Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 475: What Baseball Could Borrow from Soccer’s Structure

Episode Date: June 20, 2014

Ben and Sam talk to Will Woods about soccer conventions that might improve baseball.

Are things on here for the USA? Can they do it here? Cross, and Dempsey is denied again! And Donovan has scored! Oh, can you believe this? Go, go, USA! Sadly through! Oh, it's incredible! You could not write a script like this!

Good morning, and welcome to episode 475 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. Hi. It actually is morning this time. We're recording on Friday morning because we have a guest. It's World Cup season. We have a guest. It's World Cup season. Many of our domestic listeners are excited about the United States victory over Ghana earlier this week and the upcoming match with Portugal on Sunday.

Our 11 listeners in Spain are distraught over their team's early exit from the tournament, but probably excited about the coronation of King Felipe VI. This is not a podcast about that, about the Spanish monarchy or about soccer, but there are things that baseball could learn from the structure of soccer, or so contends Will Woods, contributor to Baseball Perspectives, former guest of Effectively Wild, former co-host of Effectively Wild.

Hello, Will. Hey, guys. How you doing? Thanks for having me. Sure. So I have known you for almost 20 years, and I have to say that you have changed. When we first met in first grade, you were a Mets fan, and that much is still true, but you were not, to my knowledge, a soccer fan. And at some point in the intervening decades you became one uh by the way would it be okay with you if we refer to the the beautiful game as soccer for the duration of this podcast uh yeah it's okay with me i i didn't know that i was still a mets fan actually yeah you you dabble and despair yeah uh okay Dabbling is not all I do at this point.

So we'll call it soccer. Apologies to our international listeners. So how did your soccer conversion occur? Well, yeah, it's true. I used to be a red-blooded American like the rest of you. I think soccer has a few advantages that are undeniable on baseball and sort of inarguable, but it doesn't, you know, it doesn't make it better. But these advantages are basically I know when it's going

to end, and I can schedule the rest of my day around it. The other advantage is that every highlight is different. Every goal is organic to itself. It comes about in a totally unique way. Whereas I've seen every home run that's ever been hit. And I've even had the privilege of, you know, seeing it from the catcher's perspective on hit. And I've even had the privilege of, you know, seeing it from the catcher's perspective on a ball that I wish had gotten to my mitt. But more importantly, I don't think it's the idea of watching these guys kick a ball around that is so much more appealing than watching a ball get thrown and hit around a baseball field. Every game is important in soccer.

They've managed to construct an environment where there's always something important happening, there are new competitions, whereas baseball kind of gives you one long slog, which we've romanticized over the years. But ultimately, I feel that the consumer experience is lacking a little bit. And I just kind of, you know, as I watch baseball and I watched Zach Wheeler throw a complete game shutout last night, which was great. And, you know, a rare highlight for a Mets fan. But I feel like there are sort of ideas kind of swimming around that could maybe make this game better.

And soccer's kind of got a few of them that we could get into. Okay, so first we'll ask you about one that we get asked all the time, probably one of the most popular Effectively Wild listener email questions, is about relegation in soccer and whether relegation would work in baseball. We talked about this once years ago, probably the first time we were asked, and then we've ignored every subsequent question about this, but we will ask you about it while you're here. So do you think that there is a way in which relegation could work? And I guess maybe you should explain what relegation is for some of our listeners who might not know.

Yeah, well, relegation is basically the the top finishers in the minor leagues get promoted up to if you win you know if you're the best team in double a you'd be in triple a the next year if you're the worst team in triple a you would replace the championship double a teams and and play in double a the following year and theoretically a team could go up from rookie ball to become you know World Series champions one day if they got promoted so many times over. Has either of you guys heard a convincing practical argument for relegation in baseball? Can't say that I have. No.

I don't know that you need a practical argument for it, but there are a lot of practical arguments against it. I mean, it's just as far as scheduling travel and all those sorts of things, it's a very complicated thing. You know, baseball, since it's a daily thing and there's, I don't know, 30 teams, and it becomes very hard to, I mean, you know, they don't have stadiums for minor league teams. For instance, it could handle major league parks, and if you had a major league park that suddenly became a minor league park, it would be just disastrously bad economically. So the scale between major and minor leagues in baseball is too difficult, I think.

But, I mean, the argument for it is pretty simple, just how to execute it, right? Yeah, it's how to execute it. And frankly, I've not heard an argument for relegation to baseball that makes any sense to me whatsoever. I think we could have it in basketball because the minor league infrastructure doesn't exist. We could maybe have it in hockey where there's less of one.

But the minor league system is so ingrained in baseball culture that I just think it's, there's too much inertia there. There's no way to get this thing rolling. And yeah, as you said, it would be disastrous if, if the city field suddenly turned into a triple A stadium. Actually, no, that already has happened. Sorry. It has been disastrous, but, but already has happened. Sorry. And it has been disastrous. But yeah, I just don't think, I think whenever people think of what Europe can bring to baseball,

relegation is always the first thing because it seems like such a cool thing. And wouldn't it be great to have competition among, you know, a couple hundred teams instead of just 30? I don't think it makes any sense. I don't think it's practical. I don't like the idea either. The Rays will be happy to hear that because right now they would be at risk of being relegated. Although in their case, they might be better off if they were relegated. It might be a better fan experience in Durham than it is in Tampa Bay at Tropicana Field.

Wait, wait, wait. I'm curious because you mentioned the Rays, and the Rays last year were basically Arguably the best team in baseball Or so, and this year they would be the worst And so In soccer Does the

Do you hear this? Does anybody hear this? I heard that That would be a three year old singing Do teams fortunes change as quickly and as arguably flukily as they do in baseball i mean do you have situations is it conceivable that you would actually lose a really good team to relegation on the strength of one fluky bad year or is the team that's usually being relegated upward or downward,

is it the result of years of basically performing the same way? I wouldn't call it a fluky bad year, but I would say Newcastle United has been an institution in English soccer, and they recently got relegated a few years ago, and they've since come back and are basically a middle-of-the-path team now. But it is, like we've seen like if you're following the World Cup, Spain has lost its first two games, and it looks like their run of international dominance is over.

It's really the product of years of bad decision-making that finally come to fruition in one fell swoop, and these teams corrode very quickly, and suddenly there's nothing you can do about it because you got a bunch of old guys that used to be able to get it done and now suddenly we're a triple a team uh so i think you know that's not exactly what's happening with the but it does there is a there is a comp there certainly okay so if relegation wouldn't wouldn't necessarily work for baseball what what do you think would work?

What are your suggestions or takeaways from soccer that could be applied to baseball? Well, one thing right off the bat is can we get some goal line technology on the walls and on the foul poles? I feel like if you hit a ball 400 feet, you deserve your home run shot and not have to wait between first and second to actually see while they go and ask New York City if it was a home run or not. That is just one right off the bat that I feel like we should have knocked out five years ago. It's a tough one, though, because you've got fans reaching over, so you'd have to find a way to deal with that.

Yeah, but I'm talking about i'm talking about like the yellow line on the wall thing which is most distracting impractical like does nothing feature of mlb stadiums that i could ever think of um and foul pole stuff we should be able to we should be able to handle that business pretty easily. More importantly, though, we were saying before, probably the biggest disadvantage of baseball is that the regular season is a six-month slog. And one of the things that soccer does to break up the monotony, well, the relative monotony of the regular season, is they have a domestic cup, which is basically a mid-season tournament

that has nothing to do with the standings of the regular season, that involves all the teams on every level, from major leagues all the way down to rookie ball, where they play each other in a single elimination knockout tournament. I think this would be one of the coolest things that we could ever bring to baseball. Are you guys kind of following what this would entail? Yeah, that sounds interesting. So basically the idea is that the MLB teams get a bye into the later rounds, but starting in April you've got

rookie ball teams and A-level teams taking a few days off here and there to play one another to advance in this tournament. And as we get into June and July, the MLB teams start to get involved, and then you've got major league teams playing double-A teams in, you know, maybe F-3 series or whatever. And, you know, the MLB teams can choose which players play for which affiliate. That creates a possibility of showcasing some top prospects on national TV.

How does Byron Buxton fare against top-level opposition? We could find out via this tournament. It could shed light on some new strategies of handling pitchers. If you're the Cleveland Indians and suddenly you've got to go play, you know, the Toledo Mudhens, how do you juggle your rotation? Do you do a staff day? Do you break out the newfangled idea that I know you guys have talked about, the three-inning rotation idea? You know, these are all kinds of new things that can just break up the rhythm

of this season a little bit and give us something new. I think it's something that I'd like to see, and I think it's an interesting concept. Yeah, we talked not that long ago, Ben and I talked about, well, I talked about, Ben listened to me rant, about how we've gotten to a place where every pitch that's thrown at the professional level exists to advance the parent club's chances of winning the World Series at some point. And I don't know whether that's good or bad for the game.

I mean, on the one hand, it turns the sport into like a, you know, multi-layer sort of game where you're... She's singing again. I wonder why she sings only when I talk, when I unmute. Hang on a second. Okay. So on the one hand, it turns it into a sort of more complex game where you're thinking about multiple layers

of competition all in the pursuit of one goal, or if it just turns everything else into something that's kind of boring and that all these players in the minor leagues stop having kind of their own identity and all these teams stop having their own identity and they only exist as sort of appendices of the parent club. And so like what you're describing would be really good for minor league baseball, but would sort of clash with the determined strategies of all the major league baseball clubs, which is the cash cow in the sport. So I guess that would be the challenge, right, is trying to figure out who the sport is supposed to serve. Is it supposed to serve these 300 minor league cities

at all, or does it exist to serve the 30 teams that are you know creating a six billion dollar industry that supports everything else yeah it's an ideological shift to a degree right that needs to be made and i think i mean my hope is that first of all you can negotiate a separate tv deal because you've got a completely separate competition so hopefully and plus it's the same number of gates for the owners, so theoretically we can make up the money within this term. So that would hopefully satisfy the owners. Then you say, okay, now the minor league teams are obviously completely on board with this, and they're independently run.

People, I guess I feel like the average fan may not realize the autonomy with which these minor league teams act. Obviously, they don't make transactions on their own, but this is something that I think would make baseball kind of the grassroots game that it really ought to be. And most importantly, I think you break even on a tournament like this as opposed to the regular season and hopefully generate some fan interest across the country in the process.

I mean, obviously you'd want to see Miguel Cabrera playing in Las Vegas, right? So that's my pitch for that. Yeah, I could see owners being into it. You'd have to find a way to convince the players to do it because they wouldn't have a whole lot of incentive to play extra games. Oh, I'm glad you asked. I'm glad you asked. Well, I didn't actually, but I will now.

How can we convince the players? I can convince the Detroit Tigers to go to Las Vegas because if we play a three-game series over a weekend or even during the week, obviously you have to win those first two games. And if you win your first two games, you don't need to play the third game. That means we get a day off. And days off are rather precious in this game during the season. are rather precious in this game during the season.

I would venture that these players would play pretty hard to earn a day off over the current structure of, you know, we can go a whole month playing a game every single day. That would seem to me to be a pretty good incentive. Yeah. Agree? Yeah. Could work. Yeah. Agree? Yeah. Could work. Yeah.

All right. Got anything else? Well, I think, speaking of days off, you know, Ben, Ben, Sam, Ben must be our punching bag for every single rant we've ever had about baseball. He just sits there and takes it.

He goes, yeah, I'll be back to work. I'll be back to work. One thing I've ranted at you about many times, mostly over Gchat, mercifully for you, so you can ignore it, is the idea of weekend double headers which would create more weekdays off. I'm talking about split gate double headers on Saturdays that give the players more weekdays off. I'm talking about split-gate double-headers on Saturdays that give the players more weekdays off

on the premise that, A, it's the same number of gates for the owner, so it's the same amount of money, and, B, I would rather work one 16-hour shift at my job than two 8-hour shifts where I have to commute two extra times. This is something that I think is really, on a Saturday, I can schedule my day around baseball. On a Wednesday night, I don't get home and feel crushed if there's no baseball on.

To me, it's all in the name of breaking up the rhythm of the season, like I said before, and just giving us something different and making baseball feel like more of an event. This is, you know, baseball on the weekend is a much more pleasurable experience than I would argue it is, you know, just on a random Tuesday night in July. And I think the players would go for it, more importantly. And you've also been a proponent of the seven-inning game. Oh, I wasn't, yeah.

I mean, I had that written down. Do you think that even passes the smell test? I mean, I would love the double-headers to be two sevens, yeah. And you mentioned that one of the nice things about soccer is the fact that you know how long it's going to go and that you can block that out. So are you anti... Except for the injury time.

Except for the mysterious injury time. But are you anti-extra innings in baseball? No, not at all. Oh, okay. I think, no, I think certainly there's some things that are that are endemic to baseball that you just can't you just can't take away and i would never take away uh hashtag weird baseball from from anyone i wouldn't want that to go away ever okay uh so the next thing i wanted to know is um that the world cup what we're watching right now is of course um you know pool play so

it's not uh and now my phone's ringing this whole thing is weird this is a weird episode uh i forget where i was gonna go oh yeah so soon it's gonna be a knockout style right and um so i wanted So I wanted to know if... That's ridiculous. Unbelievable. Control your offspring. That was my father. It's the opposite. Oh, and he's a listener. He should know better than to call you... Three generations of Miller's room in this episode.

It's not... I mean, this has not been my best episode either. So I really feel like our negative WPA for this episode is is spread pretty evenly across the family um do uh does the best team in soccer win uh more regularly in a one game setting than the best team in baseball how does it compare between like sort of baseball and football as the kind of outer extremes or Isn't basketball the sport where the winner wins most often because of how many points they're – or tennis? Yeah, but only in college basketball do you ever have a –

like there's no NBA equivalent of a one-game playoff, which I guess technically there is in baseball and also with the World Baseball Classic. So that's why I left out basketball. But, yeah, basketball is even more extreme and, of course, the NCAA. So, anyway, in that spectrum, where does soccer fall? All I can tell you is that basketball is the least random on a one-game sample, NBA basketball, that is.

And then soccer is far more random, where I think I saw the other day that the favorite is winning like 54% of the time. So do soccer fans consider it weird to play one game, essentially one game, do-or-die tournament-style games, or is it just accepted that randomness is part of life and we like this? Well, actually, in the domestic cups

the way they do it um in england at least that different countries have slightly different rules on this but they'll but if there's a tie they don't go to extra time they just schedule a game at the other team's place next week and replay the replay the game oh that's nice i like that yeah and that in the old days that used to keep going and going and going like they didn't go and replay the game. Oh, that's nice. I like that. Yeah. And in the old days, that used to keep going and going and going. Like, they didn't go to penalty kick. They would just keep scheduling it over and over and over again. So you'd have teams in, like, the seventh round, and then, you know, a mile over in the other team's stadium,

you'd have a team playing a third-round game for the 18th time. And then they finally decided that maybe this was a little bit ridiculous and we should just go to penalties. Yeah, nobody likes penalties. And they'll kind of do everything they can to avoid it, basically. So can you envision a time when the WBC attains World Cup-level excitement peaks? I mean, the structure is similar, right? Can you imagine that one day it will be as big

or anywhere close to as big or bigger than it is now? Do you like the WBC? Well, I think we need to keep sending Justin Verlander over to Poland to show little kids how to throw a baseball every December. And I guess that seems like our plan to grow baseball globally. It seems like it's kind of 100 years down the line, because what we're really talking about when you ask that is not anything really to do with the World Baseball Classic,

because structurally the World Baseball Classic is almost exactly the same as soccer's World Cup. The problem is that we have no context for this event. In soccer, you play your domestic season with your club team, your professional team. You occasionally take a little time off from that to play your domestic cup team season, you know tournament with your with your professional team and every now and then they'll squeeze in a weekend where there are no club games you have to go and play for your international team if you're you know if you get called up to that team baseball has no infrastructure along those lines there's

nothing the international game is does not exist to the point where there's any reason to play, you know, qualifying games for the South American Cup, you know, on a random weekend in August. That just doesn't exist yet. Saga has a whole network of sub-tournaments besides the World Cup. There's qualifying for the World Cup. There's qualifying for the European tournament. There's qualifying for the European tournament. There's the South American Cup and the North American Cup

and the European one, and every tournament in between. And every country is kind of bouncing around going to these various tournaments and competitions. Baseball has none of that. And we are so in the nascent stages of growing the game internationally. Baseball is the most inculcated provincial game in the world that actually has some mass appeal in a given country. They're so far behind the eight ball on that, that as much as I love the World Baseball Classic, it seems like it would take 100 years for us to give the event the context it deserves. Is soccer getting more popular anywhere besides the United States?

I know it's the most popular sport in the world, and it has been forever, but are there other parts of the world where it's growing the way it is here? all that but are there other parts of the the world where it's growing the way it is here and have there been any changes to the sport really in the last 40 years that would account for that if so uh well i don't think it can really get much more popular outside of this country than it already is so so like so like uh like like it's always been as big as it is in you know qatar and it's always been as big as it is in you know kore Qatar, and it's always been as big as it is in, you know, Korea, and it's not, like, all the countries in the World Cup have been, you know, soccer mad for as long as, you know, Brazil has? Maybe not for as long as Brazil has, just historically, because I think Europe brought it there a little bit before it brought it

to everywhere else. But yeah, I think soccer's problem, and this is sort of baseball's problem in this country as well, soccer on a global scale has been so dominant for so long that when you ask has it made any changes in the last 40 years, the answer is strikingly familiar to baseball, which is no. They've been so dominant in their market that they are recalcitrant about making any changes because why bother? We have no competition. There is nothing here. Suddenly, basketball, maybe some other sports are trying to cut into soccer's foothold around the world. And, you know, obviously football is kind of blitz, sorry, American football has blitzed the competition here

and just come out of nowhere to overtake baseball in popularity. But will that happen in soccer? That's way out of my expertise. But, yeah, it's an interesting comparison between baseball and soccer in that's way out of my expertise. But, yeah, it's an interesting comparison between baseball and soccer in that way. I just remembered one more old Effectively Wild listener email about soccer where someone asked us whether loans would work in baseball, player loans.

Can you explain, I mean, what's the incentive for the two teams involved when a player is loaned and would it possibly apply in baseball? The transfer system in general in baseball is a really interesting concept, and it works pretty much exactly along the lines of how every Japanese player comes over to this country, where you bid a certain amount of money, and if it's accepted, then you can negotiate terms of the deal. But if you don't come to an agreement with the player, you don't actually pay the transfer fee.

And then the loan structure is basically any time – there are two situations where you loan a player out. One is we have a really good young player who needs to get some first team experience. And so we would loan him to a lower division. And obviously that doesn't work in baseball because we have, that's what AA is for, right? So you progress up and eventually you get to the big club and see if you can hack it there.

And then like Travis Darnot, we send you down. And you've had your numbers in the Las Vegas pinball machine. The other reason is that you have a veteran player to whom you're paying quite a bit of money, but he isn't good enough for the first team. And certainly that is a situation that many clubs find themselves in. situation that many clubs find themselves in. So you would loan, you would loan that guy to a team where he could play first team,

first team baseball. That's a weird, weird turn of phrase, first team baseball. But where you would be in somebody's, in somebody's rotation or in somebody's bullpen or in somebody's lineup. And you can, and that team would agree to take on a portion of the salary or in a lot of cases they just take them on for free just to have him just to clear his

roster spot and get somebody else in there um that is a situation that i think baseball could really use that seems like something that would you know that would be beneficial to both parties. I see no reason why we couldn't have a situation like that in this game. All right. So last thing, give us your prediction for Sunday's match and your prediction for who wins the World Cup. I've been screaming that since the draw came out that we're going to defeat Portugal I see no reason to

back off from that right now but I will say that you guys really, everyone needs to watch the World Cup we are basically taking our third tier athletes it's like arm wrestling the rest of the world using nothing but our pinky fingers

and we're going to defeat them anyway it would be the greatest possible FU to the rest of the world using nothing but our pinky fingers and we're going to defeat them anyway um it'll be the greatest possible fu to the rest of the world and i i think if you can't get behind that i i question how american you really are everybody should be watching wow that is a this is this is definitely a new sentiment for this project just changed our international relations policy dramatically. So are you calling the U.S. victory then? Not only Sunday, but in the tournament? Yeah, we're going to win the whole thing.

Okay, bold. Get ready. Get ready, America. All right. Well, people can follow you on Twitter at IamWillWoods, where you will be tweeting your match analysis as the World Cup continues, as well as your occasional Mets analysis and your pithy observations about life. Yeah, it's mostly Travis Darnot-related Twitter, basically.

Lately, you condemned the word inbox as a verb, and you condemned the hashtag long form. Wait, how is inbox a verb? Have you never heard someone say inbox me? Are you serious? No. Oh my God, I feel like I read it every other day. It's ridiculous. We have so many words for message me, email me, text me, inbox me. Wow.

And it drives me nuts. Well, it was worth it to me anyway. My least favorite is efforting, to effort as a verb. I hate that one. It's a bad one. And I'm with you on long form being a self-congratulatory term. I loathe long form. It's just an article.

We have words for that. It's a feature. It's an form. It's just an article. We have words for that. It's a feature. It's an article. It's a column. You don't need to specify that it's long. Alright, well thank you for joining us. Thank you for delighting our international listeners.

I'm sure they're thrilled. Thanks for indulging my pie-in-the-sky fantasy. All right, so one announcement. There are a couple Baseball Perspectives events in D.C. this weekend. As soon as I put this podcast up, I have to go to D.C. There is one tonight, Friday night at 7 p.m.

It's sponsored by the Politics and Prose bookstore, but it is actually across the street from the Politics and Prose bookstore at Jake's Bar and Grill. It's free. You don't need tickets. You can just show up and talk about baseball with me and many other members of the BP staff. The address is 5018 Connecticut Avenue, Northwest.

There's also an event before the Nationals game tomorrow, Saturday, which is sold out. So you can't get to that one if you don't have a ticket, although there is a secondary ticket market going on in the Facebook group right now. But you can talk to us at the baseball game, which we will also be staying for. And it's a good matchup. Doug Pfister versus Julio Tehran, Nationals Braves. a good matchup, Doug Pfister versus Julio Tehran, Nationals Braves. So I will put the location of our seats in the Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild if you want to stop by and say hello.

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And we will be back with a new show on Monday. What does it sound like if I talk like this? Nothing, nothing different. Sounds robotic. I don't know. Sounds like you're very close to the microphone. I'm very close to the microphone. I've actually, the microphone is literally in my mouth. Literally in my mouth.

Underneath the roof of my mouth. That's exactly the way I want it.