Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2214: Don’t Bean Me, Bro

Episode Date: September 7, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the impressiveness of a prediction by Carlos Estévez, how to say the score from the losing team’s perspective, and getting hit in the head by a hot dog. Then (23:13) they discuss getting hit in the head (or the hands) by a baseball: how often it happens, how […]

Should we use defensive runs saved? Or follow the OAA way? Who's gone where in? With their quips and opinions? It's effectively wild. Effectively wild. Effectively wild. Effectively Wild, a fan graphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raulia, fan graphs, and I'm joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Okay. We received another submission in our, is this player prediction impressive genre?

And this one, it made me think, it made me at least consider whether I was impressed by this. So this was sent to us by listener John, and it comes from Alex Coffee of the Philadelphia Inquirer who just wrote an article the other day about Carlos Estevez. And the article starts with this anecdote from a few years ago, which mentions a prediction Estevez meant then. So here's the lead. Almost exactly three years ago,

on September 12th, 2021, Carlos Estevez was warming up in the visitor's bullpen with the Rockies at Citizens Bank Park when he saw a silver projectile whizzing toward his head. After it hit him, he realized what it was. It was a hot dog, Estevez said. I got smoked. I was like, was that a weenie?

This place is insane. Weenie, a weenie. He did not actually predict that he would be hit by a hot dog, though that would be pretty impressive too. The anecdote continues, Estevez hadn't exactly endeared himself to the locals. A few days before he was struck by cased meat, some fans overheard him talking to bullpen catcher,

Aaron Munoz. It was September 9th, so this was a few days before the cased meat hot dog incident, and the Rockies were down two to one to the Phillies entering the ninth inning. Now, Estevez is a Philly now, and he was a Rocky then, to make clear to everyone. That's why this story is being told. There was no guarantee Estevez is a Philly now and he was a rocky then to make clear to everyone. That's why this story is being told. There was no guarantee Estevez would pitch, but he told Munoz

to start catching him anyway. Then he loudly made a prediction. I'm coming into the game, he said, because they're going to throw a curve ball and Ryan McMahon is going to hit a homer. Sure enough, Ian Kennedy threw McMahon a knuckle curve, which Mcmahon launched to right field for a two run home run. Sam Hilliard hit a home run in the next at bat to give the Rockies a four to two lead. And then indeed Carlos Estevez came into the game.

So again, to recap here, September 9th, 2021, it's the top of the ninth, the Rockies are batting behind two to one. Do you do two to one or one to two? Do you do a one to two if you're saying behind one to two? Would you do that? I don't think I do that. I don't know.

Now I don't know. I feel like thinking about it has made what I actually do completely exit my body. Ben, I have no idea. If I'm playing table tennis or something and I'm like serving nine or something, I would say that, but I think in baseball, I would say behind one to two. I think I would say behind two to one,

even if I'm talking about the team that's currently behind. I don't know. I don't, oh my gosh, I don't know. I've forgotten how to speak at all. Quite a crisis. I didn't mean to I don't, oh my gosh, I don't know. I've forgotten how to speak at all. Quite a crisis. I didn't mean to put you on the spot here. Yeah, I don't know how to braid my hair anymore. This is a high stakes question.

Well, it's just, you know, we've talked about this before. You do things every day in your life and then you think about those routine things and all of a sudden you're as a baby. You're as a dumb little baby and you don't know what you did or how you do it. And what do I say? I would probably say they were down one to two. I wouldn't say they were down two to one, that doesn't make sense. I think they would though. You think you would?

I think I would say down two to one. I think that I would say that they were down one to two to the Phillies or whatever this score. Oh boy, this is going to be another batting around. No, don't, don't, no, no, no, don't make it like that because I'm not expressing conviction. I'm expressing consternation. I don't have a functional refrigerator, Ben, and also the microwave is still broken and now you're asking me to, I don't know what I say.

What's my name even? What episode is this? Oh my God, I've fallen apart. 2214, if that helps, but it probably doesn't. No, it doesn't. Well, we're going to get emails. Look, I'm not requesting emails, but I'm also not prohibiting emails. No, I'm not either.

I'm not requesting emails, but I'm also not prohibiting emails. No, I'm not either. I'm not either. And you know what? I would even go so far as to say the following, that I am sure that in the course of us having done this podcast, that I have said a version of this. And if anyone knows what I say. Yes, they're going to get the receipts all the times that you mentioned the team was trailing. I'm asking for receipts.

I'd like receipts because I don't know. Yeah, you're questioning everything. I didn't expect to feel so out of... Thrown into a tizzy. Yeah, I'm like having a crisis over here and I didn't plan on it, but here I am. I'm having a... Anyway. I suggest that I would still say down two to one, but I welcome input amicus briefs can be filed before the court.

Okay. So we got sidetracked. We went down a pedantic sidetrack there. Very important question. It went down to existential crisis sidetrack. The question about player prediction importance. But the point is the Rockies were trailing and so Par and so they were down one run. We can say that safely. You know what? That's probably, that's probably what I would say because that,

that's the relevant thing here. Isn't it? The margin, the margin by which they are trailing. It doesn't really matter whether it was one to two, two to one or two to three, three to two. I mean, it matters in so far as it tells you something about the kind of game that the folks there just watched. Right. Yes. But in terms of the question of would a home run in this instance, how would it change the score?

Right. You really only need to know the margin. Right. And would a closer who wouldn't come into the game if his team is trailing, would he be moved to warm up? Okay. Right. And would a closer who wouldn't come into the game, if his team is trailing, would he be moved to warm up? Okay. So we will return to this anecdote, which this did somehow pertain to, but the point is the Rockies were behind by one run in the ninth and thus it was not a safe situation for Estevez. He didn't have to be getting ready for the bottom of the ninth, but he took it

upon himself to get ready because he was so convinced that Ryan McMahon was going to get a curve ball and he was going to hit a home run and then the game would be extended and the Rockies would need a pitcher against the Phillies in the bottom of the ninth. Now, what makes this impressive as Jonathan, our listener and emailer said, I'd give him extra credit for not only making a specific prediction, but being so confident in it that he started to warm up, right?

Some skin in the game there, because you're sacrificing something. I don't know exactly what in terms of fatigue, but teams always say, like, you get up and down, you warm up and you get cold again, like it extracts some sort of cost, it takes some toll or it's believed to. LS.

We've talked about this on the pod. I mean, not you and I, but you and Sam talked about the concept of warming them up and putting them away. What? If I recall. That's the verbiage that you all were interested in. Yeah. CB.

Yeah. And objects at rest remain at rest, right? Naturally speaking. And Croesus Devas could have remained at rest and he opted not to. So he really had his convictions and he went to warm up or so he says. Now what would make this particularly impressive, I think is not just that, but also that he predicted a specific pitch type.

Granted, I guess he knew Ian Kennedy would be pitching and might be certain likelihood to throw a curve, but he must have checked the scouting report for Ryan McMahon and known that he had a strength for curve balls or that Kennedy had a weakness for curve balls or something. What makes this even more impressive that I don't think the story or our email are mentioned

is that Ryan McMahon was not in the lineup at the time. Ryan McMahon pinch hit for Jonathan Daza who was playing center field lineup at the time. Ryan McMahon pinch hit for Yonathan Daza who was playing center field and batting seventh. And so in order for this prediction to be made, then Estevez would have had to think along with the opposing manager and say, would I pinch hit for Daza here, right? And he also had to predict that McMahon would get up.

McMahon was up fourth. He pinch hit for the fourth batter in the inning. So CJ Crone struck out, Lias Diaz flew out, and then Colton Welker singled to extend the inning. And so all of these things proceeded as Carlos Estevez foresaw, supposedly, right? And then after Ryan McMahon homered off the curve ball, then Sam Hilliard also homered and that put the Phillies ahead. And then the inning continued, there was no further scoring. And so the bottom of the ninth started with the Phillies,

let's just say trailing by two to avoid any consternation here. And Carlos Estevez came in and he got the save. It wasn't a clean save. It went ground out, single, double run scoring ground out, and then a strikeout swinging of pinch hitter, JT Rio Muto. Okay. Save earned.

So is that impressive to you? Just the number of things that had to happen in order for that Carlos Estevez prediction to come true. And also the fact that he acted on the prediction. It wasn't just an idol. I'm just going to throw that out here because I'm bored in the bullpen or on the bench and what the hell, I'll just predict that this thing will happen. No, he actually took action. I do find it impressive, although I feel like I'm missing something because it sounds like you decided no, actually not impressive. I think the number of things that he has to get

right and then to your point, him being like, look, I'm going to be needed here. I really think I'm going to be right about this. Let me put my, you know, proverbial money where my mouth is or, you know, my shoulder where my mouth is. That would be weird. You'd look kind of funny if your shoulder was where your mouth is. But of these sorts of things, this one strikes me as fairly impressive, you know? Yeah. Now, if you're wondering what the hot dog has to do with anything, because I didn't complete that.

What does the hot dog have to do with it? Yeah, I am wondering that. Yeah. So he loudly made this prediction in the bullpen, I'm coming into the game talking to his bullpen catcher, supposedly, right? And then boos began to rain down on Estevez, these were not normal boos,

they were like, you jinxed us, you stink, man, Estevez said, except stink is in brackets, so that is probably not what they actually said, you don't do that to a pitcher. And then as I'm coming down the steps, boo. So the idea is that fans within earshot of his loud prediction, I suppose, heard him calling Ryan McMahon shot. And thus they were mad that he had jinxed the Phillies.

And then I guess the implication is that a few days later, they were still so mad at him that they threw a hotdog. Not entirely clear how the hotdog connects to anything. Maybe it's just a- Is it the same people? Right, it's a different day and a different game, right? When the hotdog incident happened. Sure.

So I'm unclear, is it the same people who returned a few days later and got their revenge via cased meat against Krosyscevas? Or did they pass the word along, hey, if you see Krosus Devas, throw a hot dog at him? I'm not sure really, but this is, I guess, one of those only in Philly anecdotes or before everyone cheered Trey Turner

and Philly's fans became Southeast, but. But okay, but wait, but wait, but wait, he's a Philly now, right? He's Philly now, he was a Rocky then. He was a Rocky then. He was a Rocky then, and the home run that was surrendered was a Phillies pitcher to a Rockies hitter, right? Exactly. I'm getting the order of operations here, correct?

Yes. Okay. So that's why the Phillies fans were mad because he had predicted the Rockies comeback, essentially. Sure, sure. Totally sensible. I would offer that I think it is perfectly plausible, nay likely, that the booing and the reason for the booing and the hot dog incident, completely unrelated incidents. I think it is almost more likely that Philly's fans, and I say this with affection, isn't an affection twinged with fear? Yes. I can't lie about that. But I think it's perfectly likely that

on the night that this happened, Phillies fans were mad, mad boo boo, because you've, you did a prediction that expresses confidence in your team, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but also a deeply offensive thing to do in Philly's home ballpark. How dare, how dare. And then at a later date, you still wearing the colors of the Colorado Rockies happened to be there. And there was a Philly fan who said, I'm going to bean that guy with a hot dog. You know? Because what else do I have to do with the ballpark today? Watch this game, bean that guy with a hot dog. Cased meat, it does sound very dirty.

I have to say, I don't care for cased meat as a way of describing a hot dog. Just, it's somehow dirty. Well, the more you learn about what's in a hot dog and how a hot dog is assembled, the dirtier it seems, I suppose. But yes, that term. Yeah, like hot dog, look, we don't know what's in hot dogs. Science couldn't tell us. We've decided that that's okay culturally.

We're taking our lives in our hands with that one. Somehow cased meat sounds dirtier than just calling it a sausage and waggling your eyebrows. So I'd like to submit a protest to the use of case to me. I don't like that at all. The article implies, but doesn't explicitly state a causal connection between the prediction, the reaction to the prediction, and then the subsequent hot dog toss. It positions them in the story in such a way that it suggests that one follows from the other, but I suppose they could be separate anecdotes of, oh boy, it was different to be an opposing

player visiting Philly than it is to play for the Phillies and have those fans behind you pelting opponents with hot dogs. And to be clear, and I'm going to say this also, I would not put it past Philly's fans to pelt their own players with hot dogs either. I think that is well within the range of non-tail fan behavior outcomes for Philly's fans. She says with, again, love and the appropriate amount of fear, a respectful amount of fear. I'm not trying to impugn Alex's work. Alex is a great reporter.

This sounds like a fun piece, although I must again lodge my cased meat protest. I find that distasteful, lurid really. But I just think that sometimes you have a hot dog and you don't want to throw a, I mean, to be clear, I'm not advocating throwing anything at ballplayers. I think don't do that. Like that's a, that's a bad thing to do. I would suggest not doing that. If it, if it were me, I would say don't do that.

But if you're going to throw anything, if you've, if you've decided you're the kind of person that is going to throw something at a ball player, there are a couple of things you take off the table right away. Nothing heavy, because you don't want to inflict injury, even if you're very frustrated. Maybe you care about that because it's another human being. Maybe you're self-interested and worried that you will get hauled away to baseball jail. You're not going to throw something heavy. And then I think the calculus becomes, okay, so what are the acceptable soft and or liquid objects that I can hurl in the direction of a pitcher who may or may not play for the Philadelphia Phillies?

Who could say? You look at a hot dog and you think to yourself, well, there's like an aerodynamic element to the hot dog that perhaps makes it ideal to throw, because it's like you get a good like whoosh, like you would with a paper airplane, only it's a hot dog. Also, hot dogs generally less expensive than beers at ballparks. So even though the slosh of a beer might have a certain satisfying, you get like a wrist action in there. I'm doing it in, I mean, I'm not actually throwing a beer in front of my computer. That would be insane. But I'm like, I'm making

the wrist action that I, you know, and there would be something satisfying about that. I would then proceed to feel badly about that for the rest of my life. It would haunt me at, you know, three in the morning until I died. But I could see in the moment being like, yeah, I got him. But that's like 17 bucks. Not cost effective. Right. That's like $17. Whereas like the hot dog, even, you know, if you get one of those like nice Hempler sausages, were the Hemplers, is that a subdivision of Boar's Head? Is there like a Listeria? I don't want to impugn Hemplers. I've eaten a hemplers. I'm not.

Anyway, I think that even the more expensive ones of those, less expensive than like your standard ballpark beer. And you can't throw a can. That's like psychotic. You're going to injure someone, even if it's empty, you're going to injure someone and get taken to baseball or potentially real jail. So all of that to say, don't throw stuff. Phillies fans, stand off in the comments if you would entertain throwing something at one of your

own players. I think that you would. Be honest with yourself. Search your soul. And not Craig Kimbrough necessarily, but other players too. Right. Other players. You'll bring them down and then you will lift them back up to the point about Trey Turner. It's not exclusively a hot dog throwing endeavor, but you know, I've been to Citizens Bank Park. I've seen you guys. I think that some of you would do it. I really didn't anticipate where this was going to take us.

I mean, I feel like I've recovered from my existential crisis really nicely. Well, I'm glad. I'm pretty happy with the direction it went after that because I thought I was going to take us. I mean, I feel like I've recovered from my existential crisis really nicely. Well, I'm glad. I'm pretty happy with the direction it went after that because I thought I was going to have to quit podcasting for a little while there. I still would like to know what my proclivity is in describing this scenario, but not the hot dog throwing, the other part. Well, irrespective of the cased meat, sorry. I do think it's a pretty impressive prediction

because it requires multiple layers of thinking and analysis and prescience. And it suggests some advanced scouting work done on Carlos Estevez's case. He knows the tendencies, right? He's thinking ahead and that would be impressive. Here's my one reservation, which I wrote back to Jonathan, was this prediction documented at the time? I'm not suggesting that Carlos Estavas is a fabulous,

that he is spinning yarns here. I'm just saying a few years have elapsed since this moment and human memory is malleable and fallible. And sometimes we change details after the fact without even meaning to or being conscious of it. And thus I would love to know that this was captured at the time, that this was reported at the time, that this was told to someone. When I wrote back to Jonathan to say that, he said, good point. I think it would count as documentation if the TV broadcast showed Estevez warming up, even though his team was trailing in the top of the ninth on the road.

Yes. And Jonathan said, now I'm wondering if that game is available on MLB TV. And the answer to that is no, Jonathan, because this was ancient MLB history of three years ago. Yeah. And they scrubbed those games, Ben. Yes. There is no way to access such ancient history,

as we know. It's just erased. It's like that Stephen King story, the Langoliers where they're flying in the plane and then the world is getting erased and eaten after them and they're trying to stay ahead of the reality being eradicated. This is what it's like being an MLB TV subscriber

where they wipe away whole seasons after a few years have elapsed because I guess the hosting costs, because no one would possibly ever want to watch a game from three years ago. I don't know. It's a very odd thing where it might as well be 80 years ago. If it's three years ago, there's just no way to access it. Really.

There are some highlights on YouTube, but highlights don't typically include was the opposing reliever warming up in the bullpen at that time. I did look, I couldn't tell. And I looked at some contemporary reports. I didn't scour everything or look at Twitter. Maybe there was something somewhere, but I could not find anything from on or around that date to suggest either that the prediction had been made or later that that hot dog had been thrown. So this is all after the fact. And I'm just saying I'd be a little bit more convinced if he had told associates about this at the time, if this had been publicly reported, because often it seems like when ballplayers make a accurate prediction, they're pretty eager to tell people about it. Again, it's hard to tell.

We only know about it when they do tell someone about it, right? Just as we only know that a correct prediction was made when we're aware that there was a prediction made at all. But very often, if you call your shot, then you share that you called your shot, right? And so maybe reporters weren't talking to Carlos Estevez at the end of that game. He just nailed down a fairly routine save. Perhaps they didn't go to him and ask about the origin story of how he came into that game. And maybe he didn't volunteer that information. I'm just saying I don't see anything. And if anyone can find something, please let us know.

I don't want to impugn the integrity of Carlos Estevez unfairly here. Just saying I'd be a little more convinced if this were made in the moment. And if we had multiple sources corroborating this story, can we go to that bullpen catcher and confirm maybe should I do some journalism? Is that worth bugging? Hey, do you remember three years ago that time when Carlos Estevez asked you to warm up, did he loudly predict that Ryan McMahon would hit a curb pole? Just saying, is there a paper trail? Is there any digital evidence that he told people about this at the time? That's what I want to know.

Yeah. I love the idea that it would be great if you were to go to that bullpen catcher and highlight the hot dog piece of it. And he were to say, do you know how often that happens in Philly? Which time? You asked me to remember that one specific time. Yeah. Yeah. Which time? That would be fantastic. I would be very excited. Well, I'm issuing a call for Carlos corroboration. And if anyone can confirm the details, please let me know. But in theory, that is a pretty impressive prediction,boration. And if anyone can confirm the details, please let me know. But in theory, that is a pretty impressive prediction, I would say, if it did in fact occur as related.

Okay. We should move maybe from getting beaned by hot dogs to getting beaned by baseballs. And to be clear, I think beaning specifically refers to an intentional hitting in the head by pitch, but it is sometimes used just to refer to any hitting in the head, even if it's unintentional, but maybe the distinction there doesn't matter because intention shouldn't matter. This is what Whit Merrifield has contended. Whit Merrifield thinks that MLB should and in fact will have some sort of stiffer penalty for pitchers who hit batters in the head

and possibly in other places as well as soon as next season. Because Whitmarafield was hit in the head by a 95 mile per hour fastball, I believe by a Rockies reliever, Jeff Criswell, who we mentioned and sort of semi-met last week. He was the guy who did really well against the Yankees murderers row of judge and Soto and Stanton one day, and then got taken deep by all three of them the next time he faced them. Right.

So he had a little bit of a wild outing. He hit with Merrifield, 95 mile per hour fastball, back of the head. Merrifield is okay, fortunately. And he went through the concussion protocol, and then he went for a CT scan and he got a clean bill of health. He said he didn't have a headache. He felt a little hazy and that it hurt to wear a hat, but he seems to have avoided the worst of it. This is not the first time that he has been hit by a ball in the head or in the helmet, which is maybe playing into his reaction here.

Not that getting hit in the head only one time is not something you would mind, but he got hit in the head by Diego Castillo in AL Wildcard game two, right? Castillo of the Mariners, I think, just last year. So this has happened to him multiple times. Well, it wouldn't have been last year. It would have been a year before that.

Oh yes, that's right. A couple of years ago. Yes. Sorry, I didn't mean to. Let me tell you, I remember the ones where they get to go to the postseason. Yes. I got fooled because the YouTube timestamp said one year ago,

but I guess that's because it hasn't quite reached two years ago. Okay, so it has happened to him multiple times. He's mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore. And he actually has maybe perhaps some power to affect change here. And he has explained exactly what sort of change he would like to see.

So reading from an athletic article here, he serves on the MLB competition committee. It's an 11 member committee. There's six club reps, four players, one umpire. And that's why MLB is sometimes able to unilaterally impose rules changes with prior notification because they have a majority on this committee. But he's one of the players on the committee

and he has predicted that there will be a rule in place by next season with penalties for pitchers who hit batters with similar high and inside fastballs. There was a previously scheduled informal meeting of this committee on Wednesday involving the players on it and some MOP representatives to discuss on-field matters. Mostly ABS, the automatic strike zone, that was the main topic of conversation, but Merrifield raised this issue too. And the article says he is among many players

who want to rule punishing pitchers for plunking hitters with fast balls that break hands and wrists or hit players in the head or neck. He said the committee was quite receptive. Yeah, we'll have something in place by the time the season starts next year. I'd be shocked if we didn't." That's quite a confident tone that he is striking there, right? So he gave a little bit of a diatribe after he got hit on Tuesday's game and that circulated and he used words such as pathetic

and bullsh** to describe the state of MLB pitching and the lack of recourse for hitters or punishment for pitchers who hit them in the head or hands with fastballs. I can't tell you how much my phone was blowing up with players saying, thank God somebody's finally talking about this said Merrifield. Pitchers too, which is a bit surprising. I've had a lot of pitchers reach out to me and say, yeah, this is ridiculous what some of these guys coming up are doing. It's making it sound like a generational issue.

You know, the veterans against the rookies, right? Who don't know where the ball is going. Merrifield is 35. Quote continues, so it's just a matter of how you write it, what the fine print of the rules are. If a guy ducks at the ball and gets hit in the head, does that count?

Stuff like that. Other people have supported this. Brian Snitker, Atlanta manager, said said when he was asked if he agreed with Merrifield, yeah, I do. We've had multiple guys hit. Yeah. I can see the frustration from those guys because I do think it's a concern. I guess manager just sort of sticking up for his players.

Some of his players are pitchers too. And Schnittker was asked if the rule should be something that discourages teams from bringing pitchers to the majors before they're ready and to have young pitchers realize they don't have to throw every pitch at max effort without regard for command and control. All that, Schnittker said, all of the above, this is a very ambitious rule, sweeping changes here for the safety of the players. I think they need to. And Criswell, I don't think had been particularly wild before this outing, but he issued three walks in this inning and in two thirds relief appearance in addition

to the hit by pitch. It was the seventh outing of his career. So he was wild on that day. And Merrifield said it was driving me nuts. I just took 95 right off the head. I'm very lucky that it got me in a good spot. If there is such a thing as a good spot to be hit the head by a 95 mile per hour fastball. I'm out of the game. He gets to stay in to pitch. I'm probably not gonna be able to play tomorrow. It's frankly pathetic that some of the pitchers who are running out there don't know where the ball's going

at the major league level. It's gotta be fixed. It just pisses me off to no end. So he said of the committee, everybody's in agreement. It's just about what the punishment's going to be and how are we going to word it? I don't know whether MLB would say the same that everyone's in agreement to know, yes, this is definitely going to happen, but he seems pretty confident. And Merrifield actually, he suggested some specific penalties here.

So I think if a guy gets hit up and in with a fastball hit like I got hit hit in the head with a fastball I think the pitcher should be ejected I think you should get docked a day's pay or two days pay I think if a guy runs one in on a guy breaks his hand there should be a fine not necessarily an ejection but there should be a fine he added that the intent of such a rule and penalty would be pitchers have to have some sort of thought like, all right, you're calling for a fastball in, let's try to command this thing

instead of just trying to rip it. And he said that the potential penalties have to be substantial. And so he compared it to football and to rules to protect players and changes about how you can tackle and what's permissible. It's just gotta happen before something bad happens.

What do you make of all of this? It's a really tricky thing for me to quite know what to do with because I think you're right that the number of guys who are throwing purpose pitches, I don't think that that happens nearly as much as it used to. It is, from the batter's sort of irrelevant whether the guy means to hit you or not. I am mindful of the fact that there are different degrees of severity here. I like the idea that like the effect that the hit by pitch has on the hitter should determine in some instances punishment differently than in others, right?

Where if you get hit by a breaking ball that breaks in a little too much and it's not super hard and you're not hurt and you're able to take your base and continue on, that that would have a different set of ramifications for a pitcher than a pitch that breaks something, a pitch that makes contact with the head or neck area, a pitch that is thrown particularly hard, et cetera. I don't know how effective this would be in actually reducing the number of hit by pitches. I think it would be effective in having sort of negative consequences in the moment if the result is that you have to leave the game.

But in terms of how many hit by pitches we end up having with this set of rules versus not, I don't know. There aren't very many Austin Adamses from a couple of years ago where the hit by pitch rate is just absurd and it seems like it might just be dangerous to have that guy in there because his command is that poor. I don't think that there are a lot of cases that are that either obvious or extreme. So I don't know that it would actually end up doing a whole lot to curtail hit by pitches. I have a feeling, and this is not something I have put research to, but particularly as we see more and more pitchers moving away from fastball dominant approaches and we see breaking balls that have a lot of horizontal break to them becoming increasingly popular, I imagine over time we're going to

see more hit by pitches, not fewer, right? So I don't know. I don't know that this does a lot to actually change the incentive structure. I do think that it would be satisfying to teams to see a guy who, you know, clearly doesn't have his command that night has injured your player have to exit the game as a result of that. Like, I think a lot of the time managers make that decision on their own, but making sure that you can't leave a guy in there who just like broke somebody's hand.

I don't know. Maybe that's not the worst idea, but I'm skeptical that it's going to result in a dramatic reduction just because I don't think that most of the hit by pitches that we see are the results of, you know, guys wanting to do damage. Well, give you some stats. The good news is that the hit by pitch rate on a per pitch and per plate appearance basis is lower this year than it has been in 2020, 2021, and 2023.

The bad news is that those three years and this year are the four highest hit by pitch rate seasons in the modern era since the foundation of the American league. So this is in fact a very high hit by pitch rate era. And we've talked about that plenty on the podcast. Not this season, I don't think, because nothing has really changed or spiked this season. Whitmirefield might disagree, but this has been kind of a long-term trend. Yeah. And aren't we on pace to come in under last year's total also? Yeah. Right. It's down slightly from the past few years, but still extremely elevated.

Relative to prior eras. Eras, yes, exactly. The highest hit by pitch rate on a per plate appearance basis seasons since 1901 are 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, 2022, 2019, 2018, and then 2001. So yeah, there are a lot of hit by pitches these days. That's not new. And we've talked about the causes before. I've written about the causes before. Rob Means has written a lot at baseball prospectus about the hit by pitch epidemic. And this became a talking point in 2021 when the sticky stuff crackdown happened

because a lot of players and personnel argued at the time, we already have too many hit by pitches and this is going to make things worse because now guys aren't going to be able to grip the ball and it's going to be going all over the place. Whereas MLB argued, well, this doesn't seem to be helping for one thing because you can use all the sticky stuff and you're still plunking people constantly. And also MLB argued counter-intuitively maybe, but I think logically that in fact it might have been hurting. It might have been sort of a peltzman effect where pitchers felt that they had more command than they did because they had this super

sticky stuff and so they were more likely to grip it and rip it and hit people. And I don't know if either of them was right really because the hit by pitch rate hasn't changed that much since then. It certainly hasn't gone way up or anything. It hasn't fallen precipitously or anything either. So that didn't really seem to affect anything all that much. But maybe I can quote briefly from a ringer piece that I wrote at the time about the sticky stuff, where I had a section about the hit by pitches.

Cause I went into the possible causes and I don't think any of this has really changed all that much. I wrote, although the average speed and height of pitches that result in plunkings are both lower than they've been at any point in the pitch tracking era thanks to increased usage of breaking balls, which tend to be buried and thrown with less control, it's still scary to see hitters placed in harm's way in an era when the speediest pitches fly faster than ever. One of the most common justifications for foreign substance usage by both pitchers and hitters is that it makes pitchers less likely to hit batters.

It would help clear things up if we knew exactly why batters are getting bruised more often. Possible answers abound. More pitchers counts and more breaking balls mean more pitches outside the strike zone. Faster pitches allow less reaction time, velocity is king and command is an afterthought. All of those hypotheses sound reasonable, including the command explanation, but some recent research suggests that hitters are driving the spike, and that pitchers aren't unquirking high-risk far-inside pitches more often than before, which command plus stats

supplied by stats performed seem to corroborate. I've tried to get an update to those stats and hopefully we'll have that next week. But as I recall, I just, I couldn't find any evidence that pitchers were way wilder or that the command stats that we had backed up that idea that everyone's just a thrower, not a pitcher, right? Like it makes sense because we know everyone's max effort. And so you might think that you have to sacrifice command in order to throw harder. It does sound reasonable and it's possible. I'm always loath to think that pitchers or players in general have gotten worse at anything because they're just getting better all the time.

But there are trade-offs and that is certainly possible. But it's hard to quantify command and it's especially hard to quantify command in the retrospective comparative sense because we have these various pitch modeling stats that have command components, but A, they tend to be normalized to a specific season so you can't compare across seasons, but even if you could un-normalize them and compare across seasons, we only have them going back a little ways because they're like Staticast era only. I think command plus goes back to 2011.

So that gives you a little more context and again, hoping to have an update there. But based on what I saw a few years ago, it didn't seem like there was any obvious change in average miss or anything. And stat-cast stuff you could do, tracking targets and where a catcher's glove is, that's all going to be stat-cast era too. So it's really tough to quantify that. And it's not always clear that you get better command as you age either, or that there's that meaningful a difference among older pitchers than younger pitchers.

You know, Sarah's wrote about that a few years ago. Continuing to quote from myself, batter positioning data provided by Kinnitracks doesn't show any evidence that hitters have moved closer to the plate over the past few years, though they may have moved back a bit in the box, possibly to give themselves more time to react to faster pitches.

Maybe they're wearing more protective equipment. Maybe they've gotten more willing to take one for the team. Or maybe they're befuddled by fast, high spin, well-tunnelled pitches that move more than ever, which prevents them from sidestepping pitches in spots where they once would have been easier to avoid. High spin pitches fool batters by behaving like optical illusions. Maybe batters will be safer if they're better at predicting where pitches will end up. So you got pitchers just going for strikeouts and expanding the zone and throwing hard and lots of movement. And so it does sort of seem to make sense, even though as we noted last time, catchers have gotten better at blocking balls and preventing wild pitches. So some other

stats, I did look at the average velocity of hit by pitches, and that is higher this year than ever, of hit by pitches and that is higher this year than ever. Even though more hit by pitches on a percentage basis are breaking balls than were in some earlier years, still, you know, breaking balls are getting harder too. And this year, the average miles per hour of a hit by pitch pitch is 89.2 miles per hour, which is the highest on record in the pitch tracking era since 2008.

If you limit to fast balls only 93.3 miles per hour is the average speed of a pitch that leads to a hit by pitch. That is the fastest too, or maybe tied with last year. So yes, hit by pitches are getting harder. And thus in theory, I suppose slightly harder to pick up and avoid. The good news, I guess, is that the average height of a hit by pitch is lower than in

any previous season on record, 2.76 feet. You're more likely to get plunked in the butt than the head, basically. Yeah, or like a back foot slider or something, right? It's just more breaking balls. Breaking balls tend to be thrown low in the zone and therefore the average height of a hit by pitch has fallen. But of course that doesn't prevent the ones that are high hit you. And if you limit to fastballs only even the average height now

is not the highest it's been. It's a little lower than it was a couple of seasons ago or even early in the pitch tracking era, even though we're seeing lots of high fastballs these days. So there doesn't seem to be any clear signal there. And if you look at certain regions in the zone, so at Baseball Savant, you can look at things by attack zones, right? And two of those attack zones are

the most up and in ones. So up and in on a righty and lefty respectively, those are zones 31 and 33. And if I look at just hit by pitches in zones 31 and 33, which I assume would include hit by pitches in the head or in the head area, then the quantity of those has actually fallen slightly too. So again, I guess that's kind of good news. The most hit by pitches, according to Zavant, in those two uppermost zones were in 2018, 804 of them in 2009, 800 of them, and then 799 in 2023. We're on pace for 740 of them this year, which is a lot. It's still 740 opportunities to get hit in a dangerous way,

but also is the fewest that we have had. If we end up at 740, that would be the fewest since 2017, excluding 2020, obviously. So I guess you could say that would be a positive. So again, it doesn't seem like this is getting worse necessarily, except for the fact that hit by pitches are getting harder, but it's still an elevated rate and still a high degree of danger. And so if you've personally been plunked a couple of times by Whitmerefield, then I understand why you would be up in arms about this. So I support, I guess, the idea of doing something, but it is kind of tough to determine exactly

what level of severity and what the effects of that would be. Well, and I don't want to blame Whitmerefield in particular, but sometimes you watch a game and that guy gets hit and you're like, he could have gotten out of the way more than he did. It's definitely in there. I wish that umpires called that more. That actually feels like an area where a rule, it's not a rule change. Like if you, if you lean into it, if you don't get out of the way, like they're

supposed to call it a strike, they're not supposed to award you the base. That does feel like an area where strict your enforcement actually might change behavior in a meaningful way. You know, that seems like an easy one to intervene on. You want those guys to get out of the way and the rules already there. It's already there. Just one to intervene on. You want those guys to get out of the way and the rule's already there. It's already there. Just have to enforce it. Just have to enforce that rule. So that seems like low hanging fruit, but yeah, the rest of it is tricky and I don't,

it hurt to put a hat on. It hurt for- Yeah, I guess so. Maybe he had a welt or something. Right. Okay. So here's the thing. Maybe it was the welt, but like if it's hurting to put your hat on,

that feels like you got to sit that day, you know? That feels like you shouldn't be clear to play. That's just a non-doctor's opinion about hats and- I think he was out for at least one day. It just wasn't a long-term thing. But it still hurt his head. It hurt to put a hat on. That seems very bad. It seems very bad. It seems very bad. Now, one other thing that sort of supports what you're saying is that there are hit by pitches that are recorded in areas where you really can't blame the pitcher. I mean, we can see this in the data. So again, going back to those attack zones, MLB has one attack zone called the shadow zone,

which sounds very nefarious and spooky and suspicious, but what it means MLB defines it as the area that is the width of two baseballs, one inside the zone, one outside, all around the edges of the strike zone. So sometimes a strike close enough to a strike that you can get that call if you've got a good framer or a bad umpire and luck is behind you, right?

So you probably shouldn't really be getting hit on any of those pitches. And if you do, it means you're pretty close to the plate. Assuming the tracking is accurate, you must have been crowding, right? And last year there were 49 hit by pitches recorded on pitches in the shadow zone, which was the most on record. Now we're on pace for fewer this year. There have been only 29, so on pace for 33 or so. But last year was an all time high in the short time that we actually have this data going back to 2008 for hitters getting hit on pitches that were basically borderline

strikes, right? So if that's, that's why I'm hesitant to do anything about the bird bone breaking pitches. Right. Because yeah, it's frustrating and it's bad when that happens. And again, I haven't seen any data on injuries on these pitches. You know, MLB might have that data, but I don't. We do know based on work at baseball prospectus that hitter injuries in general are not increasing and actually seem to be decreasing, but hit by pitch related injuries specifically.

I just, I don't have those numbers. I'm sure MLB could quantify that and that would be interesting data. So are we seeing more broken hands because of hit by pitches? If so, is that the fault of the pitchers or is it the fault of the hitters? We're just straying a little too close. Baseball Prospectus has this tool called the Recovery Dashboard that lets you look up injuries

and how long they typically take to come back from. And they don't have 2024 on there yet, but it does go back to 2016. And I can look up the number of hitter hand fractures by year, hands and fingers. I did that and I removed the hemate fractures because those often happen just on swings. And again, I can't say all of these came from hit by pitches, but probably a lot of them did.

Here are the totals from 2016 to 2023. 12, 10, 15, 4, 4, 11, 14, 14. So 2018 was the most, but then 2022 and 2023 were second and third most. This is one area where if you say, well, you can't come inside. I mean, what are you going to say? You can't throw an inside pitch, right? Like that just seems too restrictive. I mean, you know, you kind of can't take the inside part of the plate and, and

just in off the zone away from a pitcher. I'm more sympathetic just because it seems pitchers have the upper hand these days anyway, and so maybe it would help equalize offense and give hitters a helping hand literally and figuratively, but also that seems like a little much. Like that might have unintended consequences where if you can't come in the kitchen at all, then you're really helping hitters because they're just going to get their arms extended because pitchers are going to be afraid to come in there in theory.

And how will you ever get a sandwich if you don't go in the kitchen? You're going to have fewer strikeouts and you're going to be hungry. Yeah, we support sandwiches. So that I think seems a little too much. And granted he was suggesting a fine for those, not a suspension or an ejection or anything, but still, you know? And then the idea of just taking intentionality out of it, I see a good case for that in the sense that we can't actually assess intention and what is in someone's mind as they're throwing a pitch, right? And you can have a good idea, depends on the situation and

what's going on in the game, but it's always a little bit fuzzy and maybe it would be better just to say, no, zero tolerance. You hit a guy in the head, that's dangerous. We want to discourage that. But then again, like if the vast majority of plunkings in the head, that's dangerous. We want to discourage that. But then again, if the vast majority of plunkings in the head are accidental already, then saying, hey, you can't do that, you're going to get ejected from the game. Will that actually help? Because if it's just, oh, it slipped out of my hand, I didn't mean to do it. It's not something you're intending to do. And then if you're thinking about it, is that actually going to help or is it going to be in your head like, oh, I can't get anywhere close to this guy or else, I'm going to hit him and then I'm going to get ejected. And if it does just sort of slip out of

your hand, do we really want to change a game in that way? Granted, it changes the game to knock that hitter out and potentially endanger that hitter, but that happens in the first inning and your starter is gone because he accidentally hit someone in the head with a pitch that just got away from him and wasn't really predictable or avoidable in any way. Can you only aim for the outside corner or something if you want to avoid any chance of hitting someone in the head? So, and then yes, as Merrifield said, like, what if you kind of lean into it

or you don't get out of the way enough and that's tough. You know, there are actually like a couple to a handful of pitches recorded every year that are according to baseball savant in the strike zone that are hit by pitches. There were, there've been three of those this year. There were five of those in 2022. So in this Drake zone, you know, could be data eras, but also not necessarily. Yeah. I feel like when I see those and you do get them every now and again, one, there's like a very obvious and egregious, like lean in, you know, a pushing of the elbow into the way.

And those I think do tend to get spotted by umpires and they go, okay, hold on. Like, you don't get to take your base. You really wanted to get hit by that pitch and that's not the purpose here. So go back into the batter's box you. You know, I think those tend to get resolved. I don't know. Like maybe the answer is in general, you don't care about intent, right? But if there's really egregious, obvious intent, then like you get a little extra on top of that. But you know, if you intentionally throw it a guy, don't you get fined already?

You do, but this is maybe another case for making it automatic is that it'd be one thing if we could trust MLB to come down harshly on pitchers who do do this intentionally, but that hasn't been the case historically, right? I mean, now, yes, generally you will get ejected and you will get suspended if it's obvious that you did it intentionally, but even so,

the penalties aren't that steep, right? I mean, you might miss a handful of games or something. It's not, you know, whereas if you're really like head hunting in a dangerous way, you should be out for a long, long time, but there just isn't precedent for that. And we've kind of bemoaned that in the past. So if you're not going to just levy these steep penalties in those situations, then maybe it is better to have a, well, let's just take intent out of it. Or as you said, I guess, have the automatic, but then also be able to pile some additional penalties on if it's clear that it was intentional.

Yeah. And I think that I have advocated in the past to try to decouple our rules from the intent thing, because I just think to your point, it's difficult to discern with confidence a lot of the time. I think that most guys are not psychos and don't want to hurt people. And I think that there are instances where it's quite clear that a guy went after somebody and they might say different after the fact, but I think that we can draw on our experience watching baseball and say a lot of the time, like, you tried to

hit that guy. You really were, you were going after that guy. And it's fine in those instances to be like, you're going to suffer a big consequence as a result of that, because this is dangerous. And like, you know, a lot of guys who want to plunk someone assume that they are going to have just pinpoint command in that moment. And we know that that's not necessarily true and you could slip and you could really hurt someone.

So I do think it's appropriate for there to be real consequence for that. But I also think it's fine to say, look, we just have to disincentivize this as much as possible. And that might mean that guys who don't mean to hit anyone suffer consequences and maybe the next time out they could be more honest with themselves about like how much they have it that day. I don't know, you know? Like maybe that's an unintended consequence of this, a guy being like, look, I don't have it today. I don't have it. One other relevant fact is that NPB has such a rule and penalty in place. So in

NPP, if you hit a batter, I think the translation is in the area of the head, then it is declared a dangerous pitch and results in the automatic ejection of the pitcher. And NPP is sort of on an island with this policy, literally in that Japan is an island nation, but also because I don't know that any other major league does this, but in independent baseball in Japan, they do that too. And in Japan, pitchers for the most part don't throw as hard and yet they have this strong disincentive, right? So it has been in place for some time there. I think there's not universal agreement that that's good. I found a column from the Japan Times, 2015,

time for NPP to scrap automatic pitcher ejection rule. And the complaint was that a lot of times you do just have a pitch that very obviously got away from someone. And it's like a change up or a slow curve or something, right? And it does hit off the batter's helmet, but he's fine. And there was clearly no intent and it's early in the game. And now suddenly the whole complexion of the game changes cause your starters out and maybe there wasn't any really serious danger or anything that you would want to dissuade a pitcher from doing.

And so this column was suggesting this is too harsh and that there should be the option of deciding when a pitcher is ejected as opposed to just having it entirely taken out of the umpire's hand. I think it was early in the 2000s maybe that this automatic ejection rule was put in place. So it's been for decades over there. So I guess it's worked not disastrously well enough that they've continued to do it. In that article, Tokyo Giants reliever and former MLB pitcher Scott Matheson proposed a tweak, which was that the pitcher should only be ejected after hitting a guy in the head if the batter also has to leave the game. So if the hitter stays in the game, the pitcher should also be allowed to

remain, which I guess makes some sense. I mean, you know, you could get lucky and hit a guy hard in the head, but it just happens to be in a good place, as Merrifield said, and in the helmet and he's unscathed. And that doesn't really change anything, I suppose, from the pitcher's perspective. So maybe that's being too results oriented and it should be more process oriented, but it does suggest that like, if it wasn't really a dangerous one, then maybe there's at least some leeway where if you don't take their guy out of the game, then you aren't taken out of the game either.

Maybe. I do think that we take concussions and head injuries a lot more seriously than we used to, and I am open to the suggestion that we still are a little too loosey goosey about letting guys get back into games. So maybe this would be good because it would require a more critical assessment of the sort of neurological state of guys after they've been hit in the head. Yeah. Although I guess you might get gamesmanship where it's like, well, let's just take them out to be safe.

But also because if we remove him from the game, then the pitcher gets removed from the game too. You can make that, you can make that the umpire's call and then you don't have to worry about the gamesmanship piece of it, right? Like the umpire could, could make a determination maybe we need like, like they have in the NFL because there's never been any concussion problems in the NFL, an independent neurological consultant to determine whether the guy can stay, stay in or not. They sure do seem to make those determinations quick. Yeah. I wouldn't, I wouldn't leave that up to the up, but some, yeah, some actual professional

who's like knows whether something's dangerous or not. Yeah. Having an impartial party, I guess might help, but there's also, we've having an impartial party, I guess, might help. But there's also, we've discussed proposals in the past, I think, for steeper penalties, like in an in-game on-field way where it's, you know, you get two bases, right? Or maybe the next batter starts with a ball or something, right? Like something like that, which is a little less disruptive, but is still a more significant penalty than just you take your one base, you know, you take your two bases or you take two bases and the next guy gets an advantage in the count or something. You

could play around with it. I think in principle, I'm on board with having some steeper penalty for, and one with in-game ramifications for hitting hitters in the head. But I think probably like the bird bone breakage, that's, that's a bit too far for me, because I think hitters sometimes play a large part there. And also like, would it be only if, if the guy has to be removed from the game? I mean, sometimes you get hit in the bird bones. It's, it's hard to predict if, if they're going to break or not. So like, you know, are you going to find a pitcher just because he happened to hit a guy on the

hand instead of the knob of the bat or something? I don't know that that works for me, but I'm open to these ideas because it's not great to have hitters getting hit by high-speed, hard projectiles. No, it's definitely not great, you know? I'm opposed to that. Like, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's bad. And there's some inherent risk and players assume that risk and everyone knows what they're getting into and they're willing to do it. But still, if we can minimize the really dangerous instances of that, that'd be good. It would be good. And I think that we can, you can do more. And I think that it's the kind of thing that should be open to some amount of tinkering, you know?

Okay. One other quick thing I wanted to mention, Rob Maynes just wrote about this at BP. He looked at scoring patterns by inning and how they have changed lately. And he found that, uh, for one thing, the first inning is no longer really the highest scoring inning as it used to be very often. And that seems to be because of the DH, the universal DH has unseeded the first inning as the most important one for total scoring. He writes, when pitchers batted, the inning with the most runs scored was the first, partly because the lineup is theoretically optimized, partly because there's no chance of the automatic out represented by pitchers batting. Yes pitchers could bat in the first, but by the time the ninth batter hits, the team scored

at least three runs. It's a high scoring inning. With pitchers no longer advancing to the plate, the third through sixth innings compete with the first for the most scoring as tiring starting pitchers lose effectiveness. The second inning, usually the bottom half of the order and the seventh and eighth when the more formidable bullpen arms enter the game, are lower scoring. But another effect he documented was that home field advantage persists throughout the game.

So the home team has a positive run differential against the visiting team in every inning. However, by far the home team advantage is highest in the first inning. And this is something that Dave Smith of Retro Sheet has documented in the past and this effect still holds up. And both Smith and Maines conclude that the main reason for this is that the home team's pitcher knows when he is going to throw the first pitch, right? He knows when first pitches, he can plan his routine because he's going to be facing the opponents in the top half of the first and thus he can perfectly tailor his warmup routine to that, right? And so that's particularly advantageous maybe because

you're going to be facing theoretically the optimal opposing lineup, the top of the order, right? And so you can do everything the way you want to do it. Whereas Rob writes, the visiting pitcher lacks that advantage and the longer his teammates stretch out the top of the inning, the more he'll cool down from his pregame warmup. There's just an element of unpredictability there. And this has like real effects and persistent effects. And it sounds to me like there's got to be like some competitive advantage here. There's got to be some way for like visiting teams to compensate for this somehow.

There is some just inherent unpredictability because you don't know how long the top of the first is going to go. And maybe now with the pitch clock, it's not going to go quite as long most of the time, but you still can't perfectly warm up that way, I guess. And also if you warm up before the first inning, then you're sitting for a while and you're cooling down for a while. Do you think that's just like an insuperable advantage for the home team? I guess ultimately it doesn't matter that much because home team advantage is, you know, what 54% of the time the home team wins and only part of that advantage, though the largest

on a per inning basis is in the first inning. But still, you know, you're talking some runs and ultimately some wins that come from this just inability to perfectly time your warm up as the visiting starting pitcher. I just, I wonder if there's something visiting teams could do to compensate for that somehow. It sure feels like there should be something that they can do. You know, I, I guess I'm not surprised. You know, it's like, think about how we all feel in the days immediately before and after

going on vacation. It's like, think about how we all feel in the days immediately before and after going on vacation. We're running around with our heads cut off at work, basically trying to get ready and get situated so that we don't have to think about work even one time when we go on vacation. So who am I to disparage people for being overly tied to their routines? And particularly when you have the physical warming and cooling, I know it's not quite that, but you know what I mean. It stands to reason that there would be some effect, but it is surprising to me that it

seems, if not immutable, very hard to mute. That mute button, it's not working, Ben. That is surprising to me that it would be that persistent and sort of sticky and effect. So, and Dave Smith found that home team scoring in the first inning is correlated to the length of time elapsed in the top of the first inning. So the longer the top of the first inning, then the better the home team is going to do in the bottom of the first, of course, probably the better the visiting team is doing at the top of the first. So you probably of course, probably the better the visiting team is doing in the top of the first.

So you probably take that exchange if you're the visiting team. But still, I wonder if it's just, should you start your warmup later, you know, instead of warming up in the bullpen, let's say before the first and then walking in, could you warm up during the top of the first, like under the stadium or something, you know, just like in a mound. Like a mole man. Well, yeah, not exactly, but something like that. Just, you know, wherever, if there's a warm up area for a pitcher with a mound inside that they could walk to during the top of the first. And I don't know, maybe you get yourself in trouble if your team makes out quickly in the top of the first. And I don't know, maybe you get yourself in trouble if, if your team makes

outs quickly in the top of the first, but it is going to be your best hitters. And so I wonder maybe start a little later with the warmup. Have, have teams tried that? Perhaps they have, or sometimes like individual pitchers have a particularly tough time with this sometimes. And could that be fluky or randomness? Yes. But also sometimes they will try to adjust their routines or their

teams will try to adjust them. But I wonder some league wide, like, let's start a little later, or is there some sort of technological or just like training physical therapy, sort of like, are there stretches you could do to stay warm longer without tiring yourself out, right? Or is there like some sort of environments, you know, if you waited in a heated room, if you had a sauna or something for the picture to-

I don't think you want a sauna though. You'll get dehydrated. Right. But something, you know, some sort of a theragun or something like some, some tool maybe that would lead you to stay looser longer without fatiguing you faster. I have a feeling, Ben, that this is the sort of thing that actually teams have spent a great deal of time on and that I won't say that it's perfectly optimized because we have advances in our understanding of the human body and training routines all the time. And, you know, I'm no expert, but I suspect that this is actually an area that has been fairly well optimized.

It's surprising that it would be so persistent, right? Because like, what is it? What is it but, you know, getting warm at a little bit different time than you're used to, but it does seem like the kind of thing that a lot of time and effort would have been spent trying to correct and maybe they're like, look, this is as good as it gets. We're satisfied that we've done all we can.

Now you just have to, despite the difficulty posed by circumstance, go out there and shove. Yeah, I mean, look, when you can predict circumstances in advance, that is conducive to improved performance probably. Like if I had primed you with, hey Meg, I'm gonna ask you whether you say. No, it would have still sent me into a jail spin. Batting one two or two one,

and you'd had some time to think that through before we started the episode, which I would have if I had thought of it, but that came to me in the moment as we were recording. But perhaps you would not have been as flustered and flummoxed by the question briefly, right? Or you would have, but that wouldn't have been on mic, I guess. If you can anticipate circumstances in advance, maybe there just is kind of an immutable advantage there. And so, yeah, this is a small but intractable problem for

visiting teams. But yes, I'm sure they have devoted some thoughts to how to improve this problem. I do like to be prepared. You know, when I go onto other people's podcasts or radio shows, I am very consistently asking for a general sense of topics so that I can do a little bit of prep because I don't want to sound like a doofus. And I am not so high on my own supplies to believe that that is something that just comes naturally to me as evidenced by my on-mic meltdown earlier this episode. Yeah. Well, here on Effectively Wild, you have home field advantage? This is your podcast. Right, I do. I do, you know. I sound like a dummy a lot and Shane conceals it almost every single time.

So that is a nice advantage to bring to bear, but I don't know, like it's just, we are creatures of routine, a lot of us, not everyone. I would be curious like how, you know, is there variation within the pitching population on this score? Like are there individual guys who are just like, whatever, I'll just go up there whenever I'm, you know, they probably would have been less bothered by the last week and a half that I've spent dealing with various minor house catastrophes outside of my control. They'd be like, look, the fridge will get fixed when it does. And instead I almost burst into tears yesterday.

So to each his or her own meltdown, really. CB Yeah, there's a lot of variation. It's just hard to separate it out from randomness. But if the pitcher tells you that they're especially uncomfortable in the first, then that would help you discern, differentiate between the random and the real. And I guess there could be pitchers who go the opposite way where it's like, I don't want to know exactly when I'm going out there. I mean, you know you're going to be going out there in the first inning, so maybe it doesn't really. But if you knew the exact moment, maybe you'd be dwelling on it where it's like, I might

be coming out at this moment or a little later. Not everyone's Clayton Kershaw planning their pregame routine down to the minute, right? So maybe you'd appreciate not exactly knowing how much time you have. And then suddenly it's like, oh, it's my cue. Okay, I'm on, I guess, right? But I didn't have time to hyper-focus on the exact moment when I was coming out. All right, I have just a few emails to end on. And one is sort of related to this because it is about layoffs and

rustiness and losing your edge. And this comes from Tim who says, listening to your episodes where you were talking about minor leaguers playing in their major league ballpark or their parent clubs, I was wondering if a team could use its AAA affiliate to help it succeed in the playoffs. I'm sure you're aware of the theory that teams that have a buy in the first round of the playoffs are at a disadvantage because their players get rusty due to the extended time off.

It seems to me that taking a week off between competitive games is a choice rather than a necessity. Why couldn't a team in line for a buy schedule an exhibition game or two against its AAA affiliate while the other playoff teams are playing in the first round? Play in the Major League Park. If the MLB team is good enough to merit a buy, I imagine the games would be sold out. The AAA players would probably be thrilled for the experience, and the Major Leaguers would be happy to get the chance to maintain their skills in advance of the playoffs.

Even if the competition is not at the same level, it should be close enough to keep the edge for the MLB players. Aside from logistical issues, I fail to see the downside." What do you think of treating your AAA team as a warm-up act in between meaningful games? Well, first of all, I don't think they'd be allowed to because it's after the conclusion of the AAA season. Um, and so I don't know that you can make mandatory activities then. No, probably not. Yes.

Because yeah, the AAA regular season ends a week or so before the MLB regular season ends and then the AAA postseason is very brief, right? And that even ends before the MLB postseason begins. So yeah, you'd need to keep all the players around and house them somewhere. And you probably couldn't compel them to do that. And they're unionized now and you could, I guess, offer to pay them.

I mean, maybe if you offered to keep them as a voluntary, we'll pay you for an extra week to have you stick around and be the stocking horses for our big league team. And maybe if you're not a veteran AAA player, but a younger up and comer, I guess you might be interested in both the income and the experience and the exposure, but I don't know exactly what the mechanics and legality of that are. Yeah. So I think there's that logistical issue. I also think that like, look, I know that there is this theory that it's bad to have the layoff.

And I know that that theory has been espoused by team employees, like at least public facing team employees. But I don't know that that's actually the consensus among team personnel, particularly on the medical side. I think that a lot of team folks would tell you, no, you want the buy. Partly you want the buy so that you can line up your rotation how you want it. So you're not going to want to have, like, who's pitching these games, right? Like that's going to be part of the issue. Particularly with the pitchers, you're going to be mindful of their usage, their usage

both during the regular season and also their potential usage going forward. I think you do want to give those guys a blow as much as you can so that they can rest and recuperate and again, so that you can line them up how you want. Most teams, even playoff teams, even playoff teams with like high caliber rotations are not like so stacked with depth that they can have just like, you know, sacrificial pitching lambs. I think teams would be reticent to do this. I'm sure that, you know, they're going to have their guys sort of maintain a regular schedule.

It's not like the only day that a pitcher picks up a baseball is the day he's starting, you know, he's going to have a pulpit day. They're going to maintain sort of regular rhythms like they would observe during the regular season, but you do want to give them rest and you want them to be in a position where they can come into October as sort of healthy and rested as they can because you're already in all likelihood going to use them in a weird way during October, right? We see this all the time, particularly if you play for the Dodgers because for whatever

reason your team is just like always taxed and tired and injured. And that's true this year as much as it is any other. So I am skeptical that teams would be like, oh yeah, let's try to bring back guys who are in their off season, who might have their own developmental milestones to worry about, who are unionized and we can't compel to come hang out or might be doing, you know, might be participating in fall league and see how that goes. I feel like I'm very skeptical that that would happen. I don't want to throw cold water on it, but I am throwing cold water. I'm not sure whether hitters are believed to be more prone to rust than pitchers, but if you're worried about that, then I suppose

you could have triple A pitchers pitch instead of your big league pitchers pitch, and then they could just pitch to your batters. But then again, you could also just use the super special, fancy advanced pitching machines that they have now that are supposed to perfectly or quasi perfectly replicate pitcher stuff. So if you just want to keep hitters timing up, then that would seemingly be sufficient for that purpose over that span of time. And also there's the injury risk, right? Even if you're not going all out max effort, you could absolutely still pull something,

sprain something, strain something, and then you're undoing any advantage you might be deriving if there is any advantage whatsoever. But yeah, I'm skeptical that the people in charge of playoff teams believe enough in this effect to go to this much trouble and incur that injury risk. And Ben Clements looked at this last year and found that layoffs haven't hindered playoff teams historically. So it can be kind of a convenient excuse if you happen to lose after a layoff, then you're maybe more likely to make a stink about it.

And you might even believe that it had some effect. But okay. Question from Paolo who says, a simple stat blast light question in honor of Rich Hill appearing in a game for the 20th straight season. Sadly, Rich Hill may not be appearing in any more games because as quickly as he came back, he has now been jettisoned. The Red Sox designated him for assignment, which I guess does not mean he could not be back up with them at some point, or that he could not catch on with some other team. It seems like having gone to all that trouble of I know getting himself up to speed and making his midgetly comeback, he would want to pitch out the string somewhere. So, you know, some team that has not yet employed Rich Hill that maybe is not

going anywhere, just give Rich Hill a call and let him pitch a few innings for you down the stretch. That'd be fun. Does seem abrupt though. I know. It's weird. His first, he didn't even get to make a start. He was working in relief and his first couple outings went fine.

He didn't allow a base runner in his first two outings went fine. He didn't allow a base runner in his first two outings. And then he gave up a couple runs in his third outing and took the loss. And then in his fourth outing, he came into a tough situation, bases loaded and issued two bases loaded walks and then got a sack fly. So that didn't go great. That would be an ignominious end to Rich Hill's long illustrious career. So I hope that is not the end. I hope that he has another outing, but the question from Paulo, I was perusing

Rich Hill's player page and noticed that in 2014, he pitched only five and a third innings over 16 games, exactly one out per appearance. It looks like he accomplished this by being very ineffective in a loogie-ish role. I kind of doubt I stumbled upon a record here, but I wouldn't put it past Rich Hill. And I have a hard time seeing anyone maintaining a similar ratio over many more games.

If you aren't getting anyone out, I don't think most teams would keep running you out there, as I guess Rich Hill just discovered. And if you are, then that would obviously boost the innings pitch per game ratio. So has anyone pitched in more than 16 games in a season while averaging one out or less per appearance, or is this yet another way in which Rich Hill is unique and yeah, this doesn't even deserve the stat blast song cause all I had to do here was run a stat head query at baseball reference.

And I quickly concluded that this is in fact a record. So I, I looked for seasons where innings pitched were less than or equal to 0.33 times games pitched and then sorted by descending number of games pitched. And Rich Hill, he's up there at the top of the leaderboard. 16 games, 5 and a third innings pitched, a rate of one out per appearance. And that is the leader. The second comes from the season after that, 2015 Dana Evelyn of Atlanta. He pitched in 10 games, 3 and a third innings pitched. And then 2017 Xavier Cedeno, 9 games, 3 innings pitched.

And then Wei-Chung Wang in 2017 for the Brewers, 8 games in inning 1⁄3. So yeah, this is the most, the longest that anyone has strung together, some sort of stretch like that. And it really cannot be beaten. I guess this will remain the record forever not only because we don't have loogie so much anymore because we've got the three batter minimum. So I guess unless you were highly ineffective and yet kept being brought in anyway for short outings, the minimum length outings, then you really can't bump Rich Hill off the top of this leaderboard. So there, another very minor claim to fame for our guy Dick Mountain.

We love Dick Mountain. We do. This is indicative of why we love him because he's just been through, he's had so many incarnations, you know, an incarnation who could accomplish this and an incarnation who on a start by start basis at least was one of the best pitchers in baseball for a while. So, he just contains multitudes. Okay. Terry Spencer, Patreon supporter says, now that MLB has used Pitchcom for almost two full seasons, has there been any effect on hitting with runners on second base? Have batting averages or slugging percentages gone down as runners can no longer steal signs?

And I looked just at splits with a runner on second base and that's it. So no one on any other bases. And I'll read you the TOPS pluses, maybe our most valuable stat here when we answer stat related questions. So this is just comparing offense in that split, in that situation to overall offense and higher means that teams hit better in that situation. So since 2010, this situation runner on second, nobody else on base, The TOPS pluses have been 107, 102, 105, 100, 106, 105, 107, 104, 105, 106, 103, 104, 105, 104, 106.

A lot of very similar numbers there. So if you can detect a trend, then you're not me because I can't detect one here. So the average, if you just do a straight average of all these seasons, it's like 105 is the TOPS plus over that span. Last year was 104, this year is 106. So there does not appear to be any discernible difference here in that specific situation. So the idea that a runner on second was able to pick up signs previously when the catcher was flashing them. Obviously that did happen in certain cases and sometimes it happened organically and sometimes it happened via cheating. And it's typically batters do do a bit better in that situation overall, but there has been no trend,

no change. And it's like 15,000-ish played appearances league-wide on an annual basis in this split. Yeah, not CNNE signed there. I also went to Baseball Savant and I compared any situation with a runner on second and any situation with a runner not on second. Guess we could call it a 2B or not 2B comparison. And in terms of OPS point differential or Woba point differential or TOPS plus or Woba plus. This year is actually tied with 2022 for the largest difference since 2008. That is the league has hit better than usual this year with a runner on second relative to its overall average.

I like PitchCom. It's nice how smooth the transition to PitchCom has been. We haven't had to hear about kerfuffles about pitch stealing by runners on base either legally or illegally. Because even when there was no technology involved, players would still get pissed if they caught you doing it even legally. None of that has happened. It's probably helped speed up games. Obviously the pitch clock would have helped anyway, but games, obviously the pitch clock would have helped anyway, but you know, fewer sequences of signs and flashing lots of different signs and confusion and cross-ups, which is another reason why maybe while pitches and pass balls are down, fewer cross-ups, everyone's sort

of on the same page. They know what to anticipate. And again, when you can predict things, you're maybe in a better situation to react to them. So yeah, I'm just, I'm not seeing any change here. So this has been a smooth transition, I would say to the pitch com era. Makes sense to me that, I mean, like I think that maybe this part of the signal too is like, if a runner is already on second, that probably tells you something about like maybe how the pitcher is doing just generally.

So maybe like everyone, you know what I mean? Right. Or maybe a infielder having to hold that guy on and play a little different, opening up a hole potentially, or the pitcher's distracted or yeah, you never know. Right. Yeah. It strikes me as there being a lot of non-cheatery kind of reasons that would explain that. So here's a question from Elliot who says, is Shohei Otani's base stealing prowess even more impressive than it seems considering he is exclusively a feet first slider? Yeah, this was a good email. I don't know the answer to this.

Me neither. Now I'm very willing to entertain the idea, the notion that Shohei Otani is even more impressive than it seems. You're like, yes. I'm receptive to this argument. Obviously. Yeah, this is a novel one. I hadn't even thought of this way to make Shohei Otani sound impressive. But yeah, my answer to Elliot was, I have no idea essentially because A, I don't know what percentage of steals are feet first versus head first. And then how much slower is it, if at all? Is it harder to do that?

Is he an outlier in this sense? And I said it, it seems like a job for one of the stat providers who track these things. And as far as I know, Statcast doesn't track this, although it could in theory, but I asked friend of the show, Mark Simon, of Sports Info Solutions, and SportsInfo Solutions

does track this actually. So they sent me some SportsInfo. They have tracked this since 2021. And he sent me some data, which I don't think will allow us to answer this question conclusively, but is interesting to talk about at least. So as of a day ago, Mark told me, we have Shohei Otani with 67 slides this year, all feet first. Wow. This includes slides on stolen base attempts as well as on balls and play.

So other slides, it's just all slides lumped together. But Shohei Otani has not once slid head first this year. And Mark notes the next most by a player where all his slides were feet first is Michael Bush at 34, Wyatt Langford at 30, Adley Rutchman at 30. So Shohei has like twice as many slides as the next most prolific only foot first slider, right? Last year he had 46 slides, all feet first. In 2022, he had 47 slides, 45 of which were feet first and two were head first. Fun fact, Mark says Ronald Acuna Jr. had 19 slides this year.

Zero were normal feet first slides. He had 16 head firsts and three hook hand reach. That's how they classify that. He notes that Mike Trout had one feet first slide and three hook hand reach. That's how they classify that. He notes that Mike Trout had one feet first slide and two head first slides the last two seasons. And he also notes that Corbin Carroll, 133 feet first slides,

two head first slides the last two seasons. So there are players who slide almost exclusively feet first like Shohay Ohtani, but just not quite completely exclusively. Some of whom are fast boys. Yes, absolutely. So it's not just, I mean, not that Ohtani isn't fast, but he's not like, you know, he's not as fast as Corbin Carroll, right?

And Corbin Carroll, feet, feet, feet, feet, feet. Now he did give me the lead, the league wide breakdown. So would you care to guess? No pressure, feet, feet, feet. Now he did give me the lead, the league wide breakdown. Okay. So would you care to guess, no pressure, cause I had no idea. I had no idea. Do you care to guess what percent of slides are feet first, head first?

I'll tell you that 4% are other. So they classify that as a swim move, hook foot, hook hand reach, but the other 96%, what would you say the breakdown of feet first versus head first? Oh, Ben. Oh, Ben. I have no, well, okay. Okay. So let's like problem solve it. I feel like I would find a feet first slide to be like in the way that my body moves, like maybe more intuitive, you're protecting your little bird bones. So that's good. But also, maybe you feel like it's sort

of, you have less dexterity if you're doing that, right? Like maybe because you can't like maneuver, right? You don't, the swim move is not available to you as an alternative move if you're going with your feet, right? But maybe like the presence of Corbin Carroll suggests that like maybe you're more likely to be a feet first slider if you are a very fast boy because like you're like, I don't need that dexterity. I'm just the fastest boy. You know, you probably don't refer to yourself as a boy because you're like a man.

You're like a grown ass man. But I'm going to call you a fast boy because that's fun to say. I have no idea, Ben. I truly have no, I feel like this is an area where the fact that I did not actually play either baseball or softball is betraying me because I don't have like an instinct for my own base running days. I just have a sense that it could be anything, you know? Who knows? Who knows, Ben?

Yeah. I mean, you watch a lot of baseball, right? I do. You're not recording this, right? And you might just say, oh, he slid. I guess, I guess, I would say if head first is more, more common. I think I would say that. I think I would say head head first is more common. I think I would say that. I think I would say head first maybe. Maybe? I think it's pretty even.

I think it's pretty even. Here's the data. 62% of slides are feet first. Really? I am. Yes. I don't know if I'm shocked because I didn't have a strong sense one way or the other, but okay. Yeah, 34% head first. And the interesting thing is that I responded to this initial email and I

said that my sense was that sliding feet first was catching on. I wasn't sure what the percentages were, but I said, my sense is that feet-first sliding has gotten increasingly common and that most players, okay, I guess I said most players are feet-first sliders these days. So I was right on that score, but I said that the trend would be toward more feet-first sliding. And in fact, I was wrong about that. So they have been tracking this, as I said, since 2021, they've got 10,000 plus slides on balls and play and steals combined each of those years. And here are the percentages, the feet first percentages 2021 71%, 2022 69%, 2023 63%, 2024 62%. And then, you know, corresponding increases in headfirst from 25 to 27 to 33 to 34.

So in fact, the trend is in the opposite direction that we're trending more toward headfirst slides. That is not what I expected. And one reason why I thought that is that I thought, well, teams and players, maybe they're being more cautious and you're more likely to get hurt on a head first slide because you're endangering your bird bones. And that at least does seem to be true. Again, it's a tiny little percentages because.

Like those tiny little bones. Yes. You're, you're usually not going to get hurt one way or another, but the percentage it says slightly higher for a normal head first slide than for a normal feet first slide. There have been 50 injuries on feet first slide since 2022 and only 34 for head first slides. But as we just covered, feet first slides are more common.

And so the percentage, it's like a 0.2% for feet first slides and 0.3 for head first slides result in injuries of some sort. So I thought because of that teams would be dialing back on the head first slides, but no, the opposite seems to be the case. Although it does look like the bigger jump there came from 22 to 23. And then again, this year, as opposed to 21 to 22. So I wonder if that is all related to the relaxed rules. And you know, if you can get a bigger lead, maybe,

then do you feel like you don't? Well, but then even then, if you were getting a bigger lead and you felt more confident that you could steal, wouldn't you be more likely to take the safe approach and slide fee first? And that's not what's happening. Maybe, maybe guys just have a lot of confidence in those oven mitts, you know? Maybe, maybe they feel like there's already a successful mitigation strategy that they

have access to. Cause I gotta say, you know, maybe I have not been able to register like a pronounced preference one way or the other for head first versus feet first slides, but I feel like it's rare to see a guy not wear the little oven mitt. And I know that there are guys who don't wear them. I don't mean to suggest the truly literally every player, but I feel like, well, let me put it this way.

I feel like even a couple of years ago, you were more likely to turn on a broadcast, have an oven mitt guy and have the broadcast crew say something about the oven mitt. No, the oven mitt. Yes. Yes. Be kind of amused by the oven mitt. Kind of imply that maybe the runner was less masculine than his comrades I'm saying this was the thing that people seem to think because men still need to go to therapy

But um or that it was cheap or cheating or something like if it's super big or long It's giving you an extended reach right that I have that look look you want to hear one of my my galaxy brain Denotions one of my conspiracy that Iotions, one of my conspiracy theories. I think that the oven mitts are getting bigger very slowly and they are hoping, they being teams and base runners, are hoping that nobody notices. I think the average gap between the end of your middle finger and the inside of those gloves, I think it's getting bigger every year, Ben. I think it's getting bigger every year.

And they're like, I'm gonna sneak it in there and I'm gonna have, cause all you have to do is touch the back with it and it can be, they're not saying, hey, is there a little bird bone in there? They're not doing that. They're not checking for fingies. Yeah, we must've answered a question about that.

I feel like we have, cause if there's no rule about how long those can be, well, can't you just wear a 90 foot long oven mitt and then you're safe? I'm pretty sure we've talked about that. Obviously if you had a super, I forget whether they've imposed any regulations slightly about that. That they may be as these have become more common. But obviously if someone had a really egregious one, then that would

hasten along some kind of crackdown. But as you're saying, yeah, just like below the just noticeable difference threshold, just like at a millimeter onto the tip of your sliding glove every time. I think that there is a systematic conspiracy on the part of base coaches and base runners to shift the overage and window on the length of the oven mitts. I think it is a little bit every year and they're going to do it until somebody stops them, Ben.

They're going to do it until they are told no. So that's a conspiracy, I believe. Of all the conspiracies to believe, that one's I think pretty innocuous. And I think it might be true. I think it could be, I think it could be true. I think it be true. I think it could be true. I think it's true. I'm glad you brought that up because that is a pretty plausible... Not because of the conspiracy specifically. I'm glad you brought it up for that reason too. I'm so glad that you had the courage to bring this up on our podcast because I think someone

had to. Finally, someone speaking truth to power here. But also because I think that's a pretty plausible explanation for why sliding headfirst is on the rise is that players might feel more protected and less endangered by those slides. And so I guess if we want to come back around to whether it's more impressive if you never do that, I can't conclusively answer that question. Hopefully I've answered some other questions people might've had here, but yeah, I guess all else being equal and I don't know whether all else is equal.

Do you cost yourself any speed if you're sliding feet first as opposed to head first? Like, are you more likely to make contact with the ground earlier and then there's more friction and you slow yourself down more potentially? So this is a little different from the like running through first base versus diving into or sliding into first base versus diving into or sliding into first base, but similar. We're talking about two different types of slides here, not running through, right? Although sometimes teams are running through second base these days.

We've talked about that play too, but point is, I don't know whether you're more likely to slow yourself down that way, but you are sacrificing some control, as you said, in being able to avoid the tag. Right. You can't do the whoot-a-doot. I'd be interested. You know, that technical term, the whoot-a-doot. Especially in the replay review era, when it's not just about did the throw beat your body to the bag, but if you actually touched the bag before you were tagged, which rewards

head first to dexterity. Some complex analysis here would be interesting to see if there is any advantage. If you limited to steal attempts only and then you compared players to themselves, players who are ambi turners, ambi sliders, right? If they sometimes go head first and they sometimes go feet first, what's their success rate? Or even success rate would be noisy because it depends so much on the throw and the pitcher and the catcher and the fielder and everything. But maybe your time to second would be telling, or maybe there'd be confounding factors here because like if you don't get a good jump, maybe you're more likely to throw caution

to the winds and try to avoid the tag by going feet first, right? Or as you said, like maybe if you're not the fastest boy, you're more likely to do one or the other. So there might be some variables here that would make this difficult to analyze, but in theory it could be done. Yeah. I am very open to the notion that I am like missing critical considerations here that folks who have actually played the game have an instinct about this.

And I would welcome their feedback because I don't feel very strongly, except about the oven mitt conspiracy, because I think I'm right about that. I really do. Well, thanks to Mark for the info. People were like, I don't know, this has been a pretty normal Friday episode other than Meg's weird breakdown at the beginning of it. Some of you are probably like, she does that all the time. But you know, here we are, we're delivering on the Friday episode

goods, conspiracy theory, they're getting just a little, it's not a lot, you know? Just asking questions. You're going to think that looks normal to me, but I think if you put them next to each other year over year, they'd be getting a little, just a little bit bigger every year. You're just making it easier to get in there. And I think someone at the league knows and I think they want more stolen bases. So they're like, let them get long. Yeah, that's what I think. I have two pirates related questions to conclude here. And before you all stop listening, because you don't care about pirate related questions.

So it's prompted by pirates, but not really pirate specific questions. Tanner, Patreon supporter says, I'm curious if you believe in the concept of a natural position. In Davey Andrews' coverage of O'Neill Cruz's move off of shortstop, he excerpted a pirate's beat reporter criticizing the move away from quote unquote,

his natural position. Given the circumstances that seemed overly confident about Cruz's relationship to the position, but that phrase has always seemed oddly deterministic to me. What say you two? Do you believe that there is such a thing as a natural position? It's a little like Buck Showalter talking about high butts. There's something to it, but it is an overly simplistic determination, or maybe a better way to put it is there's greater plasticity in it than we have maybe historically given

it credit for. So I'm just going to have an upper bound to how much I can do certain things, right? Could I train my way from where I sit now to that upper bound? I sure could, Ben. Am I going to do that? No, I'm a podcaster. Are you kidding? But in theory, one could. We historically have maybe underappreciated the degree to which certain skills are trainable. And I think that there are certain folks who

have a higher ceiling as it pertains to particular skills than other folks. And so I think that there are people who probably are starting from a higher baseline of skill and that those skills might be very important to playing certain positions and less important to playing others. But I don't think we should underestimate the ability of like determined athletes with modern training techniques

to improve their ability to do certain things in a way that we maybe didn't appreciate entirely in the past. Does that make sense? Is that a sensible answer? Yeah, there probably has to be a position that your talents, your natural talents and whatever talents you develop and route to the majors, lends themselves to, I guess, natural position was probably preordained for you too soon and too concretely in the past. And it's seen as much more amorphous, much more malleable. You can practice, you can change your fate

and your skills. And so, yes, it's much less rigid than it used to be. But in theory, I mean, we all have a certain set of skills and those skills lend themselves maybe optimally to a particular position more so than any other. But I think probably the differences are smaller than they were previously seen to be and the possibility space of potential positions that a player could play competently has expanded. And O'Neill Cruz himself is, I think, an example of that because he would not have been seen as a shortstop.

Now, I don't know whether people were saying that shortstop was his natural position as it was, but it would have been seen as a highly unnatural position for him to play in the past. He would not have gotten the chance to. He would have been moved to a corner, most likely at some earlier time. And I also think that like, you know, apart from one's physical capabilities, like there

were, I like to think that some of the biases that in the past might have moved guys off of position because they were thought to like not have the requisite intelligence or whatever, that we've moved past some of that too. So, I think that we hopefully are doing a better job of giving honest assessments of guys capabilities. Now, we know from analysis by a whole lot of people that that bias is still present in some positions depending on the sport. We're not all the way there, but I think that we're hopefully doing a better job

with some of that stuff too. And that definitely plays a role. You know, Ben, you know, I could never do it. I couldn't do it, but that doesn't mean other people can't. So there you go, go play baseball, not me. There's at least a greater tolerance for letting a player play a position or at least prove that they can't play a position

that maybe isn't the most natural, right? Like, you know, their body type, their reflexes, their reactions, whatever it is, may not be the most conducive to that position, but let them try. Maybe they can. And there are limits to that. If you're naturally left-handed, you're probably not going to get a chance to play second base, shortstop, third base, or catcher. Though I say, let the lefties catch. Even though sometimes hitters will go against their natural handedness, the geography of the diamond does impose some serious obstacles at certain positions. value and you want to put guys in a position where they can contribute the most. And so maybe you, yeah, you try a guy, you're like, well, if he's gonna, if he's gonna do anything for us, he's gonna have to play shortstop. So let's let him try to play shortstop to see if he can add to a championship effort

rather than assuming he can't. It's the growth mindset versus fixed mindset, which, you know, is kind of buzzwordy, but I think I dislike that even more than I dislike the meat casing. Right. But it's the idea that, you know, your ceiling is not as low maybe or not as predetermined as it once might have been and that you could raise your ceiling or change your ceiling in certain ways through deliberate practice or just open-mindedness or whatever, right? Okay. By the way, with Otani, some users in our discord group were

mentioning this, so sorry. But you know how like he's turned on the jets, he's turned on the afterburners recently, he's been running a lot and we speculated about like, is he going for 50-50? Is that why he's running so much? So like through June, he had 16 steals. Okay, and that was 82 games. You know, that's more than half the season. He had 16 steals. And since June, he has 30 steals, almost twice as many in many fewer games, 55.

Now, some of our Patreon supporters were discussing, is this good? Has this been good for him? Because he has not been as productive overall offensively during this time when he's been running a lot. Are these things connected? Is his running hurting his hitting? Or is he running more because he's not hitting as well and he wants to contribute

in some way? If he's getting on base at all, he wants to take an extra base because he's not hitting for as many extra bases because again, I'm not sure if there's a causative relationship here, but his overall productivity at the plate has declined. If we start with, it looks to me like if you had to pick a date when he decided I'm going for it, it might be July 6th, that's he stole one that day and then stole two the next day and then stole another the next day and another the next day, right? So if we go pre-July 5th, entering that day, he had a 1020 OPS and that day he actually hit a home run.

But if we go post that day, so July 6th on a mere 933 OPS, it's just, you know, pathetic. He's lost like 90 points of OPS or something. He's continued to hit quite well. You know, he's a DH also, like he's not playing in the field. I mean, I know he's, he's thrown off a mound or working his way toward throwing off a mound and he works out a ton and everything, but a little less wear and tear, but is the slight offensive downturn, would you connect that at all?

Would you been inclined to connect that to the fact that he is just running all over the place these days? No, I'd probably attribute it to just randomness more than anything else. I mean, he's probably, sure, maybe he's a little more tired. Maybe he's feeling some amount of fatigue, but I still would be more inclined to say that it's just like feeling some amount of fatigue, but I still would be more inclined to say this. Just like a, you know, a random bit of whatever, random bit of whatever, Ben, you know? Okay. And then last question, last thing, second pirates related question.

I promised Andy says on episode 2201, you discuss the strength of a oldest Chapman's arm, not just his ability to throw 105 miles per hour, but the durability to never need elbow surgery. Ben said he has to donate his UCL to science, but why stop there? Doesn't this UCL have monetary value? Uh-oh. What if the last team to employ him could negotiate tendon rights? The pirates could have offered a one-year deal that included postseason surgery to claim the UCL. The front office would then have the option to preemptively put the tendon in Jared Jones, keep it on ice, or maybe find a trade partner nutting it away for cash considerations. I've attempted no research to learn

whether this is medically ridiculous or if it's plausible. But hypothetically, how much would this be worth to a team assume the strength is verifiable? Only one pitcher can have it at a time, but that person is immune from elbow injuries. You just have the magic UCL. I think it's very obviously not medically viable. Isn't that obvious? So let's entertain the question in a more serious way.

So first of all, gross. No, we're not doing this. We're not. No, no, no, we're not. No, we're not doing it. No, we want benefits like this true, like we're down to everyone, right? We want everyone to get to- Well, yeah, I guess there are multiple layers of ethical concerns.

There's like the player, now of course the player's signing up in this instance to have this voluntary surgery and you can operate without a UCL. You don't need a UCL and I don't mean just, all right, Dickie, like if you're not a professional pitcher you could tear your UCL and you can still, I think, go about your business pretty pain-free and uninhibited for the most part, I believe. So you could do that. It's not an appendix exactly, but it's maybe a non-essential part of your body. And that's why I suggested it could be donated to silence. I was thinking more posthumously, I guess,

maybe than actually having it extracted, but either. But yeah, there's that. And then there's like, I wasn't even thinking of it as a transplant situation. I was thinking of it as like studying the tendon for the greater good of humanity and pictures, right? So it could be not just that the pirates claim a UCL and can insert it into Jared Jones's elbow, but that they would have kind of proprietary rights to the information contained therein.

You know, like they could do their own proprietary tests and it would be a competitive advantage for them to know what makes a durable UCL and be able to replicate that. But you know, we've talked about that, I think in the past, the hypothetical of like, what if one team cracked the code when it came to injuries? Would you be able to keep that secret? And ethically, could you keep that secret? And would anyone really want to? I mean, probably someone would want to, like Jeff Luna-esque characters would want to. But I think most medical people who work with teams, I think, would be like, you know, do no harm and help people. And I don't know whether this would fall on the Hippocratic oath, but just like, let's, let's make this open source, you know, let's solve this problem for

everyone because it's a existential problem for the sports. And yeah, it would be a big competitive advantage to one team, but then like, could you even keep that secret? Wouldn't the information circulate and wouldn't you feel bad about yourself? Yeah. I mean, I think you would, that doesn't prec't the information circulate and wouldn't you feel bad about yourself? Yeah. I mean, I think you would. That doesn't preclude teams from still doing it because I think, you know, folks who work for teams like, you know, sometimes they're... Or just not feeling bad about themselves because they're kind of immoral or something.

Well, but sometimes I think they feel bad about it and they, you know, they do it anyway. I think that part of what makes Chapman's whole situation so singular is that I'm sure that there's, well, I'm not sure, but I imagine that there's something like specific to his UCL, but it might also be like how his, you know, mechanics interact with the rest of his body. And it seems silly to think that it's just the one thing, right? It's got to be all kinds of things, all sorts of things, many things, you know?

Probably. That'd be the main thing, I guess. Sure, it's a very important one. If that's the weak point in the kinetic chain for most people and it's just not a weak point for him. Right, but I find it hard to, I don't know that you could say, well, he's decided he's going to donate his UCL and we've pioneered this incredible UCL surgery that lets you just do the total transplant. And I guess that's really what, I mean, they're taking stuff from other parts of you or a cadaver and doing the, but do we know for sure that if they put a Royal Sheffield's UCL and Jerry Jones, that he's just like good to go? I mean, no, we don't know that. So why do

Why why suffer weird bioethics for a thing? You don't even know if it's gonna work. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree Okay, Otani by the way 450 X Woba in the pre Stealing basis period 409 since but I guess why this has come up is that he has sort of slumped by his standards lately, right? Like since the start of August, he has an 855 OPSC's, you know, 221, 290 on base. So he has 205 BABIP, which is kind of shocking for Shohei Otani over a month plus period. Or maybe it's not shocking because, not shocking because randomness, but he's still hitting for pretty good power over that period. But I guess you could say like,

maybe he wasn't initially affected by all the stealing, but it's been a cumulative wear and tear because prolific base thieves, they do talk about how just beat up they get, right? I don't know about Otani specifically. Again, he's going in feet first exclusively. Maybe that has helped, but you could imagine that it could just like by attrition, like

at this point in the year, it could be affecting him. Whereas it wasn't two months ago when he started running. Right? So it's possible, but I still don't know if I buy it. He's had slumps before. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening.

Congrats to Manny Machado on his two homer night on Friday. Moves him into a tie atop the all-time Padres Home Run leaderboard. Manny and Nate Colbert sitting in a tree. Their Padres Home Run totals are 163. By the way, we've been talking about Alex Verdugo's struggles both on the field and with his batting gloves that he is evidently allergic to. Listener Jake wrote in to let us know that this has been at various points a problem in hockey, especially in the 70s where there was an eczema or psoriasis-esque reaction to hockey equipment,

a condition that became known as the gunk. Lots of itching and oozing and discomfort. Defenseman Tom Reed had it so bad he got gunked out of the game and had to stop playing. Later it was discovered that the culprit was probably the use of formaldehyde in the manufacture of equipment as a way of preventing mildew and maintaining color. That mostly solved the problem, although HFM Marianjosa suffered a severe case of this several years ago and was forced to retire. He was fine most of the time, but when he put on his pads and all the other equipment this condition came back with a vengeance and he tried everything and saw everyone and just couldn't combat it. So I guess it's good news

that baseball players mostly don't have to wear restrictive cumbersome equipment, one of the many benefits of baseball being a mostly non-contact sport. Not sure how to segue from the gunk to asking you to support the podcast, but we hope you will. Go to patreon.com slash effectively wild and sign up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, we hope you will. Go to patreon.com slash Effectively Wild and sign up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks, as have the following five listeners, Mike Weber, Jeremy, Taylor Gaines, Baxter Barrett, and Joshua N. Brown. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, prioritized

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hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you next week. I'm strapped on my head with endless hidden people talking I wanna hear about baseball with nuance and puppy and stats Yeah, yeah So I wanna hear about picture wins or about gambling odds All they want to hear about might be child athletic calls And the texture of the hair on the arm going out of one's head Gross, gross Give me, give me, give me, effectively wild Give me, give me, give me, effectively wild

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