Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2194: The Breakout Fakeout

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the likenesses, word counts, and stat citations on Hall of Fame plaques, what would happen if all past stats disappeared, the impending returns of Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw (and the recent return of J.T. Realmuto), the end of James Paxton’s time with the Dodgers, Jo Adell’s breakout […]

Megan Benwax about a playoff race A blues bad's hard It's effectively wild So stick around, you'll be well-beguiled It's effectively wild Hello and welcome to episode 2194 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of FanGraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Okay.

Can I send you a Hall of Fame plaque, please? Kirsten Knoll Me personally? Ben Lindbergh Yes. I mean, not with your likeness engraved on it. Just someone else's Hall of Fame plaque. A real one in Cooperstown. Kirsten Knoll Let down a little bit now, but sure. Yeah, go ahead.

Ben Lindbergh Sorry. Maybe one day I'll make you a Hall of Fame plaque, just an honorary one, but this is a Hall of Fame plaque of an actual player with all identifying marks removed. It's not the text part, obviously, that would give away who it is. Oh boy. You're going to make me guess. Yeah. I did a screenshot of it and I cut it off below the emblem on the cap.

So you can't see what team's cap is being used here. It's just the face and the top of the body. Can you tell me who is that Hall of Famer Meg? Can you tell me who that Hall of Famer is? It's not anyone super obscure or old-timey or anything like that. I mean, it's not? No. Okay. Okay. You picked this Hall of Famer out of a lineup.

These are supposed to be famous baseball figures, easily recognizable. This is certainly someone whose career you saw plenty of. Well, I'm going to make a guess based on recent events and wonder if this is Joe Maurer. It is Joe Maurer. Is it really? That's not Joe Maurer. That's ridiculous. But if you did not know that Joe Maurer had just been officially admitted this weekend, you would have had no idea.

No, I would have guessed that it was Ryan Tannehill that he famously does not play baseball. That is not Joe Maurer, I'm sorry, it's not. No, it's not. The sideburns look kind of Maurer-esque, maybe. I guess. But that's the only part of this face that resembles Joe Mower in my mind. It's tricky because it's like there are guys who are very strongly associated with hair

and facial hair in particular, right? And so to say like, no, you shouldn't incorporate that into the plaque is like, that's silly because you know, some of these guys, like that's a, you know some of these guys like that's a like I Don't know, but I'm gonna assume gosh. Who's a famous who's a famous facial hair guy? You know who's a guy who has famous facial hair Raleigh fingers Raleigh fingers I bet Raleigh finger you know like yeah, you couldn't you couldn't design it without without the facial hair That would be absurd right, but it is like a more fleeting characteristic, right? And so there's danger there. And sideburns in particular, like, you know,

prone to the vagaries of fashion. I don't know, man. It looks a lot like Ryan Anahill. No one has ever been more clean shaven than Joe Mower. Right, yeah. But hair wise, I mean, he was, you know, like a hair spokesperson. He was a hair model, right? Yeah. Was he? I didn't know that. Yeah, he had good hair. He still does, as far as I can tell, but it's tough to tell under the cap.

But yeah, this just, I'm sorry. Like I apologize for impugning the work of whichever artists made this likeness, this alleged likeness of Joe Mauer. Alleged likeness. I'm sure it's hard to, I mean, this isn't maybe the most malleable medium, bronze or whatever it is. I can't make a Joe Mauer out of metal. Draw it all.

No, but this is just not cutting it for me. Like you would not recognize this person unless you happen to know it. That was your first reaction, who is this? And then your second reaction is Ryan Taddlehill. What about this one? I just sent you another one. I would say this is a little bit better.

That seems like Adrian Beltre to me. Is that Adrian? Yeah, that seems more recognizably like Adrian Beltre than the other. It's hard. I wouldn't say it's the spitting image, but it's recognizable. No, but it's not like that fresco they restored and it's like, Jesus was actually. That's what I thought of what I saw Joe Maher. That was the very cup. Here's the difference though. That fresco made you wonder what species of creature is this that they have? Right. This is a human man.

Joe Maher's plaque looks like a human person, just a different human person. This, I think, if you were to put it in front of me like two years from now, removed from the celebration of this past weekend, I would probably, I think, be able to say, oh, that's Adrian Beltran. It's got to be hard to, I have a lot of respect for the craft here, you know, I can't draw to save my life. It's never been a skill, you know, very early in my life. I reached an agreement, you know, an understanding with my parents where I was like, you don't have

to put these up, you know, I'm going to make them for you because that's what kids do. But like, you don't have to pretend that this is good. I'm realistic about my own talent here. And these are clearly skilled artisans, just maybe not in one of the ways that perhaps matters the most. Their best work, maybe. And you could say, oh, well, it's not supposed to be lifelike. Maybe it's like an impressionistic rendition. It's supposed to be. Yeah, it is though, right? This is supposed to just look like the guy.

It's got to look like the guy. It's not like, you know, let's capture the essence of Joe Maurer, which I don't think that this even does particularly. It's not like, you know, let's show what Joe Maurer looks like in my mind here. This is an attempt, I think, to render the actual real life Joe Maurer that just falls fairly short of that target. Yeah, I think you're right. I hope whoever designed this doesn't listen to the podcast. Oh, you've sent me another, oh boy. I sent you one more, one last one here.

I guess what I would say is that I don't think that that is meant to be Jim Leland. And so I'm guessing it's Todd Hilton. That's not a great sign if you're confusing the Leland and Hilton. That is Todd Hilton. I would say the Jim Leland likeness is the best. I would say it does. And maybe that's the facial hair thing again, coming into play. Like you see mustache, you think, oh, Jim Leland.

It lacks a cigarette sticking out of his mouth, which probably would be more true to life. Cowardly. Cowardly. Yeah. Wow. Craig Calcutera joked that this is not Todd Helton, it's Thanos, the Mad Titan. But it looks to me somewhat like Todd Helton. Again, it has the Helton goatee. So again, the facial hair helps. But this likeness looks older than Todd Helton is today, right? Like Todd Helton is 50 years old now, and I would say that in real life,

he looks younger than this. Now, maybe it's because the bronze almost makes hair look kind of grayish in a way, but this looks like an old Todd Helton, like at least as old as he is now. And I would think that if you're making a Hall of Fame plaque, you would want to make it reflect what the player looked like during his career, right?

I guess not necessarily, but if you have him in the Rockies cap and everything, you want him to look like he did when he was on the Rockies. Now, he was on the Rockies for a long time. He was fairly old by baseball player standards by the time he was done, but this does not look to me like an active Todd Helton when he was producing the stats that got him into the hall. This looks like maybe Todd Helton now or five or 10 years from now. I look back at some older hall of fame plaques and I don't know whether they've

gotten more or less lifelike over time. I'd have to do a fuller study. I'd be interested in anyone else's impressions or research on that. It does look to me like sometimes though, there is a trend toward the player being presented as they are post retirement almost, or at the very tail end of their career.

Like if you look at- It's so odd. It is, right? If you look at like Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle's plaques, they look more like themselves. Certainly DiMaggio did, but it looks like a post-retirement DiMaggio. It looks like DiMaggio made me when he was, you know, Hawking Mr. Coffee or something, or getting introduced as the greatest living player at old timers days. It doesn't really look like Dimaggio when he was active. So I don't know if it's the bronze aging them or if it's just that when you produce a plaque, you automatically almost unconsciously make them look like your last

memory of that player, like either what they look like today or what they looked like when they were bowing out of baseball. But I would think the whole thing is it's like freezing them in amber, freezing them in bronze. It's like showing what they did during the prime of their athletic life. And I would think that you would also want to make them look like they did it that time too. Well, it's a real question, right? Like when you want to memorialize them. Like

the argument, I guess, for doing it toward the end of their playing careers is that they, you know, that is them as they are probably most recently remembered. They're not necessarily how they're best remembered, right? It really depends on the guy. If a guy is in because of his peak, you know, right? Like there are guys who are in because of the totality like the sum of their career and there are guys who are in Because like their peak was just so Incandescent and so I think it kind of would have to depend on the guy would be my my Argument here like if it's someone who's just from start to finish was really terrific Maybe went out on a high note, like maybe you

capture that and some of it's gonna depend on the cap they're wearing too, right? Like if you have a guy who played for multiple teams and he, you know, he has to pick one. I mean, I guess they don't have to, right? They can go in logo list, but they don't tend to do that. They tend to pick a club. Yeah, if you're Hilton or Mauer, you they don't tend to do that. They tend to pick a club. Yeah. If you're Helton or Mauer, you don't have much of a choice. Right, right, right. But a theoretical, like Beltre, there was an obvious choice, but like he had one, right? He could have picked from-

Yeah, Fred McGriff. He went in with that logo. Yeah. So, you know, then you would want to capture him as he appeared while playing for that club. It's tricky. It's a tricky thing. And I wonder how much deference to the preferences of the inductee there is, because, you know, that

might have something to do with it too. But I don't know. Like, do you ever, on the one hand, you're so overwhelmed by the honor, I'm sure. And you're in the Hall of Fame, regardless of what the, but do you, you know, if you're Joe Mauer, fame, regardless of what the... But do you, you know, if you're Joe Mauer, do you go, I don't want to look like me. Like, we're in the process. And here's a question that's going to betray my ignorance of like sort of how this all works.

Like, I'm sure that there is a rendering. You'd think, yeah. And then there's the execution of that rendering and like which version, you know, did the guy get to see? Right. So. Do you get finals cut on the plaques? I mean, you have to, right?

Like you gotta, you gotta give a guy, don't you gotta? A literal heads up because that is what is happening to their head. Like just, you know, hey, here's what we were thinking. Is this how you want to be memorialized for all time? You know, I like what you went for there, but- A for effort, but- Yeah. My own family doesn't recognize me as this person on the plaque. I feel like I'm often kind of critical of baseball player statues and plaques and things. And I don't know if it's just a uniquely difficult medium

to work with or what, like, remember it was, I think just earlier this year, there was sort of this tragic thing where a Jackie Robinson statue was stolen from a park in Kansas. And it was, yeah, it was stolen from a park in Kansas. And it was, yeah, it was, it was like cut off at the ankles and destroyed and, and then they are rebuilding it, I believe, which is good. But when I saw this, the first thing I thought was that doesn't look like Jackie Robinson at all. Like, look at this.

Does that look like Jackie Robinson's face to you? Am I being too harsh here? I mean, it's terrible that they removed the statue and I think they're just like rebuilding the same statue with the same artist or anything. I was like, you know, maybe the replacement will be an improvement. Maybe it'll actually look like Jackie Robinson this time,

but that face, it's just very jowly. It just doesn't really resemble Jackie Robinson as an active player to me. So if we have any sculptors in the audience, if we have any metal workers here who can tell us about the difficulties, is this like a uniquely challenging medium to work with? What's the final approval process typically?

Why don't the faces look like the real faces more often? That's what I want to know. I am also keen to understand that, congrats to all the inductees though. Whatever their plaques look like, it's a great honor. Have a great weekend. Yeah. One other thing I notice is that there has been a real word count creep in the plaques. They're just much longer plaques, much longer texts now than there used to be. I counted Babe Ruth's plaque has 27 words. It's like three sentences or not even real sentence fragments.

Fred McGriff's plaque has 96 words. It's like three and a half times as much text as the babes. I guess you could say, Baberuth speaks for itself, right? We don't have to... Baberuth requires no introduction. Fred McGriff, we might have to tell people who he was, but I think it's a more... Fred McGriff out here catching strays for no reason. Sorry.

Just denigrating all of these players like as you see her as we're talking about their old fame plaques. And he's ugly. But not in real life, old fame platform. Yeah. So I don't think it's just a McGriff thing or a Ruth thing though.

I think it's that early on and granted early on, like the first classes or classes of inductees, like they were the all-time legends at that time. Maybe people figured, yeah, we know who they are. But I think this is actually a good change of anything. I mean, I think it's good for history's sake and fans, they walk around the plaque room and they want to know who this guy was. And so you might as well cram a bunch of information on them there, but it is notable. There's just like a big block of texts now, whereas before it was very sparing. So that stood out to me too.

Do you think this was a Facebook group topic, a listener named Harry posted in there about this, do you think we will ever start to see more advanced stats making their way onto Hall of Fame plaques? Like would we ever see war or something akin to that, that kind of class of stat on a Hall of Fame plaque? I am a little skeptical that we will see sort of aggregate stats like that. If only because you like, you have to pick one, there's always the chance that they're restated slightly. By the time that a guy's in the Hall of Fame, I think we can probably consider the case on his war to be fairly well settled, but you never know.

But things still might move by a fraction of a win. Nicole Soule-I hope that we last forever. But I think that there is maybe, because stats like war, at least as they're currently calculated, sit with third party providers that the league doesn't have a say in that there might be a concern about like, you know, what would happen if like we were to lose. To specify fan grass or baseball reference for on the plaque. You know, like those aren't, where do those records sit long term? I think that's a good question for us to think about sort of as an industry. Like what is, this is like a metric that defines a great deal of our

baseball discourse and understanding, where should it live long term? You know, we don't really need to worry about like being able to ascertain a hitter's batting average. Those stats are going to be kept and maintained by major league baseball, but it wouldn't be unprecedented for a website to like bite the dust. Everyone's listening and they're like, what's happening to fan-graces? Fan-graces? I'm just saying like, you know, a hundred years from now, right?

Like where does that stuff live? But I wouldn't be surprised if other stats, like it wouldn't shock me to one day see WRC Plus on a plaque. Could be true. Could be true. I guess that could change in theory, like with park factors retroactively taped, but probably not. Probably not.

Probably not that much. I should say that OPS has cracked the Hall of Fame plaque. So yeah, I believe that Helton's plaque cites an OPS. It just, it says that his 2000 campaign topped leaderboards with 59 doubles, 147 RBI, a 372 average and 1162 OPS. So they still have batting average and RBI ahead of OPS, but it's on there. And Fred McGriff's, I don't know if he was the first or if these are the only two, but it does note that Fred McGriff finished among his league's top five in long balls and OPS in seven straight seasons. And it doesn't explain what OPS was or anything. It just kind of takes it for granted that you know

that. Like on the one hand, okay, cool. But also like, it's just, it's just combining two basic slash lands. It's like, I guess, like, I guess, you know, am I being, am I being overly critical? I'm open to that feedback. You wouldn't be without precedent. I think those are good reasons why I made it at C specific war totals. I don't think I would put a specific, but you could allude to it. Maybe you could say so and so led his league in war X number of times.

That might change, I guess, potentially too, but it might not. Or right. Or you could like when trout gets in, let's say you could say, you could kind of nod at it. You could talk about how he was like an advanced stats standout or something like he, he helped put war on the map or he was a champion by advanced stats adherence who, who saw that all around value stats conveyed his incredible value. You could kind of frame it like that without citing a specific stat,

or you could even say had the highest war through age 27 of any player ever. That fun fact, which was kind of one of the defining facts of Mike Trout's early career, that he was the best ever through age X, until he started missing time. Sure.

That was something that helped frame and shape and define his legacy. So I could see something like that. Or you could allude to, let's say with a good framing catcher, you could talk about framing, not that framing is like a sabermetric concept or something. It's just something that's been quantified and valued more highly thanks to sabermetric analysis But yeah There are probably ways that you could sneak some of that stuff onto it without having something that's subject to change And I guess in theory almost any old-school status subject to change to like we've had our BI totals change and hits total change

In fact, I think Ty Cobb's plaque says that he has 4191 hits and if you go to baseball reference, it was him as having 4189 hits because there was research that was done years ago by P Palmer, I believe that uncovered some double counting and subtracted a couple hits from his total, but not all sources recognize that. So there's some disputes. So even things that seem like they're more set in stone or set in bronze than war would be, can still change sometimes. And gosh, if you had Negro Leaguers plaques, I haven't actually looked to see what stats are cited on Negro Leaguers plaques and whether they have fewer exact stats cited because

until recently the data was just so incomplete and still is to some extent. So you wouldn't want to be tied to any particular number that might be changing. So it's not just war or something similar that's subject to that. But yeah, I wonder if you would start to see an OPS plus or a WRC plus, but maybe most of the time, a OPS does the trick. Yeah. I think that your instinct that we're more likely to see it referenced in terms of like a particular category of stat playing an important role in either our understanding of his career or, or his hall of Fame case is something we're more likely to

see. But I do suspect that they will keep away from specific listings of things. Because it's also just like, I don't know, how necessary does that need to be? And I also think that the people who design and calculate war, all of us would be hopefully humble enough to admit that, like, would it shock me if at some point in the future, like, we make decisions around or advancements in our public understanding of defense, even above and beyond the stag cast metrics that we have that alter kind of the leader boards there in an appreciable way. No, that wouldn't shock me, Ben. It's funny that you mentioned the specter of some unspecified site crashing and losing

all the stats because I was actually going to ask you about an Onion article that was published on Monday, headline MLB loses millions of stats in warehouse fire. It's one of those short ones, it's just a paragraph so I'll read it. As front office executives surveyed the damage done to their record keeping facility, Major League Baseball announced Monday that it had lost millions of stats in a devastating warehouse blaze. It is with a heavy heart that I share today the news of an accidental fire that has reduced to ash. The millions of baseball statistics we have collected

over more than a century, said MLB commissioner Rob Manford, explaining that all players and teams past and present had been stripped of their titles and records, none of which could be independently verified without the lost data. Quote, these were unfortunately the only copies of many of these stats that we had, meaning

there is no hope of recovering the historic slugging percentages, earn run averages, or win-loss records of your favorite teams and players. Sadly, we no longer have any idea who has the most career home runs or no hitters, and any theory as to why Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, or Pedro Martinez were so highly regarded is now squarely in the domain of speculation. At press time, Manford prayed tribute to the brave souls who lost their lives attempting to save the stats for the 2003 Detroit Tigers. Oh my gosh. This is funny. We all laugh at this because the idea of a fire consuming all the stats

seems silly, seems ridiculous. It's all online. It's digitally archived all over the internet and in many hard drives everywhere. There was a time, I guess, when this would have been a realistic concern when all the stats were just limited to old scorekeepers, papers and encyclopedias and such. Could have had a big baseball book burning and burned all of the baseball encyclopedias. But now it's hard to imagine this sort of thing happening. But if you could imagine some scenario where this happened, like let's say, I don't know,

maybe there's like a massive coronal mass ejection from the sun or something and all our electronics get fried and we can't access our baseball stats anymore. We'd have much bigger problems in that case than just losing baseball stats. But if that happened, or if there were some civilization collapses and even things on hard drives, there's digital

decay, right? And those things can go away. And so let's say that society turns into anarchy for a couple hundred years, and then things get back together again, and people decide, let's play baseball again, and we'll restart MLB. And then they fire up the hard drives and they find that they can't boot up any of them and all the stats are gone, right? So some slightly more realistic scenario that this happens. What do you think would happen in that case if we suddenly went from having stats on everything and that being a big part of baseball, a big part of the way that people experience baseball and appreciate baseball and tell the stories

of baseball, and it was all gone, just like that, what would we do? How would that change things? All we would have is the stats left on the misshapen plaques of people. All we would have is those stats. We have to chisel. We need more than 97 words. We have to future-proof baseball by just chiseling all of the stats onto the Hall of Fame plaques so they cannot be lost. I love the idea that humanity survives the water wars and their first concern is getting the stats back up. I mean, don't you just start counting again?

You know? Yeah, maybe you do a reboot like we talked about. Is there a scenario where MLB just reboots and starts a new continuity? I guess this would be a prime opportunity for that. And I think that you could still have, you know, assuming, what a grim thing I'm about to say. Assuming in this timeline, like the museums survives, you know, the various museums survive and we are able to point to the displays, both the plaques and then the actual exhibits and artifacts there and say, well, we're confident in the providence of these things and can substantiate them and so here's our understanding of baseball. Like, you might not be able to point to a single home run leader from the before times,

but it's not as if the entire story is lost. It's just that we would not be able to offer the same kind of specificity, you know, like, but I think we'd probably get by, you know, if only because we'd have an appreciation for the stakes of this relative to other things like, you know, the restoration of society in some shape or form. Although, wouldn't that be a big part of the restoration of at least American society? I mean, you know, post-apocalyptic stories. Sometimes people play baseball and it's a healing.

It's a, we're back, right? We're so back, baseball's back. Yeah. I mean, but you can play baseball without being able to cite the, you know, leader in RBI on a Sunday night when the roof is closed, right? Like we don't lose our entire appreciation for anything. And you'd remember something.

So this isn't just a warehouse fire scenario. This is almost like a men in black neuralyser scenario where no one remembers everything, right? Like we can't remember who had the most career home runs, Rob Medford is lamenting. Obviously we would remember major milestones like that. And I wonder if this happens like now, there's probably someone out there with a photographic memory who just has all the baseball stats in their head.

Someone who's browsed every page on baseball reference or, you know, red flipped every page in the baseball encyclopedia. We could just reconstruct from their memory all the baseball stats maybe. Or if anything survived, I guess in this case, old newspaper archives might be gone too. But if they weren't consumed in the fire, we could always reassemble the stats just like Retro Sheet has done from scratch in a lot of cases, just go back to the box scores and build it back up again. But I think it would be almost like a oral history situation.

It would be kind of like the Negro Leagues, where until recently, there weren't really records or complete records. And so it was stories passed down and people telling other people about it. And you'd want to just get as much of that information down as you could in writing, right? To preserve the numbers and also the accomplishments and the legends and everything. But it would be much more prone to legend, I suppose, because we couldn't really fact check specific accomplishments.

Nicole Soule-Nicholson Well, and it would depend too on the length of the gap between now and the cessation of hostilities, I guess. Because if it's like 10 years, well, you got a lot of folks around who remember the before time and can kind of speak to it with, you know, reasonable clarity. If it's a couple hundred years, well, you're just going to be in the realm of legend regardless. But I also think that the way that like, if we assume a continuity and we assume that people will be playing baseball hundreds of years in the future and they will be doing so in a way that, you know, tries to tie itself to our

existing version of the game and entity playing the game, right? That it's viewed as sort of having a lineage back to now. I wonder how they will think about this era of baseball. Will they view it as being sort of in important ways contemporaneous to the version that they are playing? Will they look at the way that our society is constituted and say, oh, this is the same? Or will they draw some distinction that I can't quite fathom at this juncture that says, oh, well, that's a pre whatever era of the game's history. Like I think we'd have to know a lot about what baseball even looks like a couple hundred years from now before we say one way or the other. But I like this idea where it's like, okay, so we've had some catastrophic societal event, but there's

baseball, but we're worried about what the Sunday night baseball crew is going to say. How will they possibly know? How will they know, Ben? How will they know how many home runs have been hit on that kind of day? How will they know? Yeah. It would be tough for fan graphs, tough for content for us too. How would we stab blast? We would have to pass blast without stab blasting. Yeah. I think I'm okay with the fact that we are like civilization dependent. That's true. Yeah. Kind of contingent on a functioning society more or less. Yeah. Is that one of the reasons I feel a general anxiety these days?

I don't know. Like who could even say, Ben, you know? At least the baseball stats seem safe for now. That's the important thing. For now. Okay. Well, when future generations tell the story of baseball, they will certainly tell it through Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw, two players who are returning this week, possibly. Clayton Kershaw is

starting Thursday and Mike Trout is very close. He has reported to AAA Salt Lake to continue his rehab assignment. So he might be back just in a few days, which is very exciting. Although it's nice that those two, those two era defining players who are kind of oft injured in this phase of their career are coming back together, just getting a couple of main characters back in the game. Although I couldn't help but notice. So Mike Trout is theoretically returning in a few days from his knee injury. JT Real Muto came back on Saturday, having had, as far as I can tell, the same procedure that Trout did, except that Real Muto was

placed on the IL on June 10th and then had surgery on June 11th. Whereas Trout, I think, last played on April 29th or thereabouts and had his surgery on, I believe, May 3rd. And Real Muto, a catcher who has to crouch a lot, problematic with knee issues, he made it back before Mike Trout. So again, just talking about the Mike Trout recovery timeline here, a catcher made it back more than a month faster, then like a month and a half faster than Mike Trout.

They both had menossectomies, which as I think Grant Brisby noted earlier this year, you really have to be careful when you spell menesectomy, which looks like menesectomy, you have to be really careful that you spell that with the M and not typo a P there because that would be a very different surgery. Okay. Oh, hold on.

I gotta look, I appreciate a good joke as much as the next gal, but I will say that it's not like they're next to each other on the keyboard, Ben. They're not. You're not gonna- They're only a few keys away, but it would- Look, there are enough keys away that if you make that typo, you're doing that on purpose. Don't let Grant fool you, okay? Don't let him say, oh, I was an innocent bystander who made a terrible- no.

If penisectomy ends up in Grant's coffee, that's a choice. an innocent bystander who made a terrible, no, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if,

if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, I think they both had partial menesectomies, which sounds like the same thing. Admittedly, they may have had different severities of injury because Trout's was reported as a tear, a meniscus tear. And I didn't see that terminology used for Real Muto. He had knee pain and he had knee soreness and he also had a menisectomy, but it may not have been a complete tear. And so maybe the recovery was easier. So it's, you know, there's enough data out there, I guess, that Mike Trout sort of a slow healer, not to draw this specific comparison, but I did nonetheless, because I was like, wait, he had a menisectomy

and he's back already and Trout's still not back? Anyway, I'm looking forward to both of those guys returning soon. Well, Real Muta's back. He is back, he came back this weekend, yes. But Kershawn did not have a menisectomy. He had a serious injury. That we know about.

No. What a thing, by the way, Big Maple. They cut down Big Maple. We were just talking about James Paxton the other day and how he'd been really the lone stalwart in the Dodgers rotation, the one guy who had taken the ball every time and made every start. They just designated him for assignment with Glasnow returning and Kershaw returning. They're like, well, thanks for getting us through this injury stack, James, but now we no longer need you.

So I don't know if they'll trade him maybe or release him. We'll see. But I get why. Because as we acknowledged, he hasn't actually been that good really, at least like under the hood, the peripherals are kind of concerning. That is what matters ultimately. It's not even what have you done for me lately, it's what will you do for me next? And his roughly 5-fip and 5.3 x-fip does not portend positive results to come, but still to go from, and he has like decent surface stats, right?

Like, you know, 4.43 ERA, that's no great shakes in this offensive environment in Dodger Stadium, but eight and two win-loss record, right? It's just the fact that he's been upright when so few other pitchers have, it almost seems ungrateful, but then when has baseball ever been really a way to express gratitude towards the players? Yeah, it's a cruel business. And you know, you only, despite our jokes, we made some jokes. They do only have so many roster spots, you know, it feels ungrateful, you know, but like, what are you gonna, I get it. Yeah. I think they triggered his, his option at least. Like it wasn't one of these cases where they cut someone or bench

someone right as they're about to. Yeah. Cause he had a, a escalating clause in his contract. It was like 18 starts. I think he got another million or something. And so he made that start and then they got rid of him. There might be more incentives he, he could have commanded, but yeah, at least it wasn't quite that.

But Brandon Gomes, Dodgers DM, did come out and talk about how the Dodgers still seeking impact rotation arms. They've been linked to the White Sox guys. And to be fair, he's not a impact at this point. They're talking about Terrence Goopal and Garret Crochet and Jeff Flaherty and others, right? He's not giving you that. But clearly they still need pitching and starting pitching specifically. It's just they decided not this starting pitcher specifically. Given where they are as an organization, both in terms of their aspirations and the state of their rotation, like it is

appropriate that they aspire to acquire someone who's more of an impact arm than Paxton is at this stage in his career. And you're right, I think that they did make sure that his option got triggered. So like it's, you know, there are maybe versions of this that are a little more humane, but there are definitely versions of it that are a heck of a lot worse. So I think it's a thing that was bound to happen and was handled about as well as can be expected given the limitations of the roster. By the way, remember when we talked about Joe Adele a couple months ago and Jay Jaffe wrote about him, Joe Adele is finally putting it together.

We talked about him probably around the same time. It must've been in May and it looked like, oh, Joe Adele in Trout's absence, right? Maybe the silver lining here is that Joe Adele has been starting and playing every day. And maybe this is finally the post-hype sleeper. Joe Adele is breaking out now. the post-hype sleeper, Joe Adele is breaking out now. No. Sadly, no. He has an 85 WRC plus on the season now, which yeah, and given that he had been well above

average through mid-May that I'm not going to look at, I don't even want to know, but if you looked at his stats since that point, it's got to be really ugly. He's now hitting 199, 270, 399 on the season in 91 games, 308 played appearances. So it's a record high games played total and played appearances total. So for once like he's been out there, they've kept running him out there. He's had a starting spot and it looked for a while

like he was making the most of that. And then unfortunately, no, not really happening. Yeah. I mean, look, really rude of you to bring up the angels around me right now. At least I didn't bring up the Mariners. That would have been really rude. Yeah, but didn't you though? But didn't you? By extension, I didn't bring up the team that just beat the Mariners, that would have been really rude. Yeah, but didn't you though? But didn't you? By extension. By extension. I didn't bring up the team that just beat the Mariners. Yeah, it's not going great, but it's also not going great for the team more generally.

So he's probably going to keep playing for now. And if they're able to move like Kevin Pilar, they might just keep playing and playing and playing, you know? Although I don't know what Kevin Pilar's stats look like lately either, but- CB Yeah, not quite as good, I think, as when we talked about how great they looked shortly after he went from the White Sox to the Angels. And yes, now he's still got a 129 OPS plus. So yeah, it's okay. It's okay.

Yeah. But you never know, maybe Joe Adele, maybe one of these years, maybe a future year, he's still just 25. Is he still 25? I guess that's something. Yeah, he's still 25. So it could turn around one of these years.

You never know. And things can turn around like Jaren Durand, for instance, two years ago to the day, I was reminded two years ago to the day he had his notorious flub in centerfield, right? Or one of them, but the most notorious. And this came up in our discord group. Listener Joe pointed out that it was a two year anniversary

of the time when he just completely lost a ball in centerfield and then didn't seem to pursue it really. And just sort of stood there. And it was in a season of defensive bloopers for the Red Sox that was maybe the most notable. And yet here he is. He was 25 at that time. And here he is 27. And he's one of the stars of the game. He's one of the most valuable players in baseball. I didn't see that coming. I mean, he, he hit pretty well last year

in 102 games, about as many play appearances as Adele has had this year, but this year he has been phenomenal and all around phenomenal too. Not just great hitter. He can do it all. He's got power, he's got speed, he's got 11 triples leading the majors and he's playing fantastic defense in center still. So despite the fact that that was the moment that you thought, oh man, like he's kind of failing to launch, like he was a big prospect and that year he had a 78 OPS plus in addition to the defensive miscue, very Adele-esque.

And here he is, he's completely put it all together and he's just one of the most dynamic players that we just saw in the All-Star game. Right? I mean, he's totally taken the leap. He does it all. He's just tough to take your eyes off him. Yeah, it can happen. Oh God, I just looked at Adele's splits by month. Here know, here's the thing though, Ben. So, like they, yeah, they're bad. But Ben better lately. March, April 169 WRC plus, May 63, June 24, 24. And you're like, I mean, surely he was hurt and it was, you know, uh, it was no plate appearances. No, it was like 87 plate appearances.

But then, but then in July, in July so far, when 19 WRC plus, you know? And look, uh, was there an all star break in there? Yeah. But look, it's not a 24 Ben, you know? Yeah. Five times 24 just about. That's, yeah, that's a big improvement. Oh, you know? Yeah, five times 24, just about. That's a big improvement. Oh, sure.

Be fancy. Do math on the fly. Wow. Okay. It wasn't the best math. I guess it's a little less than that, but still a major improvement. Right. So I'm just saying that it could be better, but it could be worse than it has been pretty

recently. So you heard it here first, Jo Adele in 2026 will be the Jaren Durand. Yeah, Jaren Durand of 2024 is to Jo Adele of 2026. Yeah, that's a wild thing to posit. It is. Speaking of players who are struggling, now this player makes Joe Adele's struggles look like nothing at all. Perhaps you have heard the tragedy of Francisco Vicioso, the player.

So he recently became Reddit famous because someone noticed his extremely small sample stats and it almost feels bad to place a spotlight on them because he's young and they're so bad. He is a teenager, he's 19 and he's playing in the Dominican Summer League, which I guess 19 is not young for the DSL, but he's young in the grand scheme of things. And people noted he's in Atlanta's system and this is his second pro season. He pitched a third of an inning last year and he's pitched two and two thirds innings this year. I invite you to look at the stat line. Oh, why? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So.

Uh-oh. Yeah. Uh-oh. So the career stats right now for VCO, so 10 games, three innings, that right there is a problem. The ratio of, he has a pitcher by the way. Yeah, that's wrong. I mean, I don't mean that it's incorrect. I just mean that it's- Yeah.

These are stats that he probably wishes would be burned in a fire maybe, but. Yeah. So 10 games, three innings. Now the good news is he's allowed only two hits. So that's, you know, solid hits per nine. Yeah, but how many walks Ben? How many walks Ben? 28 walks.

That's so many. It's like a staggering number. I don't think that's the most staggering number on here. 35 wild pitches. Yeah. Now, maybe those things are, are collinear. Maybe you, you figure, yeah, those would go together. Do you think?

That many walks. Okay, he's probably pretty wild. Oh, maybe not so surprising. So he's faced 44 batters in total. And again, only two of them have gotten hits. That's excellent. But 28 walks, 35 wild pitches. So he's averaging almost a wild pitch per batter. He has struck out six. So again, you know, solid strikeout per innings ratio.

I mean, he struck out 18 batters per nine, Meg. You know, if you look really selectively, he's got six hits per nine, no homers per nine, and 18 strikeouts per nine. If I showed you only those columns, you might think, oh wow, this guy must be a top prospect, right? Like this is pretty impressive.

And then yeah, you look at the walks and the wild pitches and, and this year, so last year he faced 17 batters and got one out. By the way, I have not mentioned how many runs he's allowed. I mean, you could probably infer that it's a lot of runs. Yeah. He is allowed 21 runs in his three innings of work, only 20 earned. Let's give him that. Or maybe we can't give him that because now that I look, he has three throwing errors too. So maybe that's where the unearned run came from.

He's finished two games, got a couple of games finished here. Jose Ruiz, by the way, has two more games finished since we last talked about his games finished total. He's now up to a dozen on the season and he has a dozen to go to tie Ryan Webb for the all time lead in games finished without a save. He's got 93 now. That's your Jose Ruiz update for today. But I digress.

Francisco Vicio has been allowed to finish two games. So I guess, you know, you bring him in, you just kind of let him wear it. He's just been wearing it every time he pitches. And so he has a 63 ERA, no, sorry, a 60 ERA, a 63 runs allowed per nine. Again, don't want to make this look any worse than it already does. He has hit four batters, by the way. I neglected to mention that, which given the 28 walks and the 35 wild pitches, I'd say four hit by pitches is actually better than I would have expected. So he is fairly responsible when it comes to being wild in ways that don't impact hitters literally.

It just means that he's like missing wide. By so much that he couldn't even. The indication is that he is out there, out there. You know? Yes. And there is a little bit of video circulating, just like a couple of pitches. Yeah, I know. I'll link to the, just a clip.

And you can see that like, he just, I don't know whether you can call it the yips again, like I don't know what his story is here. I don't know whether you can call it the Yips again, like I don't know what his story is here. I don't really know what's like, is it the Yips was, did he have command and control at some point? Was he brought on as an emergency? Like he must have decent stuff, I guess, to get some whiffs and to even be allowed to pitch. But he has kind of like a low effort delivery or I don't know. He looks like he's just kind of playing catch except that the catcher even anticipating that he's going to be wild presumably has a pretty tough time corralling his pitches. So I don't really know the story here.

I don't know what the hopes were for him or what his ambitions were, what bonus he got or anything. So it might be that this is not someone who, you know, ever had serious aspirations or that there ever were high hopes for him or maybe he's filling in an emergency. I still, I haven't seen reporting on what exactly is happening here, but this is kind of testing the boundaries of like, I don't even really understand how he's been allowed to pitch 10 games or three innings. Like that's kind of what I want to know. Cause clearly he cannot throw strikes at all. Right?

And so is it the sort of thing where they're working with him inside sessions and he, he can throw strikes there and then he gets in the game and it's a yip situation or can he not even when he's practicing and if so, then why is he even being put into games at all? So I'd, I'd like to know more. This seems like a case where you might actually look at a professional baseball player and say, I could do that or I could do better than that. Maybe, right? Like I would certainly give up more hits than Francisco Vsioso, but I think I probably could throw more strikes again, like not a high bar to clear. I don't think I would walk as many.

I think I could not that I have a pinpoint command from 60 feet, six inches or anything, but I think based on the stats and the snippets of video that I could probably walk fewer guys and certainly throw fewer wild pitches just because I would not be throwing nearly as hard probably as he is. And so I could at least like lob it in there, which maybe he's just not trying to do. Maybe he is trying to throw hard and it's just not going well at all. But I would like to know a little bit more about this story because it's kind

of the stats have gone viral, but I have not really heard the fleshed out story. I mean, I think that look, it's not a perfect indicator, right? We definitely have seen guys who are about to defy the profile I'm about to suggest, but like he was signed presumably as an international amateur late from an age perspective, which tends to tell you a little something. Although like as I was saying, like there are exceptions to that, right? Like Houston made a run of signings where it's like the guy's a little bit older and some of those guys have turned out to be not only big leaguers, but like really important big leaguers for them. So yeah, hard to know.

Yeah, I feel bad, obviously for him, like it can't be easy to be left out there to play like that. It's just such an extreme outlier because certainly if you look at small sample minor leaguers, you can come up with plenty of players who have severely struggled and just never made it past that point. The one that it reminded me most of was not a pitcher, but a position player, and that's Shaq Thompson, who I don't know if you recall, in 2012, Shaq Thompson was an 18 year old playing for the Gulf Coast League rookie level Red Sox. Did you just ask me if I recall Shaq Thompson?

Did you just ask me Meg, a fan of the University of Washington and a football fan if I'm aware of Shaq Thompson? Well, that's the thing. So if you know Shaq Thompson, it's because his story had a happy ending, I guess, right? Like not in baseball, to be clear, but he had a second act and he was a multi-sport athlete, which is why he was so, so bad at professional baseball in his short time. Like he just had not played much of it, but he had physical skills and so the Sox drafted him in the

18th round and he goes to the GCL and he played 13 games 47 played appearances and he got fewer hits than Francisco Vicio so has allowed he went hitless in 47 played appearances and 39 it bats he batted zero zero 170 zero so he did walk eight times which just goes to show I guess in the GCL like don't swing and maybe you'll walk because you might be facing someone like Francisco VCO so so he did steal a base and got caught stealing once and he drove in a run and he scored three runs. So he wasn't totally skunked in all the statistical columns, but he batted zero

and he struck out 37 times in 47 play appearances. So 39 at bats and 37 of them were strikeout. So he barely put the ball in play and I don't know whether at any point he just sort of stopped swinging. And so he walked sometimes and struck out looking a lot. I don't know. But I wrote about that at the time and others did too. And I was kind of feeling bad about it,

but also marveling at it. And then of course, Shaq Thompson goes on to be an all-American football player for the Huskies, as he said, and then gets drafted by the Panthers and is a good player. He's 30 years old now and he's been in the NFL for years. He's nicknamed the big nickel. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on his football career, but he's been a good productive player. And that is not a pivot that most professional baseball players who

wash out of baseball can make, but in his case, it is worked. So I don't know whether Francisco Vicio. So we'll, uh, pop up in some other walk of life and Excel there. One would hope, but that's what it reminded me of where it's just like someone who's so raw and must have some physical skills and tools, but that's what it reminded me of where it's just like someone who's so raw and must have some physical skills and tools, but just is not really prepared for this level of baseball. And here we are spending like 15 minutes talking about it because we're very nice people. Yeah, look, it's gotten a ton of attention, so we're not the ones bringing it to the national

consciousness. And yet I hadn't heard about it. You hadn't heard about it, it's true. Yeah. So, I mean, some of these things, like you just goggle, you're aghast when you see a stat line and then you think about the human, the player who is producing that stat line and how unpleasant that must be. So again, I would like to hear exactly how this has happened and what it is like to struggle like this or why he has played this much

at all. Cause that was my first question. It's like how has he even gotten three innings really, but it just, I guess goes to show like that's how good baseball players are that this is the lowest rung of affiliated ball and you can struggle to that extent, right? Where if you can't throw strikes, you will just be completely powerless, right? Like you will be unmanned and that's what it will look like. So it is sometimes helpful, I think, to have someone who is just kind of completely outside the norm of professional baseball performance so that you can be reminded, oh, it's bad to be Joe Adele, right? Like that's, you know, he's struggling. Or Jaren Duran when he made that one play, that looked bad. But these were people doing it at

the highest level. And yeah, they were not great at that level at that time, but they were still just incredible baseball players. And it reminds you that most of us are very far from that. And that it takes more than just the raw physical skills of a great athlete like Shaq Thompson to be good at baseball. Yeah. So I have to ask you about Nick Castellanos and the way that the Nick Castellanos meme has morphed because it has, right? It used to be that Nick Castellanos, it was specifically like a solemn moment on a broadcast that Nick Castellanos would interrupt by hitting a home run. And there are many, many examples

of just that specific thing that Castellanos did. But obviously the most notable example is Tom Brennan. When he said his slur and then he came back on the air and was making his apology and he doesn't know if he'll ever be back on the mic, although now he is, right? Doing a different sport after four years. But that was the original meme and that was the form I wrote about it in for the ringer sometime later. And now it has morphed to whenever there is some notable national event, really, someone dies, something happens that is of national import. Now it's Nick that it's confirmation bias

and we're willing the meme into continued life. Like we got an email from Patreon supporter Zan who pointed to an athletic roundup from Levi Weaver of the times that Castellanos has had a big hit after some big news story broke. And Zan said, I've listened to enough Effectively Wild that it made me wonder, is he actually more likely to hit when something big is going on?

Or is he just hitting well enough that some of his big ones happened to coincide with major news stories pretty regularly? Seems like we might have enough data points to start making that call at this point, but I was a lit major, so I may be wrong about that. So yeah, I don't know how he would stat blast that exactly. Like does this Nick Castellanos Homer disproportionately on days

when there is some notable news and how would you define what is notable or like the type of, cause the most recent instance of this was Joe Biden announcing that he was not going to continue his run for president. And once that news came out, everyone started joking about like, go put all your savings on the Castellanos to Homer. And then he did, he actually did. And everyone's like, he can't continue this, like this can't continue to happen. So it could be, A, I suppose that there's just like more news lately or more bad news or social media just makes us all aware of the news. Like Brandon McCarthy.

Significant news, right? Right. Yeah. Brandon McCarthy tweeted, Nick Sastellanos is going to get in the hall of fame because we live in an f-ing ridiculous era. Our news cycle makes the whole league course field to him. Right? Yeah. If there's just always some news or some big blowup happening, then Nick Castellanos always says an opportunity to Homer. And so even if he does it only some part of the time, he'll do it often enough. Right? And like, is Joe Biden dropping out of the race the same as like someone

dying or something? Like these are not the same sort of news story. Some would consider that to be good news. Some would say, right. No, I guess, I guess. Elicit emails. You. Joe Biden was essentially doing the, I don't know if I'll put this headset on again or whatever, right? Like he was kind of not that there was a slur involved, but he was doing the like, you know. But I was thinking this and then Zachary Levine, former baseball prospectus and Houston Chronicle writer, he gave voice to this. He said, bravely, boldly, and he actually went kind of viral for voicing this.

He said, fine, I'll say it, we lost the plot on the Castellanos thing. The thing is homering to interrupt very serious toned monologues by broadcasters, not homering on the same day as world events. That's how I felt. But then other people pointed out like, maybe we don't have to be prescriptivists about this.

Maybe the meme can just, it can morph into something new. It started as that. Yeah, and now it's this. And as long as everyone's still having fun with it, and still kind of joking and joshing about it, which they are now, it's just that when I saw all the Biden Castellanos thing, I did kind of feel like this doesn't count, you know? And yet when he homered, I was like, okay, that's kind of funny.

It's still just funny that he went deep to left when everyone predicted that he would go deep to left. I think that we have lost the plot a little bit, but I also think that, you know, the meaning of these things changes over time. Like, I don't know, I tend to think of them as like kind of an, an out shoot of like folklore almost, right? Like it's just gonna, it's gonna shift and change and adapt over time. And I do think that it's interesting that it's, it has come to be associated with events that to your point earlier are, depending on your view

of them, maybe a little more ambiguous. It's, it's come to encompass those as well. Although some of the times that he's hit a home run, it's been like, oh yeah, we know what that event means. So yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting question. Yeah. I've seen various lists compiled of all of the Castellanos homers during significant events. For example, here's one from Twitter user at RACJAC24. So apology for homophobic slur on broadcast, career threatening injury

for Tatis. And again, we're talking about baseball injuries. Right, right. Eulogy for World War II veteran, a 9-11 tribute video package on the air, apology of opposing team's coach getting a DUI. So again, these were all like things, mostly things that were happening on the broadcast. Like someone was trying to say something solemn and they made the mistake of not waiting for Nick Castellanos' played appearances to conclude. And he interrupted them. And then they had to make the awkward, you know, call the thing and then go back to your solemn announcement. But then it morphs, right?

And okay, 10 minutes after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. I mean, Did that really happen? Was it really that close? I think that's the other thing. It's like, it needs, there needs to be proximity. Yeah. Sometimes the, like a thing will happen. And then like hours later, he hummers and people are trying to tie the two and it's like no it has to be like Right. It has to invite the question Did Nick Casiano's kill Henry Kissinger, right? right Dwayne has just pick one just pick one. I don't remember if he homered on that day

I feel like he did because of the meme. It's not on the list, but yeah, it would be on the list. Yes. So the NFL player, Dwayne Haskins died. I mean, again, like, I don't think that's, that shouldn't count in my mind, you know, Memorial Day tribute package on the air. Okay. ULG for the just deceased PA announcer for the stadium. Yes. See, that's what I'm talking about. Cancer announcement for his team's owner. Vin Scully death announcement. Oh, but see, like, we know, right, like, don't put Vin in there. We have Vin out of this, you know? Yeah, right. I mean, that is just, yeah, what is the...

You can keep, but Vin, you got to take out. Yeah. Now I'm inviting my own emails. Comment. An hour after the death of Queen Elizabeth was announced, a bridge collapsed, killing several people, the Ocean Gate submarine explosion or implosion, three other celebrity deaths. No, come on. Like a celebrity dies every day. Right? I mean, that's the way mortality works. I'm sorry to break it to everyone.

I feel like a lot of them are going lately, but that's because the ones I know are getting old, you know? That's why it feels that way. Right. So we can't just, you know, you could find probably a celebrity who died on every day. Nick Castellanos is homeward, but it just doesn't. We're stretching, we're reaching here. Two home runs on the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assassination attempt on Trump, and Biden withdraws from the race.

So at least he's bipartisan here, I guess, when it comes to notable presidential candidate news. But, and then people noted by the way that his first professional home run in A-ball was the day that Osama Bin Laden was killed. Shut up. Are you serious? Yeah. Which like, you know, that was pre-meme development by several years, but it's like he was doing

it the whole time, right? I mean, that's kind of funny, I guess. by several years, but it's like he was doing it the whole time. Right? I mean, that's kind of funny, I guess. I think that it should be reserved for like, Vince Gully is a great example. We don't want Vince Gully involved in the Castellanos meme because like, leave Vince Gully alone. Vince Gully is a treasure, right? Like celebrities dying in and of itself, maybe not appropriate

for the Castellanos meme. It depends on, again, on the person. Like, you want to bring Kissinger into this fight. Right. If it's like an infamous figure in some way. Right. Like if it's Osama Bin Laden. Sure. Yeah. Appropriate deployment of the meme. I mean, it didn't exist yet, but it would have fit the moment. But part of why we are struggling here is because you were right initially to point out that the context of the meme was front-facing, solemn apology for bad act, interrupted by joyful home run, right? Like

the contrast between the tone of those two things is what made it feel funny, you know? And so, when we are removing it from that initial context and simply attaching it to big important thing happens and that thing involves a person often like dying or nearly dying. It gets more muddled because like we could offer that there are times when we're more sad about that than at other times, you know, like Is that a set an appropriately neutral way for me to describe that? Would you like me to invoke Henry Kissinger one more time? So it's it, you know, this is where it gets kind of muddled and I think it's part of why people have

gravitated toward a broad, it accompanies big events that is tinged with either sadness or death or danger, right? Or potential world historic consequence. But it does make it a less clear meme, you know? It does. Now it just feels like we can kind of stretch it every which way because we like the Castellanos meme and people derive a lot of enjoyment and there's no real harm in it. I mean, it seems like maybe it's bothered certain Castellanos at certain points. Oh, has it really?

Does Nick not like it? I don't know if Nick doesn't like it. I think there was some shade cast by maybe some member of the Castellanos family, I vaguely recall at some point. But I don't think it does any great harm or anything. And it's kind of funny to imagine the mechanism here. It's like, does Nick Castellanos, is he aware of all these world events?

Wait, is he? Is he causing them to happen or is he like deriving some sort of fuel from them? Some kind of competitive fire? Like remember Playoff Castellanos when Playoff Castellanos would suddenly get good at defense and he was like, I'm just better able to focus when every play really matters than I am during the regular season. and he seems to like really raise his game defensively. You don't think of him as a defensive standpoint, but he's made some impressive plays in the postseason and it's like, oh, playoff Castellanos.

So you can imagine like there's a heightened environment or atmosphere at the park. Like everyone's buzzing about Osama Bin Laden just got killed and suddenly Nick Castellanos channels that somehow into his first professional Homer. But mostly it's things that he's probably oblivious to certainly in the moment, if not all moments. Unless he is in fact some sort of warlock and he is causing those things. And then the question becomes like, how ethical is it to bribe him to particular? Right. You know?

It's probably spiraled out of control to the point where if we could do some sort of rigorous analysis here, I bet it wouldn't really be that Nick Castellanos homers are overrepresented. Sure, sure. It's just that it takes on a life of its own. It becomes self-sustaining. And I think that like, to the extent that

some of these things are about events that get announced, you know, like deaths happen when they do. And so maybe those are at least somewhat immune from this stuff. But like baseball players play in the middle of the day and during prime time. And guess when people tell you about stuff during those hours, right? Like that's when, to the extent that these things are press releases that someone is sending to try to take advantage of a particular spot in the news cycle, like, you know, that's when baseball players play and that's when people tend to be like, hey, I'm not running for president anymore. You know how you can predictably say when that's going to happen? You know? Wow. We've had quite a time lately, like as

humans. A lot has happened. And maybe that is why Castellanos is thriving, as Brandon McCarthy said. If I were Nick Castellanos, I would hate this personally. Because like, you're Nick Castellanos. Congratulations, you're a big leaguer, you're making some good money. You are at times the darling and the enemy of a fan base that feels big feelings regardless of what direction they go in. Would you, if you're Nick Castellanos, say that things are going precisely to plan for you

lately? No. No, you might not say that. You have a ninth- Sub-replacement level player this season, yeah. Right. You have a 94 WRC+, you're still playing catastrophic defense, you're hitting 237, you have 14 home runs.

And those 14 home runs are probably real highlights for you in the season in a time that's been kind of rough for you and everyone associates it with something catastrophic happening. That would bump me out. That would really bump me out. And he seems like he's a guy who has the ability to reflect and put things in perspective. I think he's given some pretty thoughtful interviews about sort of where he is as a player and in his life. And like, he seems like someone who's good humoring about himself, but I would be bummed personally,

if everyone's like, he did a good thing. What insane, I'm gonna do a swear, what insane has been unleashed on us now, you know? That would, that would bump me out. Yeah, that's true. In a way, the worse he is overall, I guess the, the more fun it makes the meme. Cause if he were Aaron Judge and he were just homering every other game, it wouldn't seem so special. Yeah, gosh, that's the last thing we need for this power to reside

in Aaron Judge. Enough. We've had enough. We've had enough. But it just, it makes it more improbable. Of course, Castellanos, he still has power, but when he homers in a down year, that's more notable than 2021. He hit 34 homers and he had a 140 WRC plus. He's a really good hitter. Now it's like when he comes through and hits a homer on one of these days, when everyone's predicting he hits a homer and the odds of that happening are

lower. One would think that it, it kind of, it makes it feel funnier. Yeah. Oh, totally. I lament it only because I really love the original Castellanos meme and it is applicable in many ways, in many contexts, in many sports. And it was one of the few baseball memes that really kind of broke containment. And you'd see it kind of as copypasta cropping up all over the internet and people wouldn't even know what it was. Right. But it was, it was just so good because there were so many analogous situations. There are so many times where someone has to make an apology and then some thing comes up and you can just use the, you

know, the Brennanman text and the Castellanos meme. And so if we pivot away from that to the point where that is lost and it just becomes, oh, this guy hits a homer when some world event happens, then I don't know, that's just a little less fun. It's just more nebulous in my mind. God, what a weird day that was. That was a weird day in a really weird year because he was just then like on the air for innings and innings and I know that this stuff, I think we tend to overestimate the practical speed with which things like this can be intervened on. Like I get that it probably is more of a process than seems obvious because you're like, I'll just pull them off the air, which like probably just pull them off the air.

But I get it. Like it, you know, these things have a process and a life and somebody has to say, yeah, pull them off the air, you know. So I get it. But he just kept broadcasting for so long, but it just went on and I just sat there and I was like, he's still, he's still, he's still, he's still. And then he wasn't, but now he will be again. It builds on social media too, where you have people talking about it for a long time before. Right.

Yeah. So that's the Castellanos meme in its present form. Who knows which way it will head next. And I want to credit by the way, Twitter user at dramatic manatee, who it seems to me was first in compiling this list but didn't go as viral because they did it in a reply and in a thread. And then the user that I credited earlier had a very almost suspiciously similarly worded compilation of all of the events that then went viral a couple hours later. Also, guess I should note that Henry Kissinger died in

late November. So if Nick Castellanos had somehow homered then, that truly would have been impressive. One other thing I want to ask you here, we have talked about the Brewers being surprising in a positive sense this season. And they trade Corbin Burns, Craig Council leaves, people write them off a little bit, and then they're leading their division. Handily, like they've been really successful despite the fact that their pitching has been bad as anticipated. That is why people thought, Oh, this isn't going to be a good year for the Brewers. Their perennially strong starting rotation is just weak now and it has been weak and

yet somehow they have still surpassed expectations. And one way they've done that is by being a pretty good offensive team. Certainly by Brewer standards, they have a 108 WRC plus. And the interesting thing about that is the way they've done it where they haven't really had a whole lot of star level hitters. They have had a bunch of pretty good hitters, right? Like if you look at their top hitters by plate appearances, so they're just most used hitters. Like their top 11 hitters have at least a 96 WRC plus, which are 94, I guess is the

low up until recently. I think like just about all of them were average or very close to average, but that's still the case. Other than Christian Jelic, who is having a very fine year and bounce back to not quite peak Jelic, but somewhere in between pre-peak and post-peak Jllich and peak yellich, which is really good. He has a 155 to over your C plus, but everyone else is like in the teens, maybe in the low 20s, you know, like not a lot of stars really or people who are having extremely successful offensive seasons, but also no replacement level killers, no one who's really just eating up outs. Almost everyone is just about average. And that's the kind of thing that I think can be underrated kind of, because you look and you're like, well, who's, how are they doing this?

Who exactly? And it's not that they have a ton of players at a star level, it's just that they don't really have anyone who has sucked, right? Who's gotten a lot of playing time. And that I think has kind of been a trait of the Brewers during their, their recent competitive run is that they've been deep and they have kind of avoided the awful that Jeff Sullivan used to phrase it that way. He used to do posts every now and then about avoiding the awful,

which was just like fewest played appearances or less, at least playing time given to replacement level or sub replacement level players. Cause if you can just avoid that, then you're a long way of the way toward being good. But my question is like, we can credit the Brewers for that and we should. Do you think that is easier to do than say assembling stars?

Cause I think part of the conceit, the understanding here is that like, well, all you have to do is not suck, you know? Like it seems like it should be pretty easy not to suck. Like you could always just get a replacement level player or you could get maybe someone who's a little better than that. Like it doesn't seem like it should be that hard to just collect a bunch of guys who were average ish and yet, or not even average overall, but just, you know, reasonably close to the baseline that you're not just hemorrhaging outs and value and yet it doesn't seem like that's an easy thing to do.

It sounds easy, you know, just like don't play players who are actively hurting you. And yet a lot of teams do that. So it must be hard to do, right? Like, I guess it's harder to say, go get an Aaron Judge and a Juan Soto. Like there are only certain teams that spend the money to do that. And the Brewers are not one of them typically, although, you know, they kept Christian Jelic around, etc. But do you think it's actually easier?

It's one weird trick to be good at baseball. Just don't suck. It seems like it should be easy, but is that any easier than say collecting stars and having a stars and scrubs roster? I think part of the appeal of stars is going to help me account for like what I mean when I say this. I think that you're right that in theory, guys who are like decent are thought to be like easier to acquire, more likely to be on offer than guys who are incandescent, you

know, like it's easier to acquire a good but not great, a near replacement level, but not too far above that guy than it is to acquire Juan Soto. And I think that when you're thinking about acquisition cost in terms of either money or other players that you would trade, from a value perspective, that's obviously true because there's just more of them. Because it's easier to be okay than it is to be Wonsodo. Really hard to be Wonsodo. I also think though that the guys who are performing kind of say 10% above replacement level in any given season and are likely to be someone who, let's say you're the Seattle Mariners, just to pick

a team out of the clear blue nowhere, And you're looking at the available player population and you're looking at the guys who you think that you can either afford to sign as free agents or aren't going to decimate a farm system. I think that when you're looking at dudes who are like at present 10% above league average or even like not even 10% above league average ten percent about like Replacement level those are the guys who are also more likely to be like slightly underwater the next year to me, right? Because their true talent range is probably pretty close to centered around zero And so you're gonna get years where like they can hit for like a 105 110 WRC plus and be a reasonable defender

And then the next year like whoops They're Jorge Polanco. Mm-hmm, you know and then like where are you looking up getting ready to look up at the Astros? Where you are that's where you are Ben. So I think that it is easy in that there are a lot more of those guys and you the and then the challenge comes in picking the ones who are actually from like a true talent perspective above replacement and maybe a little more likely to continue to play that way versus the ones that are bopping around on either side of zero on a pretty consistent basis. And oh no, you got them in the year when like actually they're not very good really. Sorry, I keep talking about the Mariners, but you brought them up first.

And so here we are. But I think that they, that there's like a, they're a little instructive here both in terms of the actual like talent issues that they find themselves having on the roster and sort of like think about what bothered people about the 54% comment. Okay. A lot of stuff bothered people. But I think one of the things that bothered people who wanted the Mariners to exhibit greater ambition was you, you actually need to aim higher than 54% to reliably win 54% of the time because it's hard to win that often.

The teams that are doing it on average over a 10-year span at that level probably have a number of years in there that are well above 54% and are dragging up your average, right? Whereas you're going to have seasons where you just like, guys get hurt, guys underperform, you know, whatever the case may be, and you're going to win a little less often than 54% of the time. And so you need to have ambition so that you can like raise your average. And I think that one of the things that the Brewers are benefiting from this year is, yes, they have, they have guys like Yelich who are

having really nice bounce back. They have guys like Ortiz and Contreras who are showing themselves and Willie Adamis for that matter to be really solid contributors, able to hit 17 to 24% above league average and are kind of helping to carry the bottom part of that lineup. They also have a lot of young guys who are going to hopefully continue to improve as the season goes on. Like Jackson Trujillo seems like he's really turning it on now, right? And so I think that they're in this spot where they have a really potent combination of solid, reliable performance

and then the possibility for positive variance because of the use of their roster. And so that puts them in this position where they, I think, are not only sort of avoiding being sucky in a lot of spots, but unlike the Brewers' rosters of recent vintage where they were really strong on the pitching side and were showing at times pretty meaningful deficits on the hitting side, not only are they just avoiding suck, but they're balanced in a way that they haven't been in a long time. The book on the Brewers was that they had the pitching to get to the postseason in part because they played in a division that wasn't always super competitive

and then they'd get there and their hitters would face postseason quality pitching and then they'd kind of wash out in the first round of October. And I think that they're in a spot now where they have some room to maneuver there They have some balance like is this the best offense that's gonna go into October? Assuming that things kind of continue as it has I mean no they're not the very best one But I think that they are the best one that they've had in a long time And that's like that's not nothing Ben the best one that they've had in a long time. And that's like, that's not nothing, Ben, you know?

Like, that's not nothing. And here I am, I'm saying like, oh, they're not the best one that's gonna be in October, but like, they're not a bad offense either. They have a better offense than Cleveland does, you know? Just to pick another team that is hanging around in a central and is outperforming expectation in terms of their top line results this season. So I think that they're like a sneaky kind of problem, you know, that Brewers team.

I do think that they could use some more pitching though. I think that they need some more pitching. You know, here I am talking about balance, but it's like, oh, actually that stuff, your A is a lot worse than I thought it was. The Aries find the fit. When they're in the fours, you're like, oh, you might need some help. You might need a little bit of assistance. Maybe they're not so balanced.

Maybe it's flipped. Maybe I'm full of assistance. Maybe they're not so balanced. Maybe it's flipped. Maybe I'm full of beans. Jared Ranere Well, we can talk a little bit more about the deadline next time maybe and some teams that are facing tough decisions about which way to go, which might change by the next time we podcast. And then Ben Clemens is doing his trade value series at Fangrass. We'll talk to him later this week. And we're a week away from the trade deadline. We are a week away from the deadline. They may not be busy, but we'll see.

We don't know. It could be fine to record on Tuesday or it could be very stupid. Wow, their pitching is worse than I thought it was. That's very bad. Yeah. But their defense is great. The defense is great. I feel silly now, Ben. I feel like I got over my skis. I got so excited

about the hitting and committed to this idea of balance. I mean, it's not great. All right. Let's hope that nothing happens that could rise to the level of a Nick Castellanos homer before the next time we talk. Post-recording update on Mike Trout, he was removed from his first rehab game with knee soreness. He's listed as day to day. That'll do it for today. Thanks for listening and a special thanks to those of you who enable us to keep making the podcast by supporting us on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast

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