Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1242: Teams in Glass Houses

Episode Date: July 12, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Manny Machado trade precedents, the Astros’ weird walk-off, the A’s as wild-card contenders, Trevor Bauer and an Indians bullpen miscommunication, the Rays’ proposed stadium design, a Mike Trout shirt, and more, then answer listener emails about players and self-preservation, midseason free agents, Mike Trout hobbies besides weather, constructing […]

If there's glass in the park, darling I can't help but keep Making appointments to sweep beneath the climbing frame If the sun's in your eyes, I'll tighten your blindfold, baby Hello and welcome to episode 1242 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I ben lindbergh of the ringer joined by jeff sullivan of fan crafts hello hi i'm just doing some research for manny machado post mentioned un assessmentist the other day as a possible trade precedent and i just came across an article from the end of this past march talking about un assessmentist who's on the mets he hasn't played for the mets in a while his legs are hurt i'll just say just to get to the point the quote this team is way better than the team we had in

2015 2015 new york mets made the world series 2018 new york mets trying to fend off the marlins for last place in the national league east but they still have it better than the royals better than the white socks better than the orioles although the Orioles beat the Yankees, so there's something going on there. Are you coming up with other comps for good trade deadline players? Because we got an email just now from a listener named Charles who pointed out that Carl Speltron in 2004, pretty good comp in that he had been a very valuable player for a few seasons and was clearly not going to re-sign with the Royals

and probably wasn't even going to re-sign with the Royals and probably wasn't even going to re-sign with the Astros. But there he was, and he was young and good. So that's not a bad comp. No, I don't think that's a bad comp. The trouble that I have is when you go back too far, just the way that baseball operated was very different. So the way that the Beltran trade was handled in 2004 is very much unlike the way a Machado trade would be handled now. So I'm kind of looking for just a recent precedent alone because, you know, before 2010, before 2005, nobody knew what war was. Nobody knew how to evaluate anyone, certainly not prospects. So I mean, in what, 2004, Beltran, I'm just going to scroll down here. Beltran was traded, three-way

trade, right? There was Mark Teehan and Mike Wood were in there, Octavio Dottel, John Buck. Not a great trade, not a whole lot of valuable pieces moving around, but that's easy to say when you're 15 years after the fact. So Beltran trade, definitely a good precedent, very good player. But as far as recent precedent, I haven't found better than Senspitous, but I'm going to be honest with you, haven't really done a whole lot of searching yet. So I'm going to get back to that after this. Someone else mentioned to us Mark Teixeira and his trade to the Braves or the Braves and the year when he played for the Braves and the Angels, that was what, 2008? So that's going back a bit also, but he was what, a six win, six something-ish win player at that point, or was he quite that good? Yeah, I think he was. Yeah, he was, what, a six-win, six-something-ish win player at that point?

Or was he quite that good? Yeah, I think he was. Yeah, he was like a seven-win player possibly then. And that brought back a bunch of talent. Well, it brought back Stephen Merrick and Casey Kaufman. You might be thinking of when the Rangers traded to share it to the Braves where they got Andrews, Feliz, Harrison, and Salta Lamacchia. Although that trade also included Ron Mahe. So don't sleep on what Ron Mahe brought to the Braves where they got Andrews, Feliz, Harrison, and Salta Lamacchia. Although that trade also included Ron Mahe. So don't sleep on what Ron Mahe brought to the Braves.

I joke, but actually he might have been really valuable. This is 11 years ago. How am I supposed to remember? Yeah. Well, I have a couple things to talk about before we get to emails today. First, I guess we should talk about the end of that Astros game on Tuesday, which I've watched a few times and I'm still, I'm not totally sure I understand what happened there, but this is the second time this year that Alex

Bregman hit a ball in the infield, not even very deep in the infield, and won a walk-off in extra innings. This time he just kind of hit a dribbler in front of home plate barely and Jonathan Lucroy picked it up and dropped it and picked it up again and then took some time to set himself and throw and I can't tell where this ball went. I've watched this play about five times and it's like the what color is the dresser? Is it Yanny or Laurel? I can't tell whether it was a good throw that deflected off something or whether it was wide. Have you seen this? Can you tell what exactly went wrong here? I don't know what happened at first base.

It is a mystery to me. It's some sort of illusion. I didn't watch enough replays to get different camera angles. I thought the pop-up earlier this year against the Padres, I thought that was the weirdest walk-off that I'd seen, but this is, okay, so let's see. On April 7th, I believe it was, Bregman hit his pop-up that won the game, right? It won the game against the Padres.

Won to nothing, I believe the score was. And Alex Bregman, with that pop-up that Eric Hosmer couldn't corral, Alex Bregman was given credit for a win probability added of.394 for winning that game. And I don't have the number right in front of me for what he got credit for yesterday, but I could look that up. But this is one of those, maybe it goes without saying, but if you're ever using win probability added for analysis purposes,

this is a good reason why it's weird to do so because everybody gets credit for the result. But what Alex Bregman did once was hit a pop-up. And what Alex Bregman did the second time was hit something equally as bad as a pop-up. And it didn't matter. So I'm looking at it now. And Bregman gets credit for a wpa of plus 0.294 that's 29.4 percent of a win i guess yeah alex bregman reached on error to catcher parentheses grounder kyle tucker scored on error tony kemp advanced a second on error error by

jonathan lucroy i don't know how lucroy dropped the ball when he tried to tag Bregman, but there was only one out. So even had Bregman, I know Bregman retreated a little bit when Lucroy picked the ball up, which I don't know if that was clever or instinct or what. I don't know if Bregman might have technically gone out of the baselines or something, but at the end of the day, even if Bregman were out of the baselines, it doesn't matter because Lucroy still threw the ball to first and then something happened. I don know what it was and you know you could say well maybe the first baseman was blocked maybe his vision was blocked because Bregman was running down the line and maybe if Bregman were out running down the baselines then he wouldn't

be allowed to run down the line but we were talking some weeks ago right about how a player could technically still run along the line even if he's out right that's part of the rule so you could kind of like distract the defense even if you're forced out at second you can keep running to second so right now i have to assume that also is true if you are out going to first you can still run to first so yeah just a real screw up yeah and because of that that came against the A's so the A's lost and they are now six games back of the Mariners who also lost on Tuesday so if the A's had pulled that game out we'd be talking about an even smaller margin here do you think that there is a reason to talk about the A's as contenders, as possible

wildcard aspirants here? Because we've been talking for a while now almost as if it's just sort of settled already that the Mariners will win this wildcard, as strange as their season has been. But the A's are not all that far away, and they're a pretty decent team that I think some people were pretty high on coming into the season, including us and my colleague at the Ringer, Zach Cram. They seemed like sort of a dark horse, and they've been pretty good. So if you take away all the wild, wacky luck that the Mariners had had, it would be pretty close, I'm guessing. I don't know whether the A's would be closer or the Angels would be closer, but it would be quite close, I'm guessing. I don't know whether the A's would be closer or the Angels would be closer, but it would be quite a race for that wildcard spot,

if not for run differential defiance that the Mariners have sustained all season. And it looks like the Mariners have a slightly stronger strength of schedule remaining from this point forward, if that means anything. So the Mariners on the—no, by the way, the Rays are now within double digits in their wildcard gap. They're still 9.5 back. They're not going to get there, but it's just good for them. They keep winning.

So on the one hand, you look at it, and the A's are 6 back. And when you're 6 back with less than half the season to go, that's a huge gap to overcome. But one of the things that I think the playoff odds help to underscore is that it makes a big difference whether or not there's a crowd. So if you look in the National League, the Braves currently have possession of the second wildcard slot, and the Nationals and Rockies, they're only four and a half back of that wildcard slot, which is a game and a half closer than the A's are to the Mariners.

However, they're also four and a half back, but the Giants are four back, the Cardinals are three back, and the Dodgers are one and a half back. So there are so many more teams to overcome that it becomes quite complicated. You have the Rockies whose playoff odds right now are only 6.3%, even though they're closer to a playoff spot than the A's are.

That's not just because the Rockies project worse, but also because the A's at least, they only have to look up at the Mariners and that's it. And of course, if you look at the way things have gone outside of the actual standings the Mariners have a run differential of plus 11 and the A's have a run differential of plus 18 so the A's in that sense have been better than the Mariners and if you look at the base runs then the A's should be 48 and 44 and the Mariners should be 48 and 44 so now we this is along similar lines of what we've been talking about for a long time. But I guess the long and short of it is I do think there is something here to talk about.

From the Mariners standpoint, of course, I'm happy to see the Mariners preserve their advantage despite the loss yesterday. But on the other hand, it would have been a little more interesting to have the A's win that game. The A's have now played 11 games against the Astros. They're 2-9, should be 3-8, but Jonathan LeCroy made a couple boo-boos in that inning. So the A's have only eight games left against the Astros,

whereas the Mariners have 13. So there's something there. The Astros are far better than both of those teams. So that's probably where the strength of schedule aspect comes from. But yeah, there's a race here, and I hope for the sake of interest that the A's are able to close the gap a little more. Mm-hmm. So since you mentioned the Rays, I assume you saw the mock-ups that they put out on Tuesday of their prospective ballpark, which would be in Ybor City.

And I think it's interesting that the capacity is very small. And I think it's interesting that the capacity is very small. It's 30,842 and 28,000 fixed seats. So it would be by far the smallest ballpark in baseball in terms of how many people you can cram in there, which seems like a good thing possibly just since the Rays have always had trouble drawing crowds. Now, I assume that this geographic location would be better for drawing people, but I am kind of confused about the architecture here and how it works with Florida and sun and heat. And I've seen a few people raise this question. I haven't seen anyone answer this question. I assume there is an answer. The Rays are a pretty smart organization. I assume they've thought this through. But even one of the mock-up images that I saw just has this lens flare that's coming off the entirely glass exterior of this building, and it looks like the Rays are just using a magnifying glass to burn their fans inside. Would that happen? Am I thinking about this the wrong way? It has sliding glass exterior walls, which will allow the outside to be enjoyed inside the

building. But can you do this if you are in Florida and it's always sunny and you're playing day games and the outside is all glass? Won't it be like a million degrees in there and you're playing day games and the outside is all glass won't it be like a million degrees in there and you'd have to have like a stadium sized air conditioner next door to keep this place cool i assume there are different kinds of glass and different coatings and now i'm if they used actual magnifying glass lenses to make up the roof then i think that you would have a lot of complaints although they would be short because people would die while after complaining a little bit. So I have to assume this is, I mean, this is like point number three. It's like one, we need a baseball field.

Two, we need people, we need seats around the baseball field. And three, we need the inside to not boil people alive. So it must be considered. It had to have come up. Right. Now, and, you know, they have said that they can't use real grass because they can't grow it inside. Now, I think that if you just had a regular stadium, I'm not a glass expert. Maybe you are a glass expert, maybe on a podcast soon. Definitely not, clearly. Interview a class expert. I don't know. If you Maybe on a podcast soon. Clearly. Interview a glass expert. I don't know.

If you're out there with a greenhouse, let us know, I guess. But they can't grow natural grass. No, artificial turf. Right. But if they had like regular glass as the roof, you probably could grow regular glass, right? So there must be something about the light that gets into the stadium going through the glass that does not allow the the grass glass and grass in the same conversation my god it wouldn't allow it to live so my hunch then is that there is something about the way that the glass is treated that certain things can't get in it doesn't reflect or disperse light in the same way as

normal glass i like the idea of it but it, I have, I know it's not like the Rays aren't the architects here, you know, so it doesn't really matter how smart the Rays are. It's really how smart the designers are. They must have thought of this, but it would be great to have some clarity on why people won't die at this stadium. Right. I would like to know. So I know just from past experience that we have listeners who do every kind of career you could possibly imagine. Whenever we have a question like this, didn't we ask about how much you make if you're an organist? Organist, yes. And we got like three emails. Yeah. So I know that there are architects listening to this. I know that there are

glass stadium designers designers as small a niche kind of profession as that might be. There's probably one listening to us right now. So if you are that person, please email us and share your knowledge. Tell us what we're not considering here. I know there's a lot of fear out there that we're all losing our jobs to automation, but based on the email responses we've gotten so far, not a threat to the effectively wild listening community. Everybody still has their jobs and their jobs are bizarre. Yeah. It's like when Zoolander in Zoolander shows the model for the Zoolander Center for kids who can't read good and who want to learn to do other stuff good too. And Zoolander points out that it's

a little small for people to be in. That's kind of what I thought when I saw the Rays all-glass stadium. But I know I'm missing something, so someone tell me what it is. So what are the steps now between now and if the Rays are actually getting this off the ground? It's just finding funding? Is that it? Yeah, I assume so. Is there even a site? I haven't really tracked it that closely because it just seems like it's kind of a long way away. Yeah, there's a site. Yeah, okay, so there's a site. And funding-wise, are the Rays willing to kick in anything,

or are we going full local community exploitation here? I don't know all the details. I was curious a little bit about this. I believe they had a site that they proposed in a community called Ybor City, and I think that this current site is about a half mile away from their preferred site, which whatever, they can make it work. So the projected cost is something like $850 to $900 million, which means it's probably going to cost about $10 billion. And they had a stadium proposal some while ago that I think the projected cost at that point was like $300 million, and the Rays offered to kick in, I don't know what it was, like $100 million of it. So based on that, then you'd think the Rays would kick in about three times as much.

So the Rays would offer, it sounds like, a chunk of the money, but very obviously not even a majority of the money. Now for them to kick in anything, you could say that that gives them a leg up over many of the other organizations that have built up stadiums. But there's definitely going to be... Yeah, they're talking about tourist taxes and jock taxes, and I don't know where the money's going to come from, but it usually comes from somewhere. So I think as long as Ybor City and the surrounding community doesn't get as screwed as Miami does, then they can at least call that a victory.

Yeah. MLB.com says the Rays have not committed to a figure that they plan to contribute to the project, though Sternberg has said in the past that a list of variables, such as having a commitment for naming rights, could boost the club's contribution. So, yeah, maybe they'll cover the glass reinvention part, the non-burning ballpark.

Maybe they're just betting on having access to glass technology that doesn't currently exist. Right. This is 2023. It would be projected to open. So by then, who knows what innovations in glass we'll have. So I also wanted to mention that the Angels had Trout Shirt Night on Tuesday. So have you seen the Trout shirt? No one loves Mike Trout more than we do, I don't think, except, I don't know, his wife and parents. But I'm not sure

I would wear the Trout shirt anywhere where people could see this. It is just a giant Mike Trout face and neck. That's pretty much all it is. Okay. So when we had our Fangraphs event in Denver a few weeks ago, we had a meetup at a brewery near the stadium, and colleague Meg Raleigh promised the listeners that she would wear her Mike Trout collage shirt to the bar, and she did. She came through. It is a shirt that is a collage

of Mike Trout faces somehow okay so it was a pattern right and it and it worked I think she had like another layer on over it you know like you want a a busy a busy under layer and then like a neutral over it so that then you just kind of look at a little bit of the pattern but any sort of busy pattern can kind of blend and you don't really know exactly what you're looking at. It's just an assortment of colors. This is very clearly just a giant face. This Mike Trout shirt. I'm looking.

I just looked it up on, I guess, cut four. And there's a little crowd shots. And it's just like Mike Trout's giant face everywhere. It's really kind of disturbing. And if you put. So there's a thumbnail of this video. I don't know how to describe it, but when you put the Trout shirt on different bodies

and people come in all shapes and sizes, the Trout shirt will stretch or bend such that Mike Trout ceases to look like Mike Trout anymore. He can look like any number of different players, like some sort of like anamorph version of mike trout you put this on some pear-shaped individuals so i don't i feel bad for the man who's in this thumbnail of the video because he's just a man who's there on his own time with a trout shirt over his belly he's actually not even wearing it he just has the shirt up against his chest where he's wearing another shirt. This is a little weird.

Maybe he's seeing if it fits, but it definitely looks less like Mike Trout and more like Adam Dunn in an angel's hat. Yeah. I also wanted to ask you if you know who is currently leading the major leagues in Fangraph's pitcher war. I do, and I don't want to talk about it. Well, it's your favorite player, Trevor Bauer. And Trevor Bauer started a game yesterday, Tuesday, against the Reds. And he was great. He struck out 12 in eight innings, added to his major league leading fan graphs war total.

But the end of that game, I think, is the maybe more interesting part for our purposes right now. Because the last matchup, which was, there was a Joey Votto game-winning hit. Was it a walk-off? I forget where the game was being played, but it was a, okay, yeah. So game-winning hit by Joey Votto, who in that situation was, oddly enough,

facing a righty, Dan Otero. And after the game, it came out why that was the case. And I'm reading from a Paul Hoynes tweet right now. Tito, that's Terry Francona, wanted lefty Oliver Perez to face Votto in the ninth. He told pitching coach Carl Willis to call and get OP into the game. Willis thought he said OT for Dan Otero. And so Dan Otero was warming up, came into the game. Terry Francona saw Otero instead of Perez and was very surprised to see a righty instead of a lefty in the game at this pivotal moment. Obviously too late to fix it at that point because he's in the game and OP was

not warmed up. Got to be a better system than this, I would think, to decide. I mean, you could ask, first of all, in fairness to Willis, maybe he just didn't believe that Oliver Perez is still a major league pitcher, because that is kind of confusing to all of us, I think. Still a pretty good and effective major league pitcher against lefties after all these years, but I know that more than a few people probably read this anecdote and thought, Oliver Perez, he is still a major league pitcher. Yep, still a major league pitcher. So there's got to be a better system than this for determining who you want to warm up. I think the bullpen phone itself is kind of laughable and archaic and whimsical and kind of cute also.

It's this strange relic that baseball has for whatever reason. But the initial based warm-up when you have an OP and an OT on your team, that presents some problems. What I don't get is why would you refer to Dan Otero as OT? I understand those are two letters in his name, but I would never call you LI. Right. It's weird. I guess it's his nickname, but I would never call you L-I. Right. It's weird. I guess it's his nickname, but I don't know. This all could have been avoided if they just stuck with the baseball nickname convention

of just Danny or Otero-y or whatever. Just add a Y to it. Instead, O-T. And now you get this screw up. So I don't know. I don't know why he didn't think, really? You want a righty in the game right now? Maybe he wasn't looking at who this screw up. So I don't know. I don't know why he didn't think, really, you want a righty in the game right now? Maybe he wasn't looking at who was coming up.

But anyway, this is kind of funny, I guess. Who cares? It's not like the Indians actually need to win every game to get to the playoffs. So it's just kind of funny. It's not going to cost them anything in the long run. But before the playoffs start, probably should get the who we want warming up system down pat. Hit by pitch, single, strikeout looking, fly ball, single, double, intentional walk, walk, double, intentional walk, single, out at home. That was the Reds' ninth inning in which they scored seven runs.

I don't know. First of all, I've never called to the bullpen. So I would think that you would communicate at least more than once to confirm that you're getting things right. You say, I want OP up. That's OP. Or, you know, Oliver Perez. You can try it a couple different ways. There's the international, like, spelling, you know, like the Alpha Tango, whatever.

I forgot what that's called. This is reminiscent. I don't remember all the details. Maybe you do. I'm Googling. Apparently, I wrote about this in 2011 when Tony La Russa had his bullpen phone miscommunication. Right, right. I have this whole article. It's titled Tony La Russa had his bullpen phone miscommunication. Right, right. I have this whole article.

It's titled Tony La Russa and the bullpen phone and assortment of explanations. I have no recollection of ever writing this, but it's a couple thousand words. So something about Derek Lilliquist looks like I went with the fake conversation crutch. So way to go, Jeff. That's very 2011 baseball writing. Very 2011 baseball writing. Zero insight at all. So do you remember the

details of that any better than I do? Because what I remember is not one of them. Don't. I don't think I even wrote something about it that I've since forgotten. So I don't really recall. Well, I can, why don't we just read? We'll just read this and then we'll all relearn something that we already knew. So this is 2011. This is in the playoffs for anyone who doesn't recall in the world series as a matter of fact cardinals rangers ultimately cardinals won that world series in the fashion where people immediately forgot about game five but larusa seemed to make a few strange decisions in the bottom of the eighth reading my own words is weird to do on a podcast but using zepchinski to pitch to napoli with the bases loaded was easily the strangest what possible explanation could he have had for that maneuver?

Well, the truth wound up stranger than fiction. La Russa had earlier called down to the bullpen to get Zabchinski and Jason Mott warmed up, but the coach on the other end, Derek Lilliquist, heard only the first name. To make things even weirder, when La Russa called back, the coach again couldn't hear properly and started warming Lance Lynn, who wasn't supposed to pitch in Game 5 because he'd thrown 47 pitches in Game 3. That's more or less how the left-handed Mark Zipchinski wound up facing the right-handed Mike Napoli with Game 5 of the World Series on the line. So maybe that one's weirder because how do you hear Lance Lynn instead of Jason Mott?

I can understand not hearing Jason Mott the first time. You're like, warm up Zabchinski and Mott. Or I guess RZ and MO, if you're going to call them that. Then the other guy, you only hear one name. I get it. Maybe you're only listening for one name. But then to hear Lin instead of Mott and not ask a follow-up of like, but isn't he

not supposed to? So I don't know which one's worse or weirder. I think the idea of Mark Zabchinski facing Mike Napoli in Game 5 of the World Series with the bases loaded, that's a bad one. But Dan Otero versus Joey Votto is kind of the same. Yeah, Mike Matheny's probably made stranger bullpen moves with zero miscommunication since then. So Cardinals fans, probably nostalgic for those days. But yeah.

I'm looking at Trevor Bauer just to kind of get this out of the way so trevor bauer pitches in the america league central which is the worst division that's ever existed in any sport at any time on any planet and uh he's made 13 starts against teams under 500 six starts against teams who are 500 or better four starts against the tigers three against the royals two against the cubs the cubs are good but but the good lineups that he's faced are the Cubs twice, the Astros once, the Yankees once, and the Mariners once. But Trevor Bauer has not been tested that hard. I don't want to sit here and talk about whether or not Trevor Bauer is great.

He's fine. But he could not have asked for an easier slate this season. So if you were to fold in a strength of opposition adjustment, I imagine Trevor Bauer would be knocked out of first place as I would prefer. Yeah. Well, I have to recuse myself from talking about Trevor Bauer at this point, I think, because Travis has been talking to him for our book, and the better he does, the better that part of the story is, I suppose. So I am no longer impartial on the topic of Trevor Bauer.

Well, I would like to, I think that it's just such a great experience for all of us to see someone who was once the third overall draft pick in all of baseball overcome all the adversity that he's faced to become a non-ace starting pitcher on the best team in a god-awful historically bad division. I will not be putting that on our book jacket. There are things about the story that are pretty interesting, I will say. You can all read about it next year. All right, moving on. Emails. Let's answer some of those. So let's talk about Sean's question.

Earlier this week, you brought up the hypothetical Andrew Miller-Brice Harper trade under the context of what team says no first to a rest of 2018 rental. Miller had the perceived advantage because of not only his excellence, but the general history of relievers' increased utility in the playoffs, which was mentioned compared to batters. Your debate leads me to this question, which is when, if ever, do you think we will see relievers, particularly players in the last year of their contracts, refusing to be used like relievers like Miller have been used in the past in pursuit of a title? In another podcast this week, you guys discussed how the NBA has made fans much more aware of what several of Ben's ringer colleagues have discussed with LeBron as a post-team player, someone who values his own achievement more than that of any particular entity tied to a particular geographic location, and how fans generally understand that it is part of the way the league operates now. to that of the team and the ability to say that you as a player won the big one?

Or do you think we will see a point in time where relievers are taking themselves out of the game because they don't want to take on the additional risk of injury? No, I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that anyone knows nearly enough about it. And I think that I can't remember any example of a baseball player in the playoffs taking himself out or wanting to play less. They're all singularly motivated to try to win the championship and do whatever they can to get there. What pitcher ever wants to come out of a game besides Eric Bedard? Right. Yeah, not a whole lot. So, I mean, maybe they should at times, but I think for the most

part, major league pitchers are used pretty responsibly now. But the other thing is that if you're really worried about your own future and financial future, taking yourself out of the game is probably going to impact that negatively, I would think. Teams are not going to look all that kindly, whether they should or not, on a reliever saying, I don't want to pitch, I don't want the ball, just because there is that kind of macho competitiveness, which sometimes is overblown and taken too far, but also sometimes is part of why players succeed. So I think that when teams invest in relievers now, they want to know that the reliever is willing to do that in the playoffs. That's a big part of things.

I assume that some teams talk to the player and the agent before even acquiring them just to say, hey, are you willing to be used this way? And they probably should. It's a big difference if you're going to sign a free agent. Do you want the guy who only wants to pitch in save situations for an inning at a time? Or do you want the guy who is willing to come in in a high leverage spot that's not a save situation and go a few innings if it's a really important game? Obviously, you want the flexibility there. So I don't think a player would be helping himself unless we're talking about, I don't know, going way beyond the limits of what this pitcher typically does. And I don't think you usually see teams try to push players that far. Yeah, right. And for all the same reasons we've discussed before, no baseball player comes even close to approximating the impact

LeBron James has on an entire team. So if LeBron considers himself, I don't know, what was it, a post-team player? How was he called in email? Well, LeBron James is the team, so in that sense, a team wouldly ended by pitching too much. But at that time, it just wasn't really an option because of the reserve system and tradition. And teams obviously were much more willing to push pitchers far past where they should have been pushed. But I think today, I think for the most part, teams recognize the peril there and have backed off of that sort of thing. Yep. All right. Question from Josh.

I was thinking about how different baseball would be if players could become free agents at midseason and how much it would be worth to have a typical trade deadline player for part of a season. Obviously, we see this currently in trades, but I wanted to know how much money teams would spend if they could sign players rather than trade for them. I came up with the following scenario to give a setting for that discussion. Imagine if players could have an option in their contracts to allow them to opt out after the all-star break of the final season in their deal. They could immediately be free agents, but could only sign a contract that would last for the rest of the season and post-season. At the conclusion of the season, they would be normal free agents. I know this is unrealistic and the logistics of implementing it would be convoluted, but for the sake of a good hypothetical, let's just assume this could be a thing. How much would or should a contender spend on a Machado or Harper level

player for the last portion of the year? Would there be enough incentive for players to want to negotiate this kind of option in their contracts? What other interesting ways could this impact a team's playoff run? And I remember Sam and I answering a question like this once and talking about, like, what even would a team pay for a single start by a player, like, at the end of the season or in the postseason or something like that. And we came up with some pretty big numbers. So what do you think if you could opt out at midseason? So how many players have this contract? Is it all of them? Is it just a few? That's the thing. Unless it were all of them, I don't know that any team would sign a player to this kind of contract. Right. Because if you don't have the leverage to demand that, then I don't know why a team would concede this. I mean, presumably there

would be some kind of trade-off where they'd get a great deal before that opt-out, and I guess you could construct some scenario where it might make sense, but I just don't know that teams would want to deal with that uncertainty, because presumably if they're signing this guy, they expect to be contenders, or at least to get some value out of trading the guy to a contender. And you're just surrendering all of that. I mean, maybe if you had it, Bryce Harper say is a tree agent this coming winter. And let's say that, well, let's use Manny Machado because he's actually having a good season. So let's say Machado is like, I'm going to sign a one year contract. I want a mid season opt out. Or if you want to avoid the

opt out, then the second half of the contract. So I don't know, maybe the opt-out. Let's call it 81 games. Let's say Machado's hiring for a $40 million base salary. And first 81 games is $20 million. Second 81 games is another $20 million. Let's say he has an opt-out after 81 games, but the team could void that opt-out if they bumped up his salary to 30 million maybe so that is one way i could see it constructed and so you still have some reason for the initial team

to sign a player to that kind of contract because you know that you could keep him if he were doing really really well but then he would still opt out if he were doing well. Then it becomes more unlikely for the player to opt out in the first place. So now maybe we're losing sight of the heart of the question, which was just how valuable is the second half of the season? Should we just forget the actual practicalities of this? I suppose it's pretty impractical, but we were just saying the other day that even though Harper is having a down year, he could probably go out and get, what were we saying, $25, $30 million for a one-year contract for 2019. So that's a full season. But there is a premium at the trade deadline for players in

trade returns just because the team that's acquiring him knows with greater certainty that they need him, that they have a vacancy at the position he plays, and they're in contention. They're definitely going to be in the playoffs. So you know that it's going to make a great impact for you if you bring this guy on. So if he's available to anyone and any team that's in a playoff race or knows that it's going to be in the postseason can bid on him, I mean, could you get as much for that half season as you could for a full season in the future, potentially? I think, I mean, this is going to be a Dan Hirsch question, right? What's the

championship probability added in the second half versus the first? Because so much of the value gets shifted to the second half of course for all those reasons that you just mentioned so i you could get pretty close depending on on what the salary is because teams care so much more now just having that certainty locked up now on the other hand i don't know you look in the american league right now and there are only five maybe six teams who would be interested in buying anything but then in the national league right now and there are only five, maybe six teams who would be interested in buying anything. But then in the National League, like almost everyone is kind of in the hunt. So, yeah, you could get pretty close to a full year salary. So there's definitely player incentive to have a contract like this, but teams would hate it.

Yeah, definitely. All right. Carter says, first time emailer here. All right. Carter says, first time emailer here. I'm having a slow Friday night of MLB TV listening to that wild Trevor Bauer interview and mulling over the most persistent question of our era. Why is Mike Trout so boring? I decided to take this upon myself to try to find out something outside of baseball that Mike Trout enjoys besides weather. And my strategy to do this was to look for articles and bios posted on him from before he was drafted that maybe others have not found. What I found in roughly an hour of Googling was fishing and crabbing, apparently, although I'm not entirely sure what that is. It's like fishing, but for crabs with traps, I guess. So he sent me a link to an article, and this is from the website MaxPreps, and that's about prep school players. And I will send you a link to that, and I will put a link to that in the usual places for listeners. But this is from June 4th, 2009.

So this is shortly before Mike Trout was drafted. It says, New Jersey draft hopeful Trout living the life. And here's what Trout says. What? How do you live the life when you're a teenager? I don't know. But it says, for now, he's just trying to take everything in. It's been a hectic, though fun time for Trout. Number 50 in the Max Preps baseball report 2009 top 100. Number 50. There were half of the top 100 of the Max Preps baseball players

at that point were ahead of Trout. When not doing interviews or being called by reporters or finishing his season, he does manage to find some alone time. Quote, it's why I love fishing, said Trout Thursday afternoon as he was getting some crab traps together before heading out with friends.

Fishing and crabbing. You can say I do it all. Which I love that. Like that's it. That runs the full range of human activities. Fishing and crabbing. He does it all. And he says, it's actually a great way to wind down and relax.

When asked how good a fisherman he is, Trout let out a bellowing laugh. Bellowing laugh. I've never heardout let out a bellowing laugh. Bellowing laugh. I've never heard Mike Trout utter a bellowing laugh. But he says, on a scale of 1 to 10, I'm a 13, he said, laughing. But seriously, it's not how I would rate myself as a player. I still need work. And right now, with everything going on around me, reporters and Major League Baseball calling, it's a great time.

And the rest of his quotes are kind of typical Mike Trout quotes in here, pretty boilerplate. But I did not know, I guess, that Mike Trout was a fisherman. It's kind of on the nose given his surname. I mean, you kind of figure that every baseball player is a fisherman because they all seem to be. But I did not know about his uh fishing prowess or his crabbing prowess not something i've necessarily seen him talk about so i do feel like i know a little bit more about mike trout now than i did before do you suppose that mike trout has ever gone noodling probably well no i don't know in the northeast with that weather the bad weather probably less time that you could do that so So maybe not. I don't know.

Are we talking about the same noodling? Oh, what kind of noodling were you talking about? What kind of noodling are you talking about? I thought we were talking about like a pool noodle. Oh, no. Noodling. It's barehand catfish fishing. You get into like a pool or like a pond and you reach into catfish holes and you just try to grab them.

like a pond and you reach into catfish holes you just try to grab them um i'll say even likelier that he has not gone noodling although i don't know he's uh he he does it all he does it all yeah right so i wouldn't so he uh so if you're the angels and you know you have the standard uniform player contract but you say okay mike try you're allowed to fish you can probably go crabbing because if that's just traps and whatever. It doesn't seem like it could hurt yourself. But you probably definitely shouldn't go noodling. And even crabbing, you could say like, well, what if a crab had like really strong pinchers?

Right, yeah. And then, you know, you can kind of see how this goes. Although Mike Trout with fewer fingers. We've answered that question already, I'm pretty sure. Probably one of the first ones. Carter continues, despite or in thanks to the hilarious irony of Mike Trout enjoying fishing, how could you leverage this new interest into a marketable strategy for MLB? Mike Trout sponsored fish sticks, appearances at professional fishing events,

or is the last name thing so hokey that even this marketing strategy is dead in the water i mean they already did mike tried giant ass face shirt so i think but this all comes down to the fact that tribe doesn't really want to be that guy right that's just where this ends up and we all try to make him like fish and crab to avoid reporters so he doesn't want to uh leverage it for publicity and the reporters are always fishing around for quotes, but he won't give them, so they get crabby. This reminds me of a... So in 2011, there was a Fangraphs franchise player draft.

I was not with Fangraphs at this point, so I can be objective. I'm going to read to you the players chosen in the top 10. The introductory paragraph of this was, last week, ESPN invited a group of 30 contributors, including myself, Dave Cameron, and Jonah Carey, to take place in what they call the franchise player draft the directions were straightforward throw out real life contracts and situations specific to major league baseball and simply evaluate the players for their abilities deciding which one you would most want to build a franchise around if you were starting from scratch we picked one through 30 and

selected players we would most want as our cornerstone going forward. Here are the top 10. Okay? I will not tell you the authors at first. So the first pick, Evan Longoria, Troy Tulewitzki, Mike Trout, Ryan Zimmerman, Joey Votto, Albert Pujols, Carl Crawford, Jose Bautista, Miguel Cabrera, and Ryan Braun. Not looking great.

Votto looks really good. Of course, Mike Trotto looks really good. Of course, Mike Trout looks the best. Trout, this was in June of 2011, so I'm pretty sure Trout had not even played yet. No, that's pretty aggressive. In the major leagues. Number three. And the person who selected Mike Trout,

Carson Sistuli. Nailed it. Handcraft's managing editor, Carson Sistuli, who, for someone who does not actually perform baseball analysis has like the most impressive record of prospect future value identification of anyone I've ever interacted with. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Mike Trout just had his seventh anniversary of his MLB debut. And I wrote something last year about his partial rookie season in the majors. Because when you go back and

look at it, it's so strange that Mike Trout was a below average hitter for any period of time in the majors, really, given that immediately after that, he was the best player in baseball in 2012. So I went back and I talked to people and I tried to figure out why was Mike Trout ever not that good in the majors. And it was only 40 games, so, you know, whatever. But still, it's strange to see Mike Trout with an 87 WRC plus in 135 plate appearances. And he was still on a four-war full-season pace just because his defense and his base running. But he definitely did hit 220 with a 281 on base and a 390 slugging in those 135 play appearances and basically he just got unlucky he had a 247 babbitt and that was a large part of it but i kind of enjoyed that there was this fragment of a season on his stat

line forever where he just wasn't that good and then immediately became the best ever i'll read to you just to tie this all together with a bow i'll read to you carson's short paragraph about mike trout justifying his pick at number three in this draft in 2011 mike trout i recognize this could very well be a reach at number three but the combination of sheer athleticism and baseball specific skills i.e plate discipline combined with the fact that he's only 19 and ranking a AA is incredibly promising. Also, will likely be good from a marketing perspective. Very good.

Yeah. Carson, very impressive track record. He is, I guess, the epitome of scouting the stat line, but often scouting the stat line works. It's not necessarily the best or the only way, but it does help you find some guys who fall under the radar otherwise. Absolutely. All right. StatBlast?

StatBlast, right. I forgot about that. So let's do it when I remind myself. They'll take a dataset sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to daystep lost. So, this is all-star selection season, which we don't care so much about but whenever this comes around i've been a part of this podcast for two years so in all of the two years we've

gotten emails that are generally about the worst ever all-stars and it's not it's not actually quite as easy as you'd think to search it's one thing to find all-star seasons so it's quite another to find all-star half seasons anyway right i did want to look up a proxy so what i've done is i've looked up historical all-stars who have the fewest career games played so now when you look at position players of course the current leader in this category is glaber torres who's only played 63 games that doesn't really count he's 21 years old he's going to have a lot more games over the rest of his career, but he is, at least technically right now,

the all-star position player with the fewest career games played. But we've talked about Brian LaHare, a laughable all-star, perhaps. Well, I shouldn't say perhaps. Definitely a laughable all-star. He got into, as a position player, 195 career major league games, had an all-star berth. That's very few. It's not the fewest.

So let's kick out Gleyber Torres with his 63 because he'll play a lot more, hopefully, and we'll also kick out Ozzy Albies. He's gotten into 145, but there's going to be more of those games, we should all hope. Otherwise, we're going to have to get off this podcast and write some really depressing articles. So Brian LaHare has the third fewest career games played for an all-star but he is still ahead of don leppert don leppert played 190 games in his major league career he was an all-star with the pirates he was a backup catcher i believe but the actual leader here is uh Zak. And Frankie Zak played 123 career games. I understand you were just looking him up quite recently.

Frankie Zak was a backup shortstop in 1944 for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He had an OPS plus of 99, which for a shortstop in that day and age is pretty solid. He was selected as an all-star after that in 1945, played 15 games. And after that in 1946, he played 21 games. I did look up why this happened. I can tell you, and the answer is kind of fun. In 1944, Frankie spent all of 1944 with the Pirates. He appeared in 67 games at shortstop for the team, while Frankie Gustine appeared in 116 at the position.

With the bat, Zach hit 300 in 160 at 160 at bats during the season while augustine had 405 at bats but hit 230 eddie miller one of two all-star short stops selected was injured and as zach was in pittsburgh pennsylvania where the all-star game was played he was selected as he did not have to travel during world war ii zach did not get to play as marty marion spent the full game at shortstop so frankie zach all-star by geographical default but it still counts he was in the all-star game or at least he was uh he was selected so there's nothing we can do about that now on the pitching side there's still another category here i did a search now that's weird because whenever you i searched for the fewest career innings pitched for an all-star pitcher and then you end up with all these weird like stan musial shows up with 0.0 innings pitch

because he actually did pitch in one game face to batter that was a weird little quirk where do you ever read about this in 1952 stan musial pitching uh yeah i have heard that story refresh my memory i'm not going to look up the whole story but my understanding is it was toward the end of the season and he was in a competition for the uh for the batter's title batting title batting average and so his manager thought it would be a funny idea if he brought in stan musial to pitch against the guy he was competing against for the batting title musial did not think it was quite so clever but he did pitch anyway so anyway scrolling down uh the the pitcher with the fewest ever innings pitched, unsurprisingly, we've got Joe Jimenez with 60 innings pitched.

Again, hopefully that will grow. Joe Jimenez with the Tigers. He was the Tigers' default selection. But moving on from there, Josh Hader, again, doesn't really count. 94 innings, but he's going to throw a lot more, probably like three of them today. But let's see. We're looking at of them today but yeah let's see we're looking at ben chapman so let's see about ben chapman i haven't actually clicked on his page before but ben chapman appears to have been well this one doesn't really count because it seems

ben chapman was a position player convert so he made the all-star game as a hitter then he was a pitcher so he doesn't count yes also a racist who hated jackie robinson so there's that yeah also that part but you know 1944 to 1946 uh as a pitcher so he was that's a popular time to be a racist in america edwin diaz he doesn't count cory kniebel he doesn't count now uh we do have is steve delabarre still active is he he still a... I don't know. I don't know either. I can find it. He last pitched in the majors in 2016,

but Steve Delabarre definitely was an all-star reliever in the year 2013. Steve Delabarre this year is pitching, has pitched with AAA Round Rock, and he has only thrown 5.2 innings. His career probably over, so Steve Delabarre could be the winner here with 194.2 career innings pitched, and if he doesn't pitch again, he will have the fewest innings for an All-Star. But then I saw a name very close to Steve Delabarre, a name I had completely forgotten about, even though he's recent. Do you remember Evan Meek? Yeah, right. He was an all-star. That's right. He was one of those very silly all-stars. Yeah, Evan Meek, who pitched for the Pirates and then the Orioles,

because for a time, pitchers who were bad pitched for both of those teams. Evan Meek was an all-star in the year 2010, presumably the Pirates representative, and that year he was fine. He was pretty good, 2-1 for ERA. Evan Beek, 196 career innings pitched. He had a career war of 1.7, was an all-star for the Pirates. He threw 80 innings in the year 2010. And John Hudek, I guess, would be in third place. John Hudek was an all-star for the 1994 Houston Astros as a rookie. He was an all-star, and he finished second in the Rookie of the Year voting. And after that season, he was not special or good.

In fact, after that season, between 1995 and 1999, he threw exactly 162 innings with a 4.78 ERA. Not interesting, his ERA plus was 88. So John Hudek, third place. Steve Delabarre, Evan Meek, and John Hudek on the pitching side all right so the player that Frankie Zach replaced on that 1944 all-star team was Eddie Miller and Eddie Miller was Cincinnati Red at the time and it looks like he was a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 time all-star. And that season, 1944, he hit 209, 269, 289. That is a 60 OPS plus. And he was an all-star.

And I looked to see if he was better in the first half than he was in the second half. Nope, not really. 561 OPS in the first half, 557 OPS in the second half. Wasn't really any better than that the season prior either. Looks like he was just a really excellent defender and obviously had that reputation and also has the defensive stats to back it up. So there's that. But you mentioned Don Leppert and Frankie Zak. Neither of them played in the All-Star game, so I guess you could say that Brian LaHare is the shortest careered position player to actually appear in an All-Star game. So he does have that distinction. What is Brian LaHare doing?

Right now. Right now? Other than being mentioned by many podcasters and writers as an example of what an All-Star shouldn't look like. I'd be curious i wonder he's not still in japan or maybe maybe he's in japan he's not still playing in japan right i really couldn't tell you brian laher's whereabouts any more than i could steve delabarse but uh brian laher let's see more like Brian LaHare he is uh Brian LaHare played last season in the Atlantic League actually for Somerset 2016 and 2017 he's also played in Japan he's also played in Mexico and Venezuela and everywhere so maybe he has finally called it a career this year, but he held on for quite some time. Let's take a question from Matt, who says, if you could create a player using 250

points to allocate on the 20 to 80 scouting scale, what do you think would be the most probable to make the majors? Would you go 50s across the board and hope for an all-around average guy would a defense first player fare better in the long run let me know what you guys think so were we just trying to get the guy to the majors or to be good in the majors well he said to make the majors so i guess that is technically the question but you can take it either way you want by the way brian laher according to wikipedia was hired in january 2018 to be the billings mustangs hitting coach the rookie ball affiliate of the cincinnati reds so brian laher is around okay so we're trying to get a guy to the major leagues uh how many how many different 20 to 80 categories are there there's a lot right well are we just doing the

five tools talking about the five tools yeah probably, probably. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, they always say hitting for average or your ability to make contact is perhaps the most important. But you also hear that speed, just because speed has a bearing on everything, or at least on your ability to play defense and run and get base hits. to play defense and run and get base hits. I don't know if you can be like a 20 runner, but somehow also a good defender or like a high average hitter. I mean, technically, I guess you could, but in reality, not really. It's the tools, the five tools

don't really cover everything that's important about a player exactly. So I don't know what would be the most optimal arrangement here oh you absolutely you max out the hitting you max out hitting for average you max out hitting for power so that's 160 i guess what are we yeah right yeah i mean right so the power you're gonna get there right hitting for power hitting for average arm speed and defense those are the those are the three so you've got

80 to average 80 for power and right there that's going to get you somewhere so that leaves you with 90 right so then you just do you have 30s left so let's say 20 arm because who cares so then that leaves you with 70 35 for for fielding and running so let's say 30 runner 40 defense congratulations you have a hall of fame first baseman. Yeah, I might even go all in on defense with what you have left there and just go. I mean, again, it doesn't really make sense that you could be a really good defender, but also have really terrible speed. That's Casey Kotsman, right? I guess, yeah. If you can do that in this exercise, then I think that probably gets you further than the speed does, assuming that you're good despite the slow speed. So, yeah, the hitting stuff, that's going to get you there and make you a star, and teams will find a place for you to be, whether it's at DH or hiding you in a corner somewhere.

And, yeah, I would go with just allocating the remaining points for defense and then speed and then throwing. We were just talking to Sal last week. He was talking about Williams' Estadio essentially being like he can hit. He's going to make the majors. Players who are evaluating players to make the majors, if you have a bat, they're going to find a place for you. And if you have 80 hitting and 80 power, that's amazing. That's as good as it like that's imagine aaron judge with better bat control essentially and you've got a hall of fame hitter so you're

looking at like if you have 80 hitting 80 power and some defense and then you're bad at the other things you're more or less like i don't know miguel carrera prime miguel carrera prime albert pujols you're an amazing player now what is off of the scale is like maturity or are you an alcoholic? But those aren't really the classic 20 to 80 skills. Yeah, and there are many other allocations that would work. I mean, if you did go 50s and everything, you should make the majors and be a very good player for a long time. I guess there's just more of a risk maybe that your skills will get overlooked because you're not really standing out in any one way. And maybe you get blocked by someone who's better in a couple categories.

But that would work in theory. Even if you got blocked, you'd get traded to someone who could use you. So either way. It would work. But there are a lot of evaluators who are looking for standout skills. It's not necessarily the way it should be. But nobody in the front office wants to like find the next Jan Hervis Salarte. Everyone's looking for someone who's like a 60 or above at a skill.

Yeah. Speaking of Astadio, as we always are, I know that he looked like he was about to be used to catch in a game, I believe, on Tuesday. I wasn't watching, but some of the people in the Facebook group were. I think he had the gear on but didn't come into the game, and Paul Molitor opted to sacrifice the DH because he pinch ran for his catcher, and he just kept Astadio on the bench just because he wanted to have Mitch Garver catch, I guess, instead of Astadio. So strong was his preference for not having Astadio catch, which if you look at his baseball prospectus stats for AA and AAA,

it seems like he is a perfectly competent, if not better, catcher. I know he doesn't look like the typical catcher, but he doesn't look like the typical everything else he's played even more. So it seems like he is a decent framer and is all right at all the other stuff so i think he can catch i hope that molliter trusts him to catch because if he can catch that would really help prolong his career but he hasn't caught at this point since for like more than a month i think if you look at the minors and the majors which is i'm not saying that that's good but the last time he caught according to his game log was june 2nd then he had three days off and then he started playing

third base and left field down in triple a part of that might have been just miguel sono was was sent to the minors somewhere around that point by the twins so they thought maybe estudio could be a backup but i just don't it beggar in our position we can't be like beggars and choosers because it's just good to have s to do in the majors in the first place but now i want more let him catch bobby wilson and mitch garver let him be come on bobby wilson you don't need you're not going to the playoffs twins you suck all right todd says someone approaches you and says they're a time traveler from the year 2043. After you all exploit this person's knowledge of future events for gambling purposes, the visitor mentions that there is a consensus in 2043 about who the greatest baseball player of all time is. You're surprised when the visitor tells you that the player got Major League Service time in 2018 and is not Mike Trout or Williams Estadio.

The visitor gives you three guesses to identify this legend from among all players in the league, plus those you expect to make their debuts later in 2018. Who are your three guesses and why? Bobby Wilson is batting 141. His OBP is 211 and he's slucking 247. Bobby Wilson sucks. the Twins suck Let Williams-Astadillo catch

This is ridiculous Juan Soto Yeah, Juan Soto, good choice I mean, probably wouldn't have been my Choice three months ago But seems like a pretty good choice now So, who else is In the conversation, in the discussion

I mean, I guess it could be someone who is already a star. It could be just Mookie Betts or Francisco Lindor or someone like that, right? I mean, you're not picking a pitcher, so it's going to be a position player just because of longevity. So who are the best young, promising, talented position players? It could be Acuna if you wanted to go with the hot young guy. It could be, I don't know, Correa. Who else is young and good? It would just be like a leaderboard of who is young and good, basically.

So yeah, we've said Juan Soto. We know it's not Mike Trout. So Lindor is 24, and he's extraordinarily good, which works in his favor. I don't think it's going to be Andrew Benintendi. i don't think it's going to be ozzy albies albies is 21 but yeah i guess i could i like i like the bets idea i think bets is you know when you have power and as many walks as strikeouts and you're a really really good defender and you're 25 years old mookie bets isn't really hurting for much so i would say soto betsts, and where are we on Acuna? He's good, but I feel like there's probably someone out there who's better already in the majors.

Yeah, probably. And it doesn't have to be a young guy, necessarily. It has to be a somewhat young guy because if you're 30 or something and we're not thinking of you as in the conversation for best player ever you're probably not going to get there although i guess you could have like a an adrian beltre-esque post-30 career but it could be someone who's been around for a few years like bets i don't know if anyone else really immediately comes to mind? Let's just say it. Shohei Ohtani. Yeah, he's a contender, I suppose. All right.

Next question comes from Johnny. With Wimbledon in the middle of its final week of play, I've been watching a lot of tennis in the morning and a lot of baseball at night. I think the two have somehow melted together in my brain and given me this idea. Some of these tennis players have ridiculous serve speeds, notably reaching between 110 to 120 miles per hour, with the fastest serve ever recorded upwards of 160 miles per hour.

I think. That's also information from Johnny, so I'm just taking his word from it here. But he says that the record is 163.4 miles per hour by Samuel Groth. That's artillery! Yeah. So he says, how valuable would a tennis player be

to an MLB team as a pitcher if they could pitch by serving as they do in tennis? Note that this would have to come with the general inaccuracies of serving when compared to pitching, as well as the tennis ball lacking the same physical properties as a baseball, the trade-off being, of course, that the ball is traveling much faster than the average MLB pitcher's ball. So I asked Jonathan whether it still has to be a baseball or whether it can be a tennis ball, and he says, I think if they were using a baseball, there would be two issues. For one, the racket would be easily damaged due to the nearly 100 gram heavier ball. And two,

batters might start to literally be killed for the same reason. Let's say for hypothetical sake that the pitcher gets to choose, but most will choose tennis balls. So I guess you'd also have to consider what would happen when the hitter makes contact, right? Because a tennis ball is not going to go as far as a baseball So even if you made contact, it's not going to do as much damage And also you're not going to make contact So I think if you could use tennis balls, then this would be the most unhittable pitcher ever Well, okay, So how, how? I don't know about the accuracy.

I can't say whether you could consistently hit the strike zone because obviously if you're a tennis player, you just have to hit that service box. And I mean, I'm sure that they're pretty darn accurate, but I don't know if they're strike zone accurate. Now I think this person would lead in velocity i guess we're gonna count him as a real pitcher but there is the important point here that the ball doesn't do anything different it doesn't move you don't have different types of pitches so the ball is always straight i don't know what the spin is of a tennis ball but you got spin you got slice and and that sort of

thing so yeah but i mean you're probably not going to be doing that with any kind of accuracy at the strike zone so as a hitter you'd just be looking and you know if you're going to change the way you serve it's probably more telegraphed than like when a pitcher throws a slider instead of a fastball you know you're you'll swing the racket differently yeah i mean tennis players can return serves so we know that you can do that now granted you have the club face which is a much larger surface area than a bat but just in terms of reaction speed it seems like it should be possible in theory yeah it's also farther away though you're farther away from your opponent in tennis than you are in baseball right so i don't know are you i don't know what the the distance from baseline to baseline is seems googleable but uh it's got to be farther than 60 feet six inches presumably so yeah they

are returnable the ball would be having the same pattern of movement so you'd have a lot of guys choking up you'd see the the end of the leg kicks i guess and you just have quicker swings to hit line drives now because the ball doesn't carry very far i know you can hit a tennis ball pretty far but not that far the outfielder court is 78 feet long tennis okay so the ball would be slowing down by more but it's still if you have a 120 plus mile per hour serve then even to a tennis player it still arrives at them i guess it's covered in frizz right so it's probably probably slows it down more. I guess it's covered in frizz, right? Right, the fuzz probably slows it down more, yeah. Although it's bouncing, so you know it goes faster when it arrives.

So probably arriving at like 90 to 100 miles per hour, something like that. And they're still returned, and they're returned with some amount of accuracy. So the defense would align such that the outfielders would move in quite a bit. You couldn't really shift, probably, because you'd have guys choking up and they wouldn't pull the ball quite as often. So the batters would be trying to hit line drives against a pitch that's going very, very fast, but with limited field available and shorter swings.

So I think there would actually not be nearly as many strikeouts as you think, but I do think the batting average on balls in play and certainly the slugging would be crippled. Yes. Yeah. So you would definitely want the tennis player pitcher. Yeah. He really knows how to pitch a weak contact. Right. All right. This is similarly strange and also sort of similar. Cal in Los Angeles says, what if there were multiple mound distances to choose from and each mound distance had its own corresponding bat size and shape. For example, when a pitcher pitched from a mound that was five feet closer to home plate,

a broader paddle-shaped or oar-shaped bat must be used. The bat size shape makes it easier to make contact, but this is counteracted by the shorter mound distance. Before each at bat, the batter selects his preferred bat, and the pitcher takes the appropriate rubber. There could also be another possibility of a third mound just in front of second base. In this case, the bat used would be closer to broomstick size in its diameter and would, of course, need to be made from a stronger material so it maintains its structural integrity. I'm not sure how the ball off of each of these new bats would react,

but I assume each would affect exit velocity, launch angle, ground ball percentage, etc. It would be a matter of situational strategy when deciding which bat to use. So it would be sort of like the different tees in golf or, I don't know, the different brooms in Quidditch that maybe give you different advantages and disadvantages. maybe give you different advantages and disadvantages. So I think you'd probably want the pitcher to choose the mound first, right? Would that be more fair? Because if you have the hitter choose the bat first, then the pitcher could really exploit that, I would think.

I mean, as a hitter, I would just always ask the pitcher to throw from the mound in front of second base, and then I would just take my walks. Yeah, right. That's true too. So I think we're both, I don't know if we're in favor of moving the mound back, but I think we're in favor of moving the mound back compared to most other proposals for fixing baseball, quote unquote, and for increasing contact and everything so i am amenable to the idea of a different mound distance but multiple different mound distances would uh certainly add some strategic and tactical complexity so there's that but it would also barely be baseball anymore and pitchers i think would just end up getting hurt a lot more often and so this will destroy the game thanks a lot yeah i think uh yeah i think i'm against although i do kind of

like the idea of some complexity to choosing your equipment like that's a cool thing about golf right that you have to choose the appropriate club for your swing and for the situation so it would be kind of nice if there were some variety in bat shape like if you were going for contact as at the expense of power like it would be kind of cool if you had the option to make that choice i guess in certain situations but yeah so i could get on board with with that kind of idea in a sense, batters sort of already do. Now, this is a little video gamey, but they can have a contact swing or a power swing and varieties in between there. But I do like the oar shape just because that way we make baseball even more like cricket.

Yeah, right. All right. Last one. This is from Luis says, they may have had pitching as an amateur, and say half of them take to it and don't mind doing it. Let's assume all players happen to be very coachable, and the knuckleball, as demonstrated by Wakefield and Necro, has very little impact on fatigue and arm health, so you could waksahachiswap a guy in every time your starter has too stressful an inning or throws too many pitches or faces an unfavorable matchup in a dangerous situation without necessarily taking them out. And maybe they'd be healthier, fewer stressful innings without necessarily fewer overall

innings. Maybe you don't face the meat of the order with the starter until the third time through, eliminating the effect. Your bullpen could be deployed with more flexibility and they'd have the platoon split more often. How do you think this team would do compared to the same team run conventionally? Would you need a bigger bench to have more pinch hitting options to make up for the pitcher's spots? Well, I wonder. So the knuckleball seems super hard. Right. Potentially, would you need a bigger bench to have more pinch hitting options to make up for the pitcher's spots?

Well, I wonder. So the knuckleball seems super hard. Right. Now, my question, there have been so few knuckleballers, certainly in the modern era. But I wonder how much of that has to do with how hard it is to learn the knuckleball and how much pitchers are just averse to trying to learn it in the first place because they all think they can throw the conventional way. We've all had the thought, right, that we could maybe make the majors if we just dedicated three years to learning the knuckleball i think we've all thought that but then we've had position players tried to become knuckleballers and they don't uh make it they don't make it back now maybe that maybe they're just selected against because teams don't want knuckleballers it's uh

maybe something that now that we have better pitch tracking technology maybe we'll start to see more maybe if it's appreciated more you can measure the knuckleball better see how much it's actually spinning so i don't know how much effort but if you take like 20 minutes a day in spring training or something you have two months let's face it do you have ample time and you just have all of your position players try to throw knuckleballs under the watchful eye of i don't know a knuckleballer steve sparks will say he's one of the few who's still alive i think he's still alive so then you have the guys throwing it and catching it i guess and then throwing it because that's the other part if you need to have people who know how to catch a knuckleball if they're going to be throwing them now the the pitchers you can

learn the basics of defense i think pretty quickly can learn the basics of defense, I think, pretty quickly. I learned the basics of defense at first base in high school. It's, of course, more complicated, but it's not that complicated. So you could do that. I don't know how much this would make a meaningful difference, but you could definitely reduce the strain on some of your relievers and your starters just by having position players come in and not hurt themselves so i know you know every every spring we have we hear teams say we're gonna be the best hitting best pitcher batting team in the league we're gonna work on it and we're

gonna be good and then they're not and then it just doesn't go anywhere so i don't know how much this would actually benefit but i do like the idea of getting even like 50% buy-in to just teach some people knuckleballs because what's the actual harm? How hard? Well, I know how hard it could be, but what are you doing with your time? Yeah, it'd be fun to watch. You'd have to really start guys on this early, I think. So it would have to be a program that you institute from the second guys are drafted and they do it all the way up through the minor league system, I think, to really get them to buy in. And I mean, no one would want to come to this team, So that might be an obstacle. So you can really only do it with your homegrown guys with any great regularity. I think this is probably overestimating

the percentage of hitters, position players who could pick up a passable knuckleball. So it would be fun. I'll say that. All you really need is one, right? You just have your little portable track man or Rapsodo behind the plate in spring training, and you see over time who's throwing the knuckleball that gets the least spin. Then you're like, well, you're going to be the guy. And I don't think it would be that much of a free agent deterrent. First of all, buying a free agency is stupid. Anyway, you don't want to build a team with free agents.

But I don't think it's really that off-putting, especially if you just find guy who like is your knuckleballer or maybe you have like two or three options i mean that's not really asking that much more as a pitcher you're already having to learn pfp so why not do something else yeah and pitchers are already shagging flies every day so i could see i mean yeah that's the thing maybe you just don't need half the team to do it you really just need one or two guys to do it so maybe you you try out the whole team but you don't actually have to have them all do it in games so maybe it's a little less onerous in that sense and there's probably someone in your system who could throw a knuckleball if they devoted themselves to it i don't know if that person would also be rosterable for other reasons but yeah it's probably the sort of

thing that teams could derive some advantage from if they really pursued it i don't know what the opportunity cost would be perhaps it's nothing perhaps it's the player's free time which is something they value so they wouldn't like it in that sense but i don't know i don't know if it would like add enough wins that it would be worth the investment of just overhauling your minor league system to make this a priority. Spring training is a waste of everyone's time already. So you might as well do something practical with it. And I think if you ask position players, everyone's already throwing, you know, as

part of practice, warming up your arm. And if you talk to any position player, they'll tell you like, oh yeah, of course I mess around with pitches when I'm throwing with my partner. They'll throw sliders and curves and fastballs and whatnot. They're already messing around. Position players want to pitch in the same way that pitchers stupidly want to hit. They're all bad at it, but they just like to do something that's different. You know, like when you wrote that article where you had an opinion, you're like, wow, this is different.

This is different kind of running. This is fun. So I think that I think position players, at least some of them, would really take to it quickly. Maybe their knuckleballs would suck players, at least some of them, would really take to it quickly. Maybe their knuckleballs would suck, but at least they'd try. Alright, so let's end there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com

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