Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1365: If a Bat Flips in a Forest

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Meg seeing the Padres in person, the Phillies’ attendance surge, rooting for writers who’ve taken team jobs, and the Mariners’ lousy last week, then discuss the aesthetic and competitive ramifications of the huge spike in home-run rate in the majors and minors, why Rob Manfred is still insisting […]

We could make it like we never met Keep in mind that you'll never hear the end of it It went okay so far, so good I guess At least until all the people get out of bed Flyin' high again Flyin' high again Flyin' high again Flyin' high again Flyin' high again Fly high again

Fly high again Fly high again Fly high again Hello and welcome to episode 1365 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello Meg. Hello. You do not sound like you normally sound because you're on the road. You are in San Diego. You thought the Padres were so fun that MLB TV was not cutting it and you had to go see them. So what was that like? It was great. It was the first time I've been to

Petco. Yes, I do apologize for sounding a little pinny. I am recording from a hotel room, so I am not up to my usual audio standards. Petco is beautiful. What a fun ballpark. Padres did not win, so I apologize to Padres fans. Maybe I am bad luck, but it was fun. It was fun to see Chris Paddock, who was my NL Rookie of the Year pick preseason. He did not pitch quite as well as he usually does, but I got to watch Joey Votto hit a home run after he had a very strange week of pop-ups. So it was nice to see him looking more like himself. I learned that Padres fans have not let any of the Matt Kemp stuff go. Those booze are hearty. They are stroaty booze. And they happened every at bat. So that happened. Learned something about the good people of San Diego in that moment. They do love Manny Machado in a way that is predictable and deserved and lovely.

So, yeah, it was great. It was good fun, even though they didn't win. And I acquired another hat, which I surely did not need but will treasure. Oh, yeah. I'm not really a baseball cap person, and I feel like I'm lagging way behind everyone I talk to who has many of them. I've just never gotten in the habit, but maybe I need to start a collection. Yeah, I have, I think a statement that will not surprise you, have tended toward sort of strange looking hats, sort of anticipating my, I guess, own nostalgia for this moment. So I

have a lot of diamond back throwback hats as a result of that because they're in funky colors and look strange but i adore them but i found a great it is there you know they're in an anniversary year the padres and they had a a hat with the old throwback padres logo with the you know the friar and the bat and so it is brown but delightful uh and i'm quite excited to have it. So it will be a nice addition to the collection and probably will get a warmer reception than the Otani hat that I bought in the off-season and sometimes wear around Seattle and have garbage thrown at me by children. Yeah, that's dangerous.

No one should respond negatively to Otani attire. I don't care if you're bitter that he chose a division rival over you. He's just too precious to actually be mad about it. Yes, I agree. I think that we should enjoy all things Otani all the time. Yeah. So the listed crowd for that game was 26,577, which is about

what the Padres have been averaging this year. They're up about 3,000 fans per game. That's only nine home games so far But was there a palpable Padres fever? Did you get the sense that San Diegans think that this team is as fun as we do? I think they do I mean, I've seen a lot of gear around town

You know, probably by default because it is really the only game in town But the hotel staff. We're staying in this very strange hotel that has very small rooms and an art installation that is lit up 24 hours a day and visible from my window. So it's got kind of a weird Blade Runner vibe. But the check-in place is also a bar, and the bar staff slash, I don't know, like registration desk staff have been in Padres like jerseys all every time I've seen them.

So I think people are pretty excited. And, you know, there was a there was a buzz in the ballpark, like people expected to to win that game. You know, there were a bunch of people in cowboy hats for paddock. So I think people are leaning in. It's exciting. It turns out that when you sign a marquee-free agent and then bring up your very exciting young prospect and have him on the opening day roster, that people get excited about your baseball team.

Yeah. Yeah. The Phillies' attendance through 12 home games now, they're up 12,500 fans per game, which is basically 50% of their attendance last year. They're up this year. That is way more than any other team. League-wide attendance is just up a tiny, tiny little bit, which probably doesn't mean anything. And if it does, it's probably just that the this april has been better than it was last horrific april when there was a record for game cancellations but yeah 12,457 like it's not entirely harper obviously because they were very busy all winter and they got segura and ramudo and robertson and mccutcheon and on and on and

maybe there was some bump coming just because they went from being terrible to being pretty good last year, despite how the season ended. So it's not just Harper, but this coupled with all we read about how they sold a ton of jerseys and season tickets and everything after Harper signed. There's clearly a relationship there. I guess you need the right player and the right team at the right time. And certain teams wouldn't benefit as much because they were good before or they didn't have as much room to improve in their attendance. But it does show you what being active can do, at least in certain circumstances.

Yeah. And the weather has been better, but it hasn't exactly been warm for all of those games in the Northeast. So I think that people are probably pretty excited to be watching competitive baseball. I will say that we do not maintain a leaderboard for the teams of Fangraph alums who have moved on to front offices

because that would be gauche. But I look at the standings every day, and Fangraph's doing great. Those Phillies are in first place. Shout out to Karen. The Brewers are in first place. The Potters are only a game and a half back. Rays are crushing it. They're doing great.

Good job, guys. That's true. Yeah, I mean, i hear writers say that like it's nice to root for people you used to work with and now they work for baseball teams which is true but like at this point i feel like almost every team has a former colleague of mine and so when one is winning one is losing because you know obviously being at BP, they hired a ton of people before this recent Fangraphs spree of hirings. And so now it's kind of like every front office has one of those people. So if you're celebrating one person's team's accomplishments, then it's like when the Rays

were just beating up on the Blue Jays, it's like, oh, good for Jeff. Oh, too bad for Carson. And so they're just, they're everywhere. Yeah, but Carson is firmly in the middle of the AL East, you know, doing better than the Red Sox. And, you know, I feel like good job for you, Carson. Well done. You know, you're excited about stuff. You're not in the bottom. You're on your way up.

Earlier this week, they were at the back end of that division, and now the Red Sox decline has continued, and he just gets to sit there and be excited and look forward to Vlad Jr. Carson's doing great, I would expect. Very happy. I wish we could quantify their contributions and just have like a war leaderboard for people who've been hired by fangrass i don't know if jeff probably hasn't been working for the rays long enough to have war or i

don't know i don't think he's been directly responsible for any transactions or acquisitions yet so i don't know if we can credit him with wins above replacement but at some point he will be almost directly responsible probably for some player who's doing well. And he will have that value added to his ledger in his own mind and heart. And we'll never know about it, I guess. But somewhere out there, there's a universe where there's a leaderboard of what these people are actually contributing. And I'm sure it's a ton. Yeah, it's just nice to see people you like doing well.

So it's a good thing. So we are going to talk in a little bit to Danny Knobler, who has been writing about baseball for decades, but he has now written a book called Unwritten, Batflips, the Fun Police, and Baseball's New Future, which is new this month and very well-timed because there have been a bunch of incidents with reprisals and bat flips and tweets. And we're going to talk to him about all of that, Tim Anderson and Brad Keller and Chris Archer and let the kids play and suspensions and where all the unwritten rules and bat flip stuff is heading.

But a couple more things before we get to danny one thing i wanted to bring up remember a week ago when we were talking last and uh our first banter topic was about how the mariners never lost and uh we we almost went the entire intervening week without the mariners winning so uh we knew the reckoning was coming, but I think it came even more quickly than we expected. This is like last summer when I wrote about how, guys, it's time to talk about the AL playoff picture. And then the Mariners immediately went on a five-game skid.

They did manage to win a very strange game that I saw absolutely no pitches of last night, though. So maybe things are turning around for those Mariners in a move that will shock no one. Home runs factored heavily into their ability to win. Yeah, exactly. Well, that leads into, I guess, the bigger topic that I wanted to talk about, which is home runs, which we have touched on already, but it's all over the league. And I wrote about this. We've talked about this. So everyone knows that home runs are on track right now for another all-time high. They have come all the way back from their slight dip last season and now are even above 2017 all-time record level.

But I think what is even more interesting is this week, as a couple of people have pointed out, I think J.G. Cooper wrote about this at Baseball America and Rob Arthur wrote about this at Baseball Prospectus, AAA this year, both of the AAA leagues are now using the Major League ball. In the past, they used a different ball that was manufactured elsewhere and wasn't quite the same. Now they've switched over to the MLB ball. And unsurprisingly, the ball is out of control in AAA now too, and home runs are up by more than 30% in both of the AAA leagues, and Rob, in his article, actually acquired minor league trackman data somehow, and he was able to

gauge the air resistance and the drag of the ball, And he found the same thing that we have seen in the majors, which is that the air resistance has gone down. The ball is traveling more. And so now we've got juiced ball, better carrying ball, whatever you want to call it. Ball is not only in the majors, but in the highest levels of the minors too. And I mean, it's more evidence, I guess, not that we needed more evidence that this is largely about the ball, but

when Rob and I first wrote about this phenomenon back in 2015, one of the things that made us think that it was the ball was that the home run rates in AAA and the majors just drastically diverged all of a sudden, which you would think would have to be about the ball because a lot of players who play in AAA also play in the majors and vice versa. So it's not like two entirely different cohorts. And so when you start seeing AAA players coming up and hitting many more homers in the majors, then you start to think, yeah, it's the ball. And so now they've changed the ball and things have happened exactly the way one would think they would have happened. So yeah, the ball is really bouncy or doesn't have a lot of resistance, whatever you denied that this is like an intentional shifting, right? They're attributing this to changes in the manufacturing process and sort of variability that can result from that,

even though it has been much more variable very recently than we have seen in prior eras. And I guess I've just been thinking a lot the last week about whether I'm fussed about that. Like, does it bother? Let's assume for a moment that there is some sort of intentional shifting around of the ball to try to manipulate the offensive environment, even though we, again, will say that they have denied that that is what's going on here. Would that reality be troublesome to you? Well, I guess it makes things seem a little more artificial

if someone changes a specification somewhere and suddenly the game is completely different. Because if it were just home runs being more common, I like home runs generally. I know Sam sort of thinks that home runs are boring and not a fun highlight, but I think they're generally pretty fun and I think most fans like them. highlight but I think they're generally pretty fun and I think most fans like them so I don't mind there being more dingers but I think having more dingers and having a ball that behaves differently has led to other changes too and so now you have hitters changing their swing to try to get the ball in the air more often which makes total sense and obviously is paying off but also

maybe leads to more strikeouts. And then you get pitchers who are trying to avoid giving up homers. And so they're throwing pitches out of the strike zone and you get longer plate appearances. So I don't know that you can just change the ball and only one other thing changes. I think it tends to have all of these other perhaps unintended consequences that are not so spectator friendly. So I don't know. I still like baseball as much as I did before, so it doesn't bother me so much, but I think it could potentially bother some people. And it certainly has maybe sapped the specialness of the home run, I guess, but I don't know if it's a thing we like, is it just something we

like in moderation and it's now gotten to the point where it robs all the significance from the achievement or are we not at that point? Yeah. I struggle to know how I feel about it because I think that I would rather have, I like home runs and I like strikeouts. And so the interaction between those things doesn't bother me so much. But I think I would rather it be sort of, as it has been at various points throughout baseball's history, a natural, sort of a natural response to how players themselves are adjusting their games or are changing physically. adjusting their games or are changing physically or you know i would rather it be a result of that and have that be driving the dynamism of the game rather than you know some tinkering um going on at the league level that seems to be both intentional and and sort of wildly um inaccurate

in terms of how much they're able to dial up or down the juice level, if we want to call it that, of the ball. It's like you look at these Mariners who we have noted are hitting all of these home runs and one of their players who's contributed so much this year has been Domingo Santana. Domingo Santana's last good season with the Brewers was in a year where we know that the ball was altered from what it had been and it ended up being in 2018 to see somebody's sort of value to his team fluctuate so wildly because he goes from being able I mean this is not the only factor in Domingo Santana's game by any means, but goes from hitting 30 home runs to hitting five and is now sort of back to being at least closer to the guy he was in 2017 versus 2019

and having this sneaking suspicion that the ball is contributing to that in some way rather than some aspect of Domingo Santana's game changing because he's making adjustments or whatever. I don't know the degree to which the one is affecting his game more than the other, but now I have this little voice in the back of my head being like, well, the ball's different again, and Domingo Santana looks like he's going to be a good contributor again. Is that because Domingo Santana figured something out, which is always really exciting,

and it's really cool to see guys figure stuff out and and earn major league playing time instead of having to bounce back and forth to the minors or is it because the ball is different well that you know that's kind of a bummer to to wonder that about this player who's trying to like make a comeback so i i don't like having that little voice being like you know the ball's bouncier so domingo Santana is going to be a more productive player that's yeah that's sort of a bummer yeah or when Vlad hits a ball out of the stadium in Pawtucket I mean it's cool either way I guess yeah it's hard it's hard to mess that one up it's hard to to get to have a nagging voice around a Vlad yeah that's yeah that's okay but I don't know if it cheapens it.

There was recently a game in AAA where there were 15 combined home runs hit in a single game. Right. I think that's maybe a little bit too far. That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But you make a good point in that this affects certain players disproportionately. But you make a good point in that this affects certain players disproportionately.

So it's not like everyone benefits or suffers equally from these changes. Certain players benefit more and by extension, certain teams benefit or suffer more. And so that kind of throws a wrench into things if you're trying to decide what kind of team you want to construct and what kind of offense you want to build. And you can't really count on what the ball is going to be from year to year. And maybe it's not bad in that what we've seen the last couple of years, we'll see how things play out this year because some guys are on impressive home run paces. But recently, at least the way it's worked is that, you know, no one hits 60, no one hits 70, no one's challenging Barry Bonds or even Sosa or McGuire. But it's just is that you know no one hits 60 no one hits 70 no one's challenging barry bonds or even sosa or mcguire but it's just everyone hits 20 it's kind of that thing where even if you're like a little infielder type who maybe would have been a slap hitter in the past now you can hit for power maybe that's good i don't know maybe it's better to have the power distributed more evenly

across all kinds of hitters and it's maybe good that you don't have someone like out there hitting 80 homers or 90 homers, which you might think would be the case if all you knew was that the ball was out of control and the league home run rate was up. So I guess that's kind of a good thing, but it, it does, you know, it's, it kind of injects this element of just unpredictability into players' careers and teams' planning when you can't really count on how a fundamental part of the game will behave from year to year or week to week, for that matter. And I think that for me, the part of it that most perturbs me is that there is sort of a democratization around the home runs. And that is sometimes quite fun.

Like when little skinny guys hit home runs, quite fun like it's when little little skinny guys hit home runs you're like oh a little skinny guy just hit a home run like d gordon hit a home run the other day you're like that's d gordon he's tiny you see anything so that part is fun but at the same time that you're seeing sort of a democratization of home runs you're also seeing a flattening of like the available aesthetics of baseball and I like I don't I work for fan graphs okay you guys I'm not saying that like singles are the best everyone should hit singles it's not it's not what I'm doing I'm not saying that that's not the argument I'm making here but it is nice to have some variety in terms of like the kinds of players we see and the approaches they have to their offensive game and the value

that they're generating for teams. And I don't want the entire league to look like Gene Segura any more than I want the entire league to look like Aaron Judge. I like that there is a variety of different types of players who can approach the game from a different perspective and do a different thing. And so like, I like when we have room for that. And I do sometimes worry when, you know, home runs are incentivizing a particular kind of game and a particular approach at the plate. And that's having a knock on effect that results in a particular kind of pitcher being more valuable than others and that we end up with sort of a flattening of the aesthetic and that's a bummer because then we get less cool weird stuff and I love cool weird stuff so that part I worry about yeah I agree with that too and it changes like

player valuation and scouting and I mean now suddenly triple-a players are hitting way more homers than they used to hit. So is that because they improved or is it solely because of the ball? And if they're going from like lower minors where you're not using the major league ball and then suddenly you're using the major league ball, I mean, that has always been the case, I guess, that there's a difference. But it makes it hard to project players when you see them under one condition and how they perform and then you have to mentally adjust somehow and say it's almost like going from like a metal bat to a wooden bat or something like that where it's hard to tell like okay does this guy just have a metal

bat swing and he's not going to have power when he switches to wooden bats it's getting to the point where it's almost the same thing with the ball, which I guess you can solve by just having the same juiced ball everywhere, which is maybe where we're heading. That's a complicating factor. The other thing that does bother me about this is that Rob Manfred is still trying to tell us that it's not about the ball, which, come on. about the ball yeah which come on like yep so he said in february late february he was speaking at a conference in new york a sport techies state of the industry conference and i'm reading from tweets from eric fisher of the sports business journal he said menford says recent rise in home runs owes to improved training analytics and coaching not elements with the baseball itself and then eric followed up he said so after manfred's prepared remarks at sport

techies day the industry conference in new york i followed up with him to ask about these comments in regard to the study last year theorizing a more centered pill in the ball etc he still believes the non-ball factors are more salient or bigger factors which i don't know whether he believes this or whether he is just saying that he believes this like what he should say for the best interest of baseball is another thing that we could talk about but clearly he is either just dissembling here or he is willfully ignoring what's happening. I mean, this is giving him the benefit of the doubt and saying he's not actually intentionally ordering someone to tamper with the ball. But even if he's not, even if this just happened somehow, MLB commissioned a study about this. Yeah, they did their own report.

a study about this. Yeah, they did their own report. I know. It was one thing when it was just like Rob and me and other people looking into this ourselves and presenting compelling evidence, I thought. But like, okay, if he wants to say, well, those are just some internet writers and my people are telling me something different, which maybe was the case at the time, fine. But then he commissioned a study that supported everything we had found that it's about the ball. And that was released by MLB. The findings were on MLB.com. Alan Nathan, who was on this committee, was talking about it on MLB Network. It's out there. You can go read the whole incredibly detailed report. And they didn't figure out exactly what

it was about the ball that had changed but they did conclude that it was about the ball that the ball is flying differently it has less drag and they reported that that is entirely responsible for the change i you know i was at least willing to allow that maybe it's launch ankle and maybe it's other things that players are doing and i I think it might still be a little bit about that. But MLB's commission report said, no, it's the ball. So if you're the commissioner of baseball, are you now saying, is he swearing off the report? Is he saying, I don't buy it? I don't trust the scientists? Or is he just trying to pretend that it never happened because he was hoping that it would conclude something different? I don't know.

Yeah, I sat in a room at Boston University at Saber Seminar and listened to Alan Nathan and his colleagues present their findings. And it was about the ball. Like they stood up there, you know. Alan's a trustworthy sort. up there you know alan's a a trustworthy sort like i don't under i don't understand why you know there would still be this resistance on the league's part it's not as if that um that report did not contain within it unsurprisingly you know it did not contain within it an accusation of what had happened or like how this change had come about it isn't as if they concluded by you know looking out at the crowd and then said and and if you you know like the end of a Scooby-Doo

episode that and it was that you know that Rob Manfred and he would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you darn kids like that that wasn't what happened he could embrace the science even as he's maintaining this stance that the league has that they, you know, don't quite know how this happens. So yeah, it is a disconcerting aspect of modern life when we are presented with compelling scientific findings and then told that they are bunk. I don't like that part. I think we should move away from that. I don't need that in my baseball. I have that in enough other parts of my life. Exactly. Yeah. I think baseball is an antidote to that, actually, which one of the things that I like so much about baseball, like I'll write about other things. And when I write about other things,

if I'm writing about some culture thing for the ringer, like it's a different kind of writing. You know, you can do opinion based stuff about baseball, obviously, and sometimes I do. But often when I write about baseball, I'm like asking a question or, you know, something comes up, some sort of mystery. And the great thing about baseball is that often you can answer that. You can just do a study. You can run a certain query or get someone to run it for you. And you can get an answer, which is really satisfying because there aren't always answers to questions and in baseball there are still some mysteries and and i think it's good

that there are some mysteries so that we still have things to try to figure out but it is really satisfying when you can just tackle some myth or belief about baseball and you can either back it up or refute it with hard data that is a thing. And so to see this kind of like fake news sort of stuff come to baseball when Rob Manfred talks about this is kind of dismaying. from baseball's perspective. Like if he says, yes, it's the ball, then the implication is either that they did it intentionally, or if he says we didn't do it intentionally, then the implication is we can't control our equipment and the conditions of our game. And who knows what's going to happen next season or tomorrow. And neither of those responses really makes baseball

look good and unless he just said like yeah you know offense was really low in 2014 and we didn't like that and fans didn't like that and so we just decided to juice the ball a little bit you know would there have been a riot if they had said that i don't think so because there's precedent for that happening in the past so i think that would have been okay think so, because there's precedent for that happening in the past. So I think that would have been OK. But at this point, he's been denying it for years. So it's like almost too late, I guess, to own up to it. Right. I think that's the problem. Like once you once you say so definitively, no, we would never you know, we haven't done that. I don't you know, I can't believe it. It's hard to then turn around and

admit, actually, we've been manipulating it this whole time. And I don't think that if they had been straightforward about it, it would have, it would have been, it might have been controversial in the moment, because it would have been a change in the ball. And I think that we are right to sort of look sideways at that and wonder if it's appropriate. But I don't think that that objection would have lasted very long. I mean, when they altered, well, when the ball changed, when it did, I think we were all kind of starved for a more productive run environment than we were getting, and we certainly got one. So I don't think that fans would have looked around and been horrified.

We like watching home runs. We like watching long home runs. And you have a generation of hitters who are sort of well-positioned to deliver dramatic moments via the home run. So I think it would have been fine. to he has to stick with this stance regardless of its veracity because if he goes back on it now i think that it would have you know would have some pretty serious credibility consequences for the league and for him personally having having stuck to this line for so long and so yeah i don't know but i don't know i personally find the idea that they have so little control over their manufacturing process assuming that that's the truth,

to be more concerning than the league altering the ball and being kind of silly about it. That is more upsetting to me potentially than something else because it's like the most important thing is that this part of the game have some integrity to it. And so for there to be this much variety is a little, is that this part of the game have some integrity to it. And so for there to be this much variety is a little, it makes you nervous because how you should be able

to control that part, right? And just literally the baseball. Yeah, like I get that slight changes can produce outsized effects, but still, I mean, in the wake of that study, he even said, like one of the recommendations of it was that MLB should tighten the standards. And, you know, there was this really broad range of what was in allowable baseball. And Manfred said, we're going to take another look at that.

We're going to maybe restrict these ranges and get more consistency, which seemed like a tacit acknowledgement, at least maybe that the ball had played some role or could have played some role. And I don't know, now he's just gone back on his previous tone. Like when that study came out last May, it would have been easy for him to just say, well, we thought that the ball wasn't responsible. That was the best information I had at the time, but now we have better information and we conducted different tests and we exposed this difference. And it was a very small thing that eluded us, but now we know and we can either change it or not change it. That was the easy out.

And now he has not taken it. So it seems like he's just committed to this line for the long haul. So I don't know. The last thing that I have to say about this is that i feel like baseball's kind of backed itself into a corner where at this point offense is just entirely dependent on the ball being used because i mean i think that long term if you deadened the ball it might actually help in some areas like you'd give hitters less incentive to try to swing for the fences maybe they would try to make more contact. You would get more balls in play.

Those things that people seem to want, I think, could be produced. But in the short term, you have schooled hitters now to expect a certain ball and a certain result when they swing a certain way. And if you were to take that away, I think offense would just crater because we'd see less contact than we saw in 2014 when scoring was at its lowest level since the mid-70s. At this point, the only thing that is leading to run scoring, and run scoring is pretty robust right now, but that's entirely because when hitters make contact, the ball goes a long way. And if that changed, then I think the bottom would really drop out of things. So I don't know where you go from here. Right. It would require, you know, it's going to require another change in approach. And now you have minor leaguers using the same ball. So they are going to have the exact same set of incentives. So even on the developmental side, I imagine going to start to see some shifting there,

perhaps even more quickly than we were already seeing it. So yeah, I get nervous. I think it's good for baseball to pay attention to these things. And I don't mind tinkering. I think that tinkering so that you prevent big problems is sort of an admirable and thoughtful approach to maintaining the game a particular way, but it seems that in this case, the tinkering led to the big problem, and now I don't know what we do. All right. Should we talk about bat flips? We should talk about bat flips. I like bat flips.

Yeah, I like them too, although I guess at this point everyone's hitting homers, so maybe it's not even worth a bat flip anymore because it's all the ball. It's all the aerodynamics. It's not even you hitters. It's just the ball. This is another reason why that tinkering is trouble. Yeah. All right. So we'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Danny Knobler to talk about unwritten rules. It's buried beneath us since I wrote the thesis We're taught to live like that

We're taught to live like that All right, so you have read Danny Nadler for years at CBS Sports and Bleacher Report and ESPN and elsewhere, and now you can read him in a new book. It's called Unwritten, Bat Clips, The Fun Police, and Baseball's New Future. It's out now, and Danny is here now. Hey, Danny. Hey, how are you? Doing well.

So on the day that the book came out, I believe Chris Archer was suspended for throwing at Derek Dietrich for appearing to admire a home run too long. And then about a week after that, we had another incident where Tim Anderson bat flipped and Brad Keller hit him and benches cleared. So you basically have had everything happen at the right time for you in terms of book promotion, although I guess this sort of thing kind of happens every couple weeks at this point. So maybe you didn't get lucky. This is just how baseball works now. I think some of each.

The timing was definitely good. But you're right, Ben. Baseball kind of works that way. And I think there's an easy explanation for it. Things are changing. And people say, why doesn't baseball ever change? There's no question things are changing. And people say, why doesn't baseball ever change? There's no question things are changing. And you saw it in the reaction to both of those incidents.

And not just from fans, not just from people who say, oh, why isn't baseball going to change? You saw it just even from players in the game. There were tweets from Amir Garrett of the Reds this week about, hey, anyone who wants to, they hit a home run, they can bat flip all they want. Just be ready because if I strike you out, I'm going to celebrate the same way. Obviously not flipping a bat when you strike somebody out, but similar celebration. And so I do think the game is changing, but anytime you have change, you're going to have some resistance to it. And some people are going to agree that flipping a bat early in a game, even with an impressive home run, is the right thing to do. You're always going to have disagreements over that. And I think that's going to go on forever. It may be that the disagreements change over what they're about, but there's always going to be disagreements over what is appropriate and what isn't. Well, we can talk about these specific incidents and where we go from here, but I want to ask you more broadly what you think the purpose of unwritten rules are. What purpose do they serve? Our co-host Sam Miller has written for ESPN. He

thinks maybe it's sort of a scam that players run on each other to get them to act against their own interests so that if you end up kind of playing into the other guy's interests at times, especially when you're talking about running up the score or not stealing a base at a certain time. But do you think there is something else going on here? I mean, why do we need these rules? Or why have players felt throughout history that they have needed these rules? I think it comes down to a simple word, and that word is respect. When you talk to baseball players, and I know you talk to quite a few of them,

one of the things you hear all the time, what is most important to you to do? And inevitably, they'll say something like, play the game the right way. But one of the things they'll always say is, respect the game, respect your opponent, respect the uniform. And I think there's a general agreement that that's important. What isn't always agreed is what the meaning of that word is. And I think that's where the problems come up and will always come up because the meaning of that word changes over time. What most people, I think today, think that what Tim Anderson did didn't show any disrespect to his opponent, to the Royals or to the game. However, had he done that 10, 15 years ago, maybe even five years ago,

the percentage of people who thought that that showed disrespect, I think would have been much higher. That changes over time. And yeah, I do think there are sometimes there are mind games being played. But I also think that players believe, players have a lot invested in this game.

I think sometimes we just not, not we who are around it, but fans who don't talk to the players think, you know what? They're just making a lot of money and they're in it to make a lot of money. There's an awful lot of guys who play major league baseball who care deeply about this game and how it's played and believe strongly in the way it should be played because

they were raised that way either by their parents or other relatives or coaches they had or older teammates at times and they believe that strongly and they want to carry that on do you think that there's a way that because i think that at the core of a lot of these disputes and you know i think we saw this with the anderson bat flip and him, you know, getting plunked, that there seems to be this fundamental dispute about that respect question, but also the sort of showing up of your opponent versus just being celebratory about your own accomplishment. And I don't know that we can over-engineer those moments and have them still read as sincere and enthusiastic and all these things that we like and appreciate about baseball right now. But do you think that there is a way that those could be sort of more properly distinguished for other players on the field so that it is clear?

But no, this isn't me not enjoying or respecting the sort of pitching acumen of Keller, but this is me just being joyful and enthusiastic myself. I don't know that you're ever going to get competitive athletes to properly distinguish those things in the moment, but do you think that there's a way that might be mitigated so that we can just enjoy the home run and the bat flip and not have to worry about all of this nonsense that comes after? Yeah, I do think that there is a general understanding of exactly what you said,

that when you cross the line is when you make it about the opponent. And Tim Anderson made a point I saw in an interview of I turned to my own dugout. I flipped the bat to my own dugout. I was celebrating with my team. I wasn't my own dugout. I flipped the bat to my own dugout. I was celebrating with my team. I wasn't putting down your team. I was celebrating a great moment for us. And now look, the Royals didn't agree on that one, but I do think that that made a difference in how Tim Anderson was viewed by others in baseball. That because he did make it about himself and celebrating it

rather than putting someone else down i do think that if you turn it on the other team you're always going to have problems and i i don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that but you're right the competitive instinct a guy who gives up a home run isn't happy obviously and if he sees a guy celebrating maybe he's going to think that it's showing him up even if everyone else says no it's not so there's always going to be some of that there's emotion in the game and we don't want to take that emotion out of the game either but i think it's a matter of as you go over time as i said players learn the unwritten rules and how to play the game from the people they were brought up by and by the older players in the clubhouse

and by their coaches in the minor leagues and as go over time, exactly what you're talking about, I think gets emphasized more for the players coming up. And it probably becomes more accepted. Although I really do think that most players in baseball believe exactly what you said already. I'm curious, the bat flips and throwing at guys in retaliation, those are moments that sort of happen frequently in the game now and get a lot of attention. But I'm curious, in the course of your research for the book, if there were other, if there are other unwritten rules that have changed really dramatically over time that stand out to you as sort of particularly noteworthy in terms of how they've shifted within baseball's

culture? They might not be as dramatic as bat flips, but are there other unwritten rules that have sort of phased out or phased in that you found particularly noteworthy? Definitely. Absolutely. And you mentioned throwing at guys in retaliation for some kind of celebration. But even the concept of whether you need to hit someone when the other pitcher is seen to be throwing at someone, whether you retaliate for that with throwing at someone, that's a real topic of conversation right now in baseball. And there are pitchers and there are managers who don't believe in retaliation

at all in terms of throwing at someone. And that's actually not as new a thought as some people think. And I write about this in the book. Earl Weaver didn't believe in it either. I mean, we think of Earl Weaver, old time baseball guy. He must've been, you know, hard-nosed, throw uh throw it you know if you hit one of our guys i'm going to hit two years and that's absolutely not the truth earl weaver believed that the only thing that would happen if you got into a war retaliation was his team because his team he

always felt had better players that his team would lose out because if they lost one of their players it was going to hurt more than if you lost one of yours. So he didn't never believed in that. And I write about an incident in the book when Reggie Jackson came to the Orioles, uh, from the A's before he went to the Yankees. And there was a player hit in the game in Kansas city. And Reggie said, you know, we get, we got to hit somebody. Why didn't we hit anybody? And the other players on the team had told him, you know, that's not what Earl does. He doesn't believe in it. So I think that that part of the game is being discussed even more now because I think Earl stood out at the time. Now there's more pitchers and managers who don't believe in that. The other thing I think that has changed greatly is the way younger players are treated. It wasn't so much on the field, although a little bit, because you always talk, you always heard

about umpires not giving a young player a pitch and that the young players kind of just had to take it until they got some experience. They're not as willing to take that now. And they're not as willing to just sit down and shut up and be seen and not heard in the clubhouse as they were. That was a part of baseball that was always true. And younger players have become more prominent and the game has become younger. And part of the result of that is that the young players can stand up and stand up for themselves and stand out and are not nearly as reticent when it comes to just speaking about themselves and about their teams. selectively applied and inconsistently applied. So you get guys who are upset about things that people on other teams do and think it's okay when it's their teammates, or they do it themselves. Pitchers celebrate strikeouts and then they get upset when a hitter bat flips. But beyond that, there's also a timing element to it. People were mad at Tim Anderson because he bat flipped in an

April game that didn't mean a whole lot. And so Randall Gritchick goes on Twitter and says, guys are getting a little excessive on pipping homers on meaningless homers too. And of course, Anderson replied on Twitter, put a name on so we can see who you're talking about, which I enjoyed. But there's this idea that you can bat flip, you can celebrate sometimes, but not other times. But not everyone agrees on that clearly because as you write in the book, Jose Bautista, perhaps the most famous bat flip, he bat flipped at a extremely important moment and a climactic moment. And the Rangers still very much objected to that and said things about it and punched him. And then subsequently he bat flipped on a pretty meaningless home run. And apparently even he felt that he had gone too far with that one. So no one seems to really agree entirely on when you can do this and when you can't do this. And I guess that just comes from the specific tradition you were raised in and whoever schooled you in this stuff and what that person said at the time. Yeah, that's true. And that does make it more complicated. And I understand people thinking that that might be silly and that there should

be a way to take that part of it out. Everything should be acceptable. But I don't think that's realistic. And I would hate to have baseball be like the NFL, where you put celebration rules into the actual rule book. I don't want to see, okay, if you hit a home run that puts your team ahead after the seventh inning and it goes more than 450 feet, now you're allowed to flip your bat. And if not, you're going to get suspended. I just, I don't think that's realistic for baseball. I think it's always going to have to be some form of what we have now that the players as a group and not in a voting way, but just as a consensus emerges, agree more or less on what is acceptable and what isn't. And it's easy to say, well, you know what, let anything go and we'll just punish players who retaliate.

Well, you know, first of all, I don't think players want that because I, at that point, you end up with the thing of showing up your opponent and, uh, and, and no recourse for that. And the other thing is, you know, somebody asked me the other day, what if we just gave 50 game suspensions for throwing at somebody? And I said, here's the problem. In the case the other day, it was pretty clear that the Royals were throwing at Anderson. However, they said they were. And while we're pretty sure on that one, there's plenty of other incidents where you've been at a game and you think a pitch

was intentional, but you're not really sure. Well, how do you deal with that? When you're trying to give a suspension of that length based on reading somebody's intent, I think you're in real, real difficult territory there. So then I guess the question becomes, how have you seen, as you've written this book and sort guess the question becomes, how have you seen, as you've written this book and sort of analyzed this stuff, how have you seen those sort of pressure points and changes in culture actually evolving and getting meted out? Is it players talking to players? Is it managers trying to understand new generations of players? Is it the league trying to enforce a particular understanding of baseball culture? Is it the league trying to enforce a particular understanding of baseball culture?

Is it players actually listening to all the grousing that fans do about this stuff? What are the sort of best mechanisms by which that culture shifts and changes, or is it just as simple as, you know, the stuff moves over time as new generations of players come in? Yeah, I think it's some of each of that. Probably less of players listening to fans grouse about it and a little bit less of the league stepping in. Obviously, they do at some point, but most players, I believe, would rather have – they always talk about players policing themselves and the game policing itself.

And I think that is much more what they would, that's what they would prefer. But I think it's the same way. Think about just our culture in general. We don't decide all of a sudden, if you look at, watch a game from the 1950s and you look in the stands and everybody's wearing a hat, there wasn't any point in American society where we just decided we're not going to wear hats just of general course anymore. And that all of a sudden you start seeing it happens over time and it goes out of style and people decide you're going to act differently. That I think it happens probably faster in baseball because you're dealing with a smaller community of players and who just to talk about things a lot. And every one of those things that we're talking about now and that fans are talking about, you can be sure that it's being talked about in clubhouses.

And that Tim Anderson bat flip was seen not just by the Royals and whites. One of the things about today's game is it's not just fans who can see highlights every minute it's players around the league too which is why you get things like randall gritchick commenting on it on something like that because they they're on social media many of them not every one of them but many of them are and and the ones who aren't someone else has it on their phone in the clubhouse or on the team plane and they're showing it to them so it gets discussed and each player has influence over other players you know one of my favorite stories in the book is i talked to kenley jansen about how

he handles things and what he believes and he told, I don't care what a player does if he hits a home run off me because he's already on my list, regardless, just because he had a home run. And I looked at him, I said, on your list, he said, yeah, I want to strike him out the next time I face him. And I thought that was so great. He said, I don't want to throw it. And what good does that do? I'm a closer.

I'm usually in the game when the game's on the line. Why do I want to put another runner on base and make it harder on myself? I just want to strike him out and embarrass him that way. I thought that's perfect. And I do think things like that, you hear that more, some variety of that more from pitchers now. And that I think is how things change, is a different generation comes up, players like Kenley Jansen become veterans

and become more influential. And if he's sitting in the Dodgers bullpen or in an All-Star game bullpen and talking to other guys, of course he's going to say the same type of thing he said to me. And now if you're a 20-year-old kid in the Dodgers bullpen and Kenley Jansen says something to you, maybe that sticks and maybe that's how you want to handle things. And where do you think the biggest cultural fault lines lie when it comes to differences

about what players think is acceptable? I mean, is it age? Is it race? Is it nationality? It's probably a little bit of all of those things, but it's not a blanket across-the-board rule because even just looking at these incidents, for instance, you have Tim Anderson doing the bat flip, and he's 25, but the guy hitting him is 23.

Brad Keller is 23. And then you have Chris Archer doing payback. And in your book, you interview Martin Prado, who is from Venezuela, but he's talking about playing the game the right way and respect and hustle and all of this stuff. So, I mean, where do you think, I guess, the fractures are when it comes to this in the clubhouse. I think it's all of the above, as you said. But as in society, there's not a blanket rule. Just because a player is younger doesn't mean that he's definitely going to be a show emotion, flip your bat type of player.

And just because he's older doesn't mean he won't be. Same thing, just because he's from Latin America. But I would say that the influence of the other cultures, baseball is a much more global game in the major leagues than it ever has been. We see the numbers every year, players from Latin America, players from Asia. Now, as Martin Prado said, another one of my favorite quotes from the book is just because you walk around your own house in your underwear doesn't mean you go to a neighbor's house and walk around in your underwear.

They're coming to someone else's and those players are coming to another country, another culture. They adapt to this culture, but the culture adapts to them too. And the more of them you have in the game, the more that culture is going to be part of it. Major League Baseball is never going to look like a Winter League game in San Domingo or like a Japanese League game at the Tokyo Dome. But the influence of players from both of those places has changed the game.

Now, the other part of it is our culture has changed. What is acceptable for younger people in America now in terms of how they act is not going to be the same as what it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago. That always changes over time, and that influences the game as well. And I think when we talk about bat flips and everything like that, I go back to last September, I was doing a story on Javier Baez. I write about this in the book, and I was talking to Chris Bryant.

Chris Bryant, a young player, never flips his bat. Aaron Judge, same way, never flips his bat, never watches and admires a home run. That's how they believe they should play. But when I talked to Chris Bryant about Javier Baez, who obviously has a lot more flair in his game, he said, that's great. He said, the reason I like it is because it's him. It's genuine. He says, if I tried to do that, it wouldn't be genuine for me. The same way that if you tried to restrain him too much, it wouldn't be genuine for him to just

play the game with no emotion. That's not him. Every player has to do things within the structure of the game and the unwritten rules do things the way they are. And the game changes as those players within the game change. You said that players don't really listen to the grousing of fans, surely to their benefit. But I am curious, sort of on the back of what you just said, if you think that a shift within sort of fan culture in the U.S. might also feed into some of this stuff. I mean, I think when we look at U.S. baseball crowds compared to, say, crowds in Japan or Latin America, we look very stodgy and restrained a lot of the time.

But I think there has been some shift around that where fans are more participatory and are more excited. Do you think that those things sort of feed off of one another and we just might have a more expressive version of the game emerging? uh do you think that it's going to be driven largely by players well that part of it is definitely fan driven and and how the culture of the game is i think influences how the fans are too now one thing though that's interesting about what you said about the how american fans are when i talked to kenta Maeda and I asked him about differences coming here from Japan,

and if anybody who hasn't been to see a game in Japan owes it to themselves sometime to do it. It's a fascinating, Japan or Korea, fascinating experience, just as the Winter League games in Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico

are fascinating experiences. But one of the things he said is he really enjoys the crowd here because so much of the Japanese atmosphere is scripted. And he said here, they applaud when you do something good. They react to that. It's not just, okay, this player is at the plate. We're going to sing his song, which is fun to watch, but I can understand the Japanese players saying, wait a minute here, the crowd's getting excited because there's something big happening on the field and not just because

they're at a ball game and that's what you're supposed to do. So I, I, I get where you're, where you're coming from. And I do think that that happens. But I don't want to say that American crowds don't ever get excited or are too laid back. So as a number of people have pointed out this week, there seems to be a tension between this on-field behavior and MLB's marketing campaign, Let the Kids Play, which the league has been promoting very heavily and which I think people have responded to very positively. But the upshot of those spots and that slogan is that you can express yourself and baseball is open to that kind of behavior.

And then we see that in reality, a lot of players still aren't. And so people have argued that there's some hypocrisy there, that the league needs to take a stricter stance against this stuff because out of one side of its mouth, it is saying this is great and we approve of this. And then on the other side, it's here's a five game suspension, you know, you can come right back. And as you said, it's difficult to declare intent and to punish someone without knowing what was going on in their heads. But do you think there is pressure to hand out stiffer suspensions to kind of back up the marketing message that's going on right now? That is an interesting question. And you're absolutely right. That's something there is a tension there. But I don't think baseball is

going to get away from this campaign. The commissioner's office and the players association don't agree on everything, as we all know. But one of the things I think Rob Manfred and Tony Clark agree on more than anything else is the need to appeal to a next generation of fans. And it's one thing that they've actually been able to work together on. And that advertising campaign, that promotional campaign, is something I think they're going to remain very proud of. And now do they have to back it up by saying, okay, we're going to punish players who don't allow the kids to play? Maybe, but I don't know that they,

I don't know that baseball right now thinks they need major changes in the system of discipline. I think there's a lot of other things they worry about more than that. And while I understand what you're saying about, okay, if the kids are going to play,

then why should, you know, Tim Anderson get thrown out of a game? Well, there's still an incident on the field. The umpires have to decide who's responsible for the incident on the field. Tim Anderson did have a choice to make, and I'm not talking about the choice of flipping his bat. There have been plenty of times in baseball where somebody flipped a bat or admired a home run, and the next time up, the pitcher threw it his butt, didn't throw it his head, but threw it his butt. He said, okay, dropped his bat and went to first base. Tim Anderson could have made that choice too.

He didn't have to escalate that. He could have just said, okay, I'm going to go to first base. I'm going to try to maybe steal second, maybe score a run. I'm going to embarrass you that way because you just cost yourself another run by throwing at me. He could have done that. In fact, I quote Adam Eaton in the book. there was a situation last season where Eaton took out a Mets infielder while he was breaking up a double play. The umpires and MLB ruled it was a legal slide. I believe it was. The Mets didn't think so because their player got hurt. They threw at him the next time twice when they were at Citi Field. And Adam Eaton simply went to first base and said,

I'm going to try to score a run. I don't care. You can do what you want. As long as you're not getting the ball up near my head where you're putting my life in danger. I don't care if you throw it at my butt. That's okay. I'll take the base. Yeah. I think that's something a lot of people think, and that's kind of how it's always worked. I mean, you know, the thing that gives me pause is that pitchers just throw so hard these days and they don't have perfect control. And you might try to hit someone in the butt and you might hit them somewhere more painful. Not that getting hit in the butt's not also painful, but more damaging. And I agree with that.

Yeah. I agree with that. You're right. Pitchers don't have very good command. But that's another reason why we don't always know when a guy's trying to throw it somewhere because they don't have great command right uh and it's i would say yes okay you can aim for the guy's butt and hit him in the head but you these guys is that is it very much different from aiming from the inside part of the plate and and or a high strike over the plate

and and it runs inside and hits the guy's head i i don't think that that's i i don't i don't uh i don't necessarily agree with that reasoning for i i think if a pitcher throws at a guy and he hits him in the butt you know what it's not the greatest thing but we're not look we're not talking about serious injury from that there's a lot more chance But we're not, look, we're not talking about serious injury from that. There's a lot more chance of an injury from a brawl that starts because the it and this is how the way things work. And so get on base and make him pay for it another way. That's true, I guess. But to me, it sounds almost like if your kid gets in a fight with a bully or something and you say, well, stand up to him or don't make him mad or whatever. There are ways to handle it that lead to you getting less hurt, but it's

better if there's no bully at all. So I wonder whether there's a way to make that happen. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I would rather that a pitcher didn't react by throwing at someone. If I could control all the players, I would rather every pitcher took the Kenley Jensen approach. That would be my preference. But I understand that's not realistic. And I don't believe it's, you know, people say, will this ever be out of the game? I don't think so. Now it's already, it's much, we talk about how often things happen now. They happen much less than they happened in the past. The difference is because of the coverage of baseball now, we know about all of them instantaneously.

Right. If you go back 20 years, 30 years, things like that would happen and they would know about it in their own city. I covered the Tigers for a long time and the other writers would talk about brawls that had happened 10 years before, five years before. But I hadn't grown up in Detroit. I didn't experience those. And in those days, if it happened in another city, you didn't necessarily know about it. Yeah, that's true. And we've got replays and gifs and everything's in high definition. And then players can go on Twitter and talk about it, which continues the conversation.

So, yeah, well, that kind of anticipates the last thing I was going to ask you, which is, will we look back on this someday, decades later, and think, oh, I can't believe players were doing this sort of thing? Or, oh, this is quaint? sort of thing or oh this is quaint i mean you know kind of the way that we look back at the violence and the carousing and everything that you had much earlier in baseball history and you think i can't believe that was baseball or how did they get away with this or maybe you think oh you know players those days that sure was funny back then even if it wasn't actually at the time so will there come a day when we look at you know people getting mad about bat flips or pitchers hitting batters with pitches and think, I can't believe that went on or that anyone cared about it because it will just be either so present in the case of bat flips or just eradicated in terms of guys getting plunked?

Absolutely. I think all these unwritten rules change over time. And you've talked about how some of them have changed. Hey, think about it. There was a time, and it's not that long ago, where if a hitter got hits off a pitcher, he could expect to be thrown out. And where you still hear ex-players talking as commentators, if one hitter is getting a lot of hits off one team, say somebody's got to move his feet somebody's got to get him you know knock him down and uh that i i think that's much much less common right now and for the most part i think it's a good thing that it's less

common now you could argue that it's a result of pitchers not being willing to pitch inside and to command both sides of the play. But I think putting players in danger just because they got hits off you. We saw it one time last year with Urena of the Marlins against Acuna. And it was widely condemned. Keith Hernandez, I think, was the only guy who was outspoken in that it was okay to knock someone down when they were getting hits off you. And I think that's how the culture of the game has changed. As we go forward, I don't know where it's going to go. You brought up a couple of possibilities. I think they are very possible. you brought up a couple possibilities i think they are very possible but there's no question that somebody asked me when i was writing when the book came out said wasn't there another book

written about the unwritten rules you know almost 10 years ago eight years ago something like that and the author of the book said came back and said yeah but a lot of things changed in that time yeah and if somebody's writing this book in another eight or ten years they'll be writing a different book from what i wrote because the culture will change again absolutely no question about that i think we've arrived at our our final and most important question which is how would you celebrate a home run were you to hit one off a major league pitcher do you think that you would be a bat flip guy? No, I would love to say I would. You would be a bat flip guy? No, I think I would probably tend toward,

I've always enjoyed Robinson Cano's bat drop, not because I have any problem with bat flips, but I just think personally I would be so terrified that I had misjudged the distance and that it would just be an easy fly ball out. So the bat drop leaves you room to just turn around and head back to the dugout with minimal embarrassment after the fact. Yeah, well, it's funny because there's a quote I use,

and he didn't say it directly to me, he said it to Kevin Kern, but Aaron Judge talked about the reason that he doesn't ever do it is because exactly that happened to him in a high school game that he hit the ball he hit the ball and he started admiring it and it ended up hitting the fence and he ends up like pulling in the second base with a double that should have been a triple and with a little egg on his face and and i don't yeah i i it's just i don't think it's my personality to be a big bad flipper. I enjoy watching them.

And I didn't always say that. There were times probably a few years ago where I wasn't stodgy about it, but I said, eh, come on. What do you need, a bad flipper? Now, when I see it, I love it. But I think I'd be more the Chris Bryant of I love watching other guys do it, but it's not really my personality to do it myself. Yeah, I think I'd be too surprised that I had done something good to to react. Well, that's the other side. I would probably never have done anything that was worth that.

Right. Yeah. To have that kind of reaction down, you have to have actually been successful in the past and know what it feels like. So we'll never know that feeling. No, well, the surprising thing is that the guy who's sometimes credited with the first bat flip was Tom Lawless on the 1987 World Series. And he's not a guy who would have had a lot of experience with hitting big home runs. who would have had a lot of experience with hitting big home runs. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, he did it as well as anyone ever has. But maybe we can flip our mics after the podcast or something. That'll be our equivalent.

So we'll drop our mics. Go look on YouTube. I reference this in the book. For the ad the Seattle Mariners did a few years back. right believe it was for brett boone and uh about they were celebrating his bat flips and they have him in all situations like brushing his teeth and then flipping the toothbrush and things like that so it's it's it's a great ad go you know go look it up on youtube it's a it's a great ad. Go look it up on YouTube. It's fantastic. Yeah, and that was 15 years ago. So this is not new exactly, but yeah.

Right. All right. Well, you can find Danny on Twitter at his name, Danny Knobler, and you can go get the book, which we will link to. Again, it's called Unwritten, Bat Flips, The Fun Police, and Baseball's New Future. And clearly it has come along at the right time So Danny thanks for writing the book and thanks for joining us No problem thanks so much for having me it's been a fun conversation

Okay that will do it for today and for this week In the hours since Meg and I spoke to Danny Suspensions were announced Brad Keller got the standard suspension of five games Tim Anderson was suspended for one game Reportedly because he used the N-word during the altercation. Whether MLB should have suspended him for that is a whole separate conversation that, frankly, I do not feel qualified to lead, so I'll just say that the

whole thing could have been avoided if Keller had just let the man bat flip. One of our listeners in the Facebook group, Cody Brock, actually made a pretty good suggestion. When a pitcher retaliates by plunking you, just flip your bat after the hit by pitch. Celebrate the plunking. Then what will the pitcher do? Where do you go from there? Also, you know, in an episode earlier this week, Sam and I were talking about pitch outs and how they're extremely scarce these days. And I just kind of offhand said, yeah, I haven't even seen a pitch out this season. If you see a pitch out, let us know, tweet at us or something. And Sam said, no, please don tweet at us or something and sam said no please don't do that and i said okay don't do that but it was too late i had already said it and as i can testify based on this week pitch outs are scarce but they are not extinct and whenever

they happen we now have many people tweeting and emailing and facebook commenting at us to tell us that a pitch had happened i am already regretting that. Thanks to everyone who has let us know. I appreciate the thought, but we do not actually need notifications every time a pitch out occurs. I'm afraid Sam will quit the internet if this continues all season long. Oh, and lastly, as I'm about to post this,

we just got news that Jacob deGrom is going back to New York for an MRI because his elbow was barking as he was playing catch. I'm sure it's nothing, right? Everything will work out. He'll be fine. Okay, let's all agree on that and continue with our weekends. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Following five listeners have already done so. Evan Thiesing, Mike Carlucci, Matt Paradis, Brandon Halverson, and Doug Lemoine. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild.

You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions for me and Megan Sam coming via email at podcast at fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can pre-order my book, The MVP Machine, which comes out a little later this spring. Really looking forward to you all getting your hands on it. Early orders really help me and Travis,

so please do if you're at all interested. And we hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week.