Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2180: Passing the Greatest-Living-Player Torch

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Ben Lindbergh, Rany Jazayerli, and Neil Paine discuss the death of Willie Mays, Mays as the last legendary link to an earlier era, the statistical cases for Mays as the greatest all-around player and greatest player, period in major league history, and (36:45) baseball’s new greatest living player, plus (46:02) banter about Kansas courting the […]

I want banter with nuance From two hosts who are the guile I'm just a fan who wants Nothing less than Effectively Wild Oh wild, oh wild Oh wild Nothing less than Effectively Wild Hello and welcome to episode 2180 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon

supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined today by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs, who had to sit this one out, but we'll be back next time. Joining me instead for this first segment are two esteemed guests who've been on before, though it's been too long, and I'm glad we could rectify this now, despite the circumstances. Baseball prospectus, co-founder, Kauffman Corner, co-host, practicing dermatologist, joining us after a long day of dermatology, Rennie Giserely. Hello, Rennie. Hi, Ben. How are you?

Doing okay. Also with us is Neil Payne, who is incredibly prolific, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, now is writing at the aptly named Neil's Substack, in addition to doing a lot of freelancing for ESPN and other outlets. Hello, Neil. Hey, how's it going, guys? Going all right. So I alluded to the somewhat sad circumstances, though they will also be celebratory. Willie Mays died on Tuesday. And when someone like Willie Mays dies, not that there really is anyone else like Willie Mays,

that's kind of the point of this podcast, you scrap whatever you were planning to talk about and you talk about that or write about that, as the case may be, even if you have to be up early for dermatology related reasons. And both Rani and Neil wrote remembrances of or tributes to Mays, focused on his statistical case as the greatest of all time. You could, of course, discuss Mays as a cultural icon and a historical figure, and they did a little bit of that too, but focused mainly on just how great he was at baseball, perhaps unsurpassed and peerless. And so reading their pieces, I thought these are complimentary approaches.

It might be fun to get all of us together to just talk about how great Willie Mays was. So I don't know if this is an interesting way to start things off, because I guess we all hear news these days sort of the same way. We just see it come across our phones. So there's not really a story associated. But I wonder how you heard the news that Willie Mays had passed and how it hit you, Randy? So, yeah, I looked at my phone and I saw a tweet. And yeah, that's, you know, like I said, that's how I get most of my news these days. This was no exception. There were certainly a wow, this is a momentous moment. I won't say I was shocked. The man is 93 years old.

And you learn to anticipate that at any moment. But in the immediate moment, I knew right away, this will surpass any other baseball news for the day, for the week, maybe for the month. I feel like in the last few years kind of reassessed what Willie Mays meant to me and who he was as a player. And I think I appreciate I'd like to think that I appreciated just how great he was before he passed on. And so, you know, I was ready to write about it.

I mean, I was not planning to stay up till three o'clock in the morning last night writing a remembrance of Willie Mays. And then, as I said, I have a full day of dermatology patients this morning. But when our editor at The Ringer asked if I could, I was up for the challenge because Willie Mays is not just a great player. He was a singular player. And I do, I feel like his reputation has finally sort of caught up to his greatness in that sense. But I wanted to make that case analytically, and it's an easy case to make. Yeah. When I saw the message that you had sent to another editor at The Ringer as we were talking about our coverage plans, I think you estimated 1,500 words. And I said,

Rani on Willie Mays is not going to be 1,500 words. Well, Rani on anything is going to be 1,500 words. Yeah. Not that I want to talk. I was up all night writing 3,000 words about an accolade episode that wasn't even very good. But Neil, you wrote fewer words, but you write many more posts. And so the words probably add up to the same cumulative total. So how did you hear the news? Yeah. So I actually got a text message from my best friend, Harry Inton, who is he used to be with FiveThirtyEight. He's with CNN and he and I kind of have a special connection or bonding over the New York Giants in particular, because his father, who was a longtime judge in the Bronx, lived until he was almost as old as Willie Mays made it.

He was a New York Giants fan. He had memories of listening on the radio to the shot heard around the world and all these things. And so when I first started at 538, I got a chance to meet the judge as he was known and spend some time with him. And the three of us kind of bonded over baseball. And when Harry's father passed in 2015, the first thing that I did was I got us tickets to a doubleheader. It was a Yankee game. And I also bought us two New York Giants throwback hats to wear as sort of a tribute, you know, spend the day taking in baseball. So for us, Willie Mays was like, you know, had a special personal connection through his father who had actually seen him play at the

polo grounds. And so it was another one where, you know, like you said, Rainey, Willie Mays was 93. It wasn't exactly shocking that this would happen, but it's something that I had been kind of dreading for a long time because it's one of those things where like you want these icons to stay with us forever. Jerry West was the same way. That one hit me really hard last week in the NBA, sort of a similar figure of monumental stature within a sport whose life and legacy

stretches back more than a half century. And so to lose someone on that level, even though they had an amazing life and really lived it to the fullest, it's still just like, it's so sad that the world is without this person that meant so much to this game. And really, as I wrote about Willie Mays in my story, he was this living link back to the 1950s, the middle of the 20th century, when baseball was the national pastime, especially in New York. You know, you think of Willie, Mickey, and the Duke. That was the epicenter of baseball was New York City, and you had all these teams there that eventually scattered across the country.

And Willie Mays was part of that too because he went with the Giants out to San Francisco and helped them build that legacy out there that's still going strong as well. So that was kind of my immediate reaction was similar to you guys where it's like, this rises to the occasion of, you know, I'm not going to write about hockey tonight. I'm not going to write about, and frankly, the Edmonton Oilers did me a favor by winning that game anyway. But, you know, I'm going to drop everything and write how I feel about Willie Mays and try to see if I can put some context around how great he was with the

numbers. Yeah. Tough to say a 93-year-old was taken too soon, I suppose, though. Willie Mays, any time is too soon to lose him. And even if it's not unexpected in that sense, it's still kind of a shock whenever you hear that someone like that is gone. It just feels like there's a before and after, and the world is a little emptier and darker without that person. And yes, that was kind of a common theme of a lot of the responses, that this was the last living link to the golden age, quote unquote. And we could quibble with that, I suppose, that there are certainly guys

who came along a few years later, your Koufaxes and Aparicios and people who bridged eras. But it did feel like the end of something. And I guess constitutionally, I'm sort of skeptical of the whole golden age idea just because, well, who was it the golden age for? Not everyone, right? And also, it wasn't really the golden age in terms of quality of play, in terms of attendance, even style of play for parts of the golden age. That wasn't necessarily the most entertaining brand of baseball. I guess what we say or what people mean when they say golden age is this was a time when superstars could be created or figures

who could kind of tower above American culture in a way that certainly baseball players cannot now. And it's tough for any celebrity in any field or any sport to do now. So that is kind of what that era did, right? It made these mythic, legendary figures. And so the loss of arguably the last of those or of his stature, at least, that did feel like something that sort of rocked you back on your heels a bit. Yeah, I might even go a step further and say that when we talk about the Golden Age, what we're actually talking about is an era in which baseball was the preeminent sport in America. Because, you know, you could really trace the ascendance of the NFL. I want to say it's the 1959 championship game that really set the NFL on

a path towards what it became. The AFL started, I think, in 1960. And really, by the early 60s, the NFL was at least a major competitor with Major League Baseball for the title of the sport that really had the hearts and minds, certainly, of younger people. And so Willie Mays, not just, oh, he was an active player in the early 60s, late 50s, but he was a star in the mid 50s when the Giants were still in New York, the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn, and baseball for that last, it was the last kind of hurrah of baseball as the preeminent sport in the country. So we had one tweet and one text. I found out from an email, an email from Major League Baseball. And I think this is part of why it hit me hard is that I've been getting Willie Mays related emails for a week or two now, just constantly a stream of Willie Mays content in my inbox because of the Rickwood game, because we were all in Willie Mays mode as it was.

we were all in Willie Mays mode as it was. And so when I saw this subject line, initially, I thought, oh, this is just another email about, isn't this great? We're celebrating Willie Mays. And then I read it more carefully. Major League Baseball remembers the life of Hall of Famer Willie Mays. Initially, I was like, well, we're just remembering the good times, right? No. Oh, it's over. That's why we're remembering it now. A true giant of our national pastime was 93. And something about that did feel almost surreal because like you, Neil, I have been actively dreading this. And there was a part of me that when this Rickwood game was announced, I was thinking, gosh, I really hope Willie makes it to that because that would be such a great event. And initially it was hoped that he would be able to attend in person. And then he just released a statement a couple days ago saying that he wasn't going to be able to be there,

but he would be watching and he was happy that it was happening. And it ended very poignantly in retrospect. He wrote or said, all these years and it, Rickwood is still here. So am I. How about that? Right. And so to see this news break this week of all weeks, it felt extra sad in a sense, because there was a part of me that was like, well, he's going to make it till this game happens at least, you know, which is kind of silly and irrational. We can't exactly choose when we want to go, right? But there was a part of me that felt like, oh, well, he has to make it through this at least.

And so it was extra sad that this event to celebrate him would also be tinged with his passing. But then I guess the silver lining is, well, Major League Baseball was already kind of coming together and focusing the spotlight on Willie Mays. And now we can all kind of just clear the stage and fully focus on him. And the event on Thursday, I'm sure, will be extra special now because of all of the emotions that are roiling through this. So when we decide how to turn something like this into content, which is kind of a weird thing that we do in our business where we see some sad news like this and we have to figure out, well, how do we talk about this or write about this or make something out of it? And you both swung into action quickly and your pieces that resulted from your efforts.

Neil's post is entitled, Willie Mays was baseball's greatest all-around star. Ranny's minces words even less, I suppose, doesn't dance around the take, which is Willie Mays was the greatest baseball player who ever lived. So Neil, because you often write from sort of a statistical perspective, the first word in your Twitter bio is stat head. How did you decide that you wanted to try to quantify Willie Mays' greatness? Because there have been so many appreciations of just how good he was at baseball. And it almost feels like, well, yeah, duh, he's Willie Mays. Like, you know, what can I even say that would be illuminating or insightful? Everyone knows Willie Mays. He's one of the greatest of

all time. So how do you go about showing, yeah, but even you don't realize how great he was, or he was great in this way that no one else was great. Yeah. And I really honed in, you often hear this claim that it is kind of dancing around this idea of like, okay, well, who is the greatest player of all time? You know, you'll see a lot of advocacy for Babe Ruth or even Barry Bonds for the steroid agnostic among us. And if you look at something like Wins Above Replacement, those two among position players, at least, are ahead of Willie Mays. But I just kept honing in on this idea of people tend to call him the greatest all-around player in baseball history. And I think there's something really important to that, this idea of being able to contribute not just in one facet of the game.

And certainly, Barry Bonds was a great all-around player. Babe Ruth in his prime was a great all-around player. But both of those guys, you know, their defense waned over time. And their speed and athleticism waned and various different aspects of their game ebbed and flowed. Whereas with Willie Mays, it was really about being this total package for pretty much the entirety of his career. We won't talk about the time with the Mets. But aside from that, with the Giants, you know, early in his career, he had the phenomenal catch that I think everybody talked about. It was a touchstone for all of these pieces in the 1954 World Series. Greatest catch of all time. Vic Wertz is his Google Trends. Oh, yeah.

Really picking up this week. This was a, you know, it's a sad day for baseball, but a big win for Vic Wirtz's remembrances. But yes, no. So, you know, who else could we say had six hundred and sixty career home runs in Major League Baseball yet is most known for a defensive play? That's his signature play of his entire career. I think that really speaks to. And oh, by the way, he also stole, you know, almost three hundred and fifty bases in his career. So I was just thinking about in an era where people didn't steal bases all that much, at least for part of his career. Yeah, certainly not like, you know, later few decades after he retired. And so I was thinking about ways to kind of get at this all around title, the moniker of the greatest all around player. So I looked at it a couple of different ways.

So I looked at it a couple different ways. Obviously, you got to look at wins above replacement, or I guess this is war runs added above average, and looked at players who had the greatest combination of batting, base running, and defensive value in their careers. And Willie Mays, far and away, the greatest player on this list. He is way above Honus Wagner, who's number two. And then there's Barry Bonds. Willie Wells, by the way, prorated shortened seasons

or less than 162 game seasons, especially for the Negro Leagues players, to 162 games. So you get Willie Wells, which is kind of a fun name, an underappreciated name at number four on that, and then A-Rod rounding out the top five. I think that's kind of a cool list of guys that were really good at a bunch of different facets of the game. And then my other way of looking at it was thinking about the five tools, the classic, you know, hitting for average and power, speed, defense and throwing ability.

And it's a little tough to measure throwing in a pre-stat cast era. I was kind of toying with the idea of do we do like outfield assists? How do I do this in kind of a holistic way across positions? I ended up just doing four tools. We can kind of think of the throwing as a mythical fifth tool or kind of included among the defense because the defensive metrics. He had that one too, even if it's a little tougher to quantify. Yeah. And I did note that, you know, the throw that he had to keep Larry Doby on second base after making the catch was as impressive, perhaps, as the catch itself to keep the game tied. By the way, that was a tense situation in a World Series game.

That was the only World Series of his career that he won, in fact. And so I just looked at the four tools. I used Fangraph's amazing plus stats, which I'm sure a lot of the listeners know about, but these scale everything relative to a league average of 100. A little like OPS+, but for all the different stats. I made my own versions for defense and speed and looked at the players who combined those the best. Sure enough, Willie Mays also number one on that, although he just edges out Barry Bonds for the number one all-time on that list.

But I just was trying to think of multiple different ways we could get at this idea of like, who's the greatest all around player who combined all of the different skills that we think of as making a great baseball player at the same time in the same person over the course of their career. And I think that's kind of the legend. You like, you didn't need numbers to tell you that that's the story of Willie Mays is he sort of embodies and was one of the first players, I think, to embody all of the five tools in one person. And so I think when we think about the five tool player, others have come along. Mike Trout is in that conversation as well. Bonds, of course, plenty of others. But I think still the canonical five tool player is still Willie Mays. Yeah. And by the way, I'll stand up for Willie Mays,

the Met, because he gets such a bad rap for that ending to his career. And in his first season with the Mets, his first partial season, when he was 41 years old, he was still a great player, maybe not playing every day the way he did for so long, but still on a rate basis, an incredible player. And then even at the very end, it's kind of overblown the whole stumbling, falling down in the outfield thing. I mean, there was some basis to that, but it was really one event and it was sunny out and a lot of people were, you know, it's just kind of blown into just out of proportion. And he even had a big hit at the tail end of his career there

the last time he was playing in the postseason. He was an incredible old player, incredibly productive deep into his career, a time when most people are not still on the field, let alone producing. So it sort of pains me that he is often mentioned as an example of, oh, he hung on too long because not that long, you know, he was quite good almost up until the end. Yeah. And this wasn't like, you know, Joe Namath with the Rams or something like that. There's a lot of other examples that are definitely worse than that.

Well, it's ironic because, I mean, one of the signature traits of his career that defines not just his greatness, but like his uber greatness is how well he aged. Exactly. his greatness, but like his uber greatness is how well he aged. Exactly. He was, I mean, he was 42 in his final season, but in 1971, when he was 40, he was worth over six wins above replacement. He was an elite base runner still at age 40. You know, there's a handful of players in major league history who have aged as well

as he did. So yeah, no, it's absolutely unfair. One play, you know, kind of defines his the end of his career when, in fact, that stands in contradiction to basically everything that happened to him in his career. although I think we all feel like we've seen him because we've seen the catch and we've heard so much about him. But he was someone who passed the eye test with flying colors. He's not necessarily someone who you need the advanced stats to kind of uncover his greatness. And yet, Rani, I think you tweeted and wrote that he's someone who the numbers maybe only enhance our appreciation for how great he was. Again, not that there was disputes. Was Willie Mays good? But I think our brains work this way where we appreciate players like this,

which is not to say that we can't appreciate helmets flying off and hats flying off and basket catches and great smiles. Like we like those things too. It's just that I guess we add value in this way. And also we're just kind of wired to look at things in this way where we want to go to the numbers. And that enhances our appreciation of a great career in addition to the aesthetics. But when you look at the stats for Maze, it does pair well, I think, with the appreciation of, oh, this guy was just joyous and so much fun to watch.

So when you started digging into the numbers, Randy, what stood out to you? So if you don't mind, since it's me, I'm going to give a long answer to a short question. I'm a little older than you, Ben. Going back to being a kid in the 1980s, Willie Mays was not recently retired, but was not an old hand. He was maybe 10 years past retirement. And I remember his reputation as being one of the all-time greats. But I would not have said in the zeitgeist of baseball stars that he was considered any higher than Mickey Mantle or certainly Joe DiMaggio, just among center fielders. He was considered a great player. And when I got my first baseball encyclopedia and fell in love with the

numbers, I would look at his stats, but I would gravitate towards the gaudy black ink of a Babe Ruth or Ted Williams, the guy who led the league in offensive categories year after year after year. And I don't think that I appreciated Willie Mays, the all around abilities here, right? Like his final stats are eerily similar to Hank Aaron in terms of the rate stats, you know, a 301 career batting average, a 384 OBP, 557 slug within five or 10 points of Hank Aaron and all of those. Mickey Mantle had a higher OBP and a higher slug, just as an example, right? So he certainly led the league in various categories.

So there's a lot of black ink on his page, but I don't think he was, you know, I would not have said this is maybe the most compelling contender for Babe Ruth's title as the greatest player in baseball history. So, you know, fast forward now, you know, decades and the emergence of baseballreference.com and not just his traditional stats, which we've had since I was a kid, but all of the extra analytical stats, right? His base running value, his fielding value, right? The first thing that really opened my eyes was when we finally had defensive statistics that we felt comfortable with, like DRS, that we could apply historically. And we had actually put a number on just how good Willie Mays' defense was.

And, you know, there are some players who had a tremendous defensive reputation throughout baseball history whose defensive numbers do not support that. That was absolutely not the case with Willie Mays, right? He was double digits above average for a center fielder, what, like 10 or 11 times in his career. He finished 185 runs above average defensively. Yeah, it's funny. I will link to this piece I think I've mentioned before. Craig Wright wrote something several years ago about a mid-career fielding slump that Mays seemed to suffer.

Relatively speaking, Craig made the case, at least according to some metrics, he was an absolutely elite, top-tier, all-time great center fielder as a young guy in his early 20s when he made the catch. And then he was an all-time great older center field and stayed out there for so long and was still great at that age. And somewhat mysteriously in his mid-20s, I don't know if this is reflected in all stats, I think Craig was using defensive wind shares above replacement. But even at the time, there was sort of a perception that he had slipped a little bit. And Craig goes through various possible explanations. He was hit by a ball in the face and maybe that affected his fly tracking or maybe he got too in love with his arm or many other possible reasons. But because he had such incredible longevity and was so incredibly

elite when he was younger and older, he still ends up as one of the best centerfielders of all time, even if that may have hurt him on a per inning basis. But yeah, it's definitely not a case of, oh, he won a lot of gold gloves, but they weren't deserved. We should all be so lucky as to be four runs above average in our slump seasons. Yes, right. Yeah. I mean, but he was 18 runs above average as a 35-year-old in 1996. And look, single season defensive numbers, maybe that's not precise, but he was 15 runs above the year before. So it's like, even the center fielders who have incredible defensive reputations

that are justified by their early career play. Ken Griffey Jr. and really the canonical example to me is Andre Jones, who was one of the few people who I think you can make a compelling case was a better defensive center fielder than Willie Mays in his youth. Young Andre Jones probably would be my pick as the greatest defensive center fielder of all time. I mean, he essentially redefined how you play that position because he played so shallow that he would take away what we would think would be an automatic single on a line drive up the middle and was still able to go back on balls. But Andre Jones was basically done at age 30 as a center fielder.

His defensive metrics just completely cratered. His offensive numbers cratered pretty quickly after that, too. Ken Griffey was a very good defense center fielder up until about age 27, 28, and then he was below average after that. Whereas Mays was elite through age 35. And, I mean, we talk about, you know, falling down in center field. He was still playing center field at 42.

He did not play a game in left or right field. Basically, his entire career after age 35, he played like a game here or there in his mid-30s. But even into his 40s, he was still in center field. Mickey Mantle, to pick a contemporary not at all at random, was as a 32-year-old in 1964, was according to the metrics, 15 runs below average as a center fielder. And, you know, we didn't have those metrics back then, but maybe not coincidentally, in 1965, he was moved to left field.

Like he was already done with center field in his early 30s, and Willie was still out there into his late 40s and great until his mid-30s. And that's just one of those hidden value of Willie Mays. Like, yeah, we knew he was great, but he was even greater than we thought when it comes to his defensive contributions. And part of the contrast between those two in terms of lifestyle, of course, Mantle had the injury early in his career that affected his knee for the rest of his career. But of course, he was a carouser, right? He was a heavy

drinker. Mays wasn't at all and kept himself in incredible shape his whole career. Like he physically kind of looked the same at the end as he did at the beginning. And now you look at his listed dimensions and you think, gosh, I mean, by the standards of today, he seems quite slight. And yet he was really like wiry and strong and well-conditioned and took great care of himself. And it showed. Not that that's always perfectly predictive. You know, some players take great care of themselves and their body just doesn't cooperate for one reason or another, but he seemed to do everything he could to ensure that it would. And he was insanely durable in terms of games played. Like, you look at his games for Willie Mays and, you know, he played 151 or more games, 13 straight years.

His 13-year stretch from 1954 to 1966 is, you know, up there with the best 13 games. I mean, in 13 years, he amassed 124 wins of off-replacement. He was a nine and a half wins per year for 13 years. And those games played actually are probably more impressive than they look because for the first eight of those years, the National League was still playing 154-game season. Like, he did not miss more than five games in any season from 54 to 65. He missed nine games in 66. Those are, again, the little things. Like all great players are generally durable, but he was even

more durable than your standard superstar. And that added another, you know, half a win a year or whatever. When you're Willie Mays, an extra few games is worth a lot of value. So these are all the things that sort of added up and led to him beating the league in wins above replacement 10 out of 13 years. Yeah. You can't possibly win enough MVPs that he deserved, right? People just get sick of voting for the same person. I think if he were playing today with the same numbers and dominance, he would have won more MVPs probably. But yeah, when you're at that level, your hardware probably isn't quite going to reflect how great you were just because people want to spread things around a little bit.

It's like you look at the, what is it, 24 All-Star games or something. It's just, it's incredible. I guess, you know, maybe there were multiple All-Star games some of those years, but still. But when you compare him then to the other guys, the very few who have a legitimate case as the greatest of all time, what separates him from them? Well, I mean, for me, when you look at the list in my piece, I just wrote out what Baseball Reference currently has as the 10 greatest players of all time based on wins above replacement. And according to the numbers, I'm looking at Mays' fifth behind Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Barry Bonds. And then behind him, Ty Cobb, Henry Aaron, Roger Clemens, Trish Speaker, Honest Wagner. I think you can see a thread that connects a lot of those guys, which is they all played a long time ago. And by a long time ago, I mean before integration.

Like the only four guys on that list who played after 1947 even you know a single game that's maize and aaron on one hand and then barry bonds and roger clemens on the other and you know the point i make i mean i think if anybody has a credible case to be voted over willie maize as the greatest player of all times it's probably barry bonds but like until we get barry bonds into the hall of Fame, I don't think I want to open that argument of whether or not he's eligible for this honor. And obviously Clemens, whatever bucket you put Barry Bonds in, you're going to put Roger Clemens in the same bucket. So it's Willie Mays and Henry Aaron. Mays is 13 wins above replacement ahead of Henry Aaron.

But I think the thing that sometimes gets missed with Willie Mays is the fact that, you know, we tend to remember all the guys who missed two or three years of service in World War II. There's, you know, an entire generation of players, you know, who their stat record goes from 1942 to 1946, but very few who were affected by the Korean War. And I think Ted Williams, we remember because Ted Williams, it was for one thing, it was his second war. Like he's one of the, certainly the only star player who I think missed time

to two separate wars. And he was a, you know, maybe the game signature superstar when he went into the service was Willie Mays had just come off a rookie of the year award, but wasn't really a star yet. But Willie Mays missed

almost two seasons in the service. And when he came back in 1954, he was the MVP of the National League and started a 13-year run where he averaged nine and a half wins above replacement. So you really have to ask yourself, how good would he have been had he not been called into the service for the rest of 1952? He played 34 games in all of 1953. I do some very basic math in my piece and estimate he probably lost about 14 wins above replacement, which is a lot. And if you give him credit for that, like he moves ahead

of Barry, he moves ahead of the pitchers, Johnson and Cy Young, and he's, you know, within spitting distance, at least of Babe Ruth. So, you know, even without making arguments about PEDs or not, like you can make a very compelling case that Willie Mays is the greatest player of all time on a statistical basis for somebody who played against the best baseball players in the world of any color. Yeah. And these always conversations lead to complicated, well, how do we adjust for quality of competition? And players are constantly getting better and the talent pool is getting bigger, right? I mean, that's in effect what we're doing if we're saying, well, this guy played pre-integration, whether it was in the white major leagues or the Negro leagues, they weren't facing all of the best baseball players at the time. And so you could do the same sort of era adjustment. Not that we doubt that

Willie Mays could be a great player today, but you might give preference to a Trout or a Pujols or whoever, right, came decades after Willie. It's always a question of, well, are we comparing to their peers or are we comparing all time? It's complicated. There's no really one way to handle that. I don't know if you have kind of a way of thinking about that, Neil, or even a more rigorous way to quantify kind of, you know, I've written things about, well, how exactly much better is the caliber of competition right now than it was decades ago? And it is kind of constantly increasing. But does that mean that the greatest of all time is always someone who is active or played recently? Yeah, I agree with the piece that you wrote a

piece about that. And I think if we're being sort of the bucket of cold water to throw on these kind of hazy memories of classic players, then you're right. Like the best player of all time is probably the player that's been the best over the past, you know, decade or whatever it is, whether that's Trout or Mookie Betts, or I don't know who it would be, but some contemporary player. You guys mentioned how small Willie Mays was. I mean, that's one of the things that I think in doing the research around just his passing,

you kind of remember that because he looks so much larger relative to the other players in the old highlight films because everybody was smaller back then. And so you realize he was 5'10", 170, probably the greatest small power hitter of all time. Like I think Mel Ott also was pretty small and hit a bunch of home runs. Maybe not a coincidence. They both played at the polo grounds. You can kind of make of that what you will. But just thinking about, you know, a player of that size,

of that style, I'd like to think Willie Mays would be able to hold up just fine in today's game. The same way I'd like to think that anybody, Oscar Charleston, Babe Ruth, go down the list. Ty Cobb could play in today's game. That's probably a little romantic of a notion. And so what I've kind of always done is maybe just throw up my hands and say, like, you played against who you played against. We can make adjustments. You know, we can include statistics from the Negro Leagues and contextualize those as well. But ultimately, you can never really adjust away the timeline effect or the competition effect or anything. I mean, before interleague play, players didn't even play outside of the World Series against the best players in the other league. They only introduced interleague play 30 years ago, less than 30 years ago. So,

you know, I think you're always going to be able to find situations where the numbers didn't account for everything. And so I kind of like the romanticism of saying Willie Mays was, you know, arguably the greatest player of all time. You laid out a great case, Rainey, for that using stats like wins above replacement and, you know, kind of leaving it at that because it lets me still pretend that these guys could hop into a time machine. And, you know, I think with the benefit of training and techniques and all the things that we've learned about baseball since Willie Mays was in his prime, I think he would benefit a lot from that as well. So it's a two-way street. It's not like if you're throwing him in a time machine, you're just saying, okay, you were accustomed to the style of pitching and the style of play in

1954, have at it in 2024 and good luck. I'd like to think we'd be able to kind of bring them up to speed, I guess is the best way to put it. Yeah. He might even have physically been bigger if he were playing today, right? So yeah, it heartens me, I guess, because you do hear the like, oh, so-and-so will stick around too long and tarnish their legacy, as we were talking about that perception of Maze as an old player, which is unfair. But that always strikes me as silly, because if you have an all-time great, even if he's not all-time great at the end, does that mean that he wasn't all-time great before that, or that we forget all the incredible things he did before then? And no, it doesn't really tarnish your legacy. No one's talking about falling in center field, quote unquote, when we

talk about Willie Mays after he passes. We're talking about him as maybe the very best player of all time. And for the past few years, at least since Henry Aaron passed, there's been no debate about who the greatest living player is, right? And now that Willie's gone, there is a little more uncertainty on that score. Got an email from listener Matthew, who sent a question, who is the greatest? I was with some friends when we learned about the passing of Willie Mays. As we contemplated his greatness, our conversation turned to the question of who is now the greatest living Hall of Fame position player? Matthew specified position player.

We don't necessarily need to do that. Now, if you're going to go purely based on stats, then there isn't really an argument. It's Barry Bonds. It's Willie Mays' godson, right? You could make a compelling case for Bonds even over Mays if you wanted to. And you could even make a case for pre-PED Barry Bonds as a strong candidate for greatest living player if you want to draw some distinction there. But if you think that the greatest player must have a reputation that is unbesmirched by either some of the less than exemplary episodes in Bonds' personal life or the P.E.D. cheating question, well, then you're going to have kind of a non-P.E.D. category.

Who's the best living? Who is not tainted by that? And so that would cause you to then exclude A-Rod and Bonds and Roger Clemens, et cetera. So if you were going to draw that distinction, who do you guys think has the strongest case right now? Because I don't think it's as clear cut as it could have been when Willie Mays still walked the earth. It's a very tough question. And I mean, you could cheat and say that the pre-steroid, pre-PED Barry Bonds, I mean, the villain origin story with him starts with the 1998 season, seeing what Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa did, right?

So if you just cut off his career after 1998, he has 99.9 war, which is, you know know greater than any active ball player right now i think the answer though probably albert two holes i think if you timeline at all like ricky henderson i think leads all living players who don't have any kind of ped taint associated with them yeah i was gonna say ricky it. Just cards on the table. Yeah. Right. Ricky is, I think, a good choice, but if you timeline at all, Pujols comes very close to him in terms of overall value. I think those are probably your two best choices. I mean, what's sad though is I actually think I would have been more likely to answer Mike Trout five years ago than I would today. I know how much that hurts you personally, Ben,

but it hurts me too. I mean, really, one of the things that made me appreciate Willie Mays so much more over the last five years was the fact that five years ago, Mike Trout, we thought Mike Trout was Willie Mays. I mean, he was surpassing him on an age basis in terms of the value he was providing. He was ahead of Willie Mays' pace.

But the thing is, you have to be ahead of Willie Mays' pace. But the thing is, you have to be ahead of Willie Mays' pace because you're never going to catch him from behind. And again, the durability that Willie Mays showed, which was so incredible, that ultimately caught up to Mike Trout in really unfortunate ways here the last five years. And now he's well behind to the point where I'm not sure he's the greatest active player, let alone the greatest living player. Yeah, it's odd. I guess there's almost an anti-pitcher bias when it comes to greatest living player, at least in my mind. It's almost like we are reluctant to give pitchers MVPs. They have their own award. When was the last time? I mean, I guess it's because we've had Aaron and

we've had Mays, et cetera. There just hasn't really been a pitcher who surpassed them. But you could make a pretty solid case that it should be Greg Maddux. It should be Randy Johnson, right? And maybe they don't come as immediately to mind, but maybe they should. Why shouldn't they be the greatest living player, you know? And I mean, I guess there's a certain aura that goes along with the greatest acknowledged as the greatest. I mean, you had DiMaggio, who sort of at least is reputed to have insisted that he be introduced as the greatest living player, even though, you know, he wasn't, even though he was great, obviously. But you had Williams and you had Aaron and you had Mays and all these other guys who were probably even greater.

But there is this mythical quality to a DiMaggio, to a Mantle, to even an Aaron and a Mays and a Williams, et cetera. I don't know if Albert Pujols has that. And I don't know if that should be a prerequisite, especially because as we were saying, post quote unquote golden age, maybe it's harder to attain that type of aura. But there are players who would have a case like Ken Griffey Jr. Let's say who was maybe along with, I guess, Derek Jeter,

arguably the last baseball players to achieve that kind of name recognition and cultural penetration. And Cal Ripken, I guess, had some of that too, because of the consecutive game streak. And then Yaz is still with us Mike Schmidt right Johnny Bench if we're gonna go position players but I mean look I would say Bonds but

if Bonds didn't count then I'd probably say Ricky and yet I could certainly see like a Johnson Maddox argument or you could even go peak the way that a lot of people are probably saying Sandy Koufax, right? If you're of a certain age and Koufax certainly had that aura to him, maybe Pedro had that aura. Peak Pedro was the best pitcher anyone's ever seen, right? So I guess it's kind of a career versus peak value question. And when you're talking about greatest living player, you want both. Yeah, it is so weird how we exclude pitchers from it. And yeah, I don't know if that is just a residue of the whole MVP conversation versus Cy Young, or just the idea of, to go back to the idea of like the all-around ballplayer, Willie Mays embodying that. Joe DiMaggio, you know, certainly was no slouch as an all-around

player as well. And like you said, he went around allegedly insisting that he'd be called the greatest living ball player, but we always think of position players that way. And maybe it's just because pitchers are, they're specialized. Ultimately, they're really good at this one incredible thing, throwing a baseball, but it's sort of an apples to oranges comparison against all the different tools that you need to be in every day. And again, it's playing every day as well. A position player pencils in the lineup 150 plus times for however many straight years. You said, Rainey, that Willie Mays did that.

So yeah, so much of this conversation also just comes down to how you feel about Bonds and maybe to a lesser extent A-Rod or Clemens if we are going to include pitchers because Bonds is such a slam dunk if we don't care about the steroid factor. And then if we do care about that and exclude him and exclude A-Rod, then you really are in this sort of murky zone where not a whole lot separates Ricky from Cal Ripken, from Yaz, from Mike Schmidt, from Adrian Beltre. You know, he's up there in the war list as well. Wade Boggs, George Brett, Chipper Jones. Chipper Jones as well.

It's actually kind of wild. Ichiro even. Yeah. Yes. Especially if we're talking about cultural impact. And that comes back to the DiMaggio factor. I think it was a lot more palatable to call him the greatest living ball player because the guy had popular songs written about him.

He was married to Marilyn Monroe. He was this cultural. Mr. Coffee. Yeah. He was this to Marilyn Monroe. He was this, you know, cultural coffee. Yeah. He was this cultural icon. And that's why I thought it was really interesting that, you know, the first person that they called on MLB Network when Brian Kinney was hosting last night and the news came in about Willie Mays was Ken Griffey Jr with the godson aspect and his dad playing with Willie Mays. But in terms of just thinking of a guy playing center field, wearing number 24, making catches on par with the catch. Yeah. Playing like a kid out there.

Playing like a kid with joy, wearing the hat backwards. You know, maybe that was the 90s version of having the hat that was too large and fell off. So, you know, I think Ken Griffey Jr., he was a cultural icon to all of us 90s kids. I mean, my God, if you played Nintendo in the 90s, you knew who Ken Griffey Jr. was. And so, you know, I do think that there's that aspect as well, that it's so much tougher for today's players to break through. That makes it fundamentally tougher to answer that question about who's the greatest living ball player, because so much of it depends on also like that penetration into the wider zeitgeist of athletes in American culture. Yeah. I can totally imagine an aged Derek Jeter going around being introduced as the greatest living player. I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. I'm surprised he hasn't done

it, honestly. Yeah. Well, the point is it's debatable now. It was not debatable a few days ago. And now without Willie Mays, it is because he leaves a void and it's a step down in any number of ways. So whichever player we settle on here. So I'm glad you both wrote about him and celebrated him. And of course, you could celebrate his historical and cultural significance in so many ways. And Meg and I did an episode on that when he was still with us, episode 1927, The Living Legend of Willie Mays, when we talked to the director of the HBO documentary about him and got into all of that. all of that. Before I let you guys go, I'm contractually obligated to bring up the Royals whenever Randy makes an appearance and also contractually obligated to bring up the Mets whenever Neil makes an appearance. Although I guess we already brought up the Mets. The power of grimace compels us to mention the Mets. Although when we started recording, Sean Mania was no hitting the Rangers and now the game is tied. So the power of grimace,

it hangs in the balance as we speak. But, Rani, just quickly wanted to ask you for your thoughts on this. Meg and I did an episode not long ago, just last month, where we talked to Neil DeMoss and J.C. Bradbury about whether the tide was turning when it came to public funding of sports stadia. And part of the impetus for that episode was the referendum that failed, where the Kansas City teams were trying to extract some money and the local constituents said no. And as we acknowledged at the time, well, there will probably be some end around, there will be a pivot, there will be some sort of legislative attempt to do something or other. There will be a pivot. There will be some sort of legislative attempt to do something or other. And that, in fact, has come to pass where we have sort of a race to the bottom situation going on, I guess, where Kansas is now trying to lure away both the Royals and the Chiefs, approving a blank check bill to pay up to 70 percent of the cost of new stadiums for those teams. The state Senate just approved this this week after very little discussion and no public hearings. So this is the way these things happen.

As a Royals fan, what do you make of this development? One of the reasons why we see teams get what they want in terms of ballparks and being paid for by the public in order for private corporations to profit is the leverage of pitting different municipalities against each other. And there's always the threat of moving the team to another city entirely, another metropolitan area entirely. But frequently it comes to pass where it's just pitting one county against each other. I mean, look at the Cobb County Braves, right? So what's unique about the Royals and Chiefs is being right along the state line is that they could pit two entirely different states against each other. And in some ways, it's kind of remarkable they haven't really used that leverage before because they've both been in the stadium that was built for them in Kansas City, Missouri

in the early 70s, and they have not moved from that. So one of the reasons why I didn't feel like the failure of the Royals to get the stadium that was on the ballot in early April passed, that it would have a huge long-term impact, was I did expect that this would just open up essentially a bidding war between different municipalities, in this case, different states. I did not expect it to happen this quickly. And the fact that Kansas, the state of Kansas, has moved this quickly, the state legislature, the governor's on board, everybody seems to be on board. Like I said, it seems to have bypassed the whole public hearings and public vote part of the process. But I think it does speak to how much Kansas City obviously is a really good sports town

when you consider the population and how well they support their teams, especially a Royals team that hasn't done a ton to merit support every year over the last 30 years or so. And I do think, and I say this with love, but I say this as somebody who has lived in Chicago for the last 20 years and sort of sees the city from outside, is that a huge part of the civic identity of Kansas City, I think, is tied into how it's perceived by the rest of the country. And so having major league sports, having teams in general, but certainly quality teams is a huge part of the civic identity there. And I do think that the fan base, certainly elected officials are simply more motivated to do what it takes to keep major league sports in town than maybe the average municipality. So I'm not at all surprised by this.

I'm obviously worried as to just how much the public is going to be on tap for this bill. You're saying 70% of a blank check can be an awful lot of money. But I sort of suspect that ever since that ballot failed in April, that the Chiefs were almost certainly moving across state lines. I still think that the best location for the Royals is a downtown ballpark. I think baseball stadiums where they use it 81 times a year, I think that there's value in having that in an urban environment built into the fabric of the city. But I think that the Royals are ultimately going to be able to use the leverage of moving to Kansas to get a great deal from possibly the Missouri side. In the long run, I think the Royals and Chiefs might end up with a better stadium situation

as a result of the failure of the April 2nd ballot than they would have had it passed. OK. And lastly, as I was planning, what would I bring up with Randy and Neil and thinking, well, got to find a way to bring up the Royals and the Mets. These two teams started the season very differently. And the Mets were looked at as a seller probably once again. And the Royals, oh, they're exciting. They invested in the team. They're only going to add. Well, the Royals have had not so great a month and the Mets have had a great month, as we mentioned, Grimace. And suddenly they're not so different, at least in some respects. Now, as we speak here on Wednesday, the Royals are still a winning team. The Mets are not quite. The Royals are still in possession of

a wildcard spot. The Mets are not quite. They're like pretty much every other NL team. They're like half a game out. What do you make of the trajectories here? Because if you go by, say, base runs record, these two teams have had almost identical quality. If you go by projected rest of season record, the Mets vault above the Royals. And if you go by projected end of season records, then they're also quite similar. So is it fair to say what the stats would say, which is that maybe the Mets are better than this and will be better than this,

and maybe the Royals are not quite this good and will not quite be this good? Neil, I'll let you take that first. I suppose, yeah, if you take the approach that even sort of a half a season of baseball is not nearly enough of a sample to really get the true quality of the teams and you still need to regress back to preseason expectations. Yes. And I've cited your research if I've heard about how many games you need probably more often than any other article. Yeah, we've exchanged a lot of emails about that over the years. And so I think it's to a certain extent not surprising that the teams would kind

of converge despite the disparate starts to the season just because of the expectations. You know, the Mets, they were not great last season by any means, but just given the talent that they had, they're supposed to be better and they were supposed to be better this season. And that, again, didn't really seem to materialize early on. They're doing better. I've seen a lot of these like Mets false starts in the middle of the season where you think, oh my God, they're actually figuring it out. And then they still finish, you know, 81 and 81 or something. So I reserve as much as I

respect Grimace. I do think I reserve judgment on this season for right now. I also think it's interesting with the Royals. They have this Mets connection with Seth Lugo having this incredible, you know, Cy Young caliber start to the season. He was a Mets reliever, not even a starter for the first, you know, five seasons or however much of his career. So, you know, that was a weird one to swallow as well at the beginning of the year to sort of see him come out and be like, oh, yeah, he's an ace of this team that's blowing the doors off everybody. So the Mets still don't have a Bobby Witt Jr. though. And so I do think as long as you have a guy like that, you kind of have hope for the future. And I wrote a thing earlier

about sort of the eerie similarities between his career trajectory and George Brett's early on in his career and how, if he turns out the same way, the Royals are in great shape. But I'm curious, Randy, what you think about Ben's question and the trajectories of these teams. Yeah. And by the way, if Witt turns into Francisco Lindor, that wouldn't be so bad. Yeah. And everybody is down. You know, the consistent theme of the Mets also has been just to be down on Lindor ever since he arrived.

And he's, I think, criminally underrated, maybe when his career is over, we'll kind of reappraise him and look back and especially outside the hype of these breathless New York media cycles and everything, we'll be like, oh yeah, this guy is a Hall of Famer. So I'm curious how that's going to work out for him. Yeah. So Rennie, I know you've noted the timely hitting that the Royals have benefited from this year. That seems to be something in the water in the L Central. It's not just them. But how does that affect your perception of this team's outlook and what it should be doing as the deadline approaches? Well, first off, Neil, if you wrote an article comparing Bobby Wood Jr. to George Brett, I need to find that because that is absolute crack for me. So I need to go locate that article and read it immediately after we're

finished here. I think Ben can put it in the description or something. Yes, it will be in the show notes. Yes. Perfect. Look, what has made this world season so fascinating is there's no way to square a team that lost 106 games last season with a team that wasn't just competing for first place in the American League Central for most of the first two months of the season, but whose run differential, if anything, was even better than their record. I mean, the Royals, even now, their Pythagorean win-loss record is actually better than their overall record. And this team has been on pace to have the greatest year-over-year improvement

in major league history. 36 games, I think, is the record. The 1903 New York Giants with John McGraw improved by 36 games. If the Royals win 92 games this year, they will match that record. And for much of the season, they've been on pace to win even more than 92 games. Right now, they're on pace probably for somewhere in the range of 88 or 89. But this recent kind of slump, their's seven and 14 in the last 21 games. It was inevitable. We knew it was going to come. They had a buffer in terms of how far ahead of,

you know, the final playoff spot they were. They've blown through pretty much that whole buffer. They're only two games up on the Red Sox as we start play today. But they just finished Yankee and Dodger week on their schedule. They really don't have to face any of the truly, you know, the great teams out there for the next eight weeks or so. So they're very much in control

of their destiny. And I think they're going to be probably very aggressive in terms of filling holes on this team, because for a team that is slightly above 500, this is a team that is really built on a stars and scrubs kind of philosophy, because you have Bobby Witt, who's turning into a superstar before our eyes. Salvador Perez is having a pretty amazing kind of, I don't want to say bounce-back season, but certainly kind of a late-career renaissance. But you have one of the worst outfields in all of baseball. The rotation is phenomenal, but the bullpen is one of the worst in the game. So those are opportunities to fix holes pretty easily.

So I think the key for them is just sort of staying ahead of the pack until the cavalry can arrive and they can add one or two bodies. But look, even if they end up with, you know, 85 wins and miss out on the playoffs, it's still a pretty remarkable turnaround from where they were last year. And I'm feeling certainly a lot more optimistic about the long-term trajectory of the team, about the state of the front office, about J.J. Piccolo as a general manager after he had served as Dayton Moore's assistant general manager throughout the kind of failed rebuilding project of the last, you know, the five years that got Dayton Moore fired. So it's hard to see this season ending up as anything but a big success, but I've gotten greedy now. I really do think that, you know, being a chance to make the playoffs,

a chance to make history as the worst team in major league history to make the playoffs the following year is very much in reach. And as we know, it's a crapshoot once you're there. So a playoff berth for this team is a free roll. I mean, they go 0-2 and are knocked out in the first round. It's still an incredible season. And certainly with the Super Bowl trophy already in Kansas City, I very much look forward to the Royals winning a playoff series and then suddenly the rest of the country just getting incredibly frustrated that this plucky little town in the Midwest has a chance to suddenly own both baseball and football trophies. You know, Bobby Witt being the Patrick Mahomes of baseball.

You know, there's a lot of narrative stuff that I will take a lot of schadenfreude in watching other fan bases, you know, get angry about. I thought the Patrick Mahomes of baseball was Pat Mahomes. Yeah, that's probably fair. It would be if he wanted to. Well, senior at least still counts. Okay. Well, we joked recently about how you can call any matchup between an AL and NL team a potential World Series preview.

So maybe that's what we're doing here. Royals, Mets calling it now. Third wild cards, winners matching up. That would be wonderful for you guys. 2015 rematch. Oh, that would be great. Yes, exactly. Great series. I was in attendance. I think maybe I saw Randy there. Anyway, this was fun, and

we talked about your teams. You guys can go home happy, and for anyone who is listening to this before the Rickwood game, we hope you watch. We hope you enjoy. We will certainly discuss it next time. Extra poignant. Now we were talking about how, gosh, this is coming along too late for so many players

and people who aren't around to appreciate it. And now one of those people, unfortunately, is Willie Mays, but we will all be celebrating him and wishing that there had been a Rickwood game even sooner. Much as Rennie and I often exceed our estimated word counts, we also often exceed our estimated segment lengths here at Effectively Wild. So thank you for sticking with me. This was fun. This was edifying. And you can find Rani writing occasionally at The Ringer. You can also find him podcasting about the Royals at Kauffman Corner. And if you're in Illinois and you need a skin exam, you can also look him up for that.

Tell him you heard him on Effectively Wild. I don't know if he gives out discounts for that, but you can tell him. We accept all major insurance plans. Okay. And as for Neil, you can find him writing very near every day at neilpain.substack.com. That's P-A-I-N-E. You can sign up for free and get a lot of great he co-hosts, which is indicative of his mastery of many sports. He has incredible command of every sport, sports I know nothing about, he is able to write about authoritatively and with all the data at his fingertips, which never ceases to amaze me. Thanks to both of you guys for coming on.

My pleasure. Well, for Neil's sake, I'm sorry to say that the Mets were not victorious. The Rangers won. Grimace's first pitch powers have their limits. The Royals lost, too. But I'm happy to say that there's more podcast to come. After the StatBlast song, I'll be back, appropriately enough, with a StatBlast. Not just courtesy of frequent StatBlast correspondent Ryan Nelson, but featuring Ryan Nelson.

Ryan will be with me after the brief break. All right, it's time for a stat blast, or to be precise, which we always aspire to be on the segment for stat blasts. Or I don't know, is the segment itself the stat blast? Or is each individual topic within the segment a stat blast? Can both be true? I'm not sure my guest can answer that question, but he can answer all kinds of other questions, which is why he is a frequent stat blast correspondent. Ryan Nelson, welcome back. Hey, Ben. Thanks for having me back again. I will try to answer that question. Let's pump up the numbers. So this is four. Yes. Okay. Number one.

Here is a question that comes to us from Sam, who says, I don't know how much the two of you have been paying attention to this year's Red Sox. I know you recently discussed how dramatically they're underperforming their base runs record. This was sent a few days ago. But many fans, including myself, have been impressed with their remarkable ability to always find their way back to 500. I became interested in historic 500-ness last year when they were performing similarly up to early July. I found a wonderful article by Sarah Langs informing me that the record for most games ended at 500 in a season is 35 by the 1959 Cubs, with the 2011 Jays holding the record for a team that actually finished at 500 with 33. Last year's Sox ended up getting hot in July, then absolutely withering in September,

so they fell well off pace, though this year's team is now on pace to smash the record with 41. But obviously there's plenty of time for that to change, especially if the underlying numbers are to be believed. And in fact, as we record, the Red Sox are now 40 and 35, so they're in danger of not being 500 again for a while. However, Sam continued, I turn to you for a different question. Recently, the Sox have embarked on an incredible streak of hanging around 500. On Friday, May 24th, they lost a series opener to the Brewers to drop to 26 and 25. And since then, they've not gone more than a game above or below.500.

The reliability of their consistency to lose or win the games they need to get back to even has been astounding to watch, even when faced with a 10-game stretch against the worst team in baseball as well as the two best. As I'm writing this on Father's Day morning, the streak sits at 21 games, and I can only assume they will drop the series finale to the Yankees to extend it to 22, which I suppose will inevitably extend it to 23. Well, I guess the streak has been snapped at this point. I went to the effort to look at the three teams mentioned in Sarah's article that spent 33 to 35 days at 500 and found that the 1959 Cubs had a 29-day streak, which I wouldn't be shocked to learn is the record, but I'm hoping you can do a more thorough search. the record, but I'm hoping you can do a more thorough search. So what is the most games in a row a team has ever played while maintaining an amplitude of no more than one game above or below

500? Yeah, this is one where the question's more interesting than the answer, probably. So as you think about this, these are almost the same question, right? Days in a row within a game of 500 and most days at 500 are almost the same question, right? Cause if you're only going one away from 500, that means every other day you're going to go back to 500. So they do correlate highly. I do believe that the 59 Cubs is the record. They had 29 straight days within one game of 500 in either direction.

So I do believe that is the record. Some other close ones in 2010, in either direction. So I do believe that is the record. Some other close ones in 2010, the Mets did make it 27 games from August 1st through August 30th of that year. And then we had the 86 Cardinals at 25 and the 2022 White Sox at 22. I bet the White Sox wish they were around 500 right now, but they had a pretty long streak there too. So good observation there by Sam. My answer isn't very interesting. It's the same thing that Sarah Lang's already found. Well, still good to confirm. And I think this is the second stat blast on that topic because there was a long ago stat blast episode 1391 conducted by a Sam Miller. And this was, I think

that one was teams within five games of 500 because the 2017 Angels had been within five games of 500 every game of the season. This was exactly five years ago to the day, as we speak, that this stat blast was published. And I remember writing something, I think, about the Angels as one of the 500-est teams of all time around then. Again, they wish they were 500 now. But yeah, this comes up often because it is uniquely frustrating maybe when you can't really get far above par. You're keeping your head not even above water necessarily,

just at water. You're kind of like submerged sometimes and then you bob up again and then you go down again. Obviously it beats being bad, but there's something very upsetting about just being unable to break free of the gravity of 500. You just want to be a winner. Yeah. It's like every other day you show you can do it. And then every other day you show you can't. And that's, I think it's the teetering that gets you. Yeah, I guess it's relatable.

We all experience some success and some failure in our lives. And for some people, they're quite perfectly balanced. And for others, more of one, more of the other. All right. The second stat blast we have teed up today comes from Jimmy, who says, have teed up today comes from Jimmy, who says, I'm watching the Rays take on the A's in the final game that will showcase the word Oakland on the field at the Trop. This was a few weeks ago. And the broadcast noted a very bizarre set of pitching changes. In the top of the seventh, Kevin Kelly came on for the Rays, replacing Tyler Alexander, who operated in bulk today. In response, in the

bottom of the inning, the A's replaced reliever Michael Kelly with lefty Scott Alexander. This was before Michael Kelly was suspended as one of those players who got popped for sports betting. Is this just a wild one-of-a-kind coincidence? Has this ever happened before in any capacity? Better yet, within a single inning. Unrelated, but can you help get Randy Rosarena out of this hall of shame run form he is on?

Don't think so. That is beyond our powers to affect Randy Rosarena's performance. However, you could query this one. So Kelly replacing a Kelly after each replacing an Alexander. Yeah, so this is an elite observation by Jimmy. As far as I can tell, this has never happened. So I went back and looked. There's been about 700,000 pitching changes since 1916, which is when we have the play-by-play

data to be able to look at pitching changes. And I could not find an example, not one where, you know, it was the same direction, if you want to call it that way, where, you know, a Kelly came in for an Alexander for both. Not one where it was the other direction where maybe a Kelly came in for an Alexander for one, but an Alexander came in for a Kelly for the other team. Nothing. Right. So I can't promise that I didn't miss something there, but did pretty thorough and didn't find anything. Which that kind of got my brain going is, is it weird that we haven't seen that, right? I mean, there's a lot of players with the same name. You kind of feel like maybe this should have happened by now, but I couldn't find one. So I did some math here. There's 5,500 unique last names in baseball history, at least on the pitcher side. So, you know, if you do some

very rudimentary math that isn't good and you shouldn't do, but just for the sake of doing it, just assume all those names are equally common, you would expect this to have happened one in every 30 million pitching changes. So if that's the math you use, you wouldn't be surprised it hasn't happened. But realistically, that's not how names work, right?

There's names that are much, much more common than others. I pulled here, you know, Smith is the most common last name in pitcher history. It's about 37 times more common than the average MLB last name. Johnson is 29 times more common. Miller's 28 times more common. So if you do the math this way, where you kind of wait for names, it actually becomes more likely because there's just more of those players that have the same name out there. And based on that rough math, not perfect, but probably much more accurate than the first one, you'd expect this to happen one in every about 280,000 pitching changes. So, you know, we're overdue by one or two, but it's kind of in the right range, right?

How many pitching changes have there been? About 700,000. So you'd expect this to happen maybe two or three times in history. It seems like maybe this is the first one. So a little overdue, but kind of makes some sense there. So that's some true baseball history we caught there. And I certainly would not have noticed if it wasn't for Jimmy. So good find. Wow.

Well done, Jimmy. The old, you never know what you'll see for the first time when you go to the ballpark. No one has ever seen that, at least in a big league game in the years that we can determine that for. Cool. I wonder, I guess probably there was less name diversity earlier in baseball history, like even before you're able to query here, just because people from fewer backgrounds and fewer countries were in MLB and the AL and NL at the time, if there was an AL even. So maybe back then it was more likely to happen. Maybe there's a hidden time that it happened.

But still, pretty impressive run of it not happening. And also, maybe we did fix Randy Rosarena, or maybe just the act of sending that email fixed him because I think he had a 70 WRC plus on the season when that email was sent. And since then, he's up over 150, close to 160 over that span. So, yeah, he's fixed. I don't know if we did it, but. I know he hit a couple homers against my Braves, I believe, just last weekend. So that probably helped. Yeah.

All right. Well, that's not the only name related stat blast, I guess, that we have here, though we will save one more name one for the end because stat blast number three comes to us from listener and Patreon supporter Dennis, who says recent talk about Angel Hernandez, Ramon de Jesus and Jorge Lopez had me wondering about umpires and ejections. Do we know what the most common umpire-player-slash-coach ejection combo is? Like what one guy was ejected by the same umpire the most times? Do we have an answer to that question post-2000 when umpires stopped being assigned to one league? And do we know what pairs are disproportionately common? As in umpire X only had 20 ejections in his career, but 15 of them were player X or player Y was ejected only five times in his career, but each time by the same ump. I know RetroSheet keeps this data.

So someone with more tools and skill than me should be able to query this. Someone like Ryan Nelson. Yeah. And I would challenge anyone who'd be interested. You can just download the Excel file for this one. So no coding, no programming. You can just pull it up and take a look. So I encourage anyone who's interested to do that. But yes, we can answer that question. The most common combination of ejector ejectee is umpire Cy Riegler. Do we think that's right? Yeah. Riegler. Riegler. And he ejected second

baseman, Hall of Fame second baseman, that is Johnny Evers, 23 times in their mutual careers, which is just truly an astounding number. It's seven more times than any other combination. So he's definitely lapping the field there just about. But it makes a ton of sense. So Johnny Evers is famous for getting ejected he got ejected more than any player ever in the history of baseball 61 times as a player and then another 15 times as a coach or a manager and it seemed like based on the order there maybe there was some player manager happening there as well but far and away the most by any player second is 45 by heine zimmerman a lot of ejections

in old-timey baseball so you'll hear some old-timey names here i actually pulled an excerpt of johnny evers saber bio that i think was pretty poignant here so it says uh johnny evers a 5 9 125 pound pepper pot with a protruding jaw that came to be the symbol of the man, for he was always jawing about something. Evers developed a reputation as a troublemaker by squabbling regularly with teammates, opponents, and especially umpires. They claim he is a crab, and perhaps they are right, Cleveland Indians manager Joe Birmingham once observed, but I would like to have 25 such crabs playing for me.

If I did, i would have no doubt over the pennant they would win hands down evers was a high strong as high strong as he was brainy one reporter described him as a keen little umpire fighting bundle of nerves and sometimes those nerves got the better of him in 1911 he played in just 46 games being out of commission for most of the season by a nervous breakdown, which he claimed was due to the loss of his entire accumulated capital in a failed business venture. So this guy had it out for everybody, had it out for himself a little bit too, it sounds like maybe. But on the other side of that too, Cy Riggler was also a prolific ejector in his own right. He ejected 287 players or managers,

second all-time to contemporary Bill Clem, who ejected 364 players and managers. So these guys were just ejecting people every other game, it seemed like. And so you put the most ejected player of all time with the second most ejecting umpire of all time. You're probably going to have a pretty good combo there bill clem actually had the second most common ejector ejected duo where he ejected manager john mcgraw 16 times and then we follow that pattern where

john mcgraw himself had the third fourth and sixth most common ejector-ejectee duos with Bob Emsley, Jim Johnstone, and Cy Riggler once more on the umpire side of things. John McGraw's second all-time in ejections, period, only to Bobby Cox, who had 165. McGraw had 139. some of those names were from long ago, whether that reflected an era effect, whether there were just more ejections then on a per game basis, because I had the belief that that was true, that I had looked that up before, that ejections were on the decline. And I guess that's true relative to some earlier eras, but it's not exactly a linear decline. Yeah, that's true. And it should be said here, I'm not 100% confident that we have every ejection here. Retro sheet doesn't verify that they have all of the ejections, kind of like they do with all of the plate

appearances. So there could be some missing things, especially early on, but no, the rate of ejection doesn't really seem to have dropped that much over time. One thing that does seem to happen though, is that it seems like it's more equal between the players, the managers and the umpires. And that is in earlier times, you do see kind of these, you know, rivalries between the players and managers versus an umpire where they kind of get on each other's nerves, I suppose. That seems to happen less often and it's more random who's ejecting who. So the overall number hasn't changed that much, but the concentration has decreased, it seems. Yeah.

So that could be a part of the reason why so many of these combinations are so high earlier in baseball. Right. Yeah. It does seem like in the 2010s and early 2020s that the rates may be a little lower than it was in the 90s. Let's say, I guess it's below average, probably, historically speaking. You would think that it would decline a little bit, even though there are constantly still arguments and people get mad at each other just because there's replay. And you'd think that some of those times when you just would have been raging against someone and would have just had no recourse but to get thrown out, now you can challenge the call and you could get it overturned if you're right, and then you wouldn't have to get ejected. So I don't know. I would think that at least

in some cases, replay has kind of diffused that, and then we'll see whether ABS or challenge system or whatever comes in down the road, whether that tamps down the tensions even more. Well, one thing I've learned is that showing people they're wrong with proof doesn't necessarily make them less defensive. So I don't know how much that actually helps that. Yeah. It looks from the graph you sent me, which I'll share the per game ejection rate was at its highest ever right after integration. I don't know if there's a cause and effect there but it's interesting at least looks like you know late 40s early 50s was kind of the the peak ejection time where you had like about 15 percent of games featured in ejection and that wasn't johnny

evers's fault he was gone by then i think evers Tinker, part of the famous Tinker to Evers to chance combo, they were not friends for a large part of their time as teammates, or they didn't really talk to each other. So good double play combo, but yeah, Evers, tough guy to get along with, I guess. Yeah. And there was a couple other things to answer here on the back end of the question. So one of the questions was outlier pairings, not so much just the raw number, but as a percent who appears higher up than you'd expect. And honestly, Evers and Riggler is up there for sure. So despite Evers being the all-time leader in ejections as a player,

still almost a third of those ejections came from Riggler. So they definitely had it out for each other. There's almost no doubt about it. Yeah. I did find Dave Brain, who was actually born in the UK. That's how old we're talking here in baseball, early 1900s infielder. He was only ejected three times in his career, and all three were by Bill Clem, who's the all-time ejector leader.

So it makes some sense there. He's the only player with three or more ejections to have all three ejections by the same umpire. This kind of led me to the pendulum the other side is you know who's the least outlier prone and it appears to be bobby cox who you know he was ejected what did i say 165 times and it was 86 different umpires right so less than two ejections per umpire he just was kind of a equal opportunity yeah that's what i was gonna say too he lets everyone eject him um his all-time highest pairings is with bill hahn and bob davidson who both ejected him six times and then of course angel hernandez ejected him five times but then it's just like a who's who of umpires up here you know four times jeff kellogg hunter wendelstead

joe west among others. So if you hear a story about Bobby Cox, he would just go out there knowing he was wrong just to get ejected. So it makes sense that he would let everyone eject him. Yeah. You'd think with the Wriggler-Evers matchup, there's just so much history there, so much bad blood, presumably. I wonder, like, cut to the chase, we know how this is going to end if we're getting into an argument, like, just eject me already. We know how this is going to end if we're getting into an argument. Just eject me already. We know how this is going to go. And probably the bad blood must build up. It's like if you're in a bad relationship and you're just holding grudges against each other and every

little thing becomes a big issue because there's just so much history there and there's so much bitterness just barely under the surface that flares up again. That must have been going on with Riegler and Evers. I'll have to read more about those two. Yeah, there's plenty of words written about Evers, at least. So I'm sure you can find something. Last point here to close out on Dennis's question. Since 2000, he asked, you know, that's the year that umpires didn't have dedicated leagues.

They've umpired across all MLB. So was there a big pairing there that we can point out? That's the year that umpires didn't have dedicated leagues. They've umpired across all MLB. So was there a big pairing there that we can point out? Overall, I think, like I said earlier, ejections have become more broad and less concentrated on certain individuals. But with that being said, Bruce Bochy, probably just because of how many games he's managed, is the leader here where he had actually

two different umpires eject him five times, Mike DeMuro and Mike Winters. So that name Mike will come up in the next stat blast, I believe. But so Bruce Bochy is the leader since 2000. Well, that's a good segue into our fourth and final stat blast. The theme continues. We're playing the name game again here. And this question comes from Isaac who says question prompted by the Angels Padres game this was in early June Luis Garcia came in to pitch in relief joining two other Luises on the field for the Angels Guilherme and Renifo making one-third of the defense that inning named Luis that was in addition to the two Luises in the Padres lineup, Arise and

Camposano, for a total of five out of 27 guys who played in the game with the exact same first name. So my question is, what is the highest percentage of players either on the field at once or in a game as a whole to have the same first name? All right, so I need everyone to take a deep breath with me. I'm about to say a lot of names a lot of times. So just bear with me. Having five players or more in a game with the same name is not crazy rare. I found 852 times that's happened

since we have play-by-play data in 1916. So, you know, call that like eight times a year or something like that, that this happens. So nothing crazy. Even six players with the same name, 91 times over that period, about once a year. So not super, super rare, but this is the first time that I found that five or more has happened since 2018. So it's been a few years, I think to your earlier point, names are starting to become

less common as we have more different types of people playing in major league baseball so that's definitely a part of it but in 2018 we actually had three different games where there were five mats in the game so on april 20th the nationals had matt weeders and matt reynolds matt grace and matt adams who played against the Dodgers, who had a lonely single Matt. One easily Matt. Yeah, just one Matt. And then just a couple days later, the A's, which is, this is who I was thinking of when I think Matt's, right? So they had Matt Chapman, Matt Olson, and Matt Joyce.

They played the Rangers who had Matt Moore and Matt Bush. And then in May of that year, the same A's team and the same trio of Mats played the Rays with Matt Duffy and Matt Andrees. Really rolled out the welcome mat for that one. That's right. Mats were big on 2018. And in fact, since 2013, every game to have five or more players with the same name, all Mats. There was 11 games. Only Mats could do this. That was the only name common enough. But if we keep going back, 2012, they were back-to-back brandon games so those are june 23rd and 24th probably won't be surprised those both include the giants brandon crawford and brandon belt and they both played the a's brandon inge brandon moss

and brandon hicks so we had a couple brandon games then there's some more matt games a jason game mark game and a jeff game a couple more Jasons, and a Matt. But then this brings me to a little point here. There were 13 Ryan games between 2006 and 2007. And one of those Ryan games was actually the most recent to have six players with the same name in a single game. That was on July 5th, 2007. So the Nationals played the Cubs. The Nationals had Ryan Langerhans, Ryan Zimmerman, Ryan Church, and Ryan Wagner. And then the Cubs had Ryan Terrio and Ryan Dempster. So that was the most recent back in 2007, the last time that we had six or more players in the same game with the same name. Before that run of Ryan's, there was a couple of Jason's. And then

that brings us to the king of names from this stat, which is Mike. Mike. So not super surprising who doesn't have an uncle Mike, right? I think everyone in the world has an uncle Mike that they know, but from 1995 to 2004 of the 118 games to have five or more with the same name, 106 of those were Mike games. Wow. And Mike is the most common period in history. A full third of all games to meet this criteria were Mike games. 282 total of the 852 sample. The following names

it's going to be names that don't surprise anyone. The second most common is Jim with 133. Dave with 90. Bob with 74. Bob. John Boyce has pointed out not enough Bobs anymore. The Bob emergency. And Don was 63. That's a good point to bring up at this point. Obviously

it's not particularly easy to control for same name represented differently. So there were probably some games with more Bobs and Bobbies or Bobs and Roberts. Not really easy to do that here. So we strictly defined as the exact same name as they write it essentially on their player card.

So Jim, Dave, Bob, and Don, all of those that we've talked about previously. I have an uncle Bob, by the way. I don't have an uncle Mike. I have an uncle Bob. Bob's your uncle. Bob's my uncle. Bob's your uncle. There you go.

So all the games we've talked about so far are five or six player games, but the record for most same named players in a game, say that five times fast, is actually seven. So it's happened 15 times, most recently in 1998. And those 15 games were made up with those same exact five names we just said. Mike, Dave, Bob, Jim, and Don. So these are the most common names here. Unofficially, I'm going to give the win

to one game, which was on May 4th, 1982. The A's had two Daves, Dave McKay and Dave Beard, who faced off against the Yankees with their five Daves. Dave Winfield, Reverend Collins, Rigetti, and LaRoche, but

the A's had a secret Davey, Davey Lopes. I counted that as seven and a half Daves. So I think they get the win, but officially seven is a 15-way tie. So a couple more quick ones. The most players with the same name to appear in a game for the same team is six, which has happened twice. same name to appear in a game for the same team is six which has happened twice so in 1977 on august 19th the padres had the all dave game they had six daves dave roberts but not that dave roberts a dave winfield that is that dave winfield dave friesleben dave tomlin dave kingman and dave

wormeister all of them faced off the Cardinals, who again had their lone Dave, Dave Rader. So six Daves in that game. And then just a couple years prior to that, the Rangers had what I've dubbed the Oops All Jims game with Jim Fergosi, Jim Spencer, and Jim Sundberg in the field. And then Jim Bibby, Jim Umbarger, and Jim Merritt pitching. All the pitchers for the Rangers that day were Jims.

So only Jims. The White Sox also had Jim of their own, Jim Otten. So I will make one last note. So that was a lot of names going all over baseball history. But one thing that we did find here that Isaac found that is unique is of all the games that have matched us, all 852, find here that Isaac found that is unique is of all the games that have matched us all 852 as far as I can tell all of them were you know Anglo names you know English names this seems to be the first game in history to have five or more players with the same Latin name Luis so we did see something unique here that hasn't ever been seen before and that just shows that the game

continues to get more cosmopolitan and more people from all over the world here. So kind of surprising me it took this long to get a Luis or a Carlos or something like that. But we did get a Latin name finally for the first time in baseball history. Yeah, we've had a whole bunch of Luis Garcias, let alone Luises. We've had three Luis Garcias, one I think with an accent mark, one without. One is a junior, to help kind of clarify. But good observation by Isaac that this is the first time it's happened in this way. And also it's the first time it's happened in several years, seemingly. So this kind of thing is maybe becoming less common. But when it happens, it won't be only Mike's and Jim's and Dave's and Bob's anymore.

That's right. We need to get a five show haze in a game sometime. You know, 20 years from now, it'll happen. Be still my heart. Yeah. Or we could get Ryan's back again. We could bring Ryan back for you. There's still a chance.

Yeah. I mean, we had Ryan Nelson. We've got Ryan's now, right? I think Sam did a stat blast maybe or certainly did research to show that most or all of the Rheins are actually named after Ryan Sandberg. And so now we've got a whole bunch of Rheins. And one is Ryan Nelson, which if you say it quickly, sounds the same as your name, even if it's spelled differently. Every time that he pitches, it perks up my ears. It gets me every time, even though I know it's coming. Yes.

pitches, it perks up my ears. It gets me every time, even though I know it's coming. Yes. Well, it always perks me up to talk to you too, and to get these great answers from you, which people can get straight from the source sometimes on Twitter at rsnelson23. Sometimes Ryan freelances, does some bonus stat bless on there, but he's always happy to look into these questions for us and we always appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks, Ben. I do have one parting thought if you let me. Of course. So in a few weeks here, I'm actually going to go to the Olympics in France. My cousin is swimming in the Olympics. I want everyone to cheer for him. Yeah. His name is David Young. He swims for Fiji because he is half American, half Fijian and grew up in Fiji.

But if you ever, you know, have the Olympics on this summer, I'll be there in the aquatic center watching my cousin David swimming. So just, I want everyone to root for him if they can. Awesome. Well, I'll be rooting for him. I did not have a favorite swimmer in these Olympics, not a big swimming guy. So now I have my favorite, I guess. And appropriate that it's a Dave or at least a David. That's right. Dave Jr. for what it's worth too. All right. I'll leave you with one bonus blast. This question comes from Brian who writes, can't spell Verdugo without G-O, as in ground out. As a Yankees fan, he writes, I've enjoyed watching Alex Verdugo this season so

much so that I keep forgetting that he most recently played for the Red Sox. But I think my subconscious is working overtime to find something not to like about him. My subconscious thinks he grounds out to second base and first base for that matter way too often, like more than anyone else in baseball, like maybe more than anyone ever. If you have the time and curiosity to dig into it, I would love to know where he ranks so I know whether it's okay to like him or not. Well, for this one, I don't necessarily need Ryan. Baseball savant will suffice.

I'm not sure whether this alone is grounds for not liking someone. Grounds? Ground outs for not liking someone? But Brian's right. Verdugo does this more than anyone else. This year, entering Wednesday's games, Verdugo had grounded out to first or second 71 times,

most in the majors. If we go back to the start of 2021, he's done it 383 times, most in the majors. And since the start of 2019, he's done it 491 times, most in the majors. He's a lefty. He's been pretty durable. He hits a lot of ground balls. Most ground balls are pulled. He's pretty slow.

It's a formula for a lot of ground outs to the right side. And in his case, at least, for not being much better than an average big league batter in recent seasons. However, in second place on these leaderboards, if you can call them that, both for 2024 and for 2021 through 2024, Luis Arias. And who doesn't like Luis Arias? He's about 60 such ground outs behind Verdugo over the past four seasons. Right behind him, another guy Yankees fans definitely like, Juan Soto. Soto's sixth this year, third over the past four years, and second over the past six seasons with 431 of these ground outs to Verdugo's 491. Yet again, a perceptive listener notices something that is in fact fairly remarkable. That'll do it for today. Thanks as

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