Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1107: Dropping (and Drawing) a Line

Episode Date: September 7, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willson Contreras’ Twitter behavior and the Yankees-Red Sox sign-stealing scandal, then answer listener emails about “up the line” vs. “down the line,” how rebuilding works, whether teams can count on the current home-run rate continuing, Deion Sanders’ career taking place today, the heat of the hot corner, the […]

Pick up the phone, call up the line Call up the request line Call up the line Call up the request line Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na Call up the line Get down with it, down with it

This is a request, Mr. Radio Man Just one desire from a hip-hop fan Hey, DJ Hello and welcome to episode 1107 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrass presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangrass presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangrass. Hello. Hi, Ben. Yesterday, you and I had kind of a tough time coming up with banter. We were trying to think of things to talk about.

And then as soon as we stopped talking, there were things to talk about. So there were a bunch of silly stories that popped up after we spoke yesterday. There was Bryce Harper getting a new haircut, cornrows. There's Wilson Contreras DMing adult film stars incessantly and then trotting out the old I was hacked defense, which is always a fun one. Hacked for like a week-long span, I guess, apparently. Oh, God. Why would you hack someone to send private messages to a porn star? Especially one who has already become notorious for blowing up athletes who are DMing her.

Anyway, the more salient story, perhaps, is the Red Sox-Yankees spying Apple Watch story. So of those three, I think we're going to spend some time on that one. And then we're going to get to emails. Is there anything you wanted to say before we get to Apple Watchgate? Well, I guess the Wilson Contreras story

is a helpful reminder that every single one of us in some way is absolutely disgusting. And it's helpful to just not, you try to not know that about one another, but like we know that. We know that about every single person that we meet. Everyone is revolting. Everyone is absolutely off-putting.

If you knew what people actually did when no one's around, you wouldn't want to spend time with anyone in anyone's house. It's just disgusting. And we just lie to ourselves, try to pretend like, oh, no, these people have manners. They're good, wholesome people. And when we leave, they're the exact same. No, they're disgusting. You never want to know. And now next time i write an article about wilson conjurus which might be the first time i write an article about wilson conjurus it's going to be in the back

of my head and it's probably going to color the way that i write because uh you know it's just i'm more curious about whether that tactic works like no seemingly he has had some success with this, right? I mean, unless, I mean, he was striking out repeatedly with this particular approach, but one would think that if he's just DMing someone repeatedly, getting almost no response, it seems to be something that has worked for him in the past. Maybe if you're a major league baseball player, all you have to do is DM hi to someone and And, and that does most of the work. I don't know. Oh God. No game also just like no skill here. It's embarrassing. And you know what? It's like, if you DM to Wilson Contreras be like, Hey, you want to have a catch? Like, he's not going to want to catch you just because that's

his job or like the thing that he does a lot of the time that would be stupid. So I don't know what he's expecting this. Oh God. Just time. That would be stupid. So I don't know what he's expecting. God, just embarrassing. Very, very embarrassing. And I think it was liked by at least one other cub, this tweet by Mia Khalifa. And one would think that like there has to be some kind of clubhouse cost to this behavior, right? I mean, maybe he's not the only player doing this sort of thing, I'm sure, but to have it exposed publicly like this can't be the kind of thing that doesn't cost you some face among your teammates, at least leads to some ribbing, let's say. Yeah, this would be humiliating. Although

you wonder if he was like egged on by, I don't know, John Lackey or something. They're just like all gathered around the phone while he's sending these messages like, oh, send it, send it, emoji, put in the emoji.'s just that is very possible yeah all right so red sox yankees this is obviously a silly story probably ultimately an inconsequential story but a juicy story nonetheless and i understand why it is these are america's two most hated teams i think we can say say, just based on that 538 article, right? Yeah, the Harry Anton survey at 538, the Yankees and the Red Sox were the two teams listed most often as Americans or survey respondents least liked team. So everyone likes that one of these teams,

or maybe both of these teams don't come out of this story looking great. So basically, the story was broken by Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times, who breaks every story these days and took a quick break from politics to go back to breaking baseball stories. So essentially, the Red Sox were doing what probably every other team does, but they were doing it in a way that does break the rules of baseball in that they were stealing signs, but they were stealing signs using technology. to it to this trainer who would then relay information to the players who would then relay information to players on the field who, in theory, could potentially benefit from it. And of course, there's no way to determine whether they did benefit from it.

As Rob Manfred noted, that makes it hard to decide what discipline is appropriate here. Of course, you could say that it doesn't matter what the results are. It's the intent that they should be punished for. Anyway, there are all sorts of hot takes out there right now about how the Red Sox should retroactively have to forfeit all of their games against the Yankees, that sort of thing. I think that is kind of crazy. I mean, yes, if you want to be a hard liner and say that all cheating is equally terrible and should be punished as harshly as possible, I suppose that could lead you to that position but really we know that sign stealing has always been part of baseball it

may or may not be effective some players don't even like it and even if they do benefit from it they might still fail it's baseball it doesn't help that much and so this is breaking the rules because you know players sign steal all the. Players even get information from clubhouse video people, but that information has to be, I don't know, shouted down the tunnel from those people to the dugout, but it is not supposed to be communicating. It's not supposed to be connected to the internet or interfacing with other devices. And so they broke the rules in that way. And one of the most entertaining aspects of this story is that it was like kind of a sting by the Yankees. Like the Yankees were suspicious that they were doing this and they were evidently filming the Red Sox dugout somehow surreptitiously during games and Brian Cashman filed a complaint with the commissioner's office and then the Red

Sox were confronted they admitted it then they kind of counter sued essentially and said that the Yankees had been doing the same thing with the yes network camera I don't know if that's true although I did see some footage yesterday that certainly seemed to show Yankees players on the bench with their iPads watching the game that they were currently playing. So that is not allowed. You can have iPads. Those are provided by MLB. And I once asked an MLB spokesman how you can have iPads in the dugout but ensure that they're not connected to the Internet. iPads in the dugout, but ensure that they're not connected to the internet. And they told me that essentially these special Wi-Fi free iPads are delivered to the dugout before the game,

like in a locked case or something, and you're only allowed to use those iPads. But maybe we'll get into it in a second, but this seems like a difficult thing to enforce. Anyway, I saw a video from a Yankees Angels game in June in which Yankees players, I think maybe in the bullpen, possibly in the dugout. I don't know. But one of the two, they were watching streaming. It certainly appeared to be the game that they were currently involved in. So this is probably not a Red Sox only issue, just like when the Red Sox were caught doing bad things with bonuses in the international market. And they were fined for that. Probably not the only team doing that, but they were the ones caught and punished for

it, which is appropriate. So what were your thoughts about this story? It was hard to wrap my head around. It was a story that came out and it was incredibly popular, but it was hard to separate. It was popular because it's Red sox yankees and there are accusations of cheating right that is i guarantee you that i don't know how many people have retweeted this article 5 000 or something probably more by this point but i don't know how many of those people they probably just retweeted it without ever even before they even clicked on

the article it's just red sox accused of cheating by yankees so that's automatic spy gate yeah etc and god i'm don't don't you don't no one else needs to make that joke we've we've seen it two is not a trick anyway so i read it going in like all right this is some sort of bombshell and i read it and it took a little time it took until i think i read jeff passon's article on it to realize to fully understand like oh right this is basically nothing it's a it's a different level of cheating but it's it's essentially nothing because teams have been trying to steal signs the the whole time i am utterly unconvinced that stealing signs ever actually matters uh the evidence is not very strongly

suggestive that it does anything what i would love more information on and don't have yet is how did this work what kind of time did it because it has to be super quick in order to relay information to a runner who's out on second base to then relay information to a guy in the box because what what are you relaying are you just relaying what the sign code is so that that guy can break it or are you trying to relay after every single sign somehow between when the sign is delivered and when the pitch is delivered what's what what it's going to be. I don't know. I don't have that information. I assume that the video person is trying to break the sign system. And then once that person has done that is then trying to relay specific pitches or a little time. Yeah, there's really

is not a lot of time to have like a chain of three people with a smartwatch or not. So I mean, I guess you could step out of the box or call time or something, but it seems like it would be pretty difficult to do in practice. Right. And if you look, I've never I've never been in a situation where I'm hitting and my team is trying to steal signs. I don't know how this works. And the fact that pretty much every team is trying to do it, if only for their own amusement, suggests that, OK, maybe there's some kind of benefit because everyone is trying to steal signs all the time. And that's for the same reason that catchers and pitchers are always mixing up their signs. They mix it up by inning even sometimes. Some teams have a whole bunch of different signs that they

go through over the course of a game. So if that many people are doing it, it seems to suggest that, okay, there's some practical utility here. But if you are a hitter and you're looking for some indication of what pitch is going to be on the way, it means in part you're sort of distracted because you're looking somewhere else for some other kind of sign. And in this situation, if they're trying to relay out what the pitch is going to be, and you're looking out of the second basement who's waiting on a message from the dugout, if the pitcher like starts his delivery and you're still kind of looking for the sign from the second baseman, then you're just going to be late and distracted yourself. And one should know that the Red Sox lost many of these games to the Yankees, I believe. I don't

remember the exact numbers, but they certainly did not have a good series just over the weekend. So long story short, fun when teams are accused of cheating, less fun when you realize everyone is cheating, fun when you realize they're cheating with a stupid Apple watch, and less fun when you realize everyone is cheating fun when you realize they're cheating with a stupid apple watch and less fun when you realize it doesn't really matter but fun when you realize it doesn't really matter and yet they still got caught and busted it's impossible not to reflect on when the red sox busted michael panetta for his pine car incident just because it was so conspicuous and i think that's what the red sox ran into with their international bonus allotments that they were busted for the other year, because that's something that I think just about every single team playing in the international market was doing. I don't remember

the details of the scandal, but I think the idea was they were caught sort of like trying to bend the rules with package deals, right? So they were trying to, they couldn't sign players for more than $300,000, I think, because of previously blown past their limit. So then I think they were trying to package players together so that they could allegedly pay them both like $300,000, even though they were really trying to pay one of them like, I don't know, $550,000 or something. And that's something that teams have done for as long as the rules have existed. And that's a clear loophole opportunity. But I guess the Red Sox must have been too conspicuous about it. And so it seems like this time they might have been too conspicuous about it again their penalty will be laughably

small because nobody cares and this is just one of those those big baseball stories that people will remember they'll remember this season for but this is not like the cardinals hacking the astros this is the red sox no pressing buttons on an Apple Watch. Yeah. I mean, people will be making Twitter jokes about this for years, I'm sure. And every time a Red Sox hitter gets a hit with a runner on second or something, someone will make some joke about it for the rest of time. But ultimately, it's pretty silly. And it was stupid to break the rules in a way that could be detected. And presumably they'll be fined for it or receive some sort of slap on the wrist. But really, I mean, the idea that you can ban technology in the dugout just seems sort of silly at this point.

I mean, there was a story almost exactly two years ago where there was a question because Ned Yost was wearing an Apple Watch in the dugout and MLB said it was okay as long as it wasn't used for communication. And Andy McCullough was still tweeting about the Royals and covering the Royals then. So he was on that story. And it was like there were cheating concerns at that time. And I'm sure that other teams have used these devices in ways that are supposed to be prohibited in the intervening years. But it's like, you know, you can't necessarily notice if someone has a phone and they're surreptitiously looking at it in the dugout or something. I mean, wasn't Pablo Sandoval liking Instagram posts in the bathroom or something during games a year or two ago? If he had maybe been using it to steal signs or something instead, that would have been against

the rules. I don't know whether that would have helped him or not. Probably not. But the point is that you can have a phone like right outside of the dugout. You can have a TV right outside of the dugout. So I think the distinctions here are really pretty meaningless in this day and age when information is so free-flowing and these devices are ubiquitous and you could always come up with some workaround to make a non-internet connected device into an internet connected device. I just don't know if there's any point to even having this prohibition anymore. And even if teams weren't doing exactly what the Red Sox were doing, they're probably doing something very similar to what the Red Sox were doing. Yeah. So historically, and to this day,

the majority of sign stealing takes place when there is a runner on second. That is a guy who is looking at the catcher. That is a guy who is supposed to relay signs to the batter, whatever. So this season with the bases empty, batters have slugged 424. With a runner on first only, they've slugged 437. With a runner on second only, they've slugged 401. And with a runner on second only they've slugged 401 and with a runner on third only they've slugged 451 this is not the entirety of any kind of analysis i would it would be better to look at the numbers whenever there's a runner on second in other situations but at least based on that easy split brought to you by baseballreferences.com it is easy to see that actually batters have not been better with runners on second base if anything they've been worse this season the obp is up i

didn't mention that but that's because there are a lot of intentional walks pitching strategy changes when there is a runner on base but just in terms of like more hits and more extra base hits nope not with a runner on second so looking for any kind of benefit obviously there is not always a situation where signs are stolen but it seems like it is probably wasted effort you can just maybe stop trying to crack the code and start trying to just play better baseball because I don't think that I just don't think it really matters. Yeah. And earlier today, Evan Drellick tweeted a picture of Doug Pfister wearing a mouth guard,

which has like a component around his ear. And he reported that the Yankees evidently complained to Major League Baseball because they thought Pfister was wearing some kind of audio device in his ear, but it was actually a mouth guard, which makes this even sillier. And I like that little tidbit in the original Times story about how Chris Young had been interviewed, the former Yankee, current Red Sox player, as if he's like some sort of double agent or narc or something. I don't know what the story was. It doesn't say why he was interviewed or what he said, but that was just a little tidbit you could read into and probably make more of

than actually it merits. So I don't know. I also think that, you know, fans sometimes get up in arms when a team is caught sign stealing or is supposedly sign stealing. And that's just something that has never bothered me on any level. Like, A, it's happening whether you want it to or not. And B, I don't think we have to have the same concerns about it that players on the field do. I know players on the field get upset when they think their signs are being stolen and sometimes they will respond in some way that they think makes it less likely that their signs are being stolen. And sometimes they will respond in some way that they think makes it less likely that their signs will continue to be stolen.

They'll hit someone or they'll say something or they'll make some kind of angry comment. And maybe that's smart just to discourage the behavior and say, hey, I'm onto you. And maybe it'll make the team less likely to steal your signs in the future. So that's all well and good if they think that it is helping them to get angry about that sort of thing. But I don't think we have to have the

same concerns about that that players on the field have. I think we can just accept that this is something that happens and has always happened. And the whole reason we have signs in the first place is to keep people from knowing what's going to happen next. And the implication is that they would otherwise be looking at what you're doing and trying to tell what you're doing next. It's like screen peeking in a multiplayer video game or something like that. So I think that is just an accepted and valid part of the game. And if you're smart enough to unravel your opponent's signs or they are not smart enough to conceal them from you,

then I think that's just part of the game. And that is either a credit to you or a debit to your opponent's signs or they are not smart enough to conceal them from you then i think that's just part of the game and that is either a credit to you or a debit to your opponent i would just love it if like team is playing the red socks the catcher would just yell the pitch type right as the right as the pitch is about on the way and you know like nine out of ten times it is true like it is going to be the pitch type and then you just kind of mess with them every so often and you know maybe you only do it for like a game or two just to you know send your point home and the redlocks would complain about that but it's going to be interesting i don't remember which article it was in it might have been the the new york times article the original one it was talking about how there are

some discussions taking place about sort of wireless communication between the dugout the catcher and the pitcher yeah for down the road to help reduce pace of game essentially reduce meetings and a whole bunch of other stuff and that seems like one of those things we haven't talked about it much if at all but it feels like it's kind of inevitable of course there are headsets that are there in football yep they will come around and then i guess we get to have another conversation about the death of the human element at that point because if you were able to just i don't know if that would eliminate the usage of signs at all because the catcher would have to deliver some sort of sign to the pitcher i don't know if you could whisper it without the batter hearing it maybe

there would be a market inefficiency for batters with very good hearing maybe it would be a bigger problem in quieter stadiums as opposed to big raucous ballparks good reason for home teams to have loud environments so that batters can't hear the catcher whisper the pitch type to the pitcher. So that'll be something interesting to watch, but that will be another human element conversation that we have a few years down the road.

Yep. All right. Well, I hope that this story doesn't linger as long as the various Patriots scandals did. This was fun for a day, but I think after that, my interest probably tails off pretty quickly. Yep. All right. Well, in that case, let's get on to emails.

So we have a question from Ethan who says, when a player runs to first base, is he running up the line or down the line? Okay. I agonized over this one. Didn't come up with an answer I love because i've used them both i know and they both make sense about convey the right meaning but if i had to think you know what i actually don't even remember what i responded to him so i might respond something else but i think if you're going to first i would call that up the line and coming from third that would be down the line and in this sense i guess i'm using home as well home essentially so down would infer uh coming to coming to home so i i would say up the line but if you say someone's

running down the line to first it makes total sense so it's kind of like a 60 40 situation you yep no i completely agree and i i'm actually not sure if that's the i would guess that that's how most people say it but i'm not sure i. I've definitely heard both, I think. I don't know if I've heard up the line for running home, but I'm pretty sure I've heard down the line for running to first base. But yeah, I would agree. the line i don't know if that totally makes sense like i don't know if ballparks are usually oriented in a certain north south direction so i don't know whether that has anything to do with this but probably not i just kind of look at it as yeah coming home is like on the way back and going to first is the beginning of your journey. You're going up and going home is going down. So I would say it exactly the same way.

Well, we have some trouble here. So I found a MLB clip uploaded to YouTube. Braves Giants came from May 2015. And the headline of the clip is Freeman turns two on a hot shot up the line. OK, that makes sense. That's a Freeman's first bas hot shot up the line. Okay, that makes sense. That's a Freeman's first baseman shot up the line. But of course, whenever you have a batted ball, I'm reading now from sportingcharts.com.

I don't know what this website is, but whatever. Down the line header. What is down the line? This is a baseball term, which refers to movement, usually a hit along either the first base or third base line of the field. And of course, if you have a ball that's scorched down the line,

no one says that's a double up the line. It's always a double down the line. So now, I don't know. I don't know. Is it? Yeah, you do hear people say, like, you know, if someone's talking about someone's speed, they'll say, oh, he gets down the line pretty good. You know, like if they're talking about a home to first time or something, I think people will say, oh, he gets down the line. I probably would say that also and have said that also. Although in that case, I'm not really thinking so much about the direction so much as just the speed with which the player is moving. But that does complicate it a little bit. It doesn't just complicate it a little bit. It completely turns it on its head. Now it's maybe they're all maybe they're all down the line. I don't know. Maybe if you're in the direction. God, how would you do this? So maybe

if you if something is going away from home, maybe then you say that's down the line. And if you say coming toward home, that's up the line, in which case you would only have one circumstance where someone is running up the line. and that would imply running toward home so in this sense maybe home is like a pedestal and you're running up to get to it but it's like the the summit right the summit of the infield sure it's all flat but like you you want to get to the summit yeah figuratively speaking fever yes yeah so okay here's here's where i'm settling everything away from home that's down the line toward home up the line okay so here's where I'm settling. Everything away from home, that's down the line. Toward home, up the line. Okay, so that's the opposite of what we just said.

But okay, wait, but here's another problem. You have an offline throw from the outfield. Right, and you say, oh, that throw was a little too far up the line. Yeah, it's always up the line, right? This is impossible. No matter which line it is, yeah. That is, huh. This is going to be like batting around.

Oh, no. Just unsolvable. Yeah, I just had that debate again with Michael Downman and we were very split on that, too. Are you a 10 or a 9? There's no way I'm getting into this. Okay. That's smart. Yeah. Up the line, down the line. This is tough. It feels like there are just certain contexts where everyone agrees that you use one and not the other, and we all understand what we mean. So it's a little different from batting around in that those actually do mean two different things, and you can confuse what they mean. If someone thinks that batting around is all nine people come to the plate and says that, that is a different meaning than the first batter of the inning has come up to the plate again. This case, no one's going to get confused if you say up the line or down the line. I think everyone will understand that there's just some movement along the line and we all know the direction that players move around baselines. So probably just not as important a debate,

not that batting around is even remotely important but i would say that yeah when it's a throw that's wide it's up the line when you're just saying how fast someone is it's he gets down the line and if you're just referring to someone running to first base i would still say up the line i think if you're talking about like someone backing up a throw, like the catcher is backing up a throw at first base or something, I would still say he runs up the line, I think. But man, there doesn't seem to be a really hard and fast rule that we can apply to all situations here. This is one of those things that you just kind of have to be a native fluid speaker of baseball to use it appropriately in each context, I think. On the line. All situations now will be on the line.

Yeah, I'm fine with that. That was probably an unsatisfying answer to that question. So let's move on to the next one. Roland in Sheffield says, I appreciate that this is the preeminent podcast for the baseball fan with a sabermetric bent, and therefore you would expect listeners to have a certain degree of working knowledge on the game, including up the line and down the line. He did not say that, but I am, however, the outlier in that I'm a relative newcomer to the sport, albeit one with the evangelical enthusiasm of the neophyte. For reasons that are too tedious to elaborate, despite being an Englishman who grew up in the shadow of Winchester Cathedral and who currently resides by the seaside in Brighton, I am a follower of the Detroit Tigers. With this in mind, I wondered if you might spare a little airtime to explain what the process of rebuilding entails.

I understand that having played at the high stakes table for a number of years, the Tigers are now cashing in their chips. The money raised, I presume, will be reinvested in younger prospects. But what is the process? Is it simply a case of lying dormant, saving the pennies until a new owner comes in to buy star quality, or do they just focus on the farm system? Or is this the moment when the scouts come into their own and begin scouring the triple A's and double A's for diamonds in the rough? If the latter is the case, then is the rebuilding team the most interesting team to the stat head in the sense of trawling through data, try and identify unblossomed talent, is it a mixture of everything and if so when should i be

expecting the tigers to be flying a pennant or wearing a ring 2022 2025 well it's going to be forever until the tigers are getting rings flying a flag whatever they're going to do in the future i don't know what the baseball future is going to look like because this is going to be well into the baseball future before the tigers are good again. But I think I would say the average expected turnaround for a team in this situation is maybe like four years until it could be pretty good again. Yeah, right. I feel right. Yeah, it depends. Like if you're the White Sox, for instance, and you're bad, but you happen to

have these incredibly valuable players who are assigned to these inexpensive long-term deals, then that kind of kickstarts your rebuild because you can trade Chris Sale and Adam Eaton and Jose Quintana and get really great high-level prospects back for them. And in theory, at least, those prospects will be good major leaguers pretty soon. Whereas if you're one of those teams that's maybe waited a little bit too long and now everyone on your team is old and expensive and there just isn't a lot that would be attractive to other organizations then you just don't have as much to work with and so it might take you longer but yeah i would i'd say something you know like four years or so from the day you

decide to rebuild to the day that you're competitive again maybe our our timelines on that are skewed a bit by the success of the Cubs and the Astros. But I would say, yeah, historically, four years, five years, something like that. But, you know, the Tigers obviously are also coming from an owner who was spending more than most owners would and was more concerned with winning perhaps than profiting. And that's not necessarily the case with the organization now. So that might affect things too. Yeah, I think that the Tigers feel to me, they feel a lot like the Angels if they didn't have Mike Trout on them.

The situation would be an awful lot worse. Pujols' contract is a little like the Miguel Cabrera contract, although the Cabrera contract is starting to look even worse. Anyway, the sort of general answer to the question would be if you're trying to understand rebuilding in a baseball context, the generality of it is that it is deciding to shift from short term priorities to long term priorities. You are trying to build. You will see when teams have been rebuilding and then they start to to start to cash in their chips and shift towards short term. We saw this. I don't remember which Astros move it was, but maybe when they traded for ken giles even though that was a long-term get sort of so maybe that's not a very good example but uh maybe like the the dodgers getting you darvish that's a bad example but

that's a move that like a team that's trying to win now will make they will trade long-term prospects for a short-term ad we saw this with the astros i guess and verlander would be a better recent example they get two years and change of just Verlander, and they gave up potentially 18 or 21 years of talented young prospects from the top of their system. So with the Tigers, it's not just about sitting back and not spending. I don't think rebuilding is really about saving money for the future as much as it is just about thinking, well, we're just going to shake up this Etch-a-Sketch and start a new drawing. And they will, I don't know how long you've been a fan of the Tigers, but you might recall when they traded you in a cesspit, they brought in guys like Fulmer. And I guess Boyd

isn't a great example right now. But so let's go with Fulmer, Fulmer and Daniel Norris. So more moves like that. So you sort of stop playing at the top of the free agent market. You stop thinking about bringing in people who are in their 30s or older 20s. And you just shift your attention and resources to the draft, to the minor league system, to trying to cash in whatever veterans you have for younger talent. This is working to the Tigers advantage, I guess, that this is a pretty well-tried path. Lots of teams have rebuilt. Lots of teams will continue to rebuild. So it's nothing extraordinary that they are attempting.

It is not anything to be held against them. This was sort of a long time coming, and they tried their best to get to a World Series. The downside of the Tiger situation is that, as you mentioned, Ben, they are in a worse situation than the White Sox were because the White Sox had things that were valuable they could trade, and the Tigers really don't. You saw how little they got for Justin Upton Cabrera is unmovable of course

they did move Verlander who thank goodness for them sort of re-established his value of late but there's not a whole lot else for them to do so they're starting from a worse position than the White Sox but again when you were good for what felt like a decade I guess that this was was going to happen to them. People have been predicting this for a while. It's the necessary downside of trying to win every single year, which was a credit to their ownership. But now the hard stuff starts. But I think it is quite fun. I don't want to speak for Ben. So I'm going to let him take his moment in a second. But I do think that this part is a lot of fun because you get to i think as a fan certainly as a writer but i think also as a fan winning can be annoying that's dumb because of course you want your team to win as a fan but it's a different experience and looking for unheralded prospects or or just unrecognized or undervalued talent is a lot of fun because it it's like you get to try to discover something. It's like you're running some, it's like you have a metal detector and you're out in a field just looking for someone who might have a better fastball than the scattering report says.

So it's fun as long as you forget that the whole point is to win because you have to remind yourself that the whole point is not to win. It is to amuse yourself and rebuilding is a different form of amusement. Yeah, I think if you can clearly see the future coming, that can be fun. If you're like the White Sox and you have the best farm system in baseball and everyone is marveling over your prospects and you can drop your projected lineup for a few years from now and pretend that all of these prospects are going to pan out, that's fun. I don't know if that's as fun as when it actually happens and you have the 2016 Cubs season and you win the World Series and you're the best team in baseball. I think that is still the most fun thing for a fan.

But there are some merits, I think, to the rebuild that maybe we appreciate now more than we used to since we are so aware of what teams are doing at the minor league level now. And yeah, I think you pretty much covered the rebuilding process there. It's just taking advantage of misaligned or differently aligned incentives, basically. There are a certain number of teams in baseball at any one time that are actively trying to win in the present. And if you decide that you're not going to be

one of those teams, you're just going to kick the can down the road and say, we don't care so much about what happens now. We're focusing on the future. Then you can take advantage of those teams. They want different things than you want. And they want the guy who's good right now. You want the guy who will be good in five years from now.

And some teams want both. They're the Dodgers. But a lot of teams can't do that. Some teams want both. They're the Dodgers, but a lot of teams can't do that. And so if you are focused on the future, you can gain value there if you're willing to give up some in the present. So you sell off whatever value you currently have on the roster. You stockpile for the future.

You hopefully get some high draft picks that help your rebuild even further. And on the other side of that, in theory, you come out as a good team that is ready to win again. Doesn't always work out perfectly, but that is the blueprint at least. Would you say that you trust Roger Angel in his terminology? Yes, I would say so. Okay, so November 24th, 2003,

issue of the New Yorker, article titled Gone South, subhead in a last surprise, the young Marlins are champs. Ands and in this article roger angel says quote their closest call you could say came when the giants jt snow represented their tying run charged frantically down the line toward home with two out in the ninth of the final divisional game and slammed into rodriguez at home down the line roger angel toward home we have an article from october 2014 titled the best this is about madison bumgarner roger angel again quote the go-ahead scored the go-ahead whatever the go-ahead scored on a single by the giants dh michael morse who raised a fist running up the line as he saw the ball fall free up the line toward first down the line toward home roger angel speaketh and so it is

yep i think that's right all right let me see I'll do maybe one more quick one before we get to Stett's segment I don't know if we have any quick ones all right how about this one Mike says let's say Deion Sanders's football and baseball career was beginning now and not in 1989 Deionion was tremendously athletic, but his football commitment made him only a part-time baseball player who was available mainly early in the season, though he did make postseason rosters. His games per season ranged roughly between 50 and 100. I know he also had some injuries in there. And his baseball reference war was fairly volatile, as high as 3.2 in 1992 and 1.5 in 1993, but lower than negative 0.6 in three different seasons. Would an MLB team be

willing to sign him today? And what lengths would they have to go to to keep him on the roster? How much value would he have to provide to be worth the part-time status? So different question, but Sam and I talked not too long ago on the podcast about just whether we will see another multi-sport athlete who is playing in like the NFL and MLB at the same time. And we decided, I think that it's always silly to say never because history is long and exceptions come about every now and then. But I think the conditions certainly have made it much less likely that something like this will happen for various reasons, both because of the quality of play and the commitment required to be a high-level athlete in multiple sports at once, and because

of the injury risks, because of the money at stake that gives players less incentives to do this and increases the risk of doing this. So for various reasons, I think it's less likely that this kind of athlete will come along. if one does do you think teams would still be receptive to it well if you look at deon sanders's baseball career he was a common approach is to look at wins above replacement per 600 plate appearances to sort of get an understanding of how valuable a player was and deon sanders comes out around 1.4 wins per 600 plate appearances for his career average is right around 2.2 wins above replacement per 600 so Deion Sanders was a below average baseball

player and if you're getting partial seasons from a below average baseball player I would think that a baseball team would think this is not particularly worth it then you get into the conversation of well would a baseball team sign Clayton Kershaw for partial seasons and the answer there is of course yes yes so I think you were you were looking for a i don't know where the line is but i would think borderline all-star caliber player to be to be worth having on the roster for partial seasons otherwise it would just not really be worth it because there are any number of one to two win players floating around baseball baseball teams are not particularly good at identifying who those players are this is increasingly becoming a problem which is a

topic for another episode or full-length research project but the deon sanders level no the clayton level yes the in-between gargantuan i will put the line somewhere around four wins per 600 plate appearances or 200 innings whatever you want to use use as your baseline. And Sander's not good enough, but I can, I don't know. One of those things where I think everyone's glad he existed, but at his level, he would not exist again. And he had tantalizing talent and physical tools, of course, maybe the best in the sport. And so that was part of it. It wasn't just that he was some generic backup who was that good.

He was like, you know, he looked and seemed like he could potentially be a superstar, and maybe he could have if he had devoted himself to baseball earlier or longer. So maybe that was part of it in his specific case, but I think you're right in general. than average contact hitter. You would never expect that. I would think that contact hitting would be the biggest problem, but his strike array was a full percentage point better than average over the course of his career, which is really quite remarkable for a player who did not play baseball the whole time. So good on you, Deion Sanders. Good at putting the bat on the ball, which is what you want from a fast runner. Worse at hitting the ball hard, but everyone's got their problems. Yeah. All right. So we have a stat segment that I believe was inspired by a listener email from David who says, hey guys, time for another glossary question. Third base, the hot corner.

I know it's called that because there are more right-handed hitters, so it's consistently hotter over there. But a two-part question. One, what percentage of righties hit balls to third versus lefties to first? It seems like the former happens more often. And two, with StatCast, can we see whether or not balls hit to third by righties are actually faster than those hit to first by lefties? from a comically skewed diagram of the baseball field is a picture of david wright which is sad anyway so this will be i think a relatively quick stat segment and i couldn't figure out the perfect way to get the exit velocity stuff we'll get to that in a minute but in terms of batted ball distribution i went to the baseball reference play index former sponsor of this bongos and i dug around and so looking at first of all right right handed batters who hit the ball in third base zone. So I looked specifically for batted balls in specifically the third so that gives that yields a rate of 16.5 percent of batted balls by righties have been hit to third base for lefties i'm looking at 8,971 i don't

know why i'm reading the wrong numbers these don't mean anything to anyone but i'm doing it anyway 8,971 batted balls to first base or those first base zones out of 44,445, which yields a rate of 20.2% balls hit to first base. So overall, third base is hotter because they get more action there than the first baseman does. But on a rate basis, lefties actually hit more balls to first than righties hit to third. Interesting. Yeah.

And if you look at exit velocities, this is where I had a little bit of trouble on Baseball Savant, which is where you look up this stuff. You can sort by position where the ball is hit. The downside here is that by selecting third base or first base, I'm kind of selecting for balls that didn't get past the third basement or first basement. So the exit velocities here will be low. But nevertheless, I looked at the roughly three years of data that we have. And over the three three years when righties have hit a ball at the third baseman the average exit velocity has been 80.3 miles per hour 80.3 miles per hour so when

lefties have come up and they've hit a ball to the first baseman the average exit velocity has been 80.3 miles per hour exactly the same so that again does not really account for balls like line drives that get right past the third baseman or the first baseman. But given that the exit velocities are identical for balls that are fielded by the third and first baseman, I have to think that the batted balls themselves that get by them are basically identical as well. So third base hotter because you have more righties than you have lefties. But first base hotter on a rate basis when you have lefties versus righties than you have lefties but first base hotter on a rate basis when you have lefties versus righties if there were a league that had more lefties then maybe first base would start

to become the hotter corner i don't really know separate observation while doing this i don't know what to make of this yet i don't know if it means anything but i was looking at league average exit velocities just over the time that we have i don't know if you've looked at this i certainly haven't yet but 2015 first year of stat cast data that we have league average exit velocity 87.3 miles per hour last year 87.7 miles per hour. I think we have heard plenty about how average exit velocity went up a little bit more home runs, all that stuff. This year 86.7 miles per hour down a full mile per hour from last year. I don't know what that's about. I don't know if it means anything. The average launch angle is up a fraction of one degree. So I don't know, could be something, but a shift of one mile per hour feels pretty significant on a league wide basis. So something

to think about come November when all of us are looking for something to do. Yeah, maybe it has something to do with more balls and more weekly hit balls being tracked, but that was probably the case last year as well relative to 2015. So I don't know why that would be showing such a big decline. So yeah, that is worth further investigation, which we will not conduct right now. So question from Zach, if you were a GM or similarly empowered executive, would you head into this offseason assuming that the current baseball and the elevated home run rate that's come with it will hold constant going forward? Given how dramatically it's impacted the baseball landscape and certain players in particular, trying to figure out whether MLB will do anything to deaden the ball again seems like the biggest medium term challenge facing organizations. Seems like the biggest medium-term challenge facing organizations Given that home runs are basically the only reason that scoring hasn't continued to plummet I would be surprised if we saw a change in the baseball

But then again, how many teams saw the last change coming? Would you be comfortable making decisions going forward Under the assumption that the new ball is here for good? Or would you hedge your bets? And I guess we also got a previous question about the team-specific impact Of the change in the baseball and the home run rate rise and whether there is one, really. So this is kind of a similar question. Because if there's no team-specific impact or player-specific impact, if it's just something that affected every player or team equally, then you wouldn't really have to worry about it.

Because just whatever happened would affect you and your opponents in the same way. Right. So it's a good question. And I think the average baseball general manager would tell you, I don't know, because I think that the entire industry is a little confused by what's going on. Fun example to me, this is just personal, but if you want to understand what kind of era we're playing in and how I think it's having disproportionate effects on the playing field. Jose Ramirez slugging percentages by year 346, 340, 462, 568. Jose Ramirez is not only slugging 568 because of Mikey Matuk, but it is a contributing factor. But nevertheless, Jose Ramirez, one of those players, maybe Jose Altuve or Cesar Hernandez or Freddy Galvez, all these. Elvis Andres is a guy you wrote about back in April, right? And he's up to 19 home runs with a previous single season high of eight.

Yeah, Angleton Simmons hitting the ball hard again. So I do think that there is a disproportionate impact here where you have these middling power guys who are able to clear the fence now. So anyway, I think at this point, since baseball should better understand what has happened and it seems pretty clear that there is a ball component here, although it is not entirely the ball. I think that because it's kept up for a few years, because there's been so much research on it because of the league response, I think teams can now act more comfortably on the foundation of

the idea that the ball will not change again anytime soon. If the ball were to change again, I think there's been so much pressure on the league to this point that it would have to come clean and tell everyone what's going on because obviously there are a lot of people out there who have an interest in studying the ball and if it changed again people would notice there are more people interested in that than ever i think that if baseball were to intentionally make a change to the ball and they would probably have to fold it in over time. They'd be like, hey, look, in three years, we're going to change the ball because teams have built

around players whose performances have changed. We were talking about this with the strike zone just a couple of years ago. There was a report, I think, that the Red Sox had targeted a certain type of pitcher because of the low strike and they were going for guys who threw low in the zone and the strike zone seemed to be expanding year after year. And so there was some question about whether that had affected certain hitters and pitchers disproportionately. And the same kind of thing, if you planned around that being the case, what would happen if MLB suddenly decided to revert to a different or older strike zone? Yeah, no, absolutely would if you raise the strike

zone as baseball has talked about then i don't i don't know what you do if you're dallas keitel that's like your entire model and he's well at least he was the ace of the astros maybe still as i don't really know and that would be a that'd be a big problem for them and if you are baseball you don't i don't think that baseball has an interest in changing the ball right now anyway because as the listener pointed out baseball needs the home run because without that, the run scoring is plummeting. So I don't think they're going to do anything. And I think because of the home run spike has lasted now for two and a half years, I think that teams are going to be pretty comfortable investing in these sudden pop-up power hitters. But this has been a real issue. I think it's still going to

be a real issue because teams don't really know how to scout now those those medium power types in the minors because someone who used to be a warning track hitter might now be a first row kind of home run hitter. And then all of a sudden that player has value. So it would be interesting if you had a like last year's Brian Dozer on the market this offseason now that there's been more time for teams to understand what is taking place. So I think there's a little more comfort. But still, this has definitely put the industry in a strange position because non-power hitters have become power hitters. And it just changes how different player types are valued. And there's also the question of what happens to the game as a whole as an entertainment product if the new ball goes away. This is something I've talked about, I think, on the

podcast before, maybe in articles. Joe Sheehan just wrote something about it in his newsletter pointing out that really home runs are the only thing propping up scoring right now. And if the ball suddenly went back to the old ball, what would happen? Now, I don't know if it would be like an immediate disaster because if the ball were to suddenly deaden itself, I mean, I think part of the reason why we're seeing more strikeouts, I mean, there's so many reasons for that, but part of the reason we're seeing this all-or-nothing approach right now is that the ball supports it, makes it a smart approach for hitters.

And if the ball went back to being a bit deader, well, it's not like all of those home runs would turn into outs. First of all, you'd have more doubles and triples, presumably. Some of these balls that are going into the first row of the stands would be off the wall or on the warning track or something. And a lot of them would still be balls in play and hits. So I don't think you can just completely remove them from the ledger and presumably hitters would adjust back just as they seem to have adjusted forward to this type of ball if the ball suddenly stops flying and carrying as well then maybe the fly ball air ball revolution suddenly takes a step back too because

it just won't be as smart a strategy anymore so i don't. I think it's all sort of cyclical. And I don't know if it's fair to just say, well, you know, strip out the home runs and everything else would be a disaster. Because if you did strip out the home runs, other things would increase and other things would change as a result. So it's a little hard to just compare, I guess, without just compare like today's game, but without the baseball or today's game, but without the homers, been getting a bunch of Hall of Fame questions lately Is this guy a Hall of Famer? We did the Joey Votto discussion We agreed yes

We did the Ryan Braun discussion We agreed probably not Sean wants to know about Joe Maurer He says, I recently saw a Twins broadcast That said that Joe Maurer was hitting for a 788 OPS this year His highest since 2013 He's been worth just shy of three wins this year. I know Maurer is perhaps the most commonly cited active example of a Hall of Fame peak

followed by a fall off a cliff. But if Maurer bounces back and is worth, let's say, 10-ish wins over the next four years, would it be time to discuss Maurer as a legitimate Hall of Fame player? And then Steven asks also about Justin Verlander. I'm sure you guys have received this one in the trade aftermath. We have from you. But what do you think about Verlander. I'm sure you guys have received this one in the trade aftermath. We have from you. But what do you think about Verlander's Hall of Fame chances?

The MVP award helps, but his numbers right now probably fall a bit short. How much does he need to do in Houston to help? I'd say his postseason numbers are good overall, but he wasn't great

in three World Series starts, whatever that is worth in the scheme of things. He's 2-0 with 17 shutout innings in his two winner-take-all postseason starts. Does he need another peak season or two in Houston or a World Series ring? So Maurer, Verlander.

Okay, Verlander, more likely to me. I think he is demonstrating he has more left in the tank. I think Verlander now is 34.5. I guess he probably hasn't said he's had a half for a while, but he is anyway 34.5. And he also very conveniently seems to be throwing harder than he has in years. Yeah, Verlander's average fastball velocity right now 95.6 is the exact same as it was in 2011. He's throwing harder than he did, or I guess, as fast as he did when he was a rookie. So it's not just about what Justin Verlander has done to this point. But also he seems to have a good amount left in the tank now because he's a pitcher you can't really tell but he's vaguely i don't know maybe kind of like regionally iconic big name classic workhorse kind of guy lots of career peaks he's been in the cy young voting over and over and over i think he's got more left and i think he's not gonna he's clearly not gonna be like a first ballot kind of guy but i think that he will be in the hall of fame i say this

as someone who prefers a bigger hall of fame but in any case i think verlander will make it mauer i am far less convinced as pointed out hall of fame caliber peak certainly through about age 27 big years when he was 29 and 30 but just so little since then through no real fault of mauer's own he's been through an awful lot but he's i don't know he went from being an extremely good catcher to like passable first baseman who has also spent time being a problem I'm not sure how much Joe Maurer has left in the tank he's a grand ball hitter in the era where you want to hit the ball in the air I don't think he's going to be adding a lot to his career value so while I understand the argument pro Maurer because of what Yadier Molina has done and Molina for

reference is sitting on 35 career war according to fan graphs and yet he's discussed as a almost surefire hall of famer it seems like I don't know how that's actually going to play out but I think there's an opinion out there that when Yadier Molina is eligible for the hall of fame people will have come completely around on the value of catchers and howadier Molina is eligible for the Hall of Fame, people will have come completely around on the value of catchers and how much value Molina has brought. Well, Maurer has been a better hitter than Molina, and he hasn't caught as long, of course, but Maurer had his own defensive value when he was a catcher. I think he's rated pretty well as a framer and various other things. So there's an argument for Maurer. I think it's a weaker argument than the

one for Verlander, but I wouldn't be upset if he made it, but I'm generally not an upset kind of person. System at Baseball Reference Maurer is there already He is like number Seven on the catcher jaws List he has exceeded Both the peak and Career or at least is Right at the career and exceeded the Peak numbers for catcher standards It's tough because

I mean you have to mentally adjust And figure that catchers careers tend to Be shorter and they do Tend to mentally adjust and figure that catcher's careers tend to be shorter and they do tend to wear down. And obviously, you know, through age 30 or, I don't know, a decade or more, probably maybe 15 years or something since he was at his peak and, or really even a very productive player. And it's tough to expect the voters, I guess, to go back that far and remember what peak Maurer looked like when you've been watching post-peak Maurer for five or ten years and that extended decline phase. But he really did rack up a ton of value in that first decade of his career and compared to the catcher standards, which are a little bit lower. And maybe that's because it's pulling in some catchers from the

early days of baseball when catchers were just battered even more so than they are now and had shorter careers as a result. Maybe it's artificially low because of that, but I think by the standards of the position, you could definitely make a solid statistical case. I just, I don't know if he will have the reputation by that point. He does have the MVP award and gold gloves and all-star appearances and was a fairly well-known player despite playing in Minnesota and not really having an extensive postseason record. So if he could hang on for another five years, as the question asked, if he could rack up another 10 wins over the next four or five years and maybe the Twins get good

over that span and he gets back to the playoffs and it's a nice story, that kind of thing, I could see it happening. At this point, I'm not like a huge Maurer booster, but based on how his career ends, I could see myself voting for him when the time comes. Just going back to Verlander real quick, looking at the, just clicked on the Jaws leaderboard that's linked on his baseball reference page, and he's below Frank Tanana, Johan Santana, and Wilbur Wood.

He's above Wilbur Cooper, sandwiched between two Wilburs, very baseball move. He's above Wilbur Cooper, Sandy Koufax, and Andy Pettit. So Justin Verlander, in a sense, kind of an Andy Pettit-y career. But again, Verlander has a lot left in think, I think. So we'll see where he goes from there. Yeah, and that's another thing where it depends on the standards of the position and how voters perceive the standards of the position. Because, I mean, over the past decade, has anyone other than Kershaw been better or more valuable than Verlander? Maybe Felix, if anyone? But he's been right there as the number two pitcher in baseball behind one of the best pitchers ever over a decade-long

span. So I think players in general have been kind of hurt by voters not widening the pool to account for the wider player pool. But I think that particularly with pitchers, since what a starter is and the value that a starter provides is different today from what it used to be. These guys just don't go as deep into games, don't make as many starts, and Verlander has been a workhorse by the standards of his day, but not by the standards of previous eras. So if you're comparing Verlander to a pitcher from the 60s or 70s or even earlier, he's not going to look great.

But comparing him to his peers and his contemporaries, he's going to look really great. So, yeah, I think if he can manage to put together another couple of good years here, I think he should be in. Agreed. And now switching right back to Mauer, having clicked on the same Jaws leaderboard, a feature I have never actually explored before on Baseball Reference. What a great feature by our former sponsor. I have never actually explored before on Baseball Reference. What a great feature by our former sponsor. Of the top 11 all-time catchers by the Jaws leaderboard,

nine of them are in the Hall of Fame. One of them is Joe Maurer, and the other one is Ted Simmons. So in a sense, Ted Simmons may be kind of a test case, but in another sense, everyone else in the top 11, a test case. So yeah, I'm more convinced about Maurer than I was before, but I still think it's less likely than more likely only because the Hall of Fame seems to be getting more difficult to get into as opposed to easier. Yeah.

Simmons is one of those guys who gets mentioned all the time as someone who should potentially be in or the best player not to be in that kind of thing. All right. Let's see if we can wrap this up. Keith Law posits in his book. This is a question from Daniel. Keith Law posits in his book, Smart Baseball, that OBP is the biggest correlating factor to a player's value to his team. But he also offers the opposite to be true as well.

A player's out percentage is the biggest correlating factor to their value loss to their team. Then I read this quote from Jeff Francor in 2009. If on-base percentage is so important, why don't they put it on the scoreboard? And of course, OBP was indeed on the scoreboard. How could Jeff Francor miss such an obvious fact? I could only think of one thing that could answer this question, and it comes from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Ferski's work on human psychology. Humans are more motivated by potential losses than they are by potential gains. So my question is this, what if teams started putting out percentages on the scoreboard? Do you think Jeff Francor would have noticed? Do you think it

is possible that doing so league-wide would affect any positive change in on-base percentage? Knowing what we know about humans and how valuable on-base percentage is, do you think teams can take advantage of the loss statistic in order to motivate players to focus on that particular skill? So I like it. I don't know if you need to put it on the scoreboard, because I don't know how many players actually go up there and look at the scoreboard. I think in Frank Cora's case, that's just an expression. But if you were a team, and you were developing your players, you can give them all of their numbers as you want. But if you if you just like posted out percentages, like on the clubhouse wall or something every day, I think that loss aversion behavior would would in theory have the potential to kind

of take over because outs are the currency of the game. It's how the game moves along, you get 27 of them, and then the game is over. And as much as all it is, is the reverse of OBP. So it doesn't tell you anything new, I wonder if it might help it sink in. Because you think on base percentage, that's great. Of course, you want to reach base, but on base percentage on its own doesn't tell you what the alternative is to reaching base. on base percentage on its own doesn't tell you what the alternative is to reaching base but if you have something that just says out percentage that's pretty obvious and it's really really difficult to be a good player if you're making a lot of outs so i like it i don't know if it would make any difference maybe it's one of those things that

matters more at lower levels to help players mentally steal themselves or something but if teams aren't doing this they should uh they should do. I think it would be a very simple way to kind of get the point across. Yeah. My only question would be whether there would be any kind of demoralizing effect to being confronted with how often you are failing as opposed to how often you're succeeding. I don't know whether there's any evidence that would support that, but if it's like on the scoreboard and you're going up to the plate and you're seeing I fail 65% of the time, I'm probably going to fail this time. Maybe that would also have an effect in the opposite direction. So I'd want to see some research potentially on how that might affect the player's motivation or focus or incentives in this situation. But it is an interesting idea.

So worth thinking about, at least. All right. Last question from Cameron. With the talk about last-second waiver deals, what do you think would be the effect of trades being limited to the offseason between the end of the World Series and the first game of the following season? With midseason trades, the incentive is for bad teams to get worse and for good teams to improve thus further skewing the competitive balance i thought it would be interesting for teams to be restricted to

competing with the teams they go into the season with possible exceptions made for injury considerations well i guess let's see you uh let's start easy you would not see non-competitive teams signing like free agent relievers so much you wouldn't see those moves that are clearly just like what the phillies signing pat neshek with a clear idea to just trade him mid-season you wouldn't see so much of that now do you think that the effect would be that there would be more or less parity would teams sort themselves out better or worse i can't figure it out I think there might actually be less competitive balance because it's true that in the middle of the season, you get the good teams getting better and the bad teams

getting worse because talent is flowing mostly in one direction at the trade deadlines. But if you knew that you were prevented from making any moves in season, then you might just not invest in those players at all. Like if you thought you weren't going to make the playoffs and you knew that you couldn't just change your plans on the fly, like if you happen to have a good first half, you can buy. If you happen to have a bad first half, you can sell. If you don't have the option of selling in season, maybe you will just never buy and just kind of throw in the towel at the start of the season because you don't want to get stuck paying for players who are not actually helping you in that season. I guess

you could make the opposite case perhaps and say that maybe you would buy because you don't have the option to buy if things happen to go better than you expect them to go. I would think one, this is maybe peripheral, but one effect is if you have teams that drop out of the race and clearly are non-competitive, then I guess you would have reduced usage of their most valuable young players down the stretch because they try to keep them healthier so they can trade them during the off season so you would have like you probably wouldn't have a cy young winner from a a bad team because that pitcher would just not throw enough innings because this team would just look for reasons to skip his starts or keep his innings down because you want to trade those guys come the offseason and i wonder

you would have a clear hierarchy in any league you would know who was just the best team but then there's so much randomness that can take place over the course of a year you could i mean look at the red sox they haven't had david price good all year just i mean who i don't know who could have seen that coming or you have the giants and and the mets both completely falling apart this year even though they were supposed to be very good teams this season before the year so i wonder i wonder if you would have teams more likely to try to be competitive this is this is really difficult yeah this is almost as hard as up and down the line i don't know exactly what the effect would be i would it would be it would be. My version of heaven is a place where I can get the immediate correct answer to any question that I ask just to sate my own curiosity. And this would be one of those questions I would love to

see like 10 years of simulated out of the park baseball or something with no mid-season trades. Because I feel like, I guess it's more difficult to be very good, right? It's more difficult to be standard deviations above the mean. So it would be more difficult for a team to be really outstanding as built. The strongest teams would be likely to regress toward the mean through underperformance or injury, which would make it more difficult to be great, which would open the door for more teams to be competitive by being okay. So I think just based on that, I think you would have more teams trying to be good,

or at least above average, and fewer teams rebuilding. So that's where I'm going to come down for now. Okay. Yeah, that's a good argument. Maybe players would pay more attention to signing with winning teams or teams that are projected to be good. Like currently, if you are just signing a one-year deal or something, you might just take the highest offer because you figure even if you're going to a bad team, maybe you'll just get traded to a good team down the stretch. I don't know how many players sign a free agent contract hoping to get traded or expecting to get traded. But it's an out, at least, that you know that you have. And it's something you can tell yourself if you're on a bad team.

Maybe they'll just send me somewhere else. If that wouldn't be an option and winning is really important to you, then maybe that would be an advantage to the few teams that have established themselves as very clear contenders over the winter just because players could know and count on them being there so that might be another consideration too that's a complicated question though yeah separately because i think we're done with the uh with the questions i would just point out i come across the wire this is a stupid thing to say whatever uh in news will venable has joined the cubs as a special assistant to the president and general manager.

That's, I mean, I don't think anybody's thought about Will Venable in a long time. But interestingly, he being the guy from Princeton, maybe not the worst hire that you can imagine. And let's see, there's Chris Young, also Princeton, correct? So, okay, I didn't know about this. So I clicked on Will Venable's Princeton link on his baseball reference page to see the players who have come from Princeton. We've got Danny Barnes, current pitcher. Matthew Bowman, current pitcher. Chris Young, I think still technically current pitcher.

David Hale, Ross Ohlendorf, Will Venable. But you go back. Since when did baseball have a King Lear? 1914 to 1915. King Lear. Major leaguer Wow First person from Princeton on this page

Leonidas Lee Anyway King Lear Went to Princeton High school at Mercersburg Academy Charles Bernard Lear I guess yeah you would What's a cultural reference we can make

To give you a nickname, Charles Bernard Lear? Well, it's the 1910s, so we're just going to go with King. We have nothing else possibly to go with. No, there was no Norman Lear at that point, so you can't go with that. Yeah, well, he's got a saber bio, so I'm sure you could find out more about his nickname there. His nickname was perhaps inevitable, it says. So, yeah, that's probably the case. Yeah. We can't call him because he died in 1976. Oh, well, so did King Lear. All right.

I actually did think of Will Venable recently because there is a Venables Street in Vancouver where I was last week. Maybe it's Venables Street. I don't know what it is, but I saw it and I thought it's like multiple Will Venables. I thought about tweeting it for two seconds before I realized no one would care at all about the name of a street that looked like Will Venable. But it is surprising how often you think about players who you wouldn't really have any reason to think about normally. The last name Venable strikes me kind of like embiggens or cromulent. Just like this should be, this clearly ought to be a word.

Venable. It would be like noble. Right. Well, it's close to venerable. But yeah. All right. We will end there. Final reminder about our raffle for Hurricane Harvey relief.

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facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You should join our Facebook group page at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You should join our Facebook group regardless. You can also support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Joe Bilheimer, Josh Baer, Craig Minami, Doug Graham, and Nick Graham. Thanks to all of you. And thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Please replenish our mailbag. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcast at fan graphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you later this week. way down the line and all the things you learn when you're a kid you fuck up just like your parents did it all just happens again

way down the line