Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 536: Manager Challenges, MVP Pitchers, and Other Exciting Emails

Episode Date: September 17, 2014

Ben and Sam answer emails about Derek Jeter, manager challenges, the closer role, pitcher MVPs, and more.

Sit on my ass and watch the game like everybody else And when it's on the line that's when they take me down from the shelf You think this kind of pressure is easy, you're just kidding yourself Good morning and welcome to episode 536 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com, joined as always by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. How are you?

Okay. Are you following the Matt Albers Game Used Pants auction? I am, very much. Me too. We got an email from a listener named Steven a couple days ago who sent us a link to an eBay auction for Matt Albers Game Used Pants. Now, the title says Matt Albers Game game-used pants. Now, the title says Matt Albers' game-used pants Houston Astros, but this is not actually an Astros pant, is it? It's purchased from the Astros minor league

affiliate in the Appy League. So this is minor league Matt Albers pants. And right now there are zero bids. This auction has been going on for a couple days, I suppose, and there are six days left as we record this. Starting bid of $25. No one has placed an opening bid yet. I've considered it. If I could wear them, I would buy them. It does have a size right the size is unfortunately Albersian

yes is that a 38 waist 38 waist 30 length yeah neither one of those works for a human of my proportion no but anyone who's listening who thinks this might fit

if you're interested in Matt Albers game game-used pants, I'll put a... The official game-used pants of Effectively Wild. I will put a link in the Facebook group if you have several days to conduct a bidding war with each other. It says it has his name written on there, on the tag. Uniform number? Yeah, like he went to camp. Like a child at camp, exactly.

Yes, there you go. And yeah, generally this is something that I could get behind. So I guess what we need to do, Ben, probably you and I should each identify the ball player who is the closest to our size and then set up an alert for game-used pants of that player's size. Yeah, we probably should. It's so hard to find accurate height-weight stats, though, let alone waist size. Yeah, that's true.

And you are not what one would consider a, I guess like if you were a pitcher they wouldn't call you projectable no if i were if i were a pitcher they would call me compact they would they would yes they would they would worry that you couldn't get downhill plane yes right meanwhile i don't have um i don't know what they would say about me but I think they would say that you could beat me inside because I don't have much strength. That could be. I think if I were writing about me, I would refer to me as wispy. I'm at least as tall as Marcus Stroman. Taller, I think.

So that's something. Maybe Marcus Stroman. Okay. So email show questions. Let's start. We got a couple Jeter related questions and we did a whole show on Jeter, so we won't do another one, but we can answer a couple Jeter questions. This one comes from our friend Dan Brooks of BP and of the eponymous PitchFX website, who says, suppose that Jeter, being a negative 2.5 win player or thereabouts, decides he wants to come back after all and play shortstop for the Yankees. Let's suppose, against all personality indications, that he's extremely aggressive about it. He starts a media campaign where he asks fans to write in

for him to have just one more year at his current salary. Of course, he makes public appearances in his Yankees jersey. He signs endorsement deals as the Yankees shortstop. He wants this. I figure he can probably come back. But what about next offseason when he decides he wants to play one more season and another and another and another? How many sub-replacement seasons at shortstop do you think Jeter's legacy has bought him from, one, the fans. How many years could he convince fans that he's actually the best player for the job, even while being below replacement level? Two, his teammates.

How many years would his teammates keep saying, yeah, I hope Jeter comes back for another farewell tour? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I hope Jeter comes back. He's such an important part of our team two except should be three the front office how many years could he pull this off remember he has to play short no dhing just the captain oh no dhing he can't he can't dh he can

dh he can dh every now and then he can't he can't be a full-time DH, I assume. The 215, 298, 298 hitter can't DH. Just for days off. Just to be clear. Yes, right. Well, I assume that we're starting with the presumption that he's making the decision today and that he has already done the farewell tour, in which case I don't think he could come back as a i i don't think uh he could come back as a starter next year i think he would just tell him

no thank you uh they would they would say we could try to find a compromise that lets you save face but at this point you have uh having having gone through the farewell tour having been defeated as you have been you have no leverage and we have all the leverage so I don't think he can do it now if he hadn't announced his retirement already could he

come back next year? What would his role be with the Yankees next year if he decided that next year was going to be his retirement tour? Maybe if you were willing to take a pay cut i think you'd have to take a pay cut and if he were willing to i mean there's no role really in which he is like more value i mean if the less he plays in a way in a sense i mean he doesn't get he doesn't get less useless as he plays less, right? You're just using

up a roster spot for someone who is not good, but is just playing less. So it doesn't really make it all that much more palatable to a team, I would think. I mean, it's not like he would be good in a more limited role, and he's just stretched as an everyday shortstop if he were playing shortstop every now and then or dhing or something he wouldn't really be any more valuable than he has been so it's it's the classic this food is terrible and such small portions complaint yeah either way you're gonna lose so yeah i because of the farewell tour i think the yankees could easily get away with not bringing him back and say we we throw you such a nice party and everyone got to say goodbye and uh we're moving on but if there hadn't been a farewell tour i think if he had been this bad

there wouldn't be much public pressure on the team to bring him back. I mean, I think Yankees fans are grateful for all he's done and happy that they've had this chance to go see him one more time or 81 more times. But I don't think any of them is all that eager to see him play more in the future. to see him play more in the future. How many... When we tend to evaluate a player's value to a club, we tend to say, okay, well, he X war at X dollars per war.

But just in terms of the money that his farewell tour is worth to the Yankees, how many wins are you willing to give up for that? Maybe it depends on where you are on the win curve. Well, we're looking at where they're going to be next year. Right, and I guess there's no reason to expect that they wouldn't be somewhere around where they are right now, probably, which is a place where every win matters.

So I don't know. I think there might not be a number that would convince me to sign up for another season of this. I mean, maybe I'd feel differently if I were a Steinbrenner and got to benefit directly, but as an executive of the team, I don't think I would. Our memories are fairly short. We weren't alive for all of history, and we might have forgotten things. And maybe the farewell tour, as we're seeing it, is a new development.

But I don't know of a player offhand, I can't think of a player, who had a long and extended farewell tour while playing this badly. And Jeter benefited because it wasn't necessarily going to be the case that he was this bad when the farewell tour started and it got to pick up its momentum. But if his farewell tour started next April, I just don't know that he would get much of a tour you have to have some reason to be on the field i think and uh i don't know i'm not i'm not i don't

know how they would have handled it i think he would have gotten presents but like he wouldn't have made the all-star team next year, would he? No, I doubt it. Yeah, I think you only get one of these. Well, but I mean assuming that he didn't get one of these. You're saying you only get one lost year. Yeah. Yeah. So even if he didn't have a farewell tour this year,

you think they could have had an All-Star game without him next year? I mean, maybe. Would ESPN be stacking September games with him so that we could see him for a final time? Probably not that, but maybe the All-Star game. I mean, it's fan voting, right? So there'd probably be some fans who still want to see him because whatever, it's the All-Star game. I don't know.

Like the Mike Schmidt precedent? Yeah, right. Yeah. He probably wouldn't have made it this year is the thing. So he might have made it next year, but he probably wouldn't have made it this year is my guess. Okay. Anyway, he did the right thing. Yeah.

And the other quick Jeter question is from... The kind of person in Dan's hypothetical is not the kind of person who would be rewarded with a farewell tour. That's true. We would see through his motivations and his aspirations and ambitions, and we would not honor that person. Next Jeter question. It is a riddle. Yes, Dan acknowledged that by putting the disclaimer about personality. Okay, so this question comes from Seth,

who is convinced that Derek Jeter's jump into the stands was unnecessary. He says that as a Mets fan, so, okay, so he's giving up any pretense of impartiality here, but I tried to reason with my friends from the video that he caught the ball in fair territory and only then unnecessarily dove into the stands when he could have stopped or slid. I was wondering if there was any data available

to prove that this play was not necessary and is one of the most overrated moments of Jeter's career. I don't have any data available. You didn't jot down an article idea while you were reading this? Well, I guess you... I jotted it down. Did you not jot? I didn't. No jotting?

It's all yours if you want it. I don't think I want it, but it's a good article. You could, given the data that we have now, you could look at other balls fielded in that location and see how many of them resulted in jumps into the stands. So Seth is talking about the play from 2004 against the Red Sox, the pop-up where he chases it down in foul territory by the third baseline and jumps into the stands and emerges heroic and bleeding.

And Seth claims that he needn't have done this. Do you have an opinion? I'm watching it now. I can send it to you if you need a refresher. I'm actually going to watch it now, too. I've heard this. Here it is. watch it now too i i've heard this there it is i mean uh like what's the the the the hypothesis is that he ran into the stands for show i guess so yeah i mean the continuation of the if we assume

that he didn't have a choice about going into the stands it doesn't particularly matter whether the the catch happened before or after he was. It doesn't really matter how close he was to the stands. The play is continuous. Unless you think that he either had a choice and was sort of aiming for something showy, or you think that he just showed poor body awareness. Because you see, he does. You can actually make the case that, uh, was

this in, was this in Shea or was this a Yankee stadium? It's a Yankee stadium. So it's not that he doesn't know where the, wait, was this against the Red Sox or the Red Sox? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it wouldn't be in Shea.

It would not. Uh, probably. No. Uh, so it's sort of, you, you can make the case that he might have thought that he was going to angle off to, because this is, he runs into the stands right where the stands kind of hit their corner and then jut away from the field. You know what I'm saying? run just right on past him then he didn't bother to slow down because he thought he was going to keep running and all of a sudden oh he's he's eight inches to the left of where he's supposed to be and oh no kind of a thing so you could maybe make the case that this is a failure on his part that he showed poor awareness of the field um i though think that um it's irrelevant

i've this is not seth is not the first person i've heard say this in the last couple weeks i've heard this play has been uh denigrated as overrated it might be overrated i'm not against it being a little overrated but i think that the going into the stands part is i mean he goes in really hard yeah that's the thing he misjudged i'm gonna i'm i'm gonna give cheater credit i'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt i'm also gonna speculate that he might have misjudged where he was right i mean well i don't know yeah he had to lunge last second he had to lunge to to catch it and that takes his you could make the case that it is it's his poor range that caused

him to do this. Nobody ever said he had poor range on pop-ups, though. He's long been said to be very good on pop-ups. And not so much to his right as to his left, and this is to his right. He might have got spun around and he wasn't sure which way he was going. He might have thought he was going to his left. But, yeah, if you look only at where he caught it, that obviously many, many balls that are caught there

are just by someone who's backing up and is not moving laterally toward the stands. He is in a full sprint just to get to the ball because he goes pretty far to get there. And at that point, I don't think that he could have i mean he could have crashed into the wall instead of into the stands but probably this was the safer option at least for him not so much for the fans um and he does go in really hard and really hard yeah end over end and it's as hard as I've ever seen anybody go into the stands.

Yeah. So if he's selling, this is not your outfielder who does an extraneous roll after the catch. This is full speed ahead. So this game, here's what I remember about this game. I was in New York when this game happened, and I was listening to it on the radio, and I remember it being, I think I remember it being very late, but I might be wrong. It was.

And this is the game that went like 15 innings and Gary Sheffield played third base, right? Yeah, I was in Ecuador when this game happened, but it was, what inning was it? It was an extra inning, and it was a long one. And so because I was listening on the radio, I only had the description of it. And so to me, this is a play that I didn't really even,

in my mind, this has been a legendarily great play for all this time, and I'm not sure. Ketch was in the 12th. The game went 13. I'm not sure I would have seen it well then did he have to leave the game? is that why Sheffield came in?

Sheffield shifted from right field to third base yeah Jeter left the game A-Rod played played short after Jeter left the game so I don't even know if I would have seen this play before a year or two ago.

So I've never really even considered it very much. I've just always known it to be a great play. It's hard to know if I can even see it with fresh eyes at this point. It's not the highest leverage great play. It's a July regular season game. Between two teams that were obviously going to win the division in the world and the wild card. Right.

Yeah. Okay. Still pretty high leverage. Let's not knock it for leverage. Don't go over to Seth's side. You sound petty. Okay. Yeah, it's an excellent play.

I think possibly a little overrated just because it's Jeter, but it's a fine play. I think you can make a much better case that the flip is way overrated, and I'm not sure it is. The flip might be just as great, but I think that there are people who have made compelling cases that the flip was bizarre and not the genius move that it's purported to be and i i don't know if that's true i'd have to think about it but i i know that there are people

who feel strongly that the flip was not actually that brilliant it's so fun watching the flip i love i love that play it's really fun to watch um okay so that is cheater let's see uh so this question comes from matt trueblood who uh sends very long and thoughtful questions that are difficult to read on a a limited time podcast but he sends us to an article from 2004 that was written at BP by Derek Zumstag. Basically, the standard sabermetric line about how closers or relief aces are misused by being pegged into this limited closer role. And Matt says, it's good. It's sound. It's nothing that a modern saber savvy fan has heard fewer than a dozen times unless he's holed up recreating history saber-trick research on his own and a decade after it was written

It seems to be wrong, right? This is a question we could ask about once or twice a year just to check in but I confess to not having seriously Considered it in at least two years closer seems safer than ever part of a quickly ossifying bullpen structure Where no one gets more than three outs I think this particular piece of the stat head revolution is, sadly, a permanent failure. And Matt asks if we think this is true. Is 2004 Derek Zumstag wrong, or is he just seeing a more distant future? Is 2004 Derek Zumstag wrong or is he just seeing a more distant future? And two, if it's true that closers are here to stay now in their current usage pattern,

do we think it's because Mariano Rivera gave the role the face it needed to take on unassailable dignity? The broader bullpen revolution has made it a more efficient model than it once was. The lower run environment and rising league-wide strikeout rate make closers seem more dominant and may even make some shaky closers more viable, or the flood of money into the game and the severe curtailing of free agency have loosened all the strictures on smart roster construction such that as long as someone is good at what you ask them to do, optimization is unnecessary. And he also wants to know if we care. Bobby V.

Bobby Valentine doesn't like the flip. So the question is, was Zumstag wrong, or is the closer eventually still imperiled? If Zumstag was wrong, is it because changes in the game sort of adapted to make it a better strategy, Is it because changes in the game sort of adapted to make it a better strategy? Or is baseball simply that resilient to this good advice that people have been giving for a long time? Yeah, and does it even bother us anymore?

Or are we still insisting that these guys should be used at whatever the highest leverage or most important spot is instead of being tied to an inning. I think some portion of this is basically the Tommy John situation. I think some portion of it is the idea that you don't want to get guys warmed up and not use them. That feels to me to be something that is very important to everybody around the team and not that important to most of us. And if we considered it as important as they do, we might realize that there's a cost to getting a guy hot before and not using him. And so I think that's part of it.

I'm not sure that this, well, I don't know. that this, well, I don't know. I'm not sure that the rigidity would be quite so rigid if pitchers had rubber arms or were seen to have rubber arms. But that's a pretty important thing. I mean, one of the things that you see, and I think this is why we need to assume that the managers are acting in good faith more than maybe we do. We have this joke, this idea, that you have to be a proven closer. And once you're a proven closer, you get the ninth and you can't pitch in any inning but the ninth. And nobody else can pitch in the ninth. But what you actually see is that if the closer goes down, if tonight, for instance, if Greg Holland gets injured and is out for the year and Wade Davis becomes the closer,

they will immediately give Wade Davis the same ninth inning privileges. So it's not really about this mockable idea that they just don't have the mental capacity for it or that guys who you know guys with a proven c are different or need to be coddled or need to be treated differently you really need to have um the uh you know a predictable plan for the final few innings where the players are able to be physically ready and not be physically used up or mentally unprepared or whatever. And so you see this with every team's ninth inning, even when it's not Jonathan Papelbon or some famous closer. You see it when it's like Jesse Crane filling in because Chad Qualls has a nerve issue. I mean, it's like even if it's a three-day fix,

you see them treat the closer like the closer. And I think the one exception to that is you don't necessarily – I do think that if Jesse Crane is filling in for Chad Qualls, you're more likely to see him pitch in a tie game on the road than you're to see a closer i think that they actually i do think that there is a belief that closer for some reason can't handle tie games or something like that well no it's not they can't handle tie games but they're needed for time anyway you see that less when the gap between closer and replacement closer is smaller but

generally speaking you see the same the same patterns even if the closer is just the guy that you are using because the rest of your bullpen sucks and you're trying to make it through the month. So anyway, that's a long way of saying the fact that managers do that to me tells me that they actually see a real value to having this predictability that goes beyond simply being afraid of being criticized, that goes beyond simply being afraid of infuriating a player who wants to get saves for his arbitration, that goes beyond this idea that only certain guys can do it or that guys who can do it can only do this very limited thing. And it really is much more about the maintenance of your labor force

in this three-hour, strenuous three-hour thing. So it's possible that the idea that relievers pitch better when they have predetermined roles, that idea I think used to be dismissed out of hand as just a bunch of baseball bloviating, just unverifiable, no way to quantify it, no way to trust it, should just dismiss it. I think now the pendulum has swung more toward giving that some credence just because everyone says it and maybe they're right,

maybe they know themselves. It's also possible that it's now become too accepted, that there's too much credence given to that position. Because who knows, really, it might be the case that relievers will tell you that they would prefer to pitch in predetermined roles, but maybe they don't even necessarily know how they would do in any other situation because they haven't really been in it that much. So it's possible that they might rise to could pitch in the sixth uh if needed and um you know wouldn't be held back for you know the three run lead in the ninth uh i just think that it's much less about being about having the will to do it and being you know open-minded about the difference between you know saves and holds or whatever and it's more about finding the creative way that bridges this

problem. Because I don't think you could necessarily just implement it and expect no problems at this point. And I'm not sure that it even has to do with this point. Maybe it's always been the case that the way that they do it is the best considering the limitations they have. And so the team that punches through this problem is going to be the one that figures out a way around the limitations and figures out a way to make flexibility predictable or something that figures out a way to reshape the culture somehow. I just don't think the manager could declare tonight

that he was going to do it the optimized way and necessarily expect there to not be consequences. Okay, Play index? Yeah, sure. All right. So Ryan asks a question that I'm going to make the play index question. Ryan writes, with the news that John Rocker will be a contestant on the upcoming season of Survivor, I went to his baseball reference page to refresh myself about his career and noticed that he pitched 20 and two-thirds innings in the playoffs without ever giving up an earned run. I'm aware from being a Cardinals fan and looking at many Cardinals player pages

that Rosenthal has pitched 20 and a third innings in the playoffs without giving up an earned run. I don't know if Rocker holds the record for most innings pitched in the playoffs while still having a career ERA of zero, or if Rosenthal has the active record, but I'm interested in finding out and figured Sam could tell me definitively. So I'm going to tell you a few answers to this, but the real reason I wanted to answer this is for something a little different,

and it will actually diverge from the play index momentarily or briefly. So I used play index, which has a streak finder and which has a postseason streak finder, to find out who has the longest scoreless innings streaks in the postseason. And there are, well, there's one person who's longer than everybody else, and then there are some interesting ones beneath it. The longest, do you know who the longest scoreless streak in postseason history is?

Rivera? It is Rivera, of course. Mariano Rivera. Way on a limb there. Yeah, I have a hypothesis that if there's ever a trivia question on TV and you don't know the answer, if they're looking for a hitter, guess Willie Mays. If they're looking for a pitcher, guess Chris Bozzio.

Why Chris Bozzio? Just been a lot of trivia questions about him in my life. But in this case, postseason excellence, the answer is always Rivera. So Rivera, 33 and a third. He just narrowly beats Whitey Ford, who had a scoreless streak of 33 innings, who himself narrowly beat Babe Ruth, who had a scoreless streak of 29 innings, or so they would have us believe. I don't actually believe that happened. Christy Mathewson had a scoreless streak of 28 innings to start his career. Jonathan Papelbon, interestingly, had a scoreless streak of 26 innings to start his career

and then allowed three runs in a blown save in 2009 and has never pitched in the postseason again. So only allowed a run in one outing in his entire career, but might never be in the postseason again. So a failure, if you ask me. Kenny Rogers, a scoreless streak of 24 and a third that is still active could he's got a shot uh joe negro 20 innings that's his entire career he never allowed a run 20 innings um and uh these are all i didn't limit it to earned runs. I went with just runs.

And then Dave Drevecky went 21 to start his career. He allowed one run in his final outing and then went five more. So he has a career ERA of.35 in 26 innings. There is a Yahoo Answers page that I fell in love with while researching this. The question was, what is the longest postseason scoreless streak for innings pitched? And the answer is, well, the answer is over the span of multiple postseasons, the record is 33-1 by Mariano Rivera. All right, got it right. The next answer, believe it or not, Babe Ruth once held the record.

Oh, very true. Broken by Whitey Ford, who had 33 and two-thirds. Well, 33, but you're close. Ford's record was eventually broken by Mariano Rivera with 34 and a third. Well, it's 33. But you're close. And then edit. Unbelievable.

I get a thumbs down for stating facts. Probably from somebody that didn't know Babe Ruth used to pitch. Good point. And then somebody else answers, no, the answer is Kenny Roger. Just Kenny Roger in the 2006 postseason. And then the next answer is Kenny Rogers has 23.

But I don't recall them saying it's a record. They would probably say it every 10 minutes. And then the next person says, I think it was kenny rogers so anyway uh so i don't care that much about this borderless streak it's interesting i care a little bit about it i'm glad we got to it but the answer is mario nevera and that's expected and so therefore what do we do with that? I wonder, though, how many hidden perfect games there have been in the postseason because this podcast loves the hidden perfect game. And so I actually did not use Playindex for this.

I want to make it very clear. I could have, and I would have, but I was in a rush. And with Playindex, I would have had to take one extra step. So instead, I just emailed Rob McKeown from Baseball Projectors and had him use our database to do it, and that made it eight minutes easier for me and much less easier for him. That was the trade I was willing to make.

And, of course, Don Larson threw a perfect game, so that's not hidden, but he did know, he did throw a perfect game. And would you believe, Ben, that in all of postseason history, there has never, ever been another case of a guy getting 27 batters in a row over the course of multiple series? In fact, if you can believe this, only 19 pitchers in history have even done 20 in a row, which is not even seven innings, as you know. So 19 have done 20.

Pedro got to 21. Andy Pettit got to 23. Grover Alexander, 24. Koufax got to 20 but didn't get past it. Herb Penick got 26. He and Hiroki Kuroda at 26 are the closest. They each got within one out of a Hidden Perfect game. Mike Timlin, 24. Roy Halliday, 21. But nobody got to 27 except for Don Larson, who actually got 34. Huh. Interesting.

Yeah. So no Hidden perfect games, surprisingly. Just the one in plain view. Yeah, that is surprising. Because how much more common did we find that hidden ones were than in plain view ones? I want to say like 10 times. Yeah, it was a lot more. So Play Index, BP, $30. Yes. Coupon code. Yeah. Coupon code BP. Great product. Just a great product. It really is. All right. This question comes from Eric Hartman,

who says, we're almost a whole season into the manager challenge system. Do you think there has been a noteworthy difference between most managers in the skill of challenging? So there have been just under 1,200 challenges so far, so almost 40 per team. So we don't know what the stabilization rate of challenge success rate is. I would guess that it is higher than this, considerably higher than this.

So I would say no. And particularly because we're not really just evaluating the manager, we're also evaluating the, really even more so than the manager, we're evaluating the replay reviewer who's sitting in the video room or somewhere trying to look at the replays before time runs out and signaling to a coach who then

signals to the manager. So really we're evaluating not the manager, but either the replay reviewer or the system that the team has set up for replay reviewing. And I would guess, I don't know offhand what the success rates are, whether someone has an astronomically higher success rate than another. I think a high success rate would be a mark of failure, personally. As we talked about with Dan Brooks and Russell Carlton's research before the year, you ought to be challenging a lot. The guy who's doing it best is challenging a ton. If your success rate is very high, it just means you're not challenging enough, it seems to me. Yeah, that's probably right too.

I feel like Bruce Bochy has been a weak spot in his managing this year. And I don't have, I mean, this is anecdotal, and it's inconclusive, and it's not backed by anything. But it feels to me like there have been multiple plays this year that replays showed he should have challenged. They would have not just he should have challenged but that they would have been overturned that the replays were conclusive and he just didn't challenge and i early on in the year there were a couple of them in a row as i recall and he you know he sort of explained well if the you know if the players don't tell me to challenge it i mean i'm counting on them to sort of let me know that we need to take a look at it. And if they're not telling me, then I don't know to go out there and challenge it.

And so I've noticed that since then, too, I've seen a couple plays where they didn't challenge plays that I thought could have gone against them. And in fact, I mean, they lost 17 to nothing, so it probably didn't matter, but Yasiel Puig had a hustle double on Saturday, and it led to this rally, was certainly at least worth putting a review on but um i guess the you know the previous day i think the giants had wasted around wasted a challenge that didn't go their way and then had to play the next six innings without one and so maybe they were being particularly conservative anyway i would it just feels to me like anecdotally it it has given me at least something to judge a manager on. I guess that's the answer to Eric.

I don't actually know whether Bochy has been better or worse. But to answer his question, yes, I have judged managers. In fairness to him, I suppose it's fair to say that you've probably watched more Giants baseball than other teams baseball. So maybe if you had watched every team equally, you'd have seen the same number of missed opportunities that other managers had. I think I watch more Giants baseball than I watch probably 22 other teams or so. But there's probably six to eight teams that I watch as much, if not more, or roughly as much, if not more. And I haven't noticed this with anybody else. More roughly as much, if not more, and I haven't noticed this with anybody else. Well, the stats tentatively support your hypothesis of a high success rate being a negative indicator in that the Giants have challenged a little less often than the typical team. The average team has challenged about 39 times.

The Giants have challenged 33 times, and they have been successful 63.6% of the time, 21 out of 33, whereas the league average rate is about 47.5%. Nailed it. They've challenged a little less and been more successful when they have, so they've challenged the no-doubters, I guess. But, yeah, maybe they've let some worthwhile challenge opportunities go by. All right. Okay.

Well, this one, we have to do this one. This comes from Paul, who says, growing up, I hated the idea of pitchers being named MVP because there was an award for the best pitcher, but not for the best hitter. But in 1999, the Hank Aaron Award came along, and I thought, if this gains traction, I'll have no problem with pitcher MVPs. And now we have the Platinum Gloves, so all three major parts of the game have an award.

Problem, though, MLB has changed the selection process for the Hank Aaron Award several times. In the 15 years that the award has existed, there have been six different selection processes, a remarkable inconsistency for an award named after Hank Aaron. Personally, I like the 2003 voting method the most, fans 30%, analysts 70%, but any reasonable and consistent selection process would work for me. What do you think? Would a more prominent Hank Aaron award for each league's best hitter make pitcher MVPs

more tolerable? And would it diminish the value of the MVP award? Well, first I want to just say I wrote a piece for Fox Sports that was going to be about how the MVP award reflects sort of the soul of the writer's idea of the soul of the game at any particular time. So you see these kind of trends in which type of players get rewarded and you might then extrapolate and say, well, this is sort of what they valued and how it's constantly changing. There's not any one standard. And that, as I was working on that, Paul's question really inspired a direction that included the Hank Aaron Award and the changes in the Hank Aaron Award voting and how Bud Selig's failure to establish a consistent Hank Aaron Award is a problem for MVP voting and makes things less fun. And so I want to note that and thank Paul,

who is at BravesChopHouse House if you want to follow him on Twitter. So I do. I think that the MVP award has to be something that writers have never wanted it to be specifically because of this vacuum that the lack of a high-profile Hank Aaron Award would fill. If the Hank Aaron Award were, in fact, the Cy Young for Hitters, as I think it intends to be, I think that we would be a lot more, that we would understand a lot better the reason that writers vote in such kind of bizarre and sometimes subjective ways. Basically, Cy Young, okay, so Cy Young, you give your opinion when you vote for Cy Young,

but it's basically an objective award, right? You're basically saying who's the best, and the best is the best. You're trying to get the objective truth. It's not really your opinion. It's your best guess at an objective truth. And the Hank Aaron Award ought to be that. And the MVP Award ought not to be that, I think. I think that the fact that value is purposefully vague, and even if it weren't, I could imagine

a universe where the MVP Award never did develop this vague, ever-changing standard. But the fact that we have 80 years of it where there's no consistency from generation to generation and from voter to voter and sometimes from year to year, to me it is grandfathered in. It gets to be a squishy whatever award that people put a lot of value in without ever being able to say definitively right or wrong but like i said because there is a vacuum where we don't have the objective position player award it instead has become in our minds the objective position player award and then we get super duper mad when somebody doesn't uh pick the objectively best player i don't think it ever was necessarily intended to be. Well, I don't know.

I don't quite know how to say this. It is intended to be the best player in a way, and it is not intended to be the best player in a way. And it makes it hard to argue these things when we don't actually know what to call the award or how to treat the award. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so.

So I think that the conversation around the MVP award would be a lot more interesting and a lot less, maybe not less confrontational, but less dismissive if we had a Hank Aaron award that filled that void. Yeah, sounds right to me. Do you find it odd that Hank Aaron got the award? Not that he got the award, but that it's named after Hank Aaron. Do you think Hank Aaron is the person to name it after? I think he's, well, maybe, right?

Because he, I mean, his reputation is more for being consistently great year after year than being amazing in any single year. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I suppose so. Maybe that's, is that a justified reputation? I don't know. I mean, he did win an MVP award, and he had a bunch of seasons in the eight nine win range so it wasn't like he was a compiler or anything he was probably the best player in baseball for a

good number of those years so well he led the league he led the league in ops plus three times and willie mays led the league in ops plus six six times. And, I mean, certainly Ted Williams. If you're going to pick the best hitter, it's Ted Williams. I mean, it should be Ted Williams, right? If that's what you're going for, the best hitter is, since Babe Ruth, the best hitter is Ted Williams. Hank Aaron is clearly deserving of basically any honor that you want to give to him, but also Willie Mays is and also Ted Williams is.

And so it's just sort of interesting that of the three, he's the only one that got it. And it doesn't quite seem to be the category that you would most associate with him. Because like you say, he is a consistent guy and he is a home run guy. If there was an award for home runs, absolutely, that would be the Hank Aaron Award. If there were an award for offensive performer in a given year, I don't know. I don't know that it's the most natural fit, but certainly. Although you could make the same argument about the single season home run award, right? Because he only led his league four times in home runs,

and he only led the majors once in home runs in a single season so there's that maybe it could be the harman killabrew award or something didn't he he did he did that more i think um okay uh so we will end this podcast now um there was a quick one from andrew who just wanted to know how much pitches slow down on their way to the plate, and I believe it's about 10% of their release velocity is lost on their way to the plate. He also wanted to know if there was such a thing as a fast fastball,

like a fastball that's faster from the hand to the glove than another guy's independent of its release speed? Are there pitchers that have the ability to vary the amount that their pitches slow down on the way to the plate? Like, I don't know, like Bugs Bunny stopping his pitch on the way to the plate or something? And no, there are not those pitchers. It's all about how fast you release the ball. After that, there's really nothing you can do about it. And there was a note from Andrew who responded to your idea of home runs counting more

when the team is behind by reporting the North Korean rules of basketball, one of which evidently is that baskets scored in the last 15 seconds of a half count for eight points instead of the usual two or three. So that's the ultimate in changing the scoring rules to make the game more exciting at the end. Well done, North Korea. Yeah, it's amazing. So good. I'd like to come in North Korea today. Okay, so that's it. We already told you to support our sponsor, but please do so using the coupon code BP

to subscribe to The Play Index. And we will be back with another show tomorrow.