Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 728: The Mercurial Matt Moore

Episode Date: September 18, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Matt Albers and baseball cards, then talk to Adam Sobsey about Matt Moore and the dependability of top pitching prospects.

Time, time, here the girls, time Ogle Harbor and the city Time, one more, by current time To help paralyze that tiny little Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick Good morning and welcome to episode 728 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. Brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com, which I just looked at just 40 seconds ago in preparation for a tweet

that I intend to send into the world while one of you is talking. I have to wait for another thing to happen in another game that's happening. However, when you don't know it, I'm going to be engaging in social media. I'll know it. I follow you. Yeah, you'll know it.

But anyway. All right. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland. Hi, Ben. Hello. And we're joined

as well today by Adam Sobsey who's one of our favorite writers, one of my favorite writers who we've had on before and who, can I say

about your book? Absolutely. And who is working on a book right now about the time that Chrissy Hine ran an independent baseball team. We're merging both of our books.

Neither book is quite to the word count that it is supposed to be at. So we're just going to join forces and do a single book. The Akron Stompers. Yes. So anyway, Adam also has written a lot for Baseball Perspectives and is an annual contributor to the annual.

And Gretlund, Gretlund contributor. Oh, is that right? What did you write for Gretlund? Whoever will have me. Let's see. I wrote a thing about the time clock experiment in AAA and AA. I wrote about Dan Johnson because every year I have to write about Dan Johnson. And I wrote about Matt Bushman, a pitcher nobody's ever heard of because he spent his entire career in the minors.

And he came back through Durham. He's one of these AAA vagabond types. And I wrote about him last month. Awesome. Okay. Hang on. You didn't – I was supposed to hang on to some tweet. I got caught in the middle of the tweet.

Happens to the best of us. All right. So we have you on today to talk about Matt Moore. First, I want to do a quick banter with Ben, if you can sit patiently. And then I have a quick banter for both of you as well. Ben, I know we gave the Webb-Albers update a couple days ago, but I didn't realize until I was looking on Play Index today that there's only one pitcher in all of baseball this year

that has a lower ERA and more innings than Matt Albers this year. How about that? You'd think that guy would get a save. You'd think. You'd think one. You'd think that being that guy, the guy ahead of him has saves and he's not a closer. He's got like 13 saves and he's not a closer. He came very close.

I think it was yesterday someone mentioned in the Facebook group Matt Albers pitched the eighth in a one-run game, and he got a hold, and then David Robertson came in for the save and blew it. Should have just left Matt Albers in. Yeah, I don't know that that's close. I mean, Robertson was going to pitch the whole time. Save adjacent. He was one inning away. Yeah, I mean.

Which is like an infinite number of innings away but right well if you are the eighth inning guy you will absolutely get i mean i would guess what would you guess that of i guess not everybody keeps the eighth inning job but if i gave you a pool of 50 guys who spend an entire year in eighth inning guy roles you know obviously not in one year but over the course of a few years of those 50 how many do you think get at least one save like 47 yeah when i when i wrote my article about web albers i i basically did that i set some innings minimum over a certain number of years and they were the only two who had pitched that number of innings

and had not gotten a save. Yeah, the guy ahead of him in innings slash ERA is Wade Davis, who's an eighth inning guy, and he has 13. I mean, someone gets, you know, your closer gets hurt, your closers need a day off, whatever. So yeah, Matt Albers hasn't had a whole year as nathan again but this is getting dangerous although he hasn't been that good either like he's been he like i said the thing about the era that's good but you know he's basically been normal matt albers which is absolutely good enough to get a save almost all the time but like his fip is worse than it was in 2014 worse than although

that was a short year worse than it was in 2013 so anyway there's your WebAlbers update the quick one I want to ask you both as the faves roll in I'm refreshing I'm getting the real time numbers we're up to 8 retweets and 4 favorites this is for 4 people this is their favorite

tweet ever really good job by you I should just share For four people, this is their favorite tweet ever. Really good. Good job by you. I should just share this with everyone. 16 extra inning games this year took less time than tonight's Angels-Twins game, which is in the bottom of the sixth. How about that?

Play index. If I ever favorited anything, I would give you one. Promo code BP. $30 for a year subscription. And you can make four people happier than they've ever been in their entire life. Yep. All right. This was an email that somebody sent us, but we didn't get to it, and I was curious about both your answers. Do you have an all-time favorite baseball card year slash set?

Nope. Okay. I like the wood panel ones whatever those were 87 like 87 tops i think 88 yeah 87 i never collected a set like i never i don't know if i really bought a box of it and collected all of them i just i had a i had binders with many many plastic sheets and I would organize them by team, and they were all different years, and I never really internalized what brand or year anything was. who you got every card. If your friend had it, then you had dibs to trade for that guy. You just sort of had the right to acquire any

of this guy. Because me and my best friend each declared a guy. Actually, we declared two guys at two different points. So at that point, pretty much any time I got his guy, I had to trade him to him. And any time he got my guy, he had to trade him to me. The problem is that he was a smart eight-year-old he picked uh Nolan Ryan the first time and then Ken Griffey Jr. the

second time and I was a dumb one and I picked Will Clark and Bobby Thigpen I remember having a Daryl Boston card I was really fond of. Daryl Boston with the white socks, and he had giant glasses on, like aviator style, but not dark. And it was one of those wood panel ones. I don't know what year that was. It was 87. I mean, yeah. Well, the wood panel cards were Topps 87.

But you would have been two. Yeah, I bought old cards. I just, I bought all kinds of cards. I bought them. Oh, this is a good card. I have this card. Yeah, these are some good looking sunglasses. Yeah.

In the middle of a game. Yeah. Middle of the game wearing a helmet and aviators. Yeah, that one stuck with me. I used to just buy shoeboxes of just assorted cards, and so I would get some that were several years old, and so I was collecting in the early 90s or whatever, and I guess that was in one of them. Daryl Boston must be the only guy who has ever been a Boston White Sox. You should tweet that. Adam? This is somewhat goofy, but the only card currently on display in our house is a baseball card of Virgil Vasquez,

who has, I believe, less than half a season of Major League time. Virgil played for the Durham Bulls briefly. I have a Virgil Vasquez card from the New Britain Rockcats. Virgil came through Durham on his way from, I believe, Rochester to Florida, where he was going to propose to his girlfriend and stayed with us. And as thank you, he gave us a signed card, and it rests proudly on our mantelpiece. I'm looking at it right now it says adam and heather thank you for sharing your kindness with me much love virgil so did he just have a stack of those with him i don't really know he just hands them out to anyone who does

him a kindness carries them around the way the rest of us carry around our business cards here let me give you my card yeah like just like just like that. That and the only other card I'm haunted by is Doc Medic. Because some sometime in the dark ages of my childhood, I had a complete collection of cards that was missing Doc Medic. And I tried really hard to get it and never did. I think it was a Donruss set. Yeah, you so whenever I hear that name, I think about my missing card. that yeah so whenever i hear that name i think about my missing card wow your wife for like uh your birthday some year should just really get you that card yeah i'm gonna tell heather yeah i also remember being fond of my tom hanky cards because i i just didn't buy it that that guy was an all-star. Twice.

He was good. Yeah? Yeah. What's wrong with that? Just look at him. Also wearing aviator-style glasses. Yeah, I guess it was the glasses. Anyone who had those glasses.

Oh, yeah. Neither of you answered the actual question, which is a favorite brand in year. It was the glasses. Anyone who had those glasses. Oh, yeah. Neither of you answered the actual question, which is a favorite brand and year. I would say I'm particularly fond of 1990 Leaf and 1988 Fleer. All right. That doesn't mean anything to me. We'll do at least one guy. Some guy is furiously yelling favorite, favorite, favorite at his podcast right now.

Because that was his favorite thing. All right. So we have Adam on because we want to talk about Matt Moore. And Adam, among other things, Adam has covered the Durham Bulls, the Rays AAA team, for a while and wrote a really wonderful, beautiful book about a year doing that. Remind me the name of that beautiful, beautiful book. It's called Bull City Summer. Exactly. And I have endorsed it on this show before. It is one of the most pleasing baseball reading experiences you could possibly imagine.

So go find it and get it and either enjoy it over the course of years or read it in one two-hour rush of ecstasy as I did. So Matt Moore is back. He is pitching. And I initially was going to have him on, add him on, because Matt Moore had an okay first start back. He looked quite good for a few innings, and then he collapsed in like the fourth against the Yankees, I think,

in his first start back. And then I thought, oh, well, when that didn't work, I thought, oh, we could have him back, because Matt Moore had a horrible, horrible, horrible second start back a couple of, well, I guess five days ago in which he allowed eight runs in five innings against the Red Sox. Four homers. Four homers. And then that didn't work out. And now we're having him on tonight when he just had one of the best starts of his career. He went seven innings, allowed two hits, walked nobody, struck out nine, threw 93 pitches, 67 of them were strikes, total dominance over the Baltimore Orioles.

And I guess that gets to the point, which is that I wanted to have you on because I don't know what Matt Moore is at this point. And you got to see him not a ton, but briefly when he was in Durham this spring. Not this spring, this summer. And in particular, there was one start that stood out there, which was a game. And who, I forget, who were they playing? Columbus. Columbus. And he, what, struck out 16 and walked one?

Is that it? That's right, in six innings. Yeah, in six innings. That's right, in six innings. Yeah, in six innings. The best part of the box score is ground outs and fly outs, which are 0-1. I don't know where the 18th out came from, but maybe it's caught stealing or something like that. There was a line drive.

There you go. Oh, there was a caught stealing. It was a caught stealing. In fact. There was a line drive. There you go. Oh, there was a cot stealing. It was a cot stealing. In fact, it was a cot stealing. So Matt Moore, of course, he had his Tommy John surgery last year. He came back this year. He was quite poor, really horrifyingly poor with the raise after some sort of so-so rehab appearances in Charlotte and Durham. Horrible with Tampa.

They sent him back down for August. And while he was there, it looked kind of like he had put it back together. He had five starts. He had a 3.3 ERA. He struck out 43 in 30 innings and walked only eight and held opponents to a 207, 273, 333 line. And I kind of had got it in my head that this guy was probably back. And then the okay start, the horrible start, and now this great start.

And Matt Moore is incredibly interesting because it seems like he's sort of right on the cusp of being one of those guys who becomes known for being a great failure alongside a great success, like the guy chosen ahead of Michael Jordan kind of a situation. He was part of that class of prospects before 2012, him, Trout, and Harper, where he was ranked by some ahead of those two, but certainly alongside them in almost all of the rankings, and has never either quite looked like you would give up on him, but has certainly never looked like he's on the cusp of putting together a great, amazing career.

So, since you saw that game, part of that game against Columbus, and since you saw him, I presume, in 2011? Yes. I wanted to just get your thoughts about Matt Moore's career to date well I think part of what you see in AAA as opposed to the major leagues is that in AAA you can get away with bad command you can get away with stuff that's missing in the zone which is why he can strike out 16 guys in six innings and that's in my limited experience, just talking to guys that come through Durham, either Bulls or guys they play against that have had big time surgeries, Tommy

John and otherwise. The main thing that they tell me is, yes, the velocity takes a while to come back, but what takes longer to come back is the command. And it's not to downplay what he did against Columbus. If you strike out 16 AAA hitters in six innings, you've got stuff. And that's never been the issue with Moore at all. I mean, he's got a lot of life on that fastball, but he threw a hundred pitches against Columbus, and I wouldn't be surprised if 75 of them were fastballs that night. That's pretty much what he was working, and he could tell it was working, so he just kept throwing it and you go up to the major leagues you know as the gap between the majors and triple a keeps widening you discover

that stuff that was working down there just doesn't work up here you either have to hit your spots or you have to mix pitches better and when more came up here in 2011 from double a he was basically a three pitch pitcher and i think he pretty much still is and starters that only have three pitchers have to be either they have to have two of them be plus plus pitches you know like archer has for the raise or they have to be perfect with their command and their location and i i think what we may have just seen until tonight i didn't see the start tonight or i should say last night since we're on the air tomorrow morning, is that you come up from AAA having kind of gotten away with iffy command, and then you get up to the majors and that stuff just doesn't wash.

And a red flag always goes up for me when I see a guy giving up four homers in his start because that suggests to me he's throwing strikes that are just not good enough strikes. Yeah, you say he's pretty much still a three pitch pitcher. He's actually, since he came back up, uh, I don't know, again, I don't know about the Thursday night start either. Uh, but he had pretty much junked the change up when he came back. And that was a pitch that he had previously. There was a, uh, above average pitch when he came up and that at various points in his career, he's thrown 25, 30% of the time. He's throwing it, you know, five ish pitches out of a hundred at this point

and throwing the curve more, but he isn't exactly the guy who was pitching in 2011, just in terms of repertoire. He has kind of gotten to that point where he's had to tinker, where he's tried to find things. He's introduced a cutter and then junked the cutter. He went with a sinker for a little while that he hadn't really been throwing. And now that's pretty much back gone again. And now he's kind of leaning back on the curve. But it does seem like he's a pitcher who doesn't quite know himself or what he has at this point relative to when he came up and was a very sort of, in some ways, very simple, very consistent pitcher. He was pounding strike zone with fastballs. He had

easy velocity. He could throw 96 like he was playing catch. And then he would, you know, go with the curve and the changeup. And they were sort of true secondaries that were just very good. And now he seems like a kind of guy who has to sort of search for things. Well, yes. The funny thing being that I think he knew exactly what kind of pitcher he was when he, at least when I first saw him in 2011, he was actually quite mature for his age. He was very even keeled on the mound. He knew what his three pitches were. He knew how to mix them up. The second time through a lineup, he'd start pitching backwards and really didn't need more than three

pitches to succeed here in AAA. And as I recall in 2012, although some of the peripherals weren't outstanding, he had a good year up there in the majors. It's just that you get derailed by a surgery this major. And when you you first come back the velocity is not there I mean when when he first came back I think he was throwing about 90 91 and this is a guy who was routinely around 94 95 before that and and I I think for a guy like Matt he comes back without the velocity without the command and he has to say to okay, I know the pitcher I am or was, but right now I'm not that pitcher. I've got to adjust on the fly. And that's extremely difficult to do, especially in the majors. And quite probably the notion to send them back down to Durham in,

I think it was July, was really good just to say, go back down there, wait for some of your velocity to come back, which it did. He was hitting 94 regularly in that 16 strikeout game. And get yourself back up to speed, both literally and in terms of your ability to just stand on a major league mound and deal with getting hitters out. Because he's always been, even when he was 22 when I first saw him, a very mature pitcher, really steady on the mound. And like you said, it was easy velocity. And when you don't have velocity that's that easy anymore and you have to work harder to produce it, it changes everything. So at the time, those prospect rankings didn't seem surprising at all from what you had seen?

seem surprising at all from what you had seen coming out of 2011 i i saw a guy who was who was at his best an electric pitcher you know he he broke the durham bulls record for strikeouts with that 16 strikeout game and he broke his own record in 2011 he struck out 13 in eight innings in i think july of 2011 in a in a great pitcher's duel, actually, between, speaking of great prospects who we've lost track of, between him and Mike Miner, who put on a total show between the two of them. And he got called up at the end of 2011, went up there, did really well.

As I recall, had a really good start in the playoffs against the Rangers, and just looked like a guy who probably wasn't coming back. And with the stuff he had, I didn't see any reason why we should ever expect him to come back unless he got hurt, which is, of course, exactly what happened. I mean, hindsight being what it is, of course, Harper, Trout, Moore, that was unfortunate. But also, there is no injury that happens so routinely to position players as happens to pitchers that can take them away for a year or a year and a half as quickly as Tommy John surgery can. You pop that UCL and you're just wiped out for that long. And maybe we need to start taking that into account more when we make our annual prospect picks.

That at any moment, your favorite pitcher can be gone for a year and a half. But at the time, he was doing everything that suggested to me. That guy's a frontline starter for the Rays for quite a while. And then they signed him to, was it a five-year deal? And 14 million bucks or something like that. It was a cheap deal. But I thought, well, the Rays are going to get more than their money's worth out of that. Yeah. He has team options through 2019. And even in 2019, it's like $10 million. So he

basically just has to pitch to be more than worth that. He doesn't necessarily have to be the ace he was expected to be. But it's interesting because the Rays have a whole rotation really now of guys who are in his age range and have not been coming off a very serious injury and have been fairly effective this year so I don't know what that means for their expectations for him or the demands that will be placed on him. Obviously, they would be better with a Matt Moore who pitches like he just did in his last start, but I don't know where he even ranks on the hierarchy of young, raised starters. Especially with Blake Snell rocketing through the system the way that he is,

it's been very instructive to watch him down here pitching in the same rotation with Moore and being quite a bit better except for that 1-16 strikeout game. Both lefties both have plus velocity. Both don't look like they're working very hard to generate it. And the Rays surely know if Matt Moore can't do what he could do, we've got this other guy who also throws left-handed and has a reasonably similar arsenal. Snell actually throws four pitches,

but there he is waiting to take the spot. I mean, that's been the one thing that's kept the Rays viable for all these years. There's always another pitcher in AAA. This guy was basically as perfect as a pitching prospect could be. You saw him. we all saw the numbers He had something like a 1.3 ERA in AAA

He had something like 70 strikeouts in 15 Or in 50 innings in AAA before he got called up He was perfect And yet, you know, it didn't take that much It's not like these were extraordinary circumstances He came up, pitched, was healthy for a while and was fine, but not like the greatest pitcher in the league by any means. And then he got hurt and he got hurt in a way that a third of pitchers get hurt. And then he came back and it's not like he's throwing 86. It's not like he had some sort of

labrum thing and never came back. He rehabbed, came back. He's throwing 93-94, which is pretty good. He's got a good pitcher's body. He's left-handed. He throws hard. He's got multiple pitches. He's a perfect – or he was a perfect pitching prospect, and it went wrong in a very banal way.

So I guess having seen it, do you think that a number one prospect, a kind of worldwide global number one prospect can ever be a pitcher or by definition, are pitchers just incapable of it? And I, before you try to answer that, am going to talk for a lot longer. Have at it. So I mean, everybody knows tin staff. There's no such thing as a pitching prospect. That pit the acronym that baseball prospectus made famous some years back and that has had a lot of truth to it and also is sort of too simplistic and probably best to ignore a lot

of times. And I've looked at how pitching prospects, in fact, have become much more reliable over the last few years, that the group of pitching prospects in any given year seem to be producing more in their first six years than the pitching prospects before them. And whether that's the pitchers are more reliable or whether it's that evaluators are getting better at identifying the best ones, point remains that they are kind of more reliable prospects than they were when TinStap was created. So that's really good. On the other hand, they still produce much less as a group,

if you believe how Warp measures value. They produce much less than position prospects at the same level. And if you have a guy at 19 who consistently is going to outproduce the guy at 18 simply by knowing that he's an outfielder instead of a pitcher, it does make you wonder whether we are evaluating prospects wrong completely. And so I'm curious what you guys each think of that, what you think of that, Adam. And also I'm curious of, say, in a 20-year period, I have Baseball America's last 25 number one overall prospects. In a 25-year period, how many pitchers do you think would be appropriate at number one? In the last 25 years?

Yeah, since 1990, when basically the top 100 era began. You mean how many of them have borne out their number one no how many just just off the top i mean not not even necessarily thinking about names but if i told you there were 25 number ones how many how many would be in a given 25 year spend how many should there be yeah in the next 25 years how many if you were in charge of the top hundreds how many do you think you would have in the next 25 years? How many number ones would be pitchers? Yeah, like what's the right number?

And this might help explain what I'm talking about. Kevin Goldstein, I think, at one point was asked about the ratio of pitchers to position players in one of his top hundreds. And somebody was sort of making the point that pitchers are too unreliable. And should you really have like 46 pitchers in there? And he said, well, 46% of major leaguers are pitchers. So yeah, I think that's exactly right. And that is a good philosophy and I'm wondering if it's the right philosophy. For me, it's a little less. If I was going to have 25 number ones over the next 25 years, I might take 10 pitchers. Just because, and I mean, partly because the attrition rate seems to be increasing. I mean, I think guys like Matt Moore are good cautionary tales there.

You know, even the best guy, no matter how easy he throws and how good his mechanics are and how good a physical specimen he is, that elbow ligament is still just a thing waiting to break. I want to exercise more caution there. And especially because I get to see a lot of these guys come up through AAA and then I don't see them for a while and I don't see them in the majors and, oh, what happened to them? Oh, he's missing the whole year. Oh, oh, well, it just seems to happen all the time. So I would want to take a little bit less until

such time as we figure out what's going on with all these injuries and can we stop them? Maybe we can't, but I'd like to think we can figure out a way. Yeah, I think I'd go fewer than 10. I think I might go five because it would be unusual, I think, for the ceiling difference to be that great between the best pitching prospect and the best hitting prospect. I mean, maybe right now is a good example maybe lucas giolito is the the best pitching prospect in the minors and maybe with every position player prospect being called up this year maybe he would be the best prospect just by by ceiling or by stuff or talent or potential but i still probably wouldn't go with it i don't know what it would take for me to go with him it would need to be a a pretty big gulf i think between number one and

number two because i i think just generally philosophically i'm i'm less of the ceiling and potential if i were doing personal prospect i'd probably have a bunch of like unexciting fourth starters who were in triple a already and were major league ready. And no one would get excited about them at all, but they'd be pretty safe. And that kind of equivalent guy for position players. So I think I'd probably, it would take like a Strasburg type talent for me to go number one with a pitcher. Yeah. Strasburg-type talent for me to go number one with a pitcher.

Yeah. I actually like the smart guys because I have this, over my years in AAA watching these guys and talking to them, I have this kind of kooky idea that the smart guys may have some sense of how to develop a routine that maybe limits their susceptibility to injury. I don't really know if numbers bear that out. But when Alex Cobb was here, I was a huge Alex Cobb fan. And he wasn't really even throwing his heart here as he was able to throw up in the bigs when he got there. But he was an extremely intelligent pitcher and really worked hard both to develop his arsenal and really to pitch and

never to throw and also to understand what he was capable of physically. And that was a guy who I thought, if he can just develop one pitch that guys will swing and miss at, he's going to stay up in the majors. Again, another big time injury got him. But sure enough, he went up there and developed that pitch he calls the thing, which is some sort of split change or something like that, and thrived with just that pitch. So I'm kind of in Ben's camp. I like these guys that sort of look like fourth starters, but with some brains on them. So Baseball America is, I think, more conservative on this than most

are. And I think they've been validated in that in the 25 it's actually 26 years uh they've had number one prospects they've had six that were pitchers and three were their their very first three years and that was like prime tinstap era like when you look at as i've written when you look at where Tin Stap came from, the 90, 91, 92, 93 pitching classes were so horrifyingly bad as a group that it made a lot of sense. And there was a ton of data supporting the there's no such thing as pitching prospect idea. And they've been getting better since then. But their first three were all pitching prospects. And then only three in the next 23. So six in total. One of those six is Daisuke Matsuzaka who is basically

a grown-up that'd be like if Felix Hernandez were suddenly eligible for a prospect list yeah he'd be number one and then Beckett Josh Beckett was like the one hit out of them and then Steve Avery was middling career kind of one of them cautionary tale and then three of the greatest pitching disasters in history Rick Ankeel Taylor, and Todd Van Poppel. And if you look at the 23 hitters that they've picked, you can't really find three clear failures. Probably Jerickson Profar would be maybe number one right now, and it's way too soon to even give up on him. Delman Young would be the biggest flop going back a little further.

And then you could maybe make the case that Josh Hamilton was because they named him number one, and then he smoked crack for four years. But even he ends up being like a really good ballplayer and an MVP. So they've been you could maybe point to a couple of cases where they like, I don't know, in retrospect, Felix over Maurer would have been a good call. But so you have Maurer one and Felix two, and you get that one ever, ever, ever, ever, ever so slightly wrong, but you avoid the Todd Van Poppel possibility. Seems like it kind of makes a lot of sense. They had Strasburg behind Hayward. I mean, they're very conservative, I think, as far as this goes. David Price behind Wieders, although

so did a lot of people. So did me. But they're more conservative than I would have guessed, actually. That's interesting. Well, when we did our little hang up and listen segment, when Moore was coming back, it was the week that he was coming back, and it was the week that Fernandez was coming back also. And we talked about how coming back from injury is the new avoiding injury and that injuries are unavoidable so the question now is whether they'll come back and we sort of kind of took it for granted that they were both back i think and fernandez has been incredible since he came back he's been even better than he was before, but more has been sort of shaky, and he's looked brilliant at times and terrible at times, and maybe that is more of the norm for

a pitcher coming back. Or maybe that was just more of his norm even before the injury because he was shaky at times then too. But it's a nice reminder that not everyone is Fernandez. While looking at these rankings, by the way, these historical rankings, I discovered that DJ Boston played for Colorado Springs, which makes him perhaps the world's only Boston Sky Sox. There you go. You could tweet that too. All right.

Well, Adam, thank you very much for coming on. Anytime. 13 retweets, 11 favorites. Final tally. All right. Just a brief plug for Bull City Summer. You can buy it now for half price, 20 bucks from the Durham Bulls team store.

Do it. Can you do that online? You can do that online. Go to durhambulls.com. Okay. We'll put a link on the Facebook page. Yes, we will. All right. And Adam isBulls.com. Okay. We'll put a link on the Facebook page. Yes, we will. All right, and Adam is on Twitter, at Sobzy,

and you can catch him at various places on the Internet too and read his book about Chrissy Hynde when that comes out. That's it for today. We did a five-podcast week. They said we didn't have it in us anymore. They thought we lost a step over the summer But we're back You can send us emails for next week At podcast at baseballperspectives.com The Facebook group where we will post

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We will be back on Monday.