Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2458: The Opening Day Debutant (Base)ball

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, please visit our Patreon. Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the pleasures of and precedents for the historic rookie performances on Opening Day, the pains of Netflix’s Opening Night broadcast, an Opening Day disaster for Paul Skenes, Oneil Cruz, and a bird near Carson Benge, Freddie Freeman’s gameday fit, a perplexing (un?)fun fact about the Phillies and Jhoan Duran, why players don’t always challenge when they “should,” Nico Hoerner and Shane Baz extensions, baseball movies being back (thanks to Tom Hanks), and more, plus a Stat Blast (1:28:40) about Black Ink streaks and a postscript (1:37:14) featuring a follow-up and a few bonus Blasts. Audio intro: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to freemium model announcement Link to written explanation Link to 2026 new debuts Link to RE24 query Link to 2026 RE24 players Link to 1914 RE24 players Link to 1938 RE24 players Link to 1950 RE24 players Link to RE24 glossary Link to B-Ref RE24 leaders Link to total bases query Link to 2026 TB players Link to 1938 TB players Link to 1.000 OPS query Link to 2026 1.000 OPS players Link to 1901 1.000 OPS players Link to 1938 1.000 OPS players Link to Dick Crutcher bio Link to Baumann on the rookies Link to “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” Link to first White Sox game Link to Marchand on the Netflix game Link to Bonds story Link to Bonds at Rickwood game Link to 180-degree rule Link to FG post on Skenes Link to Ben on the Pirates and A’s Link to Pirates HR celebration Link to Benge on the bird Link to Freeman post 1 Link to Freeman post 2 Link to Stark post Link to Sam post Link to Phillies home closers query Link to Phillies road closers query Link to Phillies OD home games Link to Phillies OD road games Link to home OD saves by team Link to Kruk comment Link to Tango on location uncertainty Link to Petriello on catcher challenges Link to Ben’s catcher research Link to MLBTR on Hoerner Link to MLBTR on Baz Link to upcoming FA class Link to Hanks movie announcement Link to Hanks typewriter collection Link to Night Swim wiki Link to Caught Stealing wiki Link to Eephus EW interview Link to Black Ink info Link to Black Ink data 1 Link to Black Ink data 2 Link to Ben on Trout’s Black Ink Link to blowout 1 Link to blowout 2 Link to blowout 3 Link to blowout 4 Link to blowout 5 Link to blowout 6 Link to blowout 7 Link to blowout 8 Link to Vinay’s data Link to 1930 game Link to Sam on record talent Link to Davy on Mets basestealing Link to Newsday on Mets basestealing Link to story on Richardson and Riley Link to listener emails database  Sponsor Us on Patreon  Give a Gift Subscription  Email Us: [e-mail]  Effectively Wild Subreddit  Effectively Wild Wiki  Apple Podcasts Feed   Spotify Feed  YouTube Playlist  Facebook Group  Bluesky Account  Twitter Account  Get Our Merch! var SERVER_DATA = Object.assign(SERVER_DATA || {}); Source

Effectively wild, effectively wild, effectively wild, and I'm Effectively wild, oh, ha, ha, ha, effectively wild. Oh, and welcome to episode 2458 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rally of Fangraff, and I am joined by Ben Lindbergh of the ringer. Ben, happy third opening day. Yes, the real one, did we decide? They're all real, to me, in some.

sense. We need them all together. It's with their powers combined. We are captain opening day. So this is good. All the teams will have played by the time people have heard this. So you don't have to feel left out. If you were the Squidward SpongeBob meme, looking through the blinds at other people playing and having fun. Now you get to play too. It's opening day for everyone. Finally. Finally. And brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Also brought to you. to our Patreon supporters because this is the first paid episode of Effectively Wild. So welcome to our subscribers. Welcome also to our free previewers, whether you are spending something or nothing on this episode.

We hope you'll feel like you at least got what you paid for. We hope that you'll stick around if you're able and we're gratified by the response from everyone this week. And, you know, I was thinking, I mean, it's a momentous thing to ask people. for their money, which we've done in a sense before, but are doing in a more concerted fashion. And we always ask people for their time and plenty of it. But I know they say time is money. A shocking amount one could argue. Yeah. And, you know, time may be money in a sense, but not literally. There is an important distinction there. And also, I guess we're asking for both. So we don't take that lightly. and we understand that it may be difficult for everyone to swing that.

And so I am not at all attempting to make light of that when I say. I was just imagining a hypothetical listener who is considering subscribing to hear the rest of this episode, but it's still sort of on the fence, not for budgetary reasons, but just like, sell me, you know? Just like talk in such a fashion that I want to keep listening. and I need the free trial of however many minutes the free preview on this episode is to sort of, you know, you've been doing it for 14 years and about 2,500 episodes. I think I need maybe 15 more minutes to make up my mind, you know. You haven't quite sold me.

So we'll see if this free preview is the thing that puts you over the edge. Well, we talk about mostly the free preview. Right, exactly. I'm sure that's the kind of contents that people are thinking, oh, so they just are going to talk about the fact. that this is a paid episode the entire time. Well, I can save my money. No, we're going to talk about some baseball. That's what we do here much of the time.

And we're going to talk about some opening day activities. And this was a great opening day. And you know why this was a great opening day? What made this opening day great? What's that? Well, people played baseball. Oh, sure. That's part of it.

Yeah. I mean, that kind of comes with the territory. As we just said, not everyone played baseball. But the playing of baseball, that's pretty key to the appeal of opening day. And so that alone makes it wonderful after we have been major league baseball deprived for so long. But what made this opening day particularly special, I think, was that all the guys we were most excited to see, they did the things that we were most excited to see them do. Yeah. This was all the shiny new toys. All the guys that we've never seen be in big league

baseball games before because they never had been. They immediately showed what we had been waiting for and showed out. So I don't think it was necessarily the most high profile prospects we've ever seen on a single opening day or the most debuts. But just about everyone who did debut and who was someone that people were anticipating watching on the stage immediately showed, oh, yeah, that. That's why everyone was excited about them. This was like a baseball debutante ball.

This was like a coming out party, not in a heated rivalry sense, unfortunately, but kind of like a cotillion, you know? Sure. I know these are all sort of female coded terms, I guess, you know. That's okay. Guys, we got cheated out of the debutante ball. I mean, I'm not sure if we were getting cheated so much as it was being imposed upon not men. I was going to say, I don't know. I don't know if that's the grand tragedy.

tragedy of the debut town ball. Why won't anyone think of the dudes who didn't get to attend their own debutante ball? There are lots of fancy young men who simply want to put on a text and have it be about them. Yes. And go four for five with some extra base hits, right?

And so that's what we saw here. It was just a great day for rookies. So there were eight brand new, newly minted major leaguers that we met on this. this day, not in the sense of our meet a major leaguer segment, though I suppose it will be time to bring that back sometime soon. But guys who made their major league debuts and all the ones that you had heard of previously did something, did something really significant because that's not

always the case. Maybe you can see someone's physical tools, but sometimes guys scuffle. They struggle. Everyone slumps. Everyone takes offers. And so you don't expect everyone to just hit the ground running and be great right away. But of those eight debutantes, is there a male coded? Can we make that gender neutral? You just spell it differently. I think you just a wop an E off the end. There's just no E.

Yeah. Okay, sure. Like blonde. Right. So that of the eight, I would say that six were pretty, well, five, at least six. I'm already downgrading guys. Oh, no. No, I guess.

of these guys. So look, I'm not suggesting that people were not excited to see Walbert Urania of the Angels because I'm sure that Walbert Urania's friends and family were super excited to see him. You know, sometimes a guy has a cool name and you're like, Walbert's here. Yeah, that's how I feel. I was excited to see the name Walbert. So I'm happy to add that. I doubt there's been a previous Big League Walbert. I will check, but I'm guessing that's a first. So you have Walbert, Urania. And then you have Hedixen Pius, who is a pitcher for the White Sox. And yes, I did look up how to pronounce that. It starts with a J. There's an X in there. So Hedixen and Walbert. We have expanded the catalog of MLB names. So that's exciting. And then Carter

Bomler, who is a Rangers player. He appeared as well. You know, also ran slightly overshadowed, perhaps. But these other guys, we have Justin Crawford of the Phillies. We have Kevin Mcgonical of the Tigers. We have J.J. Weatherholt of the Cardinals. We have Munitaka Morikami of the White Sox. We have Carson Benj, not Benjian. Of the Mets. This is a lot of top prospects. And they all had fantastic games. And also Chase the Lauder, of course, of the Guardian. So this was his regular season debut. Correct. Of course, he made his debut in the postseason, which was a real trial by fire,

the circumstances, but this was his regular season debut. All six of those guys had great games. Yeah. Immediately showed, hey, here's why we're top prospects. You don't have to wait and read the scattering report. No, they were all great immediately. Yeah. And look, a lot of the old standbys were great, and it was nice to see Mike Trout hit a homer

and draw a few walks and, you know, a lot of the main characters, the recurring characters. But the new characters made incredible debuts. They just walked right in. It's like a sitcom character entrance and everyone's clapping suddenly. It's like, that's what happened here. And that made this opening day particularly entertaining for me. It was really something because, you know, we had just spent the very last bit of spring trying to remind people that the guys don't always hit their ground.

running, right? That Connor Griffin needing more time to marinate in the minors isn't like a sign that all the prospect evaluators got it wrong or that he's going to be a bad big leaguer or whatever. It mostly means that he's 19, you know. Sometimes they hit the ground like the dead bird who plummeted to the earth in Carson Benj's vicinity. We'll get to that in a second. But yeah, like that isn't to say that guys can't hit the ground running, that they can't

have a day like, say, Kevin McGonigle had. And I liked, you know, just sort of generally that you're right that each of these guys sort of showed out that group of four, maybe most dominantly. I do put DeLotter in a slightly different category, which is perhaps unfair because he had a two-home run night. So, like, way to go chase. But that they were each also very much themselves. You know, you didn't tune in to the Phillies game and then go, well, what were you? you all talking about. Justin Crawford is a bopper, you know, and he's, he's elevating and celebrating. No. He didn't hit the two homers. The latter hit the two homers. Yeah. Right. He's, he's hitting,

you know, singles and going fast and will it all hang together? We're still going to find out. But, um, but if it does, like, it's probably going to be a very extreme version of the profile that we saw on offer yesterday. So, yeah, it's, it's very exciting. If you're a Tigers fan, though, man, you got to be, you got to just be absolutely thrilled because, you know, all of these guys had a, had a good day. But McGonagall, I really, he really did it, man. Four for five with two doubles. And the very first pitch of his big league career is, is a two-run double. And he was hustling.

And you're like, wow, this is, this guy's maybe legit. I wonder if it, if it creates a false sense of expectation. But maybe that's impossible for a guy who's like a consensus top five prospect in baseball. And Torkelson to McGonagall to Dingler. Incredible. Just an incredible sequence of names. I mean, this is the new tinker to Evers to chance, I hope. But these are not the saddest of possible words.

These are the happiest and silliest of possible words. Yeah. So that is just wonderful. Even if those guys weren't good. It's spectacular. Just the fact that we are graced with a Walbert and a Hedixon and a McGonagel and a Dingler. and a Torkelson. I mean, could it be better? Not much. No.

So I tried to stat blast this a little bit. I do have a line on a little stat blast that I think I will share later in the show, but I tried to craft a fun fact about these debuts. And, you know, all fun facts lie a little bit. And I was, I was purposely trying to make this season singular. And hey, how can I say that this is unprecedented? And I don't know that I can quite get there, but I made a few different attempts, and I will share them with you. So it's tough sometimes to, you know, we have game score for pitchers, and there are various versions of game score, and it's a handy-dandy little stat. And Bill James did at one point toy with a batter game score, but it was later on, it didn't really take, and it's just a little bit harder to have a

batter game score. And so how do you quantify the goodness of a game that a batter had? And so we try to approach it in various oblique ways. So one way that I tried to do this is with a little stat called RE24. Yeah. And probably the less I say about it, the better because I've never succeeded in explaining it in actual clear ways that anyone would understand. But it's called base out runs added, essentially. I think there's a bit of a branding issue with RE24, frankly. But it's also kind of a confusing conceptually stack because it's,

it's like in between a little bit. It's basically looking at how you contributed offensively. You look at the run expectancy at the start of your plate appearance and the run expectancy at the end. And you consider just the 24 is the 24 possible base out states. And so it's like, well, did you put your team in a better position to score runs or worse? So it's a little like win probability added, but less context sensitive, but still a little context sensitive. So it's not context neutral like a linear weights WRC plus. Are we selling you on

this subscription pad? Anyone sold? You got to stop talking about it, Ben. You're tightening up. Go to patreon.com slash effectively wild right now, now that I've given you miss spiel about RE24. But look, it's a slightly context neutral, slightly context sensitive way to just say, did this guy help his team put his team in a better position to succeed essentially? So I looked up, What's the most guys we've seen, the first game of a season and the first game of their career, who had an RE 24 of 0.8 or more? And again, what does 0.8 more mean to anyone? What's the context for that? Just it's good.

It's a good game. You know? Okay. So four of these guys cleared that bar. Benj, McGonigal, Murakami, and DeLotter. And for stathead at baseball reference purposes, DeLotter here, this counts as the first game of his career. Obviously, in a very real world sense, it was not.

But for regular season purposes, it was. Okay, so four guys did that. Has that happened before? Yes, this tied the most times that has ever happened. This was the fourth time that there had been four guys in the first game of a season that was also the first game of their career, or the regular season, at least, who had an RE24 of at least 0.8. This happened in 1914, as we all recall. This happened in 1938, of course, like it was yesterday.

And it happened in 1950. So we have tied the maximum number of times now. It's not in first place alone, but it's tied for first. That's something. Because who could forget, 1914 opening day, Biddy Dolan had himself a game and obviously went on to great things and has become a household name because who would. wouldn't remember Biddy Dolan. Max Flack, Charlie Hanford, and of course, Dick Crutcher.

Yes, Dick Crutcher. Dick Crutcher. Dick Crutcher. And did I read that as Cruncher initially? I did. And then I went back and read it again. It's not that much better. I was going to say, you get a strong visual, I think, either way.

Yes, you must have such a meaty member that you need a crutch to support it. perhaps, a Dick Crutcher. I was thinking it was the crutch. Oh, yeah. Well, in that case, even more so, perhaps. Right. But less said about that, the better perhaps. But Biddy Dolan went on to be a sub-replacement level player, as did, I'm sorry to say, Dick Crutcher.

Well, he was busy. This does put into perspective that having a big game on opening day for... I thought that one different word was going to follow big there, but anyway. It does not necessarily portend greatness. That's all I'm saying. However, they achieved greatness on that day. Okay, so that was my first attempt, and I achieved a tie with the all-time record. All right.

How about I move on from RE24, and what if I just say total bases? Who doesn't like total base? Now, that's an easy one to explain. Yeah, so much more straightforward. Yeah, base outstates, total basis. How many bases? How many? How many?

You know, I guess certain ways that you can acquire the bases and rack up your high score of bases, but basically people understand total basis. So in this category, I said four or more total bases because that was the criterion satisfied by Benj, Delauder, McGonagall, Murakami, and J.J. Weatherholt, who also acquired four total bases because he homered, Murakami homered, Delatter homered twice, Benj homered, and McGonigle, as you said, went four, five with a couple doubles. So they got there in different ways, but for total bases, for five of those guys. Okay, how about that?

Is that unprecedented? Have I done it? Have I set this opening day apart? Almost. Almost. We're tied. Tied for the all-time high with, again, that pesky, 1938. 1938 also had five guys who fit all those criteria who had their first game on that day.

So, gosh. Yeah. Curs is spoiled again. And of course, in 1938, the five were Ernie Koi, Emmett Miller, Ines Slaughter. Now, that's a guy who went on to have himself a career, Hall of Famer. Yeah. Dario Lodigiani. Amazing.

Yeah. Could have played for Team Italy if he was still around. Yeah. I was going to say Paizan over here. Yeah. And, of course, Coker Triplett. Coker Triplett. Coker Triplett.

Coker Triplett. Yes. All right. So, okay. I'm doing decently. here. That's a... Coker Triplets.

Yes. This is Dick Crutcher, Coker Triplett. These names will be bouncing around in our heads. Names. Yeah, names.

And don't forget, Biddy Dolan. All right, my last attempt, so I achieved a two-way all-time tie, not bad. But I want to get Justin Crawford in here. How can I get Justin Crawford? Because he had a nice game, but it wasn't quite as standout

and offensive game. But he went two-for-four, two singles. He had himself. 1,000 OPS. Now that's a nice round number. All right. So how about I set the cutoff at a 1,000 OPS first game of the season, first game of career, or at least regular season career? 1,000 OPS. Has that happened before? Have we had 6,000 OPSers? Yes, yes, we have. That has happened twice before. 1938. Again, the bane of my existence. I'm trying to craft a fun fact here, 1938. And you keep getting in the way with. all your cocker triplets and your Enos slaughters. And they also had six that year. And so who, let's see, Johnny Rizzo, of course. Maybe, you know, another potential candidate for Team Italy back in the day. And 1901, 1901 also had six guys satisfy all of those criteria. Yeah. So it's a three-way tie in that stat. and also every way I can craft it, it has happened before, I'm sorry to say.

Wow. But you know what? That's a lot of baseball history. It is. And this was, if not quite unprecedented, it was without precedent in most people's living memory. Sure. Without precedent in the expansion era, without precedent in, well, since 1950. I mean, that's not bad, right?

That's not bad at all. Yeah. And all of these guys went on to wonderful things, as we have established. And of course, in 1901, you had Jack Hayden, Jim Jackson, Larry McLean, Wydne, Wydne, Billy Gilbert. Wid? And Jim Delahanty. Yeah. Yeah, Wid.

Wid. Yes. Okay. Okay. I am worried that you're making fun of me, you know? No. This is all very real. Wid.

Yes. Dick Crutcher. Dick Crutcher, Coker Triplit. Coker triplet. I'm just supposed to move on from that? From Coker? We're going to have to. Triplett.

The point was great suite of six debuts. Terrific. And also those other guys we mentioned, they were there too. And congrats to them. They achieved great things. They became big leaguers. But this was just a ton of fun to immediately see these guys strut their stuff on this stage. So congrats to them.

And congrats to us because we all won on this day. That'll do it for the free preview of today's Effectively Wild. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to listen on and hear whatever wisdom and wit await, we would love to have you. You can visit patreon.com slash effectively wild to access the rest of this episode and plenty of other exclusive content, weekly subscriber-only episodes, monthly bonus shows, our Discord group, our live streams. Either way, we will be back with another episode soon, which will appear in full on this feed. Until then, we wish you well and thank you for your support

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