Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 730: David Stearns, Pete Mackanin, and Troublesome Tags

Episode Date: September 23, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about the Brewers’ hiring of David Stearns, then talk about why timing is everything when it comes to tags, interim managers and Weezer and Wes Anderson.

No, there is no other one. No, there is no other one. I can't have any other one. No, I would. Now I never could with one. Good morning and welcome to episode 730 of Effectively Wild, a daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you? Very well, thank you. Anything that you want to talk about? Yeah, a couple things.

Me too. A wee bit of banter. Me too. Mine are all GM-related. Does it surprise you that the Brewers hired headhunters to find David Stearns, their new GM? Huh. I was just reading Evan Drellick's response to the hiring for the Houston Chronicle, and he mentioned, I'm sure it had been reported before,

that the Brewers, when they announced that they were looking for a replacement for Melvin, they also announced that they had retained executive search firm Korn Ferry, which Wikipedia tells me is the world's largest executive search firm. So it's weird in the sense that there's like 40 qualified people in the world and they're all famous. Yeah. Well, we've talked about that before, whether the best qualified potential GMs are all people who are working in baseball or what percentage of them are wait hang on so did did this uh headhunting firm find sterns or did they just did they engage him and then they ended up yeah i don't know i guess it it doesn't

say uh i mean they retained them and then they hired sterns so i don't know we've never been given any indication that a team was looking to hire a GM that wasn't already in baseball. So it's probably safe to assume that they weren't out looking at Apple vice presidents. Right. So presumably they found Stearns, but even if they didn't, presumably they were looking in the same places that one might find a Stearns. So it is odd in that sense. find a sterns so it is odd in that sense it just doesn't seem like you need that much imagination to find a gm like sterns you just look and go well who is there there's like i said there's just there's not that many people there's a like reading from the journal sentinel now the search process

that led to the hiring of sterns took less than weeks, but nevertheless left no stone unturned, according to Adonacio. With the help of search firm Korn Ferry, Adonacio and his staff started with an original list of 44 candidates, which they trimmed down to do interviews. So he was on that 44-person list. 40 turns out to be a pretty good estimate. So the way that, yeah, that sounds interesting. Now, if it's a matter of hiring a headhunting firm that can, I mean, one of the things that headhunting firms do that is really useful is they gauge the interest of the candidate. And in some industries, I doubt in this one,

because I doubt that, for instance, Stearns had any pre-existing relationship with this headhunting firm. Like in a lot of cases, like I remember, for instance, that a superintendent I covered left a school district to go work at a headhunting firm. And that headhunting firm kind of worked both ways. Like if you were a superintendent, you would be telling them when you were interested in going somewhere and then they would be, and if you were a district, you'd be telling them when you wanted to hire a superintendent. And so having this firm in the middle that was filled with ex

superintendents who knew everybody made it easy to know who was interested. And I assume that's part of what this firm did is they probably reached out to candidates and said, are you interested? And it's like slightly less awkward when a headhunting firm does it than when your rival team's owner calls you and does it. Like that kind of feels like a trick. Like you don't really want to say that you've said yes to that request. Whereas if a firm calls you up and says, hey, would you be interested in taking another job if it came along? They're going to ask it in a way that maybe massages the details a little bit and you can say it with a little bit less traitor in your voice, right? Cornferry Vice Chairman Jedes actually sat in on the gm interviews this is yeah that's well i guess at that point now so that's interesting because now now you're talking about basically hiring a like a management expert to make sure that you ask the right questions and go through the right process and i know they gave us 40 data points

and said to try to rank them. We came up with a profile of 11 points or skill sets we felt were important. Okay. Yeah, that seems reasonable. Okay. No, now I'm going to say totally normal. The 40, yeah, the 44 candidates feels a little weird. You like, like I, I still don't think you really need help identifying the candidates. You could just read one of the columns that gets written every year saying the 10 guys who are going to get hired to be GM next. But the process, yeah, it seems smart to hire a firm that is really good at making these decisions. I mean, if the whole point of, for instance, Sabermetrics is using objective analysis to make the right decision, and this is a firm that does that as a specialty and that

you're probably not as good at doing that i mean how many how many gms does the typical owner hire in his life too maybe and uh yeah and i mean i would definitely botch it like if i were hiring a gm i would probably get hung up on one guy and go hire him and then ask him what he believed in after. And so it seems smart. Yeah, I'm going to say yeah, good job. Okay. Yeah. It seems frivolous at first because all of the finalists were people you and I had heard of. If we had been asked to list 40 people, we probably would have had those people on our list, like off the top of our heads or after a quick Google search or something. So in that sense, it seems useless. And everyone in baseball knows everyone else in baseball, at least by reputation.

So you could put together that list pretty easily. list pretty easily. So if there was a subsequent step where it was about designing the interview or figuring out how you choose between 20 people who seem almost interchangeable, then I guess there's some value there potentially. Yeah. The headhunting itself seems like the least important part of it, but all the rest seems plausible. Yeah. My other thing, there was an interview in the Wall Street Journal with Bill James and Billy Bean, and they discussed the subject that often comes up about whether the work that's being done internally by teams is comparable to the work that's been done in the public sphere and continues to be done in the public sphere and continues

to be done in the public sphere. So Brian Costa, who is doing the interview, asked Bill James if he worries about sabermetrics continuing to exist or flourish, given that teams hire everyone who does anything interesting. And James said, I suspect that the best work will always be done in the public arena. always be done in the public arena. What's done in the public arena has a million eyes on it. Somebody sees what you've done wrong and they figure another way to do it. And somebody else figures another way to do it. I do see sometimes work being done by the Red Sox and think I wish the public could know about that. But I think the best work will mostly be done in public view. And I've heard him say this before.

He said this at the Sabre Analytics Conference a couple of years ago when I was there. And Billy Bean agrees, and he says it's like open source. Wait, wait, wait. I don't want to step all over this. I don't know if you're going to get here. But he agrees, and then in the next answer to the next question, completely contradicts. Exactly, yeah. So he says he agrees.

He says it's like an open source thing. It's self-correcting. Anytime you have an open source situation, you're probably going to have something better than three or four guys in a private situation. And then Costa asks a follow-up that's sort of the same as the previous question. Do you see work being done internally

that is far beyond what people have seen publicly? And then Bean, who just said, I agree with Bill, and anytime you have open source, it's going to be better than three or four people in private. He then says yes to the question of, do you see work being done internally that is beyond what people have seen publicly?

The great thing about what's gone on there is a transparency to the game. It's now a meritocracy. The best and brightest are now part of baseball teams. It's no longer an insider's game, et cetera. The people that we're hiring, we're competing with the Apples and Googles of the world. I just had an intern presentation a few weeks ago

from the interns we have and what they were working on. It'll make your mind spin. So it seems as if he completely contradicts himself in the course of two answers there. Yeah, that's how I felt reading it. Okay. So is there an incentive for people who are inside to say, oh, no, the stuff that's being done outside is even better? Or do you think it's modesty or secrecy or do they actually believe it or do you believe it oh i think probably both things are true like i think there are cases where having

a lot of different independent people working on something without a direct uh profit motive and uh a conversation that can take place over the course of many years and can be wrong at times because, you know, the stakes are much lower, does lead you to certain things. And then I think also having partly the best and the brightest idea. But I think more than that, it's just that there's a lot more people writing about sabermetric stuff than working in front offices that's true but there are a lot more people working full-time in front offices yeah than are working full-time writing baseball sabermetrics blogs right and i just i i think there's something irreplaceable about having somebody who's spending 60 hours a week on this as a career as opposed to like i think i think russell carlton is just about the best in the world at this stuff

and the worst part of my job is that i can't afford to make him do it 60 hours a week i can only afford to make him do it like three or four hours a week teams have versions of russell that have 15 times as much time to spend on this and fewer distractions so and they might have a staff of you know eight russell carlton's doing this so and there's also that you just have much more on the line i mean i guess in one sense every time you write something on the line. I mean, I guess in one sense, every time you write something on the internet, many thousands of people could look at it and you don't want to look stupid, but there aren't really million dollar decisions riding on what you're doing. And so you might just run a regression or toss off some analysis. And if it's an interesting article, that's all people will really remember. And if there's an error somewhere, it might never be found. Or if it is found, it's not going to kill your company and cost your owner millions of dollars. So there's less incentive to stay up all night working on something in that

sense. But there's also more eyes going over your work. So if you produce some new stat and you put a leaderboard out there, then you have many, many people combing over that leaderboard and finding inconsistencies and things that seem like mistakes. And so in that sense, maybe there is an advantage in that you have a lot more quality testers than you would in a front office. Yeah, I think both are true. And I think that the correct answer is that having both things is better than having one of them. And so maybe the question is, you know, is more being done now than there was 10 years ago because of the combination of these two things. And that I think would be undoubtedly yes. Yeah. Unless if follow the the logic of just the very first response that bill james gives then you might conclude that in fact all the people working for teams are less productive than they would be if they were in the public sphere uh and i guess that's also a way of

thinking about it i probably don't think that's true. I think that smart people we know who are in front offices instead of writing one piece a week for us are probably more productive in doing better work than they would be in a very part-time capacity, obviously with access to much less data. Yeah. Of course, you get lots of ideas from people who write things on the internet, and maybe it's just a concept that someone comes up with that they can't actually follow through on because they don't have the time or they don't have the data, but you can take that idea and implement it. So there's that. reporting on new stuff, I would sometimes wonder what it was that I contributed to the world or that I contributed to the community I was covering. Because it seemed to me that, for instance, when I was covering education, I knew much less about education than almost every one of my sources and a lot of the people who were reading me. Obviously, all the people who are teachers know more about teaching than I do. And all the people who are in administration knew more about administration than I did. And there were like, hundreds and hundreds of experts out there in education. And,

and then there are parents who knew their schools so much better than I could ever hope, hope to know them and, you know, knew every leaky air conditioner and every flickering fluorescent light bulb and everything like that. But, and what I ultimately realized is that what I brought is I would sit at a desk and do this for 40 hours a week. Someone would pay me to sit there and do the work that nobody else was doing because they have other jobs actually doing the thing or, you know, being whatever they were. And that sounds somewhat self-effacing, but it's actually true i mean that's more or less what reporters have it's less expertise and more like oh your labor good

please please do this job that we consider important do it as well as you can be a competent logical person and so just i that's kind of what i'm getting at is that just having like even if they're equal skill level to people in the public sphere, I just don't think you can, I don't think you can replace 40 to 60 hours a week. Yeah. With a comments section. Right. That's what I think separates us from your typical baseball fan. If there is something that separates us, it's that we have the time to read about baseball all day.

And then if we see something interesting on a leaderboard, we can send a stat request and get some data to back up the observation. And then we can submit an interview request and talk to the person. And these are all things that it's hard to do if it's not your job to the person. And these are all things that it's hard to do if it's not your job to do it. So it's not necessarily that we are so much more brilliant and perceptive than your

typical person who is reading our articles. It's just that we had the time to write them. Yeah. Okay. I think that's right. All right. What did you want to talk about? My GM thing is the, well well i have a few things too we might just only go with these few things and then be done the phillies extended their manager yeah do you know the name of their manager pete mackinen good for you all right so pete mackinen was the interim after ryan sandberg stepped down earlier this year. And they went ahead and made him the permanent manager.

They gave him a contract extension through 2016 with an option for 2017. And this happens a lot. It's always kind of odd when it happens, when you think about it. Because a lot of times, the guy that you hired, the guy that you named interim, you chose not to make him manager before. It doesn't happen that often, right? It happens sometimes. What percentage of interim managers become permanent? It's usually just understood that it's a stopgap placeholder and you're just going to finish out the year and then interview people.

But that was a resignation and it was early in the year so it was a longer audition than usual he had a he had an interim time before right yeah replacing jerry nairn and he did very well as it was with the the reds and he was good they won a lot with him or let me say 2007 yeah so he's had two interim stints before 2005 was a brief one with the pirates 2007 though he went 41 and 39 with the reds or the reds went 41 and 39 with him and that was a team that went 72 and 90 overall so under jerry naren they were 20 games under 500 and under mackin and they were two games over 500 and i remember there was some like higher pete mackin and sentiment at the time i think just based on that and i don't remember why they didn't i guess because they wanted a name guy like dusty baker yeah so i'm not i don't have a position on his hiring per se,

but probably be good. What's odd is that the Phillies are about to hire a GM and typically the GM gets to hire the manager or at least gets to make the decision about when to hire and fire a manager. And it's always kind of hard if you're a GM, you come in and you usually inherit a manager and you don't want to fire a guy unless you have really good cause because there's a kind of a transition period and there's some risk about who you're going to get and it sucks to fire a guy and you have to pay unemployment benefits for I think a year, just like 900 a month or something like that. So you don't want to fire people, right? And so here's this perfect opportunity where you don't have to fire anybody and you get to give your GM a clean slate and pick his manager. And they chose not to do that. And that feels very odd to me. And it feels like if I were interviewing to be the Phillies GMm i'd be really mad about this and i'm sort of trying to figure out why why why like even if even if you want to strongly insist on a guy at a certain point when you do hire the gm like especially if you don't know your gm you do at least want to be able to

envision those two guys in the same room together and have an idea of how it's going to work and right now they don't even know who the gm is going to be so how do they like how who knows how they're going to work together there's no there's no relationship not even a an idea of how that works because you don't know who it is you can't even visualize it it feels super weird it feels like maybe the may i don't know i'm gonna just go hot take here maybe the worst move that any team made this year like logically speaking just as far as process goes is it seems to me unless you're worried that mackinac is like gonna leave and you just think that he's irreplaceable which maybe i guess that was my thought well first of all maybe they'll end up hiring their interim gm that'd be a neat way to

resolve it but my only thought was that they think makinen is so great that they are not willing to risk losing him and that they think that if they hire a new GM, the new GM will want someone other than Makinen. He'll want someone he's always had in his mind as his dream manager if he ever got a GM job. And he won't want Makinen because Makinen is just the guy who was there before and predated him. And he'll want to bring in his own pick so if they think mackinac is just so incredible that it would be a mistake to let the gm make that choice then that would be the only yeah that's rationale i could come up with and it's not good that's nuts like if it was that you thought that some other team was about to hire mackinac like the day the season ended i could see that maybe

but the we we can't trust the guy we're gonna hire to bgm to hire a manager like you've already acknowledged you've already just did you you've accepted that you're gonna hire an idiot to bgm like oh you know you know the idiot we're gonna hire think about the idiot he's gonna hire. It feels very weird to me. It is. I don't like it. It's pretty strange. All right.

That's one. Two, Daniel Norris was throwing a perfect game through five innings, and they pulled him. Did you see this? I didn't see it with my eyes, but I'm aware of it. And they pulled him because I think it was his first start back from the DL. Oblique thing. Yeah, an oblique thing. They had him on like a 60, a pitch counter of around 60.

He threw 63. And then they pulled him. And I believe that one time we had a play index that was looking at all the incomplete perfect games, like people being pulled from perfect games in history and how many there were for like each number of out that you got and i believe someone can correct me if i'm wrong but i believe that there was no instance in history where a guy was pulled from a perfect game for like any reason other than he had to. He was hurt at that moment.

He was ejected at that moment. There was a three-hour rain delay, and he couldn't go back. I don't think there was ever a case where a manager walked out and took the ball from a healthy pitcher in a perfect game. No hitters, yes. But perfect games, no. For one thing, it's almost impossible to have a high pitch count in a perfect game. But for another, perfect games are different than no hitters.

So I was surprised by this. And I was sort of surprised by it, too, because it's Brad Ausmus. And Brad Ausmus is... Did we get an update? i mean he the reports were that he's going to get fired right still very much in limbo but certainly seems to be pointing toward he's not going to be back so if ever there was a manager who was going to tell his bosses to shove it uh you might have thought it'd be him right there or maybe the opposite but anyway he said after the game that there was never any doubt in his mind there was no hesitation that norris wasn't surprised

that he knew which i doubt but he knew and that he expected it and uh and i find it i just find it surprising i'm not saying good or bad i find it surprising i guess good in one sense i mean there is a level of discipline there that is admirable in a manager or in a front office it's very tempting to let your plans change you know as something shiny comes in front of you on the other hand i would have left him in it's so far away though i mean yeah but three or five innings and he'd thrown 63 pitches so he was at the pitch count that they had decided on and you're still four innings away at that point,

I think if he had gotten deeper into the game, because at five innings your odds of actually throwing the thing are still so low. Yeah, but if he gives up a hit on the next batter, you can pull him then. You can pull him at any point. The odds of him going eight and two-2 and not completing it is also pretty low. And the odds are about 1.5% if you think that he's got a 300 on base percentage against him as a true talent level on the day he's throwing a perfect game. So about 1.5%.

And, yeah, I mean, they are low, but you can pull them, and it's fun. It's fun to chase it. And now he'll never know. Now he goes through his entire life not knowing whether he'd have thrown that perfect game. And I don't know. Maybe a perfect game isn't enough of an achievement to do it. I still think perfect games are pretty cool. They're very tense, very exciting, very rare.

It's not like he was coming back from a labrum surgery or Tommy John. Right. It's oblique and it's the end of the year. It's the end of a season. They're out of it. Yeah. So worst case, he aggravates it and he recovers over the winter. I mean, worst, worst, worst case, because the idea is not so much that he was, I think

the idea wasn't so much that he was going to strain his oblique as that he hadn't built up his strength yet. So he wasn't stretched out enough and so he gets fatigued and 100 to him maybe is like 140 to somebody else because he's not stretched out yeah that's the worst case but or maybe he alters his mechanics or something to compensate for that and right his arm. So that's the worst case, and I can see that. But also, I don't know, what are we doing out here? Trying to win in 2016. Trying to throw perfect games too.

Look, at the end of Daniel Norris' career, there's a pretty good chance that a perfect game is the highlight, that there's nothing in his career more memorable in fact there's like a hundred percent chance that nothing in his career not a hundred but there's like a 98 99 chance that nothing in his career would top perfect game and yeah maybe he won't get there maybe he'll get knocked out in the sixth or the seventh or the eighth or the ninth but it does feel like you're taking away i mean i don't know i mean if he got to choose and not he you know obviously if you go out and ask him how do you feel he's gonna say

great leave me in because that's what they all say all the time but if he actually got to choose even if 30 years from now version of him got to choose don't you think that he would choose absolutely yes i would and of course he would no doubt, yes, I would. And of course he would. No doubt he would. The Tigers would say, well, we don't care. He's our asset and we don't want to lose our asset. He's valuable to us because he gets paid nothing. And we want to take advantage of that for the next few years.

So that's why they did it. It's just that, I don't know, I guess in the battle between asset and player trying to have a memorable life i think i've grown to go with player trying to have a memorable life yeah i this to me is not close to like the cory kluber game where we talked about him being removed with a chance to strike out 20 this it's just so remote five innings is to me it's barely even the embryo of a perfect game through five so what if he had gone six it's like when does life begins at conception or whatever it's like the perfect game begins at six innings for me okay so if he'd gone six and he'd had the same pitch count then i'd say yeah so if he goes if you let him go out there for the sixth though and he gets to it if he gets to six

now you're leaving him in like you've acknowledged that now you're leaving him in at six right if he had the same pitch if he goes out and he's if he goes out and he throws another 15 pitches And he's at 80 through 6 Then I still don't know if I would Really? The whole, if you believe in pitch counts Which I don't know how much you should If you just kind of have the attitude that it's all guesswork And the basic idea that you don't want to abuse pitchers' arms is good

But we don't really know what one specific start does, then I guess you can justify any one start just going after it. But maybe I'm just tired of perfect games and no-hitters. I wouldn't be if I were throwing one. How dare you put those two in the same category? How dare you, Ben? It's like going, yeah, I guess I'm just tired of cycles and four home run games. I know they're not the same.

I guess I'm just tired of my favorite team winning the wild card or the World Series. I guess I'm just tired of Pinkerton and Maladroit. I actually am. Are you really? I've never liked Weezer. Oh, really? Yeah. None of it.

You'd think I'd really like Weezer. I would. Based on my musical I'd really like Weezer. I would. Based on my musical taste. You like Smash Mouth. All signs point toward my liking Weezer, but I don't like Weezer. Not even a single song? There are single songs, but not a whole album. What would you say was your first exposure to them?

How old were you and what was it? Yeah, I didn't listen to them at the time that those albums came out so maybe that's why something about the guitar tone bothers me oh it's just like constant chugging interesting i wonder if i i think i don't know do young people i don't know so you didn't answer my question but how old were you and what was your first weezer album or weezer experience don't really remember probably probably what was your first Weezer album or Weezer experience? I don't really remember. Probably college was the first time I sat down and listened to a Weezer album intentionally. Yeah, that's pretty old to be exposed to Weezer. I don't think I would like them at that point

either. Yeah, my girlfriend loves them and the early stuff and she would listen in high school or whatever and drive around in the car with those albums on and that seems to be the the way that everyone came to love weezer i'm i was asking partly because i wonder if young people like late model weezer more like with wes anderson movies for instance i think whatever basically whatever wes anderson movie you see first or whatever wes anderson movie you see in that kind of age sweet spot you think is the best one which is the only way that anybody has ever liked Darjeeling Limited

for instance and like I know people who think that like who swear that that stupid Jacques Cousteau one I love that one yeah exactly but it wasn't the first I saw I dispute the Wes Anderson how old were you when it came out it's like 2005

2005 I think I was like 19 or something See that's the sweet spot That could be But I had seen Rushmore, I had seen The Royal Tenenbaums In the theater? Not in the theater, no

And I would say that I liked Fantastic Mr. Fox And Grand budapest hotel as much as anything yeah okay all right last thing i wanted to talk about for banter is uh there was a play tonight where uh the giants tagged out brandon crawford tagged out justin upton trying to steal. The Padres challenged it. It looked from every angle like there was no tag. It looked convincing and clear

and pretty much indisputable that there was no tag. The umpires went to the review, came back, and said nope, he's out. And there's really, it's very hard to convince yourself in any of those that you saw anything that could reasonably have been that. Except that John Miller speculated finally after probably his 40th viewing of his 15th angle that maybe the lacing of Crawford, like the loose flapping lacing coming off of his glove, caught him like on the ankle.

caught him like on the ankle and i feel like this is not quite the same but it's in the same genre as the guy coming off the bag for one millionth of a second but clearly never loses kind of control of the area around the bag is not trying to go beyond it hasn't even really slid past it and yet is now out because of this frame by frame forensics that are possible uh through replay and so i am increasingly uncomfortable with that guy getting called out when he comes off the bag ever so slightly i just don't think it's good i don't think that it's the spirit of and i maybe it is the spirit it doesn't feel like it's the spirit of my game i feel like there should there needs of my game. I feel like there needs to be a rule change if we're going to have this. There needs to be a rule change that defines possession

of the bag slightly more liberally than it is, which is to say physical contact. And I also feel like there probably needs to be an exemption for loose hanging parts of one's equipment and uniform. So you're saying that the lacing is not an extension of the glove i am saying that because otherwise what stops you from just having like a lace equivalent of like dreadlocks coming off your glove in all directions like why not like like if you had no if you had like if your glove was like a western suit you know like a country and western suit with all the like fringe like a like a nudie design uh yeah like fringe exactly yeah fringe not frills and uh you've just got these these laces flapping in all directions

and uh you get you get an extra three or four inches of extension in all directions. I think an umpire would stop you is what would stop you. Why? Because I think it would be the opposing manager would complain and they'd come out and make you... What's the problem? Well, if a pitcher were using it, it would certainly be called a distraction. Like when a pitcher has a weird colored glove or

something hanging off him someone complains and they take it away but as it is there are already these little laces hanging off of a glove yeah but they have to be there those are necessary laces you've got to tighten it just you could get a glove that has more laces more more webbing design it so that there's laces all in every direction it's a smart idea does it look does it feel like a tag i mean this lace goes outside of the gravity of this glove it is a loose thread it is not part of the glove to me it is a loose thread you are not deliberately tagging a person with the lace of your glove. The glove is, when you tag somebody with the glove, it is saying, here is the ball. I'm putting the ball on you.

It's in my glove, but I'm putting it on you. And if you don't hit them with the part of your glove that you are kind of intending to touch them with, you might as well just touch them. I mean, why not just say, oh with his uh you got him with his elbow elbows connected to the glove elbows connected to the wrist wrist is connected to the hand hands connected to the glove gloves connected to the baseball yeah you're out i was always kind of uncomfortable with just stretches like the idea of stretching for a catch, because it seemed strange that you could be like instantly transmuted

into someone with the ability to make a force out. Like your foot is still way back there on the base, but because you did a split and the ball is now touching your glove, the quality of possession of the ball applies to your entire body at the instant that the ball enters your glove i always thought that was a weird thing i think i'm gonna join you on this it's strange does the possession of the ball like travel along your arm and then travel into your foot and into your toe and then it contacts the bag or are you just instantly like an alchemist just one second you cannot all right ben ben ben i got one okay let's say that there's a ground ball the third baseman

the second baseman runs over to first stretches out holds hands with the first baseman who then stretches out can you do a human chain could it you'd gain a little extra i mean the second baseman isn't doing anything else so he there's no reason for him not to go try to do that does it count does does the blood course through two bodies to the base i don't know if it does because there's like everything's got electromagnetic force that I don't know if it does because everything's got electromagnetic force that repels everything around it all the time, and so nothing is actually ever touching anything else. But that would also probably be true about the ball and the glove.

I don't know. Very deep questions we're asking. Do you feel the same discomfort that I do with some of these replays that become almost existential? do with some of these replays that become almost existential like when is the ball in the glove for instance on that stretch is now a that does that bothers me a little bit the the coming off the bag i'm not sure if that bothers me because i was always bothered by the opposite i was bothered when someone would obviously come off the bag and there would be a tag and it wouldn't be called because he was there and his momentum carried him off the bag or something i want i want the bag to mean something i'm not saying that you can go past the bag i'm not saying you can run through the bag like it's first base or anything like that i'm saying you slide in you stop but just in the midst of this process there's like a very very very very one frame one fraction of a

centimeter where a connection is just lost ever so slightly and i don't know maybe maybe that is enough you know if your power goes out for just that long, well, you do have to reset your alarm clock. And you don't get to go, ah, it's just for a little bit. But I don't know. I mean, I just feel like 150 years of baseball where this was happening and everybody was fine with it happening. You didn't know it was happening. And all of a sudden we've got microscopes and we're like, whoa, look at that bacteria. Like that's in us yeah that is in our gut that's gross and you almost wish you didn't know about bacteria because it's good for you you need it some of it some of it is a lot of it is a lot of it is and this bacteria i know

i think too wow we're gonna keep this analogy going surprised surprised me it's true that i mean that i i think that there's been some complaining about for instance the now that you have we talked about this now that you have the replay fielders are being coached to keep the glove on the entire time because you might get a frame in there it happens a lot you might get a frame in there where the guy comes off even though he's essentially in control of that region i feel like if and so anyway what i was saying is they're complete now they're being coached to keep their glove on which doesn't seem like a big deal except that a now fielders are putting themselves in peril because they used to do that slap tag for a reason it's so they don't get hurt so they don't get their wrist jams they don't get

spiked they don't get tumbled into so they don't get hurt you don't want guys getting hurt and this is causing or at least fielders are saying it's going to cause guys to get hurt and base runners are saying that now because of this they're getting much harder tags that they're getting kind of beat on by these tags because the guys are trying to keep the glove on him. And so they don't like it. Nobody likes it. It seems to me that, look, if I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying you can run past the bag. I'm not saying that you can do like the, I don't know if this is actually a thing Jason Hayward does, but I think of this as a thing Jason Hayward does where you slide in and then he just barely keeps his toe on the bag at the end. Like he goes all the way through and his toe just

clings to the, to the bag. Barely. I'm not saying you can do that. And if you slide off the back, oh, it's okay. No big deal. We'll overlook it. You do have to, to basically be a controlled slide into the bag. But I'm saying that if, for instance, why not make base rights like skyscraper rights in Manhattan, you get, you get your little plot of land up to the moon. You know, like it goes straight up forever. And as long as you are, you've tagged the bag and a part of your body remains over that bag, you are still in possession of the bag.

I don't mind that. It's like baseball probiotics. So, all right, so we're saying this is a resolution is passing that we think that the bag now stretches up to uh faa controlled airspace well but you still have to be you have to touch it you have to essentially buy the plot of land by touching the bag yeah at some point you have to touch the bag and you can't leave once you leave that zone you have to re-establish ownership of it but once you have ownership of the bag, if you go off ever so slightly,

but your body remains over the bag within that square region, you're safe. Although I really like a good slide, a good slide around a tag. If you're in favor of that, like the one where the fielder is blocking the bag and it seems like there's no possible way that you can get by the glove and get your finger on the base on the very edge of it i like that i'm very pro that and i wouldn't want to lose that so if i like that then do i also have to be for the opposite of that which is that you have to actually be touching the base all the time i don't see the clash to me this makes it this encourages fancy sliding because it gives you a slightly more margin for error as a slider.

Okay. Then I like it. Okay, good. All right. We'll talk about the other thing later. All right. So we do still need some emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Facebook group, as always, facebook.com facebook group as always facebook.com slash

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