Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 309: ALCS Game 4, NLCS Game 5, and More Listener Emails

Episode Date: October 17, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about ALCS Game 4 and NLCS Game 5, then answer listener emails about sabermetrics and strikeouts....

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey! 305! Hey! 305! Hey! 305! Good morning and welcome to episode 309 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. I'm Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. We both just watched playoff games and are taking a break from writing about them and digesting them to discuss them briefly here. And we'll also get to a few questions. So you watched the Tigers-Red Sox game.
Starting point is 00:00:36 Any comments? Did you watch the Tigers-Red Sox game? Sort of. Did you watch the Tigers-Medsox game? Sort of. Not closely because it was kind of not the most compelling game after the beginning. And I was on a DVR delay with the first game and was writing about that. So kind of paid attention. Know what happened, but didn't see it with the level of detail that I assume you did.
Starting point is 00:01:02 So I just want to know if you have them, I want your new assessment of what Miguel Cabrera's war would be if he played every game for the season with this current body that he has. It was like, what did we say? We said two about a week, a little more than a week ago? Yeah, or your Twitter people polled said two. Did you not agree with that? We didn't come to consensus?
Starting point is 00:01:33 I don't think I advanced an opinion, but I don't know. I guess I would have been on board with that, roughly. Yeah, so I think that was around game two or so of the lds and i think it was game four that he had like kind of an awkward play in the field and i really thought that was it like he he looked in so much pain on the field um immediately after and you know he i mean he just he really looked unhappy he was super gimpy and i didn't i didn't think he would play again um frankly i thought i was that was going to be it for him i thought he'd be out the next inning and then he wouldn't play again this postseason and since then
Starting point is 00:02:14 roughly he's basically at a 950 ops in 21 plate appearances um you know he's got a couple home runs which we were told he couldn't do because he couldn't drive on that outside pitch. He's had a couple of really hard hit outs as well. He made arguably a nice play, although with Cabrera it's hard to say whether it's a nice play or it's just like a passable play, but he charged a Dustin Pedroia chopper and had a quick release and basically, I mean, essentially fielded the bunt
Starting point is 00:02:49 that we've been waiting for them to test him with, although it was a swinging bunt, and he stole the base. Yeah. Yeah, so I would guess that he's not quite at full strength, Yeah, so I would guess that he's not quite at full strength, but he certainly looks a lot better. If we said he was an average player then, he certainly looks closer to what he was.
Starting point is 00:03:17 So what was he, seven and a half wins? So I don't know, I'll say five. Yeah, that seems reasonable to me. I was going gonna say four and a half but maybe that that feels i mean there's no difference between four and five we said the same number uh so yeah that's kind of weird he just either we're both wrong or we were we were wrong we were wrong right i mean we've changed our minds it's not a i mean unless you say that he was a two-win player then and he's a five-win player now but i mean did he just miraculously be just gained three wins overnight he had a good night's sleep and he's just woke up three wins better i'd maybe
Starting point is 00:03:59 might have i mean if he's if he i mean yeah maybe he I mean, it's a small margin. It's sort of a small physical margin between him being right and him being wrong. And it is possible that he feels better. I mean, I don't know how things heal, but things do heal. My toe doesn't hurt as bad as it did when I broke it a long time ago. It still hurts a little bit, but it doesn't, it doesn't hurt as bad as it does. Um, that's like, that's a callback to the,
Starting point is 00:04:30 to the toe episode. Uh, yeah, that's how I think of that episode as the toe episode. Um, yeah, I, I guess I thought he was probably diminished in such a way that he
Starting point is 00:04:41 couldn't make that kind of recovery just overnight become almost what he was. I mean, it sort of seemed like that was what he was going to be unless maybe he got a week off or something in between series. Maybe he, you know, if they swept and he had a bunch of time to recuperate maybe, but I didn't really expect it to be sort of an overnight improvement. But yeah, I didn't either. There were, I mean, you know, I sort of look at Miguel Cabrera through the lens of watching Albert Pujols this season, and there would be weeks where he, you know, seemed to be
Starting point is 00:05:20 a lot better and claimed to be a lot better and felt better, and then there would be weeks that he didn't. And it was not a straight line up or down it was it staggered at least if you believe him um so uh i mean i don't know that he's healed i mean he could just easily go bad tomorrow it could be the sort of thing where he you know could just tweak it a little or it could be that there's been no change and that we're imagining this or it could be that we're wrong and that he's he he still is a two-win player i mean it's only 20 plate appearances and one ball that he charged and one example of a pitcher failing to pay attention to him maybe he's just a hustler so maybe he's just a hustler like he's he doubled down he's faking it
Starting point is 00:06:03 he got the red socks to triple the bet yeah he's doubled down. He's faking it. He got the Red Sox to triple the bet. Yeah, he's trying to lull them into a false sense of security. Cabrera is a shadow of his former self. Well, so this is what I was thinking. When we once talked about whether hotness is real, and we talked about a study that had looked at, I think, basketball players and found evidence that, in um, contrary to what had been sort of accepted wisdom, uh, hot shooters, uh, actually do show some effect.
Starting point is 00:06:30 They do continue to be hot, but the problem is that they, uh, change their behavior in a way that, um, that strips them of that advantage. So basically a hot shooter will start shooting more worse percentage shots. And so he undoes the benefit that he has and just as quickly is not hot anymore, right? Is that how you remember we talked about this? I think you just described it to me last time. I never actually read it. That's right, yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:56 So I wonder whether this might be the case that the A's first and the Red Sox now have essentially adjusted to Cabrera's physical ailments, but they've done it maybe too far. I mean, they basically are throwing him the same pitch over and over. And he's able to, I mean, what they gain by pitching to his weakness, they lose by being, you know, less unpredictable. The one pitch that I think he looked bad on this tonight that I remember was, as I recall, it was a slider that was inside, which was not where he was expecting
Starting point is 00:07:34 it, partly because he hasn't seen a lot of sliders and partly because he hasn't seen a lot inside. I might be totally misremembering this, but as I recall, he froze on it. Otherwise, though, I mean, they're basically just throwing him fastballs away, which he's not supposed to be able to hit as well, but if he knows exactly where it's going to be every time or a lot of the time and is able to adjust, then he starts to get some of that edge back.
Starting point is 00:07:55 What might be happening is simply that the plan on him became too obvious, too predictable, and now he's sitting on it. So maybe his true talent hasn't improved by as much as we were saying. Right. This might just be the ebb and flow of strategy, in fact. Interesting.
Starting point is 00:08:18 Maybe. Yeah. So yesterday we talked about how the Red Sox weren't hitting and you looked into whether they'd been chasing at pitches and what they'd done when they did do that. Were you watching the game today, tonight, kind of with that in mind to see if it continued to be the case? Only a little bit. Not a lot, no. They seemed like they were doing okay. It seemed to me that Pfister had a really great curveball and not great fastball command.
Starting point is 00:08:59 And what I was looking at with the other pitchers was more focused on whether their secondary stuff was as good. And I was ignoring their fastball command completely. In this case, maybe it got flipped a little. I don't know. It's hard to tell. The Red Sox actually hit. I mean, the Red Sox hit just fine tonight. The timeliness of their hits wasn't quite there.
Starting point is 00:09:18 And they gave up a ton of runs. But they basically hit. I mean, they hit a lot. They arguably hit better than than the tigers it's funny how uh fister had sort of been overlooked i feel like every time someone brought up the tigers rotation and how great it was by the time they got through scherzer and verlander and sanchez they were out of time they didn't even get to to fister but fister is really good which is
Starting point is 00:09:45 yeah that's why why I made him the top pick in the soft tossers draft Chris Singleton um said sometime around the eighth inning you know oh well we expected there to be a lot of runs in this game because they're down to the to the bottom of their rotations and they're number four starters but Pfister had a better fit this year than Verlander did. He was eighth in the American League. So he's basically a stud. Yeah, he's good. He's very tall, too. You know, I don't know if you saw,
Starting point is 00:10:15 I mentioned this on the Twitter machine, but his right leg, I think it's his right leg. Yeah, it's his right leg in his follow through sort of flings up right in between the camera and the catcher's mitt. So you can't actually see where the pitch ends up. You can speculate based on the trajectory. But for a lot of these pitches that were kind of like breaking balls particularly where uh you're judging based on you know like really the last frame and where the catcher catches it you couldn't see it his foot was blocking it and it was just killing me like i could almost not watch it was making me so
Starting point is 00:10:56 sick to my stomach to just have the last frame basically blacked out every time. Yeah, that sounds frustrating. Anything else from that game that stands out? No. Yeah, okay. Terrible game. Super boring game. Yeah, pretty bad. My game was better.
Starting point is 00:11:18 I didn't have a whole lot to say about it. I guess my confusion, my main source of confusion was that kelly was was allowed to start the fifth i thought that was weird or rather that he was allowed to to hit for himself in the fifth and then also start the fifth um that struck me as somewhat surprising because there had been a reliever warming up in the third. Actually, Shelby Miller. There was a Shelby Miller sighting. And he sort of started out struggling, and then he had a very routine fourth inning where he struck out Puig and got a couple grounders.
Starting point is 00:12:03 And I guess that may have reassured Mike Matheny that he was okay, and then he came out for the fifth and he hit for himself, and then he gave up a homer to Carl Crawford. It wasn't really a decisive thing in the game, probably, as it turned out, but just one of those cases where I felt like a manager stuck with a starter too long, probably because of the routine fourth. I think there's a tendency for a manager to give a guy a longer leash than he should have if maybe he just had an okay inning, even if he was struggling earlier.
Starting point is 00:12:39 And if you look at kind of the data on that, there's almost no way to tell when the wheels are just going to come off for a pitcher. I think in the book they found that the performance against the first nine batters of a game was predictive. If you were bad, if you struggled against those first nine batters, then you were more likely than usual to continue to struggle. If you struggled against those first nine batters, then you were more likely than usual to continue to struggle. But if you just breeze through those first nine batters, that didn't mean that you were any more likely than usual to continue pitching well, which can be kind of deceptive because you figure, oh, a guy is he's on today. He has it or whatever, but he's actually not really any more likely to continue having it. So that was one of those cases where I felt like maybe that was a mistake, but probably didn't make the difference,
Starting point is 00:13:31 and the Dodgers hit a lot of home runs, and that was sort of the story there. So you don't spend most of the regular season watching Mike Matheny closely, but then the postseason comes along, and for one thing you do, you're watching every game and you're having to write about it, so you're paying attention to these decisions he makes, but also every decision is kind of amplified and discussed and watched by many more people and picked at.
Starting point is 00:13:57 So do you have a sense of what Mike Matheny as a manager is like now? How would you describe him if you had to? I don't really i would say he's just sort of generic from what i've seen like my impression of him just based mostly on things i read or maybe stats i looked at in his first season was that he was maybe uh you know kind of a little too active as a manager. I think he was kind of a, maybe a, an over bunter in that first season. And from what I've gathered, he kind of toned it down in the second season,
Starting point is 00:14:33 maybe just because the Cardinals kind of didn't really give him a lot of opportunities to make mistakes or do anything wrong or, or do anything at all really, because they're just so solid top to bottom and they've got good starters and they've got a good bullpen. And there's just I mean, there's there's only so much that you can screw up if you're the manager of the Cardinals. And in this series, there's really no bench to speak of that.
Starting point is 00:15:00 The Cardinals just kind of don't have one with with Alan Craig out. So there aren't really all that many moves to make. I mean, the disappearance of Shelby Miller was sort of surprising, but I don't know whether that's a Matheny decision, and it could be a completely justifiable decision based on things that we don't really know about Shelby Miller. And other than that, there's not a whole lot to go on in this series. I didn't love the sort of slow hook for Kelly,
Starting point is 00:15:29 but nothing else has really stood out to me one way or another. Is Brian Wilson the best reliever pitching in the postseason that isn't the closer? It seems like the team, probably the four best relievers are probably the four closers at this point. Uehara, Rosenthal, Benoit, and Kenley Jansen. Is Wilson the next best pitcher? Possibly. He's looked really good. I'm trying to think of who else it would be. I don't know. I like Kevin Segrist, but yeah, Brian Wilson's been great.
Starting point is 00:16:10 Still hasn't allowed a run in the postseason. It's kind of funny in retrospect to think that anyone could have had him. Yeah, I'm trying to find his salary. It's not a whole lot, right? No. Well, the way I always find salaries if i if i don't if i just want to do it in one click i just google the player's name and million and it always turns up and with with wilson it's not turning up all the results are him turning down a
Starting point is 00:16:38 million dollars to shave his beard which makes me think that he is maybe not making a million dollars for the dodgers so he actually is he's making making a million dollars for the Dodgers. No, he actually is. He's making exactly $1 million. Okay, and that's a million for a small fraction of the season, I guess. Yeah. But even so, anyone could have had him. The Tigers could have signed him and put him in the back of their bullpen if they wanted to. I don't know whether, I don't know, I guess he's like maybe a West Coast guy
Starting point is 00:17:04 and maybe there were other teams interested and the Dodgers just had an advantage or something but presumably he could have been pitching for any of these playoff teams if they had wanted him enough crazy game yeah
Starting point is 00:17:20 anything else on playoffs nope do you think i'm i'm feeling seven games for both of these series uh so definitely feeling seven for for my series because it's it's closer to that uh and we just need just need kershaw to win to get to seven. It's actually not any closer. Well, yeah, right, because someone's going to win game six in the ALCS. Yeah, it's exactly the same distance from seven. Yeah, but maybe more likely to get to, yeah, Kershaw. That's a Kershaw thing.
Starting point is 00:17:56 Yes. But Kershaw against Waka. I mean, it's not like Waka's been hit a lot. No, but he's not Kershawaw although waka will have the home field advantage but probably the the most likely outcome would be a dodgers win in game six and a cardinals win in game seven just based on who's starting each game and where they'll be played well i'll tell you something ben i i am low i'm low to predict who is going to win playoff series but i refuse to ever predict how many games it's going to take that is just not something i do even after four
Starting point is 00:18:31 or five games i refuse okay uh will you do you care to make a prediction in in any amount of games for the lcs no no goodness. Okay. I have it in mind. I will write it. I will put it in an envelope. I will seal it up, and then I will mail it to Santa Claus. You can post it on the Facebook group your next time there. I'm not going to gloat if I get it right or anything. I mean, the envelope is going to disappear.
Starting point is 00:19:03 I don't even know why I'm going through with the envelope, to be honest. It seems like a pretty pointless ritual. Yeah. All right. Should we do a few questions, comments? Sure. Want to? Yeah, sure.
Starting point is 00:19:16 So I got another Amador update and I figured I should pass it on. I got an email from someone, a listener who works at the AFL, at the Arizona Fall League, where Amador is playing and where I noticed that he is listed at 215. And that person confirmed that the rosters there were based on baseball references, height, weight, stats. So that's why he was at 215. We now have an official ruling straight from Amador's mouth. He is 305. Okay. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:52 So he is, he is somehow they got that information from him. They went to him, they found out how much he weighed. He said 305. It's now updated on minor league baseball.com. Now it says 305. Do you think he knows how much he weighs?
Starting point is 00:20:09 If I were Amador, I probably wouldn't want to know. Yeah, there's a point where you get big enough that you quit paying attention to the swings, but then there's another point where you get so big that you do pay attention, that you have to pay attention. Yeah. It's a U-curve. He could have just said even 300, but maybe just adding the extra five pounds makes it more plausible.
Starting point is 00:20:35 So anyway, 305 is what Amador says he weighs. Maybe he's being a little generous. I don't know. But the 215 on baseball reference apparently is what he weighed when he was signed, whenever that information first filtered through to the internet. So I think we should organize a boycott of baseball reference until it's updated to reflect his current weight.
Starting point is 00:20:59 We should ask him how much Pablo Sandoval weighs because I don't feel like anybody's giving me an honest answer on that. And Amador. What the list of that uh geez I don't know you just you'd have to change it so often for Sandoval every time he goes to weight loss camp and gains 240 240 on the google uh 240 on uh 240 on reference too. My favorite one is, let me see if this is still, nope, it's been updated. Maybe it was always updated, but for a really long time, I was able to find Miguel Cabrera listed at 185. That's a good one.
Starting point is 00:21:46 So someone responded to our request for an Amador nickname and this is Mark suggested, uh, Butterbean based on the boxer from the nineties who was, I believe he actually recommended, I believe he suggested Butterball. He did, which was, I don't know if that was a typo. Cause he said Butterbean, the boxer. And then he said, so perhaps Amador's nickname should be Butterball. I don't know why the change. One of those, though, is what he recommends. He plays ball.
Starting point is 00:22:13 Okay. And Butterbean plays bean? No. Beaning is probably not a boxing term. No. I think it was based on a Butterbean-based diet that he had once to get to a weigh-in. You don't hit a – that's not a – no, there's no bean. Okay, never mind.
Starting point is 00:22:37 Go ahead. Okay. Scott says, I keep hearing how homers kill rallies. If this is true, wouldn't the optimal strategy for killing an opponent's rally simply be to groove a pitch down the heart of the plate and allow the hitter to kill his own team's rally with a homer? Could this be a new market inefficiency? Are you listening, Billy Bean?
Starting point is 00:22:57 I refuse to address this topic. Really? Yeah. It's been done. Yeah? It's been it's been done yeah it's been covered this topic has been well covered okay all right we got another question
Starting point is 00:23:13 fine sorry thanks for the question yeah Scott makes a good point but apparently it's been made many times before I don't mind if you address it I didn't have much to say other than I thought Scott made a good point but you can address it i made it many times before and i don't mind if you address it i didn't have much to say other than then i thought scott made a good point there but you've heard it all before um okay this one comes from jeff in trinidad colorado
Starting point is 00:23:38 and it's similar to questions we've gotten or i've gotten before. How can I use Sabermetrics as a baseball coach of nine to 10 year olds? Not necessarily to gain a competitive edge, but to teach this next generation advanced stats and how could we use them in making a lineup, et cetera, for the team? Which sort of sounds like two conflicting ideas. I don't know whether he's talking about
Starting point is 00:24:04 actually teaching them or making the team better.'t know whether he's talking about actually teaching them or making the team better. It seems like he's saying both. But I get questions like this fairly often, often from like amateur coaches will email me or email baseball prospectus, like high school coaches or college coaches or the people who keep stats for those teams will often email us. The people who keep stats for those teams will often email us, and I refer them to Russell Carlton usually, and he answers them. But I don't know that there's that much you can do, really, because at that level, there are no stats. You could keep stats for a while, but you'd have such small samples.
Starting point is 00:24:45 keep stats for a while, but you'd have such small samples. It would be, it's tough to apply major league sabermetric principles to high school or college, let alone little league. Yeah. I mean, unless you think very broadly and just think of sabermetric principles as, you know, using information to find, you know, slivers of advantages. And if you get past the idea that it's about the ways that we use it for the majors, then I don't know. It probably would just be, I mean, I would think that the best advice would just be to be really conscientious of managing for your level's context instead of managing the way that you think baseball should be played like how you've seen it played at higher levels.
Starting point is 00:25:31 You would really want to have a sort of keen awareness of the way that the field size affects things and the way the talent level affects things and the way that changes in weather maybe for your local neighborhood ballpark might affect things. I certainly remember the fifth inning on was always played in near pitch black at certain parts of the season when I was playing Little League. That might be something that would matter. But the fact that the batters maybe have never seen a left-hander pitch might be an underutilized commodity in Little League.
Starting point is 00:26:12 It might be the case that you should just have, like, one left. Anybody who can throw left-handed should be trained to pitch at least a couple batters a game so they can be, like like sort of deployed strategically, something like that. I don't know. I mean, certainly you could probably figure out, I mean, this would be no fun for anybody and you would be the worst coach in the world. But I suspect that there are, if not entire leagues, certainly many situations in a little league where the correct strategy would just be to go up there
Starting point is 00:26:45 without a bat at all and just that it's more likely the guy's going to throw four balls before he throws three strikes and so i mean you you like i said you just would just be the worst coach if you told your team not to swing ever you'd be the worst coach as well as the worst opponent. You'd be the worst human being. But there would probably be situations where you could subtly deploy that strategy and capitalize on it. But again, I mean who wins? Who wins in that situation? The kids because they learn sabermetric. Okay.
Starting point is 00:27:19 So, well, yeah, if you want it – if your focus is on helping the kids learn, then you would – instead of being the manager and making decisions, you would turn the managerial position into basically a conference between all the players and you. And so that you would actually discuss these things and it would be democratic and they would have to think through. I mean, that's the whole point of Sabermetrics is basically to think through the decisions you make instead of going on tradition and habit, right? So you just would want to talk through a lot more things and make them feel empowered to make decisions and to think about these things. Or just make subscribing to Baseball Perspectives mandatory. You don't subscribe, you don't play. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:28:01 I think that's a fair policy. All right. Let's do one more. And maybe we've briefly addressed this in the past, but if so, it was a while ago. This is from Dan. He is writing about the strikeout trend in baseball. If it happens, as Sam hypothesizes, where a three run lead becomes essentially insurmountable, can you speculate about what action, if any, baseball would take to address that trend? For fun, can you speak to both offensive and pitching adjustments to rules or how umpires call games?
Starting point is 00:28:40 Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, the good news, I guess, is that none of this is permanent. It's not an irreversible trend, really, right? Yeah, that's a good question. rules too much, but if it does get to a point where strikeouts are just so high that the game is no fun anymore, it's not like we'll be helpless and baseball will be broken. We can just, we can change things. We can change the strike zone. We can change the height of the mound. We could maybe change equipment or something. I mean, there are lots of things you could do, and probably a small change would produce a pretty big effect. Um, the pitch framing, uh, generally more, more balls are called strikes than strikes are called balls.
Starting point is 00:29:35 Right. So having, uh, having a robo would, would do something for that. And my idea, my dream of a world in which there is no strike zone and umpires simply call their conscience would create a sort of level of, ideally it would create a balance that would um you know be kind of constantly shifting but would would would always keep the sport from getting too offense or or too defense heavy right because they would essentially that would be what umpires would be trying to accomplish with their balls and strikes is to keep a a level of balance which is i guess i mean that's kind of what they
Starting point is 00:30:21 do right within plate appearances yeah it's it's kind of what they do, right? Within plate appearances. Yeah, it's kind of what they do. The strike zone expands and contracts based on the count and the situation. Yeah. So, like, what if there was a rule that you couldn't throw harder than 100? Like, if they sold it as, like, a safety thing or that, you know, it was just bad for baseball or something like that. Do you think that there's, would there be any skill like that pitchers would develop in being able to get to 99.9? Yeah, well, that's the thing. Depending on the penalty, you'd have to be so careful that you didn't break 100 that you'd have to give it a bit of a buffer.
Starting point is 00:31:04 have to be so careful that you didn't break a hundred that you'd have to give it a bit of a buffer uh so you couldn't throw you know you might be scared to throw 99 because maybe the radar gun is a little hot that day or something and it says 100 that's that's true yeah there probably wouldn't be a skill because that'd be too hard to do um there's of course the idea that um if you're that you can't come in for one batter that you have to come in for you know a pitcher has to come in for x number of batters or for a full inning or something like that that would just kind of slow the hyper specialization of open arms you could conceivably see a situation where teams were prohibited from carrying more than 11 pitchers on the roster or something like that. You could imagine a situation where there was a second DH that could be deployed for
Starting point is 00:31:54 any position you want. You could imagine that. I don't think you would see it, but you could imagine it. Yeah. think you would see it but you could imagine it yeah uh and you could i mean you can always shrink the strike zone but i think that should be sort of a last resort because um i don't know the strike zone is just such a fundamental thing and obviously it's shifted and expanded before um and contracted before but it's it's's, that's kind of, you know, that's at the heart of the game.
Starting point is 00:32:27 There are things that you can do that are a little more, more subtle, and you wouldn't have to retrain umpires and retrain batters and pitchers and adjust all of their expectations and adjust all of the stats that we've so carefully worked out over the years. So I'd rather not see that happen. It would be nice, I guess, as you were saying, if the current rulebook strike zone could be observed more closely and you could actually get umpires to stop calling those outside pitches
Starting point is 00:32:57 to lefties on those couple inches off the plate, stop calling those strikes, that would be nice. I don't know how you do that without actually replacing the umpires um unless you can just put more of an emphasis on it in training or something so the easiest thing to do and the most invisible way the like the least jarring way to do it so simple so subtleically no change, is simply to actually change the composition of the baseball, which people can, you know, there's been conspiracies that this has been going on forever, and Major League Baseball has never acknowledged it and always denies it,
Starting point is 00:33:38 and I mean, other than, I guess, 100 years ago at Deadball, but basically the thing about that that's so weird is that baseball, and maybe they're just being honest and saying it, but baseball is so defensive about the idea. They're just so forceful in denying that that would ever happen. And it's like as though it would be a scandal if it did. And really, do you think anybody would care if this were sort of modulated a little bit from year to year? Would anybody actually be mad as long as it were done openly?
Starting point is 00:34:14 I mean, the scandal would be if they denied it for 15 years and then it came out that they had been doing it all along. But it doesn't actually seem like, I mean, it would be a little sensitive because, you know, in April, if we knew that they were changing the ball every year and then April came along and offense was way down over the first three weeks, you'd have so many hot takes about how baseball screwed up that year's baseball. Like the years where the flu shot, they make the wrong flu shot. And so everybody gets this flu shot for the flu that doesn't really happen that's a pretty niche analogy sorry uh so you could imagine a lot of hot takes about that maybe that's why it's risky but i mean that's pretty small beans stuff so sure just
Starting point is 00:35:00 change the ball every year i'd be okay with that, but that doesn't really help with the strikeout thing in particular, right? Oh, that's true. That just affects what happens after contact is made, but if no contact is being made, then that wouldn't make baseball much less boring. Although it would make comebacks easier if you make the ball travel farther, but you'd still have people swinging through pitches all the time so um i don't know i don't have any sense really of what lowering the mound would do do you have any idea i mean what would happen if you lowered the mound by an inch or two inches or something i have no no sense of what effect size that has.
Starting point is 00:35:46 I don't either. I don't have any idea. Yeah. I mean, like, the scale. I don't know how far it would have to go down and how big the effect would be. No clue. Yeah. But if there were some way to...
Starting point is 00:36:02 It feels like it would be... I mean, I would feel bad for the pitchers maybe they would adjust right away like maybe it would take 10 pitches before it was normal but it feels like it would be like really strange to pitch on this one size
Starting point is 00:36:18 mound for your whole career and all of a sudden like it's different like that feels maybe dangerous yeah I was just thinking that too maybe people would get hurt either because they're they're overthrowing or something or they're landing differently um yeah that that's a potential problem but uh i don't know lots of lots of things that you could try and that would probably work pretty well. And at some point that might have to be discussed,
Starting point is 00:36:49 but I don't think we're quite there yet. All right. We done? I'm done. Okay. So we'll be back with one more show tomorrow.

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