Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 812: Warren Spahn and the Forgotten Flexible Starter

Episode Date: February 5, 2016

Ben talks to former Baseball Prospectus editor-in-chief Steven Goldman and Banished to the Pen’s Darius Austin about how Warren Spahn avoided the 1950s Dodgers and what we can learn from the way managers used their pitchers when rotations weren’t rigid.

People say don't rock the boat, let things go their own way Ideas that once seemed so right, now have gotten hard to say I wish that I could talk to you, and you could talk to me And you could talk to me Cause there's very few of us left, my friend From the days that used to be Hello and welcome to episode 812 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com.

I am Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by not Sam Miller today, but a replacement BP editor-in-chief, former BP editor-in-chief, Stephen Goldman. Hello, Steve. Hi, it's great to be back. Steve is in my living room filling in for Sam, whose internet connection wasn't great today. And it's fortuitous timing because we're doing a baseball history show. The present day-to-day baseball stories are pretty slow right now. And Sam and I are about a week away from getting into the future and doing team preview episodes. So today we're going to do a brief diversion into

the past. And we'll be talking to Darius Austin, who is a writer for Banished to the Pen. Hey, Darius. Hello. And Darius is joining us from Northern England. And I will describe the circuitous path that we took to this podcast. Darius emailed me and Sam last month, and Sam and I answered his email in an email show. And he told us that he had noticed that Warren Spahn had never started against the Dodgers for three years in the 1950s because of the Dodgers' powerful right-handed lineup and the short fence in left at Ebbets Field. And he had checked Warren Spahn's game log to confirm this. And it was true that between 1954 and 1957, Spahn had pitched only a few innings against the Dodgers. And he wondered how this had been possible and whether it was possible for teams to do something similar now, whether teams could start certain guys or sit certain guys against certain

lineups, depending on matchups. And Sam and I talked about it a bit and kind of concluded that it doesn't work as well today as it did in the 1950s, but maybe that's just a failure of imagination. So Darius did some additional research on Banish to the Pen, which is the excellent website started by listeners to this podcast. And he dug into this more deeply and wrote it up and I will link to his article in the podcast post at BP and also in the Facebook group but we're going to talk to him about it now and Steve is a baseball history buff used to write about baseball history for BP and now writes about it for Vice Sports so he will be helpful here also so darius what did you find about the league as a whole's approach against the dodgers during the 1950s yeah it really seemed like this was just the accepted

strategy so one of the first things i found when i went looking for more info on this was a joe posnanski piece about it um in which he'd you know had a similar moment a couple of years ago where he kind of thought well this can't be true um you know warren spine is one of the greatest pitchers of all time and and how can he not start against one team at all but he'd sort of you know done the same thing as me check the game logs and found that it was true and so he asked uh bill james about it and apparently bill said that this was sort of normal that that was you know uh thinking about team matchups was um was basically what managers did then so it was just kind of an accepted strategy in general to maybe uh skip your left-hander against a team that you thought uh had a lot of right-handed power

like the dodgers did and if anything um the braves had taken a bit longer than most teams to do this so um i sort of i went through it and looked at the actual total numbers of starts in the whole decade and and in 1950 they had about 50 they had 56 against left-handed starters which is about normal for 154 game season at the time and that was about average and by 1957 they'd gone down to six so they had 148 starts against right-handed pitches and six against left-handed which seems seems pretty crazy but yeah that that was just how they treated the dodgers back then the lineup was almost exclusively right hand and uh it seems like that was just what managers thought you know

that the dodgers are in town or we're going to ebbetsfield we're just not going to start our left-handers and that that was the league's accepted strategy. Yeah. So Steve, you know a lot about these teams. You're very well-read and well-written. And I mean, how widely known was this or how strong was this perception at the time? Oh, I think in general, it was pretty strong. The idea of a starting rotation, the way that we think of it, where you don't really have to check the, well, I'm going to reveal my age or the newspaper or the internet to get the starting lineup or the starting pitchers for the day is kind of a new thing. And, you know, when you look back at the history of baseball prior to the 1960s, you constantly see pitchers remembering, well,

I came into the clubhouse that day and I found a ball under my cap and that meant I was starting that day. And today it seems weird. You think, well, didn't he know he had pitched four days ago or he had pitched three days ago. So clearly it's Tuesday. It's his day. But it wasn't because managers were very aware of matchups, of picking guys who worked for a particular park or a particular lineup. A really famous example of that is, other than Spahn, is Casey Stengel, who moved Whitey Ford around another left-hander, not just to get him away from right-handed lineups, but also to maximize the matchups against other teams, and to actually save him for the best matchup so that he was facing the other guy's number one

starter, or he was facing the better team. So amazing is his career winning percentages. It would be even better if he got a few more starts against, say, the St. Louis Browns, but that was something that teams were really aware of. And if you look at, say, the Yankees starting rotation from those days, sometimes it's hard to figure out what it was because you have a lot of guys who have 15 starts, 20 starts, and some of that is contingent based on injury, but a lot of it is just, hey, they felt like starting that guy for a couple weeks and then they didn't. So Darius, you looked into how the Dodgers got this reputation, what they did to make people, you know, not use the maybe third best left-handed starter of all time in games

against them. So what was it that they did against spawn specifically but also just against the league in general to strike fear into the hearts of opposing managers okay so uh yeah one of the reasons i think that uh spawn in particular sort of uh started to get skipped was because uh the bravest manager charlie grim kept seeing him lose i think he went oh-7 over 1952 and 1953 and there was already sort of this this narrative that the Dodgers were a bit of a lefty crushing team and I think that wider narrative was fueled particularly by Roy Campanella who had a couple of incredible seasons against lefties over a thousand OPS I think in 1958-1951. Gil Hodges

also hit lefties really well he had over a thousand OPS just for in 1958-1951. Gil Hodges also hit lefties really well. He had over a thousand OPS just for the whole decade as did Campanella and Jackie Robinson didn't really have that extreme splits. He was a slightly better hitter against lefties but even so he still also had over 900 OPS against them. So really sort of all these players were kind of in their prime at the same time and they were genuinely a very good team against left-handers. And it was much more pronounced. I think the Red Sox were the best team against lefties in 1950. But they were good against both sides, whereas the Dodgers were clearly better against left-handers.

So I think that sort of started the trend. And they just kind of got better and better right up through 1955. the trend and they just kind of got better and better right up through 1955 and obviously that the following couple of years they had a particularly low number of starts against the left hand as we said before darius i'm really curious about whether when you look at the records and the statistics you can see an impact on the pennant races of particularly the late 1950s because one of the knocks on that braves team and on Charlie Graham and on Fred Haney is that as staffed as they were with talent, not just Spahn, but Hank Aaron and Lou Burdette and Eddie Matthews, they didn't win quite as much as you might think they would win on paper.

And they had five second place finishes between 1955 and 60 with just the, and it seems weird to say just the two pennants, but just the two pennants in 57 and 58. And not all those races were incredibly close, but in 56, they finished one game out. In 59, they finished two games out to what was by then the Los Angeles Dodgers. And I'm just curious if you can see or project how they might have done in the games that Spahn didn't start. And if, you know, you just didn't overrate the platoon statistics and assumed, hey, this is one of the all-time great pitchers, he probably will do okay, regardless of the lineup. How do you think they might have done? Yeah, it was kind of hard at first, as you were saying before about the difference in how pitches were managed.

At first, when I started looking at the game logs, it was quite difficult to see where Spahn had actually been skipped because there's so little consistency in the number of days rest. You know, sometimes he would go on two, other times he'd go on five, and it was all over the place. But I managed to pick things out, particularly after the All-Star break, it was quite clear there were a couple of seasons where they came out and they could have pitched him against the Dodgers and they didn't and often he got seven or eight days rest the one that really

sticks out was Grimm started a pitcher called Dave Jolly against the Dodgers I think it was in 55 and this was the only start of his major league career and they preferred him to yeah maybe the third greatest left left-handed pitcher of all time which I don't know it's like I can't think of an awful picture right now off the top of my head but you know if the Dodgers were to pick somebody off the waiver wire and start them instead of Kershaw in the playoffs it kind of seems like that kind of thing so that was one decision in particular that you sort of thought well it's not as though you've got another high quality option here they went 7 and 15 against the Dodgers that year, it's not as though you've got another high quality option here. They went 7-15 against the Dodgers that year, so it's not like it was working.

Yeah, and that was one of the amazing things. You know, this was the team that they were basically competing with for the pennant. And they had the best pitcher, you know, best lefty, certainly, and maybe the best pitcher of the decade on their team. And they just didn't use him against their number one rival. So even, as you say, it was only a game or two margin uh sometimes uh for for the title so i definitely think it made a difference and obviously they weren't so aware of the actual numbers of the split but uh it became such a narrative and i

think grim got you know burned a couple of times by spawn maybe not having the kind of starts you would expect from him and that that was it, really. He sort of let that influence his decisions. I don't know exactly why he got fired. I know it came not long after one of Spahn's rare starts against the Dodgers. So I'm not sure whether his rotation management was part of that. But yeah, they certainly seem like they left at least a couple of wins out there just by starting far inferior pitches over Spahn. That's interesting because it's not like the Dodgers reputation was wrong or exaggerated.

They really were amazing against left-handed pitchers. They were, according to the numbers in your article, maybe the best of all time in some of those years or very close to it. And yet when you are factoring in the downgrade from Spahn to almost anyone else, maybe the math still doesn't work out. And I'm kind of curious, Steve, whether you know how well understood platoon splits were at that point in baseball history or even prior to that? I mean, it's something that baseball people have always been aware of. It's not like they needed to wait for baseball perspectives to come along and figure out that there was a platoon split, but maybe they didn't know exactly how pronounced it was or at what point it made sense to sit Warren Spahn and at what point it didn't. Do you know if it was just

sort of a gut feel thing? Had anyone made any attempt to quantify this? Well, you know, as Darius points out in his article, you know, the Dodgers were tracking it through Alan Roth, but platooning had been known going all the way back to the beginning of the game. And, you know, to invoke Casey again, people always talk about Casey as the guy who invented platooning, but he didn't, he just brought it back. And there was a resistance to it, in part because players really dislike it then. And now They say, and again, this is alluded to indirectly by Duke Snyder in Darius's piece, how can I learn to hit a left-hander if I never see one? So they object to the benching, but more than that, just in the same way that a pitcher completing a game was a manhood issue. It wasn't about whether he was fatigued or, you know, there was a Raldis

Chapman throwing 200 miles an hour in the pen or Dick Raddatz in that day or somebody like that. It was more about, you know, do you have the guts? Do you have the fortitude to go through the lineup for the third time or the fourth time and throw your 185th pitch in the game? Well, in that same sense, guys objected to being platooned. And one general manager in the 1930s talking about the idea of platooning guys said, well, it's just a psychological fad. I'm not even sure what that means, really. And he was actually the father of John Quinn, the guy who designed the Braves team that we're talking about, who built it through their farm system during their down years going back to the 1940s.

So it was understood, but I don't think it was understood thoroughly. It wasn't understood well. And we've seen an evolution from guys like Stengel knowing it intuitively just through observing a lot of baseball players and almost scouting an impression of the statistics in your head to Alan Roth with the Dodgers, to Earl Weaver with his note cards, to guys doing it with computers, to today. So it was much easier to disregard it at that time, I think.

And how much of the effect do you think was Ebbets Field related? Because as Darius showed in his article, this ownership of left-handed pitchers seemed to peter out just as the Dodgers moved cross-country.. And obviously a lot of the players made that move with them. So do you think this was largely ballpark driven? Well, I wanted to ask Darius about that because there's a kind of inconsistency there, which is, yeah, Ebbets Field played really small and, you know, Mickey Mantle, who seemed to play in the World Series there every year, said, you know, he was asked how many career home runs he would have hit there if he played there every day, and he said 1,000. And there's a lot of hyperbole in everything that Mickey Mantle ever said, but that's almost believable given alternative universe. And this happened with a lot of ballparks of Ebbets Field's vintage, where when that opened in 1914, it was a cab ride to left field and to center field where, and Darius can check me on this, but I think it was about

410 down the left field line and drifting out to roughly 510 in center field. And over the years, they kind of cut away at that. Oh, and there was a flagpole in center field, Astros fans. But in play, I mean. But they gradually shrunk it down to the point that it was a favorable park, I think, for everyone. It was short down the right field line also, even shorter down the right field line. It wound up, by the time we're talking about, being about 340. But what I'm confused about is when the Dod field line also, even shorter down the right field line. It wound up by the time we're talking about being about 340.

But what I'm confused about is when the Dodgers first moved, they don't go right to Chavez Ravine. They go to the LA Coliseum. And that, if you haven't seen it, is one of the strangest ballpark alignments that you'll ever see because it's a football field. It's a track and field stadium. It's oval shaped. And so the way that they wedged a baseball diamond in there was to make it about six

miles to right field, which pretty much ends Duke Snyder's career right there. And they made it, I don't remember the exact number, but well under 300 feet to left field. And their solution in the short term was to kind of hang a shower curtain there and make guys pop it over that shower curtain. But you'd think that whatever prejudice they had against left-handed pitching in the old park would have gone double for the LA Coliseum. Yeah, that was certainly something. I think it may have been more related to the players than the part, the actual effect of them becoming less successful against left-handed pitching. But I certainly wondered, and it was difficult to find anybody actually making any comments about it,

but I wondered whether just the sort of, you know, the psychological effect of, oh, they're out of Ebbets Field now, and maybe a lot of managers didn't even bother to initially think, well, this park is just as bad. And I wondered how much, because it does seem to be visibly an immediate effect but it does coincide with the sort of the retirement or at least the decline of a lot of the players they were worried about in the same period so it's kind of difficult to to tease those two things out and separate them from each other and darius do you know if there were any other prominent starters who got the spawn treatment against the Dodgers during that time?

I mean, obviously, when they were down to facing six lefty starters in a full season, there must have been other teams using this same sort of pattern. Yeah, well, I mentioned Johnny Antonelli in the article, and he was the one starter who his manager, Leo Dirich, really seemed really seemed to maintain some kind of faith in him. And he started 12 times against the Dodgers over that same four-year period where Spine only had one. But even so, that was still a little bit less than you would expect. Probably 19 or 20 would have been a number of starts you would expect on average if he'd just been regularly used. expect sort of on on average if he'd just sort of been regularly used basically yeah every other left-handed starter in the national league saw a significant reduction uh sparm was by far and away the best and antonelli was the second by war in that period but harvey haddix um i think was was third and he got six and then after that there weren't really a lot of sort of very prominent starters i think it went

down below sort of 20 wall pretty quickly for that that decade so there weren't a huge number of guys we saw that i saw the names and thought oh wow i can't believe this guy didn't start but there were a lot of teams sort of number one lefties who basically was just not used against the dodgers for three four five, five years in the period. And you look back through some primary sources and you found a couple allusions to this, but it wasn't like front page news, like Braves aren't starting Warren Spahn and there didn't seem to be any public sign of discontent on his part. It wasn't, you know, I want to pitch. Why are you taking the ball away from me?

There didn't seem to be, from what you could tell, any great conflict of egos over this. No, I had quite a good search, you know, sort of looking for comments about games between the two teams and, you know, trying to find if there were comments from the players or the managers saying, you know, oh, I'm disappointed that I wasn't used or, you know, we couldn't use Warren in this game

or anything like that. And there just really wasn't anything at all. So it does seem sort of like that used or you know we couldn't use warren in this game or anything like that and there just really wasn't anything at all so it does seem sort of like that everybody you know players and managers and uh the newspaper writers as well kind of accepted this as a strategy that didn't really need to be questioned so yeah i found that quite strange and it was only sort of a couple you know the one article uh that was basically based on Roth's statistics was one that sort of brought out the comment about it in the first place. And then there was one that was specifically about the platoon split, in which the Dodgers actually said that they preferred facing right-handed pitching,

even though they, as you mentioned, were possibly the greatest team ever against left-handers. But yeah, it was very difficult to find any comments. I kind of thought, you know, Spahn being as good as he was, that there would be more made of this. But as far as I could tell, there really wasn't. Does that surprise you, Steve? Was that common at this time in the sort of reserve clause era when players were making more or less what managers were making? Was it less common for them to protest? It's really hard to imagine this happening today for many reasons, but that's just one of the reasons.

It's just imagining, I don't know, Chris Sale or whoever the spawn or equivalent or Kershaw or whoever it is, having a manager tell him, we don't want you to face this team seems like something that a modern player would find very hard to swallow. Oh, yeah, I think it would be harder. And guys did certainly kick back then when they had a problem with their manager or they had a problem with their general manager. And whether they went to the newspapers or they demanded a trade,

those things did happen all the time. And maybe it didn't get out to the newspapers as much because writers were a lot more discreet in those days in terms of disclosing conflict. I mean, there are some notable examples. And there's one actually very famous example in the Brooklyn Dodgers where the entire team basically quit on Leo DeRocher in 1943, and they nearly had to forfeit a game because you couldn't get anybody to put their uniforms on. But in that case, what precipitated the strike, if we can call it a strike, actually involved comments DeRocher made to the press and then denied, and the writers were part of it. So they couldn't very well ignore it or hide it. But I

mean, remember, this is a period where if you look at, say, managers like, say, Joe McCarthy of the Yankees, where you'll see things in the paper, like he wasn't at today's game, the coaches ran it because he was sick. He wasn't sick. He was in his hotel room. He had a bottle of scotch. And he just, and this is a weird thing, because Joe McCarthy lived to be like 100 once, you know, once he, he quit. So for a guy who was as unhealthy as he was, it's very odd. But these were just things that they didn't write about. Whereas, you know, flash forward 25 years from there, and you know, Billy Martin's every appearance at a strip club is publicized. So, you know, I don't, I don't think it was unheard of. And Warren Spahn was kind of an outspoken and occasionally obnoxious guy. So if he had an issue, I'm sure that that

he said something. But again, there was a certain amount of par for the course in those days with pitchers being skipped. One thing that I'm really curious about, Darius, is whether you also looked, or anybody at that time looked, at the left-handed pitchers who were starting for the Dodgers because they had them. Going into this period, Preacher Rowe was incredibly successful for them, and I think he was kind of a soft-tossing guy. Certainly didn't have the abilities of Warren Spahn, but did very well for them for several years. And I don't know, was the ballpark an impediment to guys who the Dodgers actually used on a regular basis? I didn't get too in-depth into

that. I did have a quick look, and it didn't seem like they particularly shied away from it I think they had a few guys as well in the rotation who were good left handers during that time so it would have been difficult for them I think regularly but it didn't seem like there was a huge effect from my initial glance something I might look into in a bit more depth but yeah it certainly doesn't seem

to be something that, you know, that they took the same approach to other teams. It is clear that the Dodgers were, you know, by far and away the best offense of the time as well. So I don't know if that was just so much of a, you know, a factor. They obviously didn't have to face themselves. And I think it yeah from from both sides of the plate it wasn't just against left-handers but um I think uh it was kind of the extremity of their you know how right-handed their offense was and you know how many home runs they they were hitting uh as much as it was the ballpark and Steve how did the flexible rotation work? How would that be communicated to the players? And was there any fallout from it? I mean, it's really hard for someone who grew up watching the game during the 80s or 90s or 2000s to imagine this sort of thing since the rotation has become so rigid. and players protest when, you know, if you try to go to a six-man rotation like the Mets did briefly last summer, it just doesn't work. Players like being on their schedules. Is that just

something that they've been conditioned to do, but you think with the right person or the right movement, you could get back to that point? And is there a purpose to it? I mean, if you're sitting Warren Spahn, maybe that's taking it too far. But if you're using Whitey Ford against your main rival or something, instead of against the last place team, maybe there is some advantage to that. with what I guess we can call the baseball establishment, just how resistant players can be, even if something is learned and not necessarily, for want of a better term, God-given. There's no biblical commandment that says, thou must start thy pitchers every fourth day or every third day. This is just the way that it's happened

and the way everybody's been told that it should be. And what's interesting is it's very sensible in a certain way. Like you said, you don't necessarily bench Warren Spahn against any lineup because you assume he's good enough that he'll figure it out. Or that more times than with a replacement level guy, you're certainly going to get a good outing. But for somebody less than that, if you have a track record of the guy having a bad record against a particular team, it would make sense. And this is a really miniature version of this. But I remember during Earl Weaver's last go around with the Orioles, his ill-fated comeback in 1986, their closer was Don Asse. And then is now your closer was your closer and you used him in those situations. Now the inning might have varied back then. It wasn't as rigid as it is now, but still that was the guy you went to in the ninth

inning. Don Mattingly hit Asse spectacularly well. Now this is all anecdotal. So if you go to baseball reference, maybe you'll find out that I'm misremembering. But I believe he hit him very well. And after a couple of game winning hits in a row, Earl Weaver said, I say we'll never pitch to Don Mattingly again, not even to intentionally walk him. He was the closer in 99.9% of all situations, but not against that guy. Similarly, in that same period, Todd Worrell, who was the closer for the Cardinals, Howard Johnson killed him. And Whitey Herzog's response was to question whether Howard Johnson was corking his bats

and keep pitching Todd Worrell. And they kept getting the same result, which was game-winning home runs for Howard Johnson. So you can see that Weaver's idea, and these are both great managers, but Weaver's idea not to react with stubbornness and alter the role just slightly is more sensible than just sticking to this rigid idea. And again, somebody not Clayton Kershaw, not Chris Sale, but some sort of middle of the road lefty who's heading into Fenway Park against, say, their classic 1980s lineup where you had Dwight Evans and Jim Rice and so on, and you're just

going to give them a chance to knock balls off the wall, why wouldn't you skip that guy? The one problem is, I think, that the schedule is less amenable to it now. And back then, when you had more train travel, less air travel, more days off in the schedule, more double headers, You had a need to either work in extra pitchers or skip pitchers at times. And today the schedule is so packed with so few off days and practically no double headers at all that messing with your starting rotation introduces a level of complication that I don't think existed then. And there's also the injury consideration. I mean, if you went, you know,

if you started a guy on three days rest and then started him on seven days rest or something, I think a lot of people would consider that irresponsible or dangerous. And maybe, maybe it was, I mean, you know, the fact that guys did that regularly at one time, they also blew out their arms regularly at that time, or maybe it's just that they were conditioned to do that. And today's pitchers are not conditioned to do that. But that is another major hurdle that you would have to clear if you were going to do this. But that would be common at that time that you could just go, you know, a week or just start on short rest and then start on eight days rest or something. I mean, that was common. Would

players know to anticipate that? Like, I'm not going to pitch any game against Team X this year, and I can plan ahead for that? Or would it just be kind of an on the fly thing? A little of both. And as I said, you might come to the ballpark and look under your cap in your locker and there'd be a ball and it's, oh, I'm starting today. And I think that for a guy who was an ace, again, we're talking about Warren Spahn as kind of a notable exception to this. I think for the guy who was an ace, you wanted him starting 35 or in a four-man rotation those days 40 times a year. So they weren't skipped.

They kind of knew what was going to happen. Carl Hubble, just to pick another left-hander, a great left-hander at random from the 1930s, I think he knew every three or every four days that depending on what kind of rotation they had, that he was going to start no matter who the opponent was. But everybody else, it was more flexible. And again, remember that our concept of the bullpen as a role, a living, a place where guys go and they never come out of there to do other things, that's a more recent innovation.

And pretty much if you were not officially in the starting rotation and were in the bullpen, you wouldn't necessarily call yourself a reliever. You were just a utility pitcher. And that might mean that you were a Sunday pitcher. Ted Lyons had one of the great seasons of all time towards the end of his career, making about 20 starts, just pitching the back ends of double headers every single week. And was almost invincible in that role, even though he had probably less stuff than you and I do at this point, which is saying a lot.

less stuff than you and I do at this point, which is saying a lot. So yeah, I think it's an evolution of both the way people see themselves. I think if you were in the bullpen, you wanted to get out of it for the most part. You wanted to be back in the rotation. So you certainly didn't balk if somebody stuck the ball under your cap and you were going to get a start. And again, given the slack in the schedule, I think the reverse is often true for guys below the ace level. And Darius, I'll let you get the last word. What was your takeaway from this research? Did you think, wow, teams sure were misguided. They benched Warren Spahn. Or did you think teams were creative and smart and willing to try interesting things that maybe teams in 2016 could learn something from? In some ways, I was surprised that they were sort of creative in the sense that they were

paying that much attention to the platoon split, because when I first found out about it, I'd never really thought, you know, I've read a few books from that time, Boys of Summer and things like that. And so it never really come up that much. You know, I never felt like there was that much talk about it. And so to see the extremity to which it was taken made me think, oh, this is kind of, you know, initially I was kind of thinking it was quite creative. But at the same time, when you are talking about Warren Spahn, it does seem a little bit misguided

because I think, you know, there's that effect. Maybe Warren Spahn isn't as good as Warren Spahn is against the other teams in the National League, but he's still better than most other pitchers would be in that matchup. And I looked up some guys, you know, some right-handers who were great at the time, like Robin Roberts, and he got absolutely lit up. I think over the same period, he had like a 4.60 ERA against the Dodgers or something. And, you know, it wasn't like these right-handers were going out and having a great time against them.

You know, the Dodgers were still beating up on them as well. So, yeah, it was kind of an interesting, it was definitely learned something, you know, about how teams manage their players. And like you were both saying about the day's rest, that was really kind of an eye-opener sort of initiative when I was going through the game logs and the baseball reference pages and just looking and you just see names jumping about all over the place. And,

you know, one guy's starting, you know, on two days rest and then he's back in the bullpen and then he's back in the rotation four days later. And it kind of really brought to the forefront, like how different it is to how rotations are managed today. Yeah.

But yeah, I don't think, you know, it's not, I didn't come away from it thinking necessarily it was wholly practical. I do think there are the odd situation and the one that you obviously mentioned with that Craig Goldstein brought up was Wei Yin Chen. Right. Getting skipped against the Jays last year, but that was one occasion and he did react quite badly to it.

Yeah, yeah. Sam and I discussed, right, that the Orioles seem to sort of try to do this with left-hander Wei and Chen. They had a start coming up against the Blue Jays, and they demoted him, citing general soreness, which would have the added advantage of not having to face the Blue Jays, who were essentially the 1950s Dodgers of last season. And Chen was upset, and he tweeted about how he felt great and then his agent Scott Boris chimed in and said it was grossly irregular I've never seen anything like this in my 30 years

of doing this but if he had been doing this for 60 or 70 years I guess he would have been very familiar with this with this sort of thing so I suppose there wasn't Scott Boris or Twitter when Warren Spahn was pitching. Yeah, right. Okay, well, thank you for doing this research, Darius. Again, you can follow Darius on Twitter at DariusA64, and you can find his writing at banishedtothepen.com. Thank you, Darius. Thank you.

And Steve is on Twitter at GoStevenGoldman. You can read him on Baseball History at Vice Sports. And it's not a coincidence that he has name dropped Casey Stengel a couple of times during this podcast. He has also written the book on Casey Stengel, and it's a great biography. It's called Forging Genius. So I'd encourage people to read that as well. Thank you, Steve. Thank you. It's wonderful to be appearing again on Baseball Perspectives years after I dropped Ray Davies playing Thank You for the Days and drifted along the lonesome trail. So it's neat and particularly great to be back with you who not only followed me, but taught me so much even long before that, going back to

when you were in college and I was still just as old as I am now. Yes. Well, I could say the same. It's been nice. Thank you. And this is it for us this week. You can send us emails for next week at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and rate and review the show on iTunes. We'll see you next time. Monday. I don't ever want to go, no I don't ever want to go back to my old ways again.