Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2210: The Long and Shortstop of It

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about ad proliferation on podcasts and make a sheepish plea for listener support, then discuss the reversal of offensive fortunes for first basemen and shortstops and Oneil Cruz’s move to center field before following up (35:33) on the Mariners’ managerial hiring and the Selig Rule, a Rich Hill record […]

Hello and welcome to episode 2210. 2210? Is that how we say that, Ben? 2210? That's right. Sure. Episode 2210 of Effectively Wild, a fan graphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raulette, fan graphs. I'm joined by Ben Lindbergh of the ringer, Ben. How are you? I suppose you could have said episode 2,210, but we got to move things along here. We got things to talk about. Yeah. Namely, we have to plug our Patreon or we don't have to, but it was suggested to us that maybe one way we could encourage people to sign up for Patreon is to actually mention what they get if they do at the top of an episode for once, which we rarely ever do.

And I feel almost uncomfortable about doing it. But when we recently solicited some suggestions for things that might motivate people to sign up, one of the suggestions, it's probably the easiest suggestion from Donald was one thing that might help is to periodically just plug some of the current perks at the beginning of an episode because people might miss the end of episode plugs. And that is quite true. People might not listen to the outro, the credits, right? So they might not know what they're missing. And namely, I guess they're

missing bonus episodes, right? We've done more than 30 of those and they're all accessible to you right now at a particular tier. If you sign up, you could just binge the bonus episodes. We're going to be recording one this coming weekend. And of course, prioritized email answers and playoff live streams coming up in October, we always do two of those for playoff for Patreon supporters and so much more. Yeah. Ad-free fan crafts, memberships, signed books, other discounts on merch and personalized messages.

And of course, access to the effectively wild Patreon Discord group, which is growing and busy as always. And one of the reasons I wanted to mention this here is because I just read a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about how ads are proliferating on podcasts. The headline is, podcasts used to be ad-l light oases, not anymore.

And according to this piece, it cites some data here. Ads in the second quarter of this year took up an average of 10.9% of podcast runtimes, up from 7.9% in the second quarter of 2021, according to new research from a marketing agency and audio measurement company. So up three percentage points of your total podcast time and I guess a quite high percentage increase there. And honestly, that sounds a little low to me based on some podcasts. Yeah, I agree.

I listen to 10.9%. I would sign up for that. This WSJP says, the first podcast to sell ads would often place one commercial at the beginning of their show and another in the middle. Now it isn't uncommon for podcasts to run ads after every 10 minutes, stack two or three ads per commercial break and play even more at the end of each episode. And I would guess that if you took the percentage of popular podcasts that can actually recruit

large advertisers and make a lot of revenue that way, that that percentage would be considerably higher. I think that that's right. And look, we've made decisions about how we want to fund the show and we've had conversations with folks who are like, what would advertising look like on Effectively Wild? Because you should always take a phone call and see what it's like. I'm not here to disparage anyone who makes a podcast living on ads because people got to get paid. And not everybody is related to Travis Kelsey. So, you know, some people got to scrape a little differently. Some of these deals, man, I'm like, is there

this kind of money in the pod space still? I'm surprised by that. But yeah, I think that like we've, we've talked a lot over the years about like, what is the best way to sustain the show? You know, because we, we would like to be compensated for our time. We need to pay our producer Shane, Fan Graphs gets a cut of the pod mostly for hosting service stuff. And I think we are realistic that if we were to go that route, that because we are a sports pod, that the most lucrative ad avenue for us would be, you guessed it, sports bedding. And guess what? We don't like that. Yeah. We have had a couple of calls over the years where it was like, would we have control

over what types of ads? And they'd say, oh yeah, you can opt out of certain categories. And then we say such as sports betting. And they're like, oh, well, I don't know if that would make sense. But yeah. LS Yeah. So, you know, I think we appreciate everybody supporting the Patreon. The impetus for this was again, that our Patreon has some seasonality to it, which isn't surprising given the nature of the podcast, but we'd like to grow the Patreon and we'd like to sustain a more consistent membership level over the course of the year. And so we were just interested to hear feedback from folks.

And yeah, one of the most obvious things people said was, well, you know, your episodes are long so people might not listen through to the end where you do the Patreon plug. So you could do that once in a while at the top and we were like, oh yeah, I guess we could. I will, in the midst of that, I do want to note one thing to potential new subscribers, which we would be so appreciative, which is that we got a note from Patreon about some changes that are going on with the Patreon app. If you are an Apple user, they are now going to need to pay a bigger cut on transactions through the Patreon

app on iOS devices. It's like a not small cut. It's like 30%. This does not affect any of our existing subscribers. So if you subbed our Patreon through the iOS app, which isn't very robust. I have it on my phone for the pods that I am a patron of. But their solution to this has been to just add a surcharge on those so that the amount of money going to creators kind of levels out and remains the same.

And we would so appreciate you being a patron, but we also don't want you to pay extra just because you are subbing through an iOS device. And it only applies on the phone. It does not apply to subs that are done on like a laptop or desktop. So I bring that up mostly to say like if you're an iOS user and you're like, oh, I've been meaning to sub the pod, like do it on your computer and not your phone so that you don't pay extra for no good reason.

Or do it before this November because that's when that kicks in. November, okay. Yeah, because Apple is applying their 30% app store fee, which they do, which could be a whole off-topic podcast, but because of their policies, their Patreon is then upping the price there on that app specifically in November. So yes, if you're already subscribed, it doesn't affect you, but if you're thinking of subscribing, either do it before November via that app or do it somewhere else at any point. Yeah.

Yeah, because we don't want you to pay extra for no good reason. So yeah. Yup. All right. Yeah. I listened to this one podcast called McCartney, a life and lyrics, not to single that out, except I am singling that out and the episodes are like 25 minutes ish. This is a Pushkin podcast and there are pre-roll ads and post-roll ads and two mid episode

ad breaks. So it's like at least like six or eight total minutes of ads in like a 25 minute podcast. And it's just, I like the content and I know that podcast ads aren't that obtrusive because you can usually skip, right? But you don't always have your hands free. And also, even if you do, it's kind of annoying. It breaks the flow, right? And anyway, we don't have ads because we have Patreon supporters. And if we were smart and we're interested in extracting every dollar, I suppose we could have ads and also offer an ad-free feed on Patreon. But we don't do that.

We like to have no ads for anyone. And we can do that because of our Patreon people. And again, we're doing fine. We're not losing supporters or anything. It's just that we noticed for the past few years that there is a pattern where in the middle of the year, we stop adding supporters. We get additional supporters early in the year and then people tail off probably because they're not paying as much attention to baseball at that point in the year and thus baseball podcast. So we wondered what,

if anything, we could do to kind of juice that activity late in the year. And that's that. So now we'll go back to usually not inundating you with what is an effect, an ad, I suppose, for our Patreon in lieu of actual ads. But it's an ad for us and you aren't being sold a parlay bet. So like really, I think everybody's doing okay. Yeah. There's always the early part of the year spike. And then there's like the October spike, which is people signing up so that they can do the playoff streams. And then there tends to be a little year end action, but like, anyway, thanks everyone. We appreciate it so much.

Like it does let us do this without doing ads. Although I have been tempted, Ben, to like make you do a MeUndies ad read. Like every time we get an email from an ad network or another or one of these pod networks and they're like, you're leaving money on the table, which is true. I'm like, could I get Ben to have to do MeUndies or could I get a mattress out of it? I used to. Yeah, I had to do stuff like that on the Ringer MLB show, RIP in the Past, another Ringer podcast. So I have ad read experience, but- I know. It's nice not to have ad read experience, but it's nice not to

have to do that here. So I have a couple banter topics and then several follow-ups and a little stat blasting. So one banter topic, speaking of podcasts and other podcasts, I was on Slate's Hang Up and Listen this week, which has recently undergone some changes, some significant changes. So Slate, inexplicably, seemingly laid off Jill Anderson, who was one of the hosts of that show. Deeply dumb decision in my opinion. Stefan Fatsis also left Hang Up and Listen, and Josh Levine is on hiatus now

as he works on a slow burn season. And so in the absence of those three longtime hosts, they brought in me this week, at least to talk about college football because that's really, Didn't they really bet? Oh my goodness. Wonderful. I did the reading, you know, I did my homework and I think I had some thoughts. And we also talked about the NWSL abolishing its draft, as we mentioned on Effectively Wild last week. We got into that in more depth, but we also talked about baseball.

And Alex Kirschner, who was hosting the episode, brought this to my attention. And we talked about on the show and he subsequently blogged about it for Slate. Did you realize how poorly First Baseman have hit this year? Yeah. It's been bad. Yeah. I haven't checked in on it lately. Maybe it was Jay Jaffe at one point looked at sort of how Paul Goldschmidt was recovering or not, uh, compared to having a down season last year and, uh, you know, that had some league wide numbers in it and it, it

has not gone well for them. Not at all. First basemen have a 104 WRC plus this year, so they've just been 4% better than league average. They've hit 245, 318, 411 collectively. And obviously offense is not high this season overall, but even by this year's standards, that is not great for first baseman, historically speaking, who of course have always been better than the league average

because we know about the positional spectrum and you have a larger pool of players who can play first base defense, which as Ron Washington says in Moneyball is incredibly hard, but it's not as incredibly hard as playing pretty much any other position, right? So all of the positions are incredibly hard. It's the major leagues, but relatively speaking.

So you have this vast pool of players who can competently or semi-competently stand over at first base and field the relatively few grounders you get at that position and also just catch throws from other people. And so you could station more people over there, which means that the offensive bar is higher because you can have so many people whose glove is up to the task. And so the cream of the crop offensively rises to the top. And so this year is really anomalous. And I looked back at the baseball reference splits, going back to the beginning, they have positional splits back to 1912. And this year it's a 104 TOPS plus for First Baseman. And that is tied for the lowest figure ever with 1948 and 1914.

So that's how long it's been. And those two years don't have a hundred percent play-by-play data coverage either. So it's possible that if we had the complete numbers, it would actually be higher than that. So this is either tied for the lowest or the lowest offensive output ever from first baseman. And you could say that it is just a cyclical thing and these things ebb and flow. And that is true. They do to some extent. You get a great generation of First Baseman and then those guys age out and the offense kind of comes and goes. The best decade historically for First Baseman was actually the 1930s when you had Garry and

Jimmy Fox and Hank Greenberg and Johnny Mize at a time with fewer teams, right? And so those guys can kind of disproportionately raise the overall level there. And some of that is happening now, I guess. We just saw Joey Vato retire and as you mentioned, Paul Goldschmidt just is Paul Oldschmidt all of a sudden. Oh, wow. Yeah, sorry, that was kind of mean, but what can I say? Washed over me in a way I wasn't expecting, geez. Well, he is also washed, I'm afraid. It looks like, gosh, that was kind of mean, but what can I say? Washed over me in a way I wasn't expecting, geez. Well, he is also washed, I'm afraid. It looks like, gosh, I'm doubling down. Why am I doing this?

I'm sorry, Paul Goldschmidt, I've enjoyed your career. Wow, wow. Anyway. Anyway. So, partly it's that and partly, I guess, it's just a happenstance and some things going wrong. Like Tristan Casas has been hurt most of the year and there's the weird Matt Olson outage. I don't know what's happening there exactly. And Yandy Diaz has gotten back to his ground beef ways.

And right. So, you know, a few things go wrong and that can happen, but it's not just a one year blip because this seems to be a trend. Like this decade, if we look at the 2020s so far and just kind of average the TOPS plus figures for each year, we're at 110.6 for the 2020s, which is extremely low. Historically speaking, it's been about 119 has been the average. And the last decade, the 2010s was 116.4. So again, that whole decade was below the historical baseline.

So the last time that first baseman, even for a single season have been above par, historically speaking is 2017. And before that 2011. So this is not a new trend. It's just a new extreme of an ongoing trend. And there have been previous posts and articles about this. Joel Sherman wrote about it in 2017 for the New York Post behind the disappearance of the Burley slugging

first baseman, Daniel Epstein at SB nations beyond the box score in 2018, what happened to all the first baseman, Tom Ferduci at SI, what happened to MLB's elite first baseman in 2020, but that trend has intensified. So what do you think is going on here? Because where have you gone, Joe Votto, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you, I guess, or as I said on who I'll two nations, because he's Canadian. Nicole Zichal-Klein Well, it's interesting because I think that part of what we have to explain is why this

feels surprising, because it does surprise me that you say that it's been, if not this bad, like it's been not good for a while now. And I wonder if part of that is just attributable to the fact that the guys in here, I'm like I'm looking at our leaderboards, I'm looking at as first base as the positional split and I have a 200 plate appearance minimum. So I'm getting like real actual first baseman here generally. And so I wonder if, and we could swap in different names depending on the year, but like I was a little surprised when I saw not only how bad Goltzman has been, although not so bad that I felt inspired to

do nicknames, my God, but also when you look at Jay's replacement level killer series that First Space was a place where a lot of that poor production was concentrated. And I wonder if part of it is that the guys who are leading the way at First Space are producing at such a high level. And again, we could swap in different names depending on the year, but like, you know, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has a 175 WRC plus as a first baseman. Harper has a 141, Freeman has a 138, and like he's missed time with like family concerns that are thankfully seemingly resolved.

And then also he has this finger fracture now. And you know, you have guys like Lamont Way Jr, 125 WRC+, Christian Walker's obviously been hurt since basically the All-Star break, but 124 WRC+. So there are guys who are like hitting okay and are maybe skewing my perception of what the position is producing. I do wonder if a lot of this can just be explained by, and I'd have to go year by year and kind of pick out individual names, but like it is a position where you get guys who are like superstars and hit well, but you also get guys who are old and it's like, well, they

can play first. So, you know, I wonder if what we're seeing as a first base decline is just an acknowledgement on teams parts that guys on sort of the downslope of the aging curve can play over there. So like put them over there, you know, why don't you? I think some of it is maybe idiosyncratic to the specific guys that we have like, you know, what are you really getting? I don't want to pick on anyone, but like, what are you really getting out of Nolan Shanwell? Right? You know, like what are you? Yeah, he's been better, but he's, he certainly doesn't fit

the prototypical power hitting first baseman. Right. He has a 108 WRC plus. Yeah, he's been better than the average first baseman. Right. You do have a lot of guys who, when you look at them, they might fit your mental image of like what a first baseman looks like. And it just so happens that they're also not hitting very well. I think you might be right about some of that. And the DH is similar. I mean, DHs have hit okay actually this year, thanks to Ohtani and Jordaan and others,

but that has also been a recent trend that Hannah Kaiser wrote about for The Ringer this spring, that teams are using the DH as kind of this holding spot for partial rest days, right? You just kind of cycle guys through there to give them a little bit of a breather. Although Russell Carlton's research suggests that the half day off- It doesn't really do much. Yeah, the DH day off doesn't actually help really the way that a full day off does. But yeah, just because you have fewer dedicated DHS who are just, you know, like your Edgar Ortiz kind of classic

archetypical DHS, not that there have ever been that many Edgar's or Ortiz's, but these days you have fewer guys who are just locked into that spot every day. It's more of a rotating position. And I do wonder if, you know, from a team perspective, you're like, okay, I have to fill a DH spot and I have to fill first base. And when you take out the, the DH reps that are being sort of taken up by guys who are either getting a field rest day, or maybe you're coming back from injury and you don't want them in the field yet. So you put them at DH and you're like, Oh, I have to decide where am I going to put the guy who like, maybe you're concentrating the guy

who can actually hit plate appearances in DH where you would have previously put some of those guys just at first base because it's like, well, there's no defensive value over there and also you want to keep them off his feet or whatever. So it's like the guy who can play the field a little bit better. Maybe he's playing first base more often. I don't know. Ben, you know? I don't know. I think part of it also is that players have just gotten more athletic to the point where you don't have to choose between your glove first guys who play shortstop, let's say, and then your big hulking immobile sluggers

who play first base, because you can kind of have the best of both worlds. You have lots of guys who are big and strong and powerful and can also run and field. So it used to be that beggars kind of couldn't be choosers at shortstop, right? And so shortstops would always hit worse than the league average because fewer people were capable of playing that position defensively. And so whatever offense you got was gravy, but it's kind of the opposite actually. Short stops have out hit first baseman this year. And I think that's one reason why this stands out so much. Yes, first baseman have been getting worse for a while, but they were still generally

better than people at other positions. Whereas now that's not actually true. And short stops, I think this is the first time that short stops collectively have out hit First Baseman, or it would be if that holds up for the next month or so. Short stops have a 106 OPS plus this year, which is the best ever. First Baseman have had about a 119 OPS Plus historically on average, short stops have had about an 89, and that's been brought up a lot lately. Prior to 2018, the only year when short stops had an average T-OPS Plus was 1947, when they were at 101 thanks to Lou Boudreaux and Pee Wee Reese and Luke Apling and Johnny Pesky.

Well now they've been above average 5 of the last 7 seasons. They have a 100 TOPS plus in the 2020s. In the 2010s they were at 95. Prior to the 2000s they had never been higher than 91. So part of first baseman being worse relative to the average is shortstop being better relative to the average. You have some guys who based on their builds might have been shunted to some other position in the past, but now sure, why not have

them play shortstop if they can hack it, right? So obviously O'Neill Cruz is no longer a shortstop. We can talk about that in a second, but the fact that the pirates were even willing to try him there at six, seven", then you have other tall stops like LA De La Cruz and Carlos Correa and Corey Seeger and Gunnar Henderson. All these guys are- Got all kinds of names today. I know. Six foot three are tall, are all of those tall stops, right? Tall stops.

Yeah. And people talk about the Ripken kind of giving way to A-Rod and Jeter and Nomar and Tahata and all of that. But short stops hit better than that. Now, people have noticed that too and have called this kind of a golden age of short stops. Again, it's not a new trend, but it's just a new high and a new low in terms of first baseman. And so if you have this generation of young dynamic players who can kind of do everything,

then maybe you just end up with fewer big guys getting pigeonholed as first baseman because just, oh, that's all they can do, right? No, they can actually handle more if they're more athletic or I don't know if it's like a post PD thing. You have just fewer, just massive guys who can only hit homers and then nothing else potentially. guys who can only hit homers and nothing else potentially, maybe. Or I guess there's also been a change in what teams and also by extension, fans and media

members value because teams historically used to overpay for offense and specifically power relative to other skills. And those skills also used to be overvalued by awards voters. We've talked about that, how the voting patterns have changed and come more into line with war, which takes into account the cumulative, the holistic performance of a player. And I think we've mentioned this, it was mentioned in Dan Zinborski's recent piece where he looked at the changing voting patterns that the last time position players won an MVP award with fewer than six war was Ryan Howard and Justin Morneau in 2006 and hey, both first basemen. So I think there is more

of an emphasis on all around versatile play and development and also maybe on positional flexibility and versatility and kind of positionless baseball quote unquote. I think that that's right, you know? And like it also, some of it is like a little, a little funny about this year, right? Like right now, if you look at our like short stop splits, that's hard to say. And I can't even call them a toll stop because it's Mookie Betts, but like, you know, Mookie Betts had 280 played appearances at short. So like he's pulling up the average, but you also just, like you said, you have this bumper crop, this incredible debt, like Bobby Witt Jr. is a shred stop. And so is Gunnar and so is Carlos Gray and so is Sear and so is Lindor and so is Trey

Turner and so is the L.A. Daily Cruise and Willie Adomis. Let us respect Willie Adomis because I just like watching him play baseball. But you know what I mean? Like you have all of these guys who, in addition to being very talented, in addition to being bigger on average than like the prototypical shortstop used to be, some of these guys are just also having like MVP caliber seasons, even if Bobby Witt Jr. doesn't end up winning MVP, even if Gunnar doesn't end up winning MVP. So I think it's useful to like remember that for some of this stuff, it's like not entirely a trend that might

sustain that there is something about this year that might be a little idiosyncratic, but also look at them, Ben, my God. And it varies. It's interesting. Joey Votto's old team, career team and most recent would have been team, the Blue Jays there and the Reds, they're kind of at opposite ends of the first base offense spectrum. Thanks to Vlad, the Blue Jays have the best production from their first baseman. They're at a 158 TOPS plus at first base, whereas the Reds are down at 81, which is the worst in the national league, although the Yankees and the Reds are down at 81, which is the worst in the National League, although the Yankees and the Astros are actually lower than that at 60 and 66, or yeah, Astros 66, Yankees at

60. And again, you know, Jose Abreu, right? And Anthony Rizzo and- And it's not like John Singleton's been like, you know, lighten the world on fire over there. Yeah, right. So some of these were best laid first base plans just going awry, but I'm not mourning this necessarily. I mean, it was again, kind of an archetype, like the Koo Heywood from major league, like the big hairy slugger over at first base, which I guess we've lost a little bit though Heywood was played by a pitcher, Pete Vukovic, but I'm not lamenting the fact that, oh, we suddenly have this incredible group of offense first short stops who can

also field and are incredible, right? I mean, you know, as long as the offense is coming, I don't particularly care which position it comes from. Now, maybe there's not enough offense coming. That's a separate issue, but it's an interesting trend and there might be a number of causes as there usually are. So I just hadn't realized how extreme it had gotten until Alex opened my eyes to that. So now I know.

Now you know. And O'Neill Cruz was one of the players who was raising that bar and lifting all boats at shortstop. And now he will no longer be doing that, although centerfielders can't hit either. And so his offense could be used over there, but we'll see how his glove holds up. Now that I am semi sad about that the O'Neill Cruz shortstop era is over. And Dave Andrews wrote about this for fan graphs. I totally get why that era is over and Davey Andrews wrote about this for Fan Graphs. I totally get why that era is over.

It makes sense that it's over because he just was not a good shortstop. He had the second most errors in the majors and sometimes that's okay because you have such great range, you're making a ton of plays, but that wasn't really the case so much with him. He's just below average by all of the metrics and considerably below average by some of them and so he's now been shifted to center field and it did seem somewhat inevitable that he would be moved to the outfield. I was hoping that he could stave that off a little longer. It just tickled me to see him standing so tall at that

position as the tallest shortstop ever, save for the also six foot seven Joel Guzman, who played three games at short in 2007. But it is kind of amazing that they're just throwing him into the fire there because he has basically no experience at centerfield, right? He has six spring training innings in 2021. Other than that, he's never played center field professionally and outfields anywhere. He played 81 innings in left field, 80 of which came in the minors. And so they're just like on the fly, you've been playing shortstop all season. You've barely played center at all in your adult life. And basically he DHed for a couple

days while he just learned how to play center field and just shagged flies. And then they just stuck him out there on Wednesday and said, go get it. So I have no idea whether this is going to work either because as Davey noted, like he's had issues going back on balls and on balls in the air and pop-ups at shortstop. So it doesn't necessarily seem like he's a natural there compared to say, well, I don't know, like when Fernando Tatis moved to the outfield, not center, but he was always good at going and getting balls and running and you could kind of see him as an outfielder. And so now Cruz is trying to do the Jackson Merrill

transition at a somewhat more advanced age. And we'll see how it goes. And I hope that it works because I would like him again to continue to slug at a position where we don't usually see a slugger like that. And between him and Judge, it's like Merrill Giants, Rome centerfield, suddenly, I guess, but I don't know. There's some speculation already that this might be a prelude to a move to a corner eventually.

At this point, if I were to ask you, Ben, would you say that the Pittsburgh Pirates are likely to play postseason baseball? I would not say that, no. Here's the thing. They should just do it. They should just try them in center. It's sure a trial by fire and I don't know that they will come away from this stretch before the season ends having a definitive answer to whether or not he's a long-term center fielder. But why the hell not? Try him at center, see if he takes to it, see if it works, give him a little more run with it in the spring because if

we're honest about O'Neill Cruz's bat at this juncture, the best that we can say is that he might have stretches where he is incredibly productive, but he will likely be streaky for his entire career. That's kind of what we've seen from him where he'll have these stretches and we're like, he's putting it all together. And then he doesn't, you know? And so one way to give him a good floor for value if he can't play short is to have him play center. You know? This isn't like a new idea.

This has happened a lot. If he can do it, if he takes to it and you can avoid a move to a corner, awesome. He really does have a 117 WRC plus on the season, which feels higher to me than I was expecting in part because of his streakiness. But like, let him see, you know, it's not going to hurt the team. It's not going to cost them a playoff spot. Nothing to lose except baseball games, which you're probably going to lose a lot of anyway. And I think that you could have a, you know, you could have questions about like the quality

of the look because he hasn't really had a chance to get his feet under him out there. So, this is a pretty high, in some ways a high stakes way to see what he can do, but also a pretty low stakes way. Because again, they're 14 and a half games out of first place in the central. They're under 500. I'm making Italian sounds because that's who I am, you know? And I think it makes sense, as you said, to kind of get a head start on that transition, I guess, like why if you've concluded that he can't be a shortstop long term, then why not use this time to get a look and let him get his feet wet out there. The alternate case would be that this is not positioning him for success in center.

That if you really think that he can be a fit there, and again, there's some speculation that maybe they don't actually think he can be a fit there, and that this will just be a trial by fire that's almost meant to expose that he can't be a fit there, so that it will be easier to transition him to a corner, though I'm sure they'd like him to be a center fielder if he's capable of that. But if you gave him an off season to work on it as opposed to two days DH-ing, and if he practiced in spring training and everything, then might he be more comfortable and take to the position more readily and be better positioned long-term to stick there as opposed to just, again, trying it with basically no prep and winging it and possibly struggling and getting

down on himself or something, right? So that could be how this would go wrong, I suppose. But I wish him well because I'd like to see it work. Yeah, you want it to work. And this is what I mean. You could have some questions about the quality of the look. But I imagine they'll give him some run. I wouldn't be surprised if they give him a bunch of run in center and he has a couple days a week where he maybe plays in a corner. And then if they think that there's enough there, then they probably have him work on

that in the off season and put him in center during spring and kind of see where they are. By the way, speaking of Italy and Italians, the angels just called up left-hander Sam Aldegary, who is a 22-year-old first pitcher born and raised in Italy to play in the major leagues. All right. One of your kind of countrymen almost. KS I don't want to overstate the case, you know? I don't want to overstate my own credentials, either as an Italian or an Italian American. We are like culturally that way. I don't know, man. Like that's like the thing I, I'm like a lot of people, it's like a European mix of stuff and the food was best when it was cooked out of the Italian part of the family cookbook. So here we are. Kind of cruel that there's now an Aldegary and an Arragedi in your team's division, but

not on your team. The Angels have also called up a right-hander, Kayden Dana, who is still just 20 years old and was a 2022 draftee. So angels, aggressive promotions as always, sometimes that works out for them, sometimes not so much. I'm going to talk about an angels call up a little later in this episode. I have several follow-ups for you here. And I guess I'll start with one that is a follow-up from last time. You were musing and we were wondering and questioning the Dan Wilson hire as it relates to the Selig rule, right? So the Selig rule, a memo sent by then Commissioner Bud Selig in April 1999, which was intended to promote diversity hiring, minority hiring of managers specifically, right? And that has lagged behind and continues to lag behind

the demographics of not only the country, but the game, right? The Seelig rule seemingly hasn't helped all that much, right? And maybe part of that is that it is kind of toothless, but one way in which it's toothless perhaps is that it seems like you can kind of get around the requirement to interview minority candidates when you were making a search like this by seemingly just hiring someone on the spot and bypassing a search altogether, which is what the Mariners did here with Dan Wilson.

And so we were wondering, well, why were they allowed to do this? Why didn't this violate the ceiling rule? Because they didn't just name him the interim guy. They said he is their permanent manager and they did not conduct a search. Clearly they fired Scott Service. They hired Dan Wilson immediately. So I reached out to MLB as we said one of us was going to do. And I had a conversation with an MLB spokesperson on background and got filled in a little here and was also sent some of the language from the Sea League Rule memo that is sent to teams. And so I guess you can't quite call this a

loophole because it is sort of specifically written into the rule that there is a provision for a case like this where you just bypass a search. So one of the concerns with the ceiling rule is that you're just going to sort of have sham interviews, right? Just to check the box. Like that certainly has happened and people have talked about that and that can be kind of an unintended consequence of a well-intentioned rule that if anything is even worse, because what happens is not only does the candidate's time get wasted, they prepare for an interview and they're not a serious candidate, but also they might be brought in for three or four interviews and passed over each time. And suddenly it's seen as almost a stain on them.

Like, do they not interview well? Like, is there something, you know, that teams concluded they didn't want to hire these guys? And really it was maybe just that they weren't serious candidates all along, right? But it actually puts them in a worse position potentially to get a job in the future. And so that's one of the considerations here. And so the explanation, I don't know whether we'll find it a satisfactory explanation,

but it is possible if you do a full search and conduct, say an off season, hiring process and you're bringing people in and everything, you do have to interview a minority candidate. And then there's nothing, I guess, to stop that, prevent that from being kind of a check the box. We had to comply with this rule thing, but I guess you could argue that even being forced to is in some sense good, even if it's not great

for individual candidates, because it at least sends the message that this is important in something that's being emphasized or desired. But if you bypass the search entirely, then you don't have to necessarily if certain other conditions are met. Now, this also sounds like a way to just do a complete end around the rule,

because it's like, well, we're just not going to do a hiring process. We're just going to hire this guy if you know who you want to hire, and then you can bypass the search and the requirement to talk to a minority candidate altogether. But if you do that, then you have to have a conversation with the commissioner's office. So John Stanton in the Mariners, or whoever the ownership person is, before the move in the hiring is official and announced, has to have a conversation with the commissioner's office, with Rob Manfred and Mike Hill,

who is the senior vice president of on-field operations for MLB and the former GM and POBO of the Marlins. And you basically have to make your case that this is justified. You have to explain why you're doing this and why you should be exempt from the requirement and the full search. And if you do that, you notify and you supply this rationale for why you're not conducting an external or internal interview process, then you also have to provide a succession plan for the club's senior baseball ops position. And that has to include, as they say, diverse individuals for future leadership roles.

And when a white guy, I guess we can just say a white guy, is promoted to a senior baseball ops position, the expectation is that a non-white guy will be promoted or hired to a vacancy created by that promotion. So for instance, in this case, Edgar Martinez was hired as the hitting coach. So I guess that would technically fulfill a requirement like that, let's say. And then the commissioner's office reviews the club's plan and explanation and makes a decision

about whether to exempt the club in that case from this diversity interview requirement. Right. So that is what you have to do if you want to get around this. And thus, I guess it's technically not a loophole because it is, this is an official provision. Like there's a process by which you can bypass that. But I guess you could also say that is still a way to sort of skirt the requirements of that rule. Right. And so, you know, other things are kind of taken into account just like what the pipeline looks like for that club.

If there are people who are kind of heirs apparent or, you know, people who can rise up to those positions and then what is their track record? And, you know, if a number of teams are trying to do this, right? Like if, if everyone gets the idea suddenly to say, we're gonna bypass that requirement by, hey, here's who we wanna hire, then that's probably not gonna fly and it will only be allowed a certain number of times, but who knows how many, right?

And the Cubs who did this multiple times, I guess, right? I mean, they did it with Rick Rentaria and jettisoning him to hire Joe Madden, and then fired David Ross to hire Craig Council. And in each of those cases, it was like, hey, here's our guy, we know who we want and he's maybe the most respected manager in the game and he's available. But again, if you're doing that multiple times, then can you make the case that it's kind

of a one-time only thing? Clearly not. And then I guess another consideration is in this case, specifically, seemingly, it's like the Mariners are ostensibly, I suppose, in a playoff race, in a pennant race. There's nothing that would have prevented them from hiring Dan Wilson as an interim guy, but I guess there's some consideration for like, does it hamstring the team to appoint an interim guy when you're in the middle of a playoff race? And what does that do to the interim guy's status? They don't fire your manager.

Yes, exactly. That is a good response to that. Yeah. And, you know, Dan Wilson was there, right? So he wasn't an outside guy. He was like around the team in various capacities. So that's the answer again. I don't know if it's a good answer, but it's not that you can get away with that without

doing anything about it. Like you do have to make the case and justify why you're doing that. And then you have to get approval to do that. And so I guess it comes down to should MLB have been willing to grant that approval, should it ever be willing to, right? Look, I think that the folks who we heard the most disappointment and sort of feedback around when it comes to sort of how perfunctory those interviews felt at times under the old version of the rule were minority candidates, right?

They felt like their time was being wasted. They felt like it was disrespectful. As you noted, like a lot of people felt like it sort of tainted them in a way because they were doing these interviews and then they weren't getting hired. And then people were like, what's going on with that person? Like, why do they keep having to interview but they don't get hired? So I am mindful of the fact that like, that is not an excuse, right? Like having some sensitivity to that is not necessarily the league or teams wanting to,

in an insincere way, kind of get around these requirements. But I do think that it's worth pushing back on when there is such a short track record with the individual who's being brought in, not just in an interim capacity, but in a full-time capacity. And the idea that hiring Edgar as the hitting coach somehow changes our perception of the manager spot, I don't know. I don't know if I find that persuasive. He just like, Dan Wilson just doesn't have manager experience.

Yeah, he's not Craig Council in terms of his managerial resume. He doesn't have a managerial resume. Right. And so I think that that makes the situation read differently to me and the presence of senior members of the coaching staff who were retained and who are men of color and have, in some cases, more direct managerial experience and other cases have a lot of coaching experience and are well regarded within the organization. It just, I don't want to accuse the team of like being indifferent to this

stuff and I don't know that like the specific motivation for bringing in Wilson was, I think it was nostalgia more than it was like any animosity toward candidates of color. But it is disappointing when you have people within the organization who seem like more natural heirs apparent being passed over. And so, you know, it's a tricky thing. And I appreciate that this gets complicated for people, but like at a certain point, the rubber has to meet the road on this stuff, you know? And I think we've had hiring cycles lately that have been more productive in terms of really diversifying the coaching ranks. But I don't know, like maybe you say we're a potential playoff team, we have to have some stability here.

But it also just feels like, is Dan Wilson going somewhere? Right? Like, did you really have to tag him as the guy? Like, couldn't they have just named him interim and then like thought about it for a minute? I don't know. Like that's the piece of it that I find the most sort of head scratching. Cause it's like, he's never done this before. Why don't you just make him the interim and see if he's good at it? You know, like that seems like, this seems like an obvious easy audition for this guy. Like maybe you're really high on Dan Wilson and you think he has a long, successful managerial

career ahead of him. I don't know the answer to that. I hope that I was clear about that both on the pod and on Twitter. I have no idea what kind of manager Dan Wilson's going to be, but neither do the Mariners. This is their first time really trying to answer that specific question. That part of it just was like, oh, hold your horses there. CB Yes, that part of the process. I would maybe question that even aside from the whole question of, well, shouldn't they have interviewed a minority candidate? Shouldn't they have interviewed anyone else, someone else, regardless of their background? Just like, are you sure you want to

commit permanently to this guy who has next to no experience? And we've seen certainly some managers who don't have a whole lot of experience and quickly transition from playing to managing, right? And I mean, Steven Vogt with the Guardians, who seems to have done a good job with them this year. But he had coaching experience. Yeah, he had what, one year, right? With the Mariners. Yes. But also I guess he was a guy who was seen as a top flight managerial prospect during his playing days. Whereas if Dan Wilson was, he certainly didn't quickly become that in his post-playing career.

So yeah, that is kind of questionable, but it's a tricky thing because you want to encourage certain types of hiring, but also can the commissioner come in and say, you cannot hire this person, you must hire that person, right? And so you kind of have to put these incentives in place and hopefully promote it without really much enforcement power or ability to hold a team accountable for this. And so it's just kind of trying to finesse it and hope that it helps. And it hasn't really helped all that much, even if it's a good thought in theory. KS Right. I mean, I will fully acknowledge that I am much more willing to be much more heavy-handed

with this stuff than a lot of people seemingly in the commissioner's office are, I think the idea that like, if you do a real search, you know, a fully vetted search that it's going to necessarily result in a person of color being hired every time, like, of course it's not. But if having the baseball coaching and executive ranks look like baseball and look like the country more broadly is a real priority, then moments like this feel like a missed opportunity because they could have just very easily said, we have a good feeling about Dan. We feel like Dan's going to be a good manager. We're going to let him manage for the last two months of the season.

We're going to see how that goes. And then, you know, they don't even necessarily have to commit to a search, like, but we're going to see how that goes. We feel like this is a good opportunity for him to kind of show what he's got, you know, like, could have just done that and they're like, no, it's going to be Dan and I look, I'm excited for Edgar. I guess I S I have the same, to be clear. I have the same like, Hey guys, move on from 1995 objections there.

Edgar has been a coach at times in the past. So like it's a little, his resume around the stuff is more robust. And I also just like, you know, as much as I loved Dan Wilson as a kid, like, you know, Edgar's Edgar. So some of it is like my, my willingness to give them a pass on that is probably higher for a number of reasons, but I don't know Mariners. I don't know commissioner's office, I don't know if I'm persuaded, I might not be moved. Well, we said we'd get an answer and that's the answer. Thank you for you being the one to do it because we were talking about that and I was like,

I maybe said too much about this for me to be the one that reaches out for comment. Well people could assess the strength of the answer for themselves. And I suppose if situations like this happen and people make us think about it, then maybe the commissioner's office will be a little less likely to grant those exemptions in the future. So, all right. A few other follow-ups. Just wanted to shout out a post that Ben Clemens wrote recently about what happens if you had equidistant fences in the outfield because we answered an email about this not long ago.

On episode 2201, Nick asked about why center field is deepest in baseball and we supplied some reasons for that, but we didn't consider so much, well, what would happen if it wasn't and that is what Ben considered here. And I noticed that the subhead, I don't know if you edited this one or not, but the subhead was, if baseball were different, how different would it be? And I think that was a perfect subhead for this piece because as is often the case when we do these hypothetical thought experiments, the answer is not that different. And that is what Ben concluded here. After making a lot of assumptions and modeling things and doing math, he concluded that if we

actually had fences that were the same distance to all points, that it wouldn't actually be different. He wrote, one of the most surprising things I found, overall offensive production wouldn't change much. The aggregate batting line in our weirdo world would be 239, 308, 408, hardly different from the actual 244, 313, 401 mark so far this year. There'd be fewer hits, but more power. One notable takeaway,

you might expect slugging percentage to shoot higher. What with the thousand extra homers and all, but many of the batted balls that go from non-homers to out of the park were already extremely high value. Meanwhile, the balls that went from homers to staying in the park are mostly turning into outs. The trade-off is basically homers for doubles and outs. And that's not the kind of baseball anyone wants to watch. So, sounds like it would be less entertaining, but roughly the same offense-wise, just in case anyone was wondering after we brought up that question. I'm glad Ben dove into it. Yeah. He was like, I don't know if I really found all that much. Is this worth doing? And I was like,

that is a perfect piece for a Friday, my friend. It is an August Friday and I think this is great. Let's go. Now, Rich Hill podcast icon has been called up. He's back, baby. He's back. And we have a couple past stat blasts that were related to Rich Hill. I mentioned the one about how he has the record for most times signing as a free agent with one team and discrete stints and almost the most discrete stints with one organization acquired by any way.

So now that he has been called up, listener Patreon supporter, Andrew M pointed out that on episode 2030, we did a stat blast about the record for most seasons in which a player appeared in both the minors and majors. Obviously not at the same time. I don't know that even Danny Jensen could do that. Maybe he could with a suspended game,

but we did aensen could do that. Maybe he could with a suspended game, but we did a stop-loss about that and the record was a tie between Hill and Rudy Cienes. So now he holds the record alone. This is his 15th season, appearing in both the minors and the majors. So congrats to Rich Hill. You have made history yet again. Amazing.

I mean, just like hope for us all, you know, that we can just keep doing it as we get older. Yeah, especially, I mean, I'm sure a bunch of 42 and 43 year olds just breathed a big sigh of relief that they are not older than any active Major Leaguer. So thanks Rich. I might have gotten texts in a couple of group chats about that. They're like, dodged it. Which is the better Rich Hill fun fact about his age and longevity? There was one that went pretty viral by fan graphs own John Becker who tweeted, Andrew

Bailey was drafted, debuted, won the rookie of the year award, became teammates with Rich Hill in 2012, retired and became Rich Hill's new pitching coach all in the span of Hill's career. It's like an entire professional life just flashed before Andrew Bailey's eyes. And meanwhile, Rich Hill abides throughout all of that. They were teammates when Hill was in his age 32 season. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And only two others from that team are still on an MLB roster or the IL,

Jose Iglesias and Daniel Bard. Hill outlasted 42 of the 44 players younger than he was to make an appearance for that team, including his new boss, Craig Breslow. Right. And so that's one contender. The other Hill fun fact I saw was from Ian Brown of MLB.com related to Breslow. Remarkably the last five leaders of baseball operations for the Red Sox, Theo Epstein, Ben Charington, Dave Dobrosky, Heim Blum, and Craig Breslow have all signed Rich Hill to contracts. I think the first one takes it because even though in some ways it is

more specific because it is about these two guys It feels like it says something more about baseball and like Rich Hills place in it Whereas like the second one is like really about the Red Sox But but but maybe not I don't know. I think the first one is like a pretty oh Boy gosh, how does he feel? How does Andrew Bailey feel about that? I wonder. I wonder, yeah. I would, I don't know how I'd feel. Is it like, hey, how's it going, bud?

Like do you have that vibe to it? I don't know. Yeah, is it awkward to go from teammates to pitching coach of a player? Not that Rich Hill probably needs that much coaching at this point in his career though, you never know. He could benefit at any age from a continuing education. But you could say the same thing about Breslow and Andrew Bailey because they were teammates and besties. And now Breslow is

Bailey's boss and hired him to be his pitching coach. And so they had to sort of sort that out. I talked to Breslow about that for an article earlier this year when I wrote about ex-player GMs and Popos. Yeah, I agree with you. The first fun fact is better. The second is more of a Red Sox unfun fact, I guess, about how much turnover they've had. Though it does maybe make it more impressive that Rich Hill has had so many homecomings. The Red Sox have continued to be his hometown team throughout, but it's not as if there was just one executive who really had a thing for Rich Hill and just kept bringing him back.

It's just everyone, everyone who has taken a turn as head of baseball operations for the Red Sox has been in business with Rich Hill. So I guess that speaks to just how much everyone likes him. They all just want to bring him home again. Also, we answered a question on our last email episode with our Patreon supporter about the initially high demand by a fan for that milestone Carlos Santana home run ball, right? Where he hit it in San Francisco. It was the 30th ballpark in which he had hit a home run and the fan demanded season tickets, not for the twins, but for the giants. And the twins said no. And we wondered whether that was just like an initial, drive a hard bargain opening offer.

And maybe they met in the middle somewhere because the twins turned that down. It turns out that that is what happened. I had not seen the subsequent reporting, but according to Phil Miller, a tweet from mid July, Carlos Santana finally did receive his home run ball, the one that gave him a hom Homer in all 30 parks last night from the fan who initially asked for giant season tickets in return.

What did it cost him? A pair of batting gloves, Santana said. Quite a negotiator. So that is quite a come down. You know, it's like, I demand season tickets. No, you're not getting season tickets. Fine. I'll take a pair of Carlos Santana batting gloves. That's in terms of monetary value. That's quite a

step down, I suppose. Yeah. He didn't even get like extra like, Oh man. Hmm. So maybe there's a, maybe there's a risk that there feels like a case that should be taught in a game theory class. Right. Yeah. Did you overdemand it maybe and you made the team dig in its heels too much? I don't know whether there was any haggling in between those things. It doesn't seem like there could be because a pair of batting gloves, that seems like about the minimum you could get for a home run ball.

Again, it's not a super valuable home run ball to the market at large. It's just valuable for sentimental reasons to Carlos Santana. So I get why you couldn't get some exorbitant returns for that. But still, I don't know whether he got a meet and greet. Like did Santana hand the batting gloves over personally or would that have been awkward after your demand? Yeah, I was just about to say. Plus it's a Giants fan. Maybe he wouldn't be so jazzed about meeting Carl Santana anyway. Yeah, I'm not going to say that he misplayed his hand, but maybe he did a little bit. Well, he can put betting gloves on those hands now.

Hopefully he won't be allergic to them. Also, we had a couple of follow-ups, a few responses to the email we answered on that episode about the possibility of a major league affiliate and its parent club swapping ballparks. So the big leaguers playing in a minor league park and vice versa. And we said, I don't know that it would really be all that great for the big leaguers to play in a minor league park, but it would be cool if the minor leaguers got to play in a big league park, even as an exhibition, get a taste of the big league setting. And so we endorsed, I think, sort of organization specific futures games.

And I think we noted that maybe that sort of thing has happened or happens and it does. And people wrote in to suggest some examples of that. So Sam, for instance, said, I wanted to respond to Ben's idea for intra-organizational futures games from today's episode to say the Red Sox used to do this. They called it Futures at Fenway. The Paw Sox would play the Seedogs and the Hi-A team, which changed a couple of times over the years, would play the Greenville Drive.

It was cool, it was fun. The one time I attended, my mother was very annoyed to learn there were actually two games. And as Ben theorized, the Sox prospects guys were, in fact, all over it, it was their Christmas. In fact, I think they're still sad about it no longer being a thing. I wish they would bring it back, especially as a now 25-year-old fan who spends far too much time thinking about these prospects as opposed to a 7-year-old fan who for whatever reason neglected to get John Lester's autograph when his Cub Scout pack went to a Paw Sox

game. Okay, so that to a Paw Sox game. Okay, so that was a Red Sox tradition. Remy, Patreon supporter, noted that the Royals in 2019 played a game in Omaha. This was their AAA affiliate, the Chasers. They played a game in late March. Some of these were exhibitions like at the end of spring training, right? So it wasn't, you know, mid season, interrupt the season sort of thing.

So the Royals did that with the Chasers and then the Mets used to do this annually with the Tidewater Tides who were now the Norfolk Tides and, you know, Willie Mays after he retired played in one of those and that was kind of cool. And so the, the major league Mets would journey to play the tides each summer. And I get the sense that the major leaguers got sick of this. So, yeah, I don't know exactly when the practice was discontinued,

but I found an article from the New York Times April 2001, because these were not spring training games. These were during the season. What? Yeah. And so here's the headline, Mets Notebook, Valentine frustrated over visit to Norfolk, April 19th, 2001. The Mets are scheduled to fly to Norfolk, Virginia today for an exhibition game with their class AAA affiliate, a game virtually all of them would rather not play. That includes manager Bobby Valentine, a former manager at Norfolk, who said yesterday that he would prefer giving his players a rare day off. I don't get it. Let me put it that way, Valentine said. He was always frank. I love the franchise and both of the owners are good friends of mine,

but the flavor of the month seems to have lost its taste. A frustrated Valentine added they don't even sell out. Valentine is right. Even though the Mets, the National League champions featuring Mike Piazza and Edgardo Alfonso will play at Harbor Park, the game is not a sellout. Robin Wentz, a spokeswoman for the Norfolk Tides, said that 8,000 to 8,500 tickets had been sold for the game and that the club hoped for walk-up sales of 2,000 to 3,000. The park holds 12,067. Despite what Valentine perceived as a lack of interest, Wendt said there was actually heightened interest in today's game because

the Mets started their season in Japan last year and skipped the trip to Norfolk and because they reached the World Series. Valentine, who joked that he tried and failed to schedule another trip to Japan to avoid going to Norfolk, will most likely use his regular players for one at bat each before replacing them. It's hard to play guys they want to see play because it's a day off, Valentine said. It's an ill-conceived idea. I'll say it was a well-conceived idea in a different era." Mets then-GM Steve Phillips explained that the trip served as a financial boost to the Mets' top affiliate and allows fans to see some of the players who've graduated from Norfolk to the major

leagues. Still, Phillips conceded, I know that most of the players don't want to go." So I think it was discontinued, if not immediately after that, not long after that. Gotcha. Though the Tides then became an Orioles affiliate and continued the tradition at least for a while with them where the big league Orioles would play the tides. Although I think maybe end of March, as opposed to during the season where you're losing an off day. It is pretty wild that that ever happened. Right? So yeah, like 2017 kicked off with an exhibition game between the tides and Orioles, the fifth time the O's had played in Norfolk since 2007. So yeah,

doing it at the end of spring training, that is understandable. I think you need to warm up anyway, right? And maybe you're working your way back north or something, but to do it midseason and subtract an off day, that doesn't seem like the best idea. Also, I should note that the Nationals do this now too, the Nationals futures game. So, uh, this happened actually, again, it's a late March thing. And it's the start to opening week where the top prospects from across the Nationals minor league system get to show up in front of the hometown crowd and Nationals major

leaguers and play. And so that's kind of cool. And in fact, I guess this March, the Nationals fans got glimpses of James Wood and Dylan Cruz at the Nationals futures game. And now the future is now the future is here. They're, they're big leaguers, both of them now. And hitting home runs too. Okay. So yeah, it's a, I think a good practice, but probably in the right way to do it, but not always.

And then last follow up here, we also talked and stat blasted about Mike Kruko and his contention that catchers after August 1st rarely had infield hits, right? And we kind of fact checked that and found that there was no decline in the infield hit rate for catchers or for players overall in the last couple months of the season. And I was wondering, you know, why do broadcasters say things like this? Is it just that they have to fill the dead air or do they not realize that these things can be checked or are they extrapolating from their personal experience or what? And we were alerted by Twitter user at Roger Dorn's son to a recent conversation

on the Pirates radio broadcast between Joe Block and John Weiner. Weiner is a former player. And this was on August 25th after a sky high ball hit by none other than O'Neill Cruz to Santiago Espinall in the outfield. And this is about a two minute clip that is relevant to our discussion there because they talk about how the ability to just say things kind of off the cuff is different now.

So here are Block and Wehner. Carson's fires of the Reds delivers and Cruz skies it out to right field. It's been all underneath it. And one pitch and one out here in the 6th. No, yeah, he wasn't comfortable underneath it. I would argue. Might have been the highest pop up he's ever had to catch.

Being typically an infielder. I mean, as I watched that up from our perch, I saw, it went way above the UPMC building, center field. Way above it. The first one is in there for a strike to Cotter Joe. And as it went up there, I'm wondering if I ever seen one go up that high. And yeah, it's uncomfortable. You're just out there in the outfield

hoping you're in the right spot when it comes down. Pitch is lined to left, steer is over, he can't get there and it'll one hop into the seats. That's an automatic double for Connor Joe. There've only been five balls that have stayed in the air longer this season throughout baseball than that one right there by O'Neill Cruz.

Yeah. That was up there a long long time. What was the hang time? Seven point four seconds. Wow. Seven point eight is the longest this year.

So that was the. Six longest out of almost 100,000 balls hit in the air. I love how we can just quantify that immediately. And there's a strike. And I also love how you can see that and know that without me even having to press that button to look at it. You knew that right away.

Yeah, that was up there. So I used to, not that long ago, be able to just make things up. But now I can't anymore because then you can just look things up and say, no, you're wrong. Well, I don't have to dispute it. Well, I know that, but... I can wait till we get off the air. I try not to make things up. But you said that that is probably the highest fly ball that he's ever caught.

And I'm just validating that because that's one of the highest fly balls in baseball this season. So first of all, kudos to Block on coming up with that hang time data just on a moment's notice. I don't even know how he got that because I know you can scrape that info from baseball, Savant, but it's not publicly accessible really easily on a per play basis. So maybe broadcasters have some sort of backdoor, some way that they can get that info more easily, but he had that quickly. Yeah, it was lickety split. Yeah. So kudos to him. And also I think kudos to Weiner for A, picking up on a real thing here, as opposed to, I guess, the Kruko example, but also waxing philosophic about how he used

to be able to say these things because you couldn't check anyone on it. And now he kind of watches his words a little bit because you can check it. Although in this case, his words were accurate and I'm glad he said them. And I wouldn't want to discourage a former player from making an observation that might be interesting because they're worried about podcasters coming in and saying, fact check, not true, three Pinocchios or whatever. I was just saying, maybe couch it with some sort of uncertainty. Like, oh, I wonder if that was, and that's what he did basically here. He didn't make some kind of really bold declarative statement.

He was just like, that looked like a really high fly ball. And it was. Yeah. Maybe they have a producer. Maybe he had a little producer help. Probably. I guess so. Having awareness about these things and being able to adapt to a changing media landscape and look at that as just a thing that you have to do rather than being stubborn about it is, you know, if you're coming to broadcasting with that spirit, you're probably doing okay, you know? And it must be tough if you're Kruko who's, you know, played a long time ago now and has

been broadcasting for decades. And when he started, you weren't able to look these things up, right? Least of all quickly while you're on the air. And so you might have not only been used to being able to get away with things, but also knowing that you couldn't actually do the research. And so maybe you could state these things more declaratively because like there was no alternative, which is let me look this up first before I say that. So, yeah. All right. Well, now that we've talked about some stats,

let me finish with a few stops here. One we got a question from listener Shane who said, I was thinking about something while perusing Felix Hernandez's baseball reference page today. I grew up as a Mariners fan and remember well the game where Felix hit a grand slam off of Johan Santana in 2008, which I'm sure you recall as well. Looking at Felix's batting stats, I see that he wound up with four career hits, two singles, a double and that famous granny. I was surprised to see that Felix had 50 career at bats and a slash line of 080, 115, 160

with an OPS plus of negative 24. Don't we miss pitcher hitting? Weren't those the days? Especially American league pitcher hitting. That leads me to the question, has a player ever had that low a career OPS plus with as high a percentage of their hits being homers as Felix?

While he had only one homer and 50 at-bats, fully 25% of his career hits are homers. Just thought I'd throw this out there and see if Felix is some kind of special guy with that stat. Now, Felix was a special guy, but was he special because of this stat? So this is stat-headable. So I went to baseball reference

and I looked up combined seasons. So careers where home runs made up more than a fifth of hits and you had at least one hit and at least one homer and then sorted by ascending OPS plus so from lowest to highest so Felix is down there at negative 24 so that is tied for 12th lowest among players who fulfilled these specifications and as you might expect, these are all pitchers because pitchers are uniquely bad at hitting and also didn't have big hitting samples. And so we're able to rack up this many homers as a percentage of their hits while still being bad, et cetera. But Felix does

not take the cake in this category. He is not the most special guy. The most special guy is actually someone who could use probably other claims to fame because Felix is famous for other reasons. John Gant. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I don't know that I really remembered John Gant that clearly. I remember Ron Gant,

who was also a St. Louis Cardinal at a time, but John Gant, I vaguely remember John Gant. And who was also a St. Louis Cardinal at a time. But John Gantt, I vaguely remember John Gantt and he was fine. He was like a league average or a little better pitcher, like okay for a reliever for several years there, 2016 to 2021. He played mostly for the Cardinals, but also for the twins and the Braves. And so John Gantt had 68 plate appearances, 57 at bats. He had two hits in those 57 at bats. So that is just your standard 035, 035, 140 line.

Oh sure, yeah. He never walked either. So that is a 175 OPS with a negative 55 OPS plus. But the twist is that both of his hits were home runs. No way. Yeah. So the kid who only hits homers, I guess, and never hit anything else, he mostly didn't hit at all, but when he hit, he hit homers.

That's got to be a strange thing. It's like, I suck at hitting and yet the only times I have managed to record a hit, I have gotten the best possible kind of hit. That is, it's odd because like you have to have some amount of like strength and offensive prowess to hit a home run, like even one, you know? And so to be able to do it twice, but then not even luck into like a dribbler at some point that you've got to hit, like it's, I don't know, it's a little surprising. So I don't know whether I would be proud of that or embarrassed by it or what, but John Gant. John Gant. It is a

weird, how weird, how weird. It is really weird. Okay. I did look that up and I found an MLB.com story after he hit the second homer, and he hit them two weeks apart, actually. Homers come in bunches, as they say, or at least in twos. The first one snapped a homerless stretch that dated back to his high school days, and then the 411-foot second homer made him the only player in Major League history to hit at least two home runs while never having reached base safely by any other means. Probably atypical, I'd say, Gantz said, downplaying the history he had just made. I'm just trying to make contact, and contact was made tonight.

He was also the second player since 1920 to snap an 0-for-30 start to his career by homering, and he became the third pitcher since at least 1961 to Homer for his first two major league hits, along with Jim Rooker and Danny Graves. If you've got more than one, you're a power hitter, right? Jose Martinez said. I say if you hit one, you're lucky. If you hit two, you're a power hitter. I also stat-headed that John Gant and Nolan Fontana are the only guys to have two Homers but no other hits in their career. There's only one player who had three Homers and no other hits in his career. That's former Cardinals catcher Keith McDonald who played in eight games 2000 and 2001 11 played appearances went three for nine with three dingers and two walks and never played in the majors again

Which seems like a raw deal. So now we know John Gantt for that. Thanks for that question Shane and Then we have a question here that comes from Kelly who says, Ernie Clement hit an eye level pitch for a Jack on August 22nd, and the broadcast later claimed it was the highest pitch hit for a homer this season, but how did it rank historically and was it the farthest out of zone pitch hit for a homer? Finally, is this a talent? So I checked the first part about how the height of this pitch ranked historically, and we can go back only to 2008, which is when we have pitch tracking data and Baseball

Savant allows you to go back to 2008. And according to Baseball Savant, this was indeed the highest pitch hit for a homer this season But only the third highest pitch hit in the pitch tracking era so this pitch was 4.6 feet off the ground and If you haven't seen this clip I will send you the highlight and also link to it on the show page because it is a pretty impressive feet It's not an impressive feat of pitch selection, but when he did decide to

swing at this pitch, I mean, that pitch, if it was really 4.6 feet off the ground, then I guess it wasn't actually head high, but it was, it was shoulder high, like legitimately shoulder high. The catcher who was setting a target already up in the zone had to kind of get up even higher and then reach way above the zone. And I mean, that is a high pitch. This was, I know this was off big Mike Bowman who, gosh, maybe we should try to talk to him if he even wants to talk about it, but he has been.

I would not if I were him. Yeah. He's, he's been doing the Oliver Drake, just dreaming all over the league. He's on his, he's on his what fifth major league organization this season, I think. The, the non-fangrafts Mike Bauman, but yeah, this, this was a pitch that he threw when he was still on the angels. He's now on the Marlins, but this is just really kind of incredible. And this is a, a 97 mile per hour fastball too. So like, is this impressive to you or not impressive?

Cause like, Hey, why are you swinging at that pitch? Yeah. Look, I think it can be, you know, it depends what moment of the, of the home run you're in, right? So like the swing decision, terrible, like really quite poor, everything after that, amazing. I would, I would offer, I don't know how I feel about these, terrible, like really quite poor. Everything after that, amazing. I would offer, I don't know how I feel about these sports net graphics that they put on, they superimpose over the field

for home run, but yeah, really poor swing decision, really excellent result. He's just a skinny little guy, isn't he? Right, he's not a big guy, but I think he's listed at six, one, is that right? Is that think he's listed at six one. Is that right? Is that what he's listed at, Ben? Is that his listed height? Sorry, I misspoke. He's listed at six feet, which is maybe even more suspicious. So he's 5'10", is what you're saying. He might be.

But I don't want to impugn Ernie, but I'm just saying. That only makes this more impressive because it was so high relative to his height. So yeah, it's like, why swing at that? I guess, unless you know that you have the ability to hit a home run on that pitch, but I can't imagine that's that repeatable really. But it is impressive, I guess, to get the bat head out and to be able to put a power swing on that ball that's up at your shoulder on a 97 mile per hour pitch. So yeah, anyway, this is the third highest pitch hit for a homer according to baseball savant.

The thing is though, that the number one listed pitch here is a Jason Kubel homer from August 2009, which says 5.07 feet. And that is such an outlier that I didn't really believe it. And fortunately this game is on YouTube and I was able to watch this clip and that is definitely a data error because it was not, it was not a notably high pitch. So that's just wrong,

which again makes Ernie Clement look more impressive. And then the second highest pitch hit for a homer was by Kyle Hagashioka in 2022, June 12th, and this was 4.61 feet off the ground. So 4.61 versus 4.6, essentially the same. Hagashioka is listed at six foot one, which who knows, but if he's even an inch taller than Clement, I guess, relatively speaking, this pitch would have been lower for him than for Clement. And here's the other thing.

Once I watched this pitch, the pitcher for the Sagashioka Homer was Frank Schwindell and it was a 35.1 mile per hour pitch. So it was a position player pitcher, EFAS. Yeah, which I guess means you have to supply more of the power yourself because the pitch is so slow, but also it's a lot easier to hit a 35 mile per hour high pitch than a 97 mile per hour high pitch. So when you actually dig into the two higher entries

on the leaderboard, they're both illegitimate, I would say for various reasonsimate, I would say, for various reasons. So I would say that this Ernie Clement homer is in fact the highest legitimate pitch from a legitimate pitcher hit for a home run in the pitch tracking era. So this is really impressive. The more you know. What's with all the little guys being the ones that do that?

That's funny. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe they have like Napoleon complex. It's like, I'm not short. I could swing at this pitch way up there. Look at me. Ernie Clement's going to be like, you're attributing like weird pathology to me and you're saying

that I'm lying about my height. What did I ever do to effectively wild? Although you are being nicer to me than you were to literally Paul Goldschmidt at the top of the hour. So that's true. And we're also praising his high pitch hitting ability. So there's that. We did basically say that his pitch selection is dog. But yes.

And also I'm about to in this next part of the staff last denigrate his high pitch hitting ability. So I'm going to take even that away from him. But here's the thing. This is like kind of a combined stat blast and meet a major leaguer, which might be unprecedented. I don't know that this has ever happened before

because we have a stat blast that concerns someone making his major league debut. So it's kind of a two in one. So I don't know if you saw this, but there is a new major leaguer, yet another pitcher on the angels who just made his major league debut named Ryan Zephyrjohn. Interesting last name, but I don't know that I would have selected him for this segment otherwise because his baseball backstory,

I'm sure he's an interesting guy. Everyone is interesting if you get to know them, but based on publicly available information, it's not one of these like miraculous journeys to the majors that we usually highlight here, right? And Ryan Zephyrjohn, he is 26 years old. He's from Topeka, Kansas. He's a Jayhawk, University of Kansas. He's like the 27th Jayhawk to make the majors or something. He was a third round draftee in 2019. He was recently ranked number 48 on TopSports.News's list of the top 100 athletes in Shawnee County, Kansas history. So he's got that going for him, which is nice. Hopefully he'll climb that list now. So he's not young. He's not

old. He isn't really remarkable in any baseball way. I mean, again, I'm sure there is some way in which he's remarkable. It's just not immediately publicly obvious. But he was kind of past the point of being a prospect really, but also not far enough past that point that it's that notable that he made the majors, right? So there was a story when he was with Worcester in the Red Sox organization this May where he talked about this being a big year for him and that he doesn't consider himself a prospect.

And so he came into this year, best shape of his life, lost approximately eight to 10 pounds by dieting, hitting the weight room hard. He has a better weight on him now. He cut out snacks and junk food. He ate meals of smaller portions because he knew that it was gonna be a big year and he had to show out. He said, I'm 26 now,

which is not necessarily old for baseball, but in the minor leagues, people think it's old. But honestly, this is the best I've ever felt. So again, best shape of his life. And he's been hurt every year coming up, he says, just knick-knack injuries that kind of set me back on what I could really show this year, my body's in a better place, I'm going to show what I really have. I know that I've done that I've put in the work, et cetera.

Right. And so he was traded from the Red Sox to the angels in the Luis Garcia, one of the Luis Garcia's trade at the deadline this year. And he said, the biggest thing for me was getting in the zone with my stuff. I've always had the quote unquote nasty stuff, but when it's not in the zone, it's not nasty. And he said he's gotten better mentally at being able to throw strikes and he's helped his mechanics, et cetera, et cetera. So he comes up, he makes his major league debut

and who is he facing but Ernie Clement, okay? But the notable thing is that he replaced Matt Moore with a 2-2 count. Oh. Yes, so Ryan Zephyrjohn made his major league debut in a mid-plate appearance pitching change. Weird, how weird. Very weird. The trainer came out to look at Matt Moore, his major league debut in a mid plate appearance pitching change. Weird. How weird.

Very weird. The trainer came out to look at Matt Moore. He left the game. He later went on the IL with a forearm strain and Zephyr John was already warming. And so they just brought him in a little early with a two count. And they're going to make a move. So rookie Ryan Zephyr John is set to make his major league debut. Contract was selected prior to Friday's game.

Grabbing a big league pitch comp device for the first time in his career. And here we go, a pitching change. Be right back. He inherits the 2-2 count left behind by Matt Moore, so two balls and two strikes to Ernie Clement. A two run homer by Alejandro Kirk, making it a taller order and a swing and a miss. And guess what? Ryan Zephyr-John gets the strike out there.

Yes he does. He had two free strikes left behind. And he can tell his kids someday, I struck out my first big league hitter. Yes. And we got a question from Patreon supporter, Mike, who said, did you ever look up how many players have ever recorded a one pitch strikeout as their first strikeout? Not even sure how that would be researched. Well, you asked Ryan Nelson, frequent ZAP plus correspondent, find him on Twitter, arsnelson23. That is what in fact happened.

He came in with a two, two count, Ernie Clement was up and Zephyr John, who can dial it up to triple digits through a high heat fastball to Clement. Clement chased and this one he whiffed on. He did not hit a home run on this high pitch. He went down swinging and Zephyr John had a one pitch strikeout for his first ever strikeout

and his first ever pitch. And so this made him dear to my heart because I love a mid plate appearance pitching change. Obviously this wasn't strategy. This was not a tactical decision. It was just an injury replacement. Nonetheless, I think it's cool because it illustrates the possible benefits of the mid plate appearance pitching change to the defensive team. You have the hitter back on their heels, they're down in the count, and you just have to throw

one pitch from a new arm angle, new look, and just blow them away. And that's what happened here. So I asked Ryan if he could look this up, and I wasn't sure he could because I knew from past experience that retro sheet doesn't actually break out partial plate appearances in the pitch count when there's a change. It's happened so rarely that data providers don't even account for this always and don't always track what the count was and attribute the pitches to each individual pitcher. However, Ryan came up with a clever workaround where he was able to look this up anyway. He found all instances where two pitchers face the same batter in the same game with the same number of outs and runs.

And then the pitch sequence for the first guy only shows the pitches he threw and the pitch sequence for the second guy shows the whole plate appearance. So if you remove what the first guy did, then you can find out what the second guy did and do some cleanup. So he had to do this indirect route to end up with this data, but he got it. And based on what he found, of course, we have pitch by pitch data going back to 1988. And since then he determined this was the third time on record that a pitcher has made their MLB debut in the middle of a plate appearance. Wow. Yeah.

And the other two were Vance Lovelace, which just sounds like, yeah, another great name. That sounds like a soap opera star or something. Yeah, yeah. Vance Lovelace, September 10th, 1988, came in on a 1-0 count in the 17th inning and faced only the one batter whom he walked. And then Chin Wei Hu, April 24th, 2017, came in with a one-one count in the eighth inning through four more pitches and got the ground out.

So it's the third time that a pitcher has debuted mid-plate appearance, first time that a pitcher has gotten a strikeout in that situation, much less on the first pitch. And he did look to see if a pitcher has ever done that, regardless of MLB debut status. And he finds that 945 all-time mid-plate appearance pitching changes, including those that happened due to entry, which would, I think, be the vast majority of them.

We have pitch count data for 346 of those. And of those, he found nine plate appearances where the pitcher came in and threw one pitch to get a strike out. And I will link to those if anyone's curious. I guess that doesn't count the one that the Dodgers did on purpose earlier this year that we highlighted, but that is not unprecedented. But what happened to Ryan Zephyrjohn here, that is in fact unprecedented to get your first K in a mid-plate appearance pitching change, though he is not the first pitcher

to make his major league debut in the middle of a plate appearance. I'm so glad. I mean, I'm not glad there was an injury, but I was about to get haughty on someone's behalf being like, you're doing strategy in this kid's debut, but like if he was just going to come in and he was warming and then there was an injury. Like that's, that's fine. Um, but I was going to say that's madness really. Um, but now I, now I understand Ben, it's not madness. In fact, it's fine. You know, what is weird though is how it's credited, how the rules decide whether the strikeout or whatever the outcome of that, that plate appearance is credited to the pitcher

in that spot. It's like who gets credit for having done that thing, right? When you kind of teamed up, it's a tandem effort on that single plate appearance. And from what I can tell, you'll never believe this, but it seems to me that the rule book is quite inconsistent on this point. I know that from your perusing of the rule book, like the rules are not always sensible or even internally consistent. And this seems like a low stakes instance of it not really making sense to me how the credit is apportioned here. So Zephyrjan gets credit for the strikeout

though, even though he threw only one pitch, right? And it does not go to Matt Moore. The weird thing is here, there's like a long comment on this rule, rule 9.16H in the official MLB rule book, and it specifies how you're supposed to score this. So, a relief pitcher shall not be held accountable when the first batter to whom he pitches reaches first base on four called balls. If such batter has a decided advantage in the ball and strike count when pitchers are changed. So if, yeah, they really like went into detail here and got granular and yet seemingly reached

different conclusions. So it's like, if when pitchers are changed, the count is two and O, two and one, three and O, three and one or three and two, and the batter gets a base on balls, the official score shall charge that batter and the base on balls to the preceding pitcher, not to the relief pitcher. So basically, if the original pitcher

leaves the relief pitcher at a disadvantage in the count, then if the new pitcher walks the guy, then the walk gets credited to the original pitcher. Okay. Which seems fair enough, I suppose, except that we continue here, any other action by such batter, such as reaching base on a hit, an error, a fielder's choice, a force out, or being touched by a pitch ball, shall cause such a batter to be charged to the relief pitcher. So anything other than a walk, it is charged to the new pitcher?

Yeah. I mean, if you're going to saddle the new pitcher with anything other than a walk, then why is a walk kind of the carve out for this? Because Ben, I can tell you why. I can tell you why. Because fundamentally we view walks as charity, not as work. That's why, right? Like it's, it is a failing that has to accrue to the pitcher who did the bulk of the charity.

That's why, you know, whereas like giving up a hit, you could come in with a completely clean count and give up a hit on the first pitch, right? But to have walked a guy, to have walked him, you've done this bad work before, you've engaged in this nonsense and you must suffer consequences for it. That's, I think the way to view it as sort of having a consistent internal theory. We really, we really hate walks, you know? Yeah, there's definitely an anti BB bias. Yes, it is. It is strong. It is one of the most consistent things in the MLB rule book is how much we hate it when a pitcher walks a guy. We hate it. And we view it so much more as a failing on the part of the pitcher than it is any positive

bit of anything on the hitter's side. And I, oh no, I got all worked up. This is an area where I get it. And there are a lot of times when it, that is correct. It is correct to view it as a failure on the part of the pitcher. They have, they've gotten into a bad way and it's their fault. But also, I, you know, sometimes guys, they work those walks and we should, they should, and I know that they get credit, right? Because it's reflected in their own base percentage. So it's not as if there's nothing, but we should be more, it's not always charity, you know? I'm all, I'm all worked up and, and what's wrong with charity anyway, Ben's not always charity, you know? I'm all worked up. And what's wrong with charity anyway, Ben?

We like charity. That's a good human instinct, charity. I feel we have to punish it, but I'm, wow, I didn't expect to get to this place, but it happened so fast. And there's been a kind of corrective to this in the popular perception post-Moneyball, but it's not really reflected in the rule book, I guess.

But the thing is, there's another condition to this in the popular perception post-Moneyball, but it's not really reflected in the rule book, I guess. But the thing is there's another condition to this rule so that if when pitchers are changed the count is two and two, one and two, one and one, one and oh, oh and two or oh and one, the official score shall charge that batter and the actions of that batter to the relief pitcher. So again, it's a weird thing where the original pitcher gets saddled with that walk after leaving the reliever at a disadvantage, walk-wise, right? So if you leave the pitcher behind in the count

and he walks, the new pitcher walks the guy, then the original pitcher is charged with the walk. However, if you leave the relief pitcher with an advantage in the count and then he finishes off that batter for a strikeout, then the new guy gets credit for the strikeout. What's up with that? Like if you're going to charge the original guy with a walk, then why would you not also give him credit for the strikeout if he did most of the work?

You have me there. That part of it, I think is, that part of it is not internally consistent. And here's the other thing that gets my goat to make matters weirder with pinch hitters. So I'm reading from Wikipedia here, batters will not be charged in at bat if their plate appearances end under the following circumstances. And one is being replaced by another hitter before their at bat is completed, in which case the plate appearance, lots of at bat plate appearance switching here, the plate appearance and any related statistics go to the pinch hitter unless they are replaced with two strikes and their replacement completes a strikeout, in which case the at bat and

strikeout are charged to the first batter. So if a batter comes in with two strikes and strikes out, he doesn't get charged to the first batter. So if a batter comes in with two strikes and strikes out, he doesn't get charged with the strikeout. Whereas if a pitcher comes in with two strikes and gets the strikeout, then he gets credit for the strikeout. So it seems like the pitcher rule is not only kind of inconsistent with itself,

but inconsistent with the batter rule. So if I'm reading this right, if there's a pitching change on a two-two count, let's say, let's say that it happened here. Let's say that Zephyr John replaced Matt Moore and the opposing team decided to pinch hit to face Zephyr John for whatever reason. Okay, so you've got a new pitcher

and a new batter on a two-two count. And then the new pinch hitter strikes out. The new pitcher would get that strike out, but the new hitter wouldn't. It would be charged to the new pitcher and the old batter. How does this make sense? Not that that happens really, but if it did, why? Why would that happen? It doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah. That's quite odd. Yeah. Yeah. Really? Yeah.

I love how we both got just so worked up. Yeah. We just were like, hmm. It's not a high priority change, but somewhere on the list of maybe this should be revised is this. It also always leads to a lot of confusion about who is credited with what or charged with what. I can never really remember.

I always have to remind myself. You've got to look at the role. Yeah. And now it's because I realized, why would I remember? Why would you then? Because it doesn't even make any sense. So, all right. Right. I mean, if it makes us both this angry,

I guess that is an argument that we should remember because we're so worked up, but. Maybe so. And by the way, Zephyr John, we wish him well. He ended up getting hit hard, I think, in the rest of that outing, but then had a subsequent okay outing. And I guess he's right about not being a prospect anymore because according to Eric Long and Higgins top 47 Red Sox prospects

list, he was not ranked in the 47. He was mentioned as Velo only. Yeah, he was an honorable mention. He could throw hard, but that's pretty much it. And that was recently, that was just last month. So not that much has changed since then, I guess. Zephyr John. Yeah, this is not a full Me Too Major League or segment, but also did just want to shout out that two other guys who debuted, one guy who debuted, we were informed of this by listener Bob Heening,

who is Jeff Criswell, who's a new Rockies reliever. Not to be confused with the former NFL offensive lineman is Jeff Criswell who's a new Rockies reliever. Not to be confused with the former NFL offensive lineman Jeff Criswell or the current Georgia congressional candidate Jeff Criswell, this is the one Eric Langenhagen ranked as the Rockies 39th best prospect back in April. Called him a multi-inning reliever and an up and down guy and right now he's up. Although up and down is a good description of his performance in the two games I'm about to tell you about. Again, I don't know that I would have selected him for a full media major leaguer segment either, but the way that he debuted is actually quite interesting,

because in his second outing as a major leaguer, he faced the Yankees, and then he faced the Yankees in his third outing as well. And those outings could not have gone more differently, even though he faced the same hitters, right? So he comes in August 23rd against the Yankees, facing Gleyber Torres. He strikes out Torres looking. And then in the next inning,

he sets down Soto, Judge, and Stanton on nine pitches. So he got Soto to ground out, he got Judge to pop out, and then he struck out Stanton swinging. So he's gotta be to ground out, he got Judge to pop out, and then he struck out Stanton's swinging. So he's got to be feeling himself at that point, right? Four up, four down, just works through Soto, Judge, and Stanton, the modern day murderers row in nine pitches. Okay. He comes back two days later, August 25th, he's still facing the Yankees, comes in against Gleiber Torres again, gets Torres to ground out. Okay, so far so good, right? Soto, home run. Aaron Judge, home run. John Carlos Stanton, home run. So back to back to back, or as we have called it, back to back to belly, home runs against those

three guys. And to his credit, Criswell stayed in and got jazz chism to ground out and then struck out Anthony Volpe. But still, what a difference in results. How are you feeling about yourself after one day you get through Soto, Judge, and Stanton? No problem. And then the next day, all three of them tag you with diggers. That's got to be a rude awakening, I would imagine. That's baseball, Susan, you know? That is, that is baseball. Jeff Criswell, 25 year old from Michigan, a second round draftee in 2020,

right-handed thrower, 6'4". Welcome to the majors, Jeff Criswell. And had a nice welcome initially. And then boy, couldn't have gone more differently. Also, did you know that Brady Feigl is in the big leagues now? What? And yeah, and you might say which Brady Feigl, that would be a good question, a natural question to ask. This is the new Drew Maggi, basically, a 33 year old promoted by the Pirates. And if anyone knows Brady Feigl's name,

it's probably because he and the other Brady Feigl went viral five years ago. I didn't realize how long ago it was, 2019. And it's odd because the AP story about Brady Feigl's debut as a pirate to lever as at a 33 year old doesn't even mention the fact that he was like mega viral five years ago for having a lookalike Brady Feigl in another organization. These two guys looked identical and were the same height and both like redheads and maybe both wearing like goggles went a long way to making them look alike. But also they had like

the same facial hair and the same color facial hair and like similar age and same height and were not related as far as they knew, same first and last names, but had never met another person with their surname beyond their families, and both were pitchers, and both had had Tommy John surgery performed by the same doctor, right? Like this is a big story, and they did interviews, and then they later took DNA tests

to see if they were related, and they were not, but they both had 53% Germanic ancestry, right? Anyway, one of the Brady Fiegels, actually the older one is now a big leaguer and debuted for the Pirates at 33 and it did not go great. He gave up six runs in an inning and two thirds, but he is a classic meter major leaguer guy because he signed as an undrafted amateur free

agent with the Braves in 2014, made it to the major leagues. Ten years later, he said his body was kind of shaking. He was telling himself, don't air mail it or spike it. And he, you know, he's been through every like Tommy John and pitched for the independent leagues, you know, Atlantic league for a few years, pitch for the Lexington legends when they were briefly the Lexington counter clocks. That was their name for one season in 2023. Like count count, I'm counting one, two, three or counter clocks like this clock's upside

down. The later, the latter. Yes. Counter clocks like apparently they were named the counter clocks. They were rebranded for 2023 because of horse racing industry ties in Lexington, Kentucky. And traditionally horses in England raced around a grass track in a clockwise direction. However, declaring independence from the British way, early Kentuckians began to race their horses in the opposite direction, counterclockwise and on dirt. So they were the counter clocks for one year and they had a logo where their batter

was somehow facing backward on a horse for some reason. Anyway, if they really wanted to do something original, they could have run the bases clockwise, which is a hypothetical we have contemplated in the past. Nothing unusual about running counterclockwise in baseball, but they quickly had a change in ownership and went back to being the Lexington legends. The point is that Brady Feigl had quite a journey to the big leagues.

And that made me wonder what happened to the other Brady Feigl, right? Because there were Brady's Feigl and the other one, the younger Brady Feigl, only 28 years old, just recently retired. And he tweeted and Instagrammed this late April, it's time to say goodbye to the game of baseball due to an injury. I've decided to retire and he had some sort of arm injury and he has started up a training facility of his own in Columbia, South Carolina called RED, I guess after his hair color, which stands for rotational efficiency development. So he gives advanced private and group pitching lessons, the other Brady Feigl. So it's kind of like a road not taken, two roads diverged, you know, one Brady Feigl makes it belatedly finally, and the other Brady Feigl doesn't make it. So this is kind of a sign of, you know, how careers can go.

Some guys make it, some guys don't. And some Brady Feigls make it, some guys don't, and some Brady's Fiegels make it to Brady's Feigel, and others don't. So it's, I'm glad one of them made it, you know, I guess one out of two, 50% success rate for Brady Feigel. That's not that bad. It's not that bad. Okay, Meg had to go to deal with the utility guy,

like a person from the power company, not a person who plays multiple positions, but I have one last blast. And this was prompted by a recent edition of the Joshian newsletter, which you hear me talk about often. I read it religiously. I don't always agree, but it always makes me think. Check it out, Joshian.com.

And Joe wrote a recent entry with the provocative title, Collapse. This was published on August 23rd. And Joe wrote, six days ago, we were having a perfectly normal August. But then he noted, offense cratered in what he called an incredible anomaly. First week of April offense in August. So he looked at the 6 day periods from July 30th to August 4th, August 5th to August 10th, and August 11th to 16th, and the runs per game figure for each of those periods was 9.3.

The WRC pluses were 104, 108, and 108. But then from August 17th to August 22nd, 7.6 runs per game. 91 WRC plus. So suddenly scoring plummeted. Joe noted that results on barreled balls had declined, actual stats were falling short of expected stats. It could just be a weird week, he wrote.

I can't help but think something's up though. So how weird was it and is something up? How odd is it for offense over 6 days to suddenly sink like that? How suspicious and conspiracy minded should we be if we see an offensive outage? I put this question to Ryan Nelson. He said I used OPS Plus because it's much easier than WRC Plus to calculate manually. I also didn't park adjust but I think that's okay since we're looking across the entire league.

So to set a baseline, only 5% of 6-day periods of any given season in the 30-team era have an OPS plus of 91 or lower. So even having one that low is a little bizarre. Only 1.6% of 6-day periods had a change of plus or minus 17 points of OPS from the previous 6-day period. If you average the WRC pluses from the previous three 6 day periods in Xi'an's newsletter, it comes out to 106.7. If we act conservatively and say 106, that would be a 15 point drop in the 6 day period when compared to the previous 18 days. Only 1.4% of the 6 day periods in the

sample have an equivalent or larger swing in either direction. And if we look at runs per game, only 2.2% of periods had a change of plus or minus 1.7 runs from one period to the next. So yes, this is unusual. So far, supporting Joe's thesis. Seems like something is up. However, Ryan continues, every single year since 1998, except three, 2008, 2012, and 2014, has had at least one runs per game swing of this magnitude, either up or down. And every year since 1998, except three, 2005, 2007, and 2008, also had at least one runs per game swing of this magnitude, either up or down. And every year since 1998 except 3, 2005, 2007, and 2008 also had at least one OPS plus swing of this magnitude either up or down. So it doesn't happen often, but we're good for at least one every year or so. Seems mostly random to me. Ryan notes there's probably no correlation

by time of year. I think it's just a thing that happens. Cause the thing is, even though this is rare on a percentage basis, there are a lot of 6 day periods in a season. This regular season is 185 days long, and Ryan iterated it day by day. So May 1st through May 6th, May 2nd through May 7th, May 3rd through May 8th, etc. And then it would compare against the previous periods also day by day. And it only counts days with games. And by the way, Ryan threw out the first three 6 day periods of each season, aside from using them to compare the fourth 6 day period to. So even though it's infrequent, given the number of 6 day periods we have over the course of a season, it does usually happen at some point, that there is some wild fluctuation

one way or another. Okay, so easy for us to dismiss this as a blip based on that, but what has happened since Joe's newsletter? There have been six days of games. So what happened from August 23rd to August 28th? Well, wouldn't you know it? Runs per game went back up to 9.5 and the WRC plus went up to 107.

Essentially exactly where it was in the preceding three six day periods. So it actually doesn't seem that something's up. Now I don't know why these wild swings happen. Unusual weather, a deader distribution of balls, unusually good defense or bad luck for hitters, just pure randomness, but the fact is that they do happen and they don't necessarily mean anything. So I think it was perceptive of Joe to notice this blip, but as he would be the first to tell you, variance swamps everything. I just wanted to check this because I think we're hypersensitive to this sort of

thing these days after all of the changes to the ball intended and unintended and the way that MLB insisted that nothing was going on with the ball when it clearly was. And because we have these incredibly sensitive batted ball stats now, we can get granular with these things in a way that it would have been tough to do previously. We are perhaps overly attuned to these things and we tend to overreact to one weird looking batted ball or some especially high or low scoring period. These things

do happen for no apparent reason and in no lasting way, but obviously offense sometimes has gone up or down markedly and I guess it's better to flag some spikes or sudden drop-offs that end up not being sustained if it means that we're less likely to miss the next one that actually is signal and not noise. But yeah, any given week of baseball is more noise than signal. Congrats to Rich Hill on making his season debut. A flawless relief appearance, 4-up, 4-down, 2-strike-outs, still got it. And also thanks to Patreon supporter and effectively wild wiki keeper Raymond Chen for responding

to my musing on our last episode with Kenny Jaceline about that game that was suspended after four pitches. Garrett Crochet threw those pitches but did not get an out and then did not come back when the game was resumed and I wondered would that be allowed? Given that rule 5.10f says the pitcher named in the batting order handed the umpire in chief shall pitch to the first batter or any substitute batter until such batter is put out or reaches first base, unless the pitcher sustains injury or illness, which in the judgement of the umpire in chief incapacitates him from pitching. I guess you could say that the suspended game situation incapacitated a pitcher from pitching. But Raymond brought to my attention the comment on Rule 7.02C which says,

If immediately prior to the call of a suspended game a pitcher has not pitched to a minimum of three consecutive batters in accordance with rule 510G, such pitcher when the suspended game is later resumed may, but is not required to, start the resumed portion of the game. However, if he does start the resumed portion of the game he shall have to complete pitching to his first three consecutive batters, and if he does not start upon resumption of the game he will be considered as having been substituted for and may not be used again in that game. So that seems to settle that. And of course all of this is superseded by an even more ironclad rule, which is that whoever starts, the White Sox will lose. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon, as we implored you to do earlier, by going

to Patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. The following five listeners have already pledged some monthier yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks. Brian Austin, Eric D, Thomas Matera, Josh Rodriguez, and Mary Kate, thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, discounts on merch and ad-free fan crafts, memberships, and so much more, including prioritized email answers. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms.

That helps us to spread the word. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild, and you can check the show page and the episode description in your podcast app. Not only for links to our sources for this episode, but also for information on upcoming Effectively Wild listener meetups at MLB Ballparks. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with our last episode of the week soon.

Talk to you then. Thanks for watching!