Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2529: The Bandwagon Re-Reunion

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

With Meg Rowley on vacation, Ben Lindbergh continues his quest to (temporarily) resurrect a few dearly departed baseball podcasts. Next Up: The Bandwagon, featuring Hannah Keyser of CNN and Zach Crizer of The Bandwagon (the ongoing newsletter). Ben, Hannah, and Zach discuss Hannah’s transition from baseball specialist to sports generalist, her visit to Driveline Baseball for velocity training, and why position-player pitchers throw so slow. Then they banter about baseball bits and bobs: the buzzer-beating, pre-postseason returns of Aaron Judge and other prominent players; the future of rehab assignments; Zach’s 2026 rebuild rankings and his and Hannah’s debate about how bad David Stearns has been for the Mets; Mickey Gasper’s hot streak and Munetaka Murakami’s slump; a possible Rockies sale; Thomas Pannone’s Triple-A perfect game; and how the challenge system has affected catcher framing and defensive value, plus postscript follow-ups. Audio intro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Andy Ellison, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to The Bandwagon podcast archive Link to The Bandwagon newsletter Link to Hannah’s CNN archive Link to CNN Explains series Link to first Bandwagon reunion pod Link to second Bandwagon reunion pod Link to Hannah and Lindsey appearance Link to Marte’s cap Link to Alcaraz vs. Shelton story Link to Jay on position-player pitching Link to Sam on position-player pitching Link to underhand free throws story Link to Episode 2372 Link to position-player velo by year Link to late-comeback candidates Link to Hannah and Zach on Trajekt Link to Ben on Trajekt Link to Judge on his abbreviated return Link to Judge/Jones fun fact Link to Schwarber postseason comeback Link to Cohen on Stearns Link to team rookie batting WAR Link to negative-run-differential division story Link to Yankees hitting without Judge Link to Yankees pitching without Judge Link to Gasper/Murakami leaderboard Link to Gasper wiki Link to Rockies/McCarthy play Link to Paige’s Rockies report Link to report summary Link to Greg Penner wiki Link to BP on team sales Link to Pannone story Link to Pannone photos Link to minor league perfectos list Link to Jeff on framing Link to Ben on framing in 2018 Link to team defensive challenges Link to Tango on team challenges Link to catcher-defensive deviation data Link to catcher-defense deviation graph Link to Ohtani/De Paula news Link to catcher’s interference explainer Link to 23 ways piece Link to 23 ways book Link to Nine Innings to Love trailer Link to Nine Innings to Love premiere Link to Tiglath-Pileser III wiki Link to Yankees winning-season streak  Sponsor Us on Patreon  Give a Gift Subscription  Email Us: [e-mail]  Effectively Wild Subreddit  Effectively Wild Wiki  Apple Podcasts Feed   Spotify Feed  YouTube Playlist  Facebook Group  Bluesky Account  Twitter Account  Get Our Merch! var SERVER_DATA = Object.assign(SERVER_DATA || {}); Source

Effectively Wild Effectively Wild Effectively Wilde Hello and welcome to episode 2529 of Effectively Wild A Baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer. Again, not joined by Meg Rally of Fangraffs who remains on vacation and more power to her.

So continuing in the vein of the mini-series, I started earlier this week when I was joined by the hosts of the dearly departed roundtable podcasts. I am bringing back another defunct baseball podcast, but beloved baseball podcast, briefly from the dead here. It's like the cap-Catel-Marté war that said, may the bridges I burn light the way. We're letting the baseball podcasts. We've burned light our way here in Meg's absence on Effectively Wild. And we are reuniting, really re-reuniting, because this is not the.

first reunion of this podcast on Effectively Wild, but the former hosts of the Bandwagon podcast are here, and I was delight in introducing them because their surnames rhyme. Hannah Kaiser and Zach Kreiser, Kaiser and Kreiser, Kaiser and Kaiser. Hannah, welcome back. Hello, thank you for having me. I feel like every time we do anything together, we always have to be like, and to be clear, this is not a reunion for us. We talk to each other about baseball all the time.

I know. Yeah, right. And in fact, it's not even fully a bandwagon reunion. I mean, it kind of is, but Zach continues to operate the bandwagon, which you should all subscribe to his excellent substack and newsletter, which he co-founded with Hannah. Zach, welcome. Hello. Thank you for having me. And yes, we always have to tell people.

It's like, we do still talk. We didn't just like, we weren't purely business partners. Yes, you are still kind of co-parenting the bandwagon in a way, I guess. You know, you're separated, professionally speaking, but you're still. It's a very healthy co-parenting relationship. What was the Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow thing? Consciously uncoupling. Yes, exactly.

But Hannah uncoupled not because she was sick of working with you, Zach, but because she got a gig as a sports writer at CNN, probably since the last time you were on this podcast, maybe. So congrats belatedly on that, on air at least. Thank you. Yes, it's definitely the first time I've been on the pod since because I now have to clear things like doing this podcast with the powers that be at CNN. Yes, yes. You were your own person. You could set your own media appearances before. But on the other hand, you probably have benefits and health insurance and stuff now. So, you know, pluses and minuses. And hey, they said yes. So here you are. And we will promote some of your recent work for CNN. And also maybe we can talk about that. career change, which I think we kind of previewed in a sense one time you were on this podcast at the end of 2024 when you and Lindsay Adler were on and talked about being at a career crossroads

and your relationships to baseball writing. And we may have touched on the fact that you have been more of a sports generalist in the past at Deadspin or elsewhere. And then you've been a baseball specialist. And now you have gone back to being a mainstream generalist again in your still covering baseball, but you're covering lots of stuff now. Are you, uh, you're covering the U.S. Open, in fact, which is when we're recording. So I don't know if, if you still have a hangover from staying up to watch Ben Shelton and Carlos Alcaraz at two in the morning or whether you were spared that, that vigil. I should, I, I should pretend that I do, but I was in fact spared that vigil. My, my, um, U.S. Open coverage will really ramp up tomorrow at the semis and then the

finals. And I agreed to do this podcast in part because I know, Ben, you are something of a generalist when you write at the ringer, and I want to get your take. And also, I know that Zach knows football, college football, much better than I do. So this was also just a ploy to get him to talk to me about how to cover other sports. I am a sports generalist now, despite being someone who I covered the Super Bowl for the first time this year. And I knew that was going to come up when I was interviewing and applying for the job at CNN. They mentioned that. And shortly before the Super Bowl, they were like, surely, you know football, right? And I was like, actually, I do not. I have never in my life attended a football game. So I went to one football game

before I attended the Super Bowl. I just was like, quick get me credentialed to the, I went to an Eagles playoff game. They lost. So that's why I didn't go to anymore. And then I went to the Super Bowl. It's my second ever football game. I think you should have fully leaned into the bid and just made the Super Bowl your very first football game. Well, you know what? As it turns out, it was not a particularly great Super Bowl game. So as far as I'm concerned, football games are just really good bad bunny concerts with football on either side of them. Yeah.

So has this been refreshing for you to expand your purview? Or it must be kind of intimidating, yes, because you're dabbling in things that, you know nothing of when you begin to dabble in them. And so you probably feel a bit out of your depth sometimes. But then that's a welcome feeling also and keeps you from being stuck in a rut. And then you can kind of cover almost anything in the sports world, which is nice. But then also the downside of that is you could cover almost anything, presumably. So how do you even pick something?

That is very hard. At that part, I haven't figured out. If anyone knows how to figure out what to cover. It is both incredibly intimidating. I have found that it has allowed me to think much more. expansively and productively about what it is that I like about sports coverage and what kinds of sports coverage I want to do, which was probably something that I was talking about in that podcast that Lindsay and I did with you because I was already sort of starting to do that while I

was freelancing. And really around this time last year, which was shortly before I got the CNN job, started to really hone that. This is not a writing podcast, but we shouldn't spend too much time on my process or whatever. But I think that that I think that I have enjoyed thinking about, like, what is it that I like about sports? And one of the things I really like about sports is thinking about how sports affect people who are not themselves athletes. Like, how do sports affect? When you cover one sport, like I was covering baseball at Yahoo, you become very immersed in the world of that sport, the business of that sport. And there are incredibly good stories to be done about how being a professional athlete affects someone's life, but then also about

the other jobs and roles of being in that industry and in that world. And that stuff is wonderful. But stepping outside of it, I've become much more interested in kind of like, how do, like, why do we care about any of that? It's because it affects people who aren't in that industry and in that world. And so I really enjoyed writing about, like, how do other, how do normal people relate? Like, what does it mean to them? What is it, you know, and a lot of that manifests. covering, like, youth sports, because youth sports are how a lot of people engage with sports, but also just like, you know, I wrote about a very long-running fantasy football league that meets a person every year and kind of the value that that brings to these now beyond middle-aged

men. And thinking about, like, stuff like that really excites me. And that's something that I think is hard to recognize when you're covering one sport just because you are so immersed in that world. And now I'm not particularly immersed in any one world, except for I tell people I'm a sports writer and then I get to hear about what sports mean to them. Yeah, and it is intimidating just because maybe you feel like a little bit of a dilettante. I do sometimes if I'm writing about something I haven't really covered because there's just always that niggling feeling in the back of your mind beyond the usual imposter syndrome, which is just like, am I out of my depth? Do I know what I'm talking about here? Whereas you feel like you're on solid ground when you're writing about baseball. If you've

been doing that for a long time, you're just familiar with the literature. You have contacts. I was going say, Rolodex, I guess probably no one really has a physical Rolodex anymore, but it's an expression. And so you kind of know whom to reach out to and everything. And I guess CNN opens a lot of doors, probably. Maybe it also closes some doors. You might not want to open. But, but yeah, it's nice to be able to do anything.

But then also sometimes if you're just writing about baseball, then really anything in baseball could be material for you, whereas there's almost a higher bar to clear if you're just writing about sports for CNN, it needs to be sort of something that almost anyone could relate to. Well, that is, I'll try to like, we'll try to move on and talk about baseball. But I found that, and Zach can attest to this because he was my editor for a time, that I felt like when I was just writing about baseball, I actually struggled a lot with, like, getting so small, so granular, so incremental. What's the newest thing?

What's like what's the one little detail thing? And a lot of people who cover one sport do this. It's like when you sort of think about it that way, a lot of coverage is that. Like what's the tiniest little thing that no one else has written about yet? And in some ways the job at CNN is literally the exact opposite. It's like what's the biggest thing that like you can pull from a lot of threads? And so just sort of thinking about it being inverted in that way, I, I tell you. tell my editor now to tell me to think about like for every story. Like, could this be like

the cover of a general interest magazine? Could this be like New York Magazine or the Atlantic or something? Like, do TV people like having that frame of, uh, of please put this in a print context for me? That's true. They're probably like, we have a version of that. It's should it be on CNN? Yeah. But I do think like it's really interesting when you think about like we did this velocity video. And it was crazy to me how the questions people asked me at CNN, the ones that I both could and couldn't answer when I was like, hey, everyone throws really hard now. And they were like, really? And how do they do that? And I started to explain Drive Live. And people were like, no, no, like literally with their arms. How do they do that? And I was like, oh, I don't know that.

They just throw baseball and it goes really fast. Yeah. So we could do some baseball banter or as you both called it at the bandwagon and Zach still does bits and bobs but you did do a velo video so we should talk about that you went to drive line which it feels like a right of passage I went to drive line when I was working on the MVP machine it's like we have to put ourselves through the paces that the players get paid through it's like it's some sort of humiliation ritual it's like you know participatory journalism but also it does expose just how bad we are and how unathletic compared to actual professional elite athletes, but you did this as a way of illustrating. I have to say, I heard that you were actually very good.

Did they say that? Has my legend lived on? Well, that's not true. They said somebody else was really bad. Somebody. Okay, but it wasn't me. They were like a couple people came and they told me the people who came. And then they were like, one of them was really bad.

And then they told me who that was. And it wasn't you. It wasn't me. All right, I'll take that. I like how you flipped that entirely into a compliment. Yeah. Do you know the other people who went? I might know who you're referring to, but I won't name any names.

But I will certainly settle for not being memorably bad. You were not memorably bad. That's good. I do think that they did a pretty good job. I mean, do you remember how hard did you throw? I mean, not hard, hard. Oh, come on. You remember.

I'm like 65 or something. It was not impressive. I mean, you know, not like on professional baseball scales or anything. I didn't devote myself to training or anything. It was a one-time thing. I didn't get my mechanics remade or anything. It was just, you know, hop on the mound and we'll wire you up and try to air it out. And that was what I had.

I was never a pitcher even when I played. So I wouldn't say that was necessarily my strength. But it is nice to see how the other half lives or the 0.1% lives in this case. And you publish this video. It's as part of the CNN Explains series, and it's available via CNN All Access, which I guess is kind of a misnomer because it's not actually all accessible to everyone, at least for free. But you can subscribe. And also, if you follow Hannah on the socials, you will soon see a version of this there that you can watch. But tell us a little bit about this, because the idea was to just open everyone's eyes to the Velocity Revolution.

and just to show how high the numbers have gone and how they have gone there. I do actually encourage people to subscribe because I find that the CNN Explained series is truly phenomenal in prep for this piece. I watched a bunch of them and felt so much smarter. If you'd like to feel smarter, you should watch them. Most of them are not about sports at all. I wanted, the sort of hook is like something that's newsworthy that has a complex backstory and give us the backstory.

And I was sort of hoping when I pitch. this. I pitched this months ago that we were going to get over 95 miles an hour as the average fastball velocity this year. Yeah, it's close. I'm not sure we're going to get there. But yeah, it just takes into, I mean, it's stuff that people who listen to this podcast already know. Basically, why does it feel and seem like everyone throws really hard? I found that, even as someone who does know this stuff pretty well, that talking to the guys at drive line, I was pleasantly, but pleasant isn't the right word. I was, appreciatively surprised at how candid they were about the kind of like incentive structure around

continuing to throw harder even as it becomes inexorably linked with injury. And then also as part of this video, we talked to Dr. Keith Meister, who has done so many of the Tommy John surgeries. And I was again appreciative and surprised at how candid he was and how much he does not think the velocity arms race is good. And even though it's obviously good for him, him. And I found, I found sort of his candor, which we have a lot, we spent a lot of time talking to him, and I might end up writing something to make use of the more that we have. Really interesting, kind of thinking about, like, he's so openly opposed to the way that baseball is going. But he works very closely with these teams. I was like, that must be such a strange dynamic when you, like, meet these guys. And they're like, Keith, we need you. And you're like, ah, no, another one. Yeah. But yeah, I found that I still think we are very much. I know it's like the MLB report was a couple of years ago now,

but I still feel like we are very much living in this era of various stakeholders not doing anything to address an incentive structure that everyone involved seems to agree is dangerous. Yeah. It's not great. It doesn't seem to be letting up. And did you learn anything that you did not know? because obviously you had some sense of how this works, but having been put through your paces. Well, they don't hook you up to anything anymore. It's all markerless.

It's all markerless. That's cool. I did learn that. I also thought this was interesting, kind of going out to Drive Line, this didn't make it into the video, but obviously they are thinking about what else you can do at a place like Drive Line. And so they were showing us the work they're doing to try to apply these same motion capturey type things to command to being able to pitch to command more accurately. And it's interesting that that came after velocity because in the evolution of pitching itself, it feels like command came first. But I found it also just interesting to think about like, oh, right, there are a bunch of people who work at driveline who are thinking about sort of pushing. drive line forward, even as all of the teams are catching up the driveline.

The other thing that I found really interesting was hearing from Kyle Bodie about just how, maybe you know this from having been there further back than I was, just how opposed to driveline teams were initially. Again, that's stuff that didn't make the video. But he, again, talked very openly about, like, the extent to which teams used to try to prevent their pitchers from going. Well, Ben Lindberg, Hannah Kaiser, Shoheyotani. We have all attended drive line.

I got my picture on the wall. Did you put your picture on the wall? No, I don't think I got it. I don't think I was offered the picture on the wall. Well, did you, that's maybe you didn't PR personal records because I got, I signed a little IPRed at drive line shirt. And then. Well, I didn't even get a T-shirt for my journey. This is the problem.

They don't have a T-shirt for command. They got to come on with something to say about command before they can really teach it. That's true. It's harder to measure. There isn't really a radar gun that goes off when you have a perfectly located pitch. Maybe that's what we need to change some of the incentives. Zach, how hard do you think you could throw, Zach? Well, I mean, I haven't been to drive lines, so I don't know.

But I would say in the 50s, maybe low, maybe upper 50s, I don't know. It's been a long time since I really tried to throw a baseball hard. I will say I highly recommend. This is sort of news you can use for all of your little. listeners, just for a good time, start asking everyone in your life, how hard do you think you could throw? It's, I've enjoyed, in the process of doing this video, I've asked virtually everyone I've come across, and men in particular, they love, they love to answer this question.

I also asked everybody, wait, this is going to be a fun story. I asked everybody how hard they thought I could throw. And one person got it bang on down to the mile correct first guess. And that person is Elizabeth Ben, Liz Ben, formerly of the commissioner's office, formerly of the New York Mets front office. So I told Liz she could put that on her resume that she's apparently able to scout people on site. Literally, I asked her that how hard do you think I could throw? She looked me up and down. It's just a 43 miles an hour.

And that's exactly how hard I could throw. Well, I wasn't going to spoil it. I was going to make people watch the video to find out. But no, but that's, it's good that you did because I was going to say that you can feel good about yourself in that you do throw harder than a lot of major league pitchers, specifically position player pitchers. And people have been up in arms, literally, about position player pitchers lately just because we've seen another spike. There are more of them than ever, despite some of the sort of soft constraints placed upon them a few years ago. And another trend, not just that there are more of them, which Jay Daffey documented recently for Fancrafts, but as Sam Miller wrote for pebble hunting, and as I talked about on this podcast a few years ago,

I think it was episode 2372. The velocity bar for position player pitchers keeps going down and down and down. So it's not just that there are more of them, but it's that they're not even trying. They're just soft tossing. They're just lobbing. And 43 miles per hour, that would actually be harder than a lot of position player pitchers throw now. Well, I was trying. Yes.

You were trying. I was trying very hard. Yeah, they are maybe not maxing out. But this year, the average fastball speed, or no, this is average speed period, although really it's almost a distinction without a difference when you're talking about position player pitchers. If we check fastball, then the average position player pitcher fastball is 78 miles per hour this year down from a peak of 91.2 a decade ago. But if we take off the pitch type, then I think that might be more instructive. It's 54.4 is the average this year.

and that's down 30 miles per hour from the high of 84 in 2009. And you still have some guys who maybe have some pitching experience or something who are throwing hard, but so many guys now are throwing in the 30s, in the 40s, perhaps even in the 20s, so slow that it doesn't even register on statcast. And I don't really understand why that is exactly, because they could all throw harder than that without breaking. a sweat or without really endangering themselves, I don't think. And that's the thing. Like,

when I crunch the numbers on this years ago, it seemed to me that there wasn't a huge difference that position player pitchers got hit hard regardless of how hard they threw. And so, who cares? But now they're getting crushed more than ever, and they're throwing slower than ever. And I do think that there is some causation, not just correlation there. Sam said he was sort of surprised that these guys are basically going out and embarrassing themselves. Or or they're not feeling any embarrassment about it. You would think that there'd be an unwritten rule that you at least have to make it look kind of good, even if the team is throwing in the towel and it's a travesty to begin with.

But still, for that individual pitcher, wouldn't you think there'd be some sort of, okay, I have to at least look like I can throw the ball all the way to the plate and I'm not throwing out some ceremonial first pitch or something? But why do you think that is that there's zero stigma surrounding, throwing in the 30s on a major league mound, and also just seemingly incentive to keep going slower and slower. That's the thing I don't get. It doesn't seem fun.

It seems like they are professional baseball players who would want to demonstrate something. Like, you know, you used to see a guy, you know, he'd throw whatever, 78, 80, but then he'd rip off a slider he's been working on on the backfields for the past 10 years and has never gotten to use. It has to be a team thing, right? I mean, the teams have to be telling them to do this for it to be so universal. Yeah.

And I don't know what they did to beat out of them any sense of like, oh, I would like to try to throw a good pitch. And they're just out there to lob. Is it like a bell curve sort of situation? I know, Ben, you said that they get hit hard regardless. But is it that like teams are like, hey, don't go max effort? And they're worried that, like, you know, throwing 65 like Ben Lindberg does would get them crushed. And they're like, I'm going to go out. I'm going to go back the other way and try to throw it, ephist them into submission.

But maybe what they don't know is that that's not working, that they've been told don't try to throw 85. Or maybe people are just not actually that good at modulating down their velocity. And they're like, okay, don't go 85 and then they're landing at 30. Yeah, there's got to be a middle ground, if not a happy medium, not a miserable medium. Do you think the middle ground would get them crushed more? Like that my assumption would be that it would, that like if guys are used to seeing 95, that they would really feast on 65, but that maybe 45 is harder to hit? Yeah, that was my hypothesis initially that it would just.

just be a greater change of speeds, but I don't know that it really checks out and the numbers are worse than ever as the speeds keep going down. Well, have they read that article? Maybe they didn't read you. Maybe. But do you think it's almost a defense mechanism? Like it goes the other way. I'm thinking, well, wouldn't you want to at least make it look good and throw it at Lindbergian

speeds? But then maybe that's more embarrassing. Right. They don't want people to think that they either try out at baseball writer. speeds. And so they're like, I'll just go the other way. Surely no one tops out of 43. Yeah. And then they'll all know, okay, I'm not trying. For all they know, maybe I have 90 in my back pocket here and I'm just choosing not to do it. So it's more embarrassing to throw 60 or 70 or something. That's possible. Because if it's an injury risk thing, that has to be overblown,

right? I get why you wouldn't want to totally air it out. But like, you know, even if it's hard for us to throw hard. For these guys, throw in 50-something or 60-something, that's not a challenge for any major leaguer. Backup catchers throw it back to the pitcher harder than this, like a hundred times a game. These guys play catch that hard. I mean, they don't even have to throw off a mound to get those sort of speeds without really testing themselves.

So that doesn't seem like UCL snapping danger zone to me, really. I bet that it's some version of the teams telling them not to throw as hard as they they can, and either a combination or one or the other of them thinking softer will be harder to hit, or to your point, thinking, throw it so soft that people don't think I'm trying. Yeah. I did learn, another thing I learned in doing the velocity video is that I don't experience shame in the same way other people do. They kept being like, this is so great that I sent my editor a version, Ben, you watched and Zach, you've seen it, of the final video, and my editor hadn't seen my sort of writing editor.

And he slacked you back. He said, Hannah, these guys are being so mean to you. And it's like, no thing weren't. I was like, wow, they were lovely. They let me come and throw off their mound. I don't get embarrassed, it turns out. So put me in. I'll throw as hard as I can, and it won't be 20.

Do we think anyone's going to, I mean, if someone has already done this, I haven't seen it. But do we think we're approaching the point where. someone will go full beer league softball and actually throw it underhand? Oh, yeah, might as well. Just do a, you could do like a Rick Berry underhand free throw shooting or something. That's, you know, maybe you can get better command or something because why not, really? What's the difference at that point? So I do think, though, that it looks even worse.

It's bad regardless to have a non-pitcher pitching, but I think at that point, it really does. Just rub it in that we are. still playing out the string here, but not even making an effort. And I do think that there will be a backlash to that and there will be some kind of crackdown. It's just that there aren't enough pitchers to go around, really, even though everyone goes to drive line and people come out throwing 100 and it seems like there's an endless army of relievers you've never heard of who have nasty stuff, but they don't pitch enough individually to cover all the innings that teams need to cover. And so that's why we're here. I think there's also an element of even if a

a pitcher, you can't tell a pitcher what you can tell a position player to go out there and not try as hard because it will affect their, you know, their stats and their eventual compensation. I wonder if there's a, if there's some sort of weird loophole we can add, uh, basically the Manfredman rule where the run doesn't count against you, but your performance doesn't count against you if you're in a position player pitching situation and you're a pitcher. Uh, we got to come up with some, throw it with your other hand. I don't know.

Just like, you know, do something that is that is going to take the burden of performance off of them. Yes. Do you think that the thing that will happen is that we'll get a mercy rule? I don't. We have discussed that. And I think that's probably just a bridge too far for everyone. But it is effectively we are at that spot. It's just that we all go through the motions anyway.

So, but it's just, yeah, there's such a, well, it's a written rule, I guess, that you have to finish the game or you lose, but there's, I think, a stigma about outright quitting, but this is as close to quitting as you can get without actually doing it. Do you think that if a manager forfeited a game would, I bet the discourse, I actually think that we're in a place, I bet that a manager who forfeited the game, that the, like, initial that night discourse would be anti him. And by the, by 24 hours later, there would have been so many takes written about how actually that was a really smart thing to do, that it would become widespread immediately.

Yeah. There would be people defending it, maybe both on a load management ground, and then also in a why go through this charade ground. You could see it as some sort of resistance gesture, just, hey, if this is how pitching usage works. And I saved you all the trouble of just making you watch some poor utility infielder get slaughtered out there. So this was actually consider.

of me to do this, but I think mostly there'd be a big backlash and we wouldn't see it catch on. But I don't know. Sometimes it seems like we're... Wouldn't you write in defense of it, Ben? It's weird. I would almost, I would defend it in the sense that we've already reached a point of such silliness with this stuff that maybe I could see it make sense. But I would still condemn it in a larger sense that I think actual pitcher should be.

pitch and you should finish the game. And that's kind of the bare minimum that this entertainment product should offer. And that if we can't actually supply enough pitchers to pitch a game even with the zombie runner and all the rest of it, then we have taken things too far. Zach, what would you write? What would the bandwagon's official position? I mean, I would be against that. But I think just on a broader baseball pop, like, media level, I think the response would be like 80 or 90% correlated with which team did it. Like, if the raise did it, you'd get the support. If the Giants did it, it'd be like Tony Vitello doing his college stuff again.

I don't hope that that happens. I hope that we can go the other way, in fact, and have actual qualified pitchers out there just about all of the time. At least, unless you're in extra innings or something, in extremists and you've run out of real pitchers. By the way, I've been frantically trying to look up the manuscript of the MVP machine to see if I was exaggerating my own speed. So, because this was, I don't know, eight years ago or something seven years ago that I, yeah, eight probably that I did that trip. It looks like I definitely hit 60, but I'm not, I'm not sure if I touched 65. But then again, I had the markers. I was all wired up, you know, I was constrained.

That was holding you back. Yeah, that was probably. my range of motion, plus, you know, get me out there in a game with the adrenaline and everything. You went, you went, see, you were like, oh, this was eight years ago, but that's an advantage, because you and I are old. That's true. That's true. I could have hit 60, eight years ago, too, maybe.

Yeah. We're in our mid-30s. I took a, I flew out, I was tired. I flew out at 7 a.m. New York time to Seattle. That's 4 a.m. Seattle time. Yes, jet lag. Both of us. I was jet lag.

We could keep stacking excuses. We just, we hadn't trained, you know. We were going in colds anyway. Yeah, I'm sure many of the people and maybe the men that you ask to estimate their own speed, I'm sure they were similarly exaggerating or maybe remembering their glory days through rose-colored glasses or something. I did also, while I was there, the drive-line guys, per my experience, were like, we should offer one-day training to people who are going to throw out, like, ceremonial first-be. pitches because I did get a little better. They were like, this is good.

This is the one-day drive-line program. Okay. So some other baseball stuff. I thought we could just kind of range around the league here. One thing that I'm always interested to see when we get down to the wire here and are approaching the postseason is players who make buzzer beating returns from injury, especially long injuries, lengthy stints on the IL. not so much, say, the Dodgers getting Edwin Diaz and Roki Sasaki back.

Okay, Diaz was out for most of the season, and then he came back and then got IEL again and then came back. But not so much talking about the short stints as the guys you've been waiting for for much of the season or all of the season in some cases, especially highlighted by Aaron Judge, who made his return to the Yankees on Tuesday. And then we got some added intrigue to that neck-and-neck NL Wildcard race with. With the Dodgers and Diamondbacks getting arms back. Corbyn Burns made his return to the Diamondbacks. Nick Pithetta to the Padres. So looking around, is there anyone else on your radar here where you're wondering, hey, can they make it maybe?

Did they have enough time to get back? And could this be a boost? Because Aaron Judge, coming back to the Yankees, that's about as impactful a player return. After 99 days, guys. Yeah. Matches the uniform number. Anyone, I was like, they planned it, right? Like, you think, right?

Right? Yeah. No one, I was like, I'm like conspiracy theory pilled on this. Like, like he's been fine for a week and then you were like, eh, let's get tonight. I know that's not really true. But then I, when I saw that, that is the most like double take I've ever done. Yes. I was like, what?

It was 99 days exactly. Let's see. Mama's too convenient. Although he was evidently advocating to come back sooner. And I saw the, this Sarah Lange's stat about, uh, spent. James and Aaron Judge being out there in the outfield. So they are the first team on record with multiple position players, non-pitchers, six foot seven or taller in the same season and the same outfield, no less.

So that's just giant outfielders out there. I feel like if not for the events of 25 years ago this week, the Twin Towers would have been a good nickname for those guys, but probably that ship has sailed, unfortunately. They got to get through the week not saying that. I know. I'm not suggesting anyone adopt that. They got a trade for O'Neill Cruz and then it's fine. They're the triplet towers and that has no bad, no bad connotation.

Three very tall towers. So without judge, so this was, he played his last game for them, May 31st and came back on September 9th. So from June 1st to September 8th, the Yankees ranked 28th in WRC Plus at 90 and 25th in batter war position player. war, but third in pitcher war. So they were basically the bizarro cubs. They just, they couldn't hit it all, but boy, could they pitch. And they were 46 and 39 over that stretch. So ninth in actual wins, if anyone cares about, you know, real wins and not wins above replacement anymore. So they just managed to make it through as a pitching first team. But boy, it sure helps to have Aaron Judge. The interesting thing is that he looked pretty rusty, as one might imagine. And,

he was actually sort of upset because Boone lifted him after six innings, and he grasped about that a bit, even though Boone had warned him that he probably would, and they might not start him every day. But he came back without a rehab assignment after that long absence. And it actually worked out because his replacement in that game, Elliot Ramos hit a three-run homer. So he supplied Judgeian offense after Judge was removed. anecdotally though I think we are seeing fewer rehab assignments for hitters or or maybe we will

because of all the tools out there because of the trajectory I was watching MLB now today and now I'm going to blank on who was it who was that said that Sean Casey maybe I think it was Sean Casey who was like it's the trajectory a Zach Kreiser Hannah Kaiser yes dual byline story from like five years ago now that's right yeah yeah we've all written our project article at some point. But yeah, I saw that he had hit, I think the story I just said off a high-velocity pitching machine, I assume it was probably a trajectory. But that makes some sense to me. I'm sure it's not a perfect substitute, even if you're almost perfectly replicating some aspects of the pitcher's delivery and the stuff and everything. It's probably still not a perfect substitute for

getting into games. But then again, you come back quicker. And I don't know, it's, I could see it working either way because you save yourself some time, you know, probably the big leaguers don't love to go back to the minors, even if they get to be the big men on campus and buy everyone a nice spread and everything, which might be fun. But probably, you know, they'd rather just go straight back to the big leagues. But it is hard to just go zero to 60 like that as Judge showed. So they have a couple weeks to get him back up to postseason speed, which probably a lot of people would make a joke here about what his postseason performance has been like for the most part. It's great last year.

Yeah, it was. Someone's going to write a lovely story now about like, or a sort of sad lovely story about like, what will we lose when the big leaguers stop going back to the miners for these rehab stints and like, we don't get pictures of people in like, what was it? Remember when Max Scherzer had to wear like the rumble ponies? Exactly. The spectacle of the themed jerseys in the miners for. some promotion. I love that and would miss that for sure. Coming off of a Chris Sale story,

I just remember him like ripping a minor league tunnel to shreds because he like gave up three runs to a AAA team. Yeah. Yeah. So you may not miss that. Yeah. I like the fish out of water aspect of that and just going back to the smaller pond where you were the big fish. And I may have done some analysis on that at some point or where I've certainly always wanted to where you just like look at all the performance. Maybe I did this on the podcast, but just collect all the rehab assignments and see, do the rehabbing big leaguers just totally dominate the minor leaguers? Or do they not because they're rusty and perhaps not fully healthy and the minor

leaguers are extra motivated to show out against those guys? But I will be curious to see, can you just skip that step? Is it a good enough substitute to just hit in the cage that you can just sort of skip the minor league rehab assignment and come back at close? to your peak performance. How do we feel about the aggressive myth-making around the idea that Aaron Judge was willing to play baseball? I find that to be sort of like...

I think, Ben, have you guys talked about this on the pod? The sort of the specific, like, the style of quotes. I think I have some memory of effectively while talking about, like, the style of quotes that the Yankees and Aaron Judge in particular gives about, like... Yeah, he had some... Quotes, well, he declined to give any kind of timeline or anything. He questioned the idea of timeframes for coming back, just the very concepts of that. We've certainly talked about the ways that they have referred to John Carlos Stanton's potential return. No, I mean specifically this idea that he's like, that it's less even his own quotes and more the broadcast and Boone and this kind of like, what an incredible guy. He was, he was banging down the door. He was ready to come back. You want to get lived in a game.

Hold me back. Hold me back. He's lionized. Yes. The hold me back. The hold me back. I'm willing to play baseball. I'm kind of like, sure, that puts you in a class with five million other people who'd be

happy to man right field for the New York Yankees. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. He looked healthy at least, or there was no obvious sign that he was suffering any after effects of the injury that he was nursing for so long. So that's good. And maybe he can get back to being judgeian again by the time October rolls around. and burns looked pretty good in a short outing.

So obviously they could use healthy burns, effective burns. The Padres could use healthy, effective pavetta. I was looking at Garrett Crochet because that's still sort of up in the air, but it seems like he's nearing a return. The Red Sox got Roman Anthony back. But if Garrette could come back, like, they have such good pitching. They're in a place. I don't know that you can ever say, like, we don't really need Garer Crochet. but they have not struggled to pitch well in his absence.

It's kind of incredible that they turned around their season the way they did without Anthony mostly and without crochet. But if they could get him back for October and he was good, even maybe in a short burst role, that'd be pretty handy to have. Yeah, I mean, he has pitched out of the bullpen before. He started out that way. He would probably be comfortable that way. But, yeah, I mean, you can choose whether it's fortunately or,

unfortunately, but I think a lot of people made fun of the run prevention tagline that both Craig Breslow and some other front offices had. And the Red Sox have done the run prevention thing. That is, they are preventing runs. So the Red Sox Yankees series that seems pretty inevitable in the playoffs may not have much scoring. Yeah. Who else is in the mix? I guess, well, we can probably write off Otani as a pitcher, as discussed last time. Now you're just kind of hoping for healthy Otani as a hitter or the Dodgers are. Carl's Correa, I guess, in the mix for Houston, Robert Suarez for Atlanta, Edward Cabrera, for the Cubs. Just a bunch of guys, you know, in addition to the late promoted prospects, the returning just in the nick of time.

Sometimes guys even come back in the playoffs, right? Like the Schwabber, you know, just like, and that's always interesting because it's like, well, are you just kind of being misled by the name? Are they really going to be that guy? Or you don't want to treat the playoffs as spring training for someone. So are you actually getting that guy back? Or is it just going to be some pale semblance of that guy? Is it not even worth it? So that's always an interesting. It's like the ultimate rest versus rust conversation that we're doomed to have forever in the playoffs when someone comes back after a month's long absence. Well, I mean, Ben, you mentioned Edwin Diaz. I wonder how Dodgers fans feel about it.

that. If I don't know that I would be rooting for him to be available, it's like, I don't want to find out if Edwin Diaz is himself or not in like the ninth inning of a playoff game. That's not when I want to find that out. Sorry, this is not the topic you guys are talking about, but you mentioned Carlos Correa, then I was like, then you mentioned the Houston Astros, and I was like, what's up with the Houston Astros? And are we aware that the entire A.L. West has a negative run differential.

There is not. I mean, I know we know that the American League is bad, but I was like, I was like, no way the Houston Astros are in playoff position. They are, they are a division leader, but they're not a good division leader. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that is a bleak division. Someone has to win. Can you stat cast this? Has there ever been an all negative run differential division? And all negative run differential division, not one team in, and not even close. lackluster might be a charitable term for that division. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty bad. Yeah, so all of these reinforcements cavalry arriving at the last minute could be a boost. Ben's like, I don't like your topic. I mean, yeah, I can't stat blast it immediately, probably, but I'll get you an answer on that. But yeah, it's at least maybe a morale boost, certainly to get Aaron Judge back, even if he's not functioning like Aaron Judge in the short term, just to have him there is probably. pretty reassuring, I would say. Well, and I know Zach has written in the past about,

and it just continues to be true, even though that story was years ago, like the Yankees are, they are so not the same team with and without Aaron Judge. Like everyone around him just gets bad when he is no longer in the middle. It does sort of seem that way. Yeah, I thought it would be better this year

because, like, especially at the time Judge went out, Ben Rice was hitting like crazy, Bellinger looked good. I mean, Jazz Chisholm is at least, a very competent major league hitter and just it didn't really matter everything went south i mean not as bad as it was in uh 2022 i want to say but it it's still just like what what center of gravity gets moved so far off because i mean it feels like other teams lose their best player and it kind of just keeps on rolling along sometimes we kind of get proven this idea that baseball is this

huge roster sport where it does removing any one guy doesn't break the circuit. Aaron Judge breaks the circuit. He is, he is too powerful. If you take him out, the Yankees are just like, yep, hope we can pitch. By the way, I can't answer this question because other people have answered it. So there has never been a clean sweep of all negative run differential teams in a division. So that that would in fact be a first. What a distinction. I think we're headed that way because right now the Houston Astros negative 37 and they're losing the current game that they're playing. So it's only going to get bigger. Yep. So there's also sometimes the late in the season, someone really ramps up their game. Like I was looking at the Phillies

potential playoff rotation, which is a pretty fearsome group as it has been for like five years now. I mean, they're just lapping the league since 2022 or so. And Andrew Painter since, I mean, in his most recent call-up over his string of starts, he's been really effective. And Christopher Sanchez, not as good as when he was impossible to score on for a while, but still really good. And Jesus Lazzardo is now maybe kind of the ace of that staff, or at least has been the most effective pitcher for a while now, maybe the most effective pitcher in baseball, arguably.

So even though Zach Wheeler has kind of flagged and fatigued maybe late in the season, and even though Erin Nola continues to be home or prone, just going in with a top three of Luzardo and Sanchez and Wheeler, hoping that he's great again and painter. I mean, that is, ooh, and some of those arms. But that's another case where it's like, yeah, pitching is their strength hitting, not so much, even though you think of Schwerber and Harper.

It's a pretty light lineup aside from that. I did want to say why we were on the subject of Boston. Yeah, it'd be great if they could get Prochay back and find a role for him. They did work Brian Beow back into the rotation. He made a start and it went okay because he seemed to have this, I don't know, mental block or curse or something where he just gave up a ton of runs in the first inning as a starter. And then they moved into the bullpen as a long man and he was unhittable. And he just had an effective start. So maybe he can do that if they even need him to.

But who needs Prochet? Who needs Roman Anthony when you have Mickey. Gasper, who has just been making me gasp with his offensive output over the past, well, almost a month now. Yeah, that was a stretch. I'm sorry. But he has been the best hitter in baseball since he came up in. He's had multiple stints in the big leagues.

But August 17th, I think, was when he came up now for good. And he has led all qualified hitters in WRC Plus. since then, which just has to be one of the most how to know where random, where did this guy come from, kind of outlier performances in recent memory. We started this pod by talking about what's it like to cover every sport if you're covering baseball closely. And here's what it's like. You sent us an email of some things we might talk about and Mickey Gasper was on that

email. And I said, who the hell is Mickey Gasper? Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't fault anyone for having said that before now. basically. Of course, as we are speaking, I think he's having an ofer. He's over for the last three games. That's what I know, based on having looked him up. So it's over. Maybe the honeymoon is over now for Mickey Gasper. But boy, what a run it's been. He had, and this is only 19 games, but still August 17th until almost the day we're recording.

265. WRC Plus 327, 514, 865 slash line. Just like, better than the resurgent, Kyle Raleigh, who has rallied, like Mickey Gasper, even better than that. He's not young. He's been a good minor league performer for many years, and it's just never really hit in the big leagues, and now is suddenly hitting.

We're either going to, he's either going to not make the postseason roster, and it's just going to, we're going to never think of this again, or it's going to turn out he's like, you know, the driveline equivalent of batters where it's like, oh, he learned bad.

At speed, he's good now. And it's going to be one of those two and get back to you in about a month on which one it is. Yes. Something, a very red-soxy name, I feel like Mickey Gasper. Mickey Gasper, yeah. Oh, it's perfect for the accent. Mickey Gaspa. Yeah.

And you expect to see a 450 Babbup or something? No, 243 over that stretch. And weirdly, the expected weighted on base was also over 500 along with the 555 weighted on base. So, like, he actually was hitting that well, weirdly, in that smallish sample. But yeah, he's a 30-year-old 5-9 catcher DH first baseman who's bounced around a bit.

He entered this season with a career 27 OPS Plus, which was not in much action. He had been with Boston. He had been with Minnesota. And even earlier this year, he wasn't doing anything particularly to distinguish himself.

Sometimes you just, in fact, he will turn 31 in October. October. He is a 27th round pick of the Yankees formerly. And he's from North Jersey. We need him to be in a Yankees Red Sox series. We need like Cam Schlittler of Boston roots to face for the Yankees. He's Mickey Gasper of he's probably a Yankees fan. Yeah, I guess. He did. Personal Life Wikipedia page. Gasper grew up in New Hampshire as a New York Yankees fan. Right. Yeah, Wikipedia says he was born in Highland Park, New Jersey, and baseball reference says he was born in Merrimack, New Hampshire. So. I believe he was born in a born and raised distinction. Yeah. Right. But he is a Yankees fan. He was. We hope. He was. Yeah, I guess. But he was, they picked him up off waivers from the Nats in February. And the Nats had picked him off of waivers from the twins in January.

So he was very much just free talent, just out there. And now he's just become one of those folk heroes. It's just, you know, even if it's sort of a Shane Spencer sort of situation to mix my Yankees and Red Sox, it's among the more memorable things that can happen in baseball, you remember that just scalding run that the guy you had never heard of and had no expectations of when on. That will stick in your mind. You will remember that guy for the rest of your life.

life most likely. I maybe I should have Googled him before I did this bike because now I'm just learning stuff. He was on Team Italy. Yeah, the deep Mickey Gasper lore. Yeah. Okay. That's all. That's what Wikipedia has. And he didn't play much for Team Italy. That was the impression of him. Yeah. He could have been another great Yankees Mickey if he had stayed in that organization. But instead, he is starring for the Red Sox. So hope that he can keep it up. Kind of doubt it. But boy, it's been fun while it's lasted. Also, just over that same span, I note regretfully that one of my favorite stories of the season, Munitake Morikami, he has been in a pretty serious slump over that span.

And in fact, we're recording this on Wednesday, on Tuesday. He had a golden sombrero, O for four, with four strikeouts. And that was just kind of in keeping with how he has hit or not hit over that stretch. If you go back to when he came off the IEL, which was right before the. the All-Star game and Home Run Derby. He's been about a league average hitter since then a bit below. But if you look over this arbitrary Mickey Gasper best hitter in baseball stretch, then Murakami has really been struggling and has been one of the worst hitters in baseball,

which I've been sad to see. So the question is, is that just a slump like anyone else can have? Over that span, 21 games, 95 played appearances, 37 WRC plus. So he's hit 103, 263, 192 with a 41% strikeout rate. So still taking his walks, but not much else going his way. So is this just late season slump? Or is it, oh, this was the slump everyone was forecasting and waiting for the naysayers all saw this coming? and finally the league has figured him out.

Do you have any inkling either way, Zach? My problem is that I always worry about the guys who don't hit the ball. Like, I mean, his, when he swings, even at a strike, he has less of a chance of actually making contact with the ball than pretty much anyone else in the big leagues. And that always worries me. But then also, those guys, when they have this level of power, do seem to come back around.

I mean, you could make the case that this is sort of Raleigh's problem earlier in the season. You could talk about Rafael Devers being hot and cold, and obviously right now he's very hot. You know, that type of guy, it looks really bad when they're even a little off. And if he can get close to back to normal, he'll just hit homers again and we won't notice the strikeout rate. But when it's off enough to be like this, it looks really bad and really worrisome. and you just start thinking about Joey Gallo or like mostly Joey Gallo. You start thinking about Joey Gallo.

Yeah. I like thinking about Joey Gallo, but pre-Yankies Joey Gallo particularly. Not when watching this. Yeah. Yeah, it's been, feast or famine, and it's just,

it's been all famine lately, unfortunately. And I hope he gets back on track because he's just, he's very fun and he's quite charismatic and personable. And look, I mean, even with this slump, he has still, I think, overall been productive and a great signing for the White Sox and has exceeded the pessimistic projections for him and what he was paid and everything. He's been well worth it.

It's just taken a little bit of the shine off it, both the injury and then this slump. So I don't know. This was why I kept debating like, should I write the article that's, hey, why did everyone get Murakami wrong and talk to the scouts and talk to team evaluators? and they'll eat their words or whatever, but then I knew as soon as I published that, then he would instantly stop hitting, and then I'd have to rewrite it or something. So I just waited to see what his full season would look like.

And now, I don't know, it kind of tells a confusing story, I suppose. I think you got to wait until he hits up. The first home run he hits in the playoffs, knock on would they make it? And I didn't just jinx that. But the first home run he hits in the playoffs, you write it that night and the news cycle moves on. And it's just, it's gone.

Perfect. Yes, short memories. Yeah, yeah, I haven't done a deep dive to see if he's been pitched differently. You know, he's actually seen fewer fastballs of late. The wrap on him was that he wouldn't be able to catch up to the hardest fastballs. And then it turned out that actually he was. He hits the ball so hard and he does seem to have such good play discipline that that's a pretty decent base. Right. And so you'd think like if you're still taking the walks, then you can't completely bottom out. But he does seem to have such good play discipline that that's a pretty decent base. Right. And so you'd think like if you're still taking the walks, then you can't completely bottom out. But he's, He still sort of has because it's just been walks in very little else. But as long as he keeps the plate discipline and when he does make contact continues to drive, I still believe in him in the median term, at least. So hopefully if the league has adjusted, he will adjust back. And it's a cat and mouse game.

Fun fact, because a listener and Patreon supporter Corey in our Discord group for Patreon supporters was wondering, how many times has a team had three players reached their 30th home run of the season? in a two-day span because Murakami did just get his 30th this past weekend shortly after Miguel Vargas and Colson Montgomery did. And we got a staplast answer on this from frequent stablust correspondent Michael Mountain who found that apparently this is the second time that that has ever happened. Eric Caros, Todd Zeal, and Raulmondisi all reached 30 homers for the 1997 Dodgers during a series where else at Corsefield on September 25th and 2020.

So there is precedent one time that has happened before. I feel like there's always, this is not a profound baseball thought because we all pay attention to baseball a lot. I feel like so often there are incredibly specific seeming baseball occurrences exactly like that. And then it'll be like, that's the first time since last time it happened. Oh, yeah. Oh, right. There has been so much baseball. Yep.

There's like, yes, it's like, oh, you go to a baseball game, you might see something new. But you probably won't. You probably will see something new in your lifetime, but not new if you extend it to the entire history of Major League Baseball. It's due to you, but we have short memories. Your retro sheet knows much more. Yeah. So, well, the White Sox, maybe that's a good segue. Zach, this week you're rolling out the rebuild rankings at the bandwagon, which you have done before.

And the White Sox are no longer rebuilding. Clearly, they have rebuilt. And at least this time, it's gone about as well as. that could go. And last time it went well until it stopped going well, and then it went historically terribly for them when we thought they were set up to be good for years and years. But after that being just quickly curtailed and then them being historically terrible, they have managed to bounce back from that quite quickly and impressively.

So which other teams are you focusing on when it comes to just, okay, if this was not your year, at least you can take something positive away from, your outlook for the future. Yeah, I mean, the White Sox obviously are like, you can't even, they're just competing now. And that is, man, I clicked the rebuild rankings I did last year. And apparently even doing this on a one-year cycle is not good enough to get the answer right. Because I was very down on their rebuild at this time last year. And then even in spring training, you had like Chris Gets doesn't know if Acuna bats with both hands or not.

It was all looking down and then they're pretty good. They might make the playoffs. The other teams, I would say, that are fully in the, oh, this is a good, positive season. I think you have to feel good about the Cardinals. The Cardinals are doing just exactly what the platonic ideal of hiring Heimblum will do for you. Like, that's what is happening. The Jordan Walker Renaissance has been huge, and they're just, like, cycling in all these young, players, they've had like four different interesting catchers debut, which is hard to do.

The most recent being Leonardo Bernal, that doesn't happen much. And I kind of think the Rockies, they're not good, and they still have huge derp moments, like sometimes. Did you guys see the video of Jake McCarthy throwing the ball to home plate the other night and the catcher just appearing to be daydreaming about something happening in left field. Yeah. And the ball just went by. Very relatable.

We've all zoned out from time to time. But outside of that, the Rockies are like finding interesting players and they've had young hitters come up and do well. I think you could make a case for the twins. And then I think everyone else is. more in the silver lining search than the actively happy. Maybe the nationals. The nationals you could throw in positive, too. It's been bad lately, but good season.

I was going to mention the Mets. Obviously, they did not intend to be in a rebuilding year. They have hoisted themselves out of the cellar in the NL East. And you could potentially view this season in a more positive light, given that they've been a bit more respectable lately, and some of their homegrown guys have been pretty good. And I mentioned the Mets because, Hannah, you hipped me to the fact that you two have differing opinions on how bad the tenure of David Stearns in Queens has been. I don't know who's on pro and who's on anti.

Really? Yes, you do. Maybe you're both on anti, but to different degrees. Is either of you a big David Stern's defender? Yes. Zach is a big David Stern's defender. And I'm forcing him to defend it. Or his Mets tenure specifically.

I wouldn't defend the results. It has not been good, but... Trust the process is what you're saying. I am a little bit of a trust the process in that I think everything made sense. It didn't work at all. Everything that could have gone wrong went super duper wrong. And I still think, like, Bichette made a lot of sense. I would rather have Bo Bouchet for three years than Pete Alonzo for five.

that remains a decision. Are you at home? Are you podcasting at home? Yeah, I know. I don't know if my wife can hear me or not. I think she disagrees with that point, though. Ben, I don't know. Zach is married to a very big Mets fan

and not a baseball media person, just a true Mets fan. So is the Stearns take divisive in the household then? Oh, in the household? I mean, I'm in group chats that have basically burned David Sturns. And the Stearns and effigy. You know, it's, do your in-laws like me better than you because of my S&Y takes? No, they're, they're not as intense on the Stearns thing, but we have friends who are.

As long as they're still your friends. I think it will work eventually. Well, yeah, given enough time. Yeah, that's not a good defense. That's a low bar. Given enough time and money, it will work eventually. That's probably true. On the other hand, I think that it's possible we've never seen an executive have as bad

an offseason as David Stern's had, and perhaps not even as bad a two-year stretch as, like, in any sport. I think it is he managed to, obviously not only is the team bad, but like they're also very expensive. And then on top of that, it's not just they are bad, they are expensive, they are bad, they are expensive. and the David Stern's model was supposed to sort of be smarter than just throwing money at the problem. And so in some way, saving money, I suppose.

And they didn't do that. Like, I think that that kind of triple whammy of failure, like, if the team was bad and expensive and they had just brought back all of their guys, you'd be like, well, that's a trap you could sometimes fall into when you're trying to, you've got, hometown goggles on or whatever and you think you want to bring back Pete Alonzo for more than he's actually worth. But to sort of issue the sentimental moves in favor of these like ruthless, cold, calculated moves and then end up as both an incredibly expensive and truly terrible team in a year when the like bar for making the postseason it's relatively low, obviously more so in the ale, but still that like I wrote a couple of years ago, I think,

about the Mets, I don't even remember what move it was, but I wrote a column at some point that was like, who's to say it's less important to make your fans happy in December than to make them happy in September, which was to say, like, listen, what you do in the offseason, it's valid for fans to have feelings about it. And David Stern's managed to make fans unhappy in December, and then they didn't even take until September to be unhappy again.

They were unhappy again by, like, June. It was, they were so, they are so, far out of it from a competitive standpoint. And they were sold, the fans, were sold a bill of goods that, like, we are doing all of these incredibly unpopular things because it will make us both better and sort of leaner from a payroll standpoint.

And yet they're incredibly expensive and bad. But they were expensive and bad before, too. It's not like they were good with those guys. That's the, it's sort of a, you know, they switched. They were playing meaningful baseball in September, and they were certainly playing meaningful baseball. baseball in June. Yeah, it was meaningful to the Cincinnati Reds, the baseball.

They were playing September. Yeah. But, no, I, well, we can, I think, agree that that was an all-time terrible offseason. The question is just the true talent versus the results, the process versus results. Mickey Gasper, probably not the best hitter in baseball. David Stern's probably not the worst pobo in baseball. In fact, he was widely believed to be among the best prior to the recent. prior to the recent issues.

So now you could first guess, and people did first guess about... Right, people did. And the other thing is the Mets, you talk about like the rebuild rankings and sort of where they go from here. The Mets are in a truly bad spot from a perspective of like, okay, they didn't fire Mendoza until late in the season. they kept the same coaching staff that they had last year because they were going for continuity. Doesn't seem, or they change out the coaching staff, but kept the same manager. Now do you keep the same coaching staff? They're going to have to hire a new manager because Andy Green doesn't want to come back.

They're in this very bad sort of spiral of changing out coaches and managers and even front office executives on staggered schedules such that I don't know how you move forward, especially with the looming lockout in a way that like it's not like they have the pieces in place it's not like okay one guy got hurt or a couple guys underperformed but we're just going to stay the course they do have to decide something about the coaches

and the manager and I don't know pitching when there's very little out there on the market so it doesn't feel like this was just okay we got the worst possible potential outcome from too many people this is like a bad setup for a franchise to be in.

Yeah. The manager thing, I mean, I think the Red Sox and Phillies have shown us how much managerial changes are such a problem. I wouldn't worry too much. Like, in comparison, the Mets have Nolan McLean and Carson Benj who like every single franchise would line up to have. And they're, you know, not in a competitive team this year. But that's a much better combo than most of the other teams that are in rebuilding

or bad years have. And I don't know that the managerial instability kind of stands up to the positive of that. It's not a positive season. But the silver lining of the young players is still pretty strong for the Mets in terms of positioning for the future. They just have to put other things around it, which admittedly they have failed miserably at the past few years. They're still pretty far from Dodgers East. But they do have the fifth most war from rookie position players this year. The White Sox are first.

the Cardinals are fourth, then it's the Mets. It's mostly Carson Benj and AJ Ewing. But they have promoted some guys and done a decent job of development. It's just, boy, all the outside acquisitions and decisions about players to let go in some cases backfired. And I wrote something about the precedent for teams that had huge overhauls like that. I definitely didn't say I think they're going to be terrible, but just teams like that that were that busy and remade their roster. to that extent have historically tended to underperform a bit. Steve Cohen publicly, while backing Stearns, did still question that strategy after the fact,

at least and recently said there was too much risk when you think about all the changes that were made. Whenever there are significant changes, sometimes it takes a while to integrate. Who knows whether that was it, whether it was the clubhouse was unmoored by losing all that leadership and guys didn't know each other, or whether it was just a bunch of bad luck acquisitions and outlier strange seasons. And Cohen said, David is smart. He knows what he is doing.

He is very adaptable. He has learned from mistakes. So I'd still not literally, but figuratively bet on the Mets, I guess, going forward. But yeah, it has been depressing, but a little less depressing of late, at least. I generally agree with your rankings, though, and how you've ordered the teams that were out of it, but still make you think they've set themselves up to be in it soon. And the Rockies, one positive story about them that we should touch on here. And you could argue that maybe we should have led with this.

Maybe this should have been a bigger story. I think because of the way it's been reported, it hasn't been. But when it was reported recently that Artie Marino is selling the Angels for real, we led with that and talked about that for a long time. In this case, it's more incremental but still significant. It sounds like the Montforts are about to move on. not as minority owners, but just as the control people for this franchise. According to Woody Page, who should be fairly connected in this organization, I would think the Montforts may be selling an additional 35% of the team to the Penner Sports Group,

Greg and Kerry Penner, who already bought 40% of the team. So I think that's why this has not been bigger news, is that maybe people don't realize that this would actually change the owners of the team. This would amount to a sale in effect because the penners are already in the ownership group and they bought into the team and got 40% of it in April. And then it's not confirmed.

It's multiple sources. And they intend to take over the club when and if Major League Baseball returns sometime in 2027. And they're intending to go up to 75%. But the Montforts would stay on with around 20%. or so. So I guess it's just, this is provisional. It depends on baseball being back. It depends on them actually completing this sale and the Montfort's not having second thoughts or something. But still,

if that does happen, if that reporting is accurate, that's a pretty significant development, right, on the heels of Moreno. If we move into a post-Morino post-Montfort era, when Meg and I talked about the Angel's sale, we were saying, like, who's next? Bob Nutting? You interested in, are we, You could start to get to a short list of truly terrible owners grading on a curve, of course. But these are two of the owners who have been, for differing reasons, sort of stains on the sport or their franchises and real impediments to those franchises competing. So even if Montfort has gotten out of the way to some extent, I mean, you still have Walker Monfort, who is a leading executive for the team. But at least they did kind of clean house and they brought in D-Pedesta and they've changed their ways. to some extent, at least, and invested in areas where they weren't investing before.

But still, if we get an angel sale and a rocky sale in quick succession, then you dare to dream. John Fisher, you interested in offloading? Who's next? I do wonder whether there's any amount. I wish that you could get the Monforts and Ardi Marino on some truth serum and ask them, like, at some point, does people wanting you to sell the team affect your willingness? to sell the team at all. I find it hard to imagine just from like a purely human perspective, it not coming into flight, but then that's why I'm not a billionaire.

Just like a stubborn dig your heels in sort of thing. Yeah, exactly, right. You can't make me sell it. If I sell it, it'll be on my own terms. I think that there's probably very smart analysis to be done that I have not yet done on like, this feels like a lot of new owners. I mean, this one, like you said, is contingent on being post-lockout post-new CBA, so it won't directly affect the – but even just the Padres and Stan Cronky, like the new owners – what is their take on a CBA battle? If you are a new owner – I'm going to work this out on the pod. We're going to do it real time. If you're new to Major League Baseball, are you sort of more interested in sacrificing whatever it takes to get a salary cap because you're starting your sort of – of long-term investment play right now? Or is it that you're like, hey, I now own a baseball team,

and I'd like to watch them play some baseball and enjoy that aspect of it? Yeah, we were trying to puzzle this out when we talked about Moreno, because reading the tea leaves, what does it mean that owners are interested in selling out and others are interested in buying? And I think we kind of came down

on probably this making us more bullish, not to be too Pollyannish about it. I'm fairly bullish to begin with, I guess compared to some, but the fact that, well, if they thought they were really going to get a salary cap, then wouldn't they just hold on to these assets that are going to appreciate even more when you get that sort of cost control aspect? You could also interpret it as they want to get out while they get in the goods because they think there is going to be an extended work stoppage and a loss season and then franchise values will plummet. But then the people who are buying the team, obviously they don't think, you know, that they're getting a lemon. Right? So they may think, well, I guess they could think, no, this will continue to be a strong, valuable thing. Or they could think, I'm buying low. I'm getting this thing before the salary cap. That's what I mean. Like, are they buying low or are they buying what appears to be a thriving product? And not just what do they think, what is their sort of forecast, but what will be their literal impact as members of that side of the bargaining table?

Like, are they interested in returning to play as quickly as possible, or are they interested in securing a salary cap as their sort of first step in owning a baseball team? Also, just sports teams getting trading hands a lot lately. Yeah. Billioners be doing stuff. It's interesting to think of the sales from kind of a slightly different perspective of, you know, if there's any owner in Major League Baseball who, envisions themselves as some sort of like triple agent with a brilliant plan that everyone else can see through but they don't realize it. Probably Dick Monfort. And I could see him thinking, you know, because he was like the lead on the last negotiation, I want to say, he talked to the

press a lot about how much he wanted a salary cap. And I think he was the one who floated the put a cap on front office spending. I could see him going on a multi-year campaign to make it seem like a salary cap was imminent and then like thinking that's going to sell his team and it doesn't really matter what happens you know he's just like he wants the benefit or he sees the benefit of a buyer thinking that the value will go up with a salary cap and whether it's coming or not is sort of immaterial and i i think that unfortunately would not the triple agent stuff but the the thinking may be true on the the owners who are selling in that they kind of view it as a, it's kind of immaterial to them.

It could be that there's a work stop at Jenna salary cap and you have a dip and then the franchise values go up. Or it could be that the mere prospect of the salary cap raised the value enough for them to move and they're kind of just ready to go and it doesn't necessarily mean anything about the negotiations. I wonder if that is it. But I tend to be optimistic also that it, that it means. we're going to have more people who are ready to deal with their TV contract situation

and wanting to sort it out in a long-term meaningful way that isn't immediately shutting down the game for however long. I mean, the Padres' new owners, they seem pretty enthusiastic about actually owning the Padres, which is a good thing in an owner that they seem to want to engage with their baseball team and not as legal labor adversaries across the table. Yeah, and, you know, it's proof is in the pudding. Put your money where your mouth is, ultimately. I guess it's easy to say that, but will you back it up? But yeah, I mean, you could kind of end up in a be careful what you wish for situation because sometimes it's like the devil you know, you think that the next owner has to be better and then somehow they're even worse. I don't know. I guess we're seeing a lot of Walmart-specific franchise sales here because Greg Penner is Walmart. chairman and, you know, also co-owner of the Broncos. And so lots of overlap here with the Cronky purchase, sort of. But I wonder, because Montfort has been more in the benevolent

bumbling and bungling owner camp, more so than the truly heinous, personally reprehensible billionaire kind of camp, it could be worse, I guess. It could be worse than Montfort. It probably wouldn't be worse than Montfort. But you could almost start to say, gosh, we could almost count the notoriously terrible MLB owners on one hand now, maybe, boy, if we could just, you know, get nutting to sell somehow and get Fisher to sell, just all the owners who fan bases have chanted to sell. If they actually sell, then wouldn't we be in this wonderful? It's like that meme of the, you know, utopian futuristic society.

It's like if we could just get these, these, it's like bad apple billionaires, right? But then there's always a bigger fish. There's always a bigger billionaire. And billionaires will break your heart if you get invested in them the way that some people do and see them as the savior. And then how often does that turn out to be the case? And they end up being beloved or at least appreciated as opposed to reviled. So who knows? Well, also, this is –

Zach has heard me say this so many times. I have bad news for baseball fans, which is that it is a closed system. and even if all the billionaires were benevolent, there would still be a last place team in every division like this. The owner may be better, but some team will still be really, really bad. I do think I saw someone, I don't remember where this article was. Maybe it was in Sports Business Journal or Sportico, like a couple, like around this time last year, there was a sale in some other sport that prompted it, possibly the one to, the one that was just undone. The Dodgers guy.

Oh, Mark Walter, yeah. Yes. But anyway, the take was essentially that, like, the Steve Coins and the Dan Cronkies and the billionaires upon billionaires are, that is a different class of wealth than a lot of longer standing sports team owners. And as much as we don't like it when owners cry poor, they could conceivably cry poorer than some of these really, really, like, there does seem to be a remaking of the sports team. ownership class. That is an even more elite group of rich people than the rich people who have, like, we seem to be at the dying end of the single billion billionaire owning a sports team. Right.

Yeah, we've long since left behind the mom and pop small business, family business model of sports franchise ownership. There are very few of those remaining. And now it seems like we're also leaving behind the, I'm a billionaire and I own one team. Yeah, exactly. Oh, the other billionaires are just like shaking their heads, you know, just, oh, that poor, boy, only one team. Just pity that the billionaire who owns only a single sports franchise, it now has to be part of a larger sports portfolio where you have a team in every league, basically. So, yeah, even the regular billionaires priced out. I don't exactly know right again how that will, like, affect the on-field product or the labor relations or whatever. But, I do think that it is, it would behoove people who are pro-labor to at least sort of consider that there is perhaps an exploitable divide between the outgoing and the incoming levels of richness and the ownership class.

Like that is, that is a meaningful difference between, I don't know, how much money does Bob Nudding have? Like, 1.1.1.1. billion and that's yeah pity bob nutton i mean not that we should pity bob nutting but but the new the new owner class probably does the angels and rocky's getting sold feels less about the like loathsome owner and more you know that there's the poker adage like if you can't spot the sucker at the table it's you this feels like the suckers have gotten up from the table and we're all going to find out who the new sucker is yeah um it's like when dave stewart got fired

as Diamondbacks GM, and it was like, oh, I think everyone knows what they're doing now, but we find, we find out that someone doesn't. And we're going to find out who that is. I was thinking that, because, right, it's not, it's the, because, right, already also fell into that kind of like a well-intentioned but bumbling category of guys who seeming, yeah, who seemingly enjoyed the ownership of the sports team aspect of this, but just weren't actually good at running a sports team. Yeah, and maybe the meddlesome owner is on the way out because these owners are all just so, they all are so rich that they come from the corporate world, like they tend to trust the data a little bit more.

It's hard because it's such an ego thing and you own a baseball team or a sports franchise, you want to put your stamp on it. But maybe more of them are refraining from that and empowering baseball people, in which case they're maybe a bit less incompetent. But I always think that, like, whenever the team that is reputed to be behind and sort of stuck in its old ways, like, when the nationals just did an overhaul of their front office, they were seen as being old school. And then the Rockies were kind of like the last holdout. And part of me almost lamented. Like, it was weird to have the weird uncle of baseball that was the Rockies that just were kind of marching to the beat of their own drum. And every time I think, okay, finally, everyone has modernized. They're all just the po-bopod people.

They all look at the same data and give the same quotes and everything. I guess in a relative sense, there is always a laggard or there's a team that's out of step with everyone else. But I think there's a lot less variation than there used to be. And the team that's most backward now would be like, you know, miles ahead of the most progressive moneyball era team, obviously. So it's all relative, really. Well, and beyond that, the idea of the metal. some owner, it's like we've learned through actually paying attention to sports to be wary of that, would be even a software of putting it. But it's like if you were telling someone about sports who knew

nothing about sports for a very first time, and you were like, this guy, look, over here we have owner A, he really loves baseball and he bought a baseball team because he wants to sign all the really good players and like win baseball games. And then over here we have owner B, and he just cares about making money. So he's completely hands off. He just hired, just delegates it all. You'd be like,

well, in the storybook version of it, owner A, you should be the good guy. But he's like, that's your already Moreno's. That's your, it's true.

Like, it's like, we've learned that unfortunately, the effective thing is like rich guy who just cares about, who just cares about like hiring the best people to delegate to

and not actually like, doesn't do it for love of the game. Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder if there is increasing front office parity. There's nothing close to perfect parity, nor will there ever be. But if there is less variation, then I wonder if that's contributing to the parody we're

seeing in the standings. I think that's probably just a fluke combined with expanded playoff field incentives. But it could also be that you don't have one team that's looking at new age stats and one team that's just like I use the eye test and nothing else. I mean, there's just a little less variation than there used to be. It's kind of like with. umpires, right? I mean, bad umpires now are a lot less bad than they used to be, just going by ball strike accuracy, because they've just conformed to the rulebook zone to a greater degree. So

it's all relative, and there are umps who are more accurate than others, but the range, the spread, it's a lot narrower than it used to be. So maybe we're approaching something like that with front offices and ownership groups for better or worse, who knows. Did want to mention got one email from a Patreon supporter JJ. Because one thing that puzzled us when John Mosellack took over as at least interim head of baseball operations for the Angels, maybe he's more likely to stay on now. But he didn't even interview with Artie before that. He eventually met him and talked to him, but he hadn't even talked to him before he took that

job. And we all thought that was sort of strange. And as JJ said, in light of the sale and what I guess is a longer sales process than it appeared, do we reevaluate the emphasis in Mosellax revealing that he hadn't spoken to Moreno? So maybe knowing what we know now, that makes a little more sense. I don't know if Mosellac was aware that a sale was potentially in the works. But if Artie knew that he had one foot out the door, then that might explain why he was a little less invested in who was going to be running baseball operations in the short term. So maybe, maybe that makes more sense. All right. I did

just want to shout out Thomas Pannon for being perfect. He threw a perfect game in the minor leagues. It was the first individual solo nine-inning perfecto that we've seen in the minors since 2017. And he is a journeyman too. He's 32. He had one big league game with the Brewers this year and one big league game with the Brewers in 2023.

And he had extended injuries in between. and he was with the Blue Jays before that. Career five and a half ERA just about in the big leagues, but he was perfect in AAA. And I was thinking of the AAA, the Nashville sounds perfect game. Like, it's kind of an odd distinction, I guess. It's hard for anyone to have a perfect game these days just because of pitch counts and everything.

And he had 94 pitches, so it was a perfect game in a Maddox, I think, which it pretty much has to be. now because even with a perfect game attempt, they're not going to let you go probably more than, I don't know, 110 or something usually. So you have to be efficient. And I guess you kind of have to be an old guy who's bouncing around maybe because if you're a top prospect coming up in the minors, you're probably not going to be allowed to throw nine innings.

So it's almost like a negative indicator, I guess, if you're allowed to throw a complete game at a perfect game in the, I'm sure. I mean, he was happy. Like, it's a cool achievement. Anywhere you do it. In Little League, it's cool. But it is like, it requires a certain person, I guess, to do that. I cannot recommend enough going to the Nashville Sounds Twitter account and looking at the pictures that they posted from it.

This is a, the AAA Nashville Sound team photos. Did they dig up the mound? They dug up the pitching. Look, scroll all the way over the guy on the far right is shirt. and eating off of a plate in this team photo? I don't know why. This is such a delightful photo to me. There's a guy in jeans and no shirt.

Who's he? What's he doing? There's something very minor league about this team photo in a good way. It's charming. Yeah, it's endearing because 2017, Tyler Malley did it in AA. And then there was someone in Class A who had done it three days earlier, Dominic Maza. And it hasn't been done in nine years since. And, you know, we've had a few perfectos in the big leagues, too.

This was the third perfect game in the history of the Nashville Sounds, the first since John Wosden in 2003, remember some guys? So you'd think that there'd be more in the minors just because even now, what with minor league contraction and everything, they're just more teams. And, you know, still many more teams than you have in the majors and a lot of levels and wide disparities in talent, particularly at the lower levels and everything. so you'd think it might happen more often, but the solo no-hitter or perfect game doesn't really just because of the way pitchers are developed these days. They are not taught to go deep into games, and so they don't.

Yeah, I wonder what the long-term... Would you be more impressed by a guy who said, yeah, I threw a perfect game at AAA, or like a guy who had a significant big league career but never had an all-star appearance, or, you know, there's some level of having this one cool thing you can tell someone. It's a better elevator pitch for a career than a lot of guys get, even though, you know, it's the Nashville sounds and it might not amount too much more in the majors.

Yeah. Well, that's right. Like, if you met someone and you didn't know that they had played professional baseball, and then they told you, by the way, I threw a perfect game in AAA. That would be the coolest thing that they could tell you. Like, that's the coolest thing someone could tell you that you wouldn't already know. That you wouldn't already know. Exactly.

Like, if someone you knew, if your kids, friends, dad was a major league baseball player, you would know that. But if they, if you didn't know that they had played professional baseballs but topped out in the minor leagues, and then they told you one day that they actually threw a perfect game in the minor leagues, truly actually probably at any level of the minor leagues, that would be the, right, that's the coolest thing that they could tell you that you didn't already know. Yeah. There is a baseball reference bullpen page. a list of minor league perfect games, known perfect games. It's probably not comprehensive. And there are 204 of them. So there have been more perfect games in the minors, as one would expect all time than in the majors.

But this includes, it looks like Indyball, this includes shortened games, this includes combined perfect games. So this really runs the gamut. But yeah, it is not something that you see often these days. And even Pannon, he had not gone beyond, I think, four innings in his four starts since he returned to the minors. So this was unusual for him. It's funny to take it back to where we started. He said, around baseball these days, it's so much about stuff, so much about Velo. But I kind of proved that it's really not. It's about executing, getting ahead, staying ahead, and controlling the counts if you can change speeds even the littlest bit and command your pitches.

I believe that you can have success in this game like I really truly believe. So Thomas Pannon putting drive line out of business. Yeah, we are, this is this moment right now is the pivot point in baseball history. I got my driveline video in just under the liar. Yeah. Before Thomas Pannon becomes the Babe Ruth of command. Yes, exactly. And it's just the trends they're going to reverse.

It is funny that his takeaway is that he proved that he doesn't need Velo. But the fact that he's pitching in AAA, you could interpret that less generously and say that Actually, that proves that you probably do need feel. Maybe on that day, you didn't with a little good defense and batted ball luck and all the rest. But, yeah, he also did say I felt like God was on my side. So, I mean, if you have that, that helps. I don't know what God has against the Durham Bulls on this day, but he said that he felt powerful. So I guess God didn't deliver extra velo, but he felt powerful in other respects.

So every little bit helps, I guess. So it's a cool accomplishment, I think, wherever you. you do this. So congrats to Pannon. And yeah, sometimes you hear how veterans in AAA, they can be a bit bitter. They resent that they're not in the big leagues. Maybe especially if they throw a perfect game, you might think, see, this means that I should be pitching for the brewers or someone in the big leagues and you could kind of, you could stew. But he doesn't seem to have done that. He seems to, he celebrated deep into the night. He said, I literally felt like I was dreaming. That's awesome. I love that. And he dug up the pitching rubber. People can look at this very happy photo. Yeah. Judging by the photos and the quotes and everything, his level of enthusiasm and satisfaction seems to be indistinguishable from if he had done this in the big league.

So I think that's special because pro baseball is pretty impressive wherever you are. And this is the next highest domestic level. And to throw a perfect game there, that's a pretty cool accomplishment. So kudos to Thomas Pannon and maybe he will earn himself a trip back to the big leagues. The last thing I wanted to mention is I just crunch some numbers on framing because I've been curious to see what ABS would do to catcher framing value and defensive value in general. And I guess if you had had to have a hypothesis coming into this year, you probably would have thought, and people did, that framing value would be reduced by ABS and just getting some

favorable calls to the catcher overturned in some instances. And it does look like that's what has happened. So I looked at the standard deviation in runs of team catcher defense and just looked at framing runs at Fangraph specifically. And this has been declining for a very long time. and Jeff Sullivan wrote a piece years and years ago for, I think, the Hardball Times annual about how framing was kind of doomed from the start. And I've written about this, too, it's just once everyone recognized how valuable framing was, and once there was such an emphasis placed on it, it's kind of like we were just saying about the umpires conforming and maybe the front offices conforming. Yeah, less variation among framers, too, because the very bad framers got weeded out. and they didn't get to catch anymore, or they got taught how to frame because it turned out to be at least a somewhat teachable skill. And so that really raised the bar.

And suddenly there was less variation among teams. It's not that framing was less valuable necessarily. It's just that teams got better at it. And so it was hard to separate yourself from the pack. So if you look at, say, 15 years ago in 2011, when framing was really breaking into the public consciousness, and Jonathan Lucroy and Jose Molina and all the rest of it and Mike Fast writing about it and everything. Some teams were aware of it by that point, but still it was really becoming a big thing in Sabermetric circles. So that year, the standard deviation of framing runs was like 21 runs.

This is just a measure of the spread, the variation around the mean, the average team, basically. So it was like 21 runs that year. And this year, it's five. And that's extrapolating over 162 games also, not that, you know, it makes that much difference because we're pretty close to that point now. So basically the variation among teams in framing skill or performance is now a quarter of what it was 15 years ago. And it's been in decline for a long time, but it has taken another nose dive this year, presumably because of ABS, where for the past couple of years, the standard deviation was eight or nine run. This year, it's on track to be five runs, which would be by far an all-time low in the pitch-tracking era dating back to 2008. So that's, I suppose, unsurprising and pretty predictable, but also makes me semi-sad as a framing enthusiast, but still happy that we've preserved some value and differentiation there.

So either you have any framing feelings? Just for all the talk at the beginning of the season of catchers trying to either game ABS or, like, reverse frame things. I'm still a little bit of the opinion. The opinion's the wrong word. Of the hope that we might see another spike in like a year or two as people do figure out some innovation to bring framing and to give some little edge to something with ABS in place. I don't know what it would be.

It never seemed that realistic to me to like do the fake frame to make your opponent lose their challenge or whatever. But I wonder if there's something else that capitalizes on the system existing that we might see someone gain an edge for. But I mean, it's never going to go back to the Ryan Dumet days. Man, I feel bad. Just he always gets picked on. I'd love to interview him and just ask how he feels about being the face of terrible framing. But yeah, if you ever, if you ever want some podcast therapy about that, Ryan Domit, I mean, I probably piled on as much Probably listening right now. Yeah, I know.

He's an hour and 45 minutes into this. He's always welcome. But, yeah, I was hoping that challenging would make up for this. Here's my question. Maybe we have an answer to this. Is challenge efficacy or your skill at challenge being lumped into any of the wars that are out there? No, not to my knowledge. Yeah.

Are we going to do that at some point? For catchers, at least, if not for sort of batters. But, like, that feels like a big part of the catching defensive metric right now feels like it should be including how good they are challenging. You're talking to the wrong co-host on this podcast to get that done. Yeah, you can make a case. I wouldn't be surprised if that gets rolled into some stat cast war at some point. I was looking at that.

It doesn't seem like there's as much differentiation there either. At least if you go by baseball savants accounting of this, And they do, I sorted by fielding team which lumps together pitchers and catchers, which kind of annoys me, but it doesn't make that much difference because pitchers rarely challenge anymore. And so this is predominantly catchers and their range when it comes to runs versus expected from challenging, mostly from catchers. It runs from the Rockies of all teams, number one at six runs gained and to the Phillies at negative four runs. So it's like a 10-run range. It's about a win seemingly separating the best defensive challenging team from the worst, which Tom Tango has been saying that he doesn't think teams are that good at challenging or that, you know,

he thinks there's still some juice left to squeeze there. So maybe teams and catchers could get better at optimal challenging because even if you add in, I did some kind of suspect math and like lump together the framing and the challenging standard deviations. And even if you put the challenging in there, it brings it from like five runs to six and a half, which is still like halfway to eight where it was last year. So even the framing and challenging skill combined doesn't bring us back to the framing alone from last year.

I did look at defensive runs saved also on a team level for catchers, and that's just rolling up all of the catcher defensive contributions. If you look at it that way, then it has been a bit more stable. So that's the saving grace here for catcher defense, that there is still more variation if you look at it that way, and it's actually been pretty flat over the past five years, which I guess could be maybe because the running game is more important now than it was a few years ago when there was more framing variation.

Now that they changed the running rules and everything, that matters more than it used to. So that could be part of it too, I guess. But even still, it's less variation. It's just like there's more variation in the overall, all defense now, according to DRS, than there is in framing. And it used to be that there was more variation in framing than in the overall defense. So I'll share my data in a spreadsheet and a graph, a pretty graph people can look at,

but tells a pretty clear story that it's just teams are looking a lot more like each other now when it comes to framing. And of course, this could be a prelude to just doing away with framing entirely and going full aBS, which I would not be surprised to see. Okay. Well, it has been lovely to get you two back together again on the air, on Mike. And of course, I will continue to read and enjoy Zach's work carrying the torch for the bandwagon. Subscribe, please.

And also Hannah's work at CNN, sometimes about baseball, sometimes not. Check out her tennis takes sometime soon. And Hannah, good luck bringing your child to the first. regular season. Oh, we didn't even get to talk about that. Yeah. Off, Mike, I need to ask you how we decided when to take our children to their first baseball game, because I haven't done that yet. I'm going back to the well. We're going to go back to one more game before the end of the season. Oh, okay. So she liked it so much. She wants a baseball birthday party now. She's super into baseball. I'm doing something right. I have her hooked on the Star Wars Young Jedi Adventures show. Like, she's turning into a little Ben and it warms my heart. And hopefully I'm not being too heavy hands. did about it. But yeah, my advice would just be... Well, then I definitely need your advice because we can't

right now it's, we're living in exclusively aquatic animal obsession zone. And I would love to get a little bit of baseball in there. The phases, they're fast and furious. So my advice would just be to wait until you're semi-confident that your kid can make it through a game or most of a game and enjoy it. And then, yeah, hope you get lucky. But luck at the draw. Thank you so much to both of you for coming back on together. Thank you for having us. All right. Well, after we finished recording, Munitakamur Kami hit a home run. He also struck out a couple times in the game, but he had one of the good true outcomes, too. Also, Shohe Otani was placed on the injured list, and Jose DiPaula was called up to make his major league debut. I meant to mention, too, that

Aaron Judge's comeback game, well, not so much because of Judge's contributions, but that win did officially extend the Yankee's streak of winning seasons to 34, just in case anyone was worried they wouldn't make it this year. And to Judge his second game back, he got a couple singles. That's progress. The bad news for the Yankees is that Jazz Chisholm, who had started hitting, hit the IL, which means that Anthony Volpe is coming back. But somehow, Anthony Volpe slugged 660 in AAA since his demotion with 10 dingers in 28 games.

Not sure what got into him, but we'll see if he can keep it up. Also a couple of responses to our discussion last time about the number of ways in which one can reach base. Duncan says, it mildly annoyed me in your discussion of how many ways there are to on base that none of you noted that catcher's interference is an error. If you are going to say that an automatic double and a ball hitting a base runner are not distinct because they go in the scorebook as a hit, then I would argue catcher's interference is also not unique. I don't know what the best practice would be exactly, but when I was keeping the book in high school, I'm pretty sure

catchers interference would just be denoted with an E2 indistinguishable from a muffed bunt or dropped pop-up. Well, it's true that catcher's interference is scored as an error, but I believe the batter isn't credited with reaching on an error, as he would be with a normal, fielding error, which is weird, I guess, but since we're concerned only with ways of reaching base for the purposes of this question, I think it's fair to treat the catcher's interference as a distinct category. We also received a longer surprising response from someone whose name we mentioned on that episode, Eric Enders, who writes, as a Patreon supporter and an effectively wild listener since 2014, I experienced a first today. I was doing some yard work while listening to the pod when

much to my surprise, my name came up in the discussion. As the author of the Hall of Fame, list of 23 different ways to get to first base, which was subjected to some gentle derision in episode 2528. I feel I should offer some background and ever so slightly defend myself. When this list was written around the year 2000, I was one of two librarians running the reference desk at the Hall of Fame library in Cooperstown. We would get lots of random people calling us with baseball questions, and it was my job to answer those questions. Essentially, I was paid to sit at a desk all day and answer baseball trivia questions, both from museum visitors and random members of the public calling on the phone. In a way, it was one of the world's coolest jobs. Sounds sort of like

stat blasting. You never knew what kind of questions you were going to get or who would be asking them. Once during the offseason, Ichiro randomly visited the reference desk and I missed him because I was on my lunch break. Anyway, the question we would get asked most frequently by a wide margin was, what are the 23 ways to get to first base? I don't know how, but we'd get this identical, insidious question several times a day from all types of people. Kids doing school. school assignments, people at bars playing trivia, folks doing scavenger hunts, screenwriters working on scripts. I don't know where the question originated, but it had somehow been copied and spread like wildfire, and it always requested that specific number of answers, 23. I would gently explain to

callers that really, there are only about 10 different ways to get to first base and that any number higher than that would involve double counting, for example, counting a runner getting hit by a batted ball as a separate entry when it already falls under the category of hits. Our callers would often get angry or despondent when I told them this. They would insist that there are actually 23 different ways to get to first base, and their boss or their teacher was going to get mad at them unless they came up with exactly 23. So in order to save myself some time and aggravation, I tried my best to put together a list of 23 ways, so at least I could have something to give these colors to placate them.

The list involves quite a bit of duplication and also a bit of silliness, like the entry about taking the place of a traded player. But it did seem to satisfy the colors and saved me quite a bit of time at work in no way that I think this would still be a thing a quarter century later, and I just about choked on my big league chew when I heard my name come up on the pod. And I didn't realize there was actually a book published in the 2000s, 23 ways to get to first base, the ESPN Uncyclopedia.

But I think that came later. I don't know why all these people were calling and asking for the 23 ways to get to first base. Was this some sort of Y2K-era copy pasta? But thank you for writing and listening and supporting, Eric. And apologies for impugning you. Finally, I did not subject Hannah and Zach to nine things to love. The Cubs produced TikTok-based baseball-themed microdrama rom-com we discussed last week

that came out on Friday. However, I watched it. I mean, sure, maybe Meg is opposed to TikTok microdramas, but she's 40. I'm still barely a hip-young 30-something because all young hip people described themselves as young and hip. So I binged it, though I did watch it in a web browser, which maybe gives away my age, not in the TikTok app, and also resenting the vertical video format the entire time. BingeDroped episodes, ranging from 90 seconds to almost five minutes, averaging roughly three minutes. So essentially one episode of an hour-long drama just broken up into 17 parts. And you know what? I don't have a ton to say about it.

No rom comment. Except that I thought it was cute, sort of silly, pretty predictable, and formulaic, which is almost what you want from a rom-com. Baseball is the backdrop to the romance more than anything. So I don't have much to nitpick. I'm not going to give it a wholehearted recommendation, but it's hard as in the right place. you might find it fun. Judging by the view counts, it's not performing particularly well compared to the typical Cubs video. Nonetheless, it has its moments. And you know, we were mocking the idea that the bleachers at Wrigley Field would be the perfect place to find love. But patron supporter Sean wrote in to say, this may or may not be related to the Cubs new rom-com. But when the Ricketts family bought the team, one of the PR things they put out there was that Tom Ricketts met his wife in the bleachers. Maybe Tom didn't believe in true love until that fateful day. That's true. That origin story for their romance. has been widely circulated.

Also got a message from Patreon supporter Peter, who says, my parents met it Wrigley. But they mostly met through having other friends who were consistently in the bleachers. Close enough. Anyway, I'll leave you with this sweet sentiment from, I believe, episode six of 17

of nine innings to love. Baseball? Yeah. You think baseball is romantic? I mean, sun's out, sky's blue. Strangers are shown skin. hitting the touching means just long enough to stop being strangers.

It's basically a three-hour excuse to feel something together. So, yeah, that's pretty romantic to me. That's nice, right? We can be both pedantic and romantic about baseball. And, hey, basically a three-hour excuse to feel something together. Doesn't that describe effectively wild? Okay, even our episodes aren't that long, though they are definitely longer than the entirety of nine innings to love.

We might get to two hours. if I don't wrap this up. So with that, I will say you can support EffectivelyWild on Patreon by going to Patreon.com slash Effectively Wild and signing up to pled some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad-free and get yourself access to some perks, as have the following five listeners. Teaglath Pilezer the Third, evidently back from the dead, much like the bandwagon podcast, Alex Santiago, Zach Spire, Jake Shaw, and Ryan.

Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Disc. group for patrons only. A third unrestricted episode each week. Coming up next time. Monthly bonus episodes. Exclusive live streams. Prioritized email answers, personalized messages. Shoutouts at the end of episodes, potential podcast appearances,

Fangraphs, memberships, and more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectively wild. If you are Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcast at Fangraphs.com. You can join our Facebook group at Facebook.com. slash Effectively Wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at R slash Effectively Wild. And you can check the show notes in the podcast posted fan graphs or Patreon or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we've cited today. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube music, and other podcast platforms. Thanks to Shane McKeehan for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you soon. Thank you.