Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2115: I Am Become Death Ball

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the “death ball,” a curveball variant that could be baseball’s next sweeper-esque pitch-design innovation, and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of separate classifications for “new” pitches that are subsets of other pitches, and the importance of continuing education among fans and media members. Then (39:23) they talk about […]

Hello and welcome to episode 2115 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrafts presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg R baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. Where do you stand on naming pitches that are subsets of other types of pitches? You have some thoughts on this, right? This became a big issue for some reason, especially during the postseason when everyone was talking about sweepers. And some people were upset because I guess the idea that the sweeper was something new as opposed to something that had always existed, but was now named and classified and pursued more actively. pursued more actively. I ask because I was reading a good explainer at Baseball Perspectives this week by Brian Menendez about the death ball, which is the new sweeper, essentially, the new

hotness, the new breaking ball variant. The sweeper is a kind of slider. The death ball is a kind of curve. I will explain the death ball, but tell me what you think of this in principle. Okay. I'm so glad that you asked because I have a lot of thoughts about it. Actually, I have some thoughts that I have a lot of conviction in. I mean, it is useful to have specific and distinct terminology for pitches that are sufficiently different from one another that it adds explanatory power, sort of conjures a particular image of a pitch, right? Yes. To say, this is a sweeper versus just a regular slider.

Will you allow me a brief digression, a cul-de-sac on the sweeper conversation? Of course. Okay, so here's the thing about the grumpiness in the postseason. I'm off two minds about it. Because on the one hand, I think some of it was like stuck in the mudness, right? Like, what is the platonic ideal of a sweeper to me? When I think of a sweeper, I think of the pitch that Blake Trine throws, right? Like, that to me is a sweeper that is a different animal

than a standard slider and i think that calling it a sweeper versus a standard slider allows you to conjure like an image of blake trinan's slider of a sweepier slider, right? And so I think that there's value in that. And some of the resistance that the postseason booths, and not all of the booths, right? Not all of them. And not all of the people in the booths that had objections to sweepers. Like, let us not paint with too broad a brush. But I think some of it was stuck in the mudness

where there was a refusal to acknowledge just how meaningful a difference the one had versus the other. And that's not good. these sweepers are just sliders like they're just sliders they're just they're just sliders ben they're just normal sliders they're not like trying and sweeper they're not a whirly right which is what the yankees kind of used to differentiate these pitches from other sliders right they're just sliders you know we could just call them sliders like have some you need to have precision because the whole point of having a separate name for that kind of pitch is that it's different and that you want when you're talking to a fan or another baseball person to say, well, he's throwing a sweeper, really. And then you go, okay, and you have an image in your mind about the way that the ball moves in the zone and the action that it's getting. in the zone and the action that it's getting. So, I think that it's good to have distinct names for things and to use that to help us sort of conjure a mental image of a particular pitch, right? We have this overarching category of breaking balls, but within, like, imagine if

we only call them breaking balls. There are a couple different kinds of breaking balls. Sure. It's useful to be able to say that you mean one versus the other, right? Because how they're deployed is going to be different, who they're thrown to, by whom, in what circumstances, right? And so, I think that, I think it's useful. But I think, to counterbalance that point, that there needs to needs to be like a meaningful difference between those pitches right and sometimes we get a little loose and the the differences are porous and we could simply call that pitch a slider and if it's a little bit different but not like sweeper different then we can talk about how it's a little bit different um and and that has explanatory power too so um i i think

that i think that the the thing you should be in service of is having greater explanatory power and helping people conjure an image of the particular pitch. And I think also a third thing, I think, that maybe contradicts both of the prior points that I made is that it is fun to have like cool names, right? It is, yeah. Names that have like a little flavor to them, right? That they've been zhuz judged up a little bit right like imagine if we were so staid that we didn't have room for the uncle charlie in our pitch vernacular that would be that would be travesty that'd be so sad when you're a writer you want all these words so that you don't have to keep repeating them because that gets tiresome and copy so you know i i want to try to keep all of those goals sort of in balance with

one another. I do want to put my foot down on sweeper creep and not just because it's really fun to say sweeper creep. I know I wanted to come up with some combined portmanteau of sweeper creep and then I realized that it would just be sweeper if you combine those things probably or sweep. But yeah, I am kind of glad that there was that controversy about it during the postseason because it helped bring Brent Rooker to my attention, our recent guest, because he was tweeting about it a lot. And I agree with your points there. And so a sweeper, if there is any lingering confusion. I think we could say that all sweepers are sliders, but not all sliders are sweepers, right? So it's a form of slider. And then the question becomes, do you break it out entirely from slider? Baseball Savant, other sources might just

classify a sweeper as a sweeper, not as a slider at all. It's just broken out into a different pitch type altogether, which I think maybe creates the impression that it is entirely different. It's not just a different point on the spectrum from a traditional slider. And yet there's some analytical value to doing that, too. It's almost like, does it aid comprehensibility for a general audience or does it aid comprehensibility for a sabermetric minded data analyst audience, right? It's two different audiences. I think it could be helpful for people who are analyzing pitchers to separate it into its own category, but then maybe it's misleading, at least at first, for a general audience that's maybe being exposed to it for

the first time on a national post-season broadcast is going, wait, is it a different pitch? Is it just a form of this pitch? Is this brand new? Because that's the other way that it's often talked about. It's like, oh, teams are teaching everyone sweepers. And that's true. It's not that they necessarily just invented the sweeper out of old cloth. No one ever threw a sweeper before.

It's just that we have a classification for it now. No. sweeper, but you might have heard this called a frisbee slider in the past, right? People threw it. It just, it wasn't the it pitch, right? It wasn't the hot progressive team player development pitch. It's just a slider with a large amount of horizontal movement, less of a tight break. It sweeps across the strike zone as the name would suggest. It's a little slower. It induces weak contact and pop-ups. So I think it can be explanatory and clarifying, and it can be confusing. But maybe it's only confusing because it's somewhat new, or at least this idea, the concept is kind of new. So when a curveball or a slider itself was new, maybe that was kind of confusing. And then we all learned what that meant. And now it's a subdivision of a slider. And then it becomes a question of, well, do we include you know, you have your sliders and your cutters and your slurves and your curves and slutters and slurves. And, you know, it's hard to really draw a line unless you are doing some kind of pitch classification or data analysis. And then you can say, well, it moves this much or that much, or it doesn't move more than that. And then you can draw a bright line. But in reality, there isn't really a line, you know, it's just, we decide where to set that.

I mean, I think that another element to the sweeper conversation in the post-season too, is that I don't want to impugn anyone in particular but like i think that um folks who are doing broadcasts throughout the regular season with greater regularity are more comfortable with a sweeper because they've been talking about it every day in the booth right so i think there's that part i mean i like the way that so savant has updated their search tool i think that it's laid out like this is the way that i would do it so of course i like it but if you go into pitch type they group them right and they break them down into subgroups so you have like all of your fastball variants right you know just your traditional four seamer two seamer cutter then you have all your off-speed pitches right and then in the breaking group they have a curveball group and

a slider group and then knuckleballs and nephesis because they just get thrown so infrequently and so within the i think that if you were unsure of what a sweeper looked like, you would be able to look at this and be like, oh, it's a variant of a slider. Now, if you're using the Savant search tool, do you really need to know that? Like, are you needing the pitch type groupings to inform you of that?

Probably not, right? You know, who's going to the StatCast search if they're not deep in the weeds already? But I think that, like like this sort of is in line with the way that I would think about it from a data presentation perspective. So I think it's, you know, I think it's good. I think it's good. I find these new names somewhat underwhelming because I always want them to be an entirely new creation that just has never been seen before. Remember when Daisuke Matsuzaka came over to the majors and everyone was talking about the gyro ball and there was a lot of mystique.

What is this pitch? And it was whispered about and reported on as if it was this entirely new entity that had never been seen or thrown before or defined physics or whatever. And most of these new names and classifications, they're not something that no one has ever thrown before. We're just classifying it. We're giving it a name and dividing that group a little bit. So I don't know if there is such a thing as just a new pitch, an entirely new pitch that has never been thrown. I feel like maybe they've thrown all the kinds of pitches it's just a kind of an existing pitch that probably has been thrown for a very long time. It just wasn't known or called a death ball, right? So the death ball itself, I'll play a quick clip that explains it. This is Tyler Zombrow of Tread

Athletics. So the death ball is kind of a creation of Tread, or at least has been popularized by Tread and Tread pitchers. This is the data-driven player development facility in Charlotte, kind of a driveline east, where former Effectively Wild guest Declan Cronin has worked as an instructor, in addition to a professional pitcher. And you're probably going to be hearing about the death ball a lot, because Jordan Montgomery throws it.

And this led to its initial exposure again in the postseason last year. He threw the death ball and it got the better of Jordan Alvarez in game one of the ALCS when he struck out Jordan three times. He was the giant killer. He threw him death balls and Jordan said that he just looked like a fastball out of the hand and the angle at which he releases it makes it more difficult to pick up. Right. So here's a quick clip of Tyler Zombrow, who works at Tread where Montgomery has trained and where that pitch was named. Here's him explaining it. The unique part about this pitch is that it's not a high efficiency curveball. So we're not going to have that traditional topspin.

It's going to be more gyro-oriented, and this is unique for certain guys where they've tried to get to the front of a curveball, but this is more gyro-oriented, stay behind the ball, plays at straight vertical depth, no side-to-side. This pitch particularly is good for high-slot pronators, guys who have really used their release angles to make this pitch play up even more. And here is Brian Menendez at BP adding a little bit more information. So he points out, hey, the sweeper has swept. Yes, he makes that joke. The major leagues and that not everyone, though, can throw it or can throw it well because you have to have certain traits to do it well

most importantly your arm slot so if you have a straight over the top delivery then it may be difficult if not impossible to get that 45 degree bend to a breaking ball and so you have to throw a more vertical breaking ball a hard gyro slider or a big slow curve ball. But that could be changing because now we have the death ball, which is having its own post-sweeper breakout and could become even more popular. He writes, what seems to make the death ball different from a traditional 12 to 6 curve ball is threefold. First is the aforementioned gyro component, as these three pitches come in between roughly 30 to 60 percent active spin with a supinated release meaning top spin they're thrown harder presumably because of the gyro component

so let's say above 80 miles per hour and then there's some seam shifted wake effects as well and so there's a deviation between the spin based movement how you think it's going to move based on the spin and the actual movement, which surprises hitters because they're not used to seeing this particular pitch profile that much. And the gyro spin pulls the ball back to the bottom of the clock if you're using a clock to represent the spin. And there's a layer of deception for the hitter. So it's like a sweeper in that way. It has an atypical shape relative to the arm angle of the pitcher. And so the hitter. So it's like a sweeper in that way. It has an atypical shape relative to the arm angle of the pitcher. And so the hitter is confused at least the first several times they

see this. Once everyone's throwing a sweeper, then maybe not so much. Maybe the effectiveness wears off a little bit and it is subject to large platoon splits too. So all of these pitches, there's a familiarity or unfamiliarity effect where as it becomes more common, maybe it becomes less effective on a league-wide level. So Brian says maybe this will be the pitch that blows up in 2024 so that you have downward vertical movement without the loopiness and airiness of a traditional 12 to 6 curveball. Call it a death ball, call it an anti-sweeper, but whatever it is, it looks to be here to stay. Now, one critique I would have is that

if this is going to become a common thing that we're going to need to know the name of, I don't think death ball works. Death ball sounds cool. I mean, it sounds cool. But it doesn't tell you anything about the movement of the pitch. If I just said death ball, you might know, you might divine that it's effective, that it's death on hitters, presumably, but it tells you nothing about what type of pitch it is, right? I mean, a sweeper is very descriptive, and so is cutter and slider and curveball and fastball.

is cutter and slider and curveball and fastball. We call them these things because they describe pretty efficiently in one word how they move. Whereas deathball, when I saw the term deathball, I had no idea what that meant. Now, I did think it sounded kind of cool. So if I threw a deathball, I would probably want to call it a deathball too. It sounds intimidating. It would pump me up. But again, from a how is this going to land with the general baseball audience perspective? Now, they might think it's kind of a cool name too, but you then have to explain what is a death ball

because yeah, that tells you nothing. I think that's fine though. I think we can have a little death ball as a treat. Okay. Right. But the question is then, okay, so do we now need to know what a death ball is? Are we going to be hearing about death balls constantly when Montgomery signs? Will we be hearing about the death ball? And will we then have to have a separate pitch classification for the death ball? I guess it's fine to do that, especially from an analytical perspective. Anything that adds value in that perspective, I'm not against. But ultimately, how many subdivisions and subclassifications are you going to end up with if we have variants of sliders and subsets of sliders and curves? And, you know, you already have like sinkers

as a kind of a fastball, a two-seamer, a four-seamer, right? So I guess there's precedent for that. And if we have a couple kinds of curveballs and a couple kinds of sliders and a couple kinds of fastballs, that's not the worst thing in the world probably, but it is a lot you need to know. So Jordan Montgomery throws a death ball.

Pete Fairbanks throws a death ball. Is that why he looks so nervous? Maybe. Alex Lang of the Tigers throws a death ball. And Brian, in his piece, looks up basically the parameters as defined by tread of the death ball and finds a bunch of other pitchers who, technically speaking, probably throw a death ball, but might not know it by that name, might not call it a death ball. We're just applying that label, which is another added wrinkle of complication to this is that there's always the debate about, do we call it what it is based on how it behaves and how we understand pitches that behave a certain way to be called,

or do we call it what the pitcher calls it which sometimes is a different matter entirely right oh i have so many more thoughts now um you've hit on one of the important criteria for me that need to be needs to be checked off before like a sub-classification really gets acknowledged to the point that it might like appear in a savant search which is are a lot of guys throwing it and do a lot of guys understand themselves to be throwing that pitch right so like if jordan montgomery i don't not trying to denigrate the most nervous boy in baseball p Pete Fairbanks. He just looks so nervous all of the time. It's like, really, I worry about him, you know? I don't know him, but I like worry about

him. Anyway, if it's just Jordan Montgomery, right, then I think you wait. You wait until both there are a lot of people who are like, I am throwing this variant of a variant. We need a new word of a curveball. It's the death ball. It's like Jordan Montgomery's. It's like Pete Fairbanks, but less nervous. You know, I think that that's important. I also am sensitive to the fact and I don't say this to knock tread because I think that like I enjoy tread.

Like I appreciate treads like YouTube and stuff. I think that you can learn stuff watching that. I also am conscious of the fact that like part of this is marketing on Tread's part, right? think we should not have a little bit of death ball as a treat because i don't know that we you know need to see seed ground to to marketing right which again is not a knock on tread it seems like they do good work a lot of people have come out of there better as pitchers as a result of working with those guys but i don't know if we need to like enshrine that marketing, right? Like, it's not, they're not Q-tips, right? Some, sometimes, Ben, you just are like, look, I understand that there are a lot of kinds

of facial tissue. But if I say Kleenex, people know what I mean, right? If I say Q-tip, you know what, I love that on the back of Q-tips, they're like, don't put it in your ear.

And I'm like, everybody puts these in their ears. The entire reason anyone buys them is to put them in their ears. Yes. Legal disclaimer. Don't use our product in a way that could injure you. Even though that's exactly how you use it. Right.

And, you know, don't throw pitches that might exceed your talent. I think you need a disclaimer there, too. But a death ball isn't a Q-tip, Ben. You know, it's just not. It's not a Q-tip. And to your point, it's not really telling us anything about the pitch itself. And now that I'm conceptualizing that as marketing because Dread wants a thing that, like, makes them sound badass, maybe I'm a little less inclined to cede that ground. a little less inclined to cede that ground. But I think that in general, it's fine for us to have one, exactly one pitch that is known by a fun name as its primary name, but only one. And do we want

to spend that on the death ball? I don't know. I think we can have a little fun again as a treat, but is this the treat we want? mean sometimes you're like i want dessert and all i have is this chocolate and then you eat the chocolate and you're like that wasn't really what i wanted i still want dessert and i feel like sugar gross you know it's like that i like it like it when individual pitchers have a named pitch but it's not necessarily that their pitch is different from any other pitch anyone else throws. It's just that they have a really good one, right? Like, you know, Vin Scully calling Clayton Kershaw's curve public enemy number one when he first came up.

That was cool, right? It wasn't like, oh, no one else throws this pitch. It's just that this is or was at the time a signature pitch for him and it's really effective. And so we're going to give it a name. I like that. Yeah. But this is a little different if it's a whole classification that applies to multiple pitchers. I think the word for what you were talking about is genericization.

When Kleenex or Xerox becomes synonymous with a whole category of thing. If you say Google for any search engine, just the of of searching something you're not a bing man you're not a binger you know you know bing no i don't bing i love that i was like i have one thought and then i managed to turn around and have a completely different thought by the end of my conversation there but i'm a duck duck go guy sometimes oh okay how do you like duck duck go google's just so much worse than it used to be. And I feel like an old person saying that, but there was reporting on this question and academic research on it. It's not good. That's not the point, though. I don't say Xerox. I say copy machine. That one hasn't permeated for me. But like Ziploc bag. I say Ziploc bag, not sandwich bag. I could just say sandwich bag. Sandwich bag is more descriptive actually. Because it tells

you something about the size. That's true. So I got used to the death ball apparently, but understood what it means. Yeah, there's a comment on Brian's piece at BP where someone said, I love all these new pitch names.

It's like we're in a veritable 1930s to 1950s of pitching innovation again. And that's true to an extent, but not quite to the same extent. I don't know that we're inventing new pitches. We're inventing classifications. And once we have those classifications, we can then instruct pitchers to throw those things and target that type of movement. And I think it's obviously very valuable to understand the characteristics of a pitcher that are conducive to a certain pitch type. So you can say, hey, look at your arm action, look at your release angle. You're a good candidate for

this pitch, right? And then maybe if that pitch has a name, then you can show them here's Tyler Glasnow throwing a death ball. Look how it works for him. Right. So I get it from that perspective. But I think it can be kind of confusing and misleading as well if it's in the wrong hands. Yeah, well, and like, it's so funny that the thing that you think of is like Vin Scully talking about Kershaw, because the whole idea there of naming the pitch was that no one else threw it that way, right? That there was something superlative and distinctive about Kershaw's deployment of that pitch that merited its own special designation that no one else would have access to, right? It's not like, you know, Vin was throwing that around willy-nilly, right? It only applied to Kershaw. I took it, though, to mean like it was a particularly good pitch, but it wasn't unique in the sense that no one else threw a pitch of that type. It was just the exemplar. sense that no one else threw a pitch of that type. It was just the exemplar. It was a particularly good example of that kind of pitch. But it, you know, it wasn't like no one else threw that pitch type. Right. But he wouldn't describe anyone else's curveball as public enemy number one. That was only his. Right. That was reserved for Kershaw. And so this is maybe a spot where like

Jordan Montgomery's interests and treads diverge ever so slightly. Because if I'm Jordan Montgomery, like I would love it if people only thought of me as the guy who throws the death ball. Like that's marketing goals, right? Scarcity. Yeah. One-on-one. You want the death ball? There's only one death ball.

You got to go get Jordan Montgomery. Right. Yeah, exactly. And he is death ball? There's only one death ball. You gotta go get Jordan Montgomery. Right. Yeah, exactly. So, and he is still unsigned as we are recording. So, what are they all going to sign, Ben? What are they all going to sign? Sometime soon. One would hope.

One would think. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to hold you responsible if they don't. The fact that you were just saying that you felt old saying something. I feel old when I bring this up just because when I read the work of people like Brian or people like Robert Orr or Mikey Haytoe, who's been on the show, they both have, or Nick Pollock at Pitcher List, you know, others who have sort of been steeped in this era of baseball analysis, Drew Haugen. I mean, I think that when you came up as a baseball writer has an effect on what you're most conversant with. You almost have to attend a continuing education course as a baseball writer because analysis has changed so much and the tools at your disposal have changed so much just in the time that we've been writing. And so there are almost distinct generations of baseball analysts where I guess it's not unlike the pre-Moneyball, pre-Saber Metrics crowd when that stuff kind of came in and initially there was resistance or there was confusion, puzzlement, all these new names and acronyms, which now seem standard and obvious.

I mean, OBP and OPS and things that people whip. It used to be like anything with an acronym would confuse people and they would complain about baseball being alphabet soup analysis. confuse people and they would complain about baseball being alphabet soup analysis. And then there was PitchFX. And that's kind of when I came in and really started writing professionally. And so we had those tools at our disposal. And now it's just become orders of magnitude more granular and thus more complicated and also potentially more insightful. But if you didn't come up with those tools and sort of, you know, cut your teeth on that kind of baseball analysis, you might not have the chops for it. You almost have to like audit a course, you know, you have to go back to school and be like, okay, how do I take advantage of this new tool?

It's like if you are steeped in it from the start, it's almost like an immersion course. You speak that natively, right? As opposed to it being your second and acquired language that you had to learn. And so I've had to familiarize myself with these concepts and I do understand in theory what they mean. concepts and I do understand in theory what they mean. And yet when I read an article like this and it's just full of jargon, right? Sort of stat cast technobabble, which I don't mean in a derogatory way, you know, they're not making it up. These are real concepts with meaning and analytical utility, but it's just active spin and spin direction and vertical and horizontal approach angle and seam shifted wake and pronation and supination. It's like to be a great baseball

analyst these days, you have to have not only whatever traits you used to have to have and be a clear thinker, but you almost have to be an amateur physicist and a data analyst and a scout all rolled up into one. You know, it's kind of intimidating. In my baseball writing, I don't do that much player-specific analysis anymore the way that I used to maybe more when I was writing for a baseball-only site. And you'd write about, oh, this guy is doing something a little bit differently than he used to and that's why he's been more effective. But if you set out now to evaluate a pitcher in particular, though there's more and more of this information available for hitters as well, it's daunting. You can explain much more, whereas in the past you were just dealing with output

stats, like what happened, how was it recorded in the box score, basically. And then you'd have still output stats, but characteristics of the output stats. So not just ground up to second, but you'd have batted ball stats, right? So you'd know fly ball, ground ball, you'd have BABIP and all that sorts of stuff. And that would give you something, maybe a step removed from the actual outcome. And now it's just so much more about process and characteristics and independent of the outcome. So whether it's just your expected stats, the way that you hit the ball, the characteristics of your batted ball contact, or the characteristics of your pitch, your pitch quality, the way that you hit the ball, the characteristics of your batted ball contact, or the characteristics of your pitch, your pitch quality, right? You don't just have to look at the whiff rate or whatever the outcomes of the pitch were, but how should that pitch behave based on how it moves and how it's thrown and your arm angle and all these things, right?

And it just becomes more and more removed from the outcome, which is not to say that it has less analytical use, but it's just more removed, I guess, and it's only going to get more removed as you're evaluating what's going on in a pitcher's brain or body before the contact is made. How is the pitcher's or hitter's body moving, right? And, you know, soon, yeah, what's going on with their neurons and their brains as they're making the connection? Should I swing at this or not? You know, so you could trace it back to the instant that the hitter is deciding whether

to swing or the pitcher is deciding what pitch to throw. And it becomes increasingly complicated. And so you can get to an answer more easily, I think, or not more easily, but maybe in a more satisfactory way than in the past where we might just say, oh, so-and-so is getting lucky. You know, he has a low BABIP, right? And now you just know all the inputs and everything. But the process now of analyzing a single player, you're having to do a deep dive. You're having to just comb through so many possible angles of analysis that it becomes almost a more specialized skill set, I guess, as it has in many other sciences, not just the science of baseball and sabermetrics,

but it's hard to be a lay person and come up with some revolutionary insight now in any field because a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked already. And so to push the ball forward, you have to devote your life to that specific area of expertise and inquiry, right? And you have to have a zillion degrees to do that. And there's only a limited number of people who can comprehend the state of analysis, you know, so this applies to all the sciences, but increasingly, I think it comes to apply to baseball and sports as well. Wow. You said a lot of words. I don't really have anything to add to that. I agree. I do. You know what makes me feel old? What? While we're talking about things. So many of the Scoopsteens have team jobs now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. for long enough that they talk about their careers. And they're not wrong to, right? That's not a slight.

I'm not saying they're being, you know, sassy or uppity or anything like that, like disrespecting their elders. It's like, no, they have careers because they're not teens anymore. They're like adult people who work in the industry. And I'm just like, oh, Moses. Oh, my God. Traditional media members. I mean, you know, Chris Ketilla, I remember when he first burst onto the scene and was breaking news in high school.

Right. And now he's just been a traditional media member for years. He's a Red Sox beat writer. Right. Yeah. I mean, that has happened with a lot of that generation. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Weird. This is making us sound super old, but I think the important thing is to maintain that curiosity. Even, you know, you don't want to let these things pass you by, I guess, which I think as a fan, I almost identify with all of these concepts coming in with people who feel like earlier generations of sabermetric writers. It's like, this is gobbledygook. This is impenetrable to me. This is not the baseball I grew up understanding. And so if you don't dedicate yourself to understanding the way it works now, not that you can't still enjoy it in the traditional aesthetic way without knowing everything that's going on underneath the surface. But if you do

want to know how teams are operating and increasingly how players are operating and thinking about what they do, then there is a lot of specialized knowledge there. So that's exciting, but also can be kind of intimidating. I think, yeah, the important thing is just, it's not to dismiss it out of hand because you're not familiar with it or you don't initially understand it or it wasn't part of your experience growing up with the sport. Be receptive to it. Right. What can this teach me? What can I learn from this?

I think that is the right as someone I need to wrap my brain around whenever he writes something. Yeah. I mean, like, I sometimes feel intimidated when I have to edit those folks. But I think that I serve as, like, a useful idiot in some respects because it's like i know enough to edit them and i know and i serve as a good like proxy for the uh educated end of our audience right to be like okay so i i think i know what you mean do you mean it the way that i think you do if the answer is no let's clarify what this means and i do think that it is incumbent upon writers in that space to at least be clear about who their audience is. Like, I think it's fine for there

to be baseball work and baseball research on the public side that is kind of impenetrable to some readers, just because it's useful to like advance our understanding of the game and it tends to filter down to other writers right and so it can a version of it that is um more easily comprehensible makes its way to the public eventually hopefully we probably work cited it's important but i think that where you run into trouble and you know i think think Brian does a good job of this. So, again, not a knock on him. But like, I think where people get into trouble is sometimes they're a little, they're not clear with themselves when they set out to write. Like, who is the audience for this piece? Is it people in R&D groups, really? Or is it my readership? And that's where you can get kind of like what is this supposed to be even whereas like i think that a lot of writers including all of the folks who you named like part of what differentiates their work is that there is a i think a really earnest attempt to make what they're doing comprehensible to maybe like the way that i think about it is like the nerdiest contingent of a nerdy readership, but not a person running a baseball ops group. Yeah.

And I think there's a lot of use in that, too. So, yeah. I don't know. They're also smart, Ben. They are. They are so smart. They haven't read as many books as I have, though. So, that's probably not even true.

That's probably not even true. That's probably not even true. They've just read maybe some different books, you know, or maybe some of the same ones. You've maybe had more time to read books on a cumulative career basis as opposed to a rate basis. But yeah. Yeah. There was a time where my job was going to be reading books and then I was like, I don't know if I want to be in grad school for that long. All right. A bit of baseball news. A couple signings or seemingly signings.

One that is relevant to you and your continuing comeback and takeover of the free agent contracts over under draft. So the Pirates, of all teams, have signed Aroldis Chapman, who a one one year $10.5 million contract. More good news for Meg in the over under draft because you had the under on MLB Trade Rumor's prediction of 24 million. So not only do you get the difference between the 24 and the 10.5, but you get the $10 million bonus.

And guess what, Meg? That means that you're winning. I can't believe this. You're winning right now. How is this possible? Close the gap. You're winning right now. How is this possible? Close the gap. You're winning this thing. I saw someone in the Discord group call you Miracle Meg.

I, at this point, am kind of rooting for you myself. You're the underdog. Is it because I was such a, because I showed my ongoing support of democracy and its processes? Is that what allowed me to emerge the hero here? I think so, yes. The plucky underdog? Yeah, you're on the right side of this morally. You said you would accept defeat, but you might not need to.

Wow. We'll see because, again, Cody Ballinger still on the board and that's the big thing. Someone compared this to an election, an American election, where certain precincts report first, right? And so one side might be leading, but you know, based on the projections, that that's going to even out. And so you don't want to fall prey to the misinformation that says, oh, we were winning and then they did something nefarious and then there was a comeback. No, it's just that this was not representative of the overall electorate, what was counted initially. So, it could be something similar in that we still have Cody Bellinger waiting in the wings. You know, all precincts have not reported. And once we get those Maricopa County, Cody Bellinger precincts reported. Oh my God, I can't believe I have to roll if there are other rolls in Jesus Christ. Maybe that changes things, but at this point, I'm kind of

hoping it doesn't. I mean, you know, give Cody all of the money. I was going to say, as opposed to November when you're really pulling for those Maricopa boats, just to name a thing that might be a thing. It's just the first county that came to my mind.

I don't know why. It might be a thing. It's just the first county that came to my mind. I don't know why. I need a breather. That's for later this year. But presumably, Cody Bellinger will sign sometime before Election Day. So that will go a long way toward the resolution. But hey, you have Blake Snell too, so we'll see which way this thing goes. But just really an amazing showing by you to have done this well, despite the big Otani deficit. And Roldis Chapman going to the Pirates, I guess that's not what people would have projected, given the Pirates' competitive state and the state of their payroll. And I suppose this is not different from what the Royals did last year.

The Pirates are hoping history repeats itself here where if they're not contending, just trade bait, you know. Maybe they can pick up the next Cole Reagans when they trade Chapman at the deadline. I don't know if that trick will work multiple times. Although Chapman, I guess, has been traded multiple times and then gone on to win World Series. So maybe someone else will want to try to do that again. But yeah, it's sort of a strange thing if you're the Pirates and you're not really going to spend, except on a role as Chapman, like the Orioles, even more strangely not spending except on Craig Kimbrell but yeah this certainly seems like it's something done with the deadline in mind yeah it's a weird

one and Bauman wrote about this for us and I think he's right that like when you look at the percentage of their payroll that Chapman makes up and it's interesting to me because it's like there were times when, especially during the postseason, he just looked unplayable for Texas, you know? And I know that his regular season was, at least started out better. I mean, it was quite good with Kansas City and his tenure with the Rangers was going better in the early stretch

than it did later. But yeah, I was like, okay, okay. And that's before you get into like, is this the guy you want in the clubhouse? But that's what they did, Ben. They decided that that's what they wanted to do and they went out and they did do that. Do you have thoughts on, did he not used to be Jonathan Brebbia or was he always John Brebbia? I really don't know. I really don't know.

I really don't have thoughts. Okay, well, no, I only have one thought about this. And I really thought he was Jonathan for a while. Maybe I'm just making that up. It's like a Mandela effect, Berenstain Bears. Your John Brebbia was Jonathan Berry. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. But can you conjure an image of John Brebbia in your mind, Ben? I mean, with assistance, I have, because no, I probably couldn't have picked John Brebbia out of a lineup, but I have looked him up of late. Have you seen the difference? I think he's just always been John Brebbia. I think he's just always been John Brebbia. Have you seen the difference between John Brebbia with and without a beard?

Yes, it's a big difference. with and without a beard, I now think that we were giving too much flack to the people in the Superman universe who couldn't tell that was Superman because he had glasses on. Because I, these are, you know, if Charlie Culberson and Dan Sweet Swanson are the same boy just moving back and forth

really, really fast to give the illusion of two people, this is two distinct people. This is two different humans. Maybe one of them is named Jonathan, you know? Maybe the clean shaven one is Jonathan and humans. Maybe one of them is named Jonathan, you know, maybe the clean shaven one is Jonathan and the bearded one is John. I think he's just always been John. And I don't know why I thought his name was Jonathan. This is alter ego with a beard. But yeah, I think it's more defensible for a big bushy beard to obscure someone's identity than a pair of glasses,

just in terms of percentage of the face obscured. Right. If you have a giant beard like John Brebby is, I mean, that is literally hiding a large portion of the face. Of your face, yeah. The area that we used to identify you previously is now not visible, whereas with glasses, they are by design transparent. And so there's maybe a thinnish frame, right? It does change your look, but I would argue not quite this much.

But yes, the White Sox have signed John Brebbia. It gave me sympathy, though. It gave me sympathy for all of the people around him who were like, oh, I couldn't possibly tell them apart. I'm like, yeah, I know. I've seen John Brebbia's beard. John, not John. John Prebbia. I don't know whether the White Sox acquired the beard or not, but they've got the Prebbia.

Well, he grows it over the course of the season, I think. Okay. I like that. He's like a chia pet that you get. But apparently he hates it. He doesn't like it. He doesn't like his own tradition, I don't think. Well, I can identify. I don't enjoy when I am more bearded either, but it happens sometimes.

So other signings or quasi signings. Stop me if you've heard this before this winter, but the Dodgers reportedly have acquired someone or is close to being official. Dodgers signing James Paxton. Yeah. A Paxton pact for one year and 11 or 12 million-ish, I've seen conflicting figures. So this, I mean, the Orioles were said to be eyeing James Paxton, right? Like James Paxton was the only starter in their price range. And no, the Dodgers have gone and gotten Paxton too. Obviously, they had a need even after Glasnow, even after Yamamoto, even after future pitcher Otani, hopefully. There was a vacancy

theoretically, or at least a need for some depth. And when you sign Paxton to fill a rotation spot, it's like, have you really filled that rotation spot? I can't believe you're talking about James that way. I'm sorry. Look, I enjoy Big Maple myself, but I'm just saying, if you're signing him to fill a spot, do you feel more confident that it is filled after you've acquired Paxton than before? I feel like not really very much. It's like you have a hypothetical Paxton and you hope that you will have Paxton for part of the season. So, Dinger's Paxton. Yeah. Realistically, how many starts have you actually acquired here? I hope for the best, right? But when you sign someone like that, I'm like, why not just keep going? You know, bring back Rich Hill and hopefully have him for part of a season. Please go get Kershaw, hopefully have him for part of a season. Just acquire all of the hurt or injured guys. You've got Glass now too. And just hope that you can piece together

enough starts to get you through, right? Because you can only pencil these guys in for part of a season. And you're hoping that when they pitch, they will be effective as Paxton was in 2023. But he's had every injury at some point. In fact, when he got shut down in September last year with knee inflammation, Red Sox manager Alex Cora said,

we looked at pushing him back. I don't think it makes sense to push him. He's been through so much in his career. Yeah. The way that he put that, he's been through so much. Just take it easy on poor James Paxson. He's been through so much, but he really has physically. I mean, elbow and shoulder and everything else, right?

And then knee stuff to end the season. And he's in his mid-30s now. So what are you acquiring when you were acquiring James Paxton? You're acquiring the concept of James Paxton, the idea of James Paxton. It's just like, you know, the Red Sox surprisingly got 19 starts out of him in 2023. He missed all of 2022. He made one start in 2021. He made five starts in 2020.

So over the past few seasons, he has barely been available for most of them. Most of them. So it's sort of like, you know, patching a rotation with someone who will then almost certainly need to be patched himself at some point. But why not? You know, why not? Wow. He's like good enough when he's healthy that if he happened to be healthy when October rolled around, you might consider giving him a postseason start. Maybe. And that's what the Dodgers can count on, being in a position to give someone a postseason start. Maybe. And that's what the Dodgers can count on,

being in a position to give someone a postseason start. So it's really just insurance for the rest of the rotation. I don't think it precludes them signing Kershaw because you have to figure there's a good chance that by the time Clayton Kershaw is healthy and able to pitch that Paxton or Glasnow or someone won't be, right? I'm sorry to say that, but, you know, I mean, it's like when Brian Cashman got killed for basically saying about John Carlos

Stanton that he's going to get hurt at some point. And it's like, okay, maybe Andrew Friedman should not talk about James Paxton in the way that I'm currently speaking about him, but we can, you know, that might be how he's thinking of James Paxton. And he might be thinking, okay, we'll pay him a little more than $10 million and maybe we'll get a half season out of him or something and that's fine. If he pitches as well as he did last year

and that's what you get, then okay, it's probably worth it to a team like the Dodgers. But it's just... You know, is an insurance if you then have to take out insurance immediately on the player who is providing the insurance. Wow. Wow, Ben. I just can't believe you talk about our guy, James. James Paxton was like an important part of the Effectively Wild mythology for a while.

Yeah. And also the Ringer MLB show. It was always Zach Cram was a big fan of Paxton and Michael Bauman was a big fan of Lance Lynn. And I think Michael kind of won that one because Lynn has just been more available and also quite effective at times. But that's the thing. Paxton always quite tantalizing talent wise and then always disappears at some point while recuperating from some sort of injury. He's been through so much. He's been through so much.

I think that it's just the lens through which we should evaluate all of LA's roster moves is that like, this is a team, you know, we can put like the Rangers in this category because they've adopted an even more extreme version of this strategy. But it's like, you know, if you are a team that's counting on the fact that you're going to play October baseball, we just get to say that this year.

Yes. Regular season ends on September 29th. So great. But if you think of yourself as a club that's going to play October baseball, you know, you're going to maybe do some of your roster architecting a little differently than a club that is, say,

like the Pirates, in some ways building for the trade deadline. It's a really grim way to think about roster construction, but is arguably what they're doing with some of these moves. Not all of them, right? With a couple of their moves, that seems like it's the idea, right? To be able to flip guys. 200 innings this season i sure do not think that because that is not supported by recent facts but i think that the idea that he could throw you know 120 115 105 um sprinkle keep going you know sprinkle throughout the season like that's uh possible you. It is possible. It is possible. Possible to me. Keep eagles away from him so that none of them land on him because I don't want any injuries that way.

situation is that they seem to be in a very firm YOLO territory in terms of the competitive balance tax and their payroll. And so really, the way that they strike me as building their team right now is constrained much more by how many roster spots they have than any real concern about payroll. They've already made the decision to sort of cross the Rubicon and pay a bunch of tax in service of putting a really good team on the field. And so I think that there is something freeing in that from a team building perspective, because again, then you're like, how am I, you know, these roster spots are precious. I only have 26 of them on the, you know, active big league roster, but how much it costs me to fill each individual one is sort of immaterial.

So that seems like a cool place to be in. It's certainly a better place to be in than say the situation that Pittsburgh's front office finds itself in. But, and that's not to say that like there's no upper bound for l for the dodgers in terms of their payroll commitments but as we've discussed on the pod like the worst arguably like the worst payroll spot to be is being like a little bit over one of the cbt thresholds but not you know kind of consciously going over to accommodate the kinds of players you want. Like if you're going to pay the tax, commit to paying the tax and put the best possible team you can on the field rather than like accidentally peeking over one of those thresholds

and going, whoops, I guess we got a bill come and do and we haven't put the team we want together. So, yeah, that's what I have to say about that. Yeah. Got to go get Kershaw now too, though. Oh my God, I'm going to feel so... Got to complete the set. I'm going to feel...

I'm really worried about it, actually. This is a thought that I've had independently at multiple junctures this offseason. I know we've talked about it, but I just like... I'm really worried about him not getting to be part of this team that seems like it's going to really go out there and just win a bunch of baseball games. It feels, I don't know, it's okay for there to be eras, you know, in a franchise's history. In a franchise's history. And I know that they told Otani that the last decade's basically been a failure, but like the Kershaw era of Dodgers baseball, which extends back further than a decade to be clear, wildly successful as far as I'm concerned I just would like it, you know? Think about it. He could come back as like a coach or something.

Player coach, pitcher coach. If he gets to a point in the season where he's like, you know, the arm's just not doing what I need it to, they should bring him in in another capacity. I know those spots are, you know, kind of precious. It's not like they're unlimited, but I just said that they don't care about money. So, you know. scenario as realistic and fun as possible is clearly with a starting pitcher, and it would take a good one with availability issues. A free agent who, when he pitched, he's good, but in which teams are hesitant to invest. Also a pitcher who's already made money and may also prioritize time

off. Clearly, Clayton Kershaw. So my question is, if Kershaw were to ask $1 million for a start, does any team buy? Can we make this work? And yeah, I think so. I don't think Kershaw would be inclined to do that, to enter an itinerant phase. It seems that he wants to be a Dodger or possibly a Ranger. But if he wanted to do this, any pitcher like this, if Paxton had wanted to do this, just go start by start. I think teams would pay a million per pop for a good, healthy pitcher, right? Like that might be a way to do it. I mean, if you had Kershaw, for instance, the Dodgers paid him 20 million last year, they couldn't have realistically expected much more than 20 starts. I guess he gave them a few more than that, but you're probably not banking on more than that. most acute need in their rotation at that time

or had the biggest game that week, whatever it was, then absolutely, I think you could do that. It would be worth it on a dollar per war basis if you did the calculation that way. Yeah, I think that that's right. But we want him to be a Dodger for sentimental reasons. So other signings, I guess Joey Gallo just signed with the Nationals while we were speaking on a one-year $5 million deal. I'm doing hands.

Ay! Yeah. I'm Italian. It's fine. I get to invoke that. Yeah. I've always enjoyed Joey Gallo as a player, also sort of as a personality. Yeah.

Just had a soft spot for him since he was in the minors and I wrote about him for Grantland and I was just fascinated by that extreme profile and can this work? And, you know, it worked for a while.

It hasn't worked as well lately, but teams are still running him out there and I want him to continue to run out there just to test the limits, the outer bounds of baseball. So, sure, get Joey in a corner,

have Joey Manessis, the Joey's, my pals Joey can be at the corners for the Nationals. I love it. I think two things. I think that New York is a beautiful, thriving metropolis, a gem, York is a beautiful, thriving metropolis, a gem, you know, an important cultural center. And I think it's okay for people to not like living there. I'm sure. It's important. You know, it's not for everyone. Even people who, like, really love cities.

This is not an anti-urbanism take. This is just sometimes you're like, it's all expensive and the apartments are so small. And so, I think it's fine to be a, you know, a big tall guy and say, I need to live somewhere else, you know? And that's part of what Joey's done. Yeah. A couple other things. Speaking of potentially available pitchers, we haven't really addressed the Roki Sasaki rumors this offseason because the initial rumor, there was a report from Spinichi, the Japanese outlet, that he had requested to be posted this offseason. Yes. And what I've read, it seems like the understanding is that if anything, he probably requested to be posted next offseason, not now. But there's still some question about whether that will happen. And it's really intriguing because he's the best young pitcher in the world, I would say. Certainly the best pitcher in Japan now that Yamamoto has left and was probably the best on a per inning basis as it was just dominant, nasty, lights out, untouchable, perfect game pitching pitcher, right? Just

flamethrower, incredibly compelling pitcher, absolute phenom. And there is some question about when he'll be posted because he's still so young and he can't make very much money unless he were to wait a couple more years. And so that's been the understanding. He's 22 and a young 22. He turned 22 in November. And so the understanding for a while was that he would wait, right? And we would not see him in MLB for a few more years. But there may be a secret contract clause. The reason that Otani was able to come over before he was 25 is that he negotiated that with the Nippon Ham fighters. He had a lot of leverage. Obviously, there were MLB teams interested in him, and he was reluctant at first

to be drafted. And so he did accept being drafted with the condition that he could basically request to be posted and that the fighters would do that. And so they did. And because Sasaki was also a young phenom and had MLB teams interested in him. There is some suspicion that he may also have some similar contract clause and that he might exercise it having played on the WPC roster and seen his teammates on that team go over and have such success that he might want to do that, right? And so if he does, then of course he would not stand to make very much money because of the international signing rules. And thus his team would also not stand to make very much money, the Chibolote Marines.

And so the implication would be, well, after 2026, then he'll be 25 years old, which would mean three more seasons in Japan. But there's a growing belief that it might be next winter, which would make two consecutive winters when the best pitcher available for your free agency has been from MPB. Even though he might be in line for a Yamamoto-esque contract because of his youth, he would not get that. He would get the Otani kind of contract. He'd be making league minimum initially. And the Sasaki sweepstakes, assuming he has a solid 2024 NPB season, will just be wild. I mean, everyone will want that guy. It will be the same sort of every team making its pitch

and presentation to him, right? And mystery about what he wants and where he wants to go. The thing is that it would kind of contradict precedent in NPB because there's been sort of an informal understanding that in order to be posted before you have nine years, that's when you are eligible for international free agency. And so there are some NPB teams like the SoftBank Hawks Kodaisenga's team who have just a no posting policy. They will not post a player until after they have nine years of service. until after they have nine years of service. Others will post you earlier, but it's sort of been understood that you have to have accomplished a lot by that point.

Maybe won a championship, won awards, right? You have to sort of have fulfilled your potential and shown that you have nothing more to prove over there before you're then granted the capacity to be posted. Whereas Sasaki to this point hasn't really done that, right? There's still a sense that he has more in the tank. Like he hasn't hit his ceiling yet, at least from a durability and health perspective.

He hasn't had the full season where he's been available all the time. And so it would kind of maybe ruffle some feathers if he were to insist upon being posted over his team's objections and at great cost to his team. And some traditionalists might be upset about that, and it might have effects and ramifications for other contracts and other NPP players and posting precedents, et cetera. But from an MLB fan's perspective, precedent, et cetera. But from an MLB fans perspective, we might be talking about Sasaki 24-7 when next offseason rolls around, if this is true, if there's some fire here where there is currently smoke. Here's the problem. I mean, it's not a problem. I think it's fine,

but it's going to make the discourse unbearable next offseason. So what you're essentially saying, Unbearable next offseason. So what you're essentially saying, Ben, is that you will have a very young, very talented player whose market is artificially constrained by the international bonus system who will be picking amongst teams not because of the amount of money that they can offer him because there's a cap on that, but because of the culture of winning and because of a great player dev system and a front. He's just going to be a Dodger. There's every chance that he might just be a Dodger. I mean, he might, to be clear, he might fall in love with any number of major league cities. You know, he might decide that he loves Skyline Chili. I don't know. Like, I don't know the young man. I don't know what's important to him beyond, you know, the things that we might assume about a professional athlete and their desire to win and compete. But I bet if one were to take odds on the teams that would be appealing to him,

the Dodgers would seemingly be at the tippy top. And I think that's true independent of the Japanese player contingent that they have now, right? Like even if it they literally have Yamamoto and Otani. Oh my god. Can you imagine if they just had like the entire Samurai Japan WBC rotation? It would be so cool. And Tyler Glasnow and whoever else. Oh my god. Right, because Otani will be so cool. And Tyler Glasnow and whoever else. Right, because Otani will be pitching again.

Holy Moses. Wow, that's so cool. I know that it bothers some folks, and I'm sure that if you're a hardcore fan of another NL West team, you're just so sick to death of this stuff. I really do get it, but I'm sorry I can't look at it as anything other than so stupid cool. That team's going to be so good. It's going to be so good

and they still felt like they needed to sign James Paxton. What a time to be alive. Yeah, I don't know. Share the wealth a little bit at that point, baby. Absolutely not. Some other teams have

some Japanese superstars. Absolutely not. No, no wait no no no you know what um there is there there will be plenty of opportunity for other teams to make their case and if he finds those cases compelling maybe maybe he's the kind of guy who wants to strike out on his own. So maybe he would like, rather than being one of the, um, the many, um,

members of samurai Japan on the Dodgers, he wants to be able to like do his own thing. You know, I don't know him, Ben, you know, I don't know what matters to the, to the young man.

Like he'll have to tell us that, but he'll probably just end up being a Dodger. I think he'll probably just be a Dodger. You know, it's fine because my closest big league team just plays in the same division. So, you know, I, if he, if he's not going to be a diamond back and he's not going to be a Mariner, he should sign with another NL West. It doesn't have to be the Dodgers.

I just want to be able to watch the guy in person. Yeah, let the Giants have one. Come on. Okay, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. Couple last items here.

You probably saw the news about Alex Blandino. here you probably saw the news about alex blandino and no you would not have expected that there would be news about alex blandino that would i don't know what you're talking about rise to the level of podcast banter okay well i'm breaking the news about alex blandino which is that he's converting to pitcher like charlie culberson great but the unique is, or I guess the lack of spin, is that he's a knuckleballer now. Yes. Fantastic. This is my favorite, right? So Alex Blandino, known to some as a Reds multi-position type over the last few years, though not since 2021. But he's had some pitching experience in the majors.

He's thrown five games, not with a great amount of success, but he threw four games as a pitcher, you know, just position player pitcher in 2021. He did throw a knuckleball on the mound. I remember a Pitching Ninja gif of his knuckleball looked like a legitimate pitch. And now he is converting. He is trying to be a full-time knuckleballer. So I love this because this is sort of a storied tradition. Not that it's worked out many times, but you always have had players with a knuckleball in their back pocket. Players mess around with knuckleballs. You hear about so-and-so's got a good knuckleball and they'll show it off to their teammates.

And sometimes you'd see a clip of someone throwing it. And every now and then someone will really try to make a go of it. And I love the late career knuckleball conversion. Obviously, with knuckleballs being as endangered as they are, I welcome anyone trying to throw a knuckleball. He's 31. That's young for a knuckleballer. I hope he makes it. I hope someone signs him to do this.

I think this would be a lot of fun. So I wish you well. I'll explain to you. Keep the knuckleball alive. In fact, he doesn't have to be signed by someone to do it because he signed a minor league deal with the Reds in November. And so he is reportedly going to be at AA. I don't think he has an invitation to spring training, at least not now to major league camp. So he's going to be playing his trade in the minors and I hope it works out for him.

Yeah. Oh, that's such fun news. Thank you for telling me that because I had missed that entirely and that's sure something. He has hit 90 on the mound so he has a credible for a knuckleballer fastball.

Sure, yeah, yeah. He can dial it up there. It could happen. Oh, man. How exciting. Yeah. Because it looked like the knuckleball might actually be extinct because we went a while without a legitimate knuckleball, at least thrown by an actual pitcher. And then we had Matt Waldron, fortunately for the Padres this past season, who's not a full-time knuckleballer. He's a partial.

He's a part-timer. But he throws a fair number of knuckleballs. And, you know, it seems to be a pretty good one. And he was moderately effective, you know. He was rosterable. So you have him keeping the flame alive. And you have, you know, a few other people kicking around at various levels of professional baseball. But yeah, it's a rare breed.

It's always been a rare breed. It's an even rarer breed these days, but it's always the dream for someone. It's always not necessarily plan B, but like plan C or D. If everything else goes wrong, break glass in case of emergency. I've been messing around with this knuckleball, you know. Why not? Why not try to make that work? I think that that is just delightful.

And it's not that it's gone extinct. It's just called the death pitch now. Yeah, exactly. It's just the death ball. Right. Maybe the knuckleball needs to rebrand. It needs a rebranding. Yeah.

Right. Right. Maybe the knuckleball needs to rebrand. It needs a rebranding. Yeah, right. We need to give it some cool sabermetric, cutting edge, pitch designy name to erase any stigma surrounding the effectiveness of the knuckleball in people's minds. Yeah, the sweeper, the death ball. Let's rechristen the knuckleball as something else. Yeah, start fresh. You gotta, I don't know. I'm bad at naming things. This is why I don't write fiction, you know, or at least science fiction.

Because you got to come up with nouns. Like you got to make up nouns. That seems impossible. We had Mickey Janus on the podcast back in 2021 when he briefly got to the big leagues and threw some knuckleballs. He's a real true blue knuckleballer. But he hasn't been back since. I made the case years ago in a Ringer article that we might be in for a knuckleball renaissance at some point if we get robot umps. I made the case that the knuckleball would actually be advantageous because sometimes it is not called in the pitcher's favor. It's hard to hit. It's

hard to call as well. And so maybe a full robot up situation would actually benefit knuckleballs, knuckleballers. So we'll see. But yeah, you know. No one found you persuasive. That's upsetting. And also, while we're doing little blasts from the past here, not past blasts, but just things that we used to talk about, it's been a while, but Williams-Estadillo. There was a highlight of Williams, or really a lowlight in this case, but made me nostalgic for the days when— I almost messaged you while I was watching it because I was like, oh, boy. But then it was a lowlight. It was. I didn't bother you with it. It was light. It was. I didn't bother. It was charming.

It was endearing. It's been a while since we've seen Williams. He's been over in Japan. You know, he hasn't been as visible, but he's been playing in Lidom, right, in the finals in the Dominican Republic. And there was a play where he did not cover himself in glory. He's had a couple of outfield misplays. I mean, there's one that's going around, but that is not the only one I have witnessed from our friend in this Lidom postseason.

As an aside, Lidom's postseason goes on for a century. Good grief, they've been playing postseason ball for like three months now, it feels like. Right. And William Sestadio, he did not actually cost his team. Century. Good grief. They've been playing postseason there, but, you know, he made contact. He didn't whiff. It wasn't like an ole, but he just, he dropped the ball. this game. This enabled the Tigers to come back in this particular game and tie it, but then they lost to the Astrayas. So the outcome of the series is still hanging in the balance and up in the air, much like the ball that Williams' Estadio dropped. And, you know, it was just nice to see our boy out there again. Sometimes he's sort of embarrassing himself out there in a charming way. Sometimes he is doing something surprisingly impressive out there, but he's sort of embarrassing himself out there in a charming way. Sometimes he is doing something surprisingly impressive out there, but he's always doing something that is eye-catching

and visually arresting, whatever it is, whether it's good or bad. And he was playing in the Venezuelan Winter League and, you know, he was up to his old tricks. He struck out four times in 198 plate appearances, which is a cool 2% strikeout rate. So he still got it, it being his contact rate and not really that much else, but he still got that. And this is not his first time in the outfield. I mean, he has played out there in lead-on before and in various winter leagues. out there in lead on before and in various winter leagues. And of course, he memorably played center field for the Twins in that very strange game, right? That has happened. And he played, you know, a little bit in the outfield for the Twins in the majors too. So it has happened. He has made some nice plays. I saw one on Twitter from like 2014 when he robbed a home run in winter ball in the outfield.

So, you know. Well, and he had one of his misplays this run. And I don't think this is the one that you're talking about. Like he almost made a really great play on the ball. But then he did it and then it was really bad. So, it's an adventure out there with him, man. But I think our friends, I don't remember or maybe I just don't even know which of them tweeted this. But I think from the Suspitous account, either Jake or Jordan noted that like he has played the outfield a fair bit.

Like this is not new territory for him even if it often looks like it. Yes, exactly. Well, it was nice to have him back in my life, if only via a fleeting highlight. Nice to see he's still making news one way or another. Yeah. And last thing, we got one final follow-up to our discussion about the mercenary player, but specifically the form of that where one guy has a grudge against a team and just wants to sign against whoever that team is playing over and over to play against that team the entire time. In this scenario, it was like Otani deciding that

he had it out for the Reds and he just wanted to oppose the Reds all season. Someone reminded me that Kyle Farnsworth had vowed revenge against the Mets back in 2014 because he didn't like how the Mets handled them, but he never got to face them again, sadly, because that was his last season in the majors. But I would have liked to see the Kyle Farnsworth revenge tour against the Mets. Remember when Kyle Farnsworth randomly got like ridiculously jacked? Yeah. And I's like, what is this guy on? What is up with the jackedness? Yes, I do remember that.

Yeah. So I'd be worried if I were the Mets, but he's not pitching anymore, at least. Anyway, got an email from Dan and maybe a couple other people pointed this out in the Discord group. In your discussion about a player signing to play whichever team played against the team that had slighted him, you didn't really get into what facing the same people over and over and over again would do to his stats. Sure, advanced stats, at least some of them, can correct for the strength of your opponent, but would a hitter get so familiar with the other team's rotation that they far outperformed their base talent,

or would a pitcher tailor their repertoire to the opponent's weaknesses? Can't any major leaguer identify a specific pitcher type they do better against than would be expected and position themselves to face that type of pitcher in one sixth or more of their at-bats using this strategy? Of course, always hitting against Colorado would juice your stats because, of course, field. But this way seems obvious enough. We just mentally discount their achievements. So that's the question. who would gain the upper hand in that scenario if the player is playing the same team all season? Now, if it's Otani and he's playing two ways, then he gets a benefit and also a drawback in that as a hitter, he gets to see those same pitchers over and over again. But those same hitters get to see him over and over again on the mound.

But for a more normal player, it would be bad, right? Or who would it be bad for? Does it even out? You know, you'd get not the times through the order effect, but a times through the season effect, like a multiplier familiarity effect over the course of the season.

Oh, boy. Which way do I think this would go? Yeah, I'd say that it's not going to go well for a pitcher. It doesn't within a single game or over maybe multiple games for a reliever, or in this case for a starter too. You're getting more reps against that pitcher collectively as the team. Like if the starting pitcher is facing the same team for 32 starts in a season, then all of those guys are, you know, like the whole team is getting to see him so many times. Whereas he's facing a collective benefit. Yeah, he's facing maybe different hitters each time and only seeing them a couple or a few times in each game. So maybe there's, yeah, kind of a compounding familiarity effect there. But if you're a hitter who gets to then face that pitching staff, but then those pitchers, I don't know, like each would

be able to exploit the other's weaknesses more, which was, you know, the earlier days of baseball when there weren't as many teams and you didn't have interleague play. It's just eight teams and everyone's facing each other over and over again. Or, you know, when we were with the Stompers and the Pacific Association in some indie ball leagues, you only have a handful of teams. Right. And you might not have the same caliber of advanced scouting and data that we have now in video and everything. And you wouldn't have an earlier era as a baseball. But you would have had a book on those players that would have been fairly informative just from seeing them over and over again. Yeah, yeah.

Good point, Dan. Well done, Dan. All right. That will do it for today. Congratulations to the new Hall of Famers we recorded before the Hall of Fame voting results were announced. Adrian Beltre, Todd Helton, Joe Maurer, all in. Come on down.

We will have some Hall of Fame coverage on our next episode. Maybe do an interview, discuss the Hall of Famers elect, bring you some Cooperstown content of some kind. Always nice to have multiple guys get the nod. Also, always nice to have support from our listeners on Patreon, which you can provide 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. Wayne Teeger, David Landy, JP Bender, DS Boynton, and David Saliba. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, layoff live streams,

discounts on merch and ad-free fan crafts memberships, prioritized email answers, the satisfaction of walking around in the world, knowing that you're helping prop up a podcast like Effectively Wild. All of that can be yours. Check out patreon.com slash effectively wild. If you are a Patreon

supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. But even if you aren't, you can contact us via email, send your questions and comments to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can also rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EW pod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. Now, in addition to our regular outro theme written and recorded by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, you are now hearing the opening strains of a Death Cab song, We Look Like Giants,

performed so professionally that you might not even notice that this is not the original Death Cab version. It is a Death Cab cover performed by listener Corey Brent, who has turned We Look Like Giants into an effectively wild theme. You'll be able to tell as soon as the lyrics kick in.

I have shared this cover with friend of the show, Ben Gibbard, and he called it incredible in all caps with three exclamation points. I particularly like the line where he changed and we've learned how our bodies worked into as we learn how Otani works. You're about to hear what I mean.

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