Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2298: The 2025 Preseason Predictions Game

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and FanGraphs authors Michael Baumann and Ben Clemens play “College Baseball Player or Musician Who’s Performing at Sea.Hear.Now 2025” (4:53), and then explain the third annual preseason predictions game (11:53) and make 10 bold predictions apiece (18:57) about baseball in 2025, to be voted on by listeners. Audio intro: The Gagnés, “Effectively […]

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Effective Moral Sauvage. Effective Moral Sauvage. Effective Moral Sauvage. Effective Moral Sauvage. supporters. I'm Meg Raulia Fangrass and I am joined by Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? That's the sound of me rubbing my hands together in anticipation, which I was doing before we hit record. And you said settle down, but I'm not settling down. I'm excited. Yeah. I invited you to calm down. You declined my invitation. Well, how could I calm down? This is our Super Bowl or one of our Super Bowls. We maybe have multiple Super Bowls. Okay.

You always pick the thing that like, I don't know if you won last year or not, but sometimes you'll, you'll say, Oh, this is our Super Bowl. And I'm like, why can't the, the minor league free agent draft be our Super Bowl? I've won that. That is also our Super Bowl. Yeah. I guess I won this too at one point. This is our world series. Let's leave it at that.

How can we top having Paul Skeens on the podcast? Well, we could have Michael Bauman and Ben Clemens on. How are you guys? Hmm. I'm thinking this through, and I think you might need to keep looking for ways to top that, but I'm doing well. How are your splinkers? Not as fast as his.

I bet you play video games better though. That's what we learned. A young Paul Skeen served me in an interview context. So oh, geez. Just a respectful young man. He didn't he didn't serve or ma'am us on the episode. No, this was before he had gone full Air Force to LSU. Oh, okay.

So, he was quite young at that time. Pre-mustache, yeah. I see. Okay. He's all grown up these days. Before he became Paul Skeen's evil twin, Chuckie. He has a full beard now, which we learned because we had to do a video component to the Zoom, which in hindsight, I wish I had realized

we'd have to do before I entered the chat looking like a positional power in King's Grumlin. He's all ready to sign with the Yankees someday, I guess facial hair wise. Sorry, Pirates fans, that was mean. So we are here to do the annual, third annual Effectively Wild pre-season predictions game. Ostensibly a bold predictions game.

I guess we don't necessarily specify that, but that is kind of the point of what we are doing here. These are not meant to be boring, bland predictions. These are meant to be a little bit adventurous, a little bit fun, a little bit off the wall, a little bit effectively wild. And we have done this in two previous years. And Chris Hannell, effectively wild scorekeeper

and Patreon supporter and sometime guest, this was his brainchild. And he is the one who behind the scenes, along with the effectively wild stats team the Effectively Wild Stats team, he's put together a team, he's assembled a squad. They've built a website, it's www.ewstats.com, the Effectively Wild Competition tracker, where you can or will be able to track all of our drafts

and competitions and will be able to vote in the Effectively Wild Preseason Predictions game, because this is not just a game for us, it is a game for all of you. and will be able to vote in the Effectively Wild preseason predictions game, because this is not just a game for us. It is a game for all of you. Really, it's serious business for us. For you guys, it's a game, but for us. It's all very impressive. It is. What they've done basically just for fun, and it's so grandiose compared to where this podcast started.

Like, I found myself having an original thought recently and that thought was Ben Lindbergh's cult of personality. It's really more impressive than the podcast currently is let alone where it started. The website that they've put together here, it's so slick. They've really, this is a prime example of they didn't have to go this hard. But they did. We appreciate the commitment to the bit. And so you can all weigh in

and vote on how bold you think our predictions are. And then Chris will keep track and provide periodic updates throughout the season. And then we'll do a recap pod at the end of the year to talk about how it all went. Now I assume that because Bauman is here, we have a pre-predictions exercise? Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned committing to the bit because I have a question for you, Ben. Yeah, what's that? Do you like music?

I do. Are you familiar with the See Here Now Music Festival? Yeah, not intimately familiar, but yeah. So I went last year to see Bruce Springsteen headline. I remember that, you embodied baseball writer. I was not the only baseball writer there. I know for a fact at least Jared Seidler from baseball prospectus,

who is even more Jersey Shore than I am, went down there. So I've been informed that I'm going back because the lineup came out and my wife is very excited about a couple of the headliners. Ben, if you want to come, it's actually accessible to New York City by rail. So you don't even have to get in a car. Who's headlining or is that part of the game? Can I not ask that? Well, this is part of the game.

So you can find out for yourself. You can take the train. We'll pick you up at the Asbury Park train station. But before that, we're going to play a game called College Baseball Player or Musician Who's Performing at See Here Now 2025. Wow. Okay. So I hope that you're going to be, I wrote an article once at the Ringer

about the ordering of bands in the festival poster and how that is determined and how the print size is negotiated. If you're just like down in the bottom row and how big it is and all of that. And so I know that when you get way down there, it's pretty obscure. And I certainly like music, but I don't like all of the music. And that is a perennially humbling exercise to look at. I mean, it's kind of the classic, right? There's the formula for how old you are is the Coachella poster and how many people you've heard of it, that sort of thing. So I don't know what the, what the demographic is for see here now. Exactly. It's a little older than Coachella. And I will say in size,

it is the same size relative to Coachella that New Jersey is to California. So it's, it's only a couple of like, maybe 25 or 30 acts, just eyeballing the poster. And you've heard of, you've heard of a lot of them. Good. Just speculate. Okay. So the first one is Royal Otis. That sounds to me like a band that I do not know, but I'm going to guess band.

They are an Australian pop rock duo who, if you're familiar with Triple J's Like A Version, they did a dynamite cover of Sophie Ellis Bexter's Murder on the Dance Floor, the Nudity song from Saltburn. Their version of it was excellent. I'm really looking forward to seeing them. So you are on the board. I like a lot of Australian bands these days. Yeah, Australia's they're putting out a lot of really good rock music. So hot right now. Yeah. All right. Andrew Hosier-Byrne. That sounds like a person. I mean, okay, so it can be a person who is performing at C here now. Yes.

There are solo artists. Okay. See, the fact that you're giving me a middle name, would you do that? It's a hyphenated last name. Oh, it's a hyphenated. Okay. All right. I guess I'll go college baseball.

Oh, it's a hyphenated, okay. All right, I guess I'll go college baseball. Oh no, Andrew Hosier-Byrne is the government name of Irish folk rock superstar Hosier. Oh, Hosier. Who is headlining night one of the concert. Oh, wow, okay. Well, you fooled me. If you just said Hosier household name, I would have been all over that.

I knew exactly what I was doing. Yeah, tricky, tricky. All right, Blake Morningstar. Yeah, tricky, tricky. Blake Morningstar. Wow, Blake Morningstar. What a beautiful name, stirring, inspiring. So now we're in the portion where I'm starting to try to outthink you and we get into game theory

and would you go three in a row musical acts before getting to a college baseball player? And I'm going to say this time you would. I'm going to say musical act. Oh, it's all falling apart now. Blake Morningstar is a right-handed pitcher for Wake Forest. Blake Morningstar. My goodness.

Okay. I thought about just picking a college baseball player named DJ, but I feel like I would have short circuited the entire thing as you tried to figure out what I was trying to do with that. All right. Number four, Kip Malone. Kip Malone. OK, I think that that is going to be a college baseball player. Kip Malone is the guitarist for TV on the radio. Oh, hold on now.

We're doing individual band members. Now if you'd said TV on the radio, I would have said college baseball player. But instead, you just, you give me one member of the band. I said musicians performing at Cedar now. I didn't say the name was on the poster. I guess you said that. You know, ball or not, come on. I guess you said that. You know, ball or not, come on. I guess not.

After such a promising start, to try to avoid a second half collapse and finish with at least some dignity, Mack Moisey. So I know multiple Macs who could potentially be playing C here now, but this one does not ring a bell. But now just the possibility space is so broad because this could be the tour manager for some band that I've never heard of. I guess tour manager doesn't count, has to be a musician. Yes. I'll go college baseball player. He is a college baseball player.

He's a catcher for Florida Gulf Coast. Okay. All right. I'll take 40%. That's, that's close to a coin flip. Yeah. It really collapsed in the middle. It's one fun thing about watching you play this game over the years is how momentum-driven you are.

I do outthink myself sometimes, but I also outthink you at times too. We have a lot of history here, so we're constantly just trying to outfox each other. But yeah, add this to ewstats.com, please. Chris Hannell, the lifetime career stats and the Michael Bam and Ask Me About College Baseball Players recurring series. Are we including your Ringer MLB show appearances? Is this like having stats in a foreign league? It's not considered canon on ewstats.com.

I would say it's sort of the expanded universe. If we had a Ringer MLB stats, if we incorporated all of Michael's excellent over under games that we played on the late lamented Ringer MLB show, then... It is both late and lamented. I do take some exception to your notion that it's better than the current iteration of Effectively Wild. None of us sound like we're on second all, which is the same can not be said of your early Effectively Wild.

That's true. It's come a long way. Yeah. We're a little more... Hello, Judy. How you doing? Polished and professional than we once were. And by we, I mean me.

But not quite up to the standard of this website. This website is just too good for us. Really something. Yeah, OK. So let's play the game. Now, Chris has sent along a short audio message that he has instructed me to play at the top of this podcast.

It's just a little more than a minute long. And it will give us a primer for what we are doing here today. And then I will give everyone some more details from the voluminous document that Chris has sent along with the rule set for this game. So Chris, take it away. Good evening, Ben, Meg, other Ben, Michael, and effectively wild listeners.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to participate in the 2025 pre-season predictions game. Panelists, your objective is to make 10 bold predictions about the baseball season. The predicted events must happen by the end of MLB awards season. Each correct prediction will earn points, every incorrect prediction will lose points.

Listeners, your job is to determine each prediction's point value by going to ewstats.com. There you will grade each prediction on its probability. Boulders predictions will earn more points if they come to pass and lose less if they do not. Listeners will also be scored in a separate contest with the winner earning swag from the Effectively Wild store. You have until the first pitch is thrown on opening day

to submit your balance again at ewstats.com. Good luck and may the boldest predictor win. This podcast will self-destruct in five seconds. I mean it won't actually, I'm just always wanted to say that. All right, so as Chris explained, we each make 10 predictions about the 2025 baseball season. We are drafting in reverse order of last year's standings, which means that Bauman will go first and then other Ben and then Meg and then me. And we will alternate.

So we won't just do all 10 of one persons and then all 10 of another's. We'll go around the room. Predictions, as Chris said, we have to have a decision by the conclusion of MLB awards season. So sometime in late November, it has to be decided one way or another by then.

So predict accordingly and each prediction must be something that is objective and measurable. However, Chris says he will not dissuade us from being weird and creative with our picks. I'd like to see him try. And, but we, we have to have some way we, we put him through the wringer inevitably every year. And by we, I mean Bauman in this case.

I'm gonna be nice to him this year. Okay, yeah. The Ohtani press conference track. Post game scrums versus stolen bases. Yeah, that was challenging. So if it's something that can be tracked so that he can keep score and that so we can all kind of agree on whether it came to pass or not so we can't completely be vague about these things and then the

predictions are assigned points values which come from you all the listeners based on your ballots and you will grade each prediction on a 0 to 100% scale at ewstats.com the average score sets the baseline value. So each true prediction earns a hundred points minus the listener assigned odds. So a true prediction that was graded 10% likely to come true will earn 90 points. Whereas a false prediction penalizes you by the listener assigned odds.

So a false prediction graded at 10% will lose 10 points. And Chris, in response to feedback from last year, this is mostly the same format and balloting as last year, but he has made it even more sensitive and granular now so that you can explore the studio space. You can use the whole scale when it comes to your grading. And in order to give more value to the draft aspect of the game, predictions cannot be repeated within the year or be too closely related. So we can run back a prediction from a previous year if you want to get a little less creative about it, but maybe you have a favorite. Maybe you think that you were

just a year too early and you want to bring it back and see if it comes true this time. That's okay, you can do that. However, once a prediction is selected in this episode, then it is off the board. And of course, we can debate and discuss how close is too close and whether it's in fact the same prediction. So we can adjudicate that live.

And then the predictions involving timeframes also must be clearly defined in order to avoid Chris having to make some sort of subjective judgment call. And we can all debate and declare edge cases and either ors or other outcomes that we think might cause a prediction to be declared false on a technicality. And Chris will send us the text of our predictions

before it's put on the ballot so we can all just make sure that they pass muster and they reflect what we are actually predicting here. We have final cut on the predictions. We have sign off. There are no restrictions. This one, I think, was added to the rule set in response to Bauman on making predictions on which you could

have an influence on the outcome. Cause this came up when you made one related to the Phillies. They sent Garrett Stubbs down. I don't think there's anybody else in the Phillies clubhouse. I'm going to get into Electric Six. Yeah. So that one was about what the Phillies would play on the clubhouse stereo or something along those lines. And we, we quibbled just because for all we know, you could seize control of the stereo or you could put someone up to it. And that's allowed. Evidently, Chris says there are no restrictions,

either directly or indirect influence. It's up to your fellow competitors to call this out during the draft and interrogate such a possibility so that when the audience votes they have the opportunity to factor that into their estimations. Once the submissions are closed and they close when the first pitch is thrown for real opening day, opening day for the other 28 teams next week, once they're closed, Chris says, we will not reveal the odds for each prediction until the recap episode to allow for public tracking of which predictions have been concluded

without giving away the score. However, this year on the website, they have a feature that allows listeners to track their own results. So that's exciting. You can keep tabs on your own predictions and your own scoring throughout the year. That's it, I think, other than the final rule, which is...

I feel like I'm buying a car. I know. Jeez. This is all the fine print, the terms and conditions. He'll throw in power windows. I don't know, does anyone not have power windows? I don't know, a car at this point. You should stay away from car stuff, I think.

Do they make non-power windows anymore? Probably not. I don't know if they do. I wouldn't think so. I don't know for the traditionalists out there, the purists who like to roll them up and down. But yes, I've never bought a car and don't plan to in the foreseeable future.

So I guess it's time to get going here. So Bauman, you are up first. All right, I guess I'm gonna start with one of the more boring ones, but also one that I'm kind of worried would go off the board. Probably the only one that I think one of you guys would do. All right.

So one of the Cy Young winners will come in at or below five Fan Graf's War. Oh, okay. One of this year's Cy Young winners. Yes. All right. There were only, I think, three starting pitchers who got over five war last year between the two leagues. Two of them were the Cy Young winners. Yes. All right. There were only, I think, three starting pitchers who got over five-war last year between the two leagues. Two of them were the Sa Young winners. This is leaving open the possibility

for a reliever to win it. I just think Paul Skeens being a finalist after pitching two-thirds of the season and 133 innings is a Rubicon that has been crossed. Yeah, that is a good one. I guess probably that has happened at some point in the past, I would imagine. For sure.

Yeah, not because of picture usage changes, but just because awards votes used to be just not closely correlated to FanGraph's war in all cases, which obviously FanGraph's war did not yet exist. But yes, I'm sure you could find many years where there were some suspect choices, at least by the way that we evaluate these things now. But I think the difference in this era

is that you might have a deserving Cy Young winner who had fewer than five Fandgraf's War. So yeah, there aren't many options, as you said, for guys who get over that threshold at this point with the innings totals that we're seeing these days. So part of the exercise here is sort of to try to sway the voters to some extent. And look, we're in this mainly for the entertainment value of the podcast listening more so than winning this exercise, but we want it to be fun for everyone.

And so- Speak for yourself, sir. Well, I did win last year. So if anything, saying that I'm not out to win makes me even more impressive. But really we're just trying to put on a show here. But part of the show, I guess, is a little gamesmanship. We're trying to influence the listeners

to make certain predictions sound more or less bold and influence the voting and the point totals accordingly. So as you said there, Bauman, if there were only three guys who even got above that threshold last year, then are you even going out on a limb here? Steve Bedrosian won with 0.8 more once. So we can certainly go low.

Yeah, I didn't even think of the reliever category winning besides... So I'll say one of those three guys was Zach Wheeler, who I think, just based on Tsai Ong voting for the past half decade, is somehow ineligible to win the Tsai Ong. Uh, there were also, I'm looking at it, four guys between four and a half wins and five.

And also, like, there's emerging consensus, I think. You know, I did write about this whole thing that got nominated for a Sabre Award about the relationship between war and statistics and award voting. So I think this is probably less likely to happen than not, but it's obviously plausible or else I wouldn't have predicted it. Because I'm not really out here to win. I'm out here to be right. Okay, that's kind of the opposite of being bold. In the most annoying way possible. Yeah, that's, I think it's less likely than likely, that's not bold, that's not what we're going for here,

but okay. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Are you telling me what bold is, Mr. Chalk? Yeah, the tables have turned. I guess that's not canon here. I'm sure we've mentioned my Mr. Chalk nickname Yeah, the tables have turned. I guess that's not canon here. I'm sure we've mentioned my Mr. Chalk nickname on this podcast as well. Just a couple of times.

I attempt to deviate from my reputation in that respect on this episode alone of all episodes. You deviate this, Ben. Hey, I'm just here to talk some smack and hopefully run up your likelihood score on the ballots So but it's it's a fun one. All right, mr. Clemens I think I also have one on the board that someone else could take and I this is just a calibration one Juan Soto will have more war than Aaron judge

so debate that everyone in New York is having and I know plenty of people have, plenty of my friends have made this wager both directions with each other and like with odds of different amounts. I think this is an interesting one to calibrate because it has to be less than 50% right? Like there's no projection system that thinks that Soto's ahead. So he doesn't he doesn't beat Judge in war. And Judge's skills are more awarded by war because he's a better hitter and he plays a tougher defensive position. So it's kind of a double whammy. I think that this will be an interesting kind of like endowment effect.

Like, if this shows up as 70 percent likely when we look at the scores, well, the readers are just conditioned to vote yes then. They're more interested in yes than fairness because they've read the thing and I've primed them. This is gonna happen and it goes high. So I'm kind of curious. I picked a thing that has to be probably between 35 and 50% like in terms of true actual likelihood of happening.

And so I'm curious where that'll come out. So this is more of a social experiment for you that you're doing here. Yeah, I mean, I like the Soto side at like, I don't know, 40% odds or something, which is probably where it is. I guess they play the same position, by the way, now. Oh, that's true.

Soto's playing right, judge is bad. But judge plays it a lot better. And probably Soto will DH some and Judge will center field some. And that's a meaningful difference. Yeah, the Yankees are dropping like flies. Who knows where Judge is gonna end up playing by the end of the year.

I mean, it's not a huge difference in our projections. We have it like about a win, I think 0.8 wins and anywhere between like 0.6 and one and a half, if you look at kind of everything that's doing projections. So like it could obviously happen. I'm not picking something that's 5%. I think the crowd's gonna be at 50%. Oh, it takes his judge misses a month

with an injury or something. I don't wanna say it's my best chance, cause that'd be sad, but that is probably, I mean, that's no guarantee, right? Like judge is pretty good, even when he misses a little time. In 2023, I think that's no guarantee, right? Like, Judge is pretty good, even when he misses a little time. In 2023, I think that's the one time that Soto has beaten Judge.

Is that true? Certainly recently. Judge had five war, even though he missed 50 games. And Soto played every game and beat him by a win. It could happen. But I think that Judge is just really good. If we were betting on the next 10 years, I think I would take Soto, but we're not.

And I'm picking Soto because I think that's bold. I think it is definitely less than 50% likely. It would be against the rules to bet on the next 10 years on this episode, because it must be resolved this year. Also, we just don't encourage betting much at all. It's kind of strange for this prediction podcast, but yeah. Yeah, no stakes here other than someone will get effectively wild swag if they are the listener winner,

but beyond that, and we will get bragging rights, of course, which is of supreme importance. I have a Soto related and sort of Yankees related prediction too, but I think it's sufficiently different to stand alongside yours. It's also not your turn now. No, it is not. It is your turn.

It is my turn. I'm going to take one that I'm a little worried will get scooped, particularly with the presence of other Ben on the pod, which is I am predicting that Esauk Parades will out-produce Kyle Tucker this year. Oh, that's a good one. I. Oh, that's a really good one. Yeah. Thank you. Really good.

Like in that sweet spot of possible but still unlikely. You might say it's a perfect prediction, Ben. Like if you were grading them, your grade would be A plus. You go, oh boy, that Meg, she sure has it dialed in, even though she never remembers the rules to this exercise, even though you tell them to her at the beginning of the pod every year. And so here's the thing, like, is Kyle Tucker a better baseball player than Isak Parade? Yeah, I feel comfortable saying that. We've talked a lot about how Kyle Tucker should be appreciated more in his time how he is an MVP candidate when it all comes together.

If he were to produce over a full season like he did last year, he would very easily be an MVP candidate, perhaps the MVP in the National League. But I just think that Isaac's going to tuck a lot of little home runs right down into that corner. And he's not a good defender, but he's not as bad as, it's not great, but it's not as bad as it could be. You know, it would be better if he were allowed to play first base, but famously the Astros sort of box themselves into a corner there. So there's an uphill climb for him, but I think it is a surmountable climb, but it will

have difficulty, hard, but I think it is a surmountable climb, but it will have difficulty, hard, but doable. Perfect. Sweet spot. This is great. I envy this one. I was trying to think of one in this genre because I like the someone replaces someone else. Guy, traded for Guy. Yeah. The Joey Meneses outperforms Juan Soto post first Juan Soto trade. Yeah, the example we all think of. My favorite thing ever to happen in baseball history.

Yeah, so I was trying to think of one like that from the Southseas and I was thinking, I feel like I was circling this one and somehow whiffed on it. I was thinking like, what were the big trades? Kyle Tucker, I even, I was trying to think of some sort of Esauk Paratus related one because he was on Dan Simborski's list of boom candidates, not breakouts, but booms at, at Fan Grafs on Thursday. You know, we don't want to hear about it anymore, Ben, you know, I don't need the call to come from inside the house as it were.

Yes, and so he seems like he's a guy just in auspicious circumstances for his profile at the plate. So yeah, this is a really excellent one. Okay. All right. I had some extras this year. I had more than I needed, which is rare. Usually I have barely enough and I white knuckle it hoping that no one will take one, but I

had some extra. So I think I will just kind of wing it on which ones I do, and I'll go in order of which ones I like most, and we'll see if anyone steals one or what's left over at the end. So I guess I'll go with this one. I predict that this season will feature the most teams ever and the highest percentage of teams ever finishing at 500 or better.

Yeah, because we've just got a whole cluster this year, much like we did last year, but maybe even more so, where it just seemed like there was maybe gonna be an elite team or two, and then everyone else was gonna be in this mediocre middle, and then there would be some truly terrible teams. And that is more or less how it played out last year. And if anything, there's an even bigger clump.

Yeah. And, and last year there were 18, 500 or better teams, which was tied with 2003 for the most ever. So that is that number to beat. We've got to get at least 19 teams finishing 500 or better. That's 60% of teams, 18 out of 30 is 60%. That has been equaled or surpassed on a percentage basis, however, in 10 previous seasons.

The all time high, and this was just ALNL, modern era 1901 on the all time high in terms of percentage of teams finishing 500 or better is 62.5%, which has happened five times. So in 1926, 1937, 1939 and 1948, 10 out of 16 teams finished 500 or better and 1969, 15 out of 24. So this year I say we go at least 19 out of 30, 500 or better, which would be a record for the total tally and also on a percentage basis, 63.3%.

So most ever 500 plus teams, highest ever percentage of 500 plus teams, which is essentially the same prediction in two because you can't really have one come true without the other coming true, unless I don't know a team gets contracted mid season or something, which would be a very bold prediction. Stay tuned.

Not making... You might actually need two teams to get contracted. Right. Right now, we have 11 clubs projected by our playoff odds to finish with a sub-500 record. That is the playoff odds. So in a sense, that means this is not that bold because it's projected to happen, and yet it is also something that never has happened.

So I think there's a residue of boldness on this one. A residue of boldness? A residue of boldness, is that like putting Tajin on something and being like, here's my residue of boldness? I don't know, that's my debut album title. It's what you get after you rub your hands together in excitement too much. Yeah, maybe so.

Residue of boldness. Yeah, I feel like this is, I don't know. On the one hand, it's not that bold, but I feel like we're starting with some less bold ones. I mean, yours were just like, this player will be better than that player. I mean, the odds of that are decent. You've already admitted that my prediction was perfect, the best you've ever heard.

So I don't know what you're talking about over there. Michael, is Residue of Boldness a title that you'd suggest and then get shot down on? It sounds like it. Is Residue of Boldness a band performing at that festival you were talking about earlier? No, but they play left field for a DT school. Yeah, it's a college baseball player. All right, circling back around to Mr. Michael Bowman. All right, I'm trying to decide

what direction to go with this one. I guess I'll take this off the board. A major league player will date Sabrina Carpenter. That's a good one. Who do you think it's going to be? I don't know. So she, you know, like most great things is from the

greater Philadelphia area, but the Phillies are a little old for her and frankly a little married. I mean. Has that ever stopped the baseball player before? As we all know, she's recently split up from her long-term boyfriend, Barry Kagan, the Irish actor, whose dong I previously referenced with the Saltburn

That's right, he was in Saltburn. Yeah, about that. A lot of him was in Saltburn. Yeah. Do you think you want a small major leaguer here? I mean, she's only Famously small. That's a great question. And I had thought about this

Like do we want as possible, please? Yeah Judge I guess he's married. He's married. Yeah, he's too boring for her. Anyway, is Sean jelly single I don't know. It's Tyler glass now single. I don't think he is no. Yeah, okay I think Tyler glass now has a very cute, me cute actually. I think he did a like write his number on a baseball and toss it to someone situation. It's been done.

Yeah. I mean, so cute. Time honored move in baseball circles. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's not part of the prediction. You don't have to predict who it is. You can for fun if you want, but yeah.

Someone. She is single and ready to mingle and we've got handsome available young men in her area. It can't be Alec Bohm. He's dating an ESPN betting analyst. Maybe Brandon Marsh. Maybe she'll get him to get a haircut. No. No, I hope not.

How dare? Wow. I'm furious now. The shorn and sweet tour. This could happen. There's pop star precedent when it comes to baseball players love lives. Is Bryson Stott married?

I'm just thinking of some of the shorter guys on the team. Yes, yeah, he's married. Does she notably like baseball? She's been photographed in a Philly's Jersey. Perfect, okay. That ups the odds slightly. Maybe she can convince them about pasteurization. That'll be useful.

I'm really worried about the raw milk still. Alright, Mr. Clemens. I'm going to take an Otani prediction here. I don't think an Otani prediction that you guys have, but this is in the category of Otani just deciding to do stuff, because he's good good Shohei Otani will throw the fastest pitch thrown by a starter in 2025. Ooh, I love that. I don't think this is... it hasn't happened. It seems very unlikely to me, which makes it great.

So did him going 50-50. I agree. I think that it is the kind of thing that it probably... it would be weird for it to happen. He's coming back from major elbow surgery. that it is the kind of thing that it probably, it would be weird for it to happen. He's coming back from major elbow surgery and I don't think that his velocity was really the most notable part of his pitching.

And probably I would not expect him to try to throw harder. Meanwhile, he has gotten older, but young hard throwing pitchers have come into baseball. So he was not even in the top like 15 or 20 pitches thrown in 2023 the last year he pitched. And so the normal course would just be that he won't. But I'm betting that he'll just do an Atani thing, you know? And just, like, decide that he wants to throw the hardest pitch. And surely he can, because he's Shohay Atani. He won't unless he really sets out specifically

to do it. I think he's out of the realm of doing it on accident. He doesn't throw hard enough. But if he wants to, maybe. I really do think that he just decided he wanted to go 50-50. So maybe for some reason he'll decide he wants to throw the hardest pitch in baseball. It doesn't, it's much less meaningful than 50-50. Yeah, it's far from out of the realm of possibility.

Like in 2022, he threw a pitch 101.4 miles per hour. Now he has since had a surgery and he's a few years older and Paul Skeens exists and Paul Skeens exists, but he had this club in his bag at one point. So it's not as if he's some sort of soft tosser and then just reveals out of nowhere that he can throw hard. But I will also note, however, that when he was topping triple digits, not routinely, but regularly, certainly, he was pitching for the angels in games that did not have high stakes in terms of competition.

And there is every reason to believe that Shohei Otani could be pitching meaningful postseason games. And as we know, postseason VELO tends to ramp up and... That's fair. Why don't we specify regular season? Okay, all right. Why don't we specify regular season? Because that's really how it feels to me. I didn't look at the postseason leaderboards

in coming up with this one. Do you know offhand who threw the hardest pitch of any starter last year? Let's not count openers, right? Okay, because I was going to say the answer to that question is Ben Joyce. Right, let's not count openers. I'm pretty sure it's Skeens or Scooble. It is Skeens, they're one and two.

Okay, because I looked this up for 2023 and it was Mason Miller and I was like, eh, well, that's not really what I'm going for. If he goes to the rotation, that could be interesting. Yeah, but it was Mason Miller. And I was like, eh, well. Yeah. That's really what I'm going for. If he goes through the rotation, that could be interesting. Yeah, but it was him as a. Maybe Sabrina Carpenter could date Mason Miller. Yeah, there you go. Hunter Green is actually, I actually

think he should be the favorite. To date Sabrina Carpenter. I mean, he's tall. She's too famous to date a red. Come on. But he topped the leaderboard in 22 and 23 and he throws hard like in the 102s. Yeah.

I think he is probably the favorite. I think he had like 15 of the 20 hardest thrown in 23 or something and all of them that weren't thrown by, wow, Shintaro Fujinami threw a really hard pitch. Yeah. But where, you know. Yeah, speaking of angels, Jose Soriano threw really hard last year.

I think he actually led all starters with at least 100 innings pitch. He sat like 99.1 his fourth seam. He threw harder than Skeens on average. I don't know where he topped out, but yeah. Okay. Does anyone else have Otani-related predictions? No. Wow.

Me neither, actually. Wow. Which is an upset. Yeah, how about that? Jose Soriano topped out at 101.3. Yeah, I was toying with one Otani prediction that after I thought of it initially became too bold to the point where I couldn't convince myself that it was even within the realm of possibility, but I wanted to predict that Otani would win the Cy of possibility, but I wanted to predict that

Otani would win the Cy Young Award, but not the MVP award, which yeah, because predicting that he wins Cy Young, lots of people have predicted that he's been asked about it many times, but it would be hard for him to win the Cy Young Award and not also win the MVP. So for that to come true, he would either have to have a lousy season at the plate, or I guess develop some sort of injury that would prevent him from hitting, but not prevent him from pitching. Broken non-throwing hand.

Yeah, or I guess some position player could just go wild and have some 12-4 season or something and still be better than Otani as a Cy Young Award winning pitcher plus good DH. But it would be hard for those things to happen. But I didn't ultimately predict this because I just, I can't see him competing for the Cy Young Award at this point, given that he has slowed his pitching progression.

He won't be back until May at the earliest as a pitcher, and then there will be a six-man rotation. So I just, even in these latter days of the starting pitcher, when you don't have to have high innings totals, I just don't know that he will have the workload to be able to top that list. I would like to point out that we've already been recording for 40 minutes and you just spent three minutes

detailing a not prediction of yours. So we move this baby along. Okay, go. Okay, so here's me doing that. I predict three catchers will hit at least 30 home runs this season. Now here's the thing, you're like, cowrally, Xismac, we all remember that. We know about the Big Dumper. And you might have even noticed that we have Shay Langleyers and Salvador Perez projected for 26 home runs apiece, the

Contreras' 24 and 23. And sure, sure, you know, it's like in the realm of possibility. But then I would tell our listeners that this has not been done since 1999, 1999 when it was Piazza, Pudge and- Todd Hunley. Mike Lieber. No, Mike Lieberthal. Mike Lieberthal. So Wilson Contreras wouldn't count right? Because he won't be a primary catcher this year. No. That's what I was gonna ask. Are we talking catcher as a catcher? It doesn't, it does, if they, no. I'm not giving, I'm not, if they, no.

They do not have to be at catcher the day that they're hitting the home run They don't have to be a catcher the day they're hitting the home run But I do think that they need to be primarily a catcher so define primary If we got a button for us on the leaderboard, yeah If they're on the leaderboard check out fan graphs calm, but we must specify for Chris how that is defined Do you remember is it like more than X percent, or is it a plurality of playing time? I don't have to remember, it's on the leaderboard. It's on fan graphs, however fan graphs define it. It will be on the leaderboard.

So in those circumstances, like here I would admit that probably not both of the Contrabassists will end up meeting the qualifications by season's end, but who knows? It could, it might be, who knows, you know? Could be, could be. Who's the. But who knows? It could, it might be, who knows? You know? Could be, could be. Who's the candidate to do this? I'd say probably Cal. I think Langoliers, Perez, and then William Contreras. Although Yiner Diaz is like sneaky, sneaky. He's in there because he will be primarily a catcher, but he, as Michael Vaman notes in his DHPBR, he hits like a DH,

but he also catches like one. So that's a problem for him. I mean, not Adley? Yeah, Adley. Adley could do it. I think Adley's probably more likely to do it than William Contreras, who to my astonishment has a career high of 23 home runs. Adley's is at like 20 though.

There are some thumpers, you know, not all of them are the big dumper. There's only one of those. Okay, here's my prediction. Neither of the teams playing home games in minor league parks will have the league's lowest average home attendance this season. Yikes, dude. So we've got multiple teams playing in minor league parks. We've got your A's, we've got your Rays.

And I'm saying that neither of them, despite the low capacities of their respective parks, which is what, like 14,000 in Sacramento, something like that. And I think maybe 11,000 at Steinbrenner Fields. If I'm remembering my half remembered Googling from several days ago, I'm saying that someone's going to go under. And by someone, I mostly mean the Marlins. But I was going to say Lone Depot is like borderline in a minor league park. The White Sox are a candidate. Yeah, the Lone Depot is a major league park, arguably a minor league roster. But, but yeah, I think they're the best candidate. But the White Sox, they're in the conversation

because they were not far above last year and having had one of the worst seasons ever and not really upgrading and potentially downgrading as the season wears on, they're in it. So yes, that is my prediction. Someone will fail to out draw the two teams playing in minor league parks. And I guess we can say attendance per game,

I guess will be the metric. Sure. Okay. The Pirates drew 21,000 fans a game last year. It's a beautiful ballpark. That park is beautiful, yeah. I think it's overrated because the best, the reason that everybody loves it

is you can look at Pittsburgh. Well, that's true. Wow. But that's- You can look at the bridges. Those bridges are so cool. Yeah, Warhol, Clemente. Bowman's sitting here going, yeah, I use Yinzer as a slayer, what about it? All right, Bowman again.

I will ask each of you to name a Rockies player. Are you predicting that we can't do it? Is that the prediction? No, I have somewhat more faith in you. We just did a Rockies preview, sir. We're prepared for this question. Michael Tolia. Name a Rockies player, Ben.

I feel like it's like Billy Eichner on the street. I'll come back to you. Ben Clements. I'll take Michael Tolia. Michael Tolia. It's cool, it's cool. Nolan Jones, Brendan Doyle, Jordan Beck, Zach Vien. You don't have to show off.

This is like when Bowman slipped in that he was Sabre Award nominated, just as a little brag, little flex earlier. He's also won one. Yeah, I didn't win this one though. Nolan Jones. Okay, Nolan Jones, Ben Clements, name a Rocky. Ezekiel Tovar.

Okay, none of those three will be the Rockies All-Star representative. Ooh. Interesting. A little game, I like it. Would you like to know how long it's been since the Rockies All-Star representative ended the season with two or more war?

I would like to know that. I think it was 2019. I thought it was going to be 2019. Hermon Marquez had a really good season in 2021 when the Rockies hosted the all-star game. Nice. Good for him. But the last three Rockies all-star representatives have been CJ Crone, Elias Diaz and Ryan McMahon. MVP. Yeah, also MVP. So it's pretty bleak. All right. I've got a Rockies prediction to follow up on yours.

All right. It is hopefully not one of these players. It might actually be. OK, the Rockies will give 500 played appearances of playing time to three distinct players who finished the season with negative war. Whoa, that's rough. I think you're being conservative. This is really hard.

Yeah, no teams do this. They're not that many players with negative war. I looked this up in recent years. Qualify for the batting title while being that bad. The White Sox have topped out at two and they're like, you know, with really bad White Sox teams that have huge depth issues, too. It could be done like this is definitely not impossible. And I'll specify it, but even if someone gets traded at mid season, continues to accrue playing time elsewhere, and gets above 500

while ending up with negative total war, I think that should count. I do too. Okay. Because it's so hard. Like, basically three players who appear for the Rockies this year have to play full-time, 500 players, so I think that's essentially qualify, and also end up below replacement level. So they need to be abysmal, but not replaced. All right. Who are the leading candidates in your mind?

Oh, that seems a little harsh. Yeah. I was going to say Chris Bryant, but I don't know if he's going to play enough. Yeah. Basically, you need it to be a star, I feel like, actually. Yeah. I was gonna say Chris Bryant, but I don't know if he's gonna play enough. Yeah. Basically you need it to be a star, I feel like actually. Yeah. Because otherwise they won't get 500 plate appearances. These are pretty short supply on this

Yeah. Yeah, like a relative star. Like I think Breton Doyle would count. It's just that he plays center field, so how in the world would he have negative four? Yeah. Tovar, Tovar could like just choose not to hit and he'd be above replacement level

because he plays shortstop well. So I think he's the last candidate. But yeah, I think Tyro Estrada is an interesting possible candidate because he is very hot and cold. He could have a 60 WRC plus for the year. It would not shock me. Yeah, that would be cold though. We can't have him be hot very much.

There was a guy on Blue Sky who was real mad at me because Tyra Estrada was at the bottom of the second base PPRs. I think that he has a very boom bust profile. He was awesome on a giant two years ago. I love how I specifically in the introduction to the PPRs was like, don't yell at people. But when I mentioned you, Bauman, I mentioned Designated Hitter. So he was probably like, don't yell at people. But when I mentioned you, Bauman, I mentioned designated hitters. So he was probably like, I was allowed to yell at him about second base though. All right, Meg, you're up. Other than the Dodgers, we will have no repeat division winners.

Funny. Ooh, okay. I want to acknowledge Matt Martel in this exercise because I will admit that I was like editing some PPRs and I was like, Hey, do you have any bold predictions? And he thought that I should do no repeat division winners across the board. But I felt like that was a little too strong because of the existence of the Los Angeles Dodgers. So I do think the Dodgers will win the West, but otherwise open fields. Okay. All, all right.

Some crowdsourcing going on of old predictions here. Hey, you're the one that makes us do this while I have to edit PPRs. What are your expectations? Be realistic. Oh, you could have just skipped PPRs this year. I'm sure that would have gone for great with the fan crafts audience. Everyone on this podcast, except for you, would be in favor of that notion. Yes. Okay. What will I do next? Everyone on this podcast except for you would be in favor of that notion. Probably would have been pleased about that, yes. Okay, what will I do next?

What a question. All right, here's what I will do. I will say that for the first time since 2016, three or more full-time pitchers, I want to be specific here for Chris's sake, three or more full-time pitchers will throw at least 20 knuckleballs each in MLB. I'm going to say that we're going to have at least three legitimate knuckleballers throwing 20 knuckleballs, minimum a piece, at some point this season. And I chose that basically. I want to rule out the position player pitchers who sometimes they get classified as having thrown a knuckleball or maybe they even did throw what they would say is a knuckleball or every now and then you get someone who throws a knuckleball as a tribute to a knuckleballer

just to show that they can like they throw it once or something. But you have to have thrown it at least 20 times and I'm not talking position player pitcher, I'm talking talking position player pitcher. I'm talking actual pitcher who does this. I guess they don't have to be a full-time knuckleballer. If a non-knuckleballer had a start where they threw 20 knuckleballs out of nowhere, I guess that would count, but you have to be an actual pitcher. And I am always in favor of more knuckleballs, the more the merrier.

And they've been in short supply, obviously, lately. And there's been a lot of talk about, is the knuckleball going extinct? And Matt Waldron has been the only guy really carrying the flame for the past couple of years. He's the only one who would have qualified by these standards in 2024 and 2023. And before that, you have to go back to Mickey Janis, former Effectively Wild guest in 2021. So no one did it in 2022. No one did it in 2020, short season. 2019, Steven Wright and Ryan Feerbend did it. And then 2018, Steven Wright did it. 2017, R.A. Dickey and Wright did it.

2016 was Dickey, Wright and the great Eddie Gamboa was still around in those days. So that's the last time that we've had three in one season. And I think this could be the year because of course we have effectively wild fantasy guest Matt Waldron who's still hanging around and he was great for a while last year. And then he was not good at all for a while last year and got demoted.

And I know he has a minor injury that will probably prevent him from being on the opening day roster if he would have been anyway. I don't know exactly what part he will play on this Padre staff. I guess with you Darvish's health being somewhat in doubt, I certainly wouldn't want Waldron to have to benefit from the absence of you. But I hope that Waldron gets an extended look because he has actually talked this spring about throwing more knuckleballs. He wants to be much more knuckleball dominant. He was like a third knuckleball last year

and he's been like two thirds in spring training. So he will do it. And then I think Corey Lewis has an excellent chance to do it for the twins. And then I don't know, there's the field. There's just a bunch of guys. What if George Kirby throws one to start 20 games? Right. I guess...

Is George Kirby going to start 20 games? Is he, Ben? That's tough. Yeah, that's tough. Yeah. But there are a bunch of guys who were floating around. There's Devin Kirby, the other Twins prospect who was in the Fall League but was like lower in the Miners, so it's not likely, but you know, he's floating around. There was Kenny Serwa, the independent league find that the Tigers signed this off season. Last I checked, Alex Blandino, former infielder,

is now a knuckleball pitcher in the minors. Yeah, and so it could happen, right? It could happen, someone. I just need someone to step up and be the third. And in fact, David Fletcher was throwing some knuckleballs last year in AAA. My man, has he been cleared yet? He still hasn't been cleared or convicted yet, right?

Sorry, hasn't been cleared yet? Yeah, I don't know if yet is quite the right word to describe the situation, Ben. Yeah, I don't know if yet is quite the right word to describe the situation, Ben. Yeah, I don't know. Nick Nelson has a knuckleball. Look, there are a lot of candidates out there and we just need someone to do it. So I say someone will step up.

That's my prediction. Very good. Oh, and I should mention, by the way, that I think if anything, we could be on the verge of a knuckleball renaissance because I think- I agree. ABS or even the verge of a knuckleball renaissance, because I think- I agree. ABS, or even the challenge system, benefits knuckleballers.

So there's that, there's also just if teams decide, hey, maybe it's good not to have guys blow out their elbows constantly. Maybe we'll see, hey, knuckleballs, you can throw a ton and you probably won't get hurt. But also, knuckleballs have been hard to hit and hard to catch, but also hard to call. When I wrote about this several years ago at the Ringer, I found that knuckleball pitchers get

unfavorable zones, historically speaking, and so that would actually benefit them to have a computerized strike zone. So yeah, now's the time. All right, back to Bowman. A college team will hit more home runs than the average MLB team. This actually happened last year, but it took very specific circumstances to do it. Tennessee hit 184 home runs on route to a national championship, but they did it in 73 games, which is a ton because they played a ton of games in the NCAA tournament. But there are teams out there that are scoring 910 runs a game. They're hitting two and a half home runs a game. The MLB average last year was either 181 or 182 home runs per team. There are some loaded lineups out there, particularly in the ACC

and SEC that are teeing off against guys who are going to go pro in something other than sports. So I could see this happening again. Yeah, because in MLB, we're down from the peaks of several seasons ago, but still, historically speaking, high home run rate, but college has been out of control lately. It's like back to the 90s. Yeah, bananas.

And do we know why that is exactly? It's the ball, I assume it's got to be largely the ball. So the ball and the bat have been pretty, I think they're just getting like the players are getting better and they're staying, we're getting guys staying in college longer because the draft shorter and NIL. So a lot more, you know, you're getting maybe not a lot more, but you're getting players who are going to school and staying there longer, loosening and transfer rules. And also all these teams have professional quality, like pitching and hitting labs now, just runs per game.

Like a good, like Jack Caglione was like Florida's Friday night starter when he, when they went to the college World Series final. No, he wasn't the Friday night guy, but he was in the, he was in the weekend rotation, he had like a five ERA and was walking five or six guys per nine. And that's just that qualifies as a reliable starting pitcher in college baseball now. The jack wagon. Yeah. Yeah. Makes him being drafted by the Royals pretty funny, doesn't it? I mean, he is very I mentioned this in my PPR blurb, but like he's a very unroyals player. Good for them for breaking the mold. They probably stuck to the mold too much for too long.

Okay. El Orchoben. All right, I'm gonna start off a two for on Rangers pitching picks. So first, Jacob deGrom tops 150 innings. Wow, that is bold. But accrues fewer than four war. This is wildly bold. Wow. Rough. What a needle you than four war. This is wildly good.

Wow. Rough. What a needle you're threading. Yeah. Basically, I think this is, it requires to Grom to just be a different pitcher. It doesn't look likely so far. He's taking some speed off.

He's just gonna be a durability guy now. But like, so, right? The last time that he threw 90 or more innings, he had five war with 92 innings. So 150 with under four is going to require like a very different Jacob deGrom. I wanted to predict that Lance Lynn would accrue more war than deGrom, but that seems like really unlikely this year. Does he have a jab yet? No.

No. He does not. Honorary favorite player of Michael Bowman in Pruittuity, but that is an unpaid position. Lance, I can't pay, but if you want to come be my friend. Do you guys want to know something that is kind of probably a bad sign for me? Jacob deGrom has never topped 150 innings with less than four wars, even when he wasn't good.

Or not when he wasn't good, when he was more of a good number three starter. He got to 148 with three wars, so he could have done it that year, but he didn't. So yeah, Jacob deGrom, 150 innings, under four war. It's going to require him to be a very different guy. He's probably not, but I think that you should sometimes take this bet about guys coming back from very major surgeries. I'm writing the top 15 starting pitcher PPRs as we speak, and it's kind of amazing that he made almost every start from 2018 to 2020,

and then since then he's gone 15, 11, 6, 3, without ever missing a whole year. So maybe he just wants to change it up to the point where he'll start throwing 92 and, you know, being like Old DeGrom. Are you literally writing as we speak? Oh, no, no, no. Because that would be impressive multitasking. I don't think I could do that. I would not advocate for that.

I would request you not to do that. But all the stats are in my head at the moment. More work for Meg later. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. More work for Meg. Meg, make a prediction.

More work for Meg. That's me. I am Meg. OK, here is a spicy take I have no conviction in. Are you ready? The Mets will miss the postseason. Saying brah after your pick. Is that going to juice your stats on the ballot? Yeah, because it's the inception sound, you know? And like, people still don't understand that movie. Was the top spinning at the end? Is he still in the dream?

We don't know. But are you incepting them? That would be, you don't want to incept them to believe your point. That wouldn't work. Well, I want to occupy like a middle ground here, like a medium. I guess if one wanted to build a case for this

other than me trolling, which like, hey, that's a case in and of itself, right? One could say that, like, what happens if their rotation keeps getting hurt, and they just don't really have any starters, and they look around eventually, and are like, wow, was the load-bearing Jose Ciri a good idea? I don't know. And then they missed the playoffs and Steve Cohen cries into his quarter zip. So that's the case. Well, according to your website, the odds of the Mets making the playoffs are 62.3 percent. So that's, in theory, what the listeners should say, I guess, if they trust the playoff odds. But I guess I'd take the over on that personally, probably also.

You would take the over. But I just made the inception sound. So everyone should take the under. You should want them to take the over, too, because you want them to. Yeah, I guess. But this got all confused. I got kind of like inception. Yeah. OK. All right. I didn't see that. I was like, that doesn't feel like it's my business.

If you thought inception was confusing. Yeah. Don't watch Tenet. Inception is not that hard. Tenet is. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't actually find inception that confusing, but you know, at some point you're like,

hey Chris, chill, write a movie, you know? Okay. Here's, I'll do an NL East prediction too. Here's mine. The Braves will finish out of first place in the NL East by no more than the number of games the team loses in which Craig Kimbrel takes the loss and or blows a save. Whoa. So you're really just being very mean about Craig Kimbrel?

Yes. So if the Braves win the NL East, you win. If the Braves win the NL East, no. What? No. No, I am saying that they- So you need them to lose. You need them to lose.

Yes, I need them to lose. And because of Craig Kimbrel. And because of Craig Kimbrel. Essentially, yes, essentially the margin must be Kimbrel sized. What happens if they release Craig Kimbril? If he doesn't pitch, I lose. Then you lose.

Yeah, so he has to pitch. They have to finish out of first place. Out of first place. By no more than the number of games the team loses, in which he takes the loss and or blows a save. So either it has to be close or I guess Craig Kimbrell has to just have a truly terrible season, which I think is well within his capacity, but will he get the chance? Because they just signed him recently and it was, was it a minor league deal? Right. And so, yeah, so it's not even a guarantee that he's going to be in the big leagues at all this year. But as we have noted

team after team, after team, including a number of contending teams, have decided year in and year out that they still wanna be in the Craig Kimbrough business and they still wanna give him meaningful innings. And they have paid the price in some cases for that. And they have all just universally decided this was a bad idea at some point. And then someone else says, but it won't be for us.

It's like the Tobias in Arrested Development, me basically, like, you know, this will work out for us. And I think that the temptation for the homecoming, for the reunion here, late career Craig Kimbrel, comes back to the Braves. Maybe they need a relief arm. They call him up. And I'm not saying he has to be the closer or anything,

because a blown save, you can blow a save in an early inning, right? No one notices or cares, but you can. I would blow every save in an early inning if it were me. Yeah. And you would be credited or debited with that. And so he could still accrue blown saves even if he's not in a position to accrue saves or he could take the loss. And so it'll just be when the dust settles at the end of the year, like look at last year, the Braves, I mean, they finished out a first by nothing, right?

I mean, I guess what were they behind? They tied with the Mets. I forget how many games they were behind the Phillies, but not many, right? So if they had done what they did last year and finished not that far behind, I mean, I guess, you know, everyone on the Braves was injured last year. Yeah.

So, okay. It was, it was more, but let's say they don't have devastating injuries this year in either the Mets or the Phillies or the Nationals or the Marlins. That would be a very bold prediction, but someone finishes just ahead of the Braves and we can look and say, okay, if not for the games that Craig Kimbrough pitched in that they lost, not necessarily because of Craig Kimbrough, but maybe he blew the save or he took the loss. If they had won those, then that would have propelled them to first place in the division.

That's what has to happen here. He has to blow the save or take the loss, and the team has to lose that particular game? Yes, that's right. Yeah. Okay. So I think this is pretty false. This happened to the Orioles last year. There were three games out of first place,

and there were seven games. Yeah, so there you go. Now, he's not going to be closing games as regularly for the Braves. He may not even be on the Braves. So I think this is- Might not even be on there. He can blow the save without closing though.

Yes. He can blow the save without being on the Braves. That's how bad he is. But yeah, there's a lot of moving parts here. I think it's, it's fairly bold. I mean, the Braves might just win the division and that'll be that. But yeah, that's my, I like to imagine him in the stands heckling the closer. He's like, you didn't give me this job. I'm going to make you regret it. Yeah. I love that the movie, Eephus, had a Craig Kimbrill-esque guy on the mound with just like a Kimbrill style setup on the mound. Okay. Back to Bauman. Sorry, I was counting all of Craig Kimbrill's losses and bloons saves. Yeah, probably a lot. All right, where do I wanna go now?

All right, I'm gonna break the seal on my bummer predictions. Oh no. And say that the Rays will announce a relocation plan outside the Tampa Bay area by the end of the time of this podcast, Scope, whatever. By the time we have awards votes in.

By the time we reconvene. The stadium deal has fallen apart in part because the Rays were kind of counting on the city to take care of a lot of landlord-y stuff. And I think that the more they try to build a billion dollar building in Florida, the more they're going to run into, I think, something that's going to become an actual national economic crisis, which is it's very, we are very close to a point where you just can't get insurance on a new building in Florida. Yeah.

Thanks to climate change. So I do not think that the rays are going to be long for the Tampa Bay area, which is a bummer because I really like St. Pete. But between that and Rob Manfred apparently giving Stu Sternberg the Frank McCourt treatment, all signs point to something new happening. ISKRA to split the season with Montreal years ago, right? So they've had their eyes on other cities for some time. I think the bolder part of this is not that they will leave, but that they will announce that this season. Now, are you saying that they will announce that they plan to relocate, or are you saying that there will be a specific plan about where and when?

I think that there will be a specific plan, at the very least a destination will be named. Okay, yeah, that's pretty bold. Maybe it'll be Montreal and they'll be asked, when are you gonna leave? And they'll go, mama. So this is not like in the exploratory phases. This is like, we're out.

No, I mean, the amount they explore stuff, like it's possible they announce an exploratory phase between when we record and when this goes out. Not signed, sealed and delivered, but at least this is... We are moving to this city. Okay. All right. Yeah, here's my second Rangers one. This might be a buffer for prediction, I'm not sure.

Patrick Corbin throws 100 innings or more for the Rangers. Yeah, okay. You've helped me out here because I had an extra and I didn't know what to drop and now you've taken my prediction. Although I was gonna go Boulder actually. Boulder? I was gonna go,

Patrick Corbin will lead the Rangers in innings pitched. Whoo, that is spicy. I just wanna say that the Rangers are a team that wants to that is spicy. Yeah. I just want to say that the Rangers are a team that wants to make the playoffs. Yeah. I think Patrick Corbin is the worst pitcher capable of throwing high volume that there is in Major League Baseball.

Now that's impressive because he's capable of throwing high volume, but it's also, he's bad. How do you make the playoffs if Patrick Corbin throws a hundred innings for you? Right. It seems like impossible. I don't know, they made the playoffs every year with Martin Perez pitching for you.

Yeah, as they say, he scored a billion runs and figured it out. Let me just give you a last four years Patrick Corbin against Martin Perez. Because that's an interesting counterpoint. Over the past four years, Patrick Corbin has been very durable. He's made 126 starts.

That's amazing. Much to the chagrin of nationals fans. He has a 5.71 ERA over that timeframe. Martine Perez has been like, yes, he's made a lot of starts. He has a four ERA over that timeframe. It is nearly two runs lower per nine than Patrick Corbin. Like I get that running Martine Perez out there is not, like, taking an advantage for your pitching staff, but Patrick Corbin

has been the worst starter in baseball who pitches beginnings. He just signed with them. He has not actually joined the team yet, because he is waiting for his child to be born, you know, credit to him. But that does mean that he's going to have no ramp-up time. Like, legitimately, none. the season starts in a week

He has not joined the team yet. They have a lot of pitchers although fewer than they had that is why they sign That's why he's there in the first place I agree he's got of an emergency signing and when you say big innings that he's thrown you're referring to the totals not to The leverage of those innings Yes, they've also been big in terms of how long they lasted. But yes, it would be not hard at all for him to throw 100 innings, the question is,

when he gets the chance to. Yeah, because- He's a volume fiend. Right, he may have to throw big innings as in higher leverage for the Rangers. And Chris Young, Pobo of the Rangers, talked up innings, innings, innings. I mean, that was how he justified this signing. And he talked about him.

He said he's an inning stabilizer, which is certainly one way to put it. And he is ramped up. So if anyone was thinking like, how long will it take him to get back? Yeah, he's not there yet, but he was throwing up to 80 pitches, like just throwing live BP at his home, evidently.

So, I mean, it's not the same as being in a game, but it's also not like he's starting from scratch. Imagine his heavily pregnant wife standing in the box. She's catching, yeah. Yeah, I was about to say. So Jordan Montgomery is like how this would happen. He got to 117 innings last year despite signing in a similar time. He had a 60 RA.

You know, like it can happen. But Jordan Montgomery is a lot better than Patrick Corbin, I think, is my contention here. Yeah. This could happen, but it's going to require basically the Rangers offense to be good, which it hasn't been, and Patrick Corbin to be better than he's been. Because if he is what he's been for the past few years, they're just gonna go like, no, we'll do something else.

Yeah, and the thing is, he's been a better FIP guy than an ERA guy, but over a big enough sample that it's hard to really buy that that's something. My toxic opinion is I still think Patrick Corbin has one good job left in him. Well, let's hope it's this one from Isaac. The Rangers seem to think that too, because he did actually have a pretty decent second half last year.

He had a sub four FIP, he had his peripherals improve, he changed his pitch mix somewhat, and the Rangers seem to think that there's more room for improvement there. So I realize it's Patrick Corbin and it's sort of a stretch, but still like, you know, he was he was pitchable. That is certainly true. My counterpoint would be that they signed him after the Ides of March for one million dollars. So I think like this is our plan.

Probably they don't think like, this is our plan. They didn't think that, for example, when they were coming up with their rotation or when they had a second chance to come up with their rotation in January or a third chance in February. Like now Patrick Corbin is the best option available. Right, because John Grey is hurt now. He wasn't hurt before. Yeah.

With Grey hurt, I mean, my, and Bradford is hurt. And my bold prediction to lead the team in innings was going to be because well, individually, who are you looking at on the staff and saying, oh yeah, like workhorse, right? Like Jacob DeGrom with his low efficiency, but high innings. You know, Tyler Malley and DeGrom and if Aldi has been more durable of late, certainly, but in the past has not been, and he's getting older. And then there's rocker and there's a lighter, and I'm rooting for those guys. But individually speaking, I believe in Corbin's ability

to outpitch any of them volume-wise. So it's just like, how desperate will the need be? And at times it got kind of desperate for the Rangers last year, so you never know. This is a desperate need. Yeah, I agree. Were any of you, I think Bauman maybe, were any of you Gilmore Girls? Oh yes.

Ok, do you remember in like the early seasons of Gilmore Girls there was Tobin? He was the like night manager of the Independence Inn and he and Michelle were always at odds because Michelle didn't like him. Do you remember this minor character? Michelle didn't like anybody. Michelle, yeah, at odds because Michelle didn't like him to remember this minor character. Michelle didn't like anybody. Michelle, yeah, but he like really didn't like Tobin. So the inn partially burns down and they're having a staff meeting about how they can bring people into the like kind of burned out inn and Tobin suggests being in Airbnb and Michelle makes a suggestion, the details of which I don't remember and which aren't

important for the purposes of this story, and Tobin agrees like, oh, that's a good idea, and Michelle says, get off my side immediately. That's how I feel when people bring up Patrick Corbin's FIP. That was a long wind up, but I feel like it was worth it. I feel like I landed that plane. As you know, the baseball tie in, Scott Patterson, who played Luke, former minor league pitcher, also from Haddonfield, New Jersey.

We got an email from a listener named Ruben, subject line, Patrick Corbin rides again. And Ruben was aghast. He said, my shock at Patrick Corbin's major league signing outpaced maybe every non-EPA baseball headline of the past calendar year. That feels dramatic. He just wanted to know, how is this possible?

Can you help me find a point of comparison for this? Well, Meg just did. It was in the Gilmore Girls. Yeah, it's in Gilmore Girls, clearly. For a competitive team in an era that seems to have most teams accurately evaluating players from an expected value standpoint, it felt as if a healthy Anthony Rendon were released today

and the Yankees immediately signed him to a major league deal. Historically, it's as though Felix Hernandez, aw, had thrown an additional year of a six-ish ERA at the end of his career, and then a team with Playoff Aspiration said, sure, here's a major league contract. And he wanted to know, did that sighting make either of you wonder if Chris Young was under duress? Well, he was in terms of how many pictures he had available.

That's why this happened. And it's what Young said. He said, there's no doubt this is a player who has a tremendous track record of health. Taking. I love that. Tremendous track record of health. Look, health is important. Health is what is more important than health ultimately

and the best ability is availability and taking the ball and posting the innings matter to us. And he said, I think our team's built in a way to protect our starting pitching with an offense that's going to score some runs. We played very good defense. So he's like, look, he doesn't have to be good. That's basically what he's saying. Patrick Corbin's like, please stop complimenting me.

He just has to remain upright. Dan Dunning had a five 30 era last year and they disappeared him. They were like, you don't exist anymore. He certainly fits a need that we have at this moment. However, he continued, I don't see any reason why he can't contribute all season long if he pitches like he did really the second half of last year. Look, teams do value certainty, even if even if the certainty is that the guy's not going to be good, if he's going to be there, if he's going to be there.

This is like when this is like when the Astros were casting about for left-handed bats and Dana Brown was like, there aren't any good options on the market and then like two days later they signed Ben Gamble. Wait, do you guys know that he had a worse ERA in the second half than the first half? Yeah, but the FIP been. Yeah, look at the FIP.

He actually didn't catch many ERAs. I know I took us down to Gilmore Girls Cold Stack, but we really have to move on because I have to edit PBR So all right is it my turn? Yes. I think that Nick Kurtz will out produce Travis Bazzana in the majors this year. Good one. I think everybody's acting like Travis Bazzana is more of a sure thing than he is and I like Travis Bazzana This isn't an anti Travis Bazzana take I enjoy saying Travis Bizzana Just like I enjoyed saying cat is made but I just like everybody did you should chill a little bit?

I think everyone should just relax a little bit like he was wonderful last year I think he'll be good, but also Nick Kurtz is is also good also Everyone else I think he kind of stinks you think Nick Kurtz stinks or you think Travis? No, I think Nick Kurtz kind of Wow. Well, I think he doesn't I don't necessarily disagree with this prediction because Yeah, God knows what's gonna happen in Sacramento time. But I'm gonna get exactly. Yeah, exactly There's like there's an on-ramp, but it is it is bold. It's bold You know cuz famously Travis Buzanah Travis Buzanah, I have to work on my own there's an on-ramp, but it is bold. It's bold, you know? Because famously, Travis Bazzana,

Travis Bazzana, I have to work on my Australian. It was better with Curtis, it was really good with Curtis Meade. It's really good with Curtis Meade. Curtis Meade, yeah, I've had more time. You know, I've had more time to practice. Okay, I'll give you my Yankees-soto related one, and I've tried to word this one very precisely for Chris. The Yankees will recreate one Soto

in the aggregate. Okay. What I mean by that is that the three major leaguers they... Brave robbing! The three major leaguers they acquired within 10 days of losing Soto, so that's Fried, Bellinger, and Williams, those three guys will collectively equal or surpass Soto's fan graphs were for the Mets, but the Yankees will miss the playoffs. Wow! Yeah, look, I'm getting spicy here because the initial was not bold

enough because that's what the projections say. These three, the three versus one actually pretty well matched because that trio of Freed, Bellinger, and Williams collectively earning $50.6 million per year and Soto is making just under 52. So the money is very similar. That's partly because Fried's deal is backloaded, but nonetheless.

And then war wise, they are projected to outwore him by about one win. So I just thought that wasn't quite bold enough. And I thought, okay, they're gonna be good. They're gonna be better than Juan Soto together, but the Yankees will still miss the playoffs. And I think the Yankees will be a playoff team. Initially I had it as they won't win the division.

And I thought, that's not bold enough. There are a lot of good teams in that division and Garrett Cole's hurt and lots of other guys are hurt. So miss the playoffs entirely, despite having a productive trio or more productive than one Soto will be with the Mets. And you know, they'll take up three times as many roster spots. That's saying it's better necessarily than having Soto.

I'm just saying that war wise, they will succeed in their endeavor to recreate him in the aggregate. Okay. Bellman. All right, let's keep this moving along. Three Count'em Three Boston Red Sox will get rookie of the year votes. Ooh, very good. Yeah, I like it. Thank you.

It makes me feel good. Do you feel bold enough to, it doesn't have to be part of your prediction, but do you want to specify? Well, I think it's pretty, Roman Anthony, Christian Campbell, and Marcelo Meyer, if it's gonna happen, it's probably gonna be those three guys.

Although I believe that Richard Fitz, who I know we've talked about on this podcast, Ben and I have before. We talk about Dick's fitting all the time on this podcast now. But enough about Barry Kagan and Saltburn. I mean, that was more like Richard Flopps, to be honest. Oh boy.

They had multiple rookie of the year vote getters last year too, right? So it's a strong system, but it'll have to be different guys, I guess. Different guys. Yeah. Yes, it will be different guys. Yeah. By definition. Or did they?

Wait, did Rafaela not even get a vote last year? Despite the Rafaela stands, the sedan stands out there, sedan stands. I know William Abreu got, got votes, but. William Abreu did. I don't, I don't. Okay, well, nonetheless. No, he did not.

All right, but three, lots of trios. I had like the, the three replacing Soto and the three knuckleballers and Meg had the three catchers. Three catchers. Three Rockies. All right. Yeah. Do you think if we, if people were thinking about this conversation when they were deciding whether or not to place parlay bets that they would stop sports betting, they just like think

about the people doing this and they'd be like, no, that's a bad idea. There's like Gilmore girls in there. I would be a lot more into sports gambling if it looked like this instead of. Okay, sorry, interrupted. Go, go, go. Okay. Red Sox related. Rafael Devers plays more innings at third base than Alex Bregman. Ooh, I like that too. This is going to require, I don't know, something weird happening, but you know, like, it seems like his slow spring means he's starting at DH endeavors. That's fine.

So basically what I need to happen is second base not to work out, or Bregman to really want to play second, or Yoshida to need to DH because he's hidden so good. I don't know. I don't know how it's going to happen. I don't think it will, but I do think that it's more likely than 0%. So I'm predicting it. it's gonna happen. I don't think it will but I do think that it's more likely than 0% So I'm predicting it. All right Meg. Okay. Well stick with the AL East theme anyway

If not a Red Sox Chandler Simpson will lead the league in stolen bases. Nice. Oh Okay, it's spicy Cuz cuz you're like, is it that spicy? He saw 104 bases in the minors last year But also like he's not in a new position and to. They have to decide they want to move on from their existing guys. He has to play enough. Yeah. Very rude to Johnny DeLuca. He just got optioned, not Johnny DeLuca to Simpson. He just got optioned to my early camp. So I don't know, spicy.

Okay. I'll do a stolen base one. I have a stolen base one on my list. I don't know if it's super spicy, but I say someone will steal 80 or more bases for the first time. Do you think it'll be Chandler Simpson? Could be. If he does, then that'll count. That'll be a double whammy here if he leads the league and also has that many, but someone will steal 80 or more,

which has not happened in a single season since 1988 when Ricky Henderson had 93. Cocaine! Okay. That wasn't the only reason. Vince Coleman also had 81 steals that year. And you'd think it wouldn't be super spicy, but no one's done it. Even with the rules being relaxed, even with this more favorable environment over the past couple years, we did have Ellie making a literal run for it, I guess, last year,

but not really getting all that close. In fact, the leader in 2024 had fewer stolen bases than the leader in 2023. Ellie had 67 last year and Otani had 59, but you know he's almost certainly not going to do that again this year. And then in 2023, Acuna had 73, but I don to do that again this year. And then in 2023, Acuna had 73, but I don't see that happening this year. So no one has really pushed the envelope here. And I think that even though league wide, stolen bases are up quite a bit,

we haven't really seen the leader steal that many more than they did before, which is something that Rob Maynes just wrote about for baseball perspectives. There's kind of been this democratization of steals. It's nice that something is getting more democratic, but there have been kind of a broader distribution of steals where, you know, you have a bunch of guys who wouldn't have stolen any before and now they have five or something, or maybe

more guys have 20. It's kind of like when we were at peak home run rate and the ball was super juiced and you had like everyone hitting 20 bombs but people weren't like hitting 70 or 80 or something it's very much like that the distribution as Rob found so even though the rules favor this more than they used to not by as much as you think but I'm just gonna guess third time's the charm third season with these rules in place you know Ellie's gonna run wild, someone's gonna do it. Maybe Chandler Simpson, we'll see. And someone will get over 80 or 280 at least.

Could be Corbin Carroll, yeah, if he hits in the first half this year. Okay, Bauman. Ben, you mentioned lots of things getting more democratic. I predict that at least one major league game this year will be played behind closed doors. What does that mean? Oh yeah, you'll have to elaborate.

Means there will not be fans in the stands. Like the O's back in the day. The Baltimore game. Decade ago, yeah. The Baltimore game or- Pandemic. The pandemic? So you're predicting tragedy of some sort here.

You know, in terms of nationwide protests and pandemics, it's gonna, we're in a buyer's market for both of those things. Yeah, you're not wrong. You know what I think about a lot? Remember the line in Contagion when Laurence Fishburne is like, you don't have to weaponize the bird flu, the birds are doing that? I think about that like once a day.

Think about him saying that line like once a day. I would not have guessed, but you think about a lot, but that was a about him saying that line like once a day. I would not have guessed what you think about a lot, but that was a good one. I was gonna guess magnets. I don't really know how they work. They are interesting magnets anyway. I will pick Vladimir Guerrero Jr. wins the home run derby. I think that'd be fun.

I don't have any view on whether he's going to hit, but I think he should and I think he should win. I liked it the last time you won when he wore the cool jacket. He's a big free agent at the end of this year. I really liked the home run derby where the Nats were definitely going to trade Soto. And so he was the center of attention at the All-Star game. And then, you know, he won. That was fun. So I want Vlad to do that again this year. So I'm picking him to win the home run derby.

Okay, cool. There's precedent. He's done it. So he remains an excellent power hitter. So, you know, not the boldest, but he does need to participate. That that is really one of the big keys. Yeah. And maybe you don't want to jeopardize anything in your walkie or if he hasn't signed an extension by then, if he's still an impending free agent, I'm really hoping he just wants to hit some homers. Every, I got a push notification about a story

about them feeling optimistic that they're gonna get an extension done. I don't remember exactly what the quote was, but it's like, we're gonna get him extended. And every time I think of our cats and I'm like, oh, big stretch. That's what I think of when they like. Yeah, get him on the massage table.

He probably has that kind of extension often, I would guess. Hopefully not hyper extended. Clemens, he giggled. He had a dirty mind when it came to extension, but not us, only Ben. Okay, back to Meg. The athletics will finish second in the ale west.

Ooh, that's spicy. It is spicy, it's a bowl. Wait, did you say the A's are gonna finish second in the? Second is not spicy. That is so spicy. Is it? Yeah. You don't know what's spicy, that's spicy.

It's spicy. They were like 500 team for half last season, right? Oh, so half the year is good for the A's, but it's not for Patrick Corbin? Hey, I was the one who wanted to say he'd lead the Rangers in innings. I'm all in on Corbin. We currently have the A's forecast to win 76 games and finish in fourth place. They are eight games out of second as we have it currently projected, although, you know, it's like a very smooshed at the top.

But I think it's kind of bold. Hey, you're the one who makes big weird salads. Might as well, might as well go all the way. I mean, there's no daylight between the first and second place teams in this division in the projections. No, because you have to you have to be bold but realistic and I don't I think that amongst the Mariners Astros and Rangers one of those clubs will emerge to be better than the A's but I think that they are sneaky

interesting particularly their lineup and I think that they will finish second in the AL West and that is sufficiently bold for me. That's a lot of heavy lifting for Nick Kurtz. Yeah, I did kind of end up going kind of heavy on the, but look, I'm not saying he has to do it on his own. Okay, here's one that I couldn't really decide if it was bold or not, but I guess I'll go for it and you can tell me or the listeners can. A player will be ejected or fined for tapping their head

as if miming a ball strike challenge. Oh, I like this. I do too. You're not allowed to, in soccer, you're not allowed to mime taking out a card. Yeah, okay. So same- Football, Travis Kelsey got one for pretending to throw a flag. Same Yeah, okay. So same- Football, Travis Kelsey got one for pretending to throw a flag.

Same idea, yeah. So someone's gonna mime a challenge sarcastically, knowing that they can't actually challenge, but sending the signal that if a challenge had been possible, then the ump would have been overruled and they will either be ejected or fined for that action, if not both. And I think probably this has to happen soon

if it's gonna happen, I would guess, because- We're gonna forget about it. Yeah, when the challenge system is fresh in people's minds coming off of spring training, that seems when it's likeliest to happen. I don't see someone pulling this out for the first time in September or something.

And maybe someone will do it, but get away with it. And that won't count, I guess, for the purpose of my prediction. I'm saying that they will actually have to be caught and punished for doing this. Yeah, back to Bowman. Luis Robert Jr. will produce more war after his mid-season trade than before it.

Ooh. Okay, so I have a Robert related one but I think it might be different enough, but we'll see. Okay. All right. So you're going to say he's going to turn it on after he gets out of Chicago. He's going to do a, yo, an assessment. I like that prediction, but I have a White Sox prediction that I want to chime in with.

The White Sox will end a day in first place, solo possession of first place in the American League Central. Just one though. Yeah, just one is good. At least one. We might find out about this one by the end of next week. Not exactly one, but minimum one. Minimum one, one or more. So basically they've got like two weeks at the start of the season to do this.

Yeah. It'd be funny if you said exactly one and then they won the division and it didn't count for your prediction, but. That would be a disaster. Yeah. So this one will almost certainly be decided like next week. Opening day, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I feel like if at least one AL Central team wins on opening day that isn't the White Sox, they're not playing a division game, then it's over. Like I think they basically need to... Yeah, your window's need to, they almost need it to be the first day. Yeah. Okay. High stakes then. Opening day. Meg?

Okay. I have one, you tell me if this is too similar to the raise relocation one. I predict that two teams will have new ownership by the end of our window and the transaction does not need to have been completed, but it needs to have been announced. Is that too close to the raise relocating? Cause like, obviously the raise are high on the list. I don't think so.

Cause the raise could relocate without having a change in ownership potentially. So yeah, well, okay. So we know of, I guess at least one that seems likely-ish, right, in the Twins, but maybe less likely than it seemed at some points this off season, but still we know they're exploring. And then do we know of anyone else

who's actively pursuing a sale? I mean, there have been teams that have flirted with it, the Angels, the Nationals, and then they said B back seas on that. But, okay. Yeah. So I guess we don't have to know of, of when that is it's Boulder if we don't. Yeah.

I mean, like it could be one of the ones that we, uh, have, I have come up with. Maybe, uh, Reinsdorf will finally say enough already and try to get out. Like there's, um, maybe, maybe he'll die. Yeah. Maybe, maybe nature says enough already to Jerry Reinsdorf that could happen too. I'd like to point out to nature that if it is interested in a list that he's actually not toward the top of mind at this particular historical juncture. Let me ask you this. Do we,

are we talking solely like change in control person or like, okay, what if, what if an owner did die and some family member inherited the team? Does that count? Or do we have to have a sale? No, I think that, um, I think that like, you couldn't have a situation like happened in San Diego where Peter Seidler dies and then other members of his family sort of assume a control person role for the club. It needs to be a new control person.

And I don't remember precisely what the ownership stake that you have to have to do that is because it's a pretty horrifying metaphysical statement you just made. Okay. But it has to be like, it could be a minority owner buying out. Okay. Correct. So, you know, like perhaps some enterprising young billionaire in Seattle will say enough already and expand their stake in a way that gets John Stanton out of there. That could happen, you know, I mean, it won't, but it could.

Mm hmm. It could. All right. Please. Hopefully that's specific and precise enough for us to be able to evaluate this. But- I think it is. Yeah, I think we'll probably know it when we,

like, yeah, okay. All right. You'll know. Okay. You'll know. All right. You'll know. Okay, here is my Luis Robert trade related one,

which is Luis Robert and Sandy Alcantara will get dealt by the trade deadline. That's not the bold part. And still lead the White Sox and Marlins respectively in full season fan graphs war. That's great. That's a good one. Yeah, I like that a lot.

That I basically forgot Sandy Alcantara existed. He'll remind you soon, I hope. And he'll remind his suitor soon and someone will trade for him. So yes, I'm making a bet on both of them being good, but also just as much a bet on every other member of the White Sox and Marlins being bad. So all it takes is for Xavier Edwards to keep up his super high babbit ways or something,

or I don't know, there are White Sox who could do this, who could, I don't even know that Luis Robert will be that great. Like he wasn't that great last year, even when he was playing, like he was on Dan's downgrade guys list, busts or whatever, right? So, you know, there, there are some signs that maybe he's just not the defensive player he was anymore after all the injuries and maybe that will hurt his accumulation of war. But, you know, maybe he'll be showcasing his skills for teams trading for him. And yeah, no one in the months that those teams are without the services of Luis Robert and Alcantara, presumably after the deadline, will make up the ground to outwore them on those two teams. All right, back to Balmain.

All right. Jamie Arnold, who Ben has presumably never heard of, will be one of the first two picks in this year's draft. Ooh, I like it. I cannot evaluate how bold that is. I was going to say he's going to go precisely second because the Angels have the number two pick and Jamie Arnold is probably the fastest moving prospect in this draft class. And we know what the Angels like to do, but there is a possibility that he's got some number one helium.

Jace Le Villelet, who's also in that conversation, could end up not being that attractive to the Nationals, who are a fascinating team to have at the top of the draft. I always enjoy when they have a top three pick. So anyway, Jamie Arnold off the board with one of the top two picks. Okay. Okay. Well, speaking of draft related picks,

cause I'm, wait, no, it's not my turn. Sorry, I'm so sorry, Ben. I am so sorry. Don't want to steal a vulture of draft related. Yeah, I'm sure. All right, so in the 2025 MLB draft, I have one that I want to talk for a slight amount of time about, but I'll go quickly for this one. Strikeout rate will fall below 22% lead wide. And that would be the first time since 2017 that that would be that low. I basically

just think that it could be coming because I feel like hitters have gotten a little better? Question mark? Training. Sounds so confident. It's the trajectory effect. Yeah, right. I mean, I can kind of believe that, that these advanced pitching machines are helping a little bit and, you know, VR training, all that kind of stuff, blah, blah, blah. But, like, the strikeout rate ticked down by a tenth of a percent from 2023 to 2024.

Now it did go up by three times that much from 22 to 23. Has arrested the rise and not solely because of a rise. It has stopped climbing at least. And you know, that's not just because pitchers don't hit anymore. It's after that. So yeah, right. Like saying that it would stop climbing is not bold. So I went with the bold pick, which I don't think is that likely, but it's, it's a pick on the fact that I think it's plateaued and so it could go down.

Okay. Now you can do your draft one. Okay. So this might not strike people as bold who have only looked at some draft related stuff. Um, you're going to think that's not bold at all, but it is bold. Bowman's gonna back me up. My bold prediction is that Ethan Holliday will go number one overall. Are you and Eric still talking to each other? No, because I don't think it's about Ethan Holliday being good. I think it's about the fact that the Nationals have the first overall pick and Ethan Holliday is a Boris kid and the Nationals and Scott Boris like to do a little business. They like to do business. They've done a bunch of business

together throughout the time and I could see them. I actually talked about this bold prediction with Eric and he offered that the Nets take some of these risky, highly volatile guys. He said other things about Ethan Holliday that were less complimentary than that. And then we moved on and here I am making my bold prediction. What's this say? I think the last three conversations

I've had with Eric about anything have been about Ethan Holliday not looking like everything he was cracked up to be. He doesn't, I mean, I don't know, cause I haven't seen him, but I hear tell that he looks like he's not what he was cracked up to be. But maybe, you know, maybe it won't matter. See, I know Ethan Holliday because he's a Holliday.

The less bold, more potential avenues thing would be to say he goes first overall or to either the Cardinals or Rockies because of his dad. But that feels cheap. Some of the listeners who are in the same boat as me when it comes to college baseball awareness are going to have a hard time calibrating the boldness of Jamie Arnold, or maybe even Ethan Holiday, though he's better known because he's a holiday. This is way bolder than my thing, I think.

Thank you. Thank you. Not a college player, though. So college baseball wouldn't even help you there. Yeah. That's true. Exactly. Exactly.

I mean, if he has a bad enough spring, he might become a college player. He might become a college player. Speaking of the draft, Ben Clemens, you know who is gonna go on the first run this year? Merrick Houston from your ill-fated number one overall prediction. Ill-fated?

That's like one of the only predictions I got right. Oh, I guess that's true. Good for him. Dub Gleed is a professional now, right? Gleed. If there's any baseball I know less about than college baseball, it is certainly high school baseball.

So, okay. I've got two more to make. Am I correct in thinking that? I think that's right. Yeah, I agree. Okay, all right. I will predict that the Cleveland Guardians bullpen will finish outside the top 10 in team reliever

win probability added. So this is the bullpen that just posted the highest win probability added on record in fan graphs history, which probably goes back to 1974. They just had this incredible outlier season, excellent bullpen. They led in war too, so it wasn't like they were bad but clutch or something. They were just like the best bullpen by any metric, but especially when it mattered, when it counted, except I guess for the playoffs when it counted even more. But beyond that, they had the best bullpen WPA on record.

And I don't even know if I need to say on record because prior to 74, I don't know that there were any bullpens that were beating it. Like most of the teams at the top of the leaderboard are fairly recent. So maybe we could say best bullpen WPA ever. And I will say they will be outside of the top 10

in that category this season, which is not really like I think they're bad or anything. This is more just a statement about bullpen volatility than anything else, because they have pretty much the same guys. That's why I think this is interesting. It's like they're more or less running back the same bullpen or at least the leverage guys that they had in October.

And maybe they worked some of those guys too hard. Maybe there'll be a hangover effect, or maybe it'll just be regression, because that can happen with bullpens, but I'm saying they're going to be like middle of the pack at best, and that would be bad news for the Guardians, because that bullpen got them into the playoffs last year, but maybe they'll improve in other respects to make up for backsliding in the bullpen.

We shall see. Now it's going to be rough when Nick Kurtzell performs Travis Bizzana, then where are they going to be? I guess so. If he's good enough, they won't have to have a good bullpen. But yeah, this is just, this is what I think about being able to count on bullpens. You can't.

You can't. All right, back to Bauman. That's bold. All right, so for my last prediction, I'm going to go with the following. At some level of professional baseball, a mascot will strike a pedestrian with a motorized vehicle. The Savannah bananas?

Yes, this is I specifically thought about the Savannah bananas. They do count. Okay, so- That makes them feel less bold to me. But only in their pro season, not in their college summer, wouldn't that be a season? Not in their college, yeah. Okay. Okay, motorized vehicles, so it,

presumably on the field, but I guess you're not specifying. Like if a mascot- To be in the concourse. What if someone like runs over a civilian outside of a baseball stadium? Does that count? If it's the guy inside the suit? It is the mascot performer. It's that counts. So I will say the incident that brought this to mind was, I think it was last year, but it might've been in 2023. I was lined up against the wall in the basement at Citizens Bank

Park waiting to get into a clubhouse and the fanatic came by at like 40 miles an hour on his quad bike and came very close to running over my feet. You know, I'm not there every day. I'm not always in the mascot's way. I'm not the most hittable pedestrian that you're ever going to find. But if I had that close a brush with death, then this like mascots have got to be out there driving like maniacs. All right.

I guess the fanatic has done this before, right? I mean, he's constantly trying to run people down, it seems like. But did you specify what level, any level? Any level of professional baseball. Professional baseball. So my- Domestic or international? Domestic.

Domestic. Okay. Important caveat. All right. Yeah. I don't like, obviously like, you know, the Saudi professional baseball league, they've got a mascot who runs over political dissidents with a steamroller. I'm not counting that.

That's his gimmick. Yeah, that's what the mascot does. Yeah, that's his gimmick. Okay. Well, we could have that here after- I guess we could. After the fans come back to the stadium, after the week of games behind closed doors.

Motorized vehicles, motor, like electric motor, like a scooter counts? Yes, a golf cart, a car, a motorcycle. E-bike, motorized bike, e-bike, anything, any motorized conveyance. A penny farthing does not count. Okay. Nor does a skateboard, but. And run over, make contact with? I said strike. Strike, yeah, okay.

Strike. Okay, hopefully that's specific enough. All right, Ben, your last pick. In the month of September, the Cubs are scheduled to play 25 games, and the Chicago Bears are scheduled to play four games. Amazing. My prediction is that the Cubs will double up on the Bears in terms of points, you know,

runs versus points. It is hard, hard to do. This is gonna, this is really a prediction that the Bears are going to be abysmal. So last year, the Cubs scored 124 runs in September, which is really good. 124 runs in 25 games, you know, they're, they're late charge. It's not bad. It was among the, I think they played 26 games actually last September. there's a late charge. It's not bad. It was among the I think they played 26 games actually last September, they made a late charge, they were in the top third

of baseball and scoring. And they didn't come close. The Bears scored like 75 or 80 points. NFL average scoring is just a little high for this to work in less. The Bears are really bad. I don't have any particular reason to think that. But I did realize that making one prediction kind of wrong is never gonna be the difference between winning or losing in this game, and one of my best friends is a big Bears fan, so I thought I would save it for the last prediction, hope he's listening, tell him to listen, and then troll the Bears by predicting them to be just incredibly bad. So bad that the Cubs double their scoring. Really hard. Football, you score so many points.

But I think it would be really funny if it happened. All right, Meg's last pick. Okay, uh, Katel-Morte will win an LMBP. Oh, I thought about doing this! Yeah! Look, I'm not a truther, okay? I'm not saying that a bad decision was made last year or anything like that. No such claim is being made. But man, Katel was so good last year, you guys. He was so good. And, and if he stays healthy, some other guys get hurt mostly. I don't want to root for other guys to get hurt, but it does feel like that is his

most obvious path to like clearing out some of the, the top end competition, but he sure is a great baseball player. You guys so good. So anyway, I can tell Marte and LNVP heard it here first. Yeah. And we could finally stop saying that he's underrated because he would be highly rated if he won an MVP award. Yeah. And then we could make him a breakout pick the next season. Yeah. All right. Well, my last pick, I'll tell you what it won't be.

I considered running back my prediction from last spring about no pitcher reaching 200 innings, but I thought, eh, it's kind of boring. Let's do something new and novel here. I thought about doing that one too. Yeah. I mean, I still like it. I still think it's unlikely, but it's less bold than it was last year.

It gets more likely every year, even though you have full season skeins this year, which maybe makes it a little more likely, but even so only four guys got there last year. It's like the garlic powder of predictions, you know, a little old, but nothing too crazy. Yeah, not really. So I considered doing something with the league-wide slider percentage. I was going to predict that the league-wide slider percentage per stat cast would decrease for the first time since 2014, but that didn't feel bold enough to me. Even though it hasn't happened in more than a decade, it's been trending that way.

I think you've written about this, Ben. The slider boom seems to have subsided. Now it's kick changes, I don't know, sweepers is out of vogue all of a sudden. We're not talking about sweepers, everyone got one, I guess. And if you go by the pitch info, pitch classifications on fan graphs, the slider rate actually did decrease slightly last season. And even by the stat-cast classifications, it barely increased, so just didn't feel bold enough. And then finally I considered predicting that both the Dodgers won't have the best record in baseball and the White Sox won't

have the worst record in baseball, which I thought was semi-bold. I mean you know usually you take the field in these things and so it didn't feel that bold but I thought both of those cases like the Dodgers according to most projections and Vegas and everywhere else are like head and shoulders above, not so much by the FanGraphs playoff odds, but pretty much everywhere else, it's like double-digit wins more than anyone else, like more so than just the pure randomness

that is inherent in predictions. But you get injuries and, you know, maybe they won't be going all out and they'll have a assured playoff spot And who knows and the White Sox not having the worst record in baseball. That's not that bold either So I am going with one that is esoteric which I know Chris always loves and something that is not easy to calculate I guess but can be done based on publicly available stats. It's about third base coach aggressiveness. Oh boy.

I am predicting that third base coaches will finally get aggressive when it comes to sending runners, specifically on sack flies. So we've talked about this recently because multiple studies have been done. Patrick Dubuque just wrote about this for baseball prospectus, the oyster analytics guys wrote about this for down on the farm, following up on research that Russell Carlton did 15 years ago at this point. So this has been in the air, but I think

it's been coming up more and more lately. And I've made the case that now we've kind of conquered risk aversion in sports to some extent, because you have this objective data-driven backing for decisions that once would have been seen as risky, and you would have taken flack for them, but now not so much because you can point to the numbers and say, hey, look, this is the objectively right thing to do. And we've talked about like maybe teams could just have third base coaches backs and they could just say, hey, this is something we're doing this season. We're sending guys more often. Some guys are going to get thrown out, but that's okay. That's our philosophy.

We have your back. We approve this. They could even show data that said this was the right call most of the time, even though it wasn't in this case, which I know would definitely make all the fans feel better. But I am going to say that third base coaches, and I'm going to say this will be by success rate in sack fly situations. So when there is a runner on third and not two outs, so zero outs or one out, and there could be a runner on another base too, but there will be a runner on third, the success rate will fall below 94%, which I know means nothing to anyone, but I will give you the context.

That hasn't happened in like more than 50 years. So it's almost certainly not going to happen. Russell sent me the stats here, which you can also calculate from baseball savant as Patrick Dubuque did, and it basically matches up with what Russell sent me. This does not budge at all. Like, it's the same every year, basically. And you know, there's a semi-significant sample, but like last year, the success rate for runners in this situation, when they were sent, I should specify 96.8% last year. The year before, 96.5. The year before that, 96.8% last year. The year before 96.5, the year before that 96.8, the year before that 96.5, the year before that 96.9, 97.1, 97.5. You get the point. It's always like

high nineties. And I'm saying it's going to fall to low nineties. And the only times that this has happened since 1950, according to what Russell sent me here, just a few years that we've had 94% or below. I'm going to say that. So 94% counts. 1971 was the low at 92.9%. And then 1967, 1972, 1968, 1966, they have something in common. That was like year of the pitcher, era of the pitcher, pre-DH, right? So no one was scoring so you had to send guys in order

to get them across home plate. That's basically the only time that this has happened in 1959. The season with the highest success rate was 1996 when teams scored more than five runs a game. So overall there's a 0.49 moderate correlation between average runs per game and success rate on scoring attempts on sack flies, which is another reason why the success rate could go down this year. If offense keeps declining, if you can't count on the next guy to get a hit, then you might as well chance it.

It's like Russell told me, the biggest issue is that with runner on third, one out, the ball is caught in the outfield, so now there are two outs. If you hold the runner for him to score, else happens the next batter can't make the third out and your average batter does that 68% of the time or whatever maybe more often than that now. So if I have a 50-50 chance of scoring from third that's the best chance I'm going to have because my other chance is the 30-70 shot that the next batter won't make the third out. So I'm saying we're we're time traveling back to late 60s early early 70s. We're

going to get some aggressive sends. Third base coaches are going to get the memo and they're going to wave those arms and some guys are going to get thrown out. And that's going to be okay because the success rate should be like 80% or something, or like in the 80s. This is just way out of whack with where the numbers say it should be. And it's, it's high time that teams get on board and actually agree with what the numbers say here. So that's my prediction. It's a pretty wild thing to predict the first year out of there for the first time in more than a decade that Gary Pettis is in coaching third for the Astros.

This is only uneffectively wild words you get like, here's my bold prediction. The third base success rate on SacFly attempting to score rate will be 94% or below, which means nothing to anyone. But hopefully I just gave you the context because like Russell has written, like every trend has changed precipitously in the past decade. Like all of these things where it was like people were saying,

Saber metric people crying in the wilderness, like, Oh, they should do this or they should not do that. And in the last decade, like every team has gotten on board with that. And this is the holdout. This is like the one outlier where third base coaches are still too afraid. And you know that the front offices are aware of this. They've seen the studies. They've probably done the studies, they have the stat-cast data to show when you should be sending guys and we've seen teams get

better at like translating the message from front offices to the field staff and saying hey do this, this makes sense, but this is like the last frontier. Just sending guys in not even like risky situations but like not guarantees. No one ever gets thrown out in these situations. So it's just gonna take a few, a few guys getting gunned down at home plate, it's gonna happen. It's so on brand for you because it's like a minute change

in a very narrow band of baseball that most people probably don't even notice. Yes. And you called it the last frontier and you also made Russell Carlton do a lot of work for you. Yes. He said it was a simple query. So not that much work, but he did do some work.

But yeah, if Chris wants to score this, Russell could rerun that later, or you can calculate this in season, I believe from baseball sabata. He'll be happy to do it. I'm sure he will. All right. So yeah, that's, that's my pick. So you, uh, probably don't need us to recap them all because we can't probably.

But maybe I'll do it in the outro. But this has been fun and I encourage everyone to go to www.ewstats.com and cast your ballot. You have a little less than a week to do this until first pitch of the season. And we want to know what you think. And grateful for your participation as always, and Chris and his crew for organizing and scoring.

Indeed. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Bauman. Thank you for having us. Thank you. All right, I will give you a brief recap of our predictions from Bauman. At least one of the 2025 Cy Young winners will finish with a FanGrafts War of 5.0 or lower.

A Major League player will date Sabrina Carpenter. The Rockies representative in the All-Star game will be someone other than Michael Tolia, Nolan Jones, or Ezekiel Tovar. A Division 1 college team will hit more home runs than the average MLB team. The Tampa Bay Rays will announce a relocation plan to move to a specific destination outside the Tampa Bay area. At least three Boston Red Sox players will earn Rookie of the Year votes. At least one Major League game this season will be played behind closed doors.

Luis Robert Jr. will earn more Fangrass War after being traded mid-season than before it. Jamie Arnold will be one of the first two picks in this year's MLB amateur draft, and at some level of domestic professional baseball, a mascot will strike a pedestrian with a motorized vehicle. Ben Clemens predicts that Juan Soto will earn more fan graphs more than Aaron Judge. Shohei Otani will throw the fastest pitch

thrown by a starter in the 2025 regular season, excluding openers. At least three players who play at some point for the Colorado Rockies will finish the season with 500 plus plate appearances and negative fan graphs war. Jacob DeGrom will pitch more than 150 innings but earn less than 4.0 fan graphs war.

Patrick Corbin will throw at least 100 innings for the Texas Rangers. Rafael Devers will play more innings at third base than Alex Bregman. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. will win the home run derby. The Chicago White Sox will end at least one day with sole possession of the AL Central lead. The strikeout rate will fall below 22% league wide,

and the Chicago Cubs will score enough runs to double the number of points earned by the Chicago Bears in the month of September. Meg predicts that ESOCK Parade Ace will earn more fan graphs War than Kyle Tucker. At least three primary catchers as defined by FanGraphs will hit 30 plus homers this season. We will have no repeat division winners

other than the Los Angeles Dodgers. The New York Mets will miss the postseason. Nick Kurtz will earn more FanGraphs War than Travis Bozana. Chandler Simpson will lead the league in stolen bases. The Athletics will finish second in the AL West. At least two major league teams will announce new controlling ownership.

Ethan Holliday will be the first pick in this year's MLB amateur draft. And Ketel Marté will win the NL MVP award. And finally, I predict that this season will feature the most ever teams finishing at or above 500, both by total teams and percentage of teams across the league. Neither of the teams playing home games in minor league parks. The A's or the A's will have the league's lowest average home attendance. Three or more non-positioned player pitchers will throw

at least 20 knuckleballs each in the major leagues. The Atlanta Braves will finish out of first place in the NL East by no more than the number of games they lose in which Craig Kimbrel takes the loss or blows a save. Max Reed, Cody Boundger, and Devin Williams will collectively surpass Juan Soto's FanGraphs War, but the Yankees will miss the postseason. A player will steal at least 80 bases. A player will be ejected or fined for tapping their head as if calling for a ball strike challenge. Luis Robert Jr. and Sandy Alcantara will both be moved by the trade deadline and still lead their respective original teams in full season fan graphs war.

The Cleveland Guardians will finish outside the top 10 in team relief pitcher win probability added and the success rate for scoring from third base in sacrifice fly situations will fall to 94% or below. Again, go to effectivelywildstats.com to vote, or just check the link on the show page or in the episode description in your podcast app. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon

by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks, Greg Weiland, Vriska Zone, Geo, Connor Sparks, and Tim McShane, thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild

Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, discounts on merch and ad free fan graphs, memberships, personalized messages, and more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectively Wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcastatfangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group

at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You can find the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You can find the effectively wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. And as mentioned, you can check the show page at fan crafts or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats and ballots we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week, which means we will talk to you soon. And who wants Nothing less than effectively wild Oh why oh why oh why Oh why oh why Nothing less than effectively wild Oh it's my turn

Wait, what? Oh, it's my turn. Great start. Oh, God. Okay, here we go. I boldly predict that Meg will do the intro to this episode. Okay, here we go. Sorry, let me take a quick beep. Sorry, Shane.