Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 720: The Extra-Long Listener Email Blowout

Episode Date: September 4, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about the Mets, Matt Harvey, and Scott Boras, then answer listener emails about pitcher stuff, park effects, permanent shifts, a magic Jonny Gomes, playoff seeding, and much more.

It took a long, long, long time Now I'm sorry I love you Good morning and welcome to episode 720 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the Plain Decks at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Hey, Ben.

How are you? I'm all right. Writing a book. How are you? You writing a book? Yep. How about that? What a coincidence.

So we're rusty. I feel rusty. We've been absent all week. I apologize to people who expected to see podcasts earlier this week. A lot has happened in the time since our last podcast. Mike Peska made us lobsters of the Anten twig on the gist. The Stompers season ended. We started a book, and now we're back to talk about baseball.

I was reunited with my family. Oh, that's nice. were they happy to see you they were unfamiliar at first a little bit guarded the new man in the house disappointed he had to leave uh-huh well i'm glad you get to go home and i get to go home in two days i'll be back in new york so that's the news with us your uh your diner is gonna have a lot of vegetarian omelets salmon salad chicken wraps and soup stocked up for you yeah it's bad bad news for the black bear diner in sonoma but did you wait you went to the black bear diner really i went to black bear diner yeah several several times Did you like it? Bad news for

The Black Bear Diner, good news for Market Diner In Hell's Kitchen. Black Bear Diner Is not bad, it's a chain Which I know makes it anathema To you, you will not eat at a chain But I didn't mind it It's not open 24 hours Which is Market Diner's

Main selling point It closes at regular Sonoma hours. So that kind of cut back on the number of times that I could go. I will happily eat at a chain, by the way. Just not that one. Just not that one. Yeah. I mean, in and out.

Well, yeah, I don't know. There's a difference between a chain and a franchise, too, I guess. And in and out is notised, but it's obviously much bigger than Black Bear Diner. Same with Chipotle. Uh, but yeah, like my favorite Mexican restaurant in Northern California is a chain, Super Taqueria. Um, so I'm, I'm good with chains. Round table pizza. I love round table pizza. so why not black bear diner is it that it purports to be a homey diner and it's actually part of a 20 store chain of black bear diners i've never been to black bear diner my um my wife was really excited to go to black bear diner

until i told her it was a chain uh and chain. And she also doesn't have anything against chains. But yeah, I think she felt betrayed because it did seem right. Exactly like you said, it seemed like a special local thing. They have this big bear outside it. Wooden bear. Is it wooden? Okay, like a wooden bear so she thought oh how cute it has good real estate in sonoma it seems like a place that's been there forever and then

you find out that it's just one of 30 up and down the west coast and you kind of know what you're going to get at that point food good nourishing food yeah you, but I mean, Sonoma is a city that loves to... Okay, so Sonoma, more than any city I've ever been to, likes to talk about the awards that they have won as a city. So, like, how many times I heard that they were the fourth best Fourth of July parade in the country? And Sonoma County has been voted the best county in America for dining. And it's not like any of the food that they sold at Black Bear Diner wasn't replicated within a block of it by local places.

And so why not go to them? I went to them too. Maybe it won that award because of blackbird diner you don't know what the voters were thinking what criteria they were using maybe it was best homey diner that is actually a chain anyway sounds like you and your wife are a good fit for each other and i'm glad that you're spending time with with each other again yeah okay so what are we doing emails we're doing emails sure all right are we talking about anything before we start answering emails um i guess we might as well talk about i probably should save it because it's probably a whole

episode but uh matt harvey and scott boris and the mets now. Tell us about them. So as I understand it, Scott Boris has now leaked that 180 was supposed to be his innings limit, and he's now very mad that they're going over his innings limit using some of the same language that they used earlier in the year to explain their caution with pitchers. that they used earlier in the year to explain their caution with pitchers, he's now kind of crediting them with, I don't know, something like hypocrisy or lack of internal discipline. And he says basically like the Mets need to shut him down. And I guess implying that if they don't shut him down in three years,

he's not going to want to play for the Mets when he's a free agent. That's interesting. I almost brought up Mets innings limits earlier this year when people started talking about them when it looked like it was very likely that the Mets would make the playoffs and they have this staff full of young guys. And so people were talking about whether they were going to do some sort of Strasburg-esque shutdown and whether that would be a good idea. And so this is interesting because it says that maybe the incentives of the parties are not aligned in that Scott Boris's incentive is for Matt Harvey's next contract to be a big, long one. And Matt Harvey's incentive is also that, but also wants to pitch and contribute to the team and win a World Series and all of those things. knowing that Scott Porras is the agent and that it's going to be hard to sign him to an extension is to get a lot out of him now and to have Matt Harvey pitch when they're making the playoffs, which I think given the reaction to the Strasburg shutdown and the way that the Nationals have played in the few seasons after that and their early playoff exits or their non-playoff entrances

most people i think were against the the strasburg shutdown and thought it was just being too cautious and you can't take playoff appearances for granted and you have to go for it and so forth and maybe that's been borne out by the nationals recent history so I don't know what this says, whether it's something that teams should try to do if only to make their players and agents happy, or whether Scott Boris just has to accept this and Matt Harvey just has to accept this because the team can use him however they want.

It's not like an innings limit is some sort of thing that's been handed down for generations and set in stone if anything if there's research that supports it it's research that the team did probably unless boris has done his own research on this which maybe he has i think that the i think the fact that it comes from a physician, that it is a physician's recommendation, gives it authority even if it's not based on anything, which maybe is right or maybe it's not. But I think there's a few things about this case specifically and there's a few cases about things generally that apply. One is that I don't generally trust teams to be like great guys. don't generally trust teams you know to be like great guys i generally trust teams to be selfish corporations representing the interests of the fan uh and maybe yeah of the fan which just wants to win a world series and have a parade and they do that in ways that i often disagree with and find

to be kind of morally callous and um slightly less than the sport that I would prefer to watch. However, I do kind of trust teams when it comes to pitch limits and innings limits and at least attempting to do the right thing. And I say that knowing that in a lot of cases it is in the team's self-interest to protect a pitcher. The Mets do want to get three years out of Matt Harvey. They don't want to have Matt Harvey pitch the next two weeks and then blow out. And so, yeah, they're careful with their pitchers partly because they're their pitchers. But also, it's not like you see a guy who's on the cusp of free agency throwing 175 pitch starts.

They basically treat all these guys carefully, as far as I can tell. I am kind of unaware of any pitcher abuse that served the team at the obvious expense of the player, like at any point in the last decade.

Sabathia with the Brewers? Yeah. Okay, Sabathia with the brewers yeah okay sabathia with the brewers is did did anybody think that sabathia with the brewers that was a risk though i mean yeah that would be the example you're right uh if you thought that that was the case but my guess is that the conversations that were had then is that sabathia really wanted to do it, that they probably genuinely believed that they weren't putting Sabathia at risk. They probably genuinely weren't putting Sabathia at risk, given how little we know about what does put pitchers at risk. Probably a six-week stretch of a veteran pitcher who is really big and strong probably isn't going to be. But anyway, yeah, okay, is, you know, really big and strong, uh, probably isn't going to be, but anyway, yeah. Okay. That's it. But you don't see lots of Sabathia examples. Nope. And, uh, you, if teams

were really as callous as, um, sometimes they act in other ways, then you, you might expect to see that. Um, so, which is just to say that, um, say that I don't, I feel like the teams have done a pretty good job policing themselves and that they do care about Matt Harvey's arm and that their incentives aren't that far apart here. Secondly, this is, I mean, has a player ever come out in favor of not playing in order to get a bigger payday three days down the line? I mean, this seems like, I don't know. I mean, this seems like it's going to backfire big time on Harvey as a personality. Maybe that doesn't matter.

Maybe those things, maybe Harvey's character narrative is already set. And the best ever since he went on dan patrick and refused to not talk about whatever he was promoting that day yeah um but like this seems like there's got to be mets i mean look if matt harvey's arm was falling off there'd be mets in the team in the clubhouse it'd be like tough it out rook right there was an example of that earlier this year right someone who had uh elbow surgery who and oh uh cj wilson right he had he ended up having elbow surgery and there was there were the rumblings in the angels clubhouse that he should be pitching through that yeah so uh so it seems extremely um out of character for a ballplayer to do this. And maybe that just goes to the point that Harvey is kind of different for a ballplayer.

And so the most surprising thing about it to me is that Harvey would be speaking out like this. Well, there are no Harvey quotes in the story, right? It's all Boris quotes. Yeah. But you can assume that he's aware of what was going to be said. Yeah. Boris is Harvey's agent. Yeah.

Yes. It'd be different if Boris was not Harvey's agent and he was saying that. Yeah. But there have been times when players have dropped Boris because they felt like he wasn't serving their interests or he wasn't doing what they wanted him to do or something so maybe there's some slight chance that he's just taken this further than harvey would have wanted to take it i don't know lastly oh yes lastly i think that uh the appropriate way to limit a pitcher's innings, even if you have a soft cap or a hard cap,

it's still difficult to figure out the appropriate way to do it. I mean, right now, Boris probably would have a point that the Mets don't need Harvey to make any more starts in September, most likely. Right? The difference, they are six games ahead. They are probably, almost they are probably almost certainly probably going to win this division if they don't win this division it will be because they choke to such a

degree that who knows harvey probably wouldn't even save them but do you shut down a guy and then bring him back after a month of inactivity how do you do it that's all there isn't really a clear a clear way of doing this different Different teams have tried it different ways, sometimes successfully, sometimes not successfully. Uh, and, but I don't know. I mean, the, the Mets probably shouldn't be using Harvey any more than they have to right now. And any innings that they're using from him in September, unless it is a way of bridging this period between now and October, probably are kind of wasted and kind of dumb. Maybe, yeah. I mean, if it comes to a head and Boris is taking an extremely hard stance on this and saying this is not a negotiation,

if this did come to a head, theets would probably prevail right because if a player refuses to play you could you could put him on the suspended list and not pay him or something and it doesn't seem like it doesn't seem like innings limits are so scientific and established that you could win a grievance like that the players union could win a grievance. Like that the players union could win a grievance. Against the Mets. For putting Harvey at risk. So. They kind of have the leverage I guess. But you also don't really want to.

Force a player to play. If he is this opposed to it. Which is a strange situation. It depends. If a doctor says. If you can get a doctor to say something. Then you've got a much better case so that's true depends what a doctor has said or what a doctor will say yes would say okay anything else no okay all right we've got a bunch of emails from a bit

of a backlog so we'll work through some of them here. Aaron says, I was wondering recently whether park effects are considered on a per-hitter basis. From what I've seen, park effect is usually presented as a single number with 100 as average, but it seems to me that particular parks would be advantageous to different types of hitters in a way that would prevent that number from being one size fits all. Take Fenway Park, for example. A pull-heavy flyball-hitting right-hander like Chris Bryant would probably hit a ton of home runs over the green monster. On the other hand, a low-power guy who depends on soft liners falling in the outfield would be disproportionately harmed by the small left field. I'm sure agents and GMs

consider that kind of thing when they're thinking about signings, but can algorithms like WRC Plus take it into account? Are some players systematically under or overvalued because their home park plays to or against their strengths? This was always kind of the underlying idea behind the Carlos Gonzalez debates, right? Yeah. That Carlos Gonzalez numbers were obviously inflated by Coors Field and everybody could adjust to that, but that in fact he was for a time so much better at home than on the road that there was a debate about whether Carlos Gonzalez was actually good

or whether he was entirely a product of Coors Field and the sub-question of B, if he is, does that matter if his hitting style and skill set is perfectly suited to Coors Field? The next year he had like a reverse split where he was better on the road. Yeah. And it depends like if you're trying to figure out value retrospectively or if you're trying to figure out value retrospectively or if you're trying to project what the player will do in a different park or something. Because if you're just trying to find out what a player was worth,

and I think Tontengo has made this point with maybe Juan Pierre and Coors Field or something, but even if a player has a particular ability to hit well in a park, you still have to consider him in the context of that park and the fact that everyone hits well in that park. So even if he has a special ability to hit well in that park, the runs aren't quite as valuable in that park because everyone hits so much better there and it's a different run environment.

And so maybe the value is not higher anyway because you're considering it in that context but if you want to figure out if a guy is going to translate if his stats are going to translate to a different park then you would definitely want to know what impact that park had on him and and there's some attempt to get more granular with this. Like there's, you know, handedness park factors since different parks will affect right-handed hitters or left-handed hitters differently. And there are park factors for different components. So park factors for home runs and park factors for doubles and triples. So park factors for home runs and park factors for doubles and triples.

And I don't recall how detailed your standard value stat gets with that. I know you can look up park factors for those various stats. I don't know whether it applies the park factor separately to every little thing that the hitter does based on the impact of that park and then corrects for that but theoretically you you could do that they at least adjust for handedness and they adjust for the array of road parks that you're in so like if you look up a hitter's park factor at baseball prospectus it's not just the park factor of his home park it's also the whole distribution of the road parks that he played in, which can make a difference for some guys in certain divisions. But there's probably some wiggle room here. There's probably some guys who are undervalued or overvalued by the stats that we look at,

like Drew Average or WRC plus or OPS plus or whatever, because it's not accounting for their specific skill set, because there's just no perfect way to tailor these stats that have to apply to everyone to every hitter's spray chart and skill set. So I would guess that this is an area where if you're a team that's thinking about trading for a guy or bidding for a guy you wouldn't necessarily just want to look at the ops plus and call it a day you'd probably want to do some more serious analysis to look at where his hits go and what those hits would have done in a different place so i'm sure you could extract some extra value there and then there are the guys who people say that park factors don't

even apply to them because they have so much power that they'll just hit balls out of anywhere like people used to say that about adam dunn i I think people probably say that about Nelson Cruz maybe going to Safeco, which in retrospect seems smart. Like just that they hit the ball so far that you can't do the normal adjustment because these guys are hitting the ball 30 feet over the fence. It's not just scraping over the fence, and therefore you go to a slightly deeper park and those balls would still

be home run so there's probably some truth to that too so i think you could you could improve the stats slightly if you found a way to program it to take into account every detail about a hitter or if you just did it one guy you know guy by guy and took all these things into account remember like five six years ago when bloggers all did those overlay things yeah those were bad those were bad yeah that was those were one of those things that colin wires was always angry about former stat director at bp because he didn't think that the dimensions of the ballpark diagrams were accurate enough, and the plotted locations of the batted balls were accurate enough to draw any kind of legitimate conclusion about that. But yeah, people would...

I one time found that the Angels would have hit like 120 more home runs if they played in St. Louis. Sounds legit. Yeah. No, I mean, clearly it in St. Louis. Sounds legit. Yeah. No, I mean, clearly it wasn't. They were very problematic. But let's imagine that the data wasn't a problem, that the parks mentioned were correct, maybe even that they'd been adjusted for atmospheric conditions somehow so that um that you you know you did have and and that the uh the location of the batted balls was correct so that you did have a fair representation of how

many home runs hit in one park would have been hit in another park in a year would you find that information to be at all relevant if a guy changed ballparks like assuming the data was clean would you still find it to have any reasonable value i think it'd be worth looking at and why would it not be because you'd think that the guy would hit the ball in a different place like he wouldn't continue to hit the ball in exactly the same spots that he did the previous year yeah because right exactly because it's just one year or maybe it's a couple years that uh the you know ball that just goes over the wall one year it's not like he's most guys probably aren't consistently hitting a ball to that exact a spot like they have tendencies they have pole tendencies they

have fly ball tendencies they They have general power tendencies. But, you know, it's not like they're hitting the same seat in the grandstands repeatedly. Maybe you were on to something. Maybe the angels to cardinals effect is real. And that's why Randall Gritchuk is so good now. All right. Tyler says, do you see any possibility of game day starter selection? Wait, wait, hold up.

Okay. Randall Gritchuk is really good now? Yeah, that happened during the Stomper season. I've been a little bit distracted. He is good. Good for him. We might actually mention him in a couple minutes. Oh, okay.

Great. All right. Tyler. I like Gr mention him in a couple minutes. Oh, okay. Hey, Bex. Great. All right. Tyler. I like Gritchick. You know me. I'm a big fan of Gritchick.

As a person who was – I'm a big fan of him because I thought he was unfairly used as a sort of fun fact foil for too long. And I thought dishonestly the old – he's the guy the angels took instead of mike trout or before mike trout yeah i was always a lie was never fair and always understated his potential as a legitimate prospect too because he was a week younger than mike trout and we forget that mike trout is very young and so gritchuk was too Alright Tyler says Do you see any possibility of game day Starter selection happening By using stat cast metrics during Warm up this would eliminate The conventional five pitcher rotation

As the decision is made on game day You could try comparing each pitcher's Ball spin rate etc during warm up To see what makes them effective During successful outings This would identify which pitcher has good stuff on a particular day. The thought of five or six pitchers competing for the starting job each day would be entertaining. I will say no, I don't see that happening because

you couldn't leave it up in the air until 15 minutes before game time. We, at times this season, we weren't sure who was going to start the next game for us. And it was often sort of dictated by whose turn it was in the rotation, because beyond a certain point, it's like impossible to switch that and tell someone you like, you don't want someone to go to sleep the night before not knowing that he's going to start or that he's not going to start you don't want him showing up at the park and doing his routine not knowing and i guess if this were the system and if this had always been the system then it would be easier from that perspective but barely though i mean barely yeah for one thing what five or six guys couldn't compete for the starting job each day at most

two could, right. Cause at most two are going to have the appropriate rest. And, uh, and, uh, and so then you,

you'd probably, I mean, it'd be like impossible, right? Wouldn't it be impossible unless you had all 10 of your pitchers available to start every day. But then you have the feeling that you probably wouldn't use them very efficiently. Because it would become disproportionately, I don't know. Yeah, it wouldn't work.

But there could be something to looking at how a guy is doing during warm-ups. And I'm working on something right now that's taking some time to come together but looking at whether there's a difference between starters on their good days and starters on their bad days in terms of command and movement and velocity and all those things because sometimes you see a guy Will throw two miles per hour Harder on one day Than he does the next or the previous And even after you adjust For you know

Park differences in the calibration Of stat cast or pitch fx Or whatever and Some guys will say they had their Command one day and they didn't the next You can see that happening. And maybe it's the same with movement sometimes. And so I'm curious about whether you can actually tell, like if you, you know, create a couple

buckets, like good starts and bad starts, is there a difference in the velocity and movement and command on those days? And so I'll find out whether that's the case. And then the next step will be to find Out whether you can tell Early on in a start whether A guy is off that day Whether he doesn't have his best stuff

That day and if you could You know theoretically if Often guys will say that They thought they had nothing in the bullpen and then They'll throw a no hitter or something I mean Not often but that will happen Or vice versa So I don't know whether pitchers think there's a correlation

But You could look and see Whether a guy who's throwing poorly In the bullpen or in the first inning Or something, whether that tells you anything About how he'll be throwing in the fourth inning And if it does Then you could keep that in mind as a manager.

You could say he doesn't have his best stuff today. I mean, theoretically, that's a thing that managers and pitching coaches are supposed to know and are supposed to recognize. That's like what their purpose is. That's why they're there, so they can look at the players and see how they're doing. Otherwise, you could just assume that he's always his average self. But maybe there's something that the stats could tell you early in a game about what a pitcher will be later in the game. And if so, then maybe you'd be

more reluctant or less reluctant to take him out at a certain point. So possible. I'm trying to get to the bottom of that it's slightly more practical but still impractical to think about this for a reliever right because you do have six relievers generally available every day and and if you use one they're not going to be you know unavailable the next day in most cases but But even still, you would probably still, I would say that, I mean, it'd be interesting to look at, like you're saying, it'd be very interesting to have some sort of bullpen data

just as a fun thing just to do, to play with. We should have done it in retrospect. We had the opportunity, Ben. Sort of. Sort of. We could have done it, but we didn't do it. But I think still, my guess is that at the end of it, you'd still find that the better decision would be to go with the guy

that you think all the time is better and the guy that suits the needs of the situation better rather than having each of them do an audition for you before every bullpen change. Plus, they'd be worn out throwing all those extra pitches. Mm-hmm. Yeah, right. Okay, Rob in Pasadena says,

Considering Mets starting pitcher Jacob deGrom is a converted college shortstop who has blossomed into a Cy Young candidate, does that make him a cardinal draft pick in the Mets system? His story sounds not unlike that of Trevor Rosenthal or other Cardinal surprises. Should other teams pursue college infielders with strong arms? Josh Tomlin. Your favorite. Was a college infielder without even that strong an arm.

Uh-huh. Yeah, they should. Yeah, well, there's that psychological bias called functional fixedness, which is the idea that we tend to see objects only in the way that they are traditionally used, and we don't imagine them in a completely different context, even if they could be used in the way that they are traditionally used. And we don't imagine them in a completely different context, even if they could be used in that way. Whatever we see them being used for is what we assume their best use is. So I'm sure that happens sometimes with baseball players,

where you see a college infielder with a strong arm, and maybe he has an arm that would be good enough for him to pitch, but he's an infielder. good enough for him to pitch but he's an infielder and you label him as an infielder and you never consider him as anything else so i'm sure there are guys like that and steven goldman former bp editor-in-chief used to say that teams should convert catchers more often that minor league catchers who hang around forever as just defensive org guys maybe some of them could be pitchers because catchers tend to have strong arms and maybe that would be a better use for them so yeah i'm sure there are guys it wouldn't work for every

college infielder with strong arms and you wouldn't necessarily have so much room on your farm system rosters that you'd want to do it as a wholesale strategy but but yeah if you have a guy who can't hit or can't play shortstop but he can make that throw really really well then probably should happen more often than it does i don't know how much more often. I wonder how long you would spend on a guy before you would be able to give up on him or conclude that he's worth the roster spot. If you had like sort of a, like if you turned your, your complex fields into like a conversion camp and you just always had a whole bunch of, uh, short stops and catchers coming in, I wonder how long you'd have to spend watching them, giving them some basic instruction,

and observing them before you could say, yes, this guy, or no, that guy. Like, what would you guess? Two weeks? Would two weeks be enough that you could say with 95% certainty which guys to keep and which guys to just let go? Yeah. Two weeks way too long

no then sure three weeks would be absurd but but 11 days would be uh you'd be missing everybody exactly two weeks exactly you've nailed it the two week the two week starter conversion Diet Okay Here's a question from Steve That is actually something that You were talking about Yesterday at Saber Seminar Two guys from Baseball Info Solutions Gave a presentation comparing the Full shift with a partial shift

They concluded that the partial shift was Essentially the same as no shift And that the full shift did indeed improve outcomes. I spoke with them afterwards, and we talked about how every player has some pull tendency on line drives and grounders, so yes, they believe it would be mathematically advantageous to shift every hitter, depending on the base-out status. First baseman would still be first baseman, but the rest of the infield would essentially be playing two half positions two versions of the same position even if all players coaches managers at all brought in bought into the concept of shifting would we see resistance for this reason any other reason wait what is this reason i'm sorry i missed what this reason refers to uh this reason i guess

refers to the fact that no infielder would ever be playing the traditional infield position they'd all be halfway between them all the time uh i don't think you'd see resistance for that reason i think that you see resistance i think that you see resistance for that you see resistance for well for three reasons one is that this is a unproven idea i think still and i trust the two guys from bis who gave a presentation doing this but also it's not like this is settled science probably yet this is interesting and maybe in two years we'll all agree with it 100 but right now it's just a presentation at a conference, right? Right. It's not even.

It's a conversation after a presentation at a conference. All right. So that's one reason. Two, I mean, look, all 30 managers cannot be privy to every conversation you have, Stephen. Sorry. Two, I think there is still a belief that may or may not be true and probably

is not true, maybe is a little true, but probably is not as true as baseball players think that hitters could adjust at any point and exploit this. And probably some can adjust better than others and some of it is just a matter of practice and habit

and some of it is a matter of will and some of it is a matter of ability but probably they don't adjust as well as baseball players and fans and everybody else thinks they could so there's still a fear that if you leave yourself too exposed eventually they will just uh you know uh take advantage of this right third thing is that i think that it is more psychologically draining for a pitcher to make his pitch get his weak contact and see it dribble through an empty hole than it is psychologically bolstering to have a pitcher

not make his pitch, give up a hard grounder or line drive up the middle and have a fielder standing there. And I, I think that pitchers still subconsciously, uh, uh, react more strongly to that dribbler. Um, I think it's that way for flares to right field as well. Incidentally, I think that whenever they make a pitch and they get bad contact and then it's a hit, they feel very annoyed, perhaps more frustrated, and they start looking for people to blame. So that's why it's a little bit more risky for a manager or for a defense to to put these shifts on because you're while the numbers would say probably that you pick up outs in the long run

uh to the pitcher who you have to work with and who you have to, you know, keep someone on your side because you're working with him in a lot of different ways, might not have quite the same full perspective. Yeah. I mean, you were talking about this recently just because of the intimidation effect or how it seems to screw with guys to see the shift on, particularly if they haven't seen a shift before and this would be shifting on everyone so a lot of those people would not have seen shifts before so maybe you'd get at least a initial advantage before they got used to the idea yeah i i don't know how much you want me to give away but like i think that if we were to do another season with the stompers we would strongly consider shifting everybody even if their spray charts didn't support the idea. Because it did seem like we saw worse swings, worse

approaches, and guys trying to deliberately do something when baseball hitting is so hard that it's challenging enough to just hit the ball hard somewhere to then hit the ball to a narrow 30 field 30 foot sliver of the field makes guys do kind of weird things yeah okay all right scott says how long do you think it would take for an mlb team to realize that a particular replacement level player let's call him ghani jones has a supernatural power that causes the team that carries him to a win the world series b reach the playoffs c play at 100 win regular season pace d never lose a game to be clear ghani jones doesn't need to be in the starting lineup to make use of this power but he has to be on the active 25 manman MLB roster, and whenever he plays, he puts up exactly replacement-level stats.

This reminds me a little bit of the Johnny Gomes question. Yeah, it's similar. So, never... Okay, so there's... Some of these things, like win a World Series, is not an extraordinary human achievement. Someone wins a World Series every year. And so, I mean, obviously, I'm just clarifying for people who don't have the luxury of rereading this question three times.

Win the World Series would obviously take a lot longer to see Ghani's effect because nobody would even realize that there was an effect. They would just think, oh, baseball team played baseball well. Never lose a game. What I'm basically saying is that it would take seven or eight years, arguably, before anybody even realized something supernatural was happening at all with the World Series one. I will say, though, that

we're assuming, I mean, Ghani's team will win the World Series every year, whatever team he is on. And that will be noticed. You know, like when Eric Hinsky was making the playoffs every year for a while, everyone joked about Eric Hinsky being a good luck charm. So if Ghani Jones won the World Series, you know, five years in a row, that would be a well-known thing. If he were on five different teams yeah right that would help if he were on the same team he not he quite possibly they wouldn't it

would just be like dynasty right right sport has dynasties so the question is how many at what point would it go from being a joke that people joke about this replacement level guy being like a good luck charm to people actually saying no we should sign this guy because his team always wins the world series yeah and just to finish the thought the never lose a game one it would take five it would take maybe seven or eight years before anybody realized anything supernatural was happening with the world series maybe 15 years i don't even know but the never lose a game it would take like a month and a half before somebody realized something supernatural was happening, right? Although it would be tough to attribute it to him.

No, right. I'm just saying the first question is how long before anybody realized that anything was happening. Then the next thing is how long would it take before they attribute it to Gani Jones. So I will say win the World Series. Let's go. Actually, A and B are out of order.

These are actually kind of out of order. So reach the playoffs. If Ghani's career lasts 15 years, the Braves made the playoffs basically 15 years in a row. The Yankees almost did. If you were changing teams a lot, it'd be more interesting.

But my guess is that if Gani Jones made the playoffs every year of his career with, say, four different teams, it would be acknowledged but never attributed to him in any supernatural way. He would at best, at best get the same kind of articles that Johnny Gomes has written about him. Yes, right. And at worst have the articles that, I mean, he'd be like David Justice, right? Yeah, well, a contender would maybe trade for him at the deadline, like the Royals just traded for Johnny Gomes because of his clubhouse aura or his experience or whatever but it's not like he would be making as much money as someone who guaranteed a playoff spot was he he wouldn't be making

superstar money he'd still be a paid like a replacement level player and he would hang on longer than the typical replacement player would because he would have this reputation as a good clubhouse guy. I think David Justice, from his second year on, only missed the playoffs once. Wow. And so now Ghani presumably has some sort of personality. I mean, if it's truly supernatural, if this is not even a guy who is like Johnny Gomes in any way,

then I don't even think you'd get that. I mean, Johnny Gomes, the real Johnny Gomes, earns this by being like Johnny Gomes and by people talking about how great Johnny Gomes is. I mean, Johnny Gomes was getting this reputation when he'd made the playoffs like twice. Like he got his reputation basically from that brandon mccarthy quote yeah so if he seemed like a selfish player who was not

contributing to clubhouse chemistry but he actually was it wouldn't be noticed if his wife was burning down his house uh-huh that's a david justice reference i i don't remember that you don't remember the david justice uh left eye house burning thing no hang on i think it was left eye hang on or wait was it yeah well i think it was hang on david justice huh who was it maybe it wasn't david justice who burned down whose house was it and Andre Risen? Burned down house. We're looking for an arsonist spouse of an athlete. It was. It was left eye burned down Andre Risen's house.

Oh, okay. And hang on. Did somebody date David Justice? Let's see. Someone did, I'm sure. Oh, I guess nobody dated David Justice. No one? He's been single his whole life. Poor guy. Justice, personal life. Oh, I guess nobody dated David Justice. No one? He's been single his whole life.

Poor guy. Justice, personal life. Oh, Halle Berry. Oh, okay. That's right. He was married to Halle Berry. Not an arsonist. No arson.

Restraining order, but no arson. Who filed the restraining order? She did, I am assuming. She did. Yes. Okay. the restraining order uh she did i am assuming yes okay and uh so i'm sorry confused my atlanta uh sports star uh celebrity wife yeah acrimonious split stories understandable apologies to everybody involved including including Johnny Gomes.

So now, I will say playoffs never. If it's truly a supernatural, playoffs never. Play at 100 to win regular season pace. 100 wins is a lot. I mean, how many teams have won it? Like what, like one or two teams have won 100 games in the last five years? Yeah, no one wins 100 games anymore. And so if you were...

Except the Cardinals will. Again, it would be partly dependent on whether you were changing teams. And if you were going to last place teams and they were suddenly playing at 100 win rates, that would help. If you were on the same team, I don't think that that player would have credit. I think it would always be seen as just, this is a dynasty. Now, imagine 15 years of one team winning 100 games a year. I don't even think the league would like that. You almost wouldn't want to get credit.

Like, Ghani would have to hide his power. He'd have to keep it under a bushel or whatever it is. What is that? Hide his light under a bushel basket? Hide your light under a bushel or whatever it is. What is that? Hide his light under a bushel basket? Hide your light under a bushel basket. You know, bushel baskets. Everyone's got one of those. Yeah, well,

the league might not like it, but teams would still want him. There'd still be a bidding war for him. There would be, yeah. And it would... But unless... It's hard to imagine. Supernatural things, since they're not real,

it would take tremendous evidence, I think, for us to jump to that conclusion. And I'm not sure that a 100-win regular season pace would ever seem notable enough for us to conclude that the physics of the earth had for the first time been breached right um although people conclude that the physics of the earth have been breached all sorts of times when they haven't been uh is there like every other supernatural occurrence so let me ask you this ben is there anything that has happened in your lifetime that you believe you your girlfriend me your mom or scott simon who asked this question

think happened anything supernatural anything supernatural yeah anywhere at any time we're five reasonable adults is there any supernatural event in the last 30 years that any of the five of us think has happened oh i see um no no so we we have our a priori that supernatural things don't happen right and so therefore if we saw team win 100 wins every year the narrative that we have of this earth would not be, let's find the supernatural effect, cause of this effect. We would say, oh, good team, Dynasty. The Celtics won eight in a row, you know? Yeah, right.

Yeah, so it would probably never happen. Okay. Yeah, so it would probably never happen. Okay. Now, win the World Series, though. We know that winning the World Series is a huge... I mean, it practically is a supernatural feat on its own. No matter how good you are, you're at best maybe one in four, maybe one in three to win a World Series going into it.

So not only would Ghani have to be on a team that was extremely good for his entire career, but he would have to win a series of coin flips that would at some point begin to look suspicious. Right. Probably we would say Ghani jones is cheating before we would say he has supernatural power but uh if he if he won 10 world series with three different teams and never lost one i think he would get credit by the 10th so what would his salary be in year 11 assuming he's still a replacement level stats.

Yeah, like maybe $6 million. Okay. We wouldn't be that confident. So you wouldn't totally buy it. No, we would not be that confident. What about year 15? With six different teams. Eight different teams.

Oh, eight different teams. And they all win the World Series. Yep. He's got to buy a third hand to fit all of his rings. By year 15, I think that he would get, someone would give him $30 million. I'd love to see the press conference at that signing. Because you'd have to, you'd just have to acknowledge. Yes we. We believe in the supernatural. He is a witch.

Yeah. We signed him. To play witch. Yeah it's true. You would. You'd have to. You'd have no explanation. Other than that.

You have. Reconsidered. The universe. Yep. And the funny thing too is that, that if this happened, it's so depressing to think that we could finally have evidence of,

like basically we could finally have evidence in our lives in front of our own eyes of a divine creator, of a supernatural effect that governs us all and we use it for signing a baseball player. It's the only way it shows up, and the only way we know how to use it

is winning a World Series by basically nefarious means. Yeah. Like, God is real. We're signing Ghani Jones. This is like the set- setup for season two of the leftovers i think is this happens and then a town has to deal with ghani jones's supernatural ability i don't yeah it'd be like if i don't know it'd be like if you if if god was if you know if god revealed himself in the ability to pick only crunchy apples at the supermarket. Like something just so small and pointless.

It's something that in a lot of ways undermines the very idea of a creator. He'd probably become a religious figure though. He would become, Gani Jones would be, there would be like Jonesists. There would be Jonesism. So let's, let me ask you this. Is he aware of his power and does he control his power?

No, I think it's just a latent ability that he just, it just happens. Weird things happen around him. And, and he doesn't, so like he, he's, he is, is he and so he's not in control of it but is he aware of it and does he have any kind of communication with this i think he'd only be as aware of it as the rest of us are he's just like the the rock that keeps tigers away yeah i think he'd he'd probably buy into it sooner than most people would because we like to think we're special and so he'd probably be happy to believe that he had a special world series winning ability but i'm gonna say that that no he he doesn't actively

control this it's just a a force that resides within him i mean this would this would change the world this would not only change baseball this would change the world. This would not only change baseball. This would change the world. Let me spin this question real quick. Who would believe in this power earlier? Ghani himself, Ghani's

teammates, Ghani's employer, or Ghani's beat writer? I'm going to say beat writer first. Yeah, absolutely. Teammate second. Yes. Ghani third.

You think Ghani third? I think it'd be too scary to think that you were like the son of God. Some people do think that with no evidence to the to that fact so i don't think willingly though i think people with busted synapses in their brain think that but nobody chooses does anybody choose to be divine i don't know every presidential candidate talks to god all the time about his policies that's not the same as being this people choose to believe in god of course although even that still i mean i'm not sure that you do choose to believe in god faith is it's a gift it's uh

you're you can't choose to believe anything. Right. It's always to some degree, I think, given or taken from you. But that's different than believing that you are God, that you are supernatural. Does anybody believe that who isn't crazy? Well, I don't know. I mean if look if let me ask you this i've had this conversation with with my dad um who uh yeah is a very faithful man and uh you know a man of great faith but i asked him if God showed up in his room one night and said, here I am. I'm God. Talking to you.

Like the first thing you'd think is to go to an asylum and get yourself medicated, right? It's one of the great curses of faith is that you also have some doubt that keeps you human and that if something did actually penetrate your world, our universe, and appear to you and only you, you would not believe it. No matter how strong your faith is, you would believe yourself to be a crazy person in the middle of a psychotic episode you would get medicated yeah you'd you'd probably go to dream before psychotic episode but after it persisted and that would that's kind of depressing i think that's kind of depressing and to me the idea that ghani could be blessed could be blessed

with this amazing ability this incredible, and yet probably be somewhere between terrified of it, terrified of the implications of it, unwilling to accept it, probably resistant to it. The last temptation of Ghani. Well, I wonder how it manifests. well i i wonder how it manifests like the does it do all of his teammates play better when they're on his team do all of the opponents play worse is there awful luck just every ball just bounces in the perfect place they play a game everything's totally normal and at the end they look up in the score it's eight to three ghanis right but we do analyses we'd have baseball prospectus articles analyzing how he does this how this ability manifests does he did players who play with ghani beat their projections and and do players who play against him fall short of them? So we know how it manifested somehow. Anyway, hope it happens.

Sounds fun. We haven't gotten to D, never lose a game. Oh, right. Okay. Because if a team never lost a game, there would undeniably, it would require explanation. You could not in any way say, say well there's always going to be outliers flip enough coins right no at at 80 if like even at like 30 or 40 games the numbers would be like you know the the the one in all the stars in the universe that that would happen, right? And by 50, it'd be like one in all the atoms in the universe that that would happen. And so you'd have to conclude that something either supernatural or unnatural is happening. And by unnatural, I mean somebody is cheating, some collusion is occurring to rig these games.

And again, I think presumably we would probably go with that, the earthly collusion explanation, because we're scared of the implications of the other. And so would Johnny be arrested? Would he be evicted from the game? Well, it would take... How would you discover that it was Ghani? Because it's a team thing. The team never loses. So you'd have 25 suspects.

So you wouldn't know that it was him the first season. Oh, plus you'd have... Potentially you'd have like the... I mean, if this is supernatural then it could be the the anybody anybody it could be anybody affiliated with the team it could be the the guy who fixes the sprinklers right yeah sure so you'd have to it'd be even harder to narrow it down there's no there's no reason to think that if god were going to put his hands on the scales of baseball, that he would use a player. He could use a blade of grass.

He could use anything as his. Yeah. So then it would take the second season where Ghani's team continues to win every game. And if he's still on the same team, then there'd be a bunch of players who carried over. So that would only narrow it down slightly. So you'd have to wait for him to, you know, wait a few years or change teams a couple times to the point where he is the only common link

between the undefeated teams. And then you could say it was him. And if Ghani were a rookie, then we were talking, I mean, I guess if Ghani were a rookie, then it might start the day he showed up. So that might be it. But let's say Ghani were a rookie, then it might start the day he showed up. So that might be it. But let's say Ghani were a rookie and he were on the same team for at least seven years before free agency. And his team has never lost, so they'll probably be able to afford to sign him.

But here's my question, Ben. If a player never lost, the sport would die, correct? How long would baseball as a league exist if one team never lost? Well, I think the commissioner would have to ban him from baseball in the best interest of the game. They wouldn't necessarily know it was him, though. They likely wouldn't know it was him. I mean, the league wouldn't exist for seven years

if one team won 1 1200 straight games no because right it would completely erode everyone's faith in baseball being a legitimate sport yes exactly so yeah we'd never we'd never get to the point of knowing that it was him because he would bring down baseball long before then yeah he'd be there'd be this amazing like 30 for 30 in like 2065 where a reporter tracks down ghani jones playing a slow pitch softball league and has never lost yeah good question scott are we finished with this question yeah Yeah, I think so. Okay. Play index? All right.

So we talked about how you have written about and we talked about how all the great prospects are coming up this year in a way that we've never seen before. And kind of along these lines, but actually different than this, is the other factor, which is that there are a lot of good rookies this year. Some of them are those same. There's some overlap. Sano and Russell and Peterson, Correa and Bryant are all great rookies and great prospects. and great prospects. But A, it seems to me that a very large number of these top prospects have hit, have turned, have been immediately very good in a way that we don't expect from prospects generally. And B, they are supported or they are alongside them are a number of other

rookies that were not nearly as hyped, have also been very good and so so i um i did a play index to find the number of players in each season that have produced x war and if you do a minimum of one war hitters with a minimum of one war this year who still have rookie status 2015 is third all-time with 25 and tied with last year which obviously is also third all-time with 25 which is really interesting because you would think that kind of years would be cannibalizing the years around them. If a lot of guys come up one year, well, probably some guys got held back the next year,

or the year before, and probably the next year there won't be as many to come up because a lot of guys came up. But back-to-back years at this extremely high number, which is fairly interesting to me. But then if you go to two wins, which is basically an average player, then the record is 15 in a year. And so far in 2015, there are 10. However, we have a month left. And if you scale that back to 1.6 wins above replacement, then you get 15. So there are 15 guys who, with decent Septembers, are in a position to do this. My guess is that by the end of September, we will have a new all-time record for one-win rookies and a pretty good chance that we'll at least tie the all-time record for two-win rookies.

And again, when we talk about this group, I think it's really exciting because these are elite prospects, elite athletes having immediately great careers, starts their career. And you're thinking, well, wow, with Chris Bryant and Carlos Correa and Lindor and Russell and Sano and Peterson, we might be watching this incredible group of Hall of Famers at the beginning of their career. However, looking at the years that are at the top of this particular play index already, what you find is that there is no guarantee that just because you have a lot of good rookies

that you have any sort of elite group. In 1987, the rookies that had two wins or more, there were 15, the most ever, Jerry Brown, Ellis Burks, Mike Greenwell, Chris James, Jose Lin, Dave Martinez, Mark McGuire, Matt Noakes, Luis Polonia, Benny Santiago, Kevin Seitzer, Terry Steinbeck, BJ Surhoff, Devon White, Ken Williams. Those guys, if you were collecting cards in 1987, you remember those guys were hot fire. Like these all seem like exceptional players, exceptional prospects. It was a very exciting time to have young players.

But McGuire is a borderline Hall of Famer on performance, but won't make the Hall of Fame. And after that, there really isn't a Hall of Famer in the group. Ellis Burks was very good. He qualifies as Hall of Very Good. I love Ellis Burks. I love Ellis Burks too. With a little bit of health, maybe.

But not a Hall of Famer. Devon White, Hall of Very Good, not a Hall of Famer. And after that, there's not really a consistent even all-star or great player in this bunch. Maybe Santiago, maybe Surhoff. If you go to 2006, which currently has the most 1.6 win seasons from rookies, because remember I looked at 1.6 to see who was in position to get to two this year. So 2006 has the most 1.6 win rookies. They had 18. And it's Josh Barfield, rookies. They had 18. And it's Josh Barfield, Melky Cabrera, Matt Diaz, Stephen Drew, Chris Duncan,

Andre Ethier, Kenji Jojima, Ian Kinsler, Nick Markakis, Russell Martin, Mike Napoli, Ronnie Paulino, Hanley Ramirez, Luke Scott, Dan Ugla, Shane Victorino, Josh Willingham, and Ryan Zimmerman. That's a better group, I think, than the 87ers. There's a number of consistent all-stars. But there's also not in that group any career where it was like, behold the greatness of this career. None is probably going to make the Hall of Fame unless Sabermetrics really, really rallies behind Ian Kinsler. Or Ryan Zimmerman somehow gets healthy and has a great 30s.

He was probably the one guy. When I do my 50% Hall of Fame probables every year, Ryan Zimmerman I think is still there because of his early war, but is in danger of falling off and is realistically nothing close to a 50% chance to make the Hall of Fame, I don't think. And so, you know, when you think about some of those guys were very good rookies and then immediately bad sophomores, even though they seem legit, like Josh Barfield. like Josh Barfield. Some had impressive early peaks like Marcakis, but then fell off. Some have had stretches of greatness and stretches of irrelevance like Russell Martin and Milky Cabrera and Steven Drew. And some just were pretty good for a while and then aged out at like 30 or 31, like Dan Uggla and Andre Ethier and Josh Willingham. So I think that probably this group of rookies is better, but I think that probably, I think we think that every time we see a group of rookies that produces a lot. I think we always think our rookies are the

best. Our prospects are the best. And it'll be interesting to see whether the 2015 uh rookies really do create uh produce a like a new kind of uh wave of hall of famers in 25 years or if they're just a bunch of rookies having good four months and that it doesn't mean anything more than that yeah i don't i don't know whether it will be as impressive in retrospect when we look at the names. I just know it's super impressive now, just looking at this year alone. And Rob Arthur wrote an article about this also, I think. I think he did like under 25 players or something and showed that more of the war is concentrated in that age group now than it has been for decades. So it's a strange season they're all strange seasons but in some way but this season is strange in many ways by the way i can't can't allow your pronunciation of matt diaz to

stand because matt diaz is the only diaz ever to pronounce his name diaz except except for maybe matt diaz senior probably also said dia, but those are the only two. Yeah, no, you're right. And you probably didn't notice this, but I knew I did have a faint recollection that it was not pronounced Diaz. And I didn't pronounce it Diaz. I adjusted because I knew it was different. And I pronounced it Diaz, thinking pretty good bet, safe bet.

I mean, it's not going to be pronounced Diaz thinking pretty good bet safe bet I mean it's not it's not going to pre-pronounce Diaz or yeah if you if you knew it was not Diaz you'd definitely go Diaz before Diaz exactly so I uh you caught me uh can I send you a video to watch a gif to watch sure this one just came across my internet and I'm curious to see how great you think this play is. This is Joe Panic on minor league assignment. All right. So I'm already primed by the tweet text which says Joe Panic is your god now. I'm watching the play. Donnie Jones had a very short time window as my god.

This is interesting. Okay. So he is running in the hole between first and second, deep on the outfield grass. And so he actually, he dives and he makes a play from his knees while he's still moving. No knees. He's not on his knees. He's on a knee. He's on his side. He's on his hip. There's a knee involved.

He's on his side. He's on his hip. There's a knee involved. And he uses the knee as kind of a fulcrum to propel the throw. So he short hops the first baseman, and it's an out. And it looks pretty good, but I will say that he overran the ball. No, Ben. Yeah? The first baseman tipped the ball.

Oh, I see. Okay't i couldn't make that out it's a it's milb.com so it's the first standard definition video i've watched in several years except for other milb.com footage so okay so there's a deflection by the first baseman and that's why it looks like he overran the ball and he had to reach back. Okay, well, that's really good. That's a nine and a half. Yeah, I think so too. And I think maybe without having realized that it was deflected,

you maybe didn't realize. But, I mean, you have to think about this. He's getting ready to dive forward for this ball. And at the last second with a tip, he has to fall straight back, slide like he's sliding over the hood of his cherry red Camaro and reach back, grab a ball that is now still good speed. I mean, that's not an easy bare hand just on its own. That ball's still moving. He picks up the ball kind of on a little hop as his head bangs the ground, it looks to me. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So he took a header and then does very quickly flip his body back up and make an athletic throw at an unusual angle at a quick low trajectory.

Almost impossible to imagine that throw being accurate, and it was. To a pitcher who is running to cover the bag and was not yet at the bag. So had to throw to a target that wasn't there yet. I'm going nine and a half too This to me is This to me is better than every Play that Involved a guy running into the stands This year for instance Better than the Arenado better than the Donaldson

And I just got a Facebook notification on my phone From someone who posted this video In the Effectively Wild Facebook group Six minutes ago so I was going to say that I would Post this there But it is already posted there Thank you for bringing that to my attention

Okay this has been a Long show but we are making up For no shows This is a make up call of a podcast So we have to do at least one question Following the play index segment That is traditional And I like this question from Michael Every year some sport has a playoff controversy about what teams do or do not

deserve their place in the playoffs and whether or not the playoff seating is fair. The NL Central is creating this conversation, which will be argued until the playoffs begin. I thought of a simple solution that probably has some issues, but I have yet to see suggested in any sport, and I don't know why. Why do we not let the best team pick their opponents? Is there some obvious issue with this that I cannot see? The wildcard teams are the two teams with the best record that do not win a division, currently Pirates-Cubs, and of course the Pirates are at least a few games ahead of the Cubs, which is where the discussion of the unfairness of the system comes up. They play the wildcard game, and the winner joins the division winners in the divisional series. The Cardinals are then able to

select if they would like to play the Mets, Dodgers, or the wildcard winner without an ace. It would even give us a motivation narrative, as the selected team can take offense to being selected as the weakest team. I would love to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons of this approach and why it never comes up in conversation. basketball playoffs, I think this is always something that seemed to make sense to me. And maybe even in March Madness, it would make sense. And maybe here it would make sense. I think that the take offense idea, I'm not sure teams would want to pick a team, just knowing that whatever team they pick is going to have extra motivation to beat them for being picked like there's if you believe strongly in the power of motivation as most of these guys do and if you believe strongly in the danger of bulletin board material as most of these guys do they're almost in a no-win situation like you'd have to give them the right to pick no pick.

Spin a wheel. Give me whoever. I think to some degree they would also... Okay, and then there's one other thing. There's another reason that I think teams maybe wouldn't want to do this. In my experience, baseball players never talk openly about their opponents being good and they never talk openly about their opponents being bad. Either way, it's just a psych out. If it's good, now you're intimidated.

Now you're threatened by how good they are and you're in a defeatist position. If you talk about how bad they are, now you're not taking them seriously and you're not as alert and aware and focused as you should be. And so there's never any acknowledgement that the team on the field is any better or worse than the team that was on the field the day before. After a game, there is. You can talk about how good a pitcher was or you can talk about how disappointing it was that you didn't beat that horrible team or whatever. But you never do it during a game or really in advance of a game. And so I think that to some degree, teams would rather not acknowledge that some teams are stronger than other teams.

Now, that doesn't matter to me. It doesn't matter to the viewing audience or to fans. And I think this would be very pleasing to the fans uh and i think it is more fair and i think it's a great idea and i support it wholeheartedly now ben are there practical reasons that you can see like involving travel or whatever well i suppose there must be right except that often these things are decided at the last minute as it is, right? It's not like you lay the groundwork for a postseason series weeks in advance or something. I mean, teams often don't know who they're going to play until a couple days before they play them.

So there's already lots of uncertainty built into the current system. So I'm not sure that there are scheduling issues or travel issues that don't already exist. It seems like there should be, but I'm not sure. So I like it. Good. All right. Well, if the question is why don't people talk about this more, I don't know the answer. I think they should talk about this more. It must be so disappointing for people sometimes who email us and say, why not this? And we say,

yeah, why not this? And then there's a moment of silence and everybody realizes that nobody on this phone call has any power. Right. But if he just wants people to talk about it, then we've fulfilled his wish because we talked about it. It's in the conversation. It is now in the conversation It wasn't before and now it is Alright Another playoff question Are we running long?

We are running long but we wanted to run long Joshua says the Royals greatest strength Is their late inning bullpen And for the Blue Jays it is their offense If those teams were in a playoff series Would it be conceivable to think That the Royals may never get to use their bullpen Since the Jays would probably crush

Their inferior starting pitching And then he suggests Do you think the Royals should use a different pitcher Every inning? Should they start with their bullpen To compensate for this? But just the basic question Because it's almost time Where we start talking about Playoff series and handicapping playoff series,

which is always kind of anticlimactic, I think, because usually in baseball, there aren't such great matchup insights that it really makes it all that interesting. Usually you just come down on the side of the best team being slightly more likely to win. And sometimes there's a way in which a team's strengths could exploit another team's weakness, but it's not usually dramatic. So in this case, do you think there's something to it? If the Royals' greatest strength, I don't know that that's their greatest strength, maybe their greatest strength is their defense, and that is in effect all the time. their greatest strength maybe their greatest strength is their defense and that is in effect all the time but if one of their great strengths is their bullpen and one of their weaknesses is

their rotation which is probably true although less so now that they have johnny cueto does this favor the blue jays more than you would think just based on their respective teams projections or winning percentage or whatever measure of team quality you would use. And if the Blue Jays' other great strength is that they hit the ball over the wall, which you can't defend against, that might be another place where the matchup advantage actually is relevant. Yeah, I think it's probably a worthwhile thing to talk about. I don't, I don't, so last year during the playoffs, I wrote about how one reason that the Royals looked so

much better than we thought they were and that they thought they looked all year is that the Royals, when they have a lead are a legitimately great team. They, um, they get to do all these sort of things that, um, that make it likely that they will win and that turn them into kind of a better team than when they're losing. If they're down 4-0 in the sixth, they're not a very good team anymore. Just in terms of the actual personnel that they're likely to use on the field and that you're likely to see. And I don't know whether that is also true this year. I don't know whether

that is also true this year of them. I mean, it probably is to some degree. They have mostly the same players and they still have mostly the great bullpen and the great defense and the great base running and the great tactical advantages late in games. And so perhaps, I mean, yeah, we sort of hypothesized on this show that the Royals were one of the few teams in history that really gave truth to that importance of scoring first, Kennard. And I'm not sure how well they'll be matched up against the Blue Jays to win the first six innings, for instance. So it seems plausible. I'm also not so dumb that I'm going to say anything bad about the Royals' chances at this point in my life.

I've done that a lot. You're that idiot who personally generated the Pocota projection. My first ever appearance in the New York Times. Yeah, well, so it makes sense. It's intuitive that the Royals have a greater advantage relative to other teams in the late innings when they have a better bullpen than other teams than they do in the early innings when they don't really have a better rotation than other teams and might even have a worse rotation than other teams. So the idea is that the Blue Jays will get out to a lead and the Royals will either not be

able to use that bullpen or they'll already be losing when they use the bullpen. And therefore you are taking away, to some extent, one of their greatest strengths, then it makes sense. I don't know whether it's enough to swing the expected winning percentage more than five percentage points or something. But it makes sense. And I have very few matchups that i'm like particularly interested in seeing i have very few sort of potential postseason series that i think will be necessarily more entertaining i mean the series that's entertaining is the one where through no predictability whatsoever there are close games right and that happen to go extra innings. Or the one where Randall Gritchuk is playing. However, Royals, Blue Jays,

you just hear those words and you start drooling a little bit, right? Yeah, that's going to be fun. That's a really fun series just as an abstract possibility. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. All right, last question. Dodgers Cardinals too. yeah well that's we've seen it we've seen it well see i'm the opposite yeah no i'm the guy who likes the same series every year i feel like they build on each other yeah that's true if it's the same players in a in a

short period of time i think that's true yeah okay last Okay. Last question from Mark in St. Louis, probably a Randall Gritchuk fan. I was listening to episode 718, and I was reminded of a thought that has occurred to me recently. The ever-growing celebrations on the field seemingly have divided the sensibilities of the older fans and the younger fans, white fans and non-white fans, maybe, and it seems the Sabermetric fans and the Chadwick-era stats fans. Maybe I'm totally wrong here, but it seems that most of the writers and podcasters of the sabermetrician class support, or are at least neutral, on the ever-growing celebrations on the field. The two names that readily pop into mind are Jonah Carey and Will Leach. This is curious because sabermetricians are not especially young, and one would think their dispassionate vorp-heavy take on baseball would lead to poo-pooing Jose Nobody's walk-off single celebration in the

ninth inning of game 45. Furthermore, many of baseball's old guards still clings to the belief that sabermetricians don't really watch baseball and have no idea about the sports grim realities. This leads me to think that sabermetricians are, dare I say, overcorrecting and trying to show the world that they are fun guys too and actually like to see Keith, who usses his name, toss his bat on a long fly ball to the warning track. What say you? I would say that sabermetricians or sabermetric-leaning people probably are younger, skew younger than the opposite obviously not a universal rule

but if you're comparing a sabermetric sort of writer to a cranky columnist who complains about celebrations then i would say there's still an age gap there although there won't be forever but i i guess it's he says it's that we you, look at Vorpevi take on baseball and therefore we wouldn't like the celebrations. I would say if anything, it's the opposite, that we kind of don't mind the superficial stuff as long as the production is there. So you don't care if a guy celebrates celebrates you care if he hit a home run home runs are valuable it is something to celebrate and we care about the performance and don't really stress over the rest of it maybe which is i don't that's i mean it's there's obviously a big gap in how people think about hall of fame candidates and and peds and that

sort of thing and maybe there is some over compensation or over correcting going on there i don't i don't know but that it seems to me is the same sort of attitude it's like the production matters we care about the production these guys helped win baseball games and therefore they deserve to go in the hall of fame even if they took some stuff that everyone was taking at the time and was hardly even discouraged at the time etc etc but the numbers are good so they deserve to be there and they were important and it's a museum and you would want to see them reflected there and so it's sort of a similar thing i think yeah i think that uh one of the one of the things that sabermetrics is most uh defined as being against and that led to the i mean basically one

of the founding problems of baseball or perceived problems of baseball that sabermetrics was trying to correct was seeing these players as part of some great morality struggle where certain adjectives would get used to justify players and other adjectives would be used to bury players, even when those adjectives didn't have anything necessarily to do with performance, because they were proxies for a right way to live and a right way to play the game. And so that's why, to some degree, I think sabermetricians, sabermetric writers, tend to be against scolding of any sort. If you're scolding a player based on his behavior rather than what he plays, you're probably not going to find yourself very popular on Twitter, right? At least in our corner of Twitter. You'll probably find yourself very popular in the much larger world of Twitter that I

don't see as much. So I also don't have any problem with on-field celebrations. I don't think that it's bad for the game. I don't think that it's a slow, slippery slide toward being the NFL in the 80s or whatever people think celebrations represent. And I also don't think there's anything wrong with the NFL in the 80s. I will say, though, that I'm never entertained by them, and I don't need them retweeted

And I don't think that they're worth gifts In 90% of cases Bat flips are not actually interesting You need to step back and think about this They're just not that interesting It's funny because we were showing the Stompers some highlights A few days ago I made a highlight video for them

And there's one player on the Stompers some highlights a few days ago. I made a highlight video for them. And there's one player on the Stompers who flips his bat. It's not, he's a Japanese player. It's your standard NPB bat flip. It's not an ostentatious one or anything. It's just sort of a reflexive toss. And that got the biggest mentions, the most mentions. It got the biggest applause or reaction from the assembled stompers every time this player did his minimal bat flip it got laughs and cheers yeah i know i don't i don't get it i uh i i support the sort of like uh antler things that guys do to the dugout after they get a hit. I also am not entertained by them. They do it for themselves.

And if they're doing it for me, it's a great big fail and you can stop. But I don't think they're doing it for me. I think they're doing it because they want to celebrate with their team and they want to show how excited they are and how when they're on first, they're still part of that team and that they want that offense to keep going. So I'm pro-Antlers, just not pro-Antler gifts. I'm pro-Bubbles. I'm not pro-Bubbles gifts.

What about Gerard Dyson's dance on third base in the playoffs last year? Pro. Pro, yeah. But I wouldn't want to see – gerard dyson is a special person but gerard dyson can there are some that i like look what the other day for instance uh the rays big league the guy who hit his first big league home run you know like they all ignored him they actually all got in a huddle i don't know if you saw this they all got in a huddle and just sort of stood there silently in a huddle and then he went around the dugout high-fiving imaginary teammates he had this big awesome stupid grin on his face like he was just

really excited to get a high five from an imaginary teammate uh and i thought that was well executed yeah and i i do like a well executed uh piece of color in baseball but i think our standards for color our standard it's like the whimsy watch right that hang up and listen does i think that our standards for what is colorful are so low because we're used to this gray right that people way overreact like it is like the gif of the bat flip is like the twitterers bat flip it's like yeah a flip flip the bat you know like they're flipping their bat by gifting it yeah when one day everyone bat flips it won't be notable But when no one bat flips And when bat flip comes punishable By beaning Then it's notable

So anyway go for it But be funnier That's pretty much my whole philosophy on life Go for it but be funnier Alright Okay well this was a three podcast Long podcast So hopefully People are happy

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