Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1231: Chasen the Dream

Episode Date: June 16, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan follow up on Terry Collins, trick running plays, Steven Brault‘s disappointing strikeout, the Mariners, and Justin Miller, banter about Takuya Nakashima’s 200th career sacrifice bunt, the Astros’ enviable depth, the most exciting rookies of 2018 (including Juan Soto, Gleyber Torres, Walker Buehler, and Adam Cimber), and MLB’s attendance decline, and […]

Overkill, overview, over my dead body. Over me, over you, over everybody. Too much information, running through my brain. Too much information, driving me insane. Too much information, running through my brain. Too much information, driving me insane. Hello and welcome to episode 1231 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs and from our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Bringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello! Andy Martino caught up with Terry Collins on Thursday. I'm just reading from an Inquirer Philly.com article here. This is from the bottom. inquirer philly.com article here this is from the bottom sny's andy martino caught up with collins on thursday and let him know the profanity laced moment had become the latest internet sensation something that caught the former manager completely off guard quote oh no collins responded

that's how the article ends uh his ass is in the jackpot now so apparently major league baseball is trying to scrub this yeah the internet that is if you haven't found it hurry because it's disappearing yeah according to rob manfred they made a commitment to the umpires that if they would wear microphones certain types of interactions that we all know go on on the field would not be aired publicly so right now baseball is trying to identify the leaker this is something we've heard about in the news, not so much from baseball, more from the government, but anyway, leaking is bad, I guess, except for when it benefits all of us.

I'm glad that this was leaked, and that's what I got. Do you have anything else to say on Terry Collins and Tom Hamilton? No. Yeah, if there's a leaker out there with more of these recordings, you shouldn't leak them, but maybe in 20 years you could leak them all so we can hear them at some point

or just leak them to me privately i won't put them out there but i'd enjoy hearing them i don't know it's always a tricky thing when you want to preserve the principle of leaking and yet the leaks are so much fun we have a justin miller update okay you're curious justin miller pitched not on friday or thursday but on wednesday i believe it was on wednesday justin miller pitched not on friday or thursday but on wednesday i believe it was on wednesday justin miller pitched against the yankees justin miller's first inning against john carlos stanley aaron hicks and miguel and duhar went to strike out strike out strike out he came out to pitch the bottom of the seventh he allowed a double that greg bird hooked into right field got a ground out from austin romine who tried to bunt then glaber torres had a strikeout so

justin miller has now faced what is it 34 hitters on the season let me confirm that street justin miller has faced 34 hitters he's allowed two hits walked none struck out 21 of those batters strike it right it's a healthy 61.8 percent blows away his previous career high of 29.5% I don't know where Justin Miller is going to go From here he's appeared in just 8 games But of course as mentioned in the minor leagues In AAA he faced 46 batters And struck out 23 of them

Walked 3 one of those was intentional Maybe Justin Miller is the best pitcher In the world all of a sudden It's mystifying I know you looked into Him a little bit and there have been some articles written about him this week. I saw one on MLB.com from Jamal Collier who says, you know, there's no like clear, obvious explanation for why he's suddenly amazing. He doesn't have a new pitch. He's not throwing a certain pitch much more often or something like that. He's not throwing much harder it seems like

it's partly just maybe a mental thing like he's being more aggressive and then partly a deception thing his delivery is more closed off his left foot in the set position is even closer to the third base bag than before i don't know if these are just reaching for anything that is different than it was before just because there has to be some explanation for why he's so amazing. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I come back to is every so often, maybe Justin Miller is very good, and it's very difficult to do what he's done without being a very good pitcher. Now, he's been a pretty good reliever before, at least once, I guess.

Anyway, so in a given plate appearance, anyone can strike out anyone. Mike Trout struck out against, well, I don't remember who it was, some bad Mariners pitcher. Anyway, Mike Trout strikes out sometimes. I think we've talked about Anthony Vasquez before, who that one season with the Mariners had 13 strikeouts, 13 walks and hit batters, and 13 home runs allowed. That's bad. Very bad pitching. Strikeouts, 13 walks and hit batters, and 13 home runs allowed. That's bad.

Very bad pitching. However, in any given plate appearance, for no reason but luck alone, you could just end up locating a bunch of pitches really, really well or executing them really, really well. So there is an element of luck or at least unsustainability that's always there. Like every pitcher in the major leagues, if you throw 94 miles prior, you have strikeout stuff. You can get anyone out. And if you just have, instead of having your best possible plate appearance, if you just

string a few of those together, even without being better than you've ever been, you can still have really good results over a short amount of time. I remember I was looking up, I think it was Justin Verlander, James Paxson, whoever I wrote about, trying to find the most dominant months that pitchers have had in history. And one of the most dominant months that I could find was Franklin Morales. Do you remember Franklin Morales? In 2012, in the month of June, Franklin Morales threw 25 in the third innings, and he allowed four earned runs. He had three walks and 31 strikeouts, and he allowed a Woba that month of 194. Kept opponents to a 200 on base percentage.

Franklin Morales, in reality, was not a very good pitcher then. Not a very good pitcher now. Not a very good pitcher in between. But he had just had a really good month. So what I'm basically waiting for with Justin Miller is more information. I'd like another 10 innings to see if that strikeout rate goes up or stays the same. Maybe that's unrealistic. He could be the next josh hater but i don't know when when there's not a clear explanation it's too easy to just grab for anything that might help explain it but oftentimes the the pitchers just come back down to earth yeah well dave martinez said honestly i don't

know how we got him but i'm glad he's. So I don't know if he knows either. So a couple of follow-ups. We talked on our most recent episode about how Stephen Brault's strikeout-less streak was snapped in his 35th career plate appearance. At the time, neither of us had been able to muster the will to watch. We were both so distraught about the end of the streak, but we were prodded by listener Mike who said, you really should watch this. So we did, and Steven Bralt looks about as upset about the end of the strikeout streak as we were, I think. He very clearly

reacts to this immediately after he misses with the swing. I would assume that he says some very naughty words that we can't hear. Certainly looks like he is. He is kind of screaming at himself a little bit. I don't know whether it's because the streak was snapped or because of the way the streak was snapped, because the pitch that he struck out on could not have been more centered in the strike zone. It was like middle, middle, 92 mile per hour pitch that if he were not a pitcher you would say he probably should have hit that and i'm sure that he feels like he probably should have hit that so it's one thing if he had gone down to a josh hater slider or something but this was sort

of a meatball yeah uh very disappointing terrible two and two pitch to throw incidentally if you were silvino braccio maybe that's why he was just optioned down to the minor leagues. So yeah, he's right to be upset. I'm sure that he will get over it and he's probably happy to be a good reliever now. But this is one of those cases where maybe we should have had another umpire mic'd. Yeah, right. And also listener Will wrote in to say, I just listened to your discussion of the Florida intentional stumble leading to steal of home and whether such a thing could happen or has already happened in a major league game. And I was intrigued. I'm reading George Will's men at work on a nostalgia kick. And in a discussion of Tony La Russa's eight plays for a first and third situation, somehow he had eight

different plays for that situation. He says the sixth play Is the stumble start It is a tactic for freezing the catcher The runner on first takes a few quick steps Towards second and then pretends to fall La Russa demonstrates, sprawling on the carpet His conversation could spoil The creases in his jeans if they had creases The catcher sees the stumble

Out of the corner of his eye As soon as the catcher commits to throw to first To nail the floundering runner, the man on third who has a long lead breaks for home so that is basically the four to play that we were talking about and i assume that this was used in a game at some point so almost nothing new under the sun i guess evidence that college students are now reading a lot of george will baseball volumes just really mining the archives for baseball strategy. Good book if you haven't read it, but yeah. And another update on a longtime Effectively Wild favorite.

This was sent to us by Daniel Brim. So Takuya Nakashima, the famous fighter of the NPB. He is, of course, the guy who is famous to Effectively Wild listeners because he can seemingly foul off balls at will, and that is almost all he does at times. He's not a great hitter, but he can make pitchers work and work and work. And he just recorded his 200th sacrifice bunt. That is in a career, not in a single season. He's not that bad, but he has 200 career sacrifice bunts,

and this has been a cause for some celebration daniel sent us a picture of merchandise that was specifically manufactured by the fighters to commemorate and celebrate his 200th career sacrifice bun there's a whole table full of t-shirts with this 200 logo and nakashima and there's a big banner. It has a specially designed look for this signature moment in Takuya Nakashima's career. So that tells you how much of an outlier he is and I suppose how different Japanese baseball still is from MLB baseball, because I don't think we would celebrate a player for that I looked up Takuya Nakashima's stats this year he's actually he's actually hitting fairly well by his standards

this year we we mentioned on the podcast that he did hit a home run a grand slam no less so that helps he has a 75 WRC plus which is not so bad he's uh 237, 312, 308. He does have the lower slugging than on base. That is a classic Takuya characteristic, but he has been worth something. He is worth 0.8 war, according to DeltaGraphs, because he's a good defender. So even though he sack bunts all the time, he's still worth playing. And this sort of style of play is still celebrated in japan so happy 200 that's interesting because i had been looking at his numbers on baseball reference and they were not very good but i yeah i guess those didn't that didn't have 2018 i guess no yes that was 2017 yeah so that is why i think but uh so yeah big moment forated power, career high 0.071. We have a new Jason Tyner on our hands. Yeah, exactly. So you just had a chat at Fangraphs, and I wanted to bring up something that surfaced there,

which is that every now and then, every season or two, you do this post where you look at the negative value that teams have received. And it's a way of approximating a team's depth. Every team gets some amount of sub-replacement level performance, whether it's their mop-up guy at the end of the pen or it's their utility guy. There's someone on the roster who is bad at some point in the season. But the less sub-replacement play you have on your roster, obviously that is good. That's a good sign.

So even some of the very good teams can have a decent amount of negative war if you add up all the negative war guys on their roster because maybe it's a Stars and Scrubs team where you have a bunch of good players but then the back of the bench is weak, something like that. Anyway, you just re-ran this exercise for this season and the astros have negative 0.1 were total on the season that's it you've been doing this for a few years now obviously we're you know only a third of the way through the season something like that but that has to be unprecedented probably in the time that you're doing this that's incredible

it's very good i wish that it were easier to just like examine the whole of baseball archives to see if a team has ever had none i would guess that team has never had none i might need to talk to sean bellinar about this too because doing it manually is kind of a pain but yeah the astros right now they're players who have negative war it's just jake marisnik and it's just him at negative 0.1 and he's better than that so he will improve now we talked the other day this has ties into how the Astros have used so few players this is an email question and it's because they've been really healthy and it's of course not the starters who you expect to end up below replacement but it's the guys you have to call up or the bad ones

the Cubs are at negative 0.3 so they're close they've been very good unsurprisingly the astros and cubs are good and deep so that's uh not a whole lot of a shock there the team's at the bottom i don't have the list for any of you but i remember like the royals and the orioles were down there there was like negative six and a half something bad i think the lowest good team or at least team of the hunt was the rockies who had like negative five total negative war. So essentially stop with the Ian Desmond thing. No one is benefiting from the Ian Desmond thing. But outside of that, yeah, I have now this little hope in my heart that Jake Marisnyk can improve and none of the Astros get worse and that they finish the season with zero, zero sub replacement players.

I think it's laughable. zero zero sub replacement players i uh i think it's laughable so the astros just took first place back in the division on thursday night with the mariners losing a one run game it can happen the astros have won like eight in a row i think i saw the astros don't play in above 500 team through the all-star break yeah so i mean where would you put the odds that the astros will ever fall out of first place again this season i I mean, it could happen today or something. So I guess they're still fairly high. All they need to do is lose one while the Mariners win one or something like that. But, you know, obviously, long term, their odds.

I mean, it's incredible that it's close, obviously, as we were talking about last time. Just they've had some bad luck and the Mariners have had amazing luck. And that's why it's even a discussion. But the Astros, I think they are clearly the best team in baseball, which is what we all thought coming into the season. And I know they don't have the best record. And so people can make arguments for the AL East teams at least. And they're not bad arguments. But, man, the Astros are just so good and so deep. And it's not like they don't have any holes, but they also don't have stars. Like the Brewers have been really good in recent years about not having sub-replacement level players because they just had like 21 war guys just kind of hanging around. But they didn't really have MVPs on their roster either.

round but they didn't really have mvps on their roster either the astros have the stars but they also just have no holes anywhere they are as close to a flawless team as i think you could design yeah they also have a good farm system and good management and a lot of money so they're maybe not on the level with the yankees in that regard but they're close these are two juggernauts and yeah so between them and the dodgers it feels like a point where there are juggernauts now who are just going to stay that way. But anyway, that's a conversation for another day, I guess. Yeah. Well, speaking of the Yankees, the last thing I'll say is that it came up in your chat also that with Otani out, possibly for the season or for some extended amount of time, it looks like the Yankees have just about sealed up the entire American League Rookie of the Year ballot, basically. Like, there's Gleyber Torres,

there's Miguel Andujar, now there's Domingo German. It's possible that they just kind of might run the table here and finish 1-2-3. I don't know if that has happened before. I don't know if this is the greatest crop of rookies ever, as one of your chatters asked you. As you mentioned, there have been many great crops of rookies before, including Yankees teams, but that might happen. And I just wonder if you have a favorite rookie phenom that we haven't talked about at length this season, because there's some guys like we haven't given Juan Soto his due, I don't think. We talked about Gleyber Torres on one episode like we haven't given Juan Soto his due I don't think we talked about Gleyber Torres on one episode we haven't really talked about and Duhar much we talked

about Acuna plenty before he came up but not so much since of course he got hurt but is there anyone like that who you are just flabbergasted by odd by Soto is the guy right now, obviously just because he's so young and he's been so amazing since he came up, but anyone that we've given short shrift that we should give a quick salute to on that list or not on that list. There's a few Soto. Of course he's up there. I was just reading a Ken Rosenthal interview with Kevin Long,

the hitting coach for the nationals who was saying that Soto was basically perfect. He's 19. He's 19 years old. He has more walks than strikeouts in the major leagues five home runs he's got a 192 wrc plus that's extremely good i find him really interesting i find uh on the pitching side walker bueller is really interesting because he throws strike he's a power pitcher but he he's aggressive he throws strikes in the zone which is uncommon i'm a big fan of Adam Simber on the Padres just because he's weird, and he's got that weird delivery.

He's like a lefty sidearm guy. He's a lefty, right? I don't even remember. Who cares? But he has a lefty name. So let me just confirm. You can tell how much I like him. He's actually right-handed, Adam Simber.

He's a righty. But he throws with that weird low delivery. He doesn't throw very hard. He's been dominant. I know I got a completely unsolicited text message from a baseball person the other day that just said sir anthony dominguez is gross in capital letters so that's something that goes up there and i think really really quietly if you want to go to a nerd appreciation max stacy for the astros who incidentally he's still a rookie but he's been in the majors for Six seasons in a row so That's weird but he's been a good hitter and he's

Last I checked at Baseball Prospectus He is the leader in framing Runs so Max Stacey A rookie to appreciate and Harrison Bader On the Cardinals he's like a decent hitter Not very great but he shows up as one of the Best defensive outfielders in baseball By whatever number you look at so

He also is one Of those players where war just makes him look better than you probably think when you watch him. So credit to Harrison Bader, credit to Max Stacey. But I mean, it's the Juan Soto show. And if not for all of the injuries, as Kevin Long said in that interview, if the Nationals didn't have so many players end up on the disabled list, only might they have not seen one side oh in the majors this season maybe not even next season but here he is and he is dominant yeah there are two rookies who have batted at least like 70 times and have at least as many walks to strikeouts it's one soto and jesse winker i'll be damned yeah it's funny i've seen a bunch of conversation about MLB's youth movement and the young stars are so good, and they are. And people use that to criticize the marketing because there's been all this negative news about attendance in Major League Baseball,

which is down about, what, 8%, something like that, since last season relative to the same point in the year. And there's been all this talk about why that is. And yes, it was partly the weather in April, which was terrible. But even since April, it's down about 6% relative to last year. So Travis Satchik wrote about this at Fangraphs on Friday. There's so many reasons why this could be happening that I just don't know what to attribute it to. And it's probably a whole podcast episode we could do. So I just don't know that there's an easy answer. Like whatever your narrative is for why baseball is bad now, you will trot that out and say that that's why attendance is down. And I don't know whether it's any one of those things or all of those things, whether it's pace of play, whether it's the price of the

tickets, whether it's the fact that watching games at home is pretty great now, and it's kind of nice not to leave your house and to watch games on an HD screen and be able to see the replay and do stuff between pitches. So I get it. And we don't even know about really the attendance versus ticket sales breakdown and whether that is actually different or whether it's tanking. So it's like whatever you think is wrong with baseball you can say that that's why attendance is down presumably some or all of those reasons have something to do with it but who knows maybe it's just competing for people's dollars and there are more alternatives out there yeah i i would like to see how this compares against other entertainment outlets how people are going of course there's a difference between attendance and tickets purchased. I wonder because teams are always trying, or whoever's in charge of this for teams,

they're always trying to optimize their formulas to try to make the most money, which is not the same as selling the most tickets. So maybe they're actually still making the same revenue with fewer ticket sales. I don't know. I don't know what's going on. And it's probably going to end up within a percentage point of last season just like usual but at the end of the day i mean there is nothing that is quite like the experience of going to the ballpark but it is prohibitively expensive if you want to go there regularly and certainly if you want to eat or drink or both when you go to the ballpark if you have a family all these things

so easy to watch from home so there are all these general trends that could help to explain why attendance could conceivably be going down over time but it's kind of like with the home run spike it happens so suddenly that these general trends don't really work as an explanation because you can talk your way around it but if attendance really is going to be down by seven percent or whatever relative to last season that would be a major problem and there would have to be one or two major causes of that but i'm not convinced that we actually have those. Although back when the home run spike happened, I was not convinced that something happened to the ball, which apparently it did. So who knows?

Yeah. Well, we shall see, and we'll talk about it again. So I just saw a headline on MLB.com that says, Trout's greatness could be beyond explanation. And I take that as a personal affront and challenge because that's all I do is try to explain Chad's greatness. So I've got to stop talking to you so I could go read that article. We have a guest who we will be bringing on in just a moment. It's Hans Van Sleuten, who works for Sports Reference and Baseball Reference specifically. Or at least he did.

When you're hearing this, he no longer does. Find out why we'll be back In a moment to talk to him about Being behind the scenes at baseball reference And also working for a Major league baseball team which will be his Next job Lost somewhere you'll never find This was what we said Come back to the world Come back to the world So if you have listened to many episodes of this podcast

or read many articles of mine, you have probably heard or read the name Hans Van Sluten. And if you did, you probably remembered heard or read the name Hans Van Sluten. And if you did, you probably remembered it. It's not a common name. He has been a big help to me and many other baseball writers over the past several years and is about to stop being a big help to us, but he will be a big help to someone else. So for the past four and a half years, he has worked for Sports Reference, which of course you all know for Baseball Reference and he has been the manager of baseball operations there. He still is as we

talked to him today but by the time you all hear this he will not be because he is leaving to take a job with the Minnesota Twins as a baseball systems developer. So we have not had a baseball systems developer on the show. We wanted to have him on to talk about his history and how one becomes a Baseball Systems Developer. So Hans, welcome. Hello. Welcome. Thank you. Did you welcome yourself? Yeah, I don't. I'm pretty uncomfortable with talking about myself.

Well, that's what we're going to be doing today. So get comfortable. So tell us a bit about how one gets to do what you do. And what you do is mostly magic as far as I'm concerned. I ask you to send me some very complicated information and some hours later it arrives in my inbox and I'm thrilled and I don't know how it got there exactly, but this is what you do for a job. You work with sports data, at least now you do. You used to work with other types of data. So what does one need to do to become someone who gets a job like this, either at Sports

Reference, which by the way, is now hiring for a replacement for Hans, if you're interested, but also for a baseball team? What kind of training, what kind of skills do you need? Yeah. So, well, part of my job is not actually helping you. I'm sure Sean is probably annoyed with the amount of time I help you, but yeah. So, well, just to get, my background is in computer science. I graduated with a degree in computer science about 20 years ago now, actually. And I just started doing web development, backend development right out of college for a consulting firm.

Then I went to work for a company called Comscore when they were just kind of starting out. They're pretty big in the market research area now. But I built a lot of reporting systems for them. I managed a team of developers that built a reporting system for them. And I worked there for 11 years. And then I had to move back to Minnesota. I grew up here, but I lived in Chicago for years. Moved back to Minnesota with my wife, got a job at an advertising firm for a couple years, and then just sort of serendipitously, I had started going to Sabre conferences. I had met Sean Foreman and a bunch of other baseball writers, and Sean announced that he was hiring on his Twitter feed. And I threw my name in not thinking anything of it,

that I would not something I'd be able to do. I mean, I've been interested in baseball forever and, you know, did a lot of stuff on my own. But so I, you know, put my name in and after a round of interviewing, Sean hired me and I had met him a couple of times at Sabre. But I think, you know, I think my background in software development and database management and stuff like that is really what kind of sealed the deal. So, you know, I've always loved baseball, but up until I worked at Sports Reference, I had no, I didn't work in the industry at all.

It was purely just my software development background. I think I'm good at what I do. When it comes to software development, I don't know about anything else, but when it comes to software development, I know what I'm doing. So I've worked here for four and a half years and it's been the greatest job I've ever had. And I fully intended to spend my remaining years or as many years as I could working at Sports Reference. And I started talking with, I went to a conference in Minnesota called SportCon, which is just a local free conference where companies and teams and stuff get together and just present research. And I happened to meet a few of the new people at the Twins, Daniel Adler, who is the director of baseball operations with the Twins.

Former Effectively Wild guest. Yes. And we just started talking and he invited me to a game and I met with the team there. And they were actually in the process of hiring a baseball developer and they asked me if I would be interested in it. And I said, well, you know, I love my job now, but, you know, I'm certainly willing to pursue it and see where it goes. And, you know, they really pulled out all the stops and I went through the whole interview process and had to write code for them and build an application and stuff like that. But ultimately, they hired me, and I'm grateful for that.

And it was really hard to, once they made the offer, which I wasn't expecting, it was a really hard decision because I really do love what I do at Sports Reference. But as a lifelong Twins fan from back in 1987, it's an opportunity that's hard to pass up. I have two questions, one of them kind of quick. The first one, when you were negotiating with the Twins, aside from your own family concerns, did you give any consideration to how you're pulling the rug out from underneath Ben's career? I actually did a little bit. They actually asked me, like, how are you going to feel if you, you know, not being able to help out a lot of these writers anymore? And I said, well, being able to help out a team, I think is a good consolation for that.

Not for me. So what has been, how would you describe the, just the average day of working at Sports Reference, maybe focused on Baseball Reference, because it's something I've, a lot of computer science and programming is basically magic to me regardless. But how connected is it to baseball when you have been going to work? Yeah, my day-to-day job is, I mean, one thing that I've told when I was interviewing with the twins that I talked about was every job or everything becomes a job eventually. You know, you can't just love baseball if you want to work in baseball. You have to love what you do,

because what you do is what you're going to be doing every day. And I love software development. I love technology, and I love baseball. But honestly, my day-to-day work is only tangentially related to baseball. It's database management. It's, you know, building webpages. It's, you know, trying to figure out bugs of why this data is formatted incorrectly. I get to look at baseball stats all day, but honestly, I'm not looking at whose they

are or whatever. I'm looking at why they're not formatted correctly. So it's great that I get to work in this field because I love baseball, but it's not radically different than the stuff I was doing for a market research for 11 years, honestly. There probably are ways, though, I would imagine where your familiarity with baseball will come in handy when you're working for the Twins. I mean, obviously, your familiarity with baseball data will probably help. a developer, there are probably cases where they could have hired someone who knew the same languages or had the same technical certifications, but didn't know anything about baseball. And there would have been ways in which that person probably would have had to be brought up to speed from time to time or just wouldn't have had as clear a picture of how to complete a project because of

lack of familiarity with that subject matter? Oh, of course. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big believer in having domain knowledge in what you're working with, especially going back to my years working in consulting and stuff like that. I think one thing a lot of developers get hung up on, especially people that want to get into baseball or whatever, is like, well, I have to learn Python or I need to learn R or any number of things. When in reality, yes, those things are very useful to know, but it's not the be-all

end-all. The important thing is that you understand how to apply technology to solve problems. What we're doing is solving problems. The GM of the twins doesn't care if we solve the problem in Python or R or whatever else. He wants the problem solved. And that's true of any organization you work for. And so when you're interviewing for any job, even with the twins, you need to be able to explain to them how what you do can solve the problems that they're having. And having domain knowledge in the field you're working in, whether it's advertising or marketing or baseball, having that domain knowledge helps you solve what their problems are much more easier because you know what their problems are and you can directly look at how you can solve the problems that they're looking at. So you're going to be moving from the public to

the private sphere, I guess you could say. And in a sense, in terms of the prestige of the company you're working for, I'm not sure if the twins are more prestigious than Sports Reference, given that Sports Reference is the greatest collection of websites that's ever existed. But I know that you haven't actually worked yet for the twins. But could you sort of walk us through what fears you've had about going to work for a team versus the life that you've been able to live working with sports reference? And maybe if you had concerns, how the twins have been able to alleviate them in conversations with you? Because this is something I think Ben and I and other people have talked about a bunch of times, the demand of working in baseball. And how are you approaching that, especially with a family? Yeah. And that was one of my big concerns when I was interviewing for

this position. I made it very clear early on that, one, I love my job with Sports Reference. It's a great company. And two is that my understanding of working in the industry is that the hours are long and demanding and it doesn't play well with families and stuff. And Derek and Thad and Daniel Adler all reassured me that they believe strongly in having a work-life balance. That there are times of the year, like before the draft and stuff, when you really do need to put in those extra hours. But for the most part, they try to keep work-life balance very strong. And that they try to get you out at a regular time every day. And, you know, you're not following the team around the country and you're not working 24

hours a day. Because what we do, especially in development, is we're building systems for long-term use and we're not trying to chase the latest thing. So we're thinking longer term. So you're not necessarily working to capture or to meet some deadline that's two days away. I mean, in some cases you are because of things like the draft and stuff like that. But for the most part, they reassured me that the work-life balance is very important to not just the front office, not just the baseball operations, but everybody in the company. So baseball reference is obviously a part of my daily life and Jeff's daily life, but also our listeners daily lives. Can you talk a bit about what your main public facing contributions to the site have been? I know you were instrumental in launching hockey reference,

but you know, how is baseball reference different from what it was five years ago? And what part did you play in that? Well, I didn't launch hockey reference. It existed before me, but I definitely took it over. The big things I did, well, the first thing I did was the search engine before this was, you know, four and a half years ago now, but back then it was fairly slow. It wasn't, we didn't have the dropdown that automatically linked you to certain players. So I redesigned that and made it, you know, a few milliseconds to get each search back for player names. Well, and then over the last couple of years, actually, we've been working on a site redesign to make it more useful on mobile apps. I don't know if you guys remember the mobile version before that, but our modern mobile version is much more usable.

I didn't design all of that. We had a designer that came in, and then we tried to apply that style across all of our sites. And once we had those kind of styles designed, then I was responsible for applying that to every single page within the site, which was a pretty significant undertaking and took the better part of a year for me, which is the site you see now. And then I, you know, I added stuff like the team

season finder and a lot of the, you know, a few of the different finders and stuff. A lot of the stuff I've done is not visible to external users because it's cleaning up backend code. I mean, with any site, with any system that you're building after 15 years or so, the code base is just going to become, you know, there's going to be hacks here and there. There's going to be, you know, stuff that was maybe not designed the best way from the beginning or just didn't have all the information you needed to design it correctly in the beginning. So you go back and you refactor that code. And so a lot of my work was honestly, you know, cleaning that stuff up so it's more maintainable so that when bugs happen, they're easier to fix. And so it's a lot of my stuff.

A lot of my day to day work was fixing bugs. We still have a significant backlog, unfortunately, of bugs, but I feel like I knocked down a lot of them. And, you know, it's like I said, it's not dramatically different from a developer job that probably some of your listeners have where you're you come in every day you look at your backlog and you you start fixing things you you know sean has always been pretty hands-off with the day-to-day stuff so it's he's always been very uh open to like hey we want to add this new feature or whatever so which is really nice and he's he's a great boss but uh yeah so it's it's not dramatically different from a standard development job. It's a lot of bug fixing.

It's a lot of maintenance code, especially with a system that's now coming up on 18 years old. Try not to add a ton of new features now because we look at what brings in revenue for the site. We're primarily an advertising-focused site. So as much as you and I and a lot of your listeners love the deep dive into the stats and looking at that stuff, those pages with the deep dives generally don't get a ton of traffic because we're a small group of nerds. Whereas the big stuff is Derek Jeter's page. It's the Yankees' pages. It's stuff like that, that hasn't dramatically changed in years. And that those are big revenue drivers. And everything you add to the site means something you need to maintain it. And so all new code is adding to the amount of work

that you have to do in the future. And it's a small company, we have four full time developers. So and I'm the only one that was managing baseball reference. So you have to be very careful about adding tons of new features when you're the only guy maintaining it. Well, this will not be the lasting legacy of your tenure at Sports Reference, but I know that one of the most recent bugs you fixed was one I messaged you about, which is that Mariners reliever Chasen Bradford was Chase Bradford on Baseball Reference for some reason, should be Chasen for some reason. There are multiple major league relievers named Chasen right now. I've never met a Chasen in the wild,

but there they are. How did Chasen Bradford become Chase Bradford briefly on Baseball Reference? Well, we get a feed for our historical data and for our kind of bio data from a data provider that's called Chadwick. It's Pete Palmer and Gary Gillette. So if you remember the old Total Baseball and those old baseball encyclopedias, those guys were the ones that basically created those things up until about 2003 or so. I think ESPN had the last one. They now have a company that sells that data.

So for our historical data, that's where that stuff comes from. And so they do occasionally have issues with names and stuff like that that we send back to them, and then we update them on our end as well so they're updated quickly. so they're updated quickly. And we have, in this past year, we've hired a couple of what we call data developers that handle a lot of the day-to-day transactions and name changes and fixes like that that were primarily fell on people like me, like the developers that took a lot of our time,

just kind of those needling little fixes. We have developers that kind of spend their whole day fixing little issues like that. And, you know, if we have to pull down a lot of transactions or stuff like that, they're able to do that so that we can focus more on just the bigger issues and bugs and adding new features. But, yeah, there's a lot of issues in the data. And we ask people to send, you know, feedback through our feedback link when they see it. We do try to keep it as up-to-date as possible.

feedback through our feedback link when they see it we do try to keep it as up-to-date as possible the further from the majors they are the less of a priority it becomes for obvious reasons but for name changes and stuff like that we're pretty good about that stuff because it is people take that stuff personally and we like the players to when they search for their name to actually find their player page the way they you know want their name spelled yeah that's Derek Jeter searching himself a lot I will point out so there are currently three active chasens they are the only according to baseball reference they're the only chasens in baseball history major or minor there is chasen bradford of the majors they're the only chasens in the world as far as i know yeah i believe chasens are exclusive to baseball hold on it gets weirder so there's jason bradford born 1989 there's jason shreve born 1990

and in the minors there's jason ford born 1995 jason ford born in lake forest california only four hours away from las vegas nevada where both jason bradford and jason shreve were born there is a southwest american sort of jason trend i think uh is a coincidence, three is a pattern Chasen cluster So anyway, that's solving The solution. Four hours and five minutes from Lake Forest California to Las Vegas, Nevada Chasen travels across mountains

So I've always kind of wondered When you look at the bottom of any Ben Lindbergh baseball article There's going to be some list of names Where he thanks people for their research assistance. Now, Hans, you said before we were doing this that you don't like to talk about yourself very much, which maybe you should not have accepted this invitation

to talk about yourself on the podcast. But I have always wondered what the sensation is of being named as a research assistant in a long feature article, because as a writer, I know that it can be good for the ego. The writer gets the glory, and the research assistant gets an acknowledgement that very few people see at the end. So while I feel like I already know your answer,

how have you felt about being a research assistant as opposed to being the feature writer? Is that something that you've ever given a second thought to? Not really. I'm not a writer. I don't enjoy writing. I think it's long and tedious and I'd rather just sit down and write some code or something. But that said, I do enjoy helping people and I do have an ego. So I enjoy having my name mentioned when I help people out and stuff like that. But if people know me through the way, you know, I've met actually met people that said, hey, I saw your name on Ben Lindbergh's article one time. So it's not uncommon for me to hear that occasionally. So, you know, it's an ego boost or an ego stroke or whatever you want to say. It's obviously not the

way I make my living. And so it's just sort of a bonus of working in the industry. Like I said, I love baseball. I like helping people. One of the hardest things about taking the job with the Twins is that I, you know, obviously I can't discuss baseball pretty much in any capacity outside of within people I work with anymore. But that said, it's, you know, it's not like I was a public figure anyway. I was working behind the scenes.

But I've always enjoyed working with writers and helping them out. And, you know, and if they, you know, part of it is I also want to, you know, promote sports reference for what we do. So it's, I feel like as much as I can get my name out there and present sports reference as a friendly company, it helps the company itself too. So it's, which doesn't need much help for me because, you know, Sean and everybody else there are really nice people as well. But well, can you describe what the difference is, what the differences are between writing code

and writing words? Because it sounds like you prefer writing code. I would say I prefer writing words. I've made some efforts to learn a bit of SQL and that sort of thing, but it didn't really come naturally to me, I don't think, the way that language did. So what do you like about coding and writing code that maybe tickles a part of your brain that a regular sentence doesn't? Yeah, I mean, I've been writing code for longer than I've liked baseball. I mean, I got my first computer when I was like six years old or something, which was back in the early eighties. So that computer didn't do too much. So yeah, I mean, I think it's partially just solving problems. There's something sort of that's really enjoyable about writing a bunch of code and

running it and seeing it work and answering some question that you're trying to solve or fixing some problem that you're trying to there's just something it's sort of like one thing I do in my free time is I tend to do a lot of woodworking and stuff in the garage and part of what I like about that is that you're creating something tangible you know after when you do your work there's something to be seen at the end and software development is kind of like that too is you're building something and in the end there's something that be seen at the end. And software development is kind of like that too, is you're building something. And in the end, there's something that you can say, yeah, I built that, which I think is probably not a dissimilar experience for people that write regularly as well. It's just, I've always been a big fan of really enjoyed building stuff, Tinker Toys or Legos or whatever else. It's just been sort of a driving factor in my life is I just love building stuff and seeing it move and work. And so software development sort of scratches that

itch. So, you know, I know that you say that you're not going to be able to talk about baseball very much with people outside of the Twins, but just you can blink twice if you're interested in becoming a source. So you can tell us after the podcast. We can't see him blink though, so that wouldn't help either. Type two. So of course, there are things that you are not at liberty to talk about regarding your job upcoming. But when you go to work for the Twins, do you know, are you going to be improving an existing system or are you going to be building something effectively from scratch? Because I know it's still a fairly new front office administration that is in place in Minnesota and they want to have their own system in place. They want to have their own people. But

how much creation do you think that you're going to be doing versus how much modification and improvement? You know, like I said, obviously I can't talk about too many specific details. And honestly, I don't have a lot of specific details yet, which is probably how they prefer it before I signed my NDA and everything. But honestly, I think it's going to be a little bit of both. Obviously, like you said, it's a newer front office. But, you know, every team is at different stages of incorporating this huge treasure trove of data that has kind of been dumped on the MLB's doorstep over the past couple of years. And even the teams that probably were early adopters haven't figured out exactly how to use this, much like the general public, who obviously doesn't have as much access to it, haven't figured out what to do with it yet either. So I think it's from what I know, which is honestly very limited, I think I'm going to be doing a lot of both. There's going to be some new systems that need to be built.

But they also, you know, I've met the team there, and that's a lot of really bright people I'm joining. And they've already got a lot of stuff built that I'm, you know, going to be helping out. So, you know, I think people, you know, the Twins have this, I would say, this impression among the stats community that they're way behind the curve. And, you know, they didn't adopt it as quickly as, say, the Rays or the Red Sox. But I would say that everybody would be surprised at the level of systems that they already have within there. And had before, even before Falvey and Levine and Adler moved in there, The Twins weren't nearly as far behind as people think they were. So certainly in some areas they need to improve, and other teams are the same way.

That's where everybody's looking for a competitive advantage. So it's not as bleak as I think some people think it was, and it's obviously not as, you know, I don't think every team is building has all these advanced systems already in place. I think, I guess my point is, I would say the from what the little the limited amount I know about this office and any other office is the baseball world and the open source world or the, you know, public world aren't as far apart as you would think. But obviously, the teams have much bigger data sets to work with with minor league data with

stack cast data and everything else that they're able to do a lot of deeper research and stuff like that but i think the stuff that fangraphs does that baseball prospectus does and everything is still looked at by front offices on a regular basis so one one advantage of you going to work for a team is that you get to extract yourself from the fangraphs sports reference blood feud i guess but But the sites have something in common in that, of course, they license a lot of information and they have leaderboards. But I've wondered, baseball references, to my knowledge, never used any of the PitchFX data. And of course, the last few years, there has been the StatCast data coming

out. Were there ever conversations about whether or not to try to incorporate that? Was it not made available to you? But what were those conversations like internally? Oh, of course we considered it. And actually, Sean and I were working on that. I think it was probably three years ago now at least. We have the PitchFX data and we had it historically for a long time. And we actually started putting together ideas of what we wanted to do with it.

The challenge is, with sports reference again, is what is going to bring in revenue. And so things like pitch effects and stuff have already been handled really well by things like Brooks Baseball and other sites. So one thing that Sean kind of tries to do with his company is he wants to he doesn't want to just try to reach parity with other sites. He wants to either create something that nobody else has or if it's not too hard, we can reach parity. But we're not going to try to compete with people that are doing the job better than we can or considering the resources that we have. So yes, we could build pitch effect stuff

and reporting and graphing on that and stuff. But one, it's probably not going to bring in a ton of new traffic for our site just because of the nature of what Baseball Reference is. And two, because there are sites that already do it better than us, there's no need for us to necessarily recreate that. So yeah, I mean, it was definitely something that I spent a fair amount of time working on. And with PitchFX and StatGas, more with PitchFX because we don't have all the StatGas data in the public, the PitchFX data is not perfectly clean. There's a lot of work

that PitchInfo, who runs Brooks Baseball, does to clean up that data and recategorize a lot of that data. So rather than do that, we would probably end up having to buy the data set from them. And then are we just recreating what they're doing? You know, it becomes a business decision at that point. And so ultimately, it was a business decision that they haven't, that we haven't made yet, but it's not necessarily something we wouldn't do in the future too, so. So as you mentioned, you know, even though there's data that Baseball Reference has that probably the Twins don't have, I'm sure the Twins database doesn't have the 1884 Union Association or something, there's probably no reason for them

to have that. But there's so much that they do have that baseball reference doesn't have that no one in the public sphere has. And just the quantity of the data must be an order of magnitude, multiple orders of magnitude more than you're used to working with at sports reference. As much information as it seems like there is at sports reference, I mean, a single game of StatCast must just dwarf that just in terms of storage space and the infrastructure required. So how does that change your day-to-day job? Do you use the same skills, the same languages that you would use for RetroSheet when you're working with StatCast information, Or is it more demanding? Does that scale also with just the size of the data? Well, I mean, one of the things that attracted

me to the position was that I'd be able to work with these data sets that aren't available to the public. And so if you're familiar at all with like the technology world, you know, big data is sort of the buzzword and stuff where these teams are literally dealing with big data for kind of the first time. And so that's an opportunity that I really couldn't get in a lot of other places, unless I would be dealing with like financial data or medical data or something like that. And so one of the things that attracted me to the position was not so much that it was a baseball job, although obviously that's a draw. It's that it was a pure technology position. It was being able to work with these data sets that really nobody else has access to and being able to use. Of course, I'll be using a lot of the skills I already have, SQL and stuff like that, to do this. But I'll also

have to kind of tune up a lot of my knowledge about big data and data warehousing and stuff that I have experience with, but, you know, didn't have to work with as much at Baseball Reference. So, you know, when it comes to specific technologies, like I try to tell other developers, don't get too focused on technologies because they change. I've been working in this industry for over 20 years, and I've worked with multiple different languages that have long since died. And, you know, at Sports Reference, we use Perl because it was the language that was common when Sean built the site in 2000. Perl has kind of fallen out of favor in the development world, but it's still a perfectly functional language for what we do. With the twins and stuff, they tend to use a more common Microsoft stack, which is what I used for 11 years while working at Comscore. So the

technology stack isn't dramatically different than what I have a history and it's not what I use at Baseball Reference. But like I said, I don't get too hung up on specific technologies. I get I focus more on solving problems and a lot of technologies you can pick up and they all use the basic same concepts and stuff. So once you spend a few weeks just learning the, the, the quirks of the technology, you can usually get up to speed pretty quickly. I know that, uh, so Ben has written before about how there's not a whole lot, uh, you don't get to see the same changes in front offices as quickly as, as maybe you used to. And I know that Derek Falvey has only been with the Twins for not even two years yet. But as you transition to working for a team, and again, especially since you were coming

at this already having a pre-existing family, how do you weigh the sort of uncertain job security that you have working with a baseball team? Because it seems like the trend is that when there are changes at the top then those changes all trickle down as as people want to bring in their own new new people right yeah and that was again that was something i brought up in the interview as well and and derrick even said you know his experience was that that is the way the teams work they are committed to well i think for first, the Twins historically have been a very loyal organization to their employees. Yeah, you're good for a few decades, I think. Yeah.

Rob Antony is still in the front office here. So that's one thing. I think the Twins, more so than a lot of teams, are very loyal to their employees. And also, Derek said that, you know, more so that it's generally the executives and certainly sometimes they're front offices, but generally the executives are the ones that are moved out in a big transition like that. Whereas, I guess the people lower on the totem pole like me have a little bit better chance of, you know, surviving a transition like that being as we build the systems. We're not necessarily involved in the day-to-day operations of deciding who's going where and stuff like that. So it's- It's not your fault if the free agent doesn't pan out.

Right. So I think that plays a major role. That said, of course, I think my job security at Sports Reference was significantly stronger than it will be at the Twins. That's the nature of the business. And I'm lucky that, one, I'm lucky that I was able to take the job at Sports Reference because my wife loved baseball and loves the Twins. And she encouraged me to take this job with the Twins because she loves the Twins and she loves

baseball. We're both season ticket holders. So I've been lucky to have the support of my wife in sort of this crazy endeavor of living my dream of working in baseball. But I'm also realistic about it because I do have a daughter and have a wife and I like to keep my jobs. But you got to take a few risks in life, right? And you've gone from free play index to free twins tickets. So that seems like probably a pretty good sweet deal. So baseball reference or sports reference launched a new site this week, football reference, fbref.com. This is the new soccer site and you've worked on the hockey site, as you mentioned. There are, of course, college football and basketball sites. There's American football, there's basketball, there's Olympics even that's been done. So how does the range of data at those other sites differ from baseball reference, which was obviously the original site, but also the original sport, at least relative to these other sports, and just has always had such an emphasis on data that I imagine that the other sites are never probably going to be quite at the level of depth and complexity that baseball reference is.

But what can you do to narrow the gap there? I think you'd be surprised when it comes especially to basketball reference. Basketball reference, at least in terms of just pure traffic, does similar numbers to baseball at different times of the year. So baseball is obviously still our biggest site, but all the sites are growing and the smaller sites are growing much faster than the bigger sites for obvious reasons. And basketball has really embraced statistics in a way that no other sports besides baseball has. And so basketball reference is especially very popular. With the new soccer site, we're betting on the fact that it's the biggest sport in the world. And so I do want to say first off that I had pretty much nothing to do with building that site. That's been a labor of

love of Sean's for probably well over four or five years now, and has been the work of a number of the new hires have been cleaning that data for months now. And we're going to continue adding leagues every week as the site grows and stuff. So I look forward to football reference becoming a really big site. But yeah, like obviously hockey, football, American football are not as big as sports when it comes to statistics. Obviously, NFL is big, but we are looking at ways of there are a lot of new advanced statistics and football and stuff like that that we're incorporating into the sites so certainly i don't think hockey or football are ever going to reach the level that baseball does in terms of historical stats or just the

love that their fans have for stats but the growth across the company for all the sites over the last couple years has been honestly mind-boggling. So the company itself is doing amazingly well and the sites are just continuing to grow. So I guess I'm not worried about the future of sports reference at all. So I've been using baseball reference for a decade or so and in a professional capacity even. And so I feel like I know it fairly well, But there are so many parts to baseball reference that there are times even now where I know that something is at baseball reference, but I can't quite remember how to get to it. And so I'm... Yeah, I do that too.

Yeah, I was going to ask you how well you feel you know it at this point and whether there is some secret part of baseball reference that no one goes to and no one knows about like a favorite obscure stat that you have. And also just, you know, how much you think about the layout and how intuitive it is to find information. I mean, I think it does well. I don't know that you could set it up in a much more intuitive way given just how much there is there. I mean, there's just no way to fit it all on one page or something. There's no way around it. Yeah, I mean, Sean is very focused on user experience.

He's a disciple of a guy named Nielsen, who is very focused on user experiences and stuff. And Jacob Nielsen is his name. And he's been using him as a sort of a guidepost since he started the site of how to make it as usable as possible. stuff. And Jacob Nielsen is his name. And he's been using him as a sort of a guidepost for since he started the site of how to make it as usable as possible. You know, we haven't always succeeded, but I think in general, the site has been pretty usable for people. Certainly, it's hard to categorize as much information as we have and make it all easily accessible. For everything

you try to promote, you're basically pushing everything else down. So you have to be very careful about how you promote stuff and what people are really looking for. When the vast majority of people are just looking for RBIs and home runs and batting average for their favorite player. So do you promote, you know, one thing that we did with the new site redesign is we have sort of that little stat box up by the players names where we actually include war and stuff for the first time because war is something that i think is obviously it's not unique to baseball reference in the sense that other sites have their versions of war but our version of war is unique to our site and sort of something that people know us for is having war so uh we feel like that's a and we feel it's a very useful stat that people need to know firsthand. So that's sort of the minimal amount we do to promote advanced statistics to the general

public. But yeah, there's, the sites are so crazily deep that even I have to be like, where does that page get generated? Like, I can't remember what script even generates that page or when was less, you know, so it's, it's a huge site. You can't keep it all in your, in your mind. And, you know, I think a lot of the fun stuff is on like the frivolity section.

We keep a lot of our sort of stat stuff that we don't know where to put, or there's not like a good location. Like we have all our no hitters and, you know, perfect game stuff in there. We've got our cups of coffee. So players that played one game, stuff like that, that sort of the stuff that I guess you would write articles about,

like sort of the weird stuff. Whereas, you know, my favorite page on the site still Mike Trout's stat page though, because he's the greatest player that possibly ever lived. So. Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you, and I guess this is a natural segue then, I think a lot of our favorite pages at Baseball Re that possibly Barry Bonds is being underrated by some war metrics because of the way they treat intentional walks. And some metrics disregard intentional walks or do something other than treat them the same as walks. And there are some sound reasons to do that or not do that. But Jeremy's point was that, well, if intentional walks are just being ignored altogether, obviously that was a skill that Bonds brought with him more so than any player ever. So maybe even though he already looks amazing, maybe he's even more

amazing. Maybe he should be above Babe Ruth. He should be the all-time war leader. So I wanted to ask you about how baseball reference treats intentional walks and Bonds specifically, and whether there is anything to this idea that Bonds is being underrated. Yeah. So whenever war gets brought up in the public, you always kind of like grab your seat and hold on because you never know who it's going to be, if it's Posnanski or somebody else being like, well, this is what's wrong with war. And you're just like, oh, boy, here we go again. It's like nobody's ever thought of these things before.

It's like, no, we've actually been thinking about them for over a decade now. And I am not the expert on war. I'm not an analyst. And war was built before I was even at the company. But Sean has spent a significant amount of time tweaking and improving it and working with people in the industry like Tango and stuff like that to make sure it's the best representation that we can of players' value. In the case that you're talking about, yeah, intentional walks are not included in calculation of WOBA or WOBA or W-O-B-A or whatever. How do you want to pronounce it? Weighted Hunt Base Average, yeah. Right.

or WOBA or whatever, however you want to pronounce it. Weighted hunt base average, yeah. Right. It's not included in that because statisticians and analysts have decided that those sacrifice hits and intentional walks are managerial decisions. They're not decisions that are made by players, so they shouldn't be included in that rate stat. However, if you look at weighted runs above average, which is what is sort of the counting stat that we use for war to determine how many runs a player is worth before converting it to wins and doing a lot of other

adjustments and stuff. But we actually do include intentional walks. And so we scale sort of their at-bats and walks and hit by pitch and all that stuff. we scale that by their WOBA above average. So they are actually included in ultimately their counting stats and based on sort of the number of at-bats they had. So if you include their at-bats, walks, hit by pitch, sacrifice flies, sacrifice hits, and you scale that to their WOBA, that's how we get their runs above average. And so basically what we're saying is it's not included in the rate but when you calculate when you multiply that rate by the number of appearances

they actually had intentional walks are included in in the number of runs they provided to the team so it's it's sort of a sort of a niggling point but there's a lot of little niggling points when you're dealing with something like war that's all war is is a bunch of niggling points when you're dealing with something like war that's all war is is a bunch of niggling points i can tell you're looking at barry bonds's uh career event finder all of his intentional walks did add up to 10.2 win probability added so that's like 10 extra wins his intentional walks it's just a little bit at a time they did add up to provide real meaningful value right he probably would have gotten hits in all those cases anyway so yeah right and and the reason why you treat intentional walks differently from unintentional walks is that they tend to come at times when maybe they benefit the batting team a little more

like the pitcher is putting a hitter on base intentionally for a reason because maybe you set up an out or you're getting to a weaker hitter or something it's it's on average maybe a little less valuable or it's less dependent on the player's skill perhaps or though obviously there there is a role right i mean our our version of war tries to be for lack of a better word backwards looking it tries to look at the actual value that a player provided yeah whereas fan graphs tends to be more of a projection style. There's a lot of, when you start digging into it, those lines become very fuzzy. But yeah, so if you look at those cases where he was intentionally walked, those were probably

very high leverage situations. And, you know, you can argue back and forth. There's been argues about this for 20 years about how do you determine value of a player? And there's no there's no one answer to that but i think that we've kind of come to a we we can defend our position i guess can i i'm just gonna say something anecdotal here because now i'm just playing around on barry bonds's page he drew at one point an eight pitch intentional walk and we're going to uh 1996 uh the giants playing the cubs it was one to nothing in the

sixth inning and barry bonds was up with uh with matt williams on base and amore telemaco got ahead of bonds oh and two and then ultimately intentionally walked him because he threw a wild pitch at one and two that moved williams to second so then the cubs just gave up anyway that's we just we could have an entireonds podcast if you want to just come back. Yeah, you can always do that. Yeah, well, we did do that once. You can still do that. That's not included in the NDA, right?

Yeah, I don't think that's – I think I can still talk about Bonds. Yeah, he's retired, so that's fine. Anyway, yeah, Bonds' intentional walk a little different from like an NL eighth place hitter getting walked in front of a pitcher. But still, all right, so now we know Barry Bonds, not dramatically undervalued perhaps by war. So one more I wanted to ask you, and I think RJ Anderson has written about this at CBS Sports, but every now and then something or someone new comes along as long as baseball history is and as much as almost everything has already happened, there are exceptions. So this year, for instance, Shohei Otani came along and also the opener strategy that the Rays and the Dodgers have used. I am wondering how much either or both of those led to discussions at Sports Reference and, you know, about actual changes and how data is set up or how data is displayed? Did either of them necessitate

changes on the back end somewhere or other to account for these new types of players or strategies? Well, I can tell you the opener made no difference whatsoever because the stats that people were talking about were defined based on kind of arbitrary rules anyway, and those arbitrary rules didn't change. So, you know, whether So whether an opener is counted as a start or not is just based on these sort of arbitrary rules that are very well defined. And so the opener didn't really change anything. Now, going forward, maybe people want to change definitions of starts or whatever because of the way that pitching management has changed. But that's something for a future discussion for us. In terms of Shoya Otani, we actually did adjust.

In war, we were including pitchers as we kind of had them treated as just regular pitchers all the time, even though, especially historically, if you look back in the 1800s and the early 1900s, there were a lot of pitchers that would have days where they would play positions, and then the next day they would pitch. And so we wanted to make sure that when they were pitching, their hitting would be valued as a pitcher. But when they were hitting, their hitting would be valued as a position player. And so that's one thing that we weren't really doing.

We were just always treating them as pitchers. And so that made a small adjustment to some pitchers like way back in history. It hasn't been an issue up until basically Otani. But then Otani, obviously, it hasn't been a huge issue with him. But yeah, we did make a few. They wouldn't really be noticeable to the naked eye, but there are slight adjustments so that we value his days based on whether he's a hitter or a pitcher a little bit differently. Right. And war, of course, is often being adjusted in ways that sometimes make a noticeable difference and sometimes don't.

And that is – it's an advantage of the stat, really, in that every time we get better information, you change the stat. You change your valuation, although that does confuse people and bother people. And it's, I guess, a bug in terms of its adoption by the public maybe, but a feature in terms of its accuracy. So you kind of take the good with the bad. Well, and we're always very upfront. I mean, obviously, some of the stuff can be very hard to process for people that aren't as familiar with mathematics and stuff like that. But we tend to be very upfront about the changes we're making, going into detail of how we made those changes so that we try to be very open source about everything we do as much as possible.

So the last thing I wanted to ask was when we are talking about, say, Babe Ruth's career war, trying to compare him to Mike Trout and all those different things, of course, the further back you go, the less reliable some of the information is. But I'm sure you've had this conversation a thousand times. into the average baseball fan or maybe the average effectively wild listener, the reliability of, say, fielding or base running statistics from the 40s, because there is something, but it's not defensive run saved. Right. Yeah. I mean, we have DRS back to 2003, I think. And then we have total zone rating going back to 1954, I believe. I can't remember these numbers off the top of my head. And then before that, you're basically just relying on assists and errors and put outs and stuff. So yeah, defensive ratings especially get very sketchy as you go further back. And so you just kind of have

to take that as for what it is. We're never going to have perfect information about what people's fielding abilities were early on. And, you know, I think that speaks to the thing of you don't treat war as sort of the end of the conversation. You don't say like, well, so-and-so had this war and so-and-so had this war, especially when you get into decimals. When people start saying like he had 10.1 war and he had 10.2 war, so he's a better player. The decimals are almost completely immaterial most of the time. It's a starting point of a conversation. I don't know Barry Bonds' career war off the top of my head, but you can compare those wars and say, wow, those were two really great players. Now let's dig down into the individual stats and see how did they compare on

offense? How did they compare on defense and stuff? And that's the fun part about being a baseball fan is having those discussions and arguing about who the best players were of all time. I mean, we used to do it with batting average and home runs and RBIs, and now we do it with war and we do it with WRC Plus or whatever else. It's a lot of the same conversations. We're just using better stats to try to get closer to the answer, but there is no definitive answer of who the best player of all time was. You don't know Barry Bonds' career war off the top of your head? No, I'm sorry. The twins still hired you?

162.8, come on. I guess you wouldn't want to get that tattooed anywhere prominent because it might change. No, it'd probably change. You could just get a new tattoo every time it changes. So last thing I wanted to ask is you've mentioned some advice along the way here, but for aspiring web developers, for people who want to get into baseball data, or even for people who hope to replace you right now and are applying for what was your position, what's your advice? What should they be focusing on and learning? Get really lucky. Have great parents and just fall into stuff. No, I will say that it's sort of that cliche of luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

I was very lucky to go to a very good school and get a degree in computer science and happened to love software development. I worked for 14 years in the industry doing market research and building systems for market research and advertising and all that sort of mind-numbing stuff that developers don't always like to do. But that's where you build your skill set. When it comes to getting into the industry, network. Go to Sabre conferences. Go to the industry, network. Go to Sabre conferences. Go to the Sabre seminar. Go to sport. There's a Minnesota has a thing called SportCon, which is where I met Daniel Adler the first time.

But network. Meet people in the industry. But have something interesting to say to these people. Don't just walk up to them and be like, I like baseball. Because they hear that a thousand times a day. Be able to offer something, whether that's technical skills or analytical skills, be able to talk about things intelligently and present something.

And try to pick something that you can use outside of baseball, because honestly, it's a really hard industry to get into. And I'm honestly just super lucky to have gotten where I am. So if you pick up statistical analysis, I guarantee you, you can make a lot more money working in the financial industry than you can in baseball with that same amount of knowledge. And so pick technologies and stuff like that that you can use in other places. And then when the opportunities present themselves, if you're that lucky, then you can use them for baseball.

You know, like I said, network a lot because you never know who you're going to meet that's going to present you with an opportunity later on. You know, I met Sean a couple of years or about a year and a half before I got the job at Sports Reference. I've met a lot of writers before I worked at Sports Reference and stuff like that. I went to conferences where I met more people and built those relationships. And that's kind of how I ended up where I am. So it's, you know, if you just want to sit in your basement and study stats, I'm sorry, but you need to be able to communicate those ideas to people as well. So you need to get out there and talk to people.

All right. Well, you can follow Hans on Twitter at Kent Pitch, although judging by the history of people who've been hired by teams, his Twitter account is probably about to become more boring than it has been. I mean, I've never been a big, like, talking about stats and stuff on my Twitter profile. But, yeah, I'm not going to be talking about baseball anymore.

Well, we've at least gotten you to talk about baseball for a while here. So thank you for your help over the years with me specifically and also with the site. And your work has made a difference in all of our lives, even if it's just that it takes us less time to search for someone when we're looking up his baseball reference page. So thank you for that and congratulations on the new job and good luck with the Twins. Thank you very much.

I'm glad you guys had me on. All right, so that will do it for today and this week. After we recorded this episode, Justin Miller gave up a home run to Jan-Jervis Szilarte, so he is not invincible. On the other hand, the Mariners won yet another one-run game, so they might be. Also, we didn't talk about the DH and pitcher hitting on this episode, but Rob Manfred said after the owners quarterly meeting on Thursday, I think that is a continuing source of conversation among the ownership group,

and I think that the dialogue actually probably moved a little bit. So that is either heartening or horrifying to hear, depending on your perspective. You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild, signing up and pledging some small monthly amount. Following five listeners have already done so. Alan, Andrew S. Nelson, Karina Longworth,

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So we hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Why should I be worried or hurry? Does she know the way that I feel When we meet for a while on a Saturday Sunny Saturday afternoon Happiness on a Saturday Sunny Saturday I'm with you