Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 988: The Real Mike Trout

Episode Date: December 10, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Veeck As in Wreck and front offices hiring stat-savvy former players, then answer listener emails about the real Mike Trout, likeable teams, unwatchable players, and more.

Why live in a veil of tears? Let me be the one until your prince appears. Then who knows, you may come to see that prince is me. Hello and welcome to episode 988 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at Baseball Reference. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined as always by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello. Heyo. We're going to do some emails. Before we get to that, you have a bit of banter? Yeah, since we recorded yesterday, I have started to do some basic fact-checking when I come across details in VEC as in REC that are easily checked with the historical record.

So basically anything that is describing statistics or play by people who would be in the baseball reference registry. in the baseball reference registry. And I would say that in general, even when he's talking about sort of fantastical sounding anecdotes about minor league ballplayers, in general, they check out. You look and you go, oh, yeah, that's right. Like he talks about how Satchel Paige was so infuriating because he was so dominant against Joe DiMaggio that he would actually walk people to get to Joe DiMaggio. I have not confirmed whether he walked anybody. That's the next step, to get to Joe DiMaggio. But DiMaggio went 0-8 with three strikeouts against him. And he talks about how he picked some guy up because, you know,

it seemed like the guy sort of fell into his lap in a way that seemed so serendipitous that even if he couldn't play, he thought that he must be a good luck charm. And the guy made a name for himself by hitting a series of extremely big hits for the team, even though he couldn't play baseball. These would be like tappers, or he popped a ball up behind the pitcher's mound, and there was a miscommunication,ication and it landed and three runs scored and and so on and i looked that guy up and sure enough he had 27 at bats seven hits all of them were singles everything else about him screams terrible and he never played again so so there's a lot of uh of uh circumstantial evidence supporting these stories but every once in a while i will get one that just is not true and so i think that's probably a good way of reading Vec is in Wreck. 90%, I would say 90% of what you read is 95% true and 5% exaggeration. And then the other 10% is 5% true and 95% exaggeration.

Yeah, it sounds like a pretty good ratio by baseball book standards. Yeah, that's true. It's true. I mean, yeah, at least VEC, you get the sense, is doing it for entertainment reasons and not for just not bothering to look it up as most other, many other athlete-penned baseball stories go. Yeah. Okay. And before we get to emails, I have a quick complaint to make to the

universe, which is that teams are hiring all of the interesting ex-players. It's really unfortunate for me, for people who like to listen to interesting players. Like the Cubs hired John Baker and the Red Sox hired Brian Bannister. And, you know, they're in these sort of hybrid roles where they're doing analysis and they're also talking to players. And it's kind of a kind of a coaching role, but kind of a front office role. And those teams at least still let those guys talk, which is nice. So I had both of them on my podcast and we talked about how soon every team would have someone like them in the role that they are doing. And I think they said, you know, 10 years or something.

And so since we had that conversation, Dan Heron was hired to do that job basically for the Diamondbacks. And Cole Figueroa, who has been on both of my baseball podcasts, was hired by the Rays to basically do that job. And I don't know whether Dan doesn't get to talk as much anymore. I don't know. But the Rays don't let anyone talk. So now there's no more Cole Figueroa content to consume on the internet. And I don't know if that will be the case for other people hired, but it's kind of unfortunate for the larger baseball consuming world in that I was really looking forward to having a new generation of players who were interested in analytics and stats and also had the player background to be kind of the new standard person, you know, talking head on,

on baseball panels, like instead of the old school person, you know, talking head on, on baseball panels, like instead of the old school player who just says the cliches, you'd have whoever, Cole Figueroa or John Baker or Gabe Kapler for, for a while on to fuse the playing experience with the stuff that we know about and talk about. And that was cool. But unfortunately, it seems like every one of those guys now gets hired by a baseball team, which is smart, smart moves by the baseball teams and maybe smart moves by the players too. But kind of too bad for me and maybe for fans. Okay.

Okay. I've gotten my complaint out. All right. So a couple emails. Let's all right. Let's complaint out. All right, so a couple emails. All right, let's start with... All right, well, Nick has sent us a question from Reddit. So this question is, if every player's body and face were changed

so that they looked and sounded like Mike Trout, but their level of baseball talent stayed exactly the same as it was before, how long do you think you would watch all of the Mike Trouts play baseball before you figured out which one was the real Mike Trout? Well, I mean, I guess I would pretty quickly be able to narrow it down to three hitters batting for second or third for the Angels. Well, yeah, I guess that's true. You can just rule out every other team.

Uh-huh. I... The one playing center field for the Angels is probably your best bet. You want to know something, Ben? You want to know something? What? I was reading an old tweet. Yours or someone else's?

Mine. Uh-huh. In which I made reference to a certain date in the season being the date that sample sizes were no longer too small. Because that was the date that Mike Trout had taken over the war leaderboard. Right. And so that was something like May 9th. And I would say that you'd probably be able to figure it out. I mean, if you add the stats and you did not pick a particularly misleading period of Mike Trout's season or career, I would guess within like seven or eight games.

Huh. Well, because you'd look at, you wouldn't just look at his war. Of course, you'd be looking at things like his swing rate and his contact rate. And I mean, certainly, well, and yeah, and also where he hits the ball, his spray chart. I think that with 50% probability, like I'm not saying you could narrow it down to where you're willing to bet your house on it. But if you had to make a guess with 50% or greater confidence, I would say eight days eight games huh okay yeah i mean to make the question more interesting i guess you can just say that mike trout is somewhere in baseball you don't know he could be playing for any team so yeah of course i'm

yeah yeah and and he it's just a randomly distributed mike trout somewhere in the pool of players but amongst among starters like let's just's just at least say that he is playing. Like, he cannot randomly be the backup catcher for some team. Yes. Okay. So. And I'm also assuming that he has Mike Trapp's body, but somehow not his abilities. So he looks like Mike Trapp, but like there are all sorts of people everywhere

who look like Mike Trout, but are running like David Ortiz somehow. But okay, so we'll just assume that that's the case. So yeah, I think, huh, so you're saying eight days. I think that's what this question is. The question doesn't actually make any sense. So let's just say that if if all you could see was the if all baseball was was a record of statistics being sent to your bunker

on the island uh how long would it take you to find mike trout in those statistics and to me the answer is eight games you want to do you want to do it should we do it should we set up an should we set up an effectively wild challenge where people send me, you and I each get a partner. I pick Russell and you can have another partner. And we get sent random streams of baseball game logs and we have to find Mike Trout in them. Yeah, that'd be fun. It would be fun. Too time consuming though.

It would take more than 12 minutes. So I don't want to volunteer, but maybe someday. It would be fun to do time consuming, though. It would take more than 12 minutes, so I don't want to volunteer. But maybe someday. It would be fun to do that. Eight games is nothing. There's no way eight games. Dude, it's 30 plus at-bats, and you've got, I mean, not all those. Most stats don't stabilize within 30 at-bats,

but if you've got a multitude of different stats that are all like kind of orienting you toward a certain play i mean you could rule out a lot of players within eight at bats i think just by oh swing rate i mean you could but if maybe players who are more likely to be mike trout your error bars would still be enormous at that time, I think. Because I mean, if you look at any stretch of eight Mike Trout at-bats, like he's going to have at-bats where he looks like a terrible hitter, right? I mean, it's two games. He's going to go 0 for 4 in a couple of games and swing at some bad pitches here and there. I mean, it happens. I don't think he is. I don't think he's going to swing at enough terrible pitches that he and Adam Jones are going to have comparable O-swing rates, especially if I also know the pitchers involved.

I might be able to find two games in Mike Trout's career that are like that, but it's going to be Francisco Liriano pitching in one of them or something like that, a pitcher whose entire game is getting chases, for instance. I don't think it would be easy, Ben, but I don't think that the information... I'm saying that if you sent all this to a team of intelligence officers and say, figure it out, and all it was was logs of data, as long as Russell was on that team of intelligence officers, I believe the information is there. Now, whether I could do it... Look, I don't want to brag, Ben. I didn't come here to tell you

how great I am at cracking codes. Whether you could do it, I think the world of you, Ben. But if you're saying you don't think you're up to it, fine, you're probably not. But I do believe that the amount of information that you would get in eight days would allow you to crack this code. And so whatever. So I'm wrong. It's not more than 12 days. I'm close enough. Yeah. I don't know. If you had the full stat cast stuff and like someone who could help you analyze it then maybe then you'd get speed in running time i mean like you and i can't look up running time on any individual play and we can't look up your you know how fast a jump you get on a ball or something so if you have access to all

of that i bet you could pin it down. If you're just looking at late appearances. If you had StatCast, you could do it. I bet you could do it within three games. I bet you have. I bet with StatCast,

you have sort of digital signatures of your performance. Like I bet you could. I bet if there are 300 players that you're starting with, that you could narrow it down to 15 players just by knowing his leads on three leads, three base running leads.

Maybe that's crazy. But yeah, I don't think most guys vary that much. I don't either. But I don't think that individuals vary that. I might be wrong. But if you are adjusting for the quality of the pitcher on the mound and so on, if you're doing, you know, like if you've got Jonathan Judge doing, you know, his mixed modeling for you, I bet you could. I don't think that Mike Trout's leads vary that much. Like that's what I'm saying.

I don't think there's a big difference between Mike Trout and Adam Jones, but I think there's even less of a difference between Mike Trout and Mike Trout. I think it's a lot like probably a lot of skills in baseball or a lot of actions in baseball, I bet, are like release point for a pitcher where you can find it pretty quickly. I bet where he plays, how deep he plays a center field is a sort of a digital signature that you could probably, knowing the batters involved and knowing the ballpark, you could probably identify him pretty quickly just by where he stands. Yeah, I think if you have all that information, obviously with a pitcher, you can do this in one game, in one inning, maybe in a few pitches. And with a hitter, if you have all the stat cast defense and base running stuff, then I think you're right. You could do it really quickly. If you or I had to do it or a smarter version of you or I who just had the stats available to us right now, I think it would take longer than eight games to do it with any sort of certainty.

But, you know, not super long. Yeah, I mean, I'm clearly being aggressive in this conversation But I think that I think pitch effects would give you Enough in around A games You could also look at how they get Pitched and yeah I mean there's There's a lot you could look at if you can If you're allowed to look at anything Alright question from

James in Fayetteville I was scrolling through headlines And saw that Orioles GM Dan Duquette said regarding Jose Bautista, we are not interested in him because our fans don't like him. We should assume, of course, that Duquette and company took a lot more than likability into consideration before reportedly discounting Bautista as a viable option. But for the sake of discussion, let's take Duquette's quote at face value. How much money annually do you think a team stands to gain by fielding a likable team? If flags fly forever, how much extra value does a successful team gain when fans feel like they got there the right way? So in this specific instance, I think Duquette's line was excellent.

I think that was very smart of him to say. I doubt that he would actually make decisions on that basis. I think that fans are very fickle. And if the Orioles signed Jose Bautista and he played well, Orioles fans would like Jose Bautista in, you know, a few weeks after one hot streak, if after two game winning hits. Oh, I think, I think they'd like him before he ever reported to camp. Yeah, I mean, as soon as you... I think they'd like him immediately, like one second later. What was it that I saw recently?

A pitcher and a batter who had had some fighting in their past and they were on the same team, and it was like, is it going to be awkward? And then they were like, you know, as soon as one saw the other in the clubhouse, they were pals. Did you read that too? Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to remember who that was also, but yes, I remember seeing that.

And I mean, those are like real people who actually have to share personal space with each other, which means it's a lot harder to like a person that you actually have to deal with, maybe. Although there's also a lot more incentive for them to get along. But I think that pretty much for almost all players and for almost all fans, you like him the second he puts on your pajamas. Yeah, I agree. But if you are Dan Duquette and you have concluded that you're not signing Jose Bautista for

probably many other reasons. This is a really good way to spin that, right? Instead of having Orioles fans be mad that you're not signing the big slugger or you're not making big moves, you kind of cater to them. You make it sound like, yes, we are aware of your concerns and your feelings and emotions, and we have taken them into account. And we didn't make a move because we know what you guys would have thought. And so it makes it kind of empowers the fans in a way. So very smart, I think, way to present it. But can I interrupt? Yeah, sure.

And tell you a story from Vec is in Wreck. Okay. He tells a story of how he wanted to get rid of Lou Boudreau. And it's because he wanted him to, he didn't want him to be his manager anymore. He was a player manager, and Bill thought that he was a great player but not a good manager and that player managers perhaps themselves were not a good idea, and he couldn't convince his star to quit managing. And so he arranged this trade. He was going to trade

Boudreau, who was extremely popular in Cleveland. But Bill thought that he had earned the right, having built a winner and drawn huge crowds and all that. He earned the right and he could get away with it. So this trade starts to leak, or it almost happens and then it leaks. And according to this story, thousands, thousands demonstrated in downtown Cleveland this move. Bill Beck was on the road and he decided, okay, I'll come back in a couple of days and I'll cancel the trade or tell them that I'm not going to make the trade. I think the trade had fallen apart, in fact. So he said, I'll tell them that I'm not making the trade. And somebody said, no, you got to go now. If you're going to do it, you got to do it now.

So he flew out and went to downtown Cleveland and went to the crowds and climbed up on taxis and said, quote, If I find that the people of this city are against trading Lou Boudreau, I shouted fervently, then you can be certain he won't be traded. They cheered me to the echo, which beats getting lynched anytime. And then he drove around to another part of the city and did the same thing. Yeah, very smart. So in fact, here's what he wrote. Because of his importance, what he said, because of his importance as demonstrated here tonight

and because the fans in the last analysis run the ball club, I am bowing to their will. I was stupid even to think about it. Yep, very clever. So James's question is, is there such a thing as a likable team that actually has value to the team? Does it matter how you win or who the players are? Does it matter? Is it just if you win, then the fans will come around basically. People on Twitter right now are complaining that I eat burritos funny, Ben. You do. Yeah. This guy is libeling me. He's saying that I am a funny burrito eater and other people are responding as though I am a funny burrito eater.

Ben, you must clear this up. All right. You know what? I don't even care. If people are going to tell lies about me, it's just they're lies. I don't know. What do I care? I know they're not true.

Can you build a likable baseball team? Yeah. Is the question. Does it matter if you do? I believe that it does matter if you do, even if nobody will ever give you credit for it. Okay. I believe that there is a way to increase the happiness of your fan base. And it's complicated.

And I don't know that I could do it. That goes beyond simply winning. Winning, of course, takes precedence, takes priority, but that you can also do things to make your city happier and the sports fans at large happier and the world at large happier. But that if you do it, nobody will ever give you an ounce of credit. Yeah, I'm trying to think of what an unlikable team that wins a World Series would even look like. It's pretty hard to build an unlikable team that like wins a World Series would even look like.

It's pretty hard to build unlikable teams that wins a lot. I mean, unless you're doing like the full, you know, Marlins approach of just sort of buying people and building a team, people with no roots in that system. And you're just smushing them together and they win and then you trade them again. I mean, that's that's unlikable. But for the most part, I think it's pretty hard. I don't know whether there's that dramatic a difference. I think obviously if you build a homegrown team and you get to see those guys debut and then you get to see them get better and then they win, I think that's probably the most satisfying way to do things, whether that translates to more ticket sales or, you know, more people watching on TV. Maybe.

Maybe it does. But that's probably the best way to do it if you can. I replied, Ben. I couldn't help it. Okay. All right. All right Steve says Is there any chance that the newfound

Excess money that comes from The CBA as we talked to Russell last week would go to Lowering or slowing the growth Of ticket prices How about a saner stance on streaming Where buying the MLB package would allow Viewing of the local team

Seems like both of these options would do more For widening and maintaining the fan base than any sort of marketing campaign. Do baseball tickets seem expensive to you? Are they expensive? I mean, I haven't bought a baseball ticket in years. Yeah, we're out of touch. We're horribly out of touch. I have this conversation.

I have this conversation with my father once every two years or so when whatever I convince him of starts to wear off. But my feeling, my understanding of the economics of it is that baseball teams, like normally if you have two vacuum makers that are competing with each other and a vacuum cleaner costs them $100 to make, they have to charge more than $100 or else they won't be in business. You can't run a business charging less than you spend on the product. And they would ideally charge $1,000 for it. But if there are two of them, then of course, one will undercut the other. And that is how a market develops with a fair price. And so maybe they decide, maybe each one charges $104 for this vacuum cleaner that costs them $100 to make, because if they charge 105, they'll lose sales to the other guy who's doing 104, but they won't lose sales to a guy who's doing 103 because that's not enough to put his kid in college. So that's how it finds a sort

of a rough equilibrium, right? Basic, basic thing that we all learned in 11th grade civics. Baseball teams, though, don't have another team charging a dollar less than them. And I don't know what an economist, how they would approach this, but their competition is not with other baseball teams, but with, you know, nightclubs and television and video games and amusement parks and on Wii and all sorts of other things that might keep you from going to as many games as you otherwise would. So I, it's somewhat complicated. I'm not sure that lowering ticket prices does much. I don't know how many people don't go to baseball games because they're expensive. I'm not saying that

when I say, I don't know, I'm not going, I don't know that anybody, don't go to baseball games because they're expensive. I'm not saying that when I say I don't know, I'm not going. I don't know that anybody like I'm not saying that is like a rhetorical thing. I'm saying like, I don't know. It seems to me that the cost of going to a baseball game, to me, at least, has long been that it is forever. You go an hour before the game. You might have to leave even before that. Sorry, you might have to leave more than an hour before the game because You might have to leave even before that.

Sorry, you might have to leave more than an hour before the game because of traffic. You've got to get in. There's metal detectors. You find your seat. It's a three-hour game. It's now 1045 on a work night. You've got a crowd going out of the ballpark. You're stuck in the parking lot.

And the freeway on-ramp is backed up. and by the time you get home it's 12.05 and you've been out of your house for six hours and 25 minutes and that is either worth it to you or it is not worth it to you. The $26.50 that you pay for a ticket is also a consideration, but probably less so to me. And so because I don't know what the, I don't, I have not recently taken the pulse of the ticket buying fan. So I cannot say that that is in any way a universal experience, but that is how I decide whether to go to a baseball game. Well, I think the ticket buying fan usually thinks tickets are too expensive and tickets and concessions stuff, which even when I regularly bought tickets to baseball games, I never bought things to eat and drink there because it is pretty expensive. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, there has to be a – I definitely don't.

No matter what, I don't buy food and drinks there because that is too expensive. Because then it is exclusively an economics decision. It does not – I mean, I guess there's a little bit of do you want to get out of your seat in the middle of a rally. But it is five minutes to get a hot dog. So then you're making a decision based on the money. Yeah. Well, there has to be some segment of the potential ticket-pying population that is making the decision solely based on can I afford to go, can I afford to take my three kids or whatever to a game if it's going

to cost this much per ticket, and then I have to feed them and blah, blah, blah. I guess, yeah, the fact that there is dynamic pricing is confirmation of that. Yeah, so it's definitely a factor. I don't know what percentage of the population makes its decisions solely based on that or not, but some people must. So if that's the case... mind, like when I go to a baseball game or when I, you know, if I buy a $30 ticket for a baseball game, I don't think that's expensive. I don't want to go to baseball games anymore. I think that's what a ticket costs. It's a good product. When I go to that stadium and I pay $30 for parking, I think I'm never coming back. This is a rip off. It's the same price to get to the same point. And yet one seems logical, worth it, and almost increases the sense of value

that I place on the product itself, while the other feels like a con. Uh-huh. So I don't know. This would be maybe a tough argument to make. Well, teams are making so much money as it is that they might just be fine with how things are. And you're asking them to voluntarily give up short-term profits for the potential promise of maybe it'll help attendance

in the long term because more people will buy the tickets or they'll care more about baseball or we'll make more baseball fans who will buy tickets in the future. And I don't know. I mean, it might be the smart, rational thing to do. But on the other hand, you're asking people who are making plenty of money now to make less money so that in the future, at a time when maybe they won't be running that baseball team anymore, whoever is will make more money. So I'm not sure it's a decision that teams would make.

But I mean, I guess if you're a team that isn't drawing very well, but you're getting lots of money from like, you know, your portion of the MLBAM profits or broadcast deal or whatever, and you're making enough money that you can afford to drop ticket prices in the short term, and you'll still be doing okay, but you might do even better later, then maybe that's a more realistic scenario, but we can dream. All right, play index. Yeah, I'm going to steal my play index from a piece I wrote this week about home field advantage. And I have always thought, and I also have made this argument to my dad, and now I believe that I should not have made this argument to my dad, and now I believe that I should not have made this argument to my dad. I've always sort of believed that home field advantage in the World Series is such a sort of a small issue, such a non-consequential issue, that it was okay that for 100 years they basically just flipped a coin and didn't really grapple with whether it mattered. And then when Bud Selig did his weird thing, I thought, well, it's weird. It

feels convoluted, but you know, it's no less, basically no less random than alternating years. And, and anyway, home field advantage doesn't matter that much anyway. And the reason home field advantage doesn't really matter that much anyway, is because unless you go to a game seven, home field advantage doesn't even come into play. You don't actually get more home games unless you make it a game seven. And baseball's home field advantage is so small in any individual game that it won't even swing most game sevens. And so if you just take that logic and apply a 55% home field advantage to series that get to game seven, you have something like one, maybe two World Series a century that get swung by it. And so that always seemed convincing to me and an argument that I would make.

And so then I discovered with a little play indexing that home field advantage in practice, and we'll talk about whether this is a real thing or not, but in practice has been very strange and lopsided in baseball World Series history and having nothing to do with Game 7. In fact, if you look at Game 7s, the visiting team has won 18 and lost 17. So the Game 7s have not been where the difference has been made, but rather all the other games. So what I found through play indexing is that the team that has the quote unquote home field advantage in the series wins an overwhelming percentage of their home games in games one and two, much more than the team that is at home in games three, four, and five. Such a big difference that it almost looks

like, like if you saw this pattern, if you saw this charted out and you didn't know anything about the sport, you would swear that they've been awarding home field advantage to the better team for the last 100 years. So the difference is, like I said, pretty big, statistically significant in everything. And so here's the difference. For the team that has the twos in the 2-3-2 format, they have won, they have a 6-15 home winning percentage in games 1 and 2. And then the team that has the 3 in the middle has a 5-14 home winning percentage in games 3, 4, and 5. And then games 6 and 7, it goes back up, but not as extraordinarily to the 2-3-2, which suggests, if you wanted it to suggest this, that something about the 2-3-2 format simply benefits the two in this, that there's something about having,

about the 2-3-2 format that advantages the team that starts at home. So I wanted to just lay this before you because you're one of the brightest baseball minds I've ever known. And ask you whether, well, whether you can think of any reason that a 2-3-2 format would benefit one team. And to ask you whether you would consider this to be significant. So how many years are we talking about? So we're going back to 1925 when the 2-3-2 became permanent. So for each bucket, we're talking about two to 300 games. So for the games one and two, we have 190 games. And for games three, four, and five, we have like 230-ish games. Okay. So it's not tiny. I wonder if it's possible that like the better team happened

to have home field advantage more often. Yeah. I mean, so it is like just by chance, right? Because there's no reason that there's no order whatsoever to it. And yet, if you just look at how these teams have played, teams that start at home are twice as likely to sweep. Teams that start as home are roughly twice as likely to win in five, even though they would have the home disadvantage. They've won a hugely, like basically teams that win at home. They've in fact played so much better than the other team that it would be much more

than you would expect a typical spread between two World Series teams to even be. I mean, two World Series teams are usually fairly evenly matched. At most, you might have a 630 team against a 570 team or something like that on the extremes. These teams have been playing as though it's a first-place team and a fourth-place team, practically. Yeah, that's hard to refute it's well other than just like the fact that like well there's no logical mechanism why this should be and so we fall back on right look at enough things and you'll find a weird result so it could just be that you happen to find a weird thing but uh it's always's always easier to believe or it's easier to trust

if there is some logical reason why it should be so that you can use to explain the weirdness. So, huh. I will tell you my response to this, which is not going to clarify anything, but will tell you why I love this. I love this because we are talking about a century of baseball. A century of baseball, like this goes back to almost to when baseball wasn't even real. Like it wasn't even real.

They were just making up stories, putting them in books, and then having us read them a century later. It was barely a sport, Ben. And so we, like in this long history of the game, of the World Series, there is no hope of ever getting a sample that is significant, that is a sufficiently large to ever answer this question. And so we really get like, you can say, Oh, well, it's a small sample of weird things happen in a hundred game samples.

Sure. But like that, all we've got is what we've got. And we're, we're sort of stuck with it. And you get to make one of two choices, which I think because of that, it really does give you two choices. I mean, most of us are not in a position where we have to take this and come to a conclusive conclusion. We can choose. And our choices are to say, well, to remain agnostic and say, no, no, no, there's no reason to think this is any different than the rest of baseball. And I know enough about the unreliability of numbers and small samples that I am going to disregard this bit of information, pretend it

never happened, and continue to treat these games as though they follow the normal physics of baseball. Or you can say, well, all we've got is what we've got. And to be cognizant of the fact that sometimes we lack the imagination to understand why certain things would be different than the norm. It is the World Series. It is unlike any other game that these players are playing. Both the rhythm of the series, the stakes of the series, everything leading up to the series is all different. And to say, even if I cannot imagine the reason that this may be so, I can imagine that there is a reason why this may be so. And accept that all we've got is what has happened, that the theoretical is very good for predicting the future, but the future is not promised to us. All that is promised to us is the past, and the past has told us a very interesting story. Yeah. All right. I'm going to link to this article in the usual places so that people can go dig into it. I know it's probably

hard to wrap your head around in a five-minute podcast segment, but you can go look at the numbers, and if you come up with any explanations or refutations, let us know. All right, let's do one more. This one comes from Joe, who says, in honor of Steve Traxell's 46th birthday, which was now a while ago, I make no promises about answering these emails in a timely fashion. I wanted to know if you thought that a good player could be so unpleasant to watch in an aesthetic sense that a team would opt not to sign him or to unload him. For a business that is purportedly entertainment, it is somewhat surprising to me that the aesthetics of a player's game doesn't seem to factor in at all in team decision-making.

Although for a Mets fan who watched way too many Traxell starts, I am strong evidence that the aesthetics don't impact a fan's decision to watch. If Steve Traxell had lived in a league where there was a 12 second pitch clock, would you guess his ERA plus was 99 for his career? Would you guess that in a world where he had no control whatsoever over his pace, would that ERA plus be better, worse, or completely unchanged? I think worse. I think worse. I mean, he would adapt if he had to work faster. I'm sure he would work faster and he'd get used to it.

But there must be something in Steve Traxell that made him better when he was doing that or he wouldn't have done that, right? I don't know. Maybe that's not true. Like if you give me a deadline and it's two days earlier than another deadline, I'll probably hit the deadline, right? I'll find some way. I'll not do something else instead and I'll be on time. Whereas if you had made it two days later, I won't. I won't have it in two days early. I'll have it in when it's due. So maybe it's like that. And if you gave Steve Traxell an earlier deadline, he would do the same thing, but quicker. But I think probably not. I think players probably optimize their performance in certain ways. he needed more time to think things through and what he wanted to throw or whether it was more of

a physical recovery thing. But I'm going to guess that since he organically arrived at that way of pitching, that was the best way of pitching for him and that he would be hurt more than most pitchers by having to conform to the same standard. Okay, so then as a way of simplifying this question, Steve Traxell was a league average pitcher who threw 200 innings a year. Let's say he is a number three starter, a guy that you would give, we'll say $16 million a year or two in the abstract. If I tell you that I have two Steve Traxells, one of whom is the slowest pitcher in baseball, and the other of whom is the second fastest pitcher in baseball, the results aren't going to change. He is the slowest pitcher in baseball and the other of whom is the second fastest pitcher in baseball.

The results aren't going to change. He is the same pitcher, league average, 200 innings, etc. Do you think that, A, would you pay more for the faster one? B, do you think that the market would? So now we're actually getting to Joe's question, right? Right. Yes. So now we're actually getting to Joe's question, right? Right. Yes. about Steve Traxell more, like the way that once we had pace stats and we had a leaderboard that we could sort and see who was the slowest and people will complain about Joel Peralta or Pedro Baez and the Dodgers during the postseason, everyone was complaining about him. So if Traxell were around today, I bet there'd be more attention paid to the fact that he was painful to watch.

attention paid to the fact that he was painful to watch. And maybe because it can be quantified easily now, he'd get a letter, you know, saying, hey, Steve, speed up. But if he were actually on the market with the identical fast traxel, I don't think he'd get any less money. Yep. Same. Okay. All right. Shall we end there? Yep. Okay. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have done so already. Jacob Summers, Ben Gibbard, Christopher Tompki, Daniel Lovett, and Jason Lee.

Thanks to all of you. You can also rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. 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 theonlyruleisithastowork.com for more information. It might make a good holiday gift if you're in the market for one. You can contact me and Sam via email at podcastatbaseballperspectives.com

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