Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2244: Their Name is Mud

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley follow up on previous banter about the best title for a president of both baseball and business operations, then deliver fresh banter about how Derrek Lee’s 2005 RBI total was a sign of its time, where the Rays will play in 2025 and beyond, the Marlins’ new manager, and a […]

Hello and welcome to episode 2244 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raulia, FanGraphs, and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the Ringer. Ben, how are you? Well, I'm kicking myself figuratively speaking over our glaring failure to come up with the obvious best title to describe the new job of Derek Falvey, who we started off the last episode by noting that Derek Falvey, president of Baseball Operations for the Twins, is now adding business operations to his purview.

So he's going to be president of both baseball and business operations. And we proposed a number of potential titles to describe that unique or certainly unusual dual role that he holds now. And somehow we didn't land on really the most obvious and probably most fitting term, which is po-both. Po-both. I don't know how to emphasize it exactly, but- Po-both. Yeah, po-both.

We put a call out to everyone for suggestions and I'm grateful to everyone for writing in, but as it turns out, just about everyone wrote in to suggest that. We heard from several people, quite a few. Zander, Tom, Ben, Corey, Ed, number of listeners wrote in to say, po both. How could it not be po both? How could it not be po both? I'm sure we came close to suggesting that.

We just said like he's doing both. It's such a short little leap from both to po both. And yet we and Eric in that moment failed to make it. You know, I have to reconsider my entiremith and yet this very obvious solution to this tremendous problem, certainly one that ranks among all of our many problems right now. It just didn't occur to me, Ben. I feel like I let you down, I let Eric down, I definitely let our listeners down. Really, I failed myself. It's brought me low, but I appreciate everyone's cleverness and I'm going to call it that. I'm not going to demean the contributions of all of these lovely emails to say that

it was obvious because it wasn't obvious to me, you know? And is that a bit of ego soothing on my part my part to say, well, come on, man, there's surely this brilliance and it can only be called such, the mark of genius and what am I but a humble podcaster? CB It was a collective failure. Don't blame yourself, blame all of us. And sometimes it's tough to be fast on your feet and funny on your feet while you're recording a podcast and then you think of the most your feet while you're recording a podcast. And then you think

of the most fitting thing after you're done. As I did late in that episode when I was making my Eric B and Rakim comps and little funny transitions and segues. And I was glad that I thought of one before we finished recording, but I did not think of this and I did not continue to brainstorm after we recorded. And so I did not think of this too late either, just didn't cross my mind. Fortunately, our listeners picked up the slack. They're there for us when we have a creativity deficit. And so as a community, we have come to,

I think the right solution here. It's po both. So I don't know whether Derek Falvey's business cards will specify that he is po-both, but I think it should. That's really the most apt term. So we've decided. We have spoken and our listeners have too.

So thanks for the assist and sorry for being slow on the uptake there. Here's another thing I was thinking of. I should note, by the way, that we will be devoting a large portion of this podcast to an interview. We will be talking to two delightful scientists, Doug Drolmak and Sravana Pradeep at UPenn, who have studied the rubbing mud on the baseballs. So some of you may have seen some news reports, their paper just came out last week. It was well publicized in various outlets, but we hadn't really had a chance to hear from Doug and Trevon themselves. And so they joined us for a fun, wide ranging conversation about

how they took it upon themselves to study the rubbing mud that has been applied to major league baseballs and baseballs at all levels, really are many levels, for the better part of a century now. And they devised ways of studying mud and they have come up with answers about why this rubbing mud is well suited to the baseball. And they'll talk to us about that and about potential synthetic solutions and other concerns and inquiries. It's a fun conversation. So we will get to them soon. One thing that I just had a moment of consternation about, it was mentioned in our Patreon Discord group, the fantastic season that Derek Lee had in 2005.

This is a little random, but we were remembering some guys, specifically Derek Lee. And I had pretty fond memories of Derek Lee and that season. And I think I had him on some fantasy teams way back when, when I used to play fantasy. And he was a good hitter and a good player overall. But in 2005 specifically, he was fantastic. He was just an absolute offensive force. So you know, career 35 ish war, baseball reference career, 122 OPS plus just really solid numbers all around over a 15 year career. But in 2005, he had a 174 OPS plus and he was like a eight win player and you know, all star gold Glover silver slug, third in NL MVP voting, batted

335, 418, 662 for the 2005 Cubs. Wow. Led the league in hits, led the league and the majors, in fact, in doubles, led in batting average, won the batting title, the slugging title, if that's a thing, led in OPS, all the rate stats, total bases led the majors. He was incredible. And as I was looking at his numbers and reminiscing about that season, I noticed to my surprise, he had 107 RBI, only 107 RBI, even though he played in 158 games. He had almost 600 plate appearances. He was like a Pujolsyan offensive force that season.

So I'm thinking to myself, how the heck did he drive in only 107 runs? He hit 46 home runs, like 46 dingers with those rate stats. It seems improbable that he would have driven in a mere 107 runs. And then I'm looking like, did he hit higher in the order than I recall? No, he never batted higher than third in the Cubs order. He mostly hit third and sometimes a little lower in the lineup even. So you'd think that he would be well positioned

to drive in runs. Then I'm thinking, well, was he incredibly unclutch or something? Like, was he just great with the bases empty and then kind of choked with the runners on? No, not at all. He had essentially no split, no runners in scoring position, bases empty split. He was just as good in all situations. And so then I thought, okay, it had to have been the hitters batting ahead of him. The Cubs must have just not put a lot of runners on ahead of him.

And in fact, that is what happened. So poor Derek Lee is just like churning out just hit after hit and Homer after Homer, and yet batting in front of Derek Lee that year. So collectively Cubs leadoff batters had a 299 on base percentage, which was, well, it's right there in the number. It's extremely low. That was mostly Jerry Hairston, who actually wasn't that bad from an on base percentage, but then also a lot of Corey Patterson and Nafi Perez and also Cubs number two hitters

that year, 314 OBP. And that was mostly Nafi Perez and some Todd Walker and some Corey Patterson. So it was like Patterson and Perez just kind of these, you know, slap hitters, speedy in theory, at least bat control types types just that very like old-school archetype of a leadoff hitter and a number two sort of set the table type guy so Cubs leadoff guys 74 TOPS plus number two hitters 93 TOPS plus and if you go by SOPS plus so that's like relative to the league wide split for those batting slots, 76 and 100. So in particular, the leadoff batters were bad, but the number two hitters were no great shakes

either. And that was in the era when number two hitters were that type of player, as opposed to now where you might have your best hitter batting second. And if you look at the OPP distribution in the lineup that year for the Cubs, it reminded me almost of that famous drill tweet about someone who's spending thousands of dollars per month on candles and is like someone who's good at the economy, please help me budget this. My family is dying. It's like someone who's good at batting order distribution and on base distribution, please help me have my lineup here because my run scoring is dying here. It wasn't a great Cubs lineup overall, but those were definitely not the optimal choices to put in front of Derek Lee, the powerhouse that season. So Cubs leadoff hitters had the second lowest on base percentage of any

lineup slot for the Cubs that year. And of course, number nine batters were primarily pitchers, so they were worse, but all the other lineups, even number eight batters granted inflated a little by probably people being put on ahead of the pitcher, 306 on base. The number seven hitters had an on base percentage higher than the leadoff guys and on par with the number seven hitters had an on base percentage higher than the leadoff guys and on par with the number two hitters. And this was 2005. This is not ancient history. And it wasn't even that anomalous really. I mean, this was weird, but like I stat headed it and Cubs leadoff batters that year were not like the worst ever or anything. They were, you know, down there, but like there were more than a hundred teams that had worse TOPS plus from their

leadoff batters, right? So this was just kind of almost the norm back then. they were tied for like a hundred and fifth, I guess, in terms of lowest T OPS plus out of their lead off spot. So it, it both made me nostalgic in a way. And also like we really did things this way less than two decades ago. You know, this was a very like money ball was published only two years before this kind of lineup distribution, but it almost made me nostalgic for when you could kind of get up in arms about teams self-sabotaging in this way. Like when you could feel smarter than MLB teams and be somewhat justified in that feeling that

you know more, that you might actually run a baseball team better than the qualified so-called experts. Like, we don't have that feeling so much anymore. And it was almost fun in a way when you could be mad at teams for sabotaging themselves instead of sabotaging the sport, in a sense, by like being too good and almost breaking baseball in certain ways, by like figuring out the sport, necessitating rules changes. Like it's kind of incredible that for so long and until fairly recently, there were just such on the face of it, seemingly dumb decisions that teams were making. And I almost missed that. I almost missed that feeling of superiority that you could have when you

looked at that at the time and said, how the heck are they batting Corey Patterson and Nafi Perez ahead of Derrick Lee? I have to confess something. I cannot conjure in my mind even one image of Derrick Lee playing baseball. Not even one. And I'm not saying that like I'm smart or special. I am raising it as a failure of me and I'm trying to account for it. And I think that a great deal of it has to do with the fact that, you know, he was like an NL guy mostly. And at a time when me watching NL guys, really outside my immediate control much of the time, you know?

So I can't, I'm a blank. I'm a files not found. The floppy disk has been corroded. It's been snapped in half. And I feel badly about that because it's not like I'm not aware of him existing, you know? It's not like you were like Derek Lee and I was like, oh God, who's it? I just don't have, I have nothing. I have nothing for you, Ben. I can't offer you anything. Well, I'm sorry that you don't have a mental record of Derek Lee's dominance that year.

You're not a Derek Lee doubter. You're not some sort of truth or, you know, it happened. And fortunately- Yeah, I'm not denying the existence of Derek Lee nor am I denying the dominance of Derek Lee. I'm sitting here simply saying it would have been nice for me to have experienced 170 WRC plus seven war season. But you know, it was 2005, I was a sophomore, freshman, sophomore in college. I was a sophomore in college. I wasn't, I was reading Foucault probably, and I probably would have enjoyed Derek Lee Moore and yet blank, just a complete empty file, image not found. Well, maybe that's partly because of the mediocrity of the Cubs that season and in that era in general. And maybe part of that mediocrity was because they were batting Corey Patterson, lead off and leaving Paris so often didn't help. But yeah, it just took me back to a time when you could have that kind of righteous sense of superiority,

you know, just like you could read Fire Joe Morgan or Rob Nye or Baseball Prospectus or whatever it was and feel like you were in on a secret that the teams themselves somehow didn't know and ignored for the longest time. And you would think that on the face of it, it would be fairly obvious. And I'm sure Derek Lee probably felt frustrated at times that he was just totally tearing up opposing pitchers and yet not getting many rippies. Look, Derek Lee seems like he must be a nice guy. I'm looking at his Wikipedia page. You know, he's a kind face.

Nicknamed Dee Lee. How do we feel about that? It's not the most inventive, you know, there could be more there. But yes, to your point, like, I'm sure that I have watched him play baseball, you know, he was on that, he was he was a World Series champion. So I'm sure I watched it then. But I just don't have, there's nothing, there's nothing in there. But you remember the feeling more broadly of being in the know. I do, but can I say, and here I might sound like I'm on maybe not a high horse, but like a medium height horse. I enjoyed the discovery of that time.

I enjoyed being like, oh, that tracks and makes sense. But I wasn't like a message board person. Again, I was reading Foucault, Ben. I was like over there with Foucault. I was thinking about hops. I was like, how do we understand represent? Right. No, I was like, how do we understand representative democracy in this moment? And on the one hand, I am sad that I didn't come to it sooner because ultimately like this became, you know, understanding all of this became like a big part of my life's purpose. But also I do sometimes feel fortunate that I wasn't in, I wasn't like deeply immersed

in the first round of it because I don't feel fussy about it, you know? I feel fussy about so many things, Ben, you know, just like a vast library of things upon which I can visit fuss. But I don't feel fuss about this a lot of the time. I want people to like be rigorous. I want them to engage with intellectual honesty. I think that understanding like the game through analytics is like them to engage with intellectual honesty. I think that understanding the game through analytics is like, gonna tell you more about it than not. But I don't feel fussy about it. And so when people are like, that's not for me, I feel free to go, okay, you know? And I feel fortunate because I think that some of the consternation and

like snarkiness and seeming suffering of our colleagues who've been in it for longer, I just don't, you know, I don't have that. I'm like, okay, well, you know, you'll find something else about baseball too, like probably because it's a pretty cool game. Yeah. Well, that sense of superiority at the time could kind of curdle and could lead to almost this toxic sense of superiority and this just sniping, right? And this war of new school versus old school. And that got tiresome. And because the sabermetricians at the time were ignored because they were seen as the

outsiders, because there was this clubby, clique-ish nature to the insiders in baseball. It led to a lot of verbal bomb throwing that, in retrospect, is maybe regrettable, but it was just like, they're ignoring us, so we have to raise the volume. And this was really before my time, too. Maybe I was reading, but not really contributing to that so much. But that was sort of the byproduct of feeling excluded and actively being excluded. Right. But there was sort of a nice little warm feeling that you got from feeling like you knew better, you know?

Yeah. Just like this low-stakes sense of superiority, I guess. This feeling that you were in the know and that you knew something someone else didn't. If they'd just put you in charge, then you would do things better and probably you would have done many things horribly wrong and worse than they were being done. But also, you were onto something, certainly, and eventually people of your ilk did get hired and they did do those things and they fixed the lineup construction somewhat. And also they probably determined that the lineup construction was overrated to some

extent even if it did depress Derrick Lee's RBI total in 2005 and the Cubs collective run total to some extent. And every now and then you still get teams that have a trouble scoring or have less production than you'd like out of the top of their lineup. In fact, the 2019 Cubs had the same TOPS plus 74, I think, out of their leadoff spot. But you look at the names there and it was Kyle Schwaber and Jason Hayward and Ben Zobrist, guys who maybe weren't having their best seasons or were at the tail end or were slumping, but at least were more reasonable choices.

People who had been productive hitters at some point, more so than Navy Peres and Corey Patterson, right? You could see the idea of what they were going for, even if the results weren't really there. So rarely do you get that almost purposeful stepping on rakes anymore. And rarely is it as satisfying to second guess because the obvious opportunities that are being passed up are either not as obvious or not as significant. And you always have to caveat things and say, well, they have better data than we do. And they've hired a bunch of smart people and odds are they probably have some sense

of what they're talking about. Even if sometimes they can be too close to the problem and make some mistakes that you might not make as more of a dispassionate, impartial observer from afar. But there is a part of me that misses that. I'm not saying I would like to go back to that era, but that smug sense that it gave you of feeling like you knew something that the so-called experts didn't. Going to miss that. And also in some ways, maybe teams have gotten too smart and that has

backfired in some respects as well. But it's not ancient history. It's not that long ago. And yet, Derrick Lee today, he probably have more RBI's than he did that season. And yet also, no one would really care about his RBI total in 2024. Right. And like, to be clear, it is fun to be like, I know a little something, you know, that's a fun. And it didn't, it didn't curdle for everyone. Or, you know, like, I'm going to betray that I don't know how cheese works. Like maybe it like, instead of saying it curdled it, like it ended up fermenting and for a while you're like, oh, but then like it becomes, instead of saying it curdled it, like it ended up fermenting and for a while you're like, but then like it becomes, but then it was Parmesan and you're like,

oh, Parmesan is great. So like some people they're like, they're like cheese, you know, but just get moldy or something that happens. Yeah. But I'm trying to say nice things about them so that people who are in that crew listening to our pod don't think that I'm being nasty. I'm not trying to be nasty't think that I'm being nasty. I'm not trying to be nasty at all.

I'm just saying like, you know, it wasn't a burden I bore. You get why people got a little defensive at times because you know, the Jocks did say mean things about the nerds. That was not nice of them. But you don't have to return in kind, I suppose is my broader point. Okay, let's cover just a couple other news tidbits.

The first is that we know where the Rays will play in 2025, although not necessarily beyond that. So there's been a bunch of Rays ballpark news in the past few days, pertaining to both their current park and their long-term park. Both are endangered. So there's news about the Rays stadium deal, which seemed to be a done deal because back

in July the County Commission approved a financing deal, $300-plus million for a new Rays Stadium. And it seemed like, okay, that's set. And we questioned at the time, but wait, is this actually going to improve things? Because it's in a similar location and wasn't part of the problem with the trop that it's not in a convenient location and will this actually fix things? But it at least seemed to be settled, but turns out maybe not necessarily because the actual issuance of the bonds that were approved has not been approved. So they were approved in theory, but not quite in practice.

And things have changed since then because of hurricanes and because of the election changing the composition of this commission. And now there's a new makeup of the county commission and it's not at all certain that this new commission will approve the previous commission's decisions. So now there might not actually be a done deal for the Rays or maybe the terms might shift. But in even more pressing matters, of course, the question is not where the Rays will be playing in 2028, but where will they be playing next season? Because it was also determined that the TROP is not in playable state and will not be

either. And that it's going to take a good deal of money to get it back into that state. Yeah. And so now there's the question of, well, will that be approved at all? Because it may not be ready to be reopened until 2026. And that's if there's a $56 million payout for repairs, because the current insurance coverage, there's like a 25 million coverage after St. Petersburg pays a $22 million deductible. And so St. Pete has to pay a lot out of pocket. And there was actually a reduction in the insurance coverage last spring, which in retrospect, I guess, looks a little short-sighted.

There had been a hundred million in coverage, but saved in the short term, but, you know, Pennywise pound foolish, that sort of thing. But A, will that happen? Will St. Pete spend many millions of dollars to fix the roof, to raise the roof, and only for the 2026 and 2027 seasons, if in fact the Rays will be moving after that. But also, for 2025, they're going to be playing in the spring training home of the New York Yankees. George M. Steinbrenner Field, which I visited multiple times as a young Yankees fan.

Nice place for a spring training facility and for a single A home, because this is the home also of the Tampa Tarpons, the Yankees single A affiliate, but not ideal for a big league team. But they have decided that this is the best of a bunch of suboptimal solutions. Boy, I worry about how much weather will continue to affect the seasons that they might have there, right? Because famously rains a lot in Florida during the course of the Major League regular season. Rains of the major league regular season, Reigns sometimes with hurricane force during the postseason. So that's curious. Man, it is right by the airport there, isn't it? Yeah. It's like half an hour away from the trap-ish or less. It is in Tampa, so I guess

the geographic location of the team is closer to its designation than it has been before, sort of. But also I guess, yes, there's no roof as there is now effectively no roof at the trop. And you might think, well, how is this an improvement then? I guess the difference is that there's drainage, right? Because this is in use whereas the trop, there's no drainage system because there hasn't had to be because there is a roof. So it's not ideal for Florida to not have a dome or a retractable roof setup, but at least in theory, like there is a team that uses this during the season without its roof. And so it would be more playable than if you tried to play without a roof in the trop. And I suppose then that the tarpons just have to play

on the back fields, like that is gonna be their solution. I don't know, I guess there could be some sort of timeshare as there is in Sacramento now with multiple tenants. It's not ideal, but, and also the capacity of the place is like 11,000-ish, which, you know, people will joke about raise attendance. But there are certainly times when the Rays draw more than that. Granted, I guess a lot of those times are when the Yankees

are playing them. So ironically, they will be playing in a Yankees home park essentially, which is set up to mirror the dimensions of Yankee Stadium. Maybe the Rays will have a better road field advantage when they play in Yankee Stadium now, having George M. Steinbrenner Field as their home park. They'll be used to those dimensions. LSW I don't know what I think the optimal solution to this should be, because it does feel like a great bit of hard luck for the broader Tampa, St. Petersburg area to lose out. We make jokes about attendance at race games and whatnot,

but it does feel like sort of adding bad luck to an already kind of gnarly situation to say, we're gonna take your team and you're gonna time share with say the Marlins, right? Which I wondered if that might be a solution that they explored to utilize the field in Miami, which has a roof and sort of try to figure out something that would work there or if they would use this as an opportunity to sort of pilot potential expansion

sites for the league, right? Like try to put the Rays in Nashville or- CB 0530 Yes, or split time between Montreal and Florida, just like the Rays always wanted. LSG Right. If it might serve some broader sort of expansionary purpose for the league, even if it wouldn't have necessarily made things better or easier for Tampa as a community and Tampa Bay as a team. I suppose that we have seen spring training sites in Florida play host to major league teams for stretches when other facilities were unavailable. So it's not like this is without precedent, but I don't know, it'll be interesting to kind of see how these things go. I wonder,

we had kind of come to understand part of Rob Manfred's decision to not seek another term as commissioner, that this part was resolved, right? That the ballpark situation with both Oakland and Tampa Bay had sort of run its course. He had done that. That was part of why he felt comfortable moving on. And those two things being done were sort of necessary for the league to contemplate expansion beyond its existing 30 teams. And those two things being done were sort of necessary for the lead to contemplate expansion beyond its existing 30 teams.

And both of those situations still seem very much in flux. And so I kind of wonder, like, you know, in a quiet moment, if he were forced to be honest, you know, how does Manfred sort of understand the situation he finds himself in? You know, obviously what happened with Reays is an act of God much more than an act of malfeasance, whatever we might say about the insurance related decisions that they've made, unlike the situation in Oakland. But yeah, it's going to be interesting, you know? It's going to be an interesting year. The schedule is already set for 2025, which might've played some role in where they ultimately ended up. But I wonder,

when we look ahead to future seasons, will they contemplate a timeshare with Miami or something like that? Yeah, it does sound like the single A team will play on the backfields elsewhere in the facility. And it will be weird for the Rays to have quote unquote home games in a place that is designed to mimic Yankee Stadium with the facade and all the signage and everything else. And of course, it's been reported that they will pay $15 million to the Yankees for the use of that facility. So put it in the Wonsodo Fund, I suppose. The Rays rumored to be in the running for Wonsodo. We will see, but I guess they've made it easier for the Yankees to sign him. And people have joked about the fact that the raise

don't have anyone on their payroll who will be making as much as $15 million in 2025. But I guess that money comes from insurance, not from the city or the team directly. But it's a weird solution. I'm sure that they evaluated all the options more thoroughly than we have, and that they decided for sound reasons

that this is the best they could do, but it's not ideal. It's not what you want, as Yankees manager, Jojo Ardi used to say. So I don't know how much you downgrade the Raze projections accordingly, but they will be supposedly making some unspecified upgrades to improve the fan experience at this field. I don't know exactly what that will consist of or you know since it's been a

big league spring training place, hopefully there's not that much they have to do to lighting and clubhouse facilities and so forth. So maybe that made it a bit of an easier lift than some alternative would have been. But yeah, it's not great. I don't know that it changes my view of them or their prospects as a team for the 2025 season. I'll need to think about that a little bit more, but it is an ideal. Let's imagine for a moment that the Rays are a playoff team. As we saw with the Hurricanes this year, they could have been in a position where they would have been very much displaced from their home ballpark during the postseason had they won

a couple more games and things broke a little bit differently. So it does feel like it has this sort of looming potential for further disaster, but also why not be optimistic and hope that the fortunes of the area are better when it comes to hurricanes next year, because that would just be better all around, you know? Baseball is a sort of marginal concern when it comes to that sort of thing, but I feel badly that this is the situation. I feel bad. I don't feel badly. I feel fine. You know, like I'm capable. Gotta use the right word there, you know? Jared Sissling Well, it's good to know where they're going to be, even if they're going to be is not

where they would ideally be. Jennifer Bickford Yeah, the more time we have to make appropriate adjustments on the back end to future projections and understandings of them as a team. That's the better, you know, the more time the better there, but it does feel, I don't know, maybe if you're a ray, this is the optimal solution because it minimizes the disruption to your life, your personal life, right? Like if you're playing there, you can live in your same house. You don't have to find temporary accommodations elsewhere. So, you know, to the extent that that factored into the decision making, I support that piece.

It would be funny if the Rays beat the Yankees in the AL East while playing at George M. Steinbrenner Field. That would amuse me. I don't have a horse in the race specifically, but I do think that it would be the funniest if that were true. And so I hope that it is. CBer In other Florida baseball team news, the Marlins have a manager, it's Clayton McCullough of the Dodgers. He was the Dodgers first base coach, which has led to a lot of confusion about Clayton's leaving the Dodgers and McCullough's, if you're a reader of Andy McCuller, but this is Clayton McCuller, very

different from both Clayton Kershaw and Andy McCuller. I have no particular strong opinion about Clayton McCuller, but he is going to be tasked with taking a team from the bottom back up to the top. Peter Bendix of the Marlins, formerly of the Rays, has completely cleaned house seemingly with the field staff and the front office. There's been sort of a mass exodus from the Marlins. And so he has decided that Clayton McCullough, first-time manager, is the one he wants to partner with as they hopefully build a winner that can actually stay competitive for a while for the Marlins. So we'll see. But they have a lot of work ahead of them, but at least they know that they'll be playing

in a big league ballpark. So that's a start. Yeah. Yeah. My thoughts on Clayton McCullough are only that every single time I watched a Dodgers broadcast and had occasion to note his presence at first base, I wondered if he was related to Andy. That's all I've really ever thought about him. It's not that what happens at first base doesn't matter. It matters a great deal. But I would argue that of all the coaches,

I think the least about the first base coach. Do you think that that's true? Is that consistent with your- I've questioned the necessity of having one. I know you have. Yeah. Your anti-coach and mound visit, you want them all on their own out there. No, you're not anti-coach. But I think about them really the least of any of the consistent members of a coaching staff. And obviously the size of coaching staffs can vary team to team, but they're not sending anyone. That's the thing. You don't think about them in the context of

sends, which is really the most base coach important role. I mean, it's not the most important role. There might be a lot of important roles, but it's the one that has the highest potential for you to go, that was a bad send. You don't say that about first base because famously not part of the job description. They might help send you to second, but indirectly they certainly help you get back, at least in theory. But yeah, he's a former minor league catcher. He was Blue Jays minor league coach and manager. He worked with Gabe Kapler, who's now in the Marlins front office when they were both with the Dodgers. So the Marlins, they have a major league park. They

maybe don't have a major league team as currently constituted, but- At least on the lineup side, I think their pitching will be pretty good next year. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. So I guess another team that has complained about not having enough major league players, at least their manager, Ron Washington has, the Angels. And just briefly, before we get to our guests here, there haven't been a lot of big ticket free agent signings or any really free agent signings so far this off season.

It's early yet, but the Angels have been busy, not for the first time. They have been among the more aggressive teams to take care of their off season browsing early. And they have signed a whole bunch of guys. They've signed at least three, I guess, so far. They have signed- They've signed one today, Ben. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they signed Kyle Hendricks. They signed Travis Darnoe. Travis Darnoe. And they signed Kevin Newman. Kevin Newman. And they traded for Jorge Soler. They did do that. Yeah. So they've been busy and these have been just about the most angels moves I could imagine, you know, like just thoroughly unexciting, right?

Are you excited by any of these moves? Some of them are bigish names, but more because of what they accomplished years ago. Wait, they also, they also got Scott Kingrey. Don't forget Scott Kingrey. Oh, they did that too. Yeah. They've been doing all sorts of stuff. Yeah, man, they just love trading with Philly. Okay, so look, is this now a playoff team? I mean, no, Ben, the answer to that question is no, it is still not a playoff team. But here's what I will say. I very much agreed with Ben Clemens' assessment of the Darno signing. I loved that.

I loved it. I thought it was great. I think that Logan Ohapi is a very talented player. I think that Logan Ohapi played way too much catcher last year. I think that Logan Ohapi needs a little break from playing catcher more often than he was getting one. And Matt Theis was not really a capable backup at this point in his career,

more a first baseman in all likelihood than a real catcher. And so Logan Ohapi caught a lot. It was like his first full season in the majors right after injury and what have you. I think that Logan Ohapi is better than a 101 WRC plus bat. I think that he will show himself to be better than a 101 WRC plus bat if he is given a little more rest than he was allowed to have last year. And you know what, Travis Dernow, perfect guy to provide such rest. Yeah, good backup catcher. Good backup catcher. I liked it very much. Yeah, I have no problem with it.

Does it change the forecast for the team? No. It sure does not. But also, if there is going to be in the nearish, and I don't mean like 2025 or even 2026, but in the nearish future, if there's going to be a good version of the Los Angeles Angels, I think it features a good Logan Ohapi. And I think that helping Logan Ohapi be good involves rest and like a good mentor backup. And I think Travis Darno can provide that as well. And so I liked that one, you know?

I liked, do I think that Jorge Soler is like a great roster fit? Not really, because like he really can't play the outfield anymore, it's pretty bad out there. And I think that the Angels have a number of players who they might want to cycle through DH, and so having a dedicated, real full-time DH, kind of a weird choice, but also he can still hit, they need that, they need everything. I guess that's the problem. CB 0 But also, because it's the problem, I think it takes the edge off any individual signing's potential to be bad because they need that. They need everything.

They need starters. They need relievers. They need hitters. They need infielders. They need outfielders. They need every kind of guy. So they're going to get in some of those guys. Will they make the playoffs?

No, they're not going to do that. That's not going to happen. But also, this is fine. This is fun. Right. And yet they have said, or Artie Marino has said, that that's the goal to make the playoffs. Of course, you know, you say that, right? There aren't many teams that acknowledge that that's not the goal or a realistic one, even if it isn't. But it just, it felt very angels to me to kind of come out of the gate, you know, just like off the start and block, just coming in hot and yet doing things that will probably amount to you still being a bad team. While individual moves are fine. Again, it's not like I have such a huge problem.

I don't know that like Kevin Newman will help or even that Hendrix will help at this point in his career. And part of that is maybe just Ron Washington's desire for veterans. And if you're kind of appeasing that, then maybe that turns out to be counterproductive. But the angels issue was often a lack of depth. And there was a time, what a couple of winters ago when they still had Otani, where it seemed like they had addressed that. And we kind of thought, okay, maybe this will be the year because not only do they have a couple superstars, but also they did actually fill in around the edges of the roster a little bit and then it still didn't work because they're

the angels. And the thing now is that they don't have Otani and they can't count on Trout either. So they kind of need the depth and also the superstars that they previously had. They no longer really have those either, which makes the situation even more hopeless. And I guess the fact that there's not a ton of like upper level blue chip prospect depth there that they could just plug and play prospects. This is why they need to import these more marginal veterans. But yeah, just it felt very angels to me. It's like we're, we're busy.

We're doing lots of things. Does it actually change our outlook in any meaningful way? Almost certainly not. The individual moves maybe make some sense on some level, and yet it won't. It's kind of a adding deck chairs to the Titanic in addition to rearranging them sort of situation. Unless then they back that up by also signing some superstars and they're like, hey, look, we got our little rounding out the roster business done before we signed Juan Soto or someone, you know? Then okay, if they're just doing their off season in that sequence, then that's fine. But if spring rolls around and they're like, hey, we got Travis Darnel, then that's a little less exciting. LS. It is, but I also would argue, and again, I'm not trying to defend the Angels as an institution because a lot of the time, despite the fact that I think that Moreno really does

think that he either owns a team that is going to win or is in the process of trying to win. I think that is sincere on his part, even though I think the way that they go about it is very silly, and they are fundamentally unserious a lot of the time. I think that this, to me, actually speaks to them having a much better and more clear-eyed understanding of where they are as a franchise than other off-seasons. Because I think that a lot of what they are doing is like, hey, we don't have a good farm and we have a lot of aging and often hurt guys on our roster. And we have a lot of guys who haven't quite broken through and developed at the big league

level from the prospect or recent prospect group. But one way to help start to backfill those things is to go get these like post prospect hype guys and see what they can do or go get like a good backup catcher. Because you know what is always in demand at the trade deadline? A good backup catcher, because you know what is always in demand at the trade deadline? A good backup catcher. Or we'll go get this DH who can hit a little bit and maybe he hits a little bit more and then at the deadline, somebody needs that.

And so we trade Horace Fuller and we get a prospect back in return. And so to me, this is the angels maybe for the first time in a while being like, we're not going to the playoffs. So let's try to do this other stuff, right? Let's either give Ron to guys who maybe we can help become something, again, skeptical of their ability to do that, but like right attitude. Let's see if Skakengri has anything, right? Like the way that we tried to figure out with Mickey Moniac.

Either we'll find a player who, hey, surprise, it actually would make a lot of sense to have that guy stick around and be a role player for the next good angels team, or we were wrong and actually it won't result in anything, but we gave it a try, or we are going to trade this guy and maybe it becomes part of a package that returns prospects who are useful to us later. Right? Like any of that could be true. I'm not saying it's going to work, but I do think that like directionally it is right

in a way that hasn't been true for them for a while. So in that sense, I applaud that. Yeah. I wonder whether they're approaching it in that way where they've come to terms with their situation or whether they're convincing themselves. We talked, I think, not long ago about whether they could do, whether there was any hope that they could have a Royals-esque resurgence if they were busy this winter as the Royals were last winter. In theory, they won more games this past season than the Royals did in 2023, but it was still

harder really to envision them making those sorts of strides. Not that the Royals were projected to make the playoffs, but you could sort of squint and see it happening. It wasn't the hugest shock ever, whereas it would be a pretty big shock if the Angels managed to do that, even if they have more moves up their sleeve here. So yeah, I wonder if that's how they're thinking about this. But we can save that question for a team preview podcast to come a few months down the road maybe. Are you upset that the Yankees have

stolen Dave Sims from your Mariners to replace my beloved John Sterling in the New York Yankees radio booth? STERLING I am very sad to see Dave go, but I am happy for him because I know that he's wanted to, I know Dave Simms and I are not like close, like using his first name sort of implied that, sorry. But like, I feel closeness to him because I've been listening to him call Mariners games for so long. And you know, he is prone to at moments saying goofy stuff or like, you know, he's, he, his mouth gets ahead of his mind, but Oh, makes him a perfect replacement for Sterling.

But less than Sterling to be clear. I think he's a great broadcaster. I think he has a terrific way of bringing all kinds of different folks into the booth successfully. I think that he and Susan will compliment each other so nicely. You know, my sense, and this has been reported, is that he's been trying to get back to New York for a long time, wanting to be in New York for a long time. And so I'm sad about it, but I'm also very happy for him. And I think Yankees fans will really like Dave. Dave's a delight. Dave's a delight to listen to.

So I'm stoked for him, but I am for Mariners fans. And he's only 71 years old. It's a youth movement. Yeah. I mean, some things don't really change, but I think it'll be a nice change of pace for Yankees fans. So I'm stoked for them and for him. Sterling's 86 and he's 86ing himself and I'm sad about it. I'll miss him, but I did my little ode to Stirling the first time he retired and then he unretired and came back and that was nice. And this is the second presumably real retirement. He'll be missed, but Dave says great replacement. Okay. We will be back in just a moment to discuss mud.

Well, we're joined now by two of the four authors of a paper entitled Soft Matter Mechanics of Baseball's Rubbing Mud published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which may not be in your regular reading rotation as a listener of this podcast, but perhaps it should be if only for this brand new research, which comes to us from our first guest, Doug Drolmak, professor of mechanical engineering and applied mechanics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. Always takes a long time to share the titles of professors

that we have on the podcast, but Doug, welcome. Yeah, thank you so much. Great to be here. And also with us is a close colleague, both in terms of their collaboration and also their seating arrangement as they share a pair of headphones and a microphone. Here is Doug's colleague, a UPenn postdoctoral researcher, Shravan Pradeep. Hello, Shravan. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for having me. So, Doug, when you got your PhD in geophysics from MIT and Travon, when you got yours in chemical engineering, were you thinking, someday I'm going to be studying mud on baseballs? Or is this just a diversion, a nice little lighthearted break from your regular research? Or is it something that on the surface sounds like, oh, those silly scientists studying mud on baseballs have fun for them, but actually it might have some really interesting real life applications beyond baseball. All right. When I got my PhD, believe it or not, I was pretty certain I was going to be studying

mud in my life because I was already studying mud. I studied mud in rivers and the relationship between erosion and deposition of mud and how it makes river channels evolve. I've moved into studying landslides and mudslides and things like that. And so you can see how understanding the mechanics of mud would be a common thread. I did not anticipate connecting any of those studies of geophysics and mud to something like the fanatical, superstitious, and multi-billion dollar industry of baseball. That was serendipity and curiosity converging.

What about you, Sravana? As I understand it, neither of you a huge baseball fan, right? But how did this topic come to your attention? As a chemical engineer, my main motivation, even coming to the postdoc was trying to understand how things flow. Engineers as such, we create materials from shampoos to catch-ups, where we can regulate how materials flow as a soft matter. When I was applying for postdoc, I was like, it'll be interesting to see how we can incorporate earth

and mud materials as such into this paradigm, which engineers have been working for a long time. So even getting into mud flow properties, it's itself is a new field for me as a chemical engineer and baseball problem just happened to be at the right place at the right time. So just happened to be at the right place at the right time. So the baseball problem was at the right place at the right time. Doug, you mentioned curiosity

brought you here, but how specifically did this mud get on your guys's radar? Because it's a very particular kind of mud, both from a topic perspective, but also this is unusual mud or maybe not. We'll talk about that. Yeah. So the way that it came to me actually was a phone call from a journalist, Matthew Gutierrez, sports writer. And in 2019, he was writing an article on Major League Baseball's quest to replace this mud with a synthetic. And I think that I basically punched a bunch of marks on his bingo card, right? So he called me up because he was looking for someone who knew about the physics of mud, knew about rivers, which is the source of this mud, and was also in the vicinity

of where this mud is harvested. And I'm in Philadelphia, across the river from the supposed place where this mud is harvested. And I'm in Philadelphia across the river from the supposed place where this mud comes from. And so when he called me, I think he figured, oh, this guy's got it all. He's definitely gonna know about this mud. So he said, hey, Doug, what do you think about this mud? Is it special?

And how does it behave? What makes it different? And I had never heard of it, so I had a lot of questions for him. And I went from knowing zero to saying, wait a second, so for 85 years they've been doing this, they're spending all this money to try and replace it, and no one from a scientific perspective has actually sat down and seen how this mud behaves. And that's the kind of thing that gets me hooked. You know, there are research areas where it's an important problem, and there's a lot of

attention and that a lot of people work on it. Those are important. There are other problems where no one has worked on them, but no one is interested in them and they're rather obscure. And that's, you can go down working in those places too, but you might toil in obscurity. This was a problem that had a very large number of journalists and

podcasters and sports newscasters commenting on it for a very long time, but essentially no science. And I was like, ooh, there's a problem that a lot of people love talking about and that they really care about that's right in my lane, but that no one else that I know of has ever bothered to work on.

And since we had a lot of personnel and equipment and experience working on the physics of mud in order to understand mudslides and landslides and river erosion, we thought, well, you know, it's not that much of a stretch for us to just take this mud and bring our knowledge and our experience to bear on examining its peculiar flow and sticky properties if they are peculiar or not.

Yeah, to corroborate what Doug said about his interest in mud, your email address, which I'm not speaking out of school here, it's listed on your public website, is sediment at SAS.UAPN.EDU, which is not your initials first and last or anything. It's just what you study. It's what you're into. So this was appropriate. This was in your wheelhouse. And yeah, there has been so much written about this mud. Meg, you know how I've joked about how many long form features there have been about Pablo Escobar's hippopotamuses and how they've multiplied? You could 10 times that for the number of features on Nina Blackburn rubbing mud. Everyone has made their pilgrimage

to Palmyra, New Jersey, where this secret mud hole is supposedly located. There have been pictures and video footage for various reports. So I don't know whether there's actually not so secret or whether that's a red herring and they've taken people to other mud flats to throw people off the scent or what, but this has been extremely well documented and you can see why. It's a great story. This big business is still using this mom and pop or just pop basically company that goes out and harvest this mud. And it's been happening for the better part of a century. And it's still rubbed on all these baseballs. And it's

been a part of that history. And yet, as you said, no one really has studied the science in depth. So when you decided to do this, what did you then have to do in order to come up with the answers to the questions you were asking? Shravan, did you have to essentially pioneer ways to study mud? A first part of trying to understand about the mud is it's a smearing property. So before even the pitcher grips on the ball,

the program manager, the equipment manager, so they smear the baseball. So that particular process is essentially defines how the material flows, the mud material. So coming from a background where I have worked with particulate material flow before and our earlier work on trying to understand how natural mud flows to create

landslides and mudslides, we were like, okay, that is one of the most easier things to do with this mud, trying to understand how it flows. So we use this whole process called rheology as the first step. So rheology just means the study of how things flow, how things deform. So how mud deforms when you apply a force on it and how it flows, that was our first step into understanding this mud. And are there instruments that you had to,

that you could repurpose to do that, or did you have to come up with something yourself? Yeah, so to try and understand how to smear the material on baseball, it is a standard material called a rheometer. Rheometer is you apply a particular, either a force or a shear rate on baseball, it is a standard material called a rheometer. Rheometer is you apply a particular, either a force or a shear rate on it, and then you see how the material deforms. And we measure how the mud material,

how difficult is it, or how easy is it for the mud material to be smeared. And the way that I tell people is, you know like a stick blender, where you can swap out different ends on the stick blender? It's like a fancy stick blender. So it spins. You can put different attachments on it. You can immerse it or place it on top of a fluid, but you have exquisite control over how fast it spins, and you have exquisite sensitivity to measuring the force that resists

that spinning. And essentially what that gives you is a measure of viscosity. The technique for measuring this flow is standard, but what it tells you is that the mud is remarkably shear thinning, which essentially means that you can put it in your hand and it behaves as a solid. It can hold its own weight without flowing, which of course things like water cannot do. But once you start pushing on it or smearing it, its resistance to flow goes down. And so the more you smear it, the easier it is to smear. And this is

a property that this mud shares in common with, you know, skin creams and toothpaste and hair gel and other things like that. And so this part was fascinating, but as Trevon said, pretty standard. The part that Trevon had to do that was not standard was a way to measure the friction and the friction enhancement from the mud after it dried on the surface of the baseball? Yeah, so one of the most interesting things to capture is how does the friction of the surface modified? But then we say, like the pictures talk a lot about the feeling that the feeling on the ball

has changed after you apply a mud. But then as engineers, how do we quantify that change in how pictures feel? So for that, what we did was we created this unique apparatus which is called a tribometer. So that is studying how material friction varies as you apply different force. So what we did was we had to mimic our finger.

Finger is basically a soft material that has a coating of an oil layer on top of it, and then you apply a force on the ball and then you smear on the material, on the dried material. This we mimicked by using a particular type of plastic, it's called PDMS. You can modify that plastic elasticity by changing what chemicals you add in it. We changed the chemicals and then

created a plastic that is similar elasticity as our fingers, so the same softness as our finger. Then we coated that plastic with an oil that is called squalene, and that oil has the same viscosity as that of the oil that is secreted by our glands in our fingers. So we have a plastic that is same softness as our finger, and then we have this oil, and then you basically apply a force on baseball, bare baseball, and mudded baseball, and then you smear it. So when you smear it, you'll get this, what friction,

what is the value of friction that actually a person feels holding a ball? What he found with this setup was that, you know, if you slide on a smooth baseball, a factory baseball that hasn't been mudded, there's a pretty low friction, as you might expect, and the resistance to sliding or the friction that you feel doesn't change whether you slide this fake finger across the baseball fast or you slide it across slow. So it's kind of a low friction that doesn't really change. With the mudded baseball, what you find is that the friction is higher because of the sand grains that are essentially glued to the baseball surface from the mud. More than that, the friction that you feel changes with how fast you slide the finger.

This question of sort of how to properly mud the baseballs, the composition of the surface of the baseballs themselves, how to make them sort of optimally tacky, has confounded major league baseball for years now, right? There's been all this back and forth about the substances that pitchers want to put on the baseballs and how they can get it to the exact right grip. And all of that suggests to me, a lay person, that there's something almost mystical about this specific mud that makes it so seemingly optimal in terms of its ability to be applied, but also then to have the right amount of sort of sandiness and resistance when a pitcher

picks it up. But that wasn't quite what you guys found. Is there anything actually special about this mud? Is there some heretofore unknown substance in the mud that you found? Or is it just the way that it's composed specifically in this spot that we still don't know in New Jersey? Right. There's a question about things being optimal. I don't think that the mud is optimal for enhancing grip, right? Of course, if what baseball wanted was to just have more grip, you could have a ball with more friction and more tackiness than these balls, right? And then the pitchers would be happy and the batters would be unhappy, right? We also know that in, you know, that the game, the state of play is different in places like Japan where they pre-tack the

balls and it's just, you know, the pitching is different, the hitting is different. And so I think that first of all, the mud is kind of a compromise that we've become used to, right? That the state of play in Major League Baseball has settled on this mud having the right amount of grip and visibility for a pitcher that it's improved compared to a bear baseball. But that also the batters stand a good chance, that the spin rate's not too high, that the pitches aren't too fast, and that when they've added substances or changed substances or been allowed to put like pitch or other things on the ball, it's changed that balance. The funny thing for me is that that balance to me feels more cultural than anything else,

right? So I just want to make clear that the mud is not like an optimal friction agent in the sense of it doesn't optimize for any one particular thing like friction or grip. Sure. I rather think that it's a compromise. It's a consistent compromise. Right.

So it's the same material. You guys probably know more about this than me, but from all the sports journals we've spoken to, I mean, Major League Baseball bought Rawlings in order to have more control over the consistency of the baseballs and the consensus is there's less. One year there's a problem with the lacing, another year there's a problem with the gloss or there's a problem that the weight isn't quite the same. And I think actually though is that when you smear this mud on, the fact that it fills in all the little pores and other holes and pits that are in the surface of the baseball from the factory

and then it produces this consistent roughness every time. It's that the ball feels the same to the pitcher even when the leather or the sheen or the lacing is somewhat different. So sorry that was a little long-winded but then the second part which is, is it special? There was no ingredient that we found in the mud that surprised us. It has everything in it from tiny little clay particles up to angular sand grains. There's also some leaves and sticks because it comes from an actual creek. We measured the minerals that are in there. There's normal minerals that I won't bore you with the names of, but there's a lot of

quartz because the sand is quartz. There's typical clays that we find in river sediments and so there was nothing in the size of particles or in the minerals that we can measure that seemed unusual. But there were some things from our measurements that told us that maybe some properties were tuned. The first one is the fact that if you take the mud out of the jar and add a little bit of water to it, what you find is that it becomes a lot easier to flow and it can t really form a glob or a dollop in your hand anymore. And if you dry it, if you take it out of the jar and you dry it, it won't flow at all. So this mud has been processed so that the ratio of water to particles is such that it is solid like when it's in your hand, but it has this significant shear thinning behavior.

So that's one clue that the proprietors, that the Bintle family is tuning the amount of water that's in it in order to have very good spreading properties. The other thing that we noticed is that, you know, this is getting down in the weeds a little bit, but if you look at the sizes of particles that are in there, there's a very sharp cutoff, which means that there's particles from tiny little clay particles up to about 170 microns, and then there's like nothing larger than that. We know that the family does sieve the mud, so they take the raw material and they put it through a sieve and remove a certain fraction. So it seems that they have sieved this mud in order to remove a

lot of the grit that would make it too gritty so that it wouldn't flow at all, but they've left just enough grit in it so that when it dries, it has a little bit of these angular sand grains poking out. And so I think that the mud probably has a good raw mixture of different particles to make it flow and grip pretty well. And that the Bintle family though also has an extraordinary working knowledge of how to process this mud to make it more optimal for flow and for grip. You said get down in the weeds, we want to get down in the mud. That's what we're doing here though. But what I was wondering about that too, so in your paper,

I don't think there was a comparison to other muds, right? Kind of a mud control group, I guess. That's a little on the nose. This mud is to enhance control in part. But if you were to just compare this to mud from some other mudhole in New Jersey or anywhere else in the country or the world for that matter, do you have a sense? And maybe it's tough to compare because again, of that processing that you're alluding to here and you weren't working with the Bintliff's, the third generation Jim Bintliff who does this and harvests the mud and processes it in his garage.

So you weren't privy to his process here. You were just purchasing a bottle off the shelf essentially. But he must think that there's something special to this particular place. And maybe that's branding, who knows, it enhances the aura of this company. But also he's trekking through the woods carrying this 45 pound bucket of mud. So maybe he wouldn't do that if he could just get it anywhere. So do you have any idea of whether this particular place is, if not necessarily better, distinct in any way? Or could we kind of get mud almost anywhere and put it through the same

process and probably get more or less the same effects? We've been wrestling with this question a little bit. So I will say that, you know, we have measured the flow properties of other kinds of mud, both natural mud and also what you might call a model mud mixture, which is if we just take some pure powdered industrial clay like kaolinite, which is the stuff that we use for ceramics a lot. If you just take some powdered industrial clay

like kaolinite and you mix it with water to a similar proportion that this magic mud is, we actually find that it flows very similarly. So I would say that the flow stuff, and this is also true with facial muds, which of course come from natural muds, that it has that same property that it flows really nicely, that you can put dollops in your finger but smear it and it makes a very uniform layer. So I think I might argue that the least special thing about this mud is its flow behavior. It's nice and consistent, but we've also measured other muds that seem to be just like

it. I think that there's this proportion of sand that's in there, which is that there's not enough sand to inhibit its spreadability, but there's just enough sand and I should point out the sand grains are very angular. I don't know if I'm giving away a secret, but I mean you look at it on a microscope, I've looked at a lot of sand grains from rivers and these sand grains are very angular. And so I wonder if that, you know, that part of it is that the sand that happens to be around in this mud is on the higher end of angularity

for natural sands. So that has some help for providing grip. But also I think the way that they've dialed in the proportion of sand and mud is the thing that makes it so that after it dries you have that friction property that comes from the sand. And so I think that maybe there's some good fortune or luck in the type of sand that's in there in terms of being angular and I think though that there's also a lot of skill and experience. I'm

not just being nice like this is what we've converged on. There's a lot of skill and experience from the Bintlef family in the processing. In other words, you have to play around with these materials and tune the proportions and see the workability a lot to arrive at something that has this remarkable combination of how it spreads but how it grips. And so the upshot of all of that is that I don't know if the mud itself as a raw material is that special. I think that it's certainly special how it's processed. But I will say that it's likely that the raw material had ingredients that are common to other muds, but the proportions of them, even in the raw material, are just dialed in in just such a way that the raw

material already starts closer to where you need it to be. And so it's kind of like there's nothing unusual in the ingredients, but slight changes in the proportion of those ingredients would make the material behave in very different ways. I wonder then, and you'll have to forgive my mood ignorance, this might betray my mood ignorance, but you know, I know the part of the fascination around this and all of the reporting was, as you mentioned, Major League Baseball's desire

to potentially introduce a synthetic alternative to this mud. It sounds like that would be difficult in terms of capturing the expertise, at least initially. I'm curious if there is any risk to environmental factors that influence that particulate balance in the beginning changing. Is this something that we could see as the river changes, as the ecosystem evolves, shifting over time? Is there any risk to that? Might nature get in the way of the mud? Your question kind of cuts to heart of it. I mean, I don't know what anyone at MLB is

thinking. I only know what they're thinking interpreted through journalists that have spoken to people there and written about it. Cause side note, MLB has not gotten in contact with us and we have tried several avenues to speak to representatives from from there. So anyway, if you know any ways to, you know, talk directly to people at MLB, we're interested. What I hear is that part of the concern of MLB and why they're looking to synthetics is not because the mud is behaving badly, but it has actually out of a concern of whether or not it stays consistent through time.

Will it change in the future as the environment changes or the river just changes naturally, shifting its course, migrating somewhere else? Or maybe it gets increased flooding or starts getting some sewage runoff or farm runoff from someplace which can change the chemistry and the stickiness of the clay. Or maybe sea level rise starts to inundate that area and they have to move upstream and harvest it from a different place where the composition is slightly different. So I think MLB's concern is about whether or not the mud has been consistent over the last 80 odd years and whether it will be consistent in the future. And I mean, from what I know about rivers and environmental change, it is certainly a valid concern that you could have

changes in the salinity of the water, in sea level, in pollution levels, or just natural migration and erosion and deposition of the river that could cause even natural variation in the composition of this mud. So I think it's certainly a valid concern. It seems to be ironic though that the consensus is that this mud has been the most consistent thing on the ball in terms of ball feel. And so I don t, it makes sense that you might be worried about that, but so far they ve been using this mud for a long time through, I would say, significant environmental change already. I mean, again, I don't know where this mud is from, but I'm familiar with South Jersey, and I know that the land use has changed a lot. There used to be a lot

more farming than there is there now. I know that sea level has changed. I know that there was more pollution than less pollution, and we started treating wastewater all in the time that they've been harvesting this mud. And here it is. So, you know, if I knew the specific location, I can maybe say something more informed, but it seems like the mud has stayed fairly consistent. I wish that we had a record.

I wish that we could go back and get jars of this mud perfectly preserved for the last 85 years and do the same tests that we've done now to figure that out. But we don't have those time capsules. Yeah, that's the trouble with studying the composition of the baseball itself. People have harvested old baseballs, but it's hard to find them. And sometimes they've been hit and that can change things and there's wear and tear. And so if you were to try to do the same thing with mud particles, I imagine it would be similarly challenging. But even if the substance itself, even if the composition of the mud is

consistent, of course the application of it isn't always because you have people who are rubbing up the balls and they may be doing it more or less thoroughly. And that's part of the desire to synthesize something. Now I'm in no hurry to have this synthesized because like everyone else, I'm charmed by the existence of this mud and the family nature of this secret mud spot. And so many of the quirks of baseball and sports in general have been sort of sanded down, no pun intended, just kind of, you know, there used to be like a family husband and wife duo doing the schedule for MLB and now it's more of a

computerized thing. And often you kind of need to do these things. And there, but there is still something sort of special about the fact that in the big business of baseball's sabermetric era, you're still relying on this one guy who goes out and collects mud. But if at some point they do decide to, by choice or by necessity, move away from that, Shravan, now that you've done all of this analysis

and you have pretty precisely quantified the makeup of this mud, would that, in theory, make it easier to synthes synthesize whether it's a pre-tact ball or it's synthesizing the substance somehow? Again, the guy who does this is not really getting rich off it, right? Like it hasn't even been his full-time job a lot of the time. So it's not as if there's some fortune to be made here. But if at some point they do decide to try to standardize things further or future proof themselves, environment proof themselves by doing this. And you know, the baseball itself, of course, is handmade and very, so maybe having the substance on the baseball

very and be hand applied is appropriate. But Shravan, do you think given what you found that you or someone else could now do a better job of potentially replicating this in a lab? I would say not completely because we know what are the dominant materials that give each property and we haven't even like got into the biological matter or the polymers that are present in the soil which might be helping in some way so, so that we do not know about. Here we talk only about the most dominant materials that give us friction and flow properties. To precisely replicate the properties of the mud,

would be difficult from what we know now. If it was a billion-dollar industry, chemical companies would have gotten into this much before. Yeah. There's just not that much money to be made here, I guess. Maybe that has held things back. You know, I know I, like you, am charmed by this tradition. But you know, in coming to the end of this study,

at least the first chapter of this study, because we might go further, there's this interesting compromise about the use of this material and the attempts to replace it have involved using chemicals, treating the surfaces, hiring people, you know, places like Dow Chemical. And if those attempts to replace the mud, if they liked the result they were getting, then they're going to set up, you know up a whole process with factories and whether it's chemicals or mechanical etching or something for a ball, you're going to set up an entire industry in order to do something that currently is

being done in small batches by one family that is sustainably harvesting natural material. So this mud is replenished with the tides, right? It's not like they're dredging it in mass quantities. The reason why people can cruise by in boats and walk by and not even know this is the place is because it takes remarkably small quantities of this natural material to produce this desired effect. And so besides, you know,

beyond just being like a folksy tradition that I kind of like, I've come to the conclusion that this is an example of a green material. This is an example of a sustainable material in an era where we're looking to try to replace synthetics with natural or at least nature inspired and sustainable materials.

And so I actually now think that this baseball tradition isn't just anachronistic. I think it is actually, we've held on long enough that it's now timely, that it's an example of a future looking way of thinking about utilizing sustainable earth materials when the application allows it. Yeah, it's always nice when nature provides a solution to some scientific quandary. So I

don't know if providing a better grip on a baseball is up there with, I don't know, lizard venom giving us GLP-1 medication or something, but it's one of those just fortuitous, serendipitous discoveries that was made. You just alluded, you just teased potential for the research along these lines, so I don't know if you want to spoil any of that. What do you think, Sriman? If you were going to look at something next, what would it be? I would say the effect of other soft materials like polymers. So, if you add polymers to this mixture, or if you take like sand and clay, we know that sand and clay play a big role in this material.

So if you take a sand, silica material and clay particles as we have used before, and we add a little bit of polymers, can they replicate it? So the effect of other soft materials into sand clay mixtures, how close can we come towards replicating exactly what magic mud does? Right, so the point Srimana is making is that if you take this mud out of the creek, the magic mud, and you look at it, we characterize the materials that make up about 95% of it, which is what I would say is non-living particles. But the remaining 5% is what we would call gunk.

So the gunk can be sticks and leaves and other plant detritus, but some of it is also innumerable microbes and bacteria that naturally secrete polymers. And you know, if you're like, what do polymers have to do with anything? If you think of something like hair gel, essentially what holds it together and makes it have those properties where it's kind of solid, but you can spread it, it's that it's a bunch of polymers. It's a bunch of long chains that are like springs that get tangled up in each other. And so we know that even a small amount of polymer can have a significant effect on the mechanical behavior of mixtures. And we know that there must be some kind of natural polymers in this mud. And we'd love

to look into it, but that would take a substantial effort and a different kind of effort with literally different machinery from what we've done so far. I see. And have you looked at all at other substances? Of course, you're probably aware of all the controversy about sticky stuff and spider tack, et cetera, and whether this rubbing mud was sufficient to provide the grip that pitchers prefer. We've discussed some of the effects of that crackdown that MLB has made, and there were people forecasting all sorts of ill effects of this, and maybe we'd get more hit by pitches, and maybe everyone's control would be way off. The actual effects seemingly have been more muted than a lot of people that dire presentiments sort of laid out.

But is that something you're interested in or having studied this rubbing mud, do you feel that this is sufficient, that no one should be whining about not having a good enough grip on the baseball just with this and Rozen? In terms of enough grip, I mean, I hate to be that person, but that's not my wheelhouse. What I mean is that

we have not studied the mechanics of throwing, right? We haven't worked with major league baseball or any team. In fact, as a side note, we talked to some friends at the Phillies, including alumni of our university who were great, quick to get on the phone with us, had a great Zoom meeting until we started talking about the specifics of our results. And they said, sorry, gotta go, because if MLB finds out that we're one team talking to you about something specific like this mud,

they might think we're trying to get an unfair advantage. And so we kind of keep running in circles about our ability as scientists working on this problem to actually speak and learn from players and teams about how this stuff works. That might be different if it was sanctioned by MLB, right, which our work currently is not. And so it's just to say that I don't know whether or not this mud is quote enough or whether pitchers should quote have better.

I just haven't done that kind of research. I would say that this research was hard, but it was a natural extension of work that we were already doing on mud. If we were to move into other materials like the spider tack or rosin or something like that, equipment wise, Shravan built the setup that allows us to do it, but it's further outside of the domain of other problems. Now, let me put this as a professor. That is far enough outside the domain of problems I'm currently funded to work on that it would

be hard to justify with your taxpayer dollars. But if a funding source came along that was particularly interested in approaching that problem, we could do it. And so I think we have an interest now, our curiosities peaked, but if we move away from understanding flow and friction of mud, then we can't really justify that it's connected to the stuff that's funding us to understand mudslides and landslides and things like that. Well, this was all fascinating. We will link to your paper if anyone wants to delve more deeply into the details. And I always like to know more. I know there are some people who look at sports and life in general and say, I don't want to know that much. It will

remove the mystery from this. I just want to know that it works and that'll be cool. And if you start explaining how it works, it's like explaining a joke, it'll rob it of all the delight. But in my mind, it sometimes makes it more delightful to know the science of how something functions. So I know everyone is sick of the mud slinging after election season, but hopefully they haven't minded hearing from Doug and

Shravan. Yeah, I went there. Apologies to everyone. But thank you for your research and also for sharing it with us. Great to talk to you both. Well, and thank you for that last comment. So, as scientists, of course, we definitely believe that learning how things work makes them more magical, not less magical, right? So, science is like magic, but it's real, right? Sure, sure. That will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash Effectively Wild, as have the following five listeners who have gone to the Patreon site and signed up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free, and get themselves access

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