Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2368: F Everything, We’re Doing Five Taters

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about John Brebbia’s return to the big leagues, Kyle Schwarber’s four-homer game, the potential for a position-player-pitcher-assisted five-homer game, Heliot Ramos and dingers on extremely slow pitches, an interminable inning, whether the playoff race is over and, if so, whether that’s an indictment of the 12-team format, and the […]

Room, room, here's your primer on Beef Boys, Baseball's Inn, Roger Angel, and Super Pretzels, Williams Astadillo, and Mike Trout hypotheticals, waiting for the perfect bat from a volcanic corruption. Ladies and gentlemen, the Effectively Wild introduction. Hello and welcome to episode 2368 of Effectively Wild, the Fangraphs baseball podcast brought you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraps, and I'm joined by Ben Lindberg of the ringer, Ben. How are you? Happy early Labor Day. Thank you. And hey, John Brebia's back. in the big leagues.

My boy, Brebia, he's a brave. He's a big leaker. I'm so glad, Ben, I have terrible news. Our landscapers actually just got here for real. Well, maybe they'll drown out my singing because I have a song in my heart. In your heart. And I don't know why that was sung to the tune of Winchester Cathedral, but it seemed to fit. And I'm just thrilled because he was nails in AAA.

AAA, Gwinnett, the AAA affiliate of. Atlanta, he threw 15 games, 19 innings, 1.89 ERA, 2.47 FIP, just dominated AAA hitters, and here he is. He's back for the stretch run, not for the playoff push, but at least for the final month of the regular season. So my parisocial baseball buddy is back, and I am very pleased. Is it still parisocial when you've actually spoken with him? Like, isn't that just social, social? I think one podcast probably does not a friendship make, much as I would like. Healthy boundary there.

Yeah, that's good. I like that. It's progress, obviously. It's more social than it was before we spoke, but we're still working on it. So we'll see. We'll continue to, you know, baby steps with me and Brebia. But back in the big leagues, that's the important thing. Yeah.

Yeah. So last time we talked. about the potential for this to be the third season ever with three 50 plus homer hitters. And now it's the first season ever with three, four homer games because Kyle Schwabber, Schwab's trying to get to that 50 homer threshold in one game, even though he was five dingers away, and he nearly made it because he had a four homer outburst on Thursday. So this is the third such game we've seen this season. that also sort of flummoxes me.

It's not as if any of these guys was a fluke exactly. It was Schwarber. It was Ahenio Suarez, just two of the best home run hitters in baseball over the past several years. And Nick Kurtz, who is off to a rip-roaring start in the big leagues. So it wasn't as if Scooter Jeanette was doing it, but nonetheless, three in one year. And in 2019, for instance, zero. So I guess it is just. largely random, because yet again, I cannot think of a really great reason why there should be

more unless it's the specter of position player pitchers, but that did not come into play here. That wasn't the case here, yeah. It nearly did. It looked like it might because he had a shot at number five with Vidal Bruhan on the mound, and he could not go deep. And you know what? I'm glad that he didn't because if and when we finally get that five homer game in the big leagues, I don't think I want the fifth to be off of a position player pitcher.

We talked about whether this cheapens an offensive outburst, if that final poke is off the position player pitcher. I think for an unprecedented home run display, I would not want to have to caveat that forever with, yeah, but the fifth was off of Wuhan. Yeah, you want it to be above reproach, right? And we talked about this with Kurtz. Like, it is still impressive. Hitting a home run, even with a position player on the mound, is still impressive.

But the degree of difficulty does decline and quite precipitously. So I think you're right. When we get to that point, it's like, let's have a guy whose profession is pitching up there, right? Who hasn't picked up a bat in an age, you know, who's unfit. What is a bat? He doesn't even know. He goes up there. He's so confused.

I was like, I have that. What is that? That implement. I don't understand it. You know, that's what you're hoping for. I will say, and I'm going to say things now in the event that I have to mute for a protracted period. Those leafblowers, man, they're not quiet, you know? They're not.

The Phillies have been in a little bit of a bad way of late. They got swept by the Mets. They haven't won in Queens in a while. And that feels bad because that's a place where presumably they might have to travel during the postseason. You feel like you're usually like a specter looming over the organization. And they had the opportunity with that series against the Mets to, like, basically sew up the division. And then they got swept. And now the division is still contested.

Oh, I bet you can hear it now, though. Faintly, yeah. Sorry, everyone. I'm so sorry. There was a storm, and so then they got delayed, and they had to deal with people's trees. It's very understandable, but it does mean that they are here right now at an unexpected time. Not normally a Friday, not normally a Friday crew. We'll podcast under adverse circumstances.

Yeah, sorry, everyone. Yeah, we're going to power through it. But so, like, you know, they were sort of in a bad way. Like, you know, I would describe the level of tension among the Phillies fans I follow on social media, which I'm realizing is like a very shocking number. I think there's something spiritually consistent with the way that Philly sports fans and Seattle sports fans interact with sport. You know, any fan of the Eagles or the Seahawks, the Mariners or the Phillies, you look at their social media, you know, the team could be winning by 10. This is more appropriate in the football

context, obviously, or like losing by 50. You wouldn't be able to tell from the way that we post, right? Like, we are just crashing out constantly. And I think that for a lot of the folks who I follow, who live in sort of Philly's land, a lot of consternation, great deal of concern. Plus, they hate the Mets. So it felt especially bad. And then, you know, you have to try to rebound from that with Aaron Nola on the mound and it's not been his best year, right? Things have been rough

and then he gives up three runs to the Braves in the top of the first and you go, ah, God, what are we going to, what are we in for? It's going to happen again. We're going to slide. They're going to win the division. It's going to be terrible. They being the Mets, not the Braves. That would be very surprising.

And then Kyle Schwerver goes up there and Kyle Schwerver's like, do not worry, good people of Philly. Allow me to bring you into my warm embrace. And, you know, J.T. Real Moto did his part right after that. But it is a wild swing emotionally as a fan. I might submit one of the wilder swings, certainly one of the wilder positive emotional swings. I think that most negative emotional swings, we feel the impact of those more deeply.

But to be down, to be in your feelings, to be worried, and then to immediately rebound, that's beautiful. That's better than she's sick. Yeah, a lot of things are. Bowie is the spirits, so. And he's just, he's the guy, he seems like he should have a four-homer game. That is completely in character. It seems almost predictable. It seems almost like, how did he not already have a four-homer game?

He's just such a home run-hitting savant. So I am pleased to see it. It was fun. I had forgotten, yeah, so Kurtz's final home run in his four-homer game came against a catcher, Cooper Hummel. So I guess that could be. be a reason why we have now seen three of these games for the first time in a single season. And if we are ever going to get to five, then I guess odds are that that final one will come off of a position player, just because it's usually so lopsided.

In the Suarez game, that was a while ago now. It was April. But that game, I think, was close. That game was like extra inning. So that was not a blowout, I believe. But usually when you're going to get a four-homer game. and the chance to go for more, then it's going to be lopsided, it's going to be a blowout. And in this era, there's probably going to be a position player pitcher.

So we are in a situation where not only is it hard to imagine a five-homer game, as it always has been, but probably hard to imagine it happening without some assistance from a position player pitcher. Sure. One way in which I sometimes am impressed by a big blow off of a position player pitcher is when there is a lob, when there's a super slow pitch because that drives home to me that you really have to supply a lot of the power yourself

as a hitter in that situation. And I was struck by this because on that same day, Elliot Ramos of the Giants, he hit a home run off of Reese McGuire. I was going to joke that it was down the dick because Reese McGuire,

but you know what? It wasn't actually down the dick. It was kind of high and inside. But Elliot Ramos just launched it nonetheless. And this was a 37.9 mile per hour pitch. And I will send you a link to this thing. But he has to muscle that over the fence. You know, and it's it is kind of counterintuitive, I guess,

that the harder it comes in, the harder it goes out. But that is true. That's the way the physics works. And, you know, there's not the strongest correlation in the world. You still have to supply most of the power, obviously, as a hitter. But, yeah, if the pitch is thrown harder, then you can turn it around and hit it harder. And in this case, it was thrown so slowly that Ramos really had to, I was going to say crank it, and that was not going to be a Reese McGuire joke, but it became one as it flitted across my mind.

Anyway, he had to just get his whole body behind it, and it still just barely cleared the fence. So that was impressive to me. I mean, it seems like it should be unimpressive that you hit this floater, this lob that's like 38 miles per hour. But it was still kind of an impressive power display in a way. I think that you're right. I think it is impressive. I'm moved. I'm moved by the argument that that would be so.

You know, I am. Well, if the five homer game happens on a 30-something mile per hour pitch, then we can revisit this and say, you know what contrarian take that doesn't cheap in it because actually it's kind of difficult to get that thing out of there it's almost like hitting it off a t at that point i wondered whether this was the slowest pitch ever to be hit for a homer in the pitch tracking era and probably any era but it's not it was the fourth slowest pitch and two of the three slowest were hit by kail higashioka who's just a a home run specialist when it comes to hitting a pitch that's coming in in the mid-30s. So in 2022, in June, he hit one that was 35.1 miles per hour. That's the slowest pitch clocked that a home run was hit off of, off of Frank Schwendell. And then Miguel Rojas last year in June hit one off of Logan Porter, 35.4 miles per hour. And then also last year, in fact, one year to the day, one year before the Elliott Ramos home run,

Agashioca hit one off of Oswald Parraza that was 36.6 mouths per hour. So it's difficult to do. There aren't a lot of pitches that slow. And, you know, there's a slight added degree of difficulty, I suppose. But it does bug me a bit that so many of the position player pitchers cannot be bothered even to throw a max effort pitch for them as slow as that might be. You know, just make it presentable. I don't know.

Maybe at that point you're already throwing in the towel. you might as well make it look like a farce, but boy, does it ever look like a farce when you got someone coming in there firing 37 miles per hour? Just, you know, we used to have a civilization. We used to have position player pitchers. Yeah. Would we at least get it up there in the 80s sometimes? It is, it does reveal something kind of profound about like the, the embarrassments we're willing to endure, because it's like, this is making a mockery of baseball, but it's better than a forfeit, you know? Yeah, we've had that conversation about will we get to a point where the analytical teams

decide, actually, it would be smarter not to play the final few innings, but there's just such a stigma surrounding that, that I think there's still a great resistance to doing that, which is probably for the best, but you can, of course, construct a case that at that point, you are conceding defeat anyway. You might as well make it official. But, no, the opprobrium, the condemnation, I think, would be too strong. And speaking of farces, on that same day, I guess it was the Nets and the Yankees played a game. And gosh, that game got out of hand, too.

This was on the 27th. So this was also on Thursday. And it was the bottom of the third, Yankees batting. they start the inning up one nothing so it's a close game at that point it would not be close by the end of the inning and i will just read you the sequence of events here so kabe cabali starts the inning for the nationals ben rice singles to right erin judge hits a home run drives in rice cody bellinger hits a home run jazz jism junior walks jason dominguez is at the plate while jism steals second domingez then has a

ground rule double. So we still have not had an out recorded in this inning. Anthony Volpe lines out to second. Austin Wells reaches on catcher's interference. And then we get Ryan McMahon comes up and hits a three run homer. So we have one out to this point in the inning. Things are really getting out of hand. And now we have a pitching change. So we have Shinosuke Okasawara comes in to try to stop the bleeding and he does not. There's further hemorrhaging, and he gets a strikeout.

He gets Trent Grisham to strike out looking. But then Ben Rice, who let off the inning, we bat around at this point. I'm not going to get into that controversy, but you know where I stand. He bats around, hits a home run, Aaron Judge, singles, Cody Balancher walks,

Jazz Chisholm Jr. walks, Jason Dominguez, singles. And then finally, mercifully, Anthony Volpe comes back up again and strikes at swinging. So two of the three, Yankees outs in the inning appropriately made by Anthony Volpe. But at the end here, the Nationals are now trailing 10 to nothing.

And again, the inning started. It was one to nothing. So that's 15 batters, nine runs, eight hits, three walks, plus the catcher's interference. The inning lasted, I think, 41 minutes, and the Nationals threw 77 pitches. And I saw a fun fact, although it's really the opposite of a fun fact, in this case, from Codify baseball on Twitter, that this was the most pitches by any team in any inning of any game in the entire pitch tracking era. Now, they dated that to 2008, which that is the pitch tracking era in terms of actually

tracking the trajectory of the pitch, but we could go back to 1988 with pitch counts. but this is too many pitches to throw in an inning. I think this should be disqualifying somehow. If you throw 77, they should call it right there. That's just an automatic mercy rule forfeit. You cannot throw 77 pitches in a inning. You just, you got to cut it off there. This is so ridiculous.

We should be able to roll it, you know, like in instructs when a guy doesn't have it. And you're like, this is getting out of hand. You got to roll the inning. We should have emergency roll it powers. You could give it to a fan. No, you couldn't. That would be a disaster.

But you could have like an official roll it upire, you know? Or you can make it the official scorers job, I suppose. You got to be like, we got to roll. He can't have a starter's number of pitches thrown in an inning. That's on serious. That's ridiculous. That's just like, that's not major league caliber, right? Like, once you're contemplating rules that we would see in either college

ball or like on a backfield somewhere you've gone to a very dark place yeah no i think the the threshold because if you throw more pitches in an inning than a pitcher has thrown in a complete game then i think it's over that's what triggers the forfeit or the rolling because so if i search for complete games just going back as far as stat head can so complete game nine or more innings pitched and I just sort by ascending pitch count. 74 is the fewest on record. Aaron Cook and Carlos Silva, a couple of low strikeout control guys.

They just blazed through opposing lineups in 2007, 2005, in 74 pitches apiece. So this should be the Cook Carlos line, the Cook Silva line. I don't know. We can come up with a better name. But if you throw more than 74 pitches, more than the number of pitches it took Aaron Cook or Carlos Silva to pitch an entire game, that's it. And everyone gets to go home.

And at that point, who wouldn't want to go home? Really? I mean, do the fans want to stay and see more of this? Do the players? I think everyone might be okay with calling it at that point. I, the Cook Silva line sounds like a cargo route. But as a result of like a bilateral trade agreement or something, oh, we're going to, we got to move those microchips on the Cook Silva line, you know, they got a hue to the Cook Silva line. I don't know how shipping works, except that.

Neither. But, you know, I like it when the big boats get stuck, though. I know it's bad, but it's funny. Bring back stuck big boat. Where is stuck big boat? That got a lot of us through some dark times, stuck big boat, you know? Yeah. That was a meme, certainly.

Yeah. Well, we can workshop the name. But I like the concept, at least. You go over that line, and that's it for you. That's your day is done, and everyone's day is done. Okay. So speaking of things being done, I guess everyone has suddenly concluded that the playoff race, such as it is, the pennant race, is over. Everyone has suddenly made this observation simultaneously.

We talked about this a while back on the podcast. I don't know exactly when. Some weeks, maybe a month ago, just about how it seemed like. the playoff picture was pretty set. And there was a piece about this at FanGraphs back then, about how just in terms of playoff odds alone, was this a Davey Andrews joint, perhaps? It was Davey.

Yeah, it seemed like things were just sort of cemented at a pretty early stage. And we talked about that and we said, okay, well, maybe if you looked at division odds instead of playoff odds, there's a little more uncertainty there. But it's true. I don't know that anything has changed since that point.

And now it really seems sort of set in stone because we're exactly a month as we record here away from the last day of the regular season, essentially. And it's over, you know, in terms of like who's in and who's out, barring some big collapse or great comeback. It's theoretically possible. But the odds are low because, as you mentioned, the Mets just swept, the Reds just got swept. by the Dodgers. I think that was the first time that the Reds had been swept this season. So the odds that the Reds are going to sneak in

or the Royals or someone else and the Rangers have all sorts of injury issues now. It's just, it's looking like an extreme long shot. And so other than the teams that are in at this point, yeah, you know, it's an extreme improbability. And so I think three people just wrote about this whom I read regularly, and I was perusing their pieces before we started recording. Hannah Kaiser wrote about this for the bandwagon.

Michael Bauman blogged about this for fan graphs. And Joe Sheehan wrote about this for the Joshean newsletter. And they all made the observation that, yeah, this is pretty much we can call it in terms of who's going to be in the playoffs or not. Though they had somewhat different perspectives on what that meant or whether this was good or whether this was bad. Hannah mostly lamented it, I think, and thought, well, this is pretty boring. What do we have to watch for and kind of connected it to the playoff field and the playoff format and the 12-team field, which I'm no fan of either. But Bauman actually kind of approved of this or said, yeah, this is how it's supposed to work more or less. So don't take this as an example of something gone wrong.

and the teams that should be in have made it, essentially. And then Joe was, I guess, more toward Michael and just kind of took the tack of like, you know, Joe's no fan of the expanded playoffs either, far from it, but essentially concluded that we can't conclude anything from a single season because the playoff picture just fluctuates so much. So Bowman's concluding paragraphs

there's always at least one bright line that separates the contenders from the no-hopers and trying to work backwards to fit the playoff format onto the quality of last year's league is a losing proposition. Every year some decent team will just miss the playoffs. It's why we have the regular season. Deal with it. Actually, apparently not literally every year because this year there seemed to be six fairly evenly matched teams at the top of the National League standings and six playoff spots

to accommodate them. So don't get mad if there's nothing to play for over the last two weeks of the season. that means the system worked perfectly. So essentially, if another team deserved to be in the race, then they would be, is what he's saying. And they're just not good enough to contend for that final playoff spot. And thus, they don't really deserve to be participants here. But he did go back to 2014 when the fancraft's playoff odds start. And he found that this is unusual or unprecedented in that span, at least, for things to be all but over this.

this early. So he says the answer to the overarching question is no, there has not been a playoff race so settled this early in the season as this year's National League, at least not in the past 12 seasons. There's always been someone with some hope in each league, even in the two wildcard rounds, and especially in that hateful COVID-necessated 16-team bracket from 2020, not this year in the NL, barely this year in the AL. So is this the sign of the postseason apocalypse? Is it actually bad and boring? Does this? this bother you? Do we need to do anything about it? I think the answer to the last question, do we need to do anything about it is no. For, you know, I think for the reasons that the Bowman

and Joe kind of alighted on, which is like, it's one year. I think that we see a lot of kind of natural year-to-year variation in this, right? Where we have some years where there's like a really tight race. There are a lot of good teams. And they're forced to kind of beat up on each other until the very last game. And that's thrilling. And I want there to be years like that. I don't have concern that we aren't, that we're going to be suddenly deprived of those years, at least not based on one year.

And part of it, too, is like, I've enjoyed this season. There's been a lot about it. That's been really great. But, like, teams are kind of mid this year, you know? We got a lot of mid out there. And sometimes that means that, like, you have the illusion of, you know, really exciting races right until the end because, you know, the mids kind of beat up on each other and you have changes in playoff position. But it's not, it's not as satisfying as like a sorting

exercise, right? Here are the good teams versus the bad teams. There's just change. But I don't know that we necessarily like learn a ton from that change. And then you have years like this one where it's like there's a lot of mid and any team being able to sort of overcome that mid for a sufficiently long time has sort of pushed them into the more deserving category and then the rest of the mid has sort of fallen away. And I think that that's okay. I also think that like it's hard to distinguish the specifics of this playoff race and playoff field from the background consternation with the expanded format, which I think is always sort of part of the conversation for people who are taking exception to how the races are shaking out. Because like a lot of people, I'm less bothered by

the expanded format in terms of like how the playoffs themselves wash over me. I do share a lot of people's concern about like what that format is doing from an incentive structure perspective to like get teams to try really hard and be really good and you know be dominant, although we don't like it when that happens and then we send rude emails. So like I don't know. But I think that like the specifics of this field obviously can't be completely separated from the broader format perspective or conversation. But sometimes, times when people say, ah, this isn't exciting. What they really are trying to get at is, I hate the expanded field. And I think that everyone who you mentioned is very clear, right,

about sort of what their perspective on the field is. So I don't think that's at play for like Joe or Hannah or Michael. But I do think that sometimes we can have a little category confusion there. But I think this is fine. You know, again, I like the variation because there's something very satisfying about like a really good team just kind of running roughshod through the whole thing and then they get to the playoffs and then they run rush out through that and then they win a world series and you're like we we learned things right like it's an it's like this is the best one and we we know that better after 162 than you know the the 30 or so odd games you play after that but like it feels like a a satisfying cherry on top of a of a thing

that we already know like this is the best team it was the best team during the regular season it was the best team during the postseason they're the best team these are the best boys right but there's also a lot of fun in the mid can be fun in so far as you go into every series you know like i don't know who's going to win like i don't know like they they're pitching is good but their lineup sucks or like those two parts of their club are strong but boy i'm worried about that bullpen. And sometimes I think that when we end up with the consensus best teams, but teams that relative to prior postseason clubs may seem a little weak in comparison, you can end up with a really dynamic postseason because, hey, like anyone could win.

Although sometimes you get a real slog. So we'll see. I really do wonder whether the midness of the whole playoff field will inoculate us against people being upset about the randomness of the playoffs. Obviously people will be upset when their team loses, but perhaps we'll not extrapolate that to, and thus we need to change everything as we get that kind of conversation. So optimistic of you. I know. It's just, you know, because it really comes to the fore when you have a team that way outclassed another team during the regular season and maybe, you know, won the division and then, like, gets eliminated in a short series against a team that won a wild card and had 20 fewer wins or something. That's what really wrinkles. And there just

won't really be any potential for that to happen this year because just none of the teams is that good. And so I don't know that anyone could, well, they will. I don't doubt people's ability to be upset about stuff. But I just don't know that we would have like what we had two or three years ago where it seemed like everything was sort of set up to be a perfect storm of playoff discourse just because you did have some upsets, you know, as much as anything can be an upset in the baseball playoffs because it's just also random. But there were teams that were clear favorites and teams that were clear underdogs. And that just won't really be the case to nearly the same extent this postseason. So I hope that that means that we can all just

kind of embrace the randomness of it and accept that it doesn't have to mean anything and it isn't necessarily a travesty. But yeah, maybe I'm being over-optimistic here. But I guess that's something we can talk about when we're previewing the playoffs a month or so from now. But, you know, I think, look, if you locked off a team, if you made it back into a 10-team playoff format this season. I guess it would be a more exciting race because the two teams at the bottom now that have their spots sewn up more or less would then be duking it out for that final spot. So you'd artificially have a race there that doesn't exist now. But there are other seasons where the opposite would be the case. And you get essentially an extra race that you wouldn't

get otherwise because of, so yeah, even people who are very anti-expansion of the playoff field will generally acknowledge that you can't just ping pong back and forth and fit your argument to the vagaries of the standings and just, you know, the distribution of wins in the most recent season because we all have recency bias and we say, oh, we didn't like that, therefore we should make this change, but then you look back a few years and you realize that, oh, you would have screwed yourself over, actually, if you had made that change in a previous season. Right. Right.

Yeah. It's just, I think we need to accept that there is, it can just depend. It can just depend on the air. I think that we would be better served if we mustered all of the energy around it into getting the tiebreaker game back. I think that that's, that should be our priority. Yeah, that seems doable. It does seem doable.

Just go on it. What's November 2nd versus November 1st, you know? Yeah. Like, what's one more? And build in an off day for Halloween while you're at it. I'm just saying, like, what are we doing with scheduled World Series games? We want to give out candy. We want to sit in our driveway.

That's what we do in this neighborhood. And they like people, folks sit in their driveways, which I, that's just what we do. I don't know. I participate. I'm a community member. I'm not here to ruffle feathers. And I have to be a trick-or-treat escort now. I'm in that stage in my life.

Yeah, that's so exciting. A company, my kid, on the trip-or-treating. So, yeah. Do you just go in the building or do you go out into the world? Yeah, since she was so young, we didn't venture far. And she was happy with a hall that, you know, just our building sufficed. But as she gets bigger, probably her ambitions will get bigger. Oh, sure, yeah.

That was certainly the case. When I was a kid, I wanted to go to the high-rise, you know, go to a friend's house. My building wasn't big enough. Let's go to the friend's house who has a 40-something story place or whatever. Just maximize the possible loot. I think that that's right. Although maybe she'll end up being one of those kids where she's like not a candy kid. You know, like sometimes that happens where you're like, I'm not a candy kid.

It's too sweet. Yeah. I didn't have the sweetest tooth, but I enjoyed my Halloween halls. But anyway, I think we can certainly draw big picture conclusions. about the effects of expanding the playoff field. And we know that it's inevitably going to lower the bar generally for what qualifies as a playoff team. And it's going to, in some ways, devalue the regular season

and extend the postseason. If we didn't explicitly say this, by the way, the other day, we were talking about how the season keeps starting earlier and earlier. The next year is going to be the earliest domestic opening day ever. Maybe I thought it went without saying, I'm not sure. Sometimes we get an email from someone who makes a point, and I think, didn't we say that, but I don't know. Either they missed it or maybe it was, I just sort of thought it in my head and didn't vocalize it. Yeah, but that has a lot to do with the fact that the playoffs have expanded, of course.

So the season, regular season, stayed the same length for a lot of the time. We just kept moving opening day earlier and earlier to accommodate the longer and longer playoffs. So that's why that has happened. more or less. But anyway, I think that it is sort of a dull ending to the season if you're in it for playoff races and if the arguments for the expanded playoffs other than maximizing revenue, which would be the owner's arguments or, you know, their real desires would be, well, more fan bases are invested. More fans have a reason to tune in because their team is theoretically in it. And that's less the case this year than it has been.

of late. So that's probably a net negative, though, I will just still say, like, don't sleep on some of the races that are still out there. Like, even though the 12-team field may be all but set, barring some really exciting finish, you still got divisional races to sort out here. You still have seating at stake. And I know that's less exciting than just are you in or out, you know, whether you get a buy or not or get the bragging rights in your division or not. but it's not nothing. Yeah, and it matters, it matters a lot, you know, or it can, you know, and for some teams maybe more than others, depending on the, like the underlying health

of your roster, but we also, you know, Jay has spent the last two days, like, detailing some of the recent injuries that have befallen contenders and guys are dropping left and right. Corey Seeger doesn't have an appendix anymore. I mean, Rangers fringe contender at this juncture and probably out of it now, given some of their recent injury look, or bad luck, rather. But, yeah, there's, like, all these guys getting hurt, although guys coming back, too. Real land of contrasts on the aisle right now, you know?

Yeah. I meant to cite this earlier. The Royals do have the highest playoff odds of any of the non-top 12. Yeah. And they're at 12.7%. And then after that, it's less than half that single digits for Rangers, Reds, Guardians, giants, raise, et cetera, the team's on the periphery. So, yeah, looking like real long shots.

One thing that I am actually enjoying is the prominence of young pitchers, rookie pitchers, in some of these races. Or if the races themselves aren't that interesting, then the prospect of postseason starts by some of these phenoms. I mean, that's getting me going. Some of these pitchers are playing very important roles in potential playoff rotation. and just a new arrival by the day, it seems like, and under the wire in time to qualify for a playoff roster. Though, you know, you can always get sort of squeezed onto a roster if you were in the organization, at least before September. But, you know, we're seeing the Mets calling up multiple pitchers.

We talked about Jonah Tong the other day. He's debuting Friday. And then Nolan McLean is off to a fantastic start for them. and the Red Sox have called up Peyton Toley to go against Paul Skeez. So that's fun. The Yankees called up Cam Schlittler. He has pitched extremely well. You have confidence.

You did well. You did fine. Yeah, it was Kim Schlittler. There you go. Just say it with some confidence. Say it with my chest. But yeah, he's been pitching well. The minor league numbers have translated for him.

And then, of course, you have the MIS and you have, I guess, the Cubs, Cade Horton. and some other guys who've been up a little longer. But I'm really liking just these late arrivals, the cavalry common, the reinforcements showing up just in time to bolster some of these potential playoff rotations. And it's hard for me to get invested in young pitching prospects these days just because it just feels like their days are numbered and I don't want to get too attached.

And yet this is kind of a counter to that because I can just get excited for the rest of. of this season. And, you know, probably they won't spruing between now and in October or November, fingers crossed. Why would you even say it like that? I know, sorry. So.

Why would you even say it like that? But if I can't get into like. Like candles to do a little circle or something. I don't know how magic works, but I think we should try a couple of different things, cover our bases. Ward off the snapped UCLs. But even if I can't say to myself, I'm going to get to enjoy these guys for the next decade because who the heck knows when they'll just disappear for a year or two but down the stretch

at least this is fun these guys are good i like when a phenom arrives yeah it's i mean it's thrilling and you can it's one of those times where the effect that it has on the energy and the ballpark even just watching on tv is so palpable and i think you know this isn't to knock like when you have a great position player prospect who comes up and like lights the league on fire and everyone's like oh my god he's a savior but when you have like a good starter come up and like really they're just they're just the center of attention in the course of any given start and so you get this like kind of crackling you know excitement like they're not winning every game they've cooled some from like winning literally every game but like it's so fun to watch brewer's games right now because Because the vibe in there is just, you can feel it coming through the TV, you know. Everyone's talking about Bernie Chalet with a great deal more specificity, too. They're like, Bernie Brewer, there's his chalet. I'm just enjoying how many chalet shots we've been getting.

It feels like there have been a lot of them. But, you know, it's just like a, it does imbue it with like an energy and an excitement. And, you know, I do think that an undercurrent in all of those moments is, holy, crap please don't break you know there is sort of a we're afraid to love again yeah enjoy it last enjoy the the Jared Jones phenom phase because sure it may be taken away from you quite quickly but you know like sometimes you get lucky and they stick around and they make a they make like an important part of your your memory of a given season and and potentially a given postseason And I will say, I have finally found faults with Mizorowski.

And sure, like one can quibble with the command of times. But you didn't see in the facial hair he's trying to grow? No. What's he rocking these days? And look, I don't know what Mrs. Deal is. Sometimes people have patchy facial hair because that's just the patchiness of their facial hair. Sometimes, like, people are dealing with like alopecia symptoms. So I don't want to, if a young man is dealing with a thing, I hope that he and

Rueers fans will forgive my ignorance of that and toss this take into the trash bin of history. But I'll just say, Jacob, between you and me, it's not making you look older. It's making you look younger because it's not a full, it's not a full thing, you know? I see. Yeah. You know, when young men are like starting to get facial hair for the first time in their lives? And like it kind of has like a surprisingly youthful effect because you're like, oh, buddy. Like you can't...

Peach fuzz, yeah. You know, and like, it's, again, a little patchy. And so I just, like, you can throw 197 miles an hour exaggeration. Like, you just, that's the stuff. You don't have to worry about the beard. He's just so worried about that. Also, I'm sorry, you can't credibly be trying to grow a beard and be that excited about opening a Pokemon cards, which, again, adorable. But come on, come on, come on, come on.

So, shave it. Boy, people are going to be mad at you. the same people who were upset about the Warhammer. No, I'm not, I am not knocking the great game that is Pokemon. And I know many adults who enjoy the great game, Z multiple, that is our Pokemon. But I am simply saying that that degree of delight is one that I associate with a very young person. And guess what?

He is one. I'm not misstating the case. I'm simply saying, like, that's your vibe. Linnit's your vibe. That and you're like absurd festival. I do that. That's fine. That's fine. This patchy facial hair stuff is not doing you any favors. This is coming from someone who cares. Okay? I enjoy watching The Miz, even though it has meant using a wrestling nickname a lot. And you know how I feel about that. Send emails about my wrestling takes. Like, I'm right about this. Yeah. You stick to your guns. There are certain things that you just don't quite cut into. Not always. I'm, you know, I am open to. new information, and I hope that I absorb it where appropriate, but one cannot

endlessly flip and flop, you know, like there, you should be open, you should be adaptable, you should update your priors, but you should have principles too, you know, like have conviction. And one of my principles is that he should shave that visual hair. I think it would, I think it would serve him well, you know, because it's like very patchy. Concluded that certain things are not for you, and that is perhaps one of them. But in contrast to that, some of these other young pitchers, are sporting facial hair that ages them significantly. Yes.

And I don't know if it's, I guess it's just the thickness. It's the difference maybe between the attempt at a beard or a goatee of some sort and a mustache because a mustache ages a man, I guess. It's just maybe it's hard to look really young with a mustache because Peyton Tolley, people have been joking about him, you know, top Red Sox pitching prospect. And you would not know his age to look at him. Yeah. He has a somewhat lined, creased face and also the just bushy mustache that belies his years. And Nolan McLean has some of that going on too. So maybe the mustache is the key, assuming that you can grow a satisfactory mustache because Peyton Tolley is 22 years old.

Right. He was born in 2002. So, yeah. Yeah, and he just he does not look like that. I mean, I guess he's almost 23, but still, like, he looks older than that. So maybe it's the facial hair. And maybe that's a good move because it can make you look older and more mature physically. Sure.

If you're capable of growing it. But if not, you've got to know your strengths and your tools. I agree. Again, really, people should present themselves, however, makes them happiest, you know. And if Mr. Oskie wants to wear a beard patchy, though it may be, this is his prerogative, you know, he gets to. Yeah, it's a time to experiment. It's a phase in your life where you're figuring out who you are. Right.

He's so young, you know, and he has to do this when his job is observed. And that's so strange, you know, to be so young and to have so much focus on you. I was, have you just allow a minor digression that I swear has some, some. baseball relevance. Have you been watching the U.S. Open at all? Have you been watching any of the U.S. Open? Yeah. And I've certainly followed the drama, but there's been a bunch of drama. Is this related to Carlos Alcaraz's bus cut? It is not. It is actually going to be a, so it's related to the like observational observation. So I was watching Cocoa Goff's match. And I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the name of the woman she was facing. But she was having some discomfort,

Coco Gough, Coco Gough's opponent, was having some discomfort in her right arm and had to take a medical time out at one point. And I'm, I am a real novice, a rube from six when it comes to tennis. But I do like watching the open as fun. And Cocoa Gough is great. And like, obviously, like, that was a really difficult match for her. And to watch her triumph was so cool and da-da-da. And her name is Coco. And it's a very different name than Simone.

So I don't know why there was confusion there at the end. But anyway, you know, her. opponent is being assessed by like the opens medic because i think they have like a neutral medical staff that comes and like make sure that you're okay and what have you and the camera in football you go into the blue medical tent you know you go into the blue medical tent when you have an issue sometimes because they have to take your pants off and they don't want to do that on the sideline but but often just for privacy sometimes you have your pants on is my understanding in them they don't just like automatically take your pants off when you get in the blue medical

tent. But like if you have a lower body injury, sometimes they have to remove your pants or whatever. But it's for privacy. And I was shocked. They are right up on this woman. And she's getting, you know, felt on. And like they're trying to figure out what's going on with her. And like after that she had trouble serving. And she's like flexing her hand. And I was like, is it like a nerve thing? Like is something pinched? But I was like, why are we being treated to like this degree of proximity? Like they should have a blue medical tent at the open. Like, like, this is crazy that we are watching and she's just like right there and you know she's trying to like have a neutral face and I'm like is she I you know is she going to be honest with the medic about like what it feels like because the camera's right there I just was like anyway it made me think about all of these guys you know and particularly the young players like they have so much scrutiny on them several of them because they are pitching so well or like really at the center of their, not only their team's hopes of making the playoffs, but, like, of having an extended playoff run.

And I just, I don't know. I just, like, everybody seems like they're doing okay, but I just hope everybody's doing okay. It made me, it made me worry about, like, I thought of Mizorowski, not because, like, he's had to be felt on, you know, he had that one, like, little injury scare, but it wasn't his arm. But it's just, like, really up in there.

I think we should be less up in, and maybe that's weird for me to say as a media member, But just like, you know, like when they go down in the tunnel, when they are getting felt on. And like, sometimes they're on the mound when that happens. And so like, what are you going to do? But like, I couldn't believe it. Maybe we need a mound shaped medical tent. Yes.

Carry it out there. Yeah. Or like something. I don't know. And part of it is in baseball, it's like if you were to remove them to another place to be assessed, like, you know, then it's like you're taking them out of the. game. So, like, you'd have to, yeah, you'd have to, like, wheel it out and put up a little pop-up tent. I don't know. I don't know that that's a great solution, but I was just like, I don't know if I, if I made the case that this was a relevant digression, but I was thinking about

all these folks. I was just like, Jesus, like, why are we? I don't feel like I should be able to be watching this. It's like during, during the NBA finals, when they have the camera that's, like, up the tunnel before the guys get to the locker room when they're hurt. And I'm like, Once they're past the tunnel, I feel like we shouldn't be watching. I feel like that should be obscured from our view. Like, I don't need to – Tyrese Halliburton just blew his Achilles. Everybody saw that. I don't need to see him crying.

That feels invasive. Almost invasive, yeah. Yeah, like, leave his – Yeah, see what you mean. It's extreme scrutiny. It's close inspection. It goes with the territory, but it is very strange territory. I do have one slight bone to pick.

I don't know if it's with Nolan McLean or – or just with the way that people refer to Nolan McLean. So we talked about Jonah Tong being nicknamed the Canadian Canon, which I love and wholeheartedly approve of. It's so great. Yeah, and totally in favor of young players having fun nicknames. Yeah. So Nolan McLean, his baseball reference page, says that his nickname is Cowboy Otani. Now that sounds like quite a nickname, Cowboy Otani.

Right. But the origin of the nickname, I feel like he has forsaken any claim he had to the nickname Cowboy Otani because it came from the fact that he was a two-way player in college and he played for the Cowboys. Right. He played for Oklahoma State. And so at the time, he was called Cowboy Otani. Okay. Yeah. He earned it, you know, he was a legitimate two-way player in college. And then he carried that two-way play into the minor leagues after he was drafted.

He did debut as a two-way guy for the Mets. And he put up a 565 OPS in 35 games at AA last season, which, you know, that's impressive in the grand scheme of things, but it's not going to cut it. And so he decided he was going to specialize and he was just going to be a pitcher. And that seems to be working out fine for him. But I think he has now, speaking of forfeited, he has forfeited the nickname Cowboy Otani. We cannot continue to call him Caboia. And I don't know if he's calling himself this or whether people are just, you know, enjoying the nickname, which, you know, it's a fun nickname. But I just don't think we can credibly call him that anymore because that phase of his life is behind him.

And it's sort of an insult to liken him to Otani now that he is not hitting and that he essentially showed that he couldn't hit at that level. Right. An assessment was made that he was very much not Cowboy Otani, right? Yeah. They were like, that's not you. You're a great pitcher, and he's had a very, you know, speaking of young guys having a good start, right? Like, it's been a very good start to his big league career. But, yeah, he's not, he, definitionally not Cowboy Otani anymore, which is fine. Like, he is not a cowboy anymore.

He's either. Yeah. Not even that. He was still Cowboy Otani. We can't take that away from him retroactively, but it's just that it does not just, he, He does not retain the title now that he is no longer a cowboy or a two-way player. Yeah, I, you know, and he remains like a, I imagine, like a proud alum. And so perhaps in his heart, he still fancies himself a cowboy.

I think that the OSUs should have to have more distinct logos and color schemes. I get got by that a lot. That doesn't happen to you because you don't watch college sports very much. But Oregon State and Oklahoma State is very similar. And they are orange. So I don't care for that. I think they should have to be more different from each other than they are because it can be kind of confusing. You know, if you're just flipping through the various ESPNs, you're like, which one is this?

And then you have to think about it for a minute. And that's annoying. Yeah. It's in me. And I was highlighting just young, interesting pitchers for playoff teams. But it's also nice when a non-playoff team gets a look at a young pitcher too. So Bubba Chandler coming up with the Pirates, we talked about his impending arrival. He has arrived.

He has impressed. And also, Braxton Ashcraft has been pitching well for the pirates. And so suddenly you can start to dream again of just like a all homegrown, you know, get Jones back. And then you have Skeens and Chandler and Jones and Ashcraft and Keller or whoever else is. is, you know, bringing up the rear, like, still don't get too excited because it's still the pirates and it's still Bob Nutting. But, like, you know, and that's probably not the way to build a successful team. That's not the firmest foundation for a winner in this era to just say, I'll construct a rotation top to bottom of homegrown flamethrowers. And they will just carry us to victory for the next decade or so.

Don't count on it. But that's an exciting prospect, at least. So that can salvage the sad end to a season, perhaps. Maybe not for Pirates fans who've just, you know, been fooled and beaten down for too long now to really have hope. But for other teams, perhaps fans of other teams, you know, those guys come up and give you a sneak preview, just a glimpse of what could be to come. And that's a silver lining. That's ending on an up note even if you're not competitively. yeah i i um oh god they just need some hitters man they just really need some hitters those

pirates but like it's it is kind of incredible and it can really buoy one's spirits i do think that it feels a little bit better and this is not just a pirate specific observation um although you know also that but i do think it feels a little bit better when uh it's a position player coming up and has like us because there's just again you don't have to have the like oh, when you're going to break, though. When you're going to break, though? You don't have to have that as much. Not the position players don't get hurt.

Corey, see you doesn't have an appendix anymore, you know? Yeah. Do you associate that as a childhood thing? Yeah. I associate appendix issues more with children. Again, not saying, people are going to be like, why do you think that only babies are named blah blah? And why do you think only children have appendix issues?

Although it does seem to happen more with kids, right? Isn't it a more common? Dr. Ben? Am I right? I guess if something's going to go wrong, odds are it'll happen earlier rather than later. It's not like tonsils, I don't think. Like, you know, tonsils tends to be kids. Oh, maybe it's a tonsils thing.

Appendices. Is that just in books? I don't know. Yeah, like appendixes. What is the plural of appendix? Because you only have one. Yeah. So.

I mean, hopefully you only have the one. The one you have is useless already. Like, what do you? If Nolan McLean were a pirate's pitcher, maybe. he could cowboy up and get out there and grab a bat because I'm not sure that they have that many superior alternatives to the onlyically. It is pretty rough. Yeah.

It's kind of rough out there. Okay. Well, we can end this Friday show and sail into the long weekend with a few emails here. Here is one from Greg, which is related to sproying and pitcher injuries. Greg, Patreon supporter, who quotes Michael Bauman, who was writing about Grayson Rodriguez and starts the quote, mid-sentence in Medius Reyes, Medias, Media Rez, however one pronounces that, ongoing elbow issues that have kept Grayson Rodriguez out of action all year. And then a parenthetical from Bauman, I'm not comfortable calling Rodriguez's injury season ending because the question of whether you can end something that never started is an ontological conundrum I'm not equipped to solve. Yeah.

And Greg says this, whether you have to appear. prior to a season-ending injury, seems like something effectively wild should have a position on. So I don't think you do. It is, I think, important to distinguish when you're talking about a player whether he is, I don't know that that's the way I'd say it. I don't think it's wrong,

but I don't think it would be the way that I would write it and copy, right? Like, I would refer to a player. Like, if a guy needed Tommy John, I would probably say something to the effect and he will miss next season with or he will miss this season with. Like I would put it in those terms rather than saying that it was a season-ending injury. I do think you say that more often in instances where play has commenced even if that play is like just spring training. But I don't think it's wrong.

It is season-ending. It's just, you wouldn't say a season-skipping injury. That sounds ridiculous. Then it's like, what does that mean? season skipping injury. Yeah. I'm just surveying all the dictionaries to find out the correct pronunciation of immedious race, which I guess is it.

But I just heard three different pronunciations from the pronunciation guide. So there seems to be some dispute about this. Maybe it's a U.K. U.S. thing. No, I think you can have a season-ending injury even if your season never got started. Yeah. If you were attempting a comeback or if there was some potential. for you to come back, because I don't know, like, it's a season-ending injury if it's early in the season.

And, you know, you sprang in March or April or something, I might say that's a season-ender. But then if it's like September or if it's August or something, well, see, sometimes you hear season-ending injury because you get to this stage in the season, and suddenly non-severe injuries are also season-ending. Right, that's true. You pull the muscle and you're done for the year. That's it. So you do start to hear season ending at this stage.

But if you never played in the season and it's late in the season, I think you would have had to have a credible hope of coming back. Because if everyone had already written you off, then maybe it's just like, yeah, we already assumed that the season was over. So we don't even have to confirm that it was season ending. but but no you can you can end a season that never got started because there's at least potential for it to start right and and this ends any hope of it starting of your season proceeding and that yeah that officially that's the nail in the coffin of that season it's a seasoning injury i'm okay with it i think i'm okay with it too i again like i do think that there are times where you might you might opt to say it a little differently for clarity's

sake, but I don't think it's wrong, and I wouldn't wrestle at it if it appeared. Yeah. Okay. I would trust Baumann to wrestle with such an ontological, philosophical question as much as anyone. Yeah, I agree. But, you know, sometimes you got a file, you know. That's true.

Sometimes you got a file. Yeah, you're on deadline. Yeah. It's hard to muse about these things. Yeah. Okay. Here's one from James in Claremont, California. When people sign in their signature, they say where they're from.

I like to read that. It's nice to be reminded that people are listening all over the country, all over the world. You're not obligated to identify where you live, to docks yourself. But if you care to share, then I will share. And James says, does Fangraph's War or any other measurement consider what was desired at the time by players? For example, prior era pitchers viewed complete games, much more importantly than today's give your best effort for as long as you can. Prior batters strived for batting average, much more than today's OPS focus. I think this would change our perspective on players through

history and their greatness. It would. It might. Yeah. But no. No. It doesn't. How could you possibly do. How could you possibly? Yeah. But I do think that it is a part of the appeal of a stat like war part of the explanatory power of a stat like war is the degree to which it allows you to compare players across eras right and have an understanding of like how how would they stack up but like so many other conversations related to war i hope people take that as like a starting point rather than um saying oh well that's that this guy's better than that guy even though like that guy might be better than that guy and it might not be close right and the war might point to that but I do hope that when we're trying to think about, like, you know, why does a player's career look

the way that it does, that we're taking all of that stuff into consideration. It would be, if you didn't know anything about baseball, you're on alien earth. Is it just Earth? Are they just on Earth? It's just Earth. Okay. But you're on Earth in the show, Alien Earth. And you're talking to, who's the character who likes baseball? Good question. You're talking to the guy who likes baseball. And you don't know anything about baseball because you're like, I don't know why I know what Ben Lindbergh and Mayor Raleigh said, like hundreds of years ago since I don't like baseball, but they were questioning whether I would know anything about baseball. I don't get your references. And you're talking to the baseball guy. And you're trying to, and so you're curious and you're

like, oh, I'll go back and look at all, I'll look at stats. And then you're like, oh, I've noticed that like pitchers, starting pitchers, you usually pitch a lot. And now they've, then they started to pitch less. and like if you didn't know anything about baseball you might be totally confused by that it would be a mystery you'd have this conundrum and so it's like it needs to be a starting point to inquiry and just like you would need to understand like you might look at a guy's single season war and you're like why is that low he was a great player oh he was injured or maybe he went to war like literally went to war you know and so you didn't you're like why did he miss that year oh he was he didn't have war because he was in war you know so I you know, it's useful to keep in mind the limitations of the stat in any number of directions. But I hope that when people bump up against them, it's the start of like, oh, I got to go find out more about that. Like, I think that that's one of the exciting things about it is that it can spark further curiosity. Yeah. I do think about this. It's a worthwhile question. And if we could somehow adjust for mindset and know what was in every player's mind and heart or what their team was telling them, If we had that perfect information, maybe you could provide some variant, some alternate flavor and adjust for that.

But it'd be a thorny thing to do even if you somehow knew what players were intending to do. Well, and this is the other thing about it. It's like on an individual player basis, we don't know what those guys were being told. I mean, we might, but like you're not going to be able to replicate that over an entire player population. And like you can be told to do something. it can be a team priority, and maybe you're not capable of executing it. How do you deal with that? You know, it's like I, yeah.

Yeah, you will hear older players say sometimes former players, oh, if I had known that, you know, you wanted me to take walks, I would have taken walks. But I'm always somewhat skeptical of that because it's not as easy as flipping a switch necessarily. And sometimes you just are a certain type of player, and that's your game. And there were always players who did things that are now more valued than they were in their time. So either they just were that kind of player and that was just the type of player that they were bound to be, regardless of what was invoke at the time, or they actually did perceive that there was some hidden value there, in which case I guess you could almost give them extra credit or something for being so ahead of their time. But, you know, there were people who took tons of walks, just Max, camera eye, bishop, and all these people, you know. Just people who were ahead of their times would have been Moneyball darlings if they had played decades later. And, you know, Eddie Yost, the walkin man.

Right. Like, you know, people realized that that was useful at the time, even if it wasn't as widely valued. So, I don't know. Like if no one had done those things in those era, like it hadn't occurred to anyone yet. And so every single player just fit the same mold of like all contact and swinging away and everything. And like no one could even. Right. It hadn't happened yet.

Then maybe I'd be more sympathetic to that idea. But I don't know. Then you just do era adjustments, which I guess war already does, right? So you're already error adjusting to the offensive environment to some. extent. And also on some level, I guess it doesn't matter what your intention was because we're retroactively looking and saying, this is what this was worth based on our modern understanding, which is maybe a better understanding in some ways than the contemporary understanding. And whether or not you were trying to do this or trying to do that or had the appropriate incentives,

this is just what you were worth. So it's, I mean, that's what war is aiming to do, essentially. It's It's measuring the value of the output, but it's not trying to assess what the potential of that player was in some hypothetical scenario. Like, it's an interesting what if, but it's kind of beyond the purview of the stat. Right. It's not what the stat is trying to accomplish. Right. Yeah. Okay. Here's a question from Dave, a pedantic question about rounding home. So Dave says, I recently ordered some baseball gear from Marucci, and they sent me an email saying that my order. order was rounding home when it was on its way. This is baffling to me. You can't round home, can you? Does anyone say that? How does an official partner of MLB make a mistake like this?

So there's a screenshot of the email and it says subject line, your Marucci gear is rounding home. And then there's a little image and it says Marucci, almost home. Your gear is on the way. Your package is rounding home. You can track your order below. So, yeah, that doesn't work, right? You can't round home. You can reach home. You can cross home plate. You can touch home plate.

I think people say rounding home. Rounding home? Can you, really? Do people say that? I think people say rounding home. Because you just, you run through home. You don't really round it, do you? You round the bases.

I mean, I guess after you score, you have to turn to go to the dugout. Right. But rounding home. I think people do say that. I think they do. I think people say rounding home. Maybe. Sounds odd to me.

I don't disagree with that when you think about it for even. Rounding third, rounding third. Second even. Maybe that maybe when people, I'm not saying I say it. Okay. Everybody relax. Preemptively, relax. I think that what people do is their brains, their brains meld a couple of things

the other they take rounding third it should just say rounding third that's more descriptive of the state of the package anyway and heading home heading home it's like when i conflated uh no skin off my back and and by the skin of your teeth right the other day and then we were all left with a horrifying image we were just like yeah i want to think about my gums zero percent of my day you know that's one of my goals no gum thoughts i don't care for gums or fingernails but i'm i'm Googling it, and I'm seeing some stuff. But I think you're right that it's like a, it's a malaprope, malapism. Yeah, what an episode we're having.

Yeah, that's malapropism. Let's go with that. I think it is a malapropism where you are, where you are bringing together, rounding the bases, rounding third, and going home all into one moosh. But you shouldn't say rounding third because it's like home is where it needs to, to go to the thing. Right. But because it's an order that they're shipping to you, they want a shoehorn home in there to say it's coming to your home. I think that that's right. It's approaching your home, but they want a baseball idiom because it's a baseball gear.

Right. Yeah. So yes, let's establish, let's establish our facts. Inaccurate way of describing things, a thing that people say, very strange in the context of this email when you could say rounding third, which would be a more apt. Rounding third and heading home. Yeah. Right. Right. Let me just say rounding third.

Because like baseball people who are the ones who are presumably ordering baseball gear would be like, yeah, rounding third, that's clever. But instead, we're getting emails. And I want to make clear good email because like, what is that about? Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking, yeah, it seems like there have been some things that were titled rounding home. So it looks like Greg Swindell's partner or ex-partner wrote a memoir called Rounding Home.

And then there was a 2006 movie that is baseball-related that I've never heard of called Rounding Home. And then there's like maybe a self-published or a Kindle book called Rounding Four Home that looks baseball-related. Rounding Four Home. Yeah, these all look sort of, and wow, that just came out this March. Wow. But it looks like these are all sort of, I don't know, lower budget or less prominent things. Like maybe a more prominent publisher would have caught it and said, don't you mean rounding? Yeah, so I think that this is right, that it is wrong.

Yes, I agree. Yes, I agree. All right. Here's one from Elle, who says, I was at a Harrisburg Senator's game and couldn't resist trying out the classic offering of seeing how hard you can throw on a. radar gun, despite the fact that I was wearing platform converse heels at the time. Good for you. And while I assumed up front, this would be a disadvantage, I had to wonder if maybe it could actually be advantageous.

Pitchers benefit from height and are on average the tallest players on the field. The height of the mound has correlated to pitcher performance as well. A look at the official baseball rules comes across to me as ambiguous on the question. Rule 3.03I states, no player shall. attach anything to the heel or toe of his shoe other than the ordinary shoe plate or toe plate, but does not define shoe plate if a heel is considered not ordinary, perhaps just a shoe where the sole is thicker across the board would avert that problem. Our pitchers may be leaving something on the table by not commissioning themselves some

70s disco-style platform baseball cleats. Or sometimes you see, you know, it's like the, sometimes you see a politician who is perhaps. You can just say Ronda Sanchez. I could just say Ronda Santis. Yeah. You know, standing at an awkward angle that's people caption photos of you like first day at standing school or something. And then there's a day at standing school. There's reporting about how there was some kind of custom boutique boot or something.

Yeah. But that, it always looks like. like it would make you less mobile and less balanced. And it's just it has to compromise your agility, right? So that's, you know, if you're naturally tall, then that's one thing. But if you're swaying on moon shoes or something, then that's a little bit different. So I think that there would be a couple of things that I would be concerned about. The first would be the potential instability it would introduce to your ankle in the

course of the delivery because to all you folks out there who've ever like try to walk fast in heels and done a bad job, you know, when your ankle does that little root and you're like, oh, did I turn it? No, okay, I'm okay. And so I would imagine that through the course of the throwing motion, you would be at risk of at various points of like really goofing up your ankle. But the, I think the most obvious potential downside is like if you have to field the ball off the mound out of all. Now, part of the potential danger slash humor of this is the inexperience that big league pitchers would likely have. I don't know what they do at home. So I'm not going to speculate that they have no experience or that none of them do. But, you know, like in general,

I imagine not a lot of walking around in heels or on platforms experience. And some of that might be overcome with reps but look i think that um the game is a more accepting place than it used to be but mostly you would just get the piss taken out of you by your teammates if you tried to do this and i'm not saying that's right but i am saying that's what would happen plus you turn your ankle and then fielding can you imagine trying to do like yeah he's from and you're coming down off the mound and you're just like like a like a giraffe fresh out of the or like a of like a little baby horse, you know, and it's like, oh, he's got to get up or he's going to die. Yeah.

You know, like that. Yeah. You'd be like a little, you'd be like a little horse in heels, like a little horse and heels, like a little horse and heels, you know. Yeah. The snapability of horse, like, stresses me out. I mean, yeah, man. Sure. I'm not one there.

I just, anytime I'm watching a horse-related thing with my wife and there's like any sort of stumble or just any. Anything happens to the horse, I'm just like, oh, got to put him down because that's what I've just been conditioned to expect based on all the horse fiction that I have consumed in my life. It just seems like an evolutionary disadvantage. It seems like, I mean, probably we have done that to the horses. I imagine conditioning them that way. I couldn't comment on that with any authority. I don't know about horses. Seems cruel sometimes.

Oh, yeah. Sometimes places get shut down because of that. or so yeah yeah it's uh anyway be careful out there horses and people training and riding them but no i i i do think yeah this would be a like they shoot pitchers don't they sort of situation i think if you were if you were balancing on just extreme heels i i think that would compromise your capacity to to pitch to be accurate and look some people yeah like the stability the instability that it would introduce now i don't want to say that no one could do it because there are people who do athletic stuff in heels that i marvel at um i've never been i've never

been a great heel walker you know that's never been a skill of mine um yeah and i find them you know they're uncomfortable it's not for me i used to have to wear i mean i wore suit and heels most days for years. And then I was like, I'm going to grad school where I can be in sweats. This is great. Much better. Going to change careers so I can stay in sweats forever. Smart move on your part. Yeah. That wasn't the motivation, but in hindsight, it was one of the benefits. Yeah, it might be for me. It sits up there. You're like, I'm very clear about this. Whoa, the Red Sox released Walker Bueller. Yeah, see, this is what happens now. Like late August, I don't know.

how much of a break it is from the past, but seeing because of the waiver deadline not being a thing anymore. And like it was almost sort of a second trade deadline. And now you just get guys getting cut loose, Bueller and Isaiah Kine or Fla. I mean, it's not like great players, but it's players who might perhaps have a role somewhere. Anyway, I guess it spices up late August.

We started the episode by talking about whether there was enough intrigue. Who knows who will suddenly be cut a drift and be able to qualify for a playoff roster somewhere. But the other thing about this is that if it did confer any advantage, then it would instantly be outlawed if it's not outlawed already. So even if there's a loophole or you could argue that the letter of the law does not ban this, you'd have to camouflage it. You'd have to disguise it much better than Ron DeSantis allegedly did.

You'd have to have no one detect it. And then you'd be in the situation that George Costanza is when he's wearing his, his Tim's when he meets the woman, and then he feels like he can't ever take off his Timberlands because it makes him two inches taller, even though she sees through it the entire time. So then the pitcher would just, you know, like goes back to the clubhouse. He's going to have to keep the moon shoes on until everyone leaves. He'll never be able to be seen outside of them. But the goal isn't to, like, fool people about your height, right?

It's that the height is meant to confer some sort of advantage. I don't think anyone's like, oh, gosh, wow, can't people look down, you know. You know, they see your feet. Well, yeah, but if it does confer an advantage, then I think that would quickly lead to it being being banned. To give enough, like, Ryan of Sanchez is wearing, like, cowboy boots. So you can see where the lift is. Like, if you were doing, you'd be able to, you'd be able to, look, there aren't, there aren't there aren't that many women working in the game, but there are enough women working in the game to be like, do you see them?

You see this? People would be able to. And, and, you know, many of the men, too. I don't want to limit heel observation to the ladies. I guess in the comfort of the clubhouse, if your teammates are in on it on the conspiracy, you could perhaps. Right, but the opposing team would be able.

Let the dogs out. People in the stands would be able to tell. We all know Ronda Sanchez has lifts. Like, it's not a secret. Yeah, no, this is, then we'll get into the leg lengthening surgery, which also gives me the BBGBs. Let's not do that either.

And so, yeah, no. Did you watch the Malini show? Did you watch the, it's not everybody's in L.A. anymore. It's everybody's live. There was like a whole thing. Anyway, they took a call from a guy who had leg lengthening surgery and, like, waited to the end to be like, it went badly.

And I was like, oh, my God. Do no one see Gattaca? Like, it wasn't portrayed as going great. Yeah. That's the worst. Extremely not worth the squeeze. I think everyone just spew your hate. And I know that it can be rough out there for the short kings.

I don't want to downplay the difficulties you all face, but I don't think that light lengthening is the answer. That's just my opinion, though. Okay. Tom, Patreon supporter says, as you've discussed, baseball outcomes are more random than those in other sports. The better team isn't all that more likely to win. The Rockies went two and two against the Dodgers recently. Playoff series are more or less a coin flip, et cetera. Hypothetically, what changes could be made to make it more like basketball or football,

where a significantly better team is significantly more likely to win any given game, something like winner based on total bases instead of runs, longer games, one long inning that's 27 outs long so that sequencing matters less. That's like what the nationals were doing against the UKC the other day. If you want to break it up, you could just return runners to bases who were on at the end of the previous inning, something even more outlandish. So this correlates pretty closely with just the number of, possessions or the number of points essentially. So like, you know, in basketball, there's just a lot of

possessions, a lot of points. And so the randomness just gets drummed out of the game, essentially. And if you're the underdog, you want small sample, you want volatility. Right. And basketball just doesn't really afford that. And, you know, tennis is sort of in the same boat. It's fairly predictable just because there are a lot of points and a lot of sets and so forth. And so you'd have have to no blue tents no no blue tents you just have to have more baseball basically which is the opposite of what mlb seems to want just longer games more outs more innings that would that would do it but it would have to be a lot longer probably to have a really noticeable effect and then everyone would probably get bored and want to go home but uh yeah you just you kind of need more

opportunities to demonstrate your skill. So other than just adding out or innings, I don't know. That's like the obvious answer, but also something no one would really would want, really. Or yeah, like add more bases that you could round. I don't know, just make each run more difficult to get, like more stations along the way, something like that. Or, as Tom said, like, winner based on total basis instead of runs. Yeah, we've talked about scenarios like that where it's like you get fractional, partial runs based on base advancement or something like that. Or, yeah, like over the course of a series, maybe it's based on run differential instead of actual runs. And it crosses games.

And maybe that's a little more telling. So. Yeah, but here's the thing. it saps it of narrative, right? And we love that part of baseball, right? Like the ebb and flow of the game that it's so directly tied to what you see on the field, that's a good thing, you know?

That's something that we, like, and I understand this is like an exercise and ultimately no one actually wants to do this. But like, you know, would it tell you in any individual game or over the course of many, like which is the team that deserved to win more? Sure, but you would lose all this other

stuff. I also just don't want the scoring system of baseball to be so inscrutable that it's like the end of ticket to ride. We're like, I don't know what anyone's scores are. I don't even know if that's how ticket to ride works. I only played it the one time. And I was like, that was enough for me. I think I'm good. Yeah. Okay. Well, last two, David wants to know the worst feeling in baseball. What do you think is the worst on-field feeling in baseball? Is it grounding into an inning-ending double play when your team is making a rally, a pitcher walking in a run in a close game, or would it be something non-competition related, like unintentionally drilling and injuring and opposing batter, or colliding with a teammate who had clearly called for the ball, something else.

I'm excluding awful non-play-related things like hitting a fan with a foul ball. So, yeah, maybe we should just exclude injuries here, because obviously, you know, you deal some serious injury to someone unintentionally, then you're going to feel like a month. or terrible, even if it was a complete accident. So if we keep it to just purely competition and non-injury related, what do you think would feel worse? It's got to be yips, right? Like, you can't beat the yips.

Yeah, I think it's yips. And that can be true, like, on the mound or in the field. But I think, I think the yps would feel like definitely the, definitely the worst. Like, I just think about, I don't want to say that he has the. Yips. But I just, in that run of Yankees games where like all of their infield plays seem to involve an error and many of those seem to involve Anthony Volpe. Just a number of times that the camera would linger on him afterward and the look on his face. He knew the camera was on him in that moment. Talk about being observed all the time. And you could just like feel the discomfort

for radiating off of him, you know. Yeah. And so I, yeah, I think Yips would have to be it. In with the caveats that you mentioned. Yeah. I was thinking about Volpe to making two outs in that interminable inning when no one else could make an out, even if they were trying to. And he accounts for two of them. That probably feels pretty bad.

I mean, he probably feels bad in general, just given everything that is surrounding Anthony Volpe. now, but more broadly, yeah, if you, that was always, I thought, as a fan, one of the worst feelings to come so close to a comeback and then just come up short. And I know that teams will sometimes spin that in a positive way and say, oh, we showed some fight and we, you know, never say die attitude. And sure, maybe there's something to that. But I always felt completely deflated as a fan because I started to believe. And oh, my gosh, incredible comeback. It's going to happen and then oh we were so close the tying run was you know rounding third not yeah i don't know yeah that that always upset me so if i were the guy who made the last out in that situation

because you feel like it's a relay race and everyone's passing the baton and you're rallying and oh let's keep it going and foul off a pitch and just extend it you know get the bat in the next guy's hands and then you're the one who drops it that would feel bad even if you're you're Yeah. Most of the time hitters make outs. That's kind of the default assumption. But in that context, it would feel very bad. So, yeah.

I guess mental mistakes generally bug me more than physical mistakes and probably would make me feel worse as a player because you, you know, you forgive. It's hard to hit baseballs, throw baseballs, do everything they do on the field. But when you misjudge something, when it's more on you and your mental, process than just like your body betraying you or a bad hop or lack of coordination or something along those lines, then it's kind of easier to condemn or harder to let go of. So I guess that kind of covers it for the most part. Those would probably be the obvious bad things.

But if anyone has any suggestions for a highly specific worst case, please let us know. And then last one is from Garrett, Patreon supporter, who says, I'm not named Steve Rogers, but episode 2367's talk about usually memorable pitchers got me thinking about something I've come to appreciate about our current crop of contenders for best pitcher in baseball this year. As a Red Sox fan, I've been grateful to be able to watch Garrett Crochet's stellar 2025 season unfold and often find myself watching condensed games of the most recent starts made by similarly stellar pitchers from this year. scoble skeins otani the latter being less statistically accomplished but who cares he's a miracle and we can never take him for granted i find myself doing this right around crochet start days it's become my top tier pitching visual feast of sorts their respective deliveries all in their own way bring something to the game watching experience that feels memorable crochet sky high leg kick scubel's exclusiveness and expressiveness skeens's arm follow-through in general i never think about you at all hitter energy and otani's all around will blipiness and athleticism. And did you see his little finger gun, finger pistol gesture? That was a new one for him. I hadn't seen that before in his most recent start.

He was feeling himself. He went five innings. He got nine Ks. He got to say, he got the win, right? He was able to, wasn't that his first one? These starter traits. Not ever. Eventually boiled down to a question,

what do you think are your personal criteria or pitcher visual grades that you like the most about watching a great pitcher pitch or pitch? Does an uncommon delivery like Kershaws rise above as a carrying tool? Is a pitcher's relative size or stature like my childhood pitching god of Peak Pedro Martinez? The thing that makes a great pitcher look even better for spectators? What parts do body language, personality, or pitching approach really play in how much we like or loathe, sorry Blake Snell, watching a statistically great starter every fifth day? Always love hearing your thoughts.

So what appeals to you aesthetically about a pitcher or a starter specifically? I do like it when they can reliably go at least six. I like, what do I like aesthetically? I mean, look, I don't like strong counts. I know that that's goche, perhaps gosh. But I do. I enjoy watching them. I've really enjoyed Brian Wu's season.

Did you see that, I mean, so of you. But this most recent start he had was the first he'd had this year where he did. Yeah, complete six innings. And you feel like you're settling down with a warm blanket, you know, a cozy blanket. Yep. I like to see a mix of like intense focus and also joy coming off the mound. A combination of those things is really nice and not always on offer. Yeah.

Either joy or complete implacability or intensity, sharerian intensity. Yeah. I do like it when they Smile you smile more I like it when they look happy out there You know so much of And there's there's obviously room for the like really intense Like they come off the mound

They do the like Like you know if you can if you could see me right now I'm like both of my fists are clenched And I'm you know doing that like I did it scream that they do Although not at the volume because that seems rude in this particular setting. But like I also like it when they look happy coming off the out, you know, when it's like, it went well and they're smiling. And not that there is a room for

the other thing, but I think big emotion in response to triumph in professional athletics often involves like the yell, like the scream yell. And there is something very cathartic about that. And so I understand that piece of it. And it's such an intense thing you're doing. I like it when some of them are like smiley, you know, it's like, oh, this one, you know, like, that's cool. That's nice. Just because it's like a more diverse emotional landscape that you're being presented with. So I like that part of it, too. Pace used to matter more, of course, because there used to be more variability.

And so you're like a quick worker. And now everyone's quick enough, but there's still some distinction. Yeah. But, yeah, because now it's not so much just about the pace. Now it's just about unwillingness to throw strike. essentially. And, you know, a nibbler can be kind of interesting if they're a finesse guy, if they're a command guy and they're trying to expand the zone and it's cat and mouse and what can I get away with here. If there's someone who just can't really come inside and just throw it over

the middle, I don't know how many of those guys there are anymore, but that's the thing about Snell that's frustrating is that you feel like he's got this great stuff and he's still just expanding and trying to get chases. And, you know, often it works for him, but it's still sort of frustrating to watch him work. So, yeah, either just going right at guys and challenging and here it is hit it kind of power pitcher or, yeah, kind of the style of pitcher that we don't see so much anymore of just like trying to expand the zone and finesse and putting it exactly where the target is. That's fine. And of course, yeah, distinctive delivery. And, you know, you have fewer guys pitching from the full windup now anyway. But like, Yeah, if there's a leg kick or a herky jerky thing or some funk, then that definitely adds to the appeal. And a large repertoire, that's a big thing for me, you know. There's a certain satisfaction in seeing the late-inning reliever who just goes fastball slider and it's just unhittable and he just executes that game plan over and over again. But with a starter, you want someone, you want to, you darvish, you know, you want someone who like you don't even know what they're going to throw next and you're guessing just as the hitter is guessing.

And then especially when starters used to go deeper into games and they would vary what they were throwing as they went each time through the lineup to keep giving the hitter different looks. It's also giving you the spectator different looks. And so that's visually interesting if you're really locked in enough to pay attention to what this guy's throwing from pitch to pitch and oh, what did he throw the last time he faced that guy and you can see them varying it and maybe they're fastball heavy the first time through and then, oh, suddenly it's off speed and it's breaking stuff. That's fun. So, and there's certain pitches that are just like so, so nasty and just so visually pleasing. If it's just some big kind of lollipop pitch, if it's like a, you know, a sweeper that is a true sweeper that really sweeps all the way or just like your classic 12 to 6 curve or some nasty splitter or, you know, whatever it is, like just some really wicked movement that you can tell, especially if you've got kind of the directly behind the mound home plate ankle. and you can still see just extreme movement. Like, you don't even need the pitching ninja gif.

Like, you can just see it in real time. That's nice, obviously. Yeah. And I agree, like, an expansive repertoire is really exciting. I will say, though, that, like, when you get the guys who are so effective on, like, two pitches, who are starters, there is something kind of cool about that, too. Just, you know, like, Strider when he was something like, where you're like, wow, how are you doing? how are you doing this, you know, so that that can, I think that we just like being able to see a lot of different, a lot of different kinds of looks.

Like that's so fun, you know, that's really, you just have some sort of signature visual. Yeah. Even if you're Marianne Rivera or Kenley Jansen and you're just throwing the same cutter every time, that's your signature move. And it's kind of fun to anticipate that. And maybe the charm would wear off after an inning or two, which is all they're pitching. But still, to see them go out there and everyone knows what they're going to. to do, and then they do it anyway, and they do it so well that it works, then that's pretty

impressive. And also, like, extreme deliveries, body types, you know, submariners, sidearmers, super tall guys. Yes, super, love a super tall guy. Super short guys. Love a super short guy. You know, give me a short king as we were just talking about. Give me Bobby Shantz out there, you know, just like someone who is small for a pitcher and still makes that work.

But, yeah, some sort of deception, something. kind of wonky there. That's hesitation I enjoy. You know, it's like when pitchers, they talk about staying out of the dead zone, which is just like kind of the median, just that broad area of the distribution

where everyone's stuff moves like that. You just don't want to be that. You want to be unique or unusual or an outlier in some respect so that it's a different look. And maybe, you know, more important these days, another factor possibly lowering the strikeout rates, suppressing

strikeouts could be the advanced pitching machines, the trajectory arcs, who knows? Maybe guys are getting more looks and preparing for that and perhaps that is having some small effect there. So yeah, you want to be really distinctive because, you know, it benefits you because hitters see that kind of picture less often, but also we, the viewer, see that kind of picture less often. So that's what we want. We want something new and novel. Yeah, I agree. Okay. Maybe this would go without saying, by the way, but David's question about the worst on-field feeling in baseball, obviously giving up some crushing game winning or from your perspective, game losing, perhaps walk off home run in a playoff clincher, the sort of loss that will stay with you forever,

that will be replayed in highlights forever, that ends your season, that's going to be a bad feeling too. I was thinking a little more routine, but I guess this needn't be routine if it is the worst feeling. So surrendering a notorious, terrible soul-crushing home run that will haunt a fan base forever. You know the type of play I'm talking about. That's pretty bad. Also, when we talked about hitters having to supply the power on a slow pitch, I remembered a Rob Arthur piece that he wrote for 538 a decade ago in the first season of Statcast. I don't know if this holds up exactly, but he concluded at the time, as the headline said, a baseball's exit velocity is five parts

hitter, one part pitcher. So the hitter does determine the exit speed primarily, but the pitcher makes a meaningful contribution. And the position player pitcher who's lobbing it in there isn't making much of one. Oh, and one last question. This comes from Michael M.B. Patreon supporter. In the sixth inning of Saturday, August 23rd's Royals Tigers game, Michael Waka started a two-out played appearance against Dylan Dingler. These are real names, folks. Michael Waka. Dylan Dingler with 93 pitches. Jason Benetti and Andy Dirk's went. on an extended riff about Waka running out of gas but trying to get to the next exit

while Dingler and Waka engaged in a 15 pitch at bat. Dingler ended up taking a called third strike on a curveball that was well outside. My question is, would this be an advantageous time for the Royals to employ, quote-unquote, strategy? The old mid-plate appearance pitching change. The royals could have replaced Waka from pitch 7 through pitch 12

and still have given a new reliever a 2-2 count to work from, given that the advantage tilts to the hitter the longer a plate appearance continues, it seems like strategy could mitigate that effect. I imagine Michael Waka would never talk to Matt Quattaro again if it didn't work out, or even if it did, but an outs and out, right? Hey, it's never a bad time for strategy, as far as I'm concerned. No, sure, that makes some sense.

If the guy's at the end of his outing anyway and maybe running out of gas and you're in the middle of this marathon plate appearance and you have two strikes and the hitter has gotten a lot of looks at that pitcher, then absolutely. This is probably his last batter anyway. well, yank him one strike early, give the reliever the fresh arm an advantage. Maybe I'm biased because I'm fascinated by strategy. I can see the pitcher being a bit miffed about this. But then again, it's not like he's one strike away from qualifying for a win or something. It's the sixth inning. I don't know what the score was. Maybe you want to see the job through when you're that deep into a

plate appearance. But I could also see some pitcher saying, yeah, I can't get this guy out. You try. He's your problem. I'm spent. A few follow-ups worth sharing. Listener Anthony writes, I was listening to the latest episode when you brought up Juan Soto's base stealing and wanted to bring to your attention the fact that the whole Mets team steals bases at an unbelievable rate. They had a stretch of 39 straight stolen bases without getting caught earlier in the year and our 110 for 124 this year, which, according to Stat Mews, is tied for the best single-season percentage with the 2023 Mets. For a full season, the 2020 A's were a percentage point better.

Soto and others take a kind of hop or two towards second base before the pitch, and Keith Hernandez has remarked multiple times that he doesn't understand how teams don't throw over more and if they are even doing advanced scouting. Yeah, the Mets are eighth in total stolen bases this year and also eighth in base running runs. But they are first by a wide margin in stolen base success rate, 88.7%.

Next best is the Cubs all the way down at 82.2%. So they are picking their spots efficiently. I guess this is a team philosophy that Juan Soto has embraced. Another late-breaking dispatch on significant sounds in other sports from Patreon supporter Daniel, because you asked for submissions regarding whether you can hear greatness in an athlete and then mention a couple hockey things, but missed the one, I had to chime in. You can, in fact, hear a great skater. They sound like they're tearing up the ice. Loud slash crunchy skating is a good thing. Okay. Got several Steve Rogers emails after my call

for emails from people who remember Steve Rogers. Some of you do. I'm happy to hear it. Nathan says, I remember the entirety of Steve Rogers' career and I remember him well, because he played in the same division as my team the Mets. I think the main problem for Rogers and the perception of how good he was is that he pitched mostly for bad teams and mostly in the pre-sabermetric era. So most people of my era viewed him as mostly just a 500 pitcher. There was an article about Bill James and Sports Illustrated in 1983, I think, that brought him and his work much more prominence than it previously had, and that was something of a

pre-moneyball turning point in the way players were perceived. But it was too late for Rogers, who was near the end at that point. And yeah, I mentioned the fact that he was not on good. teams. He didn't pitch in the playoffs much. But I should have noted that while he did win 158 games, he also lost 152. So perhaps that was held against him, even if that was largely out of his control. Decent number of wins, not a great winning percentage. Again, though, he did get some recognition in his day. Five All-Star appearances, three top five Tsay Young finishes, rookie of the year runner-up. So it's not as if he was ignored at the time or completely overlooked.

Topped out at 19 games in a single season, though. 82. That was his best. year, but not quite a 20-game winner might have helped. And he probably was better than the actual winner that year, Steve Carlton, but Carlton won 23 games. If he'd won more games, maybe Rogers would have lived up to his nickname and won a sigh. Then again, that's going by baseball reference war. Fancraft's War says Steve Carlton was more valuable that year. Alan writes in, how can anyone not remember Steve Rogers? I wasn't alive when he was pitching, Alan.

Not that that precludes my remembering people, but it helps to have been there. As a Phillies fan, Alan says he's memorable as one of the best pitchers in the division during the Phillies championship run. He actually had a great playoff in 81. He beat Steve Carlton twice and the Dodgers once, but he's best remembered for giving up the go-ahead home run to Rick Monday in game five of the NLCS, the Expos Black Monday. That was what I was alluding to on that episode when I said it didn't go great for him. That's one of those bad feelings one can have on a baseball field. Also, some people notified me that Nabil Christmant of the Diamondbacks pitch. the other day wearing a nasal strip, a breathe-right strip? Why is this relevant you might ask? Well,

because on a recent Patreon bonus episode, I talked about how those nasal strips have transformed my life, how I sleep with them now, how I look forward to applying them. And you do see athletes wearing them in some sports, even though the research doesn't seem to convincingly demonstrate an advantage. Maybe it's a mental advantage. It's nice to feel like you can get all the air you need, get that V-O-2 max up. So, Nabil Khrismat, bringing the breathe-right to baseball, I approve. Some local color and context on our recent discussion of Royce Lewis's resistance to a mid-season overhaul. Eric, a twins fan, writes in and says, this isn't the first time he's been reluctant to make changes mid-season. Last year, the twins had a need at second base and Brooks Lee coming up,

who could play third better than Lewis. Lewis was having some throwing issues. It was no secret that the twins would have liked to move him to second. Lewis, however, publicly stated he had no interest in moving positions and learning a new position mid-season. He said he didn't. He said he didn't want to risk making a mistake and costing his team while he was still learning. He hasn't explicitly stated this, but many suspect that his reluctance to make changes harkens back to his rookie year. Upon his call-up, he was thrown into center field, a position that he was not comfortable with, and within a couple weeks, he tore his knee for a second time, costing him another year. He is a pretty open book in interviews and seems like a genuine guy. My read is that he has

made major mid-season changes before, and it has almost cost him his career. I can understand some apprehension at this point. And an interesting observation by Ethan, who says I want to add something to the strikeout rate discussion from my actual field of expertise, epidemiology. Think about height in basketball. Among the general population, tall people are better at basketball. But among NBA players, height is mostly uncorrelated with value. That's because the short players who make it are good enough at other basketball skills to make up for it. Short players who aren't skilled at shooting rarely make it. But being short is still a disadvantage in basketball. basketball. NBA teams are correct to look at height as a factor in their recruiting. Similarly,

players in the majors with high strikeout rates tend to have power or patience because players with high strikeout rates who don't have power or patients don't make the majors. But among a broader population of baseball players, strikeout rate definitely is a disadvantage. That's why it's useful in evaluating prospects. This is called Berkson's bias or Berkson's paradox. It comes from medical studies that compare patients in a hospital with one disease to hospital patients without that disease. It can cause results like diabetes is not correlated with mortality because all healthy individuals are left out of the study. Those who don't have diabetes have other health conditions. I don't think you have to discuss this on the pod any further, but I want you all to know that this

sort of thing is well studied in other statistical fields. And finally, Michael in Germany writes in in response to something Meg said on a recent episode. In episode 2366, Meg mentioned her lack of confidence in identifying the correct Rogers twin whenever referring to them. I don't struggle with this as much, but I certainly understand. They are twins, and they do have similar sounding names.

But if you do have a hard time with this, then Michael has a solution for you. He also struggled with this until he says, I randomly stumbled upon a little mnemonic to help with that. It's basically just a little typesetting memory hook. While both have a Y in their name, Tyler's is prominently listed in his Rogers, comma, tie, in official MLB box scores, whereas Taylor is, of course, Rogers, comma, ta.

Coming from that, the dissender on the Y, the part of the letter going below the font baseline, helps me remember that Tyler is the guy throwing from below, while Taylor, who does not have the dissender featured in his MLB shorthand, is the guy throwing boringly normally. Keep in mind that this mnemonic somehow hasn't kept me from mixing up which one's the lefty in the past, but luckily, that confusion is also slowly going away. Just putting it out there for you to use or not, maybe it makes a little contribution to you being able to name the correct Rogers twin in the future. Thanks for the thought, Michael. Tyler and Taylor,

maybe that'll help someone, because if we learned anything from the saga of Taylor Ward and Tyler Wade, those names can cause some confusion. I hope you won't be confused about your answer to the question of whether to support the podcast on Patreon. Of course, the answer is yes. You can go to patreon.com slash effectively wild and sign up to 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, Ichiro Hernandez, Theodore Traphonadies, Michael Henshaw, Michael Naples, or Naples, and Frank Schuth, thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, one of which we

will be recording this weekend, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, discounts on merch and ad-free fan graphs memberships and so much more, check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash EffectivelyWild. 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, your comments, your intro, and outro themes to podcast at Fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube music, and other podcast platforms.

You can join our Facebook group at Facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at our slash Effectively Wild. And you can check the show notes at Fangraphs 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. That'll do it for us for today and for this week. We thank you, as always, for listening. If you have a long weekend, we hope you enjoy it, and we will be back to talk to you next week.

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