Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2462: Coolness Personified (and Quantified)

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Carter Jensen’s several (inadequate) alarms and why big leaguers don’t oversleep more often, Artemis II, Daniel Susac as the sequel to Andrew Susac, the timing of Konnor Griffin’s call-up, the many ways to marvel at (and value) Jo Adell’s home-run-robbery spree, Patrick Corbin the Blue Jay, a quintessentially 2026 half-inning, and follow-up emails, plus (1:40:47) a postscript featuring an Afterball by Ben about national announcer stats. Audio intro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Sean .P, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to “It’s Been Awhile” Link to Jensen oversleeping story Link to Pasquantino quote Link to Jensen TikTok clip Link to Russell on young baseball brains Link to overview effect wiki Link to Yankees/Marlins Artemis story Link to Artemis wholesomeness Link to Apollo and baseball story Link to Susac’s nephew Link to Baumann on Griffin Link to MLBTR on Griffin Link to Olney’s deleted tweet Link to info on extensions and PPI Link to Adell catch 1 Link to Adell catch 2 Link to Adell catch 3 Link to 2026 OF FRV laggardboard Link to Adell’s DRS Link to SIS on HR robberies Link to Ben on HR robberies Link to Ben on Trout’s 2011 Link to Ben on pre-WAR valuations Link to Adell’s 2020 FARTBAT Link to FARTBAT naming Link to Angels-M’s box score Link to FG post on Adell Link to win probability tweet Link to Tango on wall balls Link to Tango on catch probability Link to Adell photo Link to article about Adell catch Link to Trout’s Twitter reply Link to Hunter on Adell Link to “wallowing” wiki Link to MLBTR on Corbin Link to Jays SP projections Link to Jays RR depth chart Link to BP on Corbin Link to BP on ATL-AZ inning Link to Albies challenge Link to 2016 Young quotes Link to Grifol on the eclipse Link to Theo “trade” Link to Stokes-Lyon match Link to Snicko wiki Link to Calcaterra on Dirks Link to Dirks Pull% Link to Dirks HR spray chart Link to HUAL episode Link to USR broadcast 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

And how can you not be pedanted? A stat blast will keep you distracted. It's a long slog to death, but they're sure to make you smile. This is Effectively Wild. This is Effectively Wild. And welcome to episode 2462 of Effectively Wild. A fan grass baseball podcast brought you back. our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Rowley of Fairgrafs, and I'm joined as often, not as always, but basically as always, but Ben Lemberger the ringer. Ben, how are you? Yeah, barring a baby, pretty much always. Yeah, pretty much always. Well, I'm doing well. Yeah.

It's nice to hear your voice again. Yeah. And because you were traveling a bit and we front-loaded our recording schedule. I hesitate to say it's been a while since we've spoken because I know. that that sometimes, yeah, causes you to break into song. But it has been some time by effectively wild standards. So we have much to discuss and catch up on. And I thought maybe next time we could do a check-in on some teams that are tanking their playoff odds already.

Because it will have been two weeks since opening day. Then we'll give them a couple days to get their acts together. And for teams that are doing well to come back to Earth a bit. But we still have big developments to discuss. discuss, we have to get into the promotion of Connor Griffin, of course. We have to talk about the heroics of Joe Adele. But I wanted to lead with some big news out of Kansas City, which was Carter Jensen overslept. This was a scandal. Carter Jensen, young Royals catcher. He overslept, and he showed up late, and he was very apologetic. And he's off to a fantastic start.

offensively this season, you know, very promising prospect, et cetera. But he did oversleep. And I was wondering why this doesn't happen more often because you don't see this story all that often about so-and-so overslept and had to be scratched. Salvi, I think, was supposed to DH and he was pressed into service, had to strap on the old tools of ignorance, which at his age, you know, he was banking on a partial day off, perhaps. He had to spring into action or creak into action because Carter Jensen was not there on time. And look, as scandals go, this is pretty small beans, right? And yet it's kind of a big deal in baseball when this happens.

It doesn't happen that often. Yeah. And so he got lightly chastised, you know, a little tough love from an effectively wild favorite, Vinnie Pasquantino, who, you know, treated him courteously, but just had his little. little veteran, you know, first and foremost, I'm glad Carter's okay, you know. I mean, that's how unusual it is to just show up late for work in MLB. It's like, oh, I'm glad he's okay. I thought he'd suffered some, some mishap. Yes, right. He was worried about him. And then Pasquantino said, there's some things that cannot happen, and that's one of them. So he's going to have to wear it on the chin. Same way anybody would have to. It can't happen. And hopefully

it doesn't happen again. But it's one of those things that you just can't afford mistakes. like that in this game just got to move forward the best that he can. I know that he feels really bad, et cetera. So look, as, you know, off-field issues, like sleeping a little late doesn't seem like that big an issue, but it's treated as one. And look, you know, players are paid a lot. There's a lot at stake, obviously. It's a big business. And so they do have to show up for work on time. But it sort of surprises me that this doesn't happen more often because you've got young men sort of unsupervised or on their own, on the road, who knows what shenanigans they're getting up to at night.

Yeah, and you'd think that this might happen more often. And yet it doesn't really, which I suppose speaks well of baseball players and how seriously they take their profession and maybe also speaks to the fact that there are a lot of night games. And so maybe it's not easy to oversleep by enough that you show up late. but they always want you to show up hours and hours early because you got to go through your whole routine and there's batting practice and there's pregame meetings and pre-series meetings and everything else. And so maybe there's even a little bit of eye wash there when it comes to how early you're expected to report. But nonetheless, does it surprise you that this was like, whoa, Carter Jensen overslept?

That can't happen. This is going to be a serious talking to because I just would instinctively think, yeah, that would be a, a semi-common occurrence, not like all the time, but that, you know, every season or so, at least you'd hear about it happening to someone. Well, and I guess if you were going to rank the on-field positions that are perhaps the least prone to it being eye-washy, you know, catcher and whatever guy is starting that day, those would be high on the list, right? So if he's meant to catch, then, okay, but it is, it is a little.

little surprising. Did he sleep through an alarm or did he forget to... That's what he said. Yeah, he said, I didn't wake up to my alarms, slept through it, don't really have an excuse, nor should I. It sucks. It happens, but it doesn't happen all that often seemingly. I feel like I let teammates down, coaches down, just learn from it and just know it won't happen again. It's like falling on your swords from oversleeping. Did he get into the game later? Did he play later that day? He got there eventually he just he was supposed to start and he wasn't there in time to start it wasn't like he no-showed entirely but yeah it's another example of how different this job is from every other job because it's like any of us we oversleep one time we show up a little late for work not a big

deal maybe if you have an office job and you're on a shift and it's pretty important you might get a little bit of a rebuke or a talking to or something but it's not going to be a public issue right? And so it's just, it's a very different profession. And Vinnie continued to say, he'll learn from it, grow a little bit. We're here from him, though. It's not like anybody's mad at him. Things happen. But you've got to learn from mistakes like that and maybe get another alarm clock or something, which that's funny because I saw someone unearthed a TikTok video that the Royals published in spring training. And they were actually asking all their players how many alarms it takes for them to wake up.

And the last guy in the video was Carter Jensen. Oh, boy. It's embarrassing. I need at least like six to eight alarms. It's not good. Oh, goodness. So that was famous last words. I guess that was an indication that maybe he was cruising for a bruising, wake up wise.

I wonder if he uses his phone or if he has a physical alarm clock. I'm a big advocate of the physical alarm clock, but that's more for got to trick my dumb brain. not to be tempted to look at screen reasons than it is the phone being an insufficiently loud or annoying alarm. Yeah. Boy. Hey. Hey.

Does Carter Jensen have a person at home? Do we know? Does he have a person at home? Right. He is, he's quite young, obviously. He's 22, but Carter Griffin's married. Yeah. Right.

I don't know. You got a grade on the baseball player. Curvin, you don't have to be married to have a. person at home. You can just have a person at home. I asked because six to eight alarms is a, I think, a high number. And I'm curious if, you know, assuming he does have someone at home, is that person also a 68 alarm person? Because if not, that's a recipe for not having a person at home for very long. I know. I was going to say, I had an ex. And this is not why she's an but it didn't help, I guess, who was just an inveterate snoozer.

And I am not a snoozer. I don't hit the snooze button. You're a one and done. I'm a one and done because what I do is I set it for the absolute last moment that I can. And so I've conditioned myself to know that there's no leeway. That when the alarm goes off, I really do, in fact, have to get up, which I feel like is logical just because I'm trying to maximize my sleep. I'm trying to just eke out every second that I can.

can. So if I'm setting it earlier than I need to and then repeatedly snoozing, that's not quality sleep. Like you're losing a little sleep. I know some people might just need the snoozing process to get up and to rouse themselves. But it's not ideal if you do have someone else in the bed with you who does not have the same wake up time or snoozing habits. Yeah. The way that my alarm is designed is to have like a gradual wake up. But then once the, Like it, it does a thing initially. And then it is designed to have a secondary alarm. And they say it wakes you up better.

I don't know about that. It wakes me up the way it needs to, which is really the point. I have a loud cat outside the office. You're fine. Cat is really the most reliable alarm. Yeah, no. Carter, if he doesn't have a cat, you should just get some sort of pet that will walk on your face when it's time for breakfast. Hey, it's time for me to eat.

I don't care what you're doing. You're sleeping? Why are you loafing? I'm ready to have some food. But they're gentle. And then I, and then I get up. Unless it's, I will tell you, Ben, the Friday of the week of opening day, it took me a while to get out of bed. I was like, why did I agree to work today? That was dumb. Why am I here? Why am I awake? I should be sleeping still, maybe. I am a two alarm guy usually, by which I mean that I have two separate alarm sources, one of which is my first. phone because I don't I sometimes will sleep through it too so I have I have one alarm that's on my phone and then because I take this precaution if it's particularly important I then put my phone across the room somewhere so that I actually have to get out of bed and by the time I get out of bed then I'm probably going to be awake but it's dangerous and obviously Carter Jensen knows that if he's set in six to eight alarms then he knows that this is a bit of an issue for him and

he was at least taking some precautions and I imagine that now he is taking more. And this was a day game, I believe, to be clear, too. So that helps and explains part of it, I think. Yeah. But I still am sort of surprised that this doesn't happen more often because sometimes guys are dragon, especially if you're a catcher, especially if you have a day game after a night game, especially if maybe you went out on the town or something. And, of course, back in the day when reporters didn't always report the precise circumstances, maybe if someone had a little too much to drink for a. example, you might have the old flu-like symptoms or something like that. It might not be reported why you were scratched from a given game. And perhaps that still happens sometimes. Or maybe

people do actually show up late sometimes and it's just handled internally. And it just doesn't become a public issue. And either that person just wasn't in the lineup or the lineup has changed. And it's just not a big deal. It's just a behind closed doors thing. But still, given the demographics and all the demands and everything. You know, some of these guys are probably living on their own for the first time in their life, right? And so not having roommates. And so it does sort of surprise me that this isn't really a right of passage for players. I love the simultaneous, like, seriousness, but also, like, they're creating, the way that his teammates are talking, to be clear, like, you got to go to work. You know, if you're like, you got to go work. Especially like, you're supposed

to be the starting catcher that day. I think you knew. was true the day before, presumably. Like, I'm not saying, hey, let the kids show up whenever they want. I'm not so loosey-goosey, Ben, you know. I do feel that way about actual kids where it's like, what, my daughter's supposed to go to kindergarten at like 8 in the morning or something. She's like four. I thought it was better for kids to go to school because they're up early.

Aren't a lot of them up early anyway? I guess. But I think, you know, your brain's developing. Even when you're Carter Jensen's age, your brain is still developing, your decision-making And so, yeah, when you're a kid, sometimes you need that extra sleep. I certainly did when I was a kid as a night owl. Were you night owl as a small child, though? Yeah, always.

Oh, wow. Okay. So it really is just your rhythm, you know? I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. Sleep is such a tricky thing. We super don't understand it.

We're like, you know, out in space and we're like sleep. I don't know. Toilets also challenging. But that makes sense because that's an inhospitable environment. We are going to briefly talk about space in a second, but not yet. I have a further thought on Carter-Jensen. and then we can move on. So I love the tone of his teammates' statements about this

because they are, like, creating their own need to defend him in the way that they're talking about it. Because, again, like, go to, you got to go to work, and especially Salvi, what are you going to have him crouch all the time? No, no. Now, is this an opportunity for the royals to consider that, like, maybe you've got to have a, you know, spry or backup? Maybe it's time to be a lot.

As long as he shows up for work, on time. Yeah, it's like, Carter, come on. We're trying to get this guy out the door, maybe. You got to show up on time. But so, like, they, they want to impress upon everyone. They know this is serious, particularly because he's a rookie, you know? It's like, I don't know why I'm talking, like, from Staten Island all of a sudden. But, like, there's a seriousness to his transgression because he's a rookie still. But also, they have his back. And everyone else in the entire world is like, okay, like, you sure. Yeah, thank you. I'm glad you're not going to, what, like shove him in his locker? You know, it's just like they are, they're treating the thing with a reverence that then requires them to let you know. But don't worry, we're so good team. Don't stress about it. We're not going to, we're not going to, like, murder him?

I don't know what. We're not going to, we're not going to like. Yeah, there's no ritual rookie sacrifice going to go. Yeah, we're not going to take a bat to his rib cage while he's got the chest protector on or something. It's like, it's okay. We get it. But so anyway, Carter Johnson, get a better alarm. Maybe he needs one of the light alarms.

I've never found those to work. Or one of the ones that scurries away from you so that you have to go catch it or something? They make those? I don't think that that's a good use of technology. Is that, is that, is that moon technology? Is that technology we have? Because can I, can I riff on the moon for a second? Sure.

Just very briefly. I know you are not opposed to moon riffing, but I am aware that we are doing a baseball podcast, even though, you know, we're recording this on Tuesday. Feels a little silly. I am on record as saying that we shouldn't be up there, you know, or rather I'm on record as saying, I have no desire to go up there. You know, I understand people have like a, you know, they have a profound experience when they see the earth from space.

And I feel like it's a profound experience just to see the photographs from space, you know, just to see the images that are coming out of Artemis II from space. you really, you know, the way that these folks are talking about humanity is, it's profoundly moving to me. The overview effect where astronauts see the whole planet at once and realize that we're all in this thing together on this little marble floating in nothingness and can't we all just get along. And what a time to be reminded of that particular lesson, you know, just like, and you've got

this incredible diverse crew and this beautiful diverse ground control. And, you know, I don't want to overdo it with the like representation thing matters, of course. But like to hear it's still, it's moving to hear female voices from up there and, and their name in craters after spouses who have passed. And it made me cry, Ben. It really did make me cry. And so I just want to make sure that everyone and I, we don't have to like spend too much time on the lore of the podcast.

And I can't even remember if I said this on a main feed episode or if it was part of the Patreon. But I don't need to be up there. You know, we don't belong up there. That's not where we should be. But we send people up there and they have this experience. And then they come back and they're alive when they do. And it's really something, Ben, you know?

And it's making me feel less sad about the Mariners for one thing. I'm like, well, what does it matter? We will send people to space. coming back, you know? And what did they talk about when there was, when there was radio silence? Yeah. I wonder if they'll tell us. I hope they don't. That can be just for them. You know, that can be a special for them kind of a thing. And we're all stressed about the space toilets, you know? And if you go back and read the transcripts from Apollo 11, for instance, they were constantly getting baseball score updates. They wanted to know what was happening back

on Earth and what the baseball scores were. So, yeah, it's very interesting. I'm a big space astronomy nerd. You're right. It's an inhospitable setting. We shouldn't be up there. The fact that we're up there and not immediately dead. And, you know, we don't even have to go very high up there to be like in we should be instantly dead territory.

And we're not. We do take precautions. And I'm glad other people are up there. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm recording today because, you know, at a certain point, you do have to get back to work. But I've been off, visiting and family, and then I took Tuesday, we're recording on Tuesday as I'm reminding everyone, I took Tuesday off as a like, hey, get the house back in order and do laundry, and I got a grocery shop. And, you know, like, we're, I'm not working, but I'm working. And I'm,

grateful for the not working, but tempted by the dastrily siren song of social media on a day where, like, world events are very scary. And so I, I just, you know, I don't know, I feel like I have to acknowledge both the people up in space and also profound strangers in our current moment as we contemplate devastating and criminal war. And so, anyway, it's amazing we go up there. It's amazing they come back. We manage to do that, but we still have tippy bar tables. You know, humans are still humans, I guess, is the moral of the story. Yeah, it's quite inspiring. My daughter was riveted by the launch, as were the Yankees and the Marlins when they were watching it. That was a fun little baseball and rocketry intersection. Yeah. Anyway, going back to rookie catchers who may or may not have trouble waking up.

I don't know if you have had this experience, but I've really been thrown for a loop. I'm getting Susak deja vu because. Oh, because there are many of them, the many kids are Sussex. Because there's a new Susac. There's Daniel Susack. Yep. And the confusing thing is that he is also a giant catcher. Yes.

And he is the brother of Andrew Sussex, who was once a giant's catcher. Yes. And that was a while ago. And the thing is that they are separated by about 11 years in age. And so there's a new Sussex. So when I saw the new Sussex, I was thinking, wait, Andrew Sussex is still here? No, wait. Daniel Sussex?

There's another Sussex. And he's still related to Andrew somehow. But he's also a rookie for the same team. And to make matters more confusing, Andrew Sussex. was at Daniel's debut, too. So it was double Susack action. Whippin that baby around. Just like whipping that kid all around.

Yeah. Anyway, I'm sure that he will not have any trouble setting alarms or anything. But it has thrown me for a loop a little. We're all quite familiar with the phenomenon of Big League brothers. But usually there's not as much of a separation in age. Yeah. And then the combination of the age and the same team and the same position. and the same handedness and everything.

Daniel is bigger than Andrew. He is a literal giant giant is the thing. He's 6'5. He's a big guy. I remember seeing Daniel Susack at Arizona. He went to college at the University of Arizona. And they hosted a regional a couple years ago and probably in his draft year because I was living down here. And I just remember seeing him behind him.

home being like, whoa, that's a big, that's a big man. That's a big man catching back there. The sequel's always supposed to be bigger, right? I don't know if he'll be better, but bigger, at least, he has nailed. So, yeah, there's a new sousac, a new sack. I don't know. No, I don't care for that. And, you know, and confusing, true, because they are playing for the same team. I thought we would avoid this trouble because Daniel was originally drafted by the then, Oakland Athletics, and then he got traded. And, you know, then that's, I couldn't tell if that kid was to, our listeners who maybe have not seen Daniel Susack's family, including Andrew Susack, were reacting to Daniel

Susack's debut, particularly his first hit, right? That was the context of that video. You know, it's his family. And Andrew is holding, I think. Daniel's child maybe. I don't think that was Andrew's son. But who knows? That part wasn't clear to me. I don't know if it was Andrew's baby or Daniel's baby, but he is holding a like a toddler-aged boy. I couldn't tell if the kid was losing his mind at what was happening on the field was over-stimulated because it's loud and, you know, everyone's like, ah! Or if he was reacted to the fact that his uncle is just like,

losing his mind and thus whipping this baby around and he's not a baby. He was a toddler so he could like support his own neck which is an important detail because I can imagine you know parents out there being like oh my god you got like the neck they can't my mom called me tuna

when I was little I was a small kid so it's confusing in that way because you know tuna is are big as fish go but like they kind of flop around and she's like yeah when you were a baby you know like because babies can't support the weight of their own heads This kid could do that, but was vulnerable in the moment, whipping him around. And then I think Daniel's wife took the baby and was like, here, let me hold you in a way that is perhaps more advisable.

It was cute. That's how I feel. Looking at the sousex, just I'm experiencing some sort of whiplash. Maybe the kid is confused. Father, uncle, they're both catchers for the giants. Probably the kid understands the difference. But hard for me to keep that generation of Sussex straight, let alone the next generation. so I won't weigh in on parentage.

Nephew. Okay, so like that is your kid, Andrew. Why you whip it? I was like, you know, the kid's fine. Probably knows the safety tolerances of his own toddler. The kid's name is Chuck. Why do I find that so charming? Chuck.

I look forward to seeing him catch for the Giants in 20 years or so. Yeah, no kidding. Chuck. So I guess we can talk about a rookie. that made some more notable news, and that is, of course, Connor Griffin, who did somewhat, I was going to say belatedly, but what a ridiculous word to use with a 19-year-olds, belated only because he didn't start the season with the big club, but it took all of, what, four games with AAA for him to get called up.

Yeah, so we had our conversation about Griffin when he was sent down. Yes. And now we can have our conversation about Griffin when he was promoted. So he was brought up for the home opener. And this was after, I guess, five AAA games. And he had hit 438, 571, 625 with three stolen bases and more walks than strikeouts and everything. And still prospect promotion incentive eligible. Yes.

And there was some reporting initially that he had signed an extension. And then Buster only declared backsies on that one, I guess. And so that has not officially happened as we record here. but something seems to be in the works at the very least. Anyway, Griffin came up. It was a huge moment for Pirates fans, of course, and he delivered in his first at bat, and he doubled into the gap,

and that was very exciting. And he has not had a hit since, but that's, you know, there's going to be some growing pains because if Carter Jensen is still growing his brain, then Connor Griffin is as well, even though he may be a married man already. So I think probably some of what we said about Griffin when he did not make his major league debut on opening day still applies because that was very recent. But what was your read on why they did decide to promote him when they did?

I am shocked that he has not signed an extension. I just assumed that we would learn of it like maybe as he was debuting. Yeah. At first I thought it was just that there is an advantage. to sequencing these things in a certain way because a player who signs an extension before making his major league debut is not eligible for the prospect promotion incentive. And so this came up with Jackson Truro and Colt Keith

because they signed extensions prior to their debuts and thus they were not PPI eligible because I guess the point of the PPI is to encourage teams to have their top prospects on opening day rough, And if they've already signed them to an extension, then maybe they would be doing that anyway. And so it's like, don't give them double credit or something. But then it's sort of strange because then you have teams incentivized not to announce extensions that are basically done until after the player comes up.

And so there can be some chicanery that goes on here. And so there was suspicion that, oh, maybe they're trying to hide something. I'm sure that either this will get done or if it does get done. done and it turns out that there was a framework in place, then the pirates won't be able to get credit for that. I'm sure we'll find out more. And that, unless that report is just memory holds forever. But he's up now and maybe there will be more news to come about a contract. Right. Because it, it feels like, you know, he got 21 plate appearances at AAA. Yeah. As we noted when he did not make the opening day roster. He did not light the world on fire in spring. And so it suggested, hey,

get this kid a little more seasoning in AAA. That's fine. And the way that the pirates talked about it, I will, I just, I'm a little flummoxed, Ben, candidly. I'm a bit flummoxed because it seemed as if the way that the pirates talked about it, the way that Ben Charington talked about Connor Griffin was this kid needs more time and this is an incredibly important player to like the trajectory of our entire franchise and then he went to triple a and he played five games and he hit incredibly well and i think that that's very encouraging but i don't know that there's anything that those 21 played appearances even though they went very well necessarily change about the need for additional marination but also if you think he only needs to

like a little bit of marination. And you want the ability to earn a prospect promotion incentive pick. Well, maybe he just gets his little bit of marination in the majors. And that has to be the thinking, one would imagine. So it's like, hey, let's give ourselves the opportunity to accrue this draft pick in the event that, like, he does only need a little bit more time. And he does all this stuff. And he gets his feet under him.

and he wins rookie of the year or he places, right? And then we get a pick. And how exciting that we get a pick. The pick we didn't get was Skeens, where Skeens won rookie of the year, thus getting a full year of service, regardless of the fact that we hadn't called him up in time, we didn't get a pick.

Well, that's lousy. So maybe that's the thinking. And, you know, I imagine that the overarching sentiment of this guy is very, very important to our team and its long-term fortunes still holds. And so if he flounders for long enough, they'll send him back down and he'll get his seasoning in AAA, which is kind of what we thought would happen.

But it was a little surprising, and it was surprising, you know, as noted recording this on Tuesday, that, you know, that there is no deal. It wouldn't shock me if there was a bit of theater, just to make everyone think he's down. And then, ah, the home opener. Here comes Connor Griffin.

But it was probably a, bit more than that or just trying to sell out that game. Maybe, and I want to give the pirates some credit, at least, for recognizing where they are and the fact that they could be competitive and they're off to a decent start and they need runs and they need wins. And maybe they just saw him tearing it up in AAA for five games and they contrasted that with Jared Triolo having a 461 OPS through his first five games and then also getting hurt after that and thought, well, we're costing ourselves here because, yeah, even if he's not going to be

peak Connor right away, can he outhit Jared Triolo? That seems like a fairly safe bet. And so if you evaluate the makeup of Griffin, which they should be in a pretty good position to do and say, well, if he's mature enough to handle some struggles and setbacks and in the worst case scenario where he really slumps to start off his career, is that going to shit? jatter his confidence, or is that just going to be something that he can transcend and that he takes as a challenge and it lights a fire under him. And then maybe we send him back down for reset or he fixes himself or whatever, but it won't cause any long-term lasting damage to his development. If you come to that conclusion, then, well, might as well let him sink or swim

because even if he sinks, he might still be better than Jared Trio. Sorry, Jared Trio. But it is just kind of the case. So, I mean, he did project to be, I think, the second best position player on the Pirates after O'Neill Cruz, even though he's not projected to be amazing out of the gate. And so if you can save yourself from possibly a replacement level player and have even an average player, well, that could actually make the difference for you. So maybe it's worth the risk. Maybe it's worth a shot. Based on what we have seen of Connor Griffin so far, in terms of of his on-field performance and also just like the way that he carries himself even as a very young person. He doesn't strike me as someone where it's necessarily going to be shattering

to them if like the initial run doesn't go well and he has to go back down. But we don't know him. You know, even though I have been in the physical presence of his big neck. Yes. You know, I'm not familiar with the kids. So I don't know if it's going to be this like, you know, trajectory altering thing. And I did invoke the specter of Mike Zanino when we talked about him getting sent down. Like, I do think that there is value to guys being developmentally ready. But I also think that there's value to guys being challenged.

And, like, you know, he's probably going to be fine in the long term. And even if he flounders a little bit in the initial run, like, that's okay. Like, we all remember Bobby Witt Jr.'s rookie year. J.K., no, we don't. We don't remember that. I mean, we do. But, like, we saw this guy who was so important to his own franchise. Like, in some ways, the parallels are good.

And Bowman talked about this during our Bull Prediction Show. Like, you know, he had kind of a rough go of it in his first season. And then he made the adjustment. And now he's one of the best players in baseball. Although his early going has been less good. But that doesn't matter, does it? Yeah. Or Mike Trout's first 40 games has a real rookie in 20-11.

which I once wrote an article about that because it was like, how did he go from being a below average hitter, even if it was 135 plate appearances to then the next year being the best player in baseball probably. And he probably got a little unlucky. He had a 247 Babbap that year. That's probably the fastest player in baseball. But yeah, sometimes there's a little bit of a struggle there.

Sorry, I'm so mean to Jared Trio. He's got a good glove. It's just that the bar for beating the bat is not particularly, high. But it's exciting just to see him make the majors. I'm risking a second. It's been a while here, but it has been quite a while since we saw a player play that young in the majors, period. I think he was the youngest player in the majors since Juan Soto and first teenager to play in the major since Elvis Luciano in 2019, too. And that was a Rule 5 reliever. So sort of a special circumstance. And I think the youngest to appear in a game as early as this in a season since Andrew Jones, who went on, it turns out to be a Hall of Famer.

So there are a lot of stats and comps out there just saying to make it to the majors at all and to be a starting shortstop as a teenager, that alone bodes incredibly well. Not that it was a mystery that he might be a good player someday. But it's really just a question of will he be a good player now? and will he be better than the Pirates' alternatives? And yeah, I think there's a pretty decent chance that he will be. So it certainly makes the Pirates probably a better team and definitely a more entertaining team, especially if he stops scuffling, which I imagine he will if they leave him out there. I don't know how long a leash he'll have before they decide, okay, maybe a bit more seasoning might help.

But it's just been a handful of games as we were speaking here. So it's too soon to see. say much of anything, except for the fact that he might already be on a Hall of Fame trajectory, just because he's a major leaguer, but we're getting ahead of ourselves slightly there. Maybe ever so slightly, but also, you know, he's not even 20 yet. No, no, he's not. Well, let's talk about another former top prospect who came up not quite as young as Connor Griffin, but he was 21.

That's Joe Adele, who maybe himself the former best prospect in Baylor. baseball, according to some sources, when he was called up or pretty darn close to it. And he's been a bit of a cautionary tale, a bit of a reminder that not every prospect launches as successfully as Artemis II, and that even though he has now had a seven-year big league career, it's been bumpy, to say the least. Yeah. However, he did have an indelible game, a trademark signature game that will be remembered for the rest of his career, regardless of what he accomplishes from him.

here on out. On Saturday, Joe Adele robbed three home runs. And unfortunately for you, it came against the Mariners. And so he robbed. What are you going to do? Cal Raleigh, who had himself a long home run slump, which he has finally broken. But he robbed Cal in the first inning. And then he robbed Josh Naler in the eighth inning. And then he robbed, who was the, oh, it was J.P. Crawford. J.P. Crawford. Yeah, he was going to slip one over that short wall out there. And no, Joe Adele had other ideas. Yes. And this became the talk of baseball for a few reasons. And I think it's just, it's fascinating to discuss what this was worth. Yeah. What is a game like that worth? Because there's kind of a choose your own adventure approach to answering that question. And I don't know that there is a definitive or satisfying answer, but we can walk through the. the various possibilities here because different defensive systems and different sort of home

brew ways we could cobble together and cludge a valuation of this game produced dramatically different answers. But put aside the run value or the win value or whatever, it was just kind of awesome because it was a one-nothing game. Right. And Zach Netto hit a home run in the first inning, a solo shot. And that held up for the rest of the game. because Joe Adele just kept taking away diggers from the Mariners. And so all of these home runs were absolutely crucial.

Any of them would have tied the game at the very least. And so he saved the game repeatedly. And it was just a baller performance. And then it was preserved for all time for posterity by that incredible fan photo, which was taken by an Angels fan, a mother of five named Kaylee Krause, who just happened to be in the first. right place at the right time and was out there in right field and had an unobstructed view of Adele after the third robbery when he fell over the fence and was standing up and brandishing

the ball for all to admire and it was so dramatic and it was perfectly framed. I mean, that might be the image of Major League Baseball in 2026 right there. We'll see, which you would not expect to be in an April Angels game. But just the pose and how dramatic. it was that really only burnished the image. And in fact, it conjured a tweet from Mike Trout who actually replied, I think it was a tweet from the team account or something who had shared that photo. And Mike Trout replied to that tweet for the first time. He hadn't replied to a tweet on Twitter since late January when he had tweeted to Brent Rooker

about the weather. Yeah. And so Mike Trout tweeted, front Rooker. seat to the Joe show. And then, of course, there was a space. And then there were three exclamation points, which really brought me back to old effectively wild discussions about Mike Trout's Twitter punctuation and the mysterious spacing and why there's always a space. And is this an auto-complete thing or what's happening here? It's nice to know, even though Mike Trout off to a strong start, perhaps not the player he was, but still the punctuator he was for one reason or

another and he's probably gone through several phones since then. Anyway, this was just an awesome athletic clutch display. Yeah, and I'm sure that that mom was like, you know, my main goal is the affordability, but Joe Adelton put on a good show for us. It does suggest that that that's just how Mike Trout texts, I bet. I bet that like in the group chat to the family, it's like space three exclamation points. Do you think his mom is like, I, that's not, there's not a space. This place comes after.

Only one, only one. Probably not. She's probably letting it go at this point. I would, yeah, I think that's probably the correct answer. It, you know, it would have been satisfying for any player to have done this. Like, it doesn't matter which guy is out there. You would have just been in awe of it, you know? And the Mariners were completely flummoxed.

Like the look on J.P. Crawford's face, when he did it for a third time, was just like, are we haunted? Yeah. You know? Have we walked into a haunting here? But there is something, I think, particularly satisfying about a guy whose career has been so up and down, who even, you know, when we were talking about the Angels in our preview episode, like, you know, you want to say, oh, Joe Adele, like he, he broke through last year. And he did at the plate. But he was terrible in the field last year.

That's the amusing thing is that FRV, the stack-ass-based stat, had him as the worst defensive outfielder in baseball last year. In baseball last year. Or maybe tied with Mickey Moniac's the worst. Yeah. And so, like, for that guy, and he's still underwater by FRV standards now, like, to say that you should take, you know, the directionality and conclusion of a defensive stat with a grain of salt after 11. games is you are underselling it to a profound extent, right? Like, don't worry about it yet. And that's to say he's, he's suddenly an amazing fielder or anything, but like everyone relax, you know, it's like it's, it's 11 games. Like, I wish we didn't have them on there. I wish,

I wish there was nothing on the site for the entire first month of the season. But we've already talked about that. That's not a defensible business position. And so here we are soldiering on doing our best. He's just never graded out well. as a defender. You know, the best, the best defensive season he's had was 17 games long in 23, right? Like this, this guy has struggled in the field and last year struggled in the field profoundly. And so there's something just like really satisfying about it. There's something about being the guy who manages to do the thing. And you know, that that ballpark, as we have seen, it lends itself to robberies, but we tend to associate them with Trout in center field

because Mike Trout has robbed a bunch of home runs in his time, you know? And so it's just, it's, it was very, very cool, you know, I, I wonder about an alternate reality where Joe Adele is not pressed into service in 2020 and has sort of a more typical maturation. What does that guy's career look like? And the answer might be, it looks exactly the same. Some of the things that he struggles with, he has been able to adjust and tamp down, but, like, he's probably always going to strike out more than you want him to. And he's probably always going to walk less than you want.

Like, some of this is just, like, Joe Adele's approach is what it is, and he can tinker with it and get it to a place of playability, but it's probably always going to be a little more voracious than you would like. But, like, you look at the guy and you're like, you're clearly a talented act. athlete, you're put together good, why are you so bad out there? Doesn't make sense. Like, he looks like a guy who should, sure, maybe he struggles at the play, but like he looks like he should be a good defender because he's, he's a good athlete, but he's just never been particularly adept out there. And my, my lasting memory of his rookie season was the time that he like helped

a home run over the wall. Exactly. Yeah. In 2020, he had a what we labeled a fart bat, which is, part that. Yeah, a fielder accidentally rewards the batter a tater. He had kind of Canseco did. It wasn't off his head. It was off his glove. No, it was off his glove. Even so, yeah.

Right. And so there's something just very satisfying about that guy getting another moment, right? Another couple of moments that you can put up there. And if you're, you know, if you're the broadcast director and you're choosing which Joe Adele Fielding moment to feature. well, now you have a difficult choice to make. That's nice. You know, because, like, Joe Adele, I don't want to, I don't want to insult the young man.

Like, Joe Adele's only 26. Like, he might have a very long career ahead of him yet. But, like, in all likelihood, Joe Adele's career will not be remembered as specifically as we maybe would have thought when Joe Adele was a prospect because he was a very highly regarded prospect. He was a top 100 guy. he was, you know, he graduated as a 60 for us. Like, he was like a top 10 overall prospect, a global prospect in 2020.

And so, you know, when a guy is in that sort of stratosphere, you have it, you have a, maybe not an expectation, but a reasonable hope that he will have a long big league career that he will feature in all-star games, that he's going to have an impact on the franchise he plays for in a way that is lasting and that you. remember. And we will probably remember Joe Adele's career much less than we thought we would when he debuted. Yeah. But we will remember this. But we're going to remember this. You know, and that's, and that's amazing because the prior moment that we would have remembered, what about the fart bat? Right. And by the way, when people are hearing this, Joe Adele will probably be 27 because his

birthday is Wednesday. Happy birthday, Joe Adele. Yeah. You already gave yourself a great present or three of them. And yeah, even offensively, he's uneven. He's unpolished. He hit 37 diggers last year and yet was 12% better than the average batter because he had a sub 300 on base. He's a low babbip guy, low batting average guy, doesn't walk a ton. So even there, it's not like he's the complete package. And this year, he has homered once. So he has had more home run robberies than home runs on this young season. But there was such a satisfying progression. to these three. I think the first one,

if I had to rank the difficulty of these robberies from most difficult to least difficult, it would be three one, two. I think that the easiest one was the second one that he had. And so it wasn't quite a linear progression from easiest to hardest,

but the grand finale was clearly the coolest. And he had to... go far to get in. It was over in the corner because the first two were more in the genre of he was kind camped under it, particularly the second one. He got there and then it was just a timing play, which isn't to say that that's a cinch, but it's less impressive visually and actually than when you're just full tilt running and then your catch carries you over the fence entirely.

That was the perfect finale. That was the culmination. It was just like, you know, you want the third act. Like you want the climax to be the most exciting. And it was. And it was the ninth inning. And so it was just perfect, really. And so then the question is, well, what is that quote unquote worth?

I think it's worth a lot in the sense that it just made memories for a lot of people. And maybe that's the most exciting occurrence in an Angels game this season, we will see. But that alone, it's worth a lot. but in terms of just raw runs and everything. So the defensive systems handle this very differently. And I corresponded with Mike Petriello at MLB.com and Mark Simon at Sports Info Solutions, friends of the show to make sure that I had this all straight. And they handle home run robberies very differently.

And I don't know that either of them does it perfectly. It's hard to say for sure. And maybe there's even a happy medium. But there is a big disparity here. So statcast currently doesn't really give any extra credit for a home run robbery. It just looks at, well, what was the catch probability? Right. And the catch probability, according to statcast, of these three balls was high.

It was 95%, 95%, 95% and 85%. Now, when anyone watches those, I think they would instinctively reflexively say, no way was that a 95% catch or an 85% catch. And I do think we probably overrate the difficulty because it was a home run robbery and because he had three of them in a single game, which just makes it all seem cooler and more improbable. But still, there's a degree of difficulty there that I don't know is being fully accounted for. And the folks at StackS and MLB, they've acknowledged as much.

And Tom Tango has talked about maybe revamping. the model there because they know when it's a wall ball when the wall comes into play, but they haven't, I think by their own admission, perfectly accounted for that. And it's difficult to account for that because when a ball is at the wall, inches and feet make a huge difference to the difficulty. And the tracking is not perfect. It's tracked a long distance. It's not every ball perfectly tracked for the full trajectory.

sometimes it's sort of extrapolated. And where it hits on the wall or above the wall makes all the difference when it comes to the difficulty of a catch and a home run robbery. The system just hasn't currently accounted for that that well. And I think that they will probably change that in some way so that there will be extra credit. But basically, now there isn't really. And so if you have a 95% catch and a 95% catch and an 85% catch, then basically you're getting 0.05 runs. plus 0.05 runs plus 0.15 runs for making those catches because the presumption is, well, most people would have made that catch most of the time. So he's getting like 0.25 run. He's getting like a quarter of a run defensively for making those catches, which just seems wild. That can't possibly be right because we're all watching this and we know more than the stack cast system does. Yes, it's possible that we with our primitive eye test might outsmart the system in. some particular cases.

Yeah. So there is like a wall comparison so they're compared to other plays that were also deemed wall balls. But there's no sort of blanket, well, because this was a wall ball, we're adding in extra credit or because this was a home run robbery, we're adding in extra credit. Whereas defensive runs saved from sports info solutions does do that. It does give you bonus points because there's this added degree of difficulty for for the wall ball. So first things first, this was the first time on record that anyone had had three home run robberies in a game.

Doesn't it feel like you should get extra credit for that? Yeah, I mean, I think you should get extra credit for each individual one. I know. I think you should get extra cool this credit for doing it three times in one game. I don't know that I would factor that into defensive run saved. But this was a first. And SIS has been tracking this since 2004. And as you noted, Mike, Trout has done this a lot. He leads all players over that span with 14 of these things. And there's a park effect, obviously. Yes. And Angel Stadium, the walls, the fences are what, eight feet high or something. And so there are some fences and some walls where you can't have a home run robbery. Like, good luck robbing a home run if you're playing left field at Fenway or something. You know, you'd have to be on some super tall stilts or something. So you have to have the means, you know,

and the opportunity. And so certain parks definitely are more conducive to this. And Camden Yards has been one of those, depending on how Baltimore is currently configured and everything. And I think that's fine. I think that's good because I think that this is probably the most exciting play in baseball. I think it confounds expectations because you're thinking, oh, it's gone.

That's the worst possible thing that can happen to the defense. And then the best possible thing happens, which is that you record it out and actually no run scored at all. And so it just subverts your expectations as a spectator. And even the most routine home run robbery, even when it's like Aaron Judge with his back against the wall and he just lifts his arm up and that's all he has to do, it's still a pretty good play. And when it's a really good play, well, then there's nothing better than that really.

So I think it's good that the fence heights have kind of come down. that I even wrote about this back when everyone was wringing their hands about how there were too many home runs and the ball was too juiced. And I said, yeah, maybe, but the silver lining is more home run robberies. So that's nice at least. So yeah, this was partly a product of the ballpark. But even so, so what SIS is doing here, and again, this was the first three time, they did have two games with two robberies on record. So Nook Logan, did this in 2005, and then 20 years later, Jesus Sanchez did it. That was last year for the Astros. Okay. And that's funny because those are not the two names that would immediately come to mind, probably.

Like, if you had to guess, it would be Trout, or it would be Kevin Kiermeyer, or it would be Dalton Varsho, or, you know, it would be like... Yeah, like the really good centerfielders. The really good outfielers and the guys who played a lot. Right. And no, Logan was a good fielder, but you can play all that much.

And Jesus Sanchez is fine, but you wouldn't think of him as a superlative glove guy. So, again, there's an element of randomness to this because you just have to have the opportunity. The ball has to be perfectly positioned. The fence has to be a certain height. So it's not perfectly correlated with who are the best guys at doing this. But DRS does add a bonus value. So essentially, They add 1.6 runs for a home run robbery, any home run robbery, plus the value of the catch itself.

And SIS has different out-and-catch probabilities. So theirs were a little lower than MLBs. Mark said that their out probabilities were 84% for the first, 54% for the second, and 64% for the second, and 64% for, or the third. And even those, maybe you think that doesn't sound low enough or why would the third one be higher than the second one? It's just, it's tough to really capture, oh, he had to jump or he had to reach and everything. He had to hold onto the ball going into the stands. Yeah, that too. So the combined value of the catches, according to DRS in this game, was point nine runs. So almost a run. But then they add one. 1.6 runs for each of the home run robberies. Got it. So that's 4.8 plus the 0.9.

So you're getting 5.0 something, maybe round up to 6 runs. So more than half a win in defensive value just for those three catches, which sounds certainly closer to right. I mean, we know, of course, because it was a 1-0 game and everything that he really did sort of single-handedly, but three times saved the game. But that, I think, comports with one's gut sense better than the stat cast figures do. But then is that perfect? Maybe not, because that sort of one size fits all plus 1.6 runs.

I'm sure there's an empirical basis for that number, but not all home run robberies are created equal, of course. And even Joe Adele's home run robberies in this game were not created equal, right? So if one of those was a 1.6 run saved, well, it doesn't seem like the others should be exactly the same. So it's a little bit of a fudge factor, but it's probably important that there be some sort of fudge factor rather than no fudge factor. So maybe these are both imperfect attempts to answer a thorny question. But I think adding some extra credit does get at the extra credit that we all award when watching this. I do worry that we, and when I say we, I mean, the collective baseball writing media, especially those of us who approach the game analytically.

I do worry that we've like ruined the way that people watch baseball a little bit because it's like that tweet that goes around where it's like the kid and his dad are at a baseball game. And he's like, shut up, I'm calculating one probably. Yeah. I understand the instinct to go to, oh my God, What was that worth? Like we published a good, I think a good piece at the site that Ryan Blink wrote about this very question. So I'm not trying to like take a dig at Ryan. But sometimes I worry that we've we've kind of trained people to think about this the wrong way because it's just like, what is it? What do you mean? What? You watched it. Why do you mean? It's, it's priceless because. Look how cool that was. Yeah. And I do think that there's value in in us trying to identify more. precisely, like, where that value comes from and what it means. And I think the differences in how the different systems account for that moment are really

interesting. And I think inspire a good conversation about, like, how we understand the game. But also, like, do we don't really know. Like, I'm not going to that. Like, it was so cool. Yeah. As long as we lead with the coolness. Yes.

And then say, let's acknowledge that that was the important thing. Yes. And now let's get nerdy and try to quantify what that was worth to the team because the entertainment value was off the charts. Right. And, and, you know, because we are able to imbue our understanding of that moment with all the context of the game and the score, like, we don't, we know, we know, we know. Yeah. But also, it's pretty cool. Yeah. And Tori Hunter, who, mind you, works for the Angels, but even some. So he knows his way around an outfield fence and a home run robbery.

He has 12 of them, according to SIS. And he said that it was probably the greatest defensive game I've ever seen. And it really was spectacular, absolutely spectacular and sensational. And the funny thing is that even though SIS gives Adele five plus runs of credit for this, they still have him as plus two in right field on the season, which means that aside from, these home run robberies, he's actually been negative three or four or something in all other plays in games. So even though they haven't had him as negative as stat cast as, it's not like anyone thinks he's an amazing outfielder, which in a way just makes this all the more fun.

And also, I think that it has sort of swung back around when we talk about what it was worth because a game like this actually was worth a lot. however you slice it. And so we have calibrated our expectations to, you know, I've written and talked on the podcast in the past about how pre-war and warp and warp and all of these win value metrics, no one really knew what any player was worth. There was just no framework. And so you'd get all these just wild-ass guesses where people would just kind of confidently

say that someone was worth 20 wins or whatever. And so now that we know that's not really the case, we've reframed our. expectations and we're all just very calm and measured and oh even a MVP level season might only be seven or eight wins or something and that probably wouldn't have seemed so impressive to people in a past era because there are 162 games you're telling me the best player in a season might only help you win seven or eight games or something it sounds like a drop in the bucket and because of that we're conditioned to think well one game doesn't really matter that much or it can't possibly you can't accrue that much value in one game, which is why I think we then freak out when you have some special game, when you have like the two-way Otani game.

I guess I should specify which two-way Otani game, but one of the ones, right? And other just really incredible offensive outbursts. And then this, a defensive outburst, which is also that's kind of special because you don't get that many opportunities usually to make plays and catches in a game. and when you do, they're usually not this kind of opportunity. And so we talk about four homer games and incredible total base performances and everything. And you don't tend to talk about games where a defender, you might talk about one incredible play, but it's usually not so cumulative. And so that sort of made this an outlier too, where we're talking about three homeroid

robberies in one game. Wow. But because of that, I think that makes us Marvel all the more when we can actually quantify that someone made a meaningful addition to their totals, their season stats with one game. And so even if I could say

that this was worth more than half a win in one game, well, we know now instinctively, well, that's a lot because Joe Adele hit 37 homers last season and he was worth

1.2 war, according to Fancraft. So it's like, on defense with these three plays, maybe he amassed half that much value. So that does kind of put it into perspective, and it swings all the way back around where we can then appreciate these single game performances even more because we're not accustomed to evaluating performance on that level, that more micro level. Yeah, I think that's right.

I did want to shout out the fan grass piece that you mentioned, too, because that was yet another way or multiple ways to evaluate this, which Ryan Blake wrote about. So he was looking at this through the lens of win probability added, which doesn't give Adele any credit for the home run robberies because WPA, one of the shortcomings, obvious shortcomings of that system is that defenders don't get credit. It's just the pitcher gets credit for all of the outs, which is, you know, not how you would want an advanced version of WPA now that we have the data that we have to work. but it works fairly well, historically speaking, and also to just sort of capture the excitement value of a game or a play. But defenders don't get any credit in that system. And so Ryan was trying to figure out, well, what if you could kind of give him credit

and just tinker with the system? And then what if you gave him credit for the out? That's one way to do it. But then what if you also gave him credit for the fact that by recording that out, he was also preventing a run from being scored and then taking into account the score of the game and then he really got into the weeds and was like, and what if he hadn't made the previous catch

then what would that have been worth? So he ran the numbers every which way and he found that if you give him credit only for the outs then that performance or those three plays were worth 0.128 win probability added. So 12.8% of a win. And if you give him credit for the out and the run, taking into account that this was a one-nothing game, then it was worth 0.822, 82.2% of a win. And that, I think, intuitively feels right. Yes, feels right. Because you've got to give him like most of a win for that, right? And I guess DRS is barely giving him most of a win. But then the home run robberies, the defensive stats are not taking into account the score and everything. And so. You know, do you want to take into account the context?

Well, we have all these context-neutral stats like WRC Plus and war where you don't take that into account. But when the coolness factor is calculated, of course, you take that into account here. So if you just come up with some medley of all these stats and different statistical approaches to answering this question, some melange of the various versions, then I think you could come up with a way where, it was worth at least most of a win maybe, and that feels appropriate. Yeah, I think that that's right. It definitely felt closer to right anyway. One of the highlights of the season, one way or another. Or really, I guess, three of the highlights of the season. Switching gears slightly here.

We can maybe talk a little bit about some slow starting, faltering, foundering AL East teams next time. I did want to note, though, the Blue Jays have. have lit the Patrick Corbin signal, and he has answered. They have signed Patrick Corbyn, really the second consecutive season where we've had an emergency late Patrick Corbyn signing because basically every Blue Jay's starter is hurt. Well, not everyone. There are a couple of important exceptions. Dylan Sees, Kevin Costman, pretty important that those guys be healthy and they are. However, Jose Burrios, elbow fracture, Trey is Savage, shoulder inflammation, working his way back, about it.

and Francis, of course, had Tommy John surgery in the spring. Shane Bieber. He had elbow inflammation in the spring. He's not back yet. Cody Ponce hurt his knee, which was a big blow to him in the Blue Jays. And then Eric Lauer had the flu. And Max Scherzer exited a start after a couple of innings. He had forearm tendonitis.

Sounds like he's hopefully okay, but he's old and Max Scherzer. So who knows? So this is a perfect storm. This is just a perfect confluence. of circumstances for a team to say, why not Patrick Corbyn? And this isn't even later signing than the previous Patrick Corbin signing. The Rangers signed him last year. And that led to a bold prediction by Ben Clemens that he would throw 100 innings for the Rangers. And I wanted to be even bolder than that and say he would lead the Rangers staff innings, which he didn't quite do. But he was second

and he threw 155 and a third innings for them, and they kind of needed it. Not that he was fantastic or anything, but he provided the serviceable innings eating that he was assigned to provide. And according to Fangraphs, at least, roughly a two-win starter. So perfect little pickup, nifty. And that was on March 18th. So this time, Toronto is upping the ante and signing him on April 3rd. And he has, I believe, reported to A ball. And so they have to stretch him out.

I don't know how long it will take him to be big league ready and to provide reinforcements. The Corbyn cavalry will arrive at some point. But here's the question. Where do we think Patrick Corbyn will rank in innings pitched for the 2026 Blue Jays? Oh, boy. And Blue Jays fans right now are groaning and moaning and something. saying, why are you playing this little game? This is not a game.

This is our season. Our emotions are at stake. And if Patrick Corbyn ranks high on that leaderboard, then it probably doesn't bode well for the Blue Jays. But what do we think in terms of, you know, it's going to be tough for him to equal his Rangers' innings count just because he's getting a later start. The season has already begun. But the Fangraph's depth charts give him 33 innings. I'm taking the over on that.

I understand why because he's like eighth on the death chart or something. I mean, update alert, though, like, we have him as their number three starter. Yeah. Well, I mean, Ponce, we found out today just before we started recording, actually, that like Ponce needs knee surgery. His season's likely done. Like, there's the recovery timeline for his particular injury is six months. So that basically takes him out for the whole thing. I mean

Okay, well, here's a Is this an optimistic way to put this? Maybe his eventual innings total ends up being lower than whoever they trade for if they decide to trade for someone, but I might be pretty hot. I think it's, I mean, I'm taking the over on 30.

Yeah, me too. I think, yeah, not to question dramatically. Jason Martinez's fine work, but I think, I just, I think Patrick Corbin, he just, he throws 30 innings before he gets out of bed after six to eight alarms if he's Carter Jensen. So like, I think, and, okay, Cesar and Gossman, they're about as durable as pitchers get these days. So I see no reason to suggest that he will end up with more innings pitch than they get.

And if he does, again, bad sign for the bootjays. But everyone else, it's not as if any of these other guys has a head start. because it's the start of the season and they're all hurt. So you'd like to think that your savage will be good and will pitch more innings, but are you really counting on? Obviously, you're not counting on Ponce. Can you really count on burios or Scherzer or Bieber, for that matter? Right.

To out throw, I was going to say out pitch, but just out inning Patrick Corbin. I don't think you can really. And maybe Lauer, but then maybe Lauer just ends up in the bullpen or. I guess it depends on how much they need him. So I'm kind of thinking it's like almost even odds that he throws as many innings as anyone other than cease or gossip. Not on a pure performance basis because all those other guys on the depth charts should be better than he is in theory. But will they be as durable as he is? Is anyone as durable as Patrick Corbyn?

I kind of doubt it. So just by being present and a warm body, I think he has the inside. track at being by bulk the number three starter on this team on the defending American League champions. It has been, it is dramatic. Like, it is a dramatic turn of events. For the first couple days, I was like, oh, my God, I'm seeing Louis Varlant a lot. And now it's not funny anymore. I guess it could be worse.

It could be the Red Sox. Again, this will be our topic for next time, probably. But both those teams are off to as he starts. Yeah, that's the thing. Red Sox might have a worse record, but Blue Jays just a more threadbare staff. And so that's going to affect the playoff odds too. But we'll take the temperature of those teams and see if we can find a pulse on our next episode. But yeah, when you call in Corbyn, that's usually a sign at this stage that things are dire.

And yet it also suggests that Patrick Corbyn, once he's there, you know, it's tough to get rid of him because he will take the ball. He will always show up. And that turns out to be pretty important when you just do not have a starting staff. Yeah. I mean, I think that what it really suggests is that the Blue Jays need to help bring my bold prediction to fruition and bring in the big maple. Who better? Oh, yes. I like that.

To save the fate of this Canadian team than a Canadian. Because when you think durability, dependability. You think James Paxton. You think of James Paxton. You think about James Paxton looking great in the WBC and how hard his fastball was. And you don't think about anything else. Yep. Yep.

Okay. I'm going to say I think he will end up with the fourth most innings on the Blue Jays this year. I'm going to say cease, Gossmann, have him beat. And then at least one of the other starters is healthy enough and good enough to throw more innings than Patrick Corbyn. but if he was more or less ready, I don't know what his level of readiness is. Is this like, you know, was he throwing, was he training, was he waiting by the phone for the call?

And thus he might just need a tune up start or two and then he'll be as good as Patrick Corbin can be at this point. Or is this more starting from a standstill? Will he need several starts? So I would guess that a guy like that he could get ready pretty quickly. And yeah, I think one of the, other injury question marks will pitch warnings than he is. Or I just, I don't, it's hard to foresee him getting forced off of this staff, which to be

clear, he has not actually been added to. He is in the minor. So, you know, he has to actually make the big league club before he can accrue innings. He can't make the big league club, though. Yeah, I'm not betting against Patrick Corbyn when it comes to compiling innings pitch. So I think he will end up improbably high on the leaderboard. And that's probably not good. It wasn't great for the Rangers last year, although the Rangers, you know,

the record didn't reflect the run differential. Yeah, he did what he was asked to do. And right now you would settle for what Patrick Corbyn did for Texas last year if you're Toronto. But it's not what you want, as Joe Girardi used to say. Yeah, it's not what you want. I will also note that there was maybe the most 2026 game that transpired because replay, review and all the forms of replay review and challenge system just seemingly swung this game and swung an inning and helped the team break a game wide open. This was last week, and it was a

Diamondbacks Braves game. I don't know if you were watching this one because you were traveling, but this ended up being Brave 17 Diamondbacks two. Oh, boy. Yeah, but it was a lot closer than that when the fifth inning started. And when the Braves came to bat in the top of the fifth, this was in Arizona, I believe. It was a two-one Braves game. And then all hell broke loose because of the recourse that players have now. So Ozzy Albies was leading off for Atlanta. And there was a full count pitch, three and two. And he got rung up. And he thought it was a ball. and he challenged, and he strutted down to first confidently, didn't even wait for the review, and the review bore out his challenge. And so a strikeout was converted into a walk.

And so that sort of set Atlanta up in a way that they wouldn't have been in any previous season. And then Michael Harris II lined out, but then Dominic Smith walked, so Albies was in scoring position. And then Mauricio de Bonn bounced a ball to third base. I'm following along with an Andrew Mern's recap at baseball prospectus here. But this was a chopper, a bouncer to Nolan Aronado. And 2026 Aronado is not what he once was. So he bobbled it. Yeah.

And instead of being an inning-ending double play or at least a fielder's choice, if there had been no ABS and Albis had been retired, then the Braves were alive. The inning continued. So that was a product of this being the late model, Aronado, instead of peak Aronado. But then, after that error, bases were loaded, and Coonja walked, so they were kind of being careful, perhaps too careful with him. Then Drake Baldwin hit another possible double play ball to Aronado. He handled this one.

He threw it to Cattel Marte at second for one out. and then Marte threw to Carlos Santana, who was playing first base, for what would have been the third out, but Baldwin beat it out. And the first base umpire said that he didn't, said that the throw beat him. And so this was challenged too. We had a now old-fashioned replay review. And so the inning did not end on this call either. And then it was off to the races. And there were three doubles and a walk and a single.

That was Albis batting around coming up for the second time and signaling. And so it was an eight-run inning. And it ended up being 17 to 2. And it was the first time in a quarter century that every Atlanta starter drove in at least one run. And it turned out to be a blowout. But this was kind of only in 2026 game. Because if this had been played pre-challenge system, if it had been played pre-replay review, could have been at least a close game

and maybe a completely different outcome. And obviously, I'm not suggesting that the inning would have played out exactly the same way. Had there been no challenge system and no replay, you can't just assume that everything else

would have happened the way that it happened. But probably it would not have been an eight-run inning. And I think this is a good thing, to be clear. It wasn't a good thing for the Diamondbacks, but I think it's a good thing that these kind of clear mistakes

can be corrected. Yeah. But it did really hit home just how much of a difference this might make in any given game. Because it's kind of like we were talking about with Adele, any individual play, any individual game. You could look at a replay review that led to an overturn or a challenge that led to an overturn and say, well, that was worth 0.0 whatever or 0.1 whatever in run value. And yeah, that's probably true on the whole. And usually when a play gets overturned, it doesn't enable an eight-run inning. But sometimes it does.

And this was just a run-of-the-mill or I guess it ended up not being run-of-the-mill, but it was just an April regular season game. And yet this kind of thing could very easily happen in a higher stakes game. And, you know, these are two potential playoff contenders. And who knows if the game swinging that way will have some impact on the playoff race. But it just, it reminds me really because I kind of take it for granted now that these things can be changed. And yet you play out the alternative history where there was no challenge and no review. And maybe that game ends completely differently.

And maybe some other more important game ends completely differently. And there's a baseball butterfly effect and everything. It alters the entire course of baseball history. So maybe this isn't news to anyone. But this was just, I think, a really stark illustration. of the fact that even if one particular review or challenge, you wouldn't expect it to be decisive, sometimes it really can be.

And I guess that's good. I think that's good. And we'll just never fully appreciate this because we'll never be able to see what would have happened, what happened in the alternate universe, where everything in this game happened the same way, except that Albi's couldn't challenge and there couldn't be a replay review on that I'll call at first base.

But everything could be different. Yeah, it is stark, you know, and we used to just live with it. Yeah, that's the thing. It wasn't as if we lived with it without complaining. Oh, no, we definitely complained about it. Yes. We complained about it constantly. Yes.

As well, we should because it was annoying. But it was ultimately impotent complaining because we couldn't do anything about it. And you did at some point just accept it. Maybe you didn't accept it if it was in a World Series game and there was some famous, infamous examples of that. But then it might haunt you forever and haunt the people involved in it forever. But usually you just would kind of let it go and hope and suspect that it all would even out and that a call would go your way and probably it would and it did. And with a big enough sample and long of large numbers, yeah, you would get credit and things would go your way once

and they'd go against you once and, you know, ultimately it would kind of come out in the wash. but not in any individual game. So I think this is good, is what I'm saying. But it's also meaningful. It can actually demonstrably change the outcome of baseball games, which is why we do it this way, obviously. I mean, if it never affected the outcome of a game, then no one would have bothered to put these things in place

and no one would have cared about their absence to begin with. But yeah, it's just don't forget that these things do actually seriously affect the outcome of games. And that inning alone was just if you showed that inning to someone, even 15 years ago. Right. It would have been not inconceivable maybe, but certainly from a different, far future, alternate version of baseball that we are now living in and we'll probably quickly come to take for granted, even as it pertains to the challenge system. Yeah. I have a few email responses that I will share with you about a couple of topics that we have discussed.

recently. So we answered an email last week about Emmett Sheehan and his alleged eyewash because he was sort of no-selling the ring ceremony because he was warming up for a start and evidently he didn't really react to being put on the big board. And so there was a question of, is this eyewash that he is trying not to show that he's affected by this moment? So a listener named Willie did a little research here and wrote in episode 2460, you mentioned how strange it was that Emmett Sheehan did not acknowledge the crowd during the World Series ring ceremony. He was too busy long tossing, which is a weird look. I think he's just aping the behavior of many a starting pitcher before him. Oh, sure. If memory serves, starters rarely, if ever acknowledge the crowd when lineups are

introduced during the playoffs. That makes sense. They have good reason to be focused. Yeah. But even during previous ring ceremonies, the behavior sometimes persists. I watched a sampling of other ring ceremonies to confirm. So I appreciate this little legwork that Willie did here. In 2016, Chris Young skipped the ceremony because he, quote, didn't want any distractions and wanted to focus on winning. Well, that's, I mean, that's the ultimate eyewash. That's some Pedro Grifold saying he didn't have time to watch the solar eclipse because

he lives baseball level eyewash. You're skipping because you want to focus on winning. Focus on the fact that you did win. I mean, I understand, sure, keep your eyes on the future and what have you done for me lately and don't live in the past and everything. Keep your eyes on the prize, the next prize. But also, sometimes keep your eyes on the previous prize that you already won. I think you're allowed to wallow in that victory one time, at least. Would you describe it as wallowing?

Wallowing sounds bad, I guess. Yeah, this is a negative connotation. Revel, yeah. Revel, yeah. I was thinking of wallowing like a pig in bud, you know. Oh. They like doing that. Yeah, I don't know if I'd use, I mean, I think they would revel in mud too.

They'd be revelers. You can have little piggy revelers. I bet they'd be so cute. I bet they'd be so cute in their little mud. I think our point was more like, hey, buddy, uncletch a little. Like, you can let yourself enjoy this. Not that there was no precedent for it. But I think you're right that like sometimes these guys, you can just crack a, you can just crack a smile.

wave your little hat, you know? Yeah. What do you have that little hat for if not to wave it? I mean, to keep this on out of your eyes, it's mostly what it's there for. Do you think it's weird that pictures never wear sunglasses? Hmm. Well, I'm going to confess something to you, Ben.

My background anxiety over the course of our recording has ratcheted up, and so I'm trying so hard to stay in the moment. Yeah. I would think, you know, it's hard to have stability. stability when you're on the mound and your heads jerking around. That's one reason why you probably shouldn't challenge if you're a pitcher. And the pitcher challenges have all but dried up. Not that there were that many, but they basically stopped at that point.

Yeah. But I don't know that it would be seen as distracting or something, but I think probably, I mean, pitchers, they don't even wear protective headwear mostly, even though it could save their life. Yeah. Well, you do have to, I guess, see where you. you're throwing ideally and in the past see signals and everything. Right. But although I guess it added some intimidation value with some pitchers who had the real Coke bottle glasses. And it was like, well, can they even see me? I don't know. But fear factor sometimes maybe that can help the intimidation. But yeah, Chris Young, this is the pitcher Chris

Young, the current pobo, Chris Young. He won one World Series in his career. Well, now he's won one as a po-po, but he won one as a player. When he was with Kansas City, right? With Kansas City. And so they won in 2015. This was 2016. And yeah, if he, I mean, look, I guess if it was eyewash, I've met him. He seems like a nice fellow and obviously quite respected in the game and made his way to the upper echelons of a baseball operations department quite quickly. So maybe if it was eyewash, it served him well, I guess. But that's, yeah, you can focus on having one, I think. When you have won the World Series, you can take a little

victory lap. It's okay. Anyway, so that's, I think, more egregious than Emmett Sheehan. In 2017, Willie reports John Lackey eagerly came out of the dugout and accepted his ring. Good for him. In 2018, Justin Verlander failed to recognize the crowd while tossing in the outfield. Okay. So he did a Sheehan. I can't access footage for 2019, but I found a report that Chris Sale was busy getting ready for his start on Tuesday, so he didn't participate in the ring ceremony. In 2020, the ceremony seems to have been done in the locker room. Well, that makes sense. No fans, right? Right. Sure. In 2021, Walker Bueller didn't appear on the broadcast at all, and they played footage of him as he was preparing for his start. In 2022, Kyle Wright barely looked up while doing some arm circles. In 2023, the broadcast didn't cut to Christian Javier. So, inconclusive, in 2024, Cody Bradford received. his ring on the field. All right, good for him. And in 2025, Yoshinobu Yamamoto did not acknowledge the crowd while getting ready in the bullpen. So Willie concludes, it's weird, but it doesn't lack precedent. And in fact, maybe Emmett Sheehan, even though I guess he had not literally been there before because he wasn't in the World Series in 2024, but maybe he saw that Yamamoto didn't acknowledge the crowd. And so he thought, uh, veteran moves.

that's what we do here. That's how we handle it. That's the Dodgers way. And so I'll follow his lead or something. But I don't know. I say enjoy the moment. That's the pinnacle. That's what you've been working towards.

So take a bow. Yeah. I also just maybe the way to do it, maybe the way to convince them of it. Because I do think that this is a lot of, you know, there is real focus going on. I don't mean to impugn. the focus entirely, but it does feel as if some of it is certainly, I must project the image

of a focused starter, a locked in guy. Yeah. And I would just offer, I think you're more talented if you can, like, break character for a second and then lock back in, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I think about that. Everything about the added challenge of the re-engagement to the locking in.

Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I hope players don't listen to our podcast. Here's another response we got from Patreon supporter Billy, who notes that we talked about A.J. Preller trading himself and wondered what the value of a front office executive would be. And this is an important precedent that maybe we could have mentioned. He notes there was actually precedent of this or for this. When the Cubs signed Theo Epstein from the Red Sox in 2011, he was still under contract with Bob.

Austin, the Cubs ended up having to send compensation to the Red Sox in the form of pitcher Chris Carpenter, not that Chris Carpenter. Later, Theo hired Jed Hoyer and Jason McLeod from the Padres, even though they were both under contract as well as general manager and director of scouting and player development, respectively. The Cubs also had to send compensation to the Padres, Giovanni Soto, not that Giovanni Soto, for this quote-unquote trade as well. So there is precedent for AJ Preller's team already doing this before he came on board. So yeah, not exactly the same, I guess, not technically a trade, but sort of kind of comparable situation. And I don't know that this exactly exposes the value of a front office executive in MLB. I think probably there was, you know, there's kind of a courtesy here and someone wants to leave and the way that Epstein's tenure in Boston ended and everything. I don't know that we can necessarily say, aha, this is the perfect example to show how teams value front office executives,

especially one like Theo. But, yeah, there has at least been player compensation exchanged for MLB executives and even Padres executives in fact. So that seems relevant. Thank you for pointing that out, Billy. And lastly, I have an email here from Theo in the UK who weighs in with a cricket comp. Can I hit you with a cricket comp? You can.

I don't know that I'll understand it, but you can sure try. Me neither, but I know I'll enjoy it. It's been a while since we've had one of these. But I think this is, oh, man, third one. This is like three Joe Adele home run robberies in a single game. And I didn't even really lean into the first two. Like Joe Adele's third home run robbery, I think that that was the last. Yes, this was the last and the best.

Because the other two were conscious. I was aware. It was premeditated or at least I was aware of what I was doing. Where's this time? Yeah, I didn't see it coming. Right there with it. Yeah. Right.

Okay. Well, we like to bring up comps from our sister sports, a progenitor of baseball cricket, which is this weird kind of bizarreo baseball where it's very recognizable in some respects and completely alien to our American sensibilities in other respects. But I think this is enlightening. So Theo in the UK says in episode 2459, there was a detailed discussion of possible alterations to be made to the challenge system following complaints that some people had about its initial implementation. And much as there are not as many similarities between the sports as thought by

people who don't follow one or follow neither of them, it made me think of cricket. Ben spoke about tennis hockey technology in an earlier episode, but cricket too used Hawkeye for a spell before moving fully over to its own DRS decision review system, which allows players from either team to challenge an umpire's decision most commonly on calls related to whether a batter has hit a ball before a fielder catches it using a recently embattled system called snicko, which I love, by the way, snicko. Snicko? Snicko. It's the best. It's the one where it's like, it's based on sound and they have

a snickometer and it's like, you know, they have like the friction one, which has been used in baseball and occasion that uses like the heat, you know, just like looks at the infrared or whatever and can tell whether there was contact or something. But then there's, there's Snico, which has like the waveform and the oscilloscope and there's a microphone. And so it can kind of tell whether something made contact with something else. And no offense, but I feel like you explaining what Snicko can do is a lot like putting like a run value on Joe does.

You didn't have to tell me any more than Snicko. I'm sold. Best system ever. Snicko. Snicko. Snico. Yes. So using a recently embattled system called Snicko. Sorry to hear that snicko is embattled. Or whether a batter's leg is judged to be in front of the stumps when the ball strikes the batter's leg before they have hit it, which is, of course, a leg before wicket or LBW in one method of dismissal in the sport. In the case of leg before wicket, when using ball tracking technology, the umpire's game.

given the benefit of the doubt, if less than 50% of the ball in its calculated flight is seen to be going on to hit the stumps. For example, if Alice Capsie is facing the bowling of Amelia Cure, the ball hits Capsie's leg and Cure appeals and the umpire gives Capsie out. Capsi can choose to use one of the team's reviews, which has been three per team per innings since COVID. The review can confirm that she is out, overturn the umpire's decision, or return the result of umpire's call, in which Capsie would still be judged to be out, but her team would not lose the review. The introduction of umpire's call has definitely led to fewer instances of frustration with a team losing reviews on marginal calls, though it has also led to more speculative reviews from batters and fielding captains alike.

Considering that baseball contains a far greater number of instances in which a review could be used, the implementation of an umpire's call system would lead to a great many more reviews, as players are going to be less fearful of losing reviews for their teammate down the long. line. Though the ABS system is very fast to confirm or deny calls, I could see these extra ump checks adding up and ultimately becoming a slightly more boring experience for teams and spectators alike. I instead like to think of review strategy as being something that teams will have to improve upon. I'm certain that teams have review strategies in cricket, but the coaches can do nothing if batters such as Steve Smith or Shane Watson get given out leg before wicket

just to review it and see that 100% of the ball was going to hit the very middle of the stumps, as so often happened. I can understand with the at-dust. mindset of baseball fans that any mistake that leads to an incorrect decision being made could be seen as anathimate to the spirit of sport, but I would also argue that it is entirely your fault for wasting reviews earlier in the game. And lastly, in one of the more notable cricket matches in recent years at Headingley in 2019, Australian spin bowler Nathan Lyon bowled a ball to England batter Ben Stokes, having been down and out for much of the game Stokes had dragged England back into it with a remarkable innings such that they only needed two to win at this point. Stokes missed his

shot. It hit him in the leg in front of the stumps. And umpire Joel Wilson did not give it as out. Australia were unable to review and Stokes would go on to win the game for England in the next over. Australia had wasted their final review on a speculative, pointless appeal, just six balls before Lions not out decision. Had they used their reviews better, they would have had the chance to review the one that was a clear error rather than fishing for something that wasn't there. So Theo concludes that it's comparing apples to oranges, to be sure, or baseball to cricket. But I think that the umpires call margin in baseball would have to be very small indeed for it not to completely change the passage of time in the game. I also think the teams are still very much to blame if they find themselves how to reviews.

Cricket fans will still lament particularly poor umpiring decisions. But DRS, the cricket version, has actually meant that bad calls don't become as much of an individual talking point, just part of the fabric and narrative of the game. Yeah, so Theo thinks ABS will makeumps better and teams will get more strategic and better with their review calls. But I suppose only time will tell. And yeah, I think that will happen or is already happening. I'm a snicko sicko. We understood every word of that email. Thank you very much, Theo.

I was listening to everything that you said, but I will admit to only listening to it with like 85% attention because I was waiting for the opportunity to say snicko sicko. And you nailed it. You did not miss your opportunity. Thank you. I do find, though, that when people say that replay review should be real time and that if you need to slow it down, then it shouldn't count, and that's not the intended purpose of replay and everything, I quite strongly disagree with that position. I understand, and we've complained about the sort of, you know, the persnickety, the not snicko, but, you know, the ones where really like it's frame by frame and, oh, that guy lost contact by a millimeter with the base. and maybe there's a better way to handle this. But I do think that if we constrained it such that you couldn't even slow down the replay

and it had to be just watching it in real time, I think that kind of defeats the purpose or a lot of the purpose of replay because, okay, if you were fully focused on the replay footage, then you'd still have a better look at it than when it's actually happening in the moment. But I think sometimes it's okay to slow it down and get a better look than we actually can because we want to improve upon human eye accuracy. Right. And so in order to improve upon human eye accuracy, we have to improve upon the human eye also to some extent, I think. And maybe you can take it too far and maybe some sports have if not baseball. But I think that's too limiting to say that you either have to challenge it in a split second or.

you have to watch it in real time because now to me it's it's not sort of getting away from the intended purpose of the thing because I think you would still have a lot of pretty serious missed calls and I think people would be upset by that maybe more so than they are by calls sometimes taken a little too long I feel like there's a midway point where I don't need it to I don't need replay reviews to unfold in real time I think slowing it down in some instances is fine. I do support like a, you know, kind of a zone of safety over the bag, because coming off just ever so slightly seems like it isn't what we were trying to solve for. But I am sympathetic to the idea of like, hey, this has been taken a really long time.

Sure. And maybe it's taken too long. And if it's taken this long, you don't know well enough to overturn what you saw on the field. Even though I do want the standard to be like the call being correct rather than having a deference in every circumstance to the call in the field. I think when you truly can't tell, but the clear and convincing is just like a, I don't love that standard. But I think we agree mostly. Yeah.

I like that better. Yeah, if you say you can look at any angle and any footage and slow it down as much as you want, but you have only X minutes to make that call. Yeah. Yeah. I'd be more on board with that. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Here's something fun for you. I read in Craig Calcutera's cup of coffee newsletter. This little blurb, which Craig wrote about a Tigers broadcast, and I quote, I'm glad I tuned in because I got to hear Tigers analyst Andy Dirks refer to a pulled home run by Luke Keschel as a nice piece of hitting, which is technically true because you cannot do anything nicer than hit a home run, but usually that phrase is reserved for slapping the ball the other way while in a pitcher's count. Inning earlier, Dirks referred to a cleanly pulled first-pitched single as a nice piece of hitting as well,

so I can only assume the Analyst's Guild is going to have a word with him soon for breaking long. longstanding industry conventions. It's true. A nice piece of hitting. I'm sure we've talked about this tends to be reserved for going the other way, taking what you're given, going with the pitch, not trying to do too much, et cetera. So this is very modern terminology for Andy Dirks to refer to a pulled home run as a nice piece of hitting, which of course it is. So I asked Dirk's broadcast partner in the Tigers booth, Jason Benetti, whether Dirk's is intentionally trying to reclaim the phrase nice piece of hitting for pull hitters. And Benetti said, so that's why I haven't seen him today. The guild kidnapped him, the analyst's guild, that is. But I said, well, if you do

find him and rescue him from the guild, I am actually curious. Is Andy Dirks just partial to pole hitting, or is he trying to subvert the broadcasting cliche? As I noted to Jason, Dirk's was not himself particularly a pull hitter. I said maybe he wishes he had been. He would have been a better hit if he had hit more pulled home runs. And Jason said, I think his homers were pole side, so maybe it's power aspirational. And that's true. 23 of his 24 career major league home runs were pulled. One was hit dead center. So Benetti got back to me later and said that Dirk's response with a smile was no, never, as far as whether he ever intentionally repurposed this phrase to refer to pull hitting. So no, he's not trying to defy convention, but as I said to Jason, maybe defying

convention intuitively instead of intentionally makes it even more mold-breaking. He's a true original. I'll return to Benetti in a bit, but while we're on the subject, I thought I would play you an excerpt from the most recent episode of Hang Up and Listen, the sports podcast I've been co-hosting at Slate for a while. And Hangup is actually coming to an end at Slate soon. The door isn't completely closed on it continuing elsewhere, but either way, it's the end of an era, an almost 17-year run at Slate, even more of a podcast institution than effectively wild. And I have been honored to be the podcast steward since the original host departed, which has lasted a lot longer than I had any reason to expect. And as I've noted, has really broadened my sports horizons.

So I would be sorry to see it go. And I guess we'll find out whether I would then lose all of these sports knowledge that I have gained. Would it be kind of a Flowers for Algernon situation? Where I would go from knowing only about baseball to becoming an all-purpose sports pundit and then back to being oblivious to anything but baseball again? We'll see. I hope not. I think knowing about other sports just makes me a better baseball writer and talker too. Anyway, my favorite thing about doing Hangup and Listen, has been contributing occasional afterballs, which is the closing segment where one of the hosts just monologues about something that is of interest to them can be kind of quirky, can be a personal soapbox, there can be a bit of reporting involved. I played a previous

hang-up afterball on Effectively Wild episode 2243 about baseball clues in crossword puzzles. Anyway, this might be the final afterball, so I tried to do the segment justice. And this one is very effectively wild coded, I guess, because it's Ben Lindberg coded. And it's also related to baseball, and it's very stat-blasty in nature. It's about a fellow traveler in the world of sports stat blasting, and also broadcasting, including baseball broadcasting. So sit back, listen, and enjoy. Well, if this is the final afterball of the Hang Up and Listen era at Slate,

I want my favorite segment to go out in style. So for this edition, I made a couple of calls, but not nearly as many calls as the inspiration for this afterball. On Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia, Kenny Albert was on the mic for a flyer's Bruin's national broadcast on TNT, here's his call of the overtime five-on-three game winner for Philly, which was top prospect Porter Martone's first NHL goal. Two mad advantage. Here is Forster. Across to Zegris. Now Forster once again. Here's Zegris down low and front. All Bortone's stop.

That game marked Albert's 1538th national television broadcasts. of an NHL, NFL, or MLB game, which left him six behind the all-time record for national broadcasts of the big four North American men sports leagues, the legendary Dick Stockton's 1544. Albert closed the gap to five on Monday night in Toronto when he did a Dodgers Blue Jays game for Fox Sports One

and got to call a Shohei Otani home run. It's you won from Manton to Plight. And Otani sends this one to deep center field. It is out of here. Albert is on track to surpass Stockton during the NHL playoffs later this month, as he confirmed when I called him on Monday morning before that World Series rematch. Yeah, that sounds about right because I have a baseball game tonight, two more hockey

regular season games, so I guess first round sounds like it's on target. Albert's near-record total is pretty impressive, not only because of how prolific he's been and how much hectic travel he's done, but because he's such a sports polymath. He's not just the national voice of one sport, he's one of the most prominent national voices of three. In addition to thousands of local TV and radio broadcasts, he's done 563 national NHL broadcasts, 530 for the NFL, and 446 for MLB, which makes him 9th, 10th, and 14th all time in those respective sports. Put those totals together, and he's almost unequaled. Albert will get his well-deserved plot hits when he becomes the national number one, but what won't be as well-known is how we're

even aware of the broadcast counts I'm citing. After all, Albert himself has no precise record of how many games he's done. I've never actually kept a list myself. I think I started, you know, way back 36 years ago when I, when I started broadcasting minor league hockey, those first couple of years, I think I kept a list of the games. You know, then it just kind of got too hard. I never really continued with an actual list. If it was too hard for Albert to keep track of his own tally, imagine keeping track of the totals for every national announcer. Imagine keeping track of the totals for every national announcer, not just in the present, but for decades of past broadcast, too. That's the Sisyphian task undertaken by Tony Miller, who's kept tabs on sports broadcasts at the website

Unnecessary SportsResearch.com since 2016. And his labors began before that. I mean, the actual announcer tabulating would go back to probably 2013 or 2014, but it would have been about Christmas 2015 when I felt like I had all four of those sports under some level of control. And then it was like, well, I have this information. What can I do with it? And one of the first things was, uh, feeling like there should be a central place where that information lives or people look for it. It wasn't long before Miller's work started to get attention worldwide, both from appreciative people and from some who were quizzical. One of the first ones I did was Al Michaels called a Super Bowl for his, I think, milestone game

where he passed somebody on an NFL list 10 or 12 years ago. And I tweeted about that from my personal account because there wasn't an unnecessary sports. research account at the time. And somebody responded to it in Italian after it had gotten retweeted and passed around the web a few times. And I wasn't sure what it said. So I ran it through Google translator or whatever. And it comes back. I don't want to say that Americans are infatuated with statistics, but they even have statistics about their announcers. Yep, that's what we do here. That's what Miller does, at least. And he has a fan in Albert, who started seeing Miller's stats on social media around the same time and even mentioned Miller's site in his memoir, a mic for all

seasons. The first time I saw it, you know, I could tell the numbers were, were really close, if not exact. You know, before I started to see Tony's work, whenever I was asked about approximate number of games in each sport or total, I was able to get pretty close, I think, with an approximate number, but I don't know how there are enough hours in the day for him to keep up with all this stuff with so many different networks and people, you know, the various sports. So it's, the work that he's done is incredible and certainly trustworthy. So it's amazing. I have a huge appreciation for what he does.

And it's crazy how, you know, his databases and the research is just incredible. I don't know how, you know, going back to the 1950s and 60s, I don't even know where this information was that he found. I've checked out the website and some of the charts and the amount of hours that he's put in. How many hours might that be? Miller, who lives in Indiana, has a full-time job at a health care facility and a part-time gig is the statistician for the athletic department at Goshen College, and NAAA school.

So unnecessary sports research is an unpaid project for his spare time. How much time does he devote to it? Probably more than I should. But oddly, how much time I spend on this for as much time as I spend adding things up, that's one thing I've never tried to add up. There's part of me that doesn't really pay attention to that because I don't want to know, you know, then I, if I had the data, I'd have to start justifying it, right? But there's only so much time in the day and so much energy to devote to this

in and around the other parts of trying to be a functioning human being. Miller's self-appointed task requires him to monitor several sources to keep his stats up to date. So much of that is stuff that you track down. I mean, network press releases, social media posts, tuning in and watching the games themselves, obviously, although that is of limited use when you're talking about what's coming up in the next couple of days or weeks because you'd limit yourself to what got mentioned on the air. And then, yes, there's several very large spreadsheets that have, you know, months and weeks out into the future and what games are on and who do we know to be doing them. And this never stops.

That's the part that I probably wasn't prepared for the most. And the same fracturing of the broadcast landscape that fans lament because it makes accessing games more complicated and pricey also adds to Miller's troubles. Yes, it makes it harder. You know, I think about now when you're putting games on Apple TV and. and Prime Video and whatever other site that we may or may not have heard of yet. There are different places to keep track of and what really qualifies as national television. Yet that, Miller says, is the straightforward part. Fleshing out the historical record was the thornier challenge. Miller has done his own delving into video and newspaper archives,

but he also built on the existing research of like-minded hobbyists, who documented announcer assignments using satellites, libraries, and media guides, and then share that info on forums and message boards. The part that really turned me on to, wait, this could work in a historical sense, came from realizing that there were other people out there that wondered about and thought about, you know, who was doing the game of the week in 1960 or 1970? People like that did a lot of legwork. And I came through and said, what happens if we put all of these things in spreadsheets and put numbers on them? What happened was people paid attention, perhaps a surprising number of people. Before social media, this was a couple of people's niche hobby that never really would have gone beyond them. And now I shudder to think at how many followers are out there paying attention to sports announcer counting.

Certainly, this is a case of if I go back to when I started putting these spreadsheets together 10, 11, 12 years ago, there's no way I would have figured that I'd be doing a podcast interview like this someday. Despite Miller's best efforts, national announcer stats will probably never be verifiably, comprehensive. And although he'd like to expand his purview to other kinds of competition, MLS, women's leagues, the Olympics, the data gets even tougher to wrangle beyond the big four. It reminds me of a disclaimer that I've seen at the top of some lists on Wikipedia, which is the side I've probably spent a little too much time on in the never-ending quest for information you didn't know you needed. There are some lists that are like, this list will probably

never be able to satisfy certain standards for completeness. Like regardless of what we put on here, somebody is going to have some level of doubt about what's on it, should this be on it, should this really be here? This work, I think, is very much in that category. But unnecessary sports research has become the de facto official record of the industry. Miller has seen his stats cited in network press releases. And thanks to his painstaking tracking, Albert has been hailed by his employers and co-workers when he called his 500th national NFL and NHL games, when he passed his father Marv on the all-time national broadcast list, and when he took over the top spot on Miller's play-by-play leaderboard. And so when someone celebrates a milestone bakes you a cake or

says something on air that's been going based on this site's research? Yes, pretty much. It really is. You know, it's neat that those of us in the industry on this side of it can kind of check out the numbers and look at some of the other names and it's, you know, somewhat surreal to see a lot of the other names that are on the list, you know, when you start looking at the numbers and where where everybody ranks at this point. In a sense, Miller says, announcer stats are a strange thing for non-announcers to care about. It's not even the people playing the sports. It's the people broadcasting the sports, which is an important part of how we consume the sports.

You know, so many of us grew up listening to Joe Buck and Bob Costas do baseball, Marve Albert do basketball, that sort of thing. They become the conduit that connects us to the actual sports. But it's still like a degree removed from the people who actually put the ball in the basket. I'm sure I would talk to some people that I would say that, oh, Kenny Albert's about to have, you know, done more of these games than any other sportscaster in American history. And they'd be like, who's Kenny Albert? And I'm like, oh, yeah, there are 300 million people in this country. And a large percentage of those don't even watch the Super Bowl.

342 million people, actually, but who's counting? Well, the U.S. Census Bureau is. We don't need Tony Miller for that. But if Tony weren't tracking announcer assignments, it's likely that no one would be. And we wouldn't know about Alberts' impending milestone, which would be. would be a loss on some level. Calling that trivia is probably, you know, not wrong. There's a George Will quote about how nothing about baseball is really trivial

because, you know, everything can become a useful piece of information later. It feels like it's trivial until it isn't. It's not trivial to Albert. It's his life's work, quantified. And he's honored to be passing Stockton, a former Fox Sports colleague whom he's known and admired since the 90s. Miller, meanwhile, accepted that his own childhood dreams of athletic or broadcasting stardom wouldn't come true, but he has put his stamp on the sports world. And in typical self-effacing fashion, the Cubs, Bears, and Pacers fan prefers not to share his personal rankings of broadcasters, Albert included.

Albert obviously has, I think you could make up a sport. And within a couple of weeks, Kenny Albert would be sounding like he had done it for years. Certainly in this capacity, though, I prefer to stay impartial and not take sides about, okay, this guy's good, this guy's not so great. I don't think that me adding my voice to that equation helps a lot. Who I like or don't like doesn't really make a difference. It's what's on that counts. At some level, numbers speak for themselves. Kenny Albert's gotten himself on national TV 1,500 times,

and I've gotten myself on national TV a whopping zero. He will be watching a lot of national TV in the coming weeks. Neither Albert nor Miller plans to slow down anytime soon. In fact, they're both about to enter their busiest time of the year, with the possible exception of October. Baseball is getting going, and we're going to turn the corner next week into the playoffs, and we're going to have nights. We've got three basketball games and four or five hockey games in the same night, and several of those hockey games have two different national broadcasts, one in the U.S., one in Canada.

A little bit like drinking from a fire hose, maybe a fire zamboni. That fire hose, or Zamboni, has helped Albert climb the leaderboard. There are more teams, more games, and more networks than there used to be, which means more national broadcast assignments. And if those trends continue, Albert himself could be displaced someday. You know, as far as those numbers, oh, of course, I'm sure somebody will surpass all of us someday. You know, it's kind of unique when I look at, you know, what I've been able to do working in so many different sports and for so many different networks. So that's probably a bit unusual, but, you know, they always say records are made to be broken. So I'm sure these will be someday as well.

If so, we'll probably have Miller and his necessary sports research to thank for filling us in. I mean, I'm certainly still on the younger side of the spectrum, so I'd like to think I've got a few more years or decades of paying attention to this stuff in front of me. But, yes, we'll be watching, but not everything at once because we only have two eyes and two ears. And as long as Miller is watching the broadcast counts, many other eyes will be trained on them too. Well, as I noted on that afterball, Kenny Albert ranks a mere 14th on the MLB National Broadcast Leaderboard. The top spots are occupied by Joe. Morgan, Tim McCarver, and Tony Kuback. So yeah, this database goes back a bit. But as Kenny told me, he too might someday be surpassed. And maybe Jason Benetti, the new national voice of baseball and NBC,

will be the one to do it. He is a multi-sport broadcasting star, and he trails Kenny Albert by only 1441 national broadcasts. But hey, Benetti's the best. I like his chances. I also like it when our listeners decide to support the podcast. Morally, yes, but also financially by going to Patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pled some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast go and help us stay ad-free and get themselves access to some perks, as have the following five listeners. Frederick Height John, Paul Hush, Lee Goldsmith, Mike Archibald, and LGK, thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to an unabridged weekly subscriber-only episode, a monthly bonus pod, our Discord group for patrons only, exclusive live streams, personalized messages, prioritized email answers,

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You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at our slash Effectively Wild. And you can check the show notes in the podcast post at FangRGravFes. or Patreon 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 products assistance. We'll be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then.