Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1083: All-Star Off-Day Emails

Episode Date: July 13, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the All-Star Game, then answer listener emails about more oddly configured fields, fouling balls straight back, non-standard batting stances, FanGraphs WAR vs. Baseball-Reference WAR, a career-earnings guessing game, All-Star Game accomplishments, knickers vs. pajama pants, stats vs. scouts, a Home Run Derby hypothetical, awarding home-run value based on […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1083 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hi. So neither of us was all that invested in the All-Star game, I think, because they let people other than Aaron Judge hit, which was really fan unfriendly. So I don't know whether you have any points you want to bring up from the game. Close game, obviously.

Not sure it was a super entertaining game, although there were entertaining and meaningful moments within it. So, yeah, I wasn't paying too close attention because, you know, all-star game and whatnot. But I know, I mean, what? There were the moments, there was what, the home run? Rob was like, no, there's Nelson Cruz taking a picture with Joe West, which, eh, whatever. Fun little all-star game quirk i have some all-star game stuff for the stat segment but one of the themes that i get i don't know are there themes to the conversation about the all-star game but people have seized any opportunity how do we fix it it's usually the why why is it maybe

we'll talk about that on friday but one of the one of the things people have talked about is this is seemingly an opportunity to rip on the southern Florida slash Miami sports scene again people were making fun of the attendance the game was technically a sellout but attendance started to thin out pretty quickly there's been a lot of the usual Twitter conversation about how it's embarrassing for the game etc we usually can forgive Marlins fans for their sparse attendance on account of marlins ownership is actively tried to repel them for a decade and a half or something like that but people started to leave pretty early during the all-star game yesterday there are a lot of pictures of the later innings the game went to extras which is not what anyone ever bargains for the game went

to extras the game that means nothing and by the end it seems that empty seats outnumbered full seats. And two things. One, does that matter? There are no stakes, and you figure that the bulk of the entertainment comes early on. I saw somebody, this is just an unattributed tweet, but somebody tweeted a picture, nominally a critical picture, showing a woman asleep on her friend's or partner's shoulder with the winning run on second base in the bottom of the ninth saying, oh, look at this. This is embarrassing. But I mean, the game means nothing. There's no there's not any stakes, meaning the outcome means nothing. By rule.

Now, the outcome means literally nothing. But on the other hand, or maybe not even the other hand, just on a different part of the same hand. I don't quite I don't want to get into this too much because again maybe we'll talk about this friday but i don't quite get why the all-star game sells out maybe i'm just too far removed from what this is for but you can watch any of these players online at a moment's notice and i guess i don't i would never i would never pay hundreds of dollars of my own money to go to an All-Star game. I guess I just don't see what the thrill is. Yeah, I mean, I think it's the kind of thing where if it didn't exist, it would sound like a cool idea, right?

It sounded like a cool idea when they came up with it in the 30s. And if the All-Star game didn't exist now, we would be getting emails about it, right? From people saying, hey, what if all the best players in baseball played in one game? Wouldn't that be cool? And you'd have one league against the other. And I think that would sound fun. And it is fun, I suppose. But they've been playing the thing now for 80 plus years. And interleague play has sapped the ALNL rivalry, and it goes on throughout the season. And yes, as you're saying, we can watch just about any game anytime we want to, and so there isn't this mystery attached to players who are not on our own teams anymore.

Although a lot of fans just kind of watch their own team and may not pay that close attention to the rest of the league. So for them, other than the games that they see in interleague play, just kind of watch their own team and may not pay that close attention to the rest of the league. So for them, other than the games that they see in interleague play, some of these guys are probably new to them. So for us, we might just be so hyper aware of these players and the seasons that they're having that it's not as special for us as it would be for a kid, for instance, who is just getting into baseball and thinks it's cool to see all the best players in one game. So I don't think it shouldn't exist or anything, but I think just

in this era, it's not going to have the same specialness that it once did, and that's okay. And we probably shouldn't keep wondering how we can bring that magic back because I don't think we can. And you could talk about skills competitions and that sort of thing as we always do. And usually the response is that it won't work because players don't want to get hurt and teams don't want their players to get hurt. So I don't know if there's really a fix or a solution. I think they changed the format of the Home Run Derby and that helped. I didn't really like the presentation of the home run derby. I don't think I mentioned yesterday, but I thought it was weird how the split screen

was set up so that like less than half of the screen was a behind the batter view. And then the rest of it was a view of the ball. And on the left side of the screen, I couldn't tell really where the ball was going and couldn't tell anything about the trajectory of the pitch. I think I would have rather seen either a wider angle there or a center field view. Anyway, that's unrelated. I don't think you can just change the format of the All-Star game in the way that you can with the Home Run Derby and have it suddenly be spicy again. So I think, yeah, I don't blame people for not paying lots of money to go. I don't blame a fan for falling asleep. Sam has gotten several articles out of the fact that no one at baseball games is ever paying attention to anything, even at the most suspenseful moments. So it's an exhibition, and it's an okay thing that happens once a year. And it's probably better than no baseball happening which is where

we are today and tomorrow and that's about all i think about the all-star game well don't don't get too in depth on the skills competition because we're doing it again on friday we're having the same conversation because there's going to be a way out but okay so i understand talking about going to the all-star game sort of reflects our own privilege, I guess, or at least our own position that it's a very different experience for us than it is for your average fan or maybe a parent who has a kid who never gets to see these people in person. And if you think about it, this is an opportunity for a kid or an adult in Florida to see all those players at once, except for Mike Trout. But related to that, would you rather, all things being equal, would you rather pay X amount of money to go to one All-Star game,

or would you rather pay X amount of money to go to one Mike Trout low minors rehab game where he is starting against a bunch of losers? I think probably the latter. Yeah, probably the latter. Because the All-Star game happens every year. The low minors rehab game has only happened this year. And I guess it's not quite as fun as just the questions we get about what would Mike Trout hit at insert level of baseball here. It's not really a true test because he is rusty and he's coming back from injury and maybe he's not fully recovered.

So it's not as if you're really getting to see peak Mike Trout against minor league pitching over a long span of time, but still pretty fun, I think. So yeah, if I had to choose one as a one-time activity, probably that. Yeah. I think the ultimate might be like a Clayton Kershaw rehab start. Maybe like if he's hurt and he's making his last rehab start before he rejoins the Dodgers. And in fact, Kershaw did work in the minors a little bit last year when he was hurt. And if I can just pull up what that was, I believe Kershaw made, yeah, one appearance with the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, and he went up against the Modesto Nuts. Kershaw threw three innings. He allowed a hit. Kudos.

And he struck out five guys. He threw two-thirds of his pitches for strikes, and he got a whole bunch of swings And misses it would be more fun of course to see a Rehabbing ace pitcher than a Rehabbing Mike Trout because he gets to Participate in more of the game but Yeah I would personally rather watch A you need the player to be sort of

Committed to the game but That's what rehab is for They're always limited or they're on pitch counts Or they're not playing the whole game or they're not at 100% effort because they don't want to exacerbate whatever the injury is in a game in low A. So it's not quite the fantasy that we all have,

I think, of just watching them lay waste to inferior talent for a while. But it's as close as we can come. I think in the last rehab game of someone's assignment, then you're going to get them as close as possible. And i want to say that in the all-star game the players aren't trying their hardest but then on the other hand you have max scherzer grunting every time he throws a pitch to aaron judge and you have people throwing the ball 98 100 miles per hour these guys are clearly trying because there's something about the competition of facing one another there

are elements where they don't try so hard course, you're hopefully not going to see like an outfield collision or like a, I don't know, a double steal. That's a poor thing to bring up. But people aren't working at 100% all the time in the All-Star game, but it is close. You can tell just from how hard the pitchers are throwing, which calls into question whether or not a skills competition would actually raise the injury risk.

Again, Friday, I'm just gonna i'm just gonna stop now i don't want to i don't want to ruin the conversation yeah as my colleague zach krem pointed out in his recap at the ringer if you don't like the high strikeout version of baseball you probably won't like the all-star game because this is the best pitchers in baseball pitching an inning or two at a time and so i think he said that the two staffs combined for a 29.1% strikeout rate in the game yesterday, which is roughly Zach Greinke's strikeout rate on the year. So obviously it's the best hitters in baseball too, which would counteract that to a certain extent.

But when you have starters moving to the bullpen, that's a big boost that those guys get that they don't get during regular games. So if you don't like that kind of baseball, then maybe that's a reason why you'd be even less inclined to like the All-Star game. Well, last night there were 23 combined strikeouts. However, the year before in the All-Star game, there were only 14, which was good for a strike strikeout rate actually a little below the league average so again that segment coming up okay cool all right then let's get to emails okay our purpose here today and i thought we could do a quick weird field roundup because we've continued to get submissions about strange baseball fields we've talked about a couple of them that have odd features and slopes, and so people have written in with a few others.

The first one I think maybe has come up on the podcast before. I don't remember when, but I was aware of this field's existence. This is Clark Field. Aaron wrote in to us, with all the talk about strange ballpark features, I would like to point you in the direction of a classic college ballpark. The University of Texas Longhorns played at Clark Field until the 70s. It featured Billy Goat Hill, an actual 30-foot limestone cliff in Lefserner Field.

The cliff was in play, and many balls hit to center could only be reached by the left fielder, who would have to run up a narrow path. Being born more than a decade After it was shut down And in Canada instead of Texas I can only speculate what kind of havoc This bifurcated outfield design would have created In this run scoring environment Could Clark Field be one of the best possible

Environments to use the four-man outfield Positioning centerfielders At both the top and bottom of the cliff For flyball-heavy opponents And I will, I'll link to Pictures of all of these fields that we're talking about in the podcast post and in the Facebook group, so you can marvel along with us. It's one thing to have a hill, and pretty much every single thing that has been emailed into us has been, here's a baseball stadium with a hill or a slope or something like that that you can easily run up.

But my favorite quirk about this is just the narrow path that basically only one guy has access to, which is just like the extreme version of the extreme version of the park that we've been discussing. But I wonder, every single ballpark design now has to go through commissioner approval. And you could never get something like this approved at a major league stadium. But what if you could what if you could get the like take the triangle at fenway park and then take the triangular part and elevate it so that it's i don't know another 10 feet above the playing surface and then introduce like a

spiral staircase it has to be a spiral staircase so that the outfielder briefly leaves the viewers field of view so then he becomes invisible or she i don't know we're progressive this is clearly an alternate future so instead of demolishing this fenway park you just make it even weirder so that i know that not many balls are hit to the triangle maybe you have to move it in a little bit so that it happens more often or maybe not because this would just be like if you could have a flagpole in the field of play which by the way was something that existed as recently as last season maybe the season before i don't remember but if you could just have an elevated plateau and then there's just this tiny little path that one person has to go up i mean does the outfielder wait and hope that the ball comes down from the plateau does the

outfielder go up there aggressively do you even do even station an outfielder at the top of the plateau what happens if there's a ball that's hit like just in front of the plateau and there's someone on top of it? Does he think about diving and breaking his body for the sake of potentially making it out? There are so many ways that this would actually be terrible. Well, it would be terrible. It would be absolutely terrible. Nobody would ever allow it. But if they did, I would love to have gone back in time and seen some balls and play up on billy goat hill yes i'm i'm browsing texas longhorns forum here to look for

stories about clark field it seems like there are some some strange ones here and this is from someone the only year i saw games at clark field was its last in the spring of 1974 by then i recall that there was a slope on Billy Goat Hill that enabled the center fielder to run up to the upper level. I recall one game versus Aggie with the series winner to claim the SWC title when an Aggie player hit a ball on top of the hill. Aggie head coach Tom Chandler waved him home for an apparent inside-the-park home run, only to have the ball at home as he reached the midway point from third.

He slammed on the brakes and tried to scramble back to third only to have keith morland slap the tag on him chandler just stooped over his player who was lying in a cloud of dirt near the third base bag with his hands on his knees just shaking his head from side to side in disbelief yeah this is uh i'll keep browsing for for stories in here, but it says, what was really fun at Clark Field was watching guys like Pat Brown go up that cliff. Bib Falk made it a mainstay for Texas left fielders to understand how to go after the ball up there, and it continued in Gus's early days. Left fielders at Texas had to be good athletes and have strong arms. Apparently there were some barnstorming big leaguers who played there too.

Someone is saying that Lou Gehrig played there. He's seen pictures of it. For all I know, much of this could be apocryphal, but this is the sort of outfield feature that lends itself to apocryphal baseball stories. Well, I guess every outfielder has to deal with a wall of some sort that is a hazard, but just the idea of potentially running face first into a limestone cliff seems to really raise the stakes in another way so you'd better have like a wide running track just so that you

don't end up with a bunch of affielders who paralyze themselves because those are those are certain inside the barcom runs yeah apparently it was also used by a negro league team for a time too so a lot of history there it was there from 1928 through 1974, Clark Field. So, all right, if you have any Clark Field stories, let us know. The next weird field comes from James. He says, here's my contribution to the baseball field hill genre. It's Stevenson Field in El Segundo, just, and I mean just, south of LAX. El Segundo High School, a couple blocks away, plays its home games there. He shows a picture, and it is a very sloping outfield. There's like a flat warning track, except there is no warning track, and then it climbs fairly steeply up to a

fence. And James says, I would estimate this is a bit steeper than 45 degrees. Having played on it a couple times and looking at the picture now, it's not as tall or long as the heights, that field that we talked about before, but it's still substantial. The chalk on the hill is actually some sort of embedded permanent piece, plastic maybe, as you can see. My team's pregame stretching routine involved running to the fence to do some calf stretches and leg swings,

and it was not easy to maintain momentum up to the fence, and running back down, it was somewhat difficult in the way that descending steep inclines always is. Do you try to slow yourself, taking energy and missing out on the fun of extra speed, or do you embrace the speed but have some harsh heel strikes? So that is, I guess, a standard strange field in the genre that we are talking about here. And then this one is fun. This submission comes from John Vooch, who works in the genre that we are talking about here. And then this one is fun. This submission comes from John Vooch, who works in the Cardinals front office and listens to the podcast. And he says he was catching up on podcasts while out running.

And although it's probably over a week later, no problem, John. I'd send you a couple of 2010 photos from our Rookie League affiliate in Johnson City, Tennessee. Due to the local football stadium being built into the hill behind right field, the baseball stadium was constructed with a 15-foot high hill at a steep angle that ran from the right field line to nearly center field. I'd usually see about five to seven games a year there, and over the course of a series would typically see at least a couple face plants from outfielders tracking down a ball in the gap, or even more

amusingly, seeing a player chase a ball up the hill and then attempt to make a throw, only to spike it into the ground a few feet past the warning track due to the severe angle of the hill. The hill, along with the football stadium, was removed either in 2011 or 2012, which took away some of the charm of the park, but having a more conventional playing surface also made it significantly safer for the players. So all in all, probably a fair trade-off. It was definitely a quirky park. The pictures I sent don't show it very clearly, but the right field part of center field was strange too, as the hill went straight across right field and then made a curve, so it made for a tough place for a center fielder to play. On balls in the deep right center field gap, the center fielder wasn't sure if it was going to go

in the deep part of the park or go up the hill. That's where a lot of the outfielders bit the dust. I remember in a playoff game in 2010, Osvaldo Garcia was a top prospect for the Elizabethton Twins, and he made a long run after the ball in that area. And just as he was about to make the catch, the hill got him, and our hitter either got a triple or inside the park home run. A lot of anxious moments as Garcia was shaken up, but fortunately he wasn't badly hurt never saw anyone suffer a truly serious injury because of the hill but a lot of awkward looking plays with guys falling down you'd think back then maybe the cardinals prospects would get some sort of advantage the astros shared the cardinals division at that point the astros still had tal's hill at that point you think oh maybe this is going to

prepare our players to play better in houston one of those incremental very cardinals the advantages but then Houston left the division and they got rid of the Hill but I guess what the Hill was eliminated in 2011 2012 yeah one of those affiliates so yeah right around when the Astros moved so they figured well now there's now there's no sense in having this at all yeah I wonder if it's a developmental advantage to have some weird quirk like that. Because sometimes if there's some very harsh environment, like Las Vegas, the Mets AAA team or something, sometimes you'll hear it's demoralizing, and it's bad for development and guys get down on themselves because they're giving up so many runs. And sometimes you hear that it's good for development because it's adversity. And if you can pitch in Las Vegas, it prepares you to pitch in the big leagues where the hitters are better, but the ballpark is also better. So I don't know which it would be.

It's not like most major league parks have a feature like this or any major league park. So it wouldn't prepare you in that way, but maybe in the sense that it is a challenge that you have to surmount, it would help. On the other hand, you could hurt yourself. So probably not the best thing for a team to have a weird feature like that. On the other hand, you could hurt yourself. So probably not the best thing for a team to have a weird feature like that. All these emails about stadiums and not

one with a pit. I know. No one has done the pit yet. But this really is one of my favorite parts of baseball. I think that is one of the saddest things you could do for baseball is to make the fields uniform. And I think I remember reading a good Hardball Times graphical article not long ago about how field dimensions at least have become more standard and more uniform over time, which makes sense because a lot of times in the past, they would be just built into whatever space was available to the team and there'd be a hill or there'd be some cityscape or something that they had to try to cram it in there. And now ballparks are so expensive and such big business that you wouldn't

really just leave a feature that was there and build around it. You would just shape the geography around your ballpark probably. So I don't know that we'll see that sort of thing so much anymore. I guess it would be impossible to get the commissioner to allow a pit in the field that's just not something that you have ever seen but maybe it's more likely that you could have a site become of archaeological interest and so you have a dig that's kind of like roped off sort of over in like one of the corners or center field so i think that's that's maybe more possible yeah and i don't know if you even can mimic now this kind of weirdness because when you do have if there were a reason to have a hill there. So even if some team tried to do a throwback park with strange features like

this, if it was just an attempt to capitalize on nostalgia, I wouldn't enjoy it as much as the real thing. Yeah. I wonder if maybe the only real quirk you could get away with now is either having a lot or a little foul territory, because it's one of those things not a whole lot of people pay attention to. But Marlins Park had, well, I don't remember which, but I think it was a lot of foul territory when it was designed, maybe still has it. I know they've changed the foul territory dimensions in Los Angeles to, I think, get the seats closer to the field, which is the usual. But that's about it because otherwise, yeah, it seems like the quirk that the newer ballparks have is just, oh, we're going to make these way too pitcher-friendly and then in five years we'll adjust them. And then one other quick follow-up. This is from another Ben who's responding to our discussion of foul balls

and being right on it if you are fouling it right back and whether that tells you anything. And Ben says, I was sitting in the press box in Philly on Sunday and Aaron Alter fouled off three of the first seven pitches of an at-bat directly below us, all to different seats in the span of, no exaggeration, about 20 feet

before crushing the eighth pitch 421 feet out to left. I know it's simply anecdotal, but such is this game and such is life. Thank you, Ben. All right, question from Clay. I've always been intrigued by batting stances, especially really odd ones. Batting stances of players such as Craig Council and Kevin Euclid come to mind because they would set up with the bat outside the normal setup. This seems inefficient because it seems like the hitter would have to use extra energy to bring the bat down from the

setup position so they can swing along a normal swing plane. My question is, why would a hitter use an odd or silly looking batting stance? Is there evidence that these stances have been used to psych out pitchers? Also, is there evidence that pitchers have used certain pitches to use a batter's particular stance against them? And I guess I am kind of confused on this issue because often you will hear that although hitters have strange setups, for the most part, by the time they're ready to hit and by the time the pitch is on the way, they all kind of look the same. And they've all done whatever they need to do to get into a hitting position after starting in a strange starting position. And yet at other times you also do hear, right, that players have changed their stance in a way that they think is going to help them, whether it's enabling them to get the bat to the zone more quickly, like dropping their hands or something like that so that they won't have as far to go or closing their stance or opening their stance. Maybe sometimes a guy will open his stance and face the pitcher more and you'll hear that he's now getting a better look at the ball. So

it does seem as if there is some impact to what happens before the pitch and the swing starts. Yeah, I agree with both of the statements. It's true that most hitters will tend to end up in similar hitting positions when the pitcher is at his release point. But it's also true that you have people who change their stance and this has to do probably, I'm not a hitting coach, never have been,

never will be, never really hit. But there's a transition period between the stance and the hitting position and so if you take maybe something as exaggerated as craig cancel which we don't see anymore he has to go from that high bat position down into a hitting position and so there's a there's a certain amount of movement that takes place in between and i think what you see a lot of times is that coaches will try to coach out some of that movement because it's just energy being used and it's your body

being in motion and you can maybe change the way that you are seeing the pitcher's delivery and the ball especially if you are changing your eye level your eye position so i think you frequently want to see hitters who are doing very little in between their stance and their hitting position just for the sake of simplicity what is unfortunate is that presumably now in this day and age in all future subsequent days and ages we are going to be so concerned with getting ideal hitting and launch angles and exit velocities and all that stuff and stability and perfect efficiency that we're probably just going to see these unique stances sort of coached out before players ever get anywhere so we might never again see a craig council or a kevin euclid or a

jay buehner or maybe the maybe the weirdest one that i can recall is jeff bagwell being in that yes super wide stance that i can't imagine how that was ever comfortable you think oh catchers have short careers because it's so hard on their knees to catch all day well jeff bagwell hit like that basically all the time and no one would ever do that again jeff bagwell's body looked like somebody photoshopped in the upper half of somebody else's body onto i don't know like a horse with two legs so we we might never see that like who's this is maybe a bad way to put both of us on the spot but who's a hitter who has a really distinctive stance now yeah this this is a bad idea this exposes us i

was thinking it too but but yeah this is i mean it it does go hand in hand with what we were just saying about weird ballpark configurations which might not be as prevalent now and might not even be as efficient but definitely add some character and charm to the game so who has a weird batting stance now oh let's just say aaron judge because he's so tall nobody else is that big so aaron judge has a distinctive stance because he's enormous he's like the colossus of roads nobody else can do that oh yeah that's that's true although he is uh fairly standard otherwise i guess but yeah like there's no tony batista type stance right now i always like that a lot there's still a good amount of

bat waggle which is around some people do that and and that hasn't been totally coached out although sometimes it is because you figure that's just wasted energy whatever so just to remove us from the spotlight because we i have now successfully exposed both of us as frauds yeah pool holes pool holes is a little weird and Sandoval, I guess, is kind of weird. I guess like Itro and Noriei is kind of weird. It's more likely you'd see anything with like a long-term veteran. But even with Itro, most of it is what he does before the stance. Right.

Which is the one thing that hasn't been coached out. It's like the weird stances and i i shouldn't say that i don't think that like the 90s or the 60s were made up exclusively of players with bizarre stances most people look some variation of normal but there were there were just those outliers and i think that there are fewer of those if you have players that you'd like to highlight please let us know because i'm certain we are missing a bunch we can't watch everybody in baseball nor can we recall them even though ben's memory is better than mine so this really makes him look worse than me but i think that it's been replaced by players just doing more between swings which in the case of like i don't know

robinson cano means just doing nothing for 30 seconds yeah hunter pence is weird obviously but i i don't know jason kipnis i guess kind of does the uh horizontal bat holding thing but yeah i i don't know even like there's no jim tomey replica just with a extended bat point all these weird ones are coming to my mind from guys who were playing when like my formative years as fan, which I don't know if that's because these stances were more common then or just because I paid more attention to weird stances at that time. So, yeah, send us your submissions for current weird stances. This kind of goes hand in hand with the ballpark discussion and the nickname discussion that we've had on the show and whether these things actually are getting less colorful or whether it just seems that way in the moment. Yeah, I guess Jeff Mathis has done kind of the weird one where he's gone up without a bat at all. But I think he's been sort of grandfathered into it.

Like, you're not going to see that anymore, but he's made it work for 12 years. Yeah, good framer. It's worth it in the end. Alex says, I had a question about Fangraphs War and Baseball Reference War, specifically how it relates to Ubaldo Jimenez's contract. From my understanding, Fangraphs War uses FIP in calculation and Baseball Reference War uses actual runs allowed. So it seems like F-War is based on what should have happened based on what the pitcher can control, and B-War is based on what actually happened. So I was in discussion

on Camden Chat, the SB Nation Orioles blog, about whether Jimenez's contract will look as bad after taking the four years as a whole, since he has had some very good stretches along with his terrible stretches. Over the three full seasons that he's been on the Orioles, he has accrued 4.7 fangrass war versus 2.2 baseball reference war. Taking F war, that's an average of 1.5 war per season. If he's making 12.5 million a year on average and at 8 million per war for a free agent, that's right about on par with his contract. However, if you take his baseball reference war, he's worth roughly half of his expected free agent war per dollar. My question is basically, why should you use fangrass war when trying to decide if a player was worth it over his contract? Since that's not what actually happened when looking back at his season, wouldn't baseball reference war be better

to use in this situation? I can't believe in any stat that tells me that Ubaldo on the Orioles wasn't a huge dumpster fire, so I'm all aboard using B-War for arguments like this. And this is the same sort of discussion that we have when it comes to award voting and when there's a big difference between someone's peripherals and surface stats and which one of these stats you should use. Right. So I am helplessly brand loyal. Right. So I am helplessly brand loyal. So I always like using Fangraphs War. And I think it does do a better job of making the defensive adjustment in that baseball reference attempts kind of a weird catch all. I don't need to go into up a mid first round draft pick to sign him. Whoops, that was a mistake that is worth, I don't know how many millions of dollars, but a lot, a lot of millions of dollars more than I will probably ever see in my life. So that's something that the Orioles just happily gave up for the privilege of signing Ubaldo Jimenez. It's funny in retrospect to think of all the articles written about Ubaldo Jimenez when he was declining the first time and everyone was like oh here's look at this weird arm action he

has and if he just fixes that he can get back to being an ace that was so many years ago yeah yubalda humanez was like anyway so in in retrospect i think the b war serves a good function here because it does capture i guess more of what did happen the fact of the matter is that i think ubaldo jimenez has pitched worse with runners on base even worse than you'd expect over the course of his career with runners on base with the orioles and that's something that is not entirely his fault but should be countered against him because ultimately a pitcher's job is to prevent runs from scoring and while there are more sustainable ways, you could say, of doing that, if you allow more hits at the wrong times, that's bad. So Jimenez is captured probably more accurately by a formula that accounts more for what really did happen. Still, B-War not perfect.

And over large enough samples, you'd be fine with either war if you're doing like a big picture study. But in an isolated case, then this is where I think B war does serve a better purpose. Yeah, the bigger the sample, and we're talking about four years and 535 innings at this point, your runs allowed should be more likely to mirror your actual talent for allowing or preventing runs than they would in a single season, say. So at this point, I think it would be safer to say that Ubaldo's actual runs allowed reflect his performance than it would be if you're talking about a single season and award voting at the end of it. So I would also be inclined to go with the baseball reference for in this case. And I guess the larger the

sample, the less in theory the two measures should diverge probably. But in this case, I guess there's still a fairly significant difference. I was going to look up his actual splits using the fangraph splits tool, but it seems that our website is down. So maybe I'm going to have a very easy or a very frustrating workday. All right. Question from David. One of my favorite things Ben and Sam used to do was guess the career earnings of players, then look them up. So here is my challenge. How much money did Ricky Henderson make in his career? And how much money has Koji Uehara made in his career? They are both interesting for different reasons, but for one specific reason. And I have no idea.

I can only assume that he's packaging these two players together because they made the same amount. I would guess that would be a logical reason to package them one together. And one is one of the best players ever, and one's a pretty good reliever. So that kind of would illustrate how much salaries have skyrocketed, but I am completely guessing, as we always did in this game, which I enjoyed too. So I will just say off the top of my head, I can't really remember whether Uehara has signed a big deal, and he obviously hasn't had a very long career in the state so i'm gonna say he made 40 million right he's been around for nearly a decade when was he signed 2008 2009 was it trying not to cheat here so okay i don't remember if there was a signing bonus he didn't

get paid a whole lot when he first came over but he's been pretty healthily compensated less so let's call it uh i don't know let's say nine or ten years in the majors major league average salary is somewhere north of three million i think now uahara has gotten more than that because he never had to deal with the pre-arb years really so i don't know call his average five million a season maybe put it over nine or ten seasons so yeah 45 or 50 million so then ricky henderson played for 73 seasons and so the minimum salary when he was a rookie was probably room and board and then by the time i mean he played into the 2000s so he would have been in the modern age of making some money. But he was a marginal role player, part-time guy at that point.

Right. At that point, he was basically the cryptkeeper. So he played, let's say Ricky Henderson played what, like 20 years, 25? Yeah, it's got to be over 20. I don't know. He was hitting home runs in the celebrity softball game the other day, too. All right. Wait, wait, wait.

Let's walk this back. Because the first thing you said is right. These two people were packaged together. So why don't we just default and say they made about the same? They made about the same. You look up Uehara. I will look up Ricky. Okay.

Okay. Koji Uehara, according to baseball reference, in his career, including 2017, has made $50.25 million. All right. So you were closer, I would say. And Ricky has made $44.525. So they are not exactly the same, but comparable. I guess the point is that Uehara made more money than Ricky. Let's see. Baseball Reference has this little tool that you can convert to, well, I don't know how to explain this easily, but let's convert Uehara's money to 1990 money. I don't know what

that means. $28.35 million. So do you still have Ricky Anderson's page open? Yeah. Convert that to 1990. You see what I mean? A little pull down menu. Yeah. So that didn't change his money much because that was like the midpoint of his career almost. So, yeah, he went down from 44 something to 42.1. OK, so still compensated more than Uehara, but not really. Since Uehara, we're just talking about 90 years and Henderson, we're talking about more than 20. Yeah, that's a fun game. We should play that game more often. All right.

You want to do your stat segment? Oh, yeah. OK, so I looked up some All-Star Game stuff. One thing I found that many people might realize I hadn't, and I probably will forget this shortly, but in 1952, the All-Star Game was shortened by rain. That's the only time that's ever happened. The National League beat the American League three to two in five innings, probably the last time that the National League won the All-Star Game.

But yeah, no further point there. I just didn't realize that an all-star game had been rain shortened that's on the one hand maybe kind of embarrassing but on the other hand yeah i mean they played five innings that's the whole point right so i was mainly curious i guess about a few things i wanted to look up specific events but also just how performance in the all-star game compares to league average performance and well i decided to look at the last 10 years so i looked at the last 10 all-star games and compared that to the last 10 average regular seasons just to see how things compare in the all-star games we've had a total of nearly 800 plate appearances in the last 10 years so that's that's a decent sample that's that's like a mike trout full season when

he's entirely healthy hurry back mike so you already alluded to this earlier in the podcast, but you would assume, I believe, that in the All-Star game, we see pitching succeed more than hitting. It's your belief? Yeah, I would say so, just because you have starters who are working in relief. So they, in theory, at least, would get a bonus from that. And you have lots of hitters pinch hitting, which in theory, there's a penalty associated with that. And they don't get to see pitchers more than one time in the game, so they don't get that boost. So yes, I would guess pitchers would have the relative advantage. And as we all know, good pitching beats good hitting, right?

So in the last 10 years, so I'm going to do two stats for each stat. Oh, and also in theory, the defenses should be better than they are usually in a typical game so that would also serve to inflate pitching stats and deflate hitting stats agree so okay looking at the last 10 years all-star game averages first and then regular season so over the last 10 years in the all-star game there's been an average of 6.1 runs per game that's very low in the regular season 8.8 all-star game, there's been an average of 6.1 runs per game. That's very low. In the regular season, 8.8. All-Star game, batting average 225 against 256. OBP, 274 against 323.

Slugging percentage, 345 against 407. And so All-Star game, OPS, 619. Regular season, OPS, 730. Walk rate, unsurprisingly, a little bit lower, 6% to 8%. Strikeout rate, unsurprisingly, a little higher, 24% in the all-star game to 19 percent in the regular season hit by pitch rate about the same small one percent people don't bunt in the all-star game turns out there's been just one sack bunt in the last 10 years i'll talk about that in a little bit error rate actually reached on error rate is a little bit higher in the all-star game which is weird maybe speaks to either

really harsh scoring or just less of an effort or i don't know players trying to make more dazzling plays or and this is a distinct possibility it's a small sample because there have been 11 errors in the last 10 years doesn't really matter but in terms of batting average on balls in play a fun little thing to look at the regular season average for the last 10 years has been 298 in the all-star game 280 so there's a little bit of a hint of something there even with unfamiliar or defenders who are unfamiliar with one another and i guess i didn't pay close enough attention was there shifting in the all-star game yesterday does that happen i didn't notice either i didn't uh think about it and i certainly

won't care tomorrow but just something there probably non-optimized defensive alignments in the All-Star game. Still better defense in the All-Star game than overall. The last time there was a All-Star game with double-digit total runs scored was in 2005. Now that was actually the fourth consecutive All-Star game with double-digit runs scored, but we have not seen more than nine.

Since three years ago, there were nine runs scored in the All-Star game. Oh, I should also say that the average game length over the last 10 all-star games has been three hours and 11 minutes which is i don't know maybe about what you'd expect people talk about how all-star game rosters are kind of out of control which i i do kind of get and in fact in 2002 there were 60 players used in the all-star game 60 that was the one that tied now one of the reasons that it tied was that they ran out of players so 60 players used in 2002 however last night just 39 over the last 10 years the only all-star game that had more

than 41 players used was 2009 when there were 51 players used but mostly the managers have kept the usage to right around 40 players so nothing is actually that out of control in the last 21 all-star games the american league has lost three times and it tied once so american league dominance real thing at least as shown by this ridiculous, meaningless exhibition. Now, shifting to some more specific events, I was just curious. You don't see so much in the way of like hit by pitches or bunts in the All-Star game. I wanted to look at,

so the last player to be hit in an All-Star game, it does happen. And I guess the best one here is just to point out the most recent one, because it's fitting. Chase Utley. Chase Utley was beamed in 2014. I think everybody probably supported that. He was beamed in 2014. I think everybody probably

supported that. He was beamed by Chris Sale. Why not? I don't know if there was beef, but it's fun to retroactively assign beef. No pitcher has ever hit multiple players in an All-Star game. No batter has ever been hit multiple times. There have been intentional walks, which sucks, but they happen. I don't know why he would have intentional walks in an All-Star game. I mean, I know why, and you can at least imagine that in the era where the all-star game counted for something then the strategy sort of mattered so in 2009 victor martinez was intentionally walked in 2008 carlos guillen miguel tejada and justin morneau were all intentionally walked however before 2008 there hadn't been an all-star game intentional walk since 1991 so there was like a 17 year gap

there with uh with no intentional walks which is how it should be even though i understand what the strategy is here nobody i mean nobody is watching the all-star game because they want to see a pitcher not pitch to a hitter who comes up in 2008 aaron cook became the only pitcher in all-star game history to ever intentionally walk multiple batters in the same appearance. Aaron Cook actually threw three innings. This is 2008. This is a decade ago. Aaron Cook, All-Star, his team lost.

But this game went to 15 innings. If you remember, the American League beat the National League four to three. This is a game that had three intentional walks. The first happened in the bottom of the 10th tie game, of course. Michael Young, leading off for the American League, reached on an error by the second baseman. He was followed by Carlos Quentin, who reached on an error by the second baseman.

So then Aaron Cook intentionally walked Carlos Guillen to lower the bases. The idea here being, well, the outcome matters. I'm Aaron Cook. I'm pitching for the competitive Rockies. I don't want... The All-Star Game counted in 2008, right? That was within the era. Yes. It must have. It must have. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been these blocks. So Aaron Cook intentionally walked Carlos Guillen to load the bases, set up a force everywhere,

and it worked. Grady Sizemore grounded into a force out at home. Evan Longoria grounded into a force out at home. And then Justin Morneau grounded into an out. Aaron Cook escaped the 10th inning after loading the bases well he didn't really load the bases nobody out the second baseman loaded the bases with nobody out after that Joakim Soria in the top of the 10th actually intentionally walked Miguel Tejada so that he could face Dan Ugla that was an intentional walk to also load the bases Ugla struck out followed by Adrian Gonzalez who struck out so the intentional walk worked in that circumstance and then we go to the bottom of the 12th where Aaron Cook comes back out he allows a double he gets a ground out then he gets

a strikeout so two outs there's now a man on third and he decides to intentionally walk Justin Morneau who then moves to second on defensive indifference and then Ian Kinsler grounds out to end the inning so three intentional walks in the 2008 all-Star game for strategic reasons, and all of them worked in retrospect, no runs scored. And ultimately in the 15th inning, the game was won on a walk-off sacrifice fly, one of the lamest of all possible walk-offs. That was an inning that had Deanna Navarro in it as an All-Star facing Brad Lidge. All-Star games are ridiculous. So 1991 was the previous All-Star game intentional walk. I don't think there were stakes in 1991 for the All-Star game. I didn't look it up. I don't care. But Rob Dibble was the pitcher who issued an intentional walk in the bottom of the seventh.

The American League was beating the National League three to two, and Rob Dibble inherited runners on second and third. With one out out he decided to intentionally walk pinch hitter rafael palmero so rafael palmero came in to pinch it for cecil fielder in the bottom of the seventh of the all-star game to face rob dibble and dibble decided to not let him swing the bat and then uh harold baines hit a sacrifice fly run scored rubens here made an out i don't know if palmero batted again he did not rafael palmero's entire all-star game experience was to be intentionally walked by rob dibble that's super lame and at last uh last thing i looked at was all-star game sack bunts so in uh 1991 ozzy guion put down a sack bunt that's fine that's probably

all he ever should have done i should say that there have been several sack bunts 39 sack bunts in recorded all-star game history however many of those came in the older era there have been several sack bunts 39 sack bunts in recorded all-star game history however many of those came in the older era there have been just three since 1988 so that is the modern year i'm looking at ozzy gian in 1991 sack bunt whatever that's all he could do 1998 tom glavin sack bunted pitchers used to bet i guess i didn't know that i didn't remember that i guess but there are a lot of pitchers here listed tom glavin the sack bunt dave steve don sudden gaylord perry claude austin jim palmer sam mcdowell etc so pitchers have sack bunted i should have excluded that but 2008 russell martin came in and russell martin put down a sack bunt in 2008 russell martin was a 781 ops hitter he was a

good hitter between 2006 2007 and 2008 Then he got a little worse for a few years. Anyway, it doesn't really matter. Russell Martin, incidentally, has put down 11 sack bunts in his career and put down a sack bunt in 2008. Interesting thing about that, during the regular season in 2008, zero sack bunts for Russell Martin. 2007, zero sack bunts for Russell Martin. 2006, as a rookie, one. So Russell Martin in 2008 in the All-Star game achieved one sacrifice bunt, which equaled his career total up to that point. So I don't know exactly what that was about. But Martin actually batted four times in that game, which seems outlandish.

And let's see. This is also the game that went 15 innings, the one where Aaron Cook intentionally walked two batters. So this is a one hell of an off-struck game in retrospect. Sacrifice. So the circumstances, top of the 12th, this is the same inning in which Joakim Sori intentionally walked Miguel Tejada. So Ryan Ludwig led off with a walk. Nate McClouth actually then bunt singled to reach. So I don't know if that was an attempted sacrifice bunt. any case top of the 12th two

consecutive bunts on two consecutive pitches by the national league all-stars mcleod bunted for a single on the first pitch against soria and then martin bunted out to first base it looks like ledwick advanced to third nate mcleod advanced to second so with those two runners in scoring position then soria intentionally walked to miguel tejada so he said he could strike out Dan Ugla and so that George Sherrill could strike out Adrian Gonzalez to end the inning so that 2008 all-star game was really something else very long three intentional walks a couple bunts quite a game but I have zero recollection of it and I bet that next year I will have an almost identical stat segment do you remember Aaron Cook's last season? This was only five years ago. He made 18 starts through 94 innings, struck out 20 guys, struck out 20 guys and walked 21 guys.

Okay. So I think I have a vague recollection. That was the last year that I wrote about the Mariners every, just about every day. The last year that I wrote about, Mariners every just about every day the last year that I wrote about I think a game recap so I think it was in that year that Cook threw a dominant let me look this up I believe he dominated the Mariners and indeed he did June 29th Aaron Cook who through to that point had started two games for the Red Sox and struck out zero batters. He faces the Mariners on June 29th, and he throws a complete game shutout with two strikeouts and two hits. He needed just 81 pitches for the complete game shutout. That's outstanding.

Yeah, he had close to a 60% ground ball rate that year and every year. And I remember a Deadspin piece speculating about whether Aaron Cook had like broken baseball or defense independent pitching stats couldn't capture Aaron Cook. And he was actually going to get away with doing this somehow, which I can't mock that much because I once wrote a somewhat similar article about Derek Lowe, who was doing the same thing at the time. But yeah, you can't do that nope although aaron cook the next time he faced the mariners on uh september 5th struck at a season high five batters so aaron cook against the mariners in 2012 not dead aaron cook against everybody else super dead yeah all right question from luke do baseball teams actually provide knickers to players anymore the high sock look imitates the olden days when ballplayers wore knickers,

i.e. short pants hemmed right below the knee. Do the high sock players wear the same pants as the pajama pants players and just cuff them up inside out? Or do teams actually provide two sets of pants to choose from, long pants and knickers? In spite of internet research, I can't figure this out.

Please help. I didn't know the answer. I know nothing about uniforms. Uniforms are kind of a blind spot for me in general. So I emailed Paul Lucas, the uniform authority at UniWatch. He answered in about seven seconds. Clearly, he knew the answer already. He said, players can get whatever length of pants they want. Most high cuffers request shorter pants. Others just bunch up their long pants. Right. So that is the answer from an authority. I knew from, I don't know, some previous conversation that there was a technique that players use to sort of mimic the knicker look where you sort of you drop your pants and you hold up, you hoist up your socks. Then you sort of fold your socks down over the elastic of the pants and then you pull your pants and you hold up you hoist up your socks then you sort of fold your socks down over the elastic of the pants and then you pull your pants up i can't explain this very well in words

but hopefully you can look it up on youtube and if you find the same video i did you get to see an old man take his pants off and then pull them back up so that was a delightful little twist to my day there is a technique so players they don't have the the pants stitched to the socks anymore but they have They have a method and it looks like it's not too Complicated because why would it be yeah all right Question from zane My question is this suppose you are the gm

Of a generic major league team However baseball god has decreed That you may have access to either a The normal scouting reports for every player With their skills rated on the 20 to 80 scale along with stat Cast data for hit speed and launch angle, pitch speed and spin rate for pitchers, or B, everything on their fan graphs and baseball reference pages, excluding any direct scouting reports.

Which do you choose and why? So this is stats versus scouts. Yeah, baseball god is, we get a lot of questions about baseball god i don't know if he's like a monkey paw kind of god or if he's not trying to be like very meddlesome yeah right it's a lot of weird hypotheticals i don't know why baseball god isn't just like i'm happy to have baseball today i'm gonna expand the schedule to be all year long uh baseball god do something about the pitcher injuries please in this case i would take the stats from the stats you can usually infer a lot of the scouting information even if we didn't know

that aaron judge it's a crap out of the ball we can just look at the stats and say this looks like a guy who it's a crap out of the ball you'd miss some stuff on like i don't know zach kozart who seems to be overachieving and i don't know if this like technically the fangraphs pages include like pitcher velocity but i don't know if we're supposed to then just pretend like that's not there that's the thing this is a harder question now because stats and scouts have converged like the information the data stat cast data is essentially scouting data or it's it's trying to quantify the same sort of thing in many cases so i think zane is sort of lumping in the pitch tracking data and ball tracking data with the scouting information, which maybe would strike you as strange since we

tend to think of that as stats. So it's a blurrier line than it used to be. So if he's saying that we can only use the stats that we had, say, 15 years ago or something. So we have just the standard sabermetric stats on the Fangraphs page, but we don't have tracking information. Then obviously it depends on the player's track record, which one you would prefer. If it's a young player, maybe someone in the minors you take the scouting information but i assume this is just a choice that we're making for every player so probably yeah if we have stats and we have projections that would probably be more useful if you get that for every player's entire career and i guess it would be more useful to us specifically since we wouldn't necessarily know

what to do with all of the scouting information and how it would translate to stats and performance and how we should think about what a scouting rating of a certain number means relative to performance. So yeah, probably I think you're right. Obviously you would want all the information if you could get it, but if you can know what every player has done in every game,

that should, over a large enough sample, tell you all you need to know. Baseball God really wants you to be like a terrible executive. Like, look, you're lucky enough to have this job, but guess what? You can't know anything except for this specific one thing. Yep. She's trying to challenge us. She doesn't want us to get complacent. It was like Jim Bowden operating under some weird baseball god hypothetical we just didn't know about. That could be.

All right. Question from Michael. With the Home Run Derby this week, I went back and watched Josh Hamilton's 2008 Home Run Derby. So Hamilton hit 28 homers and that was before the current format, right? That was when a lot of home runs really meant something because they were outs.

And so it wasn't just hit as many homers and take as many swings as you can in the allotted time. It was you had to be careful with how you used your swings. And so Hamilton hit 28. It was a good time. But what if he just didn't stop?

At what point would it be so little fun that everyone just agreed to end it? Oh, man. Okay. So home run derbies back then used to be a drag. I know because I had to live blog them for my shitty job. So I think, okay. So they were already slow. Hamilton, though, he was getting a lot of it because he said,

I think he must have set a record for like one round, something like that, home runs in a row. I remember that the announcers and the fans were just eating it up. So what was the number? 28? 28 home runs? Okay, so I think there would have been like an enthusiasm crescendo. Like, you know, you'd target some sort of round number, so like 50.

And people would just lose their freaking minds because Josh Hamilton is hitting 50 home runs in the round but then it would keep going chris berman would get hoarse he'd lose his voice the broadcaster then the quality would like you couldn't even substitute for berman because whoever the substitute would be would start to lose their voice the enthusiasm like they would you'd lose all any and all might prefer the post-berman broadcast i don't know but fair point yes he was trending yesterday anyway so you would lose any and all sense of suspense because there would there would be no way that anyone would actually compete with josh hamilton in the round and in fact he'd probably be so exhausted he couldn't compete in the finals but yeah he'd keep going

so the there would be a crescendo up to about 50 there would be a plateau where it'd be like oh he had another one and another one that's 56 and then there would inevitably be a decline i think that you would start to hear some groaning probably it would be it would be subtle at first but the fans would start to groan i don't know when the booze would start but eventually there would be booze i think because hamilton just won't let people go people are sort of completionists i think on average so despite maybe the counter example is how many people left the all-star game yesterday but i think if you go to the home run derby you want to see it through to its conclusion and you want to know who's going to win and so people would just be sitting there thinking okay so then on the upside everyone is going to get a souvenir at least that's out there in the bleachers.

But on the other hand, like it's a workday, it's a Monday or a Sunday and we need to go. And kids would start to cry. I think by like a hundred, you would have a pretty loud murmur, like a din would develop in the stadium. People would just be like, all right, knock it off. I don't know at what point the pitcher would throw a ball at Josh Hamilton, but I feel like that would be inevitable because the pitcher is going to get hurt at some point. These pitches don't come with no cost. He'd have a commercial break at some point because ESPN or whoever was broadcasting it would be like, okay, we have a commitment to our partners and we're just going to cut away here for five minutes because who cares? No one's watching anymore or enjoying this.

And probably by about 300 or 400, I think someone would call the police. All right. We will wrap up with a couple other quick home run questions. Another Jeff says, what if the value of a home run was at least partially tied to the distance it went? For example, what if anything over 450 feet counted for an extra run and anything over 500 counted for two extra runs? Would guys like Stanton and Judge command more of a premium? Yes. Would other guys try to tweak their approach to maximize their chances of hitting longer homers? Baseball is already the only sport where you're never out of a game until

it's actually over. But is that true? I don't know. But this would increase that even more. Down by two runs in the ninth inning, one swing can erase that deficit even with no one on base. So yeah, I mean, there are only a certain number of hitters who I think are capable of hitting a home run of that distance even under optimal conditions. So yes, the few who could do it would be worth more. And the few who couldn't do it, I mean, it would have to be a realistic threshold because if you made it 500 feet or something, I don't know that anyone would even really try to do that because you can't do that. So I think that, you know, if it were sort of like a sliding scale sort of thing, maybe, where the boundaries weren't crazy, then yeah, you'd presumably see guys swing harder. And that would presumably exacerbate the strikeout problems that people are so worried about. And it would just be like the game is today, but more so. And people would be swinging not for the fences, but for some distance beyond the fences. And I mean, there would still be probably some cost benefit thing

here that you'd have to weigh because I don't know what the likelihood of hitting an even longer home run, like if you're really just swinging as hard as you possibly can, maybe you're just making yourself less likely to hit home runs because you're unable to aim and you lose some precision or you have to start swinging earlier or something and you don't get as much information about the pitch. So I'm not sure it would change things dramatically because there might just be a trade-off here where it doesn't make all that much sense to go for the even longer home run. Cause I think guys, when they hit a home run as it is, I mean,

I don't know. They're usually getting, if not all of it, pretty close to all of it. Although that has changed, I think in the last few years. So depends on the juiciness of the ball as well. Yeah.

Right. If you want to think, I like the idea because it seems a little strange to me that technically all home runs are created the same even though some can be a hundred feet further than another i feel like there should be some credit for that otherwise distance is irrelevant but you can think of it sort of like baseball skeeball where maybe the way that you do it is you have the wall which is the boundary between the field and the home run but then you could have like a second wall some distance back where

beyond that it's like double well not double value because the grand slam wouldn't be eight runs but you just add plus one more run so i don't know where that would be and you could have like a second wall some distance back where beyond that it's like double. Well, not double value because the grand slam wouldn't be eight runs, but you just add plus one more run. So I don't know where that would be. And you'd have to change it by the ballpark because, you know, in Colorado, whenever you see a long distance home run, it's usually in Colorado. And StatCast's Twitter account never seems to account for that. Like, of course, John Gray hit the longest home run by a pitcher in Colorado. It's not baseball. It's not the same. Anyway, but it's just another quirk you could have maybe by

the stadium and you could even leave each team a certain amount of flexibility some teams might put a second wall at like 420 feet some teams might put a second wall like right behind the first wall so that there's almost no such thing as a regular home run anymore and i don't know if that would be better or worse but one of the side effects i agree with you that there wouldn't be too much of a change because i think hitters are always trying to kind of be optimized and hitting a home run is hard enough without worrying about how far it goes. But you would still somewhat incentivize harder swings. You'd incentivize teams to find stronger players. And for example, like yesterday or the day before the Yankees officially released Chris Carter, they probably wouldn't have done that under these circumstances because Carter would be a little more valuable

Incidentally he led National League in home runs Last year that's wild he's out of a job Not a very good hitter but yeah I like the idea will never happen but I like it As sort of like a baseball three point line Right okay and last one from Andrew Patrick via Patreon I've been mulling over an idea in my head

I think that balls that bounce over The outfield fence should be home runs. This would eliminate the problem where runners on first don't score when otherwise they might score, and it still rewards balls being hit very, very hard. To clarify, I think balls that bounce fair and then go over one of the side fences before the foul pole or balls that become unplayable due to getting stuck in a fence or whatnot should retain the same behavior of two bases. Do you think this would be a good change? Why or why not? And what would be the ramifications for this? And we would have an even higher home run rate would be one ramification. I don't know

how much higher. I wonder what percentage of doubles are ground rule doubles and what percentage of ground rule doubles go over the outfield fence as opposed to one of the side fences. It's probably not very high. So we'd have more homers. You wouldn't, I don't think, adjust your approach. It's not like you can really reliably intentionally hit ground rule doubles that bounce over the fence. So it's still something that would just kind of happen by chance, more or less. Still something that would just kind of happen by chance, more or less. So I kind of agree about it always feels wrong somehow when a runner is forced to stop running on a ball that he could have scored on.

And I wouldn't miss that going away. you think that there is some value to balls in play and the resulting runners and stolen bases and that sort of thing, then this would remove even more runners from the equation. So I don't know if it's something that would make baseball better. I'm not sure if it would make it significantly worse. I don't know that I would notice the difference all that much. Well, so many of you might be aware, but this used to be the rule. So in the American League before 1930, any ball that bounced over the fence or went over the fence counted as a home run. And the National League adopted the same rule a year later. So this is how baseball used to be.

And then I don't know exactly what the decision process was, but they decided, no, that's bad. Let's not do it that way. Let's just have the balls over the fence on the fly count as home runs. So baseball already played like this. And then it decided, nah, let's bad. Let's not do it that way. Let's just have the balls over the fence and the fly count as home runs. So baseball already played like this. And then it decided, nah, let's not do that anymore. So it would be interesting to go back and read the explanations for why. I don't think baseball would be markedly different this way either. I don't think that there are that many automatic doubles that you see.

I don't keep track of them. I don't know how many people do keep track of them, but it's not like you see one a game or anything. So it wouldn't be too markedly different. But then it would be interesting to see if teams would like either install harder or softer warning tracks or put something under the grass before the fence if they feel like maybe their team is more or less powerful because you could in theory get some line drive hitters or weaker hitters who could then end up with more home runs an interesting note from wikipedia is that the pre-1930 rule in the American League that allowed balls to count as home runs if they bounced over the fence was in place for most of Babe Ruth's career.

However, I can read this line. However, most baseball historians believe that Ruth likely missed out on more home runs that did not count due to other differences in the rules in place during his career compared to the number of home runs he likely hit off bounces. But, you know, that's just baseball guesswork. So who's to say All right cool so We will end there You can support the podcast on patreon By going to patreon.com slash

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