Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1263: Around the Majors in 36 Days

Episode Date: August 29, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan have a possibly premature discussion of whether Shohei Ohtani lived up to the preseason hype, then answer listener emails about the Angels’ historic record in two-run games, the last player who’ll be older than them, using expected offensive stats instead of actual ones in WAR, and David Robertson‘s far-fetched contract […]

Two times in your life you will trace the edge Sink your toes in, review my breasts and tell it like it is My life is hype, my love is hype And I, I, well I will clench my own fist And I, I will always, I will always win Well therefore there's more than blood that feeds through my heart With my hands and my feet Stuck between my tongue and my teeth

Hello and welcome to episode 1263 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Van Graffs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Van Graffs. Hello. Hi Ben. We have a couple guests lined up for later in this episode. First, we're going to bring on a returning guest. Some of you may remember from episode 1169, back on January 30th,

we talked to listener Michael Mountain about his planned 35-day, 30-ballpark baseball road trip. Well, he has completed it. I think it turned out to be a 36 day 30 ballpark baseball road trip so complete failure way to go michael but we will have him on to talk to him about that trip and all the stuff he saw and his favorite ballparks and whether he will ever do that again we will also have angelina on she is the brilliant doodler behind the new fun baseball Twitter account, Acceptably Drawn Baseball, which is at Draw a Walk. It is my favorite new Twitter account,

so I wanted to have her on to tell me a bit about how she started that. But before we get to the interviews, we want to banter a bit and answer some emails for an indeterminate period of time. We will see how this goes. So you have a bit of banter that you want to share? Yeah, yeah, sure. And it's a banter that would have been appropriate five months ago, given all that we talked about back then. I would just like to point out that in the month of August, Shohei Otani, he's batted 62 times.

He has a WRC plus of 208. That is currently the fourth. I was going to bring up Shohei Otani, too. What do you know? Fourth best WRC Plus in the month of August for anyone with at least 50 plate appearances behind only Justin Turner, JD Martinez and the apparently criminally underrated David Peralta.

But in any case, Shohei Otani came back to some fanfare in July. He was not great. He batted 70 times. He had an 86 WRC Plus. He kind of struggled. But this month he has turned on the power again it looks like he's nearing a return to the mound again i'm not gonna hold my breath for those developments i'm sure that you won't either i recommend nobody holds their breath for more

than about 10 seconds but shohyutani at least he is uh he's back on the radar i think we're both probably overdue to write about it i don't know if we have to do it now or at the end of the season but let's say he doesn't pitch again. And let's say that the rest of the way he has a WRC plus of, I don't know, 130, 140. I'm sure we'll talk about this at the end of the year when we have our season wrap-up We're Desperate for Topics podcast. But how would you evaluate Shohei Otani's rookie season overall? Well, I would say probably great success. I mean,

I think it has obviously been disappointing in that he hasn't been on the field as much as we all would have liked him to be. But when he has been on the field, he has completely fulfilled his promise, I would say. I mean, it's fair to say that, right? I mean, part of his promise is the ability to stay healthy and actually play baseball. So he did hurt his elbow, and that was something we were all worried about. And that's something that can happen to any young pitcher or old pitcher, especially if it's a hard-throwing pitcher. So not shocking, although it's disappointing. But the question of whether he could do both of these things, I think, has pretty much been answered. I think we were both pretty confident and optimistic about his hitting ability, but here we are, and he is at 261 plate appearances and just setting a minimum

of 250 here. He ranks 13th in all of baseball on a per plate appearance basis. That is a 146 WRC+. I mean, that's really good. He's a really good hitter yeah right and you look at him i haven't gone to the trouble of trying to figure out like comps for what he is but you're looking at a guy who has a some more strikeouts than the league average but he also walks and he hits for a whole lot of power so for example just kind of eyeballing things here he's had the same season as brandon nimmo that would be one. He happens to be exactly tied in WRC+. He's not that far off from being someone like, I don't know, a faster version of Matt Chapman as a hitter.

It's not Matt Chapman as a defender, but unlike Matt Chapman, Shohei Ohtani does pitch. He is exactly tied with Matt Chapman in WRC+, so good comp. My eyes did not stray far. I was looking at that very leaderboard. So you look at Ohtani, and I know that there were concerns

when he was coming over. Everybody knew that he had real power. You could see it in batting practice. You could see it in batting games. You could tell that he could hit the ball with authority. We had good exit velocity reports coming out of Japan, but there was concern that maybe the swing and miss would get to be too much in the major leagues, or that maybe he'd get tied up against inside pitches. And nope, no, he's just made it work. Of course he strikes out a little more than the average. That's not surprising for a power hitter who hits the ball in the air. But Shohei Otani, at this point, I have seen enough hitting to believe strongly that he's a good hitter.

I've seen enough pitching to believe that when he's able to pitch, he's a good pitcher. Yeah, this is a rousing, raging, arousing success. All of those it's a arousing success but for the unfortunate fact that there's a i think still a pretty good chance we will not see him pitch in 2019 for reasons that i needn't dig into yeah so that's the part that casts a pall over the whole thing because he has backed up every bit of hype in the performance sense, but not in the health sense. And so you wonder and you worry whether he will actually get a chance to really be a full-time two-way player. But I think the talent was the really intriguing part for us.

Can one person, can one player have the ability to be one of the better pitchers in baseball and one of the him 75th in baseball. And I'm trying to remember what I said about what my expectations were for him coming into the season. I think I said somewhere, some when, that maybe he had a ceiling as a six-win player, but was more realistically like a four-win player. I think that is where I put it, like a four to six win range, obviously, with upside that was as high as anyone's. But he may very well end up right in that four war range, even though he just hasn't played a whole lot. I mean, that's 261 plate appearances and 49 and a third innings. And if he had stayed healthy, there's no telling whether he would have worn down or been worse but

he very well could have been better with more regular playing time just at the plate and also I think pitching wise maybe there was room for improvement there because we saw him seemingly adjusting and getting better in certain ways as the season went on before he got hurt so I think if he had been healthy and just continued to do what he was doing early in the season went on before he got hurt. So I think if he had been healthy and just continued to do what he was doing early in the season, even with a fairly cautious schedule, he definitely would have gotten into the upper end of that range. So, you know, I don't know, qualified success, but in some ways, very great success. Right. And I know for anyone who thinks that when you have a smaller play appearance sample, then there can be random noise, et cetera.

In case you were wondering what StatCast believes about Shohei Okani, he has a weighted on base average of 381. He has an expected weighted on base average of 377, which is pretty much exactly the same. Some names around him include Justin Upton, Ryan Braun, Andrew Benintendi, Tommy Pham, Brandon Belt, Reese Hoskins, Juan Soto, Chris Bryant, Matt Olson. Good hitters.

David Peralta, also up there. Good hitters. Shohei Otani, able to hit the ball very hard. And just for the record, while I was looking at August leaderboards, just a throwaway point, but I like to sort and see what's going on in a month because usually, especially in the month of August, I don't know what's happening. But among all the hitters with at least 50 plate appearances i just looked the uh the top i started by strikeout rate and the the highest 14 strikeout rates uh for players this month now 13 of those

14 hitters unsurprisingly have been below average at the plate overall for example tay oscar hernandez has struck out 49 of the time he's come up to the plate he's been a below average hitter there was one exception in the month of august a guy who struck out 40 of the time and a guy who's been not only better than average but 80 better than average max muncie in the month of august as a 40 strikeout rate and he's slugging 706 oh because his season just made too much sense as it was. It has to make even less sense now. Oh, man.

Well, anyway, I hope that, I mean, in a way it whets my appetite for next season or whenever we get the healthy, real two-way player season of Otani. If we ever do, I'm worried that we won't. But if we do, I am even more excited to see it. And I wrote about it earlier this season when he had that one week when he was worth one Winnebub replacement in that one week, just because he had made a couple of really good

starts and he'd hit a few homers. And it was like the total proof of concept. It was exactly what we had been salivating over all offseason and for years before that. He showed that he could do it in that one week, and it was just a matter of, well, how many weeks will he have like that? How many weeks will he get the chance to have? And unfortunately, not as many weeks as we would have liked, but it could have worked out so much worse. He could have turned out to be a bust, and he is not in any way a bust except that his elbow is kind of busted. Right. That is unfortunately the part we will not be able to forget about.

But, yeah, as you already said earlier, this is, even though I guess right now Otani is not really pitching and hitting, he's just hitting most of the time and doing some throwing most of the time and doing some throwing sessions or throwing towels. some throwing most of the time and doing some throwing sessions or throwing towels this is this has been enough proof of concept i think in that now that he's he's playing more often and he's hitting every day he's hitting about as well as he had earlier in the season when he was doing both so shohio tani has proven that you can do both and i guess we'll see if like brendan mckay and the others can can do the same following his footsteps yeah well what would you do pitching wise with him I mean we're so uninformed about the state of his elbow that

our opinion hardly means anything but knowing what we do know would you shut him down would you just say it's not worth it obviously the angels aren't really playing for anything right now so you don't want to run the risk of hurting him worse. And maybe if you give him the whole offseason to recover, then maybe his elbow doesn't just go pop and he won't have to have Tommy John surgery. that he's okay if all the indications and the MRIs say that he's okay, it would be good to get him back on the mound so that he is ready to go next season and there's no wondering and worrying about that. Or would you just say, you know what, this is going to snap sometime, just get it over with and bring him back and maybe he can hit while he's recovering? I think of it a little like how I thought about Noah Syndergaard last year when he was hurt most of the season he came back and he just made a couple relief appearances

in the last week or two of the season I think the idea there was just some some peace of mind and because it was the Mets everyone assumed they were making a stupid and bad decision and for all I know maybe they were but for for Syndergaard's own sake he just wanted to know that he could let it go and pitch in a major league game before going into the offseason. It's not often that I feel comfortable deferring to authority in baseball situations. I feel like I know enough, and I feel like I can tell when teams are lying or doing something bad. But in the case of Shohei Otani, I have to think the Angels not only have the best understanding of what's happening in his elbow, but also he's the second most prized possession of theirs possession is the wrong word to use but you know what i mean and he's he's one of the most valuable assets in all

of major league baseball so i would assume the assets possessions yeah look what do you want me to say i don't know i don't know the words chattel what are the most valuable human beings that just makes it sound differently worse. No one's selling Shohei Otani, although we're all buying him. I do assume that the Angels have had probably, at this point, I don't know, 75 internal conversations about what to do with Shohei Otani, maybe 75 a week. Maybe it's all that they've talked about. And for all I know, maybe they've just wound up at paralysis by analysis. But I would assume that they've seen what happened when Garrett Richards, he didn't have Tommy John surgery until eventually he needed Tommy John surgery.

The Angels aren't dumb. They have a strong suspicion of what could happen here. But I would imagine that there's really no substitute for letting a guy throw at 100%. So if his elbow is going to go, I guess they can give him an opportunity to find that out in the final month of the season. And then if he has Tommy John, then he should still miss about the same amount of time. All right.

Shall we answer some emails? Yes. Okay. First email comes from another Jeff, and it is Angels related, and I should have done research before beginning to read it, but here we go go I'm a lifelong Angels fan and for years have kept an ever more complex spreadsheet that tracks game results

I gotta tell you Jeff that it's all on baseball reference these days you don't necessarily need to I mean it's a sure Sean Foreman appreciates having the backup there but all right one thing on that sheet that jumps out at me this year is the Angels record in two run games, which is currently four and 23. That is really bad. This seems like a outlier for a team that has hovered around 500 for most of the year.

Is this just pure weirdness or might there be some reason why a team would be awful in two run games? I guess we should check to make sure that Jeff's ever more complex spreadsheet actually has recorded this accurately. But if that is the case, 4-23 would be pretty wild because we've talked this year about one-run records and two-run records a lot in the context of the Mariners on the opposite end of the spectrum. And we've talked from time to time about how teams that should be ahead of the Mariners

are not because of their own less than fortunate luck. But I was not aware that the Angels' two-run record was quite that bad. So you didn't do research. I don't know where to do this research quickly. So we're just going to wing it. I can tell you that let's pretend that he's correct let's just assume he didn't send us a false fun fact that we'll say that the angels are indeed 4 and 23 in two run games that does strike me as being terrible now what's weird or maybe exactly what you would expect in one run games they're 20 and 13 they've

been better than average in one run game it's just the two run games where they have trouble so i would imagine that to a large extent two run games follow similar principles as one run games they're just a little less close but probably you're going to have this sort of weird random distribution another bullpen has been a problem this season for a variety of reasons maybe if you wanted to get a better understanding of the value of bullpen, you would both combine one and two-run games and say, well, the angels have actually been below average at this, and I would feel comfortable with that. It's when you split them that it just looks bizarre.

Okay, so now you didn't get to hear the pause of research, but we did some research, but it's all edited to be very seamless. So we were searching. We were able to find how you could search for margin of victory so we could confirm this statistic. The Angels are no longer 4-23 in games decided by two runs. They are a league worst 4-24. The Baltimore Orioles are next worst at 8-18. That's a winning percentage that is more than twice as good as the Angels.

The Mariners, the best in baseball, at 16-3. next worst at 8 and 18 that's a winning percentage that is more than twice as good as the angels the mariners the best in baseball at 16 and 3 the cardinals are 17 and 5 the rays are 13 and 4 so you can get a sense that this is just kind of weirdly scattered and arranged but if you're curious about all time i am i am trying to research that right now. It's a big query, but thankfully it all loads on one page. So the 1943 St. Louis Cardinals, the best team in two-run games of all time, they finished 15-2. It's an 8.82 winning percentage. The Mariners currently fourth place at 16-3, so they've got a chance.

But if you go all the way to the bottom of the page, the team with the worst ever record in two-run games is a tie between the 1956 Kansas City Athletics and the 2018 Los Angeles Angels. At 4-24, or for the Athletics 2 and 12, they are equally divisible, winning percentage of 143. So absolutely correct. This is historically dreadful. All right. Well, that's interesting and was worth the work. So check out the play index if you don't have an extremely complex spreadsheet that you keep yourself at home. So what does that mean about the Angels in general? Because they've been unfortunate and probably unlucky in two-run games,

but on the whole this season, we talked about them last week, and they weren't way out of whack with what their record should be, right? Right. So I think they're a little under their base runs record. And now there's another way of looking at this. So what we just talked about was games with a margin of exactly two runs. You can also search for games with a margin of one or two runs. In those games, the Seattle Mariners this year are still fourth place all games with a margin of one or two runs in those games the seattle mariners this year still fourth place all time with a winning percentage of 706 they are

48 into 20 in those games and then at the very bottom we have the 1935 boston braves who finished 18 and 59 in one or two run games if you narrow it if you search for one and two run games instead of just two then it's actually this year's orioles that end up being the lowest ranked of any team this year they are 19 and 41 whereas the angels skyrocket to i'm not going to keep scrolling up because i don't know where they are they're a much higher number so what i assume this says about the angels just like if we're talking about one run games and any of those narrow margin games and it's mostly about bullpens and clutch hitting and those are things that we know exist in that they do happen but also

you don't want to build a team around clutch hitting and uh and relying on the back of the bullpen because just bad things can happen to you at any moment all right next question also probably requires some research that we should have done in advance, but I like the question, which comes from Dave, who says, I've been enjoying the recent discussions surrounding baseball and our common mortality. Maybe you're both trying to improve your podcasting skills by reminding yourselves of your ultimate destination. Anyway, I am now 43 years old,

and Bartol Colon is the last remaining MLB player older than I. It will be a sad day for me when he retires. My question for you both, whom do you predict will be your Bartol Colon? Who will be the last player older than you to be playing in the major leagues? Maybe we can use the play index here, or I guess it's not the play index, but it's baseball reference. I just sent you a link. There is a page on baseball reference that has MLB players born before or after a certain date. So you can put your birthday in and it'll tell you who the closest baseball players to your birth date are.

For me, I think it's actually Nate Fryman, former Effectively Wild guest. This is obviously difficult to forecast. I don't think anyone would have said that Bartolo Colon would still be here this long into his career. I mean, there were times where it looked like he was done and he was gone for a while and had to have strange surgeries and who knows what happened. We don't ask any questions about Bartolo Colon and his longevity. We're just happy he's still here. But you wouldn't have pinpointed Bartolo Colon necessarily as the guy you expected to last until age 45. So I doubt that we will be able to figure this out. I will say, I guess it's hard to imagine baseball that doesn't have Fernando Rodney in it. So Fernando Rodney is just going to pitch until he's's 52 it's hard because he still has the exact same stuff he ever threw so it's like i don't know when his body's gonna finally stop but yeah i don't i don't know what you are looking for what are the qualities of an old player who never goes away yeah well i guess you're the last you're

looking for someone close to you in age obviously right you're looking for someone close to you in age, obviously, right? You're looking for someone who was born like the day before you were or something to get the least distance between your ages just so he can last as long as possible. So you want someone who's close to your age. And then I don't know, what kind of player lasts a long time? Is it like a lefty reliever? That's the perception, right? That you can just kind of have arm wheel travel type guy that's always been the default that you're just going to have some sort of lefty specialist some sort of randy choate who sticks around forever but we're also

getting into an era where specialists are starting to go away because people teams just don't have enough roster spots for all the relievers that they want to have on the team so i don't know if that's actually the way this is going to go and now of course if you look at last year's free agent market no one over the age of 27 got a job so that's another problem bartola cologne was the only one so okay let's narrow this down you're not going to get some sort of defensive specialist you know that's out because no one's going to be a great defender when they're 40 something years old it's unlikely you are you're probably not going to get a reliever because teams are probably going to like to keep churning through the really hard throwers you kind of burn bright and burn fast i don't know if you're going to have some sort of like 46 year old finesse

throwing reliever when you have some equivalent of that you can probably pitch in the majors when he's 19 so you're looking for maybe a starting pitcher or maybe oh it's Rafael Palmeiro. Well, yeah, I don't know whether you want, I mean, normally when you're making any bet on a long-term player, you don't want to pick a pitcher, right? But maybe this is different because, I mean, we're talking about, we're looking for the extreme outlier here. I guess it's still more likely that, I don't know, is it more likely that a pitcher will reach a really advanced stage than a hitter will? Anecdotally, it seems like that, but I don't know if that's actually the case. I mean, I guess when you have a player who gets, a position player

gets old enough, then he's unlikely to be contributing any sort of meaningful all-around value. Now I know Ichiro is still around still around you know or at least he had was recently but it's unlikely he's going to be a good base runner or defender or that much of anything so you're looking at kind of a first base dh type who's probably not playing every day whereas if you're a pitcher you just have command then someone some bad team could have to get the back of the rotation throwing four or five innings so i don't uh i'm gonna go with some sort of command pitcher that's that's as much as I can narrow it down. Yeah, I was going to say, right, when you're a starting pitcher,

you have options. You can go to the bullpen if you want and pitch an inning, and you can probably be good for a while. But I guess if you're a position player, I don't know, teams don't really have dedicated pinch hitters anymore, so that's a problem. But you do have the DH at least. You could hang around if you're a Nelson Cruz type who can just hitters anymore. So that's a problem, but you do have the DH at least you could hang around if you're a Nelson Cruz type who can just hit forever seemingly. I mean,

I don't know. I'm 31. So I'm, I'm just looking, what are you 32 or something? Yes. Okay. So I'm looking on the Fangraphs leaderboards. I'm searching just, you know, 31 to 33 because probably the highest percentage player here is going to be someone who's close to me in age. And obviously you want someone who is currently good so that he has further to fall before he is bad and out of baseball. So scanning the list of players who are close to me in age and are good and seem to have some of the characteristics of a player who would age well like Lorenzo Cain because he just seems to keep getting better in certain ways and hasn't really

declined at all and was kind of a late bloomer and is athletic and is 32 and four months and 15 days he's an option maybe I mean there's the possibility that zach granky will never want to stop playing baseball yeah he seems as good a bet as anyone to just age extremely gracefully but on the other hand keep in mind what would we have said four years ago but rich hill coming back and pitching when he's 38 so you know like you already said there's really no forecasting these things. Bartolo Colon had to disappear from the map and go get weird European surgery or something. Yussef Meripati could be the guy.

He's only 33, but he's throwing the same as ever. I promise. I feel like he's been 33 for seven years at this point. Who else? I'm scanning the list. I mean, there's like the backup catcher who lasts forever like tyler flowers for instance who just signed a one-year extension with the braves but uh he's 32 and he's a really good framer and seems like a good pitcher handler and all that maybe he could hang around sometimes there are backup Catchers who can hang around forever

I guess ideally you'd want someone who's Just like a really good hitter Because then even if he stops being able to Play a position he could still be useful In some role I don't know you seem to be focusing more on The pitchers and I'm looking more at The hitters but I think what it sounds

Like is we're just going to keep naming Pitchers over and just naming players scrolling down lists for like the next 15 minutes if we don't move on to the next question i know i just haven't even picked one not that i have any idea who will be or any predictive powers but i feel like i should name a name in the spirit of the question here i'll go with who sounds like they don't want to not be in baseball anymore who just really doesn't want to be around a family that's why bartola colonna's playing he's got two families to worry about yeah there's a lot of people to support mike fires with his new pitching plan

this is impossible i don't know i want to name, but I just, I don't even know what the criteria are really. All right. I'm going to answer for both of us. It's Yusmer Apati. Okay, please do. Yusmer Apati will be pitching forever. I don't know exactly at what age he will retire, but it will be in the mid-40s. He has the deception going for him, and that's something that seems like it should age well. No one can see the ball coming out of his hand, so that will continue to be the case, presumably. So, yeah, all right. Lorenzo Cain, my position player, and Yusmero Petit, our pitcher.

I guess what we didn't adjust for is the fact that, like, 10 years from now or something, the rosters could be completely different. There could be twice as many designated hitters. There could be an extra bench spot. So there could and would be more room for some guy who can just kind of hit from the Left or right side yeah that's true

Well we have our answers it's whose mere petite No matter what happens in the future of baseball Alright question from Xander we answered Anything like this email question for you has There been any attempt to use expected Woba instead of Woba To create an expected war stat

Obviously this stat would show what the player's value should be rather than how much value he's actually added, but it would be useful as an indicator of talent. What are your thoughts on this? Which player would be at the top of this leaderboard that's different from the current leaderboard? So we talk about expected weighted on base average, which is just based on stat cast metrics launch ankle and exit velocity and we use that as a means of saying for at least some players that maybe they're hitting in hard luck or they're getting lucky and they should have been better based on their quality of contact so in theory yeah you could just swap in expected wobah for actual wobah and

you would get a new offensive run total that is just based on what the hitter should have done instead of what he actually did. Yeah, a little bit. But for the fact that expected Woba runs into trouble when you have a guy who's really fast or really slow because they will end up under or over their marks, Kendris Morales has a much better expected Woba

than actual Woba because he is slow as molasses, whereas all the slap hitters, someone like Alex Smith or Dee Gordon, they're going to have very better expected Woba than actual Woba because he is slow as molasses whereas all the slap hitters someone like Alex Smith or Dee Gordon they're going to have very low expected Wobas because they just don't make that good contact relative to other players because they don't necessarily need to Harrison Bader has an expected Woba that's something like 299 I think and part of that is I think he's playing over his head as a hitter but also he's just really fast and when you were really fast you can get away with hitting the ball worse spraying ground balls so until there's something inserted that controls for speed which maybe that's not very hard to do maybe it's very easy to do i don't know but until that exists at least then i think it doesn't really it doesn't really

function because you're going to have really slow players being overrated and really fast players being underrated yeah and it's just kind of a question of how abstract you want your war to be, how many factors you want to have the expected production rather than the actual production. You're just getting further and further away from the results on the field. Maybe you're getting closer and closer to the player's true talent during that season. You could make that case at least. So I would look at that if it were a number that were available, at least if speed were added into that equation.

As you're saying, I know that teams have done that with their own internal metrics, so there's no reason that it couldn't be done publicly. And, yeah, it would be a useful thing to look at, but it would probably remain something that only nerds like us would actually care about. Yeah, that sounds about right. All right. You have a stat blast?

They'll take a data set 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. Yeah, it's short and stupid, but I was curious about something. I've been thinking about strength of schedule and stuff lately, and I was thinking about how easy the Indians' schedule is this season. And there are a variety of ways that you can look at that, but if you look at baseball reference, for example, they have a strength of schedule metric that shows how many runs per game above or below average

a team's average opponents are. The Indians' average opponent this season has been minus 0.4 runs per game. That's the worst opponent in baseball by a decent margin because the indians play in one of the worst divisions in recent memory and they are of course that division's good team so i was curious you can't search for that strength of schedule all time on baseball reference but one thing you can do is split by how often you play against teams who are 500 or better and how often you play against teams who are not so i was just kind of curious so i went through all of baseball references history it goes back to 1908 i think

and i was just looking for every single team and i i sorted them i calculated their rates of games played against teams 500 or better this will stand as a proxy for tough schedules or not and the 1916 washington senators played 86.2 percent of the games against teams who were 500 or better the only team they played who was not at least that good was whatever the name of the team was in philadelphia that year that was terrible was that the athletics yeah yeah so those a's i think finished something like 36 and 117. They were dreadful. But those Washington Senators, 86% of the games against good teams. If you're looking at more recent years, for example, in 1991, the New York Yankees, Baltimore Orioles, and Cleveland Indians all played 84% of their games against teams who were 500 or better.

That was a very difficult division that year, I guess. But if you want to look at it on the other side the team let's uh let's just go with uh we'll we'll we'll count down a little bit 1994 houston astros played 27 of the games against 500 teams or better that's fifth lowest at 26 the 2017 washington nationals 25 the 1918 Washington Senators, at 23% the 1994 Kansas City Royals, and at 20.4% of games played against teams 500 or better, the very lowest rate in Major League history, the 2017 Houston Astros, who went 18 and 15 against teams who were at least 500. I am going to guess, therefore, that there were no such

teams in their division. I'm not looking at the standings, but the Astros, in that sense, had it pretty easy. A year ago, I was expecting this year's Indians to be lower than they are. They are around 32%, which is very low. That's not a rate for anyone to be, I don't know, proud of. It is the lowest rate in baseball this year. The Indians are at 32%. The Tigers are at 40%. The White Sox are at 43%. And this year's toughest schedule by this metric alone belongs to the Miami Marlins with 74% of the games played against teams 500 or better. So this is all to confirm what you already knew.

The Indians have had a very, very tremendously easy season this year. And in their 42 games against teams 500 or better, they are 18 and 24. Wow, that's a good one. Yeah, the 1916 A's, if you aren't aware of them, go read up on them. They were one of the original fire sale teams. They just kind of sold all their good players. They'd been a dead ball dynasty. And as you mentioned, they finished 36 and 117. And Connie Mack went on to manage them for 34 more years. So didn't exactly result in him just learned on a Yankees blog that David Robertson has some interesting bonuses in his contract, including for starting the All-Star game and winning a gold glove, as well as for finishing anywhere between first and fifth in MVP voting. Hypothetically, how good would David Robertson have to be to meet any of

these awards? I love unrealistic contract incentives because I just am always imagining his agent like just being a stickler, you know, man, we're really playing hardball here. Fine, we'll give you this contract, we'll settle, but you have to put in the clause that if david robertson starts the all-star game then he gets something because there is some world in which that could possibly happen how how could that happen aside from like a mass extinction event where david robertson is just the the best remaining major league pitcher in the world how how could any of these things happen well so it was starting the All-Star game? Starting the All-Star game.

That's the incentive? Yeah, okay. So the manager is Kevin Cash, and David Robertson is used as the opener in the All-Star game. So, I mean, in a sense, it makes some sense. You could imagine that because everyone is basically throwing one inning anyway in the All-Star game, it shouldn't really matter. Now, I know there's, like, honor in having the title

of being the guy who starts the All-Star game, but, I mean, independent ofstar game it shouldn't really matter now i know there's like honor in having the title of being the guy who starts the all-star game but i mean independent of that doesn't really matter now as far as the gold gloves concerned i don't know much about pitcher gold gloves but i can't imagine a reliever has ever or will ever win it uh so we're left left with what was it one through five first through fifth mvp finish yeah and that i mean i don't know if it could happen today it has happened clos. Closers have won that award. So, I mean, Dennis Eckersley won the Cy Young and the MVP in the same year. That was a bad decision by the BBWA. And I'd like to think currently a closer most of the time, at least, but he has been and could be again. So I guess that's what it would take. Just David Robertson having an amazing season, not allowing a run, being a closer all year. And I mean, if he, you know, had like, I don't know, broke the Francisco Rodriguez save record that Edwin Diaz is chasing.

If he did both of those things in the same season, he'd get a top five MVP vote maybe. Oh, was it just a vote or was it a finish? Oh, well, yeah, finish. Yeah. But I think if he were on a playoff team, it's conceivable. So let's go over this real quick. So Fernando Rodney in 2012 2012 when he had 48 saves finished fifth in the cy young race 13th in the mvp now eric gagne not enough saves 2003 eric

gagne had maybe the great relief season of all time yeah he finished with a 1.20 era over 82.1 innings 55 saves he i don't know if he blew any saves he probably didn't he won the cy young but he finished sixth in the mvp so for us to answer this question we're kind of going to have to see how blake trinan and josh hater end up doing in this year's mvp voting and i suspect they will get some down ballot support but they will not get that much support blake trinan will probably end up if he finishes as well as he's pitching he's going to get some kind of weird al cy young push support i'm sure we'll see some stuff written about that but otherwise it's the all-star game one i have the easiest time seeing the mvp one would require like a dramatic shift

in the way people vote and in the way david robertson is used he'd basically have to not allow a run over six months or something like that. And as for the gold glove, if someone out there knows the history of pitchers winning gold gloves as relievers, please let me know. But it's so hard to envision unless he had like, I don't know, five web gems. So the actual incentive here, he has a clauses contract that if he's just an all-star, he gets 15,000. And he was not an all-star, but he could have been. He has been in the past. $15,000 is, I mean, that's not much money to David Robertson,

so he probably doesn't care all that much. But the funny thing is that if he makes the all-star team, he gets $15,000. If he starts the all-star game, he gets $25,000. It feels like he should get $15 million if he starts the All-Star game. It should be a multiple of many times, not less than twice as much. I am searching. There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to the list of Gold Glove Award winners at Pitcher. I've done a Control-F for Relief or Reliever.

No such results. Nothing's coming up. I don't think a reliever has ever done this do you know who won the pitcher gold gloves last year you the league I have no idea is it did Mark Burley win I mean it seems like he's just still wins probably I don't know Dallas Keuchel does he win those things he won two years in a row in 2015 and 2016 last year apparently Marcus Stroman won good for him also I was wrong Keuchel also won in 2014 three in a row in 2015 and 2016. Last year, apparently, Marcus Stroman won. Good for him. Also, I was wrong. Keichel also won in 2014.

Three in a row. Did you know that Zach Rickey has won four in a row? Because I didn't. Well, no, definitely not. And between 1990 and 2008, every single National League Pitcher Gold Glove Award went to Greg Maddox except one. In 2003, Mike Hampton won the gold glove for the Atlanta Braves, pitching for Greg Maddux's familiar team.

I don't remember. Greg Maddux wasn't hurt in 2003, was he? What was Mike Hampton, what was Mike freaking Hampton doing that year to take a gold glove from Greg Maddux? In glove from Greg Maddox. In 2003, Greg Maddox started 36 games. Yeah.

And he had a 3-9-6 ERA. And that's just the one. And in 2003, Mike Hampton won a gold. Why would he? Did he have some spectacular play that was just on the highlight reels all year? Or did Maddox have some famous flub that year that everyone thought of? Did he make a bunch of errors that season or something? What?

That is really weird. You would have to do something special to snap that streak, you would think, because it's like automatic at that point. Maddox had two errors in 2003, and Hampton had one. That also means absolutely nothing to me and looking at the I did okay okay there's defensive run saved for this I'm gonna have to do yes because this is already there so defensive run saved leader for 2003 was Levon Hernandez with eight. Mike Hampton had five, which ranked him ninth in all of baseball. Greg Maddox was 14th in all baseball with plus three. So I guess Hampton deserved it more,

but he wasn't the best and he was barely better than Maddox. I don't know. This is weird. We should do an oral history of the 2003 pitcher gold glove voting to figure out what people were thinking. Here's the problem. We would track down all the people who voted and we'd call them and they'd be like, what? I don't remember that. Yeah. Which one did I vote for? So Mike Hampton had one. That was his fifth consecutive year winning the silver slugger for pitchers. I guess was this back in the era when people were like, the gold glove is an offensive award? So maybe Mike Hampton just finally hit well enough to put him over the top.

But then what happened the next year? Why did Mike Hampton not win again? He threw 172 innings the following season. I'm done. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break. We will mull this over. If anyone

has any answers, please let us know. And we will be back in just a moment with Michael Mountain. Chewing gum and safety pins I would hold me in at the seams My pegs are loose My screw's too tightly wound To get in tune But I still try Sometimes on those golden summer afternoons So take a trip wherever your conscience has to roam. It's much too hard to try to live a life at home.

All right, so we are joined now by effectively wild listener and triumphant returning guest Michael Mountain, who completed his MLB road trip, 30 ballparks in 36 days instead of 35. his MLB road trip, 30 ballparks in 36 days instead of 35. Slacker, Michael, you couldn't have made it in 35. You set out to do something. You've got to follow through on your plan. What happened? I did the best I could, Ben, but Mother Nature had other ideas. After four and a half months, or depending on how you look at it, possibly four and a half years of planning this trip, I made it to my first ballpark. I made it to Yankee Stadium on Saturday, July 21st, with the intention of heading down to the Phillies game for the nightcap that same evening. And in about the seventh inning, I got a tweet from the Phillies saying that rain had washed

away their game that night. So after about two hours of execution, the carefully planned schedule went a bit awry. But fortunately, I was able to regroup. I went to the Phillies game the next day instead of Nationals and switched a few things around and made it up on the back end and managed to return back triumphantly to Baltimore in only one day longer than expected. Yeah, and then you had to turn right around and leave on a work trip. Yes. No rest for the weary. But it was an inauspicious start weather-wise, but I guess everything kind of cooperated from that point on,

and you made it to every first pitch, right? You were at least technically in the ballpark. So I would say it's a rousing success. I was in the ballpark for every pitch of every game, including the Nationals makeup, which was also marred by a lengthy rain delay and ended up finishing five minutes after midnight. So how many notes or I guess statistics did you keep as you were going along? Obviously you're going to have memories from every ballpark but in terms of observations that you had or different logistics

different ease of access any of those things, how much did you record versus how much did you just kind of keep in your head? Well, one of my daily devotions at any ball game that I go to is keeping a scorecard so obviously I have all of those points of record,

which made it very, made a lot easier to gather some post-trip statistics that I did prepare to come on with today a bit. A lot of, you know, other miscellaneous observations and notes just about transportation or concession options or whatever it might be. You know, I had a co-pilot for a good chunk of the middle leg of the trip, and that was a nice opportunity to spend some time not behind the wheel and taking some time jotting down notes and solidifying those memories before they got washed away in the tide of other ballparks that I went to. So I'm not going to say that I had perfect recall of everything that I went through that entire 36 days. But I like to

think that I gathered enough information to make a pretty solid reckoning of my travels. It was fun for us to follow along because you posted in various places each stage of the trip, and you met up with a lot of other listeners. How many approximately Effectively Wild listeners did you rendezvous with at some point during this trip? Well, I was only at about five or six games by myself. Now, a good chunk of that, probably about half of that was Effectively Wild meetups. And about the other half of it was people that I had already pre-planned to meet up with outside of this wonderful community that you guys have curated over the last several years. But no, the response from the Facebook group and the general Effectively Wild community has been great. I had a lot of – I felt a lot of support

from the folks that I – not only the folks that I was able to meet up with along the way, but also just from supportive comments and on the Facebook group and on my Twitter feed and just, you know, even random people that I ran into at the ballpark, you know, responses generally fell into one of two camps, if not both. Either the I'm incredibly jealous and this is, you know, something that's on my bucket list to do before I die, or you're completely insane. Why would you ever try to do this in such a short span of time? And I can empathize with both the viewpoints. so how much pressure did you feel along the way obviously the goal was to see every ballpark and you were able to see every ballpark but of course if you talk to people who frequent each ballpark there is going to a game at each park and then there are the the best places to

sit at each park there are the signature items to eat and or drink there are all the different experiences how much pressure did you feel to get a sense of all of those different signature items to eat and or drink. There are all the different experiences. How much pressure did you feel to get a sense of all of those different signature items versus the fact that, you know, concessions, for example, at a baseball game are extremely expensive, especially when you're going to 30 different ballparks in 36 days. So how much were you able to experience? Well, I knew that I would have a much better time if I tried to get some sort of local sampling than if I simply went for a hot dog and a Budweiser at 30 stadiums. While it might have been cheaper, it would have been a significantly less rewarding experience. So I did try to solicit as much local advice or

advice from other ballpark chasers as I could. I had quite the spreadsheet helping me out with tabs for my overall itinerary, what stadium food I wanted to get, what local craft beers, places to stop for food on the road, where I should park. I had so much information that was offered to me that really helped make the trip feel a lot more authentically local and maybe some of the things that a regular ballpark rookie first time at any given stadium might have overlooked or not been aware of. So I did my best, but I'm certain that I didn't get everything. So maybe there are some return trips possible in the future. So you covered, what was it, 17,000 miles in total?

And did that take a toll on your vehicle, on your body? Did you hit a wall at some point? What was kind of the point during this trip when you were most strung out? So if the records I kept were reasonably accurate, I ended up with a total of 16,935 miles driven in 36 days. I drove through 34 states plus the District of Columbia and Ontario. I stopped for gas 49 times. And if there was a wall, the one thing that I think worked out pretty well with this itinerary was the fact that I preloaded or moved as early as possible a lot of the West Coast Stadium so that I could kind of get out there, do those big long drives between, you know, say

Seattle and Oakland, and get kind of those hard driving days out of the way as early in the trip as possible so that I wasn't doing that when I was already exhausted from being on the road for three weeks. That said, the one leg that was possibly the most challenging was leaving Atlanta after having been to both of the Florida stadiums already and having to head back west to pick up the Houston Astros, which for some reason I did not visit directly after going to the Rangers game. So I went across Texas from Phoenix, then I went to Florida and Atlanta, and then I went back to Texas. And that was right after I had dropped off my dad, who was driving that about a week and a half or so with me in Atlanta with his brother.

And so I was back on the road by myself. I was going a direction that I had already been. And it was about three, three and a half weeks into the trip. And that day of driving was probably the most, I don't want to say frustrating, but at times had thoughts of, is this really how I wanted to spend this month, especially in the Texas heat in August. But after I made it back from Texas, I went to St. Louis and then got back up into the upper Midwest and Northeast where the stadiums are a little bit closer together. And from that point, it felt like I was driving downhill all day every day because I was only doing 350 miles instead of 650 miles in a day. Oh, God. So I've been reading a biography of Reinhold Messner, just historic all-time extreme alpinist, excellent high-achieving mountain climber.

And this is in his retirement. He was referring to some of his experiences planning trips. He would always go summit the next trip planning for the next trip because the experience that you plan for and that you then have seems to become almost almost blasé after the fact which is all to get to the point of asking you put untold amounts of man hours and sweat equity into planning this trip making it happen and getting your hopes up and anticipating exactly what it would be like every single place and now it's done so as you on it, do you reflect on it as an incredible achievement of not only tolerance and durability, but logistics? Or is it now just a thing that you did,

and you don't really know how to talk about it and feel about it? I'm not sure I've quite recovered enough from the afterglow to have any sort of real overall perspective on that, especially since, as Ben mentioned, I am actually speaking to you from the road again. I'm at a hotel room in Cincinnati where I'm traveling for work this week. So I think maybe after I am back at home and settled in for a few more days even, it may start to feel a specific way or another to me. I will definitely say that your point about the work that goes into the logistics is very true. I mentioned this the last time I spoke with you guys about seven months ago or so, that this really started just as an

exercise in planning and logistics and software development and programming skill. And it really only when I felt comfortable enough that I wanted to have a proof of concept and show that the work I had put in would result in something that could actually be done. So there's definitely an aspect of my brain is kind of thinking about what things I might want to plan next. And again, thinking about what things I might want to plan next. And again, no clear sense that that would be something that I would actually do. But, you know, I do definitely tend to bounce off of one great planning thing that I'm working on and then end up working on something else. So I'm sure that another idea will present itself to me in short order. We should talk about the baseball.

What was the most exciting game that you saw, the most exciting moment that you saw, most exciting player that you saw? Any moments on the field that stand out among the many, many, many moments? Yeah, there was definitely some baseball on the trip. So in terms of excitement, probably the – I will say there are two most exciting games. One of them went to extra innings, and then I will also have a non-extra inning category for – because I think extra innings are a little bit of a cop-out because they're naturally always exciting. But the – To a certain point. True.

Especially if you've got to get to another ballpark the next day. Fortunately, the longest game I had was 12 innings. That was in Texas at the Ranger Stadium. They took the loss in 12. That was the day before the start that knocked Felix Hernandez out of the Mariners rotation. So I saw a good outing from Wade LeBlanc and eventually a game that was won by the Mariners in 12. I also saw a walk-off Colton Wong home run at Bush Stadium in St. Louis, which was a game that was also punctuated by some more Matt Carpenter heroics, unsurprisingly, and a gutty outing from Miles Michaelis, who went seven innings, gave up two home runs, but only allowed four, and they won in the ninth.

So those are probably the two most exciting games on the trip. The least thrilling game from a leverage index perspective was apparently the Braves at SunTrust. That was Kevin Gossman's first home start for Atlanta, though, and he pitched an absolute gem, which as an Orioles fan, I certainly appreciated. So I can't possibly say that that was the worst game I saw. Was the whole idea behind the trip to just make yourself watch baseball that wasn't the Orioles? That was definitely a serendipitous part of having it happen this year. One of the things I looked up was what the Orioles record was during the time that I was away. And in the 36 days that I was out of the state of Maryland,

the Orioles won nine games. One of which I was at because they were in Cleveland when I saw them beat the Indians on Jim Tomey number retirement and Alex Cobb through a complete game. So I don't know how comfortable you are with the idea of designating favorites and least favorites, given that you only got to have little slices of experiences in every ballpark and, you know, the game itself biases your own experience. But I mean, you can't we can't have you want to not ask you what you thought. I don't know how many different things you've considered ranking or having experience, but if you've got favorites and least favorites, please air them out. This is the time. Yeah, well, there's definitely a lot of

categories you can grade on. I'm not sure that I'm, again, quite qualified based on what is often a single visit. Some of the parks I've been to before, but the majority of them I have seen once, so I'm not sure been to before, but the majority of them I have seen once. So I'm not sure I would entirely feel comfortable ranking all of them on a 1 to 30 scale in every single category. But I did attempt to take out of the massive notes that I amassed, get some overall feelings and perspective on a number of them. So there's a large group of stadiums in the middle of a pack that I don't really feel are separated by any large extent, especially on the basis of one viewing. But there are about six parks that stand out to me on the positive side, and let's

say two parks that stand out to me on the negative side. So San Francisco is probably the nicest game experience that I had overall. You know, it's an aesthetically nice ballpark. The fans love it. It's easy to get to. The ballpark game day experience is just wonderful. And the game I went to was exciting, well attended, and most importantly, short. The other parks that were maybe a notch below there, Coors Field in Denver, Safeco Field in Seattle, and the two that speak to me most personally, obviously,

Oriole Park in Baltimore and also PNC Park in Pittsburgh, which is a, I feel, sort of a sister stadium to Camden Yards. Petco was also very nice. I will say that the Florida stadiums did not do particularly well in my rankings. The only thing that they really had going for them was that the games were under three hours, but the Marlins got absolutely shelled. The game in Tampa was nice because the Orioles were playing, but that's about all I can say for that. Oh, and my tickets were free. What other stats did you keep on the trip about anything you saw, if there's anything you want to mention? Well, again, as an Oriole fan, it was nice to see some former Orioles, especially recent former Orioles. Obviously, Kevin Gossman, as I

mentioned, great first home start for Atlanta. Nick Marcakis had two doubles and three RBI in that game as well. I saw two games for Jonathan Scope from Milwaukee. And in the most serendipitous move of all, by the time the Dodgers got back from their three-series road trip to start the second half, I was in LA for Manny Machado's first home game with the Dodgers, where he hit a home run in the ninth inning, got a nice ovation, wearing Orioles gear, and people were coming up to me all night just saying how excited they were to have him and how hopeful they were that he would help them succeed in October. Although at this point, we'll have to see if they make it to October 1st, I suppose. Saw a couple good pitching matchups, John Gray against Charlie Morton in Colorado, where John Gray outdueled him in seven innings of one hit ball. He retired the first 10 batters and only gave up an RBI double to Jose Altuve. Edwin Diaz got two saves. Noah Sindergaard threw six innings of six strikeout, one walk ball in New York against the Giants.

New York against the Giants. Matt Chapman made an excellent defensive play in Oakland. David Price had probably the best start that I saw all trip. He threw eight scoreless Indians against Cleveland with seven strikeouts and no walks. A couple of teams that I saw repeatedly, the Tigers obviously went 0-3 in three games with a negative 11 run differential. The Phillies also went 0-3 with a negative 16 run differential. And I saw the Mariners four times. Kyle Seeger and Gene Segura combined for 36 plate appearances with five strikeouts, two walks, two double plays grounded into, and a caught stealing, and five singles. So that's an OPS of 341. The Mariners were outscored by eight runs in those four games. So naturally they went two and two. Okay. I was going to guess four and O. That's what they do. Yeah, pretty much.

in this segment, but I don't know if I can avoid it here. Are you comfortable saying roughly how much it costs a person to do this kind of trip? For anyone who's wondering, can I afford this? If I can stomach it, can I afford it? Can you give us some sense? For anyone who's playing along at home, there are multiple reasons why I have been referring to this as a bucket list experience, because I can definitely not afford to do it more than once. I mean, there are certainly things you can do. I have done some back of the envelope calculations. I haven't tallied up any final totals or anything, but based on my pre-trip estimates and seeing how that played out along the way. If you are not hesitant about having somewhat substandard lodging and not the best seats in every stadium,

and especially if you happen to find a few generous individuals who are giving of their time or tickets or lodging, I would estimate that on a shoestring budget, a trip like this could be done for maybe $7,000, maybe $7,500. Now, if you think about that in the context of a five-week vacation, it maybe sounds a little more appetizing, but it certainly doesn't feel like a vacation when you are driving, as I said, almost 17,000 miles. So someone who plays full-time in the minor leagues could afford to do this once if they didn't pay for anything else in their life. That sounds right. I guess they already kind of do a ballpark tour.

Yeah, just, you know, this is basically, if you think about it, it's because, of course, ballplayers are only traveling once a series. And a lot of that time, again, if they do a homestand, it's at home, right? So if you think about just the number of trips between stadiums, this is essentially a half season's worth of travel condensed into about a month. So it's more traveling than MLB players do. And obviously, they are also doing a lot of that travel in the air. And even if they are on the road, they are obviously not driving a vehicle. air. And even if they are on the road, they're obviously not driving a vehicle. Yeah. And speaking of vehicle, I don't know exactly what you drive or what you're doing,

but based on 49 stops at gas stations, I estimate you spent between $2,000 and $2,500 on gasoline and loan. So that's that. That's enough math right there for anyone wondering how affordable this is. So you obviously have talked about the stadiums that stood out, the stadiums that didn't get some signature items. So was there something that you ate along the way that kind of blew you away either in a good way or I guess worse in a bad way? Well, the most memorable concession option was definitely at the Oakland Coliseum. They offer fried crickets, which have the wings and legs and I'm not sure about the head. I didn't look that closely. Basically, it's a deep fried insect torso with some flavoring. So they're really just like crunchy little protein bites. They weren't bad. I did tell the gentleman that I went to the game with that I would need a few beers before he could convince me to try some. But they were probably, honestly, one of the healthier things that I had along the way. Other things that stood out, Texas, of course, does some interesting things with their food choices. Globe Life Park offers at a stand,

helpfully titled State Fair, F-A-R-E, an item called the Dilly Dog, which is a battered, The Dilly Dog, which is a battered, fried dill pickle stuffed with a jumbo beef hot dog on a stick. It's essentially a corn dog that includes a pickle in between the corn and the dog. Back up. Hold on. Say all of those things again in the same order. All right. The Rangers Ballpark offers an item called the Dilly Dog. The Rangers Ballpark offers an item called the Dilly Dog. They sell it at one location in the Lower Deck, as far as I can tell, with other state fair type food.

It is a battered, fried dill pickle on a stick, and inside the pickle is a jumbo beef hot dog. So did they hollow out the pickle? I'm not entirely sure how they made it. The pickle is, you know, maybe a quarter inch thick. So it's not, you know, it's not very pickly. You know, a good chunk of the flavor has been fried out of it. But you can definitely tell it when you bite into it that there is some pickle in there. Sounds fantastic. in there. Sounds fantastic. So at the end of this process, did you still like baseball? Was there any point of the game where you were enjoying this or were you counting down the innings until you could, I mean, just how did the, if you were going to graph your level of enjoyment of the baseball itself throughout this trip, what roughly would it look

like? Is it flat or is it just a straight line down or is it up and down all the way? I think it's a little bit of a sine wave. There was definitely some lower points than others. There were some parks that either I had been to before and wasn't particularly enthused with, or just teams that I knew were not going to be good. I saw the Tigers, Royals, and White Sox all play each other at their stadiums. So none of those three games were particularly appealing to me. As I mentioned, toward the second half, there were one or two spots where just the knowledge of how much more driving I still had to do was a bit daunting. But again, a bad day at the ballpark is only was it some parks that were closer together, but also some parks that I had been to before and kind of knew what to expect and didn't have to feel too pressured to get a good first impression or get a complete picture of what

they were like, right? I've been to PNC before. I've been to Fenway before. I've been to Citi Field before. I've obviously been to Camden Yards many times. So, you know, a lot of those kind of felt a little bit more relaxed on a number of fronts, not just the travel required to get there, but also the pressure to have a complete game day experience. So would you recommend it? I know that's kind of a broad question and there are people who probably just aren't in a position for any number of reasons to realistically do this. But if you are young and unattached and have a job that allows you to take this time off and afford the gas money and all the rest of it, would you say that this is a valuable experience for anyone who does not already have some semblance of an idea of what they're getting into. It is certainly not something to be undertaken if you don't like road trips or if you do not have – if you haven't spent lots of time in a car by yourself or if you're going with other people, spend some time with those people in an enclosed space first.

I strongly recommend that because you will learn things about each other that will alter the tenor of your excursion dramatically, more than you might expect. Yeah. But if you if you know, if you really know what you're getting into, not just think you know what you're getting into, and we got some diner food in New York, which was fun. And at the time, you said that you were hoping against hope that you would somehow get a foul ball in the last five games or so that you had ahead of you. Odds were against it, obviously. But I saw a post in the Facebook group that you somehow got a foul ball in your last game. Did that happen? How did that happen? You forgot to mention that you also defaced my copy of The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, but we'll skip over that one. Yes, somehow, odds against odds, in the very 30th game at Oriole Park, my good friend James, who had done a good chunk of the trip with me and happened to be sitting

to my left next to a block of empty seats, got a foul ball his direction at Oriole Park off of a left-handed Yankee hitter. I will decline to mention his name because I don't particularly want to make any of the Yankees feel better about themselves. And was kind enough to gift it to me as a wonderful memento and something that he knew I had been hoping for all trip. So that, in a sense did definitely make it feel complete on the very last day. Well, we applaud you on completing the trip. You had an ambitious goal and you achieved it. And I will say it was a lot more relaxing to follow along via the photos you posted in the Facebook group than to actually drive 17,000 miles. But I am glad that you did it

and it was fun for all of us to follow along. So well done. Congratulations. Thank you. And thanks so much to all the Effectively Wild listeners who met up with me along the way or offered well wishes or offered to hook me up with tickets or lodging.

There are too many of you to name and I'm sure I would forget someone even if I tried. So just know that I appreciate all of your support, and I definitely felt it along the way. Yeah, and if anyone is not deterred by your words of warning and decides to do this themselves, I assume you are available for consultations and maybe can make the code available somewhere to plan a future road trip. Absolutely. I had a number of requests to open source the software behind the Trip Finder, so I will be throwing that up as soon as I have a spare moment back. Okay.

Well, good talking to you, Michael. Thank you. And I don't know, take it easy for the next month or so. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, guys. Take care. All right. Thanks for having me on, guys. Take care. All right. I like baseball art, not necessarily the Norman Rockwell kind,

although that's fine too, but kind of quirky and creative and original art. We had Will Johnson, the artist slash musician, on episode 1104 to talk to him. One of our listeners, Scott Brady, does really great Dragon Ball Z-themed baseball art in our Facebook group and recently rekindled his love of art and even had a show,

which was great to see. We will take a quick break now, and then I will be back with another new and original baseball artist, Angelina, who is the creator of Acceptably Drawn Baseball at Draw A Walk. When we were on each other's hands, when we started out on the road And there's gas in my tank and I've still got a way to go Another hotel, it's time to check out soon As I look around the room

I think of all the friends I've left behind on the road So if you've been on Baseball Twitter in the last week, and who hasn't, you have probably seen, or hopefully seen, the account acceptably drawn baseball which is at the handle at draw a walk the way this works is that people will send photos and suggestions and then the person who created the account who is joining me now angelina she will convert those photos into a doodle that she creates herself and then she will post the doodle next to the photo, and everyone is happier, and the world is a better place.

And this has been gaining popularity quickly, and it's a lot of fun, so I wanted to have her on to talk about the origin story. So, Angelina, welcome. Hi, Ben. Thanks for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. So, first, start by telling me a little bit about yourself. What's your baseball background, and what is your art background?

I've been watching baseball since 2013, so I'm a pretty newish fan, fan of the Dodgers. And for drawing, I've been doing it pretty much as long as I can remember. I started drawing digitally, so like on my tablet since middle school. I'm 22 years old now. And yeah, hopefully I'll still be continuing to do it, but I don't know. Yeah, I hope so too. How did you get into baseball in the first place? Was it through a friend or family member or did you just decide to start watching and get sucked in? A friend actually took me to my first Dodgers game. And from there on, I just got sucked in. You see, what about the sport appeals to you in particular? I was never really into sports before.

So I think now it's all about the pace of play. But for me, it's perfect the way it is. Well, yeah, I guess you need time to draw certain scenes, right? You don't want it to move too quickly. So how did you get the idea for this? Was it inspired by other Twitter accounts? Because I've seen some accounts where people will offer to, say, sketch someone's face if they send them their avatar or something. And then I assume they're just

bombarded with thousands of avatars and they never actually catch up. So was one of those the inspiration for this? Yeah. So there's a pretty popular Twitter account called Poor Legion Cat. Just really simple. It's pretty much set up the same way that I do it. People will send them pictures of cats and she'll draw it. And my friend just one day, she sent me one of those pictures, one of those tweets from that account. And the thought just popped into my mind of what if I did it with baseball? I hadn't been drawing regularly, so I thought it would be nice to do it as motivation, do maybe one a day. And then it just took off. Right. Yeah.

So when did you actually start it? It was at some point earlier this month, right? Yeah, it was the 1st of August. And I tried to scroll back through your feed to see what the very first image was. And am I correct in saying that it was Mike Trout? It was Cole Calhoun. Ah, okay. Cole Calhoun. Well, that's valid too. But it seems like you do return to a lot of players who are muses of mine too. You've done Yasiel Puig. You've done Rich Hill. You've done Shohei Otani. Are there certain players? I mean, you're in the LA area, I guess, so you kind of focus on players out there, but

are there certain guys that you keep returning to? Some of the Angels ones, like Otani, I've returned to because they're personal requests from my friends, and then for Dodgers players like Rich Hill, they're personal favorite of mine, and then he's pretty big amongst Dodgers Twitter this year. Yeah. Just like getting a lot of requests for them. Yeah. So you put out a call, I guess you said, just send me suggestions. And then how did this build up? Was there a certain person who sent a tweet that got this a lot of attention or how many requests have come in approximately? My friend, Brian, he happened to retweet one of my drawings. It was one of Andre Ethier the day he was retiring. So that got really big within Dodgers Twitter.

And that started circulating. So most of my followers at first were Dodgers fans. So I was getting a lot of those requests. I think I've gotten around 40 of them done, most of them Dodger stuff. And I probably have like 40 to 50 requests that I haven't gotten to yet. Yeah. So what is the process for creating a doodle? How do you go about it and how long does it take?

I just pull up the photo on my phone and then I'll set it right next to my tablet. I have a drawing program called Paint Tool Sci and I use my Surface Pro 2 with a pen to draw. It takes maybe 30 minutes for the rough sketches that you see. And then for the ones that have neater lines, that probably adds another 30 minutes. Wow. So that's interesting because you would think, I mean, they're really well done, but they look almost kind of dashed off like something that you would doodle while you're on the phone or something. Like I'm sure people think, oh, it's just like, you know, scratching something out on a cocktail napkin or something. But there's actually a lot of work and planning that goes into this. Yeah, I know it looks pretty low effort, but I try to match the picture pretty closely.

Bit of a, what's the word? Perfectionist. Well, that's interesting because it's not like you're trying to perfectly replicate the photo. I mean, it's not like you're going for photo realism. There would almost be no point in doing that, I guess, because we already have the photo. And there's something really charming about the doodle version of the photo. Even if it's the same scene, I guess there are little choices that you make about how to represent something or not represent something. It's just very satisfying to see the image in doodle form. And I don't know, maybe it's just because it's kind of magical and fun whenever anyone can draw anything. At least I think that because I can't draw at all. So if I see someone in real life just sketching a plant or something and it looks like the plant, I am amazed.

So I guess it's partly that, but it's partly, I think, some creative choices that you're making. Even if it is kind of intended to replicate the photo, it never looks exactly exactly like the photo it just sort of distills the essence of the photo somehow yeah so i had really no idea why it was getting so popular but my friends pretty much said the same thing that you did like yeah the whole minimal aspect of it and which parts like which people or the scenery that i choose to draw um and i noticed like a lot of the the popular comic artists on twitter also have like a simple art style and i really don't have the ability to do anything beyond that so yeah your your tweets are very self-deprecating especially on your personal personal account, I guess. But I noticed that you set up a place where people can donate. And on that page, it's called Poorly Drawn Baseball. And on

the actual account, it's called Acceptably Drawn Baseball. So I guess you upgraded your abilities at some point from poorly to acceptably. Yeah, I think I put out a tweet a while ago saying that I was going to change it. I was getting a lot of encouragement, so I figured I'd change it. It's good for my mental health. So would you accept any suggestion, or are there certain types of images that you won't do, or certain types that appeal to you most strongly, or that you're really hoping that people will send? I like to pick the ones that look like they would be fun to draw just because maybe the facial expression or something that was going on with the game.

I've gotten a lot of just like regular batting poses and some even personal requests from people who play baseball. Some of those I'll do, but I'm trying to just prioritize the ones that I think will be fun. I don't want to just draw anything that comes in. Yeah. How much time roughly are you spending on this per day right now? It depends. I think there was one day when I did maybe five drawings and I was working for three hours, but I'm trying to bring it down to maybe an hour a day, just do a couple of drawings. And what kind of art do you aspire to do? Are you hoping that

this is a gateway to something else or that someone will see this and ask you to do something else? Or are you just sort of enjoying the ride for now? Definitely just enjoying it for now. I don't really have any big plans to go into more serious art. It's just fun the way it is. Yeah, right. Are you, I guess, trying to just keep this fun and no stakes or are you thinking, wow, people are really interested in this. Maybe people will pay for this. I can imagine people, I mean, there are a lot of images that you've done that would be really fun to hang on a wall with the real photo next to the Doodle version. I definitely thought about doing it for money, but I don't really know how it works with the copyright issues.

I'm just using the logos and the athletes' faces. issues and just using the logos and the athletes faces I think I'm gonna be wants you to pay for like the license to do that I guess yeah that's why I'm I'll be would want yeah yeah I'm just taking donations for now and we know that Rich Hill has seen and approved of a sketch that you did of him. So how did this happen? I will link to this for people who haven't seen it, but what have you heard about this and what inspired this particular doodle? Turns out it was the Dodgers PR guy. I think his name is Jesus. So he somehow got it to Richelle's locker and someone, a reporter for The Athletic, he tweeted that Rich Hill said it was funny. And the image, for people who haven't seen it,

it is Rich Hill in midair, just rounding second base, I guess. And for people who haven't seen Rich Hill run, you're really missing out because it is just this graceful, gazelle- stride he is uh he's kind of got a goofy way of moving it's very endearing and in this particular image he is just sort of suspended in midair and so you drew him just in space with nothing around him at all and he has his left hand kind of cocked with the fingers pointing up behind his hand. And it's this unusual sort of position that you captured very well.

Yeah, my friend who was watching the game, he made a gif out of his base running. And he just happened to find that really funny still. So I took the picture and I made a little drawing of it. Yeah. What's the appeal of Rich Hill for you and for Dodgers Twitter, do you think? Because he's been an appealing player for us for a while now just because of the way that his career seemed to be over and then he completely resurrected himself

and it turns out he's kind of a cool guy too, it seems. But why is he kind of a cult hero for Dodgers fans? Yeah, it's definitely the resurgence. Last year he was fantastic. He's just really fun to watch. I don't know. I guess with Players Weekend that just happened. His nickname, Dick Mountain.

Yeah, that's a big part of it. That was great, yeah. So what's next on the docket for you? What images do you have coming up? I have a really funny one for Dodgers Twitter. It's drawing that twig bit of a horse. So hence, it's not very good. So you're doing a doodle of a doodle?

Yes. Okay. It's very meta. I like that. Do you have a favorite that you've done so far? Or if it's the Rich Hill one, do you have a non-Rich Hill favorite? Maybe the one where I didn't have a picture to look at. Someone requested Otani wearing a shirt with a picture of Mike Trout wearing an Otani jersey.

Yeah, I just, I think it was a pretty genius idea of me to have Trout drawn as an actual fish. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. There's clearly like, it's not just mimicking a photo or taking the idea literally. There is some little touch of cleverness i guess or creativity to everyone of the images that makes it special so i am thank you glad that you got this idea and started doing it and i'm glad people have noticed and i hope a lot of our listeners will go check it out and send you suggestions although i guess you will just be working forever if you get too many so you're gonna have to set up a wait list or or something I probably will I mean I've closed requests a couple of times but right now it's it's not that that busy so I'll keep it open for a while

all right and for now where can people support you in this effort? Hopefully just on the link that's in my Twitter bio. The coffee website, you can donate in increments of $3. Buy me a few coffees. That would be very nice. All right. I will link to that. I will link to the Twitter account, which, again, is DrawWalk. And I feel like just from scrolling through your own account we probably

could have just talked about video games and Star Trek this whole time and that would have worked too but I'm uh I'm glad we got to talk about draw a walk and acceptably draw in baseball it is definitely more than acceptable so please keep it up and uh thank you for coming on Angelina I appreciate it thank you all right that will do it for today thank you for coming on, Angelina. I appreciate it. Thank you. All right, that will do it for today. Thank you for listening. Our pal Kyle Freeland from the previous episode, he did it again. He beat the Angels on Tuesday in a one-run game. Freeland went six innings, gave up five hits, one run, two walks, six strikeouts,

lowered his already sterling 2.96 ERA to 2.9. So pretty impressive. Not at Coors Field, but they can all be at Coors Field. Strong start, nonetheless. He's not going to unseat the trifecta of deGrom and Scherzer and Nola from the top of the Cy Young Award results, most likely, but he has a case and I hope he'll finish top five. At least he certainly deserves that. By the way, Michael Bauman and I on the most recent Ringer MLB show had a really good discussion about NOLA and war and value and past, present,

and future of how we figure out what baseball players are worth. That was a good one, kind of effectively wild style segment. So check that out if you're interested and you can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild following five listeners have already done. So Mark Haber, Matthew Fong, Daniel Lovett,

Amy, and Mike Waller. Thanks to all of you. Thanks also to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcastatfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. If you're a supporter, you can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms.

We have one more show this week, so we will be back to talk to you soon. To prove everything still is the same A table stands empty by the edge of the stream But farewell, Angelina The sky's changing colors And I must leave.