Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2521: Keep Your Eye on the Small Ball

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, please visit our Patreon. Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a Chris Sale vs. Jacob Misiorowski matchup and how often anticipated pitching duels live up to the hype, a controversial fair/foul call and ball-tracking tech in baseball compared to other sports, and what stadium decibel levels say about whom baseball belongs to, then (57:26) answer listener emails about the AL MVP race, Brayan Bello’s bullpen turnaround, the highest-scoring game in which each run was driven in by a different batter, the potential downside of a closer entrance spectacle, the oldest player who could go yard in a home run derby, the value of freezing time on the field, a game between players dressed as their teams’ mascots, and what makes players fun. Audio intro: PJ Harding, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Nate Emerson, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to Sale vs. Miz article Link to Miz zone rate by month Link to Miz velo by month Link to Miz/Sánchez close call Link to Miz/Skenes close call Link to pitching leaders since 4/12 Link to Sale jersey article Link to Ben on Sale in 2018 Link to LaRoche retrospective Link to Alonso call article Link to Yankees booth’s reaction Link to Petriello tweet Link to Tango tweet 1 Link to Tango tweet 2 Link to baseball exceptionalism wiki Link to Kepner on baseball usage Link to NFL measurement tech Link to goal-line tech wiki Link to hockey tech article Link to FoxTrax wiki Link to NBA tech article 1 Link to NBA tech article 2 Link to soccer connected ball info Link to Miller/Grogu video Link to hippo talk episode Link to latest loudness article Link to loudness article 2 Link to loudness article 3 Link to loudness article 4 Link to loudness article 5 Link to loudness prompt Link to “Nothing Night” origin Link to FG WAR leaderboard Link to Bello SP/RP split Link to biggest SP/RP splits Link to 1-RBI-guys games Link to urinalysis info Link to Mariners derby article Link to Ichiro derby video Link to Clair on Appling Link to Ben on Ichiro homers Link to list of MLB mascots Link to McCutchen “furries” lore Link to listener emails database Link to MLBTR on Anderson Link to leaguewide games per year Link to Small Axe Studios news Link to Batman/Superman comic Link to comic heroes roster Link to Benge article 1 Link to Benge article 2  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

Oh, baseball, what have you done? Something's never been seen, something factually fun. Oh, there's so much of you, but there's so little time. So thank God. Hello and welcome to episode 2521 of Effectively Wild, a Baseball, podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, joined by Meg Rally of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg.

Hello. I find myself unreasonably excited for a pitching matchup that's coming up on Friday. We're recording on Thursday afternoon. We are. Just about 24 hours before the scheduled first pitch of Braves Brewers and Misarowski v. Sale, which is about as exciting a pitching matchup as I could craft, I think. And I'm afraid of getting too invested in this because something will happen to derail it. There will be a late scratch or something or a rain out or rain delay or one of them or both of them just won't pitch well.

I wonder what percentage of anticipated pitchers doles actually deliver probably pretty low where you get the marquee matchup. in practice that you thought you were going to get beforehand. But this is pretty exciting. 410 Eastern, 310 Central. I will be seated and watching Braves versus Brewers in a matchup of two of the best lefties in the game. This is pretty sexy, pretty exciting. How much will you be excited versus how worried will you be

that one of them is going to blow up? I am putting aside such concerns until such time as they become relevant, which could happen any day now. But, yeah, I mean, I'd be worried about them. You get into October and can the Miz keep doing this? And Sale kind of has a history of wearing down at least, just in terms of endurance by the time October rolls around.

And people have wondered, oh, is that because he's so stringy? Is that because of his build or what? So, yeah, they'd both be pretty high. on the list of pitchers that I would be worried about, but for one day, at least, unless I am given cause for such concern, I'm just going to try to set that aside and enjoy a couple of great pitchers going head to head.

And the whole institution of the pitcher's duel, it's lost a little of its luster these days just because inevitably it's not as it once was where you can anticipate that those guys were going to be going the distance or something close to it. If you're lucky and everything works out great, maybe they will pitch two-thirds of the game combined or something like that, right? So it's still going to become a bullpen game at some point. And also, it's not as if they face each other either, really.

I mean, they're both pitching independently. And they're going up against each other, which affects the outcome of the game, affects the run environment for that game. but it's not as if they are actually facing each other, not even the way that they would have if this had been pre-Universal DH and two National League pitchers were pitching in the same game. They would have actually hit off of and pitched to the other. But it's not really like that.

And yet it still does enhance the experience because if they were missing each other by a game or something, we'd still get to watch Mizraowski start and a sales start. But something about them coinciding. It definitely does enhance the experience. If only because any time anyone's on the mound and whichever half inning it is, there's an ace out there. Yeah, it's very exciting. And we haven't really seen.

I was looking back at Miz's matchups from this season. And the sexiest starting pitcher matchups that involve the Miz this year were all really early on. So I guess it would have been a second start of the season or something. April 1st, he faced Drew Razmison, who should probably be better known. and hailed more than he is. He is a very good pitcher, but doesn't have that sort of name recognition. On April 7th, the Miz faced Garrett Crochet.

Now, that was at the time. That's a couple of marquee lefties going at it. The Ms. faced Kevin Gossman on April 14th. Yuri Perez on April 19th. So really, for the first half of April, at least, it was nothing but bangers. But after that, it sort of subsided. I guess you had Ms. versus Matt,

Max Fried on May 8th, but since then, there haven't been any really double-barreled, super-exciting matchups with maybe the exception of the Miz versus Chase Burns on July 2nd. Because those early Miz matchups, something was lost there because Ms. Mania didn't really ramp up until May, because obviously there was a lot of excitement surrounding the Miz last year, but then he was shaky enough down the stretch last year or unavailable and then, you know, hadn't fully put things together. And so he was still exciting, but he hadn't ascended to clearly best pitcher in baseball untouchable. No one has ever done it like this status. That didn't really happen until May.

That was when his zone rate really ramped up and he started throwing tons of strikes. And he also added to his already incredible velocity in pitch speeds. So since he became the MIS of today, he hasn't really had that kind of marquee matchup, maybe with the exception of Burns. And he's had a bunch of close calls times when I thought, ooh, we're going to get the absolutely top tier pitching matchup. In June, he was at one time seemingly lined up to pitch against Christopher Sanchez, but then that didn't work out. They pitched in the same series, but a couple games apart. And then in June, I think there was actually a Chris. sale and Ms. Close call, because there was another Brewers Brave series, but they missed each other

by a day. And then there was a much Ballyhooed Ms. versus Skeens matchup that seemed to be in line for immediately before the All-Star break. But then the Miz was scratched from that start. And so Ms. missed Skeens. This was before Skeens had sort of sunk into current Skeen's status. So that was still very exciting. And then the Miz and Scoopal missed each other by one game this past weekend when the Dodgers played the Brewer. So we've had a bunch of almost perfectly lining up, but the stars did not quite align. And now we've got Sail and the Miz who, if we arbitrarily lop off the first half of April, because the Miz wasn't quite the Miz yet, and Sale had one rough start during that stretch. If we just start on April,

12th to present. Those guys are one, two, in baseball in FanGrafts War, 5.0 for the Miz and 4.7 for sale. Sale, if anything, has gotten less attention than I think he should this season. I agree. I guess it's just the, he's not the new kid on the block. Right. So we're all excited about the Miz and Cam Schlitler and even Sanchez reaching a new level or Dylan cease and Chris Sale has been similarly spectacular, but I guess we're just used to it, maybe?

Maybe. I don't know. He doesn't go quite as deep into games typically, but yeah, I think it's just that he's 37 and our heads are always turning to the new blood. And he's just been so good for so long now that maybe it's a little lost on us, but it shouldn't be. I think we should celebrate how spectacular sale has been and has kind of carried that Braves rotation at times when some many other people have been hurt who knew that Chris Sale would be the stalwart. I know. The bedrock of a rotation at this advanced stage. Yeah, it's exciting. And I don't know how Sale feels about facing the Miz, but I did see an article about the Miz being exciting to face Sale because, and I'm sure this would make Sale feel old, but, Chris Sale was a childhood favorite of Jacob Mizoreski.

He's not the only one failing old. Yeah, I mean, there is a pretty big age gap there. So the Miz said, I don't really focus on matchups, but it's going to be fun. It's like playing Kershaw last year, one of those moments where it's, holy cow, you're in the big leagues. And Sale, he almost was sort of a proto-Miss in a way. He had incredibly nasty stuff for his day and also the atypical build and the atypical delivery. And he's, I guess, he's almost like Sale had to walk before Ms. could run or Sale had to throw 98 before Ms. could throw 103 or whatever. Something like that.

Because Sale is 6.6. Right. And the Ms. is 6'7. And sales skinnier, I think. But the Miz said that looking at lanky sail and sort of string bean sale, that was definitely a good point as a kid. You saw that guy and thought, okay, I can do it too. There's something in play with that. I love the idea of looking at Chris Sale and saying, ah, yeah, I can do that.

Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what I thought when I watched Chris Sale. Oh, you're sure. Now there's a place for me, representation for tall lanky lefties. So anyway. And Ms. also said he likes how sale shows emotion. He was one of the first true guys to really show emotion back in the day when he got a big strikeout. He would let you know.

I think that was cool. As a kid, that's where I got it from. I'm not trying to be one of those quiet guys who just walks off. So that adds a little layer to it too. When there's the generation gap and it's kind of like the nastiest lefty of his day, who is still extremely nasty. But the new nastiest lefty and a kid who looked up to Chris Sale and now he's in the, the veteran role, though you can't call him crafty. I think his stuff is still too good.

But yeah, I'm all in on this. And probably people who are listening to this after Friday afternoon are like, little did he know that it turned out to be a dud or a bummer or something. But then again, who knows? Maybe it'll turn out to be a double perfect game. And everyone will say, ah, yes, this has actually fulfilled all of Ben's expectations. The rare double perfect game. You know how you famously get two from two different.

guys and the same gets you different guys? No less. Yeah. Chris Sale, this late career resurgence for him, it has totally cemented his status as a future Hall of Famer, I think, if you care about that because I think he was seen as sort of borderline, like he was good enough but didn't have a long enough peak and wasn't durable enough. And now I don't know that anyone would really quibble with that idea because he finally got the Sai Young a couple of years ago, and then has continued to turn in all-star seasons, and it just has been so dominant.

And when he just bottomed out with Boston and they just traded him as sort of a change of scenery thing, that's almost one where you look back and is Craig Breslow even kicking himself for that trade for Grissom? Because I think it was such a prevailing opinion at the time that they just had to move on from sale, that everyone's kind of like, yeah, I guess that. came back to bite you or it looks bad in retrospect, but no one was really suggesting that the Red Sox shouldn't deal sale at the time. It just seemed like for whatever reason it was not going to click there. It's an interesting hypothetical. If that trade had not happened, would he have had this act to his career that really put him over the top in terms of career value? I don't know. But it looks like a fleecing. And yet it's one of those where if you were there at the time, you totally understood why that swap happened. Yeah, I think that that's right. But I think part of the problem is you have it in conversation with the bets deal, even though different regimes, right, different front offices. Fans don't care about that. So, you know, it feels worse because of other seemingly missed opportunities from a trade perspective. But what are you going to do? Yeah. Yeah, I guess it would have been nice to get somebody better back if you were going to trade him. But nonetheless, he has thrived.

in Atlanta. And there are some postseason stakes to this team matchup and jockeying for seating and and, you know, trying to solidify your status in the division and everything. So perhaps it's a playoff preview. Perhaps it's a

Cy Young race preview. I don't know. I'm just going to settle in and hope that it lives up to the billing that I am giving up here. And I'm probably glazing this matchup too much before it even happens. But I'm just, I'm happy that Chris Sale has had this post-Tommy John recovery and has

gotten back to being as good as he ever was, if not quite supplying the bulk that he did back in the day on a per inning basis. He has been totally nasty and remained so. So it's nice, maybe that's hope also for the MIS, because if we are quaking about the state of his UCL, Well, look at Chris Sale, who caused similar concerns. And yes, those concerns were justified. Ultimately, he did break down and he did have T.J., but here he is still at the top of his game and the game period in his late 30s. So maybe that will be the Mrs. future.

Maybe you never know. Wouldn't you be thrilled? Wouldn't you be thrilled if that were true? I would. Yeah. I would if he has that kind of longevity. Yeah. Chris Sale just sit in 96 these days, just so.

so diminished basically just a soft tossing lefty what would it take the miss to get to the point where he cuts up the uniforms though yeah like there are obvious parallels to draw between them they are seemingly quite dispositional diametrically opposed from one another and some of this is that the miss is just like so baby face despite being as big a human as he is and throwing as hard as he does they do seem sort of diametrically opposed in terms of their affect. And that's fun. It's fun to have the contrast. Remember when that was like a big story?

That feels like a long time ago. That feels like a long time ago. Chrisel cutting up the jersey, the throwback, and the whole Drake LaRoche saga. I was just going to say, like, on the one hand, weird way to behave at work. On the other hand, bringing a kid around that much, also kind of a strange way to behave at work, arguably. in hindsight, I have more sympathy for Chris Dale than I thought I would, because sometimes you're just like, hey, aren't we doing business here? Are we engaged in the biz? You know, because I have to navigate a physical workplace with my co-worker children all that time. Yeah.

Well, Drake was a clubhouse leader. He was the glue guy. So it really tore that team apart when he was shunned from that clubhouse by the higher-ups. But, yeah, there is a lot of lore surrounding Chris Sale. But he remains one of the best pitchers in baseball. So we will see if this is a great matchup, as I hope. All right. So a couple other thoughts here, and then we will do some emails, I believe. I was taking in a little controversy from the Orioles Yankees game on Wednesday.

There was a disputed call because Pete Alonzo hit what appeared to have been a home run. Perhaps he hit a deep fly to left in the seventh inning. the score was tied at 3, and this would have put the Orioles ahead, and it was ruled foul, and there was a review, and the call stood. I think it was not confirmed, it stood, and so the score also stood at 3-3, and then the Yankees scored a couple times in the top of the 8th, and they won the game 5 to 3, and that was that. So people were aggrieved about the way that this call went, because the replay is at least

one replay that I saw, the best angle that was. was publicly accessible. It looked pretty fair. It was a tough call, but it did look like it went to the fair side of the foul pole. The problem was it was so high. It was one of those where it's like almost above and then it's kind of tough to tell and it was really close. I couldn't tell it all on the real-time broadcast. It was one of those where sometimes you see a ball that looks like it's way foul and then it's actually, it just totally depends on the angle and the parallax. Yeah, you got by the camera angle a bit. Yeah.

But when they showed the replay, it looked like, oh, no, actually, that did scrape inside. And I don't know whether that would have changed anything. Maybe the Yankees would have scored twice in the top of the eighth anyway and won five to four instead of five to three. But it's one of those where the Orioles are trying to stay in this race and obviously the Yankees wins too. So people were sort of upset about this. and Pete Alonzo said he was advocating for a technological solution and said, I think a simple fix is like football. You have the pylon camera with the plane where it shoots right across the goal line.

And I feel like for us, we could easily have a laser or a camera that shoots straight up. And Baltimore manager Craig Albernaz said something similar. He said, on the dugout iPads, there's ball tracking data with the field that the players see. so it's really tough to have that call come back as stands and have that visual in the dugout as well. It's 2026. There are teams using AI on the iPads, though I guess they're not supposed to, and other sports use ball tracking data for challengeable calls. Don't understand why we don't do it. And even the Yankees broadcast, even Michael Kay and David Cohn kind of conceded that this sure seemed to be fair

and that it was a weird call after the replay. Yeah. Alonzo said what I was told is in order. to overturn a call, you need to have two camera angles to confirm it, but the best view, the only view that shows the ball fair or foul is the one down the line, but no other camera angle is available. So video room rules it foul. Umpire obviously called it foul initially. It is what it is. And Chris Bassett weighed in and said that we don't have the technology in place to actually say, hey, this was fairer foul, is literally crazy in 2026. It's crazy. Bassett then said, because it would

cost money. He said, that's it. I mean, that's literally it, his explanation for why we don't have a technological solution to this conundrum. So. Don't we, though? Well, we have replay review, but some sort of tracking-based ball positioning based rulings on this. It seems wild to me that this isn't something that has just been resolved by Hawkeye. Like, why wouldn't we just rely on Hawkeye for boundary calls. Yeah, I guess the only issue there is that the full entire trajectory of every batted ball is not tracked, is my understanding. So when you see the estimated distance, that's the extrapolated estimate for if there were no fence or stands, how far would it go? But then also, they don't necessarily track it all the way into wherever it stops. And sometimes you could lose it at a

certain point. Or I guess there could be weather or something. Like there was that weird game where the fog was so heavy that ABS was offline. That's a rarity, obviously. But I think it's maybe more about, and I know the tracking is more reliable and sensitive than it was. But I think not every batted ball is tracked the entire trajectory. So perhaps that's an impediment. It does seem like a silly thing, though, because like Hawkeyes, like Hawkeyes use in tennis. for instance is boundary calls. Like that's what the tech is used for in other sports. So it seems like even if it's not a perfect implementation,

that it would be more reliable than like, you know, the shot down the line where the, you know, the pace umpires always getting out of the way. Like, you know, you can kind of hear his internal monologue going like, got to get out of the way, got to get it out of the way, got to get it out of the way. And then they always jump in a funny way where you're like, has your body twisted like that before, buddy? I don't know that it has.

So I cannot speak to the very. veracity of Bassett's claim that this is like a money question. It doesn't even seem like it would cost anything extra if you just use the system in place. It might not be perfect, I guess, but then human ups aren't perfect either. Right. And I want to acknowledge that there are potentially like implementation challenges here that I'm not appreciating and maybe the tech isn't ready yet. But it does seem like a place where you would just, at the very least, at the very least be able, you should be able to use the Hawkeye system as like a data point in your assessment of whether or not it's fair or foul, right? Like doesn't, doesn't that seem like it should

be available as something that they look at in the replay center? Yeah, Mike Petriello and Tom Tango were tweeting a bit about it actually. Petriello said the system isn't really built to track balls like that. Tango said we have 12 cameras capturing all the action, but most of them are focused on the pitcher and home plate. High balls down the line. are where the data capture is the least, so naturally the most uncertainty. I guess there's nothing, in theory, preventing them from just getting more cameras that are pointing that way. I was thinking, though, that one reason for this, maybe. And yeah, Alonzo was alluding to football.

Various sports have some sort of goal line technology. Yeah. In football, you have, you know, goal decision system or something, some kind of, yeah, electronic aid that can measure and track whether the ball cross the plane. And yeah, you see things like this in another sports too. I know in hockey I guess there are some difficulties with making NHL goal line technology fully automated because there's kind of a small goal and crease and you have lots of players piled up there and all those things. So it can be a little complicated, but they're working on it. And in baseball, one difference, I think, at least compared to some other major sports,

is that there's no tracking tech in the ball. Right. Right, which sets this sport apart from many others. Because I guess in hockey, it's not necessarily so much that you have a smart puck. I mean, you did have... Is there a sensor in the puck? Going back to like Fox tracks, right? The much derided glowing puck technology from the 90s.

You did have a transmitter back then, which I thought was kind of cool. And maybe that they should bring it back. It's a little less necessary. maybe in the HD 4K era because you can actually sort of see the puck. But a lot of sports either do this or have experimented with it. So in the NFL, there are trackers. There are chips in the ball, right? And they don't use that fully for everything.

They still use the refs to spot the ball. But then, and they still have the chain gang out there as a backup, which amuses me to no end. It's such a low-tech, imprecise solution. But they do use it. that once the refs spot the ball, then they project where the goal line would be or where the first downline would be digitally, virtually. My understanding, and this may have changed,

but my understanding is that there's a chip in the ball, but it's not in the nose of the ball, right? And so their ability to use the chip to spot where whether the nose has like cross the line is like, it's a tricky implementation thing. And now they have the, you know, they have the booth assist. And I think that's just using video. I don't think that's using chip transmission.

I think that's my understanding. But like a lot of, I think most of the NFL stadiums now have, or at least some of them have, they have a Hawkeye camera array. Yeah. And one of the issues, I think, in football is that you do get snow games. And so sometimes the cameras, the ball. the ball tracking functions, but the cameras, just the lenses get covered by snow or something, and that obscures the vision. But yeah, they're gradually implementing this stuff.

And I'd imagine maybe at some point this will be automated just because it's not like the refs trying to perceive where exactly the ball was to the inch under a pile up is exactly the most precise spotting system either. But there is at least tracking tech in the football. and that's used for other things. It's used just for analytics and data gathering and everything. And then in soccer, they have smart balls, right, and the Adidas balls that have the chips in them. And those are used in a lot of international competitions, including the last couple World Cups. And now I think La Liga is implementing that and other leagues, including the Premier League, or at least considering it or thinking about the connected ball. And so this is different from baseball because in baseball, there isn't really any conversation about putting a chipper, a tracker of some sort in the ball.

And I'm not really aware of that having come up in conversation. And I guess it makes some sense and rewinding a few years to when we were doing our baseball exceptionalism series and talking about what sets baseball apart from other sports. Episode is 1936 and 1937, we were talking about just the sheer number of balls. used in the game and how there are just many more baseballs in a baseball game. Sometimes you see the figure cited, oh, there's a new baseball every seven or eight pitches. It's more than that now or fewer than that. There's a piece by Tyler Kepner last year where he determined... More balls fewer pitches. Yeah. It's like 2.5 pitches per ball now. That's how long a baseball lasts. So I can imagine that Bassett might actually be right about there being some sort of expense

concern if you're going through that many baseballs in a game. That is a lot of baseballs. Even if you get the chip technology to be cheap, they're just pretty disposable. They don't last very long. And also, the balls are small, which is another impediment. Like the NBA is experimenting with chips in the balls. Now, they've had sort of a similar system to baseball, where they have cameras set up to track everything, but it's not coming from a readout in the ball itself. But they have tested and are continuing to test putting a chip in the ball. But even with the basketball, there was a concern about, will this throw off the weight or the balance and affects the play? And with a baseball, even if you can minimize the chip size and weight, it's still probably going to be perceptible or quantifiable the difference.

So it might just be that the ball is too small and they go through too many of them ever to have a trackable ball. But that might be the ideal system, I suppose, for accuracy if you just determine the positioning of the ball for fair foul calls based on the ball telling you where it is as opposed to the cameras and computers just trying to triangulate and figure out where it is. But it's worked well enough. But imagine if instead of going in the pitch FX stat cast direction where it's just tracking optically, it would be the baseball had just had a chip all on. And I would imagine that would have been very precise when it came to speed and movement. And all of those effects probably could have been quantified quite easily. Or you could have chips in the bat or something, right, to track all the bat data that we have now. But in baseball, I guess it works pretty well.

And it probably helps that it's not as much of a contact sport. It's not as fluid. There are more stoppages. You don't have bodies just being mashed together. as much as you do in other sports. So it's a little easier to separate who's where and who's doing what. So it works well enough is what I'm saying. And it is a notable difference, though, that that is such an ongoing conversation in many other sports and so many experiments with placing, you know, getting the data directly from the ball, which is not something that

baseball has really explored much to my knowledge. Yeah. And I don't want to underestimate or or undersell the technical requirements or overstate the feasibility piece. It's just like if we can do the little data vizes where the catcher comes out of the ground and you see the stick figures running around, surely we can do boundary calls, right? Yeah, well, not that the stick figures always work perfectly as discussed on episode 2500. Sometimes those malfunctioned in an amusing way, so you wouldn't want that to happen. But yeah, you'd think this would be solvable. It's not like with replay review, it's not a common occurrence for everyone to agree that, oh, it seems like they blew that home run call.

Usually they get it right to begin with. And if not, they usually correct it and get it right. But in this case, I have my doubts and maybe it would be somewhat significant. So I'm sort of sympathetic to the Alonzo-Alvernaz-Bassett perspective of there must be a better way to do this. But yeah, it's all sort of indirect. It's like with the bat-tracking tech that we have and the upcoming impending currently being tested check swing system, it would probably be precise and sort of simpler if you just had some sort of RF chip in the bat in the ball. Yeah, I guess it's just the nature of the equipment precludes that. What kind of deranged conspiracies would we get if they put a chip in the ball?

You know what I mean? Like what kind of what kind of things? could people be made to believe about what the chip was doing? Yeah, that the chip had somehow been hacked and commandeered. As long as the chip doesn't have some sort of propulsion system, because then you could get into... People think it has a propulsion system. Yeah, are we getting into the Grogu manipulating Mason Miller's pitches conspiracy?

But, yeah, I don't know. I'm so glad that you used a Grogu reference that actually meant something to me. I was like, I'm sorry, the expectation that I know what happened in that dumb movie, but this is a segment we talked about. So carry on. It's coming to streaming in a couple of weeks. I know you're excited. You can finally watch The Mandalorian and Groku at home.

Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. Probably I can't come up with a way to conspiracize that just because, and I don't know, people can tell us if there have been conspiracies about balls and being tracked in other sports and are people hacking them somehow or getting proprietary data. But yeah, it's a difference. It's baseball exceptionalism, I guess. And probably it applies to tennis and other sports that have sort of similar ball sizes or ball usage rates as well and cricket and whatever.

So there are some comps here, but it is a notable difference. Also, I was reading yet another article about how loud ballparks are. And they are loud, but also this has been extremely well covered at the point. I feel like I'm reading another article about this every week or two. Do you remember when I complained, it was on the main podcast feed, not on a bonus pod, about how I kept reading about Pablo Escobar's hippos. And this was on episode 2211. It was a couple of years ago. And I was complaining about how often I was reading about the hippos that were left behind And after Pablo Escobar acquired some, and they, the hippos proliferated.

They're so dangerous. A menace to society. They're so, they're, look, I, I support animals and want them to be well, but they are very dangerous as animals go. Yeah. And so they've been coming up with all sorts of ways to try to control that population humanely, and it's been difficult to do. But I've read so many, I'm so well informed on this subject, because it's an irresistible

topic. I mean, Pablo Escobar, you know, drug cartel kingpin, hippos running amok, you know, it's how could you not? But there have been so many people heeding that siren song and writing about it. And I said as we were speaking on that episode, I'm going to try to look up as many different long-form features on the Escobar hippos, the Pablo hippos, as I can find and put them in the show notes. And I just went back and I have 10, no fewer than 10. Oh my gosh. Hippos articles linked in the show notes to that episode, not including a link to a hippos documentary and also a link to the Wikipedia page for hippogriffs,

which are meaningfully different from hypopotamai. But I'm getting to that point where I've read so many different pieces on the loudness of ballparks that guys we get it. But also, it does bug me. Clearly, it bugs other people and it bugs writers, and that's why they're writing about it. And it probably bugs readers. and so they're reading about these pieces.

And the most recent version, and it was a perfectly fine piece from ESPN. Jorge Castillo wrote about why MLB teams and players want ballparks to keep getting louder. And we've discussed this before. And we've discussed previous pieces. And so it's sort of similar territory. But what comes across here, and it does feature Yankee Stadium because Yankee Stadium is one of the major offenders. Yes. And the Yankees have been pretty open about that they're doing this.

and that they wanted to do this. It wasn't an accident, and they're not going to stop. If anything, they're going to make it even louder. And the players want it louder constantly. And so what I have been reflecting on after reading this latest piece is just, I think it speaks to a conversation that we've had in the past

about just who does the game belong to? Right. Is this the players? Is it their game? Is it the fans? Is it probably owners think it's their game? you know, who owns baseball in sort of not an actual literal financial sense, but just who does the game belong to? That'll do it for the free preview of today's Effectively Wild. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to listen on and hear whatever wisdom and wit await, we would love to have you. You can visit patreon.com slash Effectively Wild to access the rest of this episode and plenty of other exclusive content.

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