Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1335: Horsed Retirement

Episode Date: February 14, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo’s visa problem, Doug Fister’s retirement and CC Sabathia’s retirement tour, Johnny Cueto’s late horses, the current size of Yoenis Cespedes, players’ newly coordinated messaging about baseball economics, and Aaron Nola’s extension, then answer listener emails about when baseball will cease to exist, small-market teams’ spending, Shohei […]

🎵 So things never change Never change Hello and welcome to episode 1335 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Van Graffs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Dan Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Van Graffs. Hello! Rangers pitcher Sean Kelly on where Bryce Harper will end up via TR Sullivan's Twitter feed, Sullivan underscore Ranger, quote, No idea. Talked to him the other day and he said it's actually slower than you guys think it is. How?

In what world could that be slower than we think it is? Nothing is happening. Slower than motionless? I guess if he's actually going backward, he's somehow further away from signing than he was before, I guess. Oh man, one of these days, one of these years, they'll sign somewhere, I'm sure. It's been a while since our last Williams Estadillo update, and I have an update for you, which is that Williams Estadillo has not yet arrived in Twins Camp because he is having visa issues williams sdo currently unable to enter the country we have discussed the venezuelan political situation so perhaps that's not surprising but it does seem like williams sdo should just have global entry everywhere he should just have some sort of special passport that gets him into any country maybe he was he had applied for some sort of special exemption, but he struck out.

All right. Continuing on. I think we can end the podcast now. That's good for today. We'll get the emails in the next. Yeah, we are going to get to emails in just a few minutes. A couple other things that happened. C.C. Sabathia announced his impending retirement. Feels like it's been a couple years since we had the retirement tour. Do you think C.Ce Sabathia announced his impending retirement. It feels like it's been a couple years since we had the retirement tour. Do you think CeCe Sabathia merits a retirement tour, if anyone does? I don't know why players do this pre-announcement of a retirement. I guess it's just so, I don't know, no one expects them to come back, or maybe it's something they just want to think in their own minds, this is it,

and I'm walking away after this, so I'm going to leave it all in the field, or whether it's to give people a chance to come and see them in person. I don't know if that seems sort of a self-aggrandizing thing. I will announce that I'm retiring so that you can all have the pleasure of seeing me again. Usually these retirement tours have been position players, although I guess Mariano Rivera sort of got a retirement tour too, but does Sabathia clear the bar for retirement tour worthiness? This is just a different way of having the Hall of Fame conversation, I guess, but let's do it like this. Okay, so let's see. CeCe Sabathia, according to baseball reference, is a career war of 62.2 the original farewell tour i

think was derrick jeter is that true maybe that's not true i don't know chipper jones before or after he was before jeter right okay well let's let's use jeter as the bar anyway because we're gonna derrick jeter's gonna be the bar for a lot of these things derrick jeter wound up at 72 career war so he cleared sabathia assuming sabathia doesn't have a 10-war season. But then on the other hand, David Ortiz, 55.3 career war. He had a farewell tour, as we can all recall. I think the Red Sox fans still think that he should come back and give another farewell tour. Although I guess J.D. Martinez kind of placated them for a bit. Looking at Sabathia, it's been a while since he was like Cece Sabathia.

So it's really easy to forget. This is, I mean, he's aged a lot more gracefully than, let's just say it, Albert Pujols has. Yeah. And Albert Pujols will deserve a farewell tour. But I don't know, when you have one of those, I don't even know if we have enough to have enough data to know what a farewell tour should be and who deserves one but at least feels to me that you should be close enough to having been really really good recently and in in that sense and it's been a while since the bath he was really like a top of the rotation starter it's been a very long time since upper pool holes was truly amazing and it's just so easy to forget what these players were like at at their peak

that i don't know it kind of feels like a it's an inner circle hall of fame sort of deal but i don't know i understand there's intangibles that factor into this too but does cc sabathia meet the threshold for intangibles great dude and everything but yeah i don't know he's not he's not everywhere he's not there he's not deeper i don't i don't think of cc sabath I could be wrong, but I don't think of him as a household name, and maybe that's the bar. Yeah. I mean, I think he probably is and will be a Hall of Famer. I think we just have to adjust our expectations for what a Hall of Fame pitcher looks like these days. If you just look since 2000, for instance, the career war list for pitchers goes Justin Verlander, Roy Halladay CeCe Sabathia

Followed by Clayton Kershaw, Zach Granke There are a few active guys there who could Catch up but yeah Sabathia Say he has another 2-3 Win season as he has for the last Couple years he'll end up with You know something in the realm of 65 war which is pretty

Good it doesn't clear the jaws Bar for starting pitchers but I think clear the jaws bar for starting pitchers, but I think that is in part because starting pitchers don't have the opportunity to accrue as much war these days. They just don't pitch as many innings. And he's going to get to 3,500 innings at some point this season, and that's going to be a lot for a pitcher in this day and age. So I don't know, there aren't many guys who would be Hall of Fame worthy if CeCe Sabathia is not. So I think in that way, he probably does deserve it, but he didn't spend his entire career with one team. So he doesn't have that going for him the way that Jeter and Rivera and Chipper Jones did. So I feel like that's part of it. You have to have a loyalty to a fan base. I guess Ortiz was technically not with one team his whole career, but essentially he was. So he kind of qualified in that way too. But that would be my objection. I would say that a starting pitcher is probably the best guy to have a retirement tour, right?

Because you know when he's pitching and when he's not, and you can show up and you get to appreciate him for more total time than you do for someone who just comes up to the plate for four at-bats or something. When Rivera was doing his retirement tour, that was kind of awkward because are you actually going to buy a ticket to go see a closer who might pitch? He pitches in like every few games for an inning and you just don't know whether you'll see him at all. So that was kind of weird. Yeah, that was kind of weird. Yeah, Sabathia should be the Hall of Fame pitcher. And how do we determine what a farewell tour is?

Do the teams have to give you gifts? Is that what is required? Or is it just like a Twitter thing? That was the Jeter, Chipper Jones, Ortiz thing. That was what I think distinguished them. I mean, there have been other guys who have kind of taken their final lap around the league and have gotten applauded wherever they went, but the getting surfboards and portraits and all sorts of weird gifts, that seemed to be something that was new with Chipper Jones. I don't

know. Maybe there's someone who predated him. Well, let me put it like this. I'll tell you one player who is not going to get a farewell tour, but who has now as of Wednesday retired, it's Doug Pfister. Doug Pfister has called it a career. And what's interesting about that here, this is just going to be another one of those trait. Everybody gets older really fast stories, but it feels like genuinely just the other day that myself and Dave Cameron, me of Lookout Landing and Dave Cameron of U.S. Mariner, we and some others got together to put together a reader and blog event at a Mariners game. We met with some front office people, had a Q&A before the game started.

Then we went and watched the Mariners take on the Rays at Safeco Field. It's a game that the Rays ultimately won 10-4. We watched Ian Snell, Mariners pitcher, start the game, walk six batters of the 13 that he faced. He didn't last very long. He was relieved by Chris Jockubaskas, Garrett Olsen, Sean White. This team was above 500, if you can believe it. But the last pitcher to show up in that game was Doug Pfister, making his major league debut through a scoreless one inning of work in the ninth. I can kind of remember watching Pfister's debut vividly. I was young. I was 10 years younger than I am now, so I had a lot more fun with his name. We've all gotten

used to it at this point, but we were all chanting for him. Our entire section was chanting for Doug Pfister to throw his bowling ball sinker and have a great debut and great career. And now it's over. 10 years later, it's over. There was a lot in Doug Pfister's career. He briefly looked like he was an ace. There was trade everybody made fun of. And then the prospect that was going the other way turned out to be a really good pitcher in Robbie Ray so just a real fun career for Doug Pfister came out of nowhere off the radar prospect made good and then the controversial trade and so on god bless you Doug Pfister I guess one of my favorite pitchers ever out of Fresno and it feels like he is too

young to call it quits but he wants to spend a lot of time with family and I guess unlike a lot of other baseball players he he likes his family and wants to spend more time with them. Right. All right. So no retirement tour for Pfister, but retirement podcast mention at least. In other weirder news, I don't know how much time you spend on Johnny Cueto's Instagram. So I don't know whether you saw this, but Johnny Cueto this week posted a picture of his dead horse. Not his dead horse in life, but his dead horse in death. So he posted a picture of a horse lying on the ground, lifeless, with the caption,

My horse Popeye died. And I am sad for Johnny Cueto and his horse and my condolences. But this is a strange thing to post and I'll link to it. And for anyone who doesn't like looking at pictures of dead animals, so basically everyone, you don't need to click on this. But this is a weird way of remembering a departed pet to get even stranger. This is not the first time that Johnny Cueto has posted a picture of a dead horse of his. In July 1st, 2016,

he posted a different picture of a different dead horse. Actually, it was like a collage of four pictures of this horse, two in which it was living and two in which it was dead. And this is just, I don't know if there's a, I mean, the beating a dead horse is almost too obvious here. This is just something that he does when a pet passes on. He posts a picture of how that pet looks, which is, it's weird. A lot of people will post on social media when a pet dies and maybe a picture of that pet in happier days, but not so much as the pet looks after death. This is, I believe, what is it, an example of post-mortem photography. I think it's a whole thing.

And I have not dug into this because I just don't have the heart or the stomach for it. of the stomach for it but when we have had baseball players meet their unfortunate ends in latin america generally when they're on the road i have come to understand at least anecdotally i've come to understand that in in some cultures it's just more common to post pictures of of the recently passed whether that be human or animal so i don't have any more information but this could just be an example of of a couple different cultures not quite seeing eye to eye and what's appropriate and what's not. I don't know. It's also just the headline of like Johnny Cueto posted a picture of his dead horse. It's like it's enough to elicit laughter, even though I don't think that Johnny Cueto posted the picture of his dead horse to make people laugh.

No, I'm sure he didn't. Yeah, it's a mournful time for him. Yeah, it's a mournful time for him, but I'm still going to have to stifle a few struggles on my end because dead horse in a headline is just guaranteed to make me laugh. Yeah, this is just – you don't need to show your work. No need to prove it. I believe that you have lost your horse, and I'm sorry for you. Anyway, this could very well be a culture shock thing. So if someone can write in and explain this tradition to us, that would be enlightening. But this is not normally what I expect to see on Instagram,

not that I spend a whole lot of time there. Speaking of horses, it was just a few years ago that Ioannis Cespedes rode in on one when he arrived at spring training, and he arrived at Mets camp on Wednesday, and SNY tweeted a video of Jonas Espedes walking into the facility from the parking lot, and this elicited a lot of reactions on Ringer MLB Slack, which is populated by a lot of Mets fans, because Jonas Espedes looks large. Sam and I used to do something where, you know, there would be like a tabloid photo of a player or some low-quality off-season photo, and the player would look like he'd put on a lot of weight,

and we would scrutinize it to see whether maybe it was just the angle or a gust of wind blew his shirt out or something. I don't think there's any uncertainty about that with this video of Jonas Cespedes, which I just linked you to. He looks large, and in fairness, he's not playing, and he has problems with both heels, so I guess he doesn't have to move in the near future. So if you don't have to move, you might as well pack on some pounds. But this is like the baseball saying, let it eat. This is like taking it literally.

Yeah, I don't know how you're supposed to conduct a normal offseason when you can't move your legs. He had surgery on both of his heels. Is that correct? I think so, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know how much he's able to do. I know that the Mets themselves have said if they get anything out of Cespedes this season, then they're going to be over the moon.

I think, I don't know, maybe kind of a second half reappearance, but pretty clearly based on the way that they have put their roster together and moved Jeff McNeil, they don't expect Ioana Cespedes to do very much. And that was probably before the video came out. So I'm going to click on it, but I already sort of know what I'm going to see. You've already told me what I'm going to see. It's going to be a big Ioana Cespedes, but I will at least forgive him because he has not been able to stand. And that, yep. Well, hold on. I mean, look, he's a big boy.

Not as large as you expected. But he's, it's at least concentrated more in the upper half of his upper half than the lower half of his upper half. Yes. That is true. So, you know, he, maybe, let's put it this way. He hasn't been able to do leg day in a while, but I don't think that he's skipping the gym. That could be. My colleague, Michael Bauman, said that the confidence to put a shirt that tight over that torso is a greater asset to a hitter than a flat stomach. So it does seem to show some confidence.

But this is one of those situations where if he does get back into game shape, literally at some point, he will obviously drop those pounds. But right now, not particularly important, I suppose. Yep. I haven't seen any other pictures of fat baseball players. And even if I did, I'd be willing to forgive them because they're all better than I am at everything that I do. So do you want to move on to emails or you got more banter? Last thing I wanted to say is that there have been a bunch of

what seems like coordinated social media messages from players lately. I don't know if you've noticed this, but it seemed to start with Evan Longoria, or maybe that was one of the first ones I saw on Instagram. And then there's Justin Verlander and Pat Neshek and several others have come out. Buster Posey, I think, had one as well. Just a whole lot of players pointing out either what they perceive to be anti-competitive behavior or teams not spending on free agents that they should be spending on. It just seems like all of a sudden the Players Association has, I don't know whether it's put the call out or something, but has really gotten its act together when it comes to presenting some

coherent message on the part of the players who are really its best ambassadors. I mean, Tony Clark can say whatever he wants, but if you have star players coming out and saying these things, then I think there's a greater was just a message sent out, hey, everyone tweet about how teams should be spending more on free agents or something, but it is notable that this seems to have happened all of a sudden. Would you say that it seems like they're colluding? It does seem like they're colluding. You do wonder, I know, we hopefully sometime soon we'll have the opportunity to talk to Jerry Krasnick, who was recently hired by the union. Jerry Krasnick is only one man, but, you know, he's a longtime writer. He has a good understanding of what messaging would be. And you wonder, maybe it's not Jerry Krasnick's fault, but maybe he's more of a symptom of a push to do what you said, to just try to get the union to win the battle.

to win the battle because when you're out there, I mean, you look at any sort of – click on any Jeff Passon tweet or Ken Rosenthal tweet, and the replies are either going to be, this isn't about Manny Machado or Bryce Harper, so you should delete it, or this is just more nothing about Manny Machado and Bryce Harper, and then invariably scroll a little bit and you're going to have dozens of people saying, well, maybe they shouldn't be holding out for so much money too much money owners have gotten smart yada yada yada and i'm not saying that there hasn't been a shift toward maybe a little more responsible spending in free agency but that that's just where people are and we talked to jeff passon about this uh

i don't know more than a year ago i guess it must have been last offseason, where the messaging battle is being lost or at least has been lost in the past in terms of team spending versus players wanting that money. The fans have thought the players, if anything, should be happy with what they get. So you have to fight that in the collective bargaining and you have to earn, you have to try to fight to get the money that you need or that you deserve. But the messaging also helps to apply pressure this gets a little too weird and political and conniving for me to really want to sink my teeth into it but i mean you need to be able to

have fans on your side as well and and for a very long time i don't think the fans had a very good understanding of if the players don't get the money then the owners keep it so you know you can sort of sense that there's been a shift in the way the baseball is written about online. And it would only make sense that you would want to encourage a similar sort of shift in the conversation among the fan base. And so, yeah, Tony Clark or labor lawyers can say whatever they want, but you have to have the players speaking out.

And even if they aren't always given the whole truth, well, are the owners always sharing the whole truth? I don't think that they are. It's all about talking. Right. Well, and it does seem that they're winning this messaging battle within the bubble that we occupy, which clearly does not represent baseball at large. But, you know, Facebook group posts in our Facebook group that I see or tweets that are directed at me or posts that we write, other writers writing things, it seems like there is a clear sentiment that owners are behaving in some anti-competitive ways or they should be spending more. In fact, when Aaron Nola signed his extension with the Phillies this week, which you just wrote about, I saw a lot of reactions that essentially said,

see, baseball is broken, spending is terrible, and this is yet another example of that. Now, I don't know, you dug into the terms more than I did, but this is just sort of how a pre-arbitration or pre-free agency extension for a player in his early arpeers works, right? This wasn't way out of line with other extensions that have been signed. Now, you could say that all of those deals have been team-friendly, or a lot of them have, even though obviously it benefits the player to get that sort of security. But this wasn't wildly out of line with previous contracts, right? It's just that in this climate, we're, I think, predisposed to see everything as another example of the system being broken. I'm not sure how many... When you see Nola signed for four years and $45 million,

even if you tell people, okay, but that buys out three years of arbitration and one year of free agency. I don't think that a lot of people are able to internalize that and realize, well, this isn't a free agent contract. He didn't have that same leverage. He couldn't talk to 30 different baseball teams. So this is, I do think that he signed for somewhat light terms, just given the fact that he got a signing bonus when he was drafted of $3.3 million. He's made, I don't know, $1.5 million, $2 million as a major leaguer so far, and he was guaranteed to make at least $4.4 million through arbitration this year. So you'd think Aaron Nola wouldn't be that classic out-of-nowhere who just signed at the first big offer he got because he's never made any money before. This was this is a player who had already made and was going to make more millions of dollars. So you'd think maybe he could have held out for a

little more. But still, he did get terms somewhat comparable to Carlos Martinez, who signed a five year extension at a same service time a couple years ago. Carlos Martinez, leading up to that extension signing, was a little worse than Aaron Nola and also had a recent shoulder problem, which Aaron Nola doesn't have. So working in Nola's favor is that he signed away at maximum two free agent years. Martinez signed away at maximum four. So that is still, that's something that's a little more player-friendly for Nola. But as I think more and more people keep talking about if there is this negative paul cast over

even the idea of reaching free agency then it makes sense that in theory you would see young players devaluing those free agent years and being more willing to sign extensions like this and you can never tell if that was the factor in any given extension aaron nola is not going to come out tomorrow and say i did this because i don't want to be a free agent because it sounds terrible. He's not going to say that. But it makes sense that would have motivated, at least in part, a contract like this or Eugenio Suarez signing his big contract a year ago. And I guess we're just going to have to see if we see more of this, because in a way, that means that reduced spending in free agency could lead to even further reduced spending as teams look for deals with these long-term extensions.

So it's something to monitor. And all the articles we've seen about revenue split shares and how players are still getting close to the same split as they used to, really, that's incomplete because we're going to need five or ten years of information to see if there's a trend developing, which hopefully, I guess, in the next CBA, things are corrected such that we don't get that five or 10 year trend. All right, emails. So let's start with a very big picture question here. This is from Dave. He says, how long do you think baseball will last? 100 more years, 200 more years, 1,000 years, forever? Maybe environmental degradation or dystopian politics makes the game impossible in 25 years or maybe every starting pitcher will get Tommy John surgery at age 20 because

it'll have a 100% success rate in the future and cyborgs will be legally rosterable. Maybe kids won't play baseball anymore but the professional game will be huge in Madagascar. I ask partly because every time I hear an announcer say something like we'll never see anything like it again, I feel like throwing stuff. I don't give a rat's ass about the Hall of Fame, but if baseball

lasts for a thousand more years, do we think anybody is going to want to remember Waite Hoyt or even somebody like Paul Molitor? This is a question that we've gotten over the years a few times, and Sam and I always toyed with answering it, and we always put it off because I think Sam wanted to write a book about it or something instead of just answering it in an email because he was really fascinated by this question. There's no way to predict next year, let alone hundreds or thousands of years. But do you have a gut feeling for how long baseball will exist or at least exist in a form where anyone cares about it? exist or at least exist in a form where anyone cares about it okay so are we talking about the game of baseball and people playing it or like major league baseball being the monopoly and being the center of attention of being a major sport because baseball as a game will be played

by people i think for a long time but the sort of the the current setup where major league baseball and professional baseball itself is one of the the pillars of american slash international society 75 years 75 more years and it will uh it will deteriorate uh along with uh with a lot of the rest of the institutions in the globe for for a variety of reasons i don't have a very positive outlook on the world and uh on on the motivations in the future the near-term future of humanity and i think baseball and other professional sports is going to be a casualty as things get increasingly worse. Okay. Well, 75 years, that's enough to cover the rest of our lives. Yeah, I'll be dead. So yeah, not our problem. Don't have kids. Yeah. I mean, I am more of an optimist generally, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm an optimist

about baseball because baseball has been very long-lived, I would say, for a sport. It's been a prominent recreational activity for a lot longer than most. Many things come and go and are fads and you forget about them. And baseball has been close to top of mind now for about 150 years or a little more. So that's a good run. I think if it ended right now, you'd have to say baseball has had a good run. Probably the longer it exists at this level, the harder it is to eradicate. So it'll just ingrain itself more and more in the culture to the point where it probably won't disappear. I mean, something like boxing, horse racing, those are obviously sports that used to be as prominent as baseball ever was. And now they're not so much. They're more niche activities, but they're known to everyone. It's not like they've disappeared.

If the environment falls apart and everything is flooded and hot and disastrous, then no one's going to be playing any sports, right? I mean, let alone a sport that's played outdoors on grassy fields under blue skies. It's probably a sport that's played indoors and takes up less room would be better adapted to that sort of society. I have hopes that we will figure things out before the earth is destroyed, but there is the caveat that that could very well happen and then no one will be playing anything. If that doesn't happen, I could see it continuing on for quite some time, but I wouldn't predict that anything would last like a millennium or something. So let's say a century. I'm slightly more optimistic than you are. 75 years. Okay. And after that, if there are humans, there will be like, like the way that people play throwback baseball now, like the people we talked to in a recent episode, there will probably be people who will play baseball. Just, you know, it'll be an archaic thing that no one plays anymore,

but they'll do it just for fun for the historical reenactment of it. I suspect that sooner than people imagine baseball and many other professional sports are going to end up some kind of effectively a freak show as technology just allows players to get so good and so physically gifted that it doesn't, you can't even comprehend, you can't look at the field anymore and think like, oh, you know, if I'd gone down another path, I could have been one of these players. You can't dream on your own potential or at some point even recognize these players

as being human beings. They're going to be, they're going to become superior athletes in every way, shape, and form. And we're going to have trouble figuring out the legality of what we allow players to do, what we don't allow players to do. It's already so hard to come up with an excuse for why steroids are bad.

But I don't know. LASIK is good. And the lines are already so blurry. They're only going to get blurrier. I mean, for God's sake, we've got children being created in China now that are being selected for genetically. So anyway, this gets into, as you mentioned, probably the book, maybe a series of books. I don't know. Using, I guess, baseball probably the book, maybe a series of books. I don't, using, I guess, baseball as the core conceit, but you know, it's also just the future of the world. And it's not

a book with a happy ending, at least not for humans. Yeah. Once we get into cyborgs and gene editing, I don't know whether at some point they'll just have to say, okay, you have to be the way that you were born naturally to play baseball or something or whether no one will be that way. And so you'll just have to let gene edited people into Major how far you can push that performance. But as you said, the further it gets from something natural, the harder it is to identify with. But it is interesting, as Dave was saying, to think that if baseball does go on for many more centuries, no one will remember anyone that we're talking about on this podcast, probably. Like, you know, I guess you would remember Babe Ruth because he was a formative figure.

Maybe you would remember some other people who really changed the game in a lot of ways. But there are Hall of Famers from the 19th century who no one knows now unless you really dig and look them up. And so no one will remember Williams Estadillo even in a century or two centuries or three centuries. And even like Mike Trout or someone, I mean, if Mike Trout ends up being the best player to this point when his career is over, then perhaps he will be remembered. But most great players will just be names that no one knows anything about.

Or at some point you'll just have so many Hall of Famers, there will be like, you know, hundreds, thousands of them, and there will be no way to keep them straight in your head anyway. You'd have to spend your whole childhood devoted to baseball research just to know who all the great players were. So if baseball history stretches on for a really long time, then everything that we are talking about right now is just going to be the dark ages that no one knows about. Well, sure, but everybody dies and is forgotten. It's one of the great reliefs of existence that what you worry about, what you stress about doesn't mean anything in any grand scheme of things. If you die, if you're a great achiever, maybe you get three days that people give a shit and then someone litters the earth with some sort of hastily erected stone monument in your honor, but no one will visit it after a couple of years.

And that's only if you're at the top 1% of the 1% of the 1%. If you're you or me or a listener or anyone that we love, I don't know who's in your circle, but I know who's in mine, not going to be remembered in the world, not for more than a couple of days. And I don't know of anything that's more freeing than that. Just not having to think about your place in the long-term future of the planet and humanity. Just live your life and then end it. I mean, I'm not saying that you should end it yourself, but it will end and you should allow to do so and you should smile about it. Well, some people find that comforting. Other people find it the opposite of comforting. I think it's comforting in the sense

that it helps if you have any ambitions about anything, that can be a way for you to quickly forget them, which I guess is not necessarily a good thing. But that was something that Conan O'Brien said recently in an interview, right? That he was worried about his late night show being forgotten because it's just this thing that's there every day and the episodes kind of blend into each other. And then he talked to someone who was just like, every show is going to be forgotten. Don't worry about it. And he found that to be very freeing. So in that sense, I think that can be a good thing to keep in mind in the sense that everything's going to end and everything we enjoy will end at one point too. That's not

something I'm particularly looking forward to. Although who knows how I'll feel by the time it happens. That's absolutely correct. You live here so that hopefully you can spend enough time engaging your mind so that you live an interesting or at least interested life. But you will peak, you will decline, and it'll end and people are going to move on. You're going to move on. We've all moved on from the deaths of people that we thought we were very close to before.

Maybe. Many of us. I guess maybe not all of us yet. Horses too. Horses. Especially horses. You post a picture of them on social media and then you move on with your day. Right.

The normal grieving process. All right. Continuing. Scott says, by now we've all read Sam Miller's latest in which he laments that small market teams might be out of innovations that allow them to compete with behemoths like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers. And for those who have not actually read Sam's latest, basically he postulates that this current economic system might benefit big market teams because if no one's spending, if we're in this era of austerity where no one's handing out 10-year contracts, then the thing that players are going to use to decide where to sign will be other factors like big cities or your odds of winning the World Series or your odds of getting a big marketing deal or something. So that will just favor the Yankees and the Red Sox

and the Dodgers. And then those teams won't have to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars and give players 10-year contracts, which in the past, at least kind of was a tax of a sort. Like if you wanted to sign a big free agent, you had to spend a lot, which put some players out of smaller market teams price range, but at least kept the bigger market teams from having unlimited funds, essentially. So Sam was arguing that if the system persists or intensifies, then maybe the big market teams will just get all the good players without even having to spend. Continuing now with Scott's question, Sam set up an example where the Rays would love to sign Bryce Harper, but could only

spend up to $125 million, while the Yankees could easily pay him up to $250 million. Mine isn't an original idea, but maybe in this depressed free agent market, its time has come. Shouldn't the Rays offer Harper the entire $125 million over two or three years? Compressing a long-term contract into a very small window might even be seen as innovative. What do you think? Should the Rays offer Bryce Harper $40 million a year for three years? Yeah, he's basically saying if you're a small market team and you have a fixed amount of money you can spend, should you just give it to the player over a few years instead of a lot of years? Well, when you spread it over a lot of years,

not only are you hoping to get value in the back of the contract or the middle of the contract, but you are also, of course, spreading out when you're paying that money. And now, like with every single team, we don't know exactly how much flexibility the Rays have. But if you look at how the Rays operate, how they have operated, I think we kind of have to assume that this is how they are going to operate, barring some sort of dramatic change. They are going to be a lower budget organization. And if you look at this also just gets into specifics of who Bryce Harper is and what this might mean. But it's just when you have a player who would be taking up that much money, it's always about opportunity cost, right? And so

if you're like, well, if they could give Bryce Harper $40 million a year, could they do something better with that $40 million? It's just you can say, well, is it better to have Bryce Harper for $40 million or nothing? But that hypothetical doesn't make any sense. It collapses when you think about the fact that it doesn't have to be like that. No one has just a $40 million car vet. So I do understand that if you are a smaller market team and maybe you, like the Rays in particular right now are in such a position where they have a lot of young talent that is just at or just getting to the major leagues such that it's not it's very clearly not an expensive baseball team and it's not going to be an expensive baseball team for a while i think their payroll is even like down right now like 20 million

dollars which by the way they did have a payroll last year that was above 20 million dollars even though barely so this would be, in theory, a time. And I think this is what we saw with Charlie Morton. They signed Morton for, what, $30 million over two years because he just fits that window of this is big money. It's a bigger contract than the raise of, I think, maybe almost ever given out. But it's for a time period where no one is going to cost anything. So in that sense, you can see certain appeal of it. But then, on the other hand, Bryce Harper is not going to sign a short-term contract.

We already heard that the other day because the Giants have floored to that. And the Giants would be able to absorb that kind of money a lot easier because the Giants have – what is it? Fans? Yeah, I think that's the problem. This sounds good initially, like giving a guy a shorter-term deal instead of a longer-term deal. But if you kept doing this, it's not like a sustainable strategy for a small market team, right? Because the point is they either can't spend or aren't willing to spend. And so if you continued to just give guys like $40 million a year for a couple of years, then you would end up with really high payrolls, right? If you were

going to be any good because you'd be paying all your players a ton every year. And maybe you'd be minimizing some of the uncertainty that comes with long-term contracts, but you'd be using up a lot of your money that you can spend without going over the competitive balance tax on one or two players. So I don't think this is something that a small market team or a team that's not willing to spend that much could do year after year. Maybe you do it once, but it doesn't seem like a way to get around the limitations. Does still seem like it would be a lot of fun to see the Padres end up with one of Harper or Machado. I don't know why I think of the Padres as having a greater spending capacity than the Rays, but I do. Probably because they have spent more than the Rays.

We've seen them ramp up even just a few years ago, and it would be easier for them. But also, you look at the Padres and they have a clear vacancy at third base. They could badly use someone like Manny Machado, and you take a roster like the Rays that's kind of more league average and above at every position, and the marginal value of getting one of those star players is just much lower. So it would be fun. It would be uncharacteristic to see a small or medium budget operation end up with one of these two free agent star players but i'll say that that'll happen after it already happens i'm not counting on it all right matt o'donnell patreon supporter says i saw an amazing question on the baseball

subreddit today via user raging acid which is an appropriate username for this question if shohei otani were two twins pretending to be the same person and the whole angels organization were in on it would we ever notice two twins pretending to be the same person yeah we would it would be a lot easier to notice in 2019 than in like 1979 right because everybody's got a camera and two twins are two different people i you would have to be so careful but there would be a slip-up there would invariably be some kind of slip-up whether it's you see like two different lockers or two different like gym bags that are going on a truck or something but you would you would just i mean they would meet

at some point right like they would probably like go out for a meal or like get a get uber to go or something like you would have to be so careful i'm not saying it's impossible but because these would be two twin human beings they were they would slip up they would let their guard down if only for an instant and everybody has a camera all of the time now people are so quick yeah to film or get a picture of anything right that's the problem but on the other hand who would be looking for it well i, the problem is they both have to travel with the team, right? I guess if you put both of them on the team charter, maybe you can sneak them both on. If you have one on the team charter and one has to travel some other way, if it's some public transportation, then people would see this player and say, hey, why isn't this guy on the team charter?

And that would probably give things away. Then people would see this player and say, hey, why isn't this guy on the team charter? And that would probably give things away. But I guess as long as the organization is in on it, still, right. I mean, would you have only one of them show up to the ballpark each day? Otherwise, they would need space in the clubhouse. You'd need to be training them. They'd need to be working with coaches and warming up and all the stuff that baseball players do. need to be working with coaches and warming up and all the stuff that baseball players do. It seems like it would be very restrictive to only have one of them on the field or on the premises at any particular time. And if you have both of them there, then writers are going to notice.

And what do we mean even by the angels are in on it? How many of the angels? Everybody in the major league staff, all the players, of course, and all the coaches and executives. But then what about the minor leagues? What about everybody? There's so much turnover between organizations now. There would have to be some very strictly enforceable NDAs that people sign that are just valid in perpetuity, which I don't even know if those exist through the law, but all it takes is one person saying something to one other person over lunch or in a text to a reporter nothing is ever kept nothing important is ever kept secret for that long and something something would invariably leak or be told i don't know how the angels would keep us under wraps unless they just

made sure they always had the same executives coaches and players every single year and then we'd be like why haven't the Angels hired or lost anybody? This is a really strange arrangement that they've put together. Albert Pujols is still playing there and he's 48 years old. Would save you a roster spot though. So maybe it would all be worth it.

26-man roster is the proposal. Yeah, right. That's the only motivation to do this, right? Otherwise, why go to the trouble other than the fact that it's cool that one player can do all those things. If the question were, to do this, right? Otherwise, why go to the trouble other than the fact that it's cool that one player can do all those things? If the question were how long could two identical twins get away with this and fool their own organization? I mean, that would be extremely stupid because

then they would be paid as one person, even though they're two people. So I can't think of any reason why you would want to do that. But that also seems like an impossible gambit to pull off. You know what would give it away? You know what would give it away? This would happen fast, too, because the pitcher Shohei Otani, he'd be scheduled, right? But then he might get hurt or something, maybe even between innings or something.

Maybe he'd be sick, and then the Angels would be like, oh, well, we have to have a Shohei Otani pitch, but these conditions are mysterious, so they have to send out the hitter Shohei Otani to try to pitch and fake it. And people would be like, this guy's terrible. He's not at all like the other Shohei Otani. Unless, what if they're both two-way players? And it was, hmm, there's a lot of potential here.

Now we've just doubled Shohei Otani. This conspiracy goes deep. All right. Do you have a stat blast? Yeah, a little bit. Conspiracy goes deep. All right. Do you have a stat blast?

Yeah, a little bit. 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. Here's to day still past. It's inspired by the fact that the market is such that Robbie Grossman was trending fourth on the Fangraphs drop-down list today because he signed a tiny little contract with the A's, a major league contract, actually. But I was looking at Robbie Grossman, and many of you have already tuned this out, and that's the correct behavior.

You should, because I've said Robbie Grossman now three or four times already on the podcast. But when I was looking at him, I couldn't help but be reminded of something else. So here's what I'm going to do. For each category here, I'm going to give you, Ben Lindbergh, a number, and I want you to tell me whether that number is 2017-2018 Robbie Grossman or 2015-2016 Max Muncy. Okay? Okay. Okay. Average exit velocity, 85.2. Max Muncy or Robbie Grossman? Max Muncy. That is Max Muncy. That was, I should say, Max Muncy. Max Muncy, 2015-2016, when he was in the majors of the A's, had an average exit velocity of 85.2. Robbie Grossman in the last two years, 86.1.

Moving on. Maximum exit velocity. Maximum exit velocity, 109.8. Okay. I will say that was Max Muncy. Maybe he had some promise at least at some point. That's Robbie Grossman. Robbie Grossman, 109.8.

Max Muncy topped out at 108.3. angle launch angle 13.3 i have no idea what robbie grossman's launch angle is um i'll say robbie grossman max muncy robbie grossman was at 12.9 they're the same okay isolated power okay isolated power this is uh for anyone out there who doesn't know this is It was at 12.9. They're the same. Isolated power. Okay. Isolated power. This is for anyone out there who doesn't know it. This is slugging percentage minus batting average. 0.126. Robbie Grossman. Max Muncy.

0.126. Robbie Grossman, however, was at 0.122. Okay. Out of zone swing rate. Case rate. This game is basically that they're both the same and there's just no way to know the answer to any of you have it this way i get to make you look like a fool out of zone swing rate out of zone swing rate chase rate 20 max muncie or robbie grossman

well max muncie is very selective so this sounds like something max muncie might have done but again the premise of this game is evidently that they're both indistinguishable. So Robbie Grossman. Max Muncy, 20%. Robbie Grossman was 21%. 21. You missed. Zone, in zone, in zone swing rate now, 57%.

57%. Robbie Grossman. It's going to be Robbie Grossman one of these times. Incorrect. Both of them? 57%. 57%. Robbie Grossman. It's going to be Robbie Grossman one of these times. Incorrect. Both of them. 57%.

Max Muncy and Robbie Grossman. At last, final category, and this is one where there is a difference, contact rate.

79%. So that is not especially good, right? Better than average. Better than average. Okay. Max Muncy sort of

struck out a lot this year. I don't know if he did in years prior, though. I'll say Robbie Grossman. Max Muncy. Max Muncy, contact rate 79%. Robbie Grossman 85% these past two years. Now, there was another category I realized

I could have asked, and I guess I might as well ask, because you're not liking that much spreadsheet. So So two categories. Okay, perfect. Height, six feet, zero inches. Max Muncy or Robbie Grossman? I'm going to say Max Muncy on that one. Both.

Six foot, zero inches. Max Muncy or Robbie Grossman. And at last, weight. Weight at least is listed on Fangraphs. Who knows if that's accurate, but 215 pounds. Robbie Grossman. Correct. Robbie Grossman, 215 pounds. Robbie Grossman. Correct. Robbie Grossman, 215 pounds. Max Muncy at 210.

Okay. Wow. This was one of my least favorite quizzes in Effectively Wild history. Really, really not fun for anyone except for me. What this doesn't do is ensure that Robbie Grossman is going to go forward

in 2019 and post like an incredible wrc plus max muncy had a giant breakout season in 2018 with dodgers of course we talked about him a lot he uh he reworked his swing but this is it's at least interesting i know grossman is in his later 20s muncy made his changes kind of more in his mid 20s if that makes a difference but when max Muncy first showed up in the major leagues, he was disciplined. He made a slightly above average rate of contact, and he didn't hit for any power. He didn't have a really high maximum exit velocity. He didn't look like someone who would just beat the crap out of the ball like he did in 2018. But he was able to rework his swing. He did it in AAA, and then he did it in the majors,

and it at least makes me wonder if the skills you're looking to isolate here are a good eye and decent bat-to-ball skills. Robbie Grossman seems to have them just as much as Max Muncy did. The lines couldn't look more alike, so I don't know if that means anything. It's pretty late in the spring now for Robbie Grossman to be signing with the A's. I don't know if he's going to rework his swing. I googled Robbie Grossman swing, and to no one's surprise, not a whole lot of results. I don't think he's been a hot topic for the past several months or years. But anyway, there's at least that potential. You look at Robbie Grossman and think, well, that's kind of a boring player.

You never really know who's going to break out. He's got a pretty good eye, bat-to-ball skills, could be the next Max Muncy. All he needs to do is dramatically overhaul the way he attacks the baseball with the swing. All right, I've got a stat bus myself, which I assure you does not mention Robbie Grossman and does not include a quiz. So this will be quick. This is prompted by a question from Scott, who says, I was glancing at Dallas Keuchel's baseball reference page and I noticed that he has never received a Cy Young vote outside of the year when he actually won the Cy Young. So Keichel has pitched seven seasons total, he won the Cy Young award in one of them, and in the other six, he did not receive any Cy Young

votes. Scott continues, what's the most seasons a player has played without receiving a Cy Young or MVP vote outside of a season when they've actually won the award? So I have answers, as is often the case, they came from the indispensable Dan Hirsch of Baseball Reference. So again, Dallas Keuchel, seven-season career in which he won the Cy Young Award in one year, did not receive a Cy Young vote in any other year. So here are the list of the pitchers, since the Cy Young Award became a thing, of course, who have had longer careers with the same pattern, one Cy Young season and all other seasons, no Cy Young votes. These are all the guys who've had longer careers like the same pattern, one Cy Young season and all other seasons,

no Cy Young votes. These are all the guys who've had longer careers like that than Keichel. Lamar Hoyt, eight years. Rick Porcello, 10 years. Steve Stone, 11 years. John Denny and Willie Hernandez tied at 13 years. Steve Bedrosian, 14 years.

And a four-way tie at 15 years between Mark Davis, Barry Zito, Jake Peavy, and R.A. Dickey, but all of those guys are topped by Mike Flanagan, the 1979 AL Cy Young Award winner who had an 18-year career in which he received no Cy Young votes 17 times. All right, so that's the Cy Young. Here are the MVP guys. There are a lot fewer here. It's rarer for a player to win the MVP award and not get MVP votes in any other season. So only three guys have surpassed Keuchel here. Jim Constante, 1950 NL MVP award winner, 11-year career with 10 voteless years. Ken Caminiti, the 1996 NL MVP award winner,

15-year career. And at the top of the list, Willie McGee, 1985 NL MVP award winner, 18-year career, 17 voteless years. So it's sort of a two-way tie between Mike Flanagan in the Cy Young category and Willie McGee in the MVP category. So Dallas Keuchel has a long way to go. Thanks again to Dan Hirsch and to Scott for the question. Robbie Grossman, by the way, six-year career, no MVP votes. All right, let's squeeze in a few more emails here. Andrew says This is something I think we've touched on before

I was looking at the prospect profiles For Yankees hitters Miguel Andujar and Gleyber Torres and they both seem to have Vastly outperformed on power Is it possible that the juiced balls And the launch angle revolution have made Contact tools significantly more valuable Than power tools? Basically

Are contact tools more important now because it seems like everyone has power? So regarding the juiced ball, or at least the home run surge, I think what we did see, it was a little bit of regression, the home run rates of return to where they were several years ago. We've kind of come down from the peak. So now, for whatever reason, whether it's the ball or something else, we are seeing the ball Now, for whatever reason, whether it's the ball or something else, we are seeing the ball fly over the fence a little less often than we did at the peak. And so it's not just anyone who can hit a home run. But still, I do think you are going to see teams who are prioritizing an eye and some bat to ball skills. This gets into some Max Muncy and Robbie Grossman conversation again, if you want to get back into that.

again if you if you want to get back into that that you can really maybe if you are if you are with a team or with a player development staff you might think that well we can teach guys who have bat to ball skills to hit for power better than we can teach bat to ball skills to guys who have power so i don't know how much that's actually true in in practice but at least in theory it seems like those contact skills are harder to have than the power skills. And you can even go back, I don't know, five or 10 years and look at Matt Carpenter who came out of nowhere and he was just a guy who had a good eye and could hit the ball consistently. And the Cardinals taught him or he taught himself how to hit for power. I don't think that that's any less true now. I don't think that's going away. I think that teams do want bat to ball skills. And when you don't have them, well, I mean,

it's still early in his career, but how many people still would think of Yohan Mankata as like the number one or number three top young player in Major League Baseball? Life comes at you fast, and when you have contact problems, that is a lot harder to erase than problems getting the ball over the fence. And as we've discussed, there are a lot of smaller framed power hitters these days, whether it's Jose Ramirez and Francisco Lindor or Mookie Betts or Alex Bregman, guys who seem to have just made the most of their power. I think teams are getting better at unlocking whatever power potential players have. Those are all guys who can make contact.

And so if you can get them to hit the ball a little farther out front and really use their pull power, maybe they're not hitting gigantic Aaron Judge type homers, but they're getting the ball over the fence with great regularity. So I think that is becoming more common than ever. All right. Question from Charles. How likely do you think it is that the reason why there are so few teams in on Machado and Harper is because they're trying to save their money in the hopes that they can land Mike Trout in two years? Most teams can't or won't pay for two guys on a $300 million plus deal at a time. So maybe teams are avoiding huge contracts that will go into the 2021 season in the hope that they can somehow land Trout. Almost 0%.

Do you remember a few years ago when Jeff Passan and several other writers wrote about how this year's triageon class was going to be bananas and then here we are and of course you know things happen mike trout is a lot better than manny machado he's a lot better than bryce harper but that's still two years off and the angels might even get him signed long term no one knows what's going to happen to mike trout no one knows what's going to happen with i guess the next cba won't be agreed to before then but no one knows what's going to happen to Mike Trout. No one knows what's going to happen with, I guess the next CBA won't be agreed to before then, but no one knows what's going to happen with Mike Trout. And so no one is going to be operating their franchise on the basis that maybe in a couple of years, they'll have one of several chances at Mike Trout because lots of teams are going to be in there. So not only do teams not know what's going to happen

to Mike Trout, but for all the teams that spend a lot of money, they're all going to want Mike Trout. Even if teams have a center fielder, they're going to be like, well, he's not as good as Mike Trout. So everyone's going to be in there. I can't imagine that that is a factor in anyone's thinking right now. Yeah, I agree. It's like we talked about on the last email show. I think when someone asked if teams were not spending because they're worried about a strike and having players use up some of their prime years when they're not playing. And it just seems very unlikely that teams are looking at these possible contingencies that are two or three years away and dictating their spending decisions

based on that now. It's just very low probability events, for instance, that you would be able to sign Mike Trout because the odds are decent that he's going to stay where he is. And if he goes somewhere else, then it's probably going to be to one of a few teams. There's just no way to bank on that, really. And so you don't want to govern your next two or three seasons of baseball based on whether you might potentially be able to outbid everyone or persuade Mike Trout that he should come to play for you. It's just not something you can count on, so I don't think so. All right, continuing, we've got a couple more here. This is from Mike in Irvine, California.

With all the talk about changes to MLB rules, please consider a more dramatic one that wasn't on the list, namely changing the game from nine to seven innings. Yes, I know it's dramatic, but I'd like to hear your thoughts about the pros and cons of such a rule change, how you see it affecting play, et cetera. College softball has only seven innings and it seems to be plenty.

Could it be for MLB too? Curious to hear your thoughts. I don't know if it's right for you and I to be the people to answer the question because I think you and I are maybe more open-minded than the average baseball fan because if baseball went to seven innings, I would adjust in a month and be like, yeah, that's fine.

But would it be better for the game, I guess, is the question. It would make it more consumable. I don't think it's too hard to spot what the upsides are. Now, to whatever extent people are tired of bullpenning now, this would only make it go crazy. You would have games consisting of just pitchers throwing one or two innings at a time. So starting pitching would be effectively killed.

You would have, presumably, the union wouldn't be thrilled because you would have fewer roles for players. So maybe you would have smaller rosters or at least, I don't know, maybe not less value, but you would have smaller rosters or maybe just players who have smaller roles because there is just simply less playing time available. But if the owners are still drawing the same amount of revenue for the sport, or maybe even more if people really embraced it, then that could only exacerbate the current bifurcation that people think that we're seeing. In a large sense, you can see that maybe it would make the game a little more popular because it would flow freer, but this doesn't seem like it would be the solution because even then,

maybe you have a baseball game and two and a half hours instead of three, but it's still, the pace of the game is still moving somewhat slowly and maybe not up to speed for this short attention span era of humanity's existence. So I'm going to cede the soup box to Ben. See what he has to say.

Yeah, I mean, all of this stuff, it's the same conversation that people have with the number of games in a season. My instinct is that I'd rather see fewer games in a season and have them still be nine innings. I'd rather have that happen than for this to happen, the same number of games and fewer innings per game. But either way, you're trying to find the optimal balance, I guess, where obviously the fewer games you have and the fewer innings you have in those games, the more exciting each game is and the more exciting each inning is.

You're just kind of raising the leverage of your season for every given play. So in that sense, it would be more exciting, and I think a lot of people would miss it just because a lot of people like that there's as much baseball as there is. And I think it's probably an asset of the sport that there's just so much programming. That's a big part of the reason why the broadcast contracts are so big, because if you sign a baseball contract, you're just guaranteeing yourself just so much dead air filled with baseball.

A lot of baseball, unfortunately, is dead air, but obviously you're screwing with the stats of the game. It would be kind of difficult to compare across eras when you're talking about seven inning games versus nine inning games. If we had started with seven innings, would anyone be advocating for nine innings? I don't know. I think it might be the sort of thing where off a couple innings and really establishing a discontinuity there with all of baseball's past nine innings there is a certain symmetry to that nine innings nine positions etc etc that you would lose if you did this it's pretty disruptive it's the same sport if you like nine inning baseball you'd probably like seven inning baseball too and obviously the games would not last as long, but I'd tweak the current system rather than do this.

I expect that baseball will attempt to change something like this in maybe year 60 or 70 before it's doomed in year 75. Right. Last ditch effort to save it. All right. And last question from Thomas in Ottawa. This is, I guess, sort of related. There's been a lot of talk about fixing extra innings lately, and I think we can all agree that the start with a runner on second idea is dumb. And while Sam Miller proposed some interesting alternatives a while back, there's one idea I'm surprised hasn't been floated. Break ties with total bases. The two of you mentioned on a recent episode that baseball doesn't have partial scoring like football,

but bases are absolutely partial runs. A batter on first is literally one quarter of the way to scoring. So here's the idea. At the end of the ninth, if both teams are tied in runs, look to total bases. How many times did a runner advance to the next base? The team with the most total bases wins. If they have the same number of bases, play the tenth inning, then conduct the same check. We still get extra innings in extreme circumstances But almost certainly far less often

Plus this further incentivizes hitters To play for whatever they can get in later innings As even reaching on an error In the 11th of a tie game could be the deciding factor Are there any holes in this idea? Ways it could be exploited? Or that it would be less fun to watch? Do you think it could work?

Are we counting errors on under total bases because at least for slugging percentage purposes that doesn't count but i assume it would for this because walks hit by pitches all that stuff that would all count you would uh you would really incentivize oh stolen bases you would yeah you would be incentivizing more steals you'd be incentivizing more triples now if you're caught stealing does that erase the base yeah it probably should right i think probably should you're gone so okay that's something to think about i think at the end of the day if you could again just like with the previous question you could put this in the rules and if this existed people would get behind it and after

you know a short amount of time we'd all be used to it but i don't know how much of an appetite there would be to switch to a system where a game is tied in the meaningful category after nine innings and then someone says okay it's over this team wins because they had more things mostly from like the third inning or whatever that seems like people wouldn't be very happy with what wouldn't be a coin flip but that would essentially be a coin flip it's kind of like when a game ends after an instant replay review confirms the last out or like the last run or whatever and it's just really anticlimactic so i don't think that people would have an appetite for it but i don't think it's a bad idea it would

be workable it's just people like to see things played out to uh what's effectively sudden death people love sudden death and i think that sports would be worse without it. Yeah, and run differential is not a tiebreaker in Major League Baseball, is it? Well, it is in each game. Well, yes, right. But if it comes down to the end of a season and you're trying to settle a tied race or something, we don't use run differential to decide that, do we? It's like head-to-head record and other factors that are used. This would sort of be like run differential because run differential

ultimately only really matters in that having a higher run differential leads to a better record, typically. But if it doesn't, we still count the record. It just sort of tells you what could or should have happened or might happen if you were to continue the season. It just sort of tells you what could or should have happened or what might happen if you were to continue the season. It might tell you which team is better, but ultimately it's not how we decide things. But that's what this reminds me of because it's kind of like advancing bases and having more total bases should lead to having more runs in the long run, but not necessarily within a single game. Yeah. And then like like what do you do if you have a runner on second Then you hit a grand ball and then it advances the runner to third

Is that a gain to base? I don't know, I don't know what we're doing here I just looked at the MLB page for playoff tiebreakers And I did a search for the word differential Nothing came up So it does seem like that it's definitely not a tiebreaker According to an article from 2014 Right, so I don't know if it would be satisfying

Because total base is not really a stat or a category that people care about all that much. I feel like people would rather see, I don't know, a home run derby or something. It's like a shootout in hockey. You're competing to still do the thing that everyone is trying to do, which is score goals. You're just doing it in a different way, a more compressed way. And in this case, you're just kind of looking at, as you said, maybe what happened in the third inning or something. And, oh, we win the game because this guy got to third base and then got stranded there. I don't know. It doesn't sound very satisfying to me. When people, first of all, let me tell you, as someone who watches hockey, the shootouts are terrible. It's just bad. Shootouts are a horrible way to end a tie.

But even if you want to bring something like that over the baseball, explain exactly how the extra inning tiebreaker home run debris would work. Is your own person throwing to you or is it the other team? Because in a shootout, of course, it's you against the other team's goalie and everybody is trying super hard. And everybody is trying super hard. But if you have, like, I don't know, Kyle Bearclaw or something come out to, like, try to pitch and you're trying to hit home runs, maybe you're going to hit a home run. How many pitches do you get? What is it? How does it go?

It could take a long time before somebody hits a home run because the entire idea is the pitcher is trying not to allow a home run. Can you walk during the home run derby? What if he doesn't throw strikes? What if he beans you? It's just it's not practical. Yeah. Maybe you'd have some neutral party, the designated home run derby thrower who everyone agrees upon. I don't know. Is, uh, I think maybe run differential. Is that a thing in the world baseball classic? Potentially. Maybe that's a thing there. It sounds like something that's been used to

decide something at some point. So maybe that's what I'm thinking of, but yeah, I don't know. I'm not suggesting that the game ending home run der run derby is a great idea either. We could just have ties if we want to. It's okay. I know that it's a strange, it wouldn't be the end of the world if baseball games just ended in ties. It used to happen in an earlier era of baseball. Yeah. And also, look, I'm on board with ties. I would rather have a tie than a shootout. Okay, I'm just gonna, we don't need to dwell on this any longer. I think we've, we've fulfilled our obligation. I think we have to. All right, so we will end there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and keep the podcast going. William M. Kelly, Morgan Fry,

Eddie Dudek, Kevin Schlock, and Jamie Herbst. Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. And by the way, some additional short-term incentive to join that Facebook group, Clay Dreslow, the developer of the PC game Baseball Mogul, the baseball sim game that lets you be the GM for a team and also take over on a game-by-game basis. He is making Baseball Mogul available for free to Effectively Wild Facebook group members between now and March 27th when the new edition of the game comes out. I will link to where you can join and then find the code that you can use. So thanks to Clay for taking it upon himself to make that available.

It's definitely a game that a lot of Effectively Wild listeners would like. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please replenish our mailbag. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system

if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back later this week with another team preview podcast. This one will feature the twinsins and the Phillies. I delayed the Phillies who were supposed to be on the last episode hoping that they would make whatever moves they're going to make. They did sign Aaron Nola to an extension.

Unless they make their Machado or Harper move in the next couple days, that episode could be incomplete, but we'll talk about that. So we'll be back very shortly.