Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1098: Pham is Fam

Episode Date: August 18, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about their upcoming eclipse event, Jered Weaver’s retirement, a Tommy Pham tweet, and two recent examples of unorthodox positioning, then follow up on player nicknames, odd fields, two-touch fielding, and Khris Davis’s arm and, finally, answer listener emails about the Indians’ record and run differential, the Giants’ disaster season, […]

You're sweet to me, diabetes, peace treaties, Rex is the champions, they need Wheaties, carrying the torch, the Olympic four rings, I'm a javelin throw from the crowning of the king. Hello and welcome to episode 1098 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hi. I've been out of commission for the last few days in the wilderness with wonky internet, but a lot has happened. And so I've accumulated some banter topics. We're going to do emails. But briefly, before we get to that, we should say a word or two about our Eclipse event, which is coming up on Monday. And this will apply to only a very small minority of listeners,

but we're going to make you all listen to it anyway. So we have this eclipse event coming up on Monday in Salem-Kaiser, Oregon at the Total Eclipse of the Park event that the Salem-Kaiser volcanoes are holding. So if you are coming to this event, start early, leave now, probably, if you want to get there, because you and I and Sam Miller, who is also attending, we are ostensibly staying at your house on Sunday night, but not literally staying at your house on Sunday night. Because in order to get to the park, which is about an hour away from your place in Portland, we are going to leave like nine hours early or something. So we're going to leave at like midnight the night before or morning of, however you define midnight as a.m. or p.m. I'm an a.m. guy.

We're going to leave at midnight to get there at 9 a.m. or whatever we're going to get there. So we're hoping that will work. And if you have tickets and are wondering where to get them, we will have them. So we will email everyone and let you know exactly where we'll be, but we'll be standing somewhere with everyone's tickets outside the park, and we'll have to hand them out to each of you, which will be a pretty inefficient process, but it's the best that we have right now. And if you have discovered that you can't attend this event, we've been told it is too late to issue refunds.

But if you're interested in trying to sell your tickets or gift your tickets to someone in the area, just use the Facebook group, post in there. Maybe you'll find someone who's interested in taking your tickets. And also if you are in the area and you're looking to buy tickets or hope someone will give you tickets, also post in the Facebook group. That's probably the best place to find it because we know that there are a few tickets available just from people who have looked at the long lines that are already forming into Oregon over the last few days and have decided nope not doing it but we're gonna make it and we're gonna see a bunch of you there so leave early and stay in touch with other people in the Facebook group and with us via email if you're attending and we're really looking forward to it other than the hellish trip it will take us to get there

yeah actually the actual apocalyptic it's scenes from armageddon except nobody's driving right armageddon or independence day really either one or deep impact there's a lot of scenes of people fleeing cities i would say if i were to try to sell this the memories of this event are going to be great the execution of the event it's probably going to be a nightmare. All parts of it. You're flying out in Portland at midnight on Monday. And the best I can say is that you'll probably make your airplane. But, you know, we don't know. And so the best we can do is to leave Portland so early that it still counts as late, I guess, on Sunday.

And, yeah, I don't own this house so you will as you said you'll ostensibly be staying in the house you will not be staying in the house that we rent but you will be staying in my property which will be my car i legally own the car where we will have a good number of people trying to i don't know what we're going to be trying to do but it's not it's not going to be great it's not going to be a great way to kick off the week but i'm glad that everyone's going to be there with us uh everyone who can be a great way to kick off the week, but I'm glad that everyone's going to be there with us. Everyone who can make it. I really, I really hope that none of our listeners or readers are still stuck on the freeway

when things start to happen, because that would be a, that would be a real bummer for all of us, especially you. If anyone has any suggested topics for a podcast that we could all record while you and I and Sam and my fiance and your girlfriend are sitting in a car in traffic for nine hours or so on Monday morning, let us know. Maybe that would be a fun way to pass the time. Maybe it would make it even worse. I don't know, but we'll all be there. So we might as well. Anyway. Are there laws? I know you're not allowed to like be actively on the phone or texting or whatever when you're driving. And you know,

we're going to be doing something that's a little lesser grade than driving on Monday. Anyway, we'll be road adjacent. But are there distracted driving laws against recording a podcast while you're on the freeway? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know. You can talk on a hands-free headset, right? Or you're allowed to talk. You're allowed to have a conversation.

So that's what a podcast is. So, yeah, I think it's legal. I just can't browse leaderboards as I do it. No, that's true. Right. All right. So a bunch of things to get to. While I was away, Jared Weaver retired.

So that seems like something we should at least mention. He's been a topic of discussion on this show because he was really testing the limits for how slow a pitcher can throw and still be a major league pitcher. And he found those limits, he passed those limits, and now he has retired. But I applaud his effort to hold on to his roster spot for as long as he possibly could. And I hope that the late model Jared Weaver, who was throwing in the low to mid 80s, does not obscure completely the memory of prime Jared Weaver, who threw very hard and was very good at baseball.

But I think both are admirable in a way, that he was as good at baseball as he was when he was good, and that he was as tenacious as he was in clinging to his spot for as long as he could. Weaver, when he made it his announcement, I don't have it in front of me, but he said some of the effect of thank you to the Padres for treating me so well through all this. But had we not bantered a few months ago about how Padres ownership essentially said Jared Weaver is terrible. And I think they said his name explicitly and said that he was awful and they didn't want

him to pitch for them anymore. So I don't know, maybe that was considered treating Weaver well by Weaver adjusted statistical standards. Fun fact is that his velocity very slightly actually bounced up this season. Not that it matters, but in that sense, he went out on top where on top is relative to only last season. Weaver as well. I'm uh did a quick search set a minimum of 20 innings thrown this season which is very few innings but whatever jared weaver this season exceeded that total he had 12 strikeouts the strike rate was 12 which ranked him only 13th worst in all of baseball used to be that uh cole hamels was lower than him that appears to no longer be true. But I don't know. Let's just go through some names here. Ty Block. He's pitching all the time for the Giants. Last

I checked, he's been starting every other game. He has a lower strikeout rate than Jared Weaver, who just retired. Julio Urias, before things went sideways for him. Things were already going sideways for him. Lower strikeout rate thanared weaver andrew moore he's a mariners pitcher who there's really no other reason for you to know about andrew moore but here's one of the things that he can do not strike out batters as often as jared weaver so he's there right before him is another pitcher who's pitched for the mariners this season who i have no recollection of chase to young he's there rob scahill brian mitchell paul blackburn ben lively a few years ago somebody sent me an email that yeah he was intrigued by these pitch comps that i was doing using pitch

effects data and he thought he saw some comparisons between brian mitchell and wade davis i was intrigued back then uh there was no follow-up i can tell you one place that wade davis is not and that is below jared weaver on a strikeout rate list. So Brian Mitchell still trying to hold up his end of the bargain. Ben Lively is the current pitcher in last. 9.4% strikeouts. That is some Nate Cornejo nonsense. Yeah. But still a better than average ERA.

So whatever. We'll miss you, Jared Weaver. People got a little cruel toward the end. You were not just there to be made fun of, but you were easy to make fun of, and it is probably best that now you are done. Yes. All right. And there were also a few follow ups I wanted to get to. So Thomas said, I was listening to episode 1096 and your discussion about two players needing to touch the ball before getting a force out reminded me of my horrendous little league coach. Horrible little league coaches are a dime a dozen, but I feel like mine was terrible in a unique way. His son was possibly

the worst baseball player I have ever seen take the field, quite literally never got a hit the entire year, was incapable of throwing anything but high rainbows to first, generally sluggish play, etc. But this didn't stop my coach from hitting him third in the lineup and starting him at shortstop every day. One day the coach's son hurt his shoulder in warmups and was completely unable to throw the ball to first. Instead of pulling him, my coach told his son to throw any ground ball to the second baseman so the second baseman could relay the throw to first for the out. I remember this game vividly because I was pitching,

and to say the least, watching this kid lob the ball to the second baseman after every ground ball just to have the runner beat the relay by five or six steps got frustrating quite quickly this was almost a decade ago and i've played slash umpired slash watched hundreds of baseball games since but i will bring this memory with me as the most inexplicably stupid thing i've ever seen on a baseball field okay so okay we we have this premise and the coach is overplaying his son to the son's detriment now i have a question we don't have any we don't have any further evidence of this are we sure the son couldn't hit literally the evidence suggests literally no hits all season long couldn't throw are we sure are we absolutely certain that the coach's son was not a dog?

There's no distinction between him and a dog in terms of baseball ability, seemingly. Yeah, so whenever anyone's like, how would a dog do? That's how a dog would do. That is how a dog would do as a shortstop batting third on a baseball team. He would pick up the ball, he would play fetch, he would give the ball to the second baseman, and the second baseman would be able to do nothing. And the only thing that makes me feel a little bit better about this situation is I never played Little League. Maybe that makes me weird. I only actually played organized baseball in high school. And by high school, baseball players are like competent, but I've seen Little League games. I've seen it take place before. And as much as this kid was ruining all grand balls, do people in Little League really convert grounders into outs anyway? Because I feel like the answer is almost always no. Yeah, no, I don't think so. So this probably raised the BABIP somewhat,

but I'm sure it was already extremely high. I'm trying to remember what Air Bud did in seventh inning fetch, but it's been a while since I've seen that. I don't know whether he did the relay throw. Something tells me he did not. Oh, no. I remember all of his RBI came on getting hit by pitches. Air Bud was really good at getting hit by pitches. All right. We should also give a little shout out to Tommy Pham. We talked about Tommy Pham on a recent episode, basically in an email about why we hadn't talked about Tommy Pham because he's been really good this season, and you subsequently wrote about Tommy Pham, as you promised to on that episode, and Tommy Pham

tweeted. And we mentioned Tommy Pham earlier this year because he liked the tweet about the poor defense of his competitor in the outfield, but this is even better. I think this is an explicit Fangraphs reference by Tommy Pham. Early this week, someone named Lane Newton, or at least named on Twitter Lane Newton, tweeted at TommyFam, It's time at TFamLV has a seat until he can learn basic base running at Cardinals. And then TommyFam quoted that tweet and said, 4.2 base running runs at Fangraphs, so you should zip it or zip it emoji. So Tommy Pham very active on Twitter,

clearly a Fangraphs reader or knows how to consult Fangraphs leaderboards, and I applaud him for bringing some data to this Twitter discussion. And looking at it, he has not liked the Fangraphs post written about him for Monday. That's okay. TommyFam, maybe you're just too busy being the best player on the Cardinals. His story is a fascinating one.

If you are unfamiliar with it, I can't really do it any justice. In a quick little podcast blip, but he is a 29-year-old player who did not make the opening day roster, who leads the Cardinals and wins above replacement, and has been dealing with, for most of his life, a degenerative eye condition condition which has caused him to not be able to use his left eye very well so you know pretty impressive and also thereby what's the opposite of damning with faint praise in any case the other cardinals are doing worse than a guy who has carrot carotoconus carotoc i don't know exactly how to pronounce it i'm not an eye doctor or any kind of doctor He's got a condition is the point

And he's still super good So way to go Tommy Cam Yeah good for him Alright we also got some submissions of nicknames That are inspired by other players names In response to the banter in episode 1097 About Samuel Bird who was nicknamed Babe Ruth's legs Because he used toinch run for Babe Ruth

We couldn't on the spot think of Any other players whose nicknames were Products of other players names but we did Get some write ins so William Submitted Ronnie Belliard Who apparently was nicknamed Mini Manny I don't know if that Is a widespread nickname

Or not but that's one We also got another Babe Ruth-related one from Mike, who says, in the last pod, you talked about players that had nicknames featuring the names of other players. I can think of at least one other nickname that is based on another player's name, and it is also about Babe Ruth, though in a tragic way. Josh Gibson, a leading slugger in the Negro Leagues, was apparently known at the time as the Black Babe Ruth. Gibson died even younger than Ruth, at the age of 35, just months before Jackie Robinson's debut. As he pointed out via email, Fernando Perez also calls himself the Black Eatro, apparently. I don't know whether anyone else calls him that,

but that's another one there. Then Ranger pointed out, wasn't Bill Hands called Little Froggy, which was somehow a reference to Don Larson, not quite the same as it doesn't include another player's actual name, but that's kind of similar. And that's true. The late Bill Hands, who was an Effectively Wild guest, was nicknamed Little Froggy or Froggy. And that was because his delivery resembled that of Don Larson, who was Big Froggy. And we actually asked him about that on the episode. So I should have recalled that one. And another one from another Mike. This is a really good one. Actually, in the late 1970s, there was Mark the Bird Fidrich. A few years later, there was Doug

the Fidrich Bird. That is a really good one. Doug Bird actually debuted in 1973, so his career overlapped with Fidrich's. So because Fidrich became such in them, a truly horrible nickname from Mariners history leapt to mind. As you undoubtedly remember, Randy Johnson's nickname was the Big Unit. At the height of Johnson's popularity in Seattle in 1997, the M's drafted starting pitcher Ryan Anderson in the first round. Anderson was comparably tall and was expected to be a top-of-the-rotation starter. Because of these similarities to Randy Johnson, people started calling him, and this is a real thing, the Little Unit. Ryan Anderson was 18 years old, and people were calling him the Little Unit.

Yikes. It should come as no surprise that he flamed out and never pitched an inning in the majors, so it's not an invocation of another player's name, but it might be the next best and definitely the most phallic thing. Yeah, right. Ryan Anderson, extremely talented, left-handed, tall definitely the most phallic thing. Yeah, right. Ryan Anderson,

extremely talented, left-handed, tall prospect, got as far as AAA Tacoma and then started to, I think pretty much everything went wrong, but I think it was mostly shoulder. So his career was derailed before it ever really began. But yeah, as pointed out, they were essentially calling him small penis the entire time that he was a professional. Now, based on what I have heard about Ryan Andis when he was in the system, he probably not unlike many other players of his talent, but not unlike them. He was a little arrogant.

He was a little self-confident. So maybe in a sense, maybe he either deserved such a nickname or at least could have used it. Maybe it was like the one thing kind of that could have kept him humble aside from his body letting him down. But I also know this is probably 10 years old as an update by now, but Ryan Anderson became a somewhat successful chef in or around Phoenix, Arizona. So congratulations, Ryan Anderson, on finding your calling after your initial calling. I hope that nobody compares you to a penis in the kitchen anymore, although I'm

given to understand that a lot of executive chefs are dicks, so maybe it's kind of stuck around. But I hope that Ryan Anderson is, I hope that his back is doing okay because counters are generally not very adjustable for the taller gentlemen. Yeah, that's right. It's not something I have to deal with as much as you do. Looking forward to being in a car with four other people, including you, who must be too big for many cars, as it is even with four other people there. Yeah, the expression too big to fail means nothing for my knees. All right.

We should also mention a couple weird positioning things that happened this week, probably. We can mention the four-man outfield that the Cubs employed against Joey Votto and also the crazy position switching that the Mets used with Wilmer Flores and Jose Reyes both out of commission before the game, Terry Collins didn't have enough players to play the positions that he had to fill. And so he used Travis Tarnow and Estripo Cabrera and rotated them, swapped them from second to third 22 times. So if you go to the box score for that game, there are 23 positions listed next to each of those players, both all second base and third base alternating. So those are a couple weird ones. And I have a few things to say about both. But you wrote about Joey Votto in the four-man outfield. What did you say? Well, I liked it. I know that Joe Madden is polarizing because he is a manager who has thoughts and people like to write about him. And so it was inevitable that there would be

sort of the pro-Madden group and then the counter culture anti Madden group and both those crowds exist they are quite vocal more vocal than Madden himself and so there are different ways to see the four-man outfield alignment now it was it was only done once in as far as I know this series certainly the game where Votto batted five times first two times it came up there were runners on base so you can't really do much then anyway. But Madden went to the four-man outfield, moving third baseman Chris Bryant into left center field when Votto came up in the fifth inning. At that point, the Cubs were up 7-2. There was one out, nobody on, so the leverage was low.

The Cubs were probably going to win the game anyway. Didn't really matter. Interestingly enough, Votto against left-handed pitchers, Jose Quintana was on the mound. Votto against lefties is not really that much of a fly ball hitter and quintana against lefties is not really that much of a fly ball pitcher so in that sense the math didn't make it out to be the best time to deploy this kind of formation but i don't personally i don't care i don't care what the math has to say about it i don't think that votto was very likely to hit a ground ball to third base. Very few players do that. Those are like the Nori Aoki or DJ LeMayhew kind of opposite field grounder guys. Votto is not one of those. In the moment, it's fun. It's just fun to

see a different alignment. But I also appreciate, and this is not the first kind of alignment that Madden has messed around with. He was doing some four-man outfields in 2006 when he was a rookie manager with a devil raise but we've seen him with uh with the Anthony Rizzo and the Ben Zobris switching around when Rizzo will charge in toward the plate to try to counteract a pitcher bunting or something that I just like the way that Madden expects his players to accept this sort of flexibility because it just will make them that much less willing to be resistant when he wants to do something that's truly creative or unusual because it's it's sort of like it's like stretching or exercising it's exercising the team's flexibility and even though vato still doubled that wasn't really i don't think that

was the point the point was to show vato right something he'd never seen before. Didn't work, but whatever. It still, it happened. There was some chance that Votto would get messed up. Now Votto is a machine. And I don't know, I'll have to pull up the quote after the game if you haven't already, because Votto had one of my favorite player quotes, at least of the year. And it was not something that said such is life. But between trying to mess with Votto's head a little bit and just having his players get used to a weird alignment i liked it i don't know what it would take for

me to not like a move like that unless he just did four man afields all the time for for everyone yeah it's a hard strategy to analyze i think you're right part of the reason that sam and i did it with the stoppers was just to get in the players' heads because they had never seen anything like this. And you could kind of tell that it did mess with their swings and their approach a little bit. And Votto is not someone it's easy to mess with or distract in any way at the plate. So that didn't work against him, but the Cubs have been unable to get him out with a standard alignment. So what the heck, why not try it? But it's hard to know how to spin this or portray this. Sam wrote about it and kind of positioned it as maybe like an innovative move or something that could be a leading indicator of more positional flexibility and teams just putting fielders where the ball's going to go. And it is that, but it's also this tactic that keeps popping up like every decade or two

and then disappearing again. So Bertie Tebbets did this in the 1950s. He had the Bertie Tebbets shift and he did four-man outfields. And then I think it was done in the 70s. I forget the specifics, but I remember reading that. And it was done against Mark McGuire in 98, 99, that period. And as you mentioned, Madden did it against guys like Travis Hafner in the mid to late 2000s. And then Madden brings it back now.

So I don't know if this is like the beginning of four-man outfields becoming a more regular thing or whether it reflects the breaking down of positional standards and barriers or whether it's just this weird strategy that crops up against certain hitters with certain managers and certain defensive teams every decade or two and then goes back into hibernation for a while because there are really only a few hitters at any one time that it probably makes a lot of sense against like you would have expected to see this against ryan schimpf or someone like that for example who just hits a ton of fly balls but ryan schimpf was demoted to triple a so then that didn't happen but i don't know vato is not the prototypical four-man outfield candidate but i understand why they did it and it was fun so

vato had this quote and this is from an article after the game by Mark Sheldon at MLB.com. So quote, no matter the infield setup, no matter the alignment of the infield or outfield, I do the exact same thing Votto said. It's when I get caught up in what's going on defensively when I get myself into trouble, like changing my approach. Okay, that makes sense. He continues. If that turns out to be a detriment to hitting balls in the outfield, then I clearly have to hit it over the outfield and into the seats. That was also something I was thinking about doing. Yeah. Votto, if you came up with like the best 10 player quotes at the end of a season, Votto would probably have like four of them, I think. And in the same game, you probably saw the clip.

Many of you probably saw the clip. There was a foul ball hit and Joey Votto went to retrieve it by the first base side. And his brain probably told him like, all right, throw the ball into the seats. And so he decided to just throw the ball over the seats and seemingly out of the baseball stadium. Joey Votto, professional heel. Yeah. And as for the other one, the Darnot Cabrera switching between second and third, this was

more of a desperation move than anything. The Mets had to play these guys somewhere and Darno had never played those positions in the majors. So they were just trying to hide him and switch him based on the batter's handedness and who was more likely to get the ball. And that mostly worked. I think he only had to field one opportunity and it was a pop-up perhaps. So that made sense. And there's some precedent for this too. And I've actually been working on or had been working on or trying to work on an article for some time now because there was a game between the Mariners and the Blue Jays on May 2nd, 1988, in which something very similar happened. And this was with the Blue Jays, Kelly Gruber and Cecil Fielder were the infielders in question. And they changed from second to third

18 times. And I was able to confirm that that was a major league record. Hans Van Sleuten at Baseball Reference helped me out with that. And so I've been trying to contact the principals to do a retrospective on that game. And I finally managed to track down Kelly Gruber and he barely remembered the game. So that was not very helpful. We still talked for a while, pleasant person to talk to, but not many specifics about this game. And I was unable to track down Cecil Fielder or Jimmy Williams, the manager of that team. And so I had kind of had this retrospective post on the back burner. And now I guess I can remove it completely because that game has now been

superseded by this new game in which Darno and Cabrera switched 22 times, which I believe is a new Major League record. So probably not something we're going to see catch on, but you do kind of wonder whether this is something we'll see from time to time in the outfield corners, for instance. Russell Carlton has written about whether that makes sense and maybe it's something that would happen in the infield too you just have a stronger defender you want the stronger defender in the place where he's most likely to get the ball of course there's a shame aspect to this too i think because you're publicly declaring in front of everyone that this fielder is worse than that fielder and you don't want this guy field fielding the ball, and you do want this other guy fielding the ball. So not sure that that would

outweigh any small benefits here. And we don't even know how a player would respond to changing from batter to batter and whether there's some defensive penalty associated with that. But it was another weird one, emblematic of the Mets season. And in 20 years, maybe I'll do a retrospective on that game instead. Yeah, you probably don't need to worry about the shame when you're dealing with a catcher who's playing second and third base so much. So in this one opportunity, it made some sense. I had seen that you linked to the baseball reference box score of the Mariners Blue Jays game before. I saw Kelly Gruber did not notice that it was Cecil Fielder, who's literally Cecil Fielder,

who is doing this. And Cecil Fielder, you know, he was mostly not a guy who moved around full stop, but he moved around plenty in this game. And in his career, he had seven games, he appeared at third base, and he had two games where he appeared at second base. One of them is this game where he appeared at second base something like nine times. But then three days later, in a game between the Blue Jays and the a's he played an inning at second base again and those were the only two games where cecil fielder played second base at the major league level and now i want that article to continue and i want you to track down cecil fielder the second game on may 5th so the blue jays lost the a's it appears this was the second game of a double header so in this game game, Cecil Fielder pinch hit, played second, played third, played second, played third, and then played second. So the same thing happened again to a lesser extent.

Maybe you already knew this because you were working on an article. Yeah, I think the game after May 2nd, maybe the very next game, I think Gruber and Pat Borders did the same thing to a lesser extent. So I never got the full details, but I assume there was something similar going on to the Smet situation where they just ran out of fielders. Okay. Well, that's fascinating. I had no idea that Cecil Fielder was ever a second baseman. I guess that it's more interesting to me than Jorge Posada.

So I, and this is before Cecil Fielder was Cecil. I mean, he was, he was probably still a big boy, but this is before he, what did he, he went to Japan, right? And then he started to hit for power. And then this is 1988 that this was happening. And he had an OPS of 721. And then he goes away, comes back a year later, and he hits 51 dingers. So big things happening for Cecil Fielder.

But before the home runs, there was second base and a third base and a second base. All right. And last thing for me, at least one more strange field submission. This was an international edition. This comes from Peter, who says, I just started playing for a small men's baseball league in Scotland made up of a mix of Americans like myself who live here and miss baseball and locals who are learning to love the sport. lot of errors and walks, but it's fun anyway. As it's Scotland, there aren't really any dedicated baseball fields. You either have immaculate football slash rugby pitches or public parks that are just grass. Well, that's what we play on, just grass. No infield dirt at all. We in Aberdeen have a portable mound just recently built made of wood covered in artificial turf that resembles a wheelchair ramp. I believe Glasgow also has a similar mound. The backstops are small portable fencing, usually very close behind home plate.

And the outfield wall is orange plastic, construction-style fencing erected just before game time. Anyway, yesterday we played in a way doubleheader in Edinburgh and arrived to find the field had not been mowed for some time, leaving the grass almost a foot long, though tamped down and soft, not tall, straight wheat-like grass. I was curious to see how this would affect play, as I think I remember Ben and Sam bantering about what would happen if you just let the grass grow wild. In a small sample, the grass seemed to favor the hitters. Ground balls would die in the grass, were difficult to pick up or find, especially for catchers. A ball reaching the backstop could be nigh impossible to locate, turning quickly with a mask on, making it easier to steal, stop could be nigh impossible to locate turning quickly with a mask on making it easier to steal and the difference in the way the ball behaved disrupted fielder's reactions making a routine

ground ball go for an infield hit there were several instances of hard hit balls that might have made it through the infield under normal circumstances that died instead and went for outs but on the whole the batters had the advantage and there was another email we got recently about whether the grass is something that is considered in park factors. And it's not explicitly, but different fields do have either different types of grass or certainly different ways of manicuring that grass and growing the length of the grass. And Sam once wrote something at BP about how the infield grass at Safeco was very thick and slow and that that contributed to Safeco being a pitcher's park, too. thick and slow and that that contributed to Safeco being a pitcher's park too. But if you're interested in seeing these pictures of Peter's Scottish fields, you can go to facebook.com slash Aberdeen Baseball Club and they have some images up there.

So thank you, Peter. And the only thing that I have to contribute to this episode that is apparently entirely banter is there was an article that showed up on the Players Tribune and it showed up eight days ago and it was called The Creature. Did you get a chance to see this? You would have been traveling or packing. So this is an article written by Chris Davis, but Oakland's Chris Davis, the better Chris Davis. And someone linked to me. I did not see this when it was initially published, but someone linked it to me because I had written a quick little blog post some time ago about how Chris Davis was on track to have the worst throwing arm season in modern baseball record. And this is nothing that's astonishing because he's never had a very good throwing arm. And there have been these rumors that have sort of floated around on Twitter and comment sections that, oh, well, it's because he had some shoulder injury in college,

and it's to his, I don't know, his throwing shoulder, but maybe it's his not dominant shoulder. So he's still clearly very strong at swinging, but not very strong at hitting. Not true. It turns out that is not the problem. It's essentially the yips. And this is an article that Chris Davis wrote where the creature is what he he doesn't use the word yips. He refers to it in the article. So if I just do a search, his words quote when he uses the words yips once, but he he uses the creature. I'll just use his words from this article. I'll just use his words from this article. I'll start here. For me, it'll sometimes appear as I wind up my arm to throw a baseball. When stuff like that happens in the sports world, some people call it the yips or

describe it as having a mental block. But to me, it's the creature and it's something I've struggled with for a long time. So it's an article that's worth reading to understand what's going on with Chris Davis. And in short, he has this fear that every time he throws the ball, he's going to overthrow the guy who he's throwing to generally the cutoff man or somebody else, and it just gets in his head. And he says, and you commonly hear this from people who have this sort of throwing problem that it doesn't really affect him very much when he doesn't have time to think. But when he has more time, then he starts to think about all the ways that it could go wrong. And then just goes haywire so he either throws poorly or he throws it softly and

he just doesn't get a whole lot of juice on the baseball it's something that he's continued to work on he went to an instructional class with tom house of great renown and it's tom house who actually came up with the name the creature in the first place but in any case i don't know what compelled chris davis to write this now i don't know why he wanted to go ahead and make this public. He said that it's at least as far as I know, it's something that he hadn't opened up about before. But it's it's good to know. I don't know if it's better or worse, but it's a thing. As with probably all situations, it can be fun, kind of enjoyable to look at someone's poor numbers in some category. But then when you start to hear about a player discuss said poor performance then it loses a little bit of its charm uh and now that's just part of

feeling human you know you don't want to make too much fun of chris davis for not being able to throw very well when it's something that he's struggling with and has been struggling with uh his entire time as a professional he says that he did not struggle with this before until i think it was 2009 uh yeah in fact i can tell you more you more. The creature was born in Phoenix, Arizona during the summer of 2009. I was in the Milwaukee organization then. It was right after I got drafted. I was playing for the Arizona League Brewers at the time. Almost from day one and seemingly out of nowhere, my throws to the infield were awful. It was bizarre. My arm had always been fairly strong in the past, but that summer my throws were just really, really soft. It was like there was nothing behind them and there would be no skip when they'd land. They

just kind of land and roll. I had no idea what was going on, et cetera. I don't need to read the rest of the article out loud, but in short, we have an explanation for what is up with Chris Davis and it's his brain, not his throwing arm. I don't know if that's better or worse, but we have the answer. All right, cool. Well, good for him for admitting it Or opening up about it I hope that helps him in some way As having read Rick Enkiel's book about it recently It is not a problem that I would want to have It sounds awful

And maybe it's not quite so bad for an outfielder As it is for a pitcher whose whole life is throwing But it still has to be pretty unpleasant Yeah, just imagine daily writer's block It's essentially blogging yips, right? Yeah, right. Yeah. After I read that book, Michael Bowen and I read that book so that we could talk to

Enkiel on the podcast. And it really was like I was feeling like, what if this happens to me? It's really scary. Whatever you do, just to think of the equivalent happening in your own career is pretty terrifying. So I hope it doesn't. I remember several years ago, it was probably 2007 or I don't know, maybe 2009, the Jose Lopez with the Mariners era, which lasted a while. But I remember there was one particular winter. So I guess maybe it was 2010 because I was living in Portland. But I remember, I don't remember how it

started, but it just, things got to a point where I knew that I was supposed to write and I had stuff I was supposed to write and I had stuff I was supposed to write about so the ideas were there but I would sit down at the keyboard and something in my body would refuse to let me write it out and it was I was still able to get things written and I don't have any way to evaluate how good they were nobody seemed to notice and it was fleeting as all things I've had to deal with with writing have been fleeting but I do remember for for weeks it felt like the act of writing was something that my body was trying to resist and now this was shortly after the 2010 Seattle Mariners season so I think my

body was on the right page yeah but it was it's the closest that I've we've all struggled to find ideas but I don't that's not the same thing thing. This was my body saying, you shouldn't be writing. I'm not going to let you write. And so it was a really interesting and unexplained struggle to go through. Yeah, that's pretty disconcerting. Yeah, that has never really happened to me. I've definitely had topic block before. I mean, there are days where you just feel like you're writing really well, or it's going really smoothly and quickly. And there are days when it's kind of painful and you have to grind out every word,

but I don't think I've had quite that experience, but certainly topic block is a, is a real thing that you overcome via daily desperation. Please help everyone out there. Please help. All right. I guess we should do some emails. Yeah,

we probably should. There've been some emails mixed in here, but all right, here's one from a Patreon supporter named Matt Cain, actually. And he is writing about the Indians. I don't know whether this inspired your Indians post or is just a coincidence. But he wants to know about the Indians. He says, as a Cleveland fan, it's been an interesting season.

I watch probably four games a week in all season. They've just seemed quite a bit better than their record. As a Fangraphs devotee, I head to the base run standings. And of course, my feelings are reinforced that they should be about six to eight games better than their record, depending on the day. I know base runs takes into account things like cluster luck, but as a layman, it's a bit of a black box. So I was curious why they've lost so many more games than they should have. And you just wrote about this, right? Yeah. Now, this, right? Yeah.

Now, this was actually a coincidence. This is not inspired by the Patreon message, but here we are anyway. So fun timing. So in the email that we got, he identified that there's a weird split in batting average on balls in play between Indians hitting with runners in scoring position and Indians pitching with runners in scoring position. And you could say that that's that's part of it. But what's interesting for anyone who's not familiar with base runs, it's basically just trying to strip away timing and

luck. It works if if baseball prospectuses third order standings are any more familiar, which as I say it out loud, they're probably not. But any any case, it works in a similar way. But many of you are probably more familiar with just Pythagorean record, which is based on run differential. And what's interesting is that the Indians, they're well off of their Pythagorean record as well. And that's based on actual run scoring output. So it's this is not a situation so much where the Indians have struggled to generate as many runs or prevent as many runs as you'd expect. It's more, it's been a matter of timing. And this is nothing that's unique to the Indians so much. It seems like every year,

and well, I guess we know every year there's going to be some team that's more or less clutch than every other team. But the Indians, I've made the mistake of trying to explain T-OPS plus on the air before, so I'm going to try to skip that but looking at the indians offensive leverage splits there are low leverage situations medium leverage situations and high leverage situations and this season the indians have been much much worse in high leverage situations than they have been the rest of the time and if you look at that stat which i mentioned and will not say again they show up as one of the worst of all time and all time is only a couple of decades we don't have this in a few decades more than a couple but this

information doesn't exist going all the way back to like 1922 but it covers a lot of time and the indians are way way down there so relative to their overall performance they have really struggled in these high leverage spots and what that essentially means is that while they've been able to generate a good number of runs when the runs have been the most important or when the game has been on the line, they have underperformed. And so when that happens, then you have a team that's more likely to be scoring runs that don't matter so much and less likely to be scoring runs that are meaningful and can make a difference in the game. Baseball Reference also has the split that's called late and close. I don't know where the cutoffs are for that, but the Indians have been

terrible. They've batted 210. They've slugged 340 in late and close situations. And it's just been it's been a problem of timing. There's no reason for this to continue. The Indians very roster does not have a history of doing this last year. They were totally normal. So if anything, I'd say this is kind of encouraging in that the Indians are indeed better than their first place record that they already have. Yeah, there's some team that does something along these lines every year, whether it's clutch hitting or clutch pitching. And then we write the same sort of articles about that team that we wrote about the previous year's team that did that thing. And every now and then it's the same team doing it multiple years. And then people wonder whether they have finally figured something out.

And usually, probably not. It is still just kind of a random thing, and it usually regresses. But I think fans always have a hard time believing, in some cases, that the clutchness of their team is not some inherent repeatable skill that is related to their character. But the history of teams going from clutch to not clutch is such that it's always safe to assume that the weirdness is not going to continue. And yeah, that seems like a positive sign for the Indians right now. Related to that real quick, sorry to cut you off, but something that I have delighted noticing, and we'll probably write about again soon if it keeps up. So Fangraphs keeps track of a clutch statistic. I'm not going to go into explaining how it's

calculated. It just, look, just, it's there. just look just it's there it says clutch just trusted last year by that measure the least clutch position player least clutch hitter in the national league was chris bryant now this season i wrote about it last season and you know some cubs fans came to his fence whatever he's a good player he was clutch in 2015 but last year chris bryant was the least clutch hitter in the National League. However, this season, Chris Bryant has been the least clutch hitter in either league. He has been the least clutch hitter in the major leagues. He is, well, forget his clutch score. He's just there. He's at the bottom of the list and the name just ahead of him, Aaron Judge.

Kind of fun. Yeah. And of course, you wrote about the unclutchness of Josh Reddick, which I also wrote about more recently. So yeah, he's another guy who's had that persist over a pretty large sample as these things go. All right. And look at that. Josh Reddick is right there. He's at 20th worst among all qualified heroes in the major leagues. As usual. All right. So well, while we're talking about real baseball things and teams, I guess

we could do this question. This is from Luke, who says, I continue to be surprised that more hasn't been made of the Giants collapse this season. I know we are well past the time in the year where people pay attention to non-contenders but holy crap the giants have been terrible a favorite to make the playoffs is now fighting for the number one overall pick in the draft you could argue that only two players on the roster have played to or exceeded expectations posy and block black wait black wait how do you say it you said it just i've heard both yeah posy and block did Wait, Black? How do you say it? You said it just a minute ago I've heard both Yeah Posey and Block Did I just did

I did somewhere in the middle You compromised I was probably Definitely wrong According to Baseball Reference The answer is Not listed Well, that didn't help

All right I'll say Block Wait, Ty Black Now I'm in my head Ty Just go with Black Ty Block Ty Blatch Ty Black. Now I'm in my head. Just go with Black. Ty Block. Ty Blatch. Ty Black. Posey and Black. I don't know. Sure.

Everything has been a disaster. Panic and Crawford combined for 16.5. War over the last two years. They have combined for 1.8 this year. Hunter Pence has lost 30 points on his career in 2016. WRC Plus, Brendan Beltz, Babbitt is 50 points lower than his career numbers, and he is currently battling his fourth career concussion. Denard Spann is the worst defender in baseball this year,

although this shouldn't have been surprising to anyone. And yet, reading Grant Brisby slowly lose his sanity all season has been the saddest part. So my question is simple. Can this team contend next year year or is a big rebuild required this is a big question among the fan base as i think most thought the giants window would last a couple more years as posy and bum garner are still elite talents yeah grant you've had it so tough you've had a real difficult time writing about the giants do the mariners for 10 freaking years just so when you get to this part of the season just as a writer less time is spent thinking about the teams who are terrible and have been

out of contention for a while I don't know the last time I wrote about the Phillies for example and the Giants I think we've gotten used to the fact that you know we thought that the National League playoff picture was basically predetermined and and it's not and it's mostly because the Giants and the Mets have have underachieved. And there are reasons for that the Mets have had a lot of injuries and the Giants have had some injuries as well. There's their story is less easy to just link to the number of players on the disabled list. But you know, being without Madison Bumgarner, who's probably their best player for so or second best player, I don't know, I don't care. He's very good,

but he missed a lot of time poses been there. My sense it's only a gut feeling at this point but my sense is that when we go into next season giants will make some tweaks they'll probably find like a real center fielder and and i think that they're going to be okay i'm going to look at them and think well that's a wild card contender nowhere close to the dodgers i feel like this has just been a confluence of a whole lot of horrible things happening at once but i am concerned just thinking about like belt having four career concussions he's a good player long-term extension but you just never know i know i'm a little spooked now from preparing for hours to interview dickie thon which hasn't happened but just thinking about how players come back from those things i know thon didn't have a

concussion so much as he lost vision in his eye which is a different circumstance but when you start involving the head you just can't know how someone's going to come back i know there was a report the other day that brandon belt was quote not doing any better well i guess i didn't attribute the quote so whatever that's paraphrased but i also said quote so there there are reasons to be concerned here and of course the farm system is not very good johnny cueto is not going to opt out but it looks like that's not a good thing so you know there there are reasons for some real worry here but there's still enough of a core that i think it's it's going to take more for me to give up on the giants i don't look at them and think these are the tigers or these are the orioles i

think that there's another another surge in them the next season but the the distance between them and the dodgers i guess it was tweeted the other day it's pretty much it's the biggest distance that's ever existed between the two teams and that that's true in the standings. And I think that that is, at least in modern times, that is true in the organizational standing as well. Yeah, the defense has been bad. Some of the players are getting older and the competitive landscape in that division has changed. It's gone from being the weakest and easiest division for quite some time to now being one of the tougher ones with maybe the team you would least like to share a division with, as well as two other pretty

good teams now and another team that's kind of doing its own rebuild now. So they're in sort of a tough spot, but whenever so much goes wrong and so many players underperform their projections and their past performance, it's usually safe to expect that the next season will not be quite so terrible. Although I know that their being terrible does extend back to the middle of last season too, which maybe makes it slightly more concerning. But yeah, just so many things have gone wrong that they can't continue to go wrong to the same extent most likely. All right, let's see. All right, one more before we get to your stats segment. So Billy says, I've been watching the World Athletic Championships in London this

week. While watching the javelin competition, my sports scientist girlfriend mentioned that the best way to throw the javelin is similar to how you throw a ball. This made me wonder how the best baseball pitchers would do in the javelin competition. Assuming that the best throwers in North America will play baseball for a decent salary rather than throw a javelin for little money, I thought that they'd probably walk over the javelin throwers if they wanted to compete. I looked up how fast exit velocity is on a javelin throw and found out that it's about 100 kilometers per hour for the elite javelin throwers. The javelin is 800 grams. Chapman is baseball's fastest pitcher at 170 kilometers per hour,

but a baseball is only 150 grams. I did some basic kinetic energy calculations to find out how fast Chapman might be able to throw the heavier javelin, and unfortunately this put him way behind the javelin throwers, only around 54 kilometers per hour. To be fair, Chapman doesn't get a run-up in crow hop, but even so, that's a lot to make up, so I'd assume Chapman wouldn't be able to compete at the javelin. This made me sad. However, I then realized that that meant that the best javelin throwers might be amazing pitchers. Using the same kinetic energy calculations, I worked out how fast they might throw a baseball with the same energy they release a javelin with. The answer, 144 miles per hour. I don't know. I checked the math. I'm not sure. I'd totally buy it. But again, this is with a run-up, which you obviously don't get on a baseball mound. But even so, I've never heard of any baseball player throwing a crow hop anything like that fast. Seems like these javelin throwers would have easy gas. I'm guessing they would break new records of bones broken by hit by pitches. So this sounds somewhat fishy, perhaps that you have by far the hardest throwers

ever just waiting there throwing javelins around when they could be throwing baseballs at blistering speeds that we've never seen before. So I said this to Alan Nathan, physics expert, as one does. Please be correct. Please be correct. Please be correct. He said he did have some thoughts on this. So he said, I'm just going to quote this here. He said, there have been experiments done looking at how the release speed of various balls depend on the mass of the ball. There's a lot of variance in the experiments. Roughly speaking, the speed is proportional to 1 over m to the n, where m is the mass

and n is the exponent. If the speed were independent of mass, that would imply that n equals zero. If the speed were such that the kinetic energy of the ball were independent of mass, then n would be 0.5. The experiments fall right in between those limits, n equals 0.25 to 0.3. Using 0.25, I find that an 800 gram javelin thrown at 100 kilometers per hour would imply that a 150 gram baseball would be thrown at about 150 kilometers per hour, which is only 90 miles per hour. Actually, a baseball is more like 145 grams, but that's just a detail. So I'm going to go with Alan's math over Billy's here. No offense, Billy.

You brought it to our attention. I appreciate it. But Alan is saying that javelin throwers, at least the elite ones, if you put them in baseball, maybe would be throwing faster than Jared Weaver, at least when they have the crow hop on their side, but they would not be breaking any records. They'd be throwing 90 miles per hour or so with the benefit of the run-up and the crow hop. And that sounds a bit more plausible to me. So here's the problem with you forwarding this to Alan Nathan is now there's not going to be that shred of me that thinks maybe, which is what I really wanted. Just, you know, to end the day, you go to bed, think, what if?

What if baseball has been so poor with its scouting that it completely overlooked the javelin population? And then all of a sudden we find out which baseball teams have been listening to Effectively Wild because they just go out and sign all these olympic javelin throwers yes but no alan athens has to go and prove around now granted there still exists some shred of the possibility that billy's math is correct and alan athens math is incorrect and baseball teams are horribly inefficient pitching scouts so i'm still gonna cling but my heart's not gonna be in it like it would have been otherwise.

No. Actually, I think the Million Dollar Arm guys, the Pirates signed Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel were javelin throwers as well as cricketers. And they didn't throw 140 miles per hour. So that's probably a point in Alan's column. All right. Stat segment? I have a stat segment. And this is kind of cheating because I did write about it a little bit today.

It's about Chris Davis. And it's also something you've written about. As I mentioned in the article, I violated one of my own cardinal rules, which was to write about a topic after you have written about the topic. It's a horrible idea. I do not endorse other people doing it, but it had been two and a half months. So I thought, why not? Also, I watched the thing happen yesterday that I was delighted by. Yesterday at the very end of a nerve wracking game between the Mariners and the Orioles,

two teams laughably jockeying for playoff position, which is a thing that's still happening because nobody in the American League wants to be good. The ninth inning featured a Mariners closer, Edwin Diaz, coming out. He faced seven batters. One of them he struck out looking on a ball. Another one required a miraculous catch by Leonis Martin. And the other five either got hit or walked. So it was a bad outing for edwin diaz so he was pulled and with the bases loaded and two outs in a 76 game mark zapchinski came in trying to get his second career major league save

and he got it because he struck out chris davis on three pitches that is not rare he did however strike out chris davis looking on three pitches and that is not rare he struck out chris davis looking on three pitches where the third pitch rare he struck out Chris Davis looking on three pitches where the third pitch was a fastball literally right down the middle of the plate and that is not rare so you wrote about Chris Davis and his semi-historical or at least modern baseball historic called strikeout season he was having through two months now he went on the disabled list so that kind of ruined some of his counting stats a little bit but fun fact still leading the major leagues in called strikeouts chris davis as as i speak he leads the major leagues with 54 called third strikes aaron judge and steven souza are tied for second place

at 48 chris davis has been on the disabled list those other two players have not so you know that's bad and what i wrote about was the fact that Chris Davis struck out looking. It's one thing to strike out looking on a borderline pitch. Everybody does it except for Brandon Phillips. But incidentally, Brandon Phillips and Mike Moustakis this year, one called the third strike each. Fun. But Davis struck out looking at a pitch right down the middle. So I used Baseball Savant to define.

If any of you haven't used Baseball baseball's font they break up pitches in the zone by they break the strikes into nine boxes and so you can select inner third middle third outer third upper third middle third lower third and so i selected the middle middle box just to uh to look at call the strikeouts on pitches down the middle and unsurprisingly this season chris davis leads baseball he has struck out looking He's taken eight third strikes right down the middle of the plate, as defined by a baseball savant. There is pitch tracking information going back to 2008. That is when PitchFX really blossomed and had information for every team in every stadium. And since 2008, so over 10 years, Davis is currently tied for the most such called third strikes.

Jack Cust in 2008, also famously aggravatingly patient he took eight third strikes down the middle carlos pena in 2010 also took eight third strikes down the middle nobody else has gotten to eight nobody's gotten to nine nobody's gotten to 10 davis now has six weeks to uh try to get a record he is leading the major leagues this year by two. Davis incidentally also as of taking that strikeout against Marcus Zipczynski, he has now assumed the total lead since 2008. So just as a counting stat, Chris Davis since 2008, so over 10 years, leads the major leagues in called strikeouts down the middle. He is at 28 of them. Second place is David Wright at 27, followed by Mike Napoli drew stubs and adam dunn

i don't think anything up there is too shocking but in any case just wanted to give some perspective and because it's fun to look at the hitters one might also wonder about pitchers who get strike outs down the middle i know uh and you also know that sam miller has written about clayton kershaw's habit of throwing pitches right down the middle and still succeeding so since 2008 the league leader in called third strikes on pitches right down the middle is clayton kershaw he has got 46 of them uh he's followed by justin verlander at 43 and then there's no one until max scherzer at 35 and then felix hernandez at 30 problem with felix hernandez hitters are no longer taking those pitches right down the middle so that is the uh that's the total landscape looking at The individual seasons also interesting here

2009 Justin Verlander has The individual season lead with 12 called the third strike Right down the middle and second place is 8 And look at that here's Jared Weaver He's showing up in 2011 He had 8 this year's current leader is Jamison Tyon with 7 called third

Strikes right down the middle and Getting away from the strike zone, I'm just looking at overall called strikes, since I already mentioned that Chris Davis has struck out looking 54 times this season. Chris Sale leads all pitchers with 61 called third strikes. Clayton Kershaw is in second at 56, followed by Corey Kluber, Jacob DeGrom, and Trevor Bauer. The pitcher with the highest rate of called strikeouts,

overall strikeouts, is Robert Selman. He's at 46%. And the laggard, if you will, Michael Pineda, who this year has 92 strikeouts and 83 of those being swinging. What surprised me is that Sonny Gray is actually second last. He's got 11 called strikeouts and 100 swinging strikeouts, which surprised me because he's or at least has been a big curveball pitcher and there seems to be a pretty good link between pitchers who throw really good curveballs and pitchers who get a lot of called strikes and called strikeouts but sonny gray not so much of a good breaking ball pitcher anymore he's trying to succeed via other means that's all i got all right i like when the stat segments come full circle and refer to someone

we brought up in the banter nice job with with that. All right. We have been talking for quite some time already, but I've got a few left here. We haven't done this in a while. Let's see if we can get these in quickly. So question from Bobby. You guys dealt with a question the other week about how long Albert Pujols would have to play before he managed to get back to zero career war. By the way, Pujols now holds the record or has tied the record for most ground balls double plays. Oh, yeah. No, that's another post I wrote this week. So thank you, Effectively Wild. Seriously, you are coming through for me in the clutch because it's August and there's nothing to write about. Albert Pujols, when I wrote about him, he had reached 353 career double plays routed into. Has he done it again? No, but he's at 353 he broke cal ripken's record of 350 he broke it against jarrell cotton my favorite thing about that half inning aside from pool holes rounding into his uh 351st double play is that he grounded out on a regular grounder to shortstop and in the plate appearance previous to pool holes mike trout hit a grounded shortstop

and reached safely so mike trout faster than faster than Albert Pujols as Pujols granted into career double play number 351, all time record in baseball history. Neither the Angels television broadcast nor the A's television broadcast had a word to say about it. I don't think anyone knew. All right. Well, that's not actually what this question is about. Bobby continues. At the end of that discussion, you talked about the tail end of Pujols' existing contract and how maybe the Angels would be better off just paying him and not rostering him. And y'all mentioned Gil Mesh retiring and giving back the last couple of years of his contract and how maybe Albert might do that too out of pride or something.

Y'all didn't say he should do that, but I wonder about overall value over the life of his career. It's not in dispute that baseball players are underpaid compared to their value for their first several years of their career. It's a fundamental part of the way a baseball works, and I recognize that some of this is necessary in the sense that teams have to invest in a lot of players who don't ever pan out as major leaguers, which means the ones who make it, especially the ones who excel, have quite a bit of survivor bias, but it still sticks in my craw that Pujols' is that the right plural, and Trout's, etc. are underpaid for a ton of their most productive years. If you tote up Albert Pujols' career from beginning to end, is he underpaid or overpaid relative to the value he produces? If he's underpaid, is that still likely to be true

even after his current contract runs out? If it will be, how much longer would the Angels have to pay him at the current rate before he's finally overpaid on a career basis? Okay, so I ran some math, which is good because I couldn't do this on the fly. Many of you will probably be familiar with the idea of market valuations of dollars per win on the free agent market, which is, they work as functional estimates. they work as functional estimates. And that's grown over time to the point where I think now we're at something like what, eight and a half or $9 million per win above replacement on the free agent market, something like that. And these numbers exist going further back. So just using some real easy estimates and Fangraphs has this data going back to 2002. So I estimated 2001. By free agent market rates, Albert Pujols has produced value worth nearly $500 million. He has been paid roughly $230

million and he is due another $114 million over the remainder of his deal. And then I guess there's that like lifetime something clause in his contract, personal service contract. I don't know what that means. He's going to, the angels probably aren't going to want to have him around. Anyway, so just based on what Pujols has been worth, had he played his entire career under free market rates, yeah, he's been underpaid because he's one of the best players, certainly one of the best hitters of all time throughout baseball history, and he has not been paid as such. When he had his first, his first big contract with the Cardinals, he even through that was dramatically underpaid. The Cardinals got a hell of a deal. If I were Albert Pujols and I were playing as if I were Albert Pujols today, I would probably... You can't really walk away from $114

million remaining on your deal. It would be at least like the union probably wouldn't love it. The team would definitely love it. But if you're Pujols and you're looking for a reason not to walk away from the money. You think, well, this is just making up for the money I didn't make when I was younger. And that's a perfectly rational and reasonable justification because he has been tremendously underpaid throughout his career, or at least for the good part of his career. Where you run into an issue, I guess, is that that's true of basically everyone who isn't Barry Bonds, who finds all their value after they're 30 years old. So this is just part of it. Every player who is great for the most part will retire having been underpaid relative to free market rates. But I mean, I guess that wasn't the question. Yeah. Well, so if he continues to be a sub replacement level player over the rest of this

contract, will they meet in the middle there by the end by the time he retires will he finally have been fairly paid over the course of his career do you think yeah well it i guess he'd have to be super bad but continue to play because if he's just if they just cut him or stopped playing him then he still would have been worth that 490 or $500 million. And then he would have been paid a total of something like $350 million over his career. So he needs to lose, he still needs to lose like $150 million of value, which is a lot of lost wins. That's like he has to be a negative 15 or 20 win player over the remainder of the contract, which based on current trajectory, not impossible, but seems unlikely. So I think maybe what would have to happen is for Pujols to play it out. Then it's finally over.

And then the Angels say, we have signed Albert Pujols to a $100 million extension, and he will continue to play some. And we want to make sure that he is paid what he has been worth overall. All right. Penultimate question from Chris. I would like to submit the following into the annals of if baseball were different, how different would it be? Instead of the current free agency structure where players review contracts from teams

and pick based on their preference, what would happen if players did not know which team was bidding for them? They would receive a handful of contracts that only included dollar amounts, buyouts, opt-outs, et cetera. But the contracts themselves would say nothing about the team, league, state, or country they're playing for. For the sake of this question, let's assume that local, state, and federal tax rates are not built into the contracts so that players could not deduce that they're playing in a state with no state income tax or in Canada based on their federal tax rate and that the teams could not accidentally leak that they were interested

in a certain player. Would historically great teams like the Dodgers, Red Sox, and Yankees be more affected as they would no longer be allowed to use their franchise legacy as a lure for free agents? Would this add even more parity to the already pretty steady parity of MLB? What would the difference be if the rule were implemented immediately versus if it were implemented when baseball began and never changed? So you would have more players accidentally signing with the marlins but i think that as a rule of thumb if players were signing contracts blind and they're just basically taking the biggest offer then it would operate a lot like how free agency already operates there's a case every every uh every off

season you have a few cases of players who reportedly turn down more money. Like, Kenley Jansen was offered more by the Marlins than the Dodgers, right? I think that was true. I think the Marlins offered him an extra year or $10 million extra. I don't know. The Marlins made a huge offer to Kenley Jansen, but Jansen wanted to return to the Dodgers. So in that case, you would have had to player shift teams. So you would have some movement because, of course, there are players who take smaller deals deals but just as a general rule of thumb they do not like to do that they are out there to find the contracts that best demonstrate their worth and you you would still have the same big

spenders and so even if even if players were accepting offers blind there are teams that could just offer those big contracts more than say the padresres could. Yep. Yeah. So I think it would hurt those teams to a certain extent, just because players probably do prefer to play for a winner or a place where they could get big endorsement dollars, etc. All else being equal, but all else is usually not equal. And so, yeah, if anything, those teams just might up their offers relative to what they would offer if they had the benefit of that kind of marquee value associated with their names. So maybe they'd just pay a little more, but they would still probably usually be the high bidders. And that would probably be enough to land the player in most cases, but not all. There would be some difference. I guess you'd probably have

even fewer good players reaching free agency as well, because teams might be more incentiv incentivized assign them to extensions before they're free agents if they're good so then the free agent market would be just be awful anyway and so then you don't even want to be winning the bids all right and last question this one comes from ryan with the nationals disabled list including adam eaton jason worth and nationals legend ryan rayburn and with the recent edition of bryce Harper, are there any other under-the-radar trades that since the trade deadline have gained more importance than the Nationals'

acquisition of Howie Kendrick? No, seriously, Howie Kendrick has been good this year. I promise. Look it up. Which I did, because I didn't believe it. And it's true. I searched Howie Kendrick fan graphs to find his player page And the second Google result

Was a post called Howie Kendrick is finished That was published last March At the Fangraphs community blog Which I believe is edited by one Jeff Sullivan, nice job Jeff Edited but not written So Howie Kendrick it turns out is not finished And has actually, as we speak

He is in the middle of a game, as we speak, in which he has already recorded an extra base hit. But his season line right now is 347-402-516. That is a 142 WRC plus in 209 plate appearances. So that is really excellent. And he's been even more excellent since the Nationals acquired him on July 28th for Mackenzie Mills, who is a left-handed A-ball pitcher and also some international bonus slot money. So that was such an under-the-radar trade that I'm not even sure I was totally aware of it at the time, but it happened. And yeah, Kendrick has come along at the right time and really bailed them out. So I don't know any Moves occur to you as ones that Have been especially valuable

Since the trade deadline which is less than a month ago Eduardo Nunez maybe Is one but I didn't even think of him because the one name is Tim Beckham Oh right well yeah of course I had forgotten about that because we all forgot about that We didn't even write about the Tim Beckham trade on Fangraphs Because we thought who cares but

Howie Kendrick since joining the Nationals has been worth 0.6 wins above replacement estimate but whatever that's fine tim beckham in a month with the orioles uh i take that back less than three weeks with the orioles 1.7 wins above replacement in 69 played appearances tim beckham has 84 hits that doesn't seem like it's true, but I'm just going to assume that it's true. He basically does. Tim Beckham, since joining the Orioles, has batted 485 with a 507 on base percentage, not a big walker, and he slugged 879. Tim Beckham, regular shortstop, has taken over the role previously occupied by, I think, literally Ruben Dejada.

So Beckham has been better than Kendrick. Beckham has been one of the guys who's helped the Orioles sort of kind of return to the periphery of the wildcard race which is the thing that continues to be true despite this being a team that has Ubaldo Jimenez in the starting rotation but with all the Nationals being hurt Kendrick still a very critical player for the Nationals to find he will play a role however they should have many of their players should be healthy come postseason time assuming that Bryce Harper's bone bruise heals And given where the Nationals are on the standings right now They're not going to catch the Dodgers

And they're unlikely to be caught by the Cubs So they're just kind of biding their time So Kendrick, good Beckham, amazing All right, well let's end where we started With Jared Weaver Because Mike, a listener in the Facebook group Pointed out that Jared Weaver's retirement message was delivered in a unique way.

So if you go look at Jared Weaver's Twitter, which, by the way, Jared Weaver has 4,682 followers. That seems like not enough followers for Jared Weaver to have. Granted, he's only tweeted 107 times, but still, that's not a lot of followers for a prominent major leaguer. only tweeted 107 times, but still, that's not a lot of followers for a prominent major leaguer. So Mike points out that Jared Weaver wrote a tweet announcing his retirement, didn't send it, took a screenshot of that tweet draft, then tweeted the screenshot, which appears to be true. He tweeted a picture of two figures, I assume maybe Weaver's family on a beach on a sunset, and he wrote, the sun sets on baseball careers some sooner than others. Thankful to get 12 years in.

So many great teammates. Time to enjoy family. It does look like it's a tweet that he took a screenshot of and then tweeted. I'm not sure if that's accurate. But in one of the replies in the Facebook group, Brian says, bless him. He even found a way to deliver tweets slower than anyone else. Sorry, Jared Weaver. Have a happy retirement.

All right. So we will try to get one more episode in before the eclipse madness starts. One way or another, we will talk to you soon. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners have already pledged their support include Shane Horn, Russell Bryce, Ryan Dolinsky, Tom Mohan, and Benji Mailings. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Michael and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up.

We talked about the Marlins sale and John Carlos Stanton's hot streak and trade rumors surrounding him. We also talked to Rob Arthur from FiveThirtyEight about his research into the hot hand in baseball. You can find that on the Ringer MLB show feed. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email

at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will be back.