, well, they said, well, what's, what's the overall theme? And I'm like, well, how did we get here? And I sat down, I'm like, well, what's, you know, what's the biggest piece of that, that has changed over the years? And I

came down to, it's the one inning reliever because, because you know it used to be back in the 1950s 60s 70s that if you were a reliever you were a failed starter you were out there in the bullpen because you weren't good as the starters and so if the manager needed to get the starter out of there you necessarily go into somebody who isn't as good by definition otherwise they'd be in the rotation and you look and you see that guys would swap back and forth and and relievers would start when they needed spot starts because they were already kind of prepped to do that sort of work everybody pitched multiple innings and i mean you kind of if you spend some time in some you know boomer facebook groups that talk about baseball you're going to hear about that you know where'd the three inning reliever gover go? Well, you know, in the 80s, we talk about, usually it's people bring up Dennis Eckersley, although there's

some evidence that says it was some other folks, but you started to see that, you know, ninth inning closer, and, you know, the one guy who would kind of rear back and throw 100 and get you through the ninth inning in a safe situation, and, you know, that model, it turned out, kind of worked. There were, you know, there were guys who could do that. If you were a starter who kind of failed in a specific way, either you couldn't hold the workload of three innings, or you didn't have that third pitch, but you had two good ones, or you had just, you know, 100 mile an hour gas that you could pour on for one inning.

That was a new way to be a pitcher. And it turns out there were a lot of guys who could do that, and on a per batter basis, they were better than the starters. And that was the first time that had really happened, and that kind of flipped the script. Because now, if you're a manager just trying to get the last nine outs of the game, and you're looking out in your bullpen, and you're like, well, I've got a tired starter here, or I've got four, five, six, seven, eight guys out there who are ready to go, and I just need three of them to throw an inning,

and they're a better bet than the starter. Well, okay, and as we've seen over the years, and there's a graph in there that i love bringing up and it's the percentage of relief appearances that lasted exactly three outs and we are now over the majority to where i think i was 56 last year of relief appearances lasted exactly three outs not more not less exactly three and it's and usually it's it's a single inning you come in you when come in between innings, and then you leave after your three outs are done.

And that's been it. And, okay, well, now we have all these short burst relievers. Well, now we're going to dedicate more positions or more spots on the roster to pitchers rather than position players. Well, that crowds out some of the bench players that you had. Well, now some of your utility players have to play more positions, and so there's more of a focus on multi-positionality. Now the role of starters starts to change.

You know, starters are kind of there to get it to the bullpen because the bullpen is better on a per-batter basis. And they're really, you know, instead of it's your game, it's, no, you're just kind of the first person. We're going to need someone to provide bulk innings, but you're really there just to get us to that point where we can get to the real pitchers who are the relievers. And, you know, that's been,

there's a good amount of baseball culture that has always, you know, subtitled a game by the two starting pitchers. And, you know, now we saw even in World Series games where, you know, last year the Astros threw a combined no-hitter. And you've got a starter in the middle of a no-hitter in the World Series and they're taking him out because he was just part of the chain. And so that's you know that has that has changed so much about the game and you know a lot of the strikeout problem comes from that because you've got guys who are just able to rear back and throw you see the way that the pitcher's train is now different it's it has been the sort of thing that i talk about as an invasive

species has changed the baseball ecosystem in ways that I think we're just kind of starting to see for something that happened, you know, slowly over, you could call it back to the 80s. So over, you know, 40 years, but, you know, in earnest, over the last 20, definitely. You've pointed out that, of course, people focus on starting pitchers going less deep into games. And that maybe has some narrative consequences from a spectator standpoint when you're following one player, one pitcher who's sort of the central figure in a game as opposed to just a parade of relievers who you may or may not know anything about. But also, as you have noted, it's not just that starting pitchers are pitching the way

that they used to, except that now the manager comes out and takes them out after five or six innings. It's that the starting pitchers go into the game with the goal of pitching five or six innings. And because the finish line is set so much earlier, then they can air it all out, right? They can let it eat. they can air it all out, right? They can let it eat. So it's not that you're just removing them faster and thus not letting hitters face them for the third time in the game. Let's say when, you know, they've seen them a number of times and maybe they're also they're fatigued. It's that they go into it with a totally different mindset and they're pitching with that earlier finish line in mind from the start, which means that they can just go

max effort. And now that has all kinds of consequences potentially with injuries and with offense and with strikeouts. So all of this is really kind of connected. But if you had to have an origin story for this supervillain direction that the sport has gone in, if you want to classify it that way, then it might be just the expansion of bullpens. And all of it, like every step along the way, made some sense, right? It had some logic behind it and some sabermetric rationale. And yet, every step takes you maybe further from the path that you want to be on as an entertainment product. Yeah, there's something I try to go through in this book is that it all made sense at the time.

I mean, if you kind of look at it, you go, Oh, well, I guess I would have done that, too. I mean, yeah, you know, you think about, you mentioned, you know, starters going out there with, you know, an earlier finish line, but also with a finish line. I mean, the idea is you're a starter, you know, you were just kind of there until you retired, and we'll kind of figure out what that is when we get there. You know, if you know I'm going out for six innings, I don't have to worry about the setup. So, you know, in the third inning, I go, maybe I need to reach back a little bit more for

this on this particular pitch. You have a little bit more liberty to do that. And, you know, everyone's kind of making decisions that are all rational and reasonable to them, to their teams, but it begins to shape the game into a different product. And, you know, one that I think that, you know, because it happened very gradually over 20, 30 years, there wasn't a point where somebody said, hey, wait a minute, what's going on here? It was something where it was a very organic change. But now looking back, we realize it's a change. Now, I guess we could tie that to one of the other hidden forces that we were planning to

talk about, which is the strikeout and the ongoing attempts to suppress it, right? Which is something that you've written about, I've written about recently, you know, Saris wrote about it recently. Despite all of the major changes that we've seen this season and all of the intended and desired effects of the new rules changes, one of the intended and desired effects was fewer strikeouts. And that's the one that hasn't happened. And I don't know that there was great reason to expect it to happen. It was sort of maybe this will be a secondary byproduct of these other things we're doing. But that has been an explicitly stated goal of MLB. They say fans want more action and action can be characterized as more balls in play. And therefore, we want to change things so that there will be more balls in play. But

that has not happened this season. You might have thought, well, maybe the pitch clock will make pitchers throw slower and then there will be more contact. No, that hasn't happened. And you might have thought, well, maybe if we limit certain types of defensive positioning, we make it more rewarding to put balls in play, then hitters will be incentivized to put the ball in play more often and suddenly everyone will morph into Luis Ar Rise. No, that hasn't happened either. So what do you see as the driver of this these days? And what do you think the solution will be if there is one? Oh, boy. Have you opened a can of worms?

I mean, realistically, the strikeout is going to be the next big battleground of the next 10 years in baseball. And I don't know that baseball is going to win this one. The strikeout rate looks stuck. I mean, there was talk of, well, you know, without the shift, maybe everybody will stop trying to pull, or people will be more comfortable just kind of taking a low-level swing because they know that they're not going to have somebody

in the short right field who's going to get that. Well, no, that didn't work. I mean, we've seen the numbers already the strikeout rate is still flat and it's still very high the thing that some of the actually there's an article coming up at bp uh this week on on the subject if you know you kind of try and pull some of those things apart it's a little bit of everything and a little bit of all of it's pushes the strikeout rate up a little more and a little bit of all of its pushes the strikeout rate up a little more and a little more and a little more and there's all these little pieces parts well after a while a little plus a little plus a little eventually

equals a lot and we've seen over the last ten years specifically and you know I talk about these in the book is there they're the grass that end with a thwomp and they you know you see that some very real changes that happened in real time that, you know, over 10 years of people time, but in baseball time, when you look at it on a graph, you're like, oh, I guess things did really change pretty quickly. And I think each one has contributed a little bit to the strikeout problem. And I think that eventually we're either going to have to try to untie some of them, probably not all of them,

but I don't know that there's going to be a good way to pull that one out. I think that we may have a game that's going to have a 22% strikeout rate or whatever it is at this point. In the book I talk a little bit about Nolan Ryan, his career strikeout rate was he struck out 23.4% of bat or something like that. Well, now the whole league pitches like that. And, I think, was 24.4 percent. Right. And that made him an outlier in his era. But that's more or less average these days. And I think I've seen people formulate this as just sort of an imbalance of incentives.

I know Bill James has talked about this and Louis Paulus that a strikeout is more beneficial to a pitcher than it is deleterious to a hitter, right? Because strikeouts are great for pitchers. It's great to keep the ball out of play. For hitters, it's not good to strike out, obviously, in any individual plate appearance, but it tends to go along with good things sometimes, power and patience. And obviously, there are times where you really need a ball in play. And then there are times where you really want to avoid a double play, right? So putting the ball in play, they say, put the ball in play and good things happen. Often bad

things happen too, sometimes worse things than not putting the ball in play, in fact. So you have pitchers who are incentivized to get strikeouts and teams that are incentivized to get strikeout pitchers. And the same kind of counter pressure isn't really there on the offensive side in service of contact. Right. So I think that's part of it. And then, I mean, it ties into the expansion of the one inning reliever that we just talked about and starters not having to pace themselves and everyone's just throwing all out at all times and they're bigger and stronger and they throw harder than ever and they have pitch design pitches. And how are you going to

hit that? You can't hit that. And also, I think there was this hope, I guess, that maybe banning the overshift would encourage people to put the ball in play. But as a number of people like Joshian pointed out in advance and seems to have been borne out by results thus far, it also just makes things easier for pull happy hitters, right? It's kind of a bailout for them. It's like, okay, we're taking away the cost of hitting that way. So now you can just pull to your heart's content and there won't be the same cost to it. So in some ways, maybe it provided the opposite of the incentive that was intended. So it's not surprising to me that we haven't seen a change as a result of the rules changes that were put in place this season. And so it seems like there will need to be more. And Morgan sort of MLB indicated as much when I talked to him for an article and played some clips of that on the podcast not long ago. So my preferred solution, as I've advocated in print and on podcast before,

is actually to curb the expansion of the bullpen that we were just talking about and to place a limit on the number of pitchers on the active roster, a more stringent limit than the one that was put in place last season and thus already exists. I mean, I know there are some issues with implementing that and teams will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to it, but it does seem like it would address a lot of potential ills all at once. And then we have the octopus bullpen with eight arms. And one of the things I do in the book is I bring up a box score from history that shows something I'm talking about. And I brought up the Game 6 of the 86 World Series,

not for the unfortunate Bill Buckner error, but for the fact that that year, that was kind of right before the bullpen expansion, really got going in earnest. And if you look at who was out on the mound for Boston, it was Calvin Chiraldi for most of that time in the late innings. And the reason was, well, that's kind of how things worked at the time. And Chiraldi faced 16 batters before Bob Stanley came in and faced the last batter.

I don't know what happened on that one. But it's the sort of thing where should MLB, for example, ratchet it down to, before Bob Stanley came in and faced the last batter. I don't know what happened on that one, but it's the sort of thing where should MLB, for example, ratchet it down to you can only have 11 pitchers on your active roster, and yet teams are going to play the edges and play the call-up game and move people here and there and do that. But at the same time, do you start playing those sorts of games? And that's one of the tensions in the book, is that we're seeing these things where you probably could curb some of them,

but does it start looking like mutant baseball to where, you know, we've never had a clock in baseball. Well, now we have a clock. We never told fielders where they can stand. Well, now we've banned the shift. And, you know, how do we solve some of those problems without kind of taking, well, is this still baseball, is the question that I think that a lot of people are asking. And I think that if you think about the runner on second and extra innings rule, you still get people who don't like it, but it's still baseball. Really? There's still people out there? There's still people out there that will whine about it.

You know, baseball fans will whine about anything. But at the same time, I mean, it's become from, you know, a horrible sacrilege to a sacred tradition. And, you know, it's the same thing that, you know, when they introduced the playoff system of baseball and we had league championship series for the first times and that was going to ruin baseball. And now it's just kind of another thing we do in October. I think that is the tension, though, is to how far can MLB really go to address it before the people start saying, well, is that still baseball?

baseball? So, you know, that's that is the I think that that's that's one of those questions that really is going to have to be addressed over the next 10 years is MLB has shown that they are very willing to actively put their thumb on the scale. Right. Yeah. And I think there is a distinction between these rules that are either changing something to enforce something that technically is already on the books, which you could say about the pitch clock, right? There already was supposed to be a limitation on the time between pitches. It just wasn't and really couldn't be enforced. And there was some history of trying and failing to enforce it even via earlier attempts at the pitch clock, right? So that seemed like sacrilege to a lot of people, but in a way, it was enforcing something that was already on the books and it was bringing

modern baseball more into line with past baseball so that it would look and feel and play like baseball used to. And I guess you could say the same thing about limiting the number of active pitchers. Now, on the one hand, it is sort of a change in that in the past, baseball didn't really specify and say, you can only have this many of this type of player and this many of that type of player. You had your roster and you could decide on the composition as you wanted, but it would be bringing pitcher usage a bit back more in line with what it used to be, right? So you could make the case that this is not new and scary. This is a new rule that is intended to bring baseball back into line with the way it used to work before something broke and got out of whack. Whereas I don't

think you can make that case about the zombie runner, let's say, as I am one of those people who still considers that sacrilege. That's not something I think that you can point let's say, as I am one of those people who still considers that sacrilege, that's not something I think that you can point to and say, oh, they used to do it this way. It's just that X-Trading games got out of hand and we needed some way to corral it. And so we're going to go back to putting a runner on second base to start X-Trading. So that's a break from tradition that you can't really tie to the past. and that still bothers me for any number of reasons. So I think, yeah, there are ways that you can sort of sneak these things in and get Bryan Cranston to do a promo for them and talk about how really it's just like it was in the 80s, and you can make it more palatable to people. And it should be maybe more palatable to people as opposed to a complete break with the

past. But I guess we can talk about one of the other hidden forces that you alluded to a moment ago, because as you said, when bullpens expand, when more and more roster spots are occupied by pitchers, then the remaining position players who get crowded out, they have to do more. They have to be jacks of all trades. They have to play a whole bunch of positions. And this is something we've both written about, too, where you used to marvel at the Ben Zobris type. And now you almost have to be a Zobris to still have a roster spot at the major league level. I mean, you might not be as good as Zobris, but everyone has a whole

pass-a-lug gloves with them, right? If you're going to be on the bench in the big leagues, then you've got to be the backup infielder and the backup outfielder at the same time in many cases. And this is something where I guess I don't like that some of those position players have been squeezed out and that you don't really have dedicated pinch hitters anymore. And I'd like to see more of those machinations brought back and those late inning substitutions on the position player side. But I do appreciate players who can do more than one thing. And I do respect players who can play a bunch of positions competently. And as you've noted, teams are more and more routinely

teaching their young players, even in the minors, just it's out of matter of course, you're going to play multiple positions, sometimes several positions. And you've also done interesting studies about the potential costs of that, you know, about learning a new position

or switching positions in the middle of a season or the middle of a game. So there are a whole lot of considerations there. But I do appreciate the rise of the multi-position super utility type. Not unheard of in the past, but now they uh they've taken that to an art form and i mean you can you look at their their lineup from day to day and you see not only are people sliding around the infield into the outfield oh you're playing at first base have you played first base before i guess you have you know and you know you kind of do you know not only and it's just kind of you know what do we call those people anymore? When we don't really have it. I did one of those box scores and I reimagined it in terms of some of the positions that are out there.

What does it mean back when we had the shift? When the shortstop was playing kind of where the second baseman was supposed to play and the second baseman was in short right field. We never really came up with names for that. The Abbott and Costello routine doesn't have those. Those guys were never named. I talked about last year we started to see, and I think just poking its head above water, was the fourth outfield movement.

You started to see that a little bit more here and there. And I think that had that not been outlawed which of course prompted plenty of edits on my end that we would have seen a lot more of that and okay well what do we call that person who's kind of floating between the infield and the outfield without coming out of the game and just because now we're playing a four-man outfield we need names for these people and I think I don't think I'm so freaked out by the fact that somebody invented a 10th position or an 11th position. And, well, then now they're, you know, what do we call those folks?

And we have to outlaw it. I mean, that's, and that's, there was some of that, too. I mean, you heard some of the arguments against the shift really boiled down to, well, gee, I just don't like the way it looks. And, you know, that's not the way baseball was supposed to be played. And, you know, I make the argument in the book that this says, you know, had baseball been invented in a time where we had spray charts and, well, I think the 3-1 defense, for example, would have been kind of the norm. And so, you know, teams have taken that, and now players are playing,

even now the shift's out a lot. You see guys at second and third and short sometimes even in the same game, and the next day they're starting the left field. And it has become something that when I was growing up, there was a little thing on the front of the baseball card that said that so-and-so is a third baseman. And you could count on them being a third base. And you still have some of those players, but you have these other guys who are just, you know, they're all over the place.

What do we hope, though? Yeah. And I wonder what the considerations are when it comes to development, because there have been cases of people pointed to Nick Senzel, a player who came up earlier on this podcast. I mean, you know, you task someone with a defensive responsibility that they can't handle. And then it's the scene from Moneyball and it's actually it's incredibly hard. Right. And then trying to learn a new position on the fly maybe makes it difficult to develop as a hitter and you can't separate those things. And I like the idea that not everyone is sort of set in stone at a certain position and that it's like there's more flexibility and creativity and just, hey, we have this good player. We have a hole to fill. Maybe it's a square peg in a round hole, but maybe we can move this guy to this other position. And if he could handle that position, then we'd really be set. It's like the Pirates, you know, I mentioned that the Guardians just brought up Bo Naylor for some offensive assistance behind the plate. Well, the Pirates just called up Henry Davis, right, who's had sort of a meteoric rise this season in the minors and one of their top prospects,

their first rounder in 2021, the number one overall pick. Well, he came up and instead of sending down their catching tandem, which has been fairly productive, they just decided, Henry Davis, you're going to play right field now, you know, because we have Austin Hedges, who's the defensive specialist. And then we have Jason DeLay, who's actually one of our meter major leaguer guys in the past. He's actually been pretty productive at the plate. So rather than mess with that tandem, we're just going to stick our top prospect in right field where he has played a little like he prepped for that a little. He played a little right field in the minors this year and a little tiny bit before.

But in the past, I don't think you would have seen a team do that, right? Like, let's take our number one overall pick, our top prospect. This is the future of the franchise. This is a cornerstone. Let's put him in right field because we have Austin Hedges and Jason DeLay back there, you know, who are not necessarily the future of the franchise. So it's creative. It's like, well, hey, we have a hole out there and maybe he can help us now, but maybe he can help us more at that position than this position. But do you run a risk of setting back his development at catcher or, you know, it's hard enough to acclimate to the majors when you're playing the position you specialize at? And now

you're suddenly a everyday right fielder, seemingly, who maybe catches every now and then. That's a lot to ask of a 23-year-old who's in the majors for the first time. So it must be a difficult developmental decision about, can we push this player to do this? Because on paper paper it seems like it would help us but in practice uh you have to know the player really well i suppose to know how he'll respond to this yeah i mean one of the things that teams have been moving that developmental process earlier and earlier into their you know minor league careers it used to be that you know if the team was like oh we want you to try second base like oh you don't think of me as a starting prospect you think you're developing me that maybe i'll be a utility infielder

and it was kind of a sign of shame well now you know it's now much more par for the course and there are some some individuals that you say all right we're going to start this early because we see this person has the capacity to play a couple of different positions and we might as well develop that because that's going to come in useful and you know you get the pirates doing that and sticking them in the right field it's there is a danger to that i've done research that says that when you do somebody something like that where you stick somebody at kind of an emergency position they actually tend to feel like the worst fielder in the league, even if they were like okay at their previous position, like a shortstop who's just fine as a shortstop, he's sticking at second base.

He's actually, there's a period of adjustment where, even though he was a good shortstop, he actually makes a terrible second baseman for a while. And it lasts about a quarter of a season. And so most teams have been loathe to do that. You can also say, well, it's just a cost, and sometimes it's worth the cost to do that. And you say, well, if we can make the case that we are better off

even living with that defensive penalty by upgrading the lineup by a superior amount, well, then let's give it a shot. And eventually players do seem to to take to the positions that they are put to so there's at least that to go on so it's it is a bit of a balance but i think it's something that the shortened benches have have required the team start to look into and and try to find little ways to to gain value from those sorts of moves yeah it's like position lists baseball they say positionless basketball.

This is the baseball equivalent of that. And sometimes it's just you have multiple top prospects at the same position. So you bring up Matt McClain and he's hitting and then you want to find room for Eli De La Cruz. Well, you move him to third base and we'll see what the future holds. But now you've got to get both those guys in the lineup or to bring up a rise again. But now you got to get both those guys in the lineup or to bring up a rise again. Sometimes it's someone who isn't necessarily perfectly suited for any position, really. And he just kind of floats around and he's not necessarily going to be a great defensive plus or asset, but he'll be playable. I mean, in 2021, he played third base more than any other position for the Twins.

Last season, he played first base more than any other position. Now he's back to playing second base almost exclusively. And it's, you know, he's not going to be a gold-guffer probably at any of those positions. But he's batting 400, so you've got to play him somewhere, right? You've got to figure that out. Yeah, he slumped all the way to the 370s. And I was like, well, that was a fun story. But, you know, here he goes down to his eventual wherever he will end up somewhere north of 300, but well south of 400.

And then he wraps out a couple of five hit games and he's back to 400 again. latest into a season that a player has been batting 400 since Nomar did it through 91 team games in 2000 for the Red Sox. So it's been really fun to watch. But, you know, you got to get him in the lineup somewhere. So you just stick him wherever you can. And then sometimes there are players who clearly have the capacity to play a position. They have the raw skills and tools. And then you just live with the transition period, the learning curve. You stick Jazz Chisom or Fernando Tatis Jr. out there, and you know that they might have some misreads for a while, and it's risky because they're cornerstones of your franchise, but you figure everything we know suggests that they physically could handle this.

They're just going to need to get some reps. So you might have to live with some mistakes every now and then, but you'll also get some spectacular plays in the bargain. So speaking of Arise, there was one more hidden force to talk about, which is the expansion of the talent pool and globalization. And one thing that I hadn't really recognized until I read the book, and I think I brought it up on the podcast as I was reading it, is that the percentage of Major League players who have been born outside the United States has actually kind of flattened out. It's kind of plateaued after steadily and even rapidly climbing during some earlier periods. But the makeup of the body of international players and the types of players that teams are looking at and where they come from, that is still evolving. Yeah, you think about expanding the talent pool. Major League Baseball has gone and made some very strategic investments in the game, both to expand the fan base, but also that's brought in new players into the game.

And I think we're down up to, I guess, what, 28%, 29% of the opening day rosters were born outside the United States. And that's up from, I want to say, 10%, 15% kind of before the 1990s. You know, again, one of the things I bring up was the box score from the final of the 2006 World Baseball Classic. And more as a document of where the game went, you know, we now had, it was that game was played between Cuba and Japan. And here you had an international baseball tournament and the point of the other countries wasn't just to give someone the U.S. to win against. You know, I mean, and I think the U.S. finished like eighth in that particular tournament. The game has become so much more spread out. Well, then also, you know, the population of the U.S. has increased. The number of people from other countries who want to play in the league has increased, and also, you know, major

league teams have become more accepting in terms of the types of players that they will go out and find. We talked about the invention of the one-inning reliever. Well, you know, if you were a pitcher who couldn't hold even a three-inning workload or you didn't have that third pitch, you really didn't have a place on a major league roster. Now you do. And so that brings more people into the ecosystem. Well, now you look at expansion,

and the number of roster spots has remained fairly constant over the years. We've had some expansions. We haven't had one in 25 years at this point. And we had, you know, the 26th roster spot was added two, three years ago, whenever that was. But you have just many, many more people who could theoretically fill those spots. And so you have a talent bottleneck there. And I say in the book, you know, where you used to say, you used to have a guy who would throw 91 and you had to settle for that guy. Well, now there's, you know, three guys in the minors who can throw 93. I'm going to go get one of them. And so you start crowding some of those out. And

it works on the position player side too. So you have a talent bottleneck that has built up. And I think that, you know, that's, that's something that we need to recognize, you know, both for what it's going to do on the field, you have bigger, stronger, faster players who are, who are going to throw the ball harder, that are trying to fit their, their talents into the same 90 square foot box on the infield and 60 foot strip of dirt from, from the pitching rubber to home plate. And I think that there's going to come a point where we're going to come up against some of the physical limitations of, well, physics in playing the game.

We've seen the average fastball and the other pitches have gone along with it has gone up in terms of average velocity by about four miles an hour. And if you do the math on that you know you take away about eight to ten percent of the actionable reaction time that the batter used to have and so you know it's no wonder that we're seeing batters having a hard time and baseball has an asymmetry that goes with it where you know if you're the batter and the pitcher's throwing faster you can't just you know pick it up and throw it back at him faster. The skill that has to compensate is your reaction time.

And, you know, batters are selected because they are at the top 1% of humans in terms of their reaction time. That's one of the things that makes them elite professional athletes. So it's harder to find people who can then react faster and have those faster quick twitch muscles and things like that. And I'm sure scouts are out there trying to find them, but there is a certain asymmetry that goes along with that that's pushing the game toward, and I think it's one of the things that to tie back into the strikeouts, I think that's one of the things that we're seeing that is having an effect. And the last hidden force that we wanted to talk about that we've kind of been dancing around and really runs through all of these other hidden forces and the book at large, it's something

you reckon with in here, but it's basically looking at what we have wrought here, you know, looking at all these trends and developments and some of them impairing the game in some ways and then basically doing a Urkel style. Did I do that? Right. Just wondering, did analytics break baseball? If so, can analytics save baseball? And, you know, sort of sidestepping the whole conversation about how do we define analytics.

But sabermetrics, looking at baseball in a more quantified way and bringing to bear all of these tools and technologies that we have now, do you think that that is largely responsible for some of these trends that we've seen? Some of them obviously are long-term trends. I mean, more power and more strikeouts in the game. You could go back decades, centuries, right? I mean, some of these things have been exacerbated in recent years, but these are long, long, long-term trends. But others, clearly, when we figured out the best ways to be productive in baseball, then teams and players doubled down on those things, and that had some unintended consequences. some unintended consequences. Yeah, I mean, chapter eight of the book is called Did Analytics Ruin Baseball? And I know that there's a certain type of person

who might pick up that book and read the table of contents and be like, I want to read that chapter. And I think that it's an important question that we talk about is, the answer I came to was, yeah, it kind of did. Because, you know, for a while, we just kind of chased efficiency for the sake of efficiency and for a long time it's just been well you know if the i mean the rules went unchecked

we talked about that earlier in this conversation and i think that that you know that that was something of a mistake to to say to let it ride like that. Now, how much of it was going to happen anyway? How much of it did the analytic movement just, you know, catalog versus cause? You know, we can debate that. But I think that, you know, we got to the point where everything became just a dry hacking exercise into the game. And I think that we lost sight of, well, you know, what is this game supposed to do? What function is it supposed to play? You know, where is the narrative advice? I mean, you think about the bunt.

And I think everybody listening to this knows why the sacrifice bunt is a terrible play. I mean, you score less often with a runner on second and one out than you do with a runner on first and nobody out. And so it doesn't, you know, it's not a surprise that teams kind of looked at that and went, oh, I guess we shouldn't do that. And it's beautifully efficient, I guess, but if you look at the sacrifice as a narrative device, in a nine-act play that unfolds over two and a half hours, that's a really cool play to tell a story about.

And it's noble. We call it a sacrifice. We give it a really cool word. It doesn't count against your batting average because you made a noble out. It's a wonderful book. And we went to efficiency as this standard, and it homogenized the game to the point where, you know, there were a lot of characters that used to be on the stage that have been told to move to the sides of the stage. And I think that's where a lot of people got lost along the way. I think that, you know, we have to reckon with how the analytic movement has changed baseball culture. And in ways that, you know, I'm sure that, you know, they all have wonderful spreadsheet-y ways that they all made sense. But at the same time, well, some people really liked those players who were kind of plucky

bunters who did all the things that we now realize weren't all that valuable, but they liked them. And what responsibility does baseball have to be a good storytelling device rather than just another game that you got to try and figure out? Right. Yeah. I think when we got into this and when people who preceded us got into this started thinking about these things, it was very much an abstract intellectual exercise. You know, it was should teams do this? Should players do that? And no one was really thinking about what would happen if they actually did do that or stop doing that because that wasn't really in the cards, you know? And then shortly after that, everyone we ever worked with got hired by baseball them for fun and railing against teams not trying these things, then they actually permeated the sport in ways that no one had really anticipated or thought was all that likely. And then some things happened

that maybe weren't ideal and some trends were accelerated. Something like the sacrifice bunt, I don't really lament the lack of sacrifice bunts because I don't find a sacrifice bunt all that exciting as opposed to a bunt for a hit, which I find very exciting. But it's true. It is at least a difference. It adds a little variety even if that individual play isn't so exciting. But I'm always attracted to new ideas and novelty, as I said earlier. I'm always attracted to new ideas and novelty, as I said earlier. You know, we're attracted to teams that are winning for the first time in a while because it's new and novel and it's interesting.

And I'm drawn to new ideas in baseball, too, new ideas and tactics and strategies. And then I stopped to think, well, what would happen if that actually became pervasive? Would this be good or bad for baseball? And oftentimes not so good. But my initial attraction to the idea is just, oh, that's interesting. That's clever. No one's tried that before.

I wonder what would happen. You know, it's like the mid-plate appearance pitching change, which is something I've been fascinated for a while by and I've written about, and it's kind of common in college, but is very rarely tried in the majors. It actually happened on Monday in the Reds-Rockies game. There was a mid-plate appearance pitching change late in the game where Brad Hand got one strike on Reds hitter Tyler Stevenson, and then Bud Black went to the bullpen and he called out Justin Lawrence, and he came out to

finish the plate appearance against Stevenson. And he got two very quick strikes. I mean, it was a super quick strikeout. Stevenson looked uncomfortable. You had Brad Hand, the lefty, replaced by this side-arming righty. And it looked like he just didn't know what to do. And he, you know, just two quick strikes and he looked out of sorts. It was kind of a proof of concept.

I don't know that Bud Black was doing it just for the lack of familiarity that Stevenson would have a different arm angle. There was a stolen base on the first strike, which sort of changed the situation. And I imagine that that changed his tactical calculus. I didn't hear him explain why he did it. And I'm not totally clear on why he thought it made sense to do it at that time. But I imagine that that change in the base state was why he decided to do it as opposed to just the element of surprise. But I think that's super clever and it would be fun if some team were trying that. But what if every team started doing that? Which, you know, obviously there'd be some limitations with the three batter minimum. But what if you started doing that and suddenly you'd have more pitching changes, you'd have more strikeouts, right? Like the reason it might make sense is that batters would be back on their heels

and they wouldn't be familiar with this pitcher. And so they would strike out, like the upshot of it would be just more strikeouts and less offense, which is often the case, right? So the idea appeals to me because it's like, huh, like a lot of people don't even know you can do that. They don't even know you can make a mid-plate appearance pitching

change. They think that's against the rules. Well, no, it's not. And maybe there could be this hidden advantage to doing it, but you play that out. And what if the Rays start doing that? And then everyone's like, ooh, the Rays are doing it. We better do it too. And then suddenly everyone's making mid-plate appearance pitching changes and you have a whole lot of uncompetitive plate appearances and strikeouts. It's like, is baseball better now? Probably not, right? Probably ultimately you have to make some rules so that you could stop doing that. So for a while there, it was like you didn't even really have to think about what would happen if teams actually took this advice because they weren't even considering it. But then once they started doing it and putting into practice,

it was like, Oh, Oh, it's a little bit of Pandora's box going on here. Then rewind to take 15 years and replace mid-inning pitching, or mid-batter pitching change with infield shift. Uh-huh. Sure.

Yeah. Right. And that's, you know, that's kind of what happened. I don't know. I don't know if the mid-batter pitching change is going to take that route, but that's the saying, and that is what has happened.

What I talk in the book is that you can't fault teams for saying, you know what, this would help us win. We're going to do this. And there's no kind of natural check on that other than that MLB's saying, no, you can't do that, and that's what they had to do with the infield shift. Right, right. And that dynamic right there of, you know, do we let the game just evolve where it will

and let these not-so-hidden forces kind of take the game where it's going to go, or do we try and change the rules and fight back? And I will tell you, MLB's in for a heck of a fight because they're up against big data. They're up against, you know, the natural impulse of all 30 teams are, we're trying to win this World Series. We're trying to win this next game. We're trying to win this at bat. You know, you can't stop them from doing that. And so you have to change the incentives where you can and get as much of that in. But that's going to be a really intense fight.

I think that there's going to be whatever happens on the field to look at over the next 10 years. But I think there's also what happens off the field with the rulebook that's going to be this parallel book that's going to be this parallel line that's going to be running alongside baseball history for the next for the next decade MLB has now said you know we're not just going to do efficiency for efficiency's sake we are going to try and take some some control back over the game so I mean I think that you know writing this book right now I'm sure that you know in 10 years i'll come back to it i'll go how was i wrong but at the same time that's okay i've been wrong before i'm married

but um you know i i will probably be wrong about something because you know there's a lot of the stuff that you know again we want to take 15 years and they want to really see that about the infield shift when we're doing against david ortiz? And really only David Ortiz. And it became a thing that swallowed the entire game and needed an intervention. That's what we're talking about here. And be very, very careful about the power that we hold in our hands. I write a weekly column at Baseball Perspectives where I do gory math and I come up with little pieces of strategy and things like that

that teams might want to try, and some of them have. And it's the sort of thing where you've got to be very careful about the power that we hold in our hands and recognizing some of the downstream effects that it can have and to be thinking about the responsibility of that. I talk about this kind of at the end of the book, but I think that that same thought goes through chapter eight. You know, I talk about how if the old school was overrun with magical thinking and, you know, there was clutch

and heart and grit and all that kind of stuff, the new school needs to understand that it is overrun with linear thinking, where, you know, you just kind of, you look at the thing and you only kind of take it out so far and don't think about how the effects might branch off and whether those are the effects that you might eventually want. Yeah. I mean, I guess the good thing is that if you were right about everything, you would run out of material more quickly. So if you're wrong about something or if

something takes some twists and turns that you don't anticipate, hey, then you have a whole book's worth more material to write about that some years down the road. You certainly got lots of mileage and digital ink spilled out of the shift and all of the effects of the shift and the effects that maybe were overblown about the shift as well. But the other good news is that there are measures that can be taken. There are interventions, and they can be efficacious, and they can even be popular. And so we've seen some of the effects of the rules changes this season. And The Athletic just released a survey of players, and they polled them, among other things, about the new rules. And it turns out that even the new rules are popular among players who were understandably resistant to some of them. But if you look at their responses, more than 100 responses, and the most common response, the mode for banning the shift and bigger bases is a five out of five, where five is the best for the game. But even the pitch clock, which players really had to be pushed into,

the most common response was a four. The median response was a four. The average was a 3.7. Players, they still have some misgivings and quibbles, but even they largely like the pitch clock. So things can be done, but it is difficult to anticipate what will have to be done. And there was recently an article by Tom Verducci at SI that I sent you and I will link to on the show page. But it's about this whole new frontier of gamesmanship and about what is legal and what should be allowed when it comes to pitch tipping. Because teams have all these cameras set up now that can measure the biomechanics of the pitcher and just with extraordinary precision can quantify the movements that they're making. And there are a lot of possible applications of that. You know, you could see when a pitcher is tiring and you could take them out before they

hurt themselves, or you could just help someone improve their mechanics without having to get them in a lab and, you know, wire them up and put a bunch of markers on them and have them throw in a non-game situation. You can get all that information when they're out there on a mound just in uniform. And all of that's exciting. But potentially, you can also use that technology and couple that with machine learning. And you can open up a whole Pandora's box of pitch tipping, right? Where it's no longer just reliant on someone on the bench picking up a tell, but now you have cameras and computers working in tandem and software designed to, you know,

someone's flexing their forearm as they have a particular pitch grip in the glove. And you could potentially pick up on that and know what pitch is coming. And then if you could communicate that somehow to the field and relay that, well, then are you in sign stealing scandal territory again? And is this going to be the next blight on baseball? And do we have to have rules? And, you know, is this are there safeguards you can put in place? And it's all really interesting and fascinating. And if you're working for a team, of course, you would be thinking about these things under surveillance, right? All these cameras and various systems are pointed at you

and people in the front office trying to break down every last twitch to see if there's some significance. And then that'll be in the scouting report and the pregame pre-series meeting. And then you're on the mound trying to throw a 98 mile per hour pitch. And meanwhile, you're thinking,

did I make some subtle movement there that's going to give me away? How could that not get in your head? So the whole thing is really interesting, but also potentially another danger area that could cause the next big baseball scandal. So there's always something. And I guess the technology keeps advancing and people find ways around the rules, even if you manage to try to legislate against something. So it's never going to be a solved science exactly. No. And I mean, that's the sort of thing that, you know, having worked for a couple of teams, I mean, it's the sort of thing that is talked about in front offices. I mean,

if we have this technology, yeah, those are the uses that it's there for. But if you pair those cameras with a good data crunching algorithm that's backed up by, okay, let me talk to our pitching instructor and see what should we look for in general, what should we look for with this guy? Well, I can write code that says, all right, well, if the left arm moves three inches this way versus four inches that way. Maybe that means a slider. But where you used to have to rely on a pair of human eyes watching either video or live to pick up on those things. And sometimes, you know, you can just kind of pick that up. And if you're just watching somebody and you have a good knowledge base to do that, but now add the multiplier of the computer who can do all that really quickly doesn't need snack breaks and can take, you know, a year of data and crunch it like that to where you can say, all right, we have actionable intelligence that says, hey, hey, guys, look, if you see this motion from the picture, it means there's a fastball coming.

It means there's a fastball coming. It's the sort of thing that if it can be done, someone's going to do it. And you're right, because that then very quickly becomes, is that cheating or is that the march of progress? Is there a counter move to that? And these are things that people do sweat about in front offices. And I will say that there's also the thought's also the thought of, you know, we should try to get ahead on this sort of thing. Well, then you get, you know, what the Astros did with the sign stealing scandal that happened in the garbage can. And, you know, it just kind of, well, maybe we should do this. Well, what if we went a little bit further? Well, what if we went a little bit

further? And it slowly, you know, devolves into something that is a threat to the game itself and the fairness of the game. So I think that, you know, at the end of the book, I ask about, I ask five more questions about what the game is going to look like. And one of them is, what is the role of technology going to be in the game? And we have technologies that have been advanced by, you know, advancements in camera technology, but also the ability to compile and then share large data sets that can look for some of these things that we never had to think about before. field, it was a fair fight. Well, now you've got a computer in the background there. And, you know, unless you're going to outlaw computers in major league front offices, I don't know that there's a good counter move that you can do, or you can ban the cameras or something like that. So that gets into some really thorny questions that we've never really had to consider before.

And so it's an interesting time to be a baseball fan of, you know, the game of baseball, because, you know, we're dealing with some of these bigger philosophical issues. And I mean, they're fun to talk about, but it's also, it's going to have a real effect on the game that's then played on the field. Well, you better start working on the third book now. But while you do, people should pick up your second book, your brand new book. It's called The New Ball Game, The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball. Even if you are pretty plugged into modern baseball and you've been tracking all these trends, you will learn things from this book, as I did, even though I read Russell regularly at Baseball Perspectives. And if there's someone in your life who maybe has fallen away from baseball a bit or is just getting back into it and wondering why it looks different

than it used to, this is a really good primer for them. It's obviously sabermetrically sound, but it is written in a very engaging and accessible way for anyone, regardless of your tolerance for stats and graphs and gory math. So I highly recommend it. And I recommend all of Russell's work, which you can find at BP. And he's on Twitter also at PizzaCutter4. Always a pleasure, Russell. Thank you for filling in.

Thanks so much, Ben. This was awesome. And we started this episode by talking about Joey Votto. One of the things we didn't talk about is that if he finishes strong, it could help bolster his Hall of Fame case, which I already find quite convincing. But every home run helps. However, I think he could retire right now and be a first ballot Canadian Baseball Hall of Famer. So I will be back in just a moment and we'll be talking about the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and its history and baseball in Canada and Bo Naylor's arrival and Joey Votto's return with Scott Crawford, who is the director of operations for the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. Well, it's not quite Canada Day. Effectively Wild Baseball Podcast Well, it's not quite Canada Day.

Got to wait a couple more weeks for that. But it's Canada Day on Effectively Wild because we are now talking to Scott Crawford, who is the Director of Operations for the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and has been for quite some time since the year 2000. In fact, between the induction ceremony for the Hall of Fame, which been for quite some time since the year 2000. In fact, in between the induction ceremony for the Hall of Fame, which just happened this past weekend, and the returns of Joey Votto and Bo Naylor, this just seemed like a great time to talk about Canada. And I'm a dual

citizen. I always think it's a great time to talk about Canada. So, Scott, thank you for coming on the podcast. No, it's great to be on, Ben. I love talking baseball and especially Canadian baseball. Yeah. Well, walk us through this past weekend, because just reading about it and looking at the photos from afar, it seems like it was a great time. You were not only inducting a new class, but also some previously elected players who had been elected during the pandemic when you weren't having in-person ceremonies. And then the two Canadian Hall of Famers in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, Ferguson Jenkins and Larry Walker, were also in attendance. Jenkins was being honored too. So it was sort of a star-studded cast. So walk us through the festivities and the new class that joined the Hall of Fame. For sure. I mean, it's a three-day

festival we always have here, induction weekend. And it starts off, you know, we go to Leftfield Brewery on Thursday night and have a little meet and greet in toronto and it's a great way to spread the word about the hall of fame and raise a little funds and allow people from toronto to get up and close and personal with the hall of famers and that's always a great event we've done that just the last few years and uh like a lot of places we run a celebrity golf tournament and that always happens on the friday in between the left field and the actual ceremony. And it's, again, it's a fundraiser. It's a celebrity golf tournament.

We bring in celebrities from all different sports and mostly baseball, of course, but any sports and hockey players and whatnot. And have a great round of golf and a good day. And then Saturday, this past Saturday was a big day. Like you said, we had six special guests here because two were from 2020. The legendary Blue Jay hitter John Olerud, sweet swinging John. And of course the French voice of the Montreal Expos, Jacques Doucette. He saw basically every single game from the Expos through their career. So he saw everything.

And the Expos had so many great players go through their doors and their dugouts and on their career. So he saw everything. And the Expos had so many great players go through their doors and their dugouts and on their field. So those two were the 2020 class that was mentioned that weren't able to come up yet. And then the 2020 street class, we had four amazing, unique individuals. Again, we had your Blue Jay fan,

you'll know Jesse Barfield. He played the whole decade, basically with the Blue Jays and a couple of years with the Yankees. But one of the best arms in baseball history. You throw that cannon for right field and also a good hitter. He won the American League home run title in 86 with 40 homers. And, you know, he could steal bases and play defense and a great known name.

And then you got Rich Harden. Harden from British Columbia and pitched for Oakland. He had a lot of arm troubles throughout his career, but he still made nine years in the big leagues. He's sixth all-time in strikeouts for Canadians. If he wasn't hurt, which a lot of pitchers, of course, unfortunately get,

his career would have been right up there with the best in the history of Canadian baseball. Denny Boucher, if you know your Blue Jay Expo history, Denny Boucher, if you know, again, you know your Blue Jay Expo history. Denny Boucher was the first Canadian to play for both the Blue Jays and Expos. And so that's pretty cool. There's been four altogether.

But Denny was, he's from Quebec, from Montreal story. So playing for the Expos, his hometown team was great. Ended up pitching 10 years professionally. But he's also, since he hung up with his cleats. He's been scouting for a couple different teams and he's been the head pitching coach for Baseball Canada for the last 20 years. He's been well, keeping busy

after his playing days were over. And the last fella's household name in Manitoba, his name is Joe Weichar. He spent 70 years, seven decades in the game of baseball. Imagine that. He did everything in baseball in Manitoba from starting the Baseball of Manitoba Association, from starting the Baseball of Manitoba Hall of Fame, to helping out Baseball Canada, to coaching for 50 years.

So he's a legend out in Manitoba. So it was great. This year's class that was picked, we have, you know, we have a coach, we have a scout and executive, we have a player from Canada, we have, and we have a Blue Jay player. So it was quite a well-rounded class. Tell me, I guess, a little bit about Jacques Doucette, because he hasn't come up on the podcast all that often, but we get messages from French-Canadian listeners at times suggesting that we do a whole segment or an episode on Jacques Doucette, because not only was he such a longtime and beloved broadcaster, but he really also figured out how to call baseball in French, right? He sort of developed idioms and vocabulary that didn't necessarily exist. You know, he and his partner, Claude Raymond, who was a pitcher and he's also a member of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame since 1984.

But they really kind of pioneered a way to broadcast baseball in French. He did. I mean, he started covering the Expos when they started playing in 1969. And then a couple of years later, he started broadcasting them. a couple years later he started broadcasting them so i think from 1972 right to 2004 i mean he was again he would have been the first french broadcaster because again the expos were the first correct team major league baseball um so he he was starting from scratch and again he saw over 5 000 games then he went on and did the quebec capitals after the expos left and then he did the blue jays for several years and you know he's won our Jack Graney Award for a Lifetime Media Award back in 2004. He's been a finalist for the Fort C. Frick Award a couple of times in Cooperstown.

But now with the induction of him in our Hall of Fame, we hope that might push him over the edge. And again, that Fort C. Frick Award would be pretty important for Jacques and the Quebec fan base, which is gigantic. I mean, the Expos left for various reasons 20 years ago now, which is gigantic. I mean, the Expo's left for various reasons 20 years ago now, which is hard to believe, but there's still a huge fan base out there. Right. And as for Ulrud, now he's someone else who's also had a Cooperstown case.

He was kind of overlooked by the voters, but he has a legitimate argument and I have a soft spot for him because he was my first favorite player. Just a fun player, a great player, an aesthetically pleasing player. Now, some people may be thinking to themselves, John O'Rourke, he's Canadian, huh? Well, no, not exactly. He was born in Seattle, which is close-ish to Canada, but he is not actually Canadian.

However, of course, he was a legendary baseball player in Canada. However, of course, he was a legendary baseball player in Canada. So tell people who is eligible for the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and what the admissions process is like. Because, of course, there are legendary players in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame who are not themselves Canadian. For example, Pedro Martinez was inducted in 2018, who was a pitcher for the Expos, not a Canadian native. So is there sort of a preference for Canadian players? I mean, you know, Joey Votto, he's a first ballot Canadian Baseball Hall of Famer, I assume. He is actually from Canada. He should probably be in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, too, but is there an additional hurdle that non-Canadian natives have to clear? Because otherwise I assume that All Rude and Pedro, I mean, the caliber of players that they were,

if they were actually born in Canada, would they have been earlier selections? Is it more difficult to get in if you are foreign? It might be a little. I mean, 70% of our inductees are Canadian. So we like that percentage because we are the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. But if you think, for example, we'll use this year with John Olerud and Jesse Barfield, they're definitely not Canadian, but they were who you'd go watch. I mean, Jesse was the third of the three outfielders now in the Hall of Fame, right? We had Lloyd Mosby, George Bell, and Jesse Barfield. In the 80s, if you're a Blue Jay fan, you want to see

those three, plus Ernie Witt, Tom Hankey, Dave Steen, for example, and they're all in our Hall of Fame. John O'Reilly, a little bit laughter at Barfield, of course, but again, you don't have to be Canadian, but you have to have something significant of a game in baseball in Canada. For example, like you said, Pedro Martinez,

he only pitched four years in Montreal, but he's only an expo to win a Cy Young. And he was just an amazing, amazing pitcher with the Expos. John Olerud, just over 900 games with the Blue Jays, but he was such a great career, a 300-career hitter, first all-time on base percentage with the Blue Jays. And he was just, he was loved by the fans. So, I mean, being Canadian definitely does does help but we also look at the aspect of what did you contribute to baseball in Canada and we take that

into account as well right yeah Tim Raines a Canadian baseball hall of famer before he was in the Cooperstown hall of fame right so you look at those expos and you got you got Raines and you got Wallach and Gary Carter, Andre Das and Steve Rogers, you know, Vladimir Guerrero, you know, on and on about great Expos who definitely aren't Canadian. But again, they were who you went to watch when you went to watch the Montreal Expos. Yeah. Rusty Staub. Yeah. Many more. So what is the, are there specific criteria for induction? I mean, I know you have to have been retired for, what, three years instead of five for the Cooperstown. You know, is there a certain career length or are there certain criteria?

And then it's also a 75 percent election threshold. But who is the electorate who votes? Yeah, and you hit it right on there. You have to retire three years. You need 75 percent of the vote to get in. We have a committee spread across Canada. There's 24 individuals that vote on who gets in the Hall of Fame, which is a lot less than the Cooperstown have all their media people. They

have 400 or so that vote. But we like ours. Ours is sort of split up. I mean, we only have 24 people, but it's a mix of media, past inductees, executives, and historians. So four different thoughts, I guess, people for what they think is important and allows historians to chime in and the past inductees and the media people and whatnot. So it definitely allows more variety of thoughts and input into it. And again, it's one of those things where it's tough to get into a Hall of Fame and it definitely should be tough to get into any Hall of Fame. And the committee seems to be doing a pretty good job each year.

Yeah. Is it contentious? I mean, does it get as heated as the Cooperstown process? I assume there is not a Jay Jaffe who has a JAWS system for the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame where you're kind of graded on your statistics and that kind of accomplishment. Is there more of a skew toward, you know, being famous, having done something that made you a prominent figure as opposed to clearing some statistical threshold that gets you into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame? Yeah, I mean, you look at ours. I mean, we don't really have a threshold or you've got to play X amount of games or you've got to play X amount of years.

It's just what our community feels is significant. And they take the whole aspect in. I mean, again, this year is a perfect example. Joe Weichar didn't play a day of pro baseball, let alone Major League Baseball. And he's in our Hall of Fame because he spent 70 years in Manitoba keeping baseball going. I mean, you can argue without Joe Weichar, you know, Hall of Famer Corey Koski might not have gotten into baseball. You know, because again,

Corey's grew up in Manitoba and Joe was basically doing every aspect of baseball in Manitoba. And Denny Boucher, I mean, he pitched 10 years professional, really just a cup of coffee in the big leagues for four different years,

but not full four years. And, but he spent the last 20 years outside the game helping run uh baseball canada as their national team's pitching coach and he's also been a scout for the last 20 years so um we definitely look into all aspects of the person's game and and uh the more they do obviously makes it an easier decision and there's no real there's no uh fisticuffs type thing in our, in our calls or our meetings or whatnot. It's you know, people definitely voice their opinion. And,

and when we announce our inductees in early February each year, we, we definitely hear from the public and you know, they, cause everyone wants to see their favorite person or player in a hall of fame, which I don't blame them. I, you know, everyone has their favorite person that, you know, things should be in the hall of fame and in any Hall of Fame, in any sport, wherever your favorite sport is. And, but people, you know, they're passionate about their friends and family and players they love.

So that's, that's a good thing. So this is kind of a broad question, but, but tell me a little bit about the history of baseball in Canada, which goes way back, of course, and then bringing us up to speed on the history of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, which was established more than 40 years ago now in 1982, and then the first class in 1983. So what are the roots of baseball in Canada? And then how did those eventually flower into having Canada's own Baseball Hall of Fame? Yeah, I mean, the historians

have found so far that 1793 in New Brunswick is when baseball was first mentioned in writing. No details about it. It just said there was a game of baseball played at King's square. And it was one of the newspapers in New Brunswick. So that's where the first mention there were, there were obviously a lot of variety of games over the years, but there was a big game in 1819 in Hamilton.

There was a really big game in Beachville, Ontario in 1838. And that's what we sort of based some of our information off was that game. There was a fellow who wrote about that game that was the mayor of St. Mary's, a doctor here in St. Mary's and lived here in St. Mary's. So a lot of people wonder why the Hall of Fame's in St. Mary's. It was basically because of that documentation

from an 1838 ball game that a fellow from St. Mary's. It was, it was basically because of that documentation from an 1838 ball game that Bella from St. Mary's did. But, and then you, I mean, we, we've had baseball as a mid 1800s, you got all these towns in Ontario, Southern Ontario, basically Guelph, London, Woodstock, Beachville, you know, Hamilton, Hamilton at the first team, first league in the 1850s. And that just grew from there. The Guelph was, they had a Canadian championship and basically Woodstock, London and Guelph shared it back and forth

in the 1860s and 1870s. And, you know, and then we joined, I mean, we had Bob Addy. Bob Addy was the first Canadian to play Major League Baseball and played in the very first year in 1876. So we've had some really good talent over the years. And the Hall of Fame,

like you said, it started in 1982 in Toronto. It was over where the Blue Jays used to play at Exhibition Stadium. And it lasted about 10 years in Toronto. And then we brought it over to St. Mary's. And it's expanded and been renovated recently, right? I mean, you've kind of spruced the place up in recent years. Yeah, we did a big renovation in 2018. We have a 32-acre site here at the Hall of Fame. So we have four baseball fields and some walking trails and there's about a thousand games on our ball fields over the summertime. So it's really busy here. And we wanted to really upgrade the museum because we've really built ball fields for a while and gone to the museum we had here since the mid-90s and um so in 2018 we shut down for one year after a few years of planning

for it of course and uh we added 2,500 square feet of space so we basically uh tripled the size we had and we made it a proper archive and storage location we hired a curator that could be on staff permanently um so allowed us to look after our collection properly, proper museum standards. And it really, we only closed one year. So we reopened April 2019, had a great opening year. And then as we all know, COVID really shut down things in 2020 and 2021. But last summer we were back to normal. And this year we're looking forward to a normal year as well. Yeah. And was this weekend especially joyous with Walker and Fergie Jenkins in attendance and being honored? Did the Hall of Famers always annually flock back to the induction ceremony as

they tend to at Cooperstown? Or was this a particularly packed crowd that you had? We don't get back as many as Cooperstown does. We always get back a dozen or so that come back each year. And it varies, again, who can come back. A lot of our people are still involved with the game or coaching their kids, and they don't want to miss their kids' stuff because they're the head coach. But we get some back every year. And yeah, this year is extra special because we announced the Ferguson Jenkins way after our legend, Fergie Jenkins. I mean, we have a, like I mentioned, we have a 32 32 acre site with a road that goes through it and it didn't have a name so it was just it was just the hall of fame road right because it went through the hall of fame

site so after uh some chatting with our board of directors over the last six months and whatnot and we talked to fergie and he of course loved the idea as anyone would. And so, yeah, we unveiled Ferguson Jenkins Way just this past weekend on June 17th. And Fergie was there to pull down the silk sheet, the silk blanket we had over it. And we celebrated the renaming of our road to our site. And one of the nice things about the inductees, because it's the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and not tied to any specific league, is that all kinds of people from all different times and all kinds of backgrounds and all different leagues can be members, right? So, you know, it's a lot of women from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League inducted, people from the Asahi Baseball Club. People from the Asahi Baseball Club, you know, I know that people have advocated and hoped for the induction of the Chatham Colored All-Stars, the first black team to win an Ontario Baseball Association title that's not inducted yet. But a lot of people hope that that will be the case. But it's, I guess, a broader swath of people, you know, since you're not tied to they have to have been in the

National League, in the American League or certain leagues. Right. So you can kind of recognize and honor people that have made contributions all across the spectrum of the sport. Yeah, which is a really nice thing for us. I mean, Cooperstown is the greatest baseball museum I've ever been to, obviously. And it's amazing. I've been to the Negro league hall of fame.

I've been to all kinds of different ones and Cooperstown is the thing we all try to be. But yeah, they're, they're definitely attached to major league baseball where we, again, with Joe Weichardt of the world or a few years ago, Ray Carter or Ron Stead who played amateur baseball, you know, we, we aren't a pinhold into a certain activity or certain teams or leagues. It's just baseball in Canada. So it's whether teams have played here, people from Dominican or anywhere from in the world that did something significant in the game of baseball in Canada is eligible.

And yeah, you go down our list and you'll see all kinds of names you don't recognize until you read their bio on our website or in our museum on their plaque. And you're like, well, yeah, that is a pretty cool story. And they did do a lot and they deserve it. Yeah. And is there any formal or informal affiliation or resource sharing or cooperation or coordination between the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and other baseball halls of fame? Is it even just talking about exhibits or sharing resources ever, or is it just sort of a mutual admiration from afar? Yeah. Oh, no, we work really well with the National Hall of Baseball of Fame in Cooperstown.

I mean, Tom Scheiber is the head curator there, but all their staff is amazing. Josh Rawitsch, the president, is fantastic and they treat us like gold. And we go down there, if we have any any questions again they they're the knowers of everything and uh so we touch base with them they get back to us right away um you know we uh but the same with like we're all working together we're all baseball museums you know the negro league uh museum is is great in kansas city and we're friends with them we've been there a couple times they've been up here um but all of us a lot of teams have hall of Fame museums now too. And, you know, St. Louis and Cleveland and Kansas City and, you know, a lot of the teams have these museums now in their stadiums

and they're all preserving the history of the game in baseball. I mean, which is what we all want. You know, baseball is the best sport in the world. And, you know, the St. Louis Cardinals will preserve all the St. Louis history. So if you need something from them, we call them up and, you know, we can pick their brains or ask them what to do, whether it's Canadian or not. We just, you know, we're all baseball museums. And we all, my experience has been we all work very well together. So if someone visits St. Mary's, I mean, with Halls of Fame, we often tend to fixate on the plaques, right? The players who are in there. St. Mary's. I mean, with Halls of Fame, we often tend to fixate on the plaques, right, the players

who are in there, but that's often just scratching the surface of what you actually see when you go to these museums and the exhibits that they have and the artifacts and the archives, right? So, what can people see at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame other than the inductees? And is there sort of a rotating set of exhibits or is, you know, much of what you have kind of like an iceberg where most of it's under the surface and, you know, you have to dig into the archives to find all of the holdings that you have, or is it all available to the public? Yeah, no, I mean, like most museums, we have a very small percentage on display. I mean, our total size is 3,500 square feet, so we're have a very small percentage on display i mean our total size is 3500 square feet so we're still a very small museum in the in the museum world uh but it's uh there's a lot

online if you go to our website you can find hundreds and maybe thousands of artifacts online where you can it's not as good as seeing them in public when you or in person when you can actually be here to see them but um it's just the way the museums and small museums are going but you're right like our our plaque gallery is you know 25 of our museum yet people spend probably 75 percent of their time in the plaque gallery because again they're reading about all the hall of famers and learning about the people they don't they don't necessarily know about um but yeah the uh the museum you know we sort of split it into five different areas we have you know the history and cultural aspect of the game we have a blue jay expo room we have a players room that concentrates on not only canadian players but all players like babe ruth and jackie robinson and roberto clemente

who all obviously are very important to baseball history and you know we have a room that's sort of like i'll say recent but sort of recently retired or recent players it's sort of like the last 20 years of Canadian baseball history. And then we have our front room, which are the first room we get into which changes annually. And it's sort of our newest artifacts. And we really concentrate on like the legends like Larry and Fergie and Joey Votto and the women's national team and any current displays that we,

that we have that are new artifacts we have, I should say, that we want to show people sort of our new collection because we're always trying to collect i mean we got so many great players in the game and and uh we want to be able to show off that and it's tough because if you're if you're a parent with a kid that comes in the museum and you know they don't know larry walker because he retired almost 20 years ago but uh they know the current guys who were playing and so we try to have a bit of everything on display for people to look at. So just to pull back a bit and talk about the larger landscape of baseball in Canada, I mean, how big a deal is it when a player like Joey Votto comes back and has a game like he had, or when a player like Bo Naylor shows up on the scene, right?

And these are both players from Ontario. I mean, does that make major waves in Canada, even if you don't have the perfect storm scenario where you have a native son playing for the Blue Jays or in the past, the Expos? It does. I mean, last night, I mean, our social media feed blew up when they announced Votto's comeback

and then he hit his home run and then he got a hit and then he got a walk and you know he was his he was his normal self you know he came out for a standing ovation after his home run and you know he's so happy to be back playing i mean he's such a professional that uh he doesn't like playing bad and he was playing bad last year but it was because of his shoulder injury um so i'm excited he's back he's got just over half a season to play i think they got about 90 games left i think the reds do so you know hopefully you can play most of them his shoulder holds up and you know he's obviously been around a long time and he's on the tail end of his career being i think he's 39 years old and then you got young bow nailer i mean he's so exciting. He's a young catcher for Cleveland.

And I hope they, you know, let him play five days a week the rest of summer to get familiar. He had his cup of coffee last year. He got called up in September. And his brother, of course, plays first base. And so it's pretty cool to have the double Naylor combination in Cleveland. And Josh, his brother, is having a great season with Cleveland. And Bo, I think

if he gets the chance, I mean, he's their top catching prospect and one of the top prospects in all of baseball. And he was drafted out of high school just a few years ago.

So he's got a very, very bright future ahead of him. And we're so excited. So what are the baseball hotbeds in Canada? How is the enthusiasm for the sport concentrated? I mean, obviously, you have Toronto for the sport concentrated? I mean, obviously,

you have Toronto's the epicenter, I suppose, with the remaining major league team, but you have minor league baseball in Vancouver. You have independent league baseball in various places in Quebec and Manitoba and Ontario also. So are there areas that are sort of baseball deserts? No one pays attention to baseball. And then there are others where people are sort of baseball deserts? No one pays attention to baseball. And then there are others where people are very into baseball. How is the enthusiasm for the sport distributed or concentrated across the country? Yeah, I mean, definitely British Columbia and Ontario have the most, but the biggest population, BC, has the nicest weather. So long as baseball seasons. But I mean, you got you got Mike Stroka from Calgary, Alberta, right?

You know, he was pitching for the Braves and then tore his Achilles twice. And he's coming back this year down AAA currently, but he's been up in the big leagues. And, you know, but yeah, Ontario and BC are by far the two hotbeds. You know, the draft is coming up in July soon. And we'll see where all the, I'll call them kids, but all the, all the young, uh, adults that get, uh, drafted come from, but you know, British Columbia, I mean, you got the Tyler O'Neill's of the world from BC who was having some injury issues with St. Louis this year, James Paxton's back at Boston,

pitching amazing, uh, Nick Pavetta is pitching for Boston as well this year. And, um, but it's, uh, it's definitely, uh, it's definitely BC and Ontario. And then, you know, every province has that hidden treasure. That's for sure, though. Yeah. Is there a sense that enthusiasm for baseball or the caliber of baseball play in Canada is increasing or decreasing or is it sort of stable? You know, I didn't look to see if the percentage or the number of Canadian players in MLB has gone up or down significantly.

But is the appetite for the sports increasing? Or, you know, you look at the WBC roster, is kind of the caliber of play shifting in either direction noticeably? Yeah, I mean, I think we're getting more popular. I mean, it has a lot to do with the Blue Jays. I mean, there was, of course, when they won the World Series 30 years ago, baseball skyrocketed in the mid-2015s with Jose Bautista and Edwin and Tuloinger and Bassett and on and on and on with those guys and Romano and um so if the Blue Jays do well we find that we're more we're busier and I think because it's cool to like baseball the Blue Jays do well and the kids like baseball and then the kids want to play baseball and then the parents like well let's go to a baseball museum or go to a Blue Jay game or a or an inter an inner county game or you know a low level

like a minor league game out in vancouver or something like that so or a can-am league or something independent league in quebec it's uh so it really goes how the blue jays go and i think right now i mean we're the one the youngest rosters on the wbc and uh we won a couple games and you know you look at like edward julian's playing for the Twins and they just called up Jordan as well from the Twins. He's a Canadian pitcher and we got some bright young talent. And like we talked about Bo earlier, I mean, we have some great talent coming up to the minors, which will, you know, we got several guys that are sort of mid-20s as well. So we got a good base for several years in the big leagues to come. We've got a good base for several years in the big leagues to come.

I don't know if this is something you can be unbiased about, not that you need to be, but are you an advocate for Montreal as a baseball market? Just aside from someone who's in Canada and loves baseball and wants more interest in baseball, do you think it makes sense as a home yet again for Major League Baseball in the future? I think for sure. I mean, there's lots of cities that have had a second chance. I mean, when Montreal moved to Washington, that was Washington's third Major League Baseball team. So they lost two previous teams, and then they still got a third team.

So, I mean, there's lots of decades in between all those teams, but it's the third time Washington got a team. So, you know, the Expos, I could definitely uh work um with a new stadium a smaller open air stadium like a lot of teams obviously built in the last decade or two and if they want you know they don't need 50 60 000 seats like the old olympic stadium had i think they probably fit 50 000 in that um they need 35 000 seat stadium um you know downtown with great transportation and easy to get to. And I think it could definitely work.

I think if it's going to work, it's going to be a long ways. It's going to be several years away just because again, they sort of, they had their plan with Tampa Bay and it didn't work, obviously. And so this sort of would have to start over the new plan, but I think, I think the appetite is there for baseball Montreal. And like I say, other teams have got a second chance. So why not Montreal?

Sure. All right. Well, tell people how they can find you, either the physical location of the Hall of Fame or the digital imprint. And any other information that you think would be helpful for people to know about baseball in Canada or any other resources you want to shout out? Yeah, for sure. I mean, we're in Southern Ontario, so we're, we're basically if people don't know the area too well, we're halfway between Detroit and Toronto. So that pretty gives you a big Southern Ontario,

but we're two hours West of Toronto. Easy to find. We're a small town, 7,000 people, but easy to find. And then when everything's on our website at baseballhalloffame.ca, we've got social media, we've got Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as well. So please follow us on those and just check out our website for all our information. think they'd be in some massive city center, but no, for historical reasons, they are where they are. I guess maybe the St. Mary's location could be more historically sound, I guess, than the Cooper Sound location, but the reasons why that's there, but there's a lot of tradition behind it, but nice places to visit, right? So we encourage everyone to check it out. And thank you for talking a little bit about baseball in Canada. I appreciate it.

No, anytime, Ben, it's fantastic. Like I said, at the beginning, I love talking baseball and even Canadian baseball, even better.

So we're, we're excited for another great season and a great blue Jay run into the playoffs. All right. It is time to end with the pass blast, which comes to us from 2022 and from David Lewis, an architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston, in May of 2022, the Effectively Wild podcast started a segment called the Past Blast. Nope, that is not the actual Past Blast, but it could be. David got more creative than that,

though, and he found something that happened only last year that I either never knew about or had forgotten. So well done, David. He writes Sudden Death Baseball. In 2022, baseball leagues continued to tinker with extra innings rules. While the major leagues continued to use the zombie runner rule, the MLB Draft League, a collegiate summer league, experimented with a new solution. The Draft League, created by MLB in 2021, served as an additional testing ground for experimental new rules, including a radical, quote unquote, idea to speed up extra inning games. For the 2022 season, extra innings in the draft league would last no longer than one half inning. As explained by

Andrew Kastelman of NorthJersey.com in a July 2022 article, if a game was tied after nine regulation innings, the two teams would play one final half inning to decide the winner. The batting team would begin with a zombie runner on first base, and if they managed to score a run, they would win the game. If they were not able to score, the team playing defense would win. Before each game, the home team was given the choice of whether they would bat or play defense should the extra half inning be necessary. Players and managers reportedly had split opinions on the rule change. One reason for the change was a concern for the health of pitchers and to allow for teams to better manage pitch counts in a developmental league. Jeff Manto, manager of the Trenton Thunder, said that without question that goal had been achieved and that he no longer had to worry

about who might be available to pitch in a long extra inning game. The rule also added a new strategic layer for managers who had to make the decision of whether their team would field or hit. Manto suggested that his decision-making typically came down to pitching availability, though he preferred to put the team in the field, citing the level of pitching talent. He did concede, however, that the added pressure on fielders might lead him to consider batting.

It's basically trying to just put the ball in play and let the other team make a mistake, he added. And at that level, mistakes probably pretty common. Players tried to treat the high-pressure extra frame as calmly as possible. Thunder pitcher Malcolm Gilchrist said, I would definitely try to approach it as just a regular inning, Probably pretty common. Players tried to treat the high-pressure extra frame as calmly as possible. Thunder pitcher Malcolm Gilchrist said, I would definitely try to approach it as just a regular inning.

Just go out there and give it all you got. The Thunder were 2-1 in three extra inning games at that point in the season, batting each time. Many believe the rule would have a future in professional baseball. I think the rule is good for this level of baseball, Gilchrist said, although he believed at levels where game results matter more, it may be challenging to sell the idea that one half inning decides a game. It would be challenging to sell that to me. Manto remained confident despite this potential fan reaction. I think it's going to happen. I really do, he said, concluding, I think it's quick. It's safe. I think the fans will react to it. They would definitely react to it. I am once again asking

at levels where the results really matter, could we just play the games to completion? Is that too much to ask? And if we must abbreviate them, can we not keep playing like normal until then? Evidently, it is too much to ask. There will be one more pass blast, so stay tuned. One update I mentioned earlier when I was talking to Russell that it seemed like Will Myers was the one who would be the odd man out for playing time in Cincinnati. And indeed, after we spoke, he was designated for assignment just after being reinstated from the injured list. Hey, welcome back. Goodbye. Also, the Reds won again. Make that 10 in a row. And the Giants won in a walk-off. Make that nine in a row. Wanted to share a couple of responses we got to our email answers last time. Mike wrote, I can't believe that you spent all that time talking about the

Otani twins without talking about the potential for Otani on Otani action. By which I mean pitcher Otani playing against hitter Otani, not something horny. Get your mind out of the gutter. Never occurred to me, Mike. It would finally solve the question of whether he's a better hitter or a better pitcher. Good point. I was thinking of them as teammates in that scenario, which is what the question set up. They still wouldn't face each other.

But of course, once the scheme was revealed, maybe one of them would change teams and then they would face each other. And that would be fun. We also discussed a hypothetical scenario where teams are empowered to take a mulligan on one play per game. And we talked about when managers would do that. Sean wrote in to note that we had mostly talked about it from the defending team's perspective, erasing a play that went wrong in the field, but that you would often want to use it on offense. You know, you have a big plate appearance with the bases loaded, let's say, and someone pops out. Well, you give them another crack at it. Yes, you would often want to use it on offense. You know, you have a big plate appearance with the bases loaded, let's say, and someone pops out. Well, you give them another crack at it.

Yes, you would definitely do that. Jonathan says, suppose this had been a rule since baseball's origins, would we differentiate between perfect games throughout history that used or didn't use the one pitch do-over, or rather, would those details be glossed over by most record books? Further, imagine the palpable anticipation of umpire Jim Joyce looking toward the Tiger dugout after his blown call in Armando Galarraga's near perfecto, a replay before replay, if you will. All in all, I can't help but wonder if managers throughout the 20th century, pre-stricter pitch

counts would have felt pressured to save the do-over in the event of a pitcher losing a no-no or perfect game in the late innings. And yeah, I think those games were rare enough that you wouldn't use your do-over for them that often. Usually the no-hitter or the perfect game is broken up early enough that you wouldn't have to think about it. But when your pitcher did have an attempt going in the late innings, you definitely save your mulligan to try to preserve it instead of using it to try to score more runs yourself. Of course, if your pitcher has a perfect game going late in the game, you probably have a lead already. And yes, I think we would and should distinguish between mulligan-aided no-hitters and perfect games and pure ones that didn't require a

do-over. Finally, Sean noted, you mentioned on episode 2021 what kind of embarrassing plays you would use the mulligan on and really only mentioned defensive plays for embarrassing situations you could undo. But I think the real answer would be two plans. Someone missing a base while running, tripping between bases, getting hopelessly deked by a defender, etc. Yes, those would be mulligan worthy as well. Also, since there was plenty of bad baseball news last week, I just want to relay some good uplifting baseball news that a year from today as I record this, June 20th, 2024, the Giants and the Cardinals will play at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, the oldest professional ballpark in the United States

and the longtime home of the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues. So that will be a way to honor the Negro Leagues and Willie Mays who played there with the Black Barons. And it will be right after Juneteenth. This is different from the Field of Dreams game tradition and hopefully it becomes a tradition in its own right. You could play at other surviving Negro Leagues parks. I think that's really great. And I hope that Willie will be there to see it.

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