Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 735: Podcast Court is in Session

Episode Date: September 30, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Mike Trout’s punctuation, then answer listener emails about the fastest fastball, pennant-race anxiety, Rich Hil, shortstop studs, and a fantasy-league dilemma.

Right or wrong, you're breaking our hearts again. Wonder what you're waiting for. Right or wrong, you're breaking our hearts again now. Yeah now, yeah now. Mysterious misses, no one like a dream. Sooner or later, we'll be singing for free. Right or wrong, we're breaking their hearts again now Yeah now, yeah now

Good morning and welcome to episode 735 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Hey, Ben. How are you this fine evening? Okay, pretty good. I learned something today.

Okay, good. It's always a good day when you can learn a thing. You remember that we've talked about how Mike Trout has a strange habit that I've been tracking since his rookie year of always putting a space before punctuation. Uh-huh. On Twitter? Yes on Twitter. Presumably everywhere. But on Twitter at least. It's the only writing of his we get to see.

Yeah exactly. Well his mom does it too. Really? Debbie Trout? Debbie Trout does it. She also will sometimes just tuck two spaces in between words. Just for no reason. But less commonly. But yeah she uh spaces before exclamation points spaces before quadruple exclamation points you think that's nature or nurture that's a good question i think that's probably more likely to

be nurture it seems like the punctuation that you use would be less heritable. Yeah, but wait, are you saying that you think that, no, so are you thinking that the, do you think the chicken came before the egg? I think, I think your mother is probably instrumental in your writing tendencies and your punctuating tendencies when you're a kid and she's around, right? She's guiding you. You bring your homework home. She helps you with it. She probably told him to stop not putting spaces before periods and after periods. His father does too.

Really? His brother does not. His brother is, I believe, was a law student. So that would have gotten drummed out of him. But his dad does it. I'm looking for his... Oh, here it is. Here's his sister.

His sister does not do it. Interesting. I did an article on his father earlier this year, and now I'm regretting not asking him about this. Interesting. Huh. so it's definitely not i wonder if that strengthens the case for it being genetic or not if half the people in the house aren't doing it well his mother and his father have no blood relationship

so it wouldn't be genetic unless unless coincidence, unless they just found each other. Yeah. Maybe that was their match.com. Love spaces before. Yeah. Love spaces. That'd be a heck of an algorithm to put them together. Yeah.

I guess they predated online dating. Anyway, if I had to guess, just a guess here. If I had to guess, I would guess that Mike Trout was the first to do this and they are following his lead either ironically or the way that all of our parents ask us how to do Twitter at some point. That could be. Yeah, I would guess the other way. I would think if a kid has a tendency and the parent has a tendency, then in most cases it came from the parent. But you're right that on Twitter, Mike Trout is probably a trailblazer in the Trout family,

so maybe they are following his lead. Or maybe they just figure he's so good at baseball, he probably knows what he's doing with the punctuation too. If so, they would be wrong. Do they add little airplane emojis when they take flights they do they hang on i think i saw this but it might just be that i saw lots of retweets of him doing it hang on are there any airplane flights i've yet to see any airplane flights actually lots of retweeting of his airplanes but okay you know trout by the way

uh we think of that as as a trout thing cesspitous family barbecue for instance when they fly somewhere they will often tweet and put airplanes and they'll hashtag it tweet like trout but i've actually noticed in partly i noticed this during stper's time when we were investigating a lot of baseball players online. It's very common for baseball players to do this. I think this might be a baseball player culture thing. Or maybe it's just a young Twitter thing. I'm not sure. I don't.

His sister, it looks like, also does the airplanes. Okay. This is getting creepy. Let's move on. All right. Okay. Anything else? No. Okay. This is getting creepy. Let's move on. All right. Okay. Anything else? No. Okay. So we're going to do emails and I put out a call for emails and you all responded. Emails flooded in. We've got some good ones. So we'll get to some of them today and we'll get to some of them in the future. I'm going to start with a science question science question for which i have an answer it comes from paul and he says my wife asked me this question while watching trevor rosenthal try to close out

monday's game against the pirates how fast would a fastball have to be in order to be considered literally unhittable i thought what a silly question followed by i know just the guys to ask do you ever see uh suyoshi sinjo trying to hit a i think it was 155 mile an hour pitch in a batting cage yeah like a japanese game show sort of yeah exactly and he did he got it right i don't remember you'd think i would remember the outcome of that. I just remember seeing it happen. So I asked Alan Nathan, go-to source for all baseball physics questions, which this kind of is. So he says that for an elite hitter, the actual swing takes about 0.15 seconds. If the batter literally starts his swing as the ball is released then he will make contact

at home plate if the ball is moving at about 250 miles per hour at release good heavens of course way higher than i expected yeah well so that's if he starts as the ball is released though so he doesn't get a chance to actually see the pitch so So under those conditions, Allen continues, the batter has no observation or deciding time. For a pitch released at half that speed, 125 miles per hour, the transit time is twice as long, 0.3 seconds. That allows for 0.15 seconds of observing and deciding. That is probably very close to the minimum amount of time For a batter to make a good decision About whether or not to swing So he thinks it's about 125 miles per hour

For you to actually See the pitch and Make a conscious decision to swing And get the bat to the ball Before it crosses home plate So he got about Another 20 miles per hour or so Until Aroldis Chapman becomes

literally unhittable. Let me ask you something, Ben. What will be the hardest pitch ever thrown? In all eternity? By a human, yeah. Going forward until the last baseball is thrown by a human. I'm saying, like,

let's say with natural parts. No cyborgs, no androids. Okay. I'll say 108. Really? So we're only... Because Chapman hit 106, right? Did he?

I thought it was 105, but maybe. All right. I think I remember... Who was it? Ed Price? I think. Maybe not. Yeah, Ed Price. He worked for worked for fan house and now he is an

agent he is actually an agent i thought he worked for an agency but he is actually an agent he works at caa anyway ed price was the guy who reported that pitch the the 106 i think it was and this was a what would it have been 2009 2010 yeah i think he was he was in the the official is 105 or i think it was something like the 106 was the stadium and 105 was the broadcast something like that i don't know what the i think i think like the pitch fx record is 105.1 or something yeah yeah he ed price reported 105 so anyway this was when he was in the minors and uh i remember when he tweeted that he said or aldous chapman just threw a pitch 105 miles an hour i retweeted it and said no he did not and i was i was pretty confident and um ed price had no idea who i was but i um you know i did have i think i was at the register and i think he was he tweeted back i

think something he was up he he thought that my my tweet was lousy and that made me reconsider it and i thought okay it probably was lousy and so then I wrote a blog post wondering whether he did or not. And I concluded, based on whatever logic I used at the time, that he did not. That I just didn't believe it. I was not going to believe it. And I think since then, Aroldis Chapman's history validates Ed Price's tweet. And for the last couple years, I've regretted that I haven't had an opportunity to admit that I was wrong and say that I shouldn't have said that, Ed. So now you're getting that off your chest.

Now I'm doing it. Okay. I was wrong. Well, what was his source? He was there. I think he was at the game. Or maybe he talked to a scout. Probably he talked to a scout.

We don't have to rely on Ed Price, right? We can check the numbers. No, because this was in the minors oh in the minors i see yeah well and and if you'd asked me i would have thought that it was just it was a bad radar gun but he's thrown enough pitches close to that that i believe it yeah well there is well he has hit 105 i think officially on pitch fx so uh so yeah exactly yeah and i don't know maybe i mean if he has like one 105 and he never has another 105 then you might think maybe the system wasn't quite properly calibrated and maybe it was slightly off and i don't know maybe if you go to Brooks Baseball You could find an adjusted value for that That maybe lowers it

Someone will tell me But yeah, so it's 105-ish Is the fastest I'm going to read, I found the blog post My immediate reaction was, nope, didn't happen Price didn't like this reaction Partially because what do I know? I know nothing That's fair

I'd say Price has more credibility in general And on this specific topic than I do, but 105 mile an hour fastball is like an 800 foot home run. It borders on impossible. Maybe it happened. Nearly impossible things do from time to time, but you'll never go wrong betting against the borderline impossible. I believe Price has a very good source who has a very good gun, and that radar gun probably failed him this time, and nobody should believe it happened just a few days ago i showed that detroit stadium gun and anaheim stadium gun are consistently off by a mile and a half so why couldn't one gun miss by two or three miles on one pitch on one night

looks like i'm not alone kevin goldstein asked his twitter followers if they believe it's true scores of responses running about 90 toward false with many people declaring it quote mega false or quote false by a ton or quote false no doubt i don't know why i put those in quotes and i don't know why i didn't stop after mega false which is the only one of those that's funny so what do you think did it happen and then i updated it in his major league debut chapman hit 103 uh the 103 was the fastest pitch clocked by pitch fx this year it's not 105 but ed price's report looks better right now updated further in his second outing he hit 104 i was wrong ed source was right ed price was right

do you still have access to the cms you should go back and update it again uh no i don't okay uh if i did i did talk when we talked about the chris correa astros hack thing i talked about hypothetically using access to that and uh no anyway i don't okay so anyway he has hit 105 probably or come very close to that and so i'm only forecasting a three mile per hour improvement in the rest of baseball history which doesn't sound like a lot and maybe isn't a lot it's hard to say because we don't really know how much the max speed has increased in the last century or so you can i don't know there's a ton of books and documentaries and everything about who threw the fastest fastball and how fast it was and there are so many of

those things because there is no definitive answer so we can't really say but maybe chapman is the fastest and if he is the fastest though probably not the fastest by more than a few miles per hour i would think i i don't know so it seems like it should improve more the max should just because the average is improving more and more guys are throwing 95 and more guys are throwing 100 and so theoretically you'd think more guys would throw 105 and that one guy would throw 110 at some point so i don't know i guess if you play long enough there will be some genetic freak who can do that for a year before he blows his arm out so i'm really i'm forecasting how long i think baseball will be around more than I am anything else. Tom Verducci one time wrote about Tim Lincecum and he talked about the kind of theoretical limits of what a human ligament could actually handle.

Yeah. And he wrote, pitching, unlike most athletic activities, has reached the limit of what is humanly possible. of what is humanly possible. So while we are accustomed to the increasingly swifter sprinters, faster swimmers, longer drivers of the golf ball, and bigger football players, you will not see a pitcher throwing 110. The arm and shoulder are maxed out.

Pushed any further, the shoulder would blow like an engine in a race car. And while looking for this quote, I realized that the quote from Rick Peterson that I used in my Tommy John article this spring was also in a tom verducci article seven years ago i hate that i hate that don't you hate that you're like oh yes i i finally got this guy's most interesting thing to say like i talked to him for an hour and 20 minutes and this is the quote that really stood out yeah And then you Google it and you realize he always says that. Yeah, sometimes you do Google it because you get a sense that it sounds too polished or too prepared. It sounds like a line he's delivered before.

And then you Google it in seven other articles. But I guess every now and then one slips through. Yeah. Anyway, I wouldn't be as definitive as Ferducci was. I think what he wrote is probably true for the vast majority of human beings, but you never know about some strange outlier who comes along if you play baseball long enough. So I'll stick with my answer.

Hey, Ben. Yesterday when I talked about how Jake Arrieta's insane second half wasn't as impressive as Kershaw's similar run earlier this year. Yeah. I just want to clarify because there is a tendency for people to state an opinion and then once they've stated that opinion to then become very possessive of that opinion and to get even more extreme in that opinion. become very possessive of that opinion and to get even more extreme in that opinion i just want to be very clear to the listeners as well as to myself that jake arietta's second half is insane it is historically astounding it is as good as anything ever and i am only putting it behind clayton kershaw's what i consider similarly extremely insane run this year and that in fact if not for that then I would have no problem saying Jake Arrieta is the greatest thing ever I'm not saying

ah he's whatever this is not like the time that I went with the extremely hot take that Yaseel Puig's debut was not that cool yeah I am all about arietta's second hand all right just getting that out of the way consider it clarified kershaw's throwing a one hitter by the way right now okay just so you know all right question from brandon not that my wishes have any say in the end result but is it wrong for me to wish for baseball chaos aka a four-way tie between al west and second wild card teams that would result in numerous tiebreaker games before the eventual al wild card game dude this just came in this literally came in 30 seconds ago i'm all over it i guess another way of asking this is i wouldn't want for someone else to wish that i would enter a stressful work situation for

their amusement and so that i can post about it on Facebook and Twitter. Why should I wish such a fate upon anyone else? I know that baseball in general is merely distracting us from our inevitable deaths and any added excitement is indeed a welcome distraction. I just can't help but feel that I'm hoping for something that's unduly stressful, tiresome, and ultimately frustrating for these people who are going out to play baseball in snow in no small part for our the fans entertainment no no no no they all want this all the players want this i had a the best advice i ever got in work was from a friend whose dad was a doctor and he told me when i was a journalist he said that his dad one time told him that his job was just day after day after day of monotony and repetition, seeing the same, you know, the same dumb problems over and over. Nothing really challenging him, nothing really pushing him, except once a year, maybe twice a year, he would save somebody's life. And like, that's save somebody's life.

And that's why he did it. Every once in a while, your job punctuates itself and it's really exciting. You call Ned Garver and he picks up. And they would all love this. Now, obviously, if you were a game in front and then you lost on the last day of the season and now you're stuck in a four-way tie you're disappointed and there is a question that brandon is not asking but that we should all ask ourselves which is uh what kind of monsters are we that every night we cheer against people being happy we root against a team i mean we're rooting for our team but by definition that means

that there's going to be 25 very sad people who just wanted to go out and do their best and win and now they're going to lose in front of everybody and it really is a monstrous sport when you think about it however that's not what brandon's asking brandon is implying that they don't want the stress of a chaos playoff and in fact they would love it yeah i i think they would all choose to have the playoff spot and not do that if that were an option but i don't think it's the same sort of stress because they deal with this stress every day they have to play in front of us and thousands and millions of people and that's just part of the job and so the stress of a wild card game or a tiebreaker game is not like us suddenly having to i don't know give a

presentation in front of a packed auditorium when you don't do that every day it's just them playing baseball in front of a big crowd again and the game is more important than it usually is but i mean it's it's stressful for the fans of the teams too and yet i mean it's not as stressful but it is also more stressful for the fans of the team and they love it they want this they enjoy it yeah well that's what they want again they'd rather they'd rather just win they just they want to win win is the first priority yeah but irrespective of the options to win or not the excitement of the the playoff is a is an added benefit it's a net plus all right should we talk about rich hill so we got a question about rich hill and i was actually

gonna bring this up as banter on monday and forgot to it's from James. He said, what is the cost to sign Rich Hill right now? A stupid to me article in the Herald suggested signing him to an incentive-laden contract for next year. Maybe, but would think he can get $6 to $10 million guaranteed plus incentives if a win above replacement is worth $8 million, as I heard somewhere. I'd even think someone might wrap him up for a couple years, $10 to $15 million, and he gets security and a team gets a chance at the five-win outcome. He really has been unbelievable these past few starts.

What do you think? What would you sign Rich Hill for right now? Have you done any research on Rick Hill? Rich Hill? Sorry, Rich Hill. I've researched his name name and it's Rich. I hate you. I was distracted by it. I haven't done other stuff.

I haven't looked at his stuff or anything like that. So without knowing about his stuff, I'm tempted to say I'd give him 3 in 30. Wow. I'm tempted to say I'd give him 3 and 30. Wow. I saw your tweet the other day where you tweeted his strikeout rates at every level ever, and they're all really good. Yeah, but that was more like, that was not analysis.

I mean, a bunch of them were like 22. Because the actual point of that tweet, which was subtle, and that's the only thing I got, was that he's been at not just lots of places, but lots of places for very short periods of time. Like he's had the kind of career where he's had to go to high A a couple times and that sort of thing, where he's at a place for four innings. He's got a lot of four-inning stints. So he's got a couple of 22.5 strikeout per nine stints,

and then he's got one zero per nine stints so he's got a couple of 22.5 strikeout per nine stints and then he's got one zero per nine stint he's also got the same uh war this year as jordano ventura yeah after three starts yeah he's got the same war this year as he's got better war than brett anderson he's got a better war than drew smiley just eyeballing it he's not like suddenly throwing 95 or something he's throwing about as hard as he was before like 91 ish and i don't know it doesn't seem like his movement suddenly went crazy or uh anything like that he is i don't know it's hard's hard to compare the pitch FX stats by year because as you said, he's had some years where he hardly pitched at all, but he hasn't suddenly

turned into Randy Johnson or anything. I'm sure there is a good reason why he is doing this because it's really hard to fluke into three starts of 10 or more strikeouts and hardly any walks and not many hits. I've heard that command is a big part of it and mechanics and that sort of thing. But yeah, it's not as if he has suddenly found five miles an hour. Let me ask you a slightly different question, Ben. There are 40 pitchers, 40 starting pitchers in 10 postseason teams playoff rotations right now if the playoff started today there'd be 10 teams they would each have four starters that they would have in their theoretical postseason rotation how many how many of those starters would the team rather have rich

hill starting for them to you know right now one start right now like would you rather would you rather have him or uh alex wood i would say it'd be like 30 would you rather rather have 30 than rich hill that there'd only be 10 postseason starters who they would take would you rather have him or colin mckew probably mckew would you rather have him or Bartolo Cologne him him or Alex Wood would him or Brett Anderson Anderson him or Michael Pineda um I'm biased by Michael Pineda's start tonight which was horrendous um I'll say I'll say Hill right now. Him or Mark Burley? Him. I think I might go, I think I might put him like 16th right now. Really?

Yeah. Pitching is weird, man. It is. Pitching is so different. I don't think that the teams would make that choice. I think maybe you should make that choice. I think most teams would not jettison one of their starting pitchers who got them there. I mean, just for clubhouse reasons, you wouldn't do it, but also just for

sort of risk aversion reasons. I think just you have a guy who has been pretty good for you all year if he's in your playoff rotation and you're a playoff team. this is rich hill and he's three starts and if you if you get rid of your you know number three starter who was pretty good for you all year in a pretty successful year and you go with the ultimate fad of rich hill and it backfires then you're dead so i don't think many teams would do it but i i can see the argument that maybe a lot of them should. All right. So we didn't really answer that question. What was the question?

What would we sign Richa for? Well, you said 330. Yeah. It's just like... 330. 330 is crazy, but it's also not that much. No, it's... I mean, the numbers always seem high.

We're always three years behind adjusting our brains to what people actually get or more three or more years uh i mean really if it's 330 and he like would you rather have him or well i don't want it i don't want to lump all cuban guys that you've never seen before but like someone gave yasmani tomas 68 and i mean i can imagine that if random old cuban dude came out and everybody like saw him do this for the last three starts they'd give him a ton of money right probably yeah yeah i mean rich hill is uh 35 and has a long track record of not being great so he does he's if he if you get him for 3 and 30 all he's got to do is have one good year right yeah like one good year that's it but it's so fragile like he's starting thursday he's starting thursday at yankee stadium yeah he goes out and

not even blows up if he goes out and just has a mediocre start oh i wouldn't give him i wouldn't give him a penny i wouldn't give him eight hundred thousand dollars yeah so i would not i wouldn't let him eat the spread yeah so if you're uh that close to not having a roster spot i it's that but it's 30 million is like not that much you're okay i i think that i as soon as i said it i my heart went nope you don't you didn't want to say that so i'm backing off three and thirty i haven't heard you give an answer hot shot no well No. Well, I would. There's no reason to sign him to more than a one-year deal, is there? Well, yeah, because maybe someone else.

Maybe I come around and give him a multi-year deal. You're competing with 29 other teams for Rich Hill. Yeah. It's not a sentence that I would have expected you to say three weeks ago, two weeks ago. Yeah, so you'd just have to do a cost-benefit on whether it would be worth it or not. But if I were going to give him a one-year deal, I mean, I would give him a one-year $10 million deal.

You would? I think I would, although now I'm remembering saying how weird it was when the dodgers gave brett anderson that deal the thing is that if you give him a one-year deal you lose all your upside i mean there's this like playing single back it's not like this is gonna be the beginning of a 10-year career renaissance or something like he's yeah that's what they said about bartolo cologne true that's true and i just picked rich hill over him exactly i feel like i would almost rather have him at a multi-year deal at this point well i mean i don't know what i don't know in this hypothetical world what he would ask for and what another team would offer him but i mean the odds

are pretty good that you get nothing out of him but if he's good you you hope to to get a lot out of him like you want to bet on the upside so i could see like i would rather have him for two at 16 than one at 10 yeah okay except then you get to look stupid for so long if he has one bad start. Why are you so unconfident in your GMing? Maybe you made a great deal. Maybe you're a bold leader, the kind of GM that shakes the sport up. Maybe. But if he has a bad start on opening day, then you're stuck with Rich Hill for two seasons.

Anyone would be okay with the one-year flyer i think anyone would say sure give him one year deal but if you give him two and he's terrible right away and you're stuck with him for two years okay then you look like the guy who bought it too so you're at one in ten will you stick with one in ten just for a minute to entertain a follow-up question okay okay are you you're at one in ten yes okay he pitches thursday against the yankees yeah he allows two runs in the first how much how much what kind of runs are they it's like uh uh single up the middle and a walk with a couple of uh hard single though there's like five million dollars riding on whether it's a hard single.

It's not Carlos Gonzalez, 107 off the bat, but it's a line drive. It's a solid single at the middle, a walk in between. There's a strikeout and a flyout to left, a can of corn. And then with two outs and two on, he gives up a double down the right field line from a right-handed hitter. But deep.

So that'd be A-Rod because he's the only right-handed hitter on the team, I think, at this point. I'm going to take... On a 3-1 count. Oh. I'm going to lop a million off. Only a million? Okay. It's just an inning. All right.

Although it does puncture his air of invincibility as soon as he gives up one run i mean he has given up one run yeah he is like i wish that he were negotiating for contracts right now and that this was like like a deal or no deal situation and like every pitch, the banker lowers his price. Yeah. Is that how that show worked? I'm not much of a game show watcher, but it sounds right. Pretty sure there was a banker. All right. All right.

This question I know is something you're passionate about. Nate from Minneapolis says, A couple weeks ago in San Francisco, Wellington Castillo hit into a 6-2-3 double play. Obviously, he's slow. That was sort of a non sequitur couple of first sentences, but he's establishing that there are slow players in Major League Baseball.

What's the average Major League time to first? What's the slowest time that would be playable? What percentage of non-ball players between 20 to 30 are as fast as the average major leaguer i'm curious about this because speed is the least specialized tool well i uh i've probably answered a conversion of this on the show only because i tell everybody this yeah but we all think that slow baseball players are slow. They're actually all faster than us. They're all faster than all of us.

And I tested this one time. It wasn't like a super extravagant test, but I clocked Jose Molina, who I think we can all agree is at the low end, is a 20-grade runner. I clocked him hustling to beat out a double play and he was like four, six, five or four, seven, maybe four, seven, five around there, which is really slow. That's horrifyingly slow. And then I went outside and I paced off 90 feet and I took a swing and I ran and I timed it. And then I did that about six times and I'm slower than that. I'm like a, like closer to five. And, uh, I'm not, uh, I was

never fast, but I'm also in decent shape. I'm an adult and I'm still pretty young. So I'm like, uh, you know, I pinch run for my softball team, healthy legs. And, um, you know, I'm, I'm reasonably, no, you wouldn't look at me and say, Whoa, he's slow. And I'm slower than Jose Molina. And I know that Rob Neier had Matt Corey and Jeff Sullivan out to a field in Portland, and they also ran this test. Theirs was a farce. Rob Neier was doing a jailbreak. They all fell down for one day. Well, they did all fall down, which slows you down a lot.

But they were doing jailbreak bunts. They were bunting and running as they went. I mean, it was a complete cheat. down which slows you down a lot yeah but like they were doing jailbreak bunts like they were bunting and running as they went i mean it was a complete cheat and that's a jailbreak bunt is like you lop off about four tenths of a second i i think is what scouts will tell you and so it was not nearly appropriate for so they claim that they beat david ortiz they did not they cheat so i also you and i have some experience with the stompers where fast even at that level was much slower than fast at the majors i mean these guys are really fast like guys who you don't think of as fast are really fast like eric cosmer is the fastest person you've ever met. And, and I don't,

where'd you meet him? I need to follow up question, but he is like, he is, he's faster than anybody, you know, I mean, you might know,

you might know a couple of people who are super fast. Like, I mean, if you ran track, right. You were good at track. Like you're probably faster than Jose Molina. If you were a good,

if you are, if you're a runner, if you're like, if you were the you're a runner if you're like if you were the fastest runner in your class every year growing up and everyone knows you as the super fast guy then you're probably faster than the slowest major leaguer but most of us are not that yes exactly i somebody i i like i said i bring this up constantly. Last time I brought it up on Twitter, somebody had a great reply. They said, it always amuses me that when people talk about fat athletes, they focus on fat instead of athlete. And it's true. These guys are really good athletes. They're fast. They're good. They're good at all of it. Okay. Plain deck. I mean, yeah, sure. Benjamin Lena might be the

exception. All right. So Ben, this is a topic that is near and dear to your heart. The long at bat. Oh, yeah. You had a thing once. Subject of the most misguided series I've ever done. So, we all know that as an at bat goes deeper and deeper, it benefits whom? The batter. By conventional wisdom, that is true i think

and i think it's true on ben okay you're you're gonna explain things play indexing okay sorry and so i didn't devise the best test for this we can talk about where this might not be conclusive. But I went to Play Index's event finder, and I looked at all 3-2, 3-2 at bats from 2010 to 2015, and I got to choose how many pitches there were in the at bat. So 3-2 with 6 pitches, 3-2 with 7 pitches, 3-2 with 8, with 9, with 10, with 11, with 12, with 13, with 14, with 15, and with 16. By the way, in the process of doing this, play index will sometimes take you into odd spirals of inquiry. And one thing I was surprised to learn from this, and you'll have no idea how I got to this from what I was doing, but wouldn't you think that John Lester would be

among the major league leaders in inducing batted balls this year that were fielded by the catcher because he doesn't throw and so anytime there's a ball that's in between him and the catcher he just peels off he disappears he does not go near it yeah like I've seen him do it I've seen him do it in very very very very um obvious ways and and also you would think that some guys knowing that he can't throw would have bunted against him or bunted against him more than usual and he tries not to field those either and in fact jared weaver got 18 balls fielded by a catcher this year john lester is not he's not on here he's not he's not anywhere in the top 50 he doesn't he has fewer than seven that's interesting because john lester's gotten a lot of ground balls this year and weaver is like the extreme fly ball

pitcher so you'd think that he would have even fewer super weird all right anyway going back to this so i although are you just talking about grounders or any balls any ball plate appearances okay yielded by catcher so weaver is also the pop-up master right yeah so that is probably why yeah i'm not mad at weaver being on here okay i'm mad at lester not being on here all right all right so uh we have i looked at the re24 which basically looks at the run expectancy change in any at bat I looked at the average for all of the at bats that went three, two split by how many pitches there ultimately were in the at bat. Now, first of all, three, two count, generally speaking, I think of it as neutral. It is a

neutral count. The numbers of a three, two count for a split are usually pretty close to one's numbers overall. In fact, though, there's a slight edge to the hitter. And the average run expectancy change for a 3-2 count on a 6 pitch at bat is about.046. So about 1 20th of a run advantage to the hitter just knowing that count. Okay? Okay. So that's 63,000 trials,.046 runs. So do you want to stick with the hypothesis that this will get more favorable to the hitter as it goes?

Well, based on your intro to this segment no oh okay well let's see okay seven pitches goes to 0.52 0.052 so that's uh an increase of six hundredths of a run on a six pitch full count with eight pitches it goes to 0.67 although that's a little bit of an outlier because then it goes back down to 0.61 for nine and 0.61 for 10 so it's fairly consistent from 7 to 10 is fairly consistent although maybe uh maybe some some it goes up from 7 uh to 8 and then it goes down to 9 and holds steady at 10. And then from there it goes up to.7 with an 11-pitch at bat, to.9 with a 12-pitch at bat, to.8 with a 13-pitch at bat, but to.14 with a 14-pitch at bat.

How many of those are there uh like 100 so not that many uh and and this stat is also sensitive uh to fluctuation because uh if there are runners on base then you're going to see wilder swings and and then after that 15 and 16 there are very few there's like six examples of each of those, and the results are totally all over the place. So with 15 pitches, they've actually benefited the pitcher slightly. But again, we're talking about almost nothing. So to break it down, there is a, basically if you have a six or seven pitch full count,

then it's about 1 20th of a run in the hitter's favor. If you have an 8, 9, or 10 pitch at bat, then it's about like a 16th of a run in the hitter's favorite. And if you have an 11 pitch or higher at bat, it's like a 12th of a run in the hitter's favor. So it actually does, as the conventional wisdom says, it does seem to benefit the batter the further into the count you go. Now, of course, maybe what I'm actually saying is that the deeper in a count you go, the more likely you're dealing with a mediocre pitcher who doesn't have the sort of stuff that can put a hitter away. Maybe you're dealing with a hitter who has good bat control and can fight these off. it might just be that the people who get in these

at bats tend to be the ones that that matchup already favors the hitter this is not an exhaustive survey this does not look at the expected uh offensive production of the specific particular individual pitcher hitter matchups however, there's a little something here. Maybe. Okay. Now we know. What were you going to say before I started? I was going to back up what you said. I think Russell Carlton did a thing once, maybe a long time ago for StatSpeak or something about how the more, I think he said the more balls a hitter fouled off in a plate appearance, the better he did. So everything, I haven't seen anything to contradict the conventional wisdom that this is true. Okay.

All right. Cool. Good play index. And you can use the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. We encourage you to do that. All right. Mark says. Clayton Kershawhaw by the way still a one hitter 12 strikeouts one walk he's it's i saw the yankees text poll question today was who's the nl

syon jake arietta or zach granky not even a kershaw option huh not even an option how much does it cost to have an option on a Twitter text poll or whatever? He's not even seen as being close enough to have the option, which blows my mind because he'd get my vote. Really? Yeah, Kershaw would get my vote. Here's my thinking about Kershaw. It's not halves, but let's say it's a first half and a second half.

In the first half, he had a bad ERA, and he had an amazing FIP and XFIP. And we all went, oh, he's clearly pitching much better than this, and he's getting unlucky because of the ERA. And then in the second half, he did exactly what his XFIP and FIP said, which really is convincing evidence to me that he was pitching amazingly all along and that there was nothing real about his era like we said he's going to be the best pitcher in baseball from this point forward he was the best pitcher in baseball from that point forward arguably in my mind uh and so i think he should get full credit for the first half xFIP as well. All right. He proved it.

Okay. So you're sort of giving, you're going with who's projected to be the best pitcher? I mean, he would be projected to be the best pitcher today, tomorrow. And so that's saying he is the best pitcher in baseball, just based on true talent. No, I sort of phrased it poorly but i'm saying he actually was i think that he actually was the best pitcher in baseball he actually pitched better than anybody else for the first two months of the season when he had an era of 4.6 or whatever all right mark says whatever happened to rotator cuff injuries it seemed that in the 80s and 90s we see we saw a lot of pitchers go down with rotator cuff

injuries. Now it's all UCL replacement surgery, and you rarely see a rotator cuff injury. Has something changed? Were rotator cuff injuries misdiagnosed? Was it Roger Craig's splitter? I don't have a definite answer for that, but there has been some stuff written about how Mark is correct about that. Jeff Zimmerman wrote something for the Hardball Times last year, and Rob Arthur wrote something for FiveThirtyEight this year when there was a lot of elbow hysteria. Rob pointed out that at least it's not shoulder hysteria because shoulder injuries are even worse and have lower success rates. And he showed just a graph of over time, and it was around the late 90s, he found, like 1998 was when the trajectories of elbow surgeries and shoulder surgeries diverged,

and they had sort of both been rising, and then elbow injuries took off, and shoulder injuries sort of plateaued and have now decreased and Jeff and Rob think it's about just better training and conditioning basically that exercise has gotten better that we've found ways to strengthen the shoulder that it's easier to strengthen the shoulder you can't really strengthen a ligament very effectively. And so the more strain you put on it, the more likely it is to tear. But the shoulder, you can find ways to strengthen it, condition it, make it somewhat more immune to injury. And that seems to be the place where teams actually have made an impact in keeping pitchers healthier

so that's the the good side that's the silver lining so did they i thought uh did they do we just call rotator cuff injury something different now i mean it is something right is a labrum injury the same as a rotator cuff injury or are those separate things because it's not like shoulder injuries i mean he's right in the in the late 80s and in the 90s you heard about rotator cuff injuries all the time and now you never i never hear those words and so it's i assume people are still hurting their shoulder i know they're still it's shoulder injuries are up from that point in history it's just that you never hear the phrase rotator cuff anymore you hear labrum a lot i don't know if they're this i don't think they are the same.

They are not the same, no. But if you look at the Rob Arthur graph, and I just sent it to you, and it's based on DL stuff, DL appearances, and shoulder injuries were rising through the 80s, through the 90 90s almost up to 2000 or so and then at least over the last several years they've really headed almost straight down i don't know if that's an accurate reflection of the real risk at this point or whether it's just a couple lucky years for shoulder injuries but at this point according to that graph they are at you know 80s levels at this point yeah okay um yeah 80s levels not lower than the 80s no all right can i ask one more question uh-huh okay i want to if you don't mind i want to answer a question that was asked by Stan, who employed me to be the binding arbitrator

in his league's tiebreaker dispute, his fantasy league's tiebreaker dispute. Just wondering what that email was about. So I'll make it very quick because, you know, another guy's fantasy league. However, I'm interested to know what you think about this ruling. Basically, here's the thing. They're in a league with head-to-head points matchups and these points

matchups usually come down to like i mean they go to the hundredths of a point there's never been a tie in 10 years at any in any matchup okay okay and then in the championship this year there was a tie there the first tie in 10 years of history came in the championship game. Now, they have a tiebreaker protocol. It's in the Constitution. In the Constitution of the league, it says that the first tiebreaker is whoever has the fewest points on his bench, which is a weird way to do it. But maybe it's a statement about efficient use of your roster okay however

in the leagues the guy with fewer points on the bench wins the tie break yes interesting he left fewer points on the bench would be a way that you might see that but you could also say that the guy with more points on the bench has a better team you could and as it turns out that in the league's settings on the league's content management system or whatever the setting is set to most points on the bench yeah so these two things conflict the constitution has existed for 10 years it had been reviewed by all the parties involved uh and uh it was the foundational document for this league. So now we've got two teams that both claim that the league rules support their claim on the championship.

So he asked me to decide who should win. So the other guy's claim is that the default, he's going with the default setting. He's saying it should be that instead of the constitution one. It's not a default setting. It's that the settings were set to whoever set the settings. So the Constitution and the settings conflicted. Conflict, yes.

I see. Okay. So he won. So if you go to the lead page, it says he won. Exactly. Okay. Huh. So I've asked a bunch of follow-up questions.

So if you have any, I might know the answer But if you think it's simple and cut and dried, you can also say that It's not simple and cut and dried, but I don't know if I have follow-ups What were your follow-ups? I don't want to go through all my follow-ups Does any of them have any bearing on the answer? I don't know, maybe, maybe not Nothing that would shock you yeah it's not a

satisfying end to the season either way i guess it's a memorable end maybe it's nice to have a weird ending every 10 years but it's just such a weird setting it's such a weird tiebreaker yeah either one is satisfying okay Okay, I do have one. This might be relevant to your decision. I did talk to the commissioner about the intent of writing the Constitution. And basically they imported the Constitution boilerplate from another league and then amended it as they needed to. That the tiebreaker is what it is in the Constitution was unintentional. It is not what he intended.

I don't know if he didn't probably write those words and he failed to amend them. I see. And so the founding fathers... So they probably just imported this setting from some other person's league a decade ago and no one thought it was important enough to change or no one noticed. Yeah. decade ago and no one thought it was important enough to change or no one noticed yeah so you could say that the founding father's intent in writing the constitution was that the most points on the bench would win the tiebreaker which seems relevant you could also argue though that the

constitution is the oldest document in the league and takes precedent over everything else the constitution being not just a law not just a rule or regulation but a constitution yeah that's tough i think uh i think i'm gonna be a strict constructionalist and i'm gonna say that the constitution applies i don't think that's what strict construction that i mean strict constructionalists in the common usage are interested in what the founding fathers were thinking when they wrote it. And so they, right? Well, it limits judicial interpretation. And that's what we're talking about here, sort of. We're not interpreting what the commissioner intended, though.

We can ask the commissioner. The commissioner is capable of telling us. True, but do we know what everyone else in the league intended? I guess maybe it doesn't matter. But if everyone else in the league, I mean, everyone else in the league may have thought this was intentional. They all ratified this agreement, right? Presumably it wasn't imposed on them. And so they all read this and signed off on it.

And that should matter. Here's, here's, I think the, an important detail. There was, it's not as though either team was playing for the tie. It's not like there was any strategy involved in getting the tie. They basically got in a position where by dumb luck they were tied and by dumb luck one is going to win there's nothing there's nothing particularly like logical about either of these tiebreakers it's you're basically just going to get like nobody was trying to have a deep bench so they could win this tiebreaker nobody was playing for the tie knowing that they had a deep

bench or the opposite you can't say that any of your plan was thwarted because of either interpretation, right? And so in that sense, it almost becomes random which person wins. to have a somewhat more sensible way of reading this. And the fact is that the constitutional rule makes no sense. There's no logic to it. It's stupid. It's dumb. It looks like an accident. It looks like a dumb accident, right?

It means nothing. It's like you could just pick any detail that you want. You could say like whichever team has more A's in their last names. Yeah. Like whatever whatever it's dumb how is it not like previous head-to-head record or like or season-long points totals or something sensible that would be what is going on in this league at least though the most points on your bench in some way kind of mimics real competitive life because in real sports your bench is kind of the tiebreaker in a way um you do use your bench and normally you don't use your bench in this league but in this one case you are going to the bench and it makes no sense to go to the bench and go all right which bench is worse you win it makes some sense to go to the bench and go, all right, which bench is worse? You win. It makes some sense to

say, all right, which bench is better? You win. And so there's a little bit of an internal logic there. I think the commissioner's wishes are, uh, or intentions are significant. And I just think that the fact that there isn't really two, yes, there are two documents that say two different things, but it's not like until this came up, anybody was debating it. There weren't partisans on both sides. This isn't a political dispute that happened. This is a typo that happened. And when a typo happens, I think it's best to let the lawmakers attempt to correct the typo rather than saying, well, that's the law now and we can never

change it. So I, unless you are going to strongly object and force me to bring in another party, I want to rule in favor of the most points on the bench. I'm not adamant about either position, but I think, uh, I think you've opened up a slippery slope here and i think they better review the the text very carefully before next season or there could be commissioner overreach yeah i mean you you do kind of agree that like if the dude won with the worst bench that would just be such a like like i mean talk about a loophole talk about talk about something i don't know what the correct expression is but falling uphill so you wouldn't consider just tossing out the bench condition and going with and going to the second tiebreaker just going

to a tiebreaker that makes sense just well there is this there is a second tiebreaker? Just going to a tiebreaker that makes sense. Well, there is a second tiebreaker. What is the second tiebreaker? Home field, which I don't know what determined home field. I have no idea what determined home field. That is a fair... Yeah, if you could... Invalidate the first tiebreaker because there are two documents that conflict. Right.

Oh, invalidate the first tie breaker go to the second tie breaker i think i like that i think i do too and then we'll find out that home field is determined by who had the most points on their bench but hang on all right the tie breakers order of tie breaking in the event of a tie in any given game. One, winner is decided by the least points left on the bench. See, left on the bench, that verb there is somewhat non-neutral. Like whoever did write that. Yeah. Sounds to me like you're legislating from the bench.

Second one, winner is decided by home field. All right. Well, so we don't know what that means exactly But assuming it's based on something more substantial Or even if it's not, because as it is The default is barely sensible I think there's only two rational ways to look at this One is that the first tiebreaker is invalidated

Because it is not consistent across the league's rules and therefore it has to be rewritten to be consistent you cannot enforce both laws simultaneously they're dumb or you say clearly it's a typo let's give the benefit of the doubt to the author who incident, is not one of the parties here and has nothing to gain by revising his intent. So one of those is really, I think, would be the two choices. I think I want to say invalidate the tiebreaker, go to home field. Yeah, I back that. All right. All right.

All right, it's settled. The first case of the effectively wild court it's kind of fun yeah that was good all right let's see your other disputes preferably not fantasy league ones but only if they're as interesting as this one all right last thing a question from nick because i want to connect it to something we said earlier this year nick says for the last several years the best shortstop in the game has been Troy Tulewitzki. But is he still? Have players like Xander Bogarts or Brandon Crawford surpassed him?

So maybe that's the quick question. Is Troy Tulewitzki still the best shortstop in the game? Assuming he's fully healthy, which he's not, which he never is. healthy which he's not but which he never is but if he were healthy tomorrow would you want him over Correa Bogarts Seager Lindor I would probably take I probably would take Correa I would probably take Correa too and so that's the I think the cautionary tale here because we had a question I think it was July I think it was like around the trade deadline that we talked about on an earlier email show from a listener named kevin and yeah i think it was around the all-star game or a little after the all-star game and

he asked us about the decline of short stops and how shortstop has declined in a as an offensive position and he had a hypothesis about how we understand defense better. And so, you know, more teams are okay with putting a glove first guy there who doesn't hit, that sort of thing. And I think at the time we came down on the cyclical side of things, or at least I think we may have said that it's not that this is the anomaly it's that the big three were the anomaly and that having jeter and eight rod and nomar at the same time was strange and and adjusted everyone's expectations away from what shortstop had historically been

so now we're uh two months after we answered this question maybe and i don't think anyone would say that shortstop is now a weak offensive position now suddenly three of the most exciting young players in the game who've had some of the best second halves in the game are shortstops and xander bogarts is hitting now so you've got you know along with crawford maybe and a couple other guys you've got like five possible superstars at shortstop all of a sudden i guess i mean that was that was foreseeable it wasn't it was it's not a surprise that these guys are good they were at the time top prospects and they've made a quicker transition than anyone expected them to, I think. But it's a nice reminder that a lot of times we come up with reasons and rationales for things that are really just things that we notice

in the moment because they're true in the moment, but they're not true in the moment before or after. I won't believe in this crop of super shortstops until I see them posing shirtless with gold chains in Sports Illustrated. Yeah, you'd think someone would have gotten on that by now. I mean, Photoshop, if nothing else, it's a two minute Photoshop. Yeah, we should email Emma Spann and give her a free cover suggestion. You'd think that they would want to do that just for the throwback value. Okay, so that's it it i've got more excellent questions on my word document here that we didn't have time to get to but i will star them for next week and please keep them coming and send us those questions at podcast at baseball perspectives.com you can debate our fantasy league ruling in the

facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And as we've already said, you can support the Play Index with the coupon code BP. We will be back tomorrow. There's like $2,000 riding on it, by the way. Oh, wow. I'm glad you didn't tell me that before. Uh-huh.

Not only is there like $2,000 riding on it, but if the commissioner overturns the league settings ruling and goes with the constitutional ruling, it is likely the league will break up. Wow. Because too many, a couple of people are like, refuse to pay into the system. Wow. This is really momentous. So we might have just destroyed a league that had

been going for 10 years well i feel bad now do you want to reconsider no but i hope the guy who won had home field advantage whatever that means i do too i i do too i mean it's a it's a it's a bad break that he it's a bad break that he doesn't win in one sense, but again, basically the tie was so out of their control and so beyond his intention, and the tiebreaker itself is so random as it is that really it should be a coin flip. There's nothing that makes much more sense than a coin flip.

So now it's a coin flip whoever had home field we don't know which one i think i should have gotten more credit for legislating from the bench you're just saying words you're just like making references now like it's a phrase it is we're talking about the bench the whole time we're literally legislating on the bench maybe from the bench yeah i don't know you know there's a bench involved i guess all right see ya bye