Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2346: Send in the Clones

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Rich Hill–Dallas Keuchel competition for the Royals rotation and give José Ramírez his due, then (17:45) answer listener emails about when to fire a GM, an all-star spot for elite defenders, teams composed of clones of Aaron Judge, Daulton Varsho, or Zack Wheeler, moving the mound back […]

If baseball were different, how different would it be? And if this thought haunts your dreams, well stick around and see what Ben and Meg have to say. Philosophically and pedantically, it's effectively wild. Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of FanGraphs and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Not as always, but in this instance, what?

Here we are, the two of us, you and me again. Yeah. I'm doing okay, because I was prepared to be up in arms about the fact that the Royals have signed Dallas Keichel to a minor league contract and are assigning him to AAA, where he will be rotation mates with Rich Hill. And I was upset at first, because I just think you've got a perfectly good aged lefty right there in your AAA rotation already. What do you need Dallas Keichel for?

In fact, Rich Hill is much more seasoned and experienced than Dallas Keichel, who's just a spring chicken. Dallas Keichels, 37 years young. So I was going to complain and rant, but then I looked at the last two starts that Rich Hill has made in AAA, not so hot, not so good. So I'm now not mad, I am sad, because he, in his past two starts,

facing the Iowa Cubs and the Toledo Mudhens, he's allowed seven runs in each of those starts. In one of them, only five was earned. But yeah, he's coming off of a Tuesday start where he went four innings, gave up 10 hits, seven runs, all earned, walked three, struck out three, gave up three home runs. That's not gonna get you to the big leagues.

That's, I guess, the sort of start that causes a team to call Dallas Keichel. Yeah, I, oh, that is, it's not what you want, you know? I mean, I don't have any particular beef with Dallas Keichel. I don't like have a reason to want anything bad to happen to Dallas Keichel. I'm happy for him for his chance. Yeah. You know, I proactively want Rich Hill to succeed and to find his way back to the big, so.

Don't want him to be blocked by this hot shot prospect, Dallas Keichel. Yeah, definitely not. Yeah. And the thing is that his first five starts for AAA Omaha went pretty well. Hill, that is. Right.

He had a four ERA, but sub 700 OPS allowed. He struck out 33 in 27 innings. He was looking big league ready in my mind, scouting the stat line. And maybe this is a case of, you know, how sometimes prospects stagnate when, right. When they aren't called up and they start to feel like I have nothing left to prove at this level. It can be kind of demoralizing, like what more do I have to do to get the call? And then sometimes that can cause their performance to decline because they don't feel motivated. They don't

feel appreciated. Maybe that is what has happened to Rich Hill here. He's like, look, I put in my time, I've made five starts at AAA, I'm ready, I'm not getting the call. And yeah, he feels like, what else can I learn? What do I have to prove at this level? And so that is how I'm going to rationalize these two most recent unsuccessful starts.

You've got to calm it because you've got to keep pushing. You've got to challenge a prospect sometimes. You've got to just keep testing them against more and more advanced competition. And you can't just expect Rich Hill to spend an entire season in triple A and still just bring his A game. Like, it's tough. How do you get the adrenaline pumping? Right.

It's like, you know, Rich Hill is in this moment, like, um, like a, a young Francisco Endor, uh, who famously was sort of like, I'm, I'm ready. Like, let me, let me cook you guys. You know, he's, he's done all this work to stay in game shape, right? To be his age and to be able to contribute and then to be waylaid to, to, to languish, you know, maybe he's having some ennui. He's having a touch of the ennui. Well maybe this is what he needs to light a fire under him. Maybe they signed Dallas Kechel to this minor league

contract with if he makes the majors, he gets two million, but it's more of a form of motivation for Rich Hill. Like let's bring in this other guy. Okay. Now Rich Hill says I actually have to show them what I've got now because I have to beat out Dallas Keichel. What a world. A Dallas Keichel Rich Hill battle for a rotation spot in 2025. I have actually saluted Dallas Keichel on previous podcasts because he really, he's stuck to the grind. Like he's still out there and if Rich Hill were not out there too and in the same rotation no less, I'd probably be rooting for Dallas Keichel to make it back another superannuated lefty, but he's just not nearly as superannuated as Rich Hill, because Keichel, like in every headline, he's described as former Cy Young

award winner, Dallas Keichel, which he is accurate. But that was a very long time ago, and he has been kicking around now. He hasn't really been good in the big leagues since gosh, I don't know, like 2020, I guess, maybe was the most recent time, but he's actually been in the big leagues every season since then, which would probably surprise people.

It's just that he keeps bouncing around and hasn't thrown a lot of innings for anyone, but he's been with several different organizations in that span. Like he was with the White Sox, he was with the Diamondbacks, he was with the Rangers, he was with the Twins, he was with the Brewers. And some of these teams, he's made maybe a couple of starts, probably didn't make much of an impression. He also pitched in Japan. He's been bouncing around the Miners. So I respect it. He doesn't have to do this for the money, probably.

He just is doing it for the love of the game. So good for him, but hopefully not so good that he beats out Rich Hill. That's my only condition here. Maybe they'll drive each other and then we get like a, you know, we could do like a buddy movie, you know. It's not that we haven't had good baseball movies. Like we've, we enjoyed ifus, but they've been they've been light on the ground, you know

There haven't been a bunch of them. This strikes me as like, um, you know It could have the same feel as like the rookie, you know, do you remember the rookie? Sure The rookie I thought the rookie was good. I haven't seen it in a long time I don't know if it holds up but you know, it could be like that. They could be like buddy veterans We can lightly fictionalize it you and I can but you know, it could be like that. They could be like, buddy veterans. We can lightly fictionalize it. You and I can help, you know, we can help. We can consult. Yes. We can consult. Yeah. But I like this idea.

It's like a generation K coming along or something like the young, the young guns that the Royals might be calling up here. Generation gray. Let's go with that. Oh, my. We're gonna, they're gonna recover the Fountain of Youth here, they're gonna just be energized and they're gonna come out firing after the All-Star break for the Royals. That's what we're hoping for, at least. Can we do that without anyone else getting hurt though? Like this is the Kanan Dormoi face. Well, sure, yeah. Yeah, I don't wish ill upon anyone there, but rotation spots must be opened one way or another for Rich Hill, at least. Wanted to just do at least once a season

salute to Jose Ramirez, just because I know that we're kind of past talking about whether he's underrated, because we've all just collectively agreed that he is the default answer to who is the most underrated player. And then once you became that default answer, then can you still actually have a claim to the title? But have we even mentioned Jose Ramirez on the podcast this season? I don't know that we have.

We certainly haven't discussed him in any kind of dedicated way. And I guess that there are, what what I guess at least three reasons maybe that we don't talk about Jose Ramirez as much as his performance might merit, even though we all acknowledge that he's one of the best players in baseball. He is again the most valuable player on the Guardians for the well, it's been several years running that he has been either top or very close to the top. He's on pace for another, you know, standards, just ho-hum, five, six, war, whatever it is season.

He's in the top. 6.2 by the most recent reckoning if you're going by percentage of games played. Perfect, yeah, he's in the top 20 of all players in baseball, in war. Just another standard carbon copy Jose Ramirez season where he's at roughly 40% better than a league average hitter and good base runner and just like overall value. Like this is how he does it. And I guess one reason, you know, maybe it's kind of a not big market bias. It's the guardians, it's the AL Central.

That's probably part of it. But I think part of it also is just that he's so consistent that there's nothing new to say. Even now I'm struggling to come up with something new to say. I'm just, I'm saying he's running it back. He's doing it again. And he just, it's like a metronome. He's there with his like sixish war season, year in and year out and very similar seasons to like 2021, 140 WRC plus, 2022, 140 WRC plus, 2023 slight down year, 2024, 142 WRC plus 2022, 140 WRC plus 2023 slight down year 2024, 142 WRC plus this season, 137 WRC plus.

That's just, it's just who he is. And I guess at a certain point, the consistency itself becomes noteworthy and something worth talking about, but you're just never going to grab the headlines there. The headlines are going to go to Cal Raleally who's like, you know, was good already, but now has been just a new level of good, or Shohei Otani who's doing it in his usual, unusual way. Or Aaron Judge, who has just been like, you could be consistently good at that level, I guess.

Like Aaron Judge has been a great hitter for a while now, going back to at least the second month of last season. He's been at this kind of extreme level of offensive productivity. And we've talked about that plenty because he's been even better than he was before that, which was already really good. And he is just at a level of elite

that you can't not talk about that. And also he is a giant and he's in New York and he hits a lot of dingers and all this other stuff. So I think it's partly the consistency. I remember talking about Jose Ramirez because he had that one year, was it 2019? I guess it must have been 2019 when he was inexplicably bad for a while, like really bad. And I remember talking about it then, and then

he recovered and he was great again. And it was just a blip. It's like a weird little outlier on his fan-craft player page. But that would get us talking about Jose Ramirez probably. If he suddenly sucked, then we talk about that. It's a, you get a raw deal because you're just always reliably great. Then what is there to say? And then I guess the last part of it is just that he's so all around good that you can't grab onto any one aspect of his game really and say like he is the best he is extraordinary at this one thing he's just a good hitter and a good base runner and a good defender and he typically doesn't really lead the league in any very flashy categories and he's had the slight misfortune maybe of like often being on

the short list of the most valuable players in baseball, but never really inarguably being the best player or the best player in the league even, because he's like overlapped with Otani and Judge and everything. So they sort of steal the headlines. Trout, yeah. So anyway, he's great. He's still great. Just wanted to say that so that we can't be accused of entirely neglecting Jose Ramirez, who seems like a delightful character in addition to everything else.

AMT – I think the only time that we've really talked about him this season was when I noted that he was my AL MVP pick, not because I really, I didn't really think he'd do it, but because he is so consistent and because he is so good, I just felt like somebody on our staff should have him in there. He should be one of the guys who's on a ballot somewhere. We don't want to look back and have had no one pick that guy. So I did. I felt fine about it. But yeah, he's having just a very Jose Ramirez type year. And I think you've hit on hit on the things that sort of stymie his impact in terms of being a national character a little bit. I really do think that a lot

of it is just like he's good at a lot of things at a high level, but he isn't necessarily like the loudest player in terms of like the tools he has on the field. Oh, he hit almost 40 home runs last year. Yeah. Which was notable. And I'm sure the guardians were thrilled cause like, gosh, is that a punchless lineup a lot of the time, but yeah, he's great. He's not like very big, but he's also not tiny.

You know, like if he were Altuve sized, he'd probably get more attention for being Altuve sized, but he's not that small. And so you can't really- He's not that much bigger though. He's 5'8". Like he's, you know, he's short of stature for a big leaker. He is. Yes, certainly.

I just, I always marvel at the listed weights to go along with the listed heights. Like 5'8", 190 for a professional athlete. That's just, that's like a big, that's a big 5'8 for like a fit athletic person. That's just... I mean, but like he's dense, you know? You look at him in the mirror and you're like, that's a lot, he's just like one big muscle, you know? That's the thing. It's like, yeah. Even the smaller of stature baseball players, I'm always surprised when I see the listed weight.

And I'm like, wow, that is, it's a lot of weight for that size for, for a professional athlete. But yeah, it's, uh, maybe it's even the fact that he has two extremely common names put together. It's like a generic create a player or something. So it's just, it doesn't stand out as much as a trout or a judge. So yeah, there's just, there's a little less for, for someone who's not watching him day in and day out

to grab onto, but man, what a, what a player. And both of the wars agree. He's, he's got to have one of the smallest baseball reference versus fan graphs war differentials for a guy who has a lot of war. Cause his fan graphs war is 55.0 his baseball reference war is 54.9 it's like he couldn't be closer unless it was tied So they both agree on exactly how good he has been that is kind of unusual

But just confirms and and that's like by the end of the season He's gonna be quite close to going over the 60-war threshold that a lot of people consider as like, oh, okay, that's kind of Cooperstown-y. And he will turn 33 in September. Just like, man, what a great player. Yeah. Still time to be productive and especially for a team like the Guardians where they have not necessarily spent money and they've cycled through guys and you know, they don't have this sort of rush return that say the Rays do, but they're an efficiency and team control kind of club.

You know, that's something that they prize very highly and they committed to Ramirez and he committed to them. So I think that when we get to the end of his career, which I don't think we're approaching, like he's, you know, I know he's had dings here and there and he had a little injury scare earlier this season, but like he's been, that's the other thing. He's just been like incredibly reliable in terms of how much he's played. Like he played a hundred and a hundred and fifty eight games last year. Right. So I think that when we get to the point that we're looking back on his career in retrospect, like he's been very good. He's been very good, hopefully for the same team the entire time and, you know, for a club that doesn't have a lot of

name, you know, name brand guys all the time. It's just a special thing. And so that's cool. I hope it continues for a long time. And of these years maybe I'll be right and I'll be glad I put him on my prediction sheet as the MVP. Yeah, no signs of decline as of yet. He's actually very similar war-wise and age-wise to Manny Machado, who gets a lot more attention historically speaking than Jose Ramirez for various reasons, I guess. But they are both similarly excellent and probably Hall of Fame bound.

Okay, I've got some emails, and we haven't had a nice, juicy email episode in a while, so maybe we can get through a little bit of the mailbag here. Nat wrote in to say there's been plenty of discussion over the last few days about the firing of Mike Rizzo right before the draft, but what is the best time to fire a GM?

Not in early summer because of the draft, not right after the draft, because you'd rather have the new regime drafting their own guys, not at the end of the season because free agency is right around the corner and you want to have a GM in place to sign and trade guys not right during winter meetings and the hot stove season, not at the end of the off season because you just went through the off season and it's time for spring and hope and probably not April or May because it's too early to tell if the team is really bad or if it's just early. So that leaves August and September,

which I guess is when it happens as often as not, but even then is a month long enough to do a whole hiring process before free agency. I guess maybe right before the draft isn't really so bad. So when would be the good time, I guess, to dismiss a GM if this is a weird one. The one thing about firing a guy right before the draft is that if you have become convinced that this is the wrong person to run your organization, then I guess better to do it

before they make a perhaps consequential pick than after. Or I guess it's possible that maybe there was friction over the approach to the draft and that precipitated the firing, that could be too. But even then, probably a week before is still not ideal, even if you say, I don't want this person making another number one pick for us, it's still probably a little bit more of a buffer

before that would be good. So yeah, when would you do it if you could pick the ideal time to dismiss a GM? August. I think there's a reason that that gets landed upon more often than not, particularly for non-contending teams, which let's face it, are the ones that are most often moving on from their general managers. There's always a little bit of friction because typically front office folks' contracts run through the end of the playoff season, right?

So they're running through October. But you can kind of get an early jump on both assessing your internal candidates if you're keen to try to promote from within and also just taking stock of, you know, who's potentially available either because they're rolling off of their contract or because they're sort of, they're likely to renegotiate and you can kind of slip in in that window between when they they're under their current deal and when they might come free. So there's, there's that piece of it. You're past the deadline. I understand that if it's a person you don't want to have control over your process, the deadline is probably a bigger potential issue than the draft is because as we discussed last time,

that decision certainly involves the general manager and depending on the organization maybe quite intimately, but you have lieutenants whose sole Job is directing that process right and so you have I think greater sort of institutional backup Around the draft whereas for the deadline like, you know The GM is going to be really really involved in all of that process or POBO or whatever their title is So, you know there there is that sort of navigate, but you do it in August or maybe early September, start to get a jump on your process and search. And I think that you end up having enough time. We definitely see teams that are sort of without a GM at the very beginning of the off season.

And this isn't always true, but if you're a club that's going to dismiss your GM, are you really going to be in a position where you're like, oh my gosh, we're missing out on the biggest free agents? There are teams that move on from a GM or a PoBO and are sort of more mid-tier, you know, with the potential to contend. But I don't know that I can think of a recent example where it's like they, you know, a team fires their POBO and then we come to find out like, oh gosh, we really would have liked to have signed Bryce Harper, but we had disruption in the front office and so

he wasn't interested in talking to us. So I don't know that there's as much opportunity cost there as you might necessarily think, especially because they don't tend to get rid of everybody. Sometimes you do see these very drastic housecleaning sort of things. And obviously if you hire someone new from outside the organization, they're going to want to bring in some of their own people. But it's not like everybody leaves. So you do have some sort of institutional knowledge to tide you over from the prior regime into the new one. But you know, a lot of the time, they're like, hey, let's, let's overhaul, let's do big

process improvements. Let's change the way we do player dev. Let's change the way we do scouting. If that's the kind of GM dismissal and then tear down you're looking at, I don't know that like missing out on that year's free agent class is really costing you anything, if that makes sense. Yeah, I guess one advantage of just doing it early and at a weird time is that in theory, at least you get your pick of the potential candidates out there, even if they're maybe attached currently, if you're the Nats right now. And I don't know how desirable that gig is given the ownership issues, but you can kind of get a

head start on the other teams that fire their top baseball ups executive at a more conventional time. You've, you've had a couple months to start interviewing or start putting feelers out. So that's the glass half full perspective. I guess I do like the idea of just firing a GM at the end of the off season. Just like you blew it. That was a bad off season. That was lousy.

You didn't sign anyone. Yeah. Just, you got to go. That was a bad off season. That was, that was lousy. You didn't sign anyone. Unimpressed. Yeah. You got to go. But, uh, I'd, I'd almost respect it because it's like, Hey, why, why wait to see your team stink for a couple months before you decide to do something? It's a process. So for results, but yeah, it's, it's interesting.

I know someone who applied for a team job. You also know this person. And it is really amazing how long and protracted that process can be. I mean, we know plenty of people who've, you know, applied for team jobs or interviewed for team jobs. And even for fairly low level jobs, that can be a really drawn out process. It can be several rounds of interviews. It can be questionnaires. It can be all really drawn out process. It can be several rounds of interviews. It can be questionnaires.

It can be all kinds of hoops that you have to jump through. It's like you have to interview with every person in the department. It takes forever. In fact, I would venture to say that probably it takes longer for teams often to hire a lower level or mid level baseball operations staffer than to hire a GM or a manager or something, which seems backwards, but just based on what I've observed, because often when you have a

GM search, it might go on for a month or two, but it'd be weird if it went on longer than that. And there are definitely times you're applying for some mid-level front office position and it can stretch on longer than that. I guess, I guess because it's just a lower priority, but you know, it's, it's also so much lower stakes that you think. And maybe it's that also they're just more people to talk to, or more people who might have a say. Because if you're interviewing for the top job, then you're kind of interviewing with

the owner, really, like the owner has the say. But if you're interviewing for a mid-level or entry-level front office position, then in theory, everyone else in the department could weigh in on that or want to talk to you. And so you might end up just going through many more rounds just because there are many more people to talk to. And I think that there, you know, when you're looking at those more junior positions, there's an actual, there's like a more recognizable application process, right? Like they're posting those jobs on like team

works and stuff. And so they are having to, to sort of cull through a lot of applications. And you know, because it is those positions are typically attracting more junior folks who don't have like an industry track record to necessarily go off of, I do think you have to do more like real assessment of them because that person doesn't necessarily have a reputation that precedes them, right? They aren't being poached, they're not being recruited most of the time. I mean, sometimes they are, but often not. And so you do have to sort of build a profile of them from the ground up. They're like a low level prospect, right? It's like, Oh, what do we have in this kid in the DSL?

I don't know. We got to like really do some work here because we can't just rely on, you know, their stats at AAA. It's a lot like that. Who do we know who's applying for? Say it with me. No, no, I don't. You should, you should message me though.

Cause now I'm curious. I'm like, what if you, what if I don't know? What if I don't know, Ben? It's not someone on your staff, so don't worry, as far as I know. But yes, yeah, it's true. You have to winnow down from a large applicant pool, hundreds of people who you may not know anything about.

It would be funny if teams posted like, POBO on Teamwork Online. Which is like, here's what we would like. not know anything about it would be funny if teams posted like pobo on teamwork online. Right. It's like, here's what we would like. Here's the prerequisites. Here's desired 15 years of high level for an office experience or, you know, we'd like you to be able to use Excel or whatever it is and just here's the salary range and please feel free to apply, send a cover letter, you know,

answer a few questions and we'll get back to you. Yeah, I wonder how many applicants they would get for something like that. Well, it would be funny too because, you know, having them have to articulate the difference in skill between, you know, a mid-level baseball ops person and the GM would be really funny because do you need to be able to be conversant in four different programming languages? I mean, I don't know, probably not at that level, but it would be funny to have them sort of lay out the specifics there.

The salary range thing would be very interesting too. Yes. Oh, okay. That wasn't who I had in mind. Okay. We get to have a little secret. From Dustin who says, so with the discussions of Denzel Clark's

defensive wizardry and Web Gem catches, I was wondering if it might be a good idea if the commissioner got a special pick to honor a defensive guy who maybe wouldn't be in the All-Star game otherwise. Someone like Andrelton Simmons is a good example of a guy who war-wise was one of the best and most exciting players in the game in certain seasons, but because of mediocre offensive stats, never went to an All-Star game. I think it would be a good way to...

He never went? He was never an All-Star? Yeah, that's surprising, isn't it? Yeah. That is surprising. Yeah, he should have had a... Wow. I had to look that up. He never went all-star? That's surprising, isn't it? That is surprising! Yeah, he should have had it. Wow, I had to look that up. Fact check true.

I think it would be a good way to market and showcase different types of players and maybe add some more excitement to the game if they get a chance to make a great catch. I already realize there's some issues with it, like not being able to guarantee a ball is hit toward them during an inning, and also them not wanting to get hurt making a play in the All-Star game. That's why some people will talk about, oh, they should have a home run robbery skills competition. That'd be fun, but would teams want their players to do it? Would players want to do it?

And I guess we don't see that many injuries really on home run robbery attempts in game, but I guess it happens. And there just aren't that many of them to begin with. We elect guys who hit but are bad defensively all the time. It would be cool to have a guy who is the opposite. So yeah, a defensive legends spot essentially. I wonder if Simmons was a second half player.

I'll have to check because he did get MVP votes in three different seasons. Not like high, but he did get on people's ballots in addition to the four gold clubs. So yeah, defense has historically been undervalued and probably still is to some extent, even though as I recently said, the war is becoming a better predictor of whether you make the All-Star game. And obviously that does include defense. So I think you're more likely than ever to get recognition as an elite defender and actually get to go to a game because of that. But probably all else being equal, you still have a better shot if your value skews to more obvious and easily measurable categories.

And I think the part of the issue here, I mean, like the question nails it. You don't know that you're going to really get an opportunity to have them showcase that ability. Right? Like, I love it. You know, if we could engineer Denzel Clark, like robbing a home run, that would be fantastic. But like, who's to say that, you know, a ball is going to be hit to him? Who's to say that he's going to be able to make that play? Like, we just aren't really able to do that with any kind of certainty and that makes it kind

of tricky. And they already sort of have a problem getting all of the guys into the game. They want to keep the starters in for a couple of innings. So it can be trickier than you maybe expect it to be. I wouldn't mind if there was a moment amidst all the pomp and circumstance of the proceedings if they like acknowledged the first half defensive all-stars or something and like, you know, they played a highlight reel in the ballpark and a package on the TV, on your TV at home, you know, you get like a little TV package, you know, you

get a little, they put a package here, package. I package. Yeah, I'm so obsessed with that word right now I managed to eat an entire plate of snacks without you knowing while we've been recording. Oh, aren't I impressive? Yeah, I saw you muting but yeah I needed I needed this little Puff pastry fed and caramelized onion snack Ben. I needed it right now But yeah, I think it would be tricky to have it kind of play the way that you want it to. But taking a moment to acknowledge

the terrific defensive plays of the first half, like it seems like they could find time to do that. They find time for all kinds of goofy nonsense at the, it's gonna be so humid. Oh my God, my hair is gonna be insane. Yes, that is why we're recording on a Wednesday. If we do a Tuesday, we often do a Thursday. But you are leaving on a jet plane. You are going to Atlanta. You're gonna be there for the All-Star Week festivities. Hey now, you're an All-Star. So that'll complicate our recording.

But we will figure out something. But that's why we're recording today. Yes. And also, might I just note, I'm sorry to make people nervous about this, but I will just say that like, are we sure we're going to be able to play all of the things related to the All-Star game? Because we are due for PM thunderstorms on Tuesday. That seems like a problem. Semi concerning. Andralton Simmons was actually a better hitter before the All-Star break than after the All-Star break over the course of his career. So even more curious. Yeah, very interesting. I wonder, it is I am genuinely surprised that he did not have a single season where he merited

selection that that that really does shock me. Where he merited selection. That really does shock me. Where he got a selection, he probably did merit selection at some point. Right, yes. Didn't get it. Yeah, didn't get it. Weird. Okay, well, along those lines,

here is a question about clone teams from listener Jeff M. Along those lines. It is actually semi-related because it's about your value coming from offense versus defense versus pitching versus versatility. But if you had to clone these players, which would be best?

A team of all Aaron judges, this is gonna be like one of those, you know, a hundred duck sized horses versus whatever. I've definitely mangled that, but you know, it's one of those, you know, a hundred duck sized horses versus whatever. I've definitely mangled that, but you know, it's one of those, but it's, it's not just a team of giant Aaron Judges and a team of smaller players. It's a team of all Aaron Judges, a team of all Dalton Varshos, or a team of all Zach Wheelers. Zach Wheeler's. So we have the great pitcher, we have the great hitter, and we have the guy who's a good hitter, but also is like a defensive standout and versatile and can

catch and can play center field, can do it all or can at least do those things. Can't do it all or can at least do those things. You can't do it all necessarily. Can I ask a clarifying question about a hypothetical you didn't originally pose? So if we pick a team entirely of Aaron judges, does it mean that only the position players are all Aaron judges, but then we get to feel the pitching staff or is everyone an Aaron judge, including the pitchers? I think the pitchers are Aaron judges as well. because yeah, I think if there's a pitcher and a hitter in the question, I think that's what Jeff is going for. Yeah. I think I would opt for a team entirely of Aaron Judges. You'd score so many runs.

You look at him and you're like, he could probably pitch if he were given the opportunity. Are we cloning them at a very young age and then raising them to be baseball players? Because if that's the case, then definitely Aaron Judge because you could say, okay, I want all of you errands to stand in a line and just throw this ball as hard as you can and let's see how it goes. And then you pick the ones that, you know, have the most obvious velocity or maybe you see if any of their pitches move in a funny, funky way, and then you select out those young Aaron Judges to become pitchers, and the rest, you're like, congratulations,

you're the tallest shortstop in the history of baseball, how nice for you. I think it's the finished product that you are cloning, in their current form, at least. I still think I take Aaron Judge because I am more confident in my ability, I mean, not my ability to be clear, but in someone's ability to take an Aaron Judge currently constituted and teach him to pitch at a, I mean, it wouldn't be good. I want to be clear about that. It would be bad, but it would still, I think, be better than Zach Wheeler's, Zach's Wheeler trying to hit. Like, right? Don't you think? I mean, what a ridiculous notion. Where do you keep all of them? You know?

Do you need a bigger charter? It would be hard to house all of those Aaron judges. Right. Like, do you need a bigger charter plane if your entire team? Because do you have to take seats out so that you can... Does he have a bigger seat on the Yankees charter? The Yankees, by the way, extra, extra, breaking news, just DFA DJ LaMejou. They did. Yeah.

They did. They stole that guy $22 million. That's amazing. You definitely don't want to build your team entirely out of DJ LaMejus. That doesn't seem to be going well on either side of the ball. Maybe DJ LaMejus should learn how to pitch and then he could have a second wind like Anthony Goose. Yeah.

This is actually kind of tough. I did an article. You're like, okay, she's tired herself out. Now I can talk. They're a legitimate. So Eric Judge, even though he is huge and strong, he's not nearly as much of an outlier in arm strength as he is in bat strength and just general strength. Like his arm is fine. I mean, I'm looking at the Statcast Arm Strength Leaderboard for right fielders.

And he is 19th of 51 qualifiers here, average 90 miles per hour. That is eight miles per hour below Addison Barger at number one, who swings hard and throws hard. He just does everything at top speed. Yeah, so Judge's arm, it's fine, it's good, but it's not extraordinary. You wouldn't necessarily see that and think, oh yeah, he could get on a mound and be good.

And Zach Wheeler is so good at pitching that I could imagine a scenario where just like any, it's not like Aaron Judge was some high level pitcher, like, you know, a guy who pitched in college or was drafted as a two way star or something like that. So sure. But Zach Wheeler has a negative four career WRC plus. Yeah. His best year at the plate was 2019, his final season with the Mets where he had a 54 WRC

plus. He hit 211. He did hit one home run though, so you know, maybe you can train him up. He's also 35, so and Judge is 33, so maybe Varsow's the the answer just because one you get actual position over facility and he's only you know, how old is our Dalton Varshow? Dalton Varshow. I don't want Dalton rushing. That's an entirely different person. Yeah, Varshow's 29. I don't know if this is like franchise mode or if this is just- He's got such a big head. He's got a big head. His head is not small either, but yeah.

No, but like for his body is like really big head. Yeah, I guess that's Dalton Varsho, 58207. 207. I believe it. That guy is like a little, I want to be clear. I'm not actually trying to compare a human person to an animal. I realize that can get problematic real fast. But I think Dalton Varshow said, you can decide if you think this is too much and cut it.

I'm leaving this entirely up to your discretion. I don't, I mean this in a complimentary way. I don't mean this in a, he's got like a Rottweiler's head, Dalton Varshow. You know, like his bones look like they're thick, you know, like they would have- The opposite of bird bones. Rottweiler they would have... The opposite of bird bones. He has the opposite of bird bones. He has a... He's just got a real noggin, you know? I bet like at least 50 pounds of 207 is his head. Well, he was a catcher, but yeah, it's... Well, yeah. I'm assuming that this is... If you have to win one game or it's one season,

we're not planning for like aging effects here probably. If it's an entire season, this entire thing is so disastrous as to be ridiculous. You would lose how many games could you possibly win? It would be a real problem, I think. I think it would be very bad. Well yeah, a team of Zach Wears, you're going to have the the best pitching team of all time.

I mean, and the worst offense imaginable and the worst offense of all time, too. So it's it's going to be a team of extremes. I was thinking I wrote an article in 2021 about which were worse position player pitchers or pitcher hitters, because I was looking ahead and I was saying, Oh, maybe these things will go away. Like it, it is a weird feature or bug of baseball that we do regularly see players doing things

that they are not remotely qualified to do. I think, I think that happens more often in baseball than it does in other sports. Like most other sports, like, yeah, you, you know, you have maybe like the, the kicker who now has to block on the punt return or something like that. But you know, that's fairly rare and brief. And in baseball, it was, it was a feature of the sport for a very long time that pitchers had to hit. And for most of that time, they were not remotely qualified to do so.

And then position player pitchers, of course, are very bad at what they do too. And this is just sort of an accepted practice. And so we don't regularly see, I don't think, elite athletes and other high level leagues playing that far out of position. And that can be kind of fun. Like I lamented the end of the Waxahachis swap, the tactic where you could move a pitcher from the mound to left field for a batter and then bring him back to the mound. And the three batter minimum kind of killed that. That was fun in isolation or in moderation, but pitcher hitting, not so good because it wasn't in moderation.

And then position player pitching has kind of gotten out of hand too. So, so I did this piece because I was thinking, okay, universal DH is coming. So we won't have pitchers hitting so much anymore. And then they're at least trying to take some steps to cut down on position player pitching to varied returns. And so I kind of wanted to memorialize that by figuring out, well, who is actually worse than this?

And I did a lot of data and stat stuff. And I determined that pitchers were worse at hitting than position players were at pitching. And, you know, there's a little bit of a selection bias there, maybe because any pitcher who was in the national league had to hit, whereas the position player pitchers, you could choose which position players to throw out there and, you know, maybe they'd be a little bit more qualified. That used to be the case, at least now it's not so much

anymore. You don't have to fake it anymore. You can just lob a pitch in there and that's, that's considered okay. But yeah, I think that might be true. Cause the thing with pitching is that you can just get a lot of luck and you, you can, at least like guys will hit the ball hard, but right at someone. And if you have Dalton Varsho is your entire defense. Now it's not like the all Aaron judge team is going to be a good defensive team too. That's going to be a pretty terrible defensive team. Like, you know, he's, he's a pretty good right fielder and has been able to hold his own in center at times. But it's not like he can catch, you know, it's not like you're going to put him at shortstop and he's going to be good.

So that's going to be bad. That's the only argument for Dalton Varshow is that there's more defensive versatility there. And so maybe he can, he can handle himself well to the point that you'd be good at defense. And, and maybe that would make up for how much everything else is going to be bad, how bad he's going to be at pitching. Although even Varsho, I mean, he plays center ridiculously well and could play catcher too, and he could play some corner outfield, but he's never played infield in the majors. I mean, not counting catcher, we had that debate, but it's not like you're going to put him at short and he's just going to be a natural over there.

Now he may have the skills to be and the just baseline defensive acumen that you can kind of put him in any position and he can fake it at least. Because Ketcher is really going to be the disqualifying one for a lot of players. And so... Yeah.

Can you imagine Zach Wheeler catching? He'd be terrible. Yeah, because even someone who's good at non-catching defensive positions, you put them at catcher and they're not going to know what they're doing back there. No. And so Varshow has a huge advantage in that he can catch. But even so, I...

Even so. Yeah, I think I'd take the judges over the Varshows. I think I'd take the Varshows over the judges, maybe. You've talked me into it. Well, because it's not like Varshow's a bad hitter. He's, you know, he's an average hitter, at least. So... But Judge is such a better hitter than he is.

Like, that would be an all-Judge offense. Can you imagine? You never have to play defense. Yeah, but imagine Aaron Judge having to touch and feel shortstop. Like, right. Yeah, that'd be bad. That'd be bad. Because because Wheeler, he's an athletic person. Like, sure. You could put him at various defensive positions and he's not going to embarrass

himself relative to a normal man. Like, you know, he's going to look terrible to our eyes trained on big leaguers, but he could stand out there. He can, you know, like he's shagged many a fly ball, like he can, he could catch routine balls in the outfield. He's not going to have good range or anything, but like, you know, he can probably get most of the balls that are hit right at him and obviously he has a

good arm. So, uh, gosh, just like completely unqualified guy at every defensive position, but then one of the best pitchers in baseball, if not the best pitcher in baseball at all times. And defense is going to matter a little less when you have the all Wheeler staff because you're going to get a lot of strikeouts. Yeah, but you know where it's going to be really important to leverage the all Wheeler staff is at catcher. Yes, it's true. Got to catch the ball, Ben. Sometimes you got to frame it up for him even, you know?

Yeah. Maybe if you taught him one knee down, it would be fine. Maybe so. Then we'd really get everyone converted to the one knee down lifestyle. It would be like, listen, announcers, this team that is entirely constituted by Zach Wheeler, do you think there would be a protest because of human cloning? You think people would be like,

this team is out of the devil. That's my evangelist voice. Yeah. Varsho actually doesn't have a very good arm, which you'd think maybe as a catcher he would, but last year, at least among centerfielders, he was 66th of 73 qualifiers in average arm strength. So, yeah.

Hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think the uncontroversial answer to this question is this team made up entirely of incredibly talented baseball players would be god awful and isn't that kind of funny. Unless they're playing each other, in which case... Oh, then the games would never end. They just go on and on and on. If this is just a ram-robin tournament among these three teams.

Yeah. What would be the most aesthetically pleasing or displeasing team? Is there any, is there any difference? Like at least, cause, cause with Wheeler, like it's boring to watch a position player pitcher and it's, it would be bad because with Wheeler, it's boring to watch a position player pitcher. Yeah, but like... It would be bad to see Wheeler kicking the ball around the field, but... There's some potential for humor there, at least.

Maybe initially. For a minute. Chasing the ball around. Yeah, I think I'd rather watch the team of all good pitchers as bad. Really? Well, no, but then I have to watch him hit. Yeah, then you have to watch him hit, Ben. Then you have to watch him hit. That would be fast, though.

He'd make three quick outs and the offensive half of the inning would be over. So there's that benefit where, you know, like the offensive half for the judges is going to go on forever. But at least you're watching her and judge hit, which is fun. The charm would wear off, but still. So I think, yeah, that might be a case for the Wheelers because it's boring to watch a position player pitch and then the flailing at the plate,

it's gonna be over quickly, and most of the time he's gonna be on the mound. Yeah, I guess, I guess, but I'm not, I think that what I'd rather do is avoid the entire experiment. I mean, it would be fun if you could like, if you could clone a couple different guys, so you have like, you know, the best of each model, and then you mix and match and then meant maybe then the games never end either. Like, yeah, I think maybe we want to avoid cloning.

That's the answer. Stay away from it. Yeah. The other thing is that pitchers do play defense, you know? So they're less out of their depth playing defense, I would say, than... I guess, but like... Judges pitching, or if our show is pitching. Yeah, there's like getting off the mound well and covering first base and then there's like playing center field, you know?

Yeah, at least you've worn a glove. You can catch the ball, like, you know, the bare minimum. It's so remarkable because all of these guys, even the ones that aren't good relative to their peers, as we talked about last time, like they're the very best, you know? They're so talented. The way that they approach this stuff is so incredible. And here we are talking about how you take two of the best in the league and a very good everyday player and made a team entirely of them

that it would just suck to watch. That's amazing. What a sport we love, huh? Yeah. Okay. Well, I think the problem with the Wheeler team is that that team's never going to score. No.

And he's going to put up zeros on the mound, but he does have to score at some point to win the game. And even with Judge or Varsho playing every defensive position, you can play in on him. It's just like, he's not gonna, he's gonna get shut out a lot and no matter how well he pitches, it's gonna be a Paul Skeen situation and he's not gonna get the win. Whereas, like, Judge is just gonna rake

and he will get some outs just from, from luck, just from balls being hit at people. And that might be enough for me to go with him. And then the question is like judge versus Varsho. Also, I could believe that position players have like a higher level of all around athleticism than pitchers, I would say, just because pitchers, like, you know, if you're in the big leagues, you're a good athlete, but it is a more specialized skill set. Whereas a hitter, yeah, like you have to run more regularly than a pitcher does. You have to have incredible coordination to hit, unless you're a dedicated DH,

you have to play some defensive position. So yeah. All right. I'm, I guess I'll go with the judges, but it's just, I love so much that we have spent the amount of time on this question that we have. This is what differentiates our podcast from other podcasts because we're just sitting there really trying to work in and figure it out.

Yeah. You know, Judge pitched in high school, so that's something. I started by saying this, and then you were like dismissive, and I was like, remember what was wrong? I mean, I didn't say he pitched in high school. I'm like, look at that guy. Like, don't you think you could get them up on the mountain? I think the real key to cracking it is to clone them earlier in their lives. And then you can present to them a variety of different paths.

And so it's not that they'll become good. It's not that the guy who grows up to look like Aaron Judge is like suddenly actually well suited to Ketcher, but at least Ketcher Judge would have experience being a Ketcher. Gosh, he'd be so tall back there. I think that I've changed my answer. I want the team of all judges just because the amount of amusement I would get from Ketcher Judge and Ketcher Short, I think would outweigh

any other considerations, you know? Because just think about how big he would look back there in his crouch, even in a one-knee crouch with the umpire. Amazing. The comedy, spectacular. Max says, how gradually would MLB have to move the mound back for players and fans not to notice? When would we figure it out? Oh, it would, it would happen very soon. Players, very soon. Fans, I think it would probably take a little longer.

Especially given the maybe fans in certain parts of the ballpark, like they're in person, would have a better sense of it because you'd be like, wasn't that closer before than it is? You're much farther away from it than a player is. Right. And at home, when you're watching the broadcast at home, like, you know, depending on the center field camera you have, you might not have any idea where that mount is relative to other stuff on the field, right? Because you so rarely get to like straight away shot down, you know, main street. I think it would take folks at home a while, but I think players would know very, very quickly. I think so too, yeah.

And it would show up in, well, there's still some debate about what effect it would have, of course, on pitching and offense. But if you're a pitcher, you'd notice quickly because, yeah, you just would be missing your spots or you just, you would have to, you'd notice that things were different. Like your command wouldn't be as pinpoint and the pitch would lose more speed by the time it reached the plate. And we'd see it in the data probably pretty quickly too.

Yes. I mean, assuming that MLB is not cooking the books, stat-cast wise to hide the conspiracy. Yeah. But, but if they continue to report the data that we have now, then we would see that the league wide extension figures changed. Well, I guess if they kept measuring extension from like distance in front of the rubber, then that wouldn't necessarily change.

But you know, like velocity, maybe even velocity wouldn't change because if they're measuring the pitch speed out of the hand, that wouldn't change either. Whereas in the past, they used to measure more like, you know, between the mound and the plate or around home plate. And so it would lose more speed along the way. So yeah, you could kind of camouflage it, I guess, maybe if you wanted to with the data, but yeah, pitchers would pick up on this very quickly.

I mean, you could move it millimeters, but when you start getting into like even fractions of an inch, like could you move it half an inch? And would people, would people notice that? Gosh, I don't know. I mean, yeah, I think a picture would notice that. I think they'd notice half an inch. I don't think so. I wouldn't be, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if there's that much variability now in distance from home plate. I don't, I wouldn't be surprised if there's that much variability now in distance from home plate. I don't know exactly how precisely that is measured because you got to figure, you know,

like the mound like changes shape over the course of a season and are they measuring that down to the half inch like lasers? Are they bringing lasers to bear? I'm sure that someone is measuring this is pretty important. But if you told me that there's a half inch difference between the closest mound and the farthest away mounds, it wouldn't shock me. I guess I would say they should probably do something about that. But I wouldn't be surprised because because you constantly hear things about mound height. Now that's different, obviously.

In fact, we just heard about that, because Miles Michaelis and Zach Galin were talking about how they allege that the mound in Cincinnati is a lot lower than their mound, and they allege that this could be cheating, like the Reds could go get sinkerballers or something who would work well on this mound, though it seems like wouldn't it be an advantage alleged that like this could be cheating, like the Reds could go get sinker ballers or something who would work well on this mound though. It seems like wouldn't it be a advantage to have a higher

mound? I mean, unless I guess you're a bad pitching team and you just want to maximize your, your offense, you're just a, you're like the all judges team and the all wheeler team is going to maybe want the higher mound. The all judges team is going to want the lower mound, maybe even though he's so tall. But yeah, like it seems to me and in the course of talking about that, evidently, they said that their mound at Chase in Arizona, they think is the highest in baseball, which that seems like cheating. I mean, if it actually is, but that's throughout baseball history, you have heard allegations or documented cases of teams just massaging,

finessing the mound height or slope and other things about like, you know, grass height and the slant of foul territory, all these things, if you're like a team that bunts a lot, that sort of thing. So there's variability in mound shape and height, probably less than there used to be, but still some, but I would guess a lot less variability in mound distance. But there's got to be some. So I think you could move it back half an inch and that wouldn't cross the just noticeable difference threshold,

but any more than that, it would. Yeah. And then you'd get pictures of the riders taking pictures of the mount and then... Yeah. Right. Okay. Here's one from Bertil who is a Patreon supporter says, how can you not be pedantic about stat categories on an episode sometime around May or June?

Ben mentioned in passing that war is a counting stat. I was probably talking about how innings pitched does increase your war because sometimes people will say like, oh, they only care about rate stats, but no, war takes into account how often you pitch to maybe it's still underrated because you're sparing the bullpen or whatever, but it's a factor. But the question continues, I object to this. I heard this a couple of times and I think it originates from fantasy baseball

where we have counting stats and rate stats. And from that, everything that is not a rate stat has been grouped as a counting stat. I don't know if that's from fantasy baseball or maybe it's just from real baseball because fantasy baseball stats come from real baseball. We have counting stats and ring stats. I promise that fantasy baseball is almost never my reference point for energy.

She says lovingly with so much love, with just the deepest love. But counting, if we steal Wikipedia's definition, is, quote, the process of determining the number of elements of a finite set of objects. This makes sense for home runs, hits, strikeouts, innings pitched, and so on, but you cannot count war. You can calculate war and it is an accumulating stat as all the counting stats are. So my opinion is that we should contrast rate stats with accumulating stats and counting stats are a subset of accumulating stats. So he's saying that all counting stats are accumulating stats,

but all accumulating stats are not counting stats and war because it's calculated, it's not exactly like a number of discrete events that happened that you can count that it is not... Like, there is some difference, but I'm still comfortable calling it a counting stat. Yeah, I feel fine calling it a counting stat. I think that to note that there are differences, sure, sure, sure, right? There's a homerun, there's a homerun, you add those two homeruns, you have two homeruns.

You counted them, There are two. But you can, well, first of all, you can count war, right? You can count them up. You can add them up. You can do all kinds of things like is adding an accumulation or sort of related concepts, aren't they? But, um, Yeah, they're probably too close as words to make the distinction clear.

If you say to someone, that's a counting stat. That's, that's not a counting stat. That's an accumulating stat. They would say, what's the difference? And then you'd have to explain. Yeah, I think that I understand the impetus for the question and certainly the sentiment behind it. But I do think that sometimes definitional complexity

adds confusion. And since we have a very clear understanding of what a rate stat is, and you can accumulate war and the accumulation does directly affect how much you have, right? The more you play, the more war you can potentially get. I'm comfortable calling it a counting stat because we all know what we mean. The big difference is that war can go down, whereas a traditional counting stat cannot decrease unless, you know, if a hit is redefined as an error or something, then it can change. But for the most part, if you hit a home run and the game ends, then you have that number of home runs.

And obviously, historically speaking, sometimes we find out that someone was over-credited or under-credited and then they'll take something away or give something back, but that's just because we miscounted. It's not because like the number of events that happened changed in reality, but war, you can keep playing, you can keep doing things and your war total can decrease. But how? Yeah, and this is one of the things

that makes it less well-suited to like milestones and round numbers and everything because the numbers can change retroactively and also you can't count them in the moment. You can't recognize necessarily, oh, he just hit that war threshold until like the numbers run after that. So there are some hurdles there, but yeah, I, I still think that it is.

It's uncomfortable just, yeah, yeah. Lumping it in as accounting stat, just to make the, it's, it's definitely different from a rate stat and if you are above replacement level and you play more and do more things, then the number goes up. And I think having that, helping people to understand that component of it, particularly in the case of pitchers,

particularly in the case of pitchers having a good season, but maybe not throwing quite as much as like accumulators, right? And we can sometimes refer to players that way. I think is useful as a way of helping people understand what exactly is going into the stat because I think that there's this idea of particular, we run into this maybe more than like baseball reference folks do because there's this notion we've talked about this on the pod before that FIP is abstracting away from the actual results on the field in a way that makes it hypothetical, right? Rather than capturing something real. And so I think every

opportunity that we have to help people understand the way that it is grounded in actual results is a good thing for us to do, to kind of help people understand why we approach the calculation of the stat the way that we do. I have another bit of news. Xtrey, Xtrey on Jose Ramirez. Xtrey, Xtrey, Xtrey not participating in the All-Star game to focus on, quote, recovery and preparation for the second half of the season. So, Isaac Parades will be taking his place and is an All-Star for the second straight year. Oh, that's nice.

Okay, well, second half has already started, Jose. Sorry to break it to you. Oh boy, oh boy. The other thing I guess is that you can count war across seasons, you can add up war totals for a player. Which you can't really do that with with a rate stat. So no, I can't. I mean, you can like calculate it over a span, you know, you can do that.

But you wouldn't. Yeah, I mean, you would. But you wouldn't. You know, it doesn't change it being a rate stat. But yeah, you can add them up. You can go like this. So you got four over here and you got five over there and you add them up and you're like over the past two

seasons you've been, what did I say? Four and five. He's been a nine war player. There you go. Wow. You can do math. Yeah. It's good arithmetic there.

Yeah. It's less about doing the math and more about remembering what I said, even 10 seconds ago. Yeah. Here we are. I'd forgotten that Jose Ramirez is a multi-time home run Derby participant. He's kind of in that Mookie category of like, he's a good home run hitter, but he's not necessarily the type that you want to see in the derby.

Right. I guess because it's like, yeah, a guy who's not going to hit the absolute bombs really, right? Because like Mookie and Jose Ramirez and Francisco Lindor and guys like that, you know, they'll maximize their power potential. They'll hit the ball out front. They'll pull it, you know, to the shallower part of the park and they'll hit plenty of dingers,

but it's not quite as visually awe-inspiring maybe. Yeah. All right. Question from Eric who says this idea was originally inspired by Whit Merrifield last season, talking about needing a new rule to punish pitchers who hit someone in the head, as well as your subsequent discussion about it on episode 2214. The core of the idea is as follows. What if a batter who is hit in the head is required to leave the game to be evaluated for a concussion, but if he is determined not to have a concussion, he can re-enter the game.

Further, what if the player or players who come in to replace the hit batter can also leave and re-enter the game? This second part may seem like a stretch, but I hope my explanation will reveal why I think it would be necessary. And the question goes on for quite some time. I will put the entire thing in the Effectively Wild Listener email database, but in the interest of time, I won't read the whole thing. But Eric does mention that he was originally inspired by you comparing the MLB and NFL concussion protocols. And as much as we can question how quickly the NFL

makes concussion determinations, one benefit the NFL has over MLB is that in football, they can take the player out of the game and keep playing while he gets tested and bring him back later if he seems all right. And yeah, the problem with baseball is that you can't really do that because of the way baseball substitution works. Once you're out of the game, you're out of the game and they don't want to pause the game for very long. So what if they had a mandatory exception to the once you're out of the game, you're out for good,

that you can come back in, like kind of an old school courtesy runner situation, like you can insert someone temporarily to take this player's place, and then if it's found that he's okay, he could come back in. Just this lone carve out. I think it's a good idea. I don't want to overstate the case here in terms of how big of a problem this is. I do think that in general, we're not perfect. Clearly, I took exception to this particular circumstance. But I think in general, people are taking concussions in sports,

regardless of the sport, just much more seriously than they used to. And there is a real emphasis on evaluation. They've changed the IL rules, right? So you have the concussion IL, and you see that taken advantage of, right, guys being given the time to both be properly evaluated and then to recover from concussions when they do suffer them. Uh, but part of why I like this is because it pulls out a reasonable or at least understandable concern on the part of the manager, which is like, well,

what if he's fine, you know, what if it looked bad, but he's okay. And then I'm without my quite often catcher for the remainder of this game, having that completely removed as an element so that really the only downtime you're having to grapple with is the brief stretch. Because it's not like, you know, when NFL players go into the blue tent and get evaluated, for example, sometimes they come back into games way too fast. In part because they can come back into games, right?

So sometimes I really rush out there because they're like, oh, we got it. We don't want to take this drive without my homes. He's fine, you know? Sure the brain's knocking around in there just the way it's supposed to. But I think that removing that as a potential consideration would be really useful. And on the flip side, I can't think of a way

that you would be able to like exploit this such that it would be a problem to have it, right? Because your base state as a manager is that you want your players on the field. So it's not like you're gonna, like, monkeying around with it means taking a guy out and that you probably don't want to do that. Now I suppose, could you use it as a way to manipulate the lineup? Right? So like, let's say a guy gets hit, he gets hit in the head.

You take him out to evaluate him, but maybe you like just want to be able to like get a better, are you going to have a really good bench player who's not just in? Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah. So the rest of Eric's email was about unintended and undesired consequences and side effects and he says since requiring the hitter to be replaced by a presumably worse bench player will usually represent a benefit to the pitcher's team and we don't want to reward activity leading to potential head injuries, intentional or not, I think the player should be able to return if he turns out not to

have a concussion. However, even forcing a superstar out of the game temporarily is a net positive for the pitchers team when we should be trying to disincentivize hitting guys in the head. And so that's why he then advocates, well, maybe the hit batter's lineup spot becomes flexible until he comes back and anyone who comes into that spot

can be removed and reenter it. Well, it's gonna be harder and harder to sell because if you're then sort of monkeying with like the batting order in addition to the substitution rule, like these are some pretty fundamental aspects of the sports. And so that's tough.

But yeah, you wanna come up with something, he says, that helps the hitter's team and punishes the pitcher's team without overtly punishing the pitcher himself, and allows time for the hit batter to be more properly evaluated for a concussion. So, yeah, you wouldn't want actual headhunting to go on, where, like, you know, the big star comes up for a high-leverage plate appearance, and you hit him in the head because he has to be removed

and replaced by some scrub, right? Like, that's... You don't want to encourage that kind of behavior. No, definitely not. I mean, first of all, you'd have to be like a freaking psycho to do that. To be like, oh, I'm going to hit him in the head with a projectile so he can't bat. Like, what is wrong with you? Go to get right with God or something on that one. I don't know, man. But I don't think that that would happen very often if only because if you demonstrated it as a pattern, I'm sure you'd be suspended and fined for doing it. But I think the other, like one way to keep

guys from doing it, from monkeying with it if you're like trying to get a better batter and for a particular matchup or something is you have like an independent, you could do it like the NFL does where you have an independent neuro consultant. You know what I mean? So you could at least monitor one end of it. But I like it. I think that it's an area that we should just take really seriously. It's guys' brains and the fact that it hasn't, that a bigger and more persistent problem,

especially for catchers, hasn't manifested over and more persistent problem, especially for catchers hasn't manifested over the years still surprises me. And so I think that as much as we can do to try to protect guys, and I know that, you know, I think the circumstance that came up wasn't even a really bad catcher, if I remember correctly, although I might not. So but it's always catchers getting knocked around back there. They get knocked around back there. They get, just get knocked around back there. Generally when a batter gets hit in the head,

they're coming out most of the time anyway, just because it like has caused injury, you know? And they cannot continue. So, yeah. Okay, well related to injuries, Shana writes to say, in a discussion about Cutter-Crawford's injury, Ben said, I hope the surgery is a success. And it brought the question to say, in a discussion about Cutter-Crofford's injury, Ben said, I hope the surgery is a success. And it brought the question to mind,

have we ever heard of an unsuccessful surgery? Would that be something we would hear about? What does it even mean when that is said about a surgery? I'd hope the surgeon didn't operate on the wrong arm or something. I haven't heard of that happening with a baseball player. And at what point do we slash the club determine if the surgery was successful or not? Do we have to wait to see about the result of the recovery? Wondering if there are any news sources on this. I think I've

probably joked about this before kind of that pro forma of the surgery was a success because because you always hear that update after someone gets Tommy John or whatever it is, and you don't really know if it's a success long-term, you just know they didn't die on the table or something. Like, you know, by that standard, the patient survived and woke up in the recovery room. So in that sense, the surgery was a success, you know, and as far as they know, it was a success,

and they repaired the thing that they wanted to repair. But you don't usually know if it's really going to be a success until later. Like, you know, I guess if it was a catastrophic failure, like we tried to put the UCL in there and it just didn't take, we put it in the wrong place. Yeah, like, you know, it's kind of a low baseline to clear for the immediate announcement or reports that the surgery was a success. But there are certainly cases where the surgery is not a success. And one has come to light or has come to the spotlight recently because it was related to Bobby Jenks, who sadly just died at 44

of stomach cancer. And a lot of his late in life health problems were precipitated by a surgery that was not a success. And I don't know whether it was announced as a success in the moment, but he had surgery in 2011 to remove bone spurs in his back and he was supposed to have like two levels of his spine decompressed, but the doctor didn't do the second level. And then when he sewed him back up, he left what was referred to as a serrated edge in Jenks's back. What?

And that edge sliced Jenks' back open and like- What? Spinal fluid leaked and there was an infection and it almost- Oh my God. Killed him then, cause it went to his brainstem and he had to have then emergency surgery

a couple of weeks after the first procedure, and he was bedridden for months. And then, I think this also led to issues with substance abuse, and just the pain and the recovery from this. And so, it really affected his quality of life for the rest of his life. And he sued for malpractice. And there was a settlement and he got like 5 million bucks. So like this was a case of just negligence

or just not being careful in this. Oh my God. I knew there had been like a surgical issue, but I did not know the spinal fluid component of it. That's horrifying. That's not anywhere. Very bad. So it has happened.

Yeah, and there are some maybe lower stakes cases. Like I was just Googling quickly before we started recording. Like 10 years ago, Nolan Reimold sued Johns Hopkins because he said prematurely cleared to play following surgery. So I don't know whether that counts as the surgery not being a success, but he, he had surgery for a herniated disc and then he was discharged, he said, without any restrictions

and then re-injured himself and they didn't tell him not to do strenuous physical stuff and then like his bones weren't fused and he was, he got hurt again. So I guess you could kind of consider that a surgery, which is not a success if you count the recovery from it. His bones weren't fused? There was another one with Rob Segginen who sued the team's hand consultant for negligence. And this was another case where it was like he had pain in his wrist. And then I guess he said that the doctor

didn't properly apprise him of his condition and he was negligently recommended unnecessary surgery. So I guess if you have a surgery that you didn't have to have, that would be, that's certainly unsuccessful on some level, right? And, uh, and then said that his injuries would result in permanent impairment. And so, and you know, I, I joked about like if you survive the surgery, it's a success. I don't want to make light of the fact

that occasionally you don't survive even routine surgeries. I mean, there's always some tiny chance, especially like you have to be put under, or you have anesthesia, like, you know, there's always some small risk there. And this has happened, I believe, in baseball even. I found a 1991 LA Times story about a University of Florida pitcher who died after routine shoulder surgery and he had ligament damage in his pitching arm and he just went into a coma after the surgery and never woke up again. Did he have a blood clot or something?

I'm not sure. And then just a couple years ago in 2021, a college player for George Mason, he died in having Tommy John surgery. So like there can be complications. So you just never know. Like, you know, obviously that's extremely rare, but yes, there have been unsuccessful surgeries

and extremely unsuccessful ones at that. But you don't usually, unless it's utterly disastrous like that, you probably don't know until a little bit of time has elapsed and then people aren't really paying attention and we might not hear about it potentially until years later if someone can't come back or ends up suing or something.

In general, we tend to take for granted that surgeries performed on pro athletes are going to, even if the player doesn't come back fully recognizable from a skill perspective, that the people performing them are at the very top of their game and that the success that they have is, especially when it comes to Tommy John, kind of baked in, although not entirely. And I think most of the time that confidence is warranted. This is the best, if you're a pitcher and your elbow blows out, you're in better shape in terms of your prognosis long term than you've probably ever been at any point

in the game's history. But every individual patient is an individual patient and you just never know. You don't know how your body's going to respond to that. You don't know how. I mean, like sometimes I imagine that for a lot of these guys, it's the first time in their entire lives and maybe the only time in their entire lives that they have had to go under anesthesia. And sometimes people react very badly to that.

So there's just always risk and you don't want to make people feel nervous about getting like routine quote unquote, in terms of how frequently they're performed medical procedures. But like it is good to keep in mind that like you're not guaranteed to first of all have an elbow that can bear you know 200 innings of pro baseball a year and you know there can be other consequences as well. The James thing is rough. I didn't know. You know like I just uh doctors are amazing because hard pass on all that for me. I like because hard pass on all that sh** for me. I like, mm-mm. No, thank you. No, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, he also, I guess, part of his suit

was that the surgeon was doing two separate surgeries simultaneously. Like, two-way surgery. It's called concurrent surgery. And I don't know that that's always inherently irresponsible. I'm sure that you do it under the right conditions and you're trained for that and everything. Maybe it's okay, but you could imagine that you'd be a bit distracted by trying to juggle just two surgeries at the same time. So yeah, I mean, not having to recover twice, not having to go under anesthesia twice. Like I can imagine that. I mean, to be clear, I just probably betrayed

how little of a doctor I am, but I can imagine that being. Yeah, no, what I mean is not that he was having two surgeries done on him at the same time. I mean, the surgeon was doing two surgeries. Oh, wait, what? Like on two people. Nevermind, that's the craziest shit I've ever heard in my entire life.

Are you serious? Yeah, concurrent surgery. Aw man, that poor guy. It's a thing. Yeah. That's terrible. Two... I feel silly having like my usual reaction voice because like the man just passed away

and I don't want to... Did he know that this guy was going to be performing concurrent surgeries? I do not know whether he knew. I mean, probably not based on the lawsuit, right? You should know. You should be informed about that. And then you should be able to say, absolutely fricking not,

and remember to take all the bits and bobs out of me. Don't leave anything in me. Sometimes that happens too. They sew you up and so. Yeah. Scalpel is left in there. I was on an episode of Grey's Anatomy, at least one. So that's how you know that it happens, yeah. Okay, well, I have on an episode of Grey's Anatomy, at least one. So that's how you know that it happens.

Yeah. Okay. Well, I have a couple more here and they're sort of stat blasty, so I guess we can play the song. Here's one from Tim, Patreon supporter who says, possible sat blast question with the recent seven team trade, technically in the NBA featuring Kevin Durant, which is believed to be a record. What are the most teams involved

in a single transaction in MLB history? I think the answer is four and anything above two is in itself fascinating and needs to be explored more. I sent this one to Kenny Jacqueline at Baseball Reference and yes, it is four. They don't have any trades involving more than four teams in the Baseball Reference database, but there are five four-team trades.

We haven't had one of these in quite a while. The first one was February, 1953. The Brooklyn Dodgers sent Rocky Bridges to the Cincinnati Redlegs. The Dodgers sent Jim Pendleton to the Milwaukee Braves. The Milwaukee Braves sent Earl Torgerson to the Philadelphia Phillies. The Braves sent Cash to the Cincinnati Redlegs.

The Redlegs sent Joe Adcock to the Milwaukee Braves. The Philadelphia Phillies sent Cash to the Cincinnati Reg Legs. The Red Legs sent Joe Adcock to the Milwaukee Braves. The Philadelphia Phillies sent Cash to the Braves. The Phillies sent Russ Meyer to the Dodgers. Then it didn't happen again for almost another quarter century, December, 1977. The New York Mets sent John Milner to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Mets sent John Matlack to the Rangers. The Rangers sent Tommy Boggs, Adrian DeVine,

and Eddie Miller, or maybe Devine, to the Atlanta Braves. The Rangers sent Bert Blylevin to the Pirates. The Rangers sent a player to be named later, and Tom Grieve to the Mets. The Braves sent Willie Montanez to the Mets. The Pirates sent Nelson Norman and Al Oliver to the Rangers. The Rangers sent Ken Henderson to the Mets

to complete the trade. That's a big one. That's a blockbuster. There's a lot of name brand players in that one. Then it didn't happen for almost another decade. January 1985, we have the Royals sent Don Slott to the Rangers. The Royals sent Frank Wills to the Mets. The Brewers sent Jim Sundberg to the Royals. The Rangers sent a player to be named later and Danny Darwin to the Brewers. The Mets sent Tim Leary to the Brewers sent Jim Sundberg to the Royals. The Rangers sent a player to be named later and Danny Darwin to the Brewers.

The Mets sent Tim Leary to the Brewers. The Rangers sent Bill Hance to the Brewers to complete the trade. Then we go almost another 20 years. We're up to December 2002 here. The Reds sent Elmer Descends and Cash to the Diamondbacks. The A's sent a player to be named later to the Blue Jays. The Blue Jays sent Felipe Lopez to the Reds.

The Diamondbacks sent Irubio DeRazzo to the A's. The A's sent Jason Arnold to the Jays to complete the trade. That seems like a fairly lackluster trade by four team trade standards. And then finally, just a couple of years after that one, July 2004, this was a noteworthy one. The Cubs sent Justin Jones to the Twins. The Cubs sent Francis Beltran, Alex Gonzalez, and Brendan Harris to the Expos. The Twins sent Dougman Kavich to the Red Sox. The Red Sox sent

Nomar Garcia-Para and Matt Merton to the Cubs. The Expos sent Orlando Cabrera to the Red Sox. I like the one where it's just like, and this other team got in on it somehow. They just wanted to join the party. They didn't want to feel left out. So that's it. We've got five, four team trades, according to baseball reference, in baseball history. And we haven't had one for more than 20 years. So will we ever have another? Can we get it to five? Can we go to five blades?

Five blade trades. That's what I want to see. I don't know. Here's one from Tyler. We talked about position player pitching. This is related to that. I feel like the majority of position player pitchers are right-handed.

How often do we see lefty position players pitching and do lefty or righty position players pitching have better overall stats against? So I had not considered this. I just hadn't really thought about it. I guess I kind of zone out these days when a position player is pitching, but this is certainly true. So I

looked at baseball savant and I just did the entire pitch tracking era since 2008. And overall, helpfully, they have a little flag that you can check that's is position player pitcher or is not position player pitcher. So for the is not position player pitcher, 27.6% of pitches have been thrown by left-handers. And for the is position player pitcher group, a mere 9% of pitches have been thrown by lefties. So it's about a third of the overall rate of left-handed pitching for position player pitchers.

I hadn't really thought about it, but now that I have, I guess it makes sense probably because, well, some position players basically can't be lefties because of the position they play. So like, you know, very strong bias, if not just complete disqualification for, for lefties at certain positions. So like probably position player pitchers on the whole, they tend not to be stars because you don't want to risk your stars arm, Jose Canseco style. And so probably they tend to be like the back of the roster guys.

They tend to be bench guys. They tend to be utility types and utility types have to be able to play on the left side of the infield. They have to play third. They have to play short, right? And so you're not going to get lefties so much in that group, right? That probably makes sense. And then you're not going to get catchers and you know, your backup catcher maybe could be a position player pitcher because he's on the bench and probably has a decent arm and you don't have lefty catchers. So probably the position player pools that you're pulling from are just themselves skewed towards not being left handed. Does that make sense? Am I overlooking any possible factors here? I don't know.

I mean, that's, I think you've covered the one that I would have gone over. That strikes me as right that it would skew that way. Yeah. And as for the results, I just did a very simple search here and this is kind of interesting. So position player pitchers who are left-handers have allowed a 365 weighted on base average. Now that's not good, obviously, that's on the OBP scale, that's very bad.

But position player pitchers who throw right-handed have allowed a 454 weighted on base average. So like 90 points worse for the righties, for the 91% of position player pitchers who were righties. So that's interesting. Now it's a far smaller sample, obviously. We're talking about 1,239 total pitches by left-handed position player pitchers in this span.

But does that perhaps suggest that those are the guys who maybe have some sort of pitching background or like good stuff for a position player pitcher because if you're less likely to be assigned that job, if you're a lefty thrower, then maybe if you do still get the assignment, you probably have some special ability for throwing. You're like closer to qualified and competent perhaps.

Yeah, if you're gonna be thrust into that situation, it's probably for a reason given what would otherwise be a disadvantage. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Good question. Yes. Seems obvious, I guess, but I just had not really thought about it.

All right. Here's a question from Michael, Patreon supporter. I guess it's two actually. He says there are two interesting occurrences in July 6th Giants versus A's game in Sacramento that I wanted to bring up and asked about the frequency of. First in the top of the eighth, Tyler Fitzgerald hit a fly ball to left field, which went in and out of Tyler Soderstrom's glove. So Tyler on Tyler play here and then continued over the wall, resulting in a home run. I was previously at one of this year's Giants vs. A's games in San Francisco on May 16th, where Wilmer Flores hit three home runs, one of which was helped over the wall by none

other than Tyler Soderstrom. Is it unique that a player assisted? Can't remember which term was decided upon. Yeah, what did we land on? Was it a fart slam? Is that what we went to or something along those lines? It was, fart was definitely involved. There was, there was a fart.

Fart bat. Yes. Is it unique that a player assisted a team multiple times in hitting home runs in the same season? Also of note, Tyler Soderstrom had the only RBI in that May 16th game and on July 6th scored all of the runs for the A's. So while he has contributed to the Giants lead in both games, he's been the primary source of offense. So I sent this one to Alex Vigderman at Sports Info Solutions who has

the data on home run robberies and attempted home run robberies and all the rest. So Alex says, first off, you have to be willing to accept the definition of gets a glove on it as opposed to bungles a ball in play and it bounces for a homer. We don't distinguish between these things. And there are obviously more cases of a guy briefly having the ball in his glove over the wall

than there are cases of a ball bouncing out of play. That caveat aside, I feel glad to have looked this up. Not only is this not unique, it gets blown away by another instance in the last few years. I count three instances over the last 20 years or so of a player getting a glove on a home run twice against the same team in the same season. 2015 AJ Pollock against the Dodgers, Adrian Gonzalez and Chase Utley, no less, and Tyler Soderstrom against the Giants this year. And 2023, a man we mentioned earlier,

Dalton Varshow against the Twins in the same game. So not just against the same team twice in the same season, but in the same game in consecutive plate appearances. Wow. Yeah. And he links to the videos and I will link to them on the show page. And as Alex notes, the video shows

these were pretty tough plays. So we're not talking Jose Canseco here. This is Jose Canseco, not in the context of hurting his arm as a position player pitcher, but having a ball go over his head, off his head and over the wall. But Alex says still pretty cool. So yeah, not only did it happen,

it happened twice in the same game and in consecutive plate appearances. So how about that? Yeah, so thanks to Michael for that question. And also for this question, the other interesting occurrence comes in the form of two bases loaded walks by Willy Adamus. This seems like a fairly unique occurrence

for the same player to have multiple bases loaded walks in one game, but I don't have the stat finding skills to verify. I found an old forum post from 15 years ago discussing this, which mentioned Ellis Birx having three bases loaded walks on September 2nd, 2000. How common is two and is three the record? Has anyone else done it three or more times?

So I put this one to Michael Mountain, also a Patreon supporter and listener, and Michael queried this one up for us. And he reports, the record has not changed. It's still Ellis Burks with three bases loaded walks on September 2nd, 2000. Love when Ellis Berks is mentioned on the pod. Love Ellis Berks. 118 different batters have drawn two or three bases loaded walks in a game at least once. Three batters have accomplished the feat twice each. Ellis Berks, the above mentioned game and July 23rd, 1999.

Jack Clark, August 9th, 1987 and May 7th, 92. And Joe Gordon, June 2nd, 1939 and May 2nd, 1943. And Michael went above and beyond here and said that George Brunette did allow five bases loaded walks plus a bases loaded hit by pitch all in the same inning, only recording a single out during that span. I think that's come up.

He pitched two and two thirds innings in relief that day. Les Weber also gave up five bases loaded walks in a single relief appearance, although his came across multiple innings of work on May 26th, 1943. In more modern times, Steve Delabarre relieved Alfredo Simon on May 17th, 2016 for the Cincinnati Reds with one out

and runners on the corners. His day went walk, strike out, bases loaded walk, bases loaded walk, bases loaded walk, bases loaded walk, removed. He is the only pitcher since 1960 to allow four bases loaded walks in a game. However, 114 different pitchers have allowed three or more bases loaded walks in a game.

At least once, three pitchers have suffered this fate twice each, Monte Pearson in May and June of 1936, Sam McDowell in April and May of 1974, and Tug McGraw in May and April of 1976. So thanks to Michael and also to the Michael who asked the question. And then we have one last one here, which comes to us from Elijah.

And the subject line is here, how much did throwing a ball cost Luis Ortiz? So Elijah actually goes by Eli, says Luis Ortiz's alleged spot fixing was referenced in the latest Money Stuff newsletter, where Bloomberg author Matt Levine points out that throwing a ball intentionally would have a very small dollar cost to a pitcher, as opposed to something like throwing an entire game, assuming a world in which the player is never caught because of the impact it might have on future earnings. So we're putting aside the impact of getting caught on future earnings,

which is a lot, even though Luis Ortiz is currently being paid while he's out. If he is found to have done this on purpose, then he could be banned for life. That'll cost him a lot of future earnings, but we're just talking about the ball itself. And Eli says, that got me thinking, in a world where we can map war to some dollar amount, I'm sure it's feasible to calculate the dollar amount

intentionally throwing a ball would cost a pitcher via calculating the impact of that ball versus an ordinary pitch on the pitcher's war. Obviously in the real world, dollars don't line up as nicely with war, but I'm curious about the magnitude of the effect on a hypothetical pitcher's future earnings. Okay, so the question is like, how much could it cost you just by throwing a ball on purpose, just like how that's

going to affect your your stats, potentially, the outcome of that plate appearance, etc. Okay, I mean, if you're a guy who's in the majors in a you have a regular role, right, you're starting pitcher or you're a reliever who's like really firmly implanted in the bullpen any one Ball isn't gonna matter that much, right? Because you just have so many opportunities to to accumulate stuff stats now

Where that ball falls in the plate appearance might matter some right if it, if you intentionally throw ball four, well, that's dumb. Yeah. But I think, I think the potential consequence to him, assuming that there is, you know, malfeasance found here, which like we should just remind people that he's been put on paid administrative leave, he hasn't been suspended. Um, and that distinction is meaningful. It could turn out he was on the take, but we just don't know that yet. So I want to be careful to not bury the guy before they've concluded their investigation. But the issue isn't like that any individual ball from a dollars per war perspective is going to be a problem. The issue here is the circumstances

under which he allegedly threw a ball on purpose. Now, are there benign circumstances under which you would throw a ball on purpose? Well, not really anymore, right? Because if you want to intentionally walk, you do four fingers. But you could do like a not called an intentional walk, I suppose. But typically that decision is not being made by the pitcher, it's being made by the manager or the pitcher and catcher in concert. And they kind of understand like you can walk this guy, it's fine. You're not really trying to walk him a lot of the time, but like maybe or like, well, if we walk him, it's better than Aaron Judge hitting a home run. So his problem is that like, he is alleged to have thrown a ball on purpose so that somebody could make money on the game and that might end up being the most costly ball

two balls, she's ever thrown in his entire career if it's proven that he did it because You're gonna get suspended I think that if you are manipulating results in the game as a result of gambling you're gonna get a lifetime ban and even if You didn't like what teams gonna team's going to hire you? If it's found that he did this, like, his career is over. Yep. Yeah, so that's definitely like the financial disincentive. The costliest ball of all. Yeah, you could get caught and then you could get banned

and you could not make any more money as a baseball player in addition to the reputational costs and all the rest. So that's the real reason why you would have to really get paid to even consider risking this. You know, if you're, if you were willing to even compromise your morals, it's just like how, how much would they have to pay you to try this to, you know, take a, not take a fall, but take a ball, I guess, in this case. So, but I did try to calculate just the intentional ball value, how much would you have to be paid to make up for that? So people can check my math on this, but people have calculated the run value of changing a ball to a strike or vice versa, because you know, that's important

when it comes to calculating framing, for instance. So the number that people have put on that is about like 0.14 runs. It varies a little bit depending on the analysts, but that's just context neutral, all pitches, not considering the situation or the count or anything. In general, that's the value

of changing a ball to a strike. And as you said, that varies very much based on the count. So if it's if it's three, two, well, that's going to be a big run value, that's going to be like half a run or something. Whereas if it's on the first pitch, then it's not that big a deal. And, you know, if this was the first pitch, of course, this scenario with Lattis. And so if you're doing it on the first pitch of the plate appearance, that's going to have the smallest impact. And so that's going to be the difference. It's going to be about like 0.1 runs, maybe even less, but you know, we could just use that as a rule of thumb. And then if you say 0.1 runs and keep in mind

that's changing a ball to a strike, which is not the scenario exactly. So I'm going to come back to that, but okay. So 0.1 runs, that's like one one hundredth of a win because if we say that, you know, again, rule of thumb, it's 10 runs to a win roughly. So 0.1 runs would be one one hundredth of a win. And I think Fangrass is using 8 million per win

on the free agent market these days. And so if you say, okay, it's one one hundredth of a win and a win is worth 8 million, then that's 80,000 bucks, which is still a pretty significant number, which, you know, I wouldn't say $80,000. No, it's these guys make a lot of money. A million bucks is still a lot of bucks. And even a fraction of that is still a lot of bucks. So 80,000. Now, as I said, this is not changing a ball to a strike. If you're Luis Ortiz, you might just throw a ball anyway, without intending to.

In fact, about a third of Luis Ortiz's pitches this year have been balls, 34.5% to be exact. And as far as we know, only two of them were allegedly, possibly potentially on purpose. So you figure there's a roughly one in three chance that it's going to be a ball anyway. And so you're not actually changing anything, right? And so that means that you're, you're not actually taking as much of a hit there. And then there are other outcomes. If you don't throw a ball, it could be a good outcome. It could be a bad outcome.

It could be a strike. It could be a home run. Who knows? But if we took, I guess, like lopped off a third of that tally too, just because there's a roughly 33% chance that it just would have been a ball anyway, and you're not costing yourself anything actually, then maybe it's not 80,000, maybe it's, I don't know, like only 54,000 or something. It's still a lot of money, you know?

And this is all very back of the envelope, and you know, we could be more precise about this, and I'd probably take the under, not the over on that. But still, if you're talking like 50,000 bucks potentially just from throwing a ball on purpose on a first pitch of a plate appearance, that's probably more than I would have guessed without doing any math or research. It's still a significant amount of money. So like, you'd have to get a good payday just to overcome. And of course, Luis Ortiz is not about to be a free agent. He's not anywhere close to being a free agent, even if he's able to keep playing.

So like doing the free agent dollar per war calculation doesn't make sense for all players who are not going to be free agents until maybe years down the road. So if you're a pre-arb player and you're making close to the league minimum, well, then the calculus is a little bit different for you and the downside is a little bit smaller financially speaking. And so it might make some sense. But the point is like there is a real calculable loss of value to you, just from throwing a ball on purpose, before you even account for like the enormous risk that you're taking on in other ways.

Yeah, and don't do that, you know? Don't take on that risk. That's a silly, that's a stupid risk to take on. Why would you do that? Yeah, even if you had someone who was like, eh, you know, when I die, I'll be reinstated. Thanks, Rob Manfred. So it won't linger beyond the

grave and I don't care about what people think of me or something. I just care about the money. Still, you know, you got to scrounge up, there's got to be enough action on this pitch to give you a sizable payday even to overcome the ball that you're throwing on purpose. So, and hopefully that amount of wagering would be flagged as maybe it was in this case. Okay. So that'll do it. And you wanted to put a PSA or a plea out there for, for feline lovers. Yeah. Um, so, Hey, there's some kittens. Um, uh, not too long ago, a couple months ago, a stray cat started coming around and we started feeding it and then it was clearly pregnant and it had three kittens and we've managed to rehome two of the kittens and the third is currently being fostered.

We estimate that this cat is between like, a kitten is between like eight and ten weeks old. The vet thinks that it is a little female kitten. It can be a little hard to tell when they're very small. But the gal who is fostering, that kitten and then two others, not from this litter, different mom, they are younger, sort of four to five week range. And so if you live in the greater Phoenix area and you've been saying to yourself, hey, I want a kitten, good news, got some kittens for you. And so we're just trying to help the gal who's been fostering these cats to find homes for them. The mom is feral and will not be an inside girl. It has been tried unsuccessfully.

And we have come to learn a lot about the statutory rights of stray cats in the state of Arizona. They have a right to roam, but we were able to catch mom and get her spayed through our local spay neuter hotline. She's been re-released. So there will be no more kittens. And the two that were a bonded pair in this litter have a happy home. They are still terrified, but they are well tended and safe. But we're trying to help find a home for the one from this litter and then two other little kittens. And so if you're in the greater Phoenix area and you've been thinking about getting a kitten, I would just say give me a shout on the podcast email.

If you have any questions, I know that like kind of light on detail here, but happy to answer any questions. Trying to get photos of the two kittens that are being fostered that were not part of the slitter. Having seen the one that is just the cutest little thing is just this little gray kitten and it's so cute. I don't know if it will be a short hair or a long haired kitten or cat one. It has reached maturity.

The mom is a shorter haired tabby. We think father is a Russian blue, so short hair, but you just don't know. You know, you just don't know. So yeah, if you're in the market for a kitten, give me a shout at the podcast email and happy to answer any questions that I can. And yeah, help to find these little friends a happy forever home. That's the kitten plea. They're so cute. Though I will say the third kitten from this litter that we have passed off that is being fostered that doesn't have a home, the gal fostering the kitten

works for a vet and so I think has had that kitten and the other two she's fostering checked out thoroughly. I don't know all of the ins and outs of that. I will say that when we had the two kittens before we passed them off to their new home, had them tested for FIV and they were negative. So if you know anything about cats, that's a good thing. And the mom was FIV negative when we took her in to get her spayed as well. So optimistic that these kittens also do not have FIV. But yeah, give a shout if you are in the market for something adorable. And I will just say that like, you know, the world is chaotic.

And it felt very nice to be able to help another living thing kind of find its way to something better than being, you know, about to have a bunch of litters forever and ever or living under my elderly neighbor's shed, as the case may be. So you too can have a feeling of contentment and also a cat. And sometimes those things go hand in hand. Yes, sadly not for me as I am allergic. Not for you. So I'm not in the market, but someone will be.

Someone will be. But yeah, so give a shout if you, you know, we happy to facilitate whatever handoff and transfer and what have you. So yeah. You can be a Patreon supporter. Oh, a Patreon supporter, Ben, Ben! That's wonderful, that's wonderful, great. All right, don't take those exact financial figures that I cited for Ortiz to the bank, so to speak, by the way. I think that was probably an overestimate, just saying that the value of intentionally throwing a ball,

probably high enough that you're talking in the tens of thousands in terms of hurting one's own value. And speaking of adjusted figures, in the outro to our preceding episode, I brought up the shutout rate again. Noted that some of you had suggested that the Zombie Runner might be making run scoring league wide look higher than it is, which is true. And I cited some numbers that Rob Maines sent me about the magnitude of the difference that made it seem quite small.

But Rob revisited that, simplified the way that he was breaking that down and sent me some new numbers in a new spreadsheet, which I will link on the show page. And basically he just gave me for every season in the 30 team era since 1998, an overall runs per game figure, and then another figure that's excluding extra innings

and position players pitching, and then gave me the difference between those two. So this season, 4.37 runs per game overall, but take out extra innings and position players pitching, and it's just 4.21. So that's a difference of 0.16 runs per game. That's sizable. In fact, that is tied with 2021

for the greatest difference since 98 prior to the Zombie Runner and back when position player pitching wasn't quite so rampant. The difference was typically about half that, but still even the adjusted figure of 4.21 runs per game that's higher than 2022s, higher than 2013 through 2015,

higher than 2011. So there have been quite a few seasons that had lower scoring, even aside from these inflationary factors, but fewer shutouts. Also, Meg brought up the one knee down catching stance again. We got an email from Dirk, who brought up catcher bobble heads and said,

I just got a Kbert Ruert Ruiz bobblehead. As you can see, the box shows him set up on one knee, but the bobblehead itself is squatting. How long until most bobbleheads reflect the current orthodoxy? Recent Will Smith and Cal Raleigh bobbleheads also feature them in a squatting position. That is an excellent question.

I think the traditional crouch slash squat is still probably the mental image that most people have of how catchers are set up. So let us know if there has been a one knee down catcher bobble head. If it hasn't happened yet, I'm sure it will. Finally, we talked about that guy, Dave McCaskill, who did eventually, perhaps belatedly,

get banned from Chase Field for this season, is a serial fan Interferer guy who goes after home run balls sometimes gets in the way of fielders often insights reviews and has gotten ejected Repeatedly, but not banned until all the attention recently He has embraced that attention and because he can't go to Chase Field He was cited recently at a game in San, and he styles himself the home run thief. He was wearing a home run thief jersey, as someone on Reddit said, "'Main character syndrome certainly seems that way.'"

Guess he's taking advantage of the fact that for now, at least he has not been banned league wide. But I would humbly suggest not trying to make the game about you, as some so-called celebrity fans do. Some, not all. Others are just charming local institutions. I hope you'd consider Effectively Wild a charming institution.

As we near our 13th anniversary, you can help us keep going by supporting the podcast on Patreon at patreon.com slash Effectively Wild, where you can sign up and pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get yourself access to some perks as have the following five listeners,

Samuel Baer, Lively Raccoon, Matthew Fury, Gray K, and Casey Cloan Dunsworth. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, discounts on merch and ad-free FanCrafts memberships, personalized messages,

prioritized email answers, and so much more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectively wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcast.fancrafts.com.

You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at Facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can find the Effectively Wild sub-edit at r slash Effectively Wild. And you can check the show notes at FanCrafts or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week,

which means we will talk to you soon. Well, it's moments like these that make you ask, how can you not be horny about baseball? Every take, hot and hotter, entwining and abutting, watch them climb, dig, and mountain. Nothing's about nothing, every stitch wet with sweat Breaking balls back, Dormy on effectively Wow, that can ya not be horny?

When it comes to podcasts, how can you not be horny? Eee!