Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 222: Bloodlines and the Draft/Giving Up in Extras/Managers Telling the Truth/Moore, Molina, and Calling Pitches

Episode Date: June 12, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about baseball bloodlines, managers revealing too much, giving up in extras, calling games, and more.

These are very serious questions. The American people deserve serious answers, and I hope they come soon. Hi, and welcome to episode 222 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, good morning. Good morning. How are you? It's 11.05 Eastern PM. Yeah, 8 o'clock. It's not even dark yet, or I am. It's why it feels like such a farce on my end.

Yes. Well, you used to say good morning and good evening and covered all the bases. I know. I just felt a little too Truman-y, Truman Burbank-y. It's an email show. We've got emails. You want to answer some of them? Yeah, let's do that. Great. So first, before we get into the emails that we haven't read out loud, I want to go back

to the one that we read to and had Kevin Goldstein answer yesterday, because you and I didn't talk about it. And while Kevin's answer is good and probably better than ours, I also wanted to throw my two cents in. So that was a question from Briley. Brian. He probably goes by Briley. He might. Which was basically if you had to draft a person, he's talking about sons and nephews of players being drafted. If you had to draft a person sight unseen based solely on his genealogy,

from which gene pool would you select your player? And it sounds like he wants more broad terms but i i specifically want to know which player's son you would choose uh sight unseen and uh you have to leave any information you might have out of it like for instance tori hunter's children are excellent athletes um but they're in college and we know they're excellent athletes so let's not let's not choose any sons that we know are good. And just strictly on the player himself, whose child would you draft? Huh.

Okay, so. And you can explain your rationale if you want. You can come up with a player at the end of that rationale if you don't have one in mind. You can talk your way through it. Well, his question about whether you want to go with a superstar or just kind of go with quantity of major leaguers over quality and go with a family like the Molinas or the Boones and just kind of, I guess, maximize your chances of getting major league genes or something. I feel like it's almost a question that I would want to ask a geneticist or something. Like, are you more likely to inherit the elite athleticism if you have more family members and more ancestors who were elite athletes? Or would you rather just have the one who is really, really good?

I mean, a lot of the benefit, I guess, of the bloodline is not just genes. It's about growing up in major league clubhouses and probably playing baseball from a young age and having an expert baseball player tutoring you and watching you and telling you what to do and all of those things. You're guessing. You're guessing. We don't actually know that. I think we've debated that before. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense that I think it would be a nature and nurture thing. Probably.

But I guess that doesn't change it a whole lot. I mean, if we're talking about a father who is an elite athlete, then I guess you're getting as much instruction as you would get probably having, say, two uncles who were baseball players or something. So I don't know that it, that that affects it that much. So it's really just, do you want the superstar or do you, do you want the genes of more, more people in your lineage who were baseball players. And I don't know, I guess, I guess I'd go with the elite guy. And so I guess I would just want to take the most freakishly good baseball player, assuming that there's nothing I know about him that would make me think he's a bad character guy or for some

reason that you'd inherit bad makeup or you wouldn't be instructed as well by him. So I don't know. I guess why wouldn't you go with Bryce Harper or Mike Trout or something? Yeah, I guess one thing I would want to know is I wish I could know how good on average the siblings of major leaguers are, the ones that we haven't ever heard of like you know if uh you know to to give an example if uh mike trout has a brother um he doesn't play professional ball i'd like to know though just how good he is because i i would want to know whether the three drew brothers for instance or the two boone brothers are statistically significant uh if if that is meaningful that two of them made it to the majors, or if it's

just sort of, to some degree, random variation in whether most baseball players actually have good brothers who play into college and maybe get drafted and play short season. Because there's not a huge difference between a guy who gets drafted and plays an a ball and and the majors uh genetically speaking right i mean i mean i would guess brother is a 23 year old pitcher in a ball right he's exactly and so to me that's just as convincing as if price harper's brother was um you know uh an average ball player or it's it's roughly as convincing mike trout's dad for instance was a you know minor leaguer. I think he reached maybe high A or double A. And so to me, that's just as convincing a bloodline as the Ripkins or whatever the case may be.

So that's how I would want to know whether to do the quantity or quality. And since we don't know that uh i guess i i would take the i you know i think i would um first off i mean is has who's the best player ever who's had a son make the majors uh is it maybe gwyn is it probably is it gwyn or maybe maybe pete rose uh tim raines Maybe Pete Rose, Tim Raines. I mean the very, very, very top I don't think have produced a child. But I mean we're talking about 30 or 40 or maybe 60 guys who are ahead of Gwyn. So what are the odds that one would have? So anyway, the point is I think I would go, I think I would start with

the body. I would start with things that are, uh, that have nothing to do with, with hitting and that are just unteachable. Uh, so I would want a guy who has an incredible body, um, a very toolsy player. I would want a toolsy player son. And, uh, if possible, I would like a multi-sport star if possible i would like a guy with a good batting eye because that would tell me i think two things one his his his eye his vision and two i would probably use that maybe incorrectly as a proxy for baseball smarts and uh i would i

thought a lot about this i think i would want a a lefty because even though a left-handed thrower is limited in what positions he can play, he's going to have the platoon advantage, and I would think that it's probably easier to have a natural lefty than to teach him to bat left-handed from a young age. And lefties make up a far higher percentage of baseball players, even at positions,

than they do the general population so all that is a way of saying i would want um probably grady sizemore uh i would take grady sizemore's child and i would just be gambling that the health stuff is not uh genetic that that there's nothing about itself now why not take harper who's also a freakish tools guy who's a lefty and hasn't had Sizemore's health problems? Well, because he was never a college quarterback, I guess. Okay. And I think Grady Sizemore was. My first thought was Todd Helton, actually.

But I worry that he's... I want a guy on the good end of the defensive spectrum. The other guy I thought about, but I ultimately rejected simply because he didn't play baseball, was John Elway. I thought John Elway might be a good one. But I worry that John Elway's got so much football in his bloodlines that John Elway Jr. might choose football

if he were a two-sport star. Unless he wants to get out of his father's shadow. John Elway, yeah. So Grady Sizemore wasn't a college quarterback either. He didn't go to college. I don't remember. Did he? He was some sort of a quarterback.

I know he played some sort of quarterback. Brady Sizemore did not go to college. All right. So maybe he might have been recruited to like University of Washington or something like that to play quarterback. But you know what I'm saying. So, yeah, I mean you can go with Harper. I got no problem with Harper, but I don't know. Harper, I'm not sold.

Yes, Grady signed a letter of intent to play quarterback at the, and that's where Google cuts off. I'm not sold on Harper's makeup yet. I feel a lot better about it than I did two years ago, but I want to see him play 10 years before I commit to that guy's fathering ability. Yeah, right. That makes sense. Okay. All right. We have a question. That one's done. We can unstar that one.

Yes, that one got answered twice. So that was special treatment. This one's from Steven. Hi, Sam and Ben. Less than three hours after the Yankee game ended, I guess this was a few days ago, Girardi announced that neither Mariano Rivera nor David Robertson are available tomorrow. While I find this helpful from a fantasy perspective, I can't for the life of me figure out the added value of telling an opponent what pitcher is and is not available for the next day's game.

Why say anything? That's a good question. That's a very good question. And it's interesting that you already said that because I remember early in his tenure, he didn't really get along very well with the media because he had a reputation as someone who never wanted to say anything. And he would just kind of dissemble or not volunteer any information when it came to injuries. And also, I think, when it came to who was available and who wasn't,

he just kind of never wanted to say anything. And beat writers like people who tell them things. But he's kind of mellowed a bit, I guess, or been more open in the last few years. So this is a good question. I guess maybe it's that it's Rivera and Robertson and not, say, a lefty, a loogie type or something, like a matchup guy.

I mean, Rivera and Robertson kind of are going to, they're not matchup guys. They're not people you bring in to face certain hitters that the other manager would maybe make a different decision about pinch hitting or structures line up a different way i mean they're just kind of the the eighth and ninth inning guys and they're effective against everyone so if they're not available and you know that they're not available what do you do differently i guess knowing knowing that ahead of time

as an opposing manager? Well, you know that somebody else is going to be in those roles. You might be able to surmise who now is the ninth inning guy. You might play your matchups differently knowing that essentially you're probably going to have two shots at the soft part of the bullpen instead of just one. It's not just going to be maybe the sixth and the seventh where you're going to have prime scoring opportunities. You might have four innings. It could affect it, I think. What would you do?

Hold back a pinch hitter instead of using him in an early inning? You might. i don't know you might not play for one run in the sixth if you know you're gonna have shots in the eighth and ninth maybe uh you might play if you're down i don't know i mean you see managers who manage very differently if they're down one than if they're, say, up one or tied, where if they're down one, they might go with their sixth reliever out of their bullpen a lot of times, and you're like, geez, it's only a one-run game. But, you know, they do that.

And maybe if it's a one-run game and you know Rivera and Robertson aren't in, you treat it like a tie game. You could imagine. I mean, whether there are sensible reasons to change your managing strategy against a Mariano-less team doesn't mean that managers wouldn't change their strategy against a Mariano-less team. who's available and who's not, I would think. I guess, I mean, the only advantage I can think of it for Girardi is just kind of giving, throwing the beat writers a bone and getting along better with them by being more open about things. But that obviously comes second to winning games.

So I don't know. Yeah, I think that to some degree it's just that you, you know, you want to basically get along with the people that you're around at any given moment. And if you don't think that it matters, you figure it probably doesn't. Maybe it's easier just to go ahead and say it. The other thing is that just because he says they're unavailable doesn't mean they're 100% unavailable. So there might be some subterfuge there. There's also the fact that the opposing manager is not an idiot. And he knows exactly how many pitches each of those guys has thrown

and how many days in a row they've worked. He's likely to surmise the same thing anyway. the same thing anyway. And, you know, frankly, I think if you don't say it and it comes to the eighth inning and you don't go to those guys, then, you know, there's a couple of innings where the fans are maybe second guessing you, where then at the end of the game, you have to explain yourself. And it might look like you're just covering your tail by explaining why you didn't go to Robertson in a certain situation or why you didn't go to Rivera in a certain situation. And if you've said it ahead of time, then you've cleared it.

It's not something you're going to have to address in any sort of controversial way later. And it also might be a thing that Rivera and Robertson want to know, although you could always tell them. But maybe if you tell them, it gets out anyway. So I agree. I mean, I feel like managers should feel no ethical or moral obligation, not only to tell the truth, but to not lie. I mean, I would feel perfectly fine with them going out of their way to lie. It's part of the game. So, you know, I would probably generally counsel a manager to hold back more than they

do. And some managers do. I mean, Mike Socha sort of famously refuses to say who his opening day starter is going to be, even though, A, there's no possible way that that will matter, and, B, it's obvious by the way he sets his spring training rotation who it's going to be. But, you know, you don't ever want to get pinned down. Well, I guess that's a reason not to do it, not to say that they're unavailable. I mean, the problem is that if he says that they're unavailable

and it gets to a situation where he really wants to use them, is he then locked in? Because then maybe there's only a 2% chance that you'll use either one of those guys. But let's say it gets that 2% chance. Let's say it's the 17th inning and you want to use one of those guys even just to get an out. And three weeks later, he's got a sore arm. Well, you've testified against yourself. You've made it an issue that it doesn't need to be.

So that's probably a good reason not to say anything. Yeah, that's a consideration. I get the sense that baseball teams are maybe more open about availability and injuries than teams in other sports. It's always dangerous when I start talking about other sports. I thought in football they – I think in football – someone correct us, but I think in football they have to say. That's what all that

probable right right and all that is i like i think that it's in the rules that you have to but you don't have to do that until right before the game right or yeah i don't know what are we doing ben what are we talking about i don't know i just remember that in in hockey i think when players get injured teams are just incredibly unspecific about what their injury is. They have to say what half of the body the injury is in or something, or at least some teams do this, where they'll say that a guy has an upper body injury and you don't know whether he has been decapitated or he has a bruise on his shoulder or something. Is this because they'll get targeted by i don't

know by the other team i don't know i don't know whether it's just a whether that's the hockey tradition or the precedent or whatever it is i just remember reading about this um so i mean compared to that sort of thing i guess we're we're pretty fortunate in that we actually know in great detail what is going on with players' injuries, even if we don't know as well as the teams do. Okay, next question is from Joe. As always, I'm skipping the heapings of praise that come at the beginning of all of these questions. I have no idea what question this is. Have I seen this question?

He says, I have a question that I've been pondering for some time. I thought it might be an interesting topic for your show. With the two extra inning marathon games this past weekend between Texas and Toronto and the Mets and the Marlins, does a team ever consider giving up for the sake of the health and exhaustion of their players? I know this question may seem crazy, but I was thinking that an early season game that extends too long could negatively impact a team for the next series, whether they win or lose. At what point would you consider this? 14th inning, 15th inning? I know sometimes position players are put into pitch, and I think that is an example of just giving up. Exhaustion leads to injury. Anyway, I was just curious about your perspective? It's a good question. I've thought this many times.

I've wondered whether a manager would consider it. And I have to say that after many years of watching these games and wondering about it, I don't feel like I'm very close to an answer. So what do you think? Well, I mean, I guess he's right that putting in a position player to some degree is is kind of giving up right i mean you could always totally giving up you could always put in a starter who whom you plan to start in the next few games or something just i mean that

would give you a higher probability of winning that one game probably than your position player would. I mean, it's rare that every single pitching option is exhausted. You just don't want to push a reliever farther than you typically would or you don't want to use a starter or whatever it is, but you're kind of conceiving when you put in that position player or you're saying that we care more about the next few games or the rest of the season than this one game? So, I mean, it's not forfeiting, but it's something in between forfeiting and going all out.

We've seen a lot of these situations in the last two weeks or so. The Padres recently used their next-day starter in a game that went very long. The White Sox let their closer throw something like 60 pitches in that 17 or 15 or whatever inning game against the Mariners. I think it was actually 16, which is kind of funny because I named all the numbers except 16. And the Marlins-Mets game, I believe both used their next day starter

for like seven innings apiece. And so those are cases where you're clearly sacrificing for the next day to try to win that game. And I think in those cases, it's probably appropriate. Because, you know, yes, okay, so Sean Markham pitches seven innings for the Mets in extra innings. And, you know, you're not necessarily going to win that game, so you're negatively impacting your chances the next day

for a shot at that game. And I assume they probably called up somebody from AAA to make an emergency start or something like that. The thing is, though, that you're not necessarily going to win the next day either. Just because you save Sean Markham doesn't necessarily... How much better does Sean Markham give you a chance the next day over a AAA starter? It's probably like a I don't know, like a 10% chance or something like that. Um, whereas you know very well that each inning that you're playing in extra innings is maximum leverage. Your, your whole point, the whole

point of managing, I think basically is to get, um, as much of your, your good stuff in the high leverage situations as possible and, you know, save your good stuff in the high leverage situations as possible. And save your bad stuff for the low leverage situations. So when it gets to the 14th inning, it's the most high leverage you can be. Every inning is potentially an entire win all by itself. And so I think you do have to basically manage your guts out to try to win that game. Now, the Addison-R Reed example is a bit trickier, and I think it goes to the question of whether you risk injury over an X-training game. And I guess we talked about this in that Angels-A's game when three guys got hurt, and we were wondering

whether those long X-training games put everybody at risk. But certainly I would think that you would want to be very careful about exposing any pitcher to something that he's never done before. And I probably wouldn't have let Addison – I'm certain I wouldn't have let Addison Reed throw the third inning, even though they won the game and Addison Reed got the win. To me, letting your closer throw 55 or 60 pitches is probably irresponsible and shouldn't be done. Of course, the White Sox seem to know how to keep their pitchers healthy.

They do. And it's not like I know what makes pitchers get hurt. But I wouldn't throw the previous day's starter. I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere. And I would say that anything that I thought was likely to cause injury, I wouldn't do for one win unless it was postseason or I hated the guy. What if – well, OK. Yeah, I guess – what if it was the last guy in your bullpen? Somehow he had four days in a row but he's a replacement level reliever.

Yeah. but he's a replacement level reliever. Yeah, I'd let him go as long as he had something to offer. Yeah, I think I probably would let him go. You know, I mean, you're assuming that that guy wants to pitch, right? If that guy is 20, then maybe I don't do it because he's got a lot ahead of him. But if it's Miguel Batista, and my guess is that Miguel Batista really wants the opportunity to do something stupidly heroic, even if it puts him at risk. Because this guy in the bullpen always does, I would think,

distinguish himself and players generally just want to play whenever possible. Yeah, so I wouldn't be as concerned about that guy, and it sounds selfish to say I would sacrifice the last arm in my bullpen, but I don't think it's a, I think it's a two-way street. I think that guy wants to be, that's part of the deal. When you sign on as the 25th guy on a team, I think part of the deal is that you're essentially saying, use me however you want because I know that's my value to you. If that guy said when the contract was offered to him, and by the way, I'll never throw more than 30 pitches because my elbow's too precious, I don't think he'd get that

contract. And so it's sort of an implicit agreement. Maybe. I don't know. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, we have... Wait, wait, wait, wait. One question. What we haven't talked about is a hypothetical where the catcher, the second string catcher gets injured in the 17th inning. And you need to put somebody behind the plate do you put somebody

who's never caught a major league game behind the plate to catch a major league pitcher in extra innings uh i guess it's sort of the same thing if it's the last guy on your bench and maybe maybe some sort of utility guy who hasn't gotten into the game yet and is not really that much better than the next best available utility guy you could get. I guess, I mean, you could kind of look at that as part of the contract of being a utility guy whose only value and reason for having a roster spot is that he's able to play a lot of positions adequately. And maybe that sort of understood also that he would be an emergency, emergency catcher. What if it's not the utility?

There's a pretty good chance that guy's been used already. What if it's the 25th pitcher or the last pitcher in the bullpen that needs to be on the plate? I wonder if that's more or less a concession than putting in a position player to pitch. I mean, catching is almost as specialized a position as pitcher, and putting a pitcher behind the plate, I would assume, would be very ugly very quickly. But what do you do? I mean, you don't forfeit. But what do you do? I mean, you don't forfeit.

Yeah, you can't. I don't think you can forfeit really under any circumstances, right? I mean, just the PR fallout of forfeiting. I don't think you can persuade your fans that discretion was the better part of valor or forfeiting was. So you kind of have to do something. You put a guy back there and tell your pitcher to throw nothing but you know the straightest fastballs he can yeah i guess so i mean obviously there's still a risk of injury um just getting foul tipped or run over or something i mean you you'd tell the guy not to not to block the plate not to do anything super heroic and just try to catch the ball. I guess I would do that.

I mean, I don't know. It's like what if the only available remaining guy is your young ace who you just signed to an eight-year extension or something? Well, you put that guy at first. Yeah, right. You can always do that, right? You can always put a pitcher in the field and move a position player and i guess that would always be preferable probably it's really disappointing that we've gone through this incredible run of 19 inning games and and 17 inning games and we have not even sniffed that yet yes that is sad i would say that of all

the i mean it's been a pretty good month for weird baseball, but it's been—I think it's been a large quantity of low-ceiling weirdness. It hasn't been the weirdest stuff. The Seager Grand Slam game probably qualifies as super-duper weird. X Marlins was weird. super duper weird. X Marlins was weird. I mean, just Slowie going eight or whatever and Markham going seven, but I mean, that in itself is weird,

but it kind of limited the amount of other weirdness that could happen. Yeah, exactly. It's been a lot of nice, good weirdness, but really, other than the Seeker game, I wouldn't say anything that was like super duper 20 years from now remembering it weirdness. Yeah.

I would think. That's how I feel about it. Yeah. Mitch Moreland throwing knuckleballs was cool. Or was it David Murphy? David Murphy. Sorry. You're right.

You're right. I missed that. I missed that. And so you're right. That was very – wait, no. That was a blowout. Yeah. That was not – that wasn't the extra inning game. No. Yeah. That wasn't the X-training game.

No. Yeah, you're right. Well, that doesn't count. Okay. That's not what we're talking about. All right. That's just bad baseball. That's just fun, bad baseball.

Okay. All right. This question is from George. He says the following appeared June 10th in the Tampa Tribune's game story on the Rays' loss to the Orioles the day before. And then he quotes, Moore checked the video, Matt Moore checked the video of the hits he allowed between innings and noticed that he was throwing the type of pitches deep in the count that he should have thrown on the first pitch.

Or he was throwing fastballs when he had two strikes and the hitter was trying to protect the plate rather than making him chase an off-speed or breaking pitch outside the zone. And then Moore says, They did a very good job of making me pay for those mistakes, especially late in the count. Those are when your pitches are supposed to be good, especially when I'm ahead in the count. Moore allowed six of his 12 hits after getting two strikes on the batter.

Six of those 12 hits came off change-ups and three off curveballs. End excerpt. And then George says, my question is, how much of this is the responsibility of the catcher, especially an experienced one like Jose Molina, who is in that game? I know the pitcher has the ultimate call on what he throws, but how is it possible for this to go on again and again and the catcher or the pitching coach not step up, especially with a young pitcher? That's a weird thing to notice on video like that that's like noticing on video that you

intentionally walked the bad hitter to face the good hitter like that seems like just something you wouldn't need video for yeah um but uh yeah i i you know i didn't read the tampa tribune game story and so i'm trusting that that all the important context is here. But yeah, this feels like a weird thing for a pitcher to say. It feels sort of like I'm not saying that Matt Moore meant it this way, but it reads as like passive aggressive criticism of his catcher slash pitching coach. Because this is the sort of stuff that gets talked about in the pre-game meeting, the pre-series meetings between the pitchers and the pitching coach and the catchers. And certainly there's dialogue between catcher and pitcher

throughout the game. And certainly with a young pitcher and a veteran catcher, you would expect a much larger portion of the game calling to be directed by the catcher. He certainly knows the batters a lot better, and he's supposed to, especially if his last name is Molina, you would think there'd be a lot of deference there. And so in a way, more, one way or another, this doesn't read well for Moore. It either reads that he was being passive-aggressive in these quotes, or that he was maybe somehow being petulant on the mound and not listening to Molina or ignoring Molina.

And like I'm not saying that Moore was either of those things. I'm saying that the article comes across that way. Or it could reflect negatively on Molina if he just wasn't saying anything. Yeah, or it could reflect negatively on Molina. But even if it reflects negatively on Molina, it's more blaming melina right either more is blaming yeah i guess so unless he's he's just trying to be accountable for his own mistakes and his his bad judgment and we're just reading into it well we're definitely reading into it and that's why i say i don't know that it's fair for me to read into it um but i don't uh you know every relationship is different and so i've never had a real good read on like how to tell whether it's the pitcher or the catcher who's doing the calling

but you know they the the implication is usually that the the the older the pitcher and the younger the catcher, the more the balance shifts. But yeah, I mean, it does seem like a very weird thing to have going on because certainly Molina knows. I mean, this is not advanced stuff that he's talking about throwing. I wonder, I mean, forget about Molina like this is like this to the major leagues right this is the sort of thing that my mom might notice on yeah so so that's strange in itself sorry sorry about that mom um yeah how do you get to be matt more major league pitcher and not have this dawn on you? I guess, I don't know, if you're in some sort of competitive zone and you lose the ability to think because you're so focused on throwing your pitch or something. I mean, yeah, that's not a great reflection on him either way.

I mean, the thing about, in defense of Molina melina if we assume this is true and that we're reading this all correctly in defense of melina your ultimate goal as a catcher is not really to call the right pitch for this situation it's to call the pitch that your pitcher is going to be able to execute you have to you have to know whether your pitcher is going to be able to throw the pitch you ask for and if you call the perfect pitch in the perfect location but he's not capable of executing it you've failed as a catcher i mean that's that's i think where we misread what pitch what catchers are doing the the situation comes second the hitter comes third the first thing is what's the pitch you're going to throw best and um if more was you know even if even if

more wasn't sort of fighting if his you know if he if he didn't have full buy-in, and Molina therefore had to go with what Moore was shaking to or seemed to be most comfortable with, then he's sort of stuck in that position. It's simply a matter of more not being able to execute all his pitches or not being able to execute the right pitches at the right time. And in that case, I don't know how having a better game plan is going to help. But yeah, I mean this is pretty simple stuff. This is maybe not the best case to even have this conversation on because it almost doesn't make sense. The details don't quite add up. Yeah, okay. All right, we're done answering questions. Did you want to mention that no catcher thing oh yeah somebody asked uh why you have to if if some team could

just take their catcher and put them in a position and so you could have an extra position player and just the best part of that email was the phrase use the umpire as a target but uh this is a very easy one to answer quickly. The catcher must be in the catcher's box. It's in the rules. You may not go experimenting with this if you're a major league team. There's a catcher's box. You can see it.

It's in chalk, and he has to stand in it. So anytime you see chalk in baseball, you can assume that your creativity is limited. Yeah, generally a good idea to have a catcher, even if the rules didn't specifically say that you had to have one. Probably not something umpires would take kindly to, being used as targets. Okay, we're done. We had one question that we didn't get a chance

to answer from Luis in Guatemala so I'm not going to read the question at least this week maybe we'll get to it in the future but he ended his email with I'll rate and review you on iTunes next time you ask so

he wasn't going to do it he wasn't going to do it then he's going to make us work for it he's going to do it then. He's going to make us work for it. He's going to make us beg a little bit. So, Luis, consider this the next time that we ask for ratings and reviews on iTunes. Thanks, Luis. Yes. Now we assume Luis will rate and review us now,

and we appreciate it if anyone else who listens and has not yet done so would would do that this is a good question too we should we should star it and get to it yeah because it's a good question we'll talk about it okay uh so send us more questions for next week at podcast at baseball prospectus.com we will be back tomorrow