Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 401: Listen to Your Heart, and Also to These Listener Emails

Episode Date: March 7, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about MLBAM’s new tracking technology and the future of scouting, nine-man rosters, baseball spoilers, and more.

Well, it's gonna be the future soon, and I won't always be this way. When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away. It's gonna be the future soon, I've never seen it quite so clear. When my heart is breaking, I can close my eyes, it's already here. Good morning, and welcome to episode 401 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller and no one else, because we're doing a listener email show. Mm-hmm. So let's do that.

Okay. Okay. You ready for some coughing? Ready. Am I reading the questions today? Yeah. Probably a bad idea. All right.

So let me see. Where should I begin? Let's start with Chris because you are my expert on this topic, and so you're going to end up talking about it. That worries me. Whenever you start something like that, I'm worried, because I don't consider myself an expert on anything. Chris writes about, well, the buildup to the question is about Carlos Correa's size

and whether he'll end up moving off shortstop, but the question is really, enter MLBAM's new defensive tracking system, which of course Ben wrote about in great detail. What are your thoughts on how this data might affect scouting? Would a player like Correa have a better chance to stick at shortstop because of new data available on his positioning, first step, routes, etc.? That presumes that Correa is good enough. If I, if I'm reading this correctly, it could just as easily more quickly push him off. Anyway, would teams be able to better position players to succeed

once this data is available and married to batted ball profiles for hitter and pitching tendencies? Although I guess maybe that's true. If they can position him better, then maybe he's... Anyway, that's the question that the basically the question is how will the new defensive tracking system affect scouting and the reason that i want to hear you answer this because you just sort of very very briefly touched on this uh at the end of your your long and extensive piece about the program and what it

will mean for baseball and how it will work. And I sense because you're a graduate of scouting school, which I don't think we bring up enough on the show, that you might have more insight on that. So did you think much about how it's going to affect scouting? And do you think it will affect scouting a great deal other than leading to fewer scouts? scouting a great deal other than leading to fewer scouts? Well, right. I think that's sort of the thing is I didn't want to make the article about that. I didn't want to make it look like I was going after scouts or anything.

I have a lot of respect for what scouts do and like a lot of scouts and went to scout school to learn more about it myself and everything. But in my, my last, uh, diary piece from scout school for Grantland, I, I said something like, you know, it doesn't really seem like it's a growth industry or it's not something that I would tell my grandkids to go into because it does seem like at some point there would have to be some kind of cutback,

some sort of calling in the numbers of scouts. And people were sort of worried about this at the beginning of Moneyball, and it was, you know, the whole stats versus scouts thing was partially people being threatened by other people who could possibly pose a threat to their jobs. And if anything, we've seen the opposite happen since then. Teams have poured more money into scouting and hired more scouts. But at some point, I do think the pendulum's kind of going to swing the other way because the thing about this new

data is that it is indistinguishable from scouting data, it is scouting data stats versus scouts is not a thing anymore the stats are the same as scouting information really when it's whether it's coming from a computer or or coming from a person and in some cases a computer is going to be better than a person is because computers are better at a lot of things than people are. So I do sort of wonder, you know, eventually this system will be installed everywhere. There are still lots of kinks to work out, and they're going to be testing it this year, and it's only going to be in three to five parks this year with a planned rollout to all of the parks next year. But you wonder whether teams should start shifting their scouting resources toward the amateur side, which I think maybe has already begun.

We've talked about teams relying on video or pitch effects for advanced scouting instead of sending scouts on the road. So that sort of thing might accelerate, and you might see teams concentrate more on amateur scouting, or eventually this system will be so cheap and and so easy to install and use that you can put it in a college park and maybe teams will want to do that um and it'll just end up everywhere and then i don't know where scouting goes after that i think you'll still need some scouts just for, you know, makeup concerns.

And the system can't tell you whether a guy's positioning is because he's really good at positioning or whether a coach is telling him where to stand. So that's the sort of thing that a human would be able to add value for. But I don't know. It does seem sort of like this could be, you know, a step along the road to cutting back in that area. Does that seem plausible to you? Yeah. So just before I ask my follow-up question, does it matter whether the guy is doing his own positioning or whether a coach is telling him where to stand i mean can't if a coach is telling him where to stand and you're a major league team who wants to add this guy can't your coach tell him where to stand presumably yeah sure if if yeah i mean

if you don't have a coach who's good at that um then maybe that the guy wouldn't be able to self direct um you'd rather i guess you'd rather have a guy who can already do that himself. But yeah, you would want to get someone who can do that because with this information, you'll be able to do it more effectively, presumably. So as we've talked about in the past, sports games, you know, games especially that are dictated by, you know, some sort of commissioner, but really all games are, you know, a kind of carefully calibrated mixture of freedoms and restrictions. And the restrictions aren't necessarily, you know, serving any purpose other than to create some balance in the game. And so, for instance, there's no social harm,

So, for instance, there's no social harm, societal harm, to having a guy in center field with binoculars trying to steal the other team's signs and radioing them to the dugout so that the hitters know what's coming. It's not like children are corrupted by that or anybody gets cancer. And yet it's not allowed. It's a restriction. They've decided it's not sporting, and they think the game is better without that.

So that's a restriction. And so I just wonder if you can imagine any future or any scenario where there's a restriction placed on information, that you just can't have too much information, that they put limits on what you can have. And basically this information is kept not just from us, but from the teams themselves, that they only are able to access a sliver of it. And beyond that is considered illegal, too much for arbitrary reasons, but nonetheless for competitive balance or whatever. Or I guess another way of phrasing that question is, is there any social good done from this

for the game, like from the game's perspective? Is the game actually served by this? You and I are served by this. We are excited by this. Teams themselves are excited by it, but all teams are going to get it, so they're not actually going to get an advantage. The first mover might have a brief advantage, but they're all going to have to do it. I'm not arguing against this. I'm thrilled, and I'm excited, and I love information,

but is there really a good argument for why teams should have this, and is there any argument that you can think of for why teams shouldn't have this? Well, I think you would have to put a rule on the books that they couldn't because left to their own devices, they would all want it out of curiosity. But also, I think there is some advantage. There's some edge to be gained there because it's going to be a lot of information to work with. And the teams that already have people in place who know how to work with all this data and get the most out of it will have some advantage. Yeah, some specific teams will have some advantage. But, I mean, the game is zero-sum.

So other teams will be at a disadvantage. I mean, there's no tide that lifts all ships in this case because they're all competing against each other. Well, so I wrote about in the article there was a comment by the CEO of MLB Advanced Media who was giving that presentation at Sloan last weekend. And he said, we don't think this is a discussion ender. We think it's not going to end debates. It's going to start debates, which is probably a smart way to present it. If you think people are going to be turned off by the numbers or the idea that people think that everything can be quantified, then it's a non-threatening way to present this new

system that it's just going to start new discussions. But I don't know that that's the case. I was trying to think of, you know, once, if we have all of this information and we know how to analyze it, or if teams do, it's a system that's designed to give you answers and end debates, right? A lot of the debates that we have right now are sort of unproductive compared to just looking at the numbers. Like we talk about how good a guy is on defense and then we look at his defensive stats and we say, well, how much do we need a year? Do we need two years of defensive stats before we can be confident that that's actually how good he is? And you can kind of quibble with whether they're accounting for positioning and all these things. So we end up talking about flaws with the stats, really, which is not particularly interesting.

So if you just replace that with a system that accounts for all those things, then it does end those debates. It does give you answers to those questions. And it does end those debates. It does give you answers to those questions. So I don't know because I was trying to think like will baseball be boring at some point because we will have all the answers. And it seems like the sort of thing that people say every time a new technology comes out. It's like it's going to ruin everything or it's going to change everything. And then it never really does. Like the old Gary Huckabee thing about how baseball analysis is dead many, many years ago.

And clearly it has been alive and well since then. So I wonder whether there will be some new avenues that I'm not really thinking of that this will open up. But, yeah, it is a little worrisome. As cool as it is, as much as I want to see it, I also kind of don't want to know everything. Or if I do, I wonder whether I would lose interest. Yeah, I also can't really think of any questions that this raises. I mean, there will still be questions, of course, that it won't answer everything. But are there any questions that it will actually generate or debates that it will actually generate? I can't think of any. I would imagine that that might be a column that Russell

Carlton will write at some point. But in the meantime, I think you're right. I think I'm not, I'm going to be deliberate about not repeating that, that particular piece of spin because, yeah, I don't think it's actually necessarily true. Um, yeah. And yeah, go ahead. Well, I just want, I mean, again, I, I think that it's clear that this data is going to be helpful. It's going to be great for, for us. I'm excited for it. Um, I, I just think that it is within, I mean, you know, there are golf clubs that allow you to hit the ball harder. Um, and you're not allowed to use them for whatever reason, you know, that they just have decided, like, we don't want you hitting it too hard. There's a

point where you hit it too hard. Um, and they put restrictions in place. So it's not out of the question, uh, that, that this might, uh, eventually be seen as being, uh, you know, too helpful, I guess. Do you think there's a way in which it could increase offense, or is all of the advantage tipping further toward defense with this technology? Yeah, Joe Maddon always says that

all information tilts toward defense. Yeah. It's certain... We've talked a lot about how i guess you know how it could help is like in this in this question about correa for instance is if it helps the defense so much that you're able to get away with playing better hitters at at high uh at high demand positions if basically every every good hitter can be positioned,

it's sort of weird. I don't know which would win. This would create this incredible tug of war where Billy Butler would become a great shortstop, but Billy Butler would become a great shortstop. So you'd have more Billy Butlers in your lineup, but they'd be good. So eventually, which wins out in that?

So maybe, I don't know yeah is there even if you position everyone optimally though it's not like they probably wouldn't be able to cover the entire field right so you'd still always want the guy who was better and could I would think yeah probably yeah I don't know I don't know it's something that we've talked about and other people have talked about how there's not enough action there are too many strikeouts or there aren't enough balls in play

so I mean it seems like this could further cut down on hits and exciting things. I think I'm trying to remember where I read this. I think I was just reading Dan Turgenkopf's essay at the end of Extra Innings, I think, is where I read this. And he mentions that one of the sort of avenues for inquiry you could imagine in the future was looking at batted ball data in a much better way, you know, process instead of results in a way next time in bat, but actually hit the ball harder the next time in bat, um, that you, you know, you might be able to get more answers on whether hotness is, is a, is a real phenomenon. And so you could sort of imagine not, not limited to that,

but you could sort of imagine getting a much clearer read on, um, when hitters are going to be at their best contextually, um, and therefore putually and therefore put more hitters who are in a position to succeed in that position more frequently, if that makes sense. Yeah, that's possible. But otherwise, you're right. It does seem like it's mostly defensively aimed. Mm-hmm. All right. Let's see here uh all right jordan asks if mlb is active did you by chance by the way say presented by baseball reference play index at the beginning i did okay good uh

because you haven't yes we've we've had to do multiple takes many times. Jordan asks, if MLB's active roster maximum was 9 rather than 25, how do you believe GMs would set up the roster? Would it be made up entirely of pitchers who just fill in all the other positions when they're not pitching? Surely a guy like Prince Fielder would make any team's top 9 out of 25, but with his replaceable fielding and running, is he right for a 9-man roster? Or does his hitting and durability make him the mvp would teams constantly sign and release new pitchers some teams would be pitcher heavy and other teams would be hitter heavy what happens when pitchers

face position player pitchers are there consequences at the game strategy level or business level that i did not consider um so uh i like the idea of having only nine players on your roster instead of 25, uh, because it makes no sense and you can't imagine a reason why you would go to it. And therefore it's great. The angels might have nine players in their bullpen this year. That's a, that's a, that's a zing right there. Got them. It was, it was, it was, uh, you know know he walked that back today.

He said that it was unlikely he would even have eight. So if you had nine I guess I would just want to limit this to this question. If this were the rule, more runs or fewer runs? I think

more runs. Well, you'd have, I mean, certainly having pitchers have to throw more would limit their effectiveness, but you would have, I mean, you'd have to have fewer games, right? Otherwise, you'd have to have at least, you know, you'd have to have fewer games, right? Otherwise, you'd have to have at least five pitchers. Even in the old days, if this were the case, you would need to have two or three or four pitchers, right? Yeah. So that would mean that the lineup would have

every pitcher you add is a pitcher in the lineup too. So that's fewer runs. I mean you'd have a lineup that was like a third pitchers or half pitchers. Yes. I don't know. I feel like we've answered varieties of this question in the past. Yeah. of this question in the past.

I don't know. The gap between... Is the gap between how good the typical position player would be at pitching and how good the typical pitcher is at pitching bigger than the gap between the typical hitter at hitting and pitcher at hitting? Yeah, right. That is a version of the question we've answered multiple times.

But I don't think that is the question. I think the question is that but slightly different. Right now we're looking at this and we're thinking, well, you know, Chris Davis can throw 81 and he's got a changeup. Maybe he could pitch. We need to not think about the players that we know. We need to start imagining that everybody was brought up in this game. And it is my belief that if you took every major league hitter that was picked out of high school, I mean, they were all great pitchers

in high school. Every single one of those guys pitched on his high school team. They weren't all good enough to get drafted, but a lot them were um and you know vice versa a lot of the pitchers were good enough to get drafted as hitters and then they just never work on it again they don't get the reps uh they don't get weeded out that the good one you know the bad ones don't get weeded out uh as they move up the ladder and so by the time they get up there there's really no expectation that a pitcher is going to be able to hit and there's been no investment in making him able to hit and there is literally no expectation that the hitter will ever pitch, and literally no investment in making sure that he's able to pitch.

So if you took every 17-year-old and developed them as two-way stars, the overall quality of hitter would go down, the overall quality of pitcher would go down, but I would think that the, uh, I would think that the hitters would win. I think that, um, that the, the injury issue would remain for all pitchers. And so you'd still lose a lot of pitchers, but, um, but all these high school pitchers who get drafted as hitters, if they kept hitting 400 times a year against tougher competition as they came up, I bet they'd stay pretty good.

So what am I saying? I'm saying that the pitchers would be good hitters. So basically you would see nine-man rosters of the best high school pitchers. All the best high school pitchers across the country would get drafted, and they would just get developed as pitchers who also hit every single day of their lives. So there would be nine pitchers on every team. They would all be pretty good hitters but not that good, and therefore offense would go way down.

That's what I believe. Okay. That's what I'm going with. Possible. Okay. All right. So this is a question that we have explicitly answered and we know we've answered, but it's been a year, and I think we should revisit it just real quickly.

Okay. Michael asks, which of the 30 MLB teams, assuming a blank slate starting this year, which of the 30 MLB teams would be the last to win a World Series? which of the 30 MLB teams would be the last to win a World Series? And he does not ask this, but you might ask this. Which of the eight teams that has never won a title will be the last to win a title? And so we answered this, and we don't remember exactly how we answered this, but we answered this about a year ago.

And we've learned a lot about teams in that time. So we might have different opinions about teams. I don't know. So I'm curious, assuming that you remember it all, has your opinion changed? Pretty sure one or both of us said Brewers. I feel like it was, yeah, I feel like three names were brought up, at least on my end. I feel like I brought up the Padres, Indians, and Brewers. And and yeah i think the brewers might have been the consensus because they have the bad farm system and they don't have a great market right and um they're not in a great position immediately so they're no they're no threat to wait in the next year or two yes um and you know one of the two or three worst systems in the game so

yeah they they actually seem to have solidified their position. I think so. They have all the things you look for in a team that will not win a World Series in a long time. So let's pretend that I'm remembering correctly and the Padres and the Indians were the other two teams named. Do the Padres and Indians seem stronger? I think I might have said Indians, which is probably a bad pick because they were a good team last year, so that alone kind of probably makes them a poor pick.

Let's see. Padres and Indians. I think I might say Rockies. I don't know whether we said Rockies or not, but just the fact that they are certainly no better than the Padres or Indians right now, and they also seem to have the Coors Field weight hanging over their head. They'd be high on the list.

I keep having this hope that they're going to crack Coors Field and it's going to be an advantage to play there, but that just doesn't seem to be happening. So, yeah, I would say that they're a stronger bet than the Padres. The Indians, you know, the Indians won last year, but there's a lot of reasons to not really like the Indians' chances. I mean, they're a super smart team. They're like, they're the only team, you know, they're one of the few teams that can rival,

you know, the Rays, basically, for investment in brains. They're coming off some success, but that market is really arguably as bad as Tampa's, or just about as bad as Tampa's. They have the 20th ranked farm system right now. They had a successful season last year, but you don't really expect them to have one this year at this point, having lost who they lost and with some plexiglass coming into play. So the Indians aren't a great bet for the near future or for the long-term future. And I don't remember why we didn't just say the Marlins.

Why didn't we just say the Marlins? Because we think that they have a good farm system, and when they want to spend $140 million, they can. Yeah, I don't know why we didn't if we didn't, but they'd probably be on the top five. Okay. And the Brewers are just the answer to the other one. Sorry, Brewers fans, but I can't really come up with a different answer that makes more sense.

All right. So I'm going to try to get through the Play Index segment right now without coughing. I don't think you can do it. So first I'm going to mute and I'm going to cough a lot. Okay. Okay. So you can edit this out if you want want but I'm going to cough a lot go ahead, go for it

alright so we're going to do the play index section brought to you by play index of baseballreference.com the best tool for baseball writing if you write about baseball in any capacity whatsoever, it is the best tool, the best investment you can make in your performance.

Or if you're just interested in it. Certainly that too. But if you don't, you know how at the back of baseball prospectus annuals there's that quote from Michael Lewis that any GM who doesn't read baseball prospectus should be fired for incompetence? Right. That's how I feel about anybody who writes about baseball who doesn't have Baseball Reference Play Index. You're just giving up like four-fifths of the resources out there for you.

Anyway, so I wrote a piece for Perspectives for Friday about kind of revisiting the idea of having a pinch sprinter uh as you meant as you termed it um a a like olympic quality runner who um just does nothing but pinch run doesn't doesn't even carry a glove or a or a or a bat uh just runs and of course charlie finley did this in 1974 with Herb Washington, and it didn't really work. But, you know, runners are faster now, and yet the base paths are the same length. And so I thought, well, maybe it would work now. So I kind of looked at that question and on the way explored, you know, how fast Billy Hamilton really is, because that was a key question, as it turned out. So anyway, it got me thinking about these one-dimensional runners,

and I wondered whether there is anybody in history who maybe would have fit the profile, but wasn't that guy, but basically could only run and found value by only running. Not because he was an Olympic sprinter, but just because that's all he could do. And so I went to the play index batting season finder. I switched the timeframe to entire careers. I excluded pitchers and I set the minimum at, I think, 600 plate appearances for a career. And I looked for players who met three qualifications, that they were a below replacement level hitter as measured by offensive war, that they were a below average defender as measured by defensive war, and that they were an above average base runner as measured by base running war in their career. And so essentially one skill, base running. one skill, base running. And since they had to have at least 650 plate appearances, these would have been people who managed to have a career with this particular skill set. So

I looked throughout baseball history, and there were 63 players, as it turns out. So it's actually a very rare profile to be a hitter, below average defender, above average base runner. There's 63 total players, and of those 63, half of them were only plus one base running. And so really, throw those guys out. That's a rounding error. So 33 who were plus two or better throughout history. So that's really very few, fewer than I was expecting. So there are a few names that are interesting.

Felix Pia is maybe the most interesting. Felix Pia is on this list. Probably the, probably, I would say arguably the most skilled player on this list, although he turned out to not have any. But, you know, he was not supposed to be this guy, certainly. It was a failure on his part to be on this list. But he's on this list and eugenio velez is on this list uh and emmanuel burris is on this list um which uh those are like two of the four best position players the giants have developed in the last 25 years

so that's pretty notable uh the champion for playing time, basically the longest career with this profile, is a guy named Phil Tote. Tote. T-O-D-T. Which I love. I like that name because I like to imagine an alternate grammar where you conjugate past tense not with E-D but with D-T. So he Tote him. T-O-D-T. Anyway, I liked that name. So that's probably unnecessary. I did not, that has nothing to do with Play Index. Bill Tote had 3,700 played appearances,

which is a good career. It's like almost Billy Butler's career. And he was actually always your go-to your standard for whether a career is a career is whether it's as long as billy butler's it is billy butler is that gonna change he's my he's my does that does that change as billy butler gets more playing time do you have to keep pace with him to have a career? I don't know. It's sort of like how when you get older, your peers get older too.

So it might be that when Billy Butler is retired, I'll still think of Billy Butler as a young man. But Tote was an MVP vote-getter three years in a row from ages 23 to 25, which would have made you expect big things from him, I imagine. Except that during those three years, he was worth a total of 1.2 war. Total, a total of 1.2 war. He finished 25th one year when he was at negative one war, which actually isn't as bad as bobby reeves finishing 12th that year with negative 0.6 war um which i think is because there were only eight voters at

the time and so you figure there's going to be you figure there's going to be three or four look at me voters no matter what the size of the pool is and so if there's if there's 30 voters those three or four get diluted but when there's eight, that's half the voting pool. So a lot of look-at-me voters. It's interesting because he was on terrible teams. Yeah. He was on the Boston Americans when they were winning like 40, 50 games every year. So terrible teams, low batting average, not a lot of power i mean what did he have going for him his nickname

was hook so that's kind of cool but um no he finished yeah he finished i think 25th that third year and there were actually only 25 players in baseball and every got every voter got 25 votes. Or as I call them, V-O-D-T, vote. So anyway, he's the champ for playing time. The modern record holders for playing time are Eric Owens and Danny Bautista. And there's a reason I'm telling you this. So each had about 2,500 played appearances and played about a decade. I'm telling you this. So each had about 2,500 plate appearances and played about a decade. But Bautista, so Bautista stole 37 bases in his career. So like, he's clearly not what we're looking for, right? But I mean, well, I mean, he was a corner outfielder with an 80 OPS plus,

and his career high was 11 home runs. So it's not clear what anybody was looking for, but he was not a speed guy. Owens was kind of a speed guy he stole 30 bases a year or so but never like a super high clip you i mean he wasn't like a guy who was stealing 70 bases or anything and most of the names on this list are not big stealers you have arki c and frocco not a base stealer stan jefferson um you know velez um Phil Tote, not a base dealer. Not a base dealer. In fact, there are more guys on this list who stole four or fewer career bases than stole 50 or more career bases.

And Owens is the record holder on this list with 126 career stolen bases. So it just sort of goes to show how hard it is to find the example that i was looking for because even the names that that turn up are not actually what what you're looking for um they're they're really a different kind of player um and they just sort of lucked into plus base running. And also, the champion in this regard for total base running value is only at plus eight runs. So it's hard to rack up base running runs. And for that reason, it makes a lot of sense

that it's hard to imagine an all-sprinter player, right? I mean, you only get to be on base so often, and you basically can never get thrown out or you you know you give you give back all your value um so uh so yeah it seems it seems that the fact that we haven't even really come close to having somebody who fit this profile the classic i mean i was hoping to find somebody who was like you know negative hitter negative fielder plus 45 career base runner. There's just nothing even close to that. Kerry Robinson is the closest at plus 8.

Kerry Robinson is most notable to me because when I was watching the playoffs this year, I saw Shane Robinson and I looked up his numbers and was shocked that he wasn't fast. Then I realized that all this time that I've been seeing Shane Robinson's name the last three or four years, I've been thinking it was Kerry Robinson who was fast. That happens. It does. All right.

That's that. Play-a-Dix is always adding things. I like following the blog at Baseball Reference just to see what it's adding. They just added the 1914 and 1915 seasons, so you can now search a full century of baseball data. And they just added team success as a filter. So if you want to filter your results by whether the team won the World Series or the pennant or just made the playoffs, you can do that now too. So always getting more useful. All right. Ken asks, as someone who's

catching up on Breaking Bad and hoping to avoid spoilers, I wondered how you guys felt about baseball spoilers with knowing the outcome of a game before you see it ruin your enjoyment at all, particularly with big games? Optional hypothetical, if you were to go 30 years into the future, would you willingly look up all of baseball history of the 30 years in between, assuming you could not come back and profit from or share such knowledge? When I was covering the Angels, for instance, they played late and I would go to bed really early at the time. I didn't have a podcast, so I would go to bed at 9 and wake up at 4.30 in the morning and start writing. Some mornings I would wake up and I'd watch the game and I'd just look for things to write about as I went. If I knew the outcome, I couldn't do it.

I just could not sit through a baseball game that I knew the outcome of. Even without a – I didn't have a rooting interest in the game at all. Even watching it, I didn't care who won. But if I knew who won, I couldn't stand it. So it's a little different. I mean you and I watch a lot of tape because a lot of what we do is going back and finding, you know, video or examples of things that we're writing about. But if it's a long enough game, if it's a game long enough ago, but even, you know, even when I do the worst game of the year, every year, I sort of try not to know who won. Like, I've been exposed to the winner because I've done some sort of sorting process

that has exposed me to the winner, but I kind of try to forget before I start watching it. And, and the crazy thing is I know the game is a blowout by definition, it's going to be a blowout. And by the, like the third batter, you know, who's up by, you know, who's winning, you know, who's going to win that game. It's like four to nothing, six minutes in. And I didn't choose it because the game ends up 13 to 12. And yet, it makes all the difference in the world to kind of at least vaguely have a sense of surprise. It does, yeah. When we were covering the playoffs last year, and you and I

and other people were recapping all the games, I watched a lot of them, or I DVR'd a lot of them and started them late so that I could skip all the ads and maybe catch up roughly by the end. And so I had to avoid any contact with anyone during the game, lest it be ruined. Because yeah, that would sap a lot of my enjoyment. Unless I'm going to look at some specific thing because I'm writing about it, I would prefer not to sit through a game knowing how it ends. You know another weird thing about the brain? I assume this is for all brains, but it's certainly for mine. Sometimes, every once in a while, I'll be watching an episode of The Simpsons

that I haven't seen in, you know, 15 years. I mean, this is an episode from like the 90s. I haven't seen in 15 years. I mean, this is an episode from the 90s. I haven't seen it since then. I certainly don't remember any of the lines in it. I vaguely am aware that I've seen it, though. I recognize the plot just enough, or I recognize the guest star just enough. And I don't enjoy the jokes as much.

They don't make me laugh. Even though the jokes, I do not remember them in any way. I couldn't finish them for you. They don't make me laugh. The jokes, I do not remember them in any way. I couldn't finish them for you. I don't see them coming. Yet somehow, my brain is not startled by them in the way that requires humor to work. My brain has somehow laid the groundwork for that joke to fall flat, to be repetitive. It's the weirdest thing. My girlfriend was telling me just the other day about some studies she had seen about how people enjoy books more the second time they read them, which baffles me.

I don't know. I'm not really a re-watcher or a re-reader. I'll re-watch Freaks and Geeks or Seinfeld if you put them on, but I don't usually seek out experiences I've already had with media. Yeah. Then the second part of this question is, if you were to go 30 years, I mean, we've both come out against spoilers, but this is a fantastic option. If you were 30 years in the future, would you shield yourself from all baseball history of the past 30 years? Or would it be kind of cool to know how it ends? To some degree, there's this Nick Hornby line in Fever Pitch where he says that the thing that he's most afraid of death is that he'll die in the middle of a season and not know how it ends.

And so to some degree, you would shield yourself from that. You would know how the season's going to end for the next 30 years. But would it take all the joy out of it? I mean, would you be able to keep yourself from checking even if it would take all the joy out of it? able to keep yourself from checking even if it would take all the joy out of it the hypothetical doesn't really work because ken says if you're if you if you come back from the future then you you can't profit from or share any of your knowledge which means that we'd have to if we continued to be baseball writers we would just have to pretend that we didn't know anything which would be awful um well it's conceivable that if you're time traveling that you might quit your job at baseball perspective like you might have bigger ambitions with your time traveling machine maybe maybe my horizons are too limited um well i i if i i think I think I would avoid it. And I think I could. If I were, you know,

on death's door, and I went into the future, and I didn't think I would be around to see all this stuff, then I would devour it. I'd love to know what was going to happen. But it would ruin baseball for the next 30 years for me, more or less. I'm not sure there's anything else that I would shield myself from besides, that might be the only thing I would not let myself know is baseball results. What if you could profit from them? Well, it would be hard to resist the temptation to look like a like an amazing analyst yeah or to or to bet like a super billionaire i'm not motivated by such such mundane things as money

i just want the respect of my peers uh-huh all right uh all right. Last question. Jeff, and we had good questions this week, so we might get back to some of them. Jeff says, every World Series the cameras during the broadcast show the reactions of the team executives seated near the team's dugout, usually within the first few rows. If the GM or president of a team

were faced with a Bartman-type situation where he could interfere with a foul ball that would allow them to win the game and possibly the World Series. Would they? What would the repercussions be? On the one hand, and we're assuming that this is a situation, Bartman did not actually break any rules. So he's going to say they broke rules.

Just to be clear, Bartman did not break any rules. But on the one hand, they broke Major League Baseball rules by interfering with a ball in play. On the other, they would be allowing their team to win the game, generate all the great things that come with winning a World Series. They would cement themselves in baseball history, possibly in a negative way. But their name would be a verb forever, all that cool stuff. So do you think that they would reach out and grab a foul ball if it would help the team? do you think that they would reach out and grab a foul ball if it would help the team?

We can even assume that it's not. We can even assume that this ball has left the field of play and is in the stands. It is playable by the catcher or first baseman. However, they are within their rights to attempt to field this ball. I don't think they would. I don't either. No. Those guys't either. No. Those guys are very, very,

I feel like the thing about baseball executives is they are well-educated men who could very easily be running, you know, like a pharmaceutical company or something. And they've made the decision to get into baseball, which is the right decision and the decision all of us would make. But they're slightly uneasy about it because they know that it's all make-believe and they know it's just a game. And so for that reason, they're very intentional about maintaining their seriousness. So they would never – I. So they would never, I just think they would never break character when they're in those seats.

Yes, I agree. They would, right. You wouldn't see them reaching out for a foul ball like a fan or, I mean the person, well, so the question is,

I mean, what if they could do so knowing that it might affect the outcome of the game and they've spent, you know, their every waking hour trying to get this team to this point where it could win this game. And there are many benefits that could come to this team from winning this game. And they could, for once, actually affect the outcome themselves, almost like a player on the field. affect the outcome themselves, almost like a player on the field. So there are some incentives to do it and to look less professional. But, yeah, I don't think it would be enough to overcome that aversion. But plus – It would be Bush League.

It would be Bush League. Right. I mean, we know enough about – we've seen NFL coaches who have occasionally have – like at least once have gone and disrupted the field of play, right? Have like tripped a guy returning a touchdown or something. So we know that there is a part of the brain that could kick in and at least one executive at least one time would do it. But they would regret it they

would mostly want to stand there they wouldn't even stand up they would just they would let the ball hit them in the forehead if that's what it took yeah probably anything anything but letting the ball hit you in the forehead would be bushley. All right. So that's the end of the show. Okay. Sorry to hear that. That's also the end of the week of shows, which means please send us emails for next week at podcast at baseball prospectus.com.

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