Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1223: Expansion Strategies and a Defense of Casey

Episode Date: May 28, 2018

On the day the Stanley Cup finals start, Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan talk to Baseball Prospectus writer Zach Crizer about how future MLB expansion clubs could construct baseball’s equivalent of the Las Vegas Golden Knights, the NHL’s sensational expansion team. Then (29:51) Ben and Effectively Wild listener Dom Guido reexamine the legendary 1888 poem […]

Jamaica, ooh I'm gonna take you away On holiday, on holiday Our problems, time will have to solve them someday On holiday On holiday Hello and welcome to episode 1223 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs for a special pre-recorded holiday episode.

So we don't know what has happened in baseball in the past few days, which for us, as we speak, are still in the future. So we have a couple interviews lined up here, but where in the world are you as people are listening to this podcast presumably are you in the wilderness somewhere mexico city the urban wilderness oh okay are you hiking somewhere climbing something nope just going and taking a trip to a city for the first time maybe wow it's

a it's a long weekend there's a lot of food no it's not so going to be a lot of walking and eating and sleeping and there are volcanoes around but uh one of them is blowing up all the time so i'm going to try not to get too close to uh to that one but this is just there's snow everywhere so we can't do the the backpacking that we want to do this weekend so we uh we're just gonna go take a nice quick flight but i have a i have a question for you okay so in this episode we will be talking about the vegas golden knights and expansion hockey and expansion baseball and something that occurred to me that i hadn't thought before so the last round of expansion we had was more than two decades ago when the devil rays and the diamondbacks joined the major leagues and as i'm reading through this uh this saber profile of the diamondbacks ownership history i'm reminded that they were trying to win now, and during the 97-98 baseball offseason,

the Diamondbacks acquired two of the most high-profile and high-priced free agents available, shortstop Jay Bell and third baseman Matt Williams. And I was thinking, you've got the Diamondbacks right there in Phoenix, and to a somewhat lesser extent but still relevant, Tampa Bay is in Florida, which is home of the other half of spring training locations. We know that there are a lot of ballplayers who choose to live in the Phoenix area year-round, or at least when they can. I don't know if that happens in Florida. Probably less, but still somewhat,

because there's an advantage to being where spring training is, being around your families more. So that is an advantage. Tax havens, I guess, if it still is. Yeah, those two. Those are advantages that the last two expansion teams had that the next two expansion teams will presumably not have, unless they're also in Phoenix and somewhere in Florida. But if, I don't know, who's most likely to be next?

Like if we talked about Portland, maybe Montreal, Mexico City even could get a team eventually. even could get a team eventually but what kind of immediate market how much could these teams participate in free agency right away relative to the previous expansion teams because you would be a free agent looking at these things thinking these teams are going to be bad for a while probably and they're not close to where i live i don't know how many baseball players live after the season in montreal or portland oregon so is not a major point. Now everyone's signing extensions and people are afraid to become free agents potentially, so there might be even fewer impact players available. So yeah, as we're about to talk about, there are reasons why things might be even harder on the next expansion teams than they were on the previous ones, and

it's never easy for anyone to just enter the league all of a sudden when everyone else has been there for decades or centuries. So we are going to talk to Zach Kreiser in just a second. He is a baseball prospectus author who wrote about this subject. Later in the episode, I will be talking to listener Dom Guido, who wrote a great post in the Facebook group about the famous 1888 Ernest Thayer poem, Casey at the Bat. He completely changed the way that I think about this poem. I thought I understood it. I thought I knew what the takeaway was, but he opened my eyes and we do sort of a sabermetric reappraisal and also just a close reading of Casey at the Bat. And I think we might change some minds.

Anyway, it was fun. So Dom and I will do that after you and I speak to Zach. But let's do that now. So today, Monday, marks the beginning of the Stanley Cup Finals. We might be watching. Jeff, you're a hockey fan. You watch playoff hockey. And I aspire to be a hockey fan who watches playoff hockey.

If we do watch some of the Stanley Cup, then we will be seeing one of the two teams, the Vegas Golden Knights, who are an expansion team this year in the NHL and somehow made it to the finals. And that served as a jumping off point for Zach Kreiser's article at Baseball Prospectus last week, where he considered what it would take for a baseball team to do what the Golden Knights have done. Everyone's talking about potentially adding two baseball teams at some point. We talked to Rob Nyer about that recently. So if it happens, what can a team do to try to ensure that it is competitive as soon as possible? So Zach, welcome to the podcast. And for people who are not big hockey fans, just asking for a friend here could you give a quick summary of how the golden knights did what they did hey guys uh thanks for having me yeah so i'm not the biggest hockey fan in the world but i read enough articles about this

and followed it enough this season to that i think i can explain so So basically the NHL, when they did this expansion, they made the rules somewhat different for the existing hockey teams. They couldn't protect as many people as they could in previous iterations of expansion drafts. And so when it came down to it with the salary cap that exists in the NHL, there were a lot of teams that got, I think, basically nervous about one specific player or a specific unit that they were afraid would get decimated by just the crunch that they couldn't protect enough people. And so what a lot of teams ended up doing was trying to pay the Golden Knights with a prospect or an extra player just so they would

take a certain guy or so they wouldn't take a certain defenseman or they wouldn't take their second forward or whatever. And they ended up, several of those guys that they got compensated with ended up being absolute stars. This was pretty obvious in one case. The Florida Panthers gave up two players that pretty much everyone agreed it was dumb, like the moment it happened. But several other teams like the Minnesota Wild did this, and it wasn't a huge deal at the time, but turned out to be, you know, the Golden Knights ended up with more stars than you would have expected. And then they also just had some luck because they got one guy named William Carlson, who no one thought was any good, who came in and was one of the best scorers in the league. So there was a mix of the rules and some obvious luck and then put it all together.

And they were actually one of the best teams all the way through the year. Yeah, so the Golden Knights, they won 51 games. i am coming at this as an ottawa senators fan i can tell you that things must have changed because when the ottawa senators were an expansion team they won 10 games they won a total of 51 games their first four seasons combined things have uh things have gotten a little different but now first of all i don't think anyone expected that the golden knights would be this good this season and second all, you can find a lot of quotes from like the team administration before the season started, where even they were like, yeah, we know we're going to lose a lot. And we're just in this to develop players,

etc, etc. We'll try to be good in three or four years. So as sort of a broad step back question is we're going to be comparing baseball and hockey expansion here. In baseball, it seems like we know players better. And in hockey, how much of this do you think comes down to hockey analysis is really hard and the sport is a little bit uncomfortably random? I do think there's a lot to it. There's something about basketball actually seems to maybe be better at this. But I know in football, which I follow more closely than hockey a little bit, I know basically no one knows anything about how good the players are. A lot of it has to do with the system they're playing in and the coach they're playing for and

the way they're being used. And I think some of that translates to hockey, where you see that the Florida Panthers, for example, who gave up those two players that most people thought it was a bad idea, but they didn't seem to think that those players would repeat their previous seasons, which weren't even that great. And in fact, they got much better. And so I think it is a lot more of a crapshoot in hockey, in one sense. But there's also, you know, everyone has talked that I think both of you have written about the way that baseball teams have started to focus on developing players that, you know, developing skills that maybe one team that for baseball, but the chances of someone accidentally giving up one of the top 10 players in the league seems very low in baseball. So can we review what happened in the last round of baseball expansion? Obviously,

the Diamondbacks got good pretty quickly. The Devil Rays did not. But what was the format? How did it work? How was the talent distributed, to the best of your knowledge? So newspaper archives on the internet, they're not good. I couldn't find a full detailing of some of the more intricate parts of the process, but the basics were that every existing team could protect 15 players throughout its entire organization. And then there were other stipulations on top of that where guys going into the last year of their contracts didn't have to be protected. They were just automatically not eligible for the expansion draft. Guys who had been signed either three or four years earlier in that window, depending on how old they were when they signed, you couldn't

pluck a guy who had just been drafted like two months ago. So there were guys who were just totally outside the process, but everyone else, if you wanted to make sure that player wasn't taken in the draft, you had to use one of your 15 slots. And then the two expansion teams, the Rays and the D-backs, went through and did a round where every existing team lost a player. And then every existing team got to protect three additional players. And then they did the whole thing again, and then the protections happened again. And then they did a shortened round of seven more players each. And I have no idea how they filled the rest of the minor league system. Literally no idea.

But so they had 35 players from that expansion draft and then the D-backs went out and signed Jay Bell as a free agent and did some other things. The Rays mostly traded people and bought Fred McGriff. Right. That didn't work out so well. And I remember I looked not long ago because there was a listener named Nicholas who asked us something about the mechanics of how this works. And he was wondering if teams could kind of plan for this in advance and set up farm teams and minor league systems, say a year or two ahead of actually having a major league team. And I don't believe so. Just looking back at the last four expansion teams, none of them had farm teams prior to their big league teams, and from my just quickly looking at the

number of farm teams each of them had in each year, it looked like they just had smaller minor league systems in their first years as a franchise. Like, the 93 Rockies had four farm teams, and then they went up to six in 94, and then seven in 97. And sort of the same thing with the other teams, they just kind of added farm teams, I guess, as they were able to add players. So it's not like you can kind of, you know, hit the ground running and have a runway that leads up to this. You kind of just have to start from scratch or at least that's how it's worked in the past which is difficult and explains why most expansion teams take some time to get good nick beer bro jack cussed these are the first two

diamondbacks picks and they were taken the two years before the diamondbacks played their first game so i guess that's how you begin but those are two names I completely forgot about. Anyway, I'm going to see the stage here. Yeah, I think the way the minor league says, if I had to make a guess, I'd say you'd start with a triple A team and a really big extended spring training, maybe a double A team. And then you'd just after the draft, you'd have a short season team. And then the next year, you'd end up with more players really don't know it almost does make you think that a first year team should just try and win that first year and when they like you know fail 98 of the time they should just trade things at the deadline to stock a farm

system or start stocking a farm system but i also don know, I don't have as firm a memory of the 97 like baseball aura, but I don't think young players were quite as high on the value curve then as they are now. And so you wonder how it would work these days if front offices would take a different approach. So going into some hypothetical baseball expansion, you can imagine, you talk about teams, maybe they can protect 15 up to 18 players, and you can say, well, say the Padres, they would be pillaged in an expansion draft, or maybe the Rays would be pillaged. And do you think that for something like this, I haven't run through all the math, so I don't know how it actually work out, but do you think that there should be some sort of element to protect competitive balance and parity in this draft

to make sure that expansion teams aren't just tearing away from the farm systems that other low-budget clubs have worked so hard to develop? If it works the same way the previous draft did, the maximum number of players a major league club could lose is three. So I don't know exactly how much of a of an effect it would have maybe if you if someone does go like trying to take all the prospects you might have a bit of an issue for a team like the Padres but I

don't think it would be a crazy effect the one thing a commenter in the on the article brought up is seems like the Yankees, who they have a no trade clause in Jacoby Ellsbury's contract, and no trade clauses are required to be in the protected group. And they would almost certainly release him like immediately upon finding out that an expansion team was coming, so they could save that extra protection spot. And so you'd have some weird things like that, where teams might have to shuffle players or money around to make sure they protected the guys they really wanted the most. But overall, I find it hard to believe that a team couldn't protect its tip-top most valuable assets because you'd be looking at, you know, if you're talking about Mackenzie Gore for the Padres, for instance, they wouldn't have to protect him at any point in the next, I think, three years of expansion happened. And so you get the idea. It starts to become difficult to see anyone losing too much.

Yeah. And as you mentioned, you know, part of handling this deftly is messaging. And maybe that's easier now that some teams are more open about not competing in the current season and saying that we're aiming for 2020 or 2021 or whatever it is. That's obviously an easier case to make if you're an expansion team, although you want people to come to your park and buy tickets in your first year. And there's probably just a grace period, kind of a honeymoon effect there where people will come to your games because you have games and there haven't been games before. So that helps. You don't necessarily have to put the most competitive product on the field, but walk through some of the strategies that we haven't really touched on or discussed in depth so far. If you are the GM of the Portland whatevers, what will you do? I think it's interesting if you do have these,

if you do have this brand new team that you don't have, if you don't have any expectations other than like, they're probably going to be bad. The way you might want to go about doing it is see if you can create that big boom like Vegas had. We hear the A's and the Rays talk about kind of, they never want it to seem like they're rebuilding. They never want it to be an uncompetitive season

because they're afraid of the market effects on their team. And to start an expansion team and immediately have a big boom seems like it would be very advantageous, but it's difficult. I think one of the things I would start with is just see if you can find a whole bunch of guys who are really performing in the high minors who might be undervalued by their current team, or maybe their team likes them a lot, but just doesn't have enough protection spots to get down to them. I think the examples I used in this article were Mitch Hanegar and Justin Boer, who both kind of showed up on the radar like past the normal age for when guys show up on the radar. And so that might be the type of player

that's unprotected, but could be useful in the majors right away. And we saw Mitch Hanegar get traded because the Diamondbacks didn't really have a spot to play him. You could also look at the guys who are left unprotected because their contract is big. The obvious thing that an expansion team is going to have is money. And if the competitive balance tax continues to be treated kind of like a de facto salary cap, you might have the Dodgers trying desperately to get under it to reset their penalty, or you might have the Yankees doing the same. There could be these situations where teams openly want you to take a decent or formerly good player and see what you can find. And if you're this expansion team, it's not the same as taking on a seven year,

you know, $200 million contract, it's taking on some portion of the last part of it. It's like, if you're taking on two years and 50, that's not a very large commitment. If you are not expecting to be competing necessarily, you're giving it a shot, and then you can move on soon enough after that. So those are a couple ways you could look at it. And if you hit it exactly right, maybe you could compete for a wildcard or something. You could just try and fill out the roster with no holes, but it would be extremely difficult. But those are two ways that the current landscape would seem to encourage. We are just a little bit of baseball expansion away

from full-time jobs for Jabari Blash and G-Man Choi, which I am personally excited about and I wish would happen very soon. So in your estimation, what this sounds to me like, and maybe you and Ben both agree, maybe you don't, but this sounds like it would be one of the absolute most fun things you could ever do as an executive is just try to, it's like a fantasy draft. The best part of any fantasy season is always the draft, or at least that was my experience when I last played 10 years ago. Do you think that a job like this, and granted, there will be a lot of high level

jobs, but do you think that a front office job with an expansion team would be something that is very highly sought after? Do you think you would have people trying to leave their current teams? Or do you think that this would be off-putting because there's still that perception, golden knights aside, that the team is going to be bad and bad for a long time? That's a good question. If I were a front office executive, I think I'd want to try it, but I also do not have any concept of what it's like to make the money of a front office executive and leave to maybe be fired. Yeah, I think enough people would go hard after it.

It would be interesting to know if an existing GM would want to jump to do do this and I don't have the answer at all. I think some of it would depend on whatever the ownership situation is. You know, maybe the front office folks would have a better idea of what their stability was going to be like based on who ends up owning hypothetical Portland franchise B, but that would probably play into it. But it seems like a lot of savvy front office types do try and jump at the chance to rebuild. And we've seen that the AJ Preller try and compete right now, like Onus, when that Onus was put on him, or he put it on himself, whichever one it was, that seemed very stressful. seemed very stressful. And some other GMs who've stepped in and been able to take their time, the one that I think about a lot is David Stearns in Milwaukee. Seems like he really had a nice situation and could go in and do this different type of rebuild that seems to have worked very well. So I think as long as no one was really going to put the pressure on them and make it

an unstable situation, I think a lot of people would really want to do this. Yeah, I guess the rules that are currently in place make it more difficult to go from zero to 60 if you're starting a baseball team than it might have been at one time. I mean, maybe someone who's starting an expansion team is not likely to just build up the payroll to really high levels immediately anyway, but it's harder to do that now without incurring penalties, of course, and it's harder to just spend whatever you want in the draft, which you could do at one time. Now everything is slotted and the penalties are steep, and same with international market, of course. The signing restrictions there are pretty strict compared to what they used to be. So it's harder, I guess, to fill a system when you have nothing to start with than it once was. I mean, there are maybe

more good players available. Maybe, I guess you could say that, I don't know, the gap between the worst big leaguers and the best freely available talent. Maybe that has changed in some way. The player pool has just grown and maybe player development has improved, but you'd have to get smart. And of course, there's the fact that every team is really smart. And so you're catching up with a lot. Like if you were an expansion team in 1998, you could basically be state of the art right away, more or less. Whereas now, unless you're able to poach people from a team, you're going to have to build up a whole infrastructure, a whole database system. You're going to have to, you know, there's just more to a front office. There are more people, there's more calculation that goes

into everything. And you're trying to catch up with people who have decades worth of headstart when it comes to analytics and making decisions. So it would be a difficult market to enter in some ways. Yeah, I was gonna ask, do you guys remember or know how far in advance they hire the front offices for expansion teams? Because I can imagine a like running commentary, if they hire them a year and a half, two years in advance. I can imagine a running commentary of like, the Portland front office was at the Mariners AA game today. Who were they looking at? I can imagine that being a whole thing if they actually hire them so far in advance that it becomes obvious they're out and about

scouting for players. But I have no idea. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know if you'd be able to get the best available candidate if you were starting years in advance and there was no actual team. But you almost need that kind of lead time to just build up all of the processes that go into running a major league team today. It's a really hard thing to do. So I don't know that we need expansion or that the time is ripe for expansion. Maybe it is, but there are still existing franchises that are struggling in some ways. So it's not a clear cut case, but when it happens and one day, almost inevitably it will, it's going to be a pretty

heavy lift for whoever takes this on. But are there any other strategies we haven't touched on that you wrote about in the article or that have occurred to you since? The other one I mentioned very briefly was maybe you could pillage Japan. Maybe you could just go look for whoever's dominating in the NPB. We have a very limited sample that says Myles Mikolas seems to have changed and that his performance in Japan was actually evidence of being better. You obviously have some of the actual Japanese players who came over who've been terrific, but there's enough of a history that maybe you could find something over there

that turns into an immediate big league player, but it would be extremely difficult. I have no idea if expansion is the right time right now either, but the Golden Knights seem to offer some sort of hope that even for teams that are bad now, that there is some different way of going about rebuilding a team or building it from absolutely nothing that doesn't necessarily involve just waiting to have the first draft draft pick over and over and over again so do you think we've talked about this a little bit maybe there's no perfect choice but in in your own estimation if you were to try to build the baseball team you're taking over an expansion team would you prefer your approach to be to try to make them win as many games as possible that first season or would you try to focus more on the long term because i

guess you have the the dual responsibility of trying to make a baseball team but you're also trying to establish a fan base and it seems like in theory the more success you have early on the better you could do to do that so i don't know what's your choice there's a weird dynamic i'm sure that if i were like the owner or something i the main thing I would want is for the team to be really good in April and to get people excited and then go do baseball things the smartest way from there. But I think the ideal way to do it, which may not even be possible because all the other teams are smart and would probably think of ways that a team might go about it. ways that a team might go about it. But if I could get a ton of upper minors players who have shown some performance or some potential or some really great skill, even if it's just one pitch, a slider that works really well, whatever, if I could get a bunch of those guys and have them all have options or have them all be willing to maybe stay in AAA if they don't make the team out of spring training.

If you compensate them more, maybe they would do that. I go back to the J.D. Martinez was itched from the Astros because he was going to make too much money in AAA, which seems like a very dumb reason in hindsight. And so if you took enough of those players, maybe you stumble into a 500 season. Realistically, you know, that's how you kind of have to look at it. If you stumble into a team that would be a 500 team, and maybe you get those extra five wins from luck or bullpen management or whatever it is, you could go about it that way. And then you'd still have a team that's under control and young, and you might have

a few trade chips that you could start replenishing the team to be good in the future but I don't even know if that's entirely realistic that's just a thought of how I might aim for it and it might go south very quickly and then you just trade everything you have for young players and hope you get good I found a little bit of history so this isn't a question just to comment. I can say, so the Diamondbacks began playing in the 1998 season, and this is coming from Sabre, sabre.org. As general manager, the Diamondbacks in June 1995 hired Joe Garagiola, Jr., one of the founding fathers of big league baseball in Phoenix.

Later that year, Colangelo, that's Jerry Colangelo, and Garagiola hired Buck Showalter as the club's first manager. Showalter came aboard just days after the Yankees fired him in the wake of the team's playoff loss in its first postseason appearance in 14 years. Like many of his predecessors in New York, the intense Showalter butted heads frequently with the club's domineering owner, George Seidbrenner. That's irrelevant to this paragraph. The Diamondbacks gave Showalter the additional responsibility of overseeing the development of its minor league system. The Diamondbacks fielded the first affiliated minor league teams in 1996. In subsequent seasons, Showalter clashed with Garagiola over the direction

of the club. Showalter preferred a steady player development program through a farm system, while Garagiola adopted the win-now, meaning sign-for-agents approach favored by Colangelo. As a result, Showalter was fired after the 2000 season. So I guess they hired a general manager and a manager years in advance of their first season. And I don't really know how much they did, but they definitely had them. So you had people earning a paycheck for a team that didn't yet exist. All right.

The more we know. So Zach has written a manual for expansion. Right. The more we know. So Zach has written a manual for expansion. Whatever team actually ends up being the 31st or 32nd team now has somewhere to start. And we will link to his article. You can also find him not only at Baseball Perspectives, but on Twitter at ZKreiser. Zach, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Let's take a quick break.

Thank you. Thank you. All right, let's take a quick break. And then I will be back with Dom Guido, Effectively Wild listener, Facebook group contributor, to revisit Casey at the Bat with a critical eye. This one was fun for me. Well, the outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day. Score stood 4-2 with but one inning more to play. Then when Cooney died at first and Barrows did the same, a sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game. All right, if you are like me and like almost every other baseball fan,

you have read Casey at the Bat hundreds of times, I don't know, dozens of times, maybe hundreds is a little much, but you've probably formed your opinion of what this poem is about and what its takeaway is supposed to be, oh, when you were six years old, let's say, and you probably haven't rethought it since then. This past week, I had the opportunity to rethink it because Effectively Wild listener Dom Guido posted in the Facebook group his analysis, his rethinking, reimagining of the significance of Casey at the Bat prompted a lot of admiration and discussion. And it's made me think, so I wanted to have him on to discuss it. Dom is in Northern Kentucky. He just told me that he hopes that the area gets a major league team

sometime soon. I'm interpreting that as a Reds joke. I guess it sounded like one at the time. Oh, it's definitely a Reds joke. I guess it sounded like one at the time. Oh, it's definitely a Reds joke. Okay. Well, Dom, thank you for coming on and for forcing us all to rethink Casey at the Bat. Yeah, thanks, Ben. You said it. I've been aware of this poem my entire life. I was telling you before we came on, my mom used to read it to me when I was a little kid.

And she said it was good training for being a Cubs fan because my mom used to read it to me when I was a little kid. And she said it was good training for being a Cubs fan because my mom grew up outside of Chicago. That at the moment, the moment when it seems that everything is going to go right, not to give away the ending of the poem, everything goes wrong. And for her watching those Cubs teams in the 60s and 70s and the 80s too, Her watching those Cubs teams in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, too. I got to say, I see where she was coming from. But when I was a kid, I think I was mostly influenced by like the 1940s Walt Disney cartoons of Casey at the Bat. I don't know if you've ever seen that one. Yeah, there are a million incarnations of Casey at the Bat, right?

Cartoons, there are different versions of the text. There are people who've written sequels and satirized it. So much. Yeah. We're adding to the Casey canon here. Yeah, when I was on my college fencing team, there was one about where Casey was on the fencing team. That one's ridiculous.

But I was reading the poem again because my son is three years old and he loves to hear stories before he goes to bed. But the problem with reading books is I have to have the light on, and that makes him want to be awake. So I needed something I could do with the light off, a story I could read that way. And I knew this poem well, so I read over it again and i i kind of memorized it and that way i could turn the light off and and keep reading stories to my to my kid and i also have a one-year-old who sleeps in the same room so he gets it too yeah and as i keep telling the story i kept thinking about it

more and more like i said i was influenced by the the disney cartoon version when I was younger, which basically portrays Casey as super overconfident. And he gets his comeuppance at the end when mighty Casey has struck out. Yes, I think that's the Casey consensus, is that Casey was overconfident and he thought too much of himself and he wasted this at bat. Right. And so as I keep telling the story, and you said hundreds of times, I've got to be nearing the thousands by now based on the times when I was a kid. And we've been doing this for almost a year now

with me and my sons. And so I studied history and classics and religious studies in college. I'm an ordained pastor now. So what I'm used to do is combing through text to find meaning. And as I've been combing through Casey of the Bat, I'm not sure that the reading that I was used to when I was a kid, that Casey's overconfident, right? The consensus. And that he gets his comeuppance by striking out is the right reading. And I posted this in the Facebook group. And so I said,

as you read through the poem, it seems like Mudville being down 4-2, the fans are despondent, but there's a glimmer of hope if Casey can get up to bat. And he does with two guys in scoring position.

And clearly, based on the way the crowd is reacting to Casey, he is, if not the best hitter on the team, at least their favorite one. Right. Right? Yeah. Although someone in the Facebook group disputed this because there are two outs and first bases open.

Right. And if Casey was really that good of a hitter, he'd have been intentionally walked. Exactly. So a few things I want to say about this, just to set the scene before we sort of decide how much blame Casey deserves here. For one thing, we should take into account

the scoring environment in 1888. And I don't know how familiar you are with that. I was not familiar with that until two minutes ago. 1888 was a low-scoring season and a high-strikeout season by the standards of the day. It was the lowest scoring season since 1880. It was at that point the highest strikeout season in Major League history and remained the highest strikeout season in Major League history until 1905. So this was a high strikeout year that was presumably not all Casey. And so you have to

factor that in, I think here. It's not purely Casey's fault that he strikes out. Everyone was striking out more often then, although of course, much less often than they do today. So that's one thing. The other thing is, I think that maybe Mudville's expectations are out of whack here just a little bit, because I think they shouldn't have gotten their hopes up this much in the first place. Now, first of all, Ernest Thayer, the author, he says at the beginning, the outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day. Okay, of course, we all accept that. There are people, stragglers, who are leaving in deep despair.

Maybe that seems like a slight overreaction they're not totally out of this game but it's a slim hope at this point you're not likely to win this game and so oh goodness no no and so there are people in mudville who say that they will put up even money now with casey at the bet and that's just a bad bet if you are putting up even money terrible bet i just plugged the numbers into a run expectancy calculator. And to be fair, this is not using 1888 numbers here, but it's probably not so far off. So obviously, we're at the bottom of the ninth, two outs, Mudville's down two. There are runners on second and third.

This is a very high leverage situation where one is an average leverage situation. This is a 6.25. So this is a very high leverage situation, but Mudville's odds of coming back here are extremely low. The visiting team, whatever it is, we don't even know, has, according to this calculator, an 86.5 chance of winning this game. So Mudville's odds here, only 13.5 chance of winning this game so mudville's odds here only 13.5 percent to actually come back and win this game granted if casey is a great hitter maybe it's a little bit higher than that but the odds are against mudville here so get your expectations in check mudville fans oh absolutely and and you're missing the part that they were willing to put up even money before Casey even gets up. They're like, well, if Casey ever got up, we'd be fine.

But ahead of him are Flynn and Jimmy Blake, and they're no good. So you've got to imagine that at the time when they're positing, we put up even money now, which is a terribly progressive attitude towards sports gambling, by the way. Well, in that day, I think that was a problem at that point. So yeah. I bet, yeah. Casey may have been throwing this game for all we know. Yeah, oh, sure. Now you really muddied the waters, man. But yeah, so they're excited. Casey is up. And even if the opposing team, and you said we don't know who they are, but even if they're not going to intentionally walk him, high strikeout environment and all that,

I just assumed that the first two pitches were clear show-offs, that he was boasting by not taking that, well, by taking the pitches, by not taking swings. But when I read it again, the first pitch, it says right there in the poem, close by the sturdy batsman, the ball unheeded sped. And that was my first inkling, that close by might mean that this is inside. Yeah, that seems reasonable. That if it comes close by him.

Right. If it's over the plate, you wouldn't call it close by. No, no. And the crowd, now the crowd have already shown that their expectations are far out of whack. Right. Right. Obviously biased here. They have a rooting interest. Very. Yes. Very. I believe someone who was talking in the group on the post described them as blind homers, which might be in line for 1888. But they are not having any of this. They want but umpires had to be protected at times leaving the field.

But still, this seems like perhaps an overreaction if this is clearly a called strike, if this is obviously over the plate. Even a biased crowd that is in a very high leverage, high stress situation here probably wouldn't be demanding murder, right, for a legitimate call. Right. That was what I was thinking. That was what first sent me down this road. Right. Right? Because if they knew that this was the sort of thing that Casey did, and why it would be the sort of thing he's doing in this high leverage of a situation beyond me. But if they knew this was the sort of thing that Casey did, even if he was in the custom of taking one pitch, they wouldn't have collectively lost their mind after the first one. And so Casey's response to

the crowd then, I feel like backs me up where he calms the crowd down. He says, no, no, that's okay. That's all right. Almost like he's trying to build a rapport with the umpire, right? I've got your back. It's fine. I'm not going to let him kill you. Yeah. You'd think, right, if the crowd's calling for the guy's head, you'd think that maybe he'd be more inclined to give Casey the borderline call if Casey is trying to save his life in this situation. You'd think that would engender maybe some gratitude. Maybe you get the 50-50 call going Casey's way after that gesture. Right. Absolutely. And so when the second pitch comes in, right, and Casey still ignores it and the umpire says strike two, that's when the whole tenor of everything shifts. Right. The crowd's still on the umpire.

Yes. They call him a fraud. Yes, they are maddened. So loudly that it echoes. Yes. Yes. They call him a fraud. Yes, they are maddened. So loudly that it echoes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. We don't get any descriptor here.

We don't know. We don't know if this is close by. We don't know if this is over the plate or outside. But all we know is that Casey took it again in a situation where you'd think the umpire would give him a little leeway, and he doesn't. And the crowd is even more upset, which if we're assuming that they're at all logical or rational, I don't know what the sight lines were like back in 1888. Maybe you had pillars in the way. I'm sure there were pillars. Yeah.

So that potential problem there, I'm sure that no one was actually facing the field. Probably their necks were sore from having to crane the whole game to see this. So we can factor all that in. But still, the crowd is maddened. They've just been calling for murder. Now they are saying that the Empire is a fraud. So unless the crowd just does this by default on every call that goes against Mudville, in which case, you know, that's a hostile environment.

We have to assume again, I think, that this is maybe a questionable call. I think that this is maybe a questionable call. Oh, that's where I was tracking, especially because Casey's reaction to the second strike is a shift from the reaction to the first one. With the first one, he's trying to put everybody in a better mood. He says, this is all right. And then once the second strike gets called, again, in my opinion, probably a second bad call. Now, all of a sudden, the sneer is gone from Casey's lips. His teeth are clenched in ache.

Yes, his face grows stern and cold. Yeah. Yes. And pounding with cruel violence is back upon the plate. Right. upon the plate right that this is not right again i think i had in my mind the 1940s disney cartoon where it looks like casey is just getting focused because now he's now he's gonna do it after just ignoring the first two pitches yeah but i think in the world we've constructed the world in which we've had two bad calls now casey is now he's mad yeah now he's mad. Yeah. Now he's angry.

Right. And this sets up the third strike. Another commenter in the Facebook group, Joel Haas, I think was who it was, had a good long explanation. He wasn't as sold as I am on this idea, but I like his explanation of the third pitch. Okay. So I'm going to read Joel's description here. Sure. Then the pitcher likely threw something off speed or just a spitball, common for the era,

something that Casey would miss wildly. It was a throwaway pitch, but Casey, with the added home crowd pressure, swung away. And I think part of that, too, is Casey's anger, his anger at the situation, because here he's tried to work the umpire. He's tried to work the count.

He probably thinks he should be 2-0, not 0-2. And that, regardless of the third pitch, which probably was a throwaway on a 2-0 count like that in a high strikeout environment. You're going to throw something junky and hope he whips. Not to mention that in 1888, you needed five balls to walk a guy. So he's got like three waist pitches here. Casey would have to drop five balls in order to work his way on here. So when you're down 0-2 in 1888, you are really down 0-2. You're up against it. Yes.

downed oh two you're up against it yes and yeah and so i i think for that swing then as i wrote in the as i wrote in the group you know the strikeout is the tragic result of two overly of a two bad calls in an overly emotional swing which is i think different than this being you know casey's hubris right which has inevitably doomed him, right? The classical Greek tragedy reading of Casey at the Bat, which I think is what I grew up with, and so many people did. Instead, right, Casey kind of becomes a tragic hero. Yeah. The worst you could say, he loses his cool a little bit. You know, maybe he's not the best two-strike hitter or he's let this get in his head. And I mean, that's fair, right? Because it says that he's not going to let

another ball like that go by, right? So now that, I think, implies, right? He says they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again, which that's obvious, first of all, if it's a strike, right? If that ball was right over the plate, then of course he wouldn't let that ball go by again. He's down two strikes. If he takes it again, he's going to strike out. I think that lends some credence to the case that that was a ball, that it was outside the strike zone, but he now knows that this umpire's zone is way out of whack and he can't let that ball go by again because it's going to get called on him this was pre-pitch fx pre-quest tech pre-anything pre-recording balls and strikes so who knows what the zones were like in 1888 probably just you know a foot on either side of the plate at that point

it must be because the first pitch was close by the sturdy batsman and they got called a strike. Exactly. So, I mean, maybe Casey should have just put that all out of his head and not factored in what happened on the previous pitches and convinced himself it's a new pitch and a fresh start and a blank slate. But you have to factor in the zone that you know the umpire is calling and you have to swing at anything close because you know that the call is going to go against you. So really, what is Casey supposed to do here? Well, choke up and defend instead that strikeouts are not always detrimental. In this situation, of course, a strikeout is, but maybe he's a high strikeout, high walk, high home run guy. You'd think he probably is. And so you have to take some strikeouts with the

walks and the good outcomes that comes with the territory. Oh, I mean, yeah. Oh, I think it's clear that he's a high home run guy. If the crowd is willing to put up even money with him coming back, knowing that the two in front of him would have to be on, right? And if they're going to bet on the outcome at that point, they're not assuming Casey's going to slap a single, I think. Even though that might drive into and tie the game, they're thinking Casey's going to come up and win the thing. Yeah, right.

So a couple other points I wanted to make here. I didn't mention the league-wide batting average in 1888. It was 239. So if you think that this season's batting average is low, 239, that's extreme. Only 1968 had a lower average than 239. So again, this is an extremely unfriendly two-hitters environment. I think we have to take that into account. Another mitigating factor here. call for high and low pitches as the batter. More important and more confusing, 1887 was the one season, I believe, in baseball history that had four called strikes to a strikeout. Also that year, walks were recorded as hits. Baseball in 1887 was wild. So poor Casey here, he's probably spent most of his career being able to say, I want a high pitch or a low pitch. Then the previous season, he's gotten used to there being four strikes to a strikeout. So for all we know here, he's down 0-2 and he thinks he has two pitches to play with. Just saying, extenuating circumstances. The other thing, we talked a bit about the opposing

manager's decision not to walk him, which makes you question how good Casey actually is. Just in case you're wondering if intentional walks were a thing in 1888, I believe that they were. We don't have intentional walk data before the 50s, so I don't know how common it was, but there is a record of a bases-loaded intentional walk to Abner Dalrymple in 1881. That is a baseball name. Yes, it is.

And back then, you needed, I think, seven balls to a walk, so they had to throw seven intentional balls to walk Abner dalrymple that's a lot of work so they really wanted to do it so if you could do that then we know it's an option you could have walked casey you could have put him on and face the next guy so maybe an unforced error there by the opposing manager but what can we conclude about mudville's lineup construction here we know that the hitters in front of Casey, we know that, what, one of them is a Lulu and one of them is a cake, I believe.

And so that is what it says. Yes. And so clearly that is a negative indicator. So actually, I looked this up in the Dixon baseball dictionary and Lulu should be a compliment. It was not used that way in this case. I think we are supposed to believe that Flynn, who is a Lulu, is not good. And I believe in some versions of the poem, it was changed to hoodoo, which suggests that he's bad luck. So Flynn is bad. Cake, Jimmy Blake is a cake, which I think just means piece of cake. He's an easy out. That is what Dixon says. Yeah, or of doughy construction. Possibly. Perhaps he eats too much cake.

Yes, those things might go hand in hand. So what can we conclude from the fact that the two hitters on in front of Casey are automatic outs? Everyone's shocked that these guys actually are able to get on base. I mean, does that mean, does that tell us that this is a suboptimal lineup? Should we assume that Casey is hitting second, which would be an optimized lineup if he's really the best Mudville hitter? And so fine, if Flynn is a Lulu or a Hoodoo, you'd want him batting ninth, so maybe that makes sense. But I don't know why you would want Blake, especially in that day, because I think it was pretty common for leadoff hitters to be good or even the best hitters at that time. So why would you want the cake hitting in front of your best hitter? That is my question.

So there are two things that come to my mind. The first was a suggestion someone made on the Facebook thread, which is that Jimmy Blake is a defensive replacement. Okay, all right. So maybe the visiting team had started to really apply some pressure. Mugville had to stem the bleeding. They bring in a defensive replacement

for whoever was leading off. I'd have to question, though, bringing in a defensive replacement when you are trailing. That seems like, I mean, you need trailing that seems like i mean you need runs in that situation they might have they might have made the replacement when the game tied true true mudville might have had a lead at some point okay yeah so we don't know that and then there was another suggestion made the one that i'm more persuaded by and now i'm not finding it

is that casey is batting lead off okay that those eras, you might just put your best hitter up number one. Uh-huh. Okay. And then your worst two hitters, 8-9, right? And that's why Mudville is so despondent, the Mudville fans, because due up in that inning would have been 6-7-8, right? And so they're like, well, we have no chance. Yeah. We're so far away from Casey in the lineup.

Yeah. So, you know, and with the weaker hitters at the bottom of the order. Right. That might be what it is. Okay. So that's possible. I would say that if that's the case, obviously suboptimal lineup construction here. You have your power guy, your best hitter, who is batting behind your two worst hitters. That's not great, especially you need multiple runs here. You have your power guy, your best hitter, who is batting behind your two worst

hitters. That's not great, especially you need multiple runs here. So you want guys on ahead of that guy. You want that guy to be able to drive in runs. So that's not great for the Mudville manager, but maybe by the standards of the day, I guess we have to judge Mudville and their manager against his peers, and maybe his peers were doing the same thing. So this wouldn't pass muster in 2018, but in 1888, maybe we let it slide. No, and I think we may also have a suboptimal roster there in Mudville as well, right? Being a fictitious town, Ernest Sayre could have named it anything, and he named it Mudville. I don't think we're supposed to think glowingly about this team. Good point.

Except perhaps for Mighty Casey. Yeah, right. Who we may not think glowingly of by the end of the bowl. That's true. But I think we should have some sympathy for Casey. Yeah. Which was the whole point of the Facebook post. Yeah.

And you have to figure, I mean, I guess, you know, I'm citing the 239 league-wide batting Of the Facebook. Fourth look at this starter So just going by the times through the order effect He should have an advantage here So Casey in that sense It's a little less impressive Reflects more poorly on him that he doesn't come through here But again there are other factors To consider Yeah I think so and like I said I think Bayer is taking another

Bayer is taking another look at And we can have some sympathy For this fellow who we all At least I did Grew up poo-pooing Yeah. pitcher matchup is not purely a batter pitcher matchup. It's batter pitcher with umpire and catcher involved as well. And so I think Casey has gotten a bit too much blame over the years. And I can only imagine what this has contributed to the stigma surrounding strikeouts, which I think only recently has been overcome in baseball. I mean, Casey is the goat here and not the greatest of all time kind of goat, but the goat as in the guy who ruined everything. And really, it's maybe not his fault. And strikeouts

happened, especially in 1888. So I think that the resonance, the cultural prominence of this poem, perhaps has contributed to the perception that strikeouts are more damaging than they actually are in the typical situation yeah that that whole feeling that you never even give yourself a chance right if you strike out yeah when in fact casey if he takes a mighty swing as we are meant to think he does the air is shattered by the force of casey's blow he may be giving himself himself and his team their best chance to win If he gets a good swing And a good launch angle

And all that stuff that we know now He may be doing the right thing on that swing Even if he misses It's not a Carlos Beltran situation And I think even Beltran Gets a bad rap really Because that was a tough pitch And I don't know that he could have done anything with it anyway.

But the point is, I understand why the Mudfill fans might be mad if Casey just sat there knowing that these calls are going against him. If he took the called strike three, fine, but he gives it a mighty hack. So, you know, what else can you ask of the guy? Well, you know fans, they could ask a lot. Yes, evidently. All right. Well, I think that the time was right for a reappraisal of this poem. And I think we have reappraised it.

And I mean, you have changed my mind. This research has changed my mind. Casey, I think, has been unfairly lambasted over the decades and centuries here. I'm not saying he's blameless, but I think that really the way that his character has been impugned and condemned over the years is unjust based on our recent reading of the poem. I believe so. I think the time is right for the Leave Casey Alone movement

because he has been wronged by generations of baseball fans. Yes, I completely agree. And I'm glad that you brought this to our attention. Thank you very much for bringing this up and for joining me to talk about it. I hope that we have changed some minds here today. If you disagree with our reinterpretation of Casey at the Bat, feel free to comment in the Facebook group or write in. I will share your comments with Dom.

You can disagree. You can quibble with anything that we've said here, but based on the text that we have at our disposal and, you know, if we had StatCast information for Casey's plate appearance here, I think we could come to a much firmer conclusion, but this is all we have to go on. So based on the evidence, Casey has gotten a bad rep. Dom, do you want to plug anything, anywhere people can find you or any projects or anything like that? Oh, no, no, no, no. I'm just a pastor. I live in Northern Kentucky. I'm not doing anything cool. I just wanted to know if there was room in the Facebook group for hot poetry takes. And clearly there is. And there is.

Maybe you can get a sermon out of this or something. I'll find some way, I'm sure. Yeah, and I want to know what your three-year-old thinks of this. I don't know whether he's formed an opinion already or whether when he gets old enough he will, but I'd like to know whether he is indoctrinated with your Casey opinions or whether he reaches an independent conclusion here. We'll find out. I'm going to let him come to his own conclusion. All right. We'll have you back on when he has formed his opinion about Casey.

Yeah, you can have him on to rebut everything I've ever said. All right. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you, Ben. So that will do it for today. We picked non-time-sensitive topics today because we were pre-recording. So if there's been big baseball news in the last couple of days that we didn't get to talk about, we're sorry. But we'll be back to talk about it soon. You know the drill.

You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Timothy Cullen, Stephen Rush, Nathan Wamser, Dylan Lake, and Dylan DeThomas. And while I'm name checking Dylans,er, Dylan Lake, and Dylan DeThomas. And while I'm name-checking Dylans, thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing this episode. 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. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcastwithfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will probably get to those next time.

Talk to you then. Taking the time to waste your sunny day Taking the time to waste your sunny day Sunny day Holiday surprise And a bright white bed It's a holiday at last Even though we spent the last year In a dream