Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2113: Just Like They Scripted It

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Patreon supporter Nick Taber banter about Nick’s baseball background and MLB’s most hated teams, then (19:41) answer listener emails about baseball’s newsbreakers as secret newsmakers, a baseball mercenary who plays for multiple teams in the same city (or who has it out for one particular opponent), whether we would remember […]

What's the greatest podcast of all? If you love the game of baseball It's effectively wild It's Effectively Wild. It's Effectively Wild. With Ben Lindbergh. And Meg Riley. Hello and welcome to episode 2113 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrafts presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer, joined by Meg Riley of Fangraphs.

Hello, Meg. Hello. It's been a backloaded week for us here at Effectively Wild. You never know what we're going to talk about. You never know when we're going to talk about it. But we will get to our typical three episodes this week. Come hell or high water, we will be recording a weekend episode this week. We'll be catching up on some news and banter, but we wanted to do some emails today.

That's always fun. And we have company. One of those Patreon supporters that we say the show is presented by is joining us and presenting the show in person today. Nick Tabor, Mike Trout tier Patreon supporter. Welcome to Effectively Wild. Hey, guys. Thanks so much for having me. I'm glad to be here. Well, thanks so much for being here. And thanks so much for helping us be here, making it possible for us to be here. I always start off by asking our Patreon guests the

traditional question, what could have possibly possessed you to support us at this level? So tell us a little bit about how you discovered Effectively Wild and what made you want to become a big high roller patron and join us on a pod. I started listening to the podcast, I think right around episode 1000 when Jeff came on and it moved to fan graphs. I've gone back and listened to some of the back catalog before then, but not the whole thing. How dare you show up here without having done your homework?

I know. I haven't gotten through every single one. I know. I also missed like 20 episodes during the pandemic because I didn't have a commute anymore. Yeah, I'm really slack in there. But so yeah, I've been listening since then, which I guess was like 2016 or so. Not completely sure. So I was in college then, and now I am a full-fledged adult that makes money. So I'm able to support the podcast more actively. I've been kind of a lower-tier supporter for a few years. And then during the playoffs this past fall,

I was one tier short of the playoff live streams. And there was one on as I was looking at, you know, my computer or something. And I was like, you know, I should tune into this. And I had had, you know, a couple margaritas at that point as well. And so I was like, well, this seems like as good a time as any to become a Mike Trout tier supporter. You know, it's something I had kind of had in the back of my mind for a while, but I'm glad I did.

Wow. Usually when alcohol lowers your inhibitions, the result is maybe not quite as wholesome or at least beneficial to me and personally enriching as that. So that seems like if you're going to have a couple margaritas and make an impulse purchase, that at least from my perspective is among the best you could make. Yeah, it's certainly less damaging for some other possibilities. Yeah. This makes me think, actually, our highest tier has always been the Mike Trout tier. has always been the Mike Trout tier. Now, these days, when Mike Trout is perhaps past the best that we have seen or will see of him,

do we need to demote him from the Mike Trout tier? Ben, I mean, look, he's still, if we were going to have like a patron saint of the podcast, it would still be Mike Trout, right? Like, I think that we can have that spot sit as a, a monument to him, right?

Our little, it is our version of the hall of fame, which maybe makes me think that we should get William's S the D O out of there, but that's neither here nor there. I think it's fine. I think it's fine. It's fine for

it to be like the Mike Trout Memorial spot. Oh, that is sad. Yeah. He's still alive, guys. He is still very much alive. There are a couple of people we have tears named after who sadly are no longer alive, but they are still important to us and are still honored for their contributions. So, yeah, I don't think we need to demote Mike Trout. He was the best, even if he is no longer the best. And he meant a lot to this podcast, right? So just in recognition of his career contributions, all the hypotheticals, all the material he has provided for us over the years. And hey, maybe he still

has a bounce back in him, but he's still the exemplar of baseball excellence, even though we have a lower tier that is a Shohei Otani tier. Shohei Otani, not necessarily better or more valuable than peak Mike Trout, just does it in a different way, maybe even more impressive and sensational way. But war-wise, same neighborhood, right? I also think, Ben, like it's fine. It's fine. But I don't know that we need to like you do so much to burnish the reputation of Otani on this podcast. Like I don't know if we need to do more stuff toward that.

And I think that that project is well in hand, you know? Yeah. It's nice that he has us in his corner. Right. Yeah. Giving him some publicity. Where would he be? Right.

Yeah. Burnishing his reputation. So, Nick, what is it that you do that has given you some disposable income to dispose on this podcast? What do you want to share with people about your professional life, where you are in the world, anything personal or biographical that you care to share? Sure. So like Ben, I am a born and raised New Yorker from Manhattan. I currently made the questionable life decision to move slightly out of the city to Westchester in New Rochelle. I'm a software engineer working at a consulting company, mostly doing financial software-related stuff. So very not exciting.

But I do occasionally use some of those skills for baseball-related purposes, which maybe I'll give a brief shout-out to on the end. Yes. which maybe I'll give a brief shout out to on the end. Yes. So try to find ways to kind of use those skills for my actual passions and interests, of which baseball is one of. I guess my story with baseball and all that is not super exciting.

I played growing up. I kind of took some time away from baseball in my later teenage years, and then one day, one summer during college when I had nothing going on. Baseball was a thing that happened every day for three hours and gave me something to watch for three hours every day. And I kind of got more invested in the analytics and media sides and all that. So that's kind of how I came back around to baseball and Effectively Wild.

It is handy in that way. It's always on or it's on a whole lot of the time. Do you root or have you rooted for a particular team? I would say I'm a Yankees fan, but not like a super diehard one. It was wise of you not to volunteer that, I suppose, initially, because you've just turned a significant portion of the audience against you. Well, I think, you know, we might have slowly worked towards graduating away from the most hated team in baseball. We might even be down to number three now, which would be... You think? Huh? You think sub-Astros and Dodgers, potentially? That's definitely the conversation. I don't know if we're quite there yet, but

the Dodgers are, you know, gaining momentum. Right. I wonder the most hated teams index these days because the Yankees built up such a large lead in that category. It's kind of hard. It's not like anyone has caught up championships wise. And yet the longer you go without winning one and being somewhat mediocre of late, it's maybe hard to hate the Yankees with that acute kind of rage, right? Like you can still hold it against them kind of a lifetime evil empire career contributions level, but how mad can you be about a team that is not currently the class of the league, right? You can gloat about that fact. You can absolutely revel in their missing the playoffs, let's say, but that's a little bit different from just being

the current super team. Can I offer a perspective as someone who doesn't live in the greater New York area? And who is not or has not ever been a Yankees fan to you, Ben. I don't know. I know that, Ben, you're not one for football, really. Nick, do you watch football in addition to baseball or are you just a baseball guy? Not much. I watched it much more when I lived with my family and it was on all the time. But yeah, certainly kept up actively on my own. Well, are both of you aware that last weekend the Dallas Cowboys lost to the Green Bay Packers

in kind of spectacular fashion at home? Yes, did hear that. So here's the thing about the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys have not been at the high, high, the mighty peak that they once were for a while now. at the high, high, the mighty peak that they once were for a while now. But you would not know that based on the reaction that people had online to them getting thoroughly trounced at home by the Green Bay Packers, who were a lower seed, obviously, because they were on the road here. So I just would offer that I don't think we should mistake dormancy for dissipation. You know, I think they're different. I think that all it will take is one long playoff run again for it to reanimate.

And sometimes it's really telling when, you know, you have a season like the Yankees just did where things didn't go to plan for them. Although they did not end in quite as catastrophic a fashion as I think we were worried they might for a bit there. I don't know if we were worried about it, but – Well, you know, like – Yes, we discussed it, certainly. I don't want Nick to be sad, you know? It's okay. He's a nice guy.

He's helping out the podcast. I enjoy the Yankees and I support them, but my emotions do not live and die with the Yankees very often. Sounds healthy. Yeah, I had the unfortunate misfortune of getting really into baseball, like basically right after the Yankees started stopped winning championships. And while they were still incredibly good, I perhaps have more of a Dodgers view of my first, you know, 10 years of Yankees fandom than a, you know, we got lucky and won all the championships view or whatever. Right, right. I recognize the important role that the Yankees have, like, in the sport. I don't want, I think it's better for baseball when the Yankees are good, candidly.

Even if some of the trappings of the franchise, I find a little like eye rolly, right? But people are ready. They're ready to hate again. You know, they're ready then. Yeah, yeah. The latent hatred is still there, right? Because I was wondering if there was like a half-life for hatred, a hatred half-life where, as you say, it would kind of dissipate over time. Like you need to refresh and renew that animus. And maybe there is some length of time. Like if the Yankees had several decades of incompetence, right? It would be different.

You know, they haven't even had a losing season, right? So let's talk about a losing season before we kind of write off Yankees supremacy. Yeah, I mean, we were talking about the Cowboys. If anything, that would be the benchmark for how long it takes for these things to fall off because they were good before the Yankees and also have been significantly less good overall than the Yankees in the last, you know, 25 years or whatever. So, and clearly that has only waned a little bit. So, yeah. And I think part of it too, is that the Yankees, and this is where I, you know, you, one must give them their due, right? They were so good for so long.

They just, they occupy so much real estate in the sports collective imagination i think it just takes a while for that to to wane but it you know it comes with like a a grudging respect i think even if people you know will accuse them of spending their way to championships or whatever like i think people generally look at that franchise and are like yeah right kind of do you got to hand it to him whereas like the hatred that people feel for say the ast the Astros. I don't know. I don't know how long that will take. I think it'll it'll last longer than the last guy who was on the banging scheme team being there. I think it will last longer than that. Will it last, you know, for 50 years? Probably not. But, you know, I think all you have to do is see how they get booed when they go on the road to know that that is still fresh for some or at least easy, right? It's an easy thing to grab onto when you're an opposing fan and you're faced with the Astros. It's like, well, I could make fun of, you know, a specific thing on the current team, but why not just talk about the vinging scheme?

Yeah. I was going to say that, that I think it does depend partly on continuity. So with the Astros, because that was tied to a specific team really and an incarnation of the team, you're right. Maybe that stigma will linger, but it would be kind of hard to justify from a perspective once Altuve's gone and Bregman's gone, like the last that stigma will linger, but it would be kind of hard to justify from a booing perspective. Once Altuve's gone and Bregman's gone, like the last holdovers from those sign stealing teams are gone, then on what basis are you booing really now? Yeah. It's because I don't like the astros, Ben. See, you're not a booer. And so you're looking for like, you understand, exactly. You understand booing through the prism of like,

what would it take for me to boo as a non-booer? But plenty of people are just booers. They booed in Astro's prospect of the Futures game in LA a couple years ago. And that kid wasn't even signed when the banging scheme happened. So, you know, those were Dodger fans, but still they were like, oh, he's an Astro. Boo. And it's like, yes. Yeah.

He was like 14 when that happened. I don't know that the Astros winning another championship helped them redeem themselves or made them more hated because now they just fall into the generic category of team we're tired of seeing all the time? Yeah, I think probably the latter. I think it made a more convincing case that they weren't purely a product of the sign stealing, which I never thought they were only good because they were cheating.

I thought they were good and also they were cheating. And if anything, the fact that they were so good made it even sillier that they cheated that way because they didn't even need to do that to be good. But yes, I think it's probably harder to dismiss their just general excellence over the past several seasons because they kept winning, unless you're especially conspiracy-minded and you just assumed that somehow they have managed to keep cheating under the radar. But then it has, I think, only reinforced the feeling of unfairness and people being outraged at the fact that they weren't punished more severely,

that they have, to some some extent gotten away with it. They have continued to win, right? They haven't been dinged so severely that it just drove them out of contention. And in fact, some of the very same players who were on the cheating teams were still on the post-cheating victorious team. So I think probably it only fanned the flames of the anti-Astros sentiment. Yeah. Some people really do think they're still cheating, though. Yes. Yes. I do wonder, though, I don't think that can persist that long after the last vestiges of those teams have moved on.

We will see. But I think by that point, it will start to seem even sillier than it does to boo them now. But I think the continuity really matters, not just in terms of who's on the team, but also who's running the team. The fact that Jerry Jones still owns the Cowboys. I think, you know, someone who goes back to the Aikman Emmett Smith days and also is just generally loathed himself sort of independent of the team. Maybe it's sort of similar to the Yankees as long as there's a Steinbrenner, even if it's not nearly as visible or as vocal a Steinbrenner as the original model. The fact that it's still a Steinbrenner-owned team, like if the Yankees had been sold to someone else entirely and they also sucked for a while and all the dynasty jeter era players had moved on again like they're still the yankees and they just they drum up their tradition and their

accomplishments as a franchise so much they're constantly like drawing on their legacy as a team and so they're only reinforcing the yankees pride and also the Yankees hatred. But you could imagine if they were sold to someone who didn't have that last name and also they were bad, if they were just the team of like Aaron Judge, you know, people don't really dislike Aaron Judge aside from the fact that he's a Yankee, right? Right, yeah. Which is enough for many people. But, you know, he seems like a generally unobjectionable guy beyond that. If anything, I think he's helping to pull the Yankees up from that a little bit. Yeah, yeah, maybe so. Okay, well, I didn't even expect us to go down this road and talk about what makes a team hated and what the current hated team's ranking is. You know, it's like the Cardinals, for instance, have been a hated team in some quarters.

I think generally, you know, because of the way their fan base is perceived. I don't even know if it accurately reflects the way their fan base actually is, but also just because of their run of success, you know, and because of the devil magic and that whole idea, which suddenly they stink for a year and you don't hear that much about the Cardinals when they're not doing well. But yeah, the longer you have that run of success, the more times you make the playoffs, the more sick of you people are. And they're like, OK, let's get some new blood in here. And especially if you're spending like the Dodgers have this winter, then that's going to be a formula for pissing people off if you're kind of hoarding all the talent or you're perceived to be flexing your financial muscle in a way that some teams wouldn't or couldn't.

Okay. So we have some emails to answer here. So let us get to that. Here's a question from a fellow Patreon supporter, Julian R., who says, what if we've got it all wrong? We think Jeff Passan and Ken Rosenthal are newsbreakers, but they're really newsmakers. When they break a transaction, the named teams and players who had no idea of the trade until that moment, are required to complete it. The entire baseball transaction landscape is dictated by these two men. It was they who designed the 2024 Dodgers juggernaut. It was they who decided the Brewers would somehow luck into getting William Contreras in the Sean Murphy deal. It was they who made

Preller and Poto appear to be trade-hungry maniacs while painting the Rockies as run by an inept recluse. Many questions follow. What are their secret motivations? Are they making good decisions that preserve competitive balance, excitement, and or team narratives? Why did the Brewers end up with William Contreras at so little cost? So, Passon, Rosenthal, if you want to throw some other newsbreakers in the mix, you can. They are secretly the puppet masters. They are pulling the strings. They're not just reporting the transactions, but they are dictating the transactions. I like the implication that since these often break with incomplete details, they're like, oh, well, how do we make this work? What else do we have to throw in to make this look acceptable? Just making this up on the fly. Yeah, there are prospects in the deal.

Let me Google some prospects who are on that team. And then they figure out half of it, and then the reporters bring up another detail, and they have to redo the whole thing. Yeah, and they farm out aspects of the deal to other reporters as cover. You know, like, I'll drop this little morsel, this tidbit that this person can report like some of the financial terms or something just to, you know, make it a little less obvious that I'm actually orchestrating

major league baseball. We've found the real motivation for the Atlanta Braves transaction breaking. Yeah, this is, it's like the Robert Coover book, the Universal Baseball Association, just kind of creating a league out of whole cloth or it's, you know, like playing out of the park or something. That's, that's what they're doing here with the sport that we know and love without our knowledge. That would be an enormous amount of power to concentrate in the hands of a couple of reporters. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if we want to know that version of Passin. It's like, oh, no, Jeff. No wonder you're always in a suit.

You got to be spiffy if you're going to be orchestrating the moves of the entire league. What would it do to one person to have that kind of authority. And then it's like, does the commissioner's office like send mercenaries to try to get them? Because they're like, oh, my God, now all these teams are spending so much money. It's undermining our arguments. We got to get rid of them. Yeah. What are their motivations? Right.

Yeah. I mean, you would think to create news that they could then cover. So they're sort of double dealing, right? How can I make this interesting? No wonder they get so many scoops. I mean, they're the ones breaking the news. But yeah, I mean, I guess that makes me wonder, well, why do they need to work so hard if they have this power? Why are they constantly cranking out columns and podcasts and YouTube shows and such?

Like it's an impressive work ethic given that they are deciding what happens in Major League Baseball and also so diligently covering it all. You know, I feel like in some ways, while I am not super familiar with it, this would be more impactful in like the NBA where it feels like so much of the discourse and so much of the stuff is around leaks and rumors and this and that. It feels like that would just control the whole league, basically. Well, I was going to say, I mean, that has happened or has been rumored to happen in various ways with Woj and Shams and their competition and some of the articles that we've talked about saying that they actually do exert some control directly or indirectly over moves that get made because of the information that they pass or don't pass and the intel that gets shared, right? So it is like that, but much more so. I just like, would you,

it would be so interesting because it's like, I think that, you know, in talking to those guys, like my sense is that they want baseball to be fun and competitive. It's like, did someone in Oakland make them really angry? Why are they doing this to them? Why did they do that? Yeah. You know, Denver is a nice town. What did Denver ever do to Jeff and Ken? They have to be met with such disdain.

Maybe those are the trades they're farming out to other states. I don't know if the – well, I don't know. Are the specific transactions the biggest of Colorado's problems? I don't know. I mean, they don't – put it this way, they do not help. They're not the biggest issue, but they are an issue. You know, if one were identifying a complete list, I think that the transactions, often the lack of transactions really is what's at fault in Colorado. Although, like even Dan managed to find something vaguely nice to say about the Rockies during his zips write-up of them this offseason.

Although maybe he was just doing that as like an exercise, you know. Yeah, to show that it could be done. He could restrain himself. He could say something nice instead of saying nothing. Yeah, there are some social media accounts that are kind of deranged, like speculating about all sports being rigged. Right. So this would be great fodder for them. I don't know if that's a bit or an actual conspiracy, but yeah.

I mean, that baseball is basically the WWE, that it is scripted, right? That there are people just orchestrating every storyline. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that they're doing the best possible job they could because if they did, in fact, have ultimate control over everything and, you know, you'd think Ken and Jeff with their experience in the industry, they'd have a good sense of what makes a good story, what is interesting to the audience.

And there's been a fair amount of boring baseball and a fair amount of baseball that the audience does not respond to. Now, again, maybe that's just for cover. They don't want to make it too obvious. They don't want to get caught. Yeah, if it were too compelling, if there were never any downtime, dead air, then it would be too obvious that someone was just laying all this out in some smoky back room. But yeah, I mean, it's too much power to concentrate in two hands. So, I hope that this isn't the case. Did they make the rules changes? Did they pause the lockout? Oh, man. Yeah, you would think, right. And then the thing that makes me question whether this could in fact be the case is –

The thing? The only thing is that, you know, with a conspiracy, I mean, the more people who are involved in a cover-up, the harder it is to cover it up, right? Right. So if every baseball executive is taking their marching orders from Ken and Jeff, then are they all going to stay quiet about that? What are the payoffs like? And does this extend to the game level or are we just talking like macro storylines? I mean, are they fixing the outcome of every game? Are the players on the take here?

Do they even know that this is happening or is the deck just being stacked against them? It just, it seems like too many people would have to be kept quiet for this to be the case. Yeah, this is not the way I expected the sports journalism betting scandal to play out. No, this would be a much bigger scandal than even we envisioned. Well, and, you know, it would be tricky because so that we postulated that they would be employing some of their fellow scoops men to sort of farm out aspects of trades. But surely they aren't doing that every time, all the time. And so you'd have like, you know, you'd have Jeff and Ken and their efforts and then you'd have an entire reporting core trying to catch them in the act. Although, you know, if it's like a multi-pronged conspiracy that involves several members of the media, it would like if you were going to design an exciting day that kept everyone engaged in baseball and then ultimately came to the most like kind of boring conclusion of all of Tani to the Dodgers. Wouldn't you have made it look exactly like it did before he signed? Yeah, probably.

Definitely. Well, that does raise the question. You know, this is an email show. We talk about if baseball were different, how different would it be if someone, not necessarily those someones, but someone were scripting Major League Baseball, would it be better than it is? Would we be more entertained by baseball if it were in some central control? If someone were actually scripting out storylines, designing these characters, like would baseball be better?

Would we be more entertained if this were like The Matrix, you know, and it weren't really real. It were just sort of a fiction presented to us, but we didn't know it. We were blissfully ignorant. We didn't take the red pill, right? But like, would baseball be better in that scenario? Now I'm just imagining Rob Manfred dressed as the architect. In the room with all the screens. Yeah, which means he's really dressed like Colonel Sanders.

I'm going to be distracted by that for a second. randomness and the ingenuity and accidents of many, many people and the worlds conspiring together can create. Like, you know, I think there is a truth is stranger than fiction aspect to things where, A, like, would it start to seem scripted and predictable? Would we be able to pierce that veil and know that we were watching something that just didn't have that air of reality? But beyond that, I, you know, I mean, you'd sport itself and the rules, and we follow it and create a community around it. But if it were just centralized and scripted, you'd think that it would be better because you could just get rid of the boring stuff and you could have whatever perfect vision of competitive balance you want. But I wonder if there would just be unintended consequences and we would wish for the randomness again. I feel like people who make media are mostly very good at their jobs, I think.

But also, would this make Major League Baseball as a production, the new innings eater show? Yeah. Someone would have to write all the innings that needed to be in. I know. Yeah. It'd be an enormous amount of work to script everything. Jeff and Ken work all the time, but you couldn't have just them doing it. You know, it would require, I mean, I don't know.

Maybe it would be, maybe it would be good because you'd need a lot of writers and then we'd have someone hiring. Yeah. When all the media outlets shut down, we could just, you know, get jobs working on the writing staff of the sport instead of covering the sport. I guess that would be one solution, one way out for the dwindling media. But I guess this explains why Ken and Jeff are always on the phone, right? They're just, you know, we thought it was that they were gathering information. In fact, it is that they are disseminating orders, right? The express written consent of Ken Rosenthal and Jeff Passan. Yeah, this is why teams are hiring away the baseball writers

as well. They've got to bolster the staff. Right, there you go. baseball writers as well. They've got to bolster the staff. Right. There you go. Okay. We got a couple of follow-ups to a recent hypothetical about Otani specifically, or just a mercenary more generally, who decides to go day-to-day or week-to-week or game-to-game and play for a bunch of teams in sequence within a season instead of signing for one team in one season. And we had a couple of objections to that with some listeners responding to and objecting to those objections. So here's one from David, and a couple of people contacted us in this vein. David said, once again, found myself screaming at my phone during episode 2109 when you were discussing whether Otani could pull off a single season

mercenary contract by playing for a bunch of teams on multiple short-term contracts. Hopefully it's a good sort of screening. It's like a participatory screening. I mean, Nick, you're a listener. Do you find yourself screaming at us or with us or talking to us or interjecting in your head to say things that you wish that we would say or that you would say when you were not actually on the podcast as you are today? There are occasional moments where I have a thought that I wish would be expressed, but it's usually not such intense frustration. Yeah, maybe it's exultant screaming. Anyway, David says there were two main issues and one questionable concern.

So number one was the impact on team chemistry. So he said, you know, if you're truly a mercenary and you're just going clubhouse to clubhouse, will you be welcomed? How well will you blend in and will anyone root for you? And then number two, increased travel load. That could be tiring over time. And then a concern, no home field familiarity advantage if you're kind of constantly on the road. So David says, Randy Newman, podcast listener, already provided the obvious solution to this question. I love L.A.

And Otani has clearly shown the direction this offseason. Simply play for two teams in the same city. clearly shown the direction this offseason, simply play for two teams in the same city. The Dodgers and Angels share exactly one home date all season on July 25th, and let's just give them the day off. Of course, they host each other for two games, which should be interesting. So the possible impacts, number one, plays half of each team's games, which is kind of like being traded at the deadline, although only in some.

And in any case, how is this different from those who decried the advent of free agency by saying that greedy players would hop around to the biggest paychecks and destroy clubhouses? Number two, no travel. Voila, found something that will make Otani even better. No jet lag, no middle-of-the-night arrivals, and only home cooking. Number three, if there is such a thing as home field advantage, then Otani would leverage two home fields for the entire season. And since he's only hitting this year, he doesn't have to suffer through an Oakland road trip, but misses out on

Colorado can't have everything. Again, makes Otani better. In theory, we would have a problem if both the Dodgers and Angels make the playoffs, but who are we kidding? I did not do the analysis for New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, but I recall when planning visits during previous seasons that they try to keep homestands from overlapping. Could be other possibilities with Baltimore and Washington or New York and Philly or the White Sox and the Brewers. So a few people wrote in with scenarios like this that maybe he just plays for the two teams that play in a single city, or maybe he just plays for a team that plays in a city and then plays for whatever the visiting team that plays or that homestand or that single series, then he suits up for them instead. So he's geographically based. He's locked into a single city, but multiple teams. Does that address any concerns? Is this workable? So you're telling me not only would the Angels lose Otani, they would

also have to play every single home game against Otani potentially. My only concern from the player's perspective is that it does limit their market somewhat, right? So if one of the advantages to this arrangement was that you basically just get to have instead of one sweepstakes or one bidding for your services a year, you get to do it after every game or every series. And so whoever needs you most, maybe they're shorthanded, they have an injury, they have a big game coming up, whatever it is, so they're going to pay a premium. Whereas if you are limiting your market to one or two teams at any given time, even if you're playing for two or more teams over the

course of a season, that's probably going to cost you, right? Now it's going to help you. You get the perk of getting to stay where you are and not travel and maybe have home field advantage all the time instead of never. But that would sort of sap your market, right? You just would be limiting your number of suitors at any particular time. I don't think you'd make more money doing it that way, almost definitely, even if you could get two teams to agree to it. Yeah.

Apart from anything else, I wouldn't want another team having say in the usage of the player, right? Like part of what you worry about with any baseball player when you sign them to a long-term deal, this is like a thoroughly unoriginal thought, but like you worry about the injury risk. Imagine outsourcing the management of usage and training and, you know, all of that to someone else. I wouldn't care for that at all, I don't think. You'd have to put a lot of that in

the contract or they'd just start you on like the first and last day of every homestand. Yeah. Yeah. You could pit those two teams against each other. You could leverage yourself that way so that like, let's say you're only going to play in a single city, but a team is going to be coming in for a series, then you could say, hey, either sign me to play for you in this series, or not only are you going to be coming in for a series, then you could say, hey, either sign me to play for you in this series, or not only are you going to lose out on employing me, but also I'm going to be playing against you, right? So in any given series, he can say, you could pay me to play for you, or I'm actually going to hurt you. I'm going to be doing my best to beat you in this series. So much leverage.

Yeah, it's like a double bonus, right? So you could extract more money that way because the stakes are pretty high. It's not just that you're not going to have Otani for your games, but he's going to be going against you in those games, which is a pretty big swing from a win expectancy perspective when you're talking about going from having him to having him on the opposing team. I feel like overall this whole concept

makes much more sense to the starting pitcher. Like, I imagine that life honestly probably being not bad, right? Like your agent handles all the figuring out where you're going to go and how you're going to get there. And you just sit at home, you go pitch a game, and then you go back home. I don't know. It seems okay. But yeah, I don't know if bringing two teams into it or doing like all home games. I don't know. I don't think that necessarily adds the value.

And I feel like with any of these arrangements, the people most likely to say no are the teams for sure, I think. What if on one team there's a guy you really don't like, and on the other team is your best friend? That could happen. Well, then you could play with your best friend all the time. Yeah, you would just be like, I just want to play with my best friend. He's my best work friend. I want to play with him all the time. And that other guy? Hate that guy. Would like to play against him because I hate him.

Well, we got one more follow-up in this vein from Justin, who says, I just listened to the excellent hypothetical involving Otani being a mercenary, just signing here and there for short-term periods. That was a great question, and it gave me an idea for an even higher stakes version. You were suggesting it might go poorly and be awkward for him to have to split loyalty like that. However, I just thought of another version. What if Otani had it out for just one team?

What if he just decided that he's been slighted by, I don't know, say the Reds? Otani hates the Reds with a deep passion and is willing to sign a series of two to four game contracts with all 29 teams only based on when has it out for the Reds. 62 times. So obviously he's leaving a lot of money on the table in this scenario because everyone knows he has it out for the Reds. He only wants to play for the team that is playing the Reds. And that's going to hurt the Reds, obviously, over the course of a season, just from a statistical standpoint to have to be facing Shohei Otani in every game. But yeah, what toll does that take on you to know that someone so

has it out for you that they will just travel across the country following you wherever you go because their main motivation is beating you? I would think that'd be particularly demoralizing if it was Otani because, you know, everyone more or less likes Otani as a person. For him to hold a grudge like that against you, what would you have to do? I don't know. But it doesn't reflect well on your character as an organization. But I would think it would just be depressing to have baseball's darling be so dead set on you losing that he was willing to go to great lengths like that. so dead set on you losing that he was willing to go to great lengths like that.

A player doing anything like that would quickly erode a lot of popularity they have, whether it is any form of this mercenary contract, I feel like. Probably, yes. Some people, I think, would respect the pettiness of it. You know, I would be amused by it, I think, but it would cause me to question their character in some ways as well i i would uh i'm deciding if i want to reveal an unflattering aspect of my personality do you guys ever um have the experience of like you know there's someone like an otani everybody likes otani and i'm not saying i just like ot, okay? I'm not unhinged. But, like, you know, there's somebody everybody likes, and you just don't like themate on it because you, again, you feel disconnected from like the common well of human empathy we all draw from. And then imagine that guy wants to beat you specifically. So you have real justification.

It would be a nightmare. Although I bet that you would like rally around each other in a way that was probably pretty cool. You know, you'd be you you'd feel a purpose and it would be to make otani regret the day he ever decided that he was coming for you but then like everyone likes otani so even though you're the one being picked on everyone would take his side it would be terrible yeah it would make people wonder what did you do wrong what did you do and it's you know is he incapable of a petty grudge? I know that he's wonderful, but, you know, he is still a person and flawed like the rest of us, presumably. remembers being doubted. He remembers the skeptics, right? And so maybe if it were that,

if some team were outspoken about, oh, we don't think he can be a two-way player or something like that. And then he's like, oh yeah, I'll show you and I will two-way play in every game against you if it were something like that. But yeah, I think that wouldn't be so sympathetic. You know, you would start to question like, hey, let it go. You've proved it. You've shown that you can do it. Do you really need to travel across the country just spiting this one team forever for the one time that they doubted you? So if it were something like that. If he just had this mission to beat the Reds or some other team and he didn't say why, then you would have to question like what deep wrong did they do to Otani or to the world that made them the object of his hatred like this? Yeah, I feel like it's better if it's just a random team like the Reds and not like, you know, the Yankees or whatever.

Okay. Thank you for all the follow-ups to that hypothetical. Another follow-up, Joel says, I noticed on episode 2108 when you were talking about things that we might remember about baseball in 2023 that no one even referenced Domingo Hermann's perfect game. This makes perfect sense for a multitude of reasons, the quality of the team it was against, the general distaste for German compared to how much we all loved Felix.

But the first perfect game in more than a decade seems like a fairly important milestone, and I've not seen any reference to it in the baseball press recently. Is this exceptional for a perfect game, especially one preceded by such a drought? And do you think if we see a similar drought before the next one, that this year would be known as the year with the most recent perfect game? So, I'll say speaking for myself, it didn't even cross my mind to mention this as a possibility. I wasn't like, oh, this would be a good one if not for Domingo Hermann. You know, I just, it didn't even come to my mind. Maybe that's partly because it was Domingo German. Certainly, I think the circumstances probably, you know, made it a little less easy to celebrate. But even beyond that, I never another perfect game, if that were the last one of all time, then I think 2023 would be remembered for that, at least by baseball superfans, by trivia buffs. It would come up, right?

Like, who was the biggest story of the year. Yeah, or you remember when the last Triple Crown winner was. That kind of individual accomplishment, I don't know whether a single game would be as memorable as a spectacular season like that. And I still don't know whether it would be the best or most broadly remembered thing about baseball in 2023. Because again, I don't know if the last perfecto is trumping Otani or the pitch clock, but maybe if it came to be seen as sort of a symbol of the end of an era, like the last perfect game stands in for the changes in starting pitching at large, because that's why it would be the last perfect game if it were the last perfect game.

It's just we have a lot fewer complete games and lower pitch counts and lower innings workloads. And so you're going to get fewer and fewer bites at that apple, right? So you're going to get fewer and fewer bites at that apple, right? So if we just never saw a perfect game again, and that kind of coincided with the demise of the starter in general, then maybe that would be seen as representative of the era in baseball in a way that would make us remember it. I think even that feels highly unlikely. I mean, I think about the last 400-hitter, and it's not even probably the number one thing about that general storyline, right?

It was the same year of the 56-game hitting streak. So it doesn't even really win its own year, despite being, what, 83 years ago? So, yeah, there would have to be something else about the perfect game, right? Like, it couldn't just be a perfect game. It would have to, like, I don't know, be a perfect game and have 21 strikeouts or something like right yeah like some of it was i think the the competition herman faced some of it was that the yankees won 11-0 yeah so even though there was the tension of the perfect game or not, the game was never in question. And I do wonder if this is an unanticipated consequence of no-hitter creep.

Because clearly a perfect game and a no-hitter are different things. And the regard that we hold the one in versus the other is obviously far greater. one in versus the other is obviously far greater. But I wonder if we are just kind of like, you know, we've had so many no-hitters. Isn't that different from that? You know, like, and some of those no-hitters have been, like, incredibly good pitching performances. And, like, I know that Hermann's perfect game, like,

was also on Maddox, you know, so I don't want to say that it wasn't a good game. But I wonder if we're ruined by no-hitter creep. Yeah, it could be that. And I wonder if also the game the sport has sent the signal, Rosenthal and Passon, have made it clear that a perfect game, a no-hitter, is not really the top priority anymore, those historic single-game achievements. Because I mentioned this in my Innings Eater article. I didn't mention it on the podcast, though obviously we've talked about it in the past, but it is now commonplace for pitchers to be pulled while they have no-hitters going, in place for pitchers to be pulled while they have no hitters going and maybe even in some cases while they have perfect games going.

As recently as 2012, there was only one instance that entire season of a pitcher exiting a game with more than five innings pitched while he had a no hitter going. And in that case, it wasn't even just a voluntary pull. It was a groin pull. In fact, he was pulled because he pulled something. It was Kevin Millwood, I think. Whereas in each of the past two seasons, there were 19, a record 19 such games. And it used to be controversial, a mid no-hitter hook.

And now it's so common that when you do get a rare example of deferring to tradition and letting someone go for it, like Michael Lorenzen, for instance, in 2023, when he threw whatever it was, 120 something, 124 pitches, it was like, oh, wow, throwback. That never really happens anymore. And so maybe that has sort of sent the signal that, you know, this isn't that special in the grand scheme of things. Like in a sense, it's made it more special because it's just, it's rare. It's so hard to do that you'd even be allowed to stay in the game long enough to pull this off. So if you beat the odds and do it, then it might be even more worthy of celebration. But at the same time, teams and players have sent the signal that, well, this isn't actually as important as health, as winning, as whatever else comes first.

So maybe that has devalued it somewhat. I will say, I think the average number of pitches in a perfect game must be much lower than a no-hitter overall, which probably significantly increases the chance that, like, you can get seven innings into a perfect game without even really being, like, in dangerous pitch count territory. And, like, the only one that comes to mind is the Kershaw one was a perfect game, right, where he got pulled?

Yes, yeah, and that was, you know, Kershaw and special circumstances and everything, right? So, yeah, this probably won't be the thing that we remember 2023 by. And it probably won't be the last perfect game, although it could be a while. You never know. It's kind of random and it could very well happen this season again. But, yeah, unless it were like a decades long lull or we just never saw one again. Probably not.

Okay, Dennis says, The offseason seems like a good time to ask an obvious question about the postseason format. We know from Neil Payne's off-sited, uneffectively wild work that more games is especially important in baseball in determining teams' true talent levels. We also know people have been wringing their hands about the playoffs being expanded and weaker teams sneaking in and eliminating stronger teams. I would think an obvious solution would be to make the earlier rounds longer than the later rounds, i.e. seven game wildcard series, five game division series, three game championship series, one game world series. This would theoretically make it likelier that the best teams prevail. And as an added bonus, a one-game World Series, series in quotation marks, would mean a Super Bowl-like

atmosphere that I imagine would be great for revenue and getting more eyes on the sports championship. I can't see an obvious argument against this approach other than tradition, which obviously would be impossible to overcome. Nick, clearly you can see an obvious argument. What elicited that groan? Well, I mean, I suppose tradition, but more generally speaking, like, it definitely seems ridiculous that as you get further, like, you don't, I don't know, play more games. Like, that just, maybe that's just me adhering to tradition, but even beyond that. Yeah, free your mind, Nick. Come on. I mean, yeah, you'd make a lot of money

from a one-game World Series, but the league would never do this from a revenue. There's no shot. Even beyond the actual attendance or making an event of it, like running, I don't know, six, seven-game wildcard series or something at the same time, like would like those games would start to make much, much less money. And then

you'd be leaving the less high stakes games on the table. Like the league would never, I think this is like a complete catastrophe from the league slash revenue perspective. from the league slash revenue perspective. Yeah, you are misaligning your number of games and your championship leverage index, basically. Yeah. Like the deeper you go into the playoffs, the more those games matter, the more decisive they are. And in this scenario, the fewer of them you would have.

So it would achieve that goal, I guess, of making sure that once you get to that final round, that the better teams are left standing. And I'm receptive to the idea of continuing to expand earlier rounds, not at the expense of the later rounds, but, you, people will, will, I mean, we went from the one game wild card playoff or play into three games now and people will say, oh yeah, the division series should be seven games. And, you know, other than scheduling concerns and everything, I, I'm not against that sort of thing, but yeah. Robbing Peter to pay Paul here, you know, robbing yourself of World

Series games to give yourself more wildcard games, which are just inherently less interesting, lower stakes. That's just not going to work so well. No, no. It's a valiant attempt to address one complaint that people have about the postseason, but it would cause other, maybe even more vociferous complaints. Yeah. I don't think this would be popular with almost anyone. No. Can you imagine the ratings for like wildcard series game six or something? You know, it's just, it's not going to be great. Also, because like all of those series are happening at the same time.

You wouldn't even get to watch a lot of it because you'd be like, which game am I even engaged with right now? it would detract from the legitimacy of a championship. Obviously, you'd have to run the gauntlet and get through the hurdles of those early rounds. And so the teams that made it that far maybe would be seen as more deserving. But then with a single kind of coin flip game, especially, you know, it's a super coin flip once the better teams are left standing and you're just having like one ace against the other ace or a bullpen game or whatever. Right. So it might detract from the legitimacy of the title. And there's only so much you can do to drum up interest.

Like World Series games are, you know, selling out anyway. Right. And unless you're going to do the Scott Boris idea of like the neutral site world series, which we don't like and we've talked about that multiple times. But, you know, it's still going to be kind of unpredictable where the game is being held, unless you do have some sort of predetermined site, which is bad for any number of reasons. So it's not like you're going to be able to build it up into some week-long spectator event and only so many people fit in the ballpark. I'm sure that that game would get great ratings,

but I doubt it would get greater cumulative ratings than a best of seven World Series. So yeah, this is addressing one limited specific complaint, but I think at considerable cost. All right. Question from Alan. Assume you have a player who has a baseline batting average of 150 and an annual salary of $10 million. For each $1 million this player is paid annually, his batting average increases by a point. Assume all other offensive hitting metrics scale at an average distribution to this. Thus, this player, if paid $860 million in a year, would bat a perfect 1,000 with a theoretically perfect slugging percentage.

How much do you think this player can expect to be paid? What would be the point of diminishing returns? How would teams use this player? Assume an average defensive ability for whatever position this player has, his stat scale only offensively. Okay, so his baseline batting average is 150. His baseline salary is $10 million. And every million dollars you add on

he adds another point of batting average with equivalent improvements in the other metrics so what does he get paid if anything yeah i think we can talk about adjusting the numbers but i i think he does not get signed for any amount yeah Yeah, that's my inclination too. I don't think so. Yeah, because he's unplayable at 150, right? I mean, he's like average in other respects, I assume, right? So like average power and average patience to go along with the batting average. like you know average power and average patience to go along with the batting average so it's not like he is some extreme kyle schwarber rob deer type who's you know batting 150 with like

extreme walk percentage and power or whatever like he's unplayably bad with the 150 batting average and so no one's going to pay him 10 million million to play that poorly. And it's going to take so much more money to get him up to a point where he would be playable, right? Because I mean, you're going to have to add like... Yeah, it's like $100 million before he's a starving player. $100 million for him just to be like an average player, right? Now it then scales up where you can make him a perfect player. But even like the theoretical maximum, like I'm imagining this player, I remember this old Jeff Sullivan post where he tried to craft a baseball equivalent of LeBron James, like someone who would have, yeah, have the impact that LeBron has on a typical NBA season or on a single NBA team

in baseball. So like coming up with a player who's worth, he was trying to come up with like a 23 war player and then a 42 war player and the 23 war player. It was like absolute peak Barry Bonds at the plate with like peak Ozzie Smith in the field. And this guy isn't even Ozzie Smith in the field. He doesn't even get better defensively. So if you paid him 860 million to be your perfect offensive player on a dollars per win basis, it's still, it's not going to be great, right? Because you could probably do better elsewhere. Yeah. I mean, you're essentially saying we will have a completely replacement level team everywhere else, probably for multiple years as a result of paying this guy for one year. Yeah.

Yeah. I will say though, for the hypothetically perfect player, Otani slash, you know, being a two-way player certainly makes that, those stats look a little bit less ridiculous, even though they have to be all on one person. Yeah, that was the other scenario Jeff contemplated, I think, where he's like Bonds and Ozzie Smith and also Kershaw. Like, you know, he pitches, he does everything well. And even then it was hard to make a single baseball player that valuable.

But yeah, like this guy, he'd have to be worth like a hundred war to be like a league average dollar per war player, like on the free agent market. You know, if, if the going rate for a win is like eight or 9 million or whatever it is now, then for him to be a $860 million player, he'd have to be like a hundred war. And obviously that's just, I think even theoretically impossible. So yeah, sad to say, I don't think this guy gets signed. I don't think he gets signed to be terrible and I don't think he gets signed to be amazing either. What numbers would we have to get to to make it reasonable? Like start at like a 200 average and like drop it to like 5 million per point or something.

So that's like. Or 500,000. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that might be within the realm of possibility, perhaps. Because there is value to concentrating all of that value in a single roster spot obviously and so if this guy is uh by far the best player ever and you're getting

all that war within one single spot and you still have some money left over to upgrade your other spots then that could be that concentration of value becomes less valuable when you have not when you don't have money to make those other spots valuable so it's kind of like yes you're kind of stuck there but what if what if okay okay okay okay how can we how can we salvage value so like what if um but the player is really good right in this hypothetical the player is like really really really good potentially but he's only signed to one year? Yeah. What if you'd signed him for two years and then you traded him and ate the money? And then you got a bunch of really good players back?

No, it's a terrible idea. I'm just trying something, you know, so that there's something. I was like, Meg, you haven't talked in a little while. You're sitting here, you're ruminating over sports media news, you're doing a podcast. Give an idea. Wasn't a good one. Sorry. I like the concept of the sliding scale player or like the build a bear, like the build a baseball player. You can customize. Like, you can go for the premium add-ons. Yeah. Like. I think this would be kind of fun if you approached it in a way of, like, I know people have done, like, stats to value, like, how much is one home run worth to, like, your salary potential

or whatever. Yeah. Like, especially with, like, arbitration and stuff like that. If you, like, took a similar kind of approach and found an actual value for every, like, thing that a player could do and decided how you would build them optimally with the money you had, that would be kind of interesting. Yeah. All right. Someone calibrate this scale perfectly for us where it would be something that would actually make teams think and they wouldn't just dismiss this out of hand. Okay. Question from Phil in the UK. Before a lot of sports settled down and had their official rules fully formed, it's never fully formed. We still get some changes. The number of players on a team often varied,

even in the same game. For example, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were gentlemen versus player cricket matches where the gentlemen, who were amateurs from wealthy backgrounds, were often allowed to outnumber their opposition, the players who actually earned money by playing cricket professionally. Cricket has a long and inglorious history of social snobbery. I think this is another example where baseball is different from other team sports. If you were offered the chance of an extra player on the field in soccer, football, basketball, cricket, ice hockey, etc., that would be a big advantage to that team. In baseball, I don't think it would always be an advantage.

In fact, there may be teams who would prefer to field fewer players. So my question is, what would happen if the league changed the rules so that for each game, each team could choose the number of defensive players they would field for that game. They could stick with the standard nine or go to a minimum of two, pitcher and catcher, or a maximum of 26, the active roster size, or any number between. The advantage of having more players would obviously be more defenders, so greater defensive efficiency. The advantage of having fewer players is that your hitters would come to bat more often. I'd allow teams with five or fewer players to have a ghost runner

when a base runner also has to then hit. An added bonus is that we get to use the term ghost runner correctly. The Angels could have Mike Trout bat at least once in every inning. I guess that's if he were a pitcher or a catcher in this scenario, right? But yeah, we sometimes get questions along these lines, like what if you could manipulate the

batting order? What if the manager had some discretion in who he could send to the plate? And there was something like this, the golden batter rule with the Savannah Bananas, right? Where, you know, kind of targeting that weakness or strength or at least idiosyncrasy of baseball that you can't just always put the bat in the hands of the best player or even the ball at times, right? Trying to combat that and allow for more strategy or customization there. But this case has to do with actually the number of players in the field. And then you would just sort of shorten your lineup accordingly.

I think you would want a lot. I don't know any numbers on this, but I think having 15 fielders would make a pretty big difference. And yeah, you'll have some marginal hitters, but it's not like they will be black holes who hit zero. You'll still score runs. I think having a pretty large number of players would be

beneficial, maybe even to the point of just playing every capable position player on your active roster every time. Yeah, I agree. I don't think there would be that much variation in this, because even if you had, say, Shohei Otani pitching for you

and Mike Piazza catching or whatever, right? Like you have an incredible offensive pitcher and catcher. And if you just pulled everyone else off the field, then your batting order would just be Otani Piazza, Otani Piazza, Otani Piazza. Like that would be great. You'd score a lot of runs. I mean, aside from the fact that like

they would get tired, but beyond that, you'd score a lot of runs, but you would allow far more, right? I mean- It would take a really, really extreme three-two outcome rate across the board for this to even be like, that could be considerable, right?

You think about Piazza and, you know you know otani hitting playing against like 20 players and like their babbitts are going to be like i don't know 100 150 something ridiculous and the other team's babbitts are going to be like 900 something yeah you can't walk or hit that many home runs to make up for that difference, I don't think. No. Yeah, it would certainly help if you had Otani pitching and, you know, striking out 30% of hitters or whatever. Like, you're going to get fewer balls in play, but almost all of the balls in play are going to be hits. So, yeah, that's—I think people underestimate just how much subtracting or adding one fielder would help you. Obviously, there's going to be a point of diminishing returns where the field is full of fielders. It just –

Right. It looks like the – It would get real dangerous out there. It would, yeah. I mean it would get to the point where it was like the kids shagging flies at the home run derby except they would be adults and they would cover all the ground. Nothing would fall in. But beyond that, adding extra fielders like the marginal BABIP gain

would be quite small. But I think there's plenty of room to improve there. I don't know how many fielders it would make sense to add before you start hurting yourself more on offense than you're helping yourself on defense but probably be like several yeah because you also have to consider that like with each fielder you add like your 14th best hitter is not going to be

that much worse than your 13th best hitter or whatever so it's like what's adding one extra guy i mean i don't know i just feel like while it's diminishing returns in the field, it's also diminishing returns of negative value at bat. So I don't know at what point those things converge, but I think it would be... It would have to be a really bad hitter infielder to not be worth playing. Maybe playing a backup catcher, not at at catcher maybe you would not do that but everything else everyone else on your active roster that is a position player i think you'd play and you might

even consider rostering more position players for the purpose of playing all of them yeah okay well let me run this related proposal by you that i saw Richard Hershberger post in our Facebook group, our past past blaster and historian Richard Hershberger. This was a proposal from Sporting Life, November 12th, 1892, when pitching had gotten too good. One of the periods in baseball's history when offense was at a low ebb and so the games had gotten uninteresting, right? The following year, they moved the pitchers back instead of implementing this proposal. Baseball has also declined because what were its most attractive features are now but seldom seen. As the pitcher's skill has advanced, batting has become almost a lost art. To place a hit safely now is more good luck than real skill. To see man after man

go up to the plate to be retired on strikes or else be thrown out on a weekend field hit is more disgusting than interesting. Heavy batting, which will keep the outfielder sprinting after flies and pile up the runs, is what the public wants to see. A lot of this sounds familiar. Today, baseball is all battery work. All depends upon the pitcher and catcher. Again, this is 1892, not 2024. All depends upon the pitcher and catcher. It is a game of pitchers. Keep the ball moving lively. Make it a game in which every player will have plenty to do, and baseball will again regain the position of the leading and most exciting of all sports. Here's the proposal. There are nine innings to a game and nine men to each side. Making every man on the nine pitch one inning seems to be a plan which would solve the difficulty. Give us the old-time slugging matches with the big scores, So everyone has to pitch.

I mean, this just makes hitting better. Yes, right. It doesn't necessarily make, well, I mean, I guess this wasn't the issue at the time, but like it doesn't make like balls in play or like stealing, you know, it it it makes it just this just makes pitching worse. It does definitely make pitching a lot worse. And I guess teams today are more prepared to do this than teams were then, at least in the sense that there are nine people on team who pitch now. Now, I guess in this scenario, you're talking about everyone who plays the fields maybe has to pitch an inning, not just having nine professional pitchers pitch an inning apiece.

But yeah, like if you're playing shortstop, you also have to, it's position player pitchers run amok, basically. So it would certainly increase offense. It would definitely have that intended effect. And back then, the difference between pitchers and non-pitchers skill level wise were a little less specialized. So you might not have noticed to quite the same degree as today, where you would notice immediately, right? Like this would be pretty unwatchable now. Maybe you could have gotten away with this more in 1892, but now just

too much distinction, too much specialization, and this would increase offense, I think, more than we would be comfortable with. I think after doing this for a while, most position players that were played in Major League Baseball would at least be like vaguely competent pitchers. Like they wouldn't necessarily be current Major League quality pitchers, but like they wouldn't be like current position player pitchers either. Like they would pretty quickly get to a point where they were pitching, like, you know, minor league pitchers or something, which is still a big difference. Yeah. And back then, they didn't have substitutions as much. Like, you often played the whole game, so you'd probably have to specify that.

Or it could be like someone in the Facebook group suggested, it could be like a volleyball style thing where you rotate the players, you know, that the defense rotates to. I think that's actually, that makes it a lot better because that makes the, like, what I was thinking is like, I don't think this solves the problem because like, the problem is not just that pitching is too good. It's that like the way that people hit and stuff is to some people less entertaining because of, you know, more 3-2 outcomes and all that. And I think making the fielding worse seems also good if you're going to make, well, then it would be even more runs. But I don't know. Yeah. We get questions about designated fielders, right? Like if you're going to have a designated error, if the pitcher doesn't have to hit for himself, then why not go all the way, right? Why not just have a shortstop who just fields and doesn't have to hit, right? So, I mean,

people said this was sort of a slippery slope argument against the DH. Well, where do we draw the line? If the pitcher doesn't have to hit, then do the other position players not have to hit? And then do you have like a defensive unit like in football, you know, where it's just like a separate team and it's just all specialists? And I always thought the slippery slope argument was overblown because pitchers were just in a class of their own when it came to offensive incompetence. You know, like it wasn't like pitchers and shortstops and catchers, other light hitting position players. You couldn't group them together. It was very much a difference in kind, not just degree. Like pitchers were uniquely incompetent and unprepared and not selected for their offensive talent.

But people will sometimes suggest, well, wouldn't you just have a higher level play if everyone was a specialist at everything at all times and you just had the best defenders and then the best offenders? We don't say offenders. We don't. That means something else. It does. The best offensive players, right? And I wouldn't want that. You know, even though it would, in theory, give you a higher caliber of competition, like everyone would be the best and most qualified at everything they do instead of, oh, this guy's a good hitter, we'll live with his glove.

You just have great gloves all the time, right? And maybe it would even out kind of because you'd have great hitters all the time too, but you'd also have great fielders. But I do value a broad set of skills and being a two-way player in the offense and defense sense, doesn't that just cause more of the problems that we are talking about the game potentially happening with like the way batting and pitching is going like doesn't good fielding just make that more extreme yeah you know what you should watch college i was thinking that when i said that and i part of the reason i thought of it is like yeah i don't know it's it's there's like more of a feeling of like anything can happen, I guess also with like worst defenses. Like, I think you've said this before about college baseball too. It's like, you don't just see a ball hit and you know exactly what's about to happen, right? Like you

see a ball hit and there's more suspense in every play, I think. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I experienced that with the Stompers during the Pacific Association summer, although then I was extremely nervous at all times. And so I would have been happier to have easy outs, but yeah, there was definitely a suspense on every play. I thought of a corollary that I have not thought through, but does this mean that Colorado baseball might actually be the best baseball? Yeah, I think you could make that case, right? Because higher BABIP, bigger outfield. It has a negative effect on breaking pitches too, right?

Yes, and longer home runs and everything. To the moon. Yeah, in some ways, maybe so. At least if there were better teams playing there, potentially. Okay, we will end with two Otani-inspired questions, although only one is really about Otani. And that one is from David, who sent this before Otani actually signed. And David said, while patiently waiting for news of his signing,

I was thinking back to when he first came to MLB and the discussion of whether he could be effective as a two-way player and if any team would allow him to pitch and hit. Knowing what we know now, that Shohei makes us all swoon and also excels on the mound and at the plate at the MLB level, I'd like to pose a question on a theoretical scenario. If you were a GM and had to sign Otani today as either exclusively a position player slash DH or exclusively as a pitcher, which would you choose? So it's the age-old debate. For the sake of the scenario, let's assume that he's fully healthy and in perfect form by opening day 2024 and that he will never have another injury that causes him to miss an at-bat or start. So that's a pretty important one. Yeah, that's a stipulation. Even if you heal him now, that's a pretty important stipulation. Yeah, even if you heal him now,

that's a huge difference. Yeah, that, yeah. However, he will still experience the normal aging decline that looms over us all. Does your answer change if you view the scenario as a fan, writer, editor,

or podcast host? So yeah, this really affects things, obviously, because with a pitcher, Otani, injury risk is one of the major considerations there. So if you're saying that he gets to be super healthy, durable pitcher who never misses a start, then that swings things that way. Although I still don't think that would be my answer. What's your answer? Was the question what would be more fun or what would be more valuable? What's your answer?

Was the question what would be more fun or what would be more valuable? Well, I guess it depends on your perspective. So if you're the GM who's doing the signing, that might be a different answer from us just as spectators or as media members. So if the answer is different, depending, then you could explain that. I think it'd be more valuable as a pitcher just because there are not pitchers who exist who are always healthy. And there are batters that exist that are much closer to always healthy. And I think if any ace level pitcher had the stipulation that they could not ever get hurt, they would be immediately like twice as valuable or maybe not twice but a lot a lot more valuable yeah it might depend on what kind of fielder we think he would turn out as i

think we all sort of assume that he'd be at least a above average like outfielder just because he has the tools for that but yeah i think the fielding but the fielding value would likely diminish at least somewhat starting basically now. I mean, he's certainly already in age where that's relevant. And I feel like without injuries, pitchers probably last longer overall. There are much more elite-level 40-year-old pitchers than hitters nowadays, I think. The bigger concern is just that most of them are hurt often. Does it, does our answer change at all though?

Because like, so he's only doing one, right? I want to make sure I understand the rules. He's only doing one thing and he can't get hurt. Right. Right. So then don't you put them in the field?

I think I would. So certainly if not for the the he's in vulnerable condition, then I would definitely pick position player if he could get hurt just because the injury risks that he incurs as a pitcher. But even if you're guaranteeing that he won't get hurt, I might still pick position player because I think his ceiling. I would still pick position player because I think his ceiling – now, if he can't get hurt as a pitcher, does that mean he's immensely durable within games too? Like he can just throw nine innings every time? Like can he pitch every game? But that's not injury. Fatigue – I don't think we get to conflate fatigue with injury.

Yeah. If we say he's used like a regular starter these days. Right, yeah. He just doesn't get hurt in that role. Now, if you know he's not going to get hurt, right? If we have the like magic seeing eye perspective we sometimes have in these questions where it's like we're aware that he can never get hurt. You as a manager might deploy him a little differently even though he could still fatigue right like you might you might be comfortable pushing him a little deeper into games provided he's not showing signs of fatigue because you're like well his arm's not going to blow out if i do

this because he's invincible yeah there's a slippery slope there like what counts as pushing him too much and i mean i guess that boils down to the question of how much of pitcher usage is because fatigue causes ineffectiveness versus injury. Right, right. Yeah, I think the ceiling is probably still higher as a hitter and plus defensive outfielder if you think he could be that, which I do. And plus that way you see him play every day

and you see him show off more of his skills, which I think is better from an entertainment perspective. If he'd have to DH only, I would pick pitcher for sure. But assuming he could be a good glove guy too, then I think probably from the team perspective and also from someone watching him and or covering him perspective, I'd just rather see him every day than only see him every five or six days. So I don't know that my answer changes that much, but I obviously dislike this scenario and want him to ward off specialization as long as possible, but he will probably have to face the scenario at some point. I mean, we've talked about that. Like, will he have to choose

or will he just cut back on both sides of the ball and pitch part-time or be a reliever or, you know, whatever it is. We don't know exactly how his decline will go, but yeah, at some point he will have to face this question. Hopefully it's not super soon. For the record, he's in his best seasons, he's been worth about the same amount as a pitcher in his best pitching season as a hitter in his best hitting season. So it's actually a pretty close comparison. I feel like the not being hurt as a pitcher plus extra playoff value of good pitchers still makes me lean pitcher, but yeah. Yeah, that's something we've talked about. And I think Sam has written about just that he's so perfectly balanced and calibrated that not only is he really good at both things, but he's equally good at both things or like close enough to equal that it is a debate, you know, which one is he better at? And at various points, we've had different answers. And that's good, because if he were great at one thing and merely okay or kind of good at the other, then he might have had to specialize. But the fact that he has legitimately been roughly as valuable in each role at one point

or another has, I think, helped him continue to do this and not be forced to choose one. All right. Last question from David, who says, as a lifelong baseball fan who's always been on the side of players, I have to confess the $700 million contract for Otani gave me an ill feeling in the pit of my stomach. I couldn't help it. I know he deserves to get whatever he can from the market. I'm not blaming him. What I dream about, though, is a player who would say to management, okay, I and generations of my family will be able to live unimaginably well on 500 to 600 million. And, you know, we can lower the amounts if we want to take into account the time value of money and

everything that we've talked about with his contract in particular. But so management, in order for me to sign with you, I demand you put in writing that you will take $100 million of this money. And rather than give it to me, you will, for the length of my contract, pay the folks at our stadium better so they can afford to live in our city. Hire more of them so fans don't have to stand in line for two or three innings to get a beer or a hot dog. And by the way, make that beer and hot dog less expensive so a family can enjoy the experience without gouging huge holes in their bank account. Naive beyond all reason, I know, but a fan can dream. So this scenario is basically like the Atlanta Braves Foundation except instead of 1% of the contract, it's a higher percentage. except instead of 1% of the contract, it's a higher percentage.

And instead of just going to charity or whatever the foundation team's appropriate, the player is saying, like, take this however many million you were going to pay me and distribute it thusly to our concession workers or to other underpaid people in the organization or, I guess, outside the organization. Like, take this money and do some good in the world or I guess outside the organization like take this money and do some good in the world that that I specify? I'm actually I feel like the Dodgers this offseason have actually started to put this kind of question in play in terms of like making it more obvious that players are starting to consider things more than money in certain cases. And I'm not convinced that that's actually a good thing,

as much as people like players not, you know, trying to maximize their earnings, I feel like it makes it more likely that players will gravitate towards the same teams for the same reasons. Because if the money is not a concern, can you offer like you can't do that much to convince a player to come to you over someone else and then you'll end up with players gravitating towards the best teams certain cities etc so i think it might actually be bad for the sport if players aren't largely money driven i think like it would be really great to see and we have individual players who have done this but um and certainly the i think the union in in recent years has been more active on this front but like i think that players sort of having a broad understanding of solidarity

with other workers is a really powerful thing right right? Like, it would be great if next season, we don't have any stories of like teams staying at hotels where the staff is on strike and the, you know, the players are essentially crossing a picket line as fellow union. They're not in the same union, but as union members, right, to stay there. So like, I think that there's power in that. And i think that it would be really great and meaningful to see it um exercise broadly i am nervous though about shifting the under our understanding of like where the responsibility lies for all of the things described in this email toward the players like those are management responsibilities and i agree that they have them and the fact that stadium workers don't get paid enough is a really big problem and the fact that you know yeah like

i think that all of those things are big problems and that the responsibility for fixing that needs to sit with with management it's not it shouldn't be the player's responsibility to do that not because there isn't power and solidarity, but because those are those are responsibilities that sit with ownership. But it would be really cool if like, you know, someone in a position where it's like you're a franchise player, you're not going anywhere. You have a big contract. You're important to the competitive hopes of the team. you're important to the competitive hopes of the team you know i understand it would be uncomfortable but being like our concession workers really need to make more money you don't need to be the one that writes the check being a person willing to say that publicly and like try to rally your fellow players to that end i think is is another way to exercise sort

of the soft power of being a celebrity that would be important and impactful. Yeah, great point. Yeah, there were star players across sports who donated to like cover event staff and concession workers wages during the pandemic. I remember that happening, right? Or helping to pay minor lenders during that time, right? Yeah, exactly. There were players who did that. Or helping to pay minor leavers during that time, right?

Yeah, exactly. Or players who did that. Yeah. So some of these things may happen and there might just be some players who don't tell us about it and they do it quietly. Or, you know, like Otani and the Dodgers, I guess, kind of collaboratively gave a million dollars to support people affected by the earthquake in Japan. And Otani's donated gloves to Japanese school kids. You know, it's a tiny percentage of what he's making, obviously. But he and other players are sometimes very generous and philanthropic. And we might not even know the depths.

And, you know, if you accumulate as much money as you can and have that growth, then in the long run, you have the capacity to give away more of it. How many players do that in the long run? I don't know. But you could certainly say, yeah, I'm going to make as much money as I can. And then down the road, I will sprinkle gifts to many worthy causes, which you may or may not know that I'm doing. But yeah, it is that shifting of responsibility. It's like, why should it be incumbent on the player to demand that the organization take the money that the player was going to make as opposed to money that the organization has that the billionaire owner is not giving away. So there's that, I guess,

pressure that you would be potentially putting on people. You know, like generally we're in favor of players maximizing their earning power. We've also maybe said something to the effect of like, you know, would it be nice on a societal level if human civilization valued other things more highly than we value sports and entertainment? Like, yes, players are entitled to make this money because they generate tons and tons of revenue and they're entitled to their cut of that. Nice if, you know, nurses or teachers or whatever, like, you know, lower paid people who do some societal good but don't generate as much revenue directly. If the earnings could be shifted to them somehow. dollars scripting major league baseball secretly, would we dry it up so that a single baseball player makes hundreds of millions of dollars or that the single owner makes billions of dollars as opposed to some more equitable distribution? You know, maybe, maybe not. Maybe that wouldn't be the best way to do this. It starts going on a very not baseball related road. It does. It does.

Yes. Right. Exactly. So, yeah, I, you know, I don't hold it against any player for getting theirs really. And I'm, I'm sure that many of them are quite charitably inclined and all of them have some sort of foundation where they give away something. We don't know exactly how much they give away, but, But yeah, to feel like you would sort of have to performatively say, you know, like it wouldn't affect your quality of life or your family's quality of life if you were to do this. If someone decided to do this, I guess I would say that's a nice thing to do, you know, like I would applaud that generosity, I suppose. But I definitely don't consider it selfish when someone doesn't do that, I guess, you know, Eddie, more than it's selfish

for anyone in any industry to make hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah. I will resist continuing as this is a baseball podcast. Yeah, well, at the very least, they could all sign up to be Mike Trout tier Patreon supporters. That'd be a nice gesture. Yeah, give back a little bit, which I guess takes us to the end of this episode and the part where we thank you, Nick, for joining us and also give you the opportunity to plug anything or promote your baseball work

or any of your social media presences or anything else? Social media, I'm everywhere as PokeBunny. I used to play professional video games under that handle. Oh, what did you play? StarCraft 2. Oh, awesome. Baseball-wise, most of my recent baseball slash stats slash software work have been related to a baseball video game called Mario Superstar Baseball. So if you ever heard of that or played that as a kid, I guess I can provide a link to Ben to learn about this. And it's really cool to do sabermetric work on a baseball world that is completely different and like all of your assumptions like are no longer true. is completely different and like all of your assumptions like are no longer true. So I've had a lot of fun with that about like trying to figure out like what actually matters in a baseball world that's like, you know, not real. I co-wrote a book about that. I mean, it was real, but it was

a different level of baseball for sure. So I've had a lot of fun with that. And I think that's about all. Support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get themselves access to some perks. Jason Jester, Jacob Stewart, Justine Dikotis, Alexander Pietras, and Tommy Whitman. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include, well, as you heard, potential podcast appearances. But there are plenty of perks at lower levels of support as well. Prioritized email answers, shoutouts at the end of episodes, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, discounts on merch and ad-free fan graphs, memberships, and so much more.

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