Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 995: Manny Machado’s Midriff

Episode Date: December 23, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Ivan Nova, early Hall of Fame voting, and a potential fat player, then answer listener emails about Mark Melancon and strikeouts, splitting the Rookie of the Year award, a renegade league, two-way players, CBA loopholes, changing the schedule, and the best possible highlights.

Hello and welcome to episode 995 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from baseball perspectives presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am a slightly under the weather Ben Lindberg of The Ringer joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello. Hey. So your formula for predicting what percentage of his asking price a free agent would get has been vindicated a couple times, right,

since you published that article last month? You made a prediction about Earroldis Chapman's contract based on your finding that historically, free agents have gotten 87 and a half percent of their asking price, both in terms of dollars and years. And so you made a prediction for Aroldis Chapman's contract that was what, within a couple million of what he actually got? Yeah, a million off. Yeah. So there was another one, right? Or was there another one that you checked it with?

Anyway, I don't know. But it worked well in that one. But in Ivan Nova's case, I don't know if it worked so well. What was he seeking? Well, he was seeking five years and 70 million. Okay, yeah. He got three and 26. Now, I don't know whether you maybe get off on a technicality here, because I think the five years and 70 million was his opening extension offer in late September.

So technically, I guess he wasn't a free agent, although you'd have to think that if that's what he was asking for in an extension, he would have been asking for what, you know, about the same, maybe more. Who knows if he was on the open market a month later but yeah he he did not he was like one of those guys who once the winter started everyone said oh he's gonna get a huge deal or he'll get a bigger deal than he should or he could be one of the potential guys that people spend too much on like there was a krasnick survey question about who was going to get too big a deal. And I think you guessed him first, right? That he would be the one that executives would say would get the biggest deal.

Anyway, he didn't get that big a deal. Yeah, I had some Septembers in my data. So I would consider that to count. And the thing about the 80-ish free agent seeking contracts that I was able to track down is that there was a huge, huge, huge spread. There were some players who got more than they were seeking, and there were some players who ended up getting so much less that in some cases we remember them for being either delusional or for being sort of stubborn and ending up with way, way less than they might have otherwise earned. And the point that I was trying to make by looking

at all 80 of them as a group was that it was hard to guess based on any obvious variables like their agent or when this supposed demand came on the calendar or whatever to identify which ones were going to be on which end of it. And so by looking at all of them, we would get a rough gauge. But yeah, I mean, there are players who had asked for $50 million and ended up with five. And, you know, Nelson Cruz, I think, asked for four years and ended up with one and so on. So I'm not at all surprised that there is an Ivan Nova in this year's. The one that I've really been waiting for is Trumbo, because I think Trumbo was asking for 80. And that seemed seemed really high to me. And he would have been maybe one of the guys just partly because of his

profile as a player, partly because of his relatively recent track record as a 47 home run hitter, and partly because of a sort of a glut of power hitting, one-dimensional-ish power hitting free agents this year. So I thought that he might be a guy who would be way on the low end. And I'm very interested to see if he gets enough to justify the 87.5% finding. It seems like when he asked for 80 and I started seeing rumors that maybe put him at closer to 60, which I would think would be validation, even though it's a little lower than 87%. So I'm curious to see if he'll get 60. All right. And I don't know if you've been paying close attention to the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot tracker that former podcast guest, listener of the podcast, Ryan Thibodeau, does every year and is continuing to do. But have you seen the Bonds-Clemens percentages?

They are quite high. They are both at – now, we're only at like 20% of ballots have been revealed here. And one would expect that the first ones revealed might skew toward the sabermetric or internet people kind of group, but still 81 ballots and Bonds and Clemens are both on 60 of them. That's 71%. And last year, of them. That's 71%. And last year, Bonds got 44%, Clemens got 45%. And there was essentially no split between their public ballots total and their overall total. It was like, you know, within a percentage point or two. And so this year, they are on pace, I guess you could say, for like a 25% increase. And that's very, very big. Do you have any theories?

I'd also say that Ivan Rodriguez is at 84% right now. And I mean, I think he's a deserving candidate, but I sort of expected that he would have to wait just because of all the PD suspicions tied to him. You know, he lost a bunch of weight after they put testing in place or whatever people talk about, but doesn't seem so far as if he's paying any sort of PD penalty. Is this just the year when people stopped caring about that en masse or something?

I think at some point I hypothesized that Ivan Rodriguez would get in easily and that it might break the seal, I guess, in voters' minds, because I think he is a player who is generally in the public conversation lumped in, and yet doesn't somehow seem like he's going to miss the Hall of Fame because of it. And that, I think, creates a little bit of, it forces either cognitive dissonance or forces some voters probably to reevaluate if they think that. But I would think that would probably come more if he were in the Hall of Fame, which he is not yet in the Hall of Fame. So my guess is that the 20% of ballots that have been made public so far are a very unrepresentative sample. And I would be surprised

are a very unrepresentative sample. And I would be surprised if either Bonds or Clemens passes 56% this year. Uh-huh. Okay. By the way, very, very, very early in this show's history, I don't know if you remember this episode, but Roger Clemens was pitching for the Sugarland Skeeters, and there was talk of him joining the Astros in September that year. And we talked about whether part of that calculus was the thinking that pushing his Hall of Fame clock back five years

would be tremendously to his benefit. And I wonder now if he has regrets that he didn't make two starts in September for Houston. I think if he had, I would be pretty confident about his chances of ultimately making the Hall of Fame. And as it is, I'm pretty unconfident of his chances of making the Hall of Fame. And I think those five years might make all the difference. Well, I'm fairly confident that they'll get in one way or another. But yeah, the voting, there's still a ways to go, probably. Although they're,

I mean, they're polling essentially the same as Vlad Guerrero right now, and I sort of thought that Vlad Guerrero might get in, not that I would necessarily vote for him on this ballot, but Sammy Sosa in the public ballots has doubled his final support from last year. Don't know whether that means anything. Sosa's not all that great a statistical candidate anyway, or he has the peak but not the career. All right, so we'll see how far the numbers come down. There's been a theory that Bud Selig getting in kind of

influenced writers, because if the guy who presided over the PED era is in the Hall of Fame, then the players should also be in the Hall of Fame, which, you know, makes sense logically. But on the other hand, I think it was almost a foregone conclusion that bud salig would get in i don't think anyone doubted that he would ever get in so it wasn't like that came as a surprise that would change everyone's mind i don't know maybe they weren't thinking about it that way before it actually happened but i think you're probably right that it will come down i think vlad's will go up by the way uh-huh yeah that's possible too all right and we got a question from paul it's a fat player submission and it's in the spirit of fat a rod i

bring you fat manny machado via a marcus stroman tweet and this is a fun tweet by the way just help me out because i have the the face. I see Dexter Fowler. Yeah. I see Marcus Stroman. Yeah. I see Manny Machado only because somebody told me that was Manny Machado. Who else is in this picture? The big guy is Stellan Batances.

Oh, okay. And I believe... And Mookie Betts is second from the right. All right. And I believe that's Gio Gonzalez all the way to the right. Oh, yeah. That does look like Gio Gonzalez. Yeah. They all look exactly like themselves.

As soon as you tell me, I know. There's a ton of talent in this picture, and these are like fun players, like Machado and Patances and Stroman and Betts. I mean, these are all really fun, charismatic players, and they're all hanging out on the court at a Trailblazers game. Anyway, Paul wants to know whether we see anything in Manny Machado's physique to suggest that he has put on any weight. And I have to say that in this case, I do not. Oh, really? You just think it's winter wear?

Yeah. Well, he's wearing like a bubble jacket and then he's wearing a t-shirt. Can you make out what's on the t-shirt? I don't know what's on the t-shirt. Yeah. A human being. A human being. A man. A man wearing a tie. There's a name, but I'm having a hard time making it out. And I think what Paul is asking about is there's a ripple or a rumple or some sort of undulation in Machado's shirt there. And that's always when we talk about fat player photos, it's always the leading theory is it's his shirt doing something weird or it's the wind or

whatever there's not actual belly there and that's what this looks like to me i mean it could be a little slight off-season spare tire but looks to me like the shirt is just punched up the picture on the shirt is uh jean-michel basquiat it's i don't think it's i don't know that it's actually him. That is what the name says, and that is a... Oh, artist. Yeah, he is an artist, and that is a picture that is either him or is... Yeah, that's him. That's him. Okay.

So there you go. Now you know who it is. I'm a little bit more on the fat player side of this than you. I think that, generally speaking, I try not to look at the body because the posture is a big deal for these things but i think that uh i think there's fat face here oh okay i think he's got i think he's carrying a little bit of extra weight in his in his face all right well that's perfectly fine it's december so uh there's time for it to come off i don't know hey look at his hands too he's got his hands I don't know. Hey, look at his hands too. His hands look thicker than normal.

Don't they? Look at his hands and then look at Gio's hands. Maybe he's just got big hands. He might. It's true. I don't have a baseline for his hands. Yeah. I guess I don't either.

I'm not worried about it. No, neither am I. December is the month to carry a little extra weight in your face. Right? Yeah, it's cold out there. All right. Well, I will link to it in the usual places. You little extra weight in your face. Right? Yeah, it's cold out there. All right. Well, I will link to it in the usual places. You can come to your own conclusions.

All right. Anything else before we get to more emails? No. Okay. Well, Jack says, I was looking at the stats of the top three closers free agents this offseason and noticed how similar the results were. And he's got Jansen, Chapman, and Melanson

over the past four seasons, 2013 to 2016. And all you really need to know is that Melanson has the most innings and also the lowest ERA. He has 290 innings over those seasons, a 1.8 ERA. The other guys, Chapman's at 242 and 193, Jansen's at 263 and 219. And the big difference is the strikeouts, of course. Melanson only has 268. Chapman has value despite having the most innings pitched and the lowest ERA. If two pitchers had the same ERA and innings pitched, but one had half the strikeout rate, how many years would they have to put up identical numbers to receive equal contracts? And are low strikeout pitchers potentially undervalued in today's high strikeout game? I feel like the answer to this is there is no amount of years that it would happen because Melanson has been doing this for four years.

His ERA, his runs allowed, all that is essentially identical to the others, I think even better. It's better, yeah. Over four years. So I feel like it's hard to know how much Melanson's contract represents his age. He's three years older. These guys got five-year contracts. They only got, what, Jansen got like a half a million more per season, but he got a fifth year. And it's hard to know whether that is just because Jansen's three years younger. And it might also be because Jansen got signed by the Dodgers.

So it's possible that we're making too much of the difference between Melanson and Chapman. In fact, I thought the difference at the trade deadline was much more striking. And at the time we talked about it then, and we wondered aloud whether there was, if you're signing a guy for basically the one moment in the World Series where you need a strikeout if that explains why chapman is perceived as being worth worth more uh than melanson and i i wrote a half

of an article at the beginning of this off season that i never finished about why melanson was going to be underpaid criminally underpaid relative to Chapman. And then they sign their deals, and they're actually pretty close to each other. So I guess the answer is never, but the difference isn't that big. The thing about Melanson, too, is that he throws 93. It's not like he's Brad Ziegler. You don't have to strain to see how Mark Melanson is making it work. He's got nasty pitches. It's not Jensen's cutter, and it's not 105 miles an hour,

but he has a really good cutter himself. And he's got pitches that look like they should be good. Exactly. And one other thing is that if you look at their DRAs, Melanson does trail the other two. And so it is possible also that in my and in the emails lumping them together as, as identical that we're overlooking the fact that Melanson has played in front of better defenses

and with better catchers, uh, and in some cases in better ballpark, uh, and maybe those factors are all things that teams are looking at and that explain the, the relatively modest difference, uh, in the assessments of him. All right. But generally speaking, this question would have been catnip to me two weeks ago, but kind of now I'm sort of underwhelmed by my expectations previously. All right. Question from Henry. Is there a particular date on which a team's payroll is measured for the competitive balance tax?

Can teams game the system by shifting players around at just the right time? Like, could the Phillies and Red Sox swap Clay Buchholz back in a month with an extra fee going to Philly in money or on prospects and get Buchholz's $13 million shifted off the Sox payroll? And I knew the answer to this was no, you can't just game the system like that, but I was hazy on the details. So I just checked with a front office person who explained that you are charged a certain amount of competitive balance tax dollars for a salary year. So you're charged only once, but it takes into account basically

everyone you had and everyone you were paying throughout the entire year. So you're assessed at the end of the year, but it will prorate the amount of the competitive balance tax salary you had at any given time. So Buchholz's 2017 competitive balance tax salary is $13.5 million, which as it stands now will be incurred by the Phillies. But if they were to trade him at some point, like the competitive balance tax salary is different from the actual salary he is paid also. So if they were to trade him again, then there would be a,

like it would be prorated basically for how long they had him. So they can't just trade him like the day before the competitive balance tax deadline or something and be free of the entire obligation. And I assume that if there was a way to game this, that we would read about it every year. It would be a big deal. So I'm sure that what I'm going to ask next, the answer is that they have ways of dealing with that and that it's not gameable. But let's say, so say the Phillies trade Buchholz to the Braves today and agree to pay his salary.

They don't actually write him a check. He does not remain on their books. They're not sending him paychecks. They're sending the Braves a check in order to pay, in order to cover it. And so technically, Buchholz's entire salary is on the Braves payroll, I believe. it. And so technically, Buckholtz's entire salary is on the Braves payroll, I believe. But that is also not a way of getting around the competitive balance tax. No, I don't think so. Okay. Yeah. All right. They've thought of everything, or not everything, but most things. Actually thought of very few things, but they've thought of these things. The important things. Yeah. All right.

Question from Brett, who is a Patreon supporter. Would it make sense to split up the Rookie of the Year vote the way the Cy Young and MVP are split up? Essentially a rookie pitcher and rookie player or hitter of the year. Back in September, MLB was looking for a way to honor Jose Fernandez. He'd be the perfect namesake for the Rookie Pitcher of the Year. I mean, I don't know if there's ever a point when people start saying too many awards. We seem to like them. We like to have votes, but it's not something that I wake up in the morning and that's my goal for the day is to get

a new award. I am not answering this question at all. I don't like the rookie of the year award. I've written about why I don't like the Rookie of the Year award. It seems to benefit players who are older, who aren't as good of prospects, because they're more likely to start a season in their clubs, on their club's roster, because nobody's worried about gaming their service time. They're also more likely to be kind of closer to their physical peak. And they're often, they're generally, they're often older than any number of better players who are younger than them. One of my favorite fun facts for a long time was that Felix Hernandez, I think had something like seven or eight seasons in which he was younger than the AL, than a AL rookie of the year,

top three finisher. So there was at least one top three finish finisher every year until like his seventh or eighth season who was younger than him, than him and so i uh i personally think that instead of rookie of the year award you should have player of the year for different age groups that are young so you should have 20 year old of the year 21 year old of the year 22 year old of the year 23 year old of the year and just stop that's a lot of Well, all right. There should be an old man of the year award. Sure. Yeah, so if you had this this year, then Gary Sanchez and Michael Fulmer would have won a rookie of the year award,

which, I don't know, that'd be fine, I guess. I guess it added some intrigue wondering which one of them would win, but I wasn't that intrigued anyway, so I wouldn't mind if they had this. Yeah, Rookie of the Year Award is one of those awards to me that's kind of fun when you're voting on it, fun when you're thinking about it, and as soon as it's awarded, then I never think of it again. It's not that way with MVP and Cy Young. It's not that way with MVP and Cy Young. I think about past MVP and Cy Young winners a lot or how many MVP votes you got in your career or if you were a Cy Young finisher seven times or whatever.

That to me means a lot, and I consider those a big part of a player's career. But then sometimes I'll look at a player's page and I'll see that he finished first or second or whatever in Rookie of the Year voting, and it just doesn't change anything. And so Rookie of the Year award has very little lasting impact, I guess, to me. So you can do whatever you want with it.

All right. And question from Jared in Wichita. You were discussing the new CBA and wondered how the baseball schedule might be changed. I have a different idea to shake up the current structure of schedule making using the same 10 years down the line thinking would you be in favor of a six game series instead of three game series as it stands now this would reduce travel allowing teams to have true off days as well as saving every team money for example the al could play tuesday to sunday and the nl could play friday to wednesday and there would be a few three game series throughout the season would fans enjoy watching the full pitching rotation

face the opposition or would it be viewed as monotonous? Hmm, I would think it would be bad for attendance, not bad for my experience. But well, okay, bad for attendance, generally not bad for my experience. I don't think I would get bored or care. But also in a way bad for the competitive fairness of the league. As it is, you only face a team twice and you might face them. Both of those times might be early in the season when maybe their aces hurt or maybe their stars hurt. Or they might be late in the season when they might have already traded off a bunch of pieces or they might have added a bunch of pieces and so the team that you're playing might be in significant ways different than the team that your playoff rivals faced and and mike socia would complain about this sometimes too and his thinking was just that the team might be clicking uh when you're playing them or they

might not be clicking when your opponents when your division rival is playing them. And so in that sense, you kind of want to spread them out throughout the season a little bit. And as it is, it's hard to do that perfectly because of the complications of putting together a schedule. But if you had a six-game series and that was the only time you faced a team, then that would be— although you couldn't really do that with the current schedule, right? Because you only play a team six times. I be, although you couldn't really do that with not with the current schedule, right? Because you only play a team six times. I mean, I guess you could, you just wouldn't go home and away every year. Yeah, you could still do that. But if you had six game series, you'd only face them once. And that problem would be baked in and exacerbated to the extent that it is a problem. And I think it might be a little less fun. I think for a general baseball fan,

who's just scrolling through MLB TV and picking something to watch on any given night, it probably wouldn't make a difference. But for a fan of a particular team who's watching that team every night, I think it might be a little less intriguing if you're playing basically a whole week against one team. What if it's a boring team, you know, and you're just playing the Reds or something for six games? And I don't know, I think it might get a little, might get a little less interesting. Might to some people, I can only speak for myself, and it would not get less interesting. I don't think for me, I think it would be bad for attendance. Because if you have, for instance, a series against a team that really does bring in a lot of attendance, like the Yankees or something like that, I think that people are less likely to

go to people who go to two or three or four or five games a year are less likely to go to two games in a week. And so the power of a team like the Yankees to draw big crowds on the road, or whatever team, you know, Giants and the Dodgers or whatever to draw big crowds on the road would be lessened by compressing those games into small time periods when there's sort of a max of how many times the average fan is willing to go to those games. I might have gone to, I might have circled on the schedule Giants-Dodgers in April and in July as a kid and said, those are the two series I want to go to. If they were April and April right next to each other, I would only circle one of those dates, but probably not a big factor anyway. Well, I guess the players would like having less travel, so they'd probably be in favor of this,

right? Well, they might, although I'm reading this book called The Game, which is about the industry of baseball in the 90s, at least so far it is. It might get into the 2000s and about the CBA negotiations and the strike and all those sorts of things and at one point one of the owners one of bud selig's big ideas was a really radical realignment where i think if i read it correctly it would be more like the nba where the leagues themselves i think would be split East West and it would really cut down on travel a lot because you'd be playing so many more of your games against teams on your side of the country.

And the players were against that. That was something that the players rejected, which surprised me. They thought they rejected it. According to this book, they rejected it because they thought that fans wouldn't like it and it would be bad for the game. Okay. Playing decks? Sure, Ben.

One of the reasons that I don't believe Babe Ruth is real, that he is a story that we all agreed to tell our grandchildren. One of the reasons is the absurdity of his offensive numbers. But another reason is this, is that he was, you know, of course, he was a pitcher. He was a good pitcher. And then he stopped pitching. And in 19 1921 he basically made his last pitching appearance. And then, I don't know why, but for some reason, the last game of the season in 1930, he pitched. He hadn't pitched for nine years, he had not pitched for nine years,

he was 35 years old, even nine years earlier, he had only pitched two games and only one game the year before that. So he really hadn't been a pitcher for 11 years. And then they let him pitch at age 35 and he threw a complete game, allowed two earned runs and got the win. And that just is not baseball as I know it. You know, like, I don't believe that anybody could do that in this day and age. I just don't, I don't see that being realistic. And yet it supposedly happened with Babe Ruth. So I was reading about Jimmy Fox in the historical abstract, and Bill James mentions, Fox was light on his feet and had a fearsome throwing arm. He caught 109 games in his career,

and he had a 1.52 ERA in 10 games as a pitcher. And I went, what? Jimmy Fox? First of all, pitched 10 times. I mean, Jimmy Fox, probably the second greatest first baseman ever, maybe third now with Bulls, but also pitched 10 times and he was good in those 10 times. So I got to wondering about this phenomenon of fake baseball Shohei Otani's of whether there were other players like Babe Ruth who were capable of dominating on the mound as well as at the plate. And so I went and I looked at all the pitchers, all the position player appearances on the mound, and I looked only at players who had made multiple appearances, and then I skimmed the list to see how many, if I could find any other Hall of Famers, or if Jimmy Foxx and Babe Ruth were the exceptions. So there's a lot of players who converted, a lot of not very good players who converted.

Lefty O'Doul is a very good player who converted. He was a pitcher and converted to hitting and I think his first season in the majors as a hitter was like 27 and he was phenomenal after that. So he's kind of interesting, but that's different. He converted. I'm more looking for guys who didn't convert, who just pitched a little bit on the side. And I found Ty Cobb had three pitching appearances, five innings, two earned runs, which is pretty good. But I kept going. Sam Rice, Hall of Famer, pitched nine times in his career, had 39 and a third innings in those nine games and a 2.52 era wow so we got another we got we got fox and rice now two potential otanis but i think that even the

the best example of this the uh the otani that never was uh is george sis, who pitched 24 times in his career. He had 111 innings as a pitcher and a 2.27 ERA. And Sissler was also a, I mean, really like a inner circle hitter at his peak, maybe one of the 10 greatest hitters ever or so, and also had like a half a season with a 2.2 ERA, which strikes me again is wildly implausible. For Sizzler, this was not random appearances scattered throughout his career. Primarily, he came up when he was 22 and he did not he had not yet established what he was. And in his first game, in his first season, he had 15 appearances, eight of them starts, a 2.83 ERA, which was a 101 ERA plus.

So he was better than the league average. And at that point, he was, that year he played first base, pitcher, right field, center field, left field. So he was actually being used in both roles. The next year at 23, he started three times, all three complete games, not surprising, all three complete games, and only three earned runs allowed, which is a 277 ERA plus an ERA of one. And then throughout his career, he would every once in a while come in, he started a game when he was 25 and had a 4.5 ERA. And then he came in in relief four times after that at 27, 32, 33, and 35. In those four relief appearances, he had six innings, one hit allowed, no runs,

which is crazy. Isn't this crazy? Aren't I saying something that's nuts? Jimmy Fox, by the way, crazy aren't i saying something that's nuts yeah jimmy fox by the way uh his career era of 1.52 is the second best era plus of all time uh minimum of 20 innings the only person who is better than him is brad kilby who pitched not long ago in our time covering baseball for the oakland days and had two i think two two good September call-ups, and then he hurt his shoulder and was out of the game. So those are all very interesting to me. I'm pretty much done. The only thing I'd add is that another one of these names that I recognized was Rocky Colavito, who had two scoreless appearances totaling five and two-thirds innings in his career, and one of them was in 1968 and this

made me curious you might have seen i tweeted this but i was curious about position players in 1968 whether they benefited from 1968 pitching environment as much as everybody else and i found eight instances of position players pitching in 1968 they threw a combined, I think, 23 innings and did not allow an earned run. 21 in the third innings, didn't allow a single earned run. Of course, all fun facts are lies. That one has a couple of them. One is that one guy did allow unearned runs. In fact, he allowed five of them. So that's still very good, but it's a little bit misleading because of the unearned runs. The other is that five of these appearances were by guys who had converted. One of them, though, converted like five years earlier.

He wasn't much of a pitcher. He converted five years earlier and hadn't pitched again. That was Willie Smith. and hadn't pitched again. That was Willie Smith. And the other one was a minor league pitcher who had converted not long earlier. And so he accounted for two of these outings, seven of these innings,

and kind of a quasi pitcher, I guess. Well, still a very good fun fact. Still a great fun fact. Still one of my favorites. I think it's a top six fun fact for me. All right. I mean, come on. Yeah.

Position players through 21 and a third innings with an ERA of zero. That's a great fun fact. Yeah. All right. All right. Good play indexing. Thanks. All right.

We'll do a couple more here. All right. Good play indexing. All right. We'll do a couple more here. So Jonathan says the recent labor talks and appearance on the podcast of Ben's ringer comrade Michael Bauman got me thinking about if instead of a union strike, labor negotiations got so bad that the MLB Players have the owner's money, new age front offices, the high-end stadiums and TV deals, and over 100 years of history, but replacement-level players. The Players Association might have the Los Angeles Robins versus the Los Angeles Diablos leasing a college stadium and streaming on Twitter, but it would still be Kershaw versus Trout. In future years, MLB could use its resources to attract high-end talent that isn't part of the current Players Association. The Players Association and its collectively-owned teams might see mutiny in its ranks as top players would be getting paid far less than they were before, and even marginal players could find a bigger payday by going back to MLB. On the other hand, Players Association would probably have little trouble attracting investors if the collectively-owned teams aren't working out for them.

And though the new owners wouldn't have as deep pockets, the players could have significantly more power over them. What do you think of the viability of the Players Association League in the short, medium, and long term? If viable, how quickly does MLB fold? And how quickly does the Players Association League begin to resemble the old structure? I want to ask you a hypothetical before we answer this, but let's say that the league split 50-50. Half of all players went to the one league and half went to the other. So it played out just like this, where you have the Players Association League

is all new teams, brand new stadiums, brand new broadcasters, brand new uniforms, everything's weird. And then the other half are playing Major League Baseball, sort of a zombie Major League Baseball, but same teams and still a high level of play, roughly. I mean, it's half Major Leaguers and half AAAers. It's good ball. It's both good ball.

Which one are you more likely to watch in year one? We'll deal with year two and beyond, but year one. Is it all indie leaguers and how good are they and how do they structure their teams and their lineups and just what does it look like? It's more different and more new and more weird. So I'd be more curious about that. But realistically, I'd probably watch the old one more just because the old one would still have MLB TV and all the broadcasts that I'm used to, presumably. So just from an ease of access perspective, that would have a huge lead. Yeah. I mean, the first week you would definitely watch the PAL. The question is what you'd watch in September.

Would you get swept up in the playoff race at all of the PAL? And would it be, if you imagine the PAL has difficulty because they don't have minor league systems, they don't have the depth that 200 minor leaguers provide, the range and the quality of play would be much more diverse. You'd have, theoretically, you might have Clayton Kershaw, but he might be facing uh tommy lyons hey tommy uh and so you could imagine that in september kershaw might have like a 0.8 era and

i don't know if i think that would be fun i think i would be interested in seeing that but i don't know if i could get into the pennant race or not, especially because you don't have any guarantee that this pennant race is going to be remembered for anything. Like if this is a you don't know if this is going to be a league that exists in 100 years or even 30 years. And they talk a lot about how important baseball's history is to the experience of watching baseball, which is true. But I think a bigger factor is that we are aware that we are watching future baseball history, that what we are watching will be history, will be something that 30 years from now, people will still refer to the same way that we still refer to 30 years ago. And if you don't have that, if you have a feeling that this might be a one year or five-year experiment and that nobody will do routine analysis on the performances or treat it as anything but a blip, it might be hard to care

to take it seriously. And certainly, I think it's fair to say that your bosses and my bosses would want us writing more about the real major leaguers, especially after the first few weeks. real major leaguers, especially after the first few weeks. And so you'd like, I don't think that the Los Angeles Robins would get a quarter million people to their parade because I don't think it would ever it would cross over that quickly to the mainstream. So for those reasons, I started I started out this thinking I could work, you know, except for the ballparks. The ballparks seem like the problem, the ballparks and the broadcast deals. But now I think even as a fun renegade sort of thing, it's a flame would burn out pretty quickly. So what if it is the scenario in the

question where they get all the good players and obviously that, I mean, look, it's never going to happen because you'd have to have all these guys essentially agree to play for free and walk away from their contracts. And I mean, legally, I don't know if they could walk away from their contracts. I guess they could retire from Major League Baseball and then do this other thing. Maybe, I don't know, there might be some kind of legal implications, but I mean, you'd never get them all to go along with it, obviously. But if you somehow did, if the owners did something so dastardly, if there was collusion part two, and the players were so upset about it, that they were actually bonded together, and they all decided to do this, then would it work 100% of the major leaguers? I can make an argument either way. Here's the argument for why it wouldn't work. The players who are sacrificing for future, I mean, basically this would be players today sacrificing for players tomorrow. The idea being

that you don't want to concede to the league. You owe it to tomorrow's players just as much as you owe what you have to yesterday's players and the fights that they did. So you're asking a group of players to sacrifice. And those players only get one shot at a career. The window for elite athletic performance is extremely small. This is what they've been working for their whole lives. And they're, I mean, you're talking about the difference between making a few million dollars and making a few hundred million dollars, and you only get one chance of that. So I don't think it would be very realistic to ask players to give up more than a year of that time. I think they would really get antsy as they sort of started noticing

their bodies breaking down while they're playing for, you know, 4,500 people at, you know, San Diego State's ballpark. And I think that it would break down at that point. So I think you got, I think you got one year. I don't think the league catches on in one year. I don't think the players stick together for a second year. The argument for the other way is if you truly had all the good players, obviously a big reason to be a major leaguer is that you want the money, that it pays you a lot of money, and that's a very powerful motivating force. But the other thing is that you want to play against the best players, that this is how you test yourself. This is the way that you make a mark in your field and the way that you want to play against the best players, that this is how you test yourself. This is the way that you make a mark in your field and a way that you know at the end that you were good enough.

And I don't know that a player, the way that it would break down is you would start losing individual players. But who are the individual players who are going to want to go back and play against replacement level scabs? I mean, what does it do for Clayton Kershaw emotionally to pitch against double A quality opponents?

I don't know that he would feel that that would be fulfilling. You'd start, I think you'd probably would, you'd lose a lot of your fourth outfielders probably at some point if the money was determining their decision. But it just seems that it would be a very powerful thing to tell people, the money's over there, but the game is over here. And a big part of, I think, what is satisfying about these careers is that they are where the game is.

That's why they all, you know, that's why I don't think, like I don't, I think we've, a long time ago, I think we entertained the question of whether Japan could pay enough for Robinson Cano to play in Japan or to play somewhere like that. And I just I think the answer is, is no, that even if you gave him a billion dollars, he would want to be where the game is. Partly that's because he has $240 million. It's not like the alternative is playing for scale scale And so maybe if the salaries in the PAL Are too low and they don't have that Financial security maybe they would make that decision

But otherwise I think they want to be where The best players are so they can test themselves Alright and last question From Lillian who says I thought about Bo Jackson recently and remembered An assertion I don't know whether it was made By either of you or Grant Brisby, that Bo's career is, more than any other players, basically remembered by three video highlights. The running up the wall catch, the home run at the All-Star game, and the throwing out Harold Reynolds from the warning track.

Not a bad collection of highlights, and this made me think, say you were a middling prospect in spring training and our old friend baseball god would approach you with some foreshadowings, But Baseball God says, highlights of something that you did on the field will find their way into baseball lore and be replayed forever. These can be great plays, freak occurrences, or even bloopers. The only restriction on these highlights will be that they have to be entirely decontextualized, ruling out last outs of World Series or Perfect Games. So what three highlights would you most want to be remembered by? Hmm. Wow. They thought of all the loopholes. be remembered by. Hmm. They, wow. They, uh, they thought of all the loopholes. Yeah. Yeah. So we can't say 21 strikeout game or something like that. It has to be just a moment. So this is not, this is not the highlight I would want to be remembered for, but I think other than maybe the Bo Jackson highlights, the highlight that did more for a single player, the most memorable highlight of my life and the one that maybe is did the for the player's reputation was Nolan Ryan beating up Robin Ventura. perfect highlight, right? Like partly because you're an old man and this, you're, you're not

the aggressor. You don't start as the aggressor. He's the aggressor. You're, you're in a sense, you're just, you're John Wick, right? You are the one who is simply responding to a show of force in this world with unexpected and obliterating force of your own. So again, like I wouldn't want to be remembered mostly for punching a person, but I think there's probably something to that, that there might be some lesson to that highlight that we could transfer over. I was going to say a related one. I would want one of my highlights to not be baseball-related really,

like the Rick Monday saving the flag from being burned. That's a great highlight because you're on a baseball field, you're in a baseball uniform, so you're still kind of in a baseball context, but it's not a baseball play. You are doing something that is regarded as heroic by anyone. They don't have to care about baseball. Anyone can appreciate what you did and you look like a superhero for a second. So I would take something like that. Like probably since we just talked about fans running on the field, like a really dangerous fan who is like really attempting to harm someone and you take him down. Like that – I think, you know, if you like – I don't know.

Like he's got a gun or something and you take him down from behind, like you're just a hero and you happen to be in a baseball uniform, but you did this incredibly brave and heroic act in front of the entire world. I think that's probably better than any little feat of athleticism you could display. So I'm definitely taking that one. That's a really good one. I, along those lines, I was thinking I would love a highlight of me discovering a bunch of gold. Just digging under a base or something? Yeah.

I mean, it's, you know, it's in the grass. Sure. Okay. With a metal metal detector you're just shoveling honestly it doesn't it doesn't matter doesn't matter all right it's got to be a lot of gold though yeah uh i would like i think mine do you remember the do you remember do you remember when i wrote about Josh Harrison And the pickles So the great One of the two peak Josh Harrison pickles is when he's

Stealing second over slides the bag And gets up and The guy's standing on the bag With the ball about to tag him About to tag him and Josh Harrison Is like well I can't go there So he goes to third instead gets in a pickle And escapes this pickle I can't go there. So he goes to third instead, gets in a pickle and escapes this pickle.

I wouldn't mind my highlight being somehow escaping three pickles and stealing steel. They wouldn't be classified as steals, but stealing three bags with three consecutive clean pickle breaks. Yeah, that's good. So that's that is one that I would love. That's plausible too. Cause like I keep trying to think of plays that would be cool and all of them are kind of inconsistent with you just being a middling player who's unremarkable. Like Bo Jackson has those highlights because he's Bo Jackson. And so, you know, I'm thinking like, well, you hit a ball out of a stadium or something and you know, that would be cool. People would replay that. But how are you a totally unremarkable player who hits a ball out of a stadium even once? So it's hard to imagine. But the pickle one, that's something performance one. So we got, we got hero, we got pickle,

and we need one more. What would be a good one for a pitcher? I guess a good one for a pitcher. It's just, it seems underwhelming. It doesn't feel like it would be worth having a career just for this, but like, do you remember the, this might be a little bit before your time, but do you remember the, I believe it was the Stanford pickoff play in around the late eighties, early nineties. Uh, I think it was Stanford. It might not even have been Stanford, but it was a prearranged pickoff play where the pitcher threw a pickoff throw to first base. The guy dove back in first, but throw was wild. First baseman goes and chases after it runs after it. The guy gets up and goes to second, and the pitcher just goes over and tags him because the pitcher never actually threw the ball.

And it was cool. That was a great play. It was fun. Everybody saw it for those couple years. Probably misremembered some key details. Probably wasn't Stanford. Probably he didn't tag him. He probably threw the ball to second, so on.

stanford probably he didn't tag him he probably threw the ball to second so on but a really fun trick play that is remembered forever seems good yeah right i mean it's better than it's better than what it's better than being the victim of a really fun trick play that gets remembered so like a hidden ball trick where you get two guys out or something like yeah i saw a great highlight a couple days ago meg rowley sent it to me in response to our conversation about fan on the field and it was uh it was play a couple months ago uh where a fan ran on the field and just as he did a pitch was thrown matt carpenter hit a fly ball right ago where a fan ran on the field and just as he did a pitch was thrown Matt Carpenter hit a fly ball right to where the fan was and you didn't as the viewer you don't know that this fan is has run on the field and so Matt Carpenter hits this fly ball and they cut to the left field or

chasing it and as they cut there's this other guy wearing I think an American flag running by accident straight at the ball. Like, I don't even think he knew that that's where the ball was. And it was so weird. That was a great highlight. I don't know. That's not the one I want to be involved in, though. A lot of the interesting ideas that I am thinking of would not look good. Like, like, for instance, you could imagine a play

that would be very memorable, where there's a pitch that's up and in, you duck out of the way, it hits your bat, and then goes fair. And so you have accidentally hit the ball into fair territory, and you get up and you run and then you could imagine it's, you know, a little league home run after that there's a series of errors, and you end up with a home run on it on you know scoring a run on that play but like that would get that'd be memorable like if i were designing a highlight that would last that would be a good one but i wouldn't want to be the guy in that highlight i wouldn't want to be anybody in that highlight there is nobody in that highlight who's like put this on my plaque yeah that's i mean that's almost blooper territory it is lillian said bloopers are eligible but if you were choosing three you you wouldn't choose a blooper

no what about what about just like could longest home run ever hit be on here why not well that's what i was just thinking like hit a hit a home run out of the stadium kind of thing. But I mean, the only reason why not is that it's kind of implausible that you are just this generic guy who hits a home run out of a stadium. But if we're okay with suspending our disbelief that you could do that, then then yeah, I think you know, if you had like the home run that Mickey Mantle is supposed to have hit, but he actually hit it and you have it on video. I mean, that would be, that'd be great. And it'd be like, like the Glenn Allen Hill home run. Do you know that one?

Yeah, I do. That's one of my favorites. That's a great home run. It's so massive and monstrous. And, you know, Glenn Allen Hill is not a great player. I mean, he had, had some power and who knows was, who knows what was going on at that time he was a giant man at that point but it's a really cool highlight so so yeah if you

can do that do you remember the one do you remember the one where paul o'neill kicked a ball for an assist yeah uh-huh that's a good one uh if you knew the life that it was going to have, the lifespan it was going to have, that people were still going to be mentioning it all these years later and so on, if you were Bobby Valentine, would you regret putting on that mustache? No, I don't think so. I think that's a good one. He kicks them all. Oh, it's not an assist.

In my head, I always thought it was an assist it's just he's just getting the ball back in what is he doing oh uh it's interesting if you watch this highlight the paul o'neill highlight there's a voice somewhere i don't know somewhere in the dugout or in the crowd somebody's yelling get your head out of your ass uh-huh i wonder who's yelling i don't know all right well i guess we can just go with huge home run but that's kind of a cop-out probably but oh well i thought of another one all right go ahead all right so you know how you've seen the uh handful, a very small handful of catches where an outfielder has climbed the wall to make a catch?

I think most recently Josh Reddick did. He sort of dug it, planted his foot in the wall, and used it to sort of leap even higher and catch a ball. Yeah, the Gary Matthews catch is maybe my favorite play of all time. Exactly. The Gary Matthews catch is maybe my favorite play of all time. Exactly. The Gary Matthews catch is maybe the greatest play of all time. Well, what I envision is a play in which I, as the right fielder, go into the corner, leap up onto the wall, grab the foul pole to pull myself still further and spin my body around to catch a fly ball. I believe I could catch a ball as high

as not I, but an athlete could catch a ball, could catch a ball as high as 16 or 17 feet off the ground. Huh? So would you be standing on the wall, holding onto the pole or just kind of dangling off the pole? I don't believe I would hold onto the pole. I believe I would leap plant off the wall, reach for the foul pole and then pull, give another pole, spin my body around with that, with that tug. And as, as I spin, reach up full extension and catch the home run. There's not a lot of, I don't feel like there's a lot of undone catches. That most moves you could imagine, now maybe I'm just not imagining, but most moves you could imagine have been done.

I think this though has never been done, and it would be pretty fantastic. Basically, the double parkour move, I think, would be pretty pretty unprecedented so why do you think it hasn't been done because did you hear it sounds pretty hard but we've had a pretty big sample here of potential opportunities yeah but how many well how many how many gary matthews type catches or josh reddick type catch that we've seen you know uh maybe maybe a half dozen and that is spread out over hundreds of feet of outfield wall this has to be in one very specific place it has to be within about a four or five foot range to even consider it it's very in a park with a fairly low wall i guess well not yeah i mean you don't you can't have the green monster but you need it to be a high enough wall as well that you could do this and so it's a very challenging play the timing would have to be just perfect it's it's hard but i would like that

to be my i believe that is the greatest highlight catch possible all right i like it i have one other okay i don't know if this one's legal but i'm imagining that i'm the batter. The pitch is high. I take the pitch. It pops out of the catcher's glove back in front of the catcher, and I hit that ball for a base hit. After it pops out of his glove, I get a base hit. I hit a line drive on what amounts to basically a soft toss into the strike zone. What about the scenario we once discussed of throwing your glove to stop a home run ball? Did we... We concluded that it's a bad idea usually, right? Because what, there's like a two base penalty or something?

What is the rule? It's a three base. It's a three base penalty. Yeah. So we decided it's a bad idea usually. So if it's going to be a home run anyway and you do it and there's a three base penalty, does that mean it's still a home run? I think it's three bases on top.

So I think the only way that it would plausibly benefit you is if you were able to throw the glove, hit the ball, stop its momentum, and catch the ball as it landed, because then I think it would be a triple instead of a home run. It's a triple. I don't remember. This probably, we went over this in much more detail. We might have contradicted that ruling. If that's the case, I'll take that.

That'd be pretty good. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah. Bush league, but pretty cool. Totally bush league. All right. See ya. So we will end there.

Apologies to everyone for inflicting my horseness on you today. league but pretty cool totally bush league all right see ya so we will end there apologies to everyone for inflicting my hoarseness on you today you can support the podcast on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and five listeners who have already done so are amanda rose harold walker william andreas viglakis christian thomas and taylor macaria thank you you can buy our book the only rule is it To Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. It's not too late to get it for Christmas. A bunch of people have been sending me messages about having gotten it for gifts, so I appreciate it, and I hope that your gift recipients will also.

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