Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 529: Do Fans Know Better Than Major League Baseball?

Episode Date: September 5, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about September call-ups and game length, then discuss whether MLB and its owners are acting in the long-term interests of the sport.

Let's go! Good morning and welcome to episode 529 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com, joined as always by Sam Miller of BaseballProspectus.com. Hello. Hello. How are you? Don't forget, Ben. There's a cup of tea next to you don't forget to drink it that's true i've already started sipping on this one i've pre-sipped this tea

anything you'd like to discuss just your tea okay so i have an update or some answers on something we talked about on this week's listener email show. We were speculating about how many players per year get a September call up and then never go on to do anything else again. are on an active roster before active rosters expand. So they're only good enough to crack a 40 man, but not quite good enough to make a 25 man. And Andrew Koo of Baseball Prospectus did some research for me on this for an article about September call-ups that I was writing. And so I do have some answers. So from 2000 to 2010, there were an average of 51 players per season

making their major league debuts in September. On average, 34 of those players failed to accumulate more than one career warp, or at least have thus far. Some of them are obviously still active, maybe can add to those totals. But thus far, 34 of the 51 on average don't really go on to be good. But most of them at least get something. They pop up in the majors at some point in a subsequent season. So an average of between five and six, I think it was six players per season. When I looked at a longer time span from 2000 to 2010,

it was like five and a half or something per season, make their major league debuts in September and then never go on to play in a non-September regular season game. So in 2010, it was Brian Esposito, John Lindsay, Justin James, Lucas May, Matt Fox, and Brett Sickbile. Interesting. Mildly.

I'm sorry. I can't remember if you said this. Did those people simply get rostered, or did they all appear in a game? They all appeared in a game. Yeah, so if a guy was on a roster and never did anything, then he probably wouldn't have showed up here. Fun. Yeah.

That sounds like a... I was going to say that sounds like you could do something with that list, but I really don't think you could. I could if I wanted to get a very small audience. I can do that. Speaking of having a small audience, I'd like to revisit the Diamondbacks headlines just real quickly. Okay.

For the most part, they've been fairly straight ahead lately. In fact, in some days they haven't even had top submissions. They've only had the winner, which suggests to me that the D-backs headline contest people are saying simply that they are not going to be having this nonsense. They're only going to tell you the best one um but there was one day that was probably the best day in diamondbacks headline history um i would say uh there were one two three four five six seven eight nine ten top submissions listed so this was um on august 29th this was a game that the Diamondbacks were losing,

going to the bottom of the eighth inning. And then in a very dramatic swing of events, Jake Lamb hit a grand slam home run to put them ahead five to two, the score by which they would win. And so these are the headlines. Lamblam lifts D-backs out of jam the winner pretty good job Rod of thinking of Lamb Slam I'm sure you're the only one next one Lamb Slam gives D-backs win

so here we've got the same headline except that Rod managed to get a third rhyme in at the end which in this case i actually support i think that it turns a lazy rhyme into a little bit of a rhythm lamb slam out of jam uh so that's better than lamb slam gives d-backs win uh d-backs win on a grand hyphen clam much worse lowercase s capital l do it steve could not figure out how to stylize grand slam and i would say probably came up with the worst possible one uh but joe had the same thought grand hyphen lamb beats rockies it's interesting because joe uh ranks below steve and i think it is a

pretty good lesson joe steve realized that this is a diamondbacks newspaper and so it helps to get the home team you want to have an active verb not a passive verb basically so uh steve outranks joe with d-backs went on grand slam instead of of Grand Slam beats Rockies. Keep the focus on the team. Lamb saves Gibson's game. There's nothing. There's no Grand Slam pun there. Lamb ends silence. Rocks Rockies show with clutch four-bagger.

Wow. I liked it at first. Lamb ends silence yeah rocks rocky's show with clutch four bagger uh probably didn't need the last right cause i know when to when to trim all right now we're down to number eight lamb slam and that's it that's it? That's it. That's only eight out of ten. Number nine.

Grand lamb. Grand lamb. Finally number ten. Wham-o. A slam-o. For Lambo. whammo a slammo for lambo which the problem with that is that lambo his name is lamb but lambo when you put an o at the end of it becomes a word you know that's like a that is a name that is a a name that people have read and so you can't pronounce it lambo it becomes lam becomes Lam-bo. Wham-o. A slam-o for Lam-bo.

And this is my favorite part of that one. In between each phrase is ellipses, but only two. Laurie going with the two-dot ellipses for space. A key part of headline writing is to cut characters wherever you can. Yeah, or maybe it's a suggestion of how you're supposed to read it. He doesn't want you to pause for that long. You definitely paused for three dots when you read it. All right.

That's a good day. I'm glad you updated us. So let's go on. Okay, so we're going to talk about a couple articles that I read today, and they were thematically related, and I make connections. That's about basically whether sports leagues are acting in long-term counterproductive ways in order to help their bottom lines in the short term. And so one of these articles touches on the pace of game. And I wanted to just ask you, because there have been a couple of articles at BP in the last week or so. Rob Arthur wrote one this week and Zachary Levine wrote one last week about, well,

Zachary's was about how long the ideal game should be, which is not something that we talk about often. It's just sort of generally assumed that, that faster, either faster is better or, of generally assumed that either faster is better or it just doesn't matter at all. That seems to be the two main camps, that there's the people who like baseball and they like it however long it is, maybe longer the better. And there are the people, including Rob Arthur, who like the action but not the in-between times. So Rob's position, I think, essentially is that he wants baseball games to be as close as possible to condensed games that you see on MLB.com,

more or less. He wants to cut out the dead space. He is a busy man. He has bat cracks to analyze. He just wants to see the action. He doesn't want to see the people standing around adjusting their bat batting gloves so he wants games to be as quick as possible Zachary is not convinced of that he wants to know how how long the ideal game should be because as he points out there are times when you might want a two-hour game there are also times he mentions like a afternoon when

you've got nothing to do between lunch and dinner and maybe you want a four-hour game so that it'll eat up all of that time although i guess you could always watch another game but do you have a same game twice same game twice that's an option too do you have an ideal game length if we i don't know if we just hold pace constant somehow. You can't really do that. Yeah. Well, I'm going to ignore the last thing you said. Okay. I don't necessarily – I don't know that my tastes are calibrated quite the same way that Rob's are.

However, I think that his point is very true. And my position on baseball is that pace is an issue. Time is not an issue at all. There, to me, there are, if baseball games were 42 hours, but they were 42 hours of excitement, and you could just sort of drop in and out of them whenever you wanted, I would be fine with that. I don't know the last time I watched a game from start to finish. And so I have a very different perspective on this than I used to when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I also liked long games. I didn't want the game to end. I was generally bored with life.

And baseball was the thing that I looked forward to. And baseball was the end of my day oftentimes. And it did not bother me at all when games would go long. I've never been one to want to see extra innings end, for instance. So I think that noting that thing that you told me not to note, that pace is important. To me, time is a hard thing to even think about what an ideal time is. I guess at this point in my life, I really truly don't care, Ben,

at this point in my life, I guess I would say three hours. Three hours is even when I was, even back in the old days when games didn't last three hours, I thought of them as lasting three hours. And so probably three hours is what I mentally block out in my day. And beyond that, I guess I start thinking that this is eating into another thing I might have had planned. When I was a kid, I would have probably said five and a half hours. I mean, I listened to, I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh in the mornings because that was what was on before the pregame show on KNBR. Rush Limbaugh was like a local Sacramento political pundit guy. And he was on KNBR before the postgame. And I just wanted the postgame to start so bad that I would go out to the front yard

and I'd throw the ball and listen to Rush Limbaugh until the pregame show started. And then, of course, I would listen all the way to the end of the postgame show. And then I'd listen to the talk radio on the same station until the end of the day. That's probably how he got to where he is today, just Giants fans who really wanted to listen to the pre-game show, pumping up his ratings. Probably not. I think that it's probably somewhat his style is probably appealing to a lot of people in various parts of the country, appealing to a lot of people in various parts of the country.

He's got a certain charisma to him, even if you dislike his politics and his intellectual dishonesty. It's not a serious gesture. Probably a marketing arm has been instrumental as well. Those are two parts of my life, two phases of my life. The one where I wanted more and the one now where it doesn't really matter to me because of the way that I consume the game. So now I have to think about in the in-between time. So like from maybe 16 to 27, I guess I still didn't care that much.

And even the pace thing, it's relatively new that I care about even pace. I don't remember caring that much about it before I started writing about it. No. But clearly pace. I mean, baseball is, I do, I do find that when I'm watching a game right now,

like last night, this happened. I had this thought actually go on in my head. I forget who was batting. It was Ian Desmond who was batting. There was a runner on base

and Desmond gets, you know, in his set position in the batter's box and the pitcher's looking at the runner and i'm just like seconds past i'm thinking oh no oh no he's gonna call timeout desmond's gonna call timeout and i just can't take that anymore i can't take the 14 and a half seconds of the pitcher watching the runner, and then we reset. I can't take the reset. It's the reset. I could probably take even more than 14 seconds if there was no reset. If it were 22 seconds, I could probably take it. I can't stand the reset, though. Why is it that,

because this never used to bother me either, and I think it has gotten worse. I don't think we're imagining it. The pace is slower. So maybe it's just crossed whatever boundary it had to cross for us to start caring about this. But it also seems like it's sort of a we're all just getting swept up in this pace of game debate. It's just the hot topic. I've written about it. Everyone's written about it. And suddenly's the the consensus number one problem with baseball it seems like and i wonder whether that is now in some sort of feedback loop

influencing our perceptions of the game where now that we watch now that everyone's talking about this we're even more conscious of it than we were before and it bothers us more than it would otherwise yeah it might it it might also be that simply that we've gotten, it's the only part of your life now that you can't fast forward. Basically, it's the only part of your life that you can't time shift. So if you just have lost the ability to sit still for three hours for any other facet of your life, I guess more than sit still for three

hours to sit still for three hours and not not kind of manage that thing that you're watching if you're not fast forwarding if you're not changing uh channels uh then maybe it just becomes something that we're our muscles aren't really um able to handle anymore or on the other hand you might argue that it's the exact opposite that in fact there is a two-screen way that we watch baseball these days um where almost you know it seems like most of us watch while also uh interacting with another screen uh either three screens often goodness well it's too many screens. Yeah.

I don't have three screens, so I'm going to just keep going from the two-screen perspective. So maybe it's that in the two-screen setup, maybe we're more easily distracted, we're not as focused, and therefore, in fact, by being less into the game, less mentally focused on the game, we actually find the nuance. It used to be that you would talk about how the great thing about baseball is that there's this game within the game and you stare at it and you see the pitcher looking at the runners and you see the catcher shaking off the signs and all this. If you're not paying attention to those details,

then all that stuff gets lost on you and you boil the game down to a series of MLB game day 45 seconds and you're not getting any of the extra nuance in between, then you're probably more frustrated waiting for it. And so, yeah, I'm not sure. Those two things seem to be contradictory hypotheses. And I'm not sure if one is right and one is wrong or if they're both wrong or if they're in some cases both right. I am in more of the Rob Arthur camp where I would like to see games go about as quickly as they could go and not lose any of the actual action, unless it's a particularly high-stakes game. If it's the playoffs, if it's the World Series,

if it's the wildcard game, if it's the wildcard game, I don't care how long it lasts. It could be six hours, and I'd be okay with that. And that's just because the stakes are so much higher than they are in a typical game, which I think is when people always give the example of how long a football game is and how much standing around in a football game there is, that is true, but there are only 16 football games plus preseason and playoffs. So the stakes are much higher for any particular game. So those dead times don't bother you as much as they do when there's a game on every day.

Yeah. All right. So this sort of ties into the topic. So there are these two articles. One of them is by former podcast guest Jorge Arngore, who is now a senior staff writer at Vice Sports. And the other one is at Fields of Green, which is a USA Today-sponsored site, some sort of partnership with USA Today and the USC Business School. And it's by a man named Tony Knopp. And I'll start with Jorge's article.

So Jorge's concern is that leagues are taking public opinion into account too much now, that they are adjusting their policies based on whatever the cause of the moment is on the Internet and on Twitter and the fans and the media, however they express those opinions, that they are being too reactionary, that they are concerned about losing sponsors or losing advertising or losing viewers or things that matter in the short term but in the long term might actually be counterproductive in some way. long term might actually be counterproductive in some way. And he makes the case that we are trying to tailor our sports just the way we like them, like we do with our DVRs or our smartphones or whatever other gadget that we have.

And he, so I'll quote here, he said, leagues are creating a dangerous precedent in allowing the public to dictate rules and policy. If leagues are constantly straining to change themselves just to satisfy public opinion, then what will happen to the construct of the games themselves? And worse, once leagues establish that popular opinion is enough to force significant changes, the public will feel empowered to demand any and all changes at a moment's notice. and all changes at a moment's notice. Baseball's willingness to speed up the game to appease its audience will directly reflect just how much it is willing to sacrifice the foundation of the sport in order to make more money. And then he says because nobody is necessarily claiming

that there's something inherently wrong with the game. It's just the way that we watch that's been affected. I guess I would take some issue with that. But he says sports leagues have ceased pretending to be anything pure and with their actions now admit to being money-making enterprises working in the interest of an already exclusive segment of wealthy owners. The sanctity of sports is an argument lost long ago to the profit motive. And he cites the example of Ray Rice being suspended for whatever it was, two games. And then there was an outcry about the short length of that suspension.

And then the suspension was revised upwards. And he doesn't take issue with the fact that the suspension is longer, but just that it was done in this or seemed to be done in this sort of knee-jerk way, responding to public opinion, and that potentially that could have some other ramifications down the line in collective bargaining or your relation with the players or the precedent it sets for future cases like this. So is this a problem? I guess is there a case where the public would clamor for something in baseball specifically

that would be not in the league's best interest to take into account? Are fans clamoring for something that the league would be worse off in the long term if it adopted? He also mentions instant replay, which seems to me like an example of a case where the fans were ahead of the game. Fans have been talking about instant replay. I don't know what the percentages were of people who supported it, but fans and internet people have been ahead of Bud Seelig historically in proposing that replay be a bigger part of baseball. So is there a bad thing about wisdom of crowds influencing or dictating league policies? I mean, it depends. If it's people who disagree with me that are getting their way, then yeah.

It's hard to... It feels like... I don't know. The thing about... So there's two questions here. One is, should leagues respond to their market, which is a question. And that's a question with a spectrum of answers. I think the answer is probably, yes, they should, but not if it's like in a sort of knee-jerk reactionary short-term way that doesn't consider its long-term health. And I don't think that there's – well, before I answer that, so that's one.

And the other is do we think that currently the league is responsive to – is the hypothesis that the league is currently responding to its consumers true? And I'm not sure about either of those questions. I'm not sure what the correct answer is. It seems that the pace of play example is a strong contradiction to the idea that the league is reacting to what the fans are clamoring for. This has been, the pace of play issue has been, of course, around for roughly 80 years. And the pace of play gets slower and slower.

And in particular, it seems like you and I have talked about how some of the things that people talk about to increase the pace of play, such as the clock for the pitchers, it is that the players don't want the clock, therefore the umpires don't enforce the clock, and in that way the players control the game much more than the fans do. I mean, almost every fan in the world would like there to be less time in between pitches. Maybe literally every single fan in the world would like that. And so baseball hasn't responded to that in any way. They might tomorrow. Right, there's a sense that they will.

But they haven't. There's a sense that they will, but... But they haven't. And so there's not, to me, there's not a sense that they have been particularly in touch with the general sentiment out there and reacting to it. Replay, it seems to me, took a long time to get to happen, and it probably...

I haven't totally thought this out, but my initial hypothesis is that it made it into the game not because the clamor of fans got so loud, but a combination of technology finally catching up to the point where you could get really exact. but rather 70 cameras with whatever that camera is called, Exmo, brought to you by Coors. Exmo cameras and then a combination between the technology catching up and the fact that other leagues had done it. And in every league where it's happened, the response has generally been positive. There is no league, so far as I know, there is no sport or league that has rolled back their use of technology to get calls right. So to me, that's another example of maybe Major League Baseball actually not responding to fans, not responding to the market very proactively or very whatever, very reactively. So I could certainly be talked out of that position, probably.

But given the examples that come to mind, the example on hand, it doesn't seem like that's really where MLB is going. Now, whether they should, well, as you know, I think that it's the players' league, and unless it's a true disruption to the business model, I think generally it's best to let the players' opinions be the dominant one in terms of how play is managed, what the rules are, what's legal, all those sorts of things. I think that you could argue that pace of play is an example where the business reasons outweigh the players. And so I would be pro speeding up the game in certain ways. But I don't know. I don't generally think the league should treat their fans as the number one constituency in a weird way. But also it's sort of co-equal constituency. They probably should be responsive to the things that fans want. I don't know how much

it matters to me whether the league is a $6 billion industry or a $6.5 billion industry. I'm pretty confident that baseball is going to exist in a prominent way for the rest of my life. While it does make sense to say, oh, well, they're the buyers, they're the ones giving you money, you should do what they say. I could see Jorge's point that they aren't necessarily the ones who truly understand what's best for the sport and who truly understand what's enjoyable about the sport. So I could sort of buy part of that. Yeah. Or it could be completely the opposite that in a sense they are better qualified to tell what is best for the sport in the long term because they don't have any short term stake in it really. They don't stand to profit. So it's like the

federalist papers and the idea of the disinterested legislators who are not biased by any personal interest in anything. The owners and the commissioners appointed by the owners are certainly not disinterested. They have a stake in baseball doing well and making profits in the short term and not necessarily the long term because these are owners are mostly older people they don't necessarily have a lot of stake in how baseball is going to be positioned for 40 years from now they want to make their money now and it's possible that that they could be hurting baseball in the long term by doing something that would benefit them in the short term and that maybe fans could be a kind of corrective to that. that I'm about to say, but generally I find that players are really good at seeing the unintended consequences of a rule change or a change in the sport, and fans are really bad at it. Fans being me, too. And that's because there's this sort of sticky glue that

holds the sport together on the field level that we don't necessarily appreciate or get to see quite as much. And so, I don't know. Yeah, all the cohorts are important. All of them matter. And, I mean, I think it obviously goes without saying that Major League Baseball, as a governing body, should rightly consider all perspectives, not overreact to any of them, and do what's best for the sport, for the people involved in the sport, for the people who fund the sport, and for the people who will watch the sport today as well as in 50 years. So yeah,

it's hard to say whether, it's hard to say where, you know, what's too much and what's not enough listening to the fans. Generally speaking though, I don't sense that there's a real mob mentality that's guiding the league right now. To me, it seems like if anything, the examples cited are ones where the league, uh, we're thinking of them because the league reacted to them, but the league reacted to them because they were also right. They were sort of on their face. They were right.

They should have been. The league should have done the right thing in the first place, and the fans provided them the corrective. There are probably lots of cases where fans have been complaining about things that didn't get done. Maybe there aren't. I can't name one. Well, than the ones I did name. Okay, and then related, the other article on... Well, okay, so how about the Hall of Fame, right?

The league is not doing anything to fix the Hall of Fame voting, really. Uh-huh, that's true. And that's one where there's a clear mob trying to get them to. And other than the extremely small... I guess it's not technically the league that would do that, but... where there's a clear mob trying to get them to. And other than the extremely small... I guess it's not technically the league that would do that. It's not, but it is. Right. And other than the sort of very small changes that were fairly small,

relatively small changes that were introduced recently, it's not like they're doing anything that's going to make Barry Bonds get into the Hall of Fame or anything like that. So the other article by Tony Knopp at Field of Greens is related. He makes the case that owners are not acting in the long-term best interests of sports. He's writing about football specifically, but it applies to any sport, really. He makes the case that tickets used to be, the market used to be inefficient, that they were underpriced, that teams could have been getting more for tickets, which seems to be the case given what they're getting now and all the ways that they've managed to increase revenue by building luxury boxes and attracting corporate clients and all these things. But that in the long term, this could backfire. He makes the case that many fans are created because they can buy a cheap ticket

and get a good seat to a game, and that in the long term, this leads to a lifelong fan who invests in the team in many ways, goes to many games and maybe buys season tickets and buys jerseys and all the other ways that you can spend on a sports team. And that by privileging these corporate clients in the short term, teams are making more money because they can charge a lot for those luxury boxes. But in the long term that they are maybe threatening their fan bases. And I guess it's the same sort of argument. Like right now the sport appears extremely healthy if you look at it in financial terms. If you look at it attendance-wise or revenue-wise,

it looks like it's been in better shape than it ever has been. And if you look at the size of the television contracts, it looks great. But you have these constant doom and gloom articles about baseball's place on the national stage or the national conversation or these sort of nebulous measures of cultural impact. And that we often discount those because we can cite the revenue figures

and the TV contracts, but that maybe in the long term, those TV contracts will go away or they'll go to some other sport that is more part of the national consciousness. And so there's this sense that it could be that there is some inherent weakness that is kind of being masked right now by the financial well-being, but could ultimately prove harmful. So do you, by the argument that teams are doing anything currently that is not in their long-term interest, but is in their short-term financial interest? I don't know. I guess you may be, so I don't know. It you maybe so i don't know it's hard to say you could maybe make the case that having every game on television is itself bad for baseball in the long term because

it creates this enormous uh kind of uh oversat saturation of baseball games that that the wasn't that mark cuban suggestion that there should be or his his suggestion was that the nfl should not start televising games or or scheduling games for days other than sunday because that would saturate the market and make games less special yeah i mean i want I would like there to be more baseball games and more of them on TV. But yes, I could see it being the case. It wouldn't shock me if somebody put together a report that argued that, in fact,

that the reason that nobody cares about baseball is because there are too many games to care about and that they're all available to you all the time and therefore there's nothing remotely like an event left in the sport um and that uh while like you might have like a hundred units of attention to give to a sport and if they're diluted to the point that uh they all become unrecognizably small distributions of attention, that you might feel like it's a sport with no impact, a sport that has no kind of, I forget the word I'm looking for, but I'll say impact again. Forget I said impact the first time. It has no impact. So maybe

that's one. I'm not sure. I'd have to keep thinking. It's a good email question. Okay. I'll email you. All right. So that is enough free-ranging discussion for today. I will, by the way, link to both of these articles at the podcast post at BP and also in the Facebook group. So you can go follow along. And we welcome your listening email questions at podcast at baseball perspectives.com we encourage you to support our sponsor baseball reference by going to baseball reference.com

subscribing to the play index using the coupon code bp to get the discounted price of 30 on one year subscription please join the facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and please rate and review and subscribe to the podcast and that is it for this week so have a wonderful weekend and we will be back on monday