Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1222: Testing the Balls and Beating the Bookies

Episode Date: May 26, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Red Sox designating Hanley Ramirez for assignment, what Mookie Betts and Barry Bonds have in common, Shohei Ohtani‘s “workload management,” Bartolo Colon’s 45th birthday, a John Jaso appearance at the Trop, a listener’s real-world use of tOPS+, and two more examples of players intentionally performing typically detrimental […]

Night, we'll guide you in the night. We don't have to die. If the water's getting cold, then your body's getting old. With mine, we're dark horses in the bright. Jesus, don't you try. Just to start. Get all I love. Hello and welcome to episode 1222.

That's 1,222 of Effectively Wild, fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our patreon supporters i'm jeff sullivan of fangraphs joined as always by ben lindbergh of the ringer hello ben hello how are you i'm excited for this episode great i know that usually when we have a guest and then the guest asks how are you you answer for both of us and you say we're doing well and i never give you permission to do that but i guess you can hereby consider this permission for the future in this episode we'll be talking to rob arthur about the baseball and the uh the commission that studied any changes in the baseball commissioned by major league baseball keeps saying commission and baseball as i introduce this segment later on we'll be talking

to mitchell lichman about baseball and gambling so touching on some recent news but we also have a little bit of what is to us breaking news and what is to you, the listener old hat. Hanley Ramirez has been designated for assignment by the Red Sox to make room for Dustin Pedroia. Hanley Ramirez between 2014 and 2015 was signed by the Red Sox for four years and 88 million.

I believe it was Pablo Sandoval that same off season was signed for five years and more than $90 million. And over their official spans as Red Sox, Hanley and Pablo batted 2,418 times. They had a WRC plus of 96. They played bad defense and they were worth a grand total of negative 0.6 fan graphs wore. So not a great though. He almost got there to the end of the contract, but not quite. Was it not this past offseason where Hanley was feeling optimistic he was healthy he was recovering and

i believe he said he was going to steal 30 bases well i don't have a direct quote well he hit well in april yeah and then so uh he got up to four four stolen bases now he did have seven double six home runs he wasn't a complete waste of space but But at the end of the day, the 71 and 91 Red Sox tried to jumpstart their lineup with two of the premium free agents available to them. And they were worse than giving opportunities to random guys out of AAA. So this is a useful reminder that free agency is terrible. Maybe after this offseason shouldn't be saying that. I don't know. But Hanley Ramirez this season ends up being worth negative 0.1 more. I don't know what kind

of job he can get. I don't know who is really in the market for someone like Hanley Ramirez. But on the other hand, Matt Kemp is still playing regularly for the Dodgers. So what do I know about how baseball works? Yeah, I know this news was seen as sort of surprising, but it isn't really when you look at the larger picture. I think this has been discussed with Hanley before. I mean, he was a sub replacement player last year, and he has been a sub replacement player this year. He is at this point a DH basically, who doesn't hit like a league average hitter, and that is not a valuable player. So you can sort of see why this happens. And Pedroia comes back. You need a roster spot. There goes Hanley. And speaking of free agency not working out well,

it really hasn't in the Red Sox case. I saw this tweet and a fun fact, and it definitely made me say, wow, this is from Brian McPherson. And he says, Hanley Ramirez was just a matter of months from getting to the end of the four-year deal he signed with the Red Sox. And he says, And those two were David Ross and Chris Young. So yeah, if you can develop from within, and the Red Sox have had a lot of success doing that, then that kind of works out better for you often, which is sort of how we ended up in this place where teams are no longer spending on free agents and players are not making enough money. But if you're looking at the Red Sox recent track record, you can sort of

see how that happened. It is worth recalling that when Hanley Ramirez was actually when he was a prospect, and he was a highly rated prospect, his minor league numbers were not very good. So he was he was initially a story of how minor league numbers might not tell you everything. And some players just have tools that they put together at the major league level. And when Hanley Ramirez was in his mid 20s, he was genuinely one of the very best players in all of baseball he did everything except I guess play great defense but anyway he was a short stop for the Marlins and some laughably bad defensive infields but they were they could hit he could hit he could run he was worth more than 14 and a half wins above replacement in his two seasons

age 24 and 25 and then he turned 30 and it just kind of fell off the mat. So Hanley Ramirez kind of following, I don't know if you want to call it the Ken Griffey Jr. course or the Andrew Jones course or just the players get older and worse course. But Hanley Ramirez, not a distinguished end of his career. I don't know what comes next. I don't know if he'll get another opportunity, but I guess most players don't have distinguished ends of their careers, which is why we celebrate the ones who do. Yeah, that's true. Well, in happier news for the Red Sox, Mookie Betts is great. And you wrote about him and you found a way to comp him to Barry Bonds.

As I understand it, he has essentially been Barry Bonds with two strikes this season. Is that right? Am I oversimplifying things? Well, I realized as uh was doing this research that i could found a way to compare mookie betts to barry bonds because of the way that that's his hit with two strikes but another way that you could compare bets to barry bonds is because of the way that he's hit overall you don't even have to dig deep like yeah mookie betts has a wrc plus of 212 now barry bonds topped out at 24, but there's that 200 threshold that players aren't

supposed to exceed. But in any case, yeah, Mookie Betts, he's been about as good as Barry Bonds overall, and he's been about as good as Barry Bonds batting with two strikes. He's been actually, to this point, of course, it's early, but where Betts is now would be the greatest two-strike hitting season on record, which goes back about 30 years. What Mookie Betts has done in part is with two strikes, he says, I don't really care about strikeouts anymore. I just want to drive the ball, hit it hard. That's great.

Strikeouts don't really matter that much anymore. But what he's also done with two strikes is not swing at pitches out of the zone, like almost at all. He's cut his rate almost in half, maybe more like two-thirds. But in any case, he's swinging just as often in half maybe more like two-thirds but in any case he's swinging just as often at two strike pitches in the zone which is good because you should never take a two strike pitch in the zone but he's just not swinging at two strike pitches out of the zone which i like as a a pure test of discipline because when you have two strikes pitcher's

trying to put you away you're seeing really good pitches the pitcher wants you to chase and you are already thinking i need to swing i need to protect and mookie bets isn't chasing so in long and short here mookie bets is basically a perfect hitter i don't know how perfect he can remain because he still ultimately doesn't have like barry bond's peak power or mike trap peak power but when you are this good at getting the barrel to the ball and when you don't chase you're just fantastic mookie bets doesn't care about strikeouts now and his strikeout rate is the same as it's been like his whole life yeah just it's it's absurd so I uh by the week I am less dismissive of the conversation that puts Betts in a trout tier trout is still better I still take trout I know you still take trout people should still take trout but I see it I see how you can get away with making the comparison and not feeling like you're being stupid. field to talk to some of the Rays, and there was a very concerned-looking usher who wasn't sure if

she should let him down there because he's John Jaso, and he doesn't look like a very recent professional and Major League Baseball player. This is just, I think we need to talk to John Jaso. I think we need to try to have John Jaso on the podcast. He has sort of been a podcast hero, podcast mascot. I think it's time. I think it needs to happen. We need to hear him say such is life in our ears. I mean, yeah, I think that if we had John Jaso on the podcast, it would be like the boss level, right, of a video game. I don't know if they still make video games like they used to, but I remember video games from like 20 years ago.

they still make video games like they used to but i remember video games from like 20 years ago and then you what if we get to interview john jason is that i mean short of then getting to interview like a three-handed one-legged mike trout then i don't know what else there is for the podcast that's it it's over pretty much defeated podcasting yeah he was wearing like a podcasting. Yeah, he was wearing like a tie-dye tank top with just long dreadlocks and he looks very laid back. Looks like retirement is going great for him. Obviously, he is not sailing around the world currently. He hasn't gone very far at all. It looks like he even brought a beer down to the field. Anyway, he looks like he's doing retirement right and I want to find out about it. So if anyone can help us get in touch with John Jay, so I've put one little feeler out, but we're going to try to make this happen.

And I also wanted to mention that the Angels ruined my weekend plans. My wife and I were planning an Angels brunch for Sunday. We were going to have a bunch of people over to watch Shohei Otani because he was scheduled to pitch in New York against Masahiro Tanaka at one o'clock. It's perfect brunch time. We were going to have a gathering and just all watch Otani together. And then they pushed him back and I guess he'll be hitting, but it's just not the same. There's workload management going on. They say he's fine. I was hoping that the workload management that we would see would be a heavier workload, just because I want to see more Otani, but we're getting the opposite instead. They're being

prudent and cautious, and I'm sure it makes sense, but give the people what they want. But he hits so well. Every day he does something. He walks, he gets a double, he gets a couple hits. The other day he had a game-winning hit and he stole his first base. He's good. He gets a double. He gets a couple hits. The other day, he had a game-winning hit, and he stole his first base. He's good. He's just good at everything. First of all, 1 o'clock, I don't care about your New York standards. It's too late for brunch. You're getting to dinner.

Just have breakfast in the morning and then do something with your day. You're being ridiculous. Now you're going to be forced to. What better thing could you do? Just eat before that. Do you eat before a one o'clock brunch? I mean, I'm not really a big bruncher regularly because I'm up at all hours and I might just, I don't even know what you would call it if you eat in the middle of the night. Is it breakfast? Is it dinner? I don't know. That's fourth meal, that's the yeah sure i guess so so i'm not someone who goes out to brunch and has the mimosa and all of that but this seemed like a nice occasion that we could do it until mike socia ruined everything or billy

epler i blame both of them jumping back real quick i did see the uh the gif of uh i saw it was a tweet that someone had said oh the usher doesn't the us, this usher isn't taking any of John Jaso's shit. And I saw a guy on like a tie-dyed tank top walking down and an usher like talking to him sternly. And I thought, oh, that's a funny joke. Look at the guy who looks like John Jaso. Zero part of me believed that was actually John Jaso looking at the gif. So credit to him. And as far as the Otani thing goes, I know they're saying it's workload management.

It starts once a week. I would be lying if I said this didn't raise a little bit of alarm i don't think that the angels would if something were minorly wrong with otani or he's just feeling a little bit of soreness i don't think that they would necessarily admit that because they know the frenzy that it would create yeah but i can't think of look i know he's doing something other people don't do i know it's probably exhausting maybe he does just need a break that's probably a 50 or 60 chance that's what this is but it makes me a little bit very modestly concerned three out of ten four out of ten and i know if you look at the tweets people are like oh they just don't want him to face the yankees he's scared of the yankees but if there's

one team the angels really want to beat right now it's probably wild card competition the yankees and they would want their best pitcher to be trying to do it. So this seems like one of those things that they're trying to say is just innocuous, it's innocent, we just want to give them a breather, but I sure don't know, man. All right, you have a chat to get to. Let me see if I can cram this in under the wire. I wanted to salute listener Logan, who said in the Facebook group that he just referenced TOPS Plus to make a point in a meeting at work, and it worked, and this is his greatest career achievement.

And so I asked him for the context. He said, let's see if I can do this without putting everyone to sleep. No, you can't. That is the rule of TOPS Plus. There's no way to talk about it without putting everyone to sleep. But Logan says, we were discussing customer satisfaction survey methodology. exciting already, approaches to gathering end user feedback and how to properly understand the context of survey results that we inherited from a prior team using methodology we probably wouldn't have used if you were involved. I saw an opportunity and presented TOPS Plus as

an example of a metric that provides its own context within the metric itself. Realistically, I probably could have used an actual metric we currently use, but that didn't seem nearly as fun. So I hope it went over well and that you're all finding ways to use TOPS plus in your daily lives the way that Jeff does in the Play Index. I have no response to this. All right. Well, happy birthday to Bartol Colon, who turned 45 this week and is currently leading the American League in walk rate and strikeout to walk rate. That is pretty incredible.

And last thing before I let you go belatedly to your chat, we talked on the previous podcast about things that players could do intentionally that on the surface seem bad, but actually are beneficial in certain cases. This was the Bob Wickman intentional Bach question. We got two submissions from listeners, one from Doug. He reminded me of in 2016, Chase Anderson intentionally drilled Alfredo Simone in order to prevent a runner from stealing home. There's a video of this. I recall it as I see it now, and I think we might have even talked about it on the podcast at the time, but that was how it worked. There was a guy stealing home. He got a good break, and so Anderson just hit Alfredo Simone so that the guy wouldn't be able to steal home,

and Simone was not pleased about this, but excellent example, Doug. And the other one was from listener John, who says, was listening to your podcast and the topic of the intentional buck came up and it reminded me of Alfredo Griffin's intentional strikeout back in the early nineties. The Blue Jays had a big lead in the fifth inning, but it was raining hard and we wanted to make sure the game was official so that the lead wouldn't be washed out if the game was ended. So he intentionally struck out just to hurry things along. He may have struck out anyway. It was Alfredo Griffin, but still he hastened the process. So two good examples to add to the list. Big fan of the intentional hit by pitch, although you got to be precise. You got to make sure that you hit him. But yeah,

I think that's what you should always do. All right. So we will take a quick break. We'll be back with Rob Arthur to talk about the ball, how it's different and how that has affected home runs. We have some kind of closure on this, but not complete closure. Rob will explain. And then we will also talk to Mitchell Lichtman about his history of betting on baseball for decades and how it's gotten harder and harder and harder over time. So we will be back in just a second. So I lied. I said we were taking a quick break and we'd be back with a guest. Keep on getting out until the pieces blow. So I lied. I said we were taking a quick break and we'd be back with a guest.

Well, I didn't really lie. That will happen. But I am joined by a different guest from the one I said would just be joined by. It's Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. Hey, Meg. Hi. You were here because Jerry DePoto just did something. And I knew this would happen.

Of course, he picked this time to do it so just behind the scenes here making of this podcast was completely recorded and then jerry depoto struck and he completed a trade jeff had already left for his vacation he was on his way out of the country and he had to turn his car around and return to his keyboard to blog about what Jerry DePoto did. I don't know whether you told him to do that or Carson did or he took it upon himself, but he literally turned his car around because of Jerry. What are like Jerry's least convenient timings of trades? Didn't he do one on a major holiday at one point? I think it's still probably the Taiwan Walker, Cattell Marte for Gene Segura and Mitch Hanegar trade,

which was literally the night before Thanksgiving. Yes, that was it. And it's like, Jerry, go spend some time with your family, man. They miss you. I bet they love you a lot. Yeah, so they were probably waiting by the door for him to take them away somewhere for the long weekend. And he said, no, I have to trade Andrew Moore to the Rays for Alex Colomay and Denard Spann. So I don't think I legally can play the music that Michael Bauman wrote for occasions such as this.

I don't know. He'd probably say I could, but it's spur of the moment. So we have to talk about what Jerry DePoto did here. And everyone knew he was going to do something. Jeff and I talked about this the other day about how he didn't really have anything to trade. And yet you knew he would somehow trade because he just needed to. The Mariners, everyone is hurt. Second basemen are dropping like flies he had to do something and he did so what did jerry depoto do sure so uh like you said we kind of knew that that some move would be coming he sent uh andrew moore who sort of a while ago was the top arm in the mariners system for whatever that was worth and had sort of a brief call upup last year. But it started the year in AA to the raise for Alex Conley and Denard Spann.

And I think we can think about the raise side of this later, I guess. But from a Mariners perspective, this makes a ton of sense to me. I mean, obviously the big injuries have come at, and sort of absences have come at second base, but they are getting shockingly thin in the outfield with Dee Gordon moving back to the infield. So I think that this provides them some options. You know, Guillermo Heredia is playing really well, actually, and I think is sort of starting to play his way out of his platoon split reputation. So I'll be curious to see if Spann ends up being platooned with him or maybe provides an opportunity for Ben Gamble to

go sort himself out in Tacoma or something like that. But it gives them, you know, some depth there. And then from the pitching side, you know, I think is a really nice compliment to Edwin Diaz at closer. Juan Nicasio was their big reliever acquisition in the offseason, and he's had some shaky outings, to put it charitably, and his velocity has not been where it once was. And so I think that this gives them a lot more options out of the bullpen. They can put Colomier in the eighth. They can give Diaz a couple of days off if they need

because you do worry about sort of overuse with him just because he's still a young guy, and they're in a lot of games where it calls for a save so i really i really like it for the mariners uh you know it's it's always you always are a little nervous when you're giving up on on uh starters before they really have a chance to fully mature but i think that you know even the most optimistic projections for andrew moore was that he was sort of a back of the rotation guy. And, you know, as we've been saying, this is really it for the Mariners probably in terms of their contention window. So I like that they're being aggressive and trying to do what they need to, to stay in this race that looked like they were going to start to fall out of.

Yeah, right. They just had no outfielders left and And Andrew Moore is, what, 23. So maybe he'll get better at some point. But by the time he does, the Mariners will have gotten worse. And so it won't matter. So I guess it makes sense. And Denard Spann's playing pretty well. I looked at his headshot on Baseball Reference just a few minutes ago, and he looks like he's roughly 53. reference just a few minutes ago and he looks like he's roughly 53 the last few years have not been kind to dinard spin at least on photo day in spring training he looks like the before photo in a just for men ad or something which i i guess i'm discriminating against graying hair which is not nice of me but it has aged him but he's a still pretty good baseball player. Yeah. When I heard that the trade had happened, I just hadn't had reason to really pay close attention to how Denard's fan was doing this year. And he's playing a lot better than I

knew him to be playing. I mean, I think right now he has a 114 WRC plus and he's walking a bunch. So he's definitely a useful player. I think the gray makes him look very distinguished. Uh, I sort of admire that he's willing to go with it, you know, in a game where I think people are very, you know, self-conscious about their ages. Yeah. I'm judging him right now. Yeah. And he's just like, no, I don't care. So, uh, yeah, but he's a gray and all having a sort of a much better season than I was expecting. So I think that, you know, from a depth perspective, it sounds like a really good move for them. Yeah, that should just be like the team unity thing that the Mariners have.

Just everyone goes gray, like other teams will shave their heads or grow facial hair or something. And the Mariners will just let age take its course. Kyle Seeger is growing a beard now so maybe it's going to become a theme oh how's his facial hair is it uh bushy you know it's i think he's still early stages but it it does it does make his his face look a little older he can be kind of baby faced sometimes quite literally yes uh so it it's a good look for Kyle. Good job. Yeah.

And I noticed that in a separate transaction, the Rays also acquired Wilmer Font. They're now the third team to try the Wilmer Font experience. So he had a 11.32 ERA with the Dodgers. The A's said, well, we'll give him a shot. And he had a 14.85 ERA in Oakland and so he's just making the rounds of the analytically oriented teams here and getting progressively higher ERAs yeah you do have to feel for Rays fans if you think of this as sort of swapping

call me for font that's that's a rough trade from a viewing experience perspective, though. I mean, I would be shocked, although who knows what the race, but I would be shocked if he's anywhere near the closer role, even in their brave new world. But yeah, it's quite the downgrade. Well, I won't insult anyone's intelligence by asking you if you think DePoto is done because he is never done. He is in a constant state of trying to improve the roster. I mean, the Rays right now are 23 and 25 and the Mariners are 29 and 20. And I'm guessing the underlying numbers are probably even closer

than that. They're not even really in that different situations right now. Yeah. I mean, I think that the saving grace of that Mariners team is their offense, and I think that they're probably producing quite a bit better than the Rays on that score. But yeah, if you look at their—I can just pull this up. I'll do my best Jeff sub. Let's see. The Mariners are playing four games over their Pythagorean expectation right now, and the Rays are right at it. So yeah,

they're pretty close when you look at the underlying numbers. All right. Well, we've covered what Jerry DiPoto did. Hopefully he will leave us alone for the rest of this holiday weekend. And I wanted to ask you about this. Really, I wanted to ask Jeff about it, but he's not here. So I will ask you instead. He had a chat earlier today and someone asked him, are your work nightmares about baseball? And he said, about writing about baseball, definitely. The other week I had a dream where I was in my office like normal blogging about baseball. Then I woke up and came into my office to blog about baseball. It was very stupid. Do you have nightmares about baseball blogging? I have nightmares about baseball editing. I have hardball times related nightmares,

which is not in any way a slight against the lovely people who freelance at the hardball times and do very good work. But I do have a recurring dream that I wake up and suddenly we have nothing to run for like an entire week and then I get yelled at. So that tends to be my nightmares are around the editorial calendar. which is weird. I don't really have writing nightmares, except it's like a test that I didn't study for or an assignment that I forgot about or something. And it's always such a relief to wake up and realize that not only is that not the case, but I'm not in school, which is even better. So I kind of like those nightmares because it's always so great to wake up from them. Yeah, I do have a, and this isn't a knock against my old coworkers, I do have a recurring dream that I have to go back to Goldman and I'm very

grumpy about it. And then I wake up and I'm like, Oh no, I just get to watch baseball and write about it today. So I can relate to your experience. It's nice to wake up and realize that life is quite, quite a bit better than our nightmares. Yeah. Do you have any business words in your Goldman nightmares? It's all business words. What a crazy place. I don't know if you've covered this one. I haven't heard all the business words.

But when I was at Bloomberg, I heard a lot of business words, obviously, in that environment. And there are two that come to mind. One is pain point. That's like, I don't know, it's like the, I don't even know how to describe it. It's like the thing that is, I guess, causing the problem, whatever it is. It's the the hang up. It's the thing that you have to overcome pain point. And then the other one that they would say was cycles for like, it was like, how many cycles will that take? It was like a unit of time, but it was really imprecise and I never understood how long a cycle was or what it meant, but they just used it all the time. It was like a language that I just was not privy to, but it was like a lot of cycles was like something that was going to take you all day and not many cycles was a quick one. I still don't understand what a cycle was it may have been a programming term yeah i wonder because yeah i don't i don't have that one our i guess our closest like tech related and this is this is everywhere now people asking about your bandwidth for things what's your

bandwidth i'm like oh my god i don't know fast a lot broad lot? Broad? DSL? ISDN? What is the appropriate unit of measure here even? I'm like, what am I denoting this in? I don't understand. I don't know. I'll get it to you today. All right. Well, we've relived our own professional nightmares long enough.

I will let you go. Thank you for filling in. No problem. All right. And now we will really take a break and really be back in just a moment with Rob Arthur. heart. The truth don't stop. Another day. The truth don't stop. Thunder and lightning. All right, so Jeff just stepped away. We lost him him for this segment but he will be back for the next segment however we are still two people strong because i am joined now by rob arthur who just literally just returned from his hawaii honeymoon rob was the mlb report that finally admitted that

the balls are different and home runs are surging because of the ball, the highlight of your honeymoon in Hawaii. I cannot say it was the highlight, but it was definitely a high point. Let's put it that way. Can you not say because your wife might be listening or can you not say because it wasn't the highlight? That's a great question. All right. You can't answer that. Maybe you'll tell me off the air.

Right. You can't answer that. Maybe you'll tell me to the conclusion that the ball is different, has been different, and that that is driving the home run surge. So some of the specifics maybe are different from what we have thought at times throughout this odyssey, but the fact that the ball is different, that is nice, I guess, for MLB to come out and finally say that. Yeah, I agree. And I was surprised, and pleasantly so, by the degree of transparency that they demonstrated with releasing not just the summary conclusions of the report, but the whole thing, including the data, including what analyses they did and how they came to the conclusions that they came to. So it was really a huge step, I think, for them. Yeah, so this has been going on for a while, right? They've been working on this report since August or something like that. So this is thorough. And as you say, they have released all this information. And so there are things that we know, and there are things that we know that we don't know at all,

which is also interesting. So I guess the takeaway here is that MLB has reached the conclusion that it's not so much that the ball is, well, juiced is, it's kind of an ambiguous term. Juiced sometimes seems to imply intentionality and sometimes implies that the ball is bouncier. No evidence that either of those things is true. Apparently, they are attributing all of this rise to the fact that the ball is carrying farther. So I guess you might say, well, who cares? The ball is flying farther. That is the upshot here. And that's true either way. But in terms of how we understand what is happening and how we maybe try to fix it,

it is important. Yeah. And I do want to clarify one thing. They did find that COR, the bounciness of the baseball, which is what we had focused on in our first exploration of whether the ball was behind the home run search, they did find that it increased just a tiny bit. So there is something there. It is probably a significant difference given the number of baseballs that they tested. But it's certainly true that the major factor, the overwhelming thing that makes the new balls more lively is that they are less air resistant. So they just fly farther off of a given exit velocity. Right. And so the sometimes frustrating thing for the past couple of years is that I think it was, I mean, I don't want to say it was obvious or definitive that there was something different about the ball, but there

was just no real explanation that made sense. I think really from the second that we started looking into this, we just weren't ever able to come up with another explanation that would fit the data. So it just almost had to be something with the ball. And MLB kind of deflected. And it turns out that they were just not testing the thing that was actually different about the ball, right? So they were saying that the ball was not different or was not responsible because they were looking at aspects of the ball that were not different or were not largely different or largely responsible, but they just weren't really even considering the thing that turned

out to be the big culprit at the time. Right, which is remarkable in and of itself. I mean, the way one of my friends put it is that baseball is fundamentally a projectile. So if you think about it that way, it's flying through the air. One of the most important things in projectile physics is the air resistance of the projectile. And they were never measuring that. They were never asking about, you know, how drag affected the liveliness of the baseball. They were measuring things that would impact the drag, but not the drag in and of itself, neither MLB nor Rawlings themselves. And so you can take that a couple of different ways,

but I think it's pretty remarkable that they never stopped to consider that until really the analysis that we did and until this task force came along and started to question whether drag could be different. So I haven't really been paying extremely close attention to the response to this report. You wrote it up at Baseball Prospectus with Harry and some other people, and Jeff Passan wrote about it. It's been kind of floating around. I wouldn't say that there's been widespread outrage or anything. I mean, I've kind of wondered throughout this, well, what would the response be if MLB does come out and say, yes, something is different? Because

on the one hand, it didn't really seem like they had a lot of incentive to say that something was different. But what have you gathered from people either writing about this or just people tweeting at you? Are people up in arms about this? Are they saying, yeah, we already knew this? What's kind of the consensus? Yeah, I've been surprised that more people aren't upset about it. I mean, maybe in hindsight, that should have been obvious. I think talking to a lot of people over the course of the last couple of years, the common thread seems to be that everyone would be fine, is fine with home runs increasing. It's more the lack of transparency and the lack of detail about why that's happening. So

now there's a definite culprit and we all know why and everyone seems to be fine with the underlying fact that they're increasing. So, you know, it does seem generally like positive. I will say, I think there's been some muddling or confusion around the two different questions that are involved in this report. One is whether the baseball changed, which we now know that it did. The report is very clear that the new baseballs have lower air resistance, and that's what is making for so many more home runs. But the second question, which is one that you and I danced around in different articles, is whether MLB did this intentionally or Rawlings did this intentionally. We still don't know whether the changes were made intentionally or not. We still don't know whether the changes were made intentionally or not.

I think that the report shows that all of the things that MLB measures were sort of within the set of standards that they had established, and they hadn't made any outward changes to the manufacturing process that would necessarily be expected to reduce air resistance to the degree that it fell. So I think this report pushes the evidence further towards the side that this was an unintentional change. But I think that there's a tendency to confuse the question of whether the baseball is more lively with the question of whether it was intentional or not. Those are two very different things, and I think that this report is very clear that the baseball is different. It's not as clear on why and whether it was an intentional change. And we still that there's

still a lot there that we don't know about. Yeah, right. We have conclusive proof that the ball is different and no evidence at all of why it's different or well, at least that anyone actually altered it intentionally. So does the report attribute the entirety of the home run surge to the decreased drag and the increased carry? Is it saying that that is 100% or is it assigning some lower percentage to it? So my understanding is it's actually more than 100%, which is interesting. In other words, the additional distance that would come from the decreased air resistance is so much that you would have expected home runs to increase more than they actually did. So that points to potentially other factors being involved,

and it could be different pitching strategies or different hitting strategies or some other, there's so many different possibilities. But basically, if you go just with the numbers that Nathan and other scientists calculated, the air resistance is enough to explain the whole home run surge and some more. So that's a surprising finding in and of itself. Yeah, because you had done all the studies that showed that this was an important factor, but only a part of it. Right. And that's what I expected to find i was um not a wholehearted believer by any means in the fly ball revolution or anything like that but i thought

that batters were adjusting their tendencies to take advantage of the baseball flying so much better um right that's that was one of the hypotheses that the that the report directly addresses and that kind of shoots down, basically saying that they have no evidence or they could find no evidence that batter philosophy was responsible for driving more home runs over the fence. So it is surprising. Yeah, because at the beginning of this, I think when we were starting to suggest that it was the ball, there were people saying, no, it's not the ball. It's the batters. it's the fly balls. And I think we were skeptical of that. But then when it continued to rise, and when we were seeing more and more home runs, I think you and I kind of came around to the idea that, okay, this is sort of a secondary effect that the ball changed in

some way. And so now the hitters have changed accordingly to take advantage of that change in the ball. And I mean, we know anecdotally that certain hitters have benefited from this and certainly lots of hitters talk about it and are trying to benefit. And there've been some articles that seem to have shown like an average increase at least in launch angle. And then on the other hand, you've shown that some guys have maybe suffered from making these sorts of changes. So it's really just a wash, huh? Just as far as we can tell, that whole focus on launch angles and fly balls is just not at all driving the home runs. That is somewhat surprising to me. Yeah, I agree. I think that we have to caveat all this with according to the data that we have available now. And one of the issues with using the StatCast data that they used in the report and that we've used to analyze the fly ball revolution before is that it misses some batted balls, in particular those at very high and very low launch angles.

And those batted balls just get sort of lost from the data set. And that complicates our ability to analyze them. get sort of lost from the data set. And that complicates our ability to analyze them. So every study that we do, we're doing something about those missing battered balls, and it can affect what you think about the fly ball revolution. Because one of the things that comes with increasing your launch angle, of course, is hitting more pop-ups. And so it might be that there are trade-offs that are not fully accounted for or understood in the analysis that we're doing. So a batter might be trying to swing for the fences more and lift the ball, but that ends up

resulting in them popping up fastballs high in the zone, and those battered balls might not end up being included in our data. So I don't think the book is closed on the fly ball revolution. I think that there's obviously a lot of complexity, and it depends on the particular batter. It's clear that some batters have experienced success by changing their philosophy in that way. But this report definitely does throw a lot of cold water on the idea that some people have advanced that there was like a general tendency in baseball, that it was experienced by a lot of different batters, that they all sort of en masse decided to increase launch angle and they all sort of en masse decided to increase launch angle, and they all sort of benefited to some degree from doing so. It seems like there were just

as many winners as there were losers, and the net effect, like you said, is zero or close to zero. Mm-hmm. So the really perplexing part here is that the study traced it to this lack of resistance or this increased carry, and yet has been unable to pinpoint the cause of that. And from what I understand, I was watching a video of Alan Nathan talking about this on MLB Network, I think it was, and he was saying, you know, even if you separate it into like the low drag balls and the high drag balls, and then you compare them, I mean, it seems like if it's that big a difference, you should be able to say, oh, Eureka, here is the difference between these two

balls. So this is what's causing it. And yet, no, evidently, no one is quite sure what it is. So what are the possibilities as you understand it? Yeah, so I think there are a few different things that the report points out. So one is the seam height, which is one that we knew about before, because it's sort of obvious that the height of the seams on the baseball is going to affect the aerodynamics of the baseball. And it was known from like NCAA that lowering the seams can reduce the air resistance of the baseball. So the task force studied that and found that the lower drag baseballs do tend to have lower seams, but the difference in seam height really isn't

significant enough to say that that's why air resistance is down. So they kind of dismissed that. And that was something, by the way, that we had found in measuring, I think, some of the balls that we had, that seam height was lower. But it's clear that it's not enough to explain why erosiveness is so much lower. So the two sort of novel things that they bring to bear are, one is the idea that the surface roughness of the baseballs has changed. So something about the texture of the baseball. And that's not something I don't think that we had really measured. And they measure it in an indirect way in the report.

But they find that there is some correlation between the roughness of the baseball and the drag coefficient or the air resistance so that's also something interestingly to me that the MLB's pitchers had commented on especially during the world series last year yeah they had noticed that the baseballs were feeling different and so that seems very plausible to me that there's something different about the texture of the baseballs and that's changed the air resistance. And that could be a whole bunch of different things, right? I mean, Rawlings is very careful to say that the baseballs they make are really dependent on the organic components that they make them from. So in that case, that means cowhide. So I mean, that's, you know, the cows

that go into this, the leather that comes from the cows and how it's treated, all of these factors can influence the eventual surface texture of the baseball and potentially air resistance. So they say that really anything in that long supply chain going from, you know, for example, like how the cows are fed could potentially impact this all the way to when it gets stitched onto the baseball or even beyond that to when it gets treated with the mud that they rubbed onto the baseballs. Any of that could be influencing that surface texture in such a way as to reduce the drag. So that's one thing. I suspected the cows all along. I knew the cows were at the heart of this thing.

Yeah, right. the cows all along. I knew the cows were at the heart of this thing. Yeah, right. I mean, it is kind of fascinating when you think about all the different things that go into baseball and how every little part can potentially influence the final behavior of it. Yeah, I've talked about that example in the past, like the 20s or just before the 20s during World War I, I think, where the wool that was used, or it was like the merino wool or the

different sheep that were used from Australia because the sheep that were being used before were not available because of the war. And so it was used for the interior of the ball at the time, but that made a big difference. So yeah, it's more complicated than you would think, even though we have all the sensitive equipment now to bring to bear. Right. But there's only so much that you can do to regulate an animal, right? So like you can't say like cow, you need to be exactly the same as the other cows that have before we slaughter you, please make sure that your, your skin is exactly this smooth or rough. And you were going to suggest a second possible explanation too. Yeah, the other one I think is in some ways even more fascinating.

And that's that, so the ball has a center of gravity that's dependent on the core and its relation to the outside of the ball, right? And the idea that the commission had is that maybe that center of gravity has become more pushed into the literal center of the ball in the last few years. And that would essentially reduce the wobble of the baseball when it gets hit or thrown. So instead of sort of wobbling around that center of gravity, that sort of wobble increases the air resistance. So if it was more perfectly placed in the center of the baseball, that wobble would decrease and the air resistance would go down. So this is, I think, an appealing hypothesis from MLB and

Rawlings' perspective, because it's sort of like, maybe they were introduced this just by improving the production of baseballs, by making the center of gravity of the baseball more perfect. Essentially, they reduced the wobble and reduced the air resistance inadvertently because of that. And that's a factor that I had never even considered before. But they do find some evidence that it occurs in the data, in the PitchFX data. So that's really fascinating. And it would have all sorts of implications for pitching, considering that breaking balls would tend to wobble more because they spin more. So there's a lot of complexities to that. And I don't think they've fully worked out

how that would work. But I know that they're studying it further. And I think that's a really appealing explanation as well. And I think I read something from Tom Tango that showed that if anything, this is increasing whatever is causing this. It's becoming even more significant this season, even though home runs are not up and may even be down, which means that maybe it's the weather, maybe there's something else going on, but whatever is causing this effect that is making balls carry is continuing and seeming to accelerate even. So it's not like this is something that happened a year or two ago and now it's just stable. This is creeping ever upward, I guess, right?

Yeah, I haven't looked at the latest drag numbers, but I think that's totally believable. I also think it's interesting what MLB will do going forward about this. I think that the commission made several recommendations. Yeah, I was going to ask you to summarize, so go ahead. Yeah, I was going to ask thing is just to monitor the temperature and humidity of the way that the baseballs are stored. And it seems that MLB had sort of already begun to implement this because they issued a memo prior to the current season that said that baseball should be stored under constant humidity conditions. And the temperature and humidity are

not impacting the air resistance of the baseball so much as the coefficient of restitution, which is the bounciness of the baseball. And that was something that, as I mentioned before, the commission hadn't found was a major contributor to the home run surge, but there's a ton of variation between individual baseballs in terms of that bounciness factor. And that can really influence whether a given baseball is going to go over the fence or go into the warning track. So by simply standardizing temperature and humidity conditions where the baseballs are stored, you're going to reduce that variation and potentially create a more even playing

field for all of the players and all of the at-bats in baseball. So that was one thing. Another thing was that they were supposed to review the specifications of the baseballs because they had been working with a sort of outdated set that essentially they were cartoonishly wide specifications that a baseball could be within a quite large range of weight, within a quite large range of bounciness, large range of seam heights and all these other

factors. And essentially, Rawlings was making baseballs that were much more precise than what the production specifications were. So by reviewing that, they're hoping to kind of narrow the baseballs down to a more uniform set. So it sounds like that they said, right, that Rawlings' manufacturing process is precise enough that it might not matter in many cases, the the allowable range might be really wide but it's not like Rawlings was so all over the place that they had balls at the top end of the scale and the bottom end of the scale anyway but I mean it makes sense just to narrow it anyway it's logical but that might maybe not make that massive a difference immediately right i don't think it

will although you know i think that part of this is i think it'll spur like an ongoing process overview and maybe in the future as the way that they make them gets more precise it will allow them to kind of narrow and further and further on a standardized baseball that will be less and less variable from game to game. So the third thing is sort of an obvious one that I think should have been implemented probably a while back, which is just to actually aerodynamically test the baseball. So do wind tunnel testing or some similar kind of testing to measure the air resistance of the baseball so that when the air resistance suddenly starts to decline, as it did over the past few years, you're not totally in the dark about it and incorrectly denying that the baseballs

have changed when in fact they have. So I think that'll obviously, that's partially just a way to keep ahead of changes in the baseballs. But it's also, I think, will help them understand, you know, when the baseballs have changed, why they changed. So was there a particular change in the components that went into the baseball, like we were talking about with the cows, or a change in one of the machines? They'll be able to actually trace that back when they do the serodynamic testing in a way that they couldn't really before because they just didn't have the data on it. Frickin' cows, man. Frickin' cows. Another thing that is really intriguing intriguing and it's one of those

kind of hidden parts of baseball that everybody knows about but nobody really thinks that much about is is the mud itself which that's rubbed on the baseballs and apparently there aren't very precise standards for how the mud is rubbed on them and that clearly would impact or could impact the surface of the baseball and potentially the air resistance of the baseball. So the fact that there weren't clear standards before at least could be one of the factors that influenced the home run surge and influenced the declining air resistance of the baseballs. it could be read as embarrassing for baseball that they were just really sort of, you know, anything goes about this crucial thing that could really influence the performance of a given baseball. Yeah. So in a sense, the fact that this happened is good, I guess, in that it will lead to some changes. I mean, it's, you know, it's not like anyone suffered or died as a result of this.

There's no great human cost. But anyway, if this is what it took, I guess, to get more stringent controls and monitoring and everything, it's good that that will be in place going forward. So that's the positive you could take from this. And we don't know. I mean, if MLB does figure out what exactly is causing this, then there will be an interesting discussion about what to do, right? I mean, do we decide to just roll it back to where it was a few years ago? Do we say, OK, we want home runs to be at this level forever and always, and this is

the optimal home run rate, and so we will just peg it there, and that'll be that? I wonder what they will decide to do or whether they'll say, well, where it is right now is fine, but we don't want it to climb any higher than it is. Yeah, I think that's really one of the most fascinating implications of the whole report is that by monitoring all this, they will now have to make a more informed decision about what they want the baseball to be. And by changing parameters like the air resistance and the bounciness of the baseball, they can really have a profound effect on, for example,

how many three true outcomes there are in a given season. Like by making the baseball bouncier, they could return baseball in some ways to a more lively, you know, lots of singles and people on the bases type of game that it was before. Or, you know, they could keep going in the same direction that it has been over the last few years and basically make it even more of a home run or bust league. So this kind of does put the impetus on MLB and on Rawlings to decide

where they want the baseball to go and what kind of game they want to create with it. Yeah, maybe they should crowdsource it. Just, you know, how many home runs do the fans really want? Or ask the cows what they think about all this, how rough they want their skin to be. I mean, that's kind of interesting because you'd want that data, right? You'd want to know what your fans want, what they want the game to look like.

And maybe they're already doing some surveys like that, but that will be an interesting thing. If they manage to pin this down, then they kind of have to figure out this is what we want the sport to be. And Joe Sheehan was raising this in his newsletter the other day. He was pointing out that we only know about this because we have this data at our disposal, because we have StatCast essentially. I mean, that's how we learned about the difference in air resistance.

And those reports prompted MLB to actually look into this. So if people hadn't been testing it independently, then probably nothing ever would have been looked into and nothing would have changed. And so in the past, when home run rates would fluctuate, no one had that data. And there was just no one able to check that. And so it's completely plausible that whatever is happening now

could have been happening at any point in baseball history. I mean, pick a year when there was some unexplained difference in offense, and maybe it's the cows. Yep. I think that is also really interesting that this is really the first time MLB has released this quantity and quality of data into the public domain. And it's mostly concerned with just the home run surge and the years immediately prior. But there are a few charts in the report that go a little further back. And that might be some of the most interesting stuff in the whole commission's work. Because, for example, there's this one figure in the report, figure 42, that shows the bounciness of the baseballs going back to 2003. And you can see in 2004, the coefficient of restitution, the bounciness of the baseball, which is probably the most important parameter for determining whether a given baseball is going to get hit for a home run or not.

determining whether a given baseball is going to get hit for a home run or not. That COR number was much higher than it was even just five, six, seven years later. So that era that we have long associated with steroids and with hitters being artificially enhanced to hit more home runs, maybe not all of that was because of just the hitters. Maybe the ball was a factor in those years as well and that's something that's long been long been conjectured and long been hinted at but um until they released this data there really wasn't a lot to draw on to say that the ball was definitively to blame and now now i think it just goes to show you that like you like you mentioned the ball could have been fluctuating a lot from year to year

in previous eras and in ways that really profoundly shaped the game. Yeah, and Joe was making that point about the so-called steroid era, and I just wrote about this recently for my chapter in Mike Peska's book, Upon Further Review, about what-ifs, and I was trying to say, well, what would have happened if baseball had started testing for steroids earlier? Anyway, in the course of that, I kind of considered this because of course you can't really just reflexively blame it all on steroids, the home runs of that era, when we are currently in an era when people are hitting even more home runs and everyone is being tested. But there were some differences in that era that make you think that something was going on, which you've written about also in the past and just kind of. And also the aging patterns were very different. So the league was just old in terms of the productive players. So those are things that

make you think maybe there's something to the chemical idea as well. But it's probably too simple to say that it's just that because we're seeing right now that other things can affect this stuff dramatically. Yeah, I think every era is going to be shaped by multiple things. And I think there's no question that steroids were a factor in the steroid era. I mean, there's so many aberrant patterns that it's tough to conclude that there wasn't something else going on. And I think that would be the case over any five or 10 year stretch of baseball that you examine.

There would be something, whether it was changing mound heights or new training methods or an influx of talent from a certain region of the world or whatever it was there would be something going on but i think previously we had kind of had this all had this default assumption that the ball and the the bats and the the equipment at least the baseball itself being the most important part was sort of the same for going all the way back. And now I think this report really opens the door to challenge that and to say, well, actually it was fluctuating, it was moving around, and that was probably one of the most important factors on top of all those other things I mentioned that was influencing how the game was played

at any given era in baseball's history. All right, well, anything else stand out to you from the report? Anything you're still wondering about? Lingering questions? Follow-up work? Anything we haven't covered? I mean, there's still a lot that I wish I knew about, you know, how the baseballs were manufactured and all that sort of stuff that they go into some detail about.

But obviously, they can't release everything, if only because some of it is a trade secret that Rawlings can't give up, understandably. But overall, I thought that the report was incredibly well done, incredibly detailed, and answered most of my questions and basically told us why we were seeing a lot of the patterns that we were seeing. Even the couple of cases where I had made errors or had incorrectly concluded based on the data that we had that, for example, weight was a significant factor in the home run search. It explains exactly why we found the things that we did when we x-rayed the baseball. And so I thought overall it was really conclusive. And of course, it just opens up more questions, but it sort of succeeded in closing off this round of uh why did this happen why did the home run search take place it was very clear in uh answering those those initial that initial round of questions yeah at least we can finally

stop with the is it the weather is it the batting order is it it rookies coming up? Is it pitchers getting worse? It's not. So that's, I think, a relief. So we can say case closed about some things and case open about other things. But this is progress. Right. Agreed. Okay.

All right. Well, you can continue to monitor Rob's work on the subject, of course, at Baseball Perspectives or elsewhere. And you can find it all on Twitter at no underscore little underscore plans. Rob, thank you as always. This is probably what the, I don't know, the fourth podcast we've done about the ball in the home runs and everything over the past few years. But gradually we're getting there. Yeah, far and away the most satisfying of the four or five that we've done. That's true, yeah.

All right, well, good talking to you. Yeah, good talking to you. So we will take a quick break and we'll be back in just a moment with Mitchell Lichtman, renowned sabermetrician, co-author of the book, creator of Ultimate Zone Rating,

who'd tell us how betting on baseball used to be like taking candy from a sports book. Come on, come on, but you're gonna die. Yeah, come on, come on, That's how betting on baseball used to be like taking candy from a sports book. Burning the car for someone So some of you may have read the Bloomberg story earlier this month called The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse Racing Code. It was about Bill Benter, who's made close to a billion dollars, that is a billion, betting on horse racing since the 1980s. And there was one passage in the story that caught my eye. It said,

Benter has few regrets. One relates to an attempt in the early 1990s to create a model for betting on baseball. He spent three summers developing the system and only broke even. For him, a stinging professional defeat. America's pastime was just too unpredictable. But I knew or thought I knew

someone who had bet on baseball with some success. And so I contacted him. He is Mitchell Lichtman. And you know him perhaps as MGL. He is, of course, one of the authors of the book. He is consulted for teams. He is a prolific writer and analyst. And he is joining us now. Hey, Mitchell. Hey, how you doing, Ben? And Jeff. We are doing well. And I am very eager to hear about whatever you're willing to share here. So I know that you spent some decades betting about baseball, it sounds like, with success. So can you tell us the origin story? How did this start? Okay, sure. Well, for one thing, I didn't win a

billion dollars like Bill. I'll start with that. And if I were Bill, if I had his money, at least, I don't know that I'd have any regrets, at least professionally. Actually, I do know, as I indicated in my email to you, Ben, I do know Bill. I had some dealings with him about 25 years or so ago. He's an ex-Blackjack player, as I am, which is sort of a good lead-in to the origins of my sports betting. I ran into Bill actually a few years ago at what they call the Blackjack Ball, which is kind of a secret meeting or party that they have every year of present and past professional Blackjack players. Not secret anymore. He's a real good guy. Not secret anymore.

professional blackjack players. Not secret anymore. Real good guy. Not secret anymore. I just let the cat out of the bag, I guess. It used to be infiltrated, or at least that was the rumor, by casino personnel so that they could identify a card counter so they can more easily keep them out of their casinos or bar them from their casinos. But that's neither here nor there.

So my original background was um as a professional blackjack player in the early and mid 80s and then i ventured into the poker sphere as well so i was a professional poker player as well got a little bit tired of of the stress of playing blackjack it was sort of an adversarial profession whereas uh poker kind of a walk in the park compared to a blackjack stress-wise since the casino was your friend as a poker player they didn't care whether you're a winning poker player or losing one since your money came from the other players not from the casino of course uh blackjack being just the opposite so anyway so uh i sort of transitioned from um

blackjack and uh poker into uh i sports betting, but really exclusively on baseball. I never got into betting any other sports but baseball. I know very little about betting on the other sports. And I got into that in the late 80s after sort of independently reading some of the early sabermetric works, books like Bill James, Abstract, Hidden Game of Baseball, of course, Pete Palmer and John Thorne, some of the other ones, Diamonds of Praise, even Mike Gimbel's early works. He put out some really interesting and very good books similar to the Bill James abstracts

also in the early 80s. Diamond of Praise, another good one. Craig Wright and another co-author. I can't remember the name of the co-author. I think he was a baseball guy. And Craig Wright was a statistician, I think. I read about that stuff independently, just really predicated on my interest in baseball and analytics, statistics in general, although I was by no means a statistician back then.

I'm still not, I guess at best. I'm sort of an amateur statistician now. So read up on those things, got interested in them, knew nothing about sports betting really at all other than just what I had read and heard living in Las Vegas, which I was at the time. I moved to Las Vegas in 1981 to pursue a blackjack career and then poker career.

And then I had just gotten the idea that I think I might be able to use these concepts, these sabermetric concepts to put together a model for projecting or predicting the outcome of a game. And then if I can do that more efficiently than the sports books and the bettors at the time, again, this was in the late 1980s that I thought I could get an edge, make some money. So I did some testing and lo and behold, using a database of some old lines that I'd gotten from an old company back then, lines from the probably mid to late 80s or so. It looked as if from just a fairly rudimentary sabermetric model that I could get a pretty substantial edge. And so we started betting. I say we, I had a couple of other partners that I solicited from the poker world.

We started betting in the second half of 1989 and did quite well and continued that for about 25 years. That's a fact story. Yeah. I was going to ask whether it was the baseball analysis that got you interested in the baseball betting or whether it was the baseball betting that got you interested in the baseball analysis. Would this sort of also be for the way that we all on the internet are familiar with you is as a foremost predominant sabermetric thinker and analyst, but is this also the origin story of how that all began? To some extent. Well, like I said, I think the interest in the baseball sabermetrics was really independent of the gambling, the sports betting. I just had an interest, always had a lifelong interest in baseball,

like most of us did, you know, starting from when we were kids. Definitely was an analytical person, and all of my gambling forays were analytical endeavors, of course, fly check and poker being analytical professions, at least if you're a winner. So really the interest in baseball spurned the interest in betting. And then ever since then, again, this was 1989. So this was almost 30 years ago, hard to believe. It really went hand in hand since then. A lot of the work that I've done in Sabermetrics over the

years has very little to do and really not very advantageous to the baseball betting. Much of it went hand-in-hand with the models that I used for baseball betting and were advantageous for baseball betting. So a little of both. So you said that you started actually betting on baseball in the second half of 1989. So how long did it take you before you decided your models and your tests were, let's say, implementable to actually put your money where your mouth was? How much work did you do before you actually started to give it a shot in the real world? I don't remember

exactly, but I would say probably six months to a year. The reason that I started in the second half of 1989 was simply because I wasn't ready until then. So basically, I developed the models, which compared to the models that I and lots of other people have been using, say, for the last 10 years, they were extremely primitive. They were good and they were accurate, but the technology and the information just wasn't out there back then. So I back-tested those fairly simplistic models, although compared to the way lines were made by the sports books, you know, these models were revolutionary. Even if you, even though if you looked at them now, they would look pretty simple by sabermetric standards. So I back-tested them. They looked great.

We started betting in, like I said, the second half of the 1989 season, right after the All-Star break. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure that we started out and continued like gangbusters. Don't know if we had a positive fluctuation to any extent back then or the lines were just so bad that our expectation was to put a pretty big hurt on the sports books, I think mostly the latter, because we continued to do very, very well for many, many years before gradually the lines and the betting market itself started to get more and more efficient. And they started using more and more technology and sophistication to put out the lines

and then to change the lines once they were put out, you know, the other bettors basically. So it became more and more difficult. But for the first 10 or 20 years, it was, I think the expression that I used in the email that I wrote to you, Ben, was it was pretty much a candy store for a baseball bet or back in the, say, the 90s at least. Yeah. So did you have to go to any great lengths to obscure what you were doing? What kind of volume of betting are we talking about? How would you actually place the bets? I mean, how did it kind of work on a day-to-day basis? Yeah, that's a good question. So getting into some areas that I may not be able to answer in whole, I would say back then, we probably, when I say we, there were a number

of partners. So this is not necessarily money coming out of my pocket that I was betting for myself. But volume-wise, based on my models, my projections, we probably bet anywhere in the neighborhood of maybe 10 to 50,000 per, per bet, a little bit more on sides where you bet on which team is going to win, uh, than totals, which is where you bet on whether the score is going to be, uh,

exceed a certain number or, um, or be less than a certain number that the sports book puts out. Totals are more difficult to, uh, that a lot of money on for whatever reason. The sportsbooks were always a little bit shy about taking a lot of money on the totals bets compared to the side bets.

So probably on the order of $10,000 to $50,000. Back then, we're talking about early 90s. Obviously, sports betting was legal and prolific in Las Vegas, the only state where you could make a legal sports wager. There were other avenues and areas where you could bet, and we definitely utilized those. My partners were in charge of that. I had nothing to do with that whatsoever. I won't go into detail about those avenues.

Not that I really knew that much about it back then either. So even if I wanted to, I probably couldn't tell you. And that was sort of pre-internet sports wagering days. The internet sports betting didn't come to fruition until maybe middle 90s or so. And what kind of margins were you getting at the time and how did that change over the years? Yeah, that's a great question. It's hard to say. You know, the market changes. It's a very dynamic market. It definitely changes over the years. Generally, the margins that any successful sports bettor can get, especially based upon information and technology, it usually diminishes as time goes on, which was the case for us. Probably when we first started, I would say on the order of maybe 8% to 10% advantage per wager. That's a lot. Which is, to be honest with you, that's unheard of. And most even knowledgeable handicappers probably wouldn't even believe that if they heard that kind of number. You know, people that have historically bet other sports would be more than happy with a 3%, 4%, 5% advantage.

Anything over a 5% advantage would be considered almost unattainable. But again, the market was just so inefficient back then, at least in baseball. I couldn't tell you about the other sports that we were able to get about an 8% to 10% edge. So basically for every $1,000 wager that we would make, our expectation would be, say, $8,200. And it didn't really diminish quickly until maybe after 2000 or so. It probably remained fairly constant through the 90s. And then it started to diminish a little bit, I would say, in the 2000s. So Moneyball spoiled everything.

Oh, yeah, well, lots of things. Moneyball, baseball perspectives, fan graphs, Zips, Steamer, Joe Pita, just the Internet in general, just the spread and the breadth and the wealth of information available really spoiled the whole thing. just diminished precipitously to the point where I honestly don't think that anybody using a sabermetric model can really beat baseball anymore to any significant extent. So obviously in the last five, 10 years, it's been a lot more difficult. And as you just said, it might be next to impossible to actually make money using ethical means to betting on baseball. to actually make money using ethical means to betting on baseball. But back in the day, what cutoffs were you using to identify when a total or when a game was, let's say, bettable versus when you would leave one alone?

If your estimated total was, I don't know, a half run higher than what the line was, was that something where you would strike or would that not be enough? Yeah, it sounds like you know a little bit about baseball betting. You know, that was arbitrary. It's always arbitrary. There's no real cutoff. I would set a line, basically, for each game, a line for the game for the side,

which team, you know, what their chances of winning is, and then a line for the total, what my model projects the average or the median score would be for that game. And then we'd compare it, obviously, to the numbers that we can get from the sports books. And if they were significant, you know, I had in my little betting programs, I had certain thresholds, but they were basically arbitrary. Back then, if there were a difference of, like I said, a half a run, that would probably be enough to bet that game.

The more the difference was, obviously, the bigger edge that we presumed that we had. And that bears itself out at the end of the year, you know, when I looked at the numbers. Typically, the bigger the difference between what the sportsbook projected and what I projected, the bigger edge we had, the more money we won on those bets. So, yeah, I mean, especially back in the day, we had games where there would be a run or more difference in my total and their total, and even in the lines. As you know, in baseball, you typically bet into money lines. So a team might be a minus $2 favorite,

which would mean that the sports book presumed that they were a two to one favorite to win the game. They would win the game two thirds of the time. And, you know, we had lots and lots and lots of games again, especially back in the, in the, in the nineties where the sports book might have a team as a $3 favorite, which is almost unheard of these days. But back then, if a good team with a good pitcher played a bad team, they wouldn't hesitate to post a line of $3, $2.80, $3.50. And oftentimes, I would have that game lined as $1.80 or something

like that, which would be a tremendous difference. And again, if we look at those types of bets and those types of games in the aggregate at the end of the season or the end of several seasons, you know, it would turn out that the games that I thought should be lined at minus $1.80 and they had minus $2.60 in actuality, you know, would win, say, two-thirds of the time. So the actual line should have been $2 instead of 260, which is what the sports book was putting out for the line. Did your testing determine what was the greatest source of your edge? I mean, was it park factors, for instance? Was it your daily player projections? I mean, what was the big difference that you had over the house, the book? Yeah. And that's another great question. You know, I didn't,

most of my research wasn't what they call in the stock market, you know, fundamental type research. It was more technical. Maybe I had that reversed. If I do, somebody will figure that out. But I didn't so much look at sort of a Bayesian approach, which would be, OK, is this line likely to be inefficient to start with? Basically just use a technical model to to figure out, you know, what the line should be and compared to what the line is. But to at least partly answer your question back in the day, again, in the in the early 90s and certainly before that, when I did my testing, because a lot of the testing I did was on 80s data, they had almost no concept of park effect. I specifically remember us, for example, betting unders like crazy for the first few years in Houston Astrodome, which, of course, was a notoriously difficult park to hit in for various reasons. So yeah, a huge aspect of our totals edge was in park factors, which they apparently knew very little to nothing about, which is surprising because even if they really didn't understand

the concept of park effects, you would think they'd be able to figure out, well, somehow every time a game is played in the Astrodome, the score is 3-0, 2-1, 1-0, as opposed to Boston or Wrigley Field in the summer or something like that, this pre-Colorado days, obviously. As far as sides go, Ben, and in general, lines back in the day very much reflected a lot of public superstition and sentiment. Teams that had been on a winning streak, the line may be inflated in favor of that team by 10, 20, or 30 cents. Same thing with a particular pitcher. If a pitcher had been on a hot streak or a cold streak for a few games or a few

days, the line would be inflated or deflated towards or away from that pitcher, again, in an incorrect, inefficient manner. So those are ways in which that we would get an edge, because obviously my models didn't reflect things like hot and cold streaks, especially at the team level. And those kinds of things gradually disappeared. Like if you look at like a correlation now between, you know, a team winning streak and whether the line is inflated or deflated, you know, towards or away those particular teams,

you're going to find almost no correlation now. You'll find a little bit when it comes to pitchers and maybe team run scoring and that sort of thing, but not nearly to the extent that you would find back in the 90s and I presume before that. All right. So at this moment, we seem to be looking ahead to a near-term future of legalized baseball betting. And at this moment, we're also looking ahead to a present and future of almost legalized baseball betting. And at this moment, we're also looking ahead to a present and future of almost impossible to make a profit baseball betting. So given the difficulty of betting on baseball, again, I don't know if any of us know anything about the other sports, but given how difficult it is to do anything with baseball betting, have you observed

or do you think that there is going to be any relationship between that truth and the reality of legalized betting? Will people be deterred at all or will people bet just because you can bet? No, I mean, you know, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's certainly the percentage of the what they call the public or the or the dumb money, you know, compared to the total pool bet is, is very large. It's less than it was again, back in the day, because so many, uh, smart bettors got into the market, um, in order to take advantage of these inefficient lines, probably a lot of them have gotten out in the last few years, but you're still looking at 90 or 95% of the market is just a casual better. The, you know, the average fan, the average gambler, or like in all gambling circles,

people that think that they have a mode or means of handicapping sports but don't really. So I don't think that'll make any difference at all. Gambling is a very prolific activity. Last year or the year before, I think, Vegas took in about $5 billion in wagers. I believe the estimate for extraneous sports betting, so-called illegal sports betting around the country, is on the order of about $75 billion a year. That's a lot of money. Now, granted, plurality of that is on football, whether it be in Vegas or probably even more so in the illegal market. But most people bet on football, then basketball is the second most bet sport, and then baseball. But baseball is not really too far behind these days, basketball and football. So out of the $75 billion, Ben, that's being wagered a

year now in the illegal market, I would guess probably maybe $10 billion of that is baseball. So that's a lot of money being bet on baseball. And not all of that, but a lot of that obviously will be transferred to these new betting markets that open up. I read something the other day that said something like in the next two years, like 32 states will pass some kind of sports sports betting uh law that enables them to open some kind of sports betting venue and uh of course you know new jersey is is on the verge of doing that right away i think pennsylvania might be doing that right away so yeah there'll be i i don't think the notion that people can't beat baseball anymore and that it used to be a beatable sport first of

all i don't think that's very well known at all. Who would know that except for your listeners, of course, now. But no, I don't think that's going to affect the proliferation of sports betting given this Supreme Court ruling. And you mentioned that via email that you were placing along with your partners something like 1100 wagers per season and you know with somewhat substantial amounts so you would kind of move the lines at times just yourself putting these bets down oh yeah that affect things yeah anybody uh that makes a substantial wager on a game especially especially in baseball, because, again, the volume is not nearly what it is in the other sports, especially NFL. But, yeah, anybody that makes a large wager really on any game is going to move the line around the country and all the sports books they communicate now. They have apps and databases where they can look in real time at what all the sports books are doing around the country the internet the overseas ones as well as the ones in in las vegas the licensed

ones in vegas and um so yeah i mean we were always moving the line substantially especially on totals if we made a large bet on a total um then it might move 30 or 40 cents or it might move a half a run or something like that. And then on a side, a little bit less, but on some games, it would move 10, 20, 30 cents after we would make a bet. Not only would our money influence the line move, but there are what they call in the industry followers. So people that would be following us or maybe some other sports groups. Yeah. I was going to ask if you had rivals or, you know, main competitors that you were trying to keep up with or stay ahead of. Yeah, yeah, we did. We did. There were some other

groups out there. Even back in the early days, there was some groups that concentrated mostly or exclusively on totals because they were so easy to beat back then. So there were some total groups that were big rivals. Sometimes we'd be on the same side. Sometimes occasionally we'd be on opposite sides. That'd be fairly rare. But we'd be on different games quite a bit of the time because we had different methodologies. I think I was probably one of the first, if not the first person to really use an exclusively sabermetric model. You know, some of these totals groups, they probably had a notion of park effects and things like that. So they could get a pretty big edge just

using that alone. But yeah, there were some really early groups in my email to you. I mentioned the original computer group, and they started in the early to mid-80s. As far as I know, they didn't do anything with baseball, but they were using computer sort of early sabermetric models for other sports, or at least analytical computer models, you know, to take advantage of the sort of the superstition and the public sentiment that was reflected in the lines. And they concentrated on college sports and possibly nba and nfl back in the early to mid 80s but as far as i know that that was a billy walters who's in jail right now i think for a security fraud but um i don't think he was a rival uh for me for baseball but there was another group called the kosher boys in new york and they were a pretty big rival and they had uh

they had computer guys that were using sabermetric models in the 90s as well. But surprisingly, there really weren't that many rivals back in the day. I'm sure. So this is probably how you met Tango Tiger. You were betting rivals 20, 25 years ago. So given that baseball got so much more difficult and it essentially pushed you away, there just wasn't money in anymore. Did you ever extend and express any interest in trying to bet on another sport? Or is that just, are they too far out of your wheelhouse of knowledge?

Or have they all gotten smarter around the same time? No, that's a great question. The other sports, basketball lends itself to a similar model. Probably the only know, the only other sport that really is sort of at least somewhat individualistic like baseball. Obviously, there's synergistic effect in basketball, but not nearly as much as there is in some of the other sports. So I definitely toyed around with basketball about 25 years ago. So maybe five years after I started the baseball. about 25 years ago, so maybe five years after I started the baseball. And like Bill Bentner, one of my regrets was not that I wasn't successful at it,

but that I never indulged in it. I put together some really nice models for basketball, and I think I would have done extremely well. But to be honest, you know, I was just so exhausted at the end of a baseball season that I just didn't have the energy to put the time and the effort, which is a lot, into a basketball. So I just kind of never really pursued the basketball model for the NBA, but I think it would have done really well. The NBA lines were extremely inefficient, again, also back in the 80s and 90s. And a very good friend of mine who also was an ex-Blackjack player, he had some computer remodels that he started about the same time as I started baseball. And he's been unbelievably

successful at that, mostly in the NBA, but he also did other sports. And yeah, a little bit of a regret of mine. I think it would have worked really, really well. The other sports did and do lag behind baseball in terms of the efficiency of the sportsbook lines, Ben, and that's because, as you know or as you can imagine, you know, the information on the Internet and in other venues is not nearly as robust in the other sports as it is in baseball, not even close. You know, you have sites like what football outsiders or something or APB metrics for basketball, but never really got the traction that baseball did. You know, baseball,

probably I would say at least 10 times the robustness in terms of the information available than the other sports. Yeah. Well, you mentioned the information when new information would become available if, say, PitchFX comes out or something. Can you derive a temporary advantage from that? Or how did you try to stay ahead of the books as time went on and they kept cutting the margins? Yeah, that's a great question. I thought when data like that would come out and, you know, wasn't generally available to a widespread extent to the general public, like you said, pitch FX data, stuff like framing data,

the concept of catcher framing, and then I think baseball perspectives, you know, they still do, or they used to put out catcher framing data. And, you know, I thought that would be a boon to my model. And I used that data as quickly as I could. Catcher framing was a good example that I thought, oh, this is going to be a boon to my model. The market was already in decline. I thought that, you know, I'd be able to climb back into the market, but it just didn't work out. I'm not exactly sure why.

I think just the market degraded so much that and at the same time, I think other people and the sports books themselves were utilizing that kind of data as quickly as possible. So it just became impossible to stay ahead of both the sports books, Ben, and they use computer guys. They use computer models now. They have sophisticated models. You know, you had, what was the name of that finance company that ran, they ran, they run a bunch of sports books in Las Vegas. And it was a, you know, a billion dollar finance company. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but they had at their disposal,

they had a massive staff of big data experts and IT experts, and they were using them to help create the opening lines. So it just became so difficult to beat these lines between the sports books being sophisticated at creating the lines and the betters coming in right away as soon as those lines would be put out and they would they would move the lines they would make them more efficient that even with uh with this new data coming out framing data pitch fx stat cast it just became too difficult to beat you know you can maybe you know you'd lose three percent here from from the efficiency of the lines and the efficiency of the betting market. And then you'd get back, you know, a tenth of a percent from this new data.

It just wasn't enough to overcome the efficiency of the lines. And then maybe lastly, I don't know that you'll be able to answer this, but I guess, A, I know that you did some consulting for teams at various points. Did that affect your, or did the betting affect your ability and or willingness to work for teams in some capacity? I imagine that some team would have liked to have your model for itself, but that probably would not have been as lucrative for you, which leads to part B, which is, I know you were not making Bill Bender money, and I don't want to pry, but can you, I mean, this was a full-time job, I assume. Was it all you had to do? Was it retirement money? I mean, I don't know. Can you give us any sense of how well this worked, I guess? Well, it wasn't Bill Benner money, so I can say that unequivocally.

The first question really didn't influence my work with the teams. My work with the teams was pure, 100% pure, nothing I would hold back from them. I had proprietary projection models. I gave the teams everything I had. And, of course, it was comforting to me knowing that what I gave them, of course, it wasn't like they were going to go post it on the Internet. And of course, you know, it's comforting to me knowing that what I gave them, of course, it wasn't like they were going to go post it on the Internet, you know. And, you know, I've been real, you know, I don't want to use the word generous because, you know, I don't want to sound like I don't want to beat my own horn here. But, you know, I've given like, you know, my UZR work to a fan graph, let them publish that stuff. I've published a ton of stuff for the public because I enjoy it and I like to share share my work with the public. I've done well. I'm not a greedy person.

So that answers the first question. Second question, the amount of money. I would say that's been my means of income mostly for the last 25 years or so. Although, like I said in the email, I don't really do anything anymore other than just a little fun betting during the postseason. And postseason lines, by the way, are much less efficient than regular season, much less efficient, even now. It's just a lot of public money that comes in and a lot of public sentiment that is reflected in the lines in the postseason. So dollar-wise, I mean, a lot of the money that was made then from my models didn't go directly to me. So I would say probably, without saying anything about how much money I've made over the years, I would say probably my models have probably generated on the order of maybe $50 to $75 million, maybe something like that.

Just a wild guess and I would say most of that a lion's share not going to me all right so I'm not I'm not in the Bill Bentner category and I'm sure of that billion dollars obvious I mean that's a lot of money that that that can feed a lot of people um but you, he had lots of partners too. In fact, one of his partners was an old blackjack buddy of mine, the first guy that I teamed up with back in Atlantic City in the early 80s to play blackjack with. He went on to be one of the partners with Bill.

I won't mention his name because he's kind of a private guy. Not quite like Tom Tango, but... All right. Well, this has been enlightening. I wish that I had been betting on baseball in the 1980s with a sophisticated model. I came around too late, but

it sounds like you could have just had Marcel back there and made a killing, I guess, at that point. So we missed our chance, but oh well. So I appreciate your sharing all this interesting history with us. And of course, people know about the book and they can find you on Twitter at Mitchell Lichtman, or they can just write a analytical article about baseball anywhere on the internet and you will magically appear in the comment section like a genie and point out exactly what could have been done better and i'm sure that you are right most of the time but uh thanks for coming on and sharing all right ben jeff thanks a

lot i appreciate it's been a lot of fun thank you and don't forget to wave to bill bentner's yacht from your rowboat. I think I may have mentioned it, but he's a real nice down-to-earth guy, in addition to being real bright. Yeah, I think he's a MIT grad, if I remember correctly. All right, you guys take care. All right, thanks. So way, way back at the beginning of this episode, I expressed some interest in having John Jaso on the podcast. I put out a call for Jaso assistance.

No need. I am rescinding the call because I am currently on a group text with John Jaso, and he says he's pumped for a podcast. So stay tuned. All right, that will do it for today and this week. You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. As an added perk for some of you, we have pre-recordeded the next episode which we'll be releasing probably on monday long weekend so everyone will get it then but if you are in our ned garver club on patreon that's ten dollars per month or more you'll get that episode early as soon as it's ready those messages will go out we try to do that from time

to time we don't often pre-record but when we do the ned garver club gets to listen a little early after all we've just saved you a bunch of money that you would have wasted betting on baseball, so maybe put part of that toward Patreon. The following five listeners have already pledged their support. Joe Simmons, Joseph Garino, Bertil Spolander, Michael Webb, and Fraser Dennison. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Have a wonderful long weekend. If you're somewhere that celebrates Memorial Day and we will talk to you next week. But it only rises once