Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 250: A Long-ish Listener Email Extravaganza

Episode Date: July 24, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about rating prospect ratings, baseball without rain delays, updating the box score, and more.

Opportunities are available in all walks of life in Australia So if you're young and you're healthy, why not get a boat and come to Australia? Good morning and welcome to episode 250 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. 250 actually seems like, in our uh in our tens obsessed culture 250 seems like it should be a bigger deal than 300 yeah because uh you know i mean yes 300 is is a is a century mark but it's not a you know i mean a thousand is such a big thing so to get to you know a significant milestone on the way to 1,000 seems pretty big. So who's our big guest star for episode 250?

The listeners are, in a way. Yeah, that's right, because email Wednesday. Yes. So do you have anything you need to banter about? No, I think I'm good. We can just start. I have a quick banter okay cole uh cole calhoun who's like a kind of angels fifth outfielder organizational kind of guy um hit

three home runs in salt lake and i'm just now reading this quote from him it's a pretty cool accomplishment but not something i'm going to live the rest of my life by it was a lucky night and i love player quotes that are the sort of quotes where I would feel like a jerk saying them, but they say them. And so I think it's good when a player acknowledges that having three things bunch up on one night as opposed to over the course of four days

is not inherently better. It's kind of fluky, and it doesn't make you less of a person to note that. You don't hear that often with home runs. You might hear it with a guy who goes 5 for 5 or something and has a couple bloopers, but you don't generally hear that home runs are luck, but in a way they kind of are.

I mean, not just that they're bunched together, but you have to, and we don't know what the home runs were like, whether they were just over the wall or anything, but you have to get good pitches or have a pitcher make a mistake maybe, or things have to happen in such a way that you can do that. So there's some luck involved. Do you remember that unfiltered I did after Josh Hamilton hit four home runs in a game? unfiltered I did after Josh Hamilton hit four home runs in a game and so I looked at all the players in history who have

had four home runs in a game and all the players in history who have had six strikeouts in a game and in their next game the six strikeout guys were better than the four home run guys yep so yeah I mean it is kind of

you know somewhat somewhat random events uh occur in seemingly non-random ways but uh anyway i congratulations to cole calhoun good guy and uh i'm glad he hit three home runs and i'm glad he has a good perspective on it so what's your wait no that's not what we're doing today. Tell me about the emails. You want me to read them? Oh. I'm not prepared to read them. I could.

We can split them or something. Yeah, sure. I'll read one and then you can read one and then I'll read one and then you can read one. So Joe, first-time emailer, by the way, Joe, asks, for a sport as obsessed with stats as baseball, why don't we use the tools that predict the performance of the players to evaluate the people who attempt to predict that performance or rate farm systems? No one would expect an extremely high success rate, but it would be nice to know average performance. What he's asking is, do we measure the measurers? Is anybody rating the ra raters? If not,

why not? If we're treating this data as information that we use, and I think it really is the case that prospect rankings, maybe more than any baseball writing, although I'm not sure about this, probably actually drive baseball personnel decisions. I don't think they drive them a great deal, but I think conventional wisdom in these prospect ratings does seep into front offices and into executives' mindsets. At the very least, even if you think that a player is better than the prospect rankings say he is by, uh, noting the conventional wisdom, you know what his perceived value is elsewhere. You might know, you know, whether it's a good time to move him or not. And I don't get the feeling that anybody, no offense, Ben, but I don't get the feeling anybody's reading your articles to try to find out like whether the conventional wisdom

on Derek Lowe is high or low. I hope not. But I do think that it probably is, at least to some degree, the case for prospect rankings. So why don't we have a kind of meta-analysis of prospect rankings, do you suppose? Should we? And how would you do it? do you suppose? Should we? And how would you do it? So would it just be, I mean, would it be to evaluate how accurate a specific prospect ranker is? Or would it just be to kind of establish just in general how accurate or

predictive they are? So I'm going to go with the premise that it's to compare the raters, to find out which raters are the best. Because there actually is analysis done of the rankings. I've done some and other people have done some to look for trends in prospect development and player development and positional, sort of like comparing positions and that sort of thing. So there is definitely meta-analysis going on, but I'm thinking specifically about grading the rankings. That's tough to do, I guess. I mean, you have to, first of all, how many, how many, you know, there may be a handful of people you could do this with, right? People who

have been doing this long enough and actually talk to people within the game that you could have the kind of sample and confidence to evaluate them. You know, because like, I mean, you couldn't do it with, say, Jason Parks, right? Because he's been doing this for a year, right? He's done the official BP prospect rankings for one year. So you'd have to wait, you know, who knows how long you'd have to wait several years, maybe to see any kind of difference between people. Well, and even if I mean, I would be I mean, even you're, you're sort of alluding to the sample size issue of rating him based on one year. But, I mean, you can't evaluate his rankings this year for 10 years because you don't know.

I mean, you know, especially with Parks, half these guys are 11 right now. So how do you even evaluate whether he nailed some particular prepubescent flamethrower correctly at this point? I mean, at the very least, you would want to know. Well, I don't even know. I mean, it's hard to... I mean, I've just completely stolen your... You were speaking and now you're not. But it's tricky. I mean, there's all sorts of definition problems. You could look at first six years because that's what, you know, that's all the club controls. But on the other hand, the first six years are going to be staggered differently

for players who develop differently. And so, you know, some guys don't have their first six years until they're 25 to 31 because they did poorly. And yet those are their peak years. And so there's that as an issue, for instance. I mean, it's really hard to define a lot of these things. Or, I mean, like Baseball America's lists are, they're just kind of an amalgamation. I mean, there's no one person's name on them i don't think it's just kind of a staff thing and the staff is always changing

uh and then you you'd kind of have to define what a what a success is is it is it people who make the majors like just the most prospects who get there or Or do you only care about kind of the guys at the top of the list who these people say are really impact players? Do they actually become impact players? Or do you just kind of add up the amount of, you know, the number of wins that are produced by everyone on the top 100 list and give it to the person who has the most? Yeah.

Do you put extra weight for those who perform who produce early when they're cheap yeah and or do you you know does it not matter do you just look at career uh do you do you how do you handle negative war because uh like you know you noted that maybe getting to the majors is a success but you know a lot of players make the majors and are are negative uh you negative wins above replacement. So do you dock them for that or do you treat them as zeros? I mean, none of these things are deal breakers, right? You just choose and you just state up front how you're doing it and then somebody can rank the rankings of the rankings based on your definitions if we get to that point.

But I mean, I think that there's promise behind the idea i think the biggest issue uh which is the first thing you said is that essentially you've got baseball america has been doing this for 20 plus years and nobody else has i mean you sickles sickles maybe sickles has been like probably what 12-ish or so? But Sickles, I think, would acknowledge that his philosophy has changed, his methodology has changed a great deal. So you wouldn't necessarily – I don't know this. I don't know Sickles. I don't know him. he would consider himself he wouldn't necessarily lump 2012 sickles and 2003 sickles in the same sample. You should be getting

better at this ideally if you're putting the work in and learning from people you should be better at it now than you used to be. But how do you know if nobody's measuring it? How do know i mean it would benefit i think another thing is that um uh like i don't know a lot of the people who have maybe the time to do this sort of thing like you or me i probably don't really necessarily have the inclination to go like to go saying like hey six of these guys suck yes uh And we're kind of cowardly. So, I mean, there is, I'm not the first to note that there is a little, I don't know, I guess there's a little bit of some sort of social pressure within the blogosphere or whatever. And so, the incentives go down somewhat based on that. I mean, if I had a good way to do it, I would do it. I wouldn't feel bad doing that. But you'd really want to

have an airtight methodology, I would think, before you start badmouthing people whose career is to put more work into their work than you do yours. Yeah. It's a worthwhile endeavor and goal. I mean, there's no reason why we should necessarily take every prospect ranker at their word that they're good at this, that they know something about prospects that other people don't. So yeah, I mean, it makes sense if you could figure out some way to do it, but it's it's tough i vaguely recall that we did it uh just comparing uh ourselves in the like pakoda days um back before gold scene um yeah right it like compared to baseball america or something or yeah yeah i felt like there was some self-reflection there i don't remember what the results might have been the way that it's it usually seems to go is that prospect rankers get tied to the players that they differ on from everyone else. Yeah, so we're the Pedroias and Pedroia and use Merrill Petty. Exactly, right.

So yeah, if you make some call that is kind of an outlier, you rank someone high who's not ranked high on the other person's list, then your reputation is at stake and people will either remember maybe they might not remember but they might remember that that you were either very right about that or very wrong about that and that will follow you around so uh so that's kind of how it's how it's done now i guess which is not really a great way to do it but yeah i could yeah i compared i compared our rankings to Baseball America's from like 2004 to 2007 or something once just for fun on a lark and it wasn't very rigorous

or anything like that and nothing particularly interesting emerged so that might be another reason that these don't get done. It might be that they hew fairly closely to each other. I mean, especially if you're just looking at top hundreds, you know, like 80 of the top hundreds are going to be the same from source to source a lot of times.

Yeah, and you'd think that the sources that all this is coming from, you'd think there has to be a lot of overlap, right? Oh, tons, right? Right, because, I mean, the people who are in the game and are willing to talk to prospect writers are going to be the same sort of people. And you'll come across them at the same events and they will open up to the same people. So to some extent, there's got to be a lot of cross-pollination of sources there and information. Yeah, that's kind of the point too, is that this is what these things capture is essentially conventional wisdom. And the conventional wisdom is basically, you know, the it's, uh, they're,

they're capturing the same thing. I mean, there's nuance and like what, I think what we do is really interesting because our prospect guys do a lot of, you know, like scouting on their own. Like it's a, it's a very, uh, experience or experiential approach. But I mean, that's essentially what the goal is, is not to like rewrite or to like tell the clubs themselves who's good and who's not. It's essentially to capture this really valuable thing, which is the wisdom of the major league baseball crowd. So yeah, there's going to be a lot of overlap. Uh, and the scouts are probably,

uh, themselves sharing a lot of the same information with each other. I mean, they're, they're guiding each other toward the conventional wisdom when same information with each other. I mean, they're guiding each other toward the conventional wisdom when they talk to each other. All right. Next question comes from Andrew. Another topic for a slow day that we were discussing here in my office. What if baseball didn't have rain delays? It was like football and just played through the rain. How would that change the game? Would there be guys who were rain specialists, especially with pitchers and fielders who specialized in fielding and throwing a wet baseball? Would it benefit the hitters because defenders would move much more slowly to prevent themselves from slipping and

injuring themselves, leading to more balls dropping in, et cetera? Huh. Um, well, so my guess is that there wouldn't be specialists. Like, I think that there would be a lot of narratives that would develop out of this. I mean with football players, you often hear about like Favre, for instance, having never lost. I'm totally making this up, but like having never lost in an under 35-degree game or whatever. And so my guess is that the first pitcher who won two games in a row in the rain would be known as a rain pitcher. Yeah. But it's hard to imagine what this – I mean it's easy to imagine that maybe some specialty would emerge, but it's hard to know what that would be. But to kind of maybe answer the premise, which I love by the way, and I think this is a great question and it's wonderful but the thing

about baseball that makes it different than almost any other sport is that if an accident happens you could die and so like football you know it gets rainy it gets sloppy maybe people are tearing their ACLs but ACLs aren't that important They're important to the sport and they're important to business. But nobody dies of an ACL. Whereas with baseball, it would really be super terrifying if somebody was throwing a slick wet ball near your head at 90 miles an hour. And so I just think that that's probably why it has never been pushed, right? That's why baseball is different. It's almost, I would say that it is entirely because the pitcher can't be trusted to not kill a person. Yeah, that sounds right to me.

Are you aware of studies that have been done to look at what happens to offense with rainy conditions? happens to offense with rainy conditions. I've seen a lot of stuff about windy conditions and different time of day and all that sort of thing, but I can't, I mean, I guess when it's raining heavily, you just stop the game. So you can't really do that sort of study, maybe. Yeah, there's a lot on cold as well. Right, yeah, temperature. I have found, I looked at this when I was doing the thing about stolen bases being down this year, which incidentally would be a pretty good thing to revisit. I should see if that's still true. And what I found is that it's really hard to get good

precipitation data because it's fairly blunt.'s uh you know like it's it it describes the region and it doesn't necessarily describe the you know what inning it's raining or anything like that so it's actually hard to get any the weather at first pitch or at some point during that day and yeah you can't pin down exactly when it starts raining yeah so you could probably i mean a decent proxy would probably be like the half inning before a rain delay, but how many years would you need to get enough data to get anything from that? My feeling on it has always been that offense goes way down, except that sometimes you see pitchers struggle to throw strikes, but basically offense goes way down.

That has always been my feeling. I don't know if that's true. Sometimes you see pitchers kind of struggle to throw strikes, but basically offense goes way down. It has always been my feeling, and I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that would ever be backed up, but my gut from having seen a delays, we're speculating is that pitchers lose control of pitches or could potentially lose control of pitches, then wouldn't that suggest the opposite? dry for a while, but they're not playing through seven innings of this. I mean, what this question presupposes is that they might play an entire game. And so if you got a new ball for every single pitch, you'd go through 300 or 400 balls, right? So probably they wouldn't do that. There'd be a little bit of a waterlog effect.

And their hands would get wet or their gloves would get soaked. I mean, you hardly ever see a game played and ran long enough for everything to get completely soaked through. So it's never really been put to the stress test. Yes, that's true. You'd also have defenders kind of sinking into the ground and not probably having the same range that they would under ideal circumstances. But you'd also have slower runners.

And yeah, so you're probably right. I would, yeah, I would think that the wetter it got, it would tilt toward the offense because the defense would be a big thing. I think you'd see a lot of uh risk averse defense and you know i've also if the ball's starting to get waterlogged you know it's one thing for a pitcher who gets to set his grip in his glove but if every fielder was picking up a completely drenched ball and having to throw it you know in the time it takes to you know throw a ball to first base or first base or from right field to home or whatever,

I think you'd see a lot of balls going crazy directions too. Okay. My turn. Yes. All right. So Kevin says, we were supposed to skip one of the ones that I said, but we didn't discuss which one to skip.

So hopefully we weren't planning on skipping Kevin. Kevin says, if MLB ever decided knuckleballing was out of hand, here's how to stop it. Instead of trying to legislate what is or is not a knuckleball, which seems impossible, just lower the height of the seams on game-used baseballs, making the pitch less effective and therefore less common. This would also reduce the effectiveness of curveballs and other breaking pitches, which should please our friend Travis from the forums. This is a reference, of course, to last week's show when we wondered what would happen if half the league was throwing knuckleballs and how the league would stop it. So first off, Dan Brooks pointed out that we actually have the data. You could just set a spin minimum, which makes perfect sense.

I don't know why it didn't occur to me that it's 2013. And you could. You could very easily say it has to spin 15 times or whatever. Although the tricky thing is how do you enforce that? You'd have to have a whole other umpire just to do that, right? I mean, unless you have, if you're already doing replay, then it could be the video umpire. But would have to somehow have a way of of immediately uh noting that and that's not easy in the state of the game as it is now um and someone else pointed out that pitch fx doesn't actually record the spin so you'd need like trackman to do the thing yeah that guy was sure smug yeah uh no it was good. He was right. But I wanted to read this question because it had never really occurred to me that MLB could manipulate the seams. You always hear these theories about them manipulating the core or whatever a juiced ball has manipulated.

But the seam seems like a craftier, cleverer way to do it. And so that's interesting. I'm not speculating that they've done it or that they would do it. It's an interesting idea. But I just wondered whether baseball would be more fun to watch with high seams or low seams. Well, we like movement, right? We do. We like pitches that look like wiffle ball pitches,

like you Darvish's slider or something. We enjoy that. It does seem like the movement is more enjoyable to watch than velocity. Yeah, I think so. So I'm pro high seams. Yes, so am I. Okay, that's all I wanted to answer, Kevin think so. So I'm pro high seams. Yes, so am I. Okay, that's all I wanted to answer, Kevin's question. But also I wanted to note that Kevin gave a good proposal if you ever wanted to kill the knuckleball.

Yeah, that's a good idea. All right. Okay, this question was from Tom. Okay, this question was from Tom. While buying tickets to the 2014 opening day series in Sydney, I noticed on the seating plan that there was a scaled map of the field dimensions. Using my below average but still slightly useful engineering skills, I scaled the map off and found that the field has the following dimensions,

left field and right field 320 feet and 385 feet to center. To me, this seemed ridiculously small for a ballpark. And checking my numbers, I found that this field will indeed be small. In fact, the distance to center field is potentially the smallest ever, allowing for my scaling errors. It's about the same as the Reds' Crosby field, which was 387 to center. He also checked that the walls, checked to see if the walls were high to compensate for this.

It appears that they are not. So his question is how small does a ballpark have to get to be too small? At one point would major league baseball step in and say that the field dimensions are not suitable, either find a bigger ground or we'll take opening day to another country. Would a field like this be approved if it was to become a permanent facility in the major leagues? Or is MLB allowing it just because it's for two games? And I emailed a friend, Drew Samuelson, who works for the Australian Baseball Federation. He's a player development guy there and does some international scouting and wrote something for BP about it.

And he's never been to that stadium and his, but his understanding is that the field dimensions will be ridiculously small like the Dodgers reconversion of the LA Coliseum, which is kind of what I was thinking of. I was, I was thinking of Puerto Rico. Remember Puerto Rico? Right.

Hiram B. Thorne. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what do you think about that? It's interesting. It is interesting that when you leave Major League when you leave America, it's probably

hard to find reasonably sized parks because if you don't have the super elite players, then Major League dimensions are kind of onerous when you think about it. Yeah.

Like there might not be a park in Australia big enough for major league team because what there's no Australian players who could regularly hit the ball out of a major league park. Yeah. Plus, right. And you don't need the same kind of seating capacity so you can have a smaller place. Well, I mean, the answer is obvious that they should just raise the seams on the ball. Right. That solves the problem. What was the question specifically?

At what point, I guess, small becomes too small or would this be allowed in the majors park with these dimensions? Probably no to the latter. And on the former, I former, I don't know. It's close enough. You just don't want to have balls that you feel like are hit poorly that are going out of the park. These are all going to be warning tracks. Any home run hit there is going to at least be a warning track shot in a real park, basically. It's easier to hit it out you'll you'll maybe see some some off-balance swings go out or something like that but basically you're seeing deep fly balls that would be rewarded and uh it's gonna probably yeah i mean it it won't bother me over the course

of two days certainly i'm glad that he pointed this out. I didn't know this. It'll give me something to look for. Yeah. You don't want the game to feel cheap, I guess. There have been parks throughout big league history where that was the case, where there was just a really short wall and people there would have crazy stats at home, huge home road splits, and you could load up with certain types of players and really exploit that. And yeah, I mean, we've talked about like 2000 Coors Field and how it kind of made baseball feel like something other than baseball when it was kind of at its height of scoring. So you don't want that.

I wonder if anybody – I mean that's the first series of the year. And I feel like a lot of people when they're doing their fantasy drafts, like they're way too focused on the early. I mean because there's so many – especially because so many leagues like public leagues, they just become abandoned by the end of April anyway. So I wonder how many people are going to be drafting for that series.

Yeah, well, you could, you should probably not stream starters who are pitching in that series. Yeah, probably not. All right. And I think this will be the last question because two people asked it, actually, probably not. Um, all right. And I think this will be the last question because, uh, two people asked it actually coincidentally within six hours of each other. So, uh, one of them was named Aaron and the other was named Rob. And Rob says, if you could, uh, after listening to the discussion with Gabe Kapler, uh, he says, if you could redefine a box score to capture the results of a game, what would the line be for pitchers, batters, defense, framing? Like what would you include?

What would you want in a box score if they let you do it? Well, all right. I mean, you have to keep it. There's always an inclination to want more information, but the point of the box score is that it's very condensed and gives you just a quick summary that you can take in with one glance. You definitely want to know how many times a hitter came to the plate, and you want to know how many times he got on base. And I guess maybe you'd want total bases in there would be something I'd like. I mean, I feel like the pitcher line works okay, right?

I'm pretty happy with the pitcher line in the, in the traditional box score. Would you, well, would you, I mean, would you, for real estate purposes, would you just eliminate earn runs and just go with runs? Uh, sure. Yeah, I guess so. So if you did that, what would you put instead? Uh, does, does the traditional box? See, I, I, I almost forget now what like the newspaper box score looks like compared to kind of the, the online box score that sort of has more information sometimes. And like, if you look at, uh, if you look at game day or something, you'll see how many, how many pitches were thrown and how many pitches were strikes and how many of the batted balls were ground balls and all that sort of thing um so i i would want that in there yeah i don't think that the ground balls is in a isn't a

newspaper box score so i take that strikes might be i'm not sure yeah so i i'd take i'd take a some sort of added ball profile breakdown uh-huh yeah i would want to know you know they always put they they well i also am now not sure whether I'm seeing this online, on online box scores or not. But instead of seeing pitches and then balls and strikes, I would rather see pitches and then strike percentage, which is the exact same data. But nobody can do the math in their head. And I know what 70% strikes are. You know, like I know what that means. And so I would want a percentage of strikes for pitchers.

I'm a sucker for strikes, for strike percentages for pitchers. So I would like to see that. I would like to see, yeah, plate appearances instead of at bats, of course, would be helpful. Reached instead of hits would be helpful um total bases would be good um i would like i think it it might be interesting instead of rbis because it like okay so if there's a sequence where you know first batter gets a single second batter gets a single third batter gets a single well the first batter gets a run on his on his mark and the third batter gets a single. Well, the first batter gets a run on his mark and the third batter gets an RBI on his mark. The second one just gets a hit. To try to get what RBIs is doing, I might like to see how many... Just for box scores, I might like to have a statistic that is a total total bases where you get credit not only for every you know for every uh uh base that you

propel yourself but also for every base that you propel another so the guy who hits the single would get you know one one base for himself and then two for driving the guy from first to third so he'd have three total bases on that on that swing if he did it with the bases loaded you know he'd get like seven or whatever. If he stole a base, he'd get a credit for a total base. Maybe if he even went on a pass ball. And I mean, that's a complete junk stat. It's not good for evaluative purposes.

But I actually like the box score being kind of dumb and descriptive and not analytical. I mean, I remember when I was... Yeah, go ahead. I would want hits in there, kind of. You would want hits separate from walks and hit-by-pitches? Just, I mean...

Wouldn't matter to me one bit. Yeah, I think so, because I kind of want to be able to describe what happened in a way. I mean, walks is in there now. We have walks, and we have... Yeah, but it's valuable real estate, Ben. You could use that on something else. That could be the win probability –

What is it that we want? Well, it could be the win probability added column. Okay. It would be nice to have a win probability added column. You have to admit. Yeah, I would take that. I remember when I was a kid probably reading something I'm going to guess in Baseball Digest by, I'll speculate, Bob Costas. I don't know.

In which he showed how you could figure out who the last batter of the game was in any game just by looking at the box score. And I was like, wow, that's incredible. There's like so much information embedded in a box score that I didn't even realize that like you could really recreate the game and i feel like that's the point of the box score the point of the box score is not to tell you who hit the ball the hardest um or you know who got necessarily who performed the best even so much as you know a score you have the score at the top of the game and now you're going to try to recreate it as much as possible. To me, the box score is not necessarily the place for sabermetrics. Now, better data is always better than worse data. So there are certain things that I would like to see,

like, for instance, reached on base would be more important to me than having hits and walks and hit by pitch in three separate categories. Although it is actually really nice to have hit by pitch because sometimes that tells you a story as a separate categories. Um, although it is actually really nice to have hit by pitch because sometimes that tells you a story, um, as a separate category. But, um, I'm thinking that I would like to have when probability added, I like my sort of total, total, total, total basis idea replacing RBIs. Um, and I wish there was a way to, uh, note which run each player scored. Not that he scored, but which run he scored. But that probably isn't really realistic unless you got very graphic with things.

Yeah, well, that sounds... Yeah, I guess that's the impetus behind maybe game winning RBI or something just so you know the sequence of events sort of or what the important run was kind of yeah would you guess in I don't know let's say 16 years

16 years from now, 2029, would you guess that win probability added will be in the newspaper box score? Will there be newspapers? Will there be box scores? Let's say just the Yahoo box score, sort of the mainstream. Yeah, I would say yes.

Yeah, probably. It's too good not to. I mean, it feels like the sort of the mainstream? Yeah, I would say yes. Yeah, probably. It's too good not to. I mean, it feels like the sort of thing that's fairly relatable once you get past the explanation. And, you know, it's a fun stat. It's a fun thing. So my guess is it will be there too. All right, end of the show.

Do you want to do that wins question that will take like 10 seconds? Sure, go ahead. Okay, this is from Zach in Fort Collins, Colorado. He says, I was reading a biography of Babe Ruth the other day by Robert Creamer, published 1974, and encountered this assessment of pitching value. Baseball students say that a man who wins 10 games more than he loses in a season is an exceptional pitcher. The Red Sox had four plus 10 pitchers in 1915 and a fifth plus eight, et cetera, et cetera. I've never seen this way of assessing pitcher value before,

certainly not on sites like BP, which is pretty down on using wins to value pitching. What I wonder, though, is whether it is reasonable to use wins as a way to value pitchers from this earlier era when pitchers routinely pitch complete games. For example, Ruth had two seasons during his early 20s when he threw over 320 innings on the leaderboard of starting pitchers routinely pitch complete games. For example, Ruth had two seasons during his early 20s when he threw over 320 innings on the leaderboard of starting pitchers in 1918. Almost all of the pitchers had at least 10 complete games. Most had more than 20, and several had more than 30. So for an era unlike ours, when pitchers usually threw complete games,

can win be the useful value for a pitcher, as most mainstream outlets still seem to use them? No. More useful. More useful, yeah. value for a pitcher as most mainstream outlets still seem to use them no uh more useful more useful yeah i mean uh you i mean given the choice you'd rather know how many runs the guy gave up than whether his team won just from an analytical perspective so not not useful given how easy it is to find out how many runs he gave up but yeah i, I mean, I think I'm on record somewhere in the 249 episodes before this as kind of liking the idea of the win if it were just assigned to the starting pitcher,

regardless of the five innings and whether he was in there when they took the lead. To me, there's something kind of interesting about just knowing whether his team won when he pitched. It's not particularly useful, but it's interesting. It's something that I think is worth recording, if not making decisions on. And of course, the larger the role that the pitcher has in the game,

the closer you get to that actually meaning something. I like it as a descriptive stat in that case. But still, it's just that there's such simpler, easier ways to do it. So probably even still not. Conflating team wins and individual player wins just seems like a concept that doesn't make that much sense, but not, yeah, not a lot, but Brian Kenny calls, calls the win in 1880s accounting practice, just because at the time it kind of made a little more sense in that the pitcher probably pitched the entire game. And also was seven-ninths of the offense at the time.

He actually batted seven times for every two of his teammates batting. Yes, exactly. Okay, that's the show. A lot of people don't know that, Ben. Yeah, well, we're educated. A lot of people. If you asked everybody Ben. Yeah, well, we're educated. A lot of people. Like if you asked everybody that, almost nobody would tell you that.

That's how few people know it. Yeah, some of those early rule changes were really quite surprising. Very few people would tell you that. Alright, we'll be back tomorrow.