Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 905: The Pitch-Clock Countdown Edition

Episode Date: June 15, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Dodgers injuries, home run derbies, and the new TV show Braindead, and answer listener emails about intimidation tactics, scouting trade targets, baseball’s best commercial breaks, and more.

I don't ever feel pain, cause I don't feel too much pain, and I'm out here standing in the rain. Blood flowing through my veins, I'm just doing my thing, getting ready to rock a magical chain. I don't ever feel pain, cause I don't feel too much pain. Hello and welcome to episode 905 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com and our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Hey, I just tweeted that the Dodgers are leading the major leagues in both total number of injuries. They have 53 and days lost to injury, 500, and they are way ahead of any other team in both of those categories. Well, not way ahead. I guess there's the Rockies

and the Tigers and the Phillies and the Brewers are all over 400 and they're at 500, but still they're leading the majors. And it's kind of curious because of how much public attention they have devoted to injury prevention and research. And there's the section of Jeff Passan's The Arm about how they're hiring a cutting-edge researcher, James Buffy, to try to prevent pitcher injuries. And we've had their former trainer and head of the medical services, Stan Conti, on the podcast before, and he was trying to quantify everything years ago. So it's kind of curious, but maybe not curious. Maybe this is exactly what you would expect the team that is devoting the most resources to injury prevention. You would expect them to acquire injury-plagued players, which they

have done, and unless they are really, really good at it, then you would expect those players to get hurt a lot. I don't know whether they would say this is part of the plan, probably not, but you'd think that it is one potential pitfall of trying to be the team that is really good at preventing injuries, is that if you actually believe it and you think you are good, then you'll go out and you'll get Brandon McCarthy and you'll get Brent Anderson. And if your stuff doesn't work, then you'll end up leading the list instead of at the bottom. I think you're presuming a bit to say that it isn't working. Unless you have a baseline for how many injuries they should have.

It's conceivable that, you know, in fact, hypothetically, they've, you know, signed a club that they expected would have a thousand days of injury. And if they can get that to 900 and every other team could only get it to a thousand, they would be still making a profit. Right. If they're getting discounts, if the, if injury risk is properly priced into the market, they'd be getting discounts. And you could, I think, say that the Dodgers, if, if this is the plan for the Dodgers, you could say that the Dodgers are, part of the plan is also to be the team that is least affected by actual injuries because they have so much depth and overlapping risk. And so this might not be a strategy that might, even if they're right, even if they're doing

this, and even if they're right about it, it might still not be right for the Rays to do it or the Astros or any other team 26 other teams but maybe the dodgers uh are purposefully using their resources to build depth maybe they're purposefully um investing in depth regardless of their resources so the injuries are less harmful for them i'm not saying that any of that is true uh but i'm saying that those are all plausible uh responses that you'd have that you'd have to look at, right? Yeah, I see what you're saying. I think it would be hard to consider the approach a success if you end up having the most injuries in the majors, right? I mean, if that's the outcome, then the only way that that's a success is if you built

your team expecting to have the most injuries in the majors, and it just doesn't matter because all your guys who are hurt are interchangeable with your next best guys. And so you actually have like 40 players who could be on the 25-man roster at any time. And so if some of them are hurt, it doesn't matter. You just plug in other guys. And so if some of them are hurt, it doesn't matter. You just plug in other guys. And that seems like a lot to ask of a team to have no fall off from your top guys. I mean, they have basically an entire rotation on the disabled list. And I think it would be hard to argue that that hasn't hurt them.

And a lot of these injuries are things that I don't think anyone can prevent. I mean, Kenta Maeda was hit yesterday by a comebacker and that hurt him. So that's going to happen. And a lot of these things are just going to happen. But, you know, I mean, I think it would be, I don't know. And we don't even know that the Dodgers are so ahead of the game in injury prevention research or anything. We know that that's been reported and they've kind of talked about it, or at least it's come out more so than with other teams. Maybe other teams are just better at not attracting attention. But I think if you're leading the majors in injury days, then something went wrong. I think if you're the Dodgers and you're 33 and 31, then something went wrong.

I'm not sticking up for the Dodgers' 2016 effort by any means. I'm only saying that, as with all things, it's easy to jump to conclusions based on results that are, you know, that take a long time before it's really fair to judge them. it's really fair to judge them. And that they're these kind of caveats that I offered are would be part of the would be part of the calculus. If you are getting guys at substantial discounts, because they're going to get injured. That it I mean, that player's price is presumably rational. And, you know, say, let's say hypothetically that Brandon McCarthy, with no injury history, is a, you know, $22 million pitcher. So the market decides he's worth $12 million. And if the Dodgers can make him worth $13 million, then that's still a reasonable signing. He's going to get injured still, even if he's a $13 million player with

all that injury risk. But if you're only paying him 12 and you're getting 13, then it makes sense. And you could theoretically build a whole team of guys like that, and you would lead the league in injuries, but you would pay a lot less for your roster than everybody else, and you would have a lot more talent on the field when they're healthy than everybody else. Of course, they've got nothing thus far out of their name. Again, I'm not, like the Dodgers are, you know, they're bad right now for what they should be. There's no doubt that the Dodgers right now are, relative to what they should be doing with those resources, are an outright disaster.

They're the most, probably the most disappointing team in baseball this year. Right? So I'm not suggesting in any way that they're doing great. I am saying that what we say about almost everything is, well, it's hard to say for sure. It's a small sample, maybe race. I mean, you know, we just had a conversation yesterday about Ray Searidge, where arguably a lot of conclusions were jumped to even after multiple seasons that maybe weren't true. We had a conversation yesterday about the wildly fluctuating success of projection systems from one year to the next. It's very easy to look at it and say, well, the data are, you know, it's pretty compelling.

And this is fine. It's compelling data. I'm just saying that the things that would have been true about the Dodgers plan beforehand, that we would have said in the abstract are still true. I don't think we can say that it's a bad plan. You can say that they've suffered a ton of injuries, and that's pretty lousy for them. And it'd be interesting to, I mean, if we had millions of simulations of this season, it'd be interesting to see how they all played out. I agree that right now, whoever pitched this plan in Dodger land is probably taking probably, you know, like spending a lot of time in the bathroom trying to avoid bumping into people in the halls. Yeah, right.

It doesn't seem as if they've had any big breakthrough. Or if they have, then they've been extraordinarily unlucky. Yeah. Although, again, it'd be interesting to see the baseline. I don't know if they have internal injury projections for guys that they sign, but it'd be interesting to see what the baseline expectation would have been for these players. Not because it would absolve them, but it'd be interesting to put it into context and into perspective. Care to guess which team has had the fewest days lost to injury this year? This is not a surprise. Wait, it's not a surprise?

No. Okay, the team that has had the fewest days of injury this year. I would guess that it's the... I mean, it's not a surprise. It's a team that has been known for this in the past. Oh, the White Sox. Yes, the White Sox. 72 days lost to injury.

Yeah, see, that's a good counter to the Dodgers thing, is that the White Sox do it every year. I think it's very fair to talk about the White Sox As having demonstrated something And I'm just not really ready To jump to that conclusion with the Dodgers I mean we would have Another guess might have been the Pirates Because everybody talks about how great the Pirates health is

And as you showed last year Weren't they like kind of near the bottom For injury days Or like you know the bad side for injury days last year Like it totally flipped on him. I forget. I wrote about it two years ago, I think. And at the time, I don't know, there was,

there was no real consistency from year to year for most teams. This year they have the 12th most days lost. All right. All right. So we're doing an email show. Wait, I got a banter. Okay. I've been thinking about your interest In a pitcher's home run derby

You want to watch people who can't hit home runs Try to hit home runs You think this is fun So I want to give you a few more potential home run derbies And you tell me whether you would watch them Home run derby between Major League managers Oh, sure Really?

I'd be even more likely to watch that one Why? You've got former players who are managers. I'd like to see how well-preserved they are. Okay. And I'd like to see if there are star players who are managers now. All right. Home run derby for Major League First Base coaches.

No. I don't think I'm watching that one. They're roughly the same caliber of X player. Are they? I think so, yeah. I'm watching that one. They're roughly the same caliber of X player. Are they? I think so, yeah. I wonder if they are. Who's a prominent first base coach former player? Let me see if I can find a list of Major League First Base Coaches.

Okay, I got a list. All right. Thank you, baseball reference. All right, first base coaches. Oh, yeah, it's not a great list. No. All right. Your prominent first base coaches would be Omar Vizquel, Gary DeSarcina, Tony Pena.

Great hitters. Mike Aldretti, Rocco Baldelli. Okay. Eric Young, Tom Goodwin, Juan Samuel, Bill Miller, Davey Lopes. Yeah, those aren't great. Let me try third base coaches, though. Okay. Matt Williams, Lenny Harris, Roberto Kelly, Bobby Dickerson, Gary Pettis, Ron Renneke, Ron Washington, and Spike Owen.

Uh-huh. Okay. Are they doing it for you? No, I don't think so. You definitely get a higher caliber of player in the manager's office, right? That's odd. Even Matt Williams is a former manager. I guess you do, yeah.

I think you do if you made some comparison. I mean, you've got Hall of Famers. You've got Paul Molitor. You've got Don Mattingly. You've got good players. So, all right. All right. Any others?

Yeah, of course. Of course. Home run derby of first round draft picks from last week. Well, see, I'm not that interested in draft picks, really. Or I don't know who they are. I haven't been following them. I'd probably be really interested in that if I were a prospect person or someone interested in amateur baseball. As it is, these people are basically strangers to me whose names I have read and videos maybe I have watched.

So probably not. I mean, there might be individual guys who would be interesting to see, but I wouldn't be that interested in who won. guys who would be interesting to see, but I wouldn't be that interested in who won. How many, before I go on, how many of the 30 managers do you think could hit a home run in 10 swings right now with a wood bat? All right, let's see. I'll read them. Showalter, Farrell. Yeah, I'm looking at a list.

Okay. I'd take, all right, so Ventura, I'd take. Ausmus, I guess, although not that he was a great hitter. Really, honestly, 10 swings is not that many. I really feel like you'd be watching for two and a half hours to see two balls scrape the wall. Yeah. I don't think Mattingly would hit one out right now. Maybe not.

I don't know if Mattingly could hit one out by the time he was finished playing, so I'm not sure. I mean, Paul Molitor's got to be, what, 58? He's 60. Wow. 60. okay so 59 sorry 59 all right so so he can't hit a home run why would you watch this this sounds like terrible tv i would definitely watch this i would rather watch them in a um like top chef style cooking content competition all right um i wouldn't okay uh let's see uh stars of the 90s sports stars baseball baseball stars baseball stars of the 90s yeah i'd watch that okay baseball stars of the 80s i think i'd probably watch baseball stars of any decade you would watch seriously like if they cart carted out Willie Mays and handed him a bat, you'd want to watch him take 10 swings. Okay, I may not want to watch that.

But I'd love it if, who was it who hit a home run in an old-timers game when he was like 75? Was it Luke Appling, I think, maybe? I'd love to see if someone could do that. So it'd be depressing, though, at a certain point, probably, to see how far guys had fallen. But if you actually selected for guys who had kept themselves in shape and maybe went to a batting cage every now and then, sure. I like seeing retired players show that they can still do something,

like Hideki Matsui hitting that bomb off David Cohen over the weekend. And of course he's only out of baseball for what, five years or something, but still it's fun to see those guys do it. So yeah. Luke Apling really did hit a home run. I thought this was going to be one of those things where they had like the fence set up in shallow left field.

No, he hit a legitimate one and he was how old? 75. Yeah. 75. Yeah. 75 years old. Imagine if you could see some 75-year-old do that today. If you're someone who watched

him as a kid, then it brings back all these memories. And even if you didn't, then you're impressed at how well-preserved he is. Last one comes from the play index. This is your slate. It's a home run derby with Ichiro, Ben Revere, Last one comes from the play index. This is your slate, okay? It's a home run derby with Ichiro, Ben Revere, Alcides Escobar, Casey McGee, Alexi Amorista, Michael Bourne, Cesar Hernandez, and John Jay.

The eight lowest isolated powers of the last three years. See, I'd say no except for the first name on the list. If I took out Ichiro, though, and replaced him with Eric Ibar, you'd say no? Yeah, not interested. Why pitchers but not non-power hitters? Non-power hitters can hit a home run. They have that option. They're hitters.

I want to see people who are very much out of their element. So it's not far enough out of the element for a guy who hits all the time but just doesn't hit many home runs that's not that interesting to me i'm more curious to see if if ibar can muscle up and regular like i'm i think i'd be more interested in that i guess i'm probably i think that that you represent the uh the listeners better than i do in general and so i'm guessing that uh everybody will agree with you and nobody will agree with me but of of all of these things that i would absolutely not watch unless barry bonds was in them uh the one that i would watch the most would be the low iso guys really so what would what would

the point of that be that you wouldn't wouldn't watch it i wouldn't watch it man i would watch it more than the others but i just would be curious to know how strong they really are. Like, I could see it possibly being revealing if they could hit a bunch of home runs when they really tried to. I wouldn't watch. All right. That's all. All right. So we're doing an email show.

A couple responses from listeners to things we've discussed recently dan wrote in about our texas a&m discussion from yesterday the crowd chant and he says as a texas a&m alumni and a fan of college baseball i am amused that the world has just noticed the ball five chant we were doing it when i was a student in the mid 90s and presumably it had been going on for some time before i got there if you want to see great crowd participation at baseball games, you will find no better venue than A&M, etc., etc. Regarding the best way to use a crowd to get in the heads of the opposition, I know this for a certainty, the best crowd is a small crowd. The reason is that when there are lots of people around, all you get are the scripted bits, which are good, but with a small

crowd, the players can hear individuals. I remember one particular Tuesday afternoon game at which a thin crowd so thoroughly rattled a starting pitcher that he just fell to pieces, and when he was mercifully pulled from the game, looked up to the smattering of fans sitting above the first baseline, where the most vocal tend to congregate, and flipped us off. I didn't get to play sports in college, but on that day I did help determine the outcome of a game. For a large crowd, possibly the most effective thing, though, is just the incessant calling out of the opposing pitcher's first name. It just says, we see you, we know your name, and we want you to fail. And we got another email on this topic from Patrick Dubuque, writer for Baseball Prospectus, who says, Baseball Prospectus, who says,

The subject of crowd influence at baseball games reminds me of a treasured memory, the 1996 Western Conference Finals between the Utah Jazz and the Seattle Supersonics, RIP. The Seattle crowd, rather than boo generically, chose a different strategy. It's a relatively unenforced rule that a free throw shooter gets 10 seconds per attempt, and Jazz star Carl Malone was a known abuser of this, so the crowd counted off the seconds getting louder as they reached 10. Given the extremely small sample, it appears to have worked. Malone shot 26 for 47 from the line in Seattle in the series, and the Sonics won in seven. This is the single reason why I'm hoping for the pitch clock to reach the majors.

My question, would having this single point of focus for a crowd improve home field Advantage demoralizing an opponent A la Texas A&M Or would pitchers tune it out and counting off The clock would be the new scourge of the ballpark Like the wave The last question is interesting I don't have an answer But I do think that The countdown

Is probably a very powerful force And I think a lot of people, they, I sort of think about the, I don't know if this is close enough to reality for me to use as an analogy. But remember in Austin Powers when there's that scene where the truck is moving at the guy. The steamroller. The steamroller. And the guy is like pretending he's like about to get hit, but really he's like a thousand feet, you know, it's like very slowly moving. But that sort of is like, it's an exaggeration of the psychological effect

of having a deadline in front of you. Even if the deadline is not imposing, simply having a deadline affects your brain and it gives you another thing to worry about. I have a child and so we do a lot of, you know, counting, like a lot of like, okay, you have 10 seconds to, you know, to put your shoes on because she's not putting on her shoes. And it's amazing to see how the countdown really affects her and speeds her up. Like, it's not like if I give her 10 seconds to do a thing

that only takes a half a second, she like immediately starts panicking. And like the thing is done by the time I count to two, or by the time counting down by the time I get to nine. And I used to think it was just that she was too young to have a sense of time perspective. And she really didn't know how long 10 seconds was or two minutes was. And she was just getting thrown off by the scale. But now she's old enough that she definitely knows how long it takes me to count to 10. And she still just goes into like almost a speed frenzy once the counting starts. And so I think that probably Patrick is right, that if you wanted to do something like this,

countdown is fertile ground for messing with somebody's head Yeah So we'll see I don't know if that ever happens At a minor league game where there's a pitch clock But 20 seconds is less Satisfying than 10 you'd actually have to I don't know whether you'd start counting at 20 Or you just wait till it got to 10 and then

I mean no one wants to chant 20 Things in between every pitch I think you'd start at 8 uh-huh yeah so that that could get annoying that could be more like a wave though because i mean it it happens so often right it's not like when a guy gets into the free throw line it's every single pitch and that happens hundreds of times in a game so that would probably be as maddening for spectators as it was for the pitcher. Unless it worked really, really well, and then it'd be satisfying.

It might not actually be maddening either. I mean, baseball, it's sort of boring to sit in a baseball game and not have many opportunities to raise your voice or engage sometimes. And maybe it'd be fun to cheer. I mean, other sports sure seem to like cheering non-stop for Three hours two or three hours Uh-huh I mean you know there's A lot more persistent constant noise In football and basketball and even soccer Uh than in baseball and maybe Baseball is doing it wrong I would say that

The I would worry less that it's Like the wave and more that it's like the Vuvuzela Or the uh or the Thundersticks Mm-hmm all right and Kate says I just finished watching that 1994 Classic Little Big League The movie features not only baffling 90s fashion

A painfully slow home run trot By Ken Griffey Jr. and a hidden ball trick But also a running joke about fun facts Somehow I completely overlooked this In my childhood While the joke is alas abandoned About halfway through Here are the fun facts provided by the Twins radio broadcaster to add to your collection.

Last year, though, he was sixth in the American League at hitting right-handers he was facing for the first time after the seventh inning at home. That's the 14th one-run game for the Tigers already this year. Tops for any team north of the Mason-Dixon line whose home games are not played in a dome. Pops for any team north of the Mason-Dixon line whose home games are not played in a dome. And lastly, Lou, by the way, has hit 416 lifetime versus Hanley in the month of September in even years. These are actual fun facts in the movie, apparently. I don't recall. And I'm trying to, I don't know.

There's something, it's very closely related, but the statistical minutiae I think of as slightly different from fun facts. When people make jokes about sabermetricians and they kind of do a caricature of people who care about stats in baseball by just doing the extreme splits, that's kind of the way that you caricature people who care about stats in baseball, like in that Simpsons episode about sabermetrics, they had an example of a stat where it was just one of those extreme splits, you know, night games and left-handed pitchers and this inning and this day of the week and that kind of thing. And that's, I mean, I guess it's intended to be a fun fact. It's sort of, it's intended to entertain and surprise, right? So I don't know how it's different, but it somehow feels a little bit different to me. I had the same response to this email.

It feels like something that is used to make fun of either side or to make fun of disparate groups. Same facts, different interpretations of what the flaw is. The people make fun of disparate groups, same facts, different interpretations of what the flaw is. The people make fun of stat heads for these because they claim that we're using them as predictive,

as sort of like analysis. Which is the complete opposite of what happens. Right, and then we're making fun of the media guides for thinking that these are, I guess, entertaining. And probably, I would say that probably in both cases, this is something that neither, nobody who wields these takes them very seriously. And they're noise to fill space. And we should just be, you know, a bit nicer to each other now that I think about it. Maybe. Maybe. Okay. So question from Dan, a Patreon supporter, and he is responding to our Ray Searidge discussion from yesterday. He says, it would seem to me that proximity to pitching coach probably does make a tremendous difference to pitcher performance. As with most coaches,

I imagine the job of pitching coach is 80% preparation, building pitch use models, more splitters, less splitters, drawing up batter game plans, work them in, work them away, coaching catchers on game calling and in-game strategy, etc. If Searidge's genius comes in this phase, one could imagine Jay Happ in Toronto begging Pete Walker to let him do it the way Ray had me doing it, and hearing in return, sorry, that's not how we roll at the Jays. It also stands to reason that assuming it was Searidge's approach that made him a quote-unquote genius, rather than his mechanical tinkerings, that after a few years the league would get wise and adjust. Maybe Searidge's game plans were true genius, but now they are rote.

What was once exceptional is now pedestrian. Maybe the true test will come in the next several years, as Ray himself must adjust. Conversely, his approach may still be genius, but this particular group of pitchers may be unwilling to or incapable of following his brilliant leadership properly. If you hand General Patton a platoon of ribbon-dancing bonobos, he doesn't win the Battle of the Bulge, but it doesn't make him less of a tactical genius. Man, have some respect for the troops, if you ask me.

Yeah. This is one of those sort of situations where I think that the players are telling us where they stand on this. If players felt like this were true, I think you'd see a lot more players taking discounts to stay with their team. And you don't really. you don't, you don't hear about it very often. And there's not a lot of evidence that if this is true, that players believe it's true. Now, that said, players could be wrong. This could be something that's like next level that they haven't figured out yet. And so I'm not denying the possibility, but I take the players at their word that it's not significant enough for them to give up money. And it's really not even giving up money.

If they believe it's true, it'd be a short, you know, it'd be an investment. You'd be spending, you'd be giving up money in the short term, but for the benefit of your career in the long term, which is what they prioritize, presumably just as much or most. And so I tend to be skeptical of this just because of that. Now, we did talk, I think, when sometime we had an episode after probably after the giants third world series where we talked about uh sabian's keeping his teams together and speculating that oh yeah we speculated that the uh it's been demonstrated that when teams sign their own players they generally know what they're doing and those players do better than players that they allow to walk and we take that to mean that the clubs have an information

advantage. And because of their access to these players, to their makeup, to their health, to everything like that, they're just better at predicting who's going to stay good and who's not going to be good. And we had a Sabian episode where we hypothesized that maybe it was actually that players who stayed just do better because there's something to the continuity of coaching and setting that makes players actually be better. It's not that Sab who stay just do better Because there's something to the continuity of coaching And setting that makes players actually Be better It's not that Sabian's better at picking which players But that Sabian picking them keeps them being good

And so that would be consistent with this And I could believe it And I could also not believe it And as for his Last question about whether it's the personnel And Siraj is still a genius But this particular crop of pitchers is just not receptive to his genius. That, to me, that still, I think, affects the interpretation of him because his whole reputation is built around taking pieces of junk and turning them into productive pitchers.

And it hasn't come with the caveat that well it only works sometimes it only works with some guys and if you're actually acquiring pitchers in part because you think that searage it can turn them into something better than if his powers only work with some people that makes it less valuable so i don't know if his whole reputation is built on being able to do this thing. And then he gets this one crop of pitchers and they don't want him to do the thing and they won't do the thing. Then I that Searage loses some of this reputation if it's only for certain players. It makes perfect sense that certain types of players would be identifiable as better suited for the Searage program than others. And we asked Travis Sochik about this during the Pirates preview episode. And I forget what he said, but it makes sense that part of what they have to do is identify the right pitchers, not the best pitchers. I mean, clearly the reputation is that Searidge can take broken parts and fix them or take mediocre stuff and make them better.

But it's some bonobos, not all bonobos. Right. Hashtag not all bonobos. I wonder, because at the time it happened this offseason, the Marlins signed Jim Benedict, or they hired him away from the Pirates, and he was a Pirates pitching guru, and a couple things were written saying, well, it wasn't Searidge, it was actually Benedict, or it was both of them, not just Searidge. And so now if the Pirates pitching tanks this season,

while the Marlins pitching has been good and has improved significantly since last season, then we can just replace all the Searidge compliments with Jim Benedict compliments. He was actually a different guru the whole time. All right. Play index? Sure. As you know, I like fun facts more than I like records. But I do like a record chase, and I like to keep track of players who are pursuing records.

And so somebody asked me on Twitter about pitchers who had the most saves in which they struck out every battle they faced, and I wanted to remove the saves from that because who cares and look at just the question of who has the most what you might call perfect outings. Perfect outing being you come in, you strike out every batter you face. Maybe it's all 27 batters. Maybe it's just one. But you can't possibly do better than striking out every guy you face. And so I wanted to see who this record was. Now, some records are bad because they're for stupid things. Maybe this is that one.

But some records, not many, but this record is bad because the results are disappointing. It's a bad result. You want the record to be held by Mariano Rivera or Billy Wagner, but because of the way that pitchers are used, the record is held by somebody who Rivera or Billy Wagner, but because of the way that pitchers are used, the record is held by somebody who's not interesting. And it's Mike Myers. Mike Myers holds the record. And Mike Myers has the record because he would only face one batter per appearance so frequently. And it's just too much of a disadvantage for a pitcher who's coming in and asked to face three batters. And just to put it in perspective, Mike Myers had a 18% strikeout rate in his career, and Aroldis Chapman has a 43%

strikeout rate in his career. And if you ask Mike Myers to strike out one batter, well, he's got an 18% chance. If you ask Chapman to strike out three, he's only got a 7.7% chance. And so it's just tilted too much toward him. And just to further expand on this point, Mike Myers has 80 of these appearance, perfect appearances. And, you know, we can't say for sure that he wouldn't have struck out all three batters if he'd been left in, but in his 80 appearances, he has 81 strikeouts. So only once in his career did he manage to strike out both batters he faced, and never did he come in and do a whole inning. Dan Plesak has 75 of these games and only 88 strikeouts.

Jesse Orozco, 73 of these games, only 92 strikeouts. Randy Choate, 70 and 78. Javi Lopez, 65 and 73. And you really got to go all the way down to number 11 on this before you find somebody who isn't a situational reliever Billy Wagner had 45 of these games with 117 strikeouts so most of those were multi-inning multi-batter and even full inning and so I was trying to think of because I do like this concept I like the concept of having a perfect game, a perfect appearance. And I would like to recognize the person who has the most of them.

And, you know, the problem is that if you say, oh, well, minimum of one inning or something, well, now you're into bad fun fact territory. Now you've got too many words. You've got too many parentheticals. It's too hard to really graph. So I thought, well, one way you could do it is you sort uh based on how many total strikeouts they had in these games so uh then billy wagner is the champ he has 117 total strikeouts in perfect appearances that's the most in history by a considerable considerable amount only one other person has even 100 and he's

on 100 exactly nobody else has has even more than 92. But then that's still a little convoluted too. And so I was thinking that it might, to have this record mean anything, it might take a multi-year investment in the concept of creating the one inning appearance as a unit of measure, like naming it something. And I don't think this is outlandish. If you look at it, the one inning appearance is the most common unit of pitching in baseball now. It's even more common than the starter, the start. We count starts. And we could, if we wanted, say that one inning is a thing.

We'd have to name it something a little tidier, but there were about half of the appearances in Major League Baseball this year are exactly one inning, about twice as many as there are less than one inning appearances, and about as many as there are more than one inning appearances, which includes starts and longer relief appearances. which includes starts and longer relief appearances. So the one-inning appearance is a fairly established thing in modern baseball that pitchers come in and are expected to pitch one inning. So if we named it, had a tidy way of describing it, thought of it as something that we can put in perspective,

we might be able to do it. And if we do that, if we succeed in creating the one inning appearance uh as a thing with a name uh now we've got then we've got a record chase because billy wagner is the all-time record holder in what do we call them perfect what what what do they call it when you strike out of the side on nine pitches uh rob nyer, I think, has a name for it. Immaculate inning. So we can't use immaculate, but maybe we could. Maybe we could call it immaculate. But perfect inning, maybe a perfect inning.

Some people use perfect inning just to say three up, three down. But maybe we reclaim perfect. Anyway, Billy Wagner has the most perfect inning appearances, perfect appearances. Thirty-two times he came into a game, faced three batters, struck out all three, and then left. And one behind him is Craig Kimbrell at 31. So Craig Kimbrell's next perfect inning will tie Billy Wagner for this record that doesn't exist. And once he does that, we'll have a real chase because Aroldis Chapman is only does that, we'll have a real chase because Aroldis Chapman is only seven behind Craig Kimbrell, and those two could go back and forth for a long time if they both stay good.

Kenley Jansen has 16, so he's a little bit further back. Andrew Miller has 13. All right. Let's see. Let me just see. Dallin Bertonte. Oh, he only has five. Okay.

All right. Well, you can use the coupon code BP To subscribe to the Play Index yourself Get the discounted price of $30 On a one-year subscription at baseballreference.com And speaking of relievers Who have a lot of perfect innings We got a question from Isaac

Who says a recent New York Post article Pointed out that former baseball prospectus Writer and current Cub Scout Jason Parks was at Yankee Stadium to scout their Big Three relievers. My question is why? Considering these guys only pitch in 70-ish games a year, you might not even see them in the game. And even if you do, what information could you possibly glean from seeing a role as Chapman throw one inning? Isn't the book on him Pretty set in stone at this point Also while we're on the subject

Where does the no runs DMC Moniker rank in terms of bad Group nicknames what do you think about The second question They're actually selling t-shirts that say No runs DMC it's well It's terrible because you can't Go first initial and last

Initial that's exactly what I was gonna Say it's already it's already It's terrible because you can't go first initial and last initial in the same. That's exactly what I was going to say. It's already awkward. You've got Dillon, and then you've got Miller and Chapman, so you're stretching. Yeah, you've got to stick to it. It's like, what do they call that in grammar? It's like parallel construction or something like that. Yeah.

You've got to stick with one convention for your initials. So it's also bad, generally speaking, But at least it's in New York. It'd be worse if it were in Cleveland. Although it's not in Queens. It's the wrong borough. Yeah, I agree. All right. So then can you answer the first one?

We've answered it. I think we've not answered it, but I think we have answered it. Haven't we answered it? We've probably answered it at some point, but I mean, it's a tough question because every year there's more information that you can glean about players without being there in person. So there's StatCast now and you can look up these guys' spin and velocity and release point and everything, and you can obviously watch the video. So you can get a very complete record of these players outings without having someone in the ballpark. So it's tough to say. I mean, you can,

I don't, I don't know exactly what you can glean in person from someone with large samples like this. We, we know who these guys are. We've seen them pitch. We've seen their stats. We know they're really good. I mean, if there were some sort of injury risk, maybe you could evaluate that better in person. If you have someone who is capable of evaluating injury risk just based on a delivery, then maybe you get a better view of that, a three-dimensional view. You can watch someone from any angle you want in person. And I don't know, you can talk to people. You could maybe try to work the crowd and talk to other scouts and talk to people with the team and find out if there are off the field issues, character issues, which with someone like Chapman is pretty germane. So you might want to do that.

with someone like Chapman is pretty germane, so you might want to do that. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you could figure out that you couldn't see from afar. Do you have any other suggestions? No. I don't like that teams do it. I wish they'd stop. Fewer teams do it now, I think. I mean, there are more scouts than ever, but I think there are not more advanced scouts or this type of scout. I wonder whether in some cases it's just kind of a cover your ass sort of thing.

Like you have all these scouts sitting around and the draft is over, so they're off amateur coverage for the moment, and you're thinking of making a move, and there are millions of dollars and wins riding on this so you just sort of send someone to kind of just say you sent someone and make yourself feel better about the fact that you had a actual human sitting in the stands and you just sort of check that box so i'm sure in some cases it's not totally necessary but teams probably wouldn't do it if they weren't getting something out of it.

So I assume there's an occasional insight that you couldn't get from afar, but it does seem like the practice is on the decline. All right. A question from Ben Clemens, a Patreon supporter. My girlfriend and I were watching a game recently, and she asked me an interesting question. With runners on second and third, she asked me what the term for that was. I was stumped. I realized that we have names for first, second, and third,

bases loaded, as well as first and third, runners on the corners, but not really for first and second or second and third. I'm curious if you guys think there's much rhyme or reason behind this discrepancy, or whether it's just a lack of catchy nicknames. Also, if it's the second, what would you guys suggest? I went with important bases loaded for second and third,

but never did come up with a good name for first and second. Well, I'm not going to come up with new names. Any new names that we suggest now are going to sound... All names for all things sound dumb until they have – until they are old and accepted. So I'm not going to do it. If you just came up with runners on the corners right now, it would sound really corny. Yeah. Yeah.

Bases loaded? Even that. And bases loaded is like maybe the greatest term in baseball. It would sound so, so yeah uh so i'm not gonna do that i uh well and there's none for a runner on second and there's none for a runner on first and there's none for a runner on third i mean there's 24 base out states how many do how many how many names can we all hold so i i don't the question is why did runners on the corners get one right because you don't need a name.

You can very easily say first and third, second and third, first and second. It's not hard to say. It's totally descriptive. So I don't know why. I don't know why that name exists. Maybe it's because a lot of things happen on first and third. Maybe it's because a lot of things happen on first and third. It's a very active state where you can have certain plays and outcomes that you wouldn't have.

You can have double steals and you can have, you know, all kinds of plays put on that you wouldn't in some other state. So maybe that's why. Do you know if the Little League double steal used to be common like now like super like i i do i wonder if it was if it was the default in say the night you know the late 1900s or or even in the you know the early years of the game if before before baseball players got good if if everybody was basically little leaguers and the little league double steal was was the default. And then, yeah, like you say, it is a particularly loaded play or loaded situation. And you might even need a defense specifically to counter it and all that. Yeah, right.

All right. Sorry we don't have a more satisfying answer or suggestion. Well, my suggestion would definitely be to name it, and then 30 years from now, we'll all accept that name as part of baseball and we'll love it. Yeah, all right. We'll probably use it in our normal conversation about non-baseball topics. All right, and last question from Zach. And last question from Zach. Sam has often noted that in contrast to other sports like football or basketball,

baseball goes to commercial on TV and radio when all the tension is resolved, i.e. when there are three outs and the broadcast will rejoin the game at the start of an inning when the likelihood of scoring is pretty low. So what if baseball went to commercial at different times? I would propose that play stop every 12 or 15 minutes or or whenever, but at the end of an at-bat, and the broadcast go to commercial for two minutes. I can see a multitude of downsides to this, but occasionally there would be a high-stakes commercial break. Think

Trevor Rosenthal walks the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, but stay tuned. We're 904 episodes in, is that right? Yeah, this is 905. We should just rename the show Sam Has Often Noted. Because really, it's true. It's all, this is the sixth or seventh draft of every opinion we have.

What do they do in soccer? Because soccer doesn't have play stoppage. And in the World Cup, like, they don't have commercials. But if you're I think Geez I've watched enough I don't think they do But if you're watching just some like Friendly because people

Who like watch soccer the way we watch baseball Probably watch you know There's probably a soccer game on every day right So they'd have it you couldn't possibly Give all that air time away Without commercials so You have ads on the jerseys maybe that helps Maybe it does and you know So they'd have it. You couldn't possibly give all that airtime away without commercials. So you have ads on the jerseys. Maybe that helps.

Maybe it does. And NASCAR doesn't stop and they have commercials for that. And of course, golf, they have commercials for that. But and so they replay the right. And that if something happens, you don't need to see this. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

If something happens later. Yeah, exactly. And I assume in NASCARCAR it's the same thing. The presumption is that nothing extraordinary is going to happen in the next two minutes. And if it does, guess what? We taped it. Right. I don't think I would like there to be parts of baseball that I didn't see.

I think maybe if you did it all along, we'd accept it. But if you started now having me miss at bats and then you only showed it to me if something interesting happened, I think I'd be mad. Like, I get really mad when they come back from commercial break one pitch late and it's a foul ball. Yeah. And they're like, it's 0-1.

And I'm like, you guys, one job. And so that would probably not make me happy. But you could definitely squeeze 30-second commercials in between batters. And you do hear that on radio broadcasts. They read ads, yeah. So the problem with baseball is that there are unavoidable delays. I mean, there are breaks that you just can't get around because you have to have guys come back to the dugout and go out to the field and you have to have the pitcher warm up a little bit.

And so there is necessary dead time. So if you're just adding more ads in, no one wants that. So we already have a time when there have to be some amount of commercials. Yeah, the commercials in between innings, though, the length of time between innings is driven by the ads, not by the true needs. I think you could cut that down to a minute if you wanted to. Right, yeah. But even so, I mean, no one wants to actually watch that minute, so you're going to have ads at that point anyway.

All right. I did watch Braindead, by the way, if you want to discuss that for a minute. Sure. I had... The new show by the kings, the creators of The Good Wife. I had just three responses to it. One is that I know that people don't seem to like it that much. I don't know how much people liked the movie The Faculty, but I loved the movie The Faculty when it came out. Like I have serious nostalgia feelings for The Faculty. It's like right up there with Can't Hardly Wait and 10 Things I Hate About You in that sweet spot of, you know, becoming an adult.

And so it's so much like The Faculty, in my opinion, that I am into the kind of tonal space that it occupies uh although it is i agree that it is uh trying to be funnier than it is it's really not funny it's it is almost it is written almost exactly like the good wife except with a absurdist premise that's the the only difference is that the premise is is fantastical otherwise the dialogue is roughly the same the wittiness is roughly the same uh which is to say there are funny lines uh but it's it's not madcap uh for the most part um the fact that the senator uh the uh republican senator is named Wheatus is a strange choice because there's no way that that is not a reference to the band Wheatus, right? I guess. I mean, what are the odds that you accidentally named somebody Wheatus?

Yeah, right. But are we to believe that they really wanted to – it also seems impossible that they wanted to name their senator after the band Wheatus. Like, why Wheatus? Why now? So, I don't know. I am really, I guess what I'm saying is I'm really stuck on that character name. And I wish for anything but him being named Wheatus. And the last thing.

They're just weird. I mean, maybe they're just weird affiliations to a band you like, and you just want to stick a reference in. Like, I was just reading about the first season Game of Thrones character and book character Marillion. He's the guy, he's a singer, and he comes and he makes fun of the Lannisters, and then he gets his throat cut out. And there's a British rock band from the 70s and 80 80s like a pretty popular post-punk band called merillion and i assume that's probably a reference you would name your singer after this band maybe you just like a weird band and you want to stick a character name in there and you think

that it won't be so obvious because not enough people know the the band for it to really stick out so maybe it's something like that. All right, whatever. The other thing, the last thing is that I find it, I think that it's almost impossible to be cool when you have animated ants. To me, animated ants marching in a single file is like a Smuckers commercial from like the early 90s. It's just, it looks bad. They shouldn't have done it they should have had any plot device other than cartoon ants marching yeah yeah it's it's

tough for me because i just finished watching a show called fortitude which was out last year and it's uh it's a sort of a similar story where braindead is about kind of this, it follows this staffer on the hill and she starts this new job and she finds out that everyone is being taken over by aliens, these little ants that march into their ears and tell them what to do. So I just watched another show called Fortitude where little parasites go into you and start controlling your behavior. And it's a really creepy show. And so I've had my fill of that mechanic for right now. But I think my, it was weird because there are lots of good wife echoes in the show and it's almost distracting because the music sounds very good wifey and David Lee from good wife is in the show and all the offices look like good wife

offices. So I kept kept thinking is that peter florex office is that alicia's apartment i don't know whether any of them were but they all had the same appearance but i think the main problem with the show was that i couldn't really you mentioned its tonal space i couldn't figure out what its tonal space was which i not that it has to be pinned down to any one thing because good Wife was a drama and it was serious, but it was also really funny and it had heartwarming moments and it had everything. And this show, I couldn't tell whether it was, I mean, it was part satire and part kind of campy farce. Yeah, there's like a Mars Attacks vibe to it too.

Right, and I wasn't sure. Mars Attacks is horrible. Yeah, and maybe it's just one episode It's the pilot and pilots are hard And maybe they just didn't quite nail Down the tone yet and maybe they will But it was I couldn't really tell and there was

An investigation like almost an X-Files Aspect to it also And so I'm not sure Which way it's going to go And maybe it'll figure that out eventually I'm not sure if I will stick with it long enough for it to hear that out before I quit. But I'll watch a little longer just to just to see if it was pilot growing pains. goofy show kind of i mean they had they had that whole darkness at noon thing going on in the good wife where you could tell that they uh they were they were responding they were criticizing uh the the sort of signifier aspect of prestige tv where you like have to be super serious and you're the seriousness of your tv defines you uh as a culture consumer. And so having something that is like light and, you know, intentionally broad seems true

to their convictions. I respect it. And I didn't, I certainly didn't hate the first episode. I agree with you. I think that the pilots are often not great, not even always representative of the show. And I think that there's some work to do, though, from this. Yes. Okay.

So that is it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have done so are Ryan Lemon, Ryan Monahan, Tyler Larson, Kerry Breen, and Ben Axelman. Thank you. You can buy our book, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Go to our website at theonlyruleisithastowork.com

for more information or to purchase the book, perhaps for a baseball-loving father, if you happen to have one and are in need of a Father's Day gift. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Keep the questions and comments coming to our email account podcast at baseball prospectus.com.

You can also reach us by messaging us through Patreon. If you are a Patreon supporter, we will be back tomorrow. We're up on our scatterbrain And if there's a power call Scatterbrain Let it burn