Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 764: Award Apathy and Splashy Stats

Episode Date: November 11, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about daily-fantasy ads, then answer listener emails about Barry Bonds and splash hits, end-of-season awards, when to spend on free agents, baseball and the metric system, and more.

Don't go near the water, to do to anyone, to be cool with the water is the message of this song. Let's all help the water, right away, do what we can in order Let's start today Good morning and welcome to episode 764 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of ESPN, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Hello.

The New York Attorney General has declared Daily Fantasy sites illegal gambling and ordered them to cease operations in New York. So I don't know what to do with my day now that I can't do that anymore. Yeah? Yeah. I was a big Daily Fantasy guy. You're teasing, teasing right i'm teasing daily podcasts are still legal though so i can continue to record you can you can if you want

you can still just scratch uh scratchers while you're recording your daily podcast it's like a hybrid that's true i wonder if i'll be able to just walk around and see other products advertised out in the world now and when i when i walk around new york i i will say this i i um i have been surprised to find out how much people value variety of advertising like yeah like it's all that it's not like it's not like tv stations added ad space for this you were gonna get an ad you were gonna get an ad for another product that you don't want and that you probably hate right and i can see like i i that it seems i guess legitimate that the repeat would annoy people uh but i'm surprised at how much it annoys people like it you get the feeling

that people are like if not for this they'd be showing new episodes of the wire right yeah well it's the same thing that happens every postseason when we see the same seven ads over and over and over again and they drive us mad that's a good point some of those are for daily fantasy sites now but they weren't in the past but you're right the opportunity cost is just another ad yeah all right do you have anything to talk about we're doing emails uh no okay all right ben says i hate gold gloves but I want to like gold gloves. How can we fix them? Then he has some suggestions. What if we allocated three per league to outfielders and two to middle infielders and two to corner outfielders?

This would allow two great center fielders, namely the Kevins, to each get one and allow you not to have to pick someone like Cole Calhoun. Same applies for middle infield in the NL. In this case, not shafting the best defensive player in baseball because the Braves sucked more than the Giants. You get both shortstops. Is there anything that they could do? And they've, I mean, they've changed the format. They've incorporated stats. They've switched around who's eligible and how many of these things get handed out. I think I have reached the point where I am apathetic about all awards, so I don't think there's anything you could do to salvage them for me. This year, it just doesn't seem like there's

really a particularly interesting award race. I mean, there are close ones, but all the answers seem fine to me. Like, I don't really care if Donaldson or Trout wins the AL MVP. I don't really care if Kershaw or Arietta or Granke wins the NL Cy Young because they're all great choices and they can all be justified with good arguments. So I don't care. And I've just kind of come around to the idea, which I think Kevin Goldstein used to talk about on Up and In, which is that awards don't really matter because what happened happened. And whoever the writers decide to give the award to doesn't change anything that happened. So maybe it's, I don't know, maybe it's that there's just no philosophical battle now there's no like Trout vs Cabrera this year

where it's almost like it feels like there's something at stake like a way of thinking is being tested or I don't know Felix Hernandez winning the award when he didn't have a lot of pitcher wins or something it seems almost like we're past that stuff now so I just kind of don't care yeah i i um i am i look with uh with

the a moderate degree of interest i don't not look i'm curious i don't know why i'm curious i can't exactly it's hard to avoid explain yeah but I still do look I mean I click I click to see who's on the all-star roster I I mean I don't know I don't know why I do and so I'm I'm happy they exist uh but I also have uh I've grown largely unconcerned about who wins them um because um you know like i think we we talked about one time if you if you wanted you could get a perfect group of people to get together and vote and get just the right results for you and for everybody and everybody would be happy except nobody would care about your awards like like there are these awards like like at bp we have the internet

baseball awards right and many people vote and uh and uh some of us are interested in that and some of the readers are interested in it and that's good and the ball players don't care at all um so i don't know it just seems like um these things don't necessarily serve the purpose that you might think they do. I don't know what purpose they do serve, to be honest. Why do we do this? I don't know. I know why writers do it, so that they can have something to write about and feel like they're important.

It's a listicle, right? Awards are a listicle. They're good clickbait. They've always been good clickbait. They were good clickbait in 1914 or whatever when Sporting News decided to publish these things in newspapers. And that's essentially what they are. They're a way of ordering the world into a list that people can argue over. And so I guess in that sense, as long as you don't take them too seriously, they're good fun.

And if you do start to take them too seriously, then you should probably be aware that you're falling into the clickbait model. They've trapped you. You've been duped to some degree. And I've been duped plenty in my life. I don't begrudge you the duping. I've spent some time in my life being very aggrieved about what happened to Johan Santana in 2005 or about the annual beating of the Utley by Ryan Howard. And so I know it's quite the temptation it's the lure yeah and i don't know whether baseball debates in general have gotten less interesting probably not but it seems like award debates or debates about who the best player is are somewhat less interesting

because we all have so much data that we can draw on i mean when these awards were being voted on in 1950 or whatever you couldn't look up i mean it was it was hard to look up any sort of stats maybe you could look up end of season you know batting average or something and that you weren't gonna to get probably even on base percentage. You just weren't going to be able to settle that by looking at a leaderboard in the newspaper necessarily, or at least you could make a really good argument that the leaderboard in the newspaper didn't reflect how good a player was. Whereas now we have all of these different ways to answer that question.

We don't need the people who were at the games covering the games to tell us who the best was because we can all just look at the numbers and come to our own conclusions and those conclusions might be better than the conclusions of the people who are deciding based on what they happen to see at the ballpark. So I don't know. We don't need them anymore. I would just – I think – okay. I would say more awards would be good and less discussion of them would be good. Like I would actually be happy if there was an award every day and I could click on it and go, oh, and then close it down. The Jerry Krasnick poll of the day.

Yeah. I don't know. I feel like they are less interesting than ever before. Because it's the same problem with the Hall of Fame. Where you, to some degree, it's less so with individual awards and individual seasons. But there is kind of a problem where sorting by war is horrible and awful and also the only really justifiable thing you can do. You have much more flexibility to go beyond that in MVP voting, I think. And usually there's a playing time aspect that you can debate in Rookie of the Year voting.

And then there's the imaginary versus real of pitching voting so it's not nearly so bad uh in those but it still kind of is like it's it look if i if you ask me to vote for mvp i'm gonna have a hard time doing much other than sorting by war and so that makes it even though i think that's a that's boring and dumb so that makes it less interesting yeah and you know you have to be careful about the fact that the defensive ratings are maybe less reliable than the offensive ratings, and they aren't regressed in war. So if you just sort by war and some guy shows up

because he has a plus 30 defensive rating or something, you might want to be a little more skeptical about that than a guy who is the best hitter in the league. So there's that. But I mean, we're probably going to get to a point whether it's, you know, once we've had several years of stat cast or something, and maybe we have more reliable defensive metrics that work in smaller sample sizes, then maybe we will get to a point where sorting by war is really the best answer that you can come up with. And at that point, I don't know what else there will be to say. I don't know whether they'll ever just hand over the awards to the war leaderboard,

because that would be extremely boring. But I don't know what the alternative is eventually, once we get to the point that those things are really reliable. Okay, but you can look at the Fielding Bible Awards, I guess. If you want to look at good defensive awards, those will probably match your inclinations as a statistical person better than the Gold Gloves will still. One last thing, though. I do think that they add something when i look at a player's player reference a baseball reference page uh it it

is kind of a nice quick and dirty way of seeing how good a guy was and it also is a kind of a nice quick and dirty way of seeing the seasons that stand out the outliers in his career the the the weird year where all of a sudden he was the MVP. And I would be sad if those didn't exist or if somehow they stopped existing. So in that sense, there is like a kind of a great bold ink aspect to MVP voting and so on that I like. Yeah, I guess that's true.

Although if baseball reference just replaced that with like their war ranking or defensive ranking or something would that be worse um i don't maybe it's helpful to know what people think of the player it is right it it's kind of it's like don baylor would be nowhere near the 1979 leaderboard and yet there's something nice about knowing like that does tell you a lot about that season just looking at that just looking at that little one little fact one little data point tells you something that you wouldn't find just by looking at his war yeah that's true all right in the spirit of two recent topics i did a quick check on the number of splash hits by a single player into covey cove and he includes that list it is led by barry bonds at 35 and the second place hitter is pablo sandoval at

seven so nowhere close that's surprisingly small that gap you think i definitely think yeah i'm surprised that i guess well i guess it's that the at&t didn't open until i think 2000 yeah so bonds didn't play that you you think wow bonds was way better and and also played a long time but i guess his first eight years as a giant were not there and so he wants to know what will happen first a Yankee sells more jerseys in a calendar year than Jeter. The Giants switch stadiums. The Giants leave San Francisco. Baseball ends or someone overtakes Bonds and splash hits into McCovey Cove. Well, B is an easy one.

The Giants move stadium. Well, no, it's not because they could be there for 200 years I guess how long will Fenway last uh at this point I I don't know why he would ever not be at Fenway if you're if you're still playing baseball yeah and Wrigley basically like do you think if baseball is around in 200 years they'll still be playing at Fenway and Wrigley? Yeah, I think so. They've shown that they can modernize it and compete in this environment. And there's obviously some value to the franchise in having a historic park that everyone loves. So I would think now that they've gone this far, they'll keep going.

And it's hard to imagine any... I guess it probably always felt this way about every new stadium, but it's hard to imagine anything replacing AT&T, any reason they would replace it. Right. Unless there was an earthquake or a tidal wave caused by an earthquake. Or I don't know if it's imperiled by climate change. It is on the water. Yes.

And so I don't know how many feet the oceans would have to rise to ruin it. Right. So those would be conceivable threats. Did you read the New Yorker article about the Pacific Northwest earthquake that might be coming? No, but I heard people talk about it. talk about it so it's that seems that would be the biggest threat except that it seems like the effect of that would be mostly sacramento and north and so san francisco would be just south of the destruction line so i don't know how well they know that maybe they don't. Yeah. But with that in mind, I will say that it is more likely through some combination of events or preference that they are not playing baseball there in 100 years than that they are. Uh-huh.

you would have to have one of the two or three best hitters in baseball be left-handed and essentially play there his whole career and still maybe not get there yeah well he didn't i mean he didn't get to play there that long he was i mean that was the the greatest run of yeah of production ever but he only got to play there what seven, seven seasons or something? Yeah. So, like, for instance, let's see. Carlos Delgado is on this list with three. And I'm checking, but I bet Carlos Delgado didn't get more than 200 plate appearances there. And so if you imagine that a guy like Carlos Delgado could get three in... Yeah, I would think he'd have to have fewer uh in 54 54 yeah wow that's well he played in the nl for that part of his career

anyway 54 so 3 and 54 at bats it's pretty good yeah so obviously he wouldn't keep up that anything like that pace who else is there who would you think like larry walker had one but he was kind of old who who is the big left-handed slugger of that era in the nl there really wasn't one was there prince fielder only had one in his time but there's not a great comparison here adam dunnn had one. Adam Dunn had one. I don't know. I guess 35 doesn't seem unbreakable. Yeah, well, right.

They just have to sign or develop a good left-handed hitter and have him be a career giant, and he'll break this record. Well, he won't break it, though. He might challenge it, but he won't break it, though. He might challenge it. But he won't break it. I mean, it's hard to break it. Well, what percentage of left-handed home runs? I mean, I guess it's a very, it's not just that you have to hit a lot of home runs.

You also have to hit them really far, right? And you have to hit them, yeah, and high enough. Yeah. So that's the thing's because it's a big high it's a big high wall right so it's not like you could i mean i don't know if they just like if they if they have a left-handed hitter who hits 300 career home runs or something which is you know very good but not great and he hits half of those at home or a little more than half of those at home so say say he hits 180 at home or something i don't know what percentage of those would be splash hits but to get the record it would still have to be you know if he needs 36 out of 180 it

would be he'd have to have 20 of his home runs go in the cove, which I assume is an unreasonably high percentage. Well, you might assume that. I would have assumed that, and I'm double-checking a couple of things. But it looks like Pablo Sandoval, of his home runs at home—and remember, Pablo Sandoval, switch hitter. And so a much better left-handed hitter than right-handed hitter, but still switch hitter. So he's essentially priced out on some portion of his bats and some portion of his home runs. But seven of his 52 were splash hits, which is 14%.

And he's not thought of as a guy who hits bombs necessarily. And Brandon Belt, four of his 20 are splash hits. So that's 20%. All right. So it does see, and well, let's see, Bonds. Yeah, so Bonds, how many did he hit at home? I'm going to look. In fact, maybe this, I don't know.

No, I'm using the play index, but we won't call this the play index. I don't have a good play index today, though. All right, so I'm going bonds from 2000 to 2007. While I'm doing this, can you do a quick Google and make sure AT&T opened in 2000? All right. Yes. Okay, so bonds hit 160 home runs at home in that era, of which 34.

So about 20%, 35, about 20%, a little more than 20%. Okay, so we can assume that he hit them farther than your typical power hitter does. But I feel like 20% for a, it's a small sample, but the Sandoval-Belt-Now-Bonds examples seem to suggest to me that 20% is a fair estimate for a left-handed power hitter and if it is then yeah you need to you only need to hit a 300 home run hitter yeah or maybe a 400 home run hitter yeah which is nothing it's doable yeah so all right so i'm gonna say i'll now take bonds i'll take someone beats Bonds for all of these. No, I'm going to take the jerseys. Yeah, it's got to be more likely that a Yankee sells more jerseys in a calendar year than Jeter. But otherwise, switching stadiums, leaving San Francisco, baseball ends.

Those all seem less likely than someone beating Bonds in slashes. Yeah. Okay, not a bad answer. Someone beating Bonds and Slashits. Yeah. Okay. Not a bad answer. That was from Michael in London, by the way, who says that our good mornings on every episode are always confusing for him. Tom says, if Matt Harvey comes to spring training and has any sort of injury, there will be articles written about it being due to the Mets and him throwing his innings limit out the window.

However, if he gets injured in 2022, these articles will probably not still be written. Should they be written? When is the soonest Harvey could suffer an arm injury and his 2015 workload not be discussed? At what point would you personally not attribute a future arm injury to his 2015 workload would you let me ask about the premise would you ask uh would you personally assign the blame to the workload if it happened in spring training i don't know i i should we should we lower the bar to if you had to write about this for your for your employer right espn uh would you uh mention the workload obviously you would mention yes i would mention it if it happened

in spring so let's just call it mention the work okay and mention it in in something other than the ironic way that you and i might both tend to mention it even if this happened 23 years from now right yeah okay so next year I definitely mention it if he any point next year I think any point next year yes if he comes to spring training the year after that and he has he has a normal healthy season next year and a regular workload for a starter, and then gets hurt the following year, I might still mention it. I definitely think you would. I think I would mention it, yeah.

Probably any point during that year. Two years after, I mean, it's not out of the question that it could have an effect two years on. We don't know whether it has an effect ever, could have an effect two years on we we don't know whether it has an effect ever but if it is conceivable that it could have an effect then it's conceivable that it could have an effect two years on but would i mention it i don't think i would mention it if he's gotten through two fully healthy seasons with normal workloads i don't think i would mention it although i man i don't know like it would be tempting just to mention it for a really long time just because he's a guy who made such a big deal out of or his agent made such a big deal out of the possibility that he could get hurt that if he ever gets hurt we'll say something i feel like i yeah but more that

would i think that what you're kind of describing is more the mention like the – as an observer of baseball, you know that people are talking about this and you'll mention that people are talking about it. You'll probably in fact refute the mentions of it. Yeah. In that stage, at some stage. Like you would be refuting and still mentioning it like long after you would personally put any stock in it i i agree i think that um and as long as he were healthy if if he didn't become if it didn't become sort of a thing starting next year where he's missing two weeks here and there or you're hearing little whispers of of forearm soreness before the big injury uh then I think that two years is the max. By year three, you would not mention it.

Okay. All right. Do you want to do your disappointing play index? Sure. I don't think I've ever done this before. If I have, podcast is free. All right. podcasts free all right so uh i wanted to see who the all-time uh best pickoffers were relative to box okay because it's easy like like there are guys who have great pickoff moves

and get pickoffs and their pickoff moves are box and like r..A. Dickey's pickoff move is a box. And Johnny Cueto's pickoff move is a box. And I think that's good strategy. The very often repeated by me on this podcast bit of wisdom that if you're not getting to the airport, if you're never missing a plane, you're too early, you know? So good, yes. That's cool to have some box if play and you're too early. So good, yes. That's cool to have some balks if it gets you the pick-offs.

This is not a moral judgment. However, some guys get pick-offs without a balk move, and I wondered who the all-timers in this are. So I looked at player careers since 1989. I had to do 89. Do you know. I had to do 89. 89. Do you know why I had to do 89? No.

1988 was the year of the balk. Oh, right. Yeah. And they basically, they sent out orders to umpires to enforce a particular part of the balk rule, and guys were balking like 30, 40 times. Yeah. It was just ridiculous. This ridiculous this oh such a mess and so then they went well we're not doing that anymore and so they undid the year of the balk and um and it was uh never a problem again so i couldn't start in 88 would have messed

everything up so uh the answer is that uh the clear well it's not it's not the it is mathematically the clear winner but i think that we should probably hedge a little bit but the mathematically clear winner is kirk reader who had 30 pickoffs and never balked wow which is pretty good yeah all right so uh so he's the max for the no bach group justin thompson had 18 drew smiley is 18 if you want something that we can start monitoring he is active and could pursue this record uh so he has 14 and no box tommy malone has 11 he's active nathan neovaldi has 10 and he's active and right-handed uh So those are good ones. And Aroldis Chapman has seven pick-offs without a balk.

I would love to see Aroldis Chapman's pick-off. I might. In fact, I might. I might look that up. So those are the no-balk guys. If you want, though, to start getting guys who have more pick-offs and an extremely low rate of box, Mark Mulder had 36 with one box. And then you can go higher still. Terry Mulholland had

48 and three box, which is, of course, a lower ratio, but a higher volume. And then to get to the really elite, you have Andy Pettit, who edges Mark Burley in ratio with 98 pickoffs in his career and only 11 balks, which is amazing because Andy Pettit always balks. And then on the flip side, the reverse of this, if you want the guys who are just hopelessly balking, probably the champ is one of two. The numbers aren't as extreme because it's hard to balk that much,

so instead you just don't ever pick anybody off. But Carl Pavano had 16 balks and three pickoffs. So the reverse. So he's got basically the most balks for three or fewer pickoffs. And the perfectest balker is Scott Feldman, who has nine balks and has never picked a guy off. Wow. So you'd think he'd be a candidate for Lester. He should just stop throwing over there.

Yeah. If you're curious, the most balks, period, without worrying about ratio at all, is Randy Johnson. Randy Johnson, 33 balks, 58 pickoffs. Ted Lilly has the most balks for anybody who had more balks than pickoffs. Uh has the most box for anybody Who had more box than pickoffs And

29 box and 22 pickoffs And I'm going to I'm going to Go all the way back to 1950 And see who the box champion is For just a second So this will bring in the 1988 Data

Steve Carlton 90 box twice as many as anybody else. The all-time balker, Steve Carlton. Wow, how many pick-offs? 146, which is also a lot. Yeah. All right. I'm now going to, whatever you say next, make it something. You're going to keep researching.

I'm going to keep watching. I'm going to be looking up aroldis Chapman pickoff. And then I'm going to rest my case whatever point I make, and then you're going to go right into describing what Aroldis Chapman's pickoff move looks like. It's happened before. Yeah. Okay. Well, if I start my next question, I'll have to repeat it

once you're done looking at Aroldis Chapman's pickoff move. You can just wait a minute. I'm just watching an ad, and then I'm going to watch. I'm guessing it's not going to be that interesting. Yeah, he's probably not going to do a somersault. Okay. Huh. Yeah, it's nothing.

He's got a little bit of energy to it. He gears up. He's got a very bit of energy to it it you know he he has he gears up he's got a very uh was it 102 miles per hour he does throw hard he does throw it over there hard but chapman's got a lot of got a lot of kind of energy in his leg kick when he when he pitches and so it is somewhat like misleading because it it looks like more effort than the normal pickoff throw uh leg kick anyway not that interesting okay go ahead you can you're safe okay all right well it's actually a bad pickoff move i mean he's leaning from the very first maybe people just don't expect a roll as

chapman to throw over yeah maybe okay sam says i saw a brief mention on another site about dan Okay, Cano, Fielder, have happened early in the offseason when teams jumped to take guys off the market. Yet I've often read that Boris prefers to wait for the market to develop and allow more teams to get in on the bidding. Can you repeat that? What did he say about Cano and Fielder? That they were early signings? They were late signings. Fielder was a late signer. Fielder was a very late signer. Cano was fine. Cano was normal-ish. But Fielder was extremely late. Yeah, it's true.

I can see some sense in both ideas. If there's a clear best free agent at a position such as Canoe, maybe the team has to pay a premium to sign their guy early in the offseason. Yet, even in a year like this, with 20 qualifying offer-worthy players and three ace starting pitchers, maybe if a team waits while Price and Cueto sign elsewhere, they would have to pay even more in years or dollars for Granke. Of course, GMs can help themselves by being flexible about where they improve their team, but if your starting third baseman or shortstop is Will Middlebrooks, or you end up with five number one starters like Miley Porcello and Buck Nasty, you are delusional and soon to be out of a job if you upgrade your corner outfield instead of your areas of need.

What do you think? Is there a consistent game theory advantage to signing players early or late in the season? This is a place to cite some research that was done about that a few years ago now, so this is in the Providence Journal in November of 2012, done by podcast listener and excellent beat writer Brian McPherson. He wrote then, he did a study of 2007 through, I guess, 2011 off-seasons, and he wrote, almost 400 players have signed close to 550 free agent contracts since the end of the 2007 season. In that span, the average free agent signed before January 1st has been worth an average of.86 war per season over the life of his contract. The average free agent signed after January 1st has been worth an average of.92 war per season over the life of the contract. What about the price? Before January 1st, teams have paid an average of $5.52 million to obtain one war's worth of production from the free agents they've signed.

After January 1st, teams have paid an average of $3.6 million per one war of production they've received. So, he wrote, in other words, a team with $30 million to spend on the free agent market could expect to get 5.4 war if it emptied its piggy bank before the end of December. If it waited until January, it could expect to get 8.3 war for the same $30 million. And that seems like maybe a study that we should repeat every few years just to make sure that it wasn't a quirk of the whatever 2011 to 2000 or 2007 to 2011 period. Maybe it wouldn't hold up if you ran it every year, but maybe it would. And I don't know of anyone who's rerun it since then.

So that is the best and most recent answer I have. recent answer I have. I don't know. It could vary depending on the kind of player you want, maybe, or depending on the free agent market in a given year. But that's the best answer we have, that it's more efficient to wait and get whatever is left after the new year. Yeah, I think that that is what I would have expected that to find and that is i think i my guess is that it is mostly true throughout all off seasons but you're right it can be repeated but this is a situation where the kind of complaint that sometimes people have about war which is like what is a replacement level how can you tell me what a replacement level is and normally that complaint is like kind of dumb and doesn't understand what replacement level means.

But in this case, it really is the case that you're getting more wins in a vacuum or more production in a vacuum, but you no longer have really the choice to target the spots in your roster that most need updating right like if you if you wait until the last month to sign your guys then you can probably get comparable guys for cheaper but not necessarily the ones that you want and not necessarily the ones that fit your roster and not necessarily the ones that are going to have be the best upgrade over the things you already have and so you know in a way you can say certainly for the player one thing a player can take from that study is sign early right yeah even if even if it's a little less than you're hoping for the market is probably not likely moving in your direction but rather away from you and you have to just kind of well, that didn't go as well as I'd hoped.

Get it while you can. So from the player's perspective, good intel, reliable intel. From the team's perspective, though, that isn't necessarily at all to say that you should wait. Right. That's true. All right, and last question. We got, well, I'll do one If baseball were different how different Would it be kind of question From Jared who says

How would the game of inches be different If it were the game of centimeters In other words What if we had always used the metric system Given our love of round numbers If there is magic in the bases Being 90 feet apart Maybe baseball would never have caught

on because what are the chances that we would have landed on 27.432 meters between bases? Maybe it would have been 25 meters or 30 meters. How many famous ball and strike calls would be different if the strike zone were 43 centimeters instead of 43.18? Would an entire class of relievers have been less special? Because it doesn't sound as impressive to be able to throw 160.934 kilometers per hour. Bat sizes would likely be different, etc., etc. So how different would baseball be if we use the metric system? I would be interested in hearing from some of the cricket listeners as well as maybe some of the soccer slash football listeners to know whether there is a round number fetish generally in non-American sports. Because American football, huge round number fetish, right? You're 100-yard rushers.

You're 1,000-yard receivers. Basketball, round number fetish. You're double-double. yard receivers um basketball round number fetish your double double maybe the most maybe the most round number obsessed i uh statistical achievement in all of sports uh like he got three round numbers the only way that could be a more round number focused is if you if it had to be a like a 10 double like like you had wow double figures and 10 stats uh and i'm sure they would love to get there uh and i don't know if uh so i don't know if that's just strictly an american thing or not it is kind of odd that or it would be odd that americans would be so round number focused when we choose the uh the system of measurement that eschews round numbers generally, right? I mean,

the metric system is the ultimate round number system for measurement. It's all tens and hundreds and thousands. Uh, and, uh, you know, at foot is 12 inches. That's not round. Feet themselves are relatively round. Maybe that's what we were going for uh but not the 12 inches part of it so um so i i'm not prepared to answer this question at all uh i i am wondering whether in general whether i don't know i'm trying to sort of figure out whether not so much in these individual cases but as a general more cultural thing it made the sports fan depend on round numbers because the measurements themselves are relatively round yeah i'm looking at wikipedia page for football pitch and there are a lot of round numbers here but not maybe as many not all pitches are the same size, although the preferred size for many professional team stadiums is 105 by 68 meters or 115 yards by 74 yards. So that's not particularly the, I mean, the goal dimensions, the inner edge of the post must be 7.32 meters apart, although that is eight

yards apart. So maybe it just predates meters. And the lower edge of the crossbar must be 2.44 meters, which is eight feet above the ground. So there might be some mixing of units just because these sports are so old. But we can conclude that baseball would be different in that you probably wouldn't end up with 27.432 meters between bases well but you would end up with something different i don't know whether slightly different yeah it wouldn't be exact but like it's not as though 90 and 60 feet are 50 and 100 for instance like right they already chose somewhat unorthodox. So yeah, there's a pretty good chance that there'd be something you could measure

a little more easily. Like 27.5 meters would be almost exactly 90 feet. And I don't know if that would have been considered too hard to replicate early on in baseball and if they would have picked something even rounder than that. But you're probably right that there'd be some, you know, at least some inches difference that would obviously have an effect, but not one that I care that much about. And the question is whether

they would have felt compelled to make it either 30 meters or 25 meters, which would then have a fairly large effect. I i mean then we're talking about 10 feet in one direction yeah but again like they already chose 90 which is not 100 and they already chose 60 feet 6 inches which is not even 60 yeah and so i don't think we should necessarily insist that the uh original originators of the game were compelled to some round number. Yeah. I wonder, yeah. It's possible that it would balance out,

like everything would be a little bit different, but you'd have some things that would favor the batter or the runner and other things that would favor the pitcher, like maybe the pitcher's mound would be a teeny tiny bit closer to home plate but home plate would be you know a teeny bit smaller or something so it would you'd arrive at the same sort of equilibrium i want to address this again in a later episode but first i do want to find out whether in cricket uh you see an emphasis on round numbers where it's fairly arbitrary. Like the ones listed in baseball, the 100 miles per hour, the 100 pitches per start. Those are things where there's no real difference between 100 and 102 or 198, but we obsess over the round numbers because they're round.

And we know those in baseball. There's a bunch of them. And I'm curious if there's any, if there's a similar set of examples in cricket, either in statistical accomplishment or in player assessment or even in field dimensions that would suggest that this is universal and not American. And until I know that, I can't make sense of it.

Okay. Well, we have lots of cricket listeners. There's an entire cricket splinter group of our Effectively Wild Facebook group. So I'm sure someone will let us know. That is it for today. You can continue to send us questions at podcasts at baseballperspectives.com. Rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes. Just mention the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild.

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