Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1265: Home Runs Per Homestand

Episode Date: September 5, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Trevor Story‘s improvement, Brady Feigl vs. Brady Feigl, Joe West vs. Austin Davis and an information card, a Carter Capps update, the Mariners’ clubhouse brawl, the continued dominance of Edwin Diaz, the disconcerting pitching return of Shohei Ohtani, and Kyle Schwaber’s lack of clutchness this season, then answer […]

And all the things that you're gonna do My friends say, man, what's wrong with you? I ain't never gone Oh, darling Seen nobody like you Oh, but I love you Yes, I love you Well, I love you just the same.

Hello and welcome to episode 1265 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, who has made a major mistake, yet again did not learn his lesson from his very untrafficked Kyle Freeland post last week. You've written about the Rockies again. Didn't you realize that you can only expect one result when you write about the Rockies? I think at this point I'm just trying to force it. Now, I would like to say for the record, I don't care about traffic as long as I have a job. It means nothing to me. I don't care about traffic As long as I have a job

It means nothing to me Some of the things that I like to write about Don't really draw much attention Which is fine Because some of the stuff that does draw a lot of attention Is just unpleasant and boring to write about But it never ceases to amuse me That the Rockies just never draw an audience

Just never I can't even think Maybe I'm just missing something that's very obvious But I can't think of the last thing That anyone at Fangraphs wrote about the Rockies that drew a worthwhile audience at all this isn't just a Jeff Sullivan problem this is a Rockies problem. I don't even ask and I can't see it without asking and that's fine with me. So I don't know how my Kyle Freeland post from last week did, but I'm going to assume it did do great. You kind of, you get a sense just based on feedback to the article on Twitter or email or whatever, and there wasn't much. So I think it was probably the same, but you wrote about Trevor Story, who according to your headline is making an all-time improvement.

Yep, sure is. I'd tell you why, but no one wants to hear about it, it turns out. Well, your subtitle says that he's turned into one of the top shortstops in either league. And I know that he was not one of the top shortstops in either league last year. So I'm guessing that has something to do with the improvement. Yeah. You might remember Trevor Story. He came around and he was like a big launch angle guy.

I don't know if he used the words launch angle, but, you know, he had everything in the air. He was sort of like a lighter hitting Joey Gallo in a way. He just struck out a bunch and had everything in the air. And he was a shortstop. Well, he still is a shortstop. He still hits everything in the air, but he's he stopped striking out a lot. His strikeout rate has decreased just about 9 percentage points, which it turns out is like the eighth biggest year-to-year decrease in baseball history

for anyone who's basically a qualified player in consecutive seasons. I looked at more than 7,000 season pairs of players who batted at least 500 times in both years, and only seven cases have had a bigger strikeout rate decrease than stories right now. He's a little ahead of rookie to sophomore year Chris Bryant and, I don't know, rookie to sophomore or sophomore to junior year Xander Bogarts in terms of what he's done. Bryant has not gone back to striking out. Bogarts has not gone back to striking out.

So Trevor Story, quietly, very quietly, because he plays for the Rockies, has made some sort of change. There's a partial mechanical explanation that I looked at the video. I couldn't really find anything, but I don't know. I'm not really so good at that stuff. I can only spot the obvious things. So Story has done something with this wing, yada, yada, yada, not striking out so much. Rockies first place.

I wonder if there are any Rockies fans listening who were considering clicking on your post and are now not going to because we just spoiled it, which will make your traffic look even worse. But that's how it goes. I should be fired for two reasons. One, continuing to write about the Rockies. And two, missing two work days of a four-day work week to visit family. So I'm really just not chipping in this week at all. I feel bad.

So, yeah, we just had a long weekend. Hopefully it was fairly restful for both of us. And it feels like everything that happened over that long weekend was already a long time ago. And I don't know what we should and shouldn't talk about. Like Josh Donaldson got traded about five minutes after I posted our last episode. So that was a while ago. Not that he has played in the major since, although he did hit a grand slam in AAA. So that's nice.

And he'll be back soon but shohei otani pitched williams estadio won the rochester triple a mvp award so congratulations to him is there anything you wanted to dwell on from this past weekend well i was i took advantage of maybe the last good outdoors long weekend of the year to go away and and disappear and wake up in a tent covered with frost. So I was trying to catch up yesterday with all the depth chart stuff and what was happening at baseball. I understand there was a whole weird Brady Feigl thing that caught fire on the Internet. I don't know who's going to follow up on that. I understand Joe West.

Levi's on it. Levi's on it. All right. So he'll figure it out, whatever's going on, because it does look like there's a tear somewhere in the fabric. Yeah. I'll link to that tweet. But if no one has seen it, there is a Brady Feigl in the A's minor league system, and there's also a Brady Feigl in the Rangers minor league system. One of them, I think, is five years older than the other.

One of them is a lefty. One of them is a righty. older than the other. One of them is a lefty, one of them is a righty, but at least in the headshots that Levi Weaver, who writes for The Athletic and covers the Rangers, in the headshots that he tweeted along with this discovery, they look like the same person, and it's really freaky and scary. And as I understand it, he has already talked to one of the Brady's Feigl and will soon be talking to the other, so I look forward to what he finds out i also understand there was something about joe west and a player austin davis is that right with some sort of foreign substance analytical card so that's right these are the controversies that i feel

bad for missing but then after the fact i really don't feel bad for missing them i just feel bad because it means that this part of the podcast is worse because i don't have anything to chip in but i can at least bring it up i'll be the straight man. And here's Ben Lindbergh with the punchline. Well, as it happens, I actually spoke to Austin Davis about his card a few days before this incident happened because I was interviewing him for the book. The book that I'm working on with Travis Satchik is partially about how players have embraced information themselves in an effort to improve their performance. And so Austin Davis, as far as I know, is a trailblazer.

I think Zach Greinke has since done the same thing, but Austin Davis got there first. He, I think, as far as I know, was the first to have an information card on his person on the mound, as we've seen outfielders do for positioning, as we've seen catchers do. They have wristbands with various information on there. But Austin Davis brought a card out with the scouting reports on hitters. He's been doing this for a while now, since July. And he just consults it between batters, sometimes even between pitches, just reminds himself what he wants to do. And it's just your basic, you know, he said information

is helpful and why shouldn't I do this? And Gabe Kapler approved of his doing it. And the front office people and the people who communicate with the front office people find they put a lot of work into disseminating this information to the players. And so Davis wants to take advantage of that and maybe he will cause a trend that will spread. But yes, Joe West did not take kindly to the card. He confiscated the card in the middle of a game because And MLB has since said that Joe West was wrong to deprive Austin Davis of this card. So presumably this will not happen again, but it's kind of a much newer school than rookie austin davis bringing information out to the mound with him so kind of a clash of eras here and davis will win i mean it's what it's very vaguely reminiscent of the idea of what outfielders couldn't put things in the grass to mark where they're supposed to stand or something but on the other hand i mean catchers have this information some information on their wrists right they just like quarterbacks do in football so i don't i don't

need to talk about this anymore you just did but what is interesting i didn't know anything about this until just about right now and you would think that when you have a player who's consulting a uh a little pamphlet a little piece of paper for information you think it might slow him down a little bit but for anyone who might be wondering about that austin davis's average pace between pitches this year 22.1 seconds which ranks him in the fastest 10 percent of major league relievers this year with at least 20 innings thrown so austin davis not slowing down even while studying for his homework yeah that is interesting because one thing i talked to him about i guess you can all skip the austin davis page of the book when it comes out or reread it. Maybe you'll have forgotten all this by then. But one thing that we talked about was the idea of information

overload. And players will sometimes say they don't want too much information in their heads when they're in a game because it'll screw them up. And this sounds like that, kind of, like he's actually looking at information during the game. But really, it's sort of the opposite of that, in that he no longer has to actually remember anything because he knows he has it in his back pocket. So if he forgets something, he doesn't have to stress about it. He doesn't have to memorize it. He knows he can just pull this card out anytime. And maybe that applies to his pace as well. I don't know. Maybe he's just a fast-paced pitcher, but maybe it's that he doesn't have to stand out there and think about what he wants to do because he has this card that tells him and reminds him what he wants to do, and then he has the courage of his convictions.

That's right. So was there—let's see, what else? I know before the AAA season ended, Mike Curto, Tacoma Rainiers, and Andrew tweeted out that Carter Capps, he's still around around in case you'd forgotten what carter caps is up to on august 18th he even struck out five batters but in any case carter caps this season i don't really let me just let's check in on his numbers here so in 38 innings he's got an array of three something he's got roughly a strikeout per nine he doesn't look very remarkable so carter caps long road now yeah generic but still throwing like Carter Capps such that he was called for a pitch violation he was called for a violation I believe it was last Friday because you know he's throwing like Carter Capps and what was what's weird is not

just that he was called for a violation but that he came back to pitch I believe the next day with the same umpiring crew didn't change anything nothing illegal no pitches called box or balls so carter caps illegal but then decided to be legal i don't know i don't know who's paying attention at that point but carter caps still around still causing very minor controversies that flare up briefly on twitter yeah it would be sort of said if he's still doing the leap and abound on the mound and it doesn't actually help him or it's the only thing that helps him be even playable like it used to make him superhuman and debatably unfair and now i guess he still does it to the extent that he's allowed to do it but he's just a generic guy so

that's sort of sad and i guess moving on from there the mariners had a fight it looks like something happened you messaged me and i saw on on from there the mariners had a fight it looks like something happened you messaged me and i saw on twitter before we started podcasting here on tuesday that there was some sort of altercation in the mariners clubhouse and i don't i can't tell if d gordon just like sensed a premonition or something or if he knew that this was developing but d gordon ushered the media out of the clubhouse and then there was some sort of altercation this is sort of uh as news is breaking if you will so don't, at least I don't have any further details. I haven't been looking at Twitter.

These kinds of things happen. I mean, it's been, what, seven and a half months, basically, that these people have been together, six and a half months, just on a regular basis. Yeah, Ryan Divish, who covers the Mariners, said this sort of thing happens every season. It's just unusual for it to happen within view or earshot of reporters which this one partially did so that's why we know about it but it's not necessarily that unusual right and i think more than just the fact that there was some sort of

conflict again these are all type a personalities so they're going to conflict sometimes but my favorite part about this is that because the minor league season is over the mariners class a affiliate everett aqua socks were in the clubhouse pre-game hanging out with the team getting some real influence from their professional role models at the uh the highest level of the game yeah welcome to the show that's right so i wonder i wonder if it was maybe uh could have been hazing maybe the mariner just kind of beat up on the aqua socks a little bit just decided you know we're gonna show you what it's like to be in this clubhouse. Or maybe the Aquasox beat up on the Mariners. I don't know.

Maybe some of them picked sides and they fought each other. Well, maybe we'll find out more details by the end of this podcast. But, I mean, the obvious inference that you can draw from this is team that was winning is no longer winning. And so now tempers are flaring up, and things that wouldn't have caused fights in the past maybe now will cause fights. Although I think it's funny that the Mariners, when this fight broke out or whatever it was broke out,

were coming off a one-run win. So even on Monday, the game before this happened, they were still up to their old tricks. The Mariners, when they were winning every game by one or two runs, were people in the area you would know better than I? Crediting it to chemistry, like was anyone saying this is real or this is happening because this team is just a bunch of fun-loving guys who get along and they're loose and they support each other and they come up with the big hit or was anyone making that kind of argument at the time i don't know if it was like the whole explanation here is chemistry but depoto and and service in particular have talked a lot about how they've been trying to build a culture and having the whole winning environment nothing you haven't

heard before but it's been a whole a whole part of their act a whole part of their their salesmanship is saying that the you know of course the numbers say that the team should be worse than it is. But, you know, when you just have this kind of group of guys together, etc., etc., etc., everyone's fighting in September. But, yeah, it was present. It was part of it. But I will say, at least as long as we're talking briefly about the Mariners, not only did they win on Monday, good for them. They beat the worst team in baseball. By the way, the Orioles, in case anyone wasn't paying attention they got swept by the royals so in the series for the saddest baseball team of 2018 the

orioles went out and they win convincingly but edwin diaz was named the reliever of the month for august and i only bring that up because he's been named the reliever of the month four months and there have been five months that this award has been handed out this season. In the second half, Edwin Diaz has thrown 18.1 innings. He's allowed two word runs. He's struck out 36 batters. He's been incredibly good. I don't know if anyone has checked in recently on Edwin Diaz or maybe people have just kind of come to terms

with the fact that he's unbelievable. But for all the talk about how the Mariners have been overachieving, Edwin Diaz has not been a problem. He's not been lucky. Edwin Diaz, right now, according to fan graphs, has a war of 3.5 as a relief pitcher who's pitched in 66 games. I don't know. I just noticed that, so I haven't looked up any sort of background,

but that's incredible. Edwin Diaz has been borderline an ace as a reliever because he's got 115 strikeouts and 66.1 innings 16 walks he's just been incredible and what's funny to me is his peripherals look almost identical to where they were when he was a rookie i mean he's a little better now but this is something that he's even done before and he slumped a little bit last season but edwin diaz has basically just done what he did his first year, and he's stretched it over an entire season. So even though the Mariners presumably are not going to make the playoffs, they made up no ground on the A's over the weekend, which is too bad for

them. Edwin Diaz has been absolutely unbelievable, and he looks like he, I don't know, is he the best reliever in baseball? Because he looks like he's the best reliever in baseball. Yeah, maybe one of them. Very short list. Yeah, going out on a limb there. So I guess we should very briefly mention Shohei Otani since we set the scene for his return on Sunday against the Astros. You were in the wilderness. I was not quite in the wilderness, but I was away from Wi-Fi. So I was following along via game day, did not actually see the game, and it was pretty disconcerting on the surface because he only made it, I think, to the third inning, and his velocity really sharply tailed off from the first inning where he was throwing his, you know, fairly usual high 90s to third inning where he was throwing low 90s. And really, that's sort of a scary thing to see in the span of a single game or even multiple games. You always worry and wonder what's going on there, particularly with a guy who hasn't

pitched in months in games because of his elbow. And I think a lot of people were insta-criticizing the Angels for pitching him and wondering if this was kind of the end of his pitching experiment, at least for the season. It sounds, as we record now, like that's not the case, like this was not elbow related. He has said it was not elbow related. He said that his back stiffened up somewhat, maybe as a result of his long layoff. he got hit in the hand by a comebacker. And according to him, according to the Angels, those were the reasons for his speed decrease within that game.

And he is still apparently on track to start again. So Tommy John watch is postponed for another week. It was not encouraging, but it was not quite as catastrophic as it seemed in the moment. Right. Of course, I'm reminded that shortly before Otani went on the disabled list in the first place, the angels were holding him back for reasons that they did not suggest had anything to do with his elbow. It seems like there was a little bit of beating around the bush back then, but I am, I don't really buy the comeback hurt or the ball off the finger argument here, but I can buy the back one. I think the back one is when the back hurts, it's a pressing issue for any sort of movement.

I don't know. I feel like we've probably talked about this before. I've talked about this with everyone who's ever been at least 30 years old before. As soon as you injure your back, just the minor little tweak, then all of a sudden you can't do anything. So I can understand why a pitcher might go from throwing 98 to throwing 92 so i buy it it's credible i feel like if the angels actually thought that joey otani were risking himself or if he had actually been injured then he would not be lined up for another start because that

would there would be absolutely no purpose to that really no reason for the angels to be lying here so i will take them at their, and I will watch Otani the next time. Yep. All right. Anything else? No, that's enough. Okay. And that's the end of the episode.

No, we will continue talking, but now in email answer format. So this week's going to be a little weird because it started late, and you are going away again. So we're going to do what we can and we'll see what comes out. And right now we are going to start with an email episode. So I'm going to start with a question from Craig. I don't know whether you've seen this. This has been making the rounds, but I will send you a link as I read this, hopefully. So evidently the new Amazon series, Jack Ryan, based on Tom Clancy character, is a baseball show. There are multiple baseball references in the show.

I have not had a chance to check it out yet, but this one scene has been circulating. So this is, I will quote Craig here, Jack and a colleague discussing fantasy baseball pitching decisions. I will play the quick clip now. And I will listen to it now. Actually, I was talking about Eisenberg's Fantasy League. Oh.

All right, what do we got? Okay, Zach Granke or Dallas Keuchel? Come on, Granke's the upper point lower. But SunTrust Stadium gives up 1.86 more home runs per three-game homestand than Minute Maid. So? Keuchel. Thanks. gives up 1.86 more home runs per three-game homestand than Minute Maid. So... Geico. Thanks.

You got it. Well, that was boring. So Jack Ryan, he's, what, a CIA analyst. He's supposed to know the numbers, so naturally he'd be the go-to fantasy baseball guy in the office, I guess. So Craig says, A few questions after watching this clip. Are the stats cited at least somewhat accurate to real life? Maybe the Grinky ERA stat would be tougher without knowing the day,

but does SunTrust Park actually let up 1.8 more home runs per homestand than Minute Maid? Seems hard to believe based on how Homer happy Minute Maid is versus SunTrust. Actually, it isn't, right? Is it Homer happy? I don't know. We talked about Minute Maid and it's being a surprising pitching park recently, but that's the first question here. So is it realistic that Granke's ERA is half a run lower? I don't know whether this is supposed to be 2017 or 2018. I think the first episode says Washington, D.C. present day, but obviously that's not how making TV shows works. But it's obviously plausible that Zach Reiki's ERA could be half a run lower than Dallas Keuchel's. I assume that has been the case at some point in the past couple of years, probably more than half a run lower, right?

So that part seems okay. The other part, SunTrust Park letting up 1.8 more home runs per homestand than Minute Maid. Per homestand? Per homestand. Who even cites that as a denominator? It's not like homestand is a unit of time that anyone uses. A homestand can a unit of time that anyone uses. A homestand can be varying lengths of time.

It's just like no matter how long the homestand is, it lets up 1.8 more home runs. Actually, he says three-game homestand, which would be a very short homestand. He must mean three-game series. He also says SunTrust Stadium, not SunTrust Park. So that's a suspect stat. not SunTrust Park. So that's a suspect stat. That's the kind of stat that we always say, like, come to us and just have us check the baseball references on your show because no one says home runs per homestand. So that's one thing. I mean, how many more home runs does SunTrust Park actually let up versus Minute Maid? All right, hold on. Go to those Fangraphrafts park factors.

Okay, so what we have over the last, I guess, two years, 2017, 2018, Minute Maid park, there have been 370 home runs hit there by anyone. That's combined. And that ranks Houston 15th out of 30 ballparks. Pretty neutral, even though this does not, of course, account for the ability of the Astros lineup, et cetera uh sun trust park actually fourth from the bottom 297 home runs allowed so the uh the ballpark with the fewest home runs unsurprisingly it's at&t park 230 home

runs in san francisco since the start of 2017 which is 51 fewer than the next lowest total for any ballpark so at&t park that might have been a good one to pick on. Maybe cite Madison Bumgarner here instead of Dallas Keuchel. Or no, instead of Zach Greinke. I don't know. Look, I'm all turned around because this is such a weird... I'm hung up on homestand. It's throwing me off because I can't do any sort of baseball reference query for home

runs per homestand. Maybe SunTrust just had had like really long home stands, but I can at least confirm there have been 73 more home runs hit in Houston than in Atlanta over the past year and five months. So for me, that's just like close enough, I guess. But if you're saying, hold on. So the argument, hmm, the argument was to start Keichel. Well, that's the next question from craig maybe he says this is a fantasy baseball decision based on expected start value would you expect a pitcher with an era half a run lower to have a worse expected start than a higher era pitcher because of a homer prone ballpark

i'm not sure how you would look this up but it's interesting wait did i get myself turned around he said that atlanta allows more home runs yes which, okay. No. So what I said about it being close enough, what I meant was the opposite of that. It was bad. It was a bad thing to cite. Okay. So just on that basis alone, okay, bad stat. Then a half run, but then ballpark. I think, no, home run factor doesn't do it for me because if a home run factor is up, means probably that the doubles factors down the triples factor is down home run factor is only a part of it so unless you're talking like a game in coors field or something although at least there you get the pitch against the rockies then it doesn't uh it doesn't do it for me if you were talking about just home run factor alone you would still start the guy with the lower era but of

course a real cia analyst who knows anything about baseball would not be citing era in a single season as a measure to go on so i think jack ryan unconvincing portrayal of a uh a very analytically progressive baseball fan yes very craig also asked if we could pinpoint which day this was referring to and all i can say is that zach grinke has only pitched once in sun trust park Park and it was July 14th of this season he pitched very well he went seven and two-thirds he did not allow a run he struck out seven so he would have been a good person to start on that week Dallas Keuchel did not start that same day although I guess this could have been a weekly league. So if it was a weekly league, Dallas Keuchel pitched really well that week too. He started the day before and he went six scoreless and struck out four.

But I guess the best recommendation was for Zach Greinke and none of the rationale cited actually makes much sense. Now we have, hold on. So we have Dallas Keuchel also. He's pitching a home game in Houston. We don't know who he's facing, but the probability is he's facing a team that's worse than the Astros. But we have Zach Greinke pitching a road game, which is already a disadvantage, but he's also doing it in Atlanta against a team that at least now, and presumably in the same reality, is in first place and is the best team in that division. first place and is the best team in that division so zach cranky also less likely to get the win than dallas keitel which is presumably a fantasy baseball relevant statistic although we they didn't tell us what categories their league is measuring maybe it's some sort of really weird advanced like a fib and f4 league but it's probably not since he cited zach cranky's era

being a half run lower than dallas keitel's but in any case, I think that he used bad math and words to deliver the incorrect conclusion. And then his co-worker just smiles and says thanks and goes off to follow suit, which means what is this department doing to say we're trusting this guy is making the right decisions to save the country? And he can't even sort out who

to start a baseball game i hope he's putting more care into monitoring terrorist chatter than he is to sit start decisions in fantasy baseball that's all i can say in what league do you get to start one pitcher what is this decision even down to i guess maybe she's like streaming pitchers i i don't know but maybe it's just a daily fantasy league, except they didn't actually start on the same day in reality. It's confusing. Anyway, none of it is smart or makes sense. So discount Jack Ryan's fantasy baseball advice.

That's the takeaway here. All right. Mark from Montreal says, How seriously should we consider Alex Bregman as American League MVP? While the Astros haven't been ravaged by injuries, they have had to say goodbye to a combined 79 games missed by the likes of Springer, Altuve, and Correa. Bregman leads his team, a fantastic team, in nearly every significant offensive category, and not just those which are attained by virtue of having played in more games than anyone else. those which are attained by virtue of having played in more games than anyone else. If he plays a bit over his head in September, he could theoretically finish the season with a 300, 400, 500 slash line. His team has played in a greater number of high leverage games than teams of Betts,

Ramirez, and Trout. What does Bregman have to do in September to legitimately have a shot at the award? Well, he's done a lot already. We we know that much now uh i think we've talked before that i think there are going to be there's going to be some stuff here i think that jd martinez is going to get support we've talked had this conversation before i think jd martinez will get a little bit of support for quote unquote rejuvenating the red socks lineup whatever also he's been great so jd martinez will get credit for from people who don't care about defense and i think that matt chapman is going to get some support from people who look at the A's and think, how did that team end up where they are? And Matt Chapman is the most visible player provided, and presuming those voters decide not to nominate Blake Trinan for the award,

even though he does deserve it more. But anyway, if you look at war whether it's baseball reverence war or derfangrass war it's Mookie Betts who leads the American League has been the most valuable player I think if you want to talk about Bregman he's been the best astro Mookie Betts could have his vote split with JD Martinez uh Jose Ramirez could have his vote split with Francisco Lindor although do we I forgot where we've come down at vote splitting. Is it a thing that actually makes sense or happens? I've never thought about it too critically, I guess. I don't know. It probably happens a little bit in certain circumstances, I would think, when two players for the same team have a similar case or something. I could imagine it happening.

Yeah, it's conceivable. But I mean, if you look at it now, even if you don't want to go by war just alone, which you could do, the best hitter in the American League has been Mike Trout. We can assume he's not going to win because he's been hurt and also the Angels. And the second best hitter has been Wookie Betts. Third best hitter after him has been JD Martinez. So I think right now Betts has it probably, most likely just because he's been the best player based on a few different ways of looking at things. So for Bregman to do it, I know the Astros are still kind of fending off the A's. It's felt forever. It's inevitable that the Astros will win the division, but if Bregman has another really great month and if Mookie Betts just trails off a little bit,

then I can see how Bregman's final numbers could measure up and help push him over the top right now he's got a 158 WRC plus which is outstanding but I would say that he's like I don't know fourth place right now maybe third if I had to guess how the voting would shake out yeah he's doing a lot of innovation in the dugout celebration space he's done a lot of clever home run celebrations lately but yeah basically the answer is what you would expect he has to have a really good month while his competitors have to not have really good months and also the asters have to win a bunch of games that's it's that's about it basically like i don't know what you were expecting but that's the answer.

Sorry. All right. People come to us for insight, and sometimes there just isn't all that much to be had. There's got to be good. Yeah. Other guys got to be less good. Okay. So continuing on here.

Per homestand? 1.8 home runs. How many home runs does alex bregman have to hit per homestand in september to win the al mvp holy hell okay this is not my stat blast but i just found something i can't help but share with you now okay i was thinking about clutch because mvp and all that stuff okay so i'm looking at high leverage betting uh so kyle schwarber this year kyle schwarber is batted 55 times in high leverage situations i'll repeat that 55 high leverage plate appearances for kyle schwarber okay i want there are three there are three things in his what is wrc pluses there's the what direction around zero and then there are two numbers after it so let's do this does kyle schober have a positive or negative wrc plus in high leverage situations i'll say negative good

guess what's the first number uh one nope it can't be more than one it sure can oh no two it can be six six second number is two kyle schwarber in a high leverage blade appearances this season has batted 55 times now he's drawn 10 walks although seven of those were intentional so no credit to him he's got 44 at bats he has two He has two hits, and they're singles. He has a WRZ plus of negative 62, which is the worst in high-leverage batting by 44 points. I had no idea. I got to post for tomorrow.

Yeah, all right. I wonder if that's historic. I guess we'll find out when you post tomorrow. Anyway, sorry, you were asking something. Yeah, I was about to. I'll also say you have to go really far down the position player war leaderboard before you get to an NL player, at least at Fangraphs. Well, I guess that's not true.

Manny Machado is seventh, and he is now an NL player. But you have to go all the way to Matt Carpenter at ninth before you get to someone who's been in the NL all season. The top eight guys are all AL guys or until recently were AL guys, which is weird. It doesn't really mean anything, but it's weird. I mean, you can look at the same thing in the NL pitching leaderboard, I guess, probably. Well, no, I guess on the baseball reference NL war pitching leaderboard the top four guys will all be it'll be the the Grom and Scherzer and Nola and Freeland before you get

through an AL guy but not quite true at Fangraphs anyway war leaderboards are weird at the top at times doesn't mean that much all right continuing Mark says as a Brewers fan games in Milwaukee against the Cubs are always frustrating for me as Miller Park gets turned into Wrigley North with crowds dominated by Cubs fans. It struck me that the Brewers will play all 19 games against the Cubs this year in front of crowds made up primarily of opposing fans. And given Cubs fan attendance at road games, it's possible that the Cubs may not play that many games all year in front of crowds made up primarily of opposing fans. What I wonder is, does this matter at all? If there were a team that played a normal travel schedule but played every road game in front of a home crowd, say 90% or more of their own fans, would that team finish any better than a team playing in front of normal crowds? Would there be a substantial enough influence on umpiring or morale to affect the team's record over 162 games? What about a team in the opposite situation, one that had to play in front of packed crowds

made up of predominantly opposing fans for all of its home games? Huh. Well, so again, people come to us for insight, and then the answer is, yeah, probably matters a very, very small amount. So all the rest of what we're going to do here is just talk around that point so you And the answer is, yeah, probably matters a very, very small amount. So all the rest of what we're going to do here is just talk around that point. So you can skip forward in this podcast if you want to. I could try to run a query on this, I guess, to try to figure.

I don't know how long like Cubs fans in particular have been a menace. I don't know how long they've been showing. I mean, there's always been a lot of Cubs fans, but of course, there's more now than there were pre-World Series. Same with the red sox well before that i guess you could look at home road win-loss splits for those teams before and after their championship seasons to see if anything has changed there but i would think that even if anything did we would just say well it's noise or it's not noise if there's no effect so in terms of the umpiring effect i could see there being like a something slight there just because the umpires do seem to have a slight home team favor right but it goes away somewhat quickly so much for the home field effect seems to be concentrated in the early innings some of it is like when the pitcher takes the mound versus when the other

pitcher takes the mound and that's something that you don't get to change, even if you have friendly fans in the seat. So I would think that what right now, home field advantage is something like 53% winning percentage versus 47% on the road. And I would think that if you get to play in front of so many of your own fans all the time, I could see like a very minor effect bumping up your road winning percentage, but by like a fraction of a win every few seasons, I don't think that it would be substantial, but the players would like it. Yeah. The question basically boils down to what is home field advantage or what creates home field advantage. And I don't know that we have

a definitive answer for that. There've been many, many studies and books, chapters written on that topic over the years. And I think my understanding is that the bulk of it does come from umpiring and probably from pitch calling. And so you would think that that would be the thing that would be most influenced by the crowd. So in that sense, yeah, there probably is something to that. But then there's also getting to be at home and sleep in your own bed at night. There's getting to know the ballpark and knowing it better than your opponent and maybe being built for the ballpark in some way and various other little factors, just less travel and jet lag, maybe lots of little things that could contribute to it. So I agree, it would probably matter a little. And presumably, you could construct some study on that. Like, I don't know if you look at what Red Sox games and Yankees games at Tampa Bay or

something, although hasn't Tampa Bay, I think, at least in many years, has had possibly an above-average home field advantage, which people have speculated is about the Dome. But I don't know. You could find some subset of games where you would expect the crowds to be stacked in favor of the road team, and you could see whether there's actually anything there. We have not done that. That is beyond the scope of what we can do live on a podcast. And so I will agree. It's probably something, but not that much of a thing. Okay, so let's just for the hell of it, let's try something.

The Cubs became really good in the year 2015. That's when they made it pretty deep into the playoffs. And then they, of course, they won the World Series the next year. So let's just assume that Cubs fans started coming out in droves in 2015. This is an assumption on my part. I don't know if it's true, but that's what we're going with. So we've got basically four years since then. And I looked at four years before then. So from 2011 to 2014, the Cubs had the fifth worst winning percentage at home. And then on the road, they were third worst. So they had a home minus road winning percentage difference i guess of what is

this 83 points 83 points home versus road and i think that's uh probably fairly standard so starting in 2015 the cubs have the second best home winning percentage in baseball behind only the dodgers they're at 637 and they have the best road winning percentage out of anyone in baseball at 563. That comes out to a home minus road difference of 74 points. So what was the difference the first time? It was like 83, I think. Yeah. So even if you take these numbers at face value, don't have any adjustments or error bars,

you're looking at a really minor effect but hey at least there's something i can tell you that right now over the past four years no team has won more games on the road than the cubs so that's something i guess it doesn't prove that there's no effect or a negative effect i guess yeah that is true all right this is a question from David Kim, Patreon supporter, which you have already sort of answered via email to me. But he says a quality start is six innings pitched and three earned runs. And David says that his wife finds this definition odd because that translates to an ERA of 4.5, which doesn't really sound like a quality start. She asks, how much war would a starting pitcher be worth who threw a quality start every outing?

Feel free to answer in either Baseball Reference or Fangraphs War. So, like I said, I answered this, and I can do this in a few sentences, at least as of when I sent this five days ago. 19 starters this year have allowed between 4.25 and 4.75 runs per nine innings. That averages out to 4.5, which is the quality start threshold. The average collective baseball reference war per 180 innings is about 2.3. That assumes 30 starts of six innings each. So you're looking at about 2 to 2.5 wins above replacement for these pitchers based on that analysis, which I will not do anything more thorough than that.

Yeah. So based on that, do you think quality is a fair adjective to attach to that? I mean, I don't know how accurate this rule of thumb is, but there is a rule of thumb that average is like two wins above replacement. wins above replacement so if average is two and we're saying that someone who throws a quality start every time would be two to 2.5 basically you would be an average or just a tiny bit better than average major league starting pitcher if you did that does that make you quality i guess that's that's quality right i mean there's value to that i't know. I feel like if you were going to have a separate statistic that is used to point out something that is particularly good, that should not be used for something that is better than average by the slightest possible amount. Because then, to make this over simplistic, he would have 50% of all starts being quality starts, which feels like that's just a waste of a stat. So I think that it's not quality. But then if you look at it, on the other hand, if you're an average starter in the major leagues, then you have a lot of quality because, God, you're talented at baseball, and you should be in a museum, but not a museum

in Brazil. Yeah, so there's, right. So if you want to interpret it very generously, you could make it make sense. But that is probably not what most people think when they hear quality start, they probably think, oh, that was a good start. That was an above average start. And that is not the case. So it's a pretty silly stat. Okay, stat blast. That's a days still past. Jacob deGrom on September 3rd, Labor Day. It was a game the Mets beat the Dodgers 4-2, and Jacob deGrom was terrific. He went six innings. He allowed two hits, one run, six strikeouts. The run was on a homer.

He threw 75 strikes out of 109 pitches jacob de grom brilliant start against a dangerous udders lineup no decision jacob de grom again did not get a win for a start which he was fantastic jacob de grom this season has a 1.68 era the second best era for any qualified pitcher is chris sale at 1.97 j. Jacob deGrom has a 1.91 ERA in starts. He didn't win. So that's fun. These things are so silly and stupid because, again, it all comes down to pitcher wins and losses and no decisions,

and we don't actually care about this stuff, but at least it makes for some fun queries. So Jacob deGrom, he's got an 8-8 record this year. He's also got 12 no decisions in wins, 8 wins. He has a 0.97 ERA in losses. He has a 2.73 ERA in no decisions. He has a 1.41 ERA. So, I was curious, going through baseball history, using baseball reference, this took me forever to track down because it's just a goddamn nuisance.

But anyway, I finally got what I was hoping to get, sort of. So, I looked at the past 100 years of baseball history looked at the past 100 years and i looked at all pitchers all starting pitchers who had at least 20 starts that they did not get the win so 20 losses or no decisions and uh so that gave me a sample of well i mean i don't even know thousands like 2500 roughly pitchers and i uh i looked from 1918 to 2018 just a nice even i guess that's 101 years don't math check my stat blasts and i uh i took all those guys and i sorted them by era now if you want to look at the uh at the top of the list i don't know why you would but we've got 1930 Claude Willoughby. He had 20 starts.

He had, I guess this would be 16 losses and 4 no decisions. He had an ERA of 11.5. This is not a fun fact that's about Claude Willoughby, nor is it about 2004 Ryan Vogelsang, who had 20 such starts and an ERA of 9.1. Jacob deGrom, this year, has a 1.97 ERA, I guess, in these 20 starts. I calculated that differently. Just don't worry about it. Anyway, Jacob deGrom, this whole sample of roughly 2,500 pitcher seasons, Jacob deGrom's ERA of 1.97 is indeed the lowest in the sample.

And not only is it the lowest, but it's the lowest by like more than half of a run versus 1968 Sam McDowell, who had 22 starts where he did not win, and he had an ERA of 2.48, which was 0-14 in those starts. In third place, which I realize I didn't try to filter this out, third place is this year's Ryan Stanek, who really doesn't count because he's just constantly been opening. Anyway, he has a 2.67 ERA in non-wins, but he's got 23 starts, and he's 0-2 in those starts because he's going like an inning

at a time yeah 2014 cole hamels shows up here a 3.04 era and starts he didn't win but in any case the most important point the takeaway here jacob degram unless something really goes wrong or i don't know what would have to happen in september but unless that balloons he's doing something that is indeed mathematically unprecedented pity poor jacob deGrom and how the entire NL Cy Young argument is going to be about wins, even though that is stupid and ridiculous and we don't have to be doing this anymore. Yeah, and no one knows the making of for that stat blast. I will just say the research process for that stat blast was probably the longest of the Sullivan era. You really suffered for that stat blast. It's definitely the stat blast that I hate the most. Well, I looked something up that pertains to that earlier today because I was going to talk about it

on the Ringer MLB show. All season long, we've been talking about DeGrom and whether he might finish the season with more wins above replacement than wins. And he is still on track to do that. He has 8.6 war now and eight wins. And we've been saying that if he does it, which I didn't believe he would when we first started talking about it, but now I kind of think he will. he will. He will join a club that now includes one member, Eddie Smith, poor Eddie Smith of the 1937 Philadelphia Athletics at the time. And I did a little more research on Eddie Smith. So he, for his full career, he pitched 10 years in the big leagues. He finished with a 108 ERA plus, so 8% better than average. He was a good pitcher. He was a starting pitcher for most of that time.

And yet he finished his career 73-113. That is a 392 winning percentage despite being an above average pitcher. And the reason why he did that is because he basically never pitched for a team that could hit at all. He pitched for mostly bad teams. Even the competent teams couldn't hit until his very last season. He spent a fraction of his final season with the Red Sox and they could hit. But other than that, other than those eight games and three starts, he never pitched for a team with an OPS plus above 90. So none of them could hit and that's

why he got no run support. I play indexed to make sure, but I looked up all pitchers with at least 1,500 career innings pitched and an ERA plus of at least 108, which is Eddie Smith's, and his career winning percentage of 392 is the lowest by a lot. You have to go up to 436 to find the next guy, Ken Raffensperger. So Eddie Smith was extremely unlucky. He started that 1937 season 0-10. He also started the 1942 season 0-10, and somehow he made the All-Star team in that year anyway, which was pretty open-minded of whoever was putting him on the All-Star team that year because he, which was pretty open-minded of whoever was putting him on the All-Star team that year because he did not have the win-loss record that usually goes along

with an All-Star season. And at the end of that 1942 season, when he finished with a league-leading 20 losses despite having been an All-Star, he said very philosophically, 20 losses despite having been an all-star. He said very philosophically, things ain't never as bad as they could be. So that's a good attitude to take if you're Eddie Smith or if you are Jacob deGrom. Things ain't never as bad. Yeah, it's a double negative.

So technically he means that they are, I guess, always as bad as they could be. But I assume that's not what he actually meant so yeah all right I had a sort of stat blast e question so this is from Darren he says I've been in a debate for most of this year with a friend about the current state of baseball I have been saying that pitchers are throwing harder. That is why batters are striking out more. In fact, I think the increased velocity is at the root of the increase in three true outcomes. I showed him a graph of average fastball velocity increasing over the last eight

years. He says a one mile per hour increase would not have that great an effect on the league as a whole. He then asked if there was a way to find out if three true outcomes are more prevalent as fastball speeds increase. I assume the answer is yes, but I have no idea how to go about proving it to him, so I thought of you guys. So first thing I will say is that Mike Fast, who is now with the Astros, he did a study back in 2010 for the Hardball Times that was then followed up on at Fangrass by Jeff Zimmerman in 2014, and they found that one mile per hour can make a major difference for an individual pitcher. So if an individual starter loses a mile per hour in velocity, typically he will add a quarter of a run in earned run average. If a reliever loses a mile per hour, he will add half a run of ERA, generally because relievers tend to throw more fastballs. They're more

dependent on fastball velocity, so if they lose some, it hurts them more. So that's for an individual pitcher, but there's a significant effect there. If you gain velocity, you are going to be better, and if you lose velocity, you're going to be worse for the most part. And usually that will show up in strikeout rates and other three true outcomes components. way that I went about doing this was I just sorted all of these starting pitchers this year who have thrown at least 100 innings. I sorted them by fastball velocity, whether it was four seamer or sinker, whatever their fastball was. And I just took the top half or the top 60 of them and the bottom half or the bottom 61 of them. And I just calculated the three true outcomes rate for the hard throwing half and the less hard throwing half so the hard throwing half the above average velocity starters they have an average three true outcomes percentage that is again the percentage of plate appearances that

end in a strikeout walk or home run theirs was 34.6 percent So again, that's the above average velocity guys, 34.6 are in that low velocity group, you probably compensate in some other way. You have good deception or good command. There's some reason why you're getting by without great velocity. So if you took the typical pitcher and just subtracted velocity, they would get worse. But basically, yeah, hard throwers have higher strikeout rates and higher three true outcomes percentages. And so I guess you win the debate to a certain extent there. And that's not the only thing that is at the cause of this, though. So your friend technically can claim that there is more at the root of this than just that one thing. Winning debates on technicalities. What could possibly, what a satisfying response for all parties involved, knowing that one of you is right,

but the other one of you is also technically right. So what we've learned is that maybe, maybe actually you and I are not the people to go to with questions, because I don't know if we're answering these in a satisfying way, but I guess questions keep rolling in. So people are getting something out of this yeah I think I think that answers it I mean it's obviously not just the velocity it's also hitters changing their

approach and you know sometimes it's the size of the strike zone or it's the type of players that teams go after and it's the bullpen usage I I mean, that has an effect on the league-wide velocity. Obviously, if more guys are coming in and just throwing an inning at a time or not going deep into games, then they can really air it out. But that's part of the velocity. But there's other stuff and throwing breaking balls or whatever, maybe having something to do with this in addition to throwing really hard. Maybe it's throwing out of the zone and getting guys to chase so there's a bunch of stuff at work here yeah right now and whenever you look at these things you always have to worry about the selection bias of any sort of soft throwing guy or gets the major leagues probably got there because he's really really

good at missing bats or doing something else anyway but i don't need to talk about that because you already did so you nailed the ben thank you yeah uh by the way this is the 10th consecutive season in which the average velocity in major league baseball has increased basically since we have good data just going back to the beginning of the pitch fx slash stat cast era we've seen an increase according to pitch info that's the data data behind Brooks baseball and also parts of fan graphs. It has been an uptick every single year. It's just a tenth of a mile per hour this year, but it is extending the streak. Right. And where are where are rookies this year?

I guess that's something that I could check out pretty quickly here. Yeah, right. Someone asked us that, I think, recently, just whether it's more about new young hard throwers coming into the league or whether it's about older guys also gaining velocity or, I guess, whether it's the third thing, which is just changes in pitcher usage. Right. But if you look at rookies right now, the average rookie, at least according to Fangraphs, is throwing a four-seam fastball of 93.8 miles per hour. But actually, that is more or less unchanged since 2013. It's hung out right there. Sinkers, I guess, are a little bit higher, but that seems like it's negligible. Splitters, don't care.

Cutters, don't really care. Sliders, roughly the same. Curveballs, roughly the same curveballs roughly the same so could be that we are we're seeing pitchers get to the major leagues throwing about as hard as as they're going to maybe we've reached some sort of at least local plateau but we are having softer throwers just not showing up or maybe they're just ending up eliminated at the upper end so overall velocities continuing to increase but the young pitchers who are showing up are not necessarily throwing harder than they have over the past five years. And I'll also add, if anyone was wondering, that the hard throwing half of the starters, they have much higher strikeout rates, slightly higher walk rates and lower home run rates, which is not surprising.

So the soft tossers give up more home runs and they do not not strike out as many guys, and they actually walk fewer by a teeny bit. So that's how it breaks down. All right. I will also—oh, by the way, congratulations as well to Dan Hirsch. He was not the source of any of this week's stat blasts, but he usually is. And he is, of course, the proprietor of the Baseball Gauge and will continue to be. But he has also been hired to work at Baseball Reference, which is great. He is replacing Hans van Sleuten, who was a regular source for research for us in the past.

So it is continuity there. So congratulations, Dan. That's right. Just one shot for all possible needs now. Dan Hirsch is actually going to be getting more email from Ben now? Possibly. He has even more data at his disposal now. But he knew that when he took the job. Sorry, Dan. All right. We've just, In the NBA, I often hear the argument that teams are inevitably at a disadvantage in the second game of a back-to-back. Since the team played the previous day, they are assumed to be tired and sore going into the second game and are expected to play worse. Since MLB teams sometimes go 10 to 15 days without a day off, I'm curious if there is a similar effect in baseball.

For example, if a team has to make up postponed games later in the year and they play 20 games in 20 days, does their winning percentage drop off by the end of that run? If so, by how much? I wrote a really bad post at Purple Row a while back. His words, not mine. Asking the same question. When I attempted to research this, I went through

10 years of Rocky's game results by hand. That sounds awful. The problem was that when you look at longer streaks, the sample size obviously gets much smaller. Ultimately, I had to conclude shrug emoji. So he asks us this question, and we talked about this earlier in the year a little bit in the context of the Yankees having a bunch of rain outs and so having to make up those games later in the year while the Red Sox would be off. And we wondered about whether that might be a bit of rain outs and so having to make up those games later in the year while the Red Sox would be off and we wondered about whether that might be a bit of an edge for the Red Sox and I don't know of any really good studies on the team level about how much the fatigue effect

actually impairs team performance but I do know of one good study that was done by Mitchell Lichtman, MGL, former podcast guest, and this was on the individual player or hitter level. So this was back in 2013 at his blog. I will link to the post. And the post was mostly about the DH penalty and the pinch hit penalty. But while he was at it, he looked for a fatigue penalty and he found a few. So here's what he found. In a day game following a night game, batters hit 6.2 points of WOBA, weighted on base average, worse than in day games after day games or day games after not playing at

all the previous day. So that is similar to the basketball back-to-back example. Batters hit a little worse in day games following night games. Not that surprising, but backs up what we would think. Then he also looked at batters in the second game of a doubleheader, and they lose 8.1 points of WOBA compared to all other games, so slightly larger penalty. Then he found that the penalty for playing at least eight days in a row is four points of WOBA, and that's a little smaller, but it's something. And he looked at shorter streaks of games played, and as one would expect,

he found slightly smaller penalties, so it does seem to check out. As our questioner mentioned, the samples get pretty small, but Mitchell concludes that there is probably about a four-point penalty for batters who have played eight games in a row, or roughly a homestand, as Jack Ryan would say. So that doesn't tell us the team effect, but presumably, if there is an individual hitter effect, teams are made up of individual hitters. And so you would think that it would be a compounding effect, right? Like if one guy is four points of Woba worse, then all the other guys are four points of Woba worse. And maybe it sort of stacks. Maybe the whole lineup is just four points of Woba worse. I don't know.

But it seems like there would be a penalty there. And I don't know how it affects pitchers, but you'd think there might be some hit to the bullpen at least. I don't know. 15 days in a row that you are going to have a team that's just, it's always hard to know what to ascribe a worse performance to because a worse performance can just come down to a ball that found the grass that might not ordinarily find the grass or vice versa. But you just figure it probably comes down to a little bit of maybe lapsed focus. Maybe you're not on, quote unquote, on for every single pitch, or maybe you were just feeling some aches and pains you know like if you go to the gym three days in a row and you try to get in there on the fourth to do whatever lifting you're doing you might just not be at your your peak capability so it makes all the sense in the world that these things would compound now it would be interesting to look at how teams have

done when one team is like really exhausted when one team recently had a day off i don't even know how you you would begin to search for the hey dan hirsch if you're available for a live podcast query this should be a fun because if you had a big enough sample you wouldn't even necessarily need to worry about how good each team is you would just assume that things were balanced out over the course of like 40 or 50 years assuming that you have average teams on both sides so it would be interesting to look at it like a team that has played at least, I don't know, eight or 10 days in a row against a team that just recently had a day off. And it would be interesting to see what the winning percentages come out to, because I am going to

guess it would not be 50-50. Yeah, right. All right. And then Corey, another Patreon supporter, he says, there's often discussion early in the season about how much to trust the team's early results when they differ from the projections. We've certainly talked about that many a time. What about for individual players? When a player is bucking the projections, are you faster or slower to revise your opinion of that player's true talent than you would be for a team? If there's a difference, what explains it? In you were the yankees how confident would you be in greg bird well i i think it's a lot easier so obviously a team is just made up of a group of players and players will under or over perform their projections and i think you and i both will look for reasons to believe that some deviation is is real because we can spot things now when, when you look at the team level, if you have a team that's just racking up wins in one-rank games or whatever, then we know that that's mostly noise. But at the individual level, I think that you can spot differences pretty quickly,

whether that's velocity is down or someone's strike rate is dramatically improved. So there's just a lot of noise that happens at the team level that when you are looking at a player individually you can isolate the effects pretty pretty easily i think to find reasons to believe in it or or not to but as far as greg bird is concerned i don't know do you have a particular insight on greg bird because his profile in terms of what he is or what he should be hasn't changed very much but he's he's been through so much physically that I don't even know if he's supposed to be considered the same hitter that he was a few years ago when he was just newly injury prone yeah I

haven't really looked at the underlying numbers this season when he's even been on the field I was pretty bullish on him coming into the year but that has not been borne out by the results or his health. He's found time after time that at least as a group, you should always bet on the projections that the guys who are overperforming will just about nail their rest of season projections from that point forward. And same for the guys who are underperforming. So I don't know. I mean, it's definitely easier to talk yourself into buying a hitter who's overperforming or underperforming just because you can really drill down on an

individual player stats in a way that you can't so much for a team but i don't know whether that means you would actually be right more often so yeah no that's true and yeah and it maybe mgl's point shouldn't be surprising because if projections were wrong about those players all the time then they would be very bad projections. Projections are supposed to nail these things in mass. And now I can tell you about Greg Bird, 2015, 2017, and 2018. His exit velocities, his average exit velocity has gone from 93 to 89.7 to 86.8. That's bad.

So his expected numbers are also falling off of a cliff. Now, of course, there's a question of whether or not his peak exit velocity has changed and whatnot. This is not a Greg Bird analysis podcast, so we're not going to go into that right now. But there is at least reason to believe that Greg Bird has gotten considerably worse for one reason or another. All right. Let's end this by going full circle. We talked about that Austin Davis consulting his cheat sheet from his back pocket. This is sort of related to that. Chris says, do you guys ever foresee a day in which baseball follows football with headsets to communicate for coaches and players?

Why does a catcher need to show signals for a pitcher when some algorithm or software could call the perfect pitch and a coach could communicate this to the catcher or pitcher or even just the coach part and not the algorithm part why does a team need to accuse the other team of stealing signals when a coach with a headset could just say double steal hit and run etc so why don't we cut out the middlemen or cut out the players entirely and just have coaches tell the players what to do basically since in a lot of cases they are doing that to a greater extent anyway. Isn't this basically what we talked about when the mound visit rule was being proposed? Like, why do we need to have these things anyway? Why don't we just streamline the process? I think this is, in a weird way, I think this might actually be further away than an automated strike zone

because I think that with the automated strike zone, you want everyone to be playing, in theory at least, you want everyone to be playing, in theory at least, you want everyone to be playing by the same rules. You want the strike zone to be the same for every single team and every single pitcher, every single batter, etc. And for game calling and sign sealing, I think that there's enough of some sort of skill effect or just baseball know-how that you don't want to, that players at least, or people might be resistant to having

leave the game now i know that if you have the automated strike zone that kind of defeats framing which is its own sort of technique but if you certainly if you had some sort of algorithm that's just basically some computer tells the pitcher in an automated voice like curveball and then he throws it and then the catcher hears it too then i don't know that that feels it feels a lot more distant, maybe only because there hasn't been a real conversation about it for very long, unlike the automated strike zone, which has existed as a conversation for like 10 or 15 years.

But I do think that there should probably be some sort of like dugout to catcher headset. I don't know. But in terms of getting it all automated and technological, it feels like it's quite far away, even though that also means it's inevitable. Yeah, I think that's happened at the college level in at least some places. I'm pretty sure I've talked to Michael Bowman about that. And I remember talking to Sam on an episode of this podcast about the thing that you brought up earlier, teams using like laser range finders to say that outfielders should stand in a certain spot and then marking that spot with something there was a bit of a brouhaha about that a couple years ago

because the Mets were objecting to the Dodgers doing that I think or was it the other way around I think it was the first way around and we talked about that at the time. And I remember not being totally sure how I felt about that because on the one hand, I have no problem with teams optimizing their positioning and looking at the data and that's just smart and I get it. the idea that there would be a marker on the field that would just say stand here and i don't know why because i i guess it's just like it's removing something that is a skill whether it's the hitter's ability to remember the scouting report and where he's supposed to stand or the coaching staff's ability to position the player in the middle of the game. Like to some extent, that is a test of the players and coaches' ability to execute that strategy. And if you just take that away, then it's removing the need to do that. Now, I don't know.

Does that make the game any more or less entertaining? Not particularly. So maybe it doesn't really matter. But something about that just didn't sit well with me. I assume that's happening all over the place, and really, what's the difference if you just have a marker on the field or if you have the outfielder with a card in his pocket that tells him where to stand? There is no real difference, but somehow, like, taking away the player decision-making aspect of that just rubbed me the wrong way. Like I didn't like losing, I guess, the need to

actually do the thing that you're supposed to do. Right. When you were reducing the agency of the player on the field, and it just feels like we are getting more and more toward a baseball game played by robots, even though we're already having players who are positioned according to these algorithms and equations and spray charts that are just in the dugout. The markers are basically already there. They're being communicated to the players, just not the instant of necessarily. You know, if you have a player who's in the outfield, you'll have coaches like waving them over. So they'll kind of go in the general direction.

They just might be off by like a few feet. And this would be an interesting conversation to have at a greater length over just how automated the game should be because you would reach a level where you feel like you've sort of i guess we're going to use the expression human element in this podcast you can't you can't beat around it you might as well just dive into it the human element we all cherish it i this is one of the reasons i actually do go back and forth and whether i even want an automated strike zone because i like having pitch framing as sort of an effect to say nothing of all the controversies and all the conversation you get just talking about umpires. Now, I think the game would, whatever, different conversation.

But I agree with you that there's some sort of instinctive response that thinks, I don't really like this, but it's worth examining closer because I don't know how sticky that instinctive feeling is upon closer examination. Because maybe this is just one of those things you have to talk your way out of. Yeah. All right. We have talked our way out of this episode. We will end here. But for good measure, I will add one more late-breaking question.

This is from listener Mike in response to the Rays game on Tuesday. The Rays shut out the Blue Jays 4-0. And Mike notes that they did it by utilizing seven pitchers in a nine the Rays game on Tuesday. The Rays shut out the Blue Jays 4-0, and Mike notes that they did it by utilizing seven pitchers in a nine-inning game. He continues, is that some sort of record for most pitchers used in a nine-inning shutout? I see nothing in the AP News recap, but it struck me as a lot of pitchers for a shutout regulation length game. The big record-breaking news was opener Ryan Stanek being the first rookie since 1943 To start consecutive games but the number Of pitchers in a shutout caught my eye

Well Mike seven pitchers used in a Nine inning shutout actually puts this game In a 30 way tie for second Place most pitchers ever used in a Nine inning shutout eight and that has Happened four times most recently On August 30th 2014 When the Angels did it against

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