Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 396: Your Emails, Answered

Episode Date: February 28, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about scouting based on one swing, how much GMs know, paying young players, psyching out opponents, and more.

Just ask the question that will make it go away. You still can't change it with the waving of your hand. It comes to mean that everything is surely planned. They're sending me a picture of the moon Good morning and welcome to episode 396 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller.

Can I make an announcement? Yes. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. Can I make an announcement? Yes. So I've decided that I would like to do an Effectively Wild Fantasy League, sort of. But because it's an Effectively Wild Fantasy League, I would only do it if it were Effectively Wild. And so the league will be relievers only.

It's an all-relievers league, and we're going to go, I would guess, 250 or 300 relievers deep in the draft. And all comers are welcome, because the way that we're going to do it, there's no real max on how many people can do this, but basically you'll have to draft 25 or 30 relievers out of a pool of about 300. It'll be slow drafts from starting next week until the beginning of the season, so there will not be a great urgency. You will not have to set aside an evening, and it will be set it and forget it.

There will be absolutely no effort involved once you've drafted. There will be no Yahoo sign-up. Nothing that will take any effort whatsoever from you. And it should be fun. So email me before the end of Sunday. And the email address that's been set up is relieverleagueatgmail.com. Ben, do i have your interest

sure i'll play my first my first fantasy league in several years send me an email so wait what are the categories or it's actually only going to be two categories okay uh uh one is um runs One is runs allowed per nine, and the other is strikeouts. So one counting stat, one rate stat. Okay. Fun. It's going to be fun. Yeah, sounds fun. I'll post a notice in the Facebook group.

Yeah. We will keep score, of course course but probably only like once a month and i'll have you post the scores in the facebook group as well okay all right all right building community um all right so uh at last we have we have a moment alone now you're the villain you know you're the one who didn't propose any fantasy leagues. Now everybody's going to hate you. In fact, I have turned down all invitations to join fantasy leagues. Well, sorry, everyone.

Okay. So, Friday email show. We get to let our hair down a little bit and talk about some hypothetical questions that you have sent in. Speaking of which, I guess I'll start with this one from Vinit in Milwaukee, who says,

subject line hypothetical, if baseball were different, how different would it be? Would it only be slightly different or very different? That's such a good question. Yes, one of the best pieces received it really what and i mean it it is a good question because whenever we talk about changes the question is would things change and um and i don't know if things would change if if if things were different i i genuinely don't know if things would be different i I mean, when Dan Brooks wrote his essay for the BP Annual about the kind of unintended consequences of trying to solve the strikeouts

problem, one of the ideas is that probably things would not be that different. They would adjust the tactics, but the incentives would basically be the same. The incentives would still support strikeouts from both sides, and so it wouldn't be that different. So in that case, if baseball were different, it wouldn't be very different. And in general, I think that it's probably the case that if things were different, they wouldn't be very different in almost all cases. things were different, they wouldn't be very different in almost all cases. In fact, when Vinit says, would it only be slightly different or very different, you kind of did this with your voice, but that's all caps. And I think that the correct question is, if baseball were very different with all caps, wait, would baseball have to be very different or only slightly different to be different?

Because I think if it were very different, then it would be different. If it were only slightly different, it would be unnoticeable. Baseball, for instance, is not different with the DH, right? That probably seemed like a... You could imagine your granddad and my dad doing a podcast in the 60s and and proposing the designated hitter and it would have seemed very different and yet baseball is not different uh it's slightly different it's not it's there is a dh now it is barely barely different though like it baseball isn't baseball is not different the dh is a though. Like, baseball is not different.

The DH is a difference, but baseball is not different. You get to have Matt Stairs now, whereas you might not have before. Matt Stairs is not playing, Ben. Come on, you're a professional, Ben. You should know this. I haven't let go of him yet. Yeah, I don't know. If it were very different, it could be football. Yes, right. Clearly, you could make it different by making it very different.

Clearly, right? Like if you took out the ball, it would be very different. Like if the first rule you did is there's no ball, it would be very different. It would. And then it would be different. But I feel like if you change the compression of the ball, it would not be very different. It would be slightly different. It would be slightly different. Yeah. I mean, for the most part, we've lived through fairly large shifts in the game, I would say. If you were going to suggest a change in the game that changed the run scoring environment from seven runs a game to almost ten game or what? Yeah, like seven runs a game to almost 10 runs a game. That would seem like a dramatic difference. And yet I just kept chugging

along. I mean, if you played me a game from 1996 and a game from 1972, other than the tint on the screen and, you know, the players themselves, I don't think I would notice in one game that I was watching a different sport, for instance. Yeah, we're talking about a difference that would... It would take something very different to make me not be a baseball fan. Or to make you notice. Or to make me even like baseball less or more.

I guess, to me, something that's very different would have to be immediately noticeable. Like you would have to watch one game from one era and one game with the difference and one game without it. And you'd have to notice it in that one game. And I don't think there's anything in the game that is really noticeable. Between 19, say, 40, let's say 1947, which seems like a significant difference, but since 1947 to now, I don't know if there's anything that is different and that is immediately discernible in one game. section 39 in the upper deck that you would be like,

whoa, this is different than I remember? Maybe there would be some cosmetic differences. There would be like pitcher wind-ups would all look weird, but the actual pitches might not look all that different. Yeah.

So to answer your question, Vinny, no. If baseball were different, it would be at most slightly different. Yes, I agree. All right. Two questions from Matthew. The first one, on the most recent email show, you discussed the concept of blackouts on local games. What you said made a great deal of sense.

But one thing came to mind. Many teams own their own regional sports networks, and we can probably agree that this is the most profitable format for a team rather than selling broadcast rights. However, why shouldn't a team such as the Red Sox or an Orioles or Nationals sell their game directly to the consumer in an MLB TV team package for more money, cut out the middleman of cable and make more money, and fans who only get cable get to watch sports would save money as well. Given the wild success of MLB advanced media and cable appearances of dying, wouldn't it be wise for baseball or teams to pursue a similar strategy?

It seems to me that they are, or at least some of them have already done this. If we're talking about a team within RSN making its games available in market live or not live streaming to cable customers, that has already been done. I know that the Yankees have been doing that since 2009. They were the first to do it. Yes Network offered its games streaming to certain cable customers, and I think the Padres did it the same year, and I think the Blue Jays do it, although that's a little different since they are owned by the cable network as opposed to owning the cable network.

But there are a few teams that do that, and I think the way it works, or the way it worked as of 2009 at least, when Bud Selig sent a memo around that was published on Sports Business Journal, was that half of the proceeds go to Major League Baseball, Advanced Media, and the other half goes to local interests. So the team or the regional sports network or the local cable provider. So I don't know why more teams don't already do that, but I'm sure it's complicated to work out legally and with all the parties involved. But maybe we'll start to see that more. And so it's basically a reverse MLB TV where you are blacked out of that streaming when you are out of market and you can only watch it in market.

So that is my answer to that. Great answer. Thank you. Matthew also asks, with the increasing amount of incredibly young stars and career peaks coming at a younger and younger age, do you think we'll see a movement to see younger players treated more fairly? If Mike Trout puts up another 10-war season and suffers a career-ending injury, he would make less money in his career than insert insert washed-up bum veteran, will make next season. That seems to punish players that generate most of their value early on, especially pitchers, while unions tend to favor the more senior members. Do you think that will have to change with the influx of the most popular players being young, especially when other sports like basketball promise big days early on. That's a good question.

Yeah. What would be the impetus? I mean, what would create the movement that would lead to this? I mean, if you imagine that Mike Trout really did suffer a career-ending injury, it's not as though 300,000 people would go, you know, march for justice or anything. It would be like, you know, there'd be some columns written, but who, I guess the question is,

who is capable of putting political pressure on, you know, on the decision makers? The union is, and the union's incentive doesn't seem to be to protect younger players. Although Trout is a union member. When we talk about the union's incentives not being to help

younger players, we usually mean amateurs and or minor leaguers. And not one to six players, because they should theoretically be protected. It's not clear to me why they haven't been protected. Maybe it's just too hard to fight. But yeah, I don't know.

Protected as in they can make whatever teams will pay them? Yeah, more or less. That's just the concession that the union had to give for right for free agency i suppose is that they had to give teams some some savings and cost certainty early on so yeah but at the time i mean that was what they gave at the time that was 40 years ago and like i said it might just be that that's too big an issue like that they have other issues that are always more important and or easier to get than that yeah that would i mean that would be a that would be a huge change because you have teams

now that are really trying to to develop pre-arbitration talent and that's how teams will tell you that they win by getting that kind of player. And if that's not a route to success anymore, then maybe that, I mean, if that were the case, then maybe you would start to see competitive balance be affected because then you'd really be talking about only wealthy teams being able to have good players at any point. So imagine a situation where you didn't have the the one to six years and starting tomorrow everybody was a free agent you know as soon as they are um you know as soon as they are say you get one year maybe or something then what would the pirates do in that situation or what would the rays do and do you think that the amount of money spent on players overall would go up with the amount of total salaries go up?

Or would it just be redistributed? I think it would probably. Well, I don't know because obviously you'd flood the market with players. But there'd also be a ton of demand because you'd have so much turnover. I don't know. I mean, that was discussed early on in free agency, right? That was like what Charlie Finley wanted to do or something, I think, was just have everyone be a free agent every year.

I don't know what the effect of that would be. But I'm not saying everybody's a free agent every year. I'm just saying that there's no one to six. There's no club control. Like maybe you have club control, but instead of having... You can still sign long-term deals if you want to. Yeah, yeah, you could. I'm just saying that instead of having your first three years,

your contract gets renewed at the minimum, and then you get this arbitration system that artificially suppresses you, you just have it basically be an arbitrator. You're arbitration eligible every year for the first six the club controls you basically but you have to pay you know full market value well in that situation the pirates wouldn't be able to afford a lot of their guys so it would be like a de facto free agency kind of a thing. And so, yeah, if they couldn't afford those guys, where would they spend their money? It's hard to imagine.

Well, it's hard to know. Okay. It does seem weird, though, that we have this... It does seem weird that we have this system that's set up that the only good it does is that it makes poor teams better. And that's the only reason. It feels weird to explain to Mike. Well, it saves owners money is the big reason.

Good thing. I said good thing. Okay. I don't know if I said good thing, but that's what I meant. Can you imagine going to Mike Trout and being like, no, no, we know you're worth $50 million, and yet we have to pay you one hundredth of that because the pirates. That wouldn't make any sense. Like, if you tried to explain that to him, rationally, it makes no sense.

Like, how is that the only solution to the pirates problem, is keep Mike mike trout from getting paid what he's worth by the angels doesn't it feel like all of baseball's solutions to competitive imbalance are weird and like they're all like three steps too many and they all have 10 unintended consequences yeah well we've talked about that with the draft pick compensation. That's always the way it works. It's the worst, man. The draft pick compensation just kills me.

Just up all night thinking about it. Next question. Let's do one more question before our play index segment. This one comes from Samuel. He says, Your chat with Nick Picoro about Kevin Towers struck some curiosity in my prospect-driven mind. Your chat with Nick Pecoro about Kevin Towers struck some curiosity in my prospect-driven mind. You guys labeled Towers as a 40-man roster kind of guy who sticks to primarily the big league club. Did we do that?

I don't remember doing that, but okay. Yeah, no, Nick did. Nick said that. Okay. This made me wonder how aware MLB general managers are of the so-called pipeline of prospects throughout the league who will soon be with big league clubs. To give you guys a question i will ask this out of the 30 general managers how many know who a highly rated but not top 50 kind of prospect like david doll is uh i would i would i would say that's an easy call that all 30 would know david doll uh you would i think so. I mean, he's not a top 50 guy, but he is a top 100 guy,

at least according to our rankings. And he was the 10th overall pick two years ago. Yeah. So they would have probably, I mean, most teams, well, I don't know. I mean, clearly, I would say the Rays know who he is, but the Rays wouldn't have probably scouted him because they would have known immediately that he wasn't falling to them. They might have scouted him a little bit, but it's not like they would have had to have conversations about David Dahl the player. As a person who reads a lot of prospect writing, a lot of it does just fall right out of my head. Oh yeah, me too. There's a lot of names to know. Yeah. I mean, I think any, anyone who's taken in the first half of the first round is in any GM's head or any,

any baseball executives head somewhere. Can I tell you something though? Sure. I, Somebody did once tell me that he mentioned a GM in particular who didn't know prospects and who had a reputation for being hard to make trades with because you'd give him a name of a prospect in your system and and he would have to ask the, he'd go, I'll get back to you, and then he'd have to go ask his guys, because he didn't know any of them. So I think that Dahl is too good a player, but my impression of this, of this guy, as it was related to me, is that he wouldn't have known,

for instance, of the 300 players who are top 10 prospects for their clubs. My impression is that he wouldn't necessarily know more than half of those. Yeah, I can believe that. Yeah, I'm sure it varies quite a bit by GM. Obviously, you have some GMs who've had scouting background, and maybe they themselves scout players and go on scouting trips if they're thinking about acquiring someone, whereas other people don't really have that background to the same extent, maybe rely more on their assistants who do. And if you think about it, I mean, you can get away with not knowing a lot with the information that teams have at their disposals now and how big front offices are and how many people you can consult about these things and how you can just immediately pull up all of a player's stats and biographical information and scouting reports and everything that you would really need to know. You can get that at a moment's notice so sure i mean when i talk to the people on our prospect staff at bp i'm always amazed by how many people they know how many names they know like at any level those guys are insane

right those guys are insane you ask them the most random guy and you ask them about one specific tool right of the guy and they know the tool. It's crazy. It really is crazy. And it's – I mean there are certainly many, say, like Dynasty League fantasy players who know more than – or at least are aware of more prospects than some GMs are, I would think. I would think. I mean, we get I get emails about or, you know, chat questions about like 16 year old players, 17 year old players, guys who pitch like 20 innings professionally or maybe even have not been drafted yet. And it's just insane because people have fantasy leagues where they draft these people years and years and years before they even have a chance of being in the major leagues. leagues. So if you're a real prospect hound, as Samuel probably is, I would say that you might be better informed or at least off the top of your head would be more aware than some GMs would be. But it would behoove a GM to have a passing familiarity, at least with every other team's top prospects.

Yeah. So I'm sure the good ones are pretty well informed. Yeah. I thought I had something else to say, but I don't. Okay. Well, then you can just go right into our play index segment for this week. Yeah. So this is the play index segment.

Is this also presented by baseballreference.com's play index? I suppose it is. All right. So I wanted to – I've actually wanted to look this up for a while, and I always forgot. And one time Bobby Abreu had like a reverse split for like four games into a season. And, you know, when you're trying to find something to write about for the next day, you'll take anything.

And so I asked Mike Socha some question at the time about reverse splits and whether it's something that he's seen players develop over their careers or something like that. And I might have mentioned this on the show, but one of my very, very favorite things about Mike Socha is that for any question that you ask of, have you ever seen this before or can you think of somebody who's like this, the answer is always, every single time, Pedro Guerrero. And so he mentioned Pedro Guerrero was like that.

So anyway, that's half of the inspiration. The other half is that – And was he? Right, that's half of the inspiration. The other half is that... And was he? Well, Ben, the other half of this was inspired by a Sports Illustrated article about Stan Musial that I read that was written in 1956. And toward the end of it, there's this section. Although he's not a switch hitter like Mickey Mantle, Southpaw Musial can hit left-handed pitchers almost as well as right.

The reason for it, he analyzed, is that after the cards lost, Whitey Karowski and Walker Cooper, Enos Slaughter and I were the power of the ball club, so to speak. And of course, the opposing teams would always save their left-handers for us. To begin with, in the big leagues, you've got to hit both types of pitching. But Slaughter and I saw more than our share. You either hit them or you struggle. They're a little harder to hit to begin with because the ball is breaking away from you all the time. The ball is going in one direction and you're batting another, and if you

take your eyes off the ball, it's harder to hit. A right-hander's ball is breaking into you. It's easier to follow. There are a couple of lefties, though, who seem to hit left-handed pitchers better than they do righties. Rube Walker murders lefties. So I never looked up Pedro Guerrero, and I never looked up Rube Walker, and I decided I would do that here, and I wanted to go further than that, and I wanted to see how common it actually is. And so Playindex has a Playindex splits finder, which is amazing. And so I went to the splits finder, and I sorted for right-handed batters against right-handed pitchers.

I sorted them by OPS. I clicked on the little box that says compare the split to career totals and I set a minimum plate appearance of 3,000 against right handers so 3,000 in the split which is enough for Billy Butler and I figure if it's enough for Billy Butler that's a pretty good career right? You want to have it high enough to get Billy Butler in but

lower than that you start getting into split madness. And so I ran that and, uh, there's 404 hitters that came up. These are right-handers against right-handers. So 404 hitters that met this threshold. And of those 404, there were 31 with a platoon split uh a reverse platoon split um and uh so then i repeated it with lefties and you can't set the threshold nearly so high for lefties for obvious reasons so i had to go all the way down to a thousand to get a sizable sample so i did the same stuff um with a thousand plate appearance minimum for the split. And in this case, 219 hitters came up. And of those, only three were better, which is kind of surprising when you first think about it

because the sample is one-third the size. You would think that the fluke possibility would be just mountains higher. And yet, as we know, the lefty lefty platoon advantage is considerably, uh, stronger than the righty righty platoon advantage. So despite the sample being three times flukier, the, um, the effect is apparently many times stronger. And there were only three of them that were better. And, um, so, uh, and, uh, uh, you, uh, I, once I had these results, uh, I, um, uh, downloaded them, uh, and put them into a spreadsheet so that I could analyze them. But, uh, the way that, the way that it's displayed, it's very easy to just eyeball.

So you can just eyeball and you can see the ones that jump out having a split higher than their career totals. Anyway, to answer the question, Pedro Guerrero, 850 OPS against right-handers. 850 OPS against left-handers. He is not one of our 34 reverse splitters, but he is as close as could be. And now that I think about it, out of respect to Socha and Guerrero, I probably should have gone at the extra decimal point and seen, but I didn't. So anyway, the point is, though, that Socha did have a good eye. Guerrero is very – he is at the far end in this regard. Rube Walker.

Rube Walker, OPS against righties. Remember, he's a left-handed batter against righties 579 against lefties 995 how many play appearances well so that's the tricky thing is Walker doesn't actually Walker didn't play that long and uh he some of his career took place in an era where splits were not easily gotten. And so, in fact, this seems to be largely a numerical thing. This is 1,400 plate appearances against righties and only 104 against lefties. And so clearly we would not take 104 as gospel. However, 995.

It's 416 points higher. And so if nothing else, I will say that Musial was on to something. And then Musial. Itro is in the group. Ben, well done. Yeah, Itro is one of the three lefties. He's 784 against lefties and 775 overall. The other lefties are Kelly Johnson, who is eight points above his career overall total.

So he's probably like 14 points or 12 points or something. So can conceivably still fall beneath that threshold. But of course, Ichiro looks safe. But then here's the third lefty so it's kelly johnson itro and enos slaughter oh the guy that museal said wow to get better because of the thing right so like he totally got slaughter right so i was pretty stoked about that comes full circle and museal as you recall that i began this reading by saying that although he's not a switch hitter like mantle he hits lefties almost as well as righties Comes full circle. And Musial, as you recall that I began this reading by saying that,

although he's not a switch hitter like Mantle, he hits lefties almost as well as righties. He didn't really. 997 OPS against righties, 922 against lefties. So that's a little smaller than the average split for a left-handed batter against left-handed pitchers, but it's still pretty sizable. The thing I love about this whole idea though is that i

feel like a k like like the way that museo is described and maybe i'm reading too much into it but i feel like the way museo was describing it and almost like the way that i was looking at it with abreu is that it's better like it it seems like a moral good to be as good against one type of pitcher as the other like it feels like an achievement but the great thing about splits like this is they're not that at all like if you could just be worse against the other type of hitter like barry bonds had a big split because he had like a 15 000 ops against left against righties and ted williams of all the people in this in this ted williams had the biggest differential between his biggest differential between his platoon advantage and disadvantage.

That's because he had an 11-15 OPS against righties. So there's actually nothing particularly noble about being at the top of this leaderboard. And yet it sort of feels like, I don't know, it feels like a weird... Anyway, Ralph Kiner is at the top of the leaderboard, by the way, as a righty. He has the biggest differential between his OPS and his total OPS. Also, A-Rod by like two points is on here. And Mike Lansing is on here.

Juan Uribe. It's sort of a fun list. Matt Holliday. Mini Minoso. Tim Salmon, Ron Santo, Dusty Baker, Kevin Millar, Doug Glanville, all names that you've heard. Yes. Cool. All right. Two things we have not mentioned about the Play Index. For one thing, there is a free trial, so you can try any Play Index feature, I believe. And the only difference is that the results are somewhat limited if you don't subscribe. So you can take the whole thing for a spin and see if you can do what you want to do with it. And then if you want to get the full results, you can pay for it.

And the other nice thing is that it comes with a money back guarantee. So in the unlikely event that you do not enjoy the Play Index, you can get the unused portion of your subscription back. So two more reasons to subscribe to it. Again, with the coupon code BP to get a discount from this podcast. Okay, another question comes from Austin, who asks about the promotion that the Padres are putting on on March 15th, in which any fan over the age of 16 can win season tickets if they are able to hit a home run at Petco Park off a pitching machine with only one swing,

seeing no more than two pitches, which sounds like something that a listener might have emailed us about at some point. Anyone who played Division I baseball or professionally at any level is exempt from the competition. So what Austin wants to know, outside of this being a really great idea and a fun promotion for the Padres, it got me thinking about how bad the Padres' offense is going to be. So here it is. What, if anything, could a person without any professional experience do in the setting of this competition that would make the team consider signing them?

If a 39-year-old softball dad showed up and hit his pitch onto the third deck of the Western Metal Supply building like Matt Stairs in his prime, would the team consider taking him on as a pinch hitter? Or if a 19-year-old built like Carlos Correa with no baseball training and good swing mechanics didn't hit a homer, but ripped a double into the opposite field gap, would the team think twice about offering him a minor league deal? So there's a, there's a, I feel like there's a little bit of a cheat in this premise, because it implies that they have to either sign him or let him leave. And of course, the easy answer is that if he did something to impress them, they'd say, oh, well, we'd like to see more of you. Can you come by after the game and throw us a pitch? Right, it's not like there's a clock on on this contract that expires when the ball

lands um so so i to i guess the question would be what i i mean maybe the question is more extreme to say what would it take for them to have to sign him right away right but what would it do to pique their interest to pique their interest and and um can i just say uh real quick that this con this contest is uh limited to people who are 16 years old and older and if ever you needed a reason to hate lawyers this is it there's absolutely no reason not to have 15 year olds and four and nine year olds be allowed in this except that some lawyers made them like so that like why can't a nine-year-old do it like you're worried about losing all your tickets to nine-year-olds like that's a terrible thing like a nine-year-old's gonna do it and you're gonna go broke it's horrible

nine-year-olds should totally be allowed to do this but a lawyer's like not a good idea well if it's a one-day event that takes time up maybe you just wouldn't want to waste your time with nine-year-olds with kids yeah why would you want kids to come to the park and have a good time like who would want kids on a baseball field that's a terrible idea no a lawyer lawyers did this uh i did this once you know not this contest but i angels uh used to let you bring canned food the day the day after thanksgiving and for every can you brought you you'd get a swing on the field. And that was one of the greatest days of my life. I waited about four hours.

How many cans did you bring? 20. It was the max you could bring was 20. And so you wait about four hours in the stands. There were a couple hundred people there. And you just sit there in the sun until it's your turn and then you go on. You're totally super nervous. And I think a guy pitched to

me um there was a guy pitching but i can't remember whether the the guy pitching was the default or whether he was what they brought out if you couldn't hit the machine but anyway uh i one hopped the wall on one uh right right down the line right it was probably five feet foul it was right in the corner um so it's not totally a power park too uh yeah although that line that corner juts out a little um so the uh that's totally something they could lose i mean one swing is tough to get right but there was a guy there who had who had a few out uh well i think i only remember one or two guys in the entire four hours hitting hitting him out but there were a couple guys who hit a few out. I think I only remember one or two guys in the entire four hours hitting them out.

There were a couple guys who hit. That person could have been a D1 person. I would say, though, that if you were a 17-year-old kid and you came out and you hit one on the first swing 420 the other way

for a home run, you'd get a call. Yeah, sure. What if you're old but you hit one like 500 feet? How old? 33. Are you in good shape? Do you look good? Yeah, you look reasonably fit.

Got the good face? Yes, got the good face. Red hair? No, no red hair. I think 500 probably gets you a call. Uh-huh. I don't know that I think that for I guess that 455 gets you a uh joking conversation that if you pushed it a little bit could turn serious like 4.55 you'd have a guy go we should sign you up and then you'd laugh and then you'd be shy and you'd go home but if you weren't shy and you

pushed it you could probably get another look. Get another swing, yeah. Well, if anyone... But certainly, and I mean, there is, D1 excludes junior college. I'm sure there are junior college guys who, you know, actually will get drafted and so could conceivably look good enough, but it'd be tough. You'd have to really do something. Well, if anyone... I'll stick with my 17, 420 with my 17 420 the other way that's my minimums if anyone who uh listens to the show is at this competition or participates in this competition please please let us know

let us know if you see anyone uh any 17 year olds hit one 420 the other way especially if you are that person. Okay. Man, I like the questions this week. I guess I will go with this one from Jeff. Is there any value at the major league level in trying to impact the mental state or focus of your opponent if before game five of the NLDS, the Cardinals had let it slip to the media that they had found that Garrett Cole was tipping his pitches, do you believe, one, that Pirates coaches would spend enough time trying to find the flaw on video that it would impact the team's

preparation? Or two, even if Pirates coaches told Cole that the story was made up and his mechanics were flawless, Cole himself would be worried enough that it would impact his performance. If so, in either case, how much would this swing expected winning percentage for the game? The first one, no. The first example, I would say not at all. Would you say that it would at least make them look? Could the Cardinals say made you look after that? They could definitely. They could definitely say made you look. There's no doubt they would look. Yeah. But the coaches have enough time.

Coaches' time is not like Major League Baseball's great scarcity. Right. But as to the ladder, it's a good question. You know what else? You could imagine, like, if, well, if you, huh, like, yeah, I don't know. I wonder how else you could, like, could you imagine if the, say, Adam Wainwright, I don't know who started that game, but had, like, sort of leaked, if somehow had arranged it for it to be leaked that he was scuffing his pitches? arranged it for it to be leaked that he was scuffing his pitches or like, you know, throwing a spit ball.

And of course he wasn't. So he didn't, and he knew he had planted the story. So he wasn't worried about getting caught doing a thing he wasn't doing. You could see that psyching them out too, right? Yeah, possibly.

It's very, in my experience playing sports, it is very easy to psych guys out. Psyching out is fairly easy. Of course, you are not playing against major league players who are probably more resistant to being psyched out. Psych resistant, yeah. So I can see it, but... Worth a shot. Yeah.

Of course, it would be considered Bush league and they would claim it was against the unwritten rules yeah if if anyone found out where the where the tip came from do you uh what so um how much would you how much would you say it would shift win expectancy in this specific situation let's say what was the story he was tipping his pitches huh yes and you'd have to you probably wouldn't want to leak it too soon because if it would give the story too much time to get debunked you know especially because garrett cole was coming in on such an incredible run that obviously nobody else had picked up on it. They, you know, they claim that if you're tipping your pitches, like, you know, any dugout will notice it in like five minutes.

So, uh, so you'd have to wait until like the morning of, uh, yeah, that would seem to be a good time. Um, well, if we say, I don't know if it's 50-50 without the tip. I'd go up to 50.2. I'd say a well-executed psych. I'm not saying that this one would land. Right. This one might just be a glancing blow and then i'd say nothing but if you landed a psych i would give you um i would give you an extra a win every 500 games

i bet there are there are pitchers who would make me go a point or two i don't know who they are but i bet they're out there that this would actually get in their head football players are all about psychs you know like when you hear about you know football what they say to each other like Richie Incognito saying these things wasn't it him who was saying things to opposing

players opposing linemen to try to get a rise out of them NBA is just all about the psych it's all about trash talk and psyching people out and greg maddox you know with the famous psych greg man i don't know if this is considered a psych but you know the story of greg maddox right in spring training do you know this he would like he would apparently like like allow guys to hit home runs on pitches that oh right right yeah like he would basically set them up for like four years down the road by allowing you know home runs and spring training

so i don't know if that's quite psyching but um baseball does seem to be a largely psych free sport yeah i wish there were more psyching uh-huh um can we do another? Last one. Okay. Eric Hartman asks, it seems that there are a lot of transcendent defensive performances in the last few years. He mentions that this is something that we mentioned not too long ago. I was wondering if these stats adjust as defense does.

Maybe I'm wrong, but in the last few years, it seems that there's been a greater emphasis on defense than during the late 90s and early 2000s. Therefore, wouldn't even better performance be needed to be a plus five defender? Wouldn't this mean that the incredible numbers being put up by Manny Machado and Carlos Gomez be even that much better than a similar score would indicate from 15 years ago? Or is league-wide DRS or UZR simply rising? Or is league-wide DRS or UZR simply rising? So it seems to me that, I mean, we don't have a large enough sample with those particular stats to say that those were historically out of line.

We only have them back, you know, a little over a decade. But in principle, I mean, those things are Relative to average right So in principle It should be more and more difficult To post numbers Like that I mean it's the old That Stephen Jay Gold Argument about why there are no 400 hitters anymore and obviously there Are many factors that could explain that

But one of them he makes the case that As or when The level of competition is lower, it's easier for the truly elite players to sort of feast on the weaker ones, and that there is kind of a right wall, sort of a maximum of the human limit of how good you can be at a sport. And as the level of competition rises in the sport, there are more and more people closer to that level. So there's less of a gap between the really good players and just the average player. The average keeps rising closer and closer to the elite. And therefore it's harder

to, you know, hit 60 home runs or hit 400 or whatever it is. So theoretically that should also apply to defensive stats. And if everyone is getting better at defense, then it should be harder to be plus 30 or whatever on defense. Yeah. So I don't know what it means that we still see those numbers. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess not everybody.

If you think that defensive improvement across the league is partly due to the systems that the players are in, for instance, and perhaps also the park, the effect that a park has on defensive metrics, then you would say that not all players are necessarily improving at the same rate. So. Yeah. Okay. Good questions. Some more good ones that maybe we'll get to next week.

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