Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1210: You Stay Classy, Salvy (and San Diego)

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Steven Brault’s non-strikeout streak, the failing Wilmer Font and Kazuhisa Makita, the excellent Ozzie Albies, scouting Pablo Sandoval’s pitching, a silly Salvador Perez-Tim Anderson dust-up, the AL Central’s weakness so far, the streaking Diamondbacks, Adrian Gonzalez getting booed in San Diego, and a dead man rounding the bases, […]

Just a couple quick notes before we get started. We did talk today about how well the Diamondbacks are doing, so that's one thing for Dodgers fans to be depressed about. We were not able to talk about the other thing. Corey Seager is out for the season, and we'll have to have Tommy John surgery, which might actually change the favorite in that division, but we'll have to talk about that another day. Also notable, Jeff wrote a post about Shohei Otani and did not bring it up to banter about it.

Pretty sure that's against podcast bylaws, but go check it out. Shohei Otani hit a home run over the weekend, and it was a notable home run. Spoilers, it was way inside, and it was thrown very hard by Luis Severino, and it was hit very hard by Otani, and he was not supposed to be able to do that to pitches like that. Amazing as always. We also missed out on a mention of Brewers reliever and recent podcast subject Josh Hader, who faced eight guys on Monday and struck out all eight of them. First time anyone's ever struck out that many batters in a sub-three inning outing.

Go a few hours without podcasting and the whole sport passes you by. So we have technically discussed Seager, talked about Otani, and hashed over Hader, which means that this podcast can begin. You know, half the time, a lot of people don't enjoy it. You know, you come here over a certain amount of years, you build up a lot of sort of unenjoyment you wind up unenjoying a lot of things so as long as you're here and as long as some of you may be unenjoying this all and have unenjoyed things in the past you can all have a little boo break and if you want to, you can just boo us. Everybody can boo us. Boo! Boo!

Glad to see you love us so much. A few good hisses in there. Hello and welcome to episode 1210 of Effectively Wild, To the saying anyway, goodbye was dead man's man. I'm doing very well. How are you? I'm doing all right. So later in this episode, we'll be talking to Baseball Perspectives' Rob Means about ticket prices, why they are not lower, why they may never be lower, and we'll also get into some style of play, state of the game type stuff because Rob is doing a retrospective series on 1968 when the way the game was played was even more dire than it is today. But we want to talk about modern baseball for a bit first. Where do you want to begin?

Okay, so last Friday, I believe it was, there was a game between the Cardinals and the Pirates. This is a game where the Pirates wind up winning 6-5. In 11 innings, Greg Holland blew a save. That's what happens. Jordan Hicks pitched, got the loss, probably walked some people. Let me check. He did.

He walked a guy. That's what Jordan Hicks does. So got the loss. Probably walked some people. Let me check. He did. He walked a guy. That's what Jordan Hicks does. So by the end of the game, it was forgotten. And I don't know. Tyler Glasnow had a good relief appearance. But Stephen Brault, podcast co-host, in my humble opinion, I believe, is the podcast he co-hosts with Trevor Williams. But Stephen Brault, Pittsburgh Pirates starting pitcher, he came to bat in the second inning

against Miles Michaelis. I guess that's how we're pronouncing that, Michaelis? All right. Sure. So Brault came up with two outs. The bases loaded. He took a ball, fouled pitch off. He swung through pitch, and then on a one-and-two count,

he hit the ball in play. He hit a grounder right back to Michaelis. Michaelis to first base. Inning was over. That was, for Stephen Brault, his 32nd career plate appearance. He has not struck out. Oh, right. Yes. I've seen this fun fact circulating. Yeah. Yeah. So I looked at every single active baseball player who's batted at least 25 times. And obviously, this is not the greatest way to filter things because some people have played a lot more than Steven Brault has

come to the plate. But Steven Brault is the only player with zero strikeouts among those players. In fact, he's the only one with zero, one, or two strikeouts. Lourdes Gurriel and Ray Navarro are there with three strikeouts. Anyway, that doesn't really matter. But Stephen Brault is the pitcher who doesn't strike out. And he's faced some decent—he's faced John Lester. He's actually two for two against John Lester. He's faced Aaron Nola. He's faced Kyle Hendricks. He's faced Carlos Martinez, he's faced John Lester. He's actually two for two against John Lester. He's faced Aaron Nola.

He's faced Kyle Hendricks. He's faced Carlos Martinez, of course, Miles Michaelis. But Steven Brault is essentially going up there and he's doing what I remember Barry Zito used to try to do, which was just swing, hit the ball. And if you hit the ball fair, it's a success, regardless of the fact that Steven Brault is not actually a good hitter. He has a, he's got a career on base percentage of 226.

Now a 484 OPS for a pitcher is quite good, but you know, still actually terrible. He's still not a, still not a good hitting pitcher, but he is a pitcher who doesn't strike out. According to some quotes I was able to find, he, not only does Steven Brault know that he's never struck out, but he makes it a matter of his daily routine to make sure all of his teammates know he's never struck out. So it would be a delight to at some point be able to talk to Stephen Brault about his batting approach, because I mean no offense to him, but it seems like it's more interesting at present than his pitching approach. Well, I was going to say that pitchers are historically terrible this

year at hitting, but they must have just had a good week or so because it looks like that's no longer quite the case. It's close to the case, but it is almost always the case now that pitchers are either the worst they've ever been as hitters or extremely close to the worst they've ever been. And I know that as of a week or so ago, it was looking even more dire than usual. And of course, pitchers were worse than they had ever been last year. We don't have to have the whole, does that mean there should be a universal DH debate right now? I am pro, I think, just because pitchers are so, so bad at hitting and understandably so. But yeah, it makes it even more impressive that he can at least make contact.

Yeah. And if I could follow that fun fact up with another fun fact that I personally find less fun, but I have to acknowledge I am among the world's bigger fans of Wilmer Font. Before the season, I thought that Wilmer Font could be packaged with a magic. I don't need to get into details here. And I still do believe in Wilmer Font, but I can tell you why maybe some people might no longer believe in Wilmer Font. He was the PCL, at least the Dodgers, I think, minor league pitcher of the year or something like that, PCL pitcher of the year.

He was an extremely good pitcher in AAA last season. He's up. He's in the majors. He was recently traded to the A's because he was designated for assignment by the Dodgers. Wilmer Font has pitched in seven games this season. He has thrown 12.1 innings. He's faced 57 batters and eight of them,

eight of those batters have hit home runs in his first game with the A's. He went two innings. He had a beautiful three to zero strikeout to walk ratio, a less beautiful three to three home run to strikeout ratio. I don't know. I've never seen a pitcher quite this home run prone and of course we're still talking about only 12.1 innings and we've seen a few recent outings jacob june has allowed five home runs in one start last week erasmo ramirez allowed five home runs in a start

last week when when this happens over the course of like a start or two it's easier to ignore but i mean wilmer font has allowed eight home runs in his last five relief appearances, and he's not pitching that much. I believe in him. I understand that maybe I'm the only one left. Yeah, it's really testing your faith. It would be hard to have a less impressive start to the season. I mean, he's already been moved, which I guess people were talking about him being traded

potentially even before the season started. But, I mean, man, it's been rough. So there was a point where you could look at the Dodgers record and say, yeah, but if you took out the games where Wilmer Font pitched, then they wouldn't actually be that bad because he just lost a few of them almost single-handedly. Anyway, I hope for better things ahead. You try not to get too wrapped up in these things because as a writer, you're writing about a different player and some sort of different perspective every day,

every week, and you try not to get too wrapped up and you're not going to get everything right, but holy hell, is this one looking like I got it wrong. I mean, my God. I can't think of a single reason. No one would have been able to forecast this

based on last season. He was great, but oh my God, just stop giving up home runs. Well, on a more positive note, I thought we could talk for a minute about Ozzy Albies because he is really great. I guess we mentioned him on a recent podcast when we were talking about how the Braves ended up with this great position player core, even though they set out to do a pitching centric rebuild. But Ozzy Alves maybe doesn't get as much attention as Acuna, probably wasn't even as hyped as Dansby Swanson, I would say, and in that half a season, he's been worth 3.3 wins above replacement. He's basically been a six-win player from the day he joined the major leagues, and he was 20 at the time.

He is now a young 21, so I know he wasn't quite the prospect that, say, Acuna is, and maybe he won't be quite the player I don't know but it would be hard to have a we talked about Font and hard to have a less impressive start hard to have a more impressive start than Ozzy Alves who's just looked really good and looked just pretty polished and exciting in a way that not many 20 or 21 year olds are I'm glad that you moved on to Albies because otherwise we were going to have another Brian Mitchell update. He started again. It wasn't good. But the fun thing, and we talked about the Braves in the last podcast, but I'll just

tell you. So right now, the Braves are first at Fangraphs among teams in a position player war. They're above the Yankees, the A's, the Cubs, the Pirates. In fact, they're above everyone. That's the thing about being first. So last year, the Braves were 19th, and the year before that, they were 29th. And the only team that was worse than them was the A's.

So the Braves and A's, I guess, have had very similar sort of, actually, they've had remarkably similar rises. So Braves and A's rising in parallel, but forget the A's for now. This is about the Braves. And it rising in parallel, but forget the A's for now. This is about the Braves. And it's really easy, I think, to not ignore Albies, but because Acuna is there, and Acuna is clearly the hot shit prospect.

And Freddie Freeman is there as one of just the best overall hitters in all of baseball. Dansby Swanson is there as sort of like a more boring kind of player, but he was the first overall pick, and was involved in like a highly controversial trade. So, of course, he's going to get a bunch of attention. And then, of course, you have all those pitchers. But then the easiest thing to miss is that you have this guy who's sort of flown under the radar. that maybe are a little easier to ignore just because they're not like leading the league in any one category necessarily, but they're good in every category and at a premium position, which he is also good at. So it's one of those easy to underrate cases.

Yeah. Now, one of the things that was written about Alba is before the year, and it's absolutely true, is that it's really hard to make the majors as a 20 year old and not turn out great because of course it should follow from that that in order to make the majors when you're 20 you are probably incredibly talented now of course ruganet odor made the majors in his age 20 season and he has fallen flat on his face and mariners fans will remember that jose lopez made the majors in his age 20 season and he just currently won a year's supply of Kirin I think it was beer in Japan because his career has taken him in an unusual direction so there's there are no guarantees here but for all the attention that's on the Braves right now for

for somewhat overachieving for having Freeman for having Acuna up all the already and all these other players yeah that's it's Albies who is, he and Freeman are the players who have driven this team to this point. Yeah. Did I, I may have just said that Albies is not the type of guy who's going to lead the league in homers. He is literally leading the league in homers right now. So that is, I guess, why we are talking about him right now is that he is literally doing the thing that I just said that he would get ignored because he doesn't do. I don't expect him to be among the league leaders in homers, but the fact that he is this deep into the season is pretty impressive. He's right next to Manny

Machado on the leaderboard and Charlie Blackman and Mookie Betts and guys with MVP votes. So I don't know if the power is something that is going to stay. I mean, he hit six homers in 57 games last year. So I don't know whether he is doing anything differently this year to increase power or whether he's taking advantage of seeing strikes. I know that he is hitting more fly balls, seemingly. I don't know whether that's, you know, every time someone raises his fly ball rate now, it's like, oh, he's a launch angle guy. He's a fly ball rate guy. Sometimes guys just hit more fly balls just because that happens and they got older and they got better or whatever. So I don't know if there's

that element to it, but the power has been really impressive this year there are seven players who have nine or ten home runs and among them are matt davidson ozzy albies mitch hanegar and didi gregorius weird season this is a thank goodness for mike trout hanging out there tied for the baseball lead and manny machado incidentally i'll just throw his name out there because he is having one hell of a start on a team that is not. Yes, right. And well, I'm sure we'll do the Manny Machado trade podcast pretty soon. So we can hold off on that. But there's already been a Fangraphs article about it. So the conversation has started. So when I was at Baseball Prospectus, Dan Rosenthal used to do a series about scouting position player pitchers.

And that was maybe when they weren't quite as common as they are now. And so it was special and fun every time there was one. That's not quite the case today. I think it's become common enough that we're pretty blasé about it. You'll still see tweets about it, but it's not an event. Unless that position player pitcher is Pablo Sandoval, who pitched this weekend. pretty blasé about it. You'll still see tweets about it, but it's not an event, unless that position player pitcher is Pablo Sandoval, who pitched this weekend. I don't know if you were watching live or whether you've seen highlights, but did you see enough or look at any stats that

would allow you to give us a Pablo Sandoval scouting report? Man had a, what, a 1-2-3 inning, right? He got three grounders. That was the thing that stuck with me after the fact was that someone tweeted that Pablo Sandoval this year has more 1-2-3 innings than Kenley Jansen. So that's just, this is 2018. According to Fangraphs, Sandoval, about half of his pitches were categorized as fastballs, and they were 86 miles per hour on average, and half his pitches were curveballs. That's around 70. And now I have not actually checked Brooks' baseball to check what his movements were doing perhaps you are ahead of

me on this one i'm not the curve looked pretty decent i mean it was super slow but he he got a whiff on one well i'm gonna i'm gonna tell you right now not so easy to find his pitching page on brooks baseball for some reason that doesn't come up automatically it might yeah maybe it's not even updated yet because i don't know but yeah usually when you search someone on there you'll get choice of pitcher or better if uh if they've done both but pablo not known for doing both among the the hierarchy i guess of position players pitching has In terms of overall experience and anticipation, has anything been able to top Ichiro? Is he the best one that anyone could imagine? I was wondering. I was actually thinking about that, whether this was more fun or equally fun or not as fun as the Ichiro pitching

appearance. I think with the Ichiro pitching appearance, there was a history there where we knew that he wanted to do it and that he could be capable of doing it and that he had done it in some places. And, you know, there's just this whole mystique around Ichiro and can he do this and can he do that? Could he hit more homers if he wanted to? Just because of the wizard that he was at the plate, I think there's always been this perception that he could just do anything that he set his mind to. And so we were all naturally curious to see how he would pitch. I don't know whether Sandoval has that sort of history with expressing an interest in this. I was not aware of it. So I think the element of surprise maybe surpassed the Itro appearance, just in that when I saw the headline, I couldn't believe I thought it was some kind of spoof or satire site or something that Pablo Sandoval had pitched.

So in that sense, it may have been even more entertaining. Pablo Sandoval. Okay, so I was able to find some movement here. He had a fair amount of rise on his fastball. That's a greater than league average rise. And the horizontal movement on his breaking ball was Kluber-esque. He was getting a lot of sweeping. Now, granted, this is a pitch at 70 miles per hour

that he doesn't have great command over. But nevertheless, you look at his plots, and you could see this as being like a real pitcher. His locations weren't great, but they weren't bad. Only two pitches missed pretty badly and so you can you can start to see something here but anyway i don't know for me sandoval's pitching appearance it's a good one of course kind of like i guess bartolo cologne at the plate but it doesn't come close to to each row's pitching experience maybe this one is is sort of in line

with uh with the jeff francor uh throwing on the. Kind of, here's a player who's not really good anymore, but he's got sort of a character. People understand him less as an average baseball player and more as what they like to imagine him to be. People have sort of these roles that Francoeur and Sandoval fit into. And so even though Pablo Sandoval at this point as a major league baseball player is more or less irrelevant, there's enough charm there, enough of a history that this is still, this is still fun,

but I'm not sure that anything could ever top each row in terms of a position player pitching. I can't think of a single one. Yeah. Trout. No, not even Mike Trout. No. I, yeah. I mean, I'd be excited to see Trout do that, I guess, but he's not known for his arm or anything. But Sandoval has actually been like a league average hitter this year, which is quite an improvement over where he had been for the previous two years. So maybe he has rehabilitated himself enough to be a viable position player. Despite Dave Cameron's, it's time to pull the plug on Pablo Sandoval post

from last June. I think it certainly looked like that. Maybe it's still true. I don't know. It's not like he's going to be a very valuable player at this point. So I wonder if he ever tries to pull off the late career switch to pitching as a Kazuhisa Makita style pitcher who throws a 70 something. Yeah. The thing about Makita is, I don't know if you saw his weekend appearance, but a few days ago, it was more fun to talk about Makita than it is now, because I can just read you Makita's eighth inning.

This is a game that the Padres lost to the Mets 14-2, so already that gives you a little bit of a hint, but Makita came in. I'll just read you from baseball reference. Kazuhisa Makita replaces Phil Matone, pitching and batting seventh. J. Bruce single, Todd Frazier home run, Adrian Gonzalez fly ball, Jose Reyes home run, tapas nido, strikeout swinging,

don't know who that is, Wilmer Flores walk, Azriba Cabrera single, Michael Conforto single, Brandon Nimmo single, J. Bruce foul pop fly. Kirby Yates replaces Matt Caesar, who hit for Kazuhisa Makita. So Makita in the inning allowed six hits, five runs, walk strikeout, two home runs. All of a sudden his ERA is up to 7.71. All of a sudden you could say the season is not good. Yeah, I don't know how that will work. A guy who throws that slowly and gets no grounders.

And I know he has had some strikeouts this season, but hasn't historically. I don't know. I'm rooting for him. But yeah, not looking great right now. So a couple other things I wanted to mention. First, there was a—I won't call it, I won't dignify it by calling it a brawl this weekend between the Royals and the White Sox. Benches cleared.

It was like benches clearing, milling around. I don't know if there was no even hint of aggression, not that there should have been or that it would have been better if there would be, but it was all very silly. And it was between Tim Anderson of the White Sox and Salvador Perez of the Royals. And evidently it came down to the fact that Anderson had celebrated a homer, and I didn't even really see that. I mean, it was fairly muted. I guess he did the point to the sky thing after he got to home plate, but it wasn't one of the more over-the-top celebrations. He said something to Anderson when Perez was on base in a subsequent inning, and it devolved into jawing from there. And then there were quotes after the game where Perez was saying he did it opening day, too. The same thing. Said a bad word. He didn't even play in an effing playoff game. He doesn't know about getting excited. You have to be in the playoffs to get excited.

Win a World Series to get excited. That's a game. That's a simple game. That's the second time I said something to him. The first time I saw it, I was on the DL. He'd do it again, and I have the opportunity to say something to him again. And it's funny, there was a tweet by Rani Jazerli that I thought was apt here, and he wrote, Salvador Perez calling out Tim Anderson for playing with too much joie de vivre because the White Sox haven't won anything completes the circle of life. These White Sox embody the ethos of the 2014 to 15 Royals

more than the Royals do. And that hurts almost as much as the losing. And it is interesting because this sort of thing, I mean, generally it tends to be like a white player with that kind of straight-laced baseball background getting upset at someone who comes from a different baseball background. In this case, it was not that. It was Salvi, who is known for being expressive and joyful himself, and he is taking objection to what Anderson is doing here. And Anderson, I mean, we talked about this, I think, with Jason Benetti on the White Sox preview

podcast, but he had a difficult year last year. He was grief stricken. And he alluded to that here where he said something like, you know, after the year I had last year, I'm just going to enjoy this and he should enjoy this. And it's also funny because both of these teams are currently terrible, but they are kind of at opposite ends of the stretch of being terrible, I guess. So sometimes it's like a team is losing a lot and someone will get mad and you'll think, well, it's just, it's frustrating to lose that much and tempers are on edge. But in this case, both of these teams are losing a lot, but the Royals are on the way down and the White Sox are on the way up. And so I wonder how much of a difference that makes to the mood in the clubhouse and on the field.

It's interesting. So you're right on the the one we don't usually hear these things coming from say a uh a latin baseball player trying to police the emotion of the game but one thing that is interesting so at first i wanted to just chalk this up to the royals being pissed off because they suck playing a team that also sucks but getting beaten by them or whatever it was because yeah these teams are absolutely terrible but what what I then remembered, though, Salvador Perez recently came off the disabled list, and he had a knee injury. I think it was an MCL. I don't remember.

Something with his knee that was not in season ending. He was not in the lineup on opening day. He usually is, but it was Drew Butera, who was the catcher for the Royals, which means in order for Salvador Perez to know exactly what Anderson did or said on opening day, maybe he heard it from the dugout. But more realistically, I'm going to guess a bunch

of the Royals were talking about this. So the Royals probably would have said like, hey, we didn't really appreciate what Tim Anderson was doing on opening day when he hit two of his home runs. Now, that was a game where Matt Davidson hit three home runs, so Tim Anderson still lost, but whatever. Home runs for everyone. But there would have been sort of a dialogue about tim anderson among the royals and then it would have come to a head because again the royals suck and so salvador prez wanted to

get it out of the system i think from from our perspective almost every single time we are inclined to take the side of the player who is celebrating because we like celebrations we want players to show their emotion etc we should also acknowledge that we really don't we don't really know exactly what was done exactly what the dynamics are here between players obviously it's not like the royals would have been pushed almost over the edge by nothing there was timmy nelson very well might have done something that rubbed well he clearly did something that rubbed the royals the uh the wrong way but now we have both the royals and the Twins being a little bit butthurt in the early going this season by things that seem like they're not really that big of a

deal. So the AL Central was already looking like the worst division in baseball, but now in another way, it's the worst division in baseball because I hate these conversations every single time. Yeah. I think Zach Kram at the Ringer may have mentioned recently that every team in the AL Central has a negative run differential. Is that still the case? Have the Indians even been outscored? I think they, yes, even they have been outscored by three runs. So yeah, this division is looking pretty weak right now indians got throttled a little bit by the mariners over the weekend who are trying to be a playoff team based on bets alone pitching is still terrible as a matter of fact the mariners have still been outscored but i know there there have been there's been a spate of dialogue recently it was we came into the air already with sort of the the haves and the have nots and the tanking story uh being a little running amok, perhaps. And so now there's articles out there about all the teams that are on pace for 100-plus losses.

And when you look at the landscape of teams that are terrible, like the Orioles, they tried. The Royals, they signed some free agents that we knew they were going to be bad. But, you know, they were active. The Twins are terrible, but they were supposed to be good. Yeah, there are some teams that are just not trying and have sank to the bottom. Of course, the Marlins are terrible at beating the Dodgers aside, but this is not quite the landscape that people thought we were going to see. The Nationals are six games out of first place.

The Dodgers are seven games out of first place. The Dodgers are almost as bad as the Padres right now. So I understand that this has been sort of a weird march in april in terms of the spread between teams but let's not pretend like this is exactly the spread that was preordained because by the way the pirates are in first place in the national league central there's a lot of weird things that are going on like the indians not being that good yet so yeah this is these standings were not very easy to foresee except for the fact that the red sox and yanke standings were not very easy to foresee except for the fact

that the red sox and yankees are now separated themselves in the american league east that's that was always going to happen yeah and we didn't foresee that the diamondbacks would get off to the start that they have robbie ray has an oblique issue may miss some starts that could be bad but diamondbacks have looked really good have they changed your mind at all with this series streak of nine series in a row one to start the season tying a national league record or did you just think they were pretty good and still think they're pretty good i'm not sure the diamondbacks have done much to change my mind as much as the dodgers have and just sort of the standings being where they are and i know you and i both agree on this but when it's one thing to think that the dodgers are better than the diamondbacks from this point forward but again

and we talk about this every single year but this is no longer about one team being better than the other this is about one team being seven games better than the other over the course of less than a full baseball season but yeah d-backs and dodgers have already played 27 games now that the greatest challenge i think for the diamondbacks all season long was going to be whether they could survive not having very much rotation depth and now they're down taiwan walker robbie ray is is hurt i know that uh zach grinky hasn't really pitched as well as he would like to although as i look at his numbers he's great it doesn't matter he's fine patrick corbin is taking a step forward so you know things are are manageable here but the the diamondbacks don't have a great amount of pitching depth.

So that could end up being something that exposes them. But, you know, the Dodgers also have less depth than they've ever had. And this is a season where this, you know, do you know what Diamondbacks player is fourth on the team in wins of a replacement? This is looking at hitters because, you know, Goldschmidt is up there. You know, Pollock is up there. Yeah. You might guess that Goldschmidt is up there. You know Pollock is up there. Yeah. You might guess that Peralta is up there. Guessing it's not Quetel Marte.

Nick Ahmed is a, I mean, it's only a 116 WRC+, but dude's hitting. And you remember we talked to Nick Pecoro during our interminable season preview series. Yes. And he was talking about how he still, and the Diamondbacks still, believe that Ahmed had latent hitting talent within him. And he was talking about how he still, and the Diamondbacks still believe that Ahmed had like latent hitting talent

within him. And he's, he's doing it. He's a, he's hidden. So good for, for Nick Ahmed. And you know,

it doesn't, this is a team that's been down. Steven Sousa, it's been down Jake Lamb. They're coming back soon. And to be 19 and eight now. Yeah. Nothing individually is surprised the crap out of me Except for Ahmed and Corbin

And I guess that's enough The NOMACs are good Okay, so this is something I wanted to ask you about As a native San Diegan Is that how you say that? San Diegoan? I don't know You're the native

But Adrian Gonzalez gets booed in San Diego Every time he plays there And I've always been confused by this It happened just recently Because the Mets were in San Diego every time he plays there. And I've always been confused by this. It happened just recently because the Mets were in San Diego. I get it when he was a Dodger, maybe you just automatically boo Dodgers, fine. But he got booed when he was with the Red Sox the first time he returned to San Diego. He still gets booed with the Mets now. And Adrian Gonzalez is, you know, one of the best players in recent Padres history. I guess technically right now he is tied down to the 10th place with Chase Headley,

who I know that makes the stat sound less impressive. Maybe Chase Headley has eroded his career war total so far this season. But basically the best hitter or, you know, best career for a position player on the Padres since Tony Gwynn and Dave Winfield, probably. And he didn't leave of his own volition. He was traded. He is a native of San Diego. He was born there. He grew up there. He was good there. And he was traded by the team. So I've never understood why he gets booed there. And fandom is irrational, I know, but he doesn't seem to hold any grudge. He just said it's always good to be in San Diego this past weekend.

Do you have any insight into why he gets booed there or why he would? So while you were prefacing this and explaining this to me, I was doing a little of googling and i came across a few links from padres explanation blog vox media blog i don't care gas lamp ball and uh that didn't really give me any new information it's uh the explanation seems to be so he didn't he didn't leave because he he asked out he was not he says at least he was not offered a new contract with the Padres but they knew he was going to get expensive so they traded him and it seems like the booing started because the first time Adrian Gonzalez was back in San Diego he was with the Dodgers right I don't think either one of us can find any record of him he definitely played against the Padres with the Redlocks but that was

in Boston so he yeah right not have been booed then also because he had a bunch of hits in that series but anyway so he I I would imagine he was booed when he came back. One, because it's the Dodgers, and the Padres think they have a rivalry with the Dodgers. This is definitely one of those one-way rivalries, and it's just an inferiority thing, and the Padres will, when they're good again, if they're good again, then they'll all feel better.

But it makes sense. They should have a rivalry there. They're in the same division. It would be nice to have some mutual hatred instead of complete dominance. But you have Gonzalez come back as a beloved, one-time beloved Padres MVP. He was there when the Padres were pretty good. And he was the big reason why the Padres were pretty good. And then he disappears.

You don't see him with the Red Sox. Then he comes back wearing the uniform of your most hated team. And, of course, by that point, he's a symbol of, oh, baseball players and their greed and their hundreds of millions of dollars, which, of course, is not. Well, it's his fault in that he's a great baseball player. Right. Well, I guess that's what it comes down to, which is silly. I mean, all right. So he was with the Dodgers, and maybe now they're just in the habit of booing him or something.

So they're just going to keep it up no matter where he's playing. But I found an article from 2012 when he made his first return by podcast listener J.P. Hornstra, and he asked him about it, and he says, Gonzalez knows that locals will ask him why he left San Diego. Gonzalez's response is a simple one. I didn't leave. I was traded. But the popular perception is that the Padres had good reason to trade Gonzalez. Their only other choice, it seemed, was to let the slugger leave as a free agent after the 2011 season, knowing he would want a significant raise from the $6.3 million he was due in the final year of his contract. He eventually, of course, got seven years and $154. They, of course, got seven years and 154.

Hornstra continues, or was there another choice? Gonzalez says, I don't know how much they would have been able to offer. I don't know what their limit was. I was traded. I was never offered a contract. Would you accept an offer that was never offered? So I guess it does come down to there was maybe a sense that he wanted to make money. I know, what a sin.

And I guess he wanted to play for a winner, possibly, also terrible, unforgivable. So it seems sort of silly. I mean, maybe it's partially just booing the Padres for having to have traded him and not just signing him. Or maybe it has to do with what happened in the aftermath of that trade, because of course, they traded him for Anthony Rizzo. What happened in the aftermath of that trade? Because, of course, they traded him for Anthony Rizzo. And maybe if they had just kept Anthony Rizzo, they would not be booing Adrian Gonzalez. Maybe they'd be cheering him for having brought back Anthony Rizzo. But, of course, then they traded Anthony Rizzo after whatever, 150 lousy plate appearances.

So they got Andrew Kashner back for that. So now maybe when Adrian Gonzalez comes up, they're thinking about all of these things, the fact that the Padres haven't been good, that they can't keep a player, that the player they got in exchange for Gonzalez ended up leaving before he got good. So maybe it's just a general reminder of the fact that hasn't been a whole lot of fun to root for the Padres lately, more so than Gonzalez. But if it's just that Gonzalez wanted to make money, then he deserved to make money. He was a really good player. It's the Padres' fault for not being able to pay him. Anthony Rizzo would be in his final year of service. He would be a Super 2 player. He'd be getting paid a lot of money, but he'd be with the Padres. And of course, the Andrew Kashner thing, that didn't go very well. But yeah, I would imagine that there's

probably not a whole lot of thought that goes into this. It's just Padres fans are upset because they didn't have Adrian Gonzalez anymore. They were upset because their division rival, who was pretty good, did have Adrian Gonzalez. And they were upset because Gonzalez made too much money for the Padres to afford in the first place. So it doesn't have to make sense. Booing oftentimes doesn't. You just feel this general unpleasantness in your heart and you wish to express it. And there you go.

There's really not a whole lot more to it. Yeah. Anyway, there's probably nuance here that I'm missing because I am not a lifelong Padres fan. So Padres fans, feel free to fill us in. But I guess it's not uncommon for just good player to get booed when he goes back to team he was good for But often in those cases it's that he at least chose to sign somewhere else Which is sort of also a silly reason to boo But at least it makes more sense than if a guy is traded

And really didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter Anyway, remember the good times That's what I'm saying Cheer for the good times But I guess probably they won't have to be reminded of this for all that much longer. How's Adrian Gonzalez doing this year? Oh, wish I didn't look at that. Last thing before we get to Rob, we've talked on this podcast about how reminding someone of their mortality can be a performance enhancer.

someone of their mortality can be a performance enhancer that if you're thinking about the fact that you will one day die, you may play better or perform whatever you do better in the short term. And there is a scenario here that is not quite that. If you remind someone that they will die, maybe they will perform better. If they actually die, they will not perform better, most likely. However, they can still score a run in a baseball game. So this is something that I read this morning in Pages from Baseball's Past, the great newsletter from Craig Wright, and it is about the hypothetical of what would happen if someone died while rounding the bases. And it doesn't have to be a death, I guess. It could just be being incapacitated. Now, of course, you can pinch run for someone who is incapacitated while running the bases.

That happened to Gabe Kapler once in amusing fashion. But you can also evidently carry someone around the bases. And the question is, can you do that? carry someone around the bases? And the question is, can you do that? Because of course, a runner can't pass another runner without being called out. So that's rule 5.09, parentheses B, parentheses 2. Baseball rules are really easy to cite. And that one came about apparently in 1880 was when something happened that that rule came about. So this was, it was King Kelly, the Hall of Famer of the White Stockings, was doubled over to third base by teammate Ned Williamson. I'm reading from Craig Wright here.

Kelly pretended to be shaken up on his slide, called time, and faked a discussion with his teammates on whether he could continue. What he actually was doing was telling Williamson his unique plan to win the game. On the next pitch, Kelly and Williamson took off on a bizarre double steal attempt. As Kelly approached the plate, he suddenly stopped short, and when the catcher came out to tag him, Kelly danced to the side so that he shielded the catcher from Williamson, who had kept on running around third. Kelly was naturally tagged out, but Williamson slid home with the winning run. So there was like a deke play that went on here. And that is why we have the rule that prevents people from running past other runners. So the question here was, well,

could you carry another runner? Could you touch? Can you make contact with another runner? And it seems to be the case that you can, that you can make contact with them. And there was a fairly recent precedent for this in 2007. There was a Bobby Abreu fly ball and Derek Jeter was on base. So he took off. He was watching the ball. So he ran into Malky Cabrera's back on the bases, which stopped Jeter and propelled Cabrera, which kind of helped

both of them in that case. And Mike Socha questioned the play and considered protesting it, but opted not to because the Empire said it was OK. So you know that you can do that. But there is this case that happened, the Dead Man Run that happened November 1913, and possibly apocryphal story but has never been debunked so it was cited in the

Acadian Recorder, a small weekly newspaper in Nova Scotia and quickly repeated in Baseball Magazine in 1914 under the headline, The Corpse Scored in the article an unidentified person claims to have personally witnessed the game and covers the play in considerable detail, but without saying or estimating the year that it happened.

The witness says that the college team was playing the town team from Chatham and was trailing 2-0 in the ninth inning. A St. Joseph player named O'Hara doubled, and then a teammate named Robito hit a long home run to center field. O'Hara collapsed as he was rounding third base and appeared to be unconscious. Robito picked up O'Hara and carried him to home plate. He brushed O'Hara's foot against the plate and then touched home himself, which I guess is like when you're supposed to place the oxygen mask over your own face before putting it over someone else's. This is the opposite of that.

He brushed the foot against the plate, then he touched home. In trying to revive O'Hara, they discovered he was dead. The amateur umpire ruled that both runs counted, since Robito never physically passed O'Hara until the dead man had scored the college's first run, and then Robito tied the game with the second run. So I don't know whether that actually happened. It is difficult to verify. But if that ever happens again, let's hope it doesn't. But if it does, that's what you would do. So you could literally carry someone around the bases. I guess Gabe Kapler wasn't carried because Gabe Kapler is pretty heavy. I guess if Itro gets his wish, he'll play baseball until he dies. I don't want to observe this happen, but if there's one player

I can imagine being carried to home plate after post-mortem, I think we know the guy. I think so. And also, very easy to lift. That's true, too. Alright, well hopefully that story will enhance all of our listeners' performance for the rest of the day, because we've reminded them of

their mortality. We will take a quick break, and we'll be right back with Rob Means of Baseball Perspectives. I don't know. Save my ticket for then. Save my ticket for then. Save my ticket for then. So in his chat last Friday at Fangraphs, one Jeff Sullivan said, I know implementation can be hard and maybe the team would operate at a loss, but there needs to be more chances for families to afford to go to the ballpark. It's the in-the-park experience that sells people on the sport in the first place, and it's not just families, of course, also just regular fans who aren't in the upper middle class. And related to that, Rob Maines at Baseball Prospectus wrote something on Monday about ticket prices and why they are not lower, why going to games is not more affordable, and why it probably won't ever be.

So I guess that's a depressing note. But to have him on to tell us about why this is happening and why it will probably continue to happen, he is joining us now. Hey, Rob. Hi, guys. How are you today? We're doing all right. So as you note in the article, there is this longstanding perception that ticket prices are closely tied to player salaries and team payroll and that if players just weren't making so darn much money, then we would all be able to go see them play. And I don't know whether this article was inspired by anything specific or whether people are saying that again more so than they usually are.

But why is that not the case? Yeah, well, the impetus was something that shockingly I saw on Twitter about the idea that their salaries is why it costs so much. But in the article, I say there's really three reasons. And the reason why I decided to publish it was that the day it came out, April 30th, the 15th anniversary of when Nate Silver had published something on the same topic, baseball perspective. So it obviously hadn't been put to rest. The economic theory behind it is basically that baseball is an industry where there's kind of no competition for what they're doing. If the Rockies charge more, it's not that the other team

in Colorado is going to get all of their business. And since baseball isn't a regulated business the way that, say, your local electric utility is, where they have to get their rates approved by a commission, they just charge what they want. And what they're going to charge is the amount that maximizes their profit. And that might be something that lets a lot of people into the gate. But if they can charge a lot more and maybe get a slightly smaller attendance, probably that works out mathematically. Then I also looked at real examples. And there have been cases, not only the Marlins, where teams have dropped payroll considerably from one season to the next. And if the idea is that ticket prices are tied to player salaries, you'd find that tickets for those teams would drop immensely. I mean, we're talking teams that

drop payroll by a third, by 50%, really huge drops. And in fact, that didn't happen. It might have been modest reductions in ticket pricing, but really nothing all that meaningful. And then the thing that's changed since Nate Silver wrote his article is the formalization of what we used to think of as the scalpers who stand outside the stadium. You know, there's StubHub and there's all the other resellers. And if a team charges more for its tickets and you still are not necessarily able to buy a good seat at the team website, you can go to StubHub or wherever, and the price you're going to pay there is going to be the same as what you're paying today for the ticket. It's

just that more of that profit is going to go to StubHub and the guy who originally bought the ticket rather than the team. And the team says, well, why should I do that? I mean, that's the whole idea in the variable pricing that they do for games. So there's just a lot of forces that mean that ticket prices, sadly, unless there's something that really happens economically differently in the game, I don't see them going down. So it's easy to sit here

and blame the teams for charging so much for a ticket. But I mean, is that sort of the forgotten variable? Just the fact that there is the secondary market, that even if the teams were to lower ticket prices,

well, they wouldn't be available necessarily for that cost to many of the buying audience just because of the secondary market? Or is there a way to sort of, you know, flood them out? If you reduce ticket prices to $5 for an evening, you know, the secondary market isn't going to be upselling all of those tickets. So I don't know. Is there a way for the teams to take control of the secondary market in any way to prevent this? I'm speaking from a position of complete ignorance on the subject. Well, you know, that's a good question because it's kind of a supply demand thing. I mean, it's going to be really tough for the Red Sox or the Giants or the Yankees, you know, the teams that do really well to be able to get control over the secondary market.

But certainly if you're playing in, say, the state of Florida and you're having a hard time selling out your games anyway, there's a pretty good chance that, you know, if you're buying a ticket somewhere other than from the team, that you're not paying full face anyway. So I think in those cases, there's an opportunity for teams to do things that would make games more affordable without necessarily hurting their bottom line. But the attendance in Tampa and Miami, it's already

pretty thin. I think the best hope would be something like what the Orioles are doing with get in for free with an adult to bleach your seat for games. I think that's a nice promotion, something like that could work. But, you know, if, like I say, if it's not StubHub, it's going to be the guys walking around the stadium saying, I got two behind home plate. Either way, there are going to be some people who buy the tickets who are going to either say, well, I can't make it that day, or they're going to say, hey, I can make more money selling this, and they're going to keep selling it. And if you're going to reduce the price of that, the face value of that ticket, that's creating even more of an incentive

for them to do it. Yeah. And you could kind of bring this up maybe with local TV deal situations as well, when you have cases where maybe a team is holding out for more money in some way, or there's some conflict between networks and so you can't see the game in the local market and maybe it makes sense for certain games to be blacked out in the sense that you want more people to come to the game but in the long run maybe you are eroding your fan base right because people can't see the games and in this case we're talking about ticket prices maybe people can't go to the. And in this case, we're talking about ticket prices. Maybe people can't go to the games. And if there's truth to the idea that going to games mints more fans,

which seems logical, then ultimately maybe you are maximizing your short-term returns, but potentially hurting yourself in the long run. Yeah, that's possible. And I think that the blackout thing in an age of being able to see things on MLB TV and other devices, that's kind of making less and less sense. The thing is that we've been seeing these complaints about ticket prices for just about as long as there's been free agency and people muttering about how much money the players make. Yeah, I'd guess even going back to the beginning of baseball or when there first were ticket prices as opposed to just an amateur game, I bet you could find people complaining about how you actually have to pay to go to baseball games. Yeah, I think I saw something in the 50s about it.

What Nate Silver did that's interesting in his studies, he looked at ticket prices as a percentage of disposable income and found that this is 2003, obviously, but I don't think it's changed much, that really they've been pretty flat over the last several decades. simulator you know you get to be the owner you get to set everything when you are you know simulating your your season and your circumstances and when you are the simulator on the computer then you will you will optimize your ticket prices so that you try to make the most money possible and of course this is what every single team in major league baseball does all professional sports is what they do and they they'll bring in sometimes people from the outside to find the ideal ticket price this is how they've arrived at their dynamic pricing. This is why concessions cost what they do, etc.

So the people who are responsible for setting these ticket prices are very smart. They understand how all of these different market forces interplay. But I guess from your perspective, and this is a related question, how much would you trust them to be able to understand the long-term value of, again, say if you were the Orioles or say you were the A's, the Orioles, of course, have their upper deck ticket giveaway for kids and the A's had their free game, which is fitting because they have the free roster. But you have all these, you potentially can introduce young people to the stadium who have maybe never seen a baseball game before,

have never had access to a baseball game, and wouldn't under ordinary circumstances. How well do you think analysts can forecast the long-term, not to put these words on people, but the long-term value of somebody's youthful experience at a baseball stadium? Because you really could be creating a fan just with that giveaway. And that seems to be more complicated than just a matter of short-term revenue. Yeah, and you're right. There's, you know, the people in the marketing department are versed in analytics just like the baseball operations guys. And that's part of, I think, what we're seeing in the way that ticket prices

and other prices have developed. And they probably look at the long- term about as well as the analytics guys in baseball ops do, and that they see it maybe a year, two, three, four, maybe five out. Many years out, I don't think that anyone really has the incentive to look at things that way. That's an issue. But you still have the problem of the secondary market where if you charge less, your profits just can get eaten up by somebody else. I think what the Orioles are doing is pretty sharp.

You can't resell those kids' tickets. I think that's the way to go about it. I think it would be nice if Major League Baseball can move towards a minor league model where what you've got is what I you know, what I described as a really good floor show with a nominal covered charge and bad overpriced food. That's a way you can get more people to the stadium. It's not necessarily a way to maximize near-term problems. And I know that attendance has been down slightly at least this season, and maybe that has a lot to do with weather. So I don't know if we're getting to any kind of inflection point here with ticket prices, but probably not yet, or at least it's too soon to say.

But I will be curious to see, especially as there are teams that are just very openly embracing rebuilds. And I guess the Orioles are not actually one of those teams, and neither are the A's really. So it's not as if they are compensating in that way. But maybe as you do get these teams that are saying, well, we're looking to three years from now or whenever it is, and hey, come see these guys who will be our stars one day and you can catch them early for free or for a very low price. Maybe that makes some sense if you know. I don't know where the breakeven point is exactly where it makes sense to offer free tickets or steep discounts.

But there has to be that point probably that some teams are not taking advantage of yet. Yeah, I'd say if you're drawing fewer than 10,000 people to your games, you're probably doing something pretty wrong with your pricing. And I know having looked at some hockey teams this past season that were having some trouble with attendance, it seems like the time to strike is late in the season. If your team is bad, just don't charge anything because the secondary market doesn't exist. I mean, I was seeing a hockey ticket, especially in, say, Canada, can be pretty expensive. But if you have an upper deck ticket, face value $75 that's being sold on SubHub for $10 a day of, then it seems like when you are at the...

Maybe you don't worry about trying to let people in for cheap in April and May. Every team except for the Reds has hope in April and May. But by the end of September, it seems like that's the time to strike and just lower ticket prices to a level that you've never even considered before because nobody really wants to go strongly anyway. So just let them go for free or almost free. It's like you bring your prospects up to get some seasoning, just expose them to major league pitching. Do the same with your fan base, I guess.

So, Rob, while we have you, you are also doing this year-long series, season-long series at Baseball Perspectives. Looking back at the year of the pitcher, 1968, it's the 50th anniversary. That was obviously a pivotal season in a lot of ways, obviously a momentous year in American history, but also a pivotal one for baseball and the run environment. And it is relevant now, I think, just because offense is not down to, you know, catastrophic levels right now. Scoring is okay, but there are certainly things that are going on with the game today that seem to be out of control, or if left unchecked, will get out of control. So I'm curious, as you're doing this week by week, look back at 1968, what you're coming across as far as what people were talking about then, how much they were bothered by the lack of offense, what solutions, if any, they were proposing at the time. We know what solution they adopted after the season with lowering the mound and there's a strike zone change, but what were people saying? Well, by the way, for the whole series, I have to give props to my baseball prospect, this colleague, Matt Trueblood, for giving me an idea of doing this.

But, you know, if 68, going into 1968, the concern about offense was how lousy it had been in 1967, which was a big scoring drought year that was pretty much obliterated by what we saw in 68. But early in the season, there was really a lot of hand-wringing. I mean, there were concerns that the offense was downed and that it was boring fans. And there was the Mets-Astros game in the first week of the season that went 26 innings. And everyone or a lot of observers were saying this is bad, but nobody was really sort of coming to grips with the idea that maybe something has to change. That came later in the season.

My thought is that the impetus for that might have been the 1969 expansion, which really wasn't finalized until mid-1968, with the knowledge that there were going to be four new teams coming into the league and likely a dilution of talent to some degree. And the end of the two leagues and their champions playing the World Series, divisional series and divisions starting up, and you have championship series. I think that's when people really started thinking about what the solutions would be. Early on in the season, there was just a lot of consternation and some really dumb ideas about what might work to be able to get the offenses back on track and the usual things that players, modern players, were satisfied just getting one hit

when they get into a game. And we also had at that time a commissioner, William Eckert, who was tremendously disappointed from what was going on, kind of in any way whatsoever. Baseball's response to the King assassination, which happened right around the time the season was started, was shamefully chaotic. And it was a model of order compared to what they did after Kennedy's assassination two months later. So you had a lack of leadership combined with, kind of early in the season, a lack of ideas that didn't gel until considerably later. Yeah. Joe Sheehan made a point in a recent edition of his newsletter that

MLB really hasn't done anything to address just the way that baseball is played now for about 30 years, really, since like the the Bach rule changes in 88. And then, you know, going back to the DH and the rulebook strike zone change and the things that followed 68, baseball really hasn't done anything. And if you look at the other major leagues, they take a much more hands-on approach to tweaking things from season to season. You could say that maybe they take that too far sometimes and there's some value in waiting and seeing what happens and maybe the players will just solve things themselves.

But at this point, we're more than a decade into this pretty steep strikeout increase, and really that's been going on for decades, not a decade. And so it doesn't seem like that's just going to fix itself. It seems like it's going to require some intervention, and there is history of MLB doing that, but it's getting to be ancient history at this point. So you'd think that they would be strongly considering stepping in at this stage. Yeah, I got to think that there's a lack of consensus what needs to get done. It was pretty easy in 68 to say, gee, maybe

raising the pitcher's mound was not a brilliant idea in hindsight. But there's not an easily recognizable misstep within the rules. And we know that part of what we're seeing is kind of an outgrowth of the adoption of analytics. And you've got now all 30 teams behind it. So it's sort of tough to figure out the right way to address a problem that kind of everybody has been complicit in creating. Yeah, that was sort of what Joe was writing about, the idea that sabermetrics is responsible, which is probably partly true, but he doesn't accept blame for bringing that about because he argues that it's the league's job essentially to do something about it, that it's writers' jobs to chronicle the game. And if you're an analytical writer, it's your job to point out how teams could be better or what the optimal style of play is.

It's not necessarily writers' responsibility to say, this is how you fix it. And certainly, we've all made many suggestions about how you could fix these things if you want to, but ultimately it's kind of the league's job to say, this is what we want baseball to look like. And if this is not what we want it to look like, then this is what we're going to do about it. Yeah. You look at baseball history over a real long term, this is just the latest iteration of something that always Crops up the pitchers Always figure out a way to get an edge On hitters and then

Almost always the league has to intervene In some way to even the scales Yeah alright well you Can read Rob's article on ticket Prices at BP you can check back In there to read his diary of 1968 throughout the year You can find him also at Banished to the Pen

and on Twitter at Cran underscore boy, C-R-A-N. Thank you, Rob. Thanks for talking with us, guys. Good speaking. So that will do it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. It's a new month and a new billing cycle,

so sign up now. Five listeners who have recently signed up include Rourke Adeline, Evan Kirkwood, Mitch M., Zach Wurtz, and Chris Trevell. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate and view and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And please keep your questions and your comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast.famgraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. You know the drill. We do three of these things a week. That means that we'll be back to talk to you very soon. You know the song. You know the song.

You know the song. You can imagine all the factions. They form around high-ticket attractions. Just like the Mayan took all the science and dumped it all in the drinking and sighing. They knew the science had fallen. They had the calling. You know the song. Thank you.