Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1371: What is Sabermetrics?

Episode Date: May 4, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Noah Syndergaard‘s True Win, an 81-pitch complete game for Kyle Hendricks, the AL Central after Corey Kluber‘s injury and the Twins’ hot start to the season, Tyler Glasnow’s breakout, the Chris Archer trade in review, the impermanence of coaching success, and the latest comments about the baseball by […]

The coast is never clear, answers always beyond our reach, and though it's not my way, won't you help me try? Let's make jam and that gives us a pitch, if it's true. I don't mind, there's a million other things that keep me up at night. Maybe it's not quite right, but we'll find out if it's true. Hello and welcome to episode 1371 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast brought to you by Fangraphs and our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello.

How are you? Doing well. I just got a tweet from my publisher who sent a picture of the book, which exists. The finished hard copy book is in her hands and will soon be in mine and will soon be in all of yours if you'd like it to be. So that's very exciting. Congratulations. That's wonderful. Comes out a month from Saturday. So go get your pre-orders in, people. The MVP machine. It's real. Yeah.

Pre-orders matter. They're important. Mm-hmm. So we have a guest today, also pretty important and exciting. We are talking to Jeopardy! James. Jeopardy! James Holzhauer will be our guest later on this episode. And he, of course, has been dominating Jeopardy!

And he is also a big baseball fan and a Sabermetrics person and apparently a reader of your chats at Fangraphs. I feel very intimidated. Yeah. So he's going to talk to us about his background in baseball and how he got into this stuff. He was a Bill James person and about his strategy and about the backlash to his success,

which mirrors the backlash to Sabermetrics in baseball in a lot of ways. And if you haven't read about his strategy, basically he is just betting very aggressively. He is choosing daily doubles very well. He is building up big early leads and then wagering lots of money and not just winning, but blowing everyone away he is now second behind ken jennings in all-time winnings and also in consecutive wins and will be catching up very quickly at his current pace so it has been quite impressive yeah fun conversation it was nice to talk to him very strange to hear that other people read my chats but uh we didn't dwell on that yeah i read your chats, but I've never been on Jeopardy. That's true. Yeah.

I bet you do well on Jeopardy. I don't know. There are times when I like trivia, but mostly I don't like trivia because it just, it makes me feel ignorant because even if I do get some right, which happens sometimes and then I feel good, but ultimately I get some wrong and then I just feel bad about all the stuff I don't know, which, I mean, you know, I know I don't know a lot of things and it's nice not to know things because then you can learn them. But ultimately, I come away from every attempt at trivia just feeling bad about myself. I like trivia, but my family has barred me from playing Trivial Pursuit because I was a bad sport one time, but I was a really bad sport. So I deserved

it. I earned, I earned my ban. What happened? Uh, there was a question on yurts and I may have danced around the room when I got it right. And it was just, you know, it was, it was poor form. Uh, it was definitely not form that we've ever seen on jeopardy there. They're, uh, quite civil with one another. Uh, but I was, I was punished and I deserved to be. So that was the end of my trivial pursuit days. My mom also behaved quite badly because we were playing in teams. So we were co-banned. So, you know, it happens.

Yeah. Did you get plunked the next time you played? Yeah, one of the little wedges right between the eyes. So a bit of baseball banter. First thing I should mention is that there was a true win in baseball that happened just this week. This is the latest in a long line of weird and unlikely things that are discussed on this podcast, and then they actually happened in baseball. So I think it was episode 1358 a few weeks ago. Sam and I answered a question from listener and Patreon supporter

Russell Goldstein, who has this stat that he and his friends came up with, the true win, which is awarded to a pitcher who pitches a complete game, and he is directly responsible for creating more runs than he allows. So basically, he hits a homer and he pitches a shutout, or he hits two homers and he gives up one run. He hits more homers himself than he allows the other team to score. And that's what Noah Sindergaard did on Thursday. And it was pretty cool to see just coming on the heels of that conversation because it had been a couple of years since this had happened. Noah Sindergaard had been the last guy to do it and it had been a couple of years before him. And this is a very rare feat that is getting rarer all the time. Sam actually wrote about it very quickly after that started.

I think he said it's happened 208 times since 1908, which is rarer than a no-hitter. Of course, it can't really happen in the AL anymore since the DH, but even so, it is really rare, and it's really impressive. And Sindergaard was great, and he did it in 104 pitches. That's the big risk. Not only are pitchers terrible at hitting now, but they rarely pitch complete games. And so to do both of those things in one start is very unlikely. And it happened. say he you know he uh organized it around a slightly different metric but this had not happened in terms of a pitcher um pitching a shutout and homering for the game's only run which of course like if it's a shutout it's like well it might not be the game's only run but well it had not happened since uh bob welch did it on june 17th 1983 and this is one of those cool things that just makes it more fun to watch the game. Like Sam tweeted about this, I don't know, in the fifth inning or something. And so I was following it, as was he. And it made it a lot more fun because like every pitch is a nail biter because not only

could the other team score and ruin it, but just like throwing too many pitches can get you taken out of a game. So there are just so many ways to lose it. And as he pointed out, you never know when you might just see the last true win. We just might not see any anymore. He proposed kind of co-naming it the Bob Gibson because Bob Gibson did it six times, which is the most ever. And these days it's like once every two years and probably getting rarer. So kind of cool that it happened so shortly after we discussed it. Yeah, very cool. It added tremendous stakes to that game.

And, you know, it was good that there were stakes because I had been lulled into a sense of security and happiness after seeing that Syndergaard had ditched the beard and the man bun. Yeah, but he's wear down. Yeah, it amped them back up again because I wasn't worried about his hair. So it's good. speaking of low pitch counts kyle hendricks just threw a complete game shut out in 81 pitches yeah that seems like not a lot of pitches that is i mean that's like a maddox minus 19 that is amazing wow i'm gonna have to look up just well this was, I guess, Aaron Cook did it to beat the Mariners naturally in 81 pitches in 2012.

So that was the last time that it happened. And it was the eighth nine-inning shutout with 81 or fewer pitches since 1988 when they started keeping track of pitch counts. So that's pretty impressive. Yeah, that's great. I saw not a single pitch of that game, but I look forward to going back and checking some of those out. Yeah. Should we talk about the AL Central? Yeah, I guess we should.

As I remarked on our three co-host pod, I went away for the weekend, and when I came back, the Twins were atop the Central, and that was surprising to me. Twins were top the Central, and that was surprising to me. And then things got much worse for Cleveland because now Corey Kluber is hurt and will be out for, I mean, I don't know that we have had an update on the exact timeline, but at least a month for the fracture in his arm to heal. So this is, things are getting a little bit spicy in the Central, which is great because we thought that division was going to be boring in a profound way before the season started. Right. Yeah. Kluber is evidently not having surgery, but he's going to be out for a while while that heals. And I'm just looking at the Fangraphs playoff odds comparing to the preseason odds and looking at the odds of making the division series. So Cleveland is now down 17.1% and the Twins are up about 31%, which is, I think only the Rays are up more relative to preseason. So yeah, Twins are fun. Your draft pick of them in the fun team draft is looking great. Not only are they fun,

but they are apparently pretty good. And they sort of like stopped striking out and yet they're hit for more power. And the staff is a little bit better. They do strike out some guys now and it's just kind of a fun, exciting team with like Wayne Zastadio and Byron Buxton and Nelson Cruz and people who are fun to watch play baseball. So yeah, this is cool. Yeah. The only teams in baseball with more wins than the twins are the dodgers the rays sure and the cardinals uh so that seems pretty great they are uh outperforming their pythag and their base runs record by by a little bit but only by two wins it's not like a crazy amount uh you know it's not like they have a negative run

differential anything like that so yeah they're they're fun. I'm excited for it to be a little bit more of a race. I wish that it were coming under different circumstances for Cleveland. Uh, cause it is a bummer to, you know, Kluber hasn't been quite right this season anyhow, but it is a bummer to lose him for so long. Maybe their bats will pick up and then, um, it'll be, it'll be a little more fun again. Cause we'll get good Lindor and perhaps ramirez will rebound could be yeah yeah so the rays are up almost 40 percent their odds of making the lds the twins are up about 30 percent and then the cardinals are up 20 percent and those are the only really big jumps or double digit jumps but that's all exciting and and i'm glad there is a race in the central at least. I feel sorry for Cleveland fans. I'd like to see them get to win a World Series someday. On the other hand, there's obviously the Cleveland ownership just very much took the winter off, which was at the time understandable in the sense that it looked like they were so likely to win the Division I think coming into

The season they had the highest Division odds even though they did A whole lot of nothing and spent most Of the offseason talking about trading Guys although they didn't end up Moving Kluber or Bauer but they were clearly Considering it and it seemed like They were very much trying to cut costs

And that is just Some sort of cheapness on their part, coupled with not so great attendance and coupled with, I guess, a false sense of security about just how competitive they had to be and how aggressive they had to be. And it was kind of one of these situations where we thought, like, you know, it seems like they kind of have that locked up. But if enough goes wrong and enough goes right for the twins and so far that's all happening but it's pretty early yet yeah it is it is early yet but you we were able to sort of see our way to this man the race of the best run differential in baseball yeah that's wild good job jeff we're gonna attribute it all to him it's all his doing yeah yeah i think that we all thought that

there was you know as soon as lindor went down in spring we all i think started to grapple with the possibility that that they would need to do something um more substantial than they have to really lock up and and sort of put their boot on the next that's a terrible analogy i hate that analogy i don't know why i brought that one up. But anyway, to seal it up, they were going to, they could have, you know, just really put it away early and they decided not to. And leaving the door open like that was something we all thought was a little bit weird and risky. And now it is potentially coming back to bite them. Although, obviously, there is a tremendous amount more baseball to be played. Is it possible that the Marlins have only won nine baseball games?

That seems high to me. Wow. This has been a feature of podcasts for me lately where I will be talking to someone, and so I have our leaderboards up or I have our playoff projections, and then I get distracted by an aberrant fact. And last time it was Trey Mancini, and now it's the Marlins because, oof, that's rough. Yeah, 9-21. Not so great.

Not so great. Not the worst run differential in baseball though go orioles the orioles home run allowance pace right now is really extraordinary it's one of the wildest things i've ever seen they're on pace to joshian just wrote about this so i was looking at the numbers in his newsletter and uh they're on pace for 374 home runs allowed they've only allowed i think one since tuesday so the pace has actually slowed a little bit well that's good this is like yes oh man and this is like assuming they don't trade any good pitchers that they have if they have any or like lose any to injury along the way this is

quite grim it's quite grim it's partly the run environment but not really they just right they allowed the most home runs in a baseball month by a lot by 16 16 they allowed 73 dingers in april and including march i guess which uh previous record was the A's in 1964, and May was 57. So they blew that away. So they allowed more home runs than Bellinger and Yelich. The current home run leaders have hit each. Not together, but each. Seems bad.

Well, just to go back to Cleveland for a hot minute, they get to play the Seattle Mariners for a three-game set. And so, you know, they might come away feeling a little bit better because Mariners have been dreadful. Yeah. They have been quite poor over the last seven days, so they might get a bit of a reprieve. The Mariners have been outscored 35-7 in their last three games.

That seems pretty bad. Yeah, that's not great. One other thing, or maybe two other things, this seems to be like the Tyler Glasnow week. There was a Tyler Glasnow post at Fangraphs, and Michael Bauman wrote about Glasnow at the Ringer, and I think everyone's kind of paying lots of attention to Glasnow, which they were coming into the season because he was a very popular breakout type pick because he had been pretty

good in in certain ways after the Rays traded for him last year and man that trade is just looking like we're like 10 months or so after that trade the the Chris Archer for Austin Meadows and Tyler Glasnow and others trade. And that is looking like an all-timer for the race right now, which it kind of did at the time. But this is like, this is just, I mean, Archer is hurt right now, but before he was hurt, was not pitching particularly great anyway. And he's kind of been on a downward trend for a while now. And Glasnow seems to be like a frontline starter, and then Meadows is also on the IL now, but he was hitting like really incredibly well before he got hurt too.

So, gosh, that trade, that is regrettable for Petters. It does not appear good because Austin Meadows was worth a win before he got hurt, right? He has a 191 WRC+. Yep. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Yeah. That'll play.

And Costo's like, he was obviously a touted Prospect and he had good stuff and Maybe this would have happened anyway I don't know But he's made some tweaks And I think David Lorela just Wrote about him too right there have been multiple Fan press posts about Glasnow Recently so this is like Partly a player development

Success I guess like he Has a couple different types of Fastballs and so He has a couple of different types of fastballs. And so he's throwing a cutter more. He's throwing in the zone more. I haven't consumed all of the Glasnow content yet to see what exactly he's doing differently. But have you edited these pieces enough to know? I have, but I am going to need a moment for the data to load. But I think that while I'm stalling on that score, I am going say that i mean like obviously he is different tyler glasnow is different than paxton because you know he's right he's lefty but i i think that what all of

these pieces have pointed out and it is true is that like the the additional just strike throwing is really what's gonna what seemed to have made the difference. And then that has been refined even further, uh, this year. And, uh, I think that one of the things that Ben was struck by different Ben, there are too many bands. We're going to start renaming you because I don't want to, I don't want to confuse people with all the bends. I think that, you know, one thing that, one thing that he noted, for example, is that he's having greater success on first pitches in terms of finding the zone. So that seems to be encouraging, and he is mixing these pitches very effectively. And so I think that the combination of that fastball and the variety of fastballs paired with his breaking stuff is just really great.

And he's throwing strikes. Yeah. balls paired with his breaking stuff is just like it's just really it's just really great and he strikes so yeah it's funny how the reputation of the pirates has sort of switched when it comes to making players better because it was just a few years ago that ray searidge was a miracle worker and i remember doing podcasts at the time about like how much do we believe that because sometimes you see coaches who just sort of have a fleeting reputation for being brilliant and then that reputation goes away for whatever reason i don't know whether it's that they weren't actually that great in the first place and they just got sort of lucky or whether they were able to reach a certain group of players and then new players come along and they're not as receptive for whatever reason. Or maybe they have one weird trick that they advise players to do to be good at baseball

and then the game changes and then that weird trick doesn't work anymore, which it sort of seems like we're at that point with the Pirates where Travis wrote a whole book about the things that they did and their pitching approach and inside fastballs and sinkers and get grounders and then shift and do good framing. And, you know, some of that was other teams catching up. And then some of it, it seemed like, I don't know, maybe they fell in love a little bit with that strategy because suddenly you get like Garrett Cole, who is not flourishing under that system. And then he goes to Houston and suddenly he's great and

last known now. And it just seems like you're not seeing those success stories of people who go to the pirates anymore. It seems like there are more of people who leave the pirates. Well, and I wonder how much, I always wonder how much like being known for one, embracing one Saber concept, like you said, kind of enhances our, or not enhances, but makes us assume that there's more going on with another. Like we, we looked at them and we're like, well, they're really in on pitch framing and we like pitch framing and think it's super smart and cool. So there must be a lot to those sort of overall pitching strategy and it will probably be good and adaptable going forward because in this way,

the organization is proving itself to be progressive. And if they're embracing the one thing, surely they're thinking critically about the other. And I just, I think you're right that it doesn't appear that that was either, it either didn't continue to adapt at the rate that it needed to, or was perhaps too one size fits all for the pitchers that they were actually getting. So yeah, it doesn't look great. Unlike Tyler Glasnow, who looks fantastic. So yeah, it doesn't look great. Unlike Tyler Glasnow, who looks fantastic. Yeah.

I mean, whenever you have sort of a one-size-fits-all organizational philosophy, it seems like you're in danger of guys who don't fit into that so well just being left out a little bit. And someone like Garrett Cole, who has this explosive fastball and this great breaking stuff, and you're telling him to throw lots of sinkers. It's like, you know, that might work well for Yvonne Nova or other guys, but maybe that's not the best way to unlock Garrett Cole. So I talked to him for the book or Travis did and he was talking about how when he went to Houston, he sat down with the people there and he immediately heard things that he never heard in Pittsburgh about how he should pitch and what his best pitches were. And so there are coaches who are in the game for a long time and are very respected, but it's just really hard to find guys on the scrap heap and turn them into

productive players year after year after year, because if you're doing something really smart, then other people are going to see what you're doing. And those players are going to take what they learn to other places and people will mimic what you're doing. And those players are going to take what they learn to other places and people will mimic what you're doing. And then maybe other teams will copy the framing and the shifting and their launch angles will change and player swings will change and suddenly you don't want to throw sinkers, you want to throw sliders and everything's different

and you can't really reinvent yourself. So it's hard to be better than the other baseball teams for a long time. It's so interesting that two of the most analytically inclined organizations that we can think of, when you think about their approach to player dev, I just wonder when we're going to see that problem emerge for a Houston or for the Dodgers, right? Because Houston's approach to pitcher-player development, a lot of those guys look very, very similar in terms of what they're throwing and how they're throwing it.

And when you look at Dodgers hitters coming up through the system, there's a lot of the same, right? You have guys who are sort of approaching things the same way. There's a lot of swing and miss in the profile. And so I know this has been something like Eric and Kylie have thought a lot about is they've gone through and ranked systems and just thought about player dev. Do you end up with a biodiversity problem basically where all of the guys look the same and either some guys can't adapt or teams kind of know what you're going to do because you're so heavily committed to this one profile. profile and you know things have worked out pretty okay for for the astros and the dodgers uh but i do wonder you do wonder because like you look at pittsburgh and it's like well i don't know yeah it didn't go so well yeah it's it's hard for baseball teams to dominate baseball the way that

james holtzauer is dominating jeopardy because he is one person and he seems to have found this strategy that is really working well right now. And other people could copy it, but it's, as we're going to talk to him about it, it's partly dependent on just how good he is at implementing it and on knowing the facts of everything. Right. It's just harder in baseball where if you come up with some smart idea, then the players find out about it and the players change teams or executives change teams and you can pick up some of this stuff with public data. So it's just hard to sustain that sort of advantage, but it's impressive while it lasts. So the last thing I wanted to mention, there's been some more writing and speculating about the baseball and about dingers. There was

some writing this week in which David Price was quoted and said, come on, just tell us. We all see it. Just come clean and say it about the baseball being different. And it is funny how you see pitchers talk about this so much more than hitters. It's like they all know, but it's the pitchers who complain about this, even though, I mean, it does affect some pitchers disproportionately, but it affects all of them in a way so that, like, if all the pitchers are giving up more dingers, then you're not going to runs, even if it doesn't affect their performance relative to their peers or their earning power that much. But anyway, Price said that and Rob Manfred has changed his tune a little bit, I guess. is responsible or partly responsible here but now he's saying it's uh it's like uncontrollable variation in the way the baseballs are made because they're made by hand and it's natural products and it's hard to make them uniform and everything which uh i guess that's progress but

like would that okay like let's say let's say we believe him, that that's true. Does that make you feel better? That does not make me feel better. we're in that range of variation that we don't know how to eliminate when the drag goes down the ball goes further and you're going to have more home runs which is true but if it were just purely random variation like you would expect that sometimes there'd be juiced balls and sometimes there wouldn't be just juice balls it's like clearly like there's some variation but like the mean has moved and it's moved a lot and consistently now where we've been talking about this since the middle of 2015. So almost four years at this point, the baseball is clearly different. So it's not just variation. I mean, I get that it could vary from the beginning of 2015 to the end of 2015, but it has stayed at a very high level for the past few years. And if you wanted it not to be at that level, there are things that you could do. So it's better that he's at least like admitting

that the ball is part of it here, but it just still seems somewhat disingenuous to just be like, well, we've done all we can. I don't know. We're at the mercy of this manufacturing process. Yeah, I don't. I think that our impression of it might be a touch different if there weren't such a clear. I mean, first of all, if we didn't have a literal report commissioned by baseball that told us that this was because the ball was different.

But I think that if that change had happened, you know, it's like the frog in boiling water thing. If it had happened slowly over time, maybe you look around and you're like, whoa, this is just like a change in the way hitters are doing things or, you know, natural variation. But that there was such a stark contrast between pre-all-star break and post-all-star break home run rates that one year. It just, you know, it's like we've talked about. We want people to believe in science and it always feels very, it doesn't make us feel good as human beings when we think someone assumes that we're a little bit dumb and we're just going to kind of believe them when what they're saying doesn't

sound super plausible and is in defiance of the evidence so i think it is better but at this point i don't know that there's much he could say out apart from just admitting like yeah we monkeyed with the ball a little bit that would satisfy people because we've had this hemming and hawing and dissembling for potential dissembling for so many years now as you said it's four Yeah. There are kids who went to college and are ready to graduate from college over the course of the ball being different. They've learned a whole college education's worth of stuff. Yeah, I know.

There's got to be something that could be done if they wanted something to be done. So they can't want it that bad. All right. So we will take a quick break and we will buzz in James Holzhauer to talk about sabermetrics and Jeopardy. Where's the show tonight? Who's on? Did I see them play in Houston? What year was that? What day is it?

Why do I lean on good intentions? What are intentions? Las Vegas, Nevada Nevada James Holtz Window maximum please. Yes. What is anemia anemia is right? Lead over some meat All of it. Okay. What is Bangkok? What is Kyoto? What is Kyrgyzstan? What is curiosity? What is dead cat? Kyoto? What is Kyrgyzstan? What is Curiosity? What is Dead Cat? Answer there. The Daily Double.

4,400 off the one-day record, James. Okay, I'll try. And how much did you risk? 38,314. A new one-day record. 110,914. In December 2015, Alex Trebek read this clue on Jeopardy. This word for the science of baseball analytics comes from the name of a research society. He was greeted by blank stares and silence. Eventually, he said, that would be sabermetrics.

Yeah, it's an unusual word. Our guest today, James Holzhauer, would have no trouble with that question. Not that he has much Trouble with any other questions James, there will not be any prize money At the end of this episode, but thank you for Joining us anyway. Hi Ben, I remember that Episode, I was excited Yeah

Well, we've been following your success With interest, as has the rest of the country But we got even more interested this week Because in response to a Very cranky column about how you're ruining Jeopardy, one of many out there, you tweeted tongue-in-cheek that you had always dreamed of working in an MLB front office and ruining baseball. You've since explained a little bit about your baseball background to Mark Krug of The Athletic, but for people who

haven't read that piece, which we will link to, could you explain a little bit about how baseball became a gateway to what you're doing now? Well, it's kind of a lifelong love affair. You know, when I would come home from school, Cubs games were what was on TV. Well, Cubs games and Jeopardy, so that informed my whole life right there. I was always the kid who was really into the stats that flashed on the bottom of the screen. You know, back then they only had the betting average, home runs, and RBIs. But even that, I wanted to collect every baseball card in the set.

In the days before baseball reference and fan drafts were around, you had to go into Excel and input everyone's stats yourself and try to run some formulas on them, see what the real MVP was. That was me. Fast forward to about age 13, I remember telling my dad that I wish there were a stock market for sports teams because I would just trade sports teams for a living and clean up on it. And, you know, it took me eight years to realize that such a thing existed, but that's, you know, became who I was. In between, I would play a lot of fantasy baseball and, you know, kind of run my own numbers to try to figure out who's going to win the World Series this year. And, you know, this is the kind of thing I would do for fun anyway. So knowing that I could make some money off of it was just gravy on top. So yeah, since age 21, I've been supporting myself betting sports just as the only job I have really. And we talked on an episode to Mitchell Lichtman,

who was a sports better and he used to clean up betting on baseball like back in the 80s, 90s. And he has since just given up betting on baseball because it's gotten a lot harder to make money doing that. So did you have or do you have much success betting on baseball specifically? It's definitely harder now than it used to be. I mean, the opportunities are still there, but you're you're you're got to be comfortable with having like, I don't know, a two% edge on your bet instead of an 8% edge that you used to have 15 years ago. I think back in MGL's day, they would even be higher than that. It was crazy. It took the books quite a while to catch up to the stats revolution in baseball, but they're basically there now. And you got to really be on top of stuff. You know, Mike Trout's not playing.

If you could fire in a bet against the Angels, that's honestly just as big a source of edge now as crunching the numbers is for me. So where do you find those edges? What are the sports betting markets that haven't quite caught up to the inefficiencies yet? Well, a big thing is just if you're playing the market itself, it's not the stock exchange. The stock exchange, if you want to buy Google stock, you have to accept whatever price the market is giving you. In sports, there's 13 different sportsbook operators in Nevada. They all have their own odds on the game. And sometimes, you know, either the guy who's managing risk at one place decides he wants to get more money on the other side. You know, maybe they're taking a lot of bets on the Bears.

They want to get some Packers money in. Or maybe the sportsbook manager just doesn't like the Bears for whatever reason. He gives you an extra half point. And a big source of edge is just making sure you're shopping for the best price you can. Other than that, in baseball, crunching your numbers is, of course, very important. Staying on top of that lineup info. I know part of MGM's new deal with baseball is that they want to have exclusive access to that lineup info before anyone else does.

I don't think they're going to get this, but it would be interesting to see how that affects the marketplace if they do get exclusive insider info like that. So what was your impression generally then? I guess we hadn't really planned on talking about this, but what was your impression of MLB's deal with MGM? Is this something that you're excited about to see that sort of avenue? I don't know if that legitimizes the word I'm comfortable using, but expanded in terms of a formal partnership? I would say that the first thing I thought when I read about this was interesting. Baseball says

they're committed to not wanting to be involved in gambling, but it turns out their price was $15 million or whatever MGM paid them for this partnership. But I think that's overall more legalization of sports betting is a good direction for the industry. And I'm proud to see that taking place right now. More and more states kind of falling. So how far did you go in attempting to work in MLB? I would say that based on even your Jeopardy! winnings alone, I think you've done better pursuing what you pursued than

getting an entry-level job in an MLB front office. But what was your hope and who did you apply to, or what kind of job were you looking for and when? Yeah, I mean, this was never going to be an avenue to make money. I run on record saying I would love to work in a front office, but I have to think I would be taking a pretty serious pay cut, not just from Jeopardy, but from gambling in order to do it. So it would just be kind of a passion project for me. I would not say that I gave it my all in the past. You know, I would submit online applications whenever I saw one, but I would never go to the winter meetings or things like that. And so, yeah, I would not say I gave the best effort I could have.

And I know that Mark tweeted that at least one team has expressed some interest in you now. Would you be interested still in some sort of consultant role, let's say? I think that that would be something I could definitely be interested in. But, you know, I would like to work remotely if I could. You know, I really love Las Vegas. My family's here. My friends are here. And my work is here.

I might have to put the gambling on baseball aside if some consultancy thing opens up. I wonder if the Golden Knights analytics department has an opening. It could be perfect, maybe. Well, historically, coming on this podcast or co-hosting this podcast or writing for Fangraphs has been a really good way to chop in baseball. So maybe this will do it i do think they probably would make you stop uh placing bets on actual mlb action if you were to work for a team though yeah you know i was wondering if front offices have bans on fantasy baseball because the my friends and my keeper league that we've been playing in forever is already starting to call

dibs on vladimir guerrero jr if i have to drop him next year. Right. So do you see your strategy right now as analogous to any specific baseball strategies or sabermetric strategies that we've seen, well, in baseball, but also in any sport? Obviously, the response to it has been similar in a lot of ways, but do you look at certain tactics as inspirations? I don't know if I would call it a direct, draw a direct analogy between the two, but I would say, you know, when I came into formulating my Jeopardy strategy, I did not look at what anyone else was doing. I just thought, you know, if I were starting from scratch and I had no idea how to play Jeopardy, what are the ways I could play that would give me an advantage over the typical player?

You know, and I think that some of these teams and things like the shifts and uh prioritizing strikeout pitchers and home run hitters they're you know thinking we don't need to follow tradition there's no reason that we uh need to follow maxims like pitching is 75 of the game let's figure out how much pitching actually is and work from there you know let's figure out where people actually hit their ground balls and position our fielders accordingly so you know, not catering to historical tendencies, I think, was a big part of it. And there have been a bunch of responses, including that one column I alluded to earlier about how you are impairing the Jeopardy spectator experience, which has been a criticism that a lot of people have lodged against sabermetrics. And maybe it's made baseball a less entertaining sport. And I think a lot of people are watching Jeopardy just because you are doing so well, which kind of goes against that argument, I guess. But do you see that as

a genuine concern in baseball or in Jeopardy as you were dominating at the moment? Because it does seem that in football, for instance, in basketball, there are a lot of ways in which the optimal way to play is also the most entertaining way to play for spectators. And that probably is not the case in baseball. And I wonder whether you think it's the case in Jeopardy. Well, I know that Jeopardy's ratings have been going up lately, so I don't think they're complaining on their end. But of course, you know, they're welcome to change the rules of the game if they think it's impairing the viewer experience. I have to think that the few people who are writing hit pieces represent a minority of the people out there.

But you know, my goal is not to get 100% approval rating. So that's my problem. You can pull the veil back a little bit for us maybe on the Jeopardy filming experience. I don't know how much interaction you have with your fellow contestants prior to filming or even after. But I think one of the things that has been striking about watching you is just how unsettled some of your fellow contestants have been watching you employ the strategies that you have. Have you had any

opportunity to talk to any of them before or after and sort of gauge their reaction to this? Or are you sort of isolated pregame so that there's not a lot of mingling? I'm encouraged to chat with the other contestants in the green room beforehand. And, you know, I like to think that I was always cordial with them. Everyone was certainly very cordial with me, which I appreciated. You know, no one was trying any mind games or anything like that. I would not say that my strategy was designed to intimidate anyone, but I could see how people would find it intimidating just looking at the scores I was racking up.

Do you think that, you know, baseball had its sort of money ball moment where there was a team out ahead on some of this stuff and then everyone caught up? Do you anticipate that future Jeopardy! contestants are going to try to mimic this strategy, become the Red Sox of Jeopardy! with money and a good sabermetric department? Well, I would be excited to see that direction just because I, as a fan, like when the contestants are betting big and chasing the big paydays, I can't say that everyone's going to have the same temperament I have because even if it's the mathematically correct play to bet $10,000 on a daily double, not everyone's going to be able to do that and

be able to answer a trivia question without it hanging in the back of their mind. Oh, there's so much riding on this. I think I would be happier overall to see future contestants go in a similar direction. I would feel kind of like a pioneer in that field. Yeah. What do you think prevented previous contestants from doing what you're doing now? I know that you've spoken about how maybe your gambling background has made you more comfortable with wagering large amounts of money, but just the strategies that you're pursuing and the clues that you're choosing, how much is that based on data analysis that you've done of previous Jeopardy games? And is that one reason why you're able to do this that previous people haven't done it? Or is there like an unwritten rules

aspect to it where you're supposed to play a certain way and people aren't willing to go against that? I think there's a couple of things at play there. First of all, as I said, you know, I'm just much more comfortable with winning and losing money than the average contestant is ever going to be based on my background. You know, maybe if someone's a bond trader in New York or something that that would also roll off their back. But also, I read a book once that I can't remember the name of it, but they divided the world into groups they called maximizers and satisficers. And the satisficer is happy with good enough you

know this describes my wife she doesn't want to search 20 different websites to find the best deal on her hotel or anything you know she finds one that's good enough and she moves on with her life and i think that satisficers are supposed to be much happier but i'm definitely a maximizer i knew i had one shot at jeopardy and i was not about to screw it up you know i wanted to do everything uh as well as i could have and leave it all out there. And I'm not sure how many people are really that interested in making sure that their one Jeopardy shot doesn't go to waste. I wanted to ask you about the relationship between skill and luck in Jeopardy, because of course you have a certain strategy, but you don't know what the clues are going to

be beforehand. So there is some chance involved here. How much would you put it as skill versus luck? How does that compare to other sports and to baseball? That's a good question. I don't, well, I would definitely say that an underdog in a baseball or hockey game has a better chance of pulling off an upset than they would on Jeopardy. I might compare it more to an NBA where, you know, if the Warriors are playing, say the Suns, there's pretty unlikely the Suns are going to win, but there is, you know, the opportunity out there. It's not, it's never going to be more than like 95% or something like that. But yeah, there's, I think, more luck than many viewers realize. You know, a lot of people talk about, oh, James is playing a certain way. He was definitely going to go on this winning streak. But if you

look at the first couple of games, you know, there are definite turning points. If I didn't uncover one out of three daily doubles in my second game, I would have lost that one and nobody would know my name now. And yeah, there's just lots of things like that that pop up in the game. I think that everyone's trying to speculate on how I'm going to lose eventually, but you know, sometimes luck just gets you or maybe skill does, who knows. Just to touch on that skill a little bit further, I think everyone who plays bar trivia is looking for tips that are perhaps in a lower stakes environment, but certainly tips on how to accumulate knowledge like this. How have you gone about sort of assembling this great database of trivia knowledge that you have? So of course, it depends on the venue

that you're doing your trivia knowledge for, but for Jeopardy!, they test breadth of knowledge more than depth. And I found it very helpful to go to the children's section of the library, look for books that introduce you to a subject, give you basic facts about it. And you know, often I would delve into a second or third children's book, but that was like the right level for me. It engaged me. It didn't bore me to read a book full of pictures and infographics and things like that. And it gave me enough knowledge about every subject that I felt comfortable, you know, filling in the gaps with other sources and going in knowing I had, there was no subject I didn't know anything about, except there was a Monty Python quotes category last week that when I was

just SOL on. Are there any others that you others that you don't have to reveal this weakness if you don't want to? Are there any other categories that you're generally sort of dreading? There was a ballet category a couple of weeks back that I did not do so well on, but I still felt comfortable. I think three clues had been revealed and I didn't know any of them, but the fourth clue was a daily double and I still bet $15,000 on it because I figured I had to be a favorite to get it right and I did so. How do you prepare for baseball trivia specifically? Oh I don't know that I've been to a baseball specific trivia night in some time goodness I think I know more about I think I know more about historical baseball than I do the past couple years so maybe I would do a quick

refresher on things that have happened recently. I see. Because there's so much baseball knowledge out there that you could have a clue come along that even if you're a big baseball fan, might just be beyond your expertise. But you haven't kind of sat down and tried to memorize baseball reference or anything? It's been a while. When I was a kid, I definitely memorized everyone's career home run totals, but now I'm more interested in memorizing their career war, and that doesn't come up a lot in trivia. Yeah, it changes all the time, which would make an awkward question. We're waiting for the sabermetric revolution to hit trivia categories too. I remember I went to just a general bar trivia one night,

the tiebreaker question. They try to get some big number that nobody can get right. And so you can guess closest to it. And they asked me how many, how many strikeouts Nolan Ryan had in his career. And I was just like, oh, I wrote down the exact number. The other team never had a chance. I pity anyone who just shows up to bar trivia night and James Holtzauer happens to be there. That's unfortunate. You know, I meet him for a trivia night in Seattle sometime. And I

figure like if anyone else comes into the bar and sees me and Ken sitting together, they're just going to walk out. Yeah. You're too well known to get away with that now. You'll have to wear a mask or something. Yeah. Were there any, I know that you, you told Mark, you grew up reading Bill James and were influenced by him. Were there any writers or any particular research or studies either then or even recently advances in baseball that have really caught your eye? Well, I guess I would owe a debt to Boros McCracken and his dips research because that was, I think, the big gap between my understanding and the bookies' understanding when I was just getting started in gambling, they really took a long time to get in touch with the idea that most of the balls in play is luck. There's only a little bit of pitcher skill to it. Clay Davenport, I think, brought attention to the idea that you could use math to simulate

the rest of the baseball season. They have these things called futures markets where every day you can place a bet on which team is going to win the World Series. And often the odds shift in ways that the bookie is not looking for. When a team goes on a winning streak, they don't really know how to adjust it that well. And I think Clay's work kind of inspired me to make my own simulations that use a similar method. And that was definitely a profitable approach. Can I add your projections to Fangraph fan graphs to round out our collection? I'm curious. I know that you must be very busy,

both preparing for jeopardy and filming. Cause it sounds like the filming schedule is quite arduous, but how, how much time have you actually had to watch baseball this year? And I know that you said you grew up a Cubs fan. Are you, are you following your cubbies with great interest or or has Jeopardy sort of taken over? I'm following from a distance, but yeah, things are very busy here.

In my normal life, I would have time for my family and then a little bit of sports at the end. But now I have time for my family and Jeopardy, and maybe I can watch 20 minutes of baseball highlights if I'm lucky. I saw one of the analyses maybe at 538irtyEight about how the distribution of Daily Doubles on the board, you know, they tend to be on certain squares and not on others. And I wonder how much of that you're factoring into your choices and whether you know why there is such an unequal distribution. on why the producers do the things the way they do, but they seem to have had a tendency to include Daily Double. I mean, Daily Double is never in the top row of the board, so if you're hunting for the Daily Double, you're just never correct to pick up there.

As far as the other rows, it does seem to be somewhat random, but there are some that come up more than others. I think that the 538 analysis might have included the columns too, but I think that might be a bit too far. I don't know what the producer is doing when they stake the Daily Double where they do, but I don't think that where the column is into consideration. So for those of you who don't watch Jeopardy! a lot, the difficulty of the clues goes up as the dollar value goes up, and I think that they don't want to put the Daily Double in the top row, first of all, because people usually play the category top-down, and they want to give the audience at home and the players a

feel for the category before they start having the Daily Double. But also, I think they don't want to make it too easy. A gimme question. So I'd like to think that they won't switch up the rules on you in the middle of your run here, but if after your run concludes someday, if it ever does, and they decide that, well, this was fun, but maybe we want to prevent another James Holzhauer from earning all our money and blowing our budget completely, how would you stop you? How would you stop a future version of yourself on the show? That's a good question. I don't, I mean, the producers are free to do whatever they want, of course, uh you know and i'm not going to speculate on why they would want to stop the next james but

uh i guess the easiest thing to do would just be to make the daily doubles harder or i don't know if they made final jeopardy harder that would be uh something but you know you don't you can't ruin the viewer experience by making final jeopardy something they're never going to get i mean i'm I'm picking up an extra 25,000 an episode or something just from that final bet where the game is already a runaway. And we're just seeing what my final score is. Right? Yeah. When you're looking at sort of the I guess the actual baseball version of what you're doing, does does does the shift ruin your viewer experience as a baseball fan, not as someone who's analyzing the game necessarily or thinking about how to maximize winnings on Jeopardy, but do sort of advanced Sabre concepts as they are manifesting themselves on the field?

How do you end up feeling about those just as a fan watching baseball? We're talking about like infield shifting. I don't care about infield shifting. I do think it's a worse viewer experience. So there's more strikeouts and more home runs and fewer balls in play. And it would be interesting to see them tinker with the rules a little bit to try and bring that balance a little back down.

But, you know, I certainly have no problem with the teams trying to win if they feel that more strikeouts and more home runs gives them the edge. Then, you know, I think that they should be doing everything they can to get the wins, to get the fans in the seats and sell their merchandise. You know, that is their goal. So even the great Jeopardy champion has an aesthetic preference for baseball that isn't quite a Sabre extreme. It's good to know. And I know I've seen you talk a bit here and there about the advantage of just having been on the show before, the incumbent advantage, and the pressure that

maybe you don't experience as much. Did you find the first time you were on, did you feel that pressure? Or did you just have your strategy down so cold that the moment didn't faze you? Well, you know, I'd like to think that I went in less nervous than my opponents, shall we say, but the nerves were still there. And, you know, I know that you've, well, I don't know if you personally have researched this, but research has shown that pinch hitters have a penalty when they're coming into the game cold. You know, I mean, I kind of liken it to if one team gets to take five rounds of batting practice and the other gets one, you know, who's going to be more warmed up for the game. If I'm the defending champ, having been there three times, I've gotten to time the buzzer already. I've gotten a feel for standing around at the podium, getting comfortable in my surroundings,

and the challengers don't have that. So it's not at all a surprise that they would be struggling to come out the gate. And when you have just kind of wiped away the other competitors, are they generally pretty gracious about that? Or are there any bad sports ungracious losers there no one has ever refused to shake my hand um i would say that there was a game on monday uh let's see it would be the april the 29th i think where the the challenger had the highest second place score in in history and even he you know who really in any other universe would have won seven episodes of his own and jeopardy shook my hand and was seemed really happy would have won seven episodes of his own and Jeopardy! shook my hand and seemed really happy to have had the thrill

of getting to play on the big stage so I think that at least outwardly everyone is projecting that they had a great time and they were happy to be there and I'm really glad for that How far in advance do you guys tape the show? So they do

a taping schedule of ten episodes a week. There's five episodes one day, then five episodes the next. And typically what they'll do is do two weeks on, one week off. So these episodes have all been in the can since February. Got it. If you were to work in baseball, I wonder whether you think that there's some untapped territory that you would be able to help a team mine because you'd think at this point there wouldn't be that much more in baseball that you could do the game's been around for so long we've seen the sabermetric revolution proceed but jeopardy's been around for a really long time too and the data has been out there for quite some time and yet you are kind of

reinventing the game right now so do you think that that opportunity is even still possible in baseball? I can see what you're saying. It's kind of ironic. You know, I would have probably the most to contribute to a baseball team, but there's the least to gain from hiring a new consultant there, I guess I could see. I really think an NFL team could definitely benefit more from a math guy telling them, hey, it's only fourth and three. It's really a lot better for you to go for it here. Or maybe burgeoning field of stats in, say, hockey. There's lots of untapped material there, but I'm not sure they have the data to find it yet.

If you were able to fix fourth down decision-making in football, whatever animus, silly as it is, has been generated by your strategy on Jeopardy! would be wiped away i'm sure yeah well i don't know i think i would uh get blamed for a lot of times when that goes awry but yeah i guess that is the way i can take it that's right and how much of the analysis of your own performance have you consumed because i always think like if i were a baseball player i'd be reading all of the articles about me and it would probably get in my head. I wonder whether you are

reading all of the statistical analyses of your own performance and whether you've learned anything about yourself from that. I would not say I've learned a terrible lot. You know, there's a couple of, I guess you could call them, Jeopardy sabermetric sites out there that are trying to compile statistics. There's one that especially especially there running a comparison between me and Ken Jennings' stats. And the stats geek in me is kind of interested in this just from that perspective. But, you know, it's not an editorial site, so the opinions are mostly kept out of it. There's also a site called the Jeopardy Archive where they track the stats from every season. And I have taken kind of a delight in watching.

They have the standard deviation of winning scores for each season. And I think this year it's gone up from like 8,000 to 22,000 already. So I'm kind of delighted to see that change by the day. Jeopardy graphs. We got to get in on that. Are there any other game shows out there that you would like to apply your talents to? Oh, so in 2014, I was on this show called The Chase, which I really like because there's a villainous British trivia expert on the show who's literally trying to chase you down from behind.

And I love the idea of a hero and a villain character duking it out on the set. So if they ever want to reboot that show and make me the chaser, I would definitely have to listen to that offer. Yeah, I guess there's maybe I don't know if there are that many kind of analytically oriented game shows or shows where you could use numbers to make a similar sort of impact. Yeah, for the most part, I mean, I guess they could hire me as a consultant on risk management or something like that. But for the most part, you know, game shows have a fairly straightforward format. You know, Jeopardy is honestly pretty open-ended in that regard. There are different ways to approach it as we've seen. And, you know, some I think work better than others. Yeah, right. That's right. You could be like a white hat hacker or something who gets hired as a security consultant just to prevent other people from

winning too much at game shows. But all right. Well, we will let you go. I wonder, is there anything that you are particularly enjoying or paying attention to or hoping to see this baseball season? You know, I'm really hoping for Shohei Otani to come back strong. I know he's not pitching for this year, but he is my favorite player in the league, partially because he's Japanese and partially because he's just doing such amazing things

that we haven't seen in my lifetime. So that would be the big one, I think. He's the James Holzhauer of baseball. You're the Otani of Jeopardy. All right. Well, I'm glad that we could have you on and I would wish you luck. I don't know if you actually need luck or how much luck even comes into play at this point,

but I hope that your run continues and that not too many people are mad at you. And maybe you will open some minds about the ways that we can use this sort of information in other areas of life. And I'll be curious to see where you pop up next and what you are able to parlay this into, because there's no telling what sort of opportunities might arise. You'll have to think about who should play you in the Jeopardy! Moneyball movie. Yeah, it's tricky. There's not a lot of half-Asian celebrities out there to pick from. I think it's reverse-aged

Keanu Reeves, maybe, or something like that. All right. Well, you can find James on Twitter at James underscore Holzhauer, and you can find him on Jeopardy! every weeknight taking Jeopardy! for all it's worth. Thanks, James. Good luck. underscore holtzower and you can find him on jeopardy every weeknight taking jeopardy for all it's worth thanks james good luck thank you for having me ben meg all right that will do it for today and for this week and if you are interested in pre-ordering my book the mvp

machine send some proof of your pre-order to the mvp machine at gmail.com just a confirmation email or a screenshot or a photo of a receipt whatever you have and that will qualify you for some pre-order goodies. We're going to be sending out a bonus chapter and a conversation about the book between me and Travis and some other additional documents when the book comes out. So your pre-orders help us. They can also help you. You can also support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners already have Jason Bersani, Ronak Nair, Paul Formichelli, David Egan, and Robbie Sampson.

Thanks to all of you. A few other things. After we spoke to James, his latest episode and victory aired. On Friday night, he earned his 22nd straight victory. He won another $82,381, which brings his total to $1,691,008. Not too shabby. His next episode doesn't air until May 20th, so he will be undefeated at least until then,

but one would think quite a bit longer. He now has, I think, nine of the top ten single-game winnings in Jeopardy. It's almost how, like, Baseball Savant used to have the Chapman filter, where you'd look at the fastest fastballs ever thrown, and you'd just have to press the button to remove all the Eroldis Chapman ones because that was the entire top of the leaderboard. Kind of need a whole tower filter for the single day Jeopardy! winnings. I think my favorite part of that interview was when I asked him how the show could stop someone like him, and he kind of couldn't come up with an answer because he is just that unstoppable. Speaking of unstoppable, Tower of Glass now won again on

Friday. He is now 6-0 by old school one loss record. He threw seven more shutout innings. Granted, it was against the Orioles, so you know. At least the Rays only hit one home run off Orioles pitching, so that's something. Also, a few of you have emailed us or tweeted at us in response to Sam's stat blast on the previous episode. That was about the last walk-off by a pitcher, which Sam said was Scott Proctor. As some of you have pointed out, there have been more recent walk-offs by pitchers. Madison Bumgarner had a walk-off hit last year. John Lester had a walk-off bunt in 2016.

Those didn't show up in Sam's query because those pitchers were both pinch hitters at the time, so they were not listed as pitchers. But yes, if you include pinch hitters, it has happened. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via

email at podcast.fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Too slow, too late, too slow, too late, too slow. That was fun. Thanks.

I appreciate it. That was great. All these national media outlets are talking to me. I get this email from FanDrafts. I'm like, hey, I read FanDrafts. This is actually exciting. Thank you for having me. Hello and welcome to effectively – nope, see?

Dang it. Podcast intro, yips. No, you can't call it that because then it's going to be worse. Okay.