Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1006: Sullivan’s Travels

Episode Date: January 13, 2017

We’d like to welcome Effectively Wild to its new home on FanGraphs! Effectively Wild will continue to be hosted by The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh, who is joined by his new co-host Jeff Sullivan. Fans of our existing podcasts need not worry, as Effectively Wild is an addition to our existing podcast offerings, all of which […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1006 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs and Baseball Perspectives Presented by our Patreon supporters, I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer Joined sort of fully for the first time by Jeff Sullivan from Fangraphs Hi Jeff, welcome back Hello, thank you, this is delightful Yeah, making some history here in a very small scale way. The last time we talked, you were in an airport and we were discussing post-vacation depression. Has yours set in yet?

Oh, no. No, no, no. This is still the adrenaline part of there's so much that you want to get done when you get back. I don't know the last time you took a vacation because the last time we spoke, you referred to the fact that you don't do that ever. But you know, if you take a weekend, then you kind of go off the grid, you lose touch, you come back and all of a sudden there's a lot of stuff to do. And it kind of keeps you from, you know, collapsing entirely. But I am just home after

about 30 hours of travel from the other side of the planet. So the collapse is imminent. And hopefully I can put it off by about 40 to 45 minutes, 30 hours. How does that add up? It's Punta Arenas to Santiago, Santiago to Mexico City, Mexico City to Guadalajara, Guadalajara to Los Angeles, and then Los Angeles to Portland. I'm not saying that it was the most efficient way. There are direct flights, I think from Santiago to Los Angeles at least, but this was the way that cost about $300. So that part was incredible. Yeah. Well, like what, two days ago you were looking at penguins and now you're back.

Yeah. Looking at Portland again. If you want, I mean, you already think that like the baseball landscape in January is bleak, but consider the baseball landscape in January, two days after being on an island with 150,000 penguins and a colony. And it's brutal. Yeah. When you left, you assured me that I'd be able to talk about Mike Napoli, at least for one of the weeks that you were gone. And then even that didn't happen. So I had to talk to Carson Sestouli instead. Oh, wow. That one got bleak.

Yeah. So we're going to do an email show. You've been home for, what, about four hours? Is that enough time for you to have read the Mariners' transaction history? I've read the last about three or four pages of it, but I think that covers the second half of my vacation. Yeah. How many wins better do you think the mariners got while you were away well let's see when what what started it because obviously the uh the guyardo stuff which yeah it was the what the dyson and the carnes and the guyardo and the

smith and then there were what two more trades yeah they got like malik smith another smith and then they flip him yeah smiley right right okay so if we let's just say it's that four i think right i think that's it yeah yeah it probably vaults if you if you want to use vault this is a very rube goldberg sort of vault i guess but it uh it it moves them chaotically into probably like the number one slot for the American League wildcard. But I'd say that that's not so glorious a position to occupy in the middle of January. But you give one thing to Jared Butto and he refers to it himself, but he does seem to be hyperactive. And really, it's not dull. Nothing about it is dull. And I think that there's just so much. It doesn't even matter.

There's no point in really analyzing who's getting the better side of any move that he's making because it's so fun to get caught up and try to figure out what's going to happen next. And I guess he's been trying to get Drew Smiley all winter. And then they just didn't have the prospects to move to the Rays because you might have noticed the Mariners don't have any of those. But they did have enough prospects to get Malik Smith, which apparently was then enough of a prospect. It's just, I don't know.

The route DePoto took from like 10th best team to 8th best team is like the route you took from Santiago to Portland, basically. Right, yeah. He's taking sort of like the, I'm blanking on the names of all the different travel websites because i have my own brain drain but uh you know the will the william shatner one oh right it doesn't matter but it's uh it's complicated you have some general managers who might think okay i'm gonna get this player i'm gonna get two wins better but then jared apoto thinks i'm gonna get these 11 players i'm gonna get two wins better that's gonna be a lot of fun i'm gonna give my people something to write about i'm gonna keep bringing media people to the

stadium for press conferences i'm i don't know if they had a press conference yeah i don't know if any of this press conference worthy but yeah well it was fun i mean we had a few things to talk about just because of depoto and this is just the way he operates now, I think it's safe to say, after however long he's been in this job. And I guess it's just a product of the fact that he kind of took over a team that had a window sort of in the way that the Tigers had a window and we all were looking at it and estimating when it would close. And the Mariners kind of had one of those too

with a bunch of guys signed through a certain time and no farm system to speak of and i guess he just didn't want to embark on the full rebuild right away so instead he has just tried to trade up very slowly and in many small increments yeah it feels like one of those what was it one red paper clip kind of things where he's just i made that comparison on the ringer podcast when we talked about this stuff yeah that's a wonderful coincidence yeah it's uh you know you inherit uh an organization with zero future and you think i can work with this i'm gonna i'm going to very very gradually but i guess it doesn't really feel gradual at all and you wonder if other if other front offices like mad, do you think other general managers enjoy the hyperactivity?

I know that people are kind of down on AJ Preller just because he's a smarmy dude you probably don't want to have a lot of dealings with. But do you think that DePoto wears people out? Is he just the really smiley guy in the back of a bus who just can't stop being really excited about everything? Or does he, do you think he like a rising tide lifts all boats? And does he like put a smile on your face when you get a call from Jared Apoto? Like, Hey, I might do something this afternoon. It's January 12th, but you know, who's to say? Yeah. That was kind of my theory about Preller when he managed to make all those deals in such a short time span. And with Preller, it was like with bigger name guys usually and bigger prospects and more established players.

And my theory was just that he was kind of willing to be more annoying than everyone else, basically. And like, maybe there's some sort of etiquette or reserve. Like you don't want to be that annoying guy in the fantasy league who's just constantly proposing trades and then getting mad at you if you don't respond to them right away. And so maybe that was an advantage for him guy in the fantasy league who's just constantly proposing trades and then getting mad at you if you don't respond to them right away and so maybe that was an advantage for him or maybe it would

have been if the moves he'd made had been better which they weren't very good as it turns out but but yeah i kind of think that like maybe other gms are just somewhat sheepish about constantly bothering other gms and then if you don't have that reservation, then maybe there's more opportunity. I've only met Jerry DePoto one time and I ran across him when I was in what Nashville is that the winter meetings two years ago, Nashville. And I was walking around just talking to some other baseball dude. And we happened to cross Jerry DePoto just across one of the many bridges spanning the interior of the Gaylord Opulent and resort complex. And we obviously had some professional understanding of who one another is,

but just talking to him felt over. This was like, there were three people in this setting. There was nobody else around. This was a very unusual setting for the complex, but it was like the middle of the afternoon. Not a whole lot was going on going on just three of us i am naturally a little more introverted but i prefer the small setting you know like a dinner with with two or three friends that's uh that's most comfortable but i was worn down in just five minutes of extremely polite small talk and there was nothing complicated about it but just it was he beams like i know I know beam is a synonym for smile, but he has this beam that pulls you in, and it also kind of sucks some of your power or focus. I don't know.

One of the potential downsides of being the guy who's constantly proposing trades is you don't know if you're going to be the guy who sort of accidentally proposes, I'll give you Yosemite Grandol and i'll get matt temp yeah but right well like with the poto it's they always seem to be moves of such small stakes that you don't really like shay simmons i don't i'm gonna level with you i now that i've been back for four hours i haven't done a whole lot of research on who shay sim is, but like, I don't know. He's going to be one of the 35, 40 odd players who show up in Mariners big league roster in the season

head. And he's a piece that Jerry devoted wanted. And like, if you're, if you're the Braves, how, how much do you really want to negotiate about Malik Smith and Shea Simmons?

And versus like, you know, if you like, you know, he's going to be persistent, you know? So at some point you just have to think like, I'm going to,

I'm just going to cut this off here. I'm'm just gonna accept whatever the last thing is that we discussed and get and just get this over with so you think maybe he just cares more about the the small scale moves than someone else does like he cares more about the 25th man or the 26th man than someone else does or maybe he he just like targets that player more so than some other team would like he has a specific player in mind for each role and he is willing to go after them harder than someone else who just says we'll get someone to fill that spot and you know honestly maybe he has to because he doesn't really have any resources to focus anywhere else like you can get it feels like the offseason has been going on for months we still have no idea if mitch hanegar is like actually like a good baseball player even though we talked about

why we think he's really exciting it felt like seven years ago but like it's not that often that i think you get to make a move where it's like oh this guy right here looks like he's maybe a three win off the radar center fielder right away that That's kind of exciting. But a Shea Simmons, like I'm not even convinced Shea Simmons cares that much. Like I know he tweeted about how excited he is to join the Mariners organization, but I think if you're a player that Jerry DiPoto just traded for, you probably shouldn't get too accustomed to your new surroundings. Yeah, that's probably, that's just an obligatory tweet. Whenever you change teams or get picked up, it's probably safest to send the, I'm excited to be with this team tweet more so than the yelling at that team's beat writer tweet that Mike Fulton-Evich sent earlier today, which you probably missed because you were on a plane.

I did miss that one. I'm upset about it. All right. Well, we have established that Jerry DiPoto knows who you are. Well, we have established that Jerry DePoto knows who you are, so I'm going to use that as a forced segue into the first question, which is from Nick, who asks, Do you guys think Mike Trout knows who Jeff is? Based on the sheer volume of his Mike Trout output, I would find it strange yet unsurprising, based on what we know of Trout, if he had never heard of Jeff. I know most players probably couldn't care less what is written about them on the web, but this seems like a particularly unique case. Do you think Mike Trout would be better off if he did know who Jeff was? I mean, obviously he would be in general if he followed him on Twitter,

but do you think he would potentially increase his ability for self-reflection of his flaws as a player if he read Jeff's analysis of him? I assume he's getting this information in spades from the Angels anyway, but the team has a lot to worry about, and it's always nice to have different perspectives on your performance. I don't think Mike Trout has a whole lot to worry about about making himself better. I would say, I would have to guess this.

I think Mike Trout has probably, my name has probably been said in the vicinity of Mike Trout before. I think the probability is as close as possible to 0% that Mike Trout has retained that name. I am virtually certain that there are several members of Mike Trout's extended family who know who I am and who know who you are, because we know that there is no more rabid baseball fan than the extended family member. But I cannot imagine that Mike Trout could give two heaps of crap about who I am or the things that I have to say about how wonderful he is. There is, and this isn't quite exactly the same case, but were you ever familiar, this goes back a few years, but there was a fan who would show up at Safeco Field.

His name was Brandon Tofty. I got to know him, but he was known as Red. His name was Brandon Tofty. I got to know him, but he was known as Red. I first noticed him because he kind of looked like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. But he would show up and he had these seats. They're kind of like a few rows up behind home plate off to the side such that you could see him when the camera would like zoom in on a right handed hitter when he would like step out of the box. You could see the fans behind him. And so when Adrian Belcher was a Mariner, he would come up and the camera would zoom in on him. And more often than not, when it had that precise angle, you could see in the background, this cowardly lion looking dude turned out to be an amateur wrestler who would hold up signs that began with like, I heart Belcher, a very noticeable. And this is at a time when Adrian Belcher was not the beloved baseball player that he is today, at least not wildly beloved but the the fandom didn't just kind of end with

signs uh the signs got uh more more detailed uh I think that at some point Red started to realize that people were noticing him on the internet the tv broadcast certainly started to notice him and he would always sport a Bellatree jersey and he would have some very creative signs. He also came into the possession of a, I would say roughly three foot tall, Adrian Bellatree bobblehead doll that I got to know him over the years. And one of the minority owners of the Mariners at the time provided these tickets that are called Diamond Club tickets, which is like the first row behind home plate. Yeah. And he was just so appreciative of this fan's support for Adrian Belcher and the Mariners that he just wanted to

give him a reward. And the fan Brandon wanted to reach out to me and invite me up to give me a ticket because I guess helped get him noticed by the owner, whatever. So I thought, oh, diamond club tickets. I'm like 25 years old. This is going to be great. I'm going to fly up from San Diego, go to Seattle, see some friends and go get one of these four tickets that were given him. So the four tickets, four tickets to Diamond Club, I don't know what the face value of these tickets is, but it's probably like three, four, $500 at least right behind home plate first row. And one ticket goes to Brandon. One ticket goes to his, uh, his girlfriend. One ticket goes to row and one ticket goes to brandon one ticket goes to his uh his girlfriend

one ticket goes to me and one ticket goes to the three-foot adrian beltray bobblehead doll that just sat back there and loomed and i was gonna say that like a large bobblehead doll sounds like a bobblehead sounds like it would be less appealing the larger it gets like at some point it would just get creepy yeah Yeah, you definitely hit that Uncanny Valley kind of Khalil Green situation. And so this fandom, this almost worship between, I shouldn't say between, of Red toward Beltre sustained through years and years and years. Even when Beltre left the Mariners, Red would still show up when he would visit with the Red Sox or with the Rangers.

left the Mariners, Red would still show up when he would visit with the Red Sox or with the Rangers. And I got to wondering after a while, like, clearly, Adrian Beltre must know who you are. Like, there's no, there's no hiding that you are a like, dangerously large, wild looking man, who has some sort of insane affection for admittedly a very good and at the time underrated baseball player and what i came to understand is that adrian beltre was quite fond of red or at least his perception of red but that adrian beltre's wife on the other hand was absolutely petrified by this uh this man who who seemed to uh hold her husband up as some sort of deity now i don't know if that's gotten better over the uh the five or six years since I heard about that.

But at a certain point, the players do become aware of what's out there and that is aimed at them. But it's mostly the family members that feel the strongest about it. Yeah. There have been instances, though, where something has gotten back to you, right? About you wrote something on Fangraphs about some player, and then you found out later that that player was reading that post or had read something about it and had made some sort of change even in some cases. Like there's the older example was when Dave Cameron did that, right? With Felix.

And that was a famous example. I don't even remember what it was that he should throw a pitch more or something. He was like throwing fastball, like 10, 15 fastballs in a row to start every single game. And this is back in 2007. And then he's like, Oh, what if you didn't do that? And then Felix did do that and he threw a shot out. Yeah. Right. I wonder if Dave has a solution for 2017 Felix, probably a harder, harder thing to fix. But yeah, there are, like that, though, since you are often writing analytically inclined things about individual players. Sometimes it gets back to them and you find out about that occasionally, right? Like they'll mention it in an interview or something sometimes i think often i'll end up especially in season i'll end up writing about a player who's sort of like already done something and so i'll i'll point that out as a substitute for the fact that i don't actually go to ballparks and get quotes uh i like to just lean on quotes that are uh given to other people who do the hard work and then i can

just sit here and uh and do the rest and make make gifs gifs gifs i guess we don't have a an agreement here now i'm a gift guy but that's. Yeah. We're going to come back to that later. But I, uh, one of the, I guess the recent case, and I don't remember if I've talked about this in one of our other podcasts that we've done in the last few months, but, uh, as a Korean player, I don't think he's signed yet. There were some rumors while I was away, uh, J.G. Hwang. I don't think he's signed yet. There were some rumors while I was away. Jaegin Hwang, I don't know if he's crossed your radar at all, but he's a Korean infielder. I think he's a third baseman. Hits for power now and he's a free agent. So he's available to anyone and he wants to play in the major leagues. He was posted last offseason and he didn't get any bids, which was odd. He had a power breakthrough, but I guess teams didn't like that he struck out a bunch. So what he did

this past year, he was like, I don't want to do that anymore so he he kept hitting for the exact same amount of power but he cut his strikeouts like in more in half he was just like i'm gonna become a lot better at this and then i'm gonna be a free agent and it'll be better so he still hasn't signed but i wrote a thing about him like months ago this is probably early november i'll guess because i was just desperately searching for any korean free agent news because i'm really interested in what's coming out of south korea yeah so i wrote a post about him i don't know if he's going to be great obviously you don't ever know if any of these players are going to be great but i think that the south korean market is underappreciated and so i wrote just a pretty simple like eight 900 word post about hey hey here's the next good hitter to come from south korea and at the winter meetings like a month ago

i got an email from huang's agent who said he just wanted to uh to get together and just like meet face to face and i was like yeah i'm not doing anything else so let's just let's have a chat and he he basically just wanted to meet me and show me how to get this guy signed. How do I persuade a team to sign my player? He said after the post that like four or five different teams reached out to him to say like, hey, what do you got on this Wong guy? Which I mean, in one sense, I guess it's kind of flattering. But in another sense, it's like, what are these teams doing where they needed to wait for just some throwaway blog post to try to figure out who's the best player coming from Korea this offseason?

So that was definitely one of the more memorable cases. And granted, he still hasn't signed anywhere, but at least there are teams who are familiar with his name. Yeah, well, as for Trout, there have been things that you've written about Trout that he has seemingly consciously tried to correct, but not necessarily because he went to his Fangraphs player page and saw your article linked and said, hey, maybe I should do that. But when everyone was talking about how Trout couldn't hit high fastballs

and everyone was throwing him high fastballs and you were documenting that, but that was probably something that he was aware of just from being Mike Trout and seeing lots of high fastballs and not doing so well against them. And maybe someone with the team reinforced that as a goal and something he should be working on, but he went out that winter and worked on hitting high fastballs and then came back and was the best high fastball hitter. So, you know, maybe he saw one of your posts at some point in that process, but probably you were not the direct conduit for that information, I would guess. Yeah, the way this probably usually goes, teams are going to be reluctant to, I think, admit that they ever get anything from the public

sphere because it makes them look bad all the time. But what I imagined would happen, and this is what happened a decade ago with the Mariners and pitching coach Rafael Chavez and Felix Hernandez. The story was that there was this blog post that Felix read and then used to get better. But what Rafael Chavez, the pitching coach said at the time was like, oh, this is stuff we'd already been talking about. And like we were trying to drill this home. And I think finally, we just kind of got the point through. And so I think it's in the high fastball case. First of all, Mike Trout probably knew I'm not hitting these pitches, because obviously that's what he was getting like half the time, especially like against the Royals in that one playoff series. So there's that. Trout was

probably acutely aware of the one thing he didn't do better than literally everyone else on the planet. And also, even if there's something that an analyst picks up, and let's be clear, I'm not the only person who's been writing articles about Mike Trout over the past several years, that the Angels, some analyst or some other analyst of the Angels is likely to read posts. And then they're less likely to tell Trout, hey, here's this post from Ben Lindberg or Jeff Sullivan about a thing that you could do different. They're more likely to say, here's a thing you could do different, and then just work from there. Just not give us any credit, basically. Pretty much. It's just wasted words. All right. Well, it's appropriate that we're starting with a Trout question and next a Bonds question, because Trout and Bonds are probably the MVPs of listener email shows over time. So Bonds' question comes from Mitch, and he says, If the league hadn't colluded against Barry Bonds after 2007, we'll just accept for the purposes of this question that that's what happened,

and he had signed with an al team to dh how many more years do you think he would have played and how many career home runs would he have ended up with so to review barry bonds last season 2007 was his age 42 season he played in 126 games he was great he led the major leagues in base percentage and walks, even though he didn't play all that much. And his power was somewhat down from where it had been, but he still slugged 565 with a very large isolated slugging and hit 28 homers and 340 at bat. So he was still very much a beast. So if Barry Bonds had had no baggage and no attitude and no PD problems and had just been allowed to play out his career naturally because he did want to continue playing,

how much longer might he have lasted? I guess the complicating factor is that we don't know whether he would have had to stop doing whatever he was doing, chemically speaking. I mean, by the time he retired, 2007 was after testing, and it was maybe before testing was as accurate and sensitive and frequent as it is now. But I don't know. We don't know the details of what he took and when he took it, We don't know the details of what he took and when he took it. And I don't know whether he was doing anything different in 2007 from what he was doing in 2002 or 2003 before there was mandatory testing. He was obviously worse at baseball, but still one of the best hitters in baseball.

Assuming that he either had already stopped doing what he was doing and was still good or could have kept doing what he was doing because it wasn't as detectable as what he had been doing before. I don't know. I assume that he was really good at taking whatever he was taking. In addition to like, you know, I assume that he he had like a high true talent level for taking PEDs too. Like, you know, like he he currently got more benefit from them. I think it's probably fair to say that he got more benefit from them than the typical player does. Like he was obviously a Hall of Fame level all-time great player before he took them. But then the way that he got even better at a time when most players get worse suggests that, I don't know, either he was like genetically predisposed to getting a greater advantage from these things or he was just better about it and smarter about what he took or had better advice. I don't know.

I'm going deep into the weeds of speculation about what Barry Bonds did and when he did it. The point is he was one of the best hitters in baseball and hadn't really declined that much as a hitter over his last couple years like he was less durable for sure but you know and he'd lost something in the field and on the bases but if he'd gone to an al team i don't know how long do you have uh you have your your huge projections database do you uh can you dig up a barry bond's 2008 projection and see what he was projected to do at that time? I probably could, but I forgot the URL. So every so often I go back and I think, like, I wish, I wonder what a Barry Bonds forecast would look like for now. Like,

it's been 10 years. We've gotten that question on the show, like, you know, Barry Bonds just turned 50. What would he hit today? That kind of thing. Yeah. So there's, there's a fun way and there's a less fun way to answer this question. And the less fun way is kind of alludes to what you said where, okay, he's probably going to have to start taking things at least a little differently if, if not quitting cold turkey. And, you know, even, even the most incredible athletes that we've ever seen start to break down in their mid 40s. And he was 42 in his last year. So if you want to take the unfun way, then you say, okay, he probably could have been a good hitter for 2008. And then maybe like a better than average hitter for 2009. And then that probably gets them beyond probably gets them beyond 800 home runs.

And then who knows if he has a job for 2010 because at that point he's like a pinch hitter. But we know that Julio Franco was like a pinch hitter when he was 47 and he was bad. And then he was a pinch hitter when he was 48 and he was worse. So Julio Franco kind of stuck around. He didn't have any power. Like at the end of his career, he didn't have any power at all. Barry Bonds might have had a little more power power he certainly could have been good for like a pinch walk but at some point barry bond at some point you have like the barry bonds line intersecting

the jack cussed line and then that's the point where i think that you'd lose your employment and this is of course avoiding all the stuff about barry bonds being who he is in terms of teammate wise. Yeah. So if you look at what Roger Clemens was really good until 2007 as well. And in 2007, he would have been his age 44 season. And he was still he was still an above average starting pitcher. So maybe you figure Bonds could have stuck around to like 44 45 but i think that like uh maybe maybe he would have turned into like really late career ricky anderson or i don't know how much power he would have had left but he could probably get you a walk and then you could pinch run so to whatever extent that you need like a base runner to uh to start off a ninth inning against a tough closer

then maybe he would have had a spot. But that's pushing it. And it's not nearly as fun as I want the answer to be. Yeah, I'm looking up Barry Bonds' 2008 Marcel projection on baseballprojectionproject.com. That's the one. Yeah. Bonds' Marcel for 2008. It has him tied for the 22nd best weighted on base average in baseball that year, right between Hanley Ramirez and Maglio Ordonez with a 380 WOBA and 488 plate appearances. And it has him with 23 more home runs that year actually if you open up his marcel for the following season he's still on the spreadsheet and that year he was projected for the 25th best weighted on base average even though he hadn't played and 11 more home runs in less playing time so if he was on the 2010 spreadsheet too,

I don't know why he would have been other than just wishful thinking he was on there too. So Perry Bond in 2010 was still projected for a 364 weighted on base average, which is really good. That's 2010. You keep talking, but I'm going to pull up a leaderboard in 2010.

Okay, and that's another nine home runs. So it has his playing time just being dramatically reduced, but on the other hand, that is using, I guess, his playing time totals from when he was an NL player, so it's not really taking into account that he would have become a DH and maybe that would have helped him stay in the lineup. Anyway, that has him adding probably like 40 or so more home runs, which would get him over 800 in those years.

So I think that's probably a fair thing to say, that he would have gotten that far. What is Sadaharu Oh's record? He had 868 home runs, so I don't think he would have gotten that far, but somewhere in between that and where he ended up. And then you have to... You wondered why... You always have to wonder why we don't include the playoff stats,

not that Bonds had all that much playoff experience, but, you know, nine more. I guess nine. Okay, we're talking about nine. Nine doesn't make a difference. Never mind. Forget the Barry Bonds playoff story. Maybe he would have played a lot of playoff series in you know nine more i guess nine okay we're talking about nine nine doesn't make a difference never mind forget the very ones playoff story maybe he would have played a lot of playoff series in 2008 through 2010 but so 2010 that would have been his age 45 season he said

364 waited on base okay okay so here are some players who are right around there uh from 2010 uh alex rodriguez victor martinez and vladimir guerr. Those are all 364 or 365. That's like the 41st best hitter in baseball, which is actually a little worse than I thought because I'm so accustomed to more recent offensive levels. But nevertheless, that's like Barry Bonds would have been, yeah, I guess maybe Vladimir Guerrero at that point because Guerrero was toward the end of his career and he had some different, I guess, aging problems than B Bonds would have but Guerrero was only a one-win player even though he hit so well that year because he was just old and he couldn't do anything and Bonds would have been old and he wouldn't be able to do anything except still hit like super good yeah it's a hard question

because normally you would just sort of apply the standard aging curve but he's the guy who like completely demolished the standard aging curve so I don't the guy who like completely demolished the standard aging curve. So I don't know whether you can just, you know, like subtract the normal amount that you would subtract for each year or whether because he may have been propped up by some sort of substance, maybe it would have been a steeper decline. Maybe his body would have broken down, who knows, but he was still hitting at a really high level at that point so I like if he had had the standard just get a little bit worse every year from then on then I'm gonna say that he would have played I'll say three more years and added another I'll say like 45 homers something

like that and probably would have spent a lot of time on the DL in those years, but maybe still have been a decent hitter when he was playing. So if he had been willing to play for league minimum or whatever, which I think he said he maybe was at the time, but if people had been willing to give him a job, I think just purely on a performance basis, there's no reason to think he couldn't have hung on for a few more seasons because he was the best hitter ever just a couple of years before that.

Lenny Harris hung around until he was 40 and he was bad. He was a bad bench player, but he played for almost two decades. And so if you figure Bonds is still hitting, then there's still a chance to get him one plate appearance a game at some point. And I mean, maybe that's a little more difficult in the american league but it's one of the greater injustices maybe that's too strong of a way to put it but like lenny harris when he was 38 lenny harris had a 31 wrc plus and then he played again when he was 39 and he had a 35 wrc plus but then he still got a job when he was 40 and granted that year he was much better but like teams looked at Lenny Harris and they thought there's there's something in the tank yeah I

know we have a decade now of evidence to the contrary but we're gonna keep letting Lenny Harris do his thing I don't know what that was about Barry Bonds could have been Lenny Harris and then some Barry Bonds could have been twice as good as Lenny Harris yeah okay that that's an understatement Barry Bonds was a lot more than twice as good as Lenny Harris yeah and yet Lenny Harris in his last season was good. Yeah. There was something teams were seeing all that time. Lenny Harris, his highest career, his best career offensive seasons were his first one and his last one.

I wonder how long a career Lenny Harris would have if he came along today. Because that dedicated pinch hitter role doesn't exist anymore because everyone has a 13-man bullpen. Yeah. Also, I would like to restate that he was bad. All right. Question from Kyle in Bradenton, Florida. I was wondering how much weight teams put into last season's home run spike in their offseason planning.

Dave Kamen wrote a piece the other day about the overcorrection of the market for bat-first first base DH types and the glut of them remaining in free agency. Have teams also overcorrected for the home run rate? What happens if that rate turns out to be a blip on the radar and power returns to its pre-2016 level? Will teams be forced to trade for power at the deadline because their offseason plans factored in the 2016 home run rate? Yeah, this one is complicated in that I don't think even teams

know the answer. And I think you can see some of that in the haggling with, okay, actually, there's multiple reasons why teams are haggling with Mark Trumper's price tag. We know that much. But like the Dodgers have been almost trading for Brian Dozier for what, two months, I think, is how long it's been. And like, they've already agreed on DeLeon too. They're just like the other stuff that nobody really cares about. That's where the problem is. But Dozier last year, he's been a good player before, obviously, but last year he vaulted to 42 home runs. He'd never before cleared 28. He went 6, 18, 23, 28, 42. So Dozier's power took off. But if you've ever watched Brian Dozier hit a home run, then you've watched Brian

Dozer hit every one of his home runs. And they're not, they're not like upper tank shots that he's hitting. They are those those wall scrapers that it seemed like those like slighter, smaller, mediocre power guys, they were just hitting more of them like Gene Segura, I think had a similar kind of power spike where no one thinks of Gene Segura as a power hitter. But for whatever reason, that tier of players seem to just be able to get that extra five or 10 feet. And I don't think that teams know what to do about that. I think that it's, you've done some very good analytical work that seems strongly, but not, I would say conclusively to suggest that there's something with the baseball. And I know Alan Nathan has presented, I think it was Alan Nathan who's presented some evidence to the contrary. So it's not an open and shut case that the baseball is different. But let's say it

is an open and shut case and that the baseball was different. Okay, now what? What do you do? Is the baseball going to stay different? I don't think that there's any sort of internal line of communication between teams and a commissioner's office that says, okay, we're going to go back or we're going to keep this up. And so I think it's a little difficult for teams to evaluate exactly what kind of hitter they want to acquire because you really don't know if you can believe in these five foot 10 guy power spikes because the the power was legitimate in the way that the game played but when you say power spike what that very term implies is that it's going to go back down really quickly and you did some research that showed that it seemed like guys who didn't hit the

ball quite as far generally benefited disproportionately from whatever this was, which seems like it would be consistent at least with something happening with the baseball. Like if a, if a guy who normally hits the ball 400 feet or whatever hits the ball a little farther, maybe it doesn't make as big a difference for him as it does for someone who hits the ball 320 feet, but now he's hitting it 340 instead, and there are more home runs kind of in that range, probably more marginal home runs added to your total if you're in that kind of category.

And so I guess that would make you somewhat skeptical about someone like that as opposed to someone who always had power and always hit home runs. as opposed to someone who always had power and always hit home runs. I guess in general, I think probably the strategic implications are smaller than we would think. It's a pretty dramatic difference in the game, and it has big implications for the sport and the way that the game is played just kind of by every team. But I wouldn't say that that many teams adjusted their strategy in some way because everyone was hitting home runs. I think Eno Saris did a post where he interviewed a bunch of managers about how the home run spike had affected their managing.

And they were all like, well, it didn't really. Mike Matheny talked about bullpens in his answer for some reason. But that was it. And I think that's kind of the case like if because everyone's hitting more home runs it's just if the whole run environment changes then you know like you're there are just a lot more runs being scored but everyone's playing under the same condition so it's not like you're necessarily benefiting more than the other guy is or that you can exploit it somehow except maybe for this case that we're talking about of the guy who benefits more than someone else like i don't know

that it has even as many implications as like the strike zone changing and people have documented how the strike zone has gotten bigger and lower and it seems like some pitchers might benefit disproportionately from that or some hitters might suffer more than others based on their approach at the plate and that kind of thing maybe could be exploited like what there is a theory that the red socks were like stockpiling low ball pitchers or something to take advantage of the the strike zone and that like if the strike zone changed then maybe they would be in bad shape because they had been banking on the strike zone continuing the way it was. So something like that even I think probably has greater ramifications. I think like this has great ramifications for the sport as Joshian has written, if we just took the home runs away at this point, we'd be back in like 1968 level offense just because strikeouts are up so much

and base hits are down so much that home runs are kind of the only thing propping it up. But from a roster construction perspective, I don't know if it matters quite as much unless, as we were saying, you are talking about someone who just got dramatically better last year and seems to fit into that category of little guy who doesn't have that much pre-existing power, but suddenly became a power hitter. Yeah. And maybe, yeah, like you said, it's more of a league wide thing. It's fun to observe. It's fun to write about. It's really interesting, but it doesn't really like good players have mostly stayed good players, bad players have mostly stayed bad players. I think that one case where

one player might be a little upset by this would be Chris Carter, who just can't seem to get a job. And granted the numbers, we all are familiar with the numbers that suggest that Chris Carter is not that good of a baseball player. But at the end of the day, he is a baseball player who's hit like about 100 home runs the last three years. And teams love home runs. Teams have always loved home runs. Teams will always love home runs, but they don't seem to love Chris Carter's home runs. And I think that he is one of the players who's suffering because so many other players hit home runs. Like the fact is that if I remember correctly, because I just said the number.

Yeah. Chris Carter, who is like as strong as I don't know, he's probably in the top 20 strongest, maybe even top 10 strongest, just pure power hitters in the major leagues. And he he he hit one for your home run. The Brian Dozer last year, Brian Dozer, who stands forfeit nothing, and he plays second base for a team that no one ever watches. And Brian Dozer hit more home runs than Chris Carter. And that is, it's not to suggest that any team is looking at Carter and just completely dismissing him. But when his greatest single skill is something that is so much more abundant, then it's that much easier to think, well,

I don't need to even give his agent a call. This is just not worth it. And there are other factors at play, but I'm sure that Chris Carter is one player who would love to understand what happened to the power spike and what he can personally do to see to it that it goes away. All right. Well, some people have been asking about the baseball reference sponsorship and the play index segment that we've been doing for a couple of years on the podcast. And we are not currently sponsored by baseball reference because baseball references reworking their subscription features for the play index this winter. And in a month or two, they will have tweaked those.

And there's a good chance that we will continue to do play index segments and say that we're sponsored by baseball reference again, as we have for some time. But since we are not doing that now, and since the Play Index kind of became a fun part of the email show that we were doing because it added something in addition to the fact that we were being sponsored to do it, we figured that we would keep doing something like that in the interim. And of course, the website that we're doing this podcast for now, Fangraphs, has its own very powerful statistical tools, and you spend a large percentage of your day looking at those things. So we're going to do the same thing. I don't know

what we're going to call it. We'll call it like the splits segment, the splits leaderboard segment. I don't know. That doesn't sound as good as play index, but anyway, you have one of those. Well, here's, here's the good news. We don't really need to give it much of a good name because in a month and a half, hopefully we don't need to refer to it anymore. At present, the fan graphs splits leaderboards extravaganza, which is an unfortunate. So, okay. So for, this is going to be appropriate for what we've already talked about in, uh, in this podcast. But one of the splits that I like to look at, even though there's nothing to actually write about it,

is we have these splits, and it only goes back to 2002, which I know is not as powerful as the play index. But, you know, we're making do here. And one of the splits I like to look at is the best weeks that players have had just over the course of a season. And I think, like, for example, you wrote, it would have been two years ago, about that crazy Bryce Harper hot streak. And he had, like, what you found to be one of the greatest hot streaks in baseball history. Like one of the, was it the greatest, actually?

Was it the very greatest hot streak? I think it was. It was like looking at a, I was like slicing and dicing spans of plate appearances to find like his hottest streak within that streak and then comparing it to streak. So I think if you took like his hottest streak in that period of a certain length, it was maybe the best or very close to the best since I don't know, like the previous six decades or something. Yeah, just something absurd. Yeah. So what I was looking at is kind of similar to that. Now, on the Fangraph splits leaderboards, you can't, it doesn't just select from all possible weeks. It has these like designated weeks that it has this set starting and end point. And then you can look at the numbers within that week.

So what I want to do is I want to look at hitters. Going back to 2002, I want to find the best offensive weeks that have been posted. And so I had to set a minimum of like 20 plate appearances just so you don't get any weird outliers. I'm going to use WRC+. So just for the sake of this past season, you might guess that the – actually, you might – who do you think had the best offensive week? I know that's a really unusual and impossible question to ask, but you

might have some guesses. I guess Trevor Story is a candidate. Brian Dozier, who we were just talking about, seems like a candidate, one of those guys maybe. And Gary Sanchez, of course, would be a candidate from later in the year. Right. I did an article on that. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. That research is really difficult to pull out. So, okay. So the top offensive weeks just from this past season, at number 10 is the first time that Trevor Story shows up, but it's actually a streak from July and not from his start to the year, which is odd.

He had like a 352 WS plus over this week in July. He's followed by Tyler White, who's a name that we all wrote about for two weeks and then tried to pretend that we didn't do that. Uh, Gary Sanchez actually shows up twice in the top 10. He had a week, uh, where he had a 365 WRC plus, and then the following week he had a 391. So he actually went from seventh place to second and fittingly in first place for this

past season, Mike Trout. He had a week where he had a 405 WRC+. Now, Mike Trout was the winner by this record for this past season. But like I said, we have these splits going back 15 years. So I wanted to look at the best offensive weeks going over the past 15 years. And so in the top 10, you run into some, you know, mostly very good offensive players. You get a surprising Joe Creedy sighting. He shows up in fourth place. He had a 459 WS plus one week. He slugged 1.556 in a week that he played for a team that appears to have been the White Sox. In third place. So okay, Creedy,

459. That was his week. Fourth place, best offensive week over the past 15 years. Third place, Lucas Duda. That's weird. He had a 473. Second place, Sean Green in 2002. I don't know if that was the week he had like the six for six game where he had four home runs. That probably was.

He had a 487. Okay, second place, 487 WRC Plus in a week. That's great. One week. I'm sensing a big gap between number one and number two here. You're sensing it. You're sensing it. And you can also probably sense the name.

It's not Mike Trout. It's Barry Bonds. Barry Bonds in 2004, April 12th through April 18th. He came to the plate 21 times and his WRC Plus was 568, which is a gap of 81 points between him and Sean Green, 81. a gap of 81 points between him and Sean Green. 81. Also, incidentally, I believe being Lenny Harris's career, WRC plus just for a Lenny Harris callback. Lenny Harris was the difference between the best and the second best offensive week in the past 15 years. Barry Bonds that week, he made an out. Let's see if I can run this mentally. He made an out four times,

appears to be the case. 21 plate appearances. He made four outs. I don't know who recorded those outs, but one of them was a buy strikeout. Kudos to that pitcher. He batted 733. He was worth 15 runs in 21 plate appearances, which is absurd. His Woba, just his weighted on, was actually four digits, which I did not know was a thing that you could do. So it is just another case where the more you dig into the numbers, the more fun facts you continue to find about Barry Bonds and Mike Trout. Barry Bonds also shows up in sixth place on this list. And then he's down there in 18th place, one ahead of Will and Rosario, which is also weird.

Yeah. All right. Well, normally this is where I would tell people how they can subscribe to the play index and the coupon code and all that. But for Fangraphs, you just go to Fangraphs.com and use it for free. This is a pretty cool thing about Fangraphs. Just giving it all away. All right. This one's going kind of long, but whatever. It's our first one.

And we'll knock the rest off this way more quickly. Just a couple more maybe quick ones. Michael says, what kind of value does a high pitches per plate appearance have for a batter? Obviously, seeing more pitches leads to more walks, but also more strikeouts, so I imagine there's a certain type of profile for which it is a valuable asset. I'm also wondering in terms of the fatigue aspect for the opposing pitcher, is it ever really important to try to fatigue a pitcher or a whole staff, or is it simply too much to worry about? This is kind of like an area of analysis that I don't know whether we ever really got that great a handle on it. Like we never, we never really quantified the wearing down pitcher effect i don't think like everyone always said it's a good thing

and sort of like sabermetric teams would go after guys who saw lots of pitches and everything but i don't know that we ever like put a run value on just seeing more pitches and if we had i don't know whether it would still be the same today because everyone has like a million great relievers and getting the starter out of the game is like sometimes like it doesn't even matter if you get the starter out of the game it's you're often you're worse off if you get the starter out of the game earlier because then you just have to face really good relievers so uh last year among qualified hitters three of the top 12 hitters in in pitches per plate appearances were Michael Saunders,

Jose Batista and Chris Carter. And they can't seem to find work at the moment. Yeah. Uh, and, uh, but more, maybe more pertinently the highest pitches per plate appearances, uh, Jason worth at a very exhausting 4.60 and the, uh, the shortest plate appearances on average, unsurprisingly belongs to Salvador Perez at 3. 3.43 uh he was tied with unel escobar who i didn't watch a single plate appearance all season long and ruden at odor uh was there at 3.44 he probably will be the leader next season so right there between the actual first and last place in whichever order you decide to order those players you have a difference of 1.2 i guess pitches

per play appearances which is something that no one uh no one cares about at all so this question addresses the hypothetical where you have a guy who gets so good at i guess fouling pitches off that he can stand in there the thing ichiro was purported to be able to do yeah purported and uh and i think people have said this about joey vato as well and uh vato was alluded to his own skill i think and clearly you don't want to call joey vato's bluff on anything like i'm just going to take him at his word most of the time but like i think if there were players who were really good at just fouling balls off they wouldn't strike out and like league high rates, like increasingly

high rates all the time. So like you were talking about, because every single pitcher is amazing. Now, there's so much less benefit to actually getting a pitcher out of a game that I think the greatest accomplishment would just be that people would get really annoyed. And if you, if you can prepare your own team for that annoyance, then maybe there's some sort of psychological advantage that you have over the other team. Because when a team gets annoyed, and it gets agitated, and if it cannot wrap its head around that agitation, maybe it becomes more mistake prone. This is this is perhaps a reach. So if you had a player who's up there and he's having like, what was it? That Alex Cora at bat?

Or he went like, what, 22 pitches? I'm probably making that up. Yeah, I don't think it was quite that high, but yeah, 18, 18. And did it not end in a home run as well? Yes, it did. That's wonderful. Some Russell Carlton research, I think he showed that like, the hitter gains some small advantage.

Like if you hold the count constant, then every additional pitch that the hitter sees in that count. So basically, if he fouls off more pitches, then you should expect him to do better than he would have otherwise. It's not like an enormous difference, but it's a difference. Yeah. And so maybe that's where this gets really interesting is I think there's less to be gained in terms of like getting a starter out of the game or getting to a different

reliever. But I think maybe the big advantage would be in you are driving the pitcher absolutely insane because he can't put you away. And as a hitter, a foul ball is not a win. But if you're fouling off two strike pitch after two strike pitch after two strike pitch, then that pitcher is going to start getting really annoyed by you by Jose Altuve or by whoever you are, who's just up there fighting pitches off. And I haven't pitched for a very long time. But I do know that I was not good. And when I was annoyed, I was worse. And so it's possible.

And maybe this gets into a little of what Russell was was demonstrating. But it's possible uh and maybe this gets into a little of what russell was was demonstrating but it's possible that as pitchers become more annoyed by these long plate appearances that maybe they try to muscle up and overthrow or maybe they try to aim a breaking ball out of the zone and we're talking about like fractions of a percentage point at this point of the conversation but if you get i don't know what the term is on tilt if you get the pitcher on tilt maybe then he's uh he's going to be more likely to screw up and then you can take advantage of that. So maybe that's the real advantage to a really obnoxiously long plate appearance. Or there could be some sort of familiarity effect, like even if the pitcher doesn't lose his cool, like if there's a times

through the order effect, then maybe there is a similar long plate appearance effect just because you you're seeing all the guys pitches and seeing his motion a bunch of times in a row, something like that. So I guess I don't know, all else being equal, I'd probably rather have the guy who takes more pitches, probably, but I guess I'd probably care about it less than I would have even, I don't know, 10 or 20 years ago. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So let's say you're a fan of a team, first of all, and then let's say you want that team to win like, like fans do. And, and let's also assume for the sake of this conversation that, uh, that the longer plate appearance goes, the more the odds shift in favor of the hitter. So if you have a player who's like,

he's averaging six, seven, eight pitches per plate appearance, then that hitter is doing well. And that is good for your team. You like it. Where's the tipping point? Where do you start to really hate that player or at least feel less fondly about him? Yeah, that's a good question. Right. So like, if you know, when he comes up to the plate that you're in for like eight pitches, like I like a long plate appearance. I used to do a weekly feature where I would highlight the longest plate appearance of that week and break it down pitch by pitch, which was a terrible idea. And I quickly regretted having started it, but I do like a long plate appearance. But if I knew that every plate appearance was going to be long, that would probably be the point where I would get up and go to the bathroom or something.

So, yeah, I would guess that probably about like seven, I would say like, all right, buddy, you know, move it along. Yeah, seven feels appropriate because like that's not just seven pitches in a plate appearance. That's 650 plate appearances of seven pitches for plate appearance. And what was the average time between pitches last year? Probably like 23 seconds, I'm going to guess. Then like seven times 23. This is for easy math.

It's 161. So you're looking at almost a three minute, you know, you have to have your music and you have to have your, especially if it's fouling balls. Oh, that, oh, it gets worse. Because if you foul balls off, they go in the stands or the pitcher has to get a, especially if he's fouling balls. Oh, it gets worse. Because if you foul balls off, they go in the stands or the pitcher has to get a new ball and he rubs it up. So there's actually more time taken between pitches. Oh, you'd hate this player. You'd hate this player so much. Yeah. So how good would he have to be then for you to put up with him?

He'd have to be Votto, basically okay okay so okay okay we're gonna use baseball reference here so i mean i i took away i i'm looking at all non-qualifiers and qualifiers so last year the leader the leader in pitches per plate appearance no minimum one plate appearance 10 pitches way at leblanc the uh ian kroll also a pitcher comes comes in second. Eight. Tony Singrani, Cody Ege, Seth Maness, all pitchers, seven. I don't know who Edu Bray-Ramos is. I'm going to guess he's a pitcher, also seven. So Kevin Gosman, he batted three times, 20 pitches. Impressive.

But, I mean, if it's a pitcher, you take it. That's fine. If a pitcher takes eight pitches and then he gets out, whatever. Those are throwaway plate appearances. But if you have a hitter who goes up, you better be trout level good if he's going to be looking at 10 pitches yeah that's just that you're wasting everyone's time right i mean people don't like joey vato right i don't know if that's why i don't know if that has anything to do with his tendency to take pitches but it sort of does right because people get mad at him for not swinging when

he could drive a runner in instead or something. That's sort of a separate issue maybe, but related. Yeah. All right. Last one from Will, who says, somewhat related to a past conversation on how many fans on the field happen per season, like people who just run onto the field and stop play. What scenario of fan on the field would engender the most crowd support? Because it's, you know, it's usually like a 20 something drunk guy, which is not the most sympathetic character, maybe. And so Will's saying that a person with their dog would be a scenario that he himself wouldn't mind achieving. And that's a good point because animals run on the field all the time and stop games and it becomes like a highlight video. Everyone, I mean, when a human runs on the field all the time and stop games and it becomes like a highlight video

everyone i mean when a human runs on the field the cameras don't focus on that and no one will talk about it and whoever the broadcaster is will make some disparaging reference to it but when a squirrel runs on the field it's like a clip that everyone gifts and shares so good point if you are a 20 something drunk guy who wants to run on the field, if you bring your dog, that would probably be a good way to engender some sympathy. And you're probably not going to get tackled if you're like, you know, if you're walking your dog, that I can't imagine someone would tackle you. So you'd probably be treated with more respect, I think, if you had a pet with you. Yeah, definitely some sort of service animal. If a blind person wound up on the field, we don't know what the circumstances were,

but it would be easy enough to believe that he made a mistake. I think he would be pretty clearly blind. Yeah, that's the perfect cover, really. And maybe at least given, I think, what we have observed in other maybe scripted circumstances, if you had like, I don't know, if you had like Lance McCullers Jr.'s dad, well, that's a bad example. That's like any other player, any other young player, like some player's dad, and then like the dad has been in the service, and then he goes on the field to surprise his son that he's actually home from like combat, right? Yeah, like they script for a lot of baseball and football games. Yeah, if you did that, and no one was aware of it, but then you have the cameras following the dad or the mom. Let's not be.

Let's not separate here. And then they follow, and they go sneak up on the third baseman, and the third baseman has a son, and he's really excited. Then that would get a standing ovation, actually. The umpires would love it. MLB would make it a clip. They'd put it on their Twitter and their Facebook. So that would be a big one, at least in, uh, in, in the majority ballparks.

Yeah. Or like a kindly old lady just, uh, walking slowly onto the field. That'd be a big hit. I'm sure. Or if someone put their kid out there, like a cute kid running on the field, that would, that'd probably go over pretty well. Or maybe even like a former player just like crashing the game. Like he misses being in baseball games. So he just runs onto the field and everyone's like, oh, who is this jerk stopping play? And then they say, oh, it's Paul O'Neill or whoever. I don't know if Paul O'Neill would do that. He's a broadcaster.

But something like that, like just a random player you haven't seen in a while and then you recognize him. And it's just a fun little prank. I could see that going over well. Do you think, first of all, that Mike Trout ever goes to baseball games? And do you think, second of all, that Mike Trout ever thinks like, I could do better than this? And then he thinks about like, you know, like if he goes down to the local play field, as they're called, and he's like, I'm going to show these people the thing.

I'm just going to interrupt the procession here. I'm just going to go on the field, but I'm Mike Trout, who's going to say anything. And I'm just going to, I don't know, go play center field. Who cares if there's a center field?

It just makes me go somewhere else. You can go to right. Right field goes to left. Left field goes to the bench. Then your game has been interrupted by Mike Trout, but it hasn't been interrupted and made worse,

which I think is the biggest problem with when someone runs on the field. Right. That's like a famous comedian interrupting an open mic night or something, which happens every now and then and no one's complaining that the famous comedian is there now instead of the amateur. Actually, Cam Newton is known for doing that too. Kevin Clark wrote about that for The Ringer. Cam Newton just shows up and plays pickup basketball and pickup football games with people. How do you think people would respond to like a guy with a big fan propeller strapped to his back, right? And then he just flies into a stadium. Do you think that people would enjoy that? Yeah. Like there's always something weird happening like in McCovey Cove, for instance, like there's always like someone with a water

jet pack or something and everyone loves that. So if you could, if you could do that or like the, the thing that people do before first pitches or like when someone will parachute in and throw a first pitch, that kind of thing, if they just parachuted in for no reason, that would probably still be a pretty popular maneuver. Hologram, 3D projection. Yeah, sure. I could see that. We're not there yet technologically maybe, but we'll get there.

One day with the automated strike zone. All right. Well, we just received yet another Mike Trout hypothetical email just seconds ago from a listener named Dennis. But sorry, Dennis, that is going to have to wait for next week. We'll get there. This has been an unusually long episode as it is. But this was fun. And people can keep the questions coming to podcast at fangraphs.com.

And you have a chat at 12 Eastern. So people can just finish up this episode and then head over there and pester you some more. I look forward to it. The chats are always fun. Except that then you, I don't know the last time that you conducted a live chat. Have you conducted a live chat? No, it's been a while.

I guess not since I left BP. I did like a Reddit AMA sort of thing, but not your standard chat for quite some time. Well, AMA kind of gets to the same point. You feel guilty. Like when you don't get to answer someone's question, they're just in there just trying to have a good time and get some baseball information. But it's like all the people submitting podcast questions. Like you can't tackle all of them, but you want to.

And I hope that feeling never goes away. What's the deal with the guy in your chats who always says hello who's named Bork? I don't know. He just seems like a friendly guy. And he's always there. So you don't know whether, I guess it could be multiple Borks just masquerading as the same Bork, but probably why would anyone do that? So it's probably the same Bork.

I hope it's the same Bork. At all your chats. At all but one. And that one, I'm not going to lie, something did feel like he was missing. Yeah. Were you worried about him? A little bit. Then I had to conduct the rest of the chat. Yeah. Quickly forgot about Bork's well-being.

All right. So you can support the podcast on Patreon at patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's five listeners who've already pledged their support are Mike Carlucci, Michael Edler, Steven Winthrop, Michael DiPrima, and Evan Cleave. Thank you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. As mentioned, you can contact us via email at podcast at fangraphs.com. Thanks for your patience during Jeff's absence. Hope you enjoyed the solo guest host shows. And I hope you also enjoyed the first one with Jeff.

Have a wonderful weekend and we will be back next week. Could it be that I have found my home at last? Home at last.