Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2324: Hustle Hassle

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Elly De La Cruz’s unspectacular start to the season, the firing of Brandon Hyde and what it would take for them to blame a manager for a team’s disappointing season, the hubbub about Juan Soto’s hustle, MLB’s announcement about Rivalry Weekend’s success, Kyle Schwarber and the lineage of […]

Hello and welcome to episode 2324 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of FanGraphs. I was going to say I'm Meg Rowley of Patreon. Nope, that's not where I work. I work at FanGraphs. Me, Meg. You're Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. That's where you work. And you're joining me on this year pod. How are you, bud? I have words there in my mouth. Yep. Most of that was entirely accurate. You are funded in part by Patreon. So there was an element of truth even to that.

So I'm doing well. And I was just reflecting on someone we haven't talked about. Got a bunch of banter to get to today and we will talk about some players. But every now and then I like to step back and say, gosh, we haven't talked about that guy for a while. And that realization occurred to me in this case with Ellie De La Cruz.

We just haven't really talked about Ellie this season. He may have come up in passing once or twice, but I sort of expected, independent of our long running bit about not talking about the Reds, I thought he was gonna force our hands this season as he did last season. I thought Ellie would be inescapable that we just be talking about Ellie all the time

that as great as he was last year, there might be an additional leap that he might make and he hasn't yet. So we just haven't had a whole lot of reason to talk about him. And so I had this epiphany, gosh, when was the last time we talked about Ellie? He's just been average-ish as a hitter.

He just has not progressed. And so he has 16 steals, which is good for a normal player, but for Ellie, just doesn't really raise your eyebrows, doesn't really pique your interest. And everything else, he's just kind of static, which is not the way that we think of Ellie being. He's constantly in motion, he's always improving. And as it is, he's on pace for about a three war season. And that's the floor for Ellie,

which tells you how good he is. But yeah, it's kind of a combination, I guess, of maybe he was a little lucky last year. Like the underlying numbers are largely the same, but the results are different. He was just a little bit above the expected weighted on base last year. And now the expected weight on base is almost identical, but so is his actual on base and weighted on base. It's just kind of he's he's done what the numbers say he should have done, whereas last year he did a little bit better than that. And the defense has been down, at least according to the stats, according to Statcast,

he's been instead of an excellent defender, he's been a below average one. So that's part of it. But really it's just that the offense has been unspectacular. And it seems like the only thing that has really changed meaningfully is that he's hitting the ball on the ground a lot. And obviously he has the speed where you can make that work

and you can beat out some hits, but that's gonna reduce your power and that's what has happened. So he's hit grounders almost 60% of his battle balls. So the launch angle is down, which I imagine is just something mechanical, is just some sort of funk and he will figure it out and he'll start elevating again and elevating.

Is that something? I think so. Maybe, okay. Something. And I'll file that away for when it happens. I think he'll get hot at some point. Yeah. Maybe, okay. Something. And I'll file that away for what happens. I think he'll get hot at some point. Yeah. Red hot even.

And then- And then you're doing too much. Yeah, that's definitely not something. But we will talk about Ellie more at some point this season. So I'm sort of planting the flag just to say, I think that that time is coming when he becomes the main character again.

And bantering about Ellie because he has four hits and five steals every day. Somehow that period of the season will come, but it hasn't come yet. I love how you're like, I remember people and things, and I want to assure everyone that I am aware of the existence of people object permanence. I have it. Wow. Way to brag, Ben. Yeah, I think that your general take is in line with mine, which is, you know, I'm heartened by the fact

that he seems to still be hitting the ball hard. You know, his hard hit rate is pretty much unmoved from last year. He's barreling the baseball at relatively the same rate. And you're right that with speed like his, an elevated ground ball rate relative to... Elevated? See, now you're... You said it was something Meg. You said it was something.

Yeah, I didn't say it was everything. I just said it was something. You don't want to overuse it before you have an opportunity to say it's time to elevate and celebrate. You got to, you got to save it. You know, don't. He does have six infield hits this year, 14 of last season. So he's a little bit ahead of that pace at least. Sure.

And you know, he is going to be able to do more with that ground ball rate than say someone with a meaningfully lower sprint speed. But there's like being able to do something with a ground ball rate and then there's, wow, you're, you know, 11 percentage points above where you were from a ground ball rate perspective compared to last year. So I think you're probably right that there's some mechanical something or other that needs to get adjusted here I'm not terribly worried about the defensive piece of it if only because like I haven't watched a ton of Ellie playing short this year and so it's

May 20th. I simply beg of people to not put too too much into Defensive metrics at this stage of the game. But also I haven't really watched him. So I don't know if I have like a real opinion on whether there's been actual regression there or if it's just like small sample of flukiness. So yeah, he still makes a fair amount of errors, but he did that last year too. And was still good. Cause the range. So, yeah, right.

Right. I mean, he's like the size of a skyscraper. So one would imagine he like reach out and get it. But that also there will be times where you're reminded that he's a six foot five guy playing shortstop. And sometimes that looks a little goofy. So I'm not necessarily too concerned. I imagine it feels a bummer for Reds fans because, you know,

the Central is like, I think think still a winnable division. I don't think anyone came into 2025 expecting Cincinnati to like run away with it or anything like that, but you could see a path to them being competitive and it involved Ellie occupying for the Reds the role that say Bobby Wood Jrr. Occupied for the Royals in the AL central I am aware that that is a different league than the one that Ellie plays it to be clear but to dry comp a parallel to how one guy's Really superlative production can sort of you know be the rising tide that lifts the whole ship him having At least a repeat of last year, if not, to

your point, a sort of step, a further step forward seemed like it was going to be important to them outpacing what we projected for them, even though the good parts of their projections already baked in like a pretty reasonable projection for Ellie. I did expect him to run away with it, but he is on pace for a mere 55 stolen paces. But if he gets on base a little more, and really it's just that the isolated power's down and that'll come up at some point. So yeah, it's really young.

I assume the launch angle does anyway. Yes, exactly. So yeah, if he didn't just suddenly transition into Yandy Diaz or something, and he's ground beef now, ground Ellie, I don't think that that will happen. But when it happens, I'm just, every now and then we'll talk about someone and then they will go on a remarkable run after that.

And sometimes it's the opposite. It's regression, it's the cover jinx, it's the effectively wild jinx. But I'm willing into existence the opposite of that where we talk about, huh, haven't talked about this guy. And then suddenly he's all anyone is ever talking about. Right, yeah. It's sort of like how I feel nervous for the Twins fans

who listen to the pod and read fan graphs, because, you know, as you might have noted and noticed, Twins went on a nice little run then. You know, they had a good little win streak going, finally was broken. But they had a terrible start to the season, pulled themselves out of the doltrums. Them and the Braves, man, it's like, we've got to pull ourselves up by some bootstraps. And they seem to have done that. And so of course, JJ, if you write about them today, and as

well as should, it's like a remarkable turnaround from their early season fortunes and now bucks and career hurts you have to ask like how long is it going to last and then if they start a 10 game losing streak everyone's going to be like Jay and won't be Jay's fault. He's not on the twins, you know? So anyway, you just worry about the fact that you notice something and then that's your very special particle after that. Now we did devote part of our most recent episode, which we recorded on Friday, to the Orioles and they have not had that happen. They have not had things turn around since we discussed them.

In fact, they have not won a game since we discussed them. So in that sense, nothing that we said is out of date, but not long after we posted that podcast, I think it was, I forget the exact timing, but Brandon Hyde was fired. Saturday morning sometime. Right, exactly. That's when they did it, yeah.

Yeah, so it was like effectively wild dropped. The Orioles listened to that episode, said, oh boy, things really aren't going well. We gotta get him out of here. Ben and Mecca, right, we better change something. And what they decided to change was their manager, Brandon Hyde, who was the 2023 AL manager of the year.

This is not the first time that someone has gone from manager of the year to fired. This isn't even the fastest time. So that'll happen. It goes with the territory and gosh. There's something, sorry, there's something kind of mean and pointing it out that way. Like you couldn't even suck the best. Like you weren't even the fastest to get canned. What's wrong with you?

Anyway, didn't the Marlins fire Joe Girardi like before he won or was it something to look up the timing? Yeah, that may have been the records, but their playoff odds have continued to ebb away. They're almost gone at this point. They're 12 games back. It was still single digits when we last talked about them. And so Hyde takes the fall. And I saw the general tenor of the reaction seemed to be,

well, he was the fall guy. He was the sacrificial lamb. Yeah, it's not really his fault. I mean, just to quote one person, Craig Calcatera said, you know, he talked about how bad the Orioles had been and said, not that it's Brandon Hyde's fault. And that's generally what I default to with managers too. That's, that's what we said more or less about Bud Black and Derek Shelton. And, you know, it's at a certain point, if, if things aren't going well for your team,

which is an understatement for the Rockies and the Pirates, then the manager, it's just, you know, you know going in that you're going to be the guy who's going to lose his job before the GM does. And so, fine, but I was kind of wondering, like, what would it take for us to say, oh, it was actually his fault, really. Like, it did, he did deserve to take this fall.

He wasn't just a bystander. Cause like, if there were such a situation, you'd think that Hyde and the Orioles might be one. Because yeah, we can and have faulted Elias ownership, some combination of the two for not investing more in that roster. But the roster has been so much worse than it seemed like it should be, even given the talent that they entered the season with.

And so this is like a team that's expected to contend that's expected to be one of the best teams in baseball, even with their relative lack of aggressiveness over the season. And so that's a little bit different from Derek Shelton with the Pirates, for instance, where that team just wasn't going to be good. And Bob Nutting should look in the mirror if he wants to know why. And there were injuries and everything else. And so that, okay, hard to pin that on him. Bud Black, Rockies, he had been there so long

and there'd been so much losing that I think we all thought if anything, he lasted longer than he had any right to expect to, which isn't to say that it was his fault exactly, but he wasn't maybe contributing to the culture changing there, or like this was kind of a prerequisite, you gotta do something, you gotta acknowledge that you understand that things can't keep going on this way, but no one was expecting the Rockies to be good this year either. And the deltas are different. It's like for the Orioles,

it's between being a contending team and being a very bad team. And for the Rockies, it's between being a very bad team and being potentially one of the worst teams of all time. In terms of under performance, maybe it's sort of similar, but it's just a little bit different in terms of where you are in the standings. Anyway, with Hyde and the Orioles, you got a team that's expected to be good and they've been bad and it's been kind of an across the board failure. Isn't that kind of the textbook case of where you might say, yeah, maybe the manager was not doing his job. And if even this is a case where we're inclined to say, eh, it's not his fault, then has the

manager position just evolved beyond ever getting significant credit or blame from us? Oh, how interesting. What a big, what a big question you're asking. You know, I have a couple of thoughts about this. I mean, as Bauman put it when, when he wrote about the firing for us, like, you know, when you have a team that's sort of in this position, you can't say that everything has gone exactly right from the manager's standpoint. And I think we, we echoed this sentiment with, with Bud Black, where it's like when you're dramatically underperforming. Now, I think the Orioles are underperforming.

I don't think they're dramatically under, I mean, like the Rockies have won eight games Ben, it's still just, it's still, it's still only eight games, right? So I want to separate it out a little. Although the Orioles have only won 15. You would expect there to be a bigger gap there. They're not just out of the running. They are worse than the Marlins. They are like one of the absolute worst teams in baseball.

I've just run differential record wise, whatever it is. They're just, they've been horrible. Only the Rockies have been worse than they have. So I think that the notion that Hyde, you know, doesn't have anything to do with their performance as it's currently constituted is sort of to like give him a pass. I do think that in many ways the GM situation is a bigger problem for Baltimore than it even is for Colorado because the needs were so obvious and the rest of the team so ready to contend. It's just a simpler problem to solve, right? Like starting

pitching, you know, you have to find the right guy. You got to evaluate the right dudes. You have to be able to convince a free agent to come play for you. There's work to be done there. And I'm not saying that it would have worked out perfectly, you know, Bowman entertained this possibility too. There's an alternate reality where the Orioles decide we're going to spend, we're going to commit like a hundred million dollars more to payroll annually. And they go out and they sign a bunch of guys and we say, Oh my God, look at this Orioles team trying so hard. And they still face plant cause like that's baseball and that can happen. But the needs of the club were so obvious and the problem, at least the answer to the problem, what do you need to do to be better is so much simpler than

it is for Colorado. The Orioles do not play baseball on the moon, you know, they play in a very hard division. Although, you know, as we sit here on May 20th, like other than the Yankees, the rest of the AL East has sort of fallen flat. Yeah, AL East has been pretty mediocre. NL West, NL best. Yeah, relative to expectation. Yeah, so, you know, there's that, but like, it is in theory a tough division and it certainly is home to several teams that spend a good bit of money and then also the Rays who, even

if they're kind of underperforming relative to my expectation and don't spend as much as their peers in the division, manage to field a good baseball team more often than not. So I don't want to say that it's an easy project to come out of the East with a division championship in hand, but I still think it's easier than trying to play baseball on the moon for half your games. This is an organization that has a lot of bright people in it. And again, like very strong and good position player core. And so I don't think that Hyde is blameless,

although I couldn't like pinpoint like a particular strategic failure that I have seen from him, either in extremity or occurring so often that it sort of makes me question whether he can do that part of the job. I don't know, but there's got to be something, right? There has to be some sort of responsibility that sits with him. But I think you're right that like we find ourselves in a really weird period of managerial evaluation as outsiders because the number of guys who I think are sort of regularly making like doofy choices, we don't

have a lot of doofs floating around. And that isn't to say that like everyone's equally good at people management or that they're able to sort of get the guys to cohere or they're able to balance the differing demands of young players and veterans. I think that there are managers who are better at their job in its totality than others, but in terms of the pieces where you could say that cost them a game and he did it, I think those examples are fewer and farther between. Now, every fan of a team can think of an instance in a season, at least one, where the manager made a choice that like didn't make sense or maybe, you know, ended up backfiring even if the process was

down. So it's not that they're all perfect either, but the times, there aren't a lot of like gaffes. We don't have a lot of gaffes. So some, but it's not as prevalent. And I think part of that is how closely aligned managers and senior front office personnel tend to be these days. And I think that that is often good and quite productive. And I think it helps teams at least have better communication processes at the very least. And I think it does aid in better decision making.

But I also think that in some ways it makes managers even more vulnerable as the first domino to fall in a chain of firings. Because if your ownership and you view your organization as mired in a lost season and in need of a potential cleaning of house, well, if the manager and the POBO or GM or whatever the senior most title is are very closely aligned, you can be perceived as doing something by firing the manager. And you also can be sending a very strong message to senior leadership on the ops side that like, Hey, this isn't working. That guy's dispensable now, you're dispensable later. Like if I'm Mike Elias, I'm very nervous. Now it could well be that Rubenstein is just

like, hey, I want there to be some continuity and I'm going to give these guys one more go. But I just don't, I think that you find yourself in a position where you have to ask Elias, and I'm sure he wouldn't really answer because this is an awkward question to be put on the spot for, but it's sort of like what I asked last year when the Mariners got rid of Scott Service. It's like, Jerry, what about what you're doing? Means that you should keep your job with him losing hits. Where's the daylight in responsibility and

decision making and the way you're connecting with players, whatever. Where are you achieving daylight such that you should keep your job? Now, I've said all of that and I've said that Elijah should be nervous, but guess who kept his job at the end of the year? Jerry DePoto. So sometimes these guys just keep their jobs forever because ownership is content to have it be good enough. But this is very different than a Mariners team that misses the playoffs by once one game or whatever, both in terms of the expectations of the Orioles coming into the year and after a long and very painful rebuild.

And in terms of, I think the concentration of position player talent on the roster, all the Mariners have hit a hell of a lot better than the Orioles. So what do I even know, Ben? You know, like what do I, what do I even know? But I think it's not surprising that Hyde went and I will be at least mildly surprised if, if Elias keeps his job at the end of the year. But you know, it's been a season for Meg being surprised by people's decisions. So who knows? Yeah. A couple follow ups there. I said that only the Rockies had been worse than the Orioles. I meant in terms of run differential, to be clear, I want to give the White Sox and the Pirates their due. They still have worse records than the Orioles.

You don't have to issue clarification on that. You could just let people think it was fine. Right. Jojo already was fired by the then Florida Marlins in 2006 before he won the manager of the year award for that season. So I couldn't quite remember what the sequencing was. Tough to beat that. And in terms of comparison to preseason expectations, the Rockies, according to the fan graphs, depth charts, playoff odds page were projected for about 63 wins coming into this season. And they're on pace now for 28. If I round up,

which I probably shouldn't, but yeah. So there are 35 wins if we just extrapolate their pace so far this season and compare that to their preseason projected wins total they'd be 35 below whereas the Yeah, I know the Orioles meanwhile were projected before the season for about 83 wins and they're on pace for 53 again if I round up so they're only 30 wins off their projected

only 30 wins off their projected pace. So the Rockies have been even worse relative to their preseason projections, but it's pretty close actually. So yeah, I would say that the last time that I can recall thinking, oh yeah, that manager really deserved to be fired or is actually significantly responsible for this team's tire fire of a season was Bobby Valentine with 2012 Red Sox, where he was brought in and there were the clubhouse

issues down the stretch in 2011. And that was just pouring fuel on the fire. Like, it was, he was kind of a disaster. I mean, not only were the red socks even worse than they had been, I think in like half a century, but he was just kind of a distraction and an embarrassment and he was constantly stepping in it and just bad headlines. And so even then I wouldn't say like, yeah, they're bad because of Bobby Valentine, but he clearly was subtractive, is that a word? Not additive, he was making things worse. But barring that, I almost think like that's the situation that it needs to be, it's like almost as much

of a PR problem as it is clubhouse stuff, which we can't even really see unless it then comes out into view, if it becomes a like, he's lost the clubhouse situation and that happens in a very public way, then it's fairly easy for us to say, okay, maybe they're not bad because of him, but he's not a good manager.

Yeah, I think you're right. Like if you think about some of the managerial dust ups that we have talked about in the last couple of years now, you know, not everybody who has a public dust up with some portion of their clubhouse ends up losing their job. Yeah, Holly Marmole, still Cardinals manager. Right. It has been along the lines of the Marmole's or, you know, refusing to look at an eclipse, not directly at it.

You shouldn't look directly at an eclipse, but appreciating an eclipse, right? The white sock situation after the Russo with Pedro Gryffold, like it has existed in that realm. And it's just a, an interesting spot for folks like us to be sitting in, not only because we so rarely get real true insight into all of the nitty gritty HR actual people management pieces of it, but because I think sabermetric types are used to when we grouse about managers. Historically, the grousing has been, I can't believe he had him try to bunt there. I can't believe that he's not bringing in his closer in a high leverage situation late and close just because it happens to not be the ninth.

Right. It's, it's been stuff like that where it has been managers refusing to adapt to emerging sabermetric orthodoxy. And that's just not, you know, as obvious a gap. I do, like I said, I don't think these guys are all the same. And I, there is a little more old school to be had depending on the guy you're talking about. But even, even guys who are considered old school managers now, at least engage with and, and sort of have to be conversant in concepts, you know, like times through the order, if only to explain why they are departing from that orthodoxy when they do. So it's just a,

it's a fascinating time to be alive. So. Yeah. Well, here's another thing. So, okay, if we've acknowledged that, except in rare cases, we're rarely really gonna say that a manager is responsible for a team's lack of success. And that's kind of a change from an earlier era where managers were often seen as determinative. And when you were away, I talked to John W. Miller about the last manager, the biography of Earl Weaver, another Orioles manager, and we talked about that change. And okay, here's another one, hustle. This has been another area where I think there's

been an evolution of thinking and there's an old school and a new school. And maybe we tend to push back a bit on players getting dinged for lack of hustle. So this came to the fore with Juan Soto over the weekend. I thought we were going to get further into the episode for you to do stupid one. So discourse, there is a whole hubbub about one Soto. Now there were, there were multiple hubbubs. So I'm going to separate the hubbubs. And I'm going to focus on, I think the more legitimate hubbub because there was one that was just based on just

inaccuracy and distortion, which was just about New York radio guys either misinterpreting accidentally or willfully something that was said on the ESPN Sunday broadcast about how Juan Soto, he has something in his contract, just a certain number of charter flights for his family. And that's not unusual. Lots of charter flights for his family. And that's not unusual. Lots of big free agents have that perk. And so this got distorted and there was a game of telephone slash hot take and people

were saying that he flies charter, which obviously wasn't the case. And then Jeff Passon corrected it. Put that whole nonsense aside. So two things about Soto. One is that frankly, he's my hero because he decided not to participate in ESPN Sunday Night Baseball's mic'd up on field thing. He was announced as the guy, like Buster only tweeted that he was going to be the mic'd up player for that game

while he was on the field. And then he, he didn't do it. He decided not to, and only a tease that like they were going to ask him about Aaron Judge and not getting to play with Aaron Judge anymore, which man, if Soto saw that, why, why would he want to talk about that in the middle of a game? Yeah. Please ask me about my former team and my former teammates and whether I missed playing with him. Meanwhile, I have Pete Alonso doing great. Like he's not gonna want to talk about that.

And I don't want to hear whatever he would say trying to be diplomatic while he's on the field. Now, I guess if he came out and said, he did say earlier this season that he missed that protection that he thought Judge gave him. So he has kind of already addressed that. Anyway, I've been very anti the mic'd up on field interview. And so I salute Juan Soto, why ever he pulled out of doing that.

And I think Brendan Nimmo subbed in. So, you know, it's not as if he sank the whole exercise, unfortunately, but it went on without him. It's like, you know, you make a principled stance and you hope that that will change something and now they'll just find someone else to say yes. But I guess people are less interested in what Brendan Nimmo thinks about Aaron Judge.

Anyway, good for him there, whatever his motivations were. But hustle and potentially the lack thereof has come up with Soto because back to back days, he had plays where I think indisputably he was not running hard out of the box. One of them was in that Sunday night baseball game and it was late and it was tied two to two. Yeah. It's Yankees and Mets and it's a rivalry and Soto hit a ground ball

that looked like it might scoot through the middle. And there was a diving play and he was thrown out at first and he was far from busting it out of the box. He was he was jogging. And then the next day he hit a ball off the wall in Boston off the monster. He thought it was gone and it wasn't there was wind, whatever. It hit off the top of the wall and he ended up at first base. He did then steal second, I think maybe on the next pitch, which I think if we could

somehow stat blast instances of a player not running as hard as they should have and ending up not on the base they should have been on, what the steal attempt rate in that situation would be. Yeah, it would be fascinating. Yeah, the make up steal in that situation. I think if I were a pitcher, I would always throw over in that situation because you just know that guy wants to take the heat off of himself and show a little hustle and get that bag that he should have had.

Anyway, he did steal second and he got stranded there. And if you believe in, as Michael K calls it, the fallacy of the predetermined outcome, then perhaps he would not have scored regardless. Cause he, he didn't get advanced beyond that. Anyway, he took a lot of heat for not running in these two spots. And Mets manager, Carlos Mendoza even acknowledged

that he would talk to Soto about it. Soto himself said, I think I've been hustling pretty hard, but on these particular plays, he didn't appear to be. And Mendoza said, speaking about the one in Fenway, he thought he had it in this ballpark with that wall right there, you gotta get out of the box. We'll discuss that. So.

Yep, seems fine. Yeah, I think that's fine too. I think there's all sorts of stuff, like certain players getting, you know, tarred with this brush. Sure. Like, you know, people thinking that there's players of certain ethnicities don't hustle,

and you know, players who don't look like they're hustling as much as other guys. And maybe it's expression and maybe it's body language and it's all this stuff. And sometimes it's sort of unfair. Also, sometimes guys don't hustle. Right. And I think that is, that's what happened here. Now, the first game I've, I've been a, a defender of non-hustlers before because I do think there's something to just not hurting yourself essentially.

And I know that a lot of people would hear that and say, these are professional athletes. These are supposed to be elite physical guys and they're being paid zillions of dollars and they shouldn't hurt themselves running to first base. And yeah, that'd be nice, but they do sometimes. We know that they do. And so I wrote something years and years and years ago

comparing Robinson Canoe and Derek Jeter and how Canoe was always someone who was said to be a non-hustler. And he even said himself, like, you know, he was thinking he was taking the long view sometimes. And he was thinking, well, if I pull a hamstring or a calf or something here, I'm gonna be out. And that's what I looked at kind of the infield hit rates

for Jeter who was always, yeah, this guy hustles, he runs out every ground ball and Cano. And I found that in the grand scheme of things, it just didn't make that much difference. Like if I tried to control for ground balls hit to a certain side and how often they beat them out. And there were some other variables there.

But as best as I could determine, Jeter was getting more infield hits, but not that many more. And if Kano is durable and he was to that point in his career, then that's better because you beat out one infield hit here or there. Okay, you got a handful of hits. That's nice. And it's all singles. But if you get one IL stint there, because you're, you're busting it and you tear something, then that's going to more than make up for all of those hits that you gained while you were sprinting all the time. Right. So in general, I'm willing to defend players on that basis and say it's a long season and

this is for the best and Soto has been pretty durable in his career. So I would say though, I'd make an exception. Well two exceptions. One is that when you admire the fly ball and it doesn't, that's not good. That's just, it's not a good look. Like cause it's not a good look. Yeah. Then it's not even that you were not running as hard as you possibly could be you weren't running at all And wait, you know, he he took his time. He was at home plate

He admired it and then finally he he went into a slow trot before he realized though This is gonna not get out. So that situation I think you should always jog out of the box such that you could make it to second on a ball that actually hits the top of the wall instead of getting out. And I'm not saying sprint as hard as you can. I'm just saying jog a little bit. Right. Be in a position where you can access a new gear with relative ease. Yeah.

Or you don't even have to sometimes if it's like off the top of the monster, you probably could jog into second. I know it's a shallow wall, but there's enough hang time there that you probably don't even have to sprint to get there as long as you're moving. And so that's different, I think, because that's not a case of,

oh, I was just rationing my energy and this was self-preservation. This was more of an ego thing. This was, I was just rationing my energy and this was self preservation. This was more of an ego thing. This was, I'm going to take a minute to just enjoy my majestic home run here. The ground ball from the previous day fit more into that canoe category, though I will say that late in a game, Thai game, that's a little bit different from running out or not running out a ground ball in an extremely low leverage spot. And I think one reason why this got so much attention

was it's Juan Soto and it's Mets Yankees. And this was according to an MLB press release we got about how Rivalry Weekend is a hit with fans. This was the most watched Sunday night baseball game in seven years on ESPN. So a lot of people were watching this moment. So that said, even though it's a big game, it is still a single regular season game in late May.

And you expect to play deep into October if you're on the Mets, hopefully. So it's a big moment for a regular season, early season moment, but it's not that big a moment in the grand scheme of things. So that one I equivocate on a little bit more, though I'd say in that situation, a little more effort maybe would be nice.

But I think it's fine to just have a manager, even with a superstar. We know that there's sort of different rules for superstars and super highly paid players. But I do think it's good not to say that they're exempt from a reminder about what's run out of the box every now and then. So ultimately it's not that big a deal and it's being blown up into a bigger deal. But I do think there was more merit to this than there sometimes is when people complain about specific instances

of non-hustle. AMT – I think that's all very fair. I think it's really hard, you know, it's hard to separate those discourses. It's hard to separate like the part of the discourse that has been historically watching players of color get sort of tagged on unfairly with accusations of laziness because they're not busting it out of the box or whatever. I think it's hard to decouple that in people's minds from there are instances where people loaf. I think that in general, players have a pretty good, not a perfect sense and this last couple of days is perhaps illustrative of that at times, but I do think that players generally have a pretty good sense of when they should either leg it out,

be primed to leg it out to your point, to like be in a jog so that if they need to turn it on, they can, versus when it's going to be an easy ground out to first base and don't worry about it because you're going to be, you ground out to first base and don't worry about it. Cause you're going to be, you would be out even if you were busting it down the line. Um, I think players have a good sense of that. And I think sometimes, you know, we can maybe go, we've like wrapped around too much on some of this stuff because you're right. Like sometimes it makes sense to, to really turn it on to try to, to try to reach base.

Not every game it's, it depends on the game state. sense to really turn it on to try to reach base. Not every game. It depends on the game state. It depends on your own health. It depends on sort of how your athleticism manifests itself. I think the answer is really different in the postseason as opposed to the regular season. All of these things. But there are times when guys should leg it out a little more than they do. And then there are plenty of times where, you know, old heads get grumpy

about it. And I think it's fine. I think it's also okay for a manager to say, you know, most of the time, this isn't a problem. I think these were a couple of opportunities for us to learn and reassess so it can, you know, the next time he has a better sense of when he should bust it out or how he should play the monster or whatever, you know, it's fine. Say like, this didn't go great, we'll address it, move on. Like, I think it's okay. And in much the same way that it can be hard to disentangle the when should you actually run discourse from the, what has that discourse historically been laced with piece of it. It's hard to separate these individual instances of Juan Soto from the broader Juan Soto discourse.

And can I, may I for a moment just say, you guys need to take yourself so much less seriously than you do. Like New York needs to freaking chill. I know you're all stressed about the May world race. You got to think about something else. I respect that. But good God, the self-seriousness at play in all of this is wild. The defensiveness of Mets fans, the whininess of Yankees fans. You can boo the man. I think it's silly. I think it is a goofy thing. I think that everyone in every one of those boroughs would be happier if they entertained the idea that one can simply prefer a different place to the place you're at and it doesn't mean you must go to war with their family and salt their fields. Jesus Christ. It's just like, look, amazing city,

one of the best, what a town. You all have to relax because it's too much, you know? I'm not going to defend my city on that basis. We all let you guys do this because quite frankly, we can't have another day of discourse about bodegas. It will kill us. Yeah. You're right. There are no corner markets anywhere else. You're the only ones. You're the only corner. They're a miracle. No one else can get a BLT anywhere else in the world. Jesus Christ.

So look, we let, if only out of self-preservation, much like not tweaking a hammy, running it out to first base when you're gonna be out by two steps anyway, sometimes in the interest of self-preservation, we let you guys just wild. And it's like, fine, let New York Twitter or blue sky exhaust itself and then we can talk about other stuff. But I'm begging. I'm simply, I'm simply begging. I'm, I, and I

understand in some ways this is karmically my fault, right? Because I have been a bit of a brat about your mayors and I'm not wrong, but I have been loud about it and I'll entertain the feedback that I've been annoying. And so the world had to send me a message. No, no, there is dumber discourse. We're going to give it to you. It's going to be about him and charter flights. And it's not unusual.

You don't have to like it. Like you could think it's not good for people to fly private. That's defensible. No, they just said that he was the one who was taking these, that he was not flying on the team plane or anything, which is just inaccurate. I know. And look, I'll say this as someone who has, over the years, followed various major leaguers on Instagram. There are times when the stars on the team

will fly private. Often when that happens, it's because they are going to the All-Star game right after a series concludes or whatever, but it's not unprecedented. And it does occasionally happen with their families, especially if they have a big family. Like occasionally they just send their families on a private flight while they take the charter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It matters to the planet, but nobody's mad about it for that reason.

Be mad about it for a cool reason. My God. But anyway, yes, I think there are times when guys loaf a little bit. I think that most of the time they do a really good job of having a sense of like based on a variety of variables, including their own speed, their own health, the game state, the place they are in the season, the stakes for the playoffs. They do a pretty good job even in the moment of doing that quick mental calculation and knowing how fast or slow to go. I think baseball players try very hard. They are also humans.

It is conceivable to me that they would on occasion have a lazy moment at work, but generally I think it's fine. I think the way that the team seems to be addressing this issue, which I am putting giant air quotes around because none of us would care if it was someone named something other than Juan Soto, but the way that they're addressing it is fine. It sounds like there's no conflict on the team. Whatever. Yeah. I think part of this is that Soto has not been spectacular yet. And it says something that I know, but hold on because sorry to interrupt you. I'm being rude now, but I just, I need people.

I need people to be, he, it's, it's, it's fine. It's gonna, it's fine. Oh, of course it's fine. He'll be fine. But I think, yeah, it's fine. He'll be fine. But I think, yeah, it's your standards, highly paid player comes over and you expect him to be his absolute best self immediately. And if he's anything short of that, now you can't say, as you would in other circumstances,

he can't play in New York because he just played in New York last year and was fantastic. But you can say he can't play in Queens. It's the bright lights of Flushing. Hey, I live in Queens. Queens is great. Queens, don't disrespect Queens. I think that that thing that you're identifying

actually accounts for why some, not all, but some of the Yankees fan base has been so unhinged about this because they love nothing more than being able to accuse a player of not being able to handle it because they're like, this is a city for, for hardened folk for you're just good at enduring expensive inconvenience. Like that is a skill, but it's not one you brag about. Like what is anyway.

Yeah, no, there's, there's some of that. It's like, he spurned us sort of, and now our guy judge has been amazing and Soto, eh, you know, we've been fine without him. Right. They can't do the thing that they normally do in these moments, which is be like, he can't hack into New York. They can't do that. They don't have that bat in their bag and it is driving them slowly insane. That could be it. It says something about how amazing Juan Soto is

that I say that this has been a slow start for Soto. And he's a 130CW RC. Exactly, yeah. It actually reminds me very much of his start in San Diego when he was traded there after mid 2022. Yep. And then he was fine, but he was outplayed the rest of the way by the legend, Joey Manessas, who replaced him in Washington. Yes, I will take every opportunity to mention that, but you're doing it because the bench is thin on that particular team. Yeah, but he kind of had a power outage

and just wasn't his usual self. 130 WRC plus in San Diego, same, almost the same war, same WRC plus, same playing time. And then in 2023, he was much better. And then in 2024, he was spectacular. And he will eventually be that with the Mets, but it is sort of that similar. And when he went to San Diego,

he'd been with the Nationals for so long and it was mid-season. And Bill James used to have this concept of the transition tax, which he said was sort of like, when a, I think he said it specifically, when a big free agent with a lot of expectations signs with a new team that maybe there's a year where not everything clicks and he takes some time to acclimate

to his new surroundings and the expectations and the pressure and there's kind of an adjustment there. And I don't know whether there's been a good study about the transition tax and whether that's really a thing because we also say that when you sign a big free agent to a long-term deal, you want them to be their best early on. You want that production to be front loaded so that you're getting more than your money's worth early on.

And then later on when he's not so good anymore and you're still paying him, well, it all evens out. But there are certain individual cases where there at least appears to be something like this. And again, he's just going across town. So I don't know how the transition tax, if it even is a thing applies in this specific situation, but at some point, Soto will get hot and he will be the player, the Mets signed and everyone will lay off if he happens to jog out a ground ball or stand in a box a little too long.

Right. And like, this is the moment where even though I don't want to overstate the case and make this sound more predictive than it is, like, Wansoto right now has a 359 Woba and a 435 X Woba. Like one can, his, you know, his BABIP is running not below like all of his career averages, but he's a 258 babbip. His career babbip is 303. There's stuff here that could indicate to you that there might be some unluckiness with the bad at ball luck.

Now does that make you say, well, you're running out then? Maybe. Okay? Maybe. But you want the guy healthy and you want him healthy for October. And I guess here's the simplest way that I can put this. It is telling to me, and perhaps my sense of this is wrong,

maybe I just happen to follow only enlightened Mets fans because I am such a special girl. So discerning. But it was illustrative to me on Sunday that the people who I saw referencing the quote unquote loafing were not Mets fans. Like the people who were like, I can't believe he's not buzzing it down the line.

Don't want W one soda to succeed. They're rooting for the Yankees. So, you know, that might tell you a little something about the sincerity of the complaint, right? So there's that piece of it, too. But all of that to say, guys sometimes fly private. Sometimes their families do, too. It doesn't sound like that is actually a thing that is happening

with any kind of regularity. It is actually a thing that is happening with any kind of regularity is simply a contract clause is not unusual. All of you take yourselves less seriously, please. And me too, you know, I, but I didn't take myself seriously until I moved to New York. No, that's not true at all. But, um, you know, it's just like, speaking of the rivalry weekend press release we got where MLB is crowing about the success of it. Now, you know, MLB would not have sent a press release that did anything, but celebrate it.

And if you know, wouldn't send a press release to say, I was kind of a flop on the whole, but, but the numbers in here, there was that most watched Sunday night baseball game. Yes. It was the best attended weekend night baseball game. Yes. It was the best attended weekend prior to Memorial Day weekend since 2012 in terms of total attendance and average attendance. And you might say, oh, qualifiers prior to Memorial Day weekend. But that's meaningful because, you know, summer kids get out of school, attendance goes up.

So you do actually want to compare to early seasons there or stipulate. And they said it was the second most watched day ever on MLB TV Saturday, trailing only 2023 opening day. They also had some stats in there about merch sales and social media stuff going up relative to last weekend at this time. And I think there could be something to that. But I wonder, and there's probably no way to untangle this.

But to what extent is that the fact that this was branded as Rivalry Weekend with a sponsor and everything? And how much was it just? Well, there were actually some good matchups. Right. And so I, you know, because if it's the ladder, if it's just, yeah, you had Yankees playing Mets and you had some other series that actually were real rivalries. Well, you would expect attendance and attention to go up. And correspondingly, you'd think that it would then be down later in the year.

Like if you made an attempt to cluster a bunch of compelling series in one weekend, well, then you're going to have fewer compelling series spread out over the rest of the season. And so you'll have some less attended and less watched games in there. And maybe it just won't matter. Like that's the question ultimately. Yes, you managed to put a bunch of compelling series together. And again, I don't have a problem with this concept. I was okay with it. I think, you know, try something.

It's a long season, whatever, it's kind of innocuous, but I just wonder they're kind of saying, yeah, we did it. We'll look at the success of Rivalry Weekend, but is it that it was something called Rivalry Weekend, or is it that you just kind of cannibalized the schedule later in the season a little bit? Because I wonder how many people, because baseball is such a regional sport

in terms of how it's followed, who was tuning in to say, oh, it's Rivalry Weekend? Okay, well now I'm gonna actually watch a game featuring some teams that I don't care about or that I don't root for and that normally I wouldn't watch because this was branded as rivalry weekend. I can't imagine there were that many people. Maybe there was coverage and there were people writing and we were talking about it on a

podcast and I don't know if that has some sort of effect just getting people to perk up and say, oh, baseball exists. That's a thing. Well, NHL and NBA playoffs are going on. Also there's baseball and hey, some good series. Maybe I'll, I'll tune in. But yeah, I wonder just over and above whatever boost you're going to get just from the series being good and then corresponding decrease later in the season. Was there anything to a rivalry weekend halo effect? I suspect it was more about, I mean, you're right. Like I had the same thought.

I'm like, well, was it cause you called it that? We've been calling it the Vedder Cup this whole time. Like we didn't need your help. I'm doing a voice a lot this episode. It's not on purpose. I just don't know. It's just, it's just Ben, this is the thing that's happened. You know, I'm not doing a bit.

The bit found its way out of me. It just happened. Anyway, I also think that like you're, you're right because the reason people care about rivalries is because they already have feeling and experience bound up in them. Right? Like that is why a rivalry makes a difference. It's why I keep coming back to college football as a comparison. And we got a number of emails after our discussion of rivalry weekend about instances of teams actually using like border battle and all this stuff. And so I don't mean to say that there's like no precedent for it

within baseball itself, but I, it is a thing that I really associate with college football. And it's, you know, it's about like family and the time in your life when you would get drunk with your friends and go to a game. It's bound up in all of this stuff that isn't immediately or easily manufacturable. It needs to be either handed down or hard won through often disappointment. I think you take, you take rivalries more seriously if you've been on the losing end at some point, not all the time. Cause then that's when you get the like, you know, older sibling, younger sibling dynamic. But like if, if there's been a back and forth, you know, if wazoo wins the apple cup, you care about it more, you know, because then you gotta go

get them next year. They had the Apple Cup in like September. Tragedy. Like I'm never, I'm never going to forgive anyone for realignment. You're all, you're, you're all going to sports health. But anyway, you can have good marquee matchups. And I'm less worried about like exhausting the inventory of those later. Cause you just, they're just going to be good matchups, right? And it's for us to anticipate which of the matchups are going to be good a long time in advance. I'm sure when the schedule makers made the schedule, there were later season Orioles

games that looked like they were going to be primo and now they look like they're going to be Garbo. So like it's, it can be hard to tell in advance. I'm not, I don't know that you're going to necessarily see a trade off because you happen to concentrate, you know, a lot of them in the same weekend, but I just, the enthusiasm, the enthusiasm for those games, if MLB is right, that it's about rivalry, it's just they didn't have anything to do with that. That already existed. And we already talked about the ways in which,

for some of these rivalries, it didn't exist. But for some of them, it did, and it already did, and you didn't need a branding. Although, I don't know, every time they cut away it during that Powdered Mariner series, I saw somebody buying a Vedder Cup hat. So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm underestimating the appeal of the whole thing. But I'm not because we already called it that. And then wasn't there better stuff with the Cubs too? How many baseball teams does that man like? Right. I think the Vedder Cup

thing was always sort of, he was tongue in cheek and kind of silly because he's a Cubs fan. And so it's funny that it's two cities that obviously he's associated with, but he's not a fan of either of those teams. But it was like an online thing that was fun when it was unofficial. And so it becomes less fun in a sense when it becomes corporatized and it gets the official branding of MLB and it gets sponsors and everything. And it feels like, Oh, it was this indie band I liked that's sold out and it's on a major label or something like that. Right. Once Arby says that something is lit and that's over.

Right. But probably many more people are aware that the Vedder Cup is a thing now than were when it was an online subculture kind of thing. But probably many more people are aware that the Vedder Cup is a thing now than were when it was an online subculture kind of thing. And so pluses and minuses, I guess, more people are introduced to the concept, but the people who were cool, cause they were in on the ground for now it's, oh man, this is just corporate branding. This is not fun anymore. So yeah, it's a trade off. Anyway, a few other things. Kyle Schwaber hit his 300th home run.

Congrats to Kyle Schwaber. Yeah, he did it in service of defeating the Rockies in I think a comeback victory. Kyle Schwaber is a great home run hitter and he is one of the fastest two 300 home runs in terms of playing time at Bats, at least. I think Aaron Judge, only Aaron Judge was faster. Anyone, like fewest career at Bats of any member of this club, I guess,

is a little bit different. That's one tweet I saw. But yeah, but he hits a lot of home runs. He's very good at home runs. And this reminded me of a player archetype that I always kind of enjoy, which is the guy who people extrapolate his production and say, ooh, boy, if he keeps going, then he's gonna give Hall of Fame voters a hard time because he's gonna get to some magic numbers

despite not having the actual play all around the value that one would associate with a Hall of Famer. Often this is about guys who seem to be on pace for 3000 hits. Sometimes it's 500 homers. It's these magic numbers. And so I was thinking of like, the guys I associate this with might be like a Edgar Renteria or a Nick Marcakes. Nick Marcakes is like the example for me. But yeah.

Yeah, because Rentaria, I remember pre-Marcaecus because he just started so young and he was pretty durable and he just got a lot of hits and people thought, oh boy, this is gonna get interesting. And then ultimately he petered out at a mere 2,327 hits And then ultimately he petered out at a mere 2327 hits because he was just kind of done as a productive player like after 30 essentially and then done altogether as a big leaguer at 34. And that's usually what happens with these guys with the Marquecas or the rentaria or

I guess with the home runs, maybe it would have been like Dave Kingman back in the day, who was still cranking homers until the end of his big league career, but was just an abysmal player at that point. He hit 35 homers in his final season with a 255 on base percentage. And this was 1986 and people weren't quite as focused on OPP as they later would be, but everyone knew

he was the epitome of the all or nothing guy and a 21% strikeout rate in the eighties was really something. And maybe Adam Dunn more recently, where he got even closer. He got to 462 home runs. Kingman stopped at 442 and that was, you know, people were saying big donkey, Cooperstown, because like so many home runs and yet, and he was, he was a good player and a good hitter at times, but so limited. Did you forget about Big Donkey? That was a fun one.

I did. I forgot about Big Donkey. It makes him sound like he's a Magic of the Gathering card. Oh, I gotta get this Big Donkey in here. Anyway, what usually happens with this type of player, who everyone knows is not really Coopers Town caliber, but is on pace for one of these magic numbers, is that they don't last because it takes like to be a true Hall of Famer, you have to remain productive late into your career.

And so usually they don't actually get that close because they get into their mid thirties and they're just done. And maybe that'll happen to Schwaber too, though he's at least got a shot. Like he's 32 and he is one of the best home run hitters in baseball since the start of 2022. Only Aaron Judge and Shohei Otani

have out homhomer'd Kyle Schwaber. And he could maybe make a run at the 500 Homer Club. Now, obviously the 500 Homer Club isn't what it was. And for a time there, there were no exceptions to the rule. You have 500 homers, you're going to be a Hall of Famer. Now there are several exceptions, but they're all still because of PD associations and suspicions and and proof And there still is not anyone who has 500 homers who doesn't have some sort of steroid-era stain on their name so it would be kind of interesting if he got there, but it would be hard to get there because He's only 32 and yet he needs 200 more homers.

And I just stat headed how many guys have had age 32 or older 200 or more home runs. And I guess he'd have to have even slightly more than that because he's already hit some this year. It's only 19 hitters in history who have had that many home runs after that age and 19 who are not in the Hall of Fame, that is. Right. Right. And a handful of those are the guys that I'm talking about who just didn't get in because of PED stuff.

Bonds, Palmeiro, McGuire, Sosa, Sheffield. Other guys who, and Manny, another one. The only other guys who didn't do it. So Nelson Cruz, who of course had his own PD suspension. We talked about that. He hasn't been up for Hall of Fame and he won't get in, but he didn't get to 500 homers. And Andres Galarraga, well, Albert Pujols is on this list just because he hasn't been eligible for the Hall of Fame yet.

Daryl Evans, Hank Sauer, Raul Abanez, that's a good one. Kind of another Cruz-esque old player who peaked later, remained productive for a long time but wasn't a Hall of Famer. Steve Finley, Luis Gonzalez, Jeff Kent, Jason Giambi, Greg Nettles, Cy Williams throwback ahead of his time, and Jim Edmonds, who many people think should or could have been a Hall of Famer.

So it's a short list of players who have managed to do this. And Schwaber, maybe, maybe he'll do it. Like all those guys I'm listing, except for the PED guys are not 500 homer guys. Could he be the first to actually get there and really test whether 500 homers is not a magic number anymore,

even if you have no steroids associations? Maybe, like he is a great home run hitter, but it also tends to be like if you're kind of, now he's not one dimensional offensively, I guess, to the extent that Kingman was maybe like, he's, he's a good hitter. Yeah. I mean, it depends on the year, right?

It does depend on the year. How good a hitter sort of depends on the year. I want more than anything to have to hear people debate his 197 batting average in 2023 as part of a hall of fame case. Yeah. Kingman had his years where he was good too, but. Right, he's not just a bopper. Yeah, he walks, he gets on base. Right, he has a 163 WRC Plus this year.

Yeah, this year's been great. This year's been great. And last year was good too. I mean, heck, even the year, even that 2023 year, he had like a 120 WRC Plus, and we can give him a service medal for standing out in the outfield because he simply had to. How do you interpret that, you know, positional shuffle that they were engaged in that year?

This is the kind of stuff people will forget though. They'll forget that he had to be out there because of other injuries and heartburn and all that. So, yeah, because if you look at his war, he's not even at 20 yet. And partly that is because he was miscast as an outfielder. But even if he had been D H-ing that entire time or playing for space or something, he still wouldn't be, you know, anywhere close to wouldn't be anywhere close to Hall of Fame threshold or on pace to be. And yeah, usually what happens is you're just,

you're limited in some way that probably makes you age more quickly than others. And in his case, he doesn't have anywhere to go on the defensive spectrum. So if he's not mashing, well, if he's not mashing, he's not gonna get to 500 domers anyway, but you can't just move him to first or DH or something. He's already there.

And, and it has helped of course, that he was batting lead off and that was odds too. He was kind of maybe miscast or at least he was playing against type to be a lead off guy. And so that helped him get a lot of plate appearances and he's been durable. He's played a lot of games and so that helped him rack up the homerun totals. Anyway, I think that he will probably fall short and it'll turn out that, uh, the skills start to go in his mid thirties maybe, and he's just not an elite homerun hitter anymore.

And because he has no value outside the batter's box on the field, he's, he's not going to linger in long enough to compile, but, but that would be a fun test case. I'm rooting for one of these guys to get there. And ultimately I think what would happen in this era, it might've been different in an earlier era where if you got to 3,000 hits or 500 homers and you weren't actually that good, I think back then they would have been more bound to the, well, he's in that club. It's, it's a milestone. It's a magic number. You got to put them in. Whereas now war carries so much weight that ultimately I think, yeah, if he hit 505 homers or something and ended up with

30 war, I don't think he would really sniff induction ultimately, but probably not now, but it would be fun at least to test that contention. Just one time, I want one of these guys to actually get there so that we can just see. And so that we can say, okay, well, maybe an arbitrary round number isn't all that matters ultimately. And there's mystique, it's kind of nice to have those things. Like we like baseball history and we like talking about clubs like that.

But also you can put too much weight on that at times. I think that the path for Schwab to make a really interesting and I think ultimately successful Hall of Fame case is for him to go back to catching. Yes, I would. I don't know if that would help. But I mean, look, real me shows a free agent at the end of the season. cases for him to go back to catching. Yeah, that would, I don't know if that would help, but look, real moochos are free agent at the end of the season. They gotta put him somewhere. Harper back while you're at it either.

No, maybe, maybe Schwaber can back up Harper or vice versa. They could just do a catching tandem of those two guys, return them to their return them. Put them back where they belong. No, I think that, um, my assessment is largely the same. He will ultimately fall short. He will be what I think he is, which is like a hall of the very good, you know, he'll be a hall of the very good guy. He has at times been like a really tremendous hitter. He's certainly serving a really important role for that Philly's team right now. It's just, it's hard when you're already limited at 32 by what you can do.

And we don't, he doesn't want to be out in the field and we don't want to watch him there. So to the batter's box he goes, but when he gets a hold of one, it goes far. So he's good at that. Yeah. People always say how when you age, you kind of regress to infancy in some respects, like in the sense that, you know,

we start out young and we're less capable, and then maybe you reach an advanced age and you're less capable, at least physically in some respects, and you know, all sorts of things, right? Like you're getting wheeled around in a stroller, maybe you're in a wheelchair at the end of your life, or, you know, diapers, whatever it is, right?

Like there are all these parallels. That doesn't really happen in baseball though. You don't go full circle. It's not like, yeah, I came up as a shortstop and then I moved, and now at the tail end of my career, I've gone back around. Yeah, I'm a shortstop again. No, it definitely doesn't.

It doesn't happen that way. It would be so fun though. I mean, it wouldn't. It would be terrible. I say it would be fun because of the novelty, but then I would feel badly about having asked that they do it. You know? Yeah. I guess for ceremonial purposes, maybe sometimes like

Cal Ripken playing shortstop in the All-Star game, that kind of thing. Right. Yeah. For once in a year, but mostly not. Or when you sign the one day contract to return to your long time team. So in some ceremonial respects, I guess there's parallels there, but mostly not. Yeah, man, the one day contract,

it would be funny if they made them play. I mean, it wouldn't be, again, it would be rude. It would be inconsiderate. It would be a bad way to send someone off after having completed a successful career. But I gotta think that at least a couple of those guys are like, I don't know, maybe they'll ask me to get a glove on.

Yeah, that'd be fun if it were the last day of a season and the team was out of it or there weren't stakes or something. Why not? Just, you know, because the one day contract, it's kind of gimmicky, whereas actually having to get you in uniform and on the field, you could just, even if you went out there, maybe you should have to just like pinch run or something. Now, the problem with this, of course, is that you have to have, you'd have to be on the 40 man, you'd have to be on the active roster, someone else is going to have to get sent out. Like I don't want someone else to lose their job.

Yeah. You don't have some kid to have to go down to triple A just cause you need to satisfy the, maybe there should be some exemption like there is in the all star game where there's the ceremonial like commissioners pick for the all star game. And you can get Miguel Cabrera in there or whatever, or Pujols or someone who's like not that great anymore, but you just want them there. Maybe there could be something like that for the end of a career where it doesn't actually take up a roster spot and you just get this guy so that he can actually get into a game

officially. I'd come at that. Yeah. I kind of like it too. I mean, you'd want it to be a very limited thing so that, you know, no one's losing the game because of it. No one's, you know, in danger of getting hurt. But I could see it being a good fun time. Well, you know, kind of nostalgic. Maybe the, maybe the better way to do it is to have that person come back and like be in uniform

and in the dugout for a game, but not actually forced to participate. Although maybe that's worse because then it's like, I'm hanging out with all these people. I don't know any of them. Like, who are these kids? Yeah, right. Yeah. It's like, yeah, going back to your, your old school after you graduate or something. And yeah, people don't know who you are. Maybe your teachers do. Yeah. Speaking of coming to the end of things, we talked about the end of the Austin Barnes era for the Dodgers. Chris Taylor was released not long after that,

who I think I had described as looking kind of cooked. And he was very briefly the longest tenured Dodgers position player. And now he's not anymore. So that didn't last long. Yeah, they're kind of cleaning house there in a way that was sort of sad, but maybe overdue. Like they're actually in a race, as I said,

and some of these guys who just did a lot for the Dodgers in their day, but you do have to have a bench and you do have to find a way to work in the next generation. And it's kind of painful to do that at times and rip the bandaid off and send someone away. But you do sometimes have to do it ultimately. I think that one of the most reliable ways

of evaluating players, well, maybe, let me rephrase that. Maybe I think it's like a telling indicator that is sometimes underappreciated is like how clubs interact with their own personnel. Right? So like when you're looking at prospects and the miners, if you know, they get moved around a lot, if they get moved off a position, if they, you know, or the, you have a crowded group of infielders and only some of them get promoted and the other stuff, like the organization will sometimes tell you what it thinks of its own players in the way that it promotes them, positions them, um, both on the field and off, right?

The same can maybe be applied at the organization level in terms of the team's fortunes. And uh, I did not expect the Dodgers to clearly feel like they have to exhibit the kind of urgency that they are. And we talked about this a little bit last time as it pertains to Barnes, but they're not messing around. You know, they're a little nervous. I think they're a little nervous about how tight this race is. Probably doesn't help that they got like freaking wallops.

Yeah. By the angels. Well, and then by the Diamondbacks. I mean, they came back some in that game, but there was a point in that Diamondbacks game yesterday where they were down like 7-0, you know? And they were just like giving up on runs and all the guys were doing all this stuff. And they scored five, but they still lost. So yeah, like I think they're telling us what they think of their situation, which is we need to act with urgency.

And I don't mean that like they're, they appear panicked or anything. I don't think they do, but I think they are not taking for granted the fact that they came into the season with like the best projection in baseball. I'm like, that's no good to us anymore. We got to go, we got to go win a couple. And right now the Padres are half game back. Yeah. So there's one other Dodger I want to return to in a second, but did want to note that MLB is now testing the automated check swing system in single A in the Florida State League. So this is

the same progression with the pitch clock with ABS with all the rest. Now they're doing this and it was tested in the Arizona Fall League. You saw it in action there, but now it's coming to the minors and it's they have now defined a swing because you've got to define a swing and famously there's no real rule book definition of a swing. It's just when the umpire says it was a swing, it's a swing more or less, which has led to inconsistency in check swing rulings. And so what they are testing currently is

if the head of the bat is ahead of the knob by more than 45 degrees, it will be considered a swing. So if you kind of- If the head of the bat is the head of the knob, okay. So picture the- Yep, yep. Yeah, the knob is like the fulcrum, and then, yeah, the head of the bat's swinging around.

If it's a 45 degree angle, they're saying- Then it's a swing. Then it's a swing. And I think it's- And that's regardless of where the hitter is positioned in the box? Yes, I suppose so. And so they're doing this based on statcast style technology.

And they're just testing whether it's accurate and also whether this is a good place to set this. And I'm sure that there will be disputes and there will be times that it feels wrong and perhaps there will be errors. But I applaud the effort at least because it has been frustrating for me that there's just no consistency and also that there's no real redeeming value or aspect to that inconsistency in my mind where there is sometimes like strategy and stuff that comes into play and player talent

when it comes to influencing strike calls, when it comes to influencing check swing calls, I don't know, I guess there are probably some hitters who are more adept at holding up than other guys are, but I don't know who they are. We don't have data on that. I don't appreciate that skill if it is one. And so I think this is actually good

because every now and then you do get a really meaningful call, right? 2021 San Francisco Giants could testify to that. And sometimes it just seems wrong. And I've talked about how I always think that the guy didn't go around and then I watched the replay and it seems clear that he did go around, but I think it's good to try to come up with some rule.

And so you might say, well, is this gonna help hitters or hurt hitters? So the way that they've set it with this 45 degrees, according to their data, according to MLB, umpires call swings and no swings equally at only 18 degrees. So that seems to be where it's a coin flip currently. Okay.

18 degrees, which is not far. So they seem to be setting this far enough that no one will be mad about it. Like if it's kind of coin flip at 18 degrees, then for 45 degrees seems almost as if they're just trying to get rid of the most egregious. And maybe that's okay. Maybe it's all right to just say, let's get rid of the ones where it's obvious to everyone that this was a mistake. It doesn't seem like they're trying to put their thumbs on the scale to say help hitters or reduce strikeouts. It doesn't seem like that's what they're doing here,

that they're really just trying to get rid of the obvious mistakes. It feels like a place that technology really ought to be useful to us. And I'm struggling candidly to remember what I thought of the actual point at which things started to be called a strike or not in part because when I saw this pioneered

in the fall league, the main and most distracting thing was the graphics package that they used for it, which was just confusing because they were trying to make it line up with the challenge system. And so then you had,, it doesn't matter. The way they were using red and green was not intuitive to me. And so I often got confused about what the calls were. So some of it is, I need to see that in action.

But will the appeals work the same way? So like if the catcher, you know, gestures down to the base coach that has a view of the swing, does that like count as a challenge? Like, are you going to be able to do that as many times as you want? Is it just does that count as a challenge? Or are you gonna be able to do that as many times as you want? Is it just gonna be an automatic call? Like, oh, you know.

So I'm curious how they plan on doing that from an implementation perspective also. Yeah, that's a good question. Okay, so I'm reading this Wall Street Journal report. Teams will have the ability to ask a computer to determine whether a hitter swung or not. So I'm not sure if this is going to be its own challenge system with a certain number of challenges or whether you can do that anytime you want.

But it's it's seemingly not automated. You do have to ask for an appeal, which you have to ask umpires currently for an appeal, of course, too. Right? Yeah, you have to. I will look forward to, you know, assuming they can get an implementation that makes sense and is sort of consistent with our understanding, we'll like this because I often feel confident and then silly when it comes to check swing calls. And it appeared,

like you said, it purely depends on the, the angle that you're initially shown. And it, like you said, it purely depends on the angle that you're initially shown. And also, you know my theory that every like sixth or seventh call, the relevant base umpire has not been paying attention and just kind of makes it up. Right. Yeah, so we'll see how it goes. And another thing is that this has really evolved over the years. The article mentions that MLB went back

and looked at swings, partial swings from decades ago and found that umpires back then would just say that anything short of absolute undeniable full swing was a ball. Like everything used to be a check swing, like things that today you would think were no doubters, definite strike. Back then they would just rule, yeah, no, he didn't fully go around. If you made any effort to stop basically, it was just like, you couldn't go around too far

unless it was an absolute swing in which you never had second thoughts basically. Like it could be a check swing. And that has changed. And I don't know how much of that was guidance from the league and how much that just evolved, developed organically. And also until 1972, the plate umpire couldn't even ask

for help from a base umpire. So that's an improvement, I think. But even now you might have different umpires with different standards or different attention levels. So yeah, I'm in favor of doing this and standardizing it if they can make it work. So we'll see how it goes. It does seem again, like a place where technology really ought to be able to help us a good bit. Just given how many things the system can track and with precision, like once we got to the point where we could track

the movement of fielders on the field, I'm like, well, why are we relying on that guy paying attention? Like you can just tell where the end of the bat is. Let's go, let's do it, you know? Speaking of that baseball savant, MLB just released a new batch of stat cast stats. They did. Swing tracking stats. Yeah. And I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. I know me too.

And maybe this means we're washed and we're just old or something. Now the difference is that a previous generation, when new stats would come along, they would reject it. They would reject the utility. They would say, this is ruining baseball. This doesn't matter. Nobody cares. I'm never going to get to that point. I hope I'm vigilant about not rejecting things just because they weren't around when I was younger.

And so I'm all for more information being out there, but it's just personally, I just, I feel partly overwhelmed by it and just not as stimulated by it as I once was. Like I don't doubt that excellent analysts are gonna come up with ways to use these things. And I mean, public analysts, I'm sure team analysts already have been, but.

Sure. Now we have attack angle and attack direction and swing path tilt. Now we have attack angle and attack direction and swing path tilt. And it's good that these things are out there. You sound really sure of that. Yeah, it's just like pulsating from you. I think it is good because we got the bat speed stuff

and we got the like squared up raid and blasts. And then we had to remember, wait, how is a blast different from a barrel and then swing length and all of this stuff. And then we got the batter positioning, which I think is nice. It's descriptive. It's kind of cool. And the intercept points. And now, okay, we've described some aspects of the swing and we've

described where the batter is. And now we can describe new things of the swing and we've described where the batter is. And now we can describe new things about the swing, the swing path, the attack angle, the ideal attack angle, the attack direction. And it's just, it's gotten to the point where if you analyze a player, there are so many different things to look at. And I say this as someone who likes data

and likes stats and is not afraid of this stuff and is kind of wired to embrace at. And I say this as someone who likes data and likes stats and is not afraid of this stuff and is kind of wired to embrace it. And now it's like the idea of analyzing a player and why they're performing the way that they are is almost overwhelming to me. It's almost exhausting to think of like, Oh man, all the things that I would have to dig into to figure out what is going on here. And it's good because we might get to a better answer as opposed to just saying, his babbip is low. Or like I said with Ellie, he's hitting a lot of ground balls.

Now that might still be the takeaway. He's hitting too many ground balls, but then the question is, well, why is he hitting too many ground balls? And I said, well, maybe something mechanical. Maybe he's just in a funk. Okay, maybe now we could describe why and how he's in that funk

and why is he hitting more ground balls? Maybe his swing path has changed. Maybe he's further from the ideal attack angle, all of these things. And yeah, I just, I feel like I give my blessing to all the people who will do that analysis. I just feel like, you know, has the game passed me by? I just feel like all these things that are like

not in my tool bag because they haven't been in anyone's tool bag publicly, I'm less like, oh, let's dive in and master all of these different descriptive things. And I also, I guess, feel that maybe it's getting too granular for what I do, which is like, you know, talk about baseball, write about baseball, but I'm doing less of the hardcore individual analysis. And that was like, my specialty, but I dabbled in it, at least there's always been better people, better analysts to like, be the hardcore pitching stuff analysts, the better mechanics analyst. And there are so many good people who do that on the internet, let alone for teams that, you know, I'm telling higher level stories and pointing out quirks and stuff.

Like I might point out that Ellie's not doing so well. And you might go to someone else to figure out why exactly is he not doing so well or like, we're almost getting into the point of like being hitting coaches or pitching coaches for these guys. Like we're coaching them on what they need to do differently, which is interesting, but also I think might be more of a niche market for that because I don't know that other people are like a mass audience wants to know the nitty gritty. They kind of want to know what this guy has been bad. Why has he been bad?

Give me the upshot, almost like many players do, where it's like boil it down to the big picture. What do I need to work on here? Because if you start telling them angles and stuff, then that might not translate. They might not be super receptive to that, or it might just be too complicated for them to keep in their heads while they're trying to hit major league pitching. It feels like it's getting more specialized, I guess, is what I'm saying. As are all fields, most fields, right?

Like people who are pushing the boundaries of all sorts of science are so just specialized and have such esoteric knowledge that the generalist feels hopeless to understand. You can't be on the cutting edge the way that you could be in an earlier where you had these gentlemen scientists and you could just realize things about physics and the universe by just observation and looking around and not literally like an apple falling on your head and you saying gravity, but sort of like that.

And that low hanging fruit, so to speak, has been plucked. And so now it's like you need an advanced degree. And I guess I feel like I'm sounding almost like the old school guy who's like, I don't want an advanced degree to appreciate baseball, but I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm just saying it's gotten to the point where maybe it's less for me than it once was. I, I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about this because I, it feels like it has the potential to really dramatically advance

our understanding of the why of hitting, you know, and, and what works and what's going to potentially like translate well to the majors. Why is the push and pull between pitching and hitting what it looks like right now? I am mindful of the fact that we, it can take a while for us to really be able to properly contextualize these kinds of metrics that often it takes a couple rounds of writing and digging in and research from public analysts for us to be able to say what's temporarily interesting versus important. Yeah.

Descriptive versus predictive or descriptive versus even like correlating to production. Yeah, right. And I think that sometimes in the in the excitement to engage with new data, we end up having sort of bad habits calcify like, I think most analysts would tell you that the utility of straight, like average exit velocity is somewhat limited, that there are stats around exit VLO and, you know, hard hit rate and what have you that tell you more about the skill of a hitter and paint a better picture of a hitter as one who like really wallops the ball versus not, but you know, average exit velocity was what we had first. And so it still gets thrown around a lot where like

EV 90 might be a more useful way of trying to break a guy down. So, you know, I get a little antsy about the potential for that, where we, and not you and I necessarily, or not just you and I, but you know, when it comes to casual fans and even other public analysts that we might start to develop some bad habits there, and that those can be hard to roll back because the public appetite for new stats isn't endless. So I worry about that piece of it. You know, I will admit a moment of humility, which is that I do start to worry about my ability as an editor to like properly spot problems in some of this stuff, the more technical it gets, and to be able to provide feedback to writers that is going to really help them to hone a useful argument.

And then the other thing I don't worry about, but I hope that writers on the public side will seek clarity on for themselves, which is like, is the purpose of a piece that you're writing to help the reader of that piece better understand baseball, understanding that the vast majority of people who read about baseball don't work for teams or is your goal to get a job with a team because those results in very well not always but often results in quite different pieces. And so I especially to your point as this stuff moves more from hey look at this thing that's happening and here's what it

means to, here's how Ellie Dayla Cruz can fix his swing. And we know that because of all this new information we have, how he might fix his swing. That's interesting to Reds fans. It's not like these things are mutually exclusive from one another, but I do think it behooves writers to continue to have good clarity about sort of the intent of the piece and what arguments they're trying to make and who the target audience for those arguments is because, you know, if you're trying to get a job with a team, you might lean much more technical and you might be less inclined to explain. And yeah, so I don't know, I think it's cool.

I don't know what it means yet. I do wonder about my own sort of rate of metabolizing these things. And like I need to. Right, yeah, no, to continue to. Kind of important for me to get it figured out. And we're in a fortunate position as individuals because I haven't had a chance today

to dig through all of the new stuff that they put out, but I know that I will sit down with it. And as I get my arms around it, if I'm confused about something, I'll just text Mike and be like, hey, what does this mean? But not everyone's in a position to be able to do that. And so we end up becoming translators in a way. And that can be really fun and exciting. And that's sort of been the project this whole time, but you're right as the, as the unit of measure kind of gets more and more granular. And the thing is at a further remove from what we, not even what we're seeing on the field, but it's like, I feel like we're

on the magic school bus sometimes, you know, where the way we were watching baseball before was like the fluid motion of the bat as it moved through space, the fluid motion of the bat as it moved through space the fluid motion of the fielder as he crossed the field the fluid motion of the Base runner as he rounded the bases and now we're on like a little bus and we have zoomed so far into the individual frames of that moment that you can lose You can lose the base runner because you're like in his nostril or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I feel that too.

And I try to guard against calcified thinking. And I think that if you're going to do this job and do it well, you should treat it as a continuing education course and not think that you learned all that you ever need to know decades ago. And gosh, I listen to new music. I do it Meg, at 38 years old. Now maybe it's the same genres that I've listened to for a long time.

But new artists, new releases at least. Yeah, so. Everything doesn't have to be an exercise, you know? Yeah, so that's what I'm thinking. But if it helps hitters gain an upper hand or at least not have the lower hands then then that's good I guess I'm glad teams have this stuff or at least individual players have this stuff at their disposal when they are You know receptive to it if they're wired that way that they want that information or they have someone who can synthesize it for them

That's good. Yeah, it's never bad to be mrs. Fri. Miss Frizzle? Mrs. Frizzle. Miss Frizzle? I think. Which? I think it was. Miss. It was Miss. Miss Frizzle. Oh, Valerie. I am so sorry. I love that I knew her first name, but couldn't remember if she was Miss or Mrs. Yeah, I don't know about that. But anyhow, like again, it's never bad to be Miss Frizzle. Like one should aspire, you know, our curly haired queen, but I don't

want baseball writing. Well, I mean, it literally is work, but I don't want people reading baseball writing to always feel like it's work. And we should, you know, we should try to understand new stuff. But I, I, I'm mindful of, of trying to like, approach it and enter it in such a way that it, it can be rendered accessible and that the descriptive value or the predictive value that it brings is made obvious such that learning a new thing feels worthwhile. I'm optimistic that that can be done. I think that at Fandrass, at Baseball Prospectus, at some of these other outlets, we're lucky that I think in general our audience is quite curious, but it's a new, we got a lot of new acronyms that need

to be in circulation for a while before they reach war status, right? Where I don't, you know, this is always the thing I say when we're hiring and people are trying to understand the difference for, uh, between like writing for Fangrass versus a more general outlet for instance. And it's like, we don't spell out what war is every time it's in copy, you know, and other places do. And we got a lot of stuff that's got it's got some some long runway before it gets to that status. So, yeah.

Lastly, said I was going to return to a Dodger. Just want to shout out Johnny Pareta, the A's backup catcher who struck out Shohei Otani. This was a mop-up man, position player, pitcher situation. Seems like we should have more backup catchers being the position player pitcher because they've got good arms, but he came in trailing 17 to two in the eighth inning and struck out mighty Shohei Otani and

Did it in a funny way because he looked like he was sort of sandbagging he he had this delivery where he was just you know casually tossing just playing catch and Didn't really do much of a wind-up and then mid delivery Suddenly amped it way up and fired it in there at 89 and Shohei was late on 89 from the backup catcher. And Pareta was grinning. And speaking of saving the ball from milestone accomplishments, he got to keep the ball. And- I would throw myself on it

and put it in my pocket while I was on the mound. Absolutely, yeah. And this just made me think, I'm all for pitching deception. This was one form of deception where Otani's like, I didn't know you had that. And changing the delivery midway through, probably not something that a real pitcher

could or should do. I don't know what the injury implications would be. Maybe it's better if you can throw hard, just to throw hard. But I like that idea of like, oh, look, it's just gonna come can throw hard just to throw hard. But yeah, I like that idea of like, Oh, look, it's just going to come up here floating like a beach ball. Oh, 89. You're way late. I love that. I kind of I almost wish you know, it seems like something out of satchel page or something just to camouflage how hard you're going to throw. You do that with arm speed. If it's like

change up instead of fastball, you want some deception there, but rarely is it just like, oh, I'm casually tossing this. Oh no, here's my max effort. So if you can hit it. But on the Otani front, you say sometimes that things are gonna make you turn into the Joker. And this is the thing that probably will make me

turn into the Joker, which is that whenever Otani is doing well at either pitching or hitting, but not the other, we get the refrain of he should specialize. He's too good at this one thing, he's too valuable at that to do the other thing. And the latest entry in that genre was from Barry Bloom at Sportico.

Dodgers Otani, too valuable a hitter to risk pitching again. And I've probably made this argument before, so. But this comes up over and over and over again through his whole career. He must be so sick of this because he's been pretty consistent about what he wants to do.

And he has answered all the doubters. And yet, and this speaks to part of why it's so hard to be a two-way player is that not only do you have to have the talent to do it, but also it has to be perfectly calibrated so that you're not too much better at either one or the other. Right. Because even if you're major league caliber at one, if you're better at the other, then

people will say, but you should just do the one that you're better at. And mathematically, maybe it makes sense sometimes to say that. Sam wrote this years ago for ESPN about how not only was Zotani just preternaturally talented, but also these things were so in balance that it just worked out that it actually made sense for him to keep doing these things. So I understand why this conversation keeps coming up whenever he is excelling,

which is he's always excelling at something, but when he was younger in Japan, or even when he first came over to MLB and he had that rough spring training and he was seen as more of a pitching prospect, everyone was saying, why are you wasting your time with this hitting? He should specialize, he should pitch. And more recently, as he's become elite as a hitter, and he hasn't been pitching, now it's the opposite, it's he should just hit. And we've gone through a number of cycles of this. And so now, he's having his best year yet, even better than last year overall, at least WRC plus wise. He's at 190 this year. He's leading in home runs. He has 17. He's the best hitter in the national league. Like he's, he's an incredible bat, but I continue to plead that people not try to take away toway Otani from us before father time and nature and circumstances do. Which they will at some point and it might not even be that long from now. But

as long as it can be done, let us just enjoy it. Because who is this for? I guess it's like, well, it's not good for the sport for him to specialize. And I'm not saying that writers need to be boosters of MLB in their articles, but it's not what Otani wants to do. Clearly he's been pretty consistent on that score. So until he changes his tune, I guess you could say, well, for the Dodgers sake, it's better, or maybe it's even for Otani sake, he just doesn't know it. Or like he wants to pitch, but he shouldn't. And it's better in the long run for him to be preserved and be a hitter.

I bounce off this every time because it's like we are already seeing in my mind the downside of his pitching, which is that he will get hurt and he won't be able to pitch anymore. That's that's what happened. That's what is currently happening. And so this is the downside, essentially. Like if he can't pitch, then he will just continue to hit and be a great hitter.

So what's the downside? I guess the downside is you could say, okay, maybe he's been this great at DHing because he hasn't pitched, but like in 2023, when he was pitching for most of that season, he was nearly as good offensively. He was like 179 WRC plus, he had 44 homers. Like if that's the offensive downsides,

then you live with that of him being a two-way player. Maybe you say it makes him more injury prone, but like I know he had the knee surgery years ago. Obviously he had the shoulder surgery, but he wasn't pitching then that had nothing to do with his pitching. It was just a bad slide. Just general wear and tear. Okay, sure.

Pitching and training to pitch and ramping up to pitch. It has to take some sort of toll, I guess. But I just, I don't really see the argument for why it is imperative that he specialize if he comes back and he still has the stuff. And it's not like the Dodgers don't need pitching either, by the way, which is the other thing. If they had seven healthy elite pitchers,

I'd be a bit more receptive to it, at least from a team standpoint. By the way, since the Royals signed Rich Hill, and we said, where is Rich Hill gonna pitch? On Saturday, both Seth Lugo and Cole Regans went on the IL, not with arm injuries, fortunately, but they're out for a bit, so there's an opening. Rich Hill, come on down, anyway.

So if the Dodgers had a surplus of pitching, fine, but they don't, they're scrambling to put a pitching staff together, and that will probably continue to be the case. And so any contribution they can get from Motani on the mound, I think makes sense. If you are saying, as Barry Bonds did, I think this spring, that if you just commit to him being a position player and he actually plays a position

and he's not just a DH, but you say, okay, you're in the outfield, now the pitching experiment, well, it's more than an experiment, but you say, okay, you're in the outfield. Now the pitching experiment, well, it's more than an experiment, but pitching is over. Okay. I could see how maybe now that he's this good at hitting, if we assume that he'd keep being that good at hitting and also would add some defensive value, then okay. Maybe you can make the case based on a war performance basis. And so,

maybe if you want to say, turn the page on pitching, that's in the rear view mirror. Now you're a position player and thus you should actually play some outfield and maybe he'd be a great corner outfielder despite how long he's been since he's really played out there. I could see the argument, but it seems to me

the Dodgers need pitching. He wants to pitch, fans want him to pitch. It's what's made him such a sensation. We've been given this gift as a sport, as fans, as analysts. Let's play it out a little. We're not that far from his hand being forced here. So let's just see if he can make a go of it. And it seems like they're kind of treating this as this is the last hurrah. And they're slow playing it and they are not rushing him back and he is building, he's throwing bull pens again now,

but they're taking their sweet time and they're feeling like maybe you're on your last ligament here and after this, if you blow out again, okay, maybe then we have to see to the inevitable here. But I just think we're not there yet. And he's shown that he can be the best pitcher and hitter in baseball. Like he can be the best player in baseball doing both. Give him one more crack. Let's not hurry to way Otani out the door. I agree with you. And like, again, just in terms of taking teams at, you know, and how

they understand their own rosters as sort of a powerful indicator. Like, I don't think the, the Dodgers are particularly bothered here. And I also don't get the sense, I think him being really good is important to him, you know, and he, he's a human being, he might be possessed of pride in a way that clouds his judgment, but I don't get the sense from Otani that like, when, when the time comes for him to, to be done pitching and to just play a position that he's going to refuse that he clearly wants to do it now. It was an important part of the conversation when he came to the U S it was an important part of his free agency conversation. He's not wrong to want to do it. It's gone well, you know? And to your

point, it clearly hasn't precluded him being a very formidable hitter, even as he is, you know, he's having to play in big league games while rehabbing the arm injury. So, you know, I think until he demonstrates either diminished ability once he's back and that persists for long enough that we feel confident that he is on the other side of the injury, this is the new Otani on the mound. Or, you know, I could imagine a scenario where some number of injuries pile up and either he or the Dodgers are like, look, you know, it's not that you can't come back from this, but having to constantly be rehabbing is detracting from your production. Yeah. Okay. Well, then that's, you know, that's a, a difficult conversation

in response to actual like facts on the ground, but I don't, I don't really see us there yet. Barry's the one who wrote that. That's perfect. Um, so, you know, I, I just don't think that we're at a point where it's necessary for them to make those kinds of determinations that time may come, but we're just not there, so I don't know. Well, we may not be there, but we are here, which is the end of the episode. Thanks as always for listening,

and special thanks to those who support Effectively Wild on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay almost ad free, and get yourself access to some perks, as have the following five listeners,

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