Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2198: Schrödinger’s Catcher

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the end of a historic Clayton Kershaw streak, pitcher errors and unearned runs, the lack of top prospects traded at the deadline, the short-handed Marlins vs. the stripped-down Rays, the latest sign of the White Sox apocalypse, the resurgent Blake Snell, Brett Phillips the full-time pitcher, and whether […]

Does baseball look the same to you as it does to me? When we look at baseball, how much do we see? Well, the curveball's bent and the home runs fly The more to the game, the beats the eye To get the stats compiled and the stories filed Fans on the internet might get riled, but we can break it down on Effectively Wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2198 of Effectively Wild, a fan-graphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Riley of fan-graphs and I am joined by Ben Lemberger, the ringer. Ben, how are you? Well, I'm mourning the end of an era and the end of a record setting streak, namely, Clayton Kershaw's streak of regular season games started with a strikeout, which was snapped this week. It ended finally on Wednesday when he made a regular season start without striking out a soul. Wednesday when he made a regular season start without striking out a sole. And he held this record. I don't know how well known this was. I was aware of it, but that was his 424th regular season start and his streak of 423 regular season starts with at least one strikeout was the longest at least since the mound was moved to its current distance in 1893.

So he had 423 starts in a row with a strikeout. Tom Siever had 411, Nolan Ryan had 382. And now the streak has been snapped because he started a game against the Padres and he went three and two thirds, six hits, seven runs, three earned, one walk, one homer, no strikeouts, just a goose egg in that K column for the first time in his regular season career. I'm sort of sad. Wow.

I didn't know it was a thing to mourn until just now, but now having been made aware of it, I feel sad in retrospect. I did specify regular season because of course he had the disastrous NLDS start last year where he got one out and it was not a strikeout. So that was a start without a strikeout, but regular season only, this is a really long streak and I guess part of it is the era or that helps. Obviously it's, you know, high strikeout era. So it's harder to have a strikeout free game, but obviously also a testament to his skill and his longevity and just the fact that he didn't get knocked out of

any games quickly enough to have not had a strikeout, right? So maybe it tells you almost as much about the floor as the ceiling. And that's one reason why it was so shocking, even though everyone was kind of aware that he was compromised in the playoffs last year to see him given that drubbing and unceremoniously exit so soon without having recorded a single strikeout that had never happened before. So it is the consistency of not getting knocked out immediately, I guess that helps almost as much as just being maybe the best pitcher of your generation. LS It's funny because drubbing is such a fun word to say, but it denotes such a terrible thing. What do you do with that, Ben? CB It does. Sounds like rub-a-dub-dub, but it isn't fun like that.

LS Right. Rub-a-dub-dub. Yeah, it didn't go great, let's put it that way. I had it on and I was like, this isn't going great. And then it went worse. CB I did wonder how this streak would end for him if it ever did. And really I assumed or expected that if it did end, it would just be that he had to exit due to injury quickly. Right. Like you could have felt something in the shoulder and had to leave after an inning or a batter or something and that would have ended the streak through no fault of his own really. But no, he actually went three and two thirds and he faced a good number of batters in this game, 21 batters and none of them struck out.

In his first start when he returned against the Giants, he struck out six in four innings. So he still has the capacity to miss bats and strike people out just not on Wednesday. Yeah. It didn't go particularly great. And boy, that division has tightened up in a hurry, hasn't it? It has. Yeah. Yeah. Padres are what, five and a half back or so as we speak? Yeah. Kind of close. Yeah. And the D-backs are coming on strong-ish, you know? Will we say it's strong? It's strong-ish,

you know? Yeah. It's pretty strong. Yeah. Four and a half. Four and a half, Ben. The Padres are four and a half back. Don is actually five, only five. Road Dodgers. Didn't expect things to be that tight. By the way, I mentioned that Kershaw line in that game. And as you may have heard, I said seven runs, three earned.

There were a bunch of unearned runs and there were some errors committed. Although Kershaw himself committed one of the errors in that game. And this is a question we get sometimes and must have been discussed on Effectively Well at some point, but I don't really recall. We just recently got an email about this from listener and Patreon supporter Thomas, who wrote in, this was well mid July. And he said, today's Cubs game against the Cardinals really got me thinking about something that's been bugging me for a while I looked it up in the wiki, but couldn't find anything always appreciate the pre email wiki check So I'm hoping you have some thoughts Hayden Wysneski gave up 11 runs in four innings pitch today

It was not the worst outing by a Cubs pitcher ever but not great He was only charged for four earned runs though, because of two errors that eventually led to the Cardinals runner scoring. Okay, fine. Except that it was Wisneski himself who made the throwing errors. It has always astonished me that pitchers aren't charged with runs that are demonstrably their fault. How much more earned could a run be than one that happens because the pitcher

whoops the ball over the second baseman's head. He asked, A, if we could stat blast how many unearned runs occur every season because of pitcher errors and whether it's enough to skew ERA standings. I haven't done that yet. Maybe we will at some point. I'm sure it's not a lot, but I guess in some edge cases, it could make a difference. Or two, a hypothetical, he asked, if you're a pitcher who loads the bases at the start of an inning, isn't there an incentive to muff a play to take those runs off your books? But you can't, I don't think you could really do it intentionally. Yeah.

The rules about like unearned runs and earned runs are really kind of complicated. Yeah, they are. It's all about the sort of like alternate history of what if this error hadn't been committed there, what if there had been an out or did this better reach because of an error? Like if you put all the guys on not through errors and the bases are loaded and then those guys score on an error, those are still going to be earned runs. Right.

Right. I mean, there are some situations where it just, it gets very complicated, but I think it wouldn't actually be that easy to bail out your own ERA by making errors because the rules kind of account for, well, it had to have been like they reached on an error or the inning would have been over if not for the error, that sort of thing. LS. Yeah. It's a little bit trickier than people realize to do that sort of weaseling. But I have always had this bone to pick with the way that we do it too, because it seems goofy. It's obscuring the quality of the outing by doing it this way. Arguably,

Ben, it feels worse to get got by your own fielding malfeasance. That would probably feel worse, right? To get runs across by some thing that is a secondary part of your job, that would feel terrible. So I've always thought that this was kind of doofy the way that we did it. It's doofy, Ben. It is kind of doofy. I do agree with that. I guess I see the rationale in the sense of kind of keeping things cleanly separated. You want to penalize a pitcher for their pitching performance, maybe as opposed to their fielding performance. If, you know, I mean, if you look up someone's ERA, you're not primarily thinking about, well, is he a good fielding pitcher? Is that why he's preventing runs?

Maybe you just want to know the pitching only and kind of keep it separated. And then you could also, if you want, look up, does he make a lot of errors? And that would be sort of a separate category, like maybe lumping those things together. I could see a case for kind of separating and just having pitching only stats, but it is strange to say unearned when it's clearly earned because the pitcher by any definition was earning those runs by putting them on in the first place. Yeah. His goofing is what caused them to be there to score. I get what you mean. And look, I work for FanGraphs and we employ a fifth base four. So we're all about separating stuff out, except that fielding is part of your job as a pitcher. It's not the most important job.

And it's definitely rarely the decisive part of your job, but it's still part of your job. You have pitcher fielding drills, you go out there, you do your little time coming off the mound, seeing, resisting the urge to reach for a ball that really should be handled by one of your fielders behind you. Like it's a skill, you know? I think it's still part of the job, even though it's not striking a guy out or getting him to pop up. Yeah. I see what you mean.

Maybe we need a new term. I think part of it, what rankles is the unearned term. I guess that could rankle in any case because it's not entirely unearned, even if it's an unearned run in some cases. But in this case, it is particularly unearned. It is earned by any stretch of the imagination. So maybe we need like a different kind of classification. Like it's not unearned, but it's, I don't know, pitched. I will need to workshop that, but we need, we need something that I think enables us to keep things kind of consistent. Cause I do kind of want to keep it consistent.

Like if it's as a result of an error and you can make a case for just doing away with errors entirely, or we never should have had them or what, but we do. And we've always had them and just to keep things consistent. I see a case for, for keeping things consistent, but I do kind of feel like, well, if, if you don't count it when some other fielder makes an error, then maybe there is something to be said for just keeping that consistent, even if in this case, the fielder is the pitcher who is pitching, but it does make me uncomfortable either way.

I guess I'm uncomfortable with it. Very anxious about the whole scenario. You're just like an uncomfortable boy. I understand the argument for it. I don't know what I'm actually advocating for us to like re-share the way we define ERA. Because look, we're too far into this thing. We can't change it now. That would be madness. That would be so confusing. That would be the worst thing. Yeah, do we retroactively recalculate every ERA? No, absolutely not. No, it's done. It's done.

But I do think that it obscures a little bit about how a guy does on any given day in a way that I wish were different because I think that it lacks descriptive power because people don't look, they don't look to see if the picture had errors. They don't look. I did in this case because I wanted to read this email. So I was like, I wonder if he caused some of the errors that led to that. But usually you wouldn't necessarily. So they kind of skate, they get off scotott free. They're not blameless. Yeah. And look, I think that it's fair to say was Gavin Lux's fielding a bigger problem for

him yesterday and to answer that question in the affirmative because that was my assessment having watched the game. Someone can help us resolve this uncertainty somehow. That would be great. Yeah. So we recapped the trade deadline last time. We were fairly thorough, I suppose. One of the points that we made was that there weren't really any superstars traded.

There were good players. There were some prominent players. I guess you could say Randy Rosarena has been a star at certain points, just in terms of fame and name recognition. But, you know, the caliber of the best players traded was less than I think it usually has been at deadlines. And one other manifestation of that is that according to Baseball America, at least, and this is only one prospect classifier, but Baseball America had zero top 100 prospects dealt at the deadline.

And according to JJ Cooper of baseball America, this was the first time in the decade that BA has been doing mid-season top 100 updates, that there was not a top 100 prospect traded in a deadline deal. A few prospects were traded who had been top 100 guys on BA's list earlier this year, but they dropped off on the most recent revision. Now I did ask Eric Langenhagen of Van Graaffs whether he had some top 100 guys traded and he did. In fact, he said he had four. So Agustin Ramirez, who went from the Yankees to the Marlins in the Jazz Chisholm trade, Jake Bloss went from the Astors to the Jays

in the Yusuke Kikuchi trade. Dylan Lesko went from the Padres to the Rays in the Jason Adam trade. And Tyrone Larranzo went from the Dodgers to the Tigers in the Jack Flaherty trade. So this is just a difference of prospect opinion, I suppose. And neither had Connor Norby as a top 100 guy in the most recent update, I guess.

So this might be a, a BA specific thing, but it's still sort of notable at least by their accounting that this hasn't happened before. And I guess it stands to reason that if the caliber of the best players traded is a little lower than usual, then the caliber of the best prospects traded. Might be similarly lower. Jackson Holliday hit a grand slam. Yeah, he sure did. In his first game back. Yeah, that was fun. Yeah, good for him.

So we talked about how just so many depth prospects were traded and just so many guys who were far away from the majors and who knows, and some of them will pan out and will turn out to be good players. But as I was reading the names of the prospects dealt here as a non-prospect expert myself, there were only so many names that were really ringing a bell for me. So this kind of vindicated, it's like, do I even know even less about prospects than I thought? Well, maybe, but also there weren't that many really famous, uh, top ranked prospects being moved here. And, you know, even though there were some non-stars traded who had multiple years of team control, at least I guess that just still just didn't tip the scales

enough for there to be tippy top prospects traded for the most part. And as we've chronicled it, it does seem like teams are stingier with prospects these days, at least with impending free agents and guys who are in their walk years and on expiring contracts. Yeah, there are certainly exceptions to that. And I think it's useful to keep in mind that, like, you know, it's not like there aren't top 100 guys who are in the low miners. Those guys definitely exist. But given the motivations of some of the teams that were the most active and them looking ahead to say the crunch that they might face with their 40 man, it's not surprising to

me that like, you know, the Raze always have a 40 man crunch. So of course they're going to generally target guys who are further from the majors. Some of those guys are going to be less likely to be top 100 guys, but some of those guys, I'm not saying about the Raze dudes in particular, but they might grow into top 100 guys. It could happen. They could become top 100 guys. You don't know. I certainly hope it happens. You don't know, Ben. I don't know why I'm being so aggressive. I'm not maintaining that I know. I am very upfront about not knowing.

Very often, not in the know. Me either. I don't actually know. I just know what I edit. Really. That's all I know. It is funny that the Rays and the Marlins, maybe the two most active teams, the two Florida teams, the two teams that are run by either the Rays themselves or a former Rays executive. I guess there are plenty of teams that are run by Rays executives these days, but they were playing each other in the immediate aftermath of the deadline. It was kind of funny. It was like two entirely turned over rosters. There was some question about whether the Marlins would be able to field an entire team here because like they just, they traded so many guys and fairly late,

you know, the Rays always have depth and roster crunches, but in the Marlins case, they don't really have a surplus of qualified major league players. That has notably been a problem for them. So there was some scrambling there. Like I was looking at the Marlins lineup. I mean, they had some people making major league debuts in the wake of the deadline. They must've been just calling people up. Like, can we get people here in time?

I don't know whether they ended up maybe being slightly shorthanded, but they were. I think they were. I think they were. I think they were. They only have 23 guys. I think so. Yeah. They didn't have, I mean, you don't have to have 26 if you don't want to. You don't. You're not required. No, all you have to have- They knew you should put that rule in, but- You have to have every position filled on the field, but beyond that, I mean, yeah, maybe they should require that in case like

Marlins ownership gets any ideas from this. Like, oh, wow, we didn't know we could do this. We only have to pay 23 players. Wow. Life hack, loophole. Looking at their roster, I was looking at just like the highest paid players who are still on the Marlins. And there are not a lot of them.

So Sandy Alcantara and Jesus Lizardo are paid 9.3 and 5.5 million this season respectively, but both of those guys are on the IL. So I believe of actual active Marlins, the highest paid player is Jesus Sanchez, who is making $2.1 million this year. That is the best compensated, most highly remunerated Marlin right now. That's something. It's pretty bleak right there currently. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and speaking of bleak, the White Sox lost again. Yeah, they did. Lost 17 in a row. And at this point, if they won out, if they miraculously went undefeated

the rest of the season, they would still have a losing record. The latest Pedro Foll quote. So he, he did deny that, that he had said the thing that was attributed to him the other day, where it was reported that he had said the thing that was attributed to him the other day, where it was reported that he had said in a team meeting that it was only the fault of the players that they are this bad. He refuted that, although he did confirm the other detail in that report, which was that he had made various types of practice mandatory, unless you're hurt or tired or something.

But after the 17th consecutive loss, he said, we're in the middle of it now. We're in the freaking eye of the storm here. We just have to get back after it. And two things about that, obviously, one is that the eye of the storm is the calm part in the middle, where it is not actually storming, which does not seem like where the white socks are. Although technically, I guess they have an off day on Thursday. So I guess that's sort of an eye in this storm that they're weathering here. But also to say we're in the middle of it now, I know what he meant

is like, you know, we're in the thick of it, right? But I read that literally at first and I was like, imagine if they are just in the middle of it, right? But I read that literally at first and I was like, imagine if they are just in the middle of it. Imagine if this is just halfway through the losing streak. They're 17 deep, but what if he's saying, you know, we're going to get to 34, we're only halfway through. This is just the middle. I'm sure that is not what he's saying, but I just don't have a whole lot of faith in the White Sox snapping this streak on any given day. I do expect that they will snap it at some point, but it's when you look at that roster, especially further depleted post deadline, you know, any given day you say,

yeah, they could lose again. They could extend this thing. I believe in their ability to do that. It's such a weird form of belief, you know, because you have confidence in their ability to do stuff that is terrible and that feels bad, but isn't untrue. You know, I do, I do have, at what point do you fake an injury? You know, like, I'm not going to say a specific player because I don't want to impugn anybody's integrity, but like, at what point do you think about faking an injury? Here's the follow up question. At what point do fans say, yeah, I'd get that? Pete Slauson Yeah. I mean, they are being psychologically wounded and injured by watching this team. They are at the point now.

Beth Dombkowski I don't think a lot of them are watching anymore, Ben. I hope that they've freed themselves from this club. You are not obligated to I hope that they've freed themselves from this club. You are not obligated to stick around for this level of suck. I mean, we talk about it like it's a fun historical oddity and I guess on some level it is, although we've obviously voiced our concerns about there seemingly being maybe not to this degree, obviously, but they're just being one of these like, excuse us where, s*** ass teams every year where we're like, oh my God, are you going to be historically bad? We have to be on historically bad watch. And like, that's not good for the sport that that's kind of the area we're occupying. But there

is sort of like a morbid curiosity that develops like, how long can they do this? How bad can it get? And I'm interested in that question, but I don't know that I'm interested in watching enough of them to know the answer, like as it's happening. I think I'm okay catching it on the day after, you know, being like, oh, they lost again. Right. I'm not directly consuming white touch base. Yeah. I'm not witnessing this, except it's like you witness an eclipse, which Pedro Grafol famously did not care to do earlier this year. Right, you don't stare directly at it, you have to have some sort of protective eyewear.

And so I'm not really watching the White Sox, I'm following them from afar, but I am following them pretty closely from afar, which sounds kind of like an oxymoron, but it's true. I saw someone point out that their winning percentage is now identical to the MLB batting average. They are both 243.

The league wide batting average is 243 and the White Sox winning percentage is 243. Those numbers both seem lower than they should. Those numbers should not be allowed to be that low. But particularly the White Sox part of it, you know, because like you can hit 243 and like have some thump and be useful, but you can't win at that rate and say the same thing, you know? The White Sox to be clear are batting 218. So they're nowhere near 243.

But yeah. What a disaster. They're on bases 277. I mean, they do have one of the lowest on base. I think it's the lowest on base percentage since the dead ball era, except for the 65 Mets. I believe that was the case the last time I looked. And of course, it's the 62 Mets that they are trying not to join or surpass with 120 or more losses. And they are on pace for 39 wins right now, which is just an inconceivable number.

That's inconceivable. Oh my God. I just, you know, I feel bad because like a lot of, you have to think that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs this off season, you know? And you never want to root for that. You don't want to root for people to lose their jobs. But you gotta, even if you're in the saying, we're in the midst of our tear down, we just had regime change, whatever, like, this is like so bad. You know, this is the kind of fact that follows a franchise around for a while. And I say that as someone who roots for a team who had their postseason futility just

hurled at people on random broadcasts. You're watching NFL games and all of a sudden you have to hear about how bad the Mariners are, right? This will follow them. Yeah, no, it's true. It does almost have the ability to change the reputation of a franchise in the public's mind, I think. Now, the White Sox, you could say they should be better known for their futility than they are. I think some White Sox fans almost feel like they

should get more credit for their suffering than they do because the Red Sox and the Cubs got all the attention for their long streaks. And you could even say the Guardians with the longest ongoing or teams like the Mariners that have never won one, et cetera. Like the White Sox though, their snapping of their long streak of not winning a World Series, that was almost overshadowed, I think, by the Red Sox and then the Cubs doing it. Just these kind of more- But they didn't win a World Series. That was almost overshadowed, I think, by the Red Sox and then the Cubs doing it. Just these kind of more... But they did win a World Series.

They did. It's true. But the fact that they have only once made the playoffs in back-to-back seasons and it took 2020 to make that happen, that is really notable, right? I mean, they just have had, yes, they have won a World Series within this century, this millennium, but still, their record of just not having any sustained period of success is probably unsurpassed. And to be clear, I don't mean to say that if you root for the White Sox, that you are not like entitled to financial restitution. Cause you absolutely are. You have won a world series, like, you know, within, but also 2005,

like that was a while ago now. It was. Yeah. It was a while ago. Was it different regime or should I say administration? Yeah. Should we say administration? Should we, you know? That's a callback all the way to our last episode.

So I do think though that the Rockies are kind of the butt of everyone's jokes, right? Like they're the default kind of, oh, this is a bumbling organization that can't get out of its own way. But the White Sox, I think a season like this could vault them to the top because as bad as the Rockies have been or as rudderless, aimless, directionless, they have never been this bad. They had never lost a hundred games in a season

until last year. And so yeah, they have not won a division in their now more than three decades existence, but they have had some good teams and they've won a pennant. And, you know, they have never been this abjectly terrible in any season. And so the White Sox, I think their organization is getting maybe overdue credit for being bumbling because Jerry Reinsdorf has been there forever. And he's as big a part of this as anyone, probably a bigger part than anyone. And so, yeah, we're picking on Griffoels quotes and people might mock Chris Getz or lay this at their door.

And I'm not saying none of the responsibility lies there, but the buck does stop with Jerry Reinsdorf and he just has not made much of an effort to change the organization, obviously hired Getz from within, which has been one of the criticisms of Monford and the Rockies. They just keep promoting from within. They think that things are going great and they just wanna keep trucking along. So yeah, the incompetence with which the White Sox seem to be run these days,

the way they fumbled their rebuild, which was so promising, that I think has kind of changed the perception of the organization. It's not just bad, but also, you know, I don't wanna say toxic is maybe too much. I mean, even though there's like reports of clubhouse discourse here, but, but just directionless, just not knowing what to do or being willing to do it.

I think that you do want to distinguish between like toxic probably would not be the word that I would, would throw out, but I do think that it's been bad, it's been bad for a long time. There's a resistance seemingly to a complete refresh organizationally, right? I don't think that every internal promotion is bad. There are talented people who work for baseball organizations and I think promoting them from within after you've cultivated them can be a good thing. But when you're a club in the position that the White Sox find themselves in, it does seem like just to have a new voice in the room, to have someone say, hey, why are we

doing it that way? It would be immensely valuable. I don't really have a strong opinion about Gats one way or the other. I think that it's not like this rebuilt has gone swimmingly. It's not like the farm system is suddenly like flush with really, really great prospects. Part of that is that they didn't trade their two most valuable guys, but yeah, it doesn't seem like a good situation. My opinion changes every week about which of the White Sox, Rockies and A's I think

is the like worst situation right now. Ben Yeah. They just take the cake just for non-baseball related reasons really. Or, I guess it's partly baseball related and partly not. It's all- Nicole Right.

There's some competition for the worst franchise in the league, which is something that if I were Rob Manfred, I would feel pretty not great about. Right? But yeah, it's not good, Ben. which is something that if I were Rob Manfred, I would feel like pretty not great about, right? But yeah, like it's not a good, it's not good, Ben, you know, it's not good. It doesn't seem like it's going to get a lot better. So I don't know what to tell you. They do rank third on the updated farm system rankings on the board at FanCraft. So that's that's some reason for hope. Yes. And part of this is like there is depth in the lower rungs of the system that is contributing like some of that, you know, but not all of it. Right. Help is on the way, but not necessarily soon, I guess.

But yeah, but it is, I guess, a good progression. I mean, you better have your farm system be on the upswing if your major league team is this historically terrible, but they were ranked 30th entering 2022, according to FanGraphs and then 27th entering 2023. So it is kind of a quick turnaround there to 11th entering 2024 to now third. So that at least is moving in the right direction, even if again, it might take some time to see the fruits of the farm reflected on the Major League roster. Anyway, that's probably enough punching down at the poor White Sox. Sorry, White Sox.

So I will celebrate one player who has surged, who is resurgent, Blake Snell. The resurgent Blake Snell. Resurgent Snell, he did not get traded at the deadline, but he has seemingly right at the ship. And we talked a bunch about his early season struggles and some of his quotes about those struggles, but he has reeled off four impressive vintage Snell starts in a row. So over his past four starts, he has thrown 24 innings, which, you know, for Snell, not

a bad innings per start there. And he has allowed two runs, both earned. He has walked seven and struck out 30. So he is a 0.75 ERA over that span with a 2.08 FIP. And if I look at the leaders in Fangrass pitching war since that streak started, so July 9th through July 31st, Blake Snell ranks sixth after Dylan Cease, George Kirby, Michael King, Ryan Nelson, and Fromber Valdez, who also seems to have gotten his strikeout mojo back recently. But Blake Snell, sixth over that.

Yeah, I know. Hey, at least George Kirby was on there. He threw another knuckleball. Right? He threw a knuckleball in seemingly a salute to Tim Wakefield against the Red Sox, right? Yeah. Yeah. He talked about it after the game.

I love it when young guys do stuff like that. I think it- Yeah, that's really nice. I like that. Having that connective tissue in the game is an important thing and I really like that. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the storylines that we said we were interested in seeing how it developed over

the rest of the season was, would the guys who struggled in the first half find a way back to respectability and for Snell at least that has happened. So I don't know how good a rest of the way stretch run he'd have to have to, I mean, I guess, you know, if he finishes super strong, then we could be looking at potentially an opt out situation. I don't know. It would be a lot to- Particularly likely, but- To overcome the way that he started the season and the injuries and everything else. But

if he finishes strong, at least that would be a relief. Whereas Jordan Montgomery has not flipped the switch and had that happen. So he missed some time. He was on the IL and then he came back with a start where he gave up only one run over five, two strikeouts. But then his second start back, he lasted only four innings, nine hits, six earned. So he's still struggling. He is still, he's in the middle of it. He's in the eye as is still, uh, he's in the middle of it. He's, uh, in the eye, as Patriot

Krafo would say. Well, and it must be so frustrating because at a time when, you know, the rest of the Diamondbacks playing pretty well, you know, things are looking up and they're about to get Rodriguez and, uh, Maril Kelly back. So yeah, look out the snakes, they're alive. Yeah. If they could get Montgomery right, even by the playoffs, then it wouldn't really matter that he sort of sucked all season. It would, kind of, but if it doesn't prevent them from reaching the playoffs and if he's October Montgomery again, by the time it's October, then they might still be happy that they made that move. but we haven't seen that happen yet. That form of Montgomery has not returned.

No, he has been absent thus far. Another guy I'm sad to report has struggled on the mound lately, my man David Fletcher. David Fletcher, when I last updated his performance as a pitcher for AA Mississippi in the Atlanta system. He was fresh off an Eton two-thirds inning start where he allowed just two runs. Since then he's had three starts. He went six and gave up four runs, three earned. Then he went five and gave up five runs, four earned. You know, you're gonna get more un more unearned runs in the minors, but also because he's a knuckleballer. Right. And things happen. But his most recent

start against the Tennessee Smokies on July 31st, he lasted only two and two thirds, eight hits, 10 runs all earned, three walks, one strikeout. Yeah. That's not bolstering his case. Should he be cleared as a problem gambler to an important caveat, which I do make sure to mention every time I sort of stumped for David Fletcher returning as a potential two-way player and knuckleballer look from a utilitarian perspective, you know, some things outweigh the bad things, good things sometimes are worth it. And you know, maybe not in this case, but I'm just saying it'd be a nice thing.

Anyway, he has fallen on hard times lately, but we have a new challenger, a new converted pitcher, though not an active two-way player, I suppose, but Brett Phillips, fan favorite, the delightful Brett Phillips, who has gone viral for his laugh and the joy with which he plays the game and also his pitching appearances as a position player pitcher when he would sometimes just fire it in there, like mid-90s-ish, and it was like, oh, okay, maybe he can do this. Well, once it became clear that he could not do what he was doing, which was trying to be a major league hitter, that part wasn't going so great.

He has now committed to being a pitcher and trying to do the Anthony Goes, and he pitched at the National Baseball Congress World Series. He was clocked 94 to 97, struck out the side with a sharp slider, and he's trying to make it back now as a reliever. And the Yankees signed him to be a minor league pitcher. So it would be great to get Brett Phillips back in action. I root for anyone who's trying to go from pitcher to position player, vice versa, but Brett Phillips specifically. I would love to have him back in the big leagues in this form, especially. See, you can just root for that. You can leave the other thing aside and not have to

work. But he's not a knuckle baller though. Not yet. You don't know what he's going to be. Yeah. And also he's, I think, just given up entirely on hitting at this point, which David Fletcher hasn't, but might as well, I guess, for as well as it's going. But I guess Brett Phillips might be about as realistic an offensive option were he to make it back to the majors as a reliever these days as David Fletcher would be. But Fletcher is at least nominally still an ostensibly two-way player. So that makes it more fun for me. But yes, a little less baggage with Brett. Yes. Yes. I mean, look, there might not be any baggage, but. And one more thing. I read this on the latest or almost latest box score banter at baseball prospectus, our pal Patrick

Dubuque wrote something which concerned me and I wanted to investigate this. So he was writing about Eugenio Suarez's three home run game, part of that Diamondbacks resurgence Suarez is hitting now, I guess. Patrick noted that all three of his home runs, only one of which was against Patrick Corbin, to be clear, only one gets the Corbin discount. Corbin's going for his fourth time leading the league in losses, which would tie a major league record shared by Pedro Ramos, Bobo Newsom and Phil Negros. So you know, some good pitchers in that mix, as everyone always says to lead the league in losses, like you have to be good enough to keep getting the ball.

I don't know that Patrick Corbin is good enough to keep getting the ball, but he keeps getting it anyway. And he's trying to make history here. But that wasn't the point. The point was Eohanou Arsouarez hit three home runs and all three, Patrick wrote, were pulled to left, raising an idle question. Having already lived through the three true outcome revolution, are we doomed to watch home run highlights themselves homogenize into a series

of pulled fly balls? Unsettling. This was unsettling. Once Patrick put that image in my mind, just imagining every home run being pulled, how boring that would be. You could almost imagine it with people trying to pull the ball and realizing that pulled fly balls do well. Yeah. And more players trying to do the esoc parades. No one does it quite like parades does, but trying to get the esoch Paredes. No one does it quite like Paredes does, but trying to get the bat head out front and trying to just jerk it over the wall. And this could happen. You could imagine like it'll just become

the optimal approach to hitting fly balls. And suddenly we will just have nothing, but balls just scraping over the wall down the lines. And how boring would that be? Sam Miller used to talk about how he finds home run highlights boring, which I don't fully agree with him. He just, you know, his point was basically,

there just isn't a lot of suspense. You're just, you can see that it's gone most of the time and you're just watching it sail over the wall. I think it's still exciting, at least given the context, though the highlight itself maybe is not always perhaps, but I think it often is just because it's an important moment in the game and because sometimes even if it's a no doubt home run, if it's completely crushed, then that's fun to watch too. It just becomes like jaw dropping like some of the home runs that Otani has hit recently.

Yeah. He hit one like out of Dodger Stadium and then he hit one in Minute Maid that was like, what? How? I've never seen that. I've never seen someone hit the ball where he hit that ball. I'd never seen it before. It was amazing. It was. So these were not that Suarez does not hit Otani type home runs for the most part. So I wanted to see like, is this a realistic concern? Are we creeping toward a world where Patrick's dystopic vision here of every home run being pulled comes true? And I'm pleased to report that I don't think so. I mean, maybe we're inching ever closer to it, but we're not going to get there.

So first of all, now I think that one underappreciated fact about baseball is that most fly balls are not pulled. Like, you know, people who are real baseball knowers know that, but I don't know that that is just a generally widely known thing. If you just ask the kind of casual baseball fan, like what percentage of fly balls are pulled, I don't know that they would know that it is as low as it is because ground balls tend to be pulled and fly balls tend not to be. So if you look at the percentage of all fly balls that are pulled, we are close to a high in the pitch tracking era in

the post 2008 era that I can easily search at Baseball Savant. It's 26.7% of fly balls this season have been pulled which is tied with 2020 for the second highest rate over this span. Last season was the highest rate, so last season 27.0% of fly balls were pulled, now it's 26.7% so we're close to the high there, and it used to be several percentage points lower. So like in 2010 it was 23.4% of fly balls were pulled, 2015 is the low 21.4% of fly balls. So that's a meaningful change in, you know, we're not really going to get to a hundred anytime soon, but on a percentage basis, that is a pretty big increase.

Now if you look at very well hit fly balls, those are more often pulled, but still not most of the time, which that did sort of surprise me. If I limit to barrels only, and so now I have to just look in Statcast era only 2015 on, then the rates get higher, but it's still not the majority of fly balls that are barreled. Most of them still are not pulled. And, you know, I guess pulled is a minority of the field area. So that's part of it, right? That you have center and you have the opposite field

and that's just a bigger area, but even so. So this season, 43.2% of barreled flyballs have been pulled, which is just a hair lower than 2020, which is the high at 43.3. So again, we're almost at the high and in 2015, only 36.2% of barreled fly balls were pulled. So, you know, to go from from 36 percent and then to add seven percentage points on top of that in less than a decade, that's a pretty meaningful movement, right? But we're not going to get to a point where every homerun is pulled, though this is where we finally get to the point where most of the balls in question are pulled. If you look at fly ball home runs and then you look up the percentage of those that were pulled,

it is a majority. However, in this case, we are not at or near the high over this span. So this year, 66.5% of fly ball homers were pulled, but the high is 71% in 2014. So it goes 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and then 2024. However, what's happening here is a product of how lively the ball is. So if the ball is pretty dead as it was in 2014, then a higher percentage of the home runs are going to be pulled because you have to pull it to get it over the wall. You have to hit it hard and to a shallow part of the park. The lowest percentage here is 2019, which was peak lively ball. When the ball was carrying incredibly well, that year only 56.7% of flyball homers were pulled. About 10 percentage points

lower than this year. But that was because back then you didn't need to be Otani or judge to hit the ball out to any part of the park. It was traveling so well that mere mortals could do that with regularity. But maybe what Patrick was responding to is that this year's rate of fly ball homers that are pulled is the highest in a decade. And maybe that's just because the ball is deader than it's been since 2014, or maybe it's some combination of that and hitters optimizing for a pulled fly ball approach. So not near the high again yet, but the rate is on the upswing, so to speak. So that is kind of concerning if you're worried about Patrick's nightmare vision here of just cookie cutter, carbon copy homers, just all

going in the same direction unless it's, you know, Aaron Judge or Shohei Otani hitting them. I don't know if it's as concerning as hearing you say jerk it over the wall. Especially after referring to the bat head. Yeah, really rough, Ben. You've been working blue a lot lately. It's unusual for you, but. I wasn't going to bring it up this time. You did though.

It did occur to me. I think mostly my take on this is that I want there to be, like, I just think baseball is best when there are a lot of different kinds of guys, you know? And I'm glad that we have collectively come to understand the very real value that someone like an Isaac Barades brings, right? Because we've had sort of a, you know, when you look at some of the stat-cast stuff and you don't take directionality into account, you might be down on a guy like him, right? And so I think it's good that we've come to appreciate it, but we don't need to go overboard.

I'm sure he's satisfied that we appreciate his skill now. We don't need to all do what he's doing. We wanted a bunch of different kinds of guys because that's a more fun offensive environment to engage with. Just like I don't want every hitter to be air and judge. That would be incredible though. It would be amazing if we had the All-Monstars League, but I think it's better when you have room for different swing paths and different offensive approaches and the different body types that might go with some of those more often than not. It's just like a good thing when it looks interesting and multi-layered and there's like a, you know, it feels like a healthy ecosystem when

it's not just one profile that's dominating. Right. Yeah. I guess the Hall and Air Judge team, I'm just imagining that some sort of like breaking MLB the Show John Boyce video or it's like you put in the cheat codes and it's just a giant team or you go to the creative player and max out all of the stats. Yes. But I guess in an earlier era, Predasis 2023 would have been acclaimed. Like people would have just been like, yeah, he hit 31 bombs, you know, and fewer than 500 at bats.

That's really impressive. Whereas in this era, there was at least in some quarters, more skepticism because he doesn't hit the ball that hard. And he does it in this unique, I guess it's fair to say unique way where he just is extremely pull happy and he doesn't have to hit the ball that hard because he just pulls it very extremely and just hits it to't have to hit the ball that hard because he just pulls it very extremely and just hits it to the short part of the park. And so if you looked at, yeah, expected weighted on base or whatever, you might think that he's playing over his head that this

is not sustainable, but he seems to be an exception in that he's an outlier. And even though ex wobe and the ex stats, they don't by default take into account spray angle and horizontal direction, which always puzzles people. It's like, well, don't you need to know like where he's hitting it in the park? Which direction? And I guess for the most part, at least predictively speaking, you don't necessarily. But in his case, it seems like you do. There are some, some players on the margins at the extremes where knowing that he hits it in that direction all the time. Yes, very important.

That is pretty important. Yeah. Because he has a repeatable ability to do that. Will he be able to do that forever? I don't know. Will he have the same skills? Will pitchers adjust? I don't know. But it's working okay for him so far. But anyway, Patrick was onto something there, but hopefully that will not come to pass in that degree anytime soon. Well, one other nightmare scenario for some people, although for many of us, I think it's sort of a dream

scenario, a pleasant dream, is that Danny Janssen, who was traded from the Blue Jays to the Red Sox, may become, later this month, the first MLB player ever to play for both teams in the same game. There is a scenario where that could happen because of a suspended game that he appeared in when he was with the Red Sox that he could now appear in on the other side of. And that is fun. We will all be tracking to see if that happens. But for at least one man, it's not all fun and games.

He realizes the fun, but also there's some work that might be associated with this. Kenny Jacqueline, semi-frequent stat blast consultant of Effectively Wild and primary baseball developer for baseballreference.com is now confronting a possibly B-ref breaking scenario of having one player play for two teams in the same game, which has not happened before and has not been built into the system. And so he now has to figure out what to do about that. And we will talk to him after a quick break about what he thinks he can do or what needs to do or what the worst case scenario is if they were to do nothing. And also some precedents, some previous situations where something weird and wonky happened and baseball reference had to adjust lest the side be broken. So we'll be right back with

Kenny. Well on June 26th the Red Sox and Blue Jays were playing the top of the second inning at Fenway when the rains came. After an hour 48 minute delay the game was suspended with Danny Janssen at the plate for the Jays and it was scheduled to be resumed as part of a split double header on August 26th. One problem, Danny Janssen doesn't play for the Jays anymore. He plays for the Red Sox, which means that if he plays for the Sox that day,

he could become the first player in MLB history to play for both teams in a single game. Now, the guy who was catching when Jensen was at the plate, Reese McGuire, is no longer on the Red Sox. Jensen replaced him. And hey, it's a double header. The Sox might not want the same catcher starting both games. If Connor Wong catches the second game, but not the first, then Jensen could catch in the resumed game, in which case he could be both the batter and the catcher in a single plate appearance. This is all great fun for most of us, but for a few people, it could cause

some headaches. One of the people who has a sort of Damocles hanging over his head, or would it be a sort of Danny Cleese is Kenny Jacqueline, the primary developer of baseballreference.com who told me the other day that this, and I quote, could be a Y2K level technical problem. You know Kenny's name because he often helps us out as a stat blast consultant, but today he is here to sound the alarm and tell us whether baseball reference needs to be future proof to ensure that the Red Sox don't cause computers to crash and planes to fall out of the sky on August 26th. Kenny, welcome to Effectively Wild. Kenny Smedley Thanks for having me.

Adam Tate Thanks for your help over the years. When did you realize that Janssen playing for both teams in this game was a possibility and what was your reaction? Kenny Smedley Yeah, I mean, as the transaction happened, it didn't take long for the tweets to start going around about the suspended game. These lengthy suspensions can always be kind of hanging over our heads a little bit in this way.

There's always, it's always frustrating to have some things that are kind of half official and half done. And when the game hasn't reached that official status and is not reflected on the site as a result, it can be always a little bit challenging for us to display things in a way that works well. Yeah, because if you go to the game logs right now for the Red Sox or the Pujays,

that day that game just doesn't show up, right? It's like it hasn't happened yet, which it in a sense hasn't. Right. And so when you saw this possibility, did you think, oh, that's fun? Or did you immediately think, oh no? We have had discussions about this many times over the years

at Sports Reference about what a mess this could be if it happens. And we've, I feel like we've kind of been dodging the potential opportunities for it. But this one is, I'm feeling like it's on the likely side of things to happen. So do we know? Wait, I'm sorry, I have to ask this question. I asked, I put this to Ben before we started recording. Do we know for sure he's eligible to reenter that game for the new team though?

Because he's going to have to be pinch hit for, right? They get to fill his spot in the lineup. And so does that constitute a removal from the game that then disqualifies him from reentering? Because there are rules on substitution. CB It's true. There is. So yeah, the official baseball rules do say a player once removed from a game shall not reenter that game. If a player who has been substituted for attempts to reenter or reenters the game in any capacity, the umpire in chief shall direct the player's manager to remove such player from the game immediately upon noticing the player's presence or upon being informed of the player's improper presence by another umpire or either manager. That said,

I think what I said to you was that I assumed that applies to if you're removed from one team, that doesn't preclude you from re-entering the game for the other team. But then again, this situation hasn't happened. So maybe you'll get a reprieve from the high court of baseball, is my point. It's possible. I think the best case scenario for us would be to know sooner than later whether we need to worry about this. So it has happened in AAA, August 16th, 1986, Dale Holman, he played for both the Syracuse Chiefs and the Richmond Braves. He got the game winning hit, but finished on the losing team, which is great. That's great.

But yeah, so that was allowed to happen and allowed to stand. I suppose there's some chance that in this unusual circumstance in MLB, that MLB could step in and say, no, this is not allowed. I think it has happened in the NBA as well. Eric Money, this happened. He played for both the Nets and the 76ers, November 8th, 1978. So there is some precedence in other sports or in baseball, even just not in the majors as far as we know. Kenny, I subscribed to the Daily Baseball Reference newsletter and I couldn't help but notice Janssen was traded on Saturday and on Monday, the newsletter listed two new job openings. Is Sean Foreman hiring a senior DevOps engineer specifically to deal with the Janssen crisis. BG He wouldn't say that, but I have my suspicions too.

CB Yeah, it's the Janssenpocalypse. And as you said, there have been some funny cases with suspended games like Juan Soto homering in a game before he officially made his major league debut, right? That was a fun one. I don't know if that- BG Right. We do have, I'd say let's take a few dozen lines of code specifically handling exceptions like that where we want to have the correct debut date for a player, even if the official date of the game, the first official game date that they appeared in is earlier than that. So the example could be you debut on July 1st and then you appear in a suspended game completion. Is your first official game on July 1st or in April or

May when that suspended game began? CB What's the answer to that question? I guess it's the official game, not the suspended resumed one? B Yeah, we always want the debut date to be the factual, when did they take the field for the first time? Right. Especially from the point of view of our running count of major league players in history, we wanted to reflect that. When did they step on the field?

So with the Jensenpocalypse looming, have you scheduled meetings about this? Is there a tiger team forming to confront this problem? At this point, it's mostly just been me posting about my anxiety on Slack. I have started to look a little bit at what this might entail, testing some of the tooling that is part of our data ingestion pipeline with some examples, just like modifying some play by play data to create a fake situation where a player is subbed out from one team and subbed in for the other team. I don't think it's a dead end here.

I made the Y2K analogy. Maybe it's like Y2K in the sense that it will require a good amount of effort to make it not disastrous. Yeah, there's a little bit of movement, but I also don't want it to become a thing where, you know, I spend the next three weeks of my job planning for something that doesn't happen. And what is the ideal presentation of this? Let's assume that it happens. What's the ideal presentation of it for you? What is the hang up?

I asked Appleman about this and he doesn't seem overly concerned. So now I worry that we're underprepared, because you seem very nervous and he seems not nervous at all. Yeah. And it may just be that there are more places in our database where we're expecting only one row per player per game than is the case at Van Graaf's. That's certainly possible from just a database design point of view. To me, the big concern is how does it impact the timeliness of our site updates?

If we have to be making a lot of changes to support this one particular game, it's hard for us to get the site updated with the rest of these less complicated games on the schedule that our users are used to. Since this hasn't happened before and might not happen again, is there some sort of clutch, some sort of just like one-time exception that you can sneak in or does it basically have to be like we have to

rebuild the back end somehow to deal with this possibly unprecedented and never to occur again situation? Yeah, it definitely is a situation where I think a one off exception would be more palatable than it is is a situation where I think a one-off exception would be more palatable than it is in a lot of other cases. Although there have always been things that have started as one-offs and become more generalized later on. So the Otani rule is one that comes to mind where that was a one-off in the All-Star game

in 2021. Then we went the rest of the season and then the next year it became the law of the land. Ohtani can DH and pitch in the same game all the time. You always want to plan for that if you can, but yeah, this definitely does seem to be a more exceptional circumstance and there's probably less of a marketing angle to being able to have suspended game hijinks of players moving than for having as much Otani as possible on the field at all times. CB 1 Yeah. CB 2 That's true. Yes. Yeah. And you were kind of concerned when I messaged you first about this,

that the more attention is paid to it, the more likely it is to happen. So in a sense, by coming on Effectively Wow to talk about this, you might be helping bring it about because suddenly everyone will be like, oh, we got to see this happen. We got to see Kenny's day get ruined. So just, you know, it's like a Streisand effect sort of thing, I guess. You want to sweep it under the rug. I walked right into your trap, Ben. Yeah. Yeah, because for most people, what's the harm? Sure.

This is fun. It could be a one-time, we've never seen this before, fun facts kind of thing, but then there's you, the primary developer of baseball reference who has to deal with the fallout. What do you think you will end up doing or what might be some possible work around for this? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is going to be identifying what the scope of this would be to do it right, to make us able to support a situation like this in a really general way.

And that's still an open question for me. I think we're past the bigger concerns about the tools that we use to parse event files, which are the same tools we use to parse data from Retro Sheet. Can they handle this? And I think the answer to that is yes, which makes sense to me because in early baseball history the rules on substitutions were quite a bit wilder than they are today. I remember looking into an issue years ago where we had flagged somebody as being a DH in, I think, 1923.

And it was just some odd set of circumstances where they actually pinch hit and pinch ran in the same game because someone had to use the restroom. Not exactly a scenario we run into today. Yeah, they used to have courtesy runners. Yes. Yes. That was like until 1949, I think was the last one where in addition to pinch runners, if a base runner had to leave the game temporarily, then a courtesy runner could come in. I like that term. They could just come in and then they could leave and reenter later or they

could already be in the game somewhere, but they could just move over to run, and now you can't do that anymore. And it could be for reasons as unfathomable today as the opposing team wants the other team's best player on the field as much as they can, even if they can't run, because they want to sell tickets. Yeah. I would have a hard time believing that one today. Yeah. I don't know if anyone will show up to this game just to see if history happened.

Someone might, I guess, just to see. I mean, there was a game, there was a suspended Red Sox game a couple of years ago that I wrote about that they opened up Fenway for. They couldn't find another time to do it. And the game lasted 12 minutes. The. And the game lasted 12 minutes. Like the rest of the game lasted 12 minutes. That was it. That was all they got that day. Because like there wasn't very much left to do. It had been suspended. So wait, I don't know. I don't recall why they weren't able to call it official at the time. It must have

been 00 or something. But yeah, 12 minutes. Pack your kids into the car for 12 minutes of baseball. What are the various places that could potentially break if this were to happen and you didn't do any intervention? I mean, the game log itself, like from our end, our just looking at a game log, like he could just be in both box scores and, you know, the play sequence could just say that he was hitting and he got pinch hit for, and then later he hits for the other team.

So just from the user's perspective, it might not have to really look that different. But from your end, or are there things other than game logs? Are there season totals, splits? What else could potentially be affected? A lot of it is really like the technical restrictions on the way our database is designed. Right now if you tried to add two database rows for the same player in the same game with different information that operation would fail and so there are not just like the final game log tables that we

use to build the pages that you see on the site but also there's a lot of intermediate steps before then that would have some of the same restrictions in place. So that's really the biggest thing is going to be how do we get this kind of data all the way through without running into a step where it's going to crash the entire database build. Then, I mean, if we got to the point where we left all of the settings the same as they are now, we got all the way through, yeah, we'd have Danny Jansen with only one of the lines and so then we start getting into, yeah, his splits and the splits of players he was playing against would be a little bit off.

Yeah, we wouldn't have all of the correct information in that box score. and the splits of players he was playing against would be a little bit off. Yeah, we wouldn't have all of the correct information in that box score. It would be a lot of little things that aren't quite right, and that would probably also cause some of our other checks to fail where we compare the totals of our game level data versus the season level data to make sure that we're staying consistent and make sure that we're presenting things correctly. Because usually those things being out of sync with each other is a sign of a much bigger problem than this really narrow scenario that we know about.

Yeah, that does sound potentially pretty gnarly, I guess. But so, I mean, you, you basically, unless MLB does come out and, and clarify the rule and say, he can't come back into this game, it's the best interest of baseball clause or the best interest of baseball reference clause, I guess, then you will pretty much have to figure this out before that day, even though that all that work might go to waste if he doesn't actually play in that game, but you wouldn't want to be in a situation where you're scrambling on August 26th, I guess. Right, right. Well, we wish you well over the next few weeks, I guess. So you mentioned Otani. I was going to ask you about the Otani rule or other times when you have had to meddle with things when something unanticipated happened. So you joined baseball reference during Otani's rookie season, I guess,

right? 2018, but then the Otani rule comes along a few years later. So how did you have to tweak the site then and other stats? And there was a question about like war, right? Like would this count as a pitcher played appearance for him or a DH played appearance for him, ultimately the latter, but someone had to figure those things out. There are very many code commits in our code base that have Otani's name in them and plenty of checks specifically to do different things for Otani. A lot of that has been just kind of a steady drip over his career, both because of the way that his player profile has evolved as he became more and more of a true two-way

star. Additionally, the rule changes that came along with that. We've had to do more of those exception cases to make sure that we're not just kind of trying to shoehorn him into being primarily a primary position player or primarily a pitcher. We want to make sure that we can highlight both for him. There's been plenty. I think, you know, the pandemic in 2020 introduced a lot of places where we challenged, where we were violating a lot of assumptions that kind of had lived for a long time in a baseball software context.

Things like a game is nine innings long. Things like a national league team doesn't use the designated hitter. Things like extra innings start with the bases empty. Yes. Zombie runner. Yeah. So all kinds of things like that. Those tend to impact a lot more of things like win probability and leverage index.

When the assumptions we're making about what comes next in the game are changing. The high leverage situations that happen in the ninth inning, if the game's only seven, those happen a few innings earlier. If the 10th inning is going to start with a runner in scoring position, getting to the middle of the 10th isn't quite as safe for the team that's going to be taking the mound if they're already going to be facing the walk-off winning runner at second base. So we definitely had to do some work to make some of those things that you're tempted to think of as having a one true answer and adding a little bit of variance to them to be able to handle things like a win probability in the

context of this being a seven inning baseball game. Yeah. I wrote something in 2020. I talked to Sean for an article at the Ringer about the adjustments that various sites were having to make for the 60 game season and the zombie runner and yeah, you had to factor in what is the run expectancy of an inning that's starting. It's a different baseline, right?

Because, and you don't want to disproportionately penalize extra inning pitchers, right? Pitchers who are pitching in extra innings. So some things had to change there, or just figuring out like the whole, this isn't charged to anyone situation, right? That caused all kinds of headaches. That was definitely a situation where I wish

MLB had decided to let us spare Kenny this problem and not implement the Zombie Runner at all. Yeah. That's the real reason we're opposed to it. Yeah. It's all for me. And I appreciate that. Yeah. We've been your partisans for a while now. Yeah. And you weren't yet at Baseball Reference when Pat Venditti debuted in 2015, but that required some changes, right?

Yeah, there was quite a bit there to change how we do splits, to be looking at an individual plate appearance level instead of just being able to say, we know which pitcher is on the mound and we know which hand to throw with. That from a technical standpoint is not quite as complicated, but getting all of that data correctly and in a maintainable and scalable way, especially if he ended up being the first of many of these, that hasn't quite been the case, but never say never. Which first rounder this year was the switch pitcher. You're right. Yeah, you said a one-off situation that seems like a one-off. It might not be

ultimately. So if Durangelo-Saint-Chek comes along, then you'll be glad that you've already done all that work. Yeah, exactly. So, but yeah, there's definitely been plenty of those situations. Yeah, we've got to take something that happens once and if we got to fix it for once, we will do our best to be prepared for it to happen again. Yeah. Can you remember any other exceptions like that? Otani, 2020 60-game season, Venditti? Similar to the 60-game season, we have, as we added Negro League data to our major league database, plenty of things around what it means to qualify for the batting title.

How do we handle situations where the season was longer than the data we have? Happens quite a bit for those leagues. So those were similar, but not exactly the same problem to solve, but it did force us to get a little bit more flexible with some of that logic around what it means to qualify for leaderboards and things like that. A little bit lower on the complexity scale, I remember this was very early in my time working here, it was in 2018. JD Martinez won two Silver Slugger Awards in one season, which was a similar sort of thing where our database was set up that you can win an award one time each year.

And so we had to make it so you can win it one time per position per year. And that one has not happened again since. That was a very strange one. Usually they split the vote and they don't win anything if they're between two positions like that, but he impressed enough people. And are there any cases that you have dreaded? Because you mentioned that this Jensen possibility had occurred to you before it became more realistic. Are there other things that are kind of like in the,

let's hope this never happens, bucket? Nothing I can think of. This one really has been kind of the, we know it'll be a problem if it happens for as long as I've been working here. So yeah, I can't think of another one that looms quite as large as this one does. Well, I guess that's the silver lining then.

You could finally take care of that anxiety that you've been dealing with all along, this low grade dread in the back of your mind. If it comes to pass or you have to plan for it coming to pass, then you can figure out how to deal with it one way or another for good and then you'll never have to worry about it again. BF And who can't relate to having just some mild Danny Jansen or related stress in your life just always in the background. CB Yeah. LS Yeah.

Finally taking that box of clothes and chipped mugs to goodwill. Get it out of here. CB Yeah. We've had times when a player, well, almost this happened. Like we've had players play multiple games in the same day, just not for the same team in the same game. Yeah. Or, you know, people like switching teams between the games of a double header or something, right? Like some weird stuff like that has happened or suspended games, or I was reading in the Boston Herald, the closest to this happening was Chris Canizzaro

who played in the first game of a San Diego Padres, Chicago Cubs doubleheader on May 16th, 1971, did not play the second game, which was suspended after six innings and then was traded to the Cubs a few days later. Ken Azzaro also didn't play when the suspended game was completed on August 4th, 1971, but he did play in the regularly scheduled game a few hours later. So that was a case where it could have happened and it didn't.

Everyone was spared this problem. Although if it had happened then, then probably this wouldn't be your problem. Now someone would have had to figure this out decades ago. everyone was spared this problem. Although if it had happened then, then probably this wouldn't be your problem now. Someone would have had to figure this out decades ago. And Janssen is aware of this possibility too. He's been asked about it and he said, I don't even know how this works. I've heard about it a couple of times,

but that would be funky. I'm down to 01, right? I don't know what's going to happen. And neither do we. Well, and I think that we are spared the craziest possibility of him getting the put out on his own strikeout. Oh, yes. Right.

I meant to mention this because the MLB scoring changes Twitter account noted that the only thing better or worse, I guess from your perspective maybe, is if Jensen had a two strike count, and then Jensen came in to catch as someone else completes his at bat, strike three in the dirt, and then the throw goes down the line and into the corner and the substitute is thrown out at home.

That would be Danny Jensen strikes out, reaches first on an error by Danny Jensen, tagged out at home by Danny Jensen. But he has one strike on him. So I guess that at least can't happen. I'm sad about that. I want that to happen. So is your mindset, are you able to enjoy the absurdity and the funkiness as Jensen

said here and the fun fun or is it kind of overwhelmed by the building dread? It's gonna happen either way I may as well I may as well have some fun with it. I'm always a fan of weird baseball stuff happening so even though this one might be temporarily a pain in the neck for me. I think I can get past that and enjoy it. Yeah. And for the fellow engineers in the audience,

this is effectively wild, so I'm sure we have some. What exactly will be the mechanism as you deal with this? What's the stack? What's the setup? What's the back end? What languages will be required here to potentially fix this problem.

Yeah, the biggest thing is that we have a whole lot of database tables. We use MySQL and those tables all have primary keys on them that are defining what must be unique about a column to be able to identify it. And right now, the team is not part of that key. And so I believe that adding that should take us a long way. The bigger question is identifying all of the affected tables.

Like I mentioned, there's steps along the way where there's temporary tables, not just the ones that we read from at the end. But on top of that, once we're past that point, are there any strange display things that we run into? Yeah. Well, you have two games for him on the same day, two lines in his game log. That is a good question.

There would be two lines in the same, two lines in the game log, I would think for sure, to separate out which teams. But it's a good question of does his season total count two that day? Because it would count one for each team. And that's a question that would, I mean, our season totals, we use the official season totals that we get from Major League Baseball. So that one is a little bit out of our hands, but yeah, it would definitely be an interesting scenario. What does it mean to have a game played?

Yeah. And obviously there have been many times when someone played more than 162 games without a tiebreaker scenario because they got traded to a team that had more games left or whatever, right? Like people have played like 165 games in a season or so, you know, that has happened. But yeah, when you look at the line on the player page and it lists the number of games, it's broken down. You have a line for each team that the player played for. So then, broken down, you have a line for each team that the player played for. So then do you double count that game because he had a game played for each team. That's almost like a philosophical existential conundrum. I guess MLB will rule on that one way or another, but it's almost like we should get some philosophers together and figure that one out.

Well, I'm intrigued. I will be thinking for the next few weeks about Danny Jensen, but also about Kenny Jacqueline. And if any of the smart programmers in our audience have any tips to pass along, we will, but I'm sure that you all will figure out some solution. And if anyone wants to apply for a job at Sports Reference, one of these emergency Danny Jensen related listings, which we've established. That's the sole reason for these jobs being available. If you want to be a senior DevOps engineer or scrum master, which is just a wonderful term. I've since read up on the scrum master position, but this was not a job title that I knew existed. It sounds like, I don't know, scrum in my world is like when you all cluster around a player and interview them all at once, but this is a different sort of scrum.

But we really need, I think, a scrum master in this situation to direct traffic and get everyone on the same page about this Danny Jensen apocalypse. So if you want to work with Kenny, you could potentially get hired in time to help him implement some potential fix for this problem and avert the worst possible scenario where we all have to wait for baseball reference to update a little longer than usual, I guess. And if any tragedy befalls Danny Jansen

in the next couple of weeks, I got bad news. You're high on the list of suspects. Yeah. There is. Maybe not means an opportunity, but definitely motive. I feel like this actually ends with me buying a Danny Jansen jersey. Just leaning into it. Maybe he could send you a signed one or something just to apologize. It's not his fault. I guess it's really, it sucks. Blue Jay's fault. Yeah. So, yeah, man. All right. Well, please keep us posted on what you decide to do about this. If you do put a fix in place, we will update our audience and otherwise we will wait to see what happens. So thank you for

all of your stat blast consulting and consulting for my articles over the years. And we wish you well in these challenging times. You bet, thank you Ben. Thanks Meg. All right, a few followups for you. One, there is some news and not good news about a player on the Angels who Meg has advised me

to forget about until he returns to the majors. And we now know that that will not be until next season. So I suppose if I take her advice I will continue to forget about this player who now has another meniscus tear in his left knee, the second he has suffered this season and thus is done for the year. You might remember who I'm talking about, I just can't quite recall, but I imagine Meg may jog my memory when we discuss this sad development next time. A few other things, on episode 2194 we critiqued the new Hall of Fame plaques, particularly

Joe Mowers for not really resembling Joe Mowers that much, and we talked about how bronze is probably difficult to work with, we wondered whether Mowers had seen his plaque before it went up, we got some emails from people who know about sculpture and weighed in on why it might look like it does, but it's not just a you had to be there sort of situation. According to Clayton who wrote in to say, I had the privilege of being in Cooperstown for Joe Mauer's Hall of Fame induction last weekend and appreciated your critiques of his plaque on a recent episode. After waiting in a long line to see Joe's newly minted bronze in the plaque gallery last Monday, it was disappointing to hear nearly every person who approached Joe's award react with similar critiques

about his likeness or lack thereof. Due to the 3D nature of the carving, it does look somewhat different depending which angle you view it from. Generously, I would say it does look a bit more like him when viewing from a slight angle. Then Clayton linked us to a video, which I will link on the show page, about the making of Hall of Fame plaques from a couple years ago, and Clayton linked us to a video, which I will link on the show page, about the making of Hall of Fame plaques. This is from a couple of years ago. And Clayton says, Interestingly, the video reports that the player

does not have a preview of the artwork until the plaque is unveiled on stage in Cooperstown. That's correct. Here's a clip of the VP of the Hall of Fame saying so. These plaques are unveiled to everyone, including the new Hall of Famers on stage at the induction ceremony. So that's the first time that a new Hall of Famer will see what they look like in bronze and they'll know how they're being depicted with the text.

And we got an email from Ross who says, I'm a sculptor and I'm happy to weigh in on your convo about Hall of Fame plaques. The type of sculpture you see on Hall of Fame plaques is called relief. Personally, I've never sculpted a relief. The challenge with it is that you are trying to create the illusion of a 3D head on more or less 2D surface. I do 3D portraiture sculptures and in those you really want to pinpoint a few features that make a person look like themselves.

Caricature artists do the same thing, but in a full 3D sculpture with accurate proportions, you don't really have to worry about it looking like a caricature. However, in a relief, you don't have the same liberties. If you give someone a big nose, it's not contextualized by the proportion of the ear or jaw or head size. It just looks like a big freaking schnoz. I think that's why many Hall of Fame plaques look nondescript. It's hard to accentuate the features that make them look like themselves while maintaining

correct proportions. And he links us to a video of the person who does Hall of Fame plaques for motorsports. And Ross says the artist creates a 2D armature which is basically just a silhouette of a head. On top of that they sculpt the head using clay. After the head is done, they pour silicon over it to create a mold. This mold can be used to create a wax cast of the sculpture. The wax sculpture is brought to a foundry. The foundry creates a mold of the wax sculpture and pours molten bronze over the wax into the mold. This is called lost wax casting. After it sets, you break away the mold and have the sculpture cast in bronze.

We also got an email from Sean who says, art dealer here, typically the bust would be done first in wax or clay. That original would then be used to make a mold to then be cast in bronze. The original would in most cases be ruined when the mold is being made. So if there is a mistake or issue later on, you'll be starting over from scratch. In most cases, images of the OG wax or clay would be submitted for approval. This is where problem number one can occur. The most likely outcome was that the wax bust was approved, but then a lot was lost in translation going from wax or clay to bronze. The poor could have caused a flare-up, or just created new shadows,

or changed how tones read. I've done small casts myself, and it can be shocking just how much things change when it's a new material. It can be very frustrating, but rather than start over they might have just pushed ahead since it was originally approved. I feel for the artist it's a difficult job spending all that time and having to wait so long to see the final results. It's possible the Mauer bus looked amazing in wax or clay and the artist did a fantastic job, it just didn't work in bronze. It's also possible it was just okay and then got worse in bronze. Sean also notes that some artists will avoid the input process because giving patrons a window for input can be a disaster. I have seen too many patrons give criticism of a commission

only for their corrections or input to just be terrible. But since they gave it to you, you kind of have to use it. I also have to imagine this isn't a booming industry. I work in the high-end commercial area and the number of foundries that even do high-end casting is dwindling. It's possible the plaque world is a thriving industry, but I know as a sculpture major the number of schools even offering metal casting is plummeting. Another listener sent us a video of how the Todd Helton plaque was created. It is done in clay first. I don't really want to call out the artist, but it is the same man who's been doing these

sculptures for the Hall of Fame since 2016 and had been doing baseball sculptures long before that. He says it takes 18 to 50 hours just to do one. And he also says you're going to make sure that you're capturing the essence of how he really looks. I want to make sure that people walking up to the plaque from 10 feet away, even from a distance say, oh yeah, there's Todd over there and they can spot it. So it is supposed to be recognizable as the player. You can see in this video,

the reference photos he used for Helton and it does look like they were photos from during his career. We noted how old he looks on the plaque and he does say that players with strong features like facial hair are easier to mold. That's something Meg mentioned. Anyway, now you know, now we know.

Thank you to the experts who always weigh in on whatever esoteric topic we weighed into. And one more email from Justin who wrote in in response to our conversation on episode 2189 about whether an infielder could rob a home run. The question was prompted by Ellie de la Cruz, but Justin wrote in about O'Neill Cruz. He says, I remember you both discussing whether or not Ellie would be able to rob someone of a homer if he started from his usual shortstop position. I was poking around on Reddit and came across a clip of O'Neill Cruz trying to make a

catch in left field which reminded me of your prior conversation. And yes this was a two errors on one play deal from Wednesday where he ran way out into left on a deep pop-up that would have been better played by the left fielder. That one skied into shallow left coming on the left fielder Reynolds going out Cruz. Look out it's going to drop and that's going to score a run. Chas never stopped running. He's going to cross the plate. Ball gets away. Jordaan's going to head to third. A comedy of errors as O'Neill Cruz ran through Brian Reynolds and the ball dropped. And then the throw got beyond the catcher. Should be a double error. The day before that, he had run even farther into left field on a play that Bryan Reynolds

actually made a nice catch on. The video is funny because you see Reynolds diving to make this catch and then O'Neill Cruz goes streaking past him toward the outfield wall. Maybe O'Neill secretly longs to be an outfielder, which he probably will be one day. This was in Houston, so Crawford Boxes, shallow left field. But he did get way out there. So Justin says, after watching these clips a few times, I do believe it could be possible for Ellie to make a home run Robin catch starting from short.

The conditions would have to be perfect, but it looks possible with Ellie's speed. I still doubt it, but maybe he could make it close. And finally, here's something I have to tell you just to get it out of my head. Way back in March on episode 2145, I mentioned that sometimes I have these silly associations with players' names, where I'll see a player's name and I'll think of something else. And it's not just me. For instance, Grant Brisby had a funny tweet the other day where he showed a baseball card of former pitcher Moose Haas and made a reference to the Rammstein song Du Haas. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast.

Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast.

Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast.

Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. Du hast. shake when I see the name Bryce Elder, the Atlanta pitcher, especially if it's abbreviated to be elder. Inevitably I think of the pavement song Box Elder from their first EP, which goes like this. Bryce Elder, Box Elder, will vocalizing this helpC-K-E-L-D-E-R help us stay ad-free and get themselves access to some perks. Weldon Will, Shane Batters, Sean Mayland, Brendan Lanfer, and Charles Greider. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild

Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, one of which we just released. We shared some low stakes complaints and also talked to a listener who studies super volcanoes. You can also get prioritized email answers and playoff live streams and potential podcast appearances and discounts on merch and ad-free FanGraphs memberships and so much more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email, send your

questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild, and you can check the links on the show page or in your podcast app for information on upcoming Effectively Wild listener meetups at MLP ballparks. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week.

Talk to you soon. What's the greatest podcast of all? If you love the game of baseball. It's effectively wild. It's effectively wild. When men land back It's effectively wild With man and bike In back rally