Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1399: The Longest Leader

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley reflect on the passing of Tyler Skaggs. Then (9:57) Ben and Sam Miller banter about whether it’s better for a team to be in a division with a few good teams or a division with one great team and a few bad teams and answer listener emails about whether baseball […]

Hi Meg. Hello. We're doing a kind of cold open today because Sam is away this week and he and I recorded the rest of this episode on Sunday before the tremendously sad news about the passing of to him that have poured out of players and friends and media members since he was found unresponsive in his hotel room in Texas. And, you know, I know that in this situation, when this happens to an active player, particularly in the middle of the season, I know there's a disbelief that I think we all feel this is someone who pitched Saturday and suddenly he's gone. And so you always say that sort of thing about how this feels wrong and he was not even quite to his 28th birthday and everything about this just feels like it's not supposed to happen. And I wish that it were even less familiar than it is that something like this happens because I feel like I've had much more practice than I would like to have had responding to news like this, because we've seen this happen to Daryl Kyle and Corey Lytle and Joe Kennedy and Josh Hancock and Nick Adenhardt and Greg Hallman and Oscar Tavares and Tommy Hansen and Jose Fernandez and Jordano Ventura and Luis Valbuena. And the list goes on and on. And of course, you're aware of prior players who were gone before we were around to see them.

And I wish that this were an even less frequent occurrence than it is. But as fairly infrequent as it is, it's still pretty shocking when someone in the sport that you cover and that you've watched is there one day and gone the next. I think it's such a strange, it's a strange, awful thing for everyone. You know, it's a strange and awful thing for fans because you have this sense that, you know, these guys, and we don't, of course, right? Like we don't exchange Christmas cards with them. But they are part of, you know, if you're an angels fan in particular, like even on days when Skaggs wasn't pitching, you probably saw him in the dugout, right? He was a part of the tapestry of your life, even, uh, if a relatively minor one.

And so you, you do feel a loss, but you feel strange making it too much about yourself because you're not one of his people, right? You know, you're not suffering that loss in anywhere like the same way that his friends or family are having to grapple with it. And it's weird as baseball media types because, you know, what do you say? Again, it's not someone who you know. You want to make it about the person. I think there were a number of angels, beat writers and other folks who wrote really just lovely portraits of him. But I think when you don't have that daily exposure, you don't quite know how to talk about it or what to say. If there's one sort of thing that's come out of this that I thought was really touching

and sort of positive was like you mentioned, like the outpouring of stories about him. It's just been overwhelming. Like it sounds like he was a really lovely human being and someone who was respected and well-liked and appreciated by the people who were around him in baseball. And I think that, you know, think that when Jose Fernandez died, he was this bright, shining star in baseball. He was a guy who we expected to see, at least on the field, in this very important role of not only for his franchise, but for the sport.

Skaggs had a quieter profile, but it was just this very sad but nice reminder that these guys all know each other, right? They all came up together and they've met on, you know, he's pitched in big league ballparks, but he had plenty of friends who he only knew on backfields. And I think I was particularly moved by Giancarlo Stanton's comments, because obviously he is all too familiar with what it feels like to have a teammate pass away in the season. And he tried to offer some words of comfort and care

for how the Angels players might be able to deal with this. So it is a moment where people kind of find their way toward one another, but it's always an awkward road to get there. And so it's just a hard thing to think about. And what we're dealing with is nothing compared to his wife and his mom and everyone who knew him. So it's just really awful. Yeah.

And this made me realize, and I feel bad about just how little I knew about Tyler Skaggs before this. You know, like if you had asked me to talk about Tyler Skaggs a few days ago, I would have just reeled off the basic biographical details. I would have said, well, he was drafted right after Mike Trout, and he was a top prospect, and he was with the Diamondbacks. Then he came back to the Angels. He's a left-handed starter. He had Tommy John surgery. He ran into some other injury issues, and now it looks like things are coming together, and he's been effective this season. And that kind of would have been it.

I would have painted the portrait of a roughly league average starting pitcher without the personal details. And I've learned so much about him for the past few days. Of course, whenever there's an untimely passing of someone, people will say nice things and remember the person. But this seems like an uncommon outpouring of tributes just of what a great guy he was and what an impact he had on the people around him. And I never covered Tyler Skaggs' team. I never interviewed him. I never wrote a full article about him. I just never really had a pressing reason to get to know Talorskag the person. And I'm sorry that I didn't when he was around to be known. realize are great because of course we know about the not good guys and we fret about the not good

guys and there are some of those guys but I think there are many more good guys in baseball and you don't always know about the good guys until something like this happens so it kind of makes me want to get to know the good guys while they're around I don't know exactly how you do that but it reminds you that it really is a tight-knit fraternity. I mean, even though there are thousands of professional baseball players, so many of them had played with him or played against him or had crossed paths with him in some way or had heard about him from someone. And it seems like almost everyone was touched by this in some way. So it just kind of reminds you that baseball is a brotherhood.

And from the outside, you don't even necessarily see that stuff unless you're around a certain team every day. Yeah. I think that it just goes to show that we tend to pay attention to particular kinds of baseball stories. And there's a reason that we do that because we only have so many hours in the day to tell stories and we have to focus our attention using some kind of selection criteria and the one that we tend to use is performance on the field but I think it just goes to show as you said like there are good guys whose stories we don't know and there are probably a lot of stories that would be worth our telling even if it's not a superstar they're still still worthwhile people, still worthwhile stories. And we maybe lose a little something when

we forget that and don't spend a bit of attention on those stories too. So it's a hard way to be reminded of that, but hopefully something that we remember for days when things are a little less grim. Yeah. And it's know, it's almost easier to come to terms with it from afar when there's some precipitating event, when there's an accident, you know, a car crash, a plane crash, something like that, that I think we understand that those things happen. But when an athlete in the prime of his life is just suddenly gone, and to go that way, I think, is just especially sad in the middle of a season where all of his teammates and a team is sort of a family in a way, a family away from home. And then they have to go on and keep playing games. And obviously, their minds will be elsewhere.

Of course, he was recently married, another thing that I would not have known about Tyler Skaggs just a few days ago. So we will link to some of the remembrances that I think flesh out the person he was. And obviously he and his loved ones will be in our thoughts and his teammates who are trying to go on. It was tough to watch Trout and Andrew Heaney and Cole Calhoun and Justin Upton and others break down while they were talking about playing their first game without Skaggs on Tuesday after the game was postponed on Monday. It was very clearly a different atmosphere from the typical baseball game, and it was obvious that this has brought those guys together. We just wanted to say something about it because I know it has an impact on us. It has an impact on all of you listening, even if we were not connected to Skaggs in the way that so many seem to have been.

Yeah, very well put. You know, I just hope that peace and healing can come for people sooner rather than later and that we take time to remember him in happier days. All right. Well, you and I will reconvene a little later this week, so I will talk to you then. And in just a moment, you will hear me and Sam discussing some nonsense. Well, where did you go?

Why did you leave? What did you know? How, how does it feel when you're the one who is alone? Someone, somewhere, somehow says so. Hello and welcome to episode 1399 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Van Graffs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lemberg of The Ringer, and I am joined, as always, except when I'm not, by Sam Miller of ESPN.

Hello, Sam. Hey, Ben. How are you? I'm doing well. So we are pre-recording this episode because of the holiday, and so we're going to do mostly emails. Is there anything you want to say before we do? 1326 in the middle of your banter, you say

something along the lines of, and another player that we talk about a lot on this show was in the news this week, Oliver Drake. And I just realized right then that I have a long way ahead of me. Oliver Drake, Ben. Yeah, we even talked to oliver drake although maybe you you'll miss that one because you hate guests wow he was a good guest though oh all right so the uh oliver drake show is coming up yep 1324 you uh mentioned that the reds who you uh you and jeff were talking about their impending trade for sunny gray and you i, this was not like a well-researched thought or anything like that, but just your Insta reaction was, well, it might be the worst division for the Reds to be in as this sort of mediocre-ish 80-some win team because the NL Central was so filled with potentially

good teams. And I wanted to know if you think that for a team that let's say has a, like a projected win total of like 81 games, would you rather be in a division where like the NL central where all four other teams project to be pretty good? Like you have four quality teams, but none of them projected to win 90 games. Or would you rather be in a division like the twins were in, in the AL Central? And perhaps I'm putting my thumb on the scale accidentally by choosing that division where there's only one team that is projected to be any good,

but the projections had them, that one team, Cleveland, being very good and being a mid-90s team, which obviously didn't happen, but that was the projection. So what do you think in general is the division that you can expect a higher win total for the the ultimate champ one with five teams that all project to win between let's say 80 and 88 games or one with only one team projected to be over 500 but they project to say win 94 games. Probably the latter, I think, just because that one team would get to beat up on all the other teams. Although, of course, there is some potential for that one team to have a bunch of things go wrong, as Cleveland did this year. And then you might end up with no good teams, except that the Twins then turned out to be a good team this year in that specific case. Yeah, because they also got to beat up on the yes right so i i think that that one you could make the case that the other one

just because you have more potential good teams and so maybe one of them will turn out to be a really good team but it will be harder for that one team to just rack up easy wins against the competition because the level of competition will be high all right i see that i've uh i i left this maybe i would say left this loophole there where it might take more wins to win the the worst division but it might not actually be harder to win that division because yeah so i guess maybe what i should say is if you're a true talent 81 win projected team which one do you would you think your playoff odds are better in yeah right your division odds not your wild card but your division odds right in that case probably the the one team that's good division it seems like things could go wrong for that one team and then you might have a clear path whereas you probably will not have

just a smooth sailing all the way to the playoffs if you're in the division with a bunch of decent teams. Yeah, it's hard to say. The Cleveland example is obviously a point in favor of picking that because we have seen how, well, your MVP candidate can suddenly be bad and your ace can get injured and your bullpen can, I don't know, I don't even know if Cleveland's bullpen has been bad this year, but let's just say your bullpen can be bad.

And then suddenly the 94 win team is only winning 84. And now it's wide, wide, wide open. That is the case for picking that one. But then you only have to go half an inch to the left on the newspaper page C4 and see that Houston is doing just fine. The AL West was a comparable situation. And in that case, Houston has made it very difficult, even for a breakout team like Texas to get within sniffing distance.

So I don't really know which is I mean, I could probably if I wanted to. All the playoff odds for the last decade are online. So I could just go and check to see what the playoff odds would say i should prefer anyway i noted that while i was listening to you and jeff talk about baseball from five and a half months ago yeah all right so let's do some emails the rest of the way this question is from nat he says in zach crams recap of last monday's u.s women's soccer match at the ringer he wrote soccer is a weak link, meaning that a team is typically only as good as its weakest link, as opposed to a sport like basketball, where a team is generally as good as its strongest link.

Do you think baseball is a strong link sport or a weak link sport? I think Mike Trout's Angels prove it's not a strong link sport, but also the Red Sox just won a World Series with Eduardo Nunez and Sandy Leone. Sorry, guys. I think Mike Trout's Angels prove it's not a strong link sport, but also the Red Sox just won a World Series with Eduardo Nunez and Sandy Leone. Sorry, guys. I love you. So maybe it's a median link sport where the team is as good as its median player. Do you have any thoughts on strong link versus weak link? A few years ago when the Cardinals lost the World Series to the Red Sox, when the Cardinals lost the World Series to the Red Sox. And I think maybe we talked to Will Leach that offseason about how the Cardinals' weak link,

which was, I think, Pete Cosma at the time, had been so badly exposed in that series. I could be remembering some of those details wrong, but I definitely know Pete Cosma factored into it. It's an interesting question because you have to figure out what timeframe you're talking about in one game, in one series, or in a season. Yeah, I'd say a season.

I mean, in any one game, of course, your weak link can kill you, right? I feel like what makes something strong linkable or weak linkable, two factors. If you can dramatically increase usage around your strongest link, as you do in basketball, then that kind of helps it become a strong link sport. And for baseball, there just aren't that many players on the court or the floor or the field or whatever at one time, which is also the case with basketball. I mean, that is technically the case with basketball, but I'm not going, I have not thought that through enough to concede that that is a consistent factor across different types of gameplay, but it might be, but you can dramatically increase the usage of your strongest link.

And you can't do that in baseball unless it's pitcher. And then only in certain circumstances. But certainly within one game, then you don't have to, like if you have the best pitcher in baseball and four terrible pitchers in the rotation for one game you don't have to use those four terrible pitchers at all and so for a day it's definitely i would say a strong link sport but centered only around one one position on the field pitcher pitcher is sort of like the ultimate high usage yes that and maybe quarterback but generally speaking you cannot like you you can't get Trout any more at bats

than you can get, you know, your worst hitter, except some games you can get him one more and that's it. And you can't leverage them. You can't rearrange his at bats so that he's there in the biggest moment. It is totally up to chance whether he's there in the biggest moment. And so that makes it,

so it's hard to make it a strong link sport. But what makes something a weak link sport, I believe, is that you can, the other team can target that player. And you can't target a baseball player either. There's nothing you can do. You could intentionally walk batters in front of him. But usually that's at most a very small benefit at most and often it's not really an option at all you can't hit the ball at the worst defender consistently you can't everybody hit it to to castellanos now like you can't do that you can if you if they have a weak bullpen you can try to get into the bullpen and uh through like sort of pitch pitcher attrition over the course of a series. But that's kind of hard to do.

And of of suspect value in the larger scheme of things. horrible third baseman but that would presuppose that for some reason the other team's weak link is third base defense which is not like a universal thing that like every game you can like look up and see whether they have the world's worst third base defender and they're just going to stick with that so are there other ways you can target i i mean there's a little bit of maybe matchups with relievers but that's hard to do much about so and it's baseball has you know fairly liberal substitution rules fairly deep rosters so that you can change your lineup every day depending on the situation. So it's very hard to repeatedly exploit another team's weakness. So I guess that that rules out the two other alternatives. And so you just have to say it's a medium link. Yeah, I think that's right. Because in basketball, what I was saying is,

I mean, just because you have fewer players, they have a proportionately greater impact on the game and on the season. So in basketball, you can have, say, two superstars and you can have a really good team and you can just build around those guys with decent players or not even that great players. And they'll certainly get you to the playoffs and maybe even make you a strong contender. Whereas in baseball, there are just a lot more players i mean there's 25 players at any one time there are many more players who are used over the course of a season so having two stars is a nice start but even the angels who have the best star and then have also surrounded that star with you know angleton simmons and justin upton and shohei otani and some other

really good players they've been a 500-ish team or less than 500 if you don't count Trout, and Trout alone is not enough to elevate them. So in that sense, I don't think it's a strong link sport in that there are just too many players, and it's sort of what you were saying about how you can't really emphasize any one player. Even a starting pitcher is going to pitch in what 20 of your games over the course of a season maybe so that's just not enough to make a bad team into a good team or something like that so i do yeah yeah i wonder if it's the defense holds the ball thing is a factor

too you can only score by reacting like so in basketball for this is part of why i'm like uh i'm not quite ready to concede the size of the roster is the determinant factor because let's say basketball instead of deciding that you scored points by making baskets say you scored points by blocking shots like that's how you got a point you blocked a shot well you just wouldn't you would avoid the other team's best player and so even though the other team's best player is still one fifth of the people, you could avoid him very easily. But because, you know, basketball is primarily a sport where you score when you're the offense, you can make sure that the best player has the ball instead of can be avoided. And so, and you could say that football is probably a strong link sport and football has more players on the field than a baseball team does and more players on the roster than a baseball team does. But if you have a great quarterback that can make you a really good team

almost on its own. So basketball is also a little bit of a, of a weak link sport too. Now that there's so much switching, so much, you know, like you're doing so many switches that you're trying to get DeMarcus Cousins to guard your shooting guard and take advantage of that. And so then DeMarcus Cousins becomes your weak link and he has to be taken off the court.

Or if you're a 45% foul shooter, you become a weak link and they have to take you off the floor no matter how, you know, maybe no matter how good you are at everything else. And so in a way, basketball is kind of both at the same time. And maybe that's because like now maybe I'm now fully on board with the smaller the roster, the active players on the field, maybe the more it goes both ways. Yeah. Okay. Tough question. But I do think baseball is in the middle somewhere. Players on the field Maybe the more it goes both ways Yeah okay tough question But I do think baseball is in the middle Somewhere there's not a real Clear cut answer that it's one or the other

Alright question From Josh In Dubuque Iowa he says For some period of time now there has been an Increasing emphasis at the team level In producing home runs this is Consistent through all levels of most organizations to include player development, encouraging and developing home run friendly launch angles, roster construction in paying

and procuring such players, and even at the franchise level when one team or another is constantly moving fences in to encourage more home runs. I feel that we are at a breaking point. Wouldn't it behoove a team to zig where everyone else has zagged, build or remodel a home park to have a massive outfield, 450-plus feet in center, close to 400 feet down the line, large enough to take away a majority of current home runs and turn them into either based hits or outs,

construct a team of line drive hitters, which theoretically should be cheaper, sign an outfield full of the fastest players and best defenders you can get which again should be relatively inexpensive and hold far greater value to you than other teams am i crazy or is this the kind of drastically different team identity that fans could really get behind i want to say one other thing which i now think that maybe baseball is in some ways a strong links plural sport because the nice thing about most runs, less so now, but most runs are scored by a combination of acts and you can cluster your good hitters together and you can cluster your bad hitters together. So in a way, your weakest link is made significantly less weak because he bats eighth when there's fewer runners

on base than if he batted third when there were a lot of runs on runners on base and then vice versa you can put your best player in a situation where he's going to have a lot more base runners and so it might be that we would say that baseball is more of a strong link sport but in like maybe three or four hitters in tandem uh-huh the strong links in tandem all right we used to i mean i feel like this has been uh it's interesting this question comes up in the context of the uh lively ball because this has been probably proposed forever that this has always been uh an idea that we've kicked around that people have kicked around the idea of of manipulating your ballpark in a way that it is extreme and that you alone of all the teams in your league are building a roster to that extremity and so nobody else can build their roster for the three to nine games a

year that they're going to play in your park but you can and you can really take advantage of that fact and it is somewhat i think i am am going to probably, I'm remembering something that is from eight or nine years ago. But I remember writing a piece at the Orange County Register, probably a small piece, probably a piece I spent 45 minutes on. Probably not super well researched, but I remember looking at home field advantage over the previous like 10 years and trying to find out what factors caused some franchises to have higher home field advantages than others. And what was notable was that the Padres, who at the time played in Petco, were quite low, that they did not have a distinct home field advantage. And I think, if I remember right, I think that generally speaking,

the more extreme parks on either side tended to not really have the more extreme home field advantages. Pretty gutsy of me to say that, not remembering anything at all about what I wrote or what I found, but I think I remember that. So I'll just put that marker down.

But couldn't, Ben, isn't it the opposite? Isn't what we're seeing right now, the, the juiced ball, the lively ball is, seems to be benefiting marginal power guys more than power guys. And so it seems like what you actually would want to do is maybe bring your fences in like three feet to take a little bit more advantage of that. And then all of your scooters, Jeanette can hit their home runs because the ball is now just that much livelier and maybe now the fence is three feet closer. Yeah. That doesn't really give you a distinct identity though. You're just kind of the team that's going all in on this trend that everyone is seeing. i just i i guess what

i'm just saying is that instead of paying for power guys you you don't have to pay for power guys quite as much anymore because they just happen and if you think that that it might be the case that they can just happen even more so uh if you give your fences a little nudge in yeah so first of all i think that you could have a fan friendly identity if you were distinct if you give your fences a little nudge in. Yeah. So first of all, I think that you could have a fan-friendly identity if you were distinct, if you were like the 2014-2015 Royals who were very contact heavy, but didn't walk, didn't hit home runs. They stood out from everyone else and they were just a really fun team. They were fast and they had good defense and they made a lot of contact. So if you did that, I think that fans would enjoy that.

That'd be a fun way to play. It would be fan unfriendly, I think, to have just massive fields and ballparks and to have center field be 450 feet away. I mean, you'd have to have your seats farther away from the action too. And so at least for fans in person, I think that would be a disadvantage. And so at least for fans in person, I think that would be a disadvantage. And could you get players who were currently undervalued by the market? I mean, sure, I guess if you had like, you know, coarse field, but not at altitude and even bigger so that the ball didn't really carry, but you just had giant outfields and high babips and you could just plunk a lot of singles in in front of guys then i guess you could acquire a team of just not powerful guys who made a lot of contact

and were sort of speedy and those guys would be kind of undervalued by the market just because in general you want hitters who have power and so maybe you could collect some of those guys. It's just, I don't know, it's a problem because you'd have to develop them yourselves. There aren't even that many players who were taught to play like that anymore. So maybe you'd be at a disadvantage because you can't really go get guys like that. Or maybe every team has someone like that just in AAA who's not making the majors. But I just, I don't know. You'd need such an extreme environment.

A lot of players wouldn't want to play for this team, which would be a big disadvantage too, because guys would want to have the high numbers. They'd want to hit home runs. It seems like hitters do not like extreme pitcher-friendly parks. They're always complaining when they hit a ball that would have been out somewhere else. And then lobby the team, they complain enough that often they get the fences moved in so that the hitters won't whine about it. So I think on the whole, to go super extreme like that probably would hurt you more than it would help you. Do you think that the fundamental question here is, do certain players really benefit more from certain stadium layouts?

Are there players whose value is significantly higher in one park than another? I mean, and I'm not saying, given that we have a fairly narrow range of ballpark layouts right now, I'm not saying that we need to have like a three-war difference, but a real tangible difference. Like I remember that Billy Hamilton, for instance, when he left Cincinnati, for Kansas City, one of the things that seemed really appealing to that is that Billy Hamilton is obviously extremely fast. That is his signature skill.

He is a center fielder. He can chase down a lot of baseballs. Cincinnati had, I think the smallest or maybe the second smallest outfield in baseball by square footage. Kansas City has one of the larger ones. And so that's an example of how it might work, how it like it's a plausible hypothesis that Billy Hamilton is more valuable in Kansas City than he's in Cincinnati. I have just named one of the most extreme baseball players stylistically of our lifetime. And Billy Hamilton is still nonetheless not very worthwhile this year. And so if that's the best example I gave, I could come up with, maybe you will say, no, Sam, the value that one player can produce in another ballpark is very small. But if you say, yeah, I think so. I think there's players who have good opposite field power,

and so they're perfectly suited for Yankee Stadium. Or I think there's pitchers who are great ground ball or fly ball pitchers or who are strikeout pitchers and are therefore more immune to ballparks that are hitter-friendly, things like that, and that it's significant, then you would say, well, why not exaggerate those ballpark differences? Why not collect players of that type? So first you have to demonstrate that that premise holds. And if your thinking is, to be honest, baseball players are kind of similar. It's hard to really exploit a strength or weakness. Most,

you know, for the most part, you're, you know, like if you actually, I don't know. Anyway, so that's step one. And then step two is, are there enough actual players available of those types? How are they available enough? Is the marginal benefit of getting those players good enough that you're willing to give up the flexibility that comes with going into the free agent market or the trade market with all players available to you? And does the backlash potential, is it good enough to not worry about the backlash potential of like, will it look weird? Will players hate it? Could it backfire? And so on. Yes, right. I think there are some guys who benefit disproportionately from certain parks. I don't know if it's enough to make them into stars if they weren't already, but yeah, there are

hitters whose strokes sort of favor a certain alignment or like isn't Christian Jelic in Miller Park. I mean, I know he has these extreme home road splits that probably aren't representative of the actual talent there, but I think his swing is somewhat suited to that park, and he's even adjusted it to take advantage of that park, he said. And then you have guys on the other end of the spectrum, like Brandon Belt, who really seem to be hurt by their home parks. So yeah, I think that exists in principle. I'm on board with that.

And if you had even more extreme parks, then in theory I suppose you would have more players who benefited from that park than in the current system where parks are different but they're all within some fairly narrow range for the most part these days yeah but it seems like then you you you get stopped on the player availability issue yeah i think so i think that is probably a constraint there may not be as many guys out there like free talent guys who are bad everywhere else but are secretly really good in this one place i think yeah this would make a lot more sense to a team like the stompers than yes it would to a team like the Stompers than it would to a team like the Marlins even,

where you are kind of limited to, I mean, they have to be among the 2,000 best players in the world. Like the pool of players whose particular skill sets you could draw the most value out of just is not going to go beyond that. So, you know, you're looking at it as it is now. You think, well, who can we go sign to play third base and you have six options. And if, if you look out there and you say draftiversary, what team would you choose to have drafted him if you could go back and change time and your goal is to maximize fun and general coolness?

Maybe this is unfair, but it feels like the Angels have been below average in this regard. We all know they've wasted his talent in regard to playoff success, but I also feel like they've wasted his talent in regard to entertainment value. I think my choice is the Blue Jays because the Blue Jays being fantastic would be really cool. Trout could have played with Bautista and Encarnacion, and because Mike Trout, Canadian

hero, just feels right. So if we could go back and ordain that Trout is drafted by a certain team or not to maximize the good for baseball. Which team would that have been? You know, I have lately been thinking about what an incredibly lucky thing it was for me, life-altering thing it was for me that he played in Anaheim, because I would not be at ESPN if he had not been drafted by the Angels. Yeah, because of your cover story. Because I, two cover stories that I wrote about him.

The first one, which was entirely dependent on me being a few miles away from him. So, yeah. So I guess I'd pick the Angels. What would be a fun, I don't know. How do you answer this? What are we talking about? Are we talking about most divisions won? Are we talking about most divisions flipped? Are we talking about most visible? Are we talking about how big a star he is? Are we talking about which team he would add the most color to? Which team would add the most color to him? color to which team would add the most color to him we're talking about the team that would create i mean the rockies i don't know would it be more or less fun if he were were a rocky and he had i

mean he if he were well i'm gonna i'll just do it i'm gonna look up mike trout i'm gonna look up his uh rockies what do you call that not neutralized the opposite of neutralized translated stats yeah so i've looked at the adjusted batting stats for mike trout using baseball references a little adjuster tool in their advanced stats on player pages and so i've chosen to set mike trout's career to 2016 coors field which is not 2019 coors field would be even crazier as, because of the lively ball and also because of the impending stat blast. But for right now, we're just talking about 2016 Colorado Coors Field. Mike Trout, to do this, to make any of these numbers make any sense at all.

All right. Mike Trout has 262 home runs currently. If he had been playing in Colorado this whole time, baseball references toy tool estimates an extra 50 home runs. He would have, let's see, he'd have 310 home runs through midway through his age 27 season, which means to get to 763, he would only need to hit 453 more, which over the course of, let's say, 13 years is still 35 a year. He wouldn't be a lock, but he'd be probably, I would say, on a pretty good track. I think he would, my guess, I am not doing this play index, but my guess is that he would be the all-time home run leader through age 27. He would have a, does it do this? Let's see. He has a 995 career OPS right now. If he had been in Colorado the whole time, this says he would have a career OPS of 1105.

He would be a career 343 hitter, which would put him, I don't know, in the top. It would put him ahead of Tony Gwynn. He would have had seasons of 365, 366, 351. He would have had no season with an OPS under 1,072. As it is, he has only had one season ahead of 1,072. He would have had runs scored totals, He would have had runs scored totals, including years of 139, 148, 157, 159, and 170. And that was as a 20-year-old.

RBI total as high as 154. He would have had a 50 home run season. He would have had a 59 stolen base season. So I guess, in a sense, he would also have 284 doubles at this point as it is, he has 242. And so he might be on some sort of historic pace for doubles as well. He would be halfway to 3000 hits. He is actually at 1269 in real life. So I would say that I've raised, I started this by saying, would that be more or less fun? I think, so I was going to say that I think a better hitter's park would be beneficial to the Mike Trout story just because, you know, Angel Stadium has not favored him. And I think his superficial stats, his traditional stats are still very impressive, obviously,

but I think he looks a little more impressive when you park adjust. I would not go all the way to Coors Field though, because that's the one place where you then have to almost adjust in the other direction. People don't trust the stats. They say he's a product of Coors Field. We have to discount him maybe even more than you should. So I wouldn't want to put him in Coors Field because I wouldn't want to risk delegitimizing anything he's done or anyone to look at it and say he's a product of Coors Field. But I would put him in, say, a neutral park or maybe a slight hitter's park just to give

a little boost to the numbers just so that his numbers match his advanced stats and there's no adjustment required there to understand how good he's been. As it is now, he has a career home line that is exactly the same as his career away line. That is not normal. Normally, of course, you have a home field advantage. And so if he played in a neutral park, he would have better stats. So I've switched to 2019 course field. And Ben, here we have runs scored total as high as 188. We have an RBI total as high as 171 in a season we have a

53 homer season we have a 381 batting average season a 382 batting average season we have three years in a row over 1200 ops we have a career ops of 1152 and a career batting average actually i'll just give you the whole slash line 35 359, 477, 675. You want to give me a different park? Give me a park that you would prefer that, you know, is lively enough that he doesn't get discredited by his park, but that he does get nice, fun numbers. Well, I go Wrigley, right?

What about Wrigley? Okay, sure. All right. Because nobody ever complains about wrigley stats nobody's ever like javi baez he's just a product of the wind all right here we have 282 career home runs instead of 262 so uh that would i think mike trout is a sleeper contender to set the all time home run record. And so I'm keeping I'm counting home runs. So 20 extra home runs, an extra 16 points of batting average, an OPS instead of a career OPS of 995, it'd be 1041.

And he would have had a couple of kind of slightly more instead of having one season with 40 home runs. I guess he had 41 that year he would have 340 home run seasons um and so um in all those little ways he would have had a little bit more black ink a little bit more eye-catching round numbers a little bit better career pace um and uh probably my guess is mvp awards in those years because instead of having Anaheim numbers, he'd have Wrigley numbers. Exactly. Yes. So that is what I would do, I think, to further the Mike Trout narrative.

And then as far as which team to put him in, which market to put him in, I mean, I guess you could say that you just add him to the team that's had the most playoff appearances or would have with Mike Trout just because I think that being a playoff staple and being back there every year in those nationally broadcast games, I think that's how you become the Jeter type star is you're just there every year. You have the opportunity to have these big indelible playoff moments. And so I want that for him. And I don't know which the best team, I mean, I don't want to just say, put him on the Yankees, put him on the Red Sox, you know, have a dynasty because they have Mike Trout now. But maybe there's some team that over the course of his career has missed the playoffs by the least amount the most times. You know, like if we just calculated, OK, how many times would this team have made the playoffs if they had Trout instead of an average player or something? Then there's probably one team. of an average player or something, then there's probably one team, I don't know off the top of my head, which it would be, that in theory would have made the playoffs more often because they had Trout. Or you could even find the team with like the worst center fielders over that period who would have benefited the most from Trout. Maybe it's like, you know, what if you put him on the Nationals, let's say, and he gets to play with some other stars stars maybe he and Bryce Harper on the same team you have the Nationals maybe winning a playoff series at some point and they're sort of depressing seasons where they haven't made the playoffs and it's been a disappointment maybe they don't have

them they're in a pretty prominent city it's a pretty prominent team you know like maybe the Nationals and Nationals park is a a pretty neutral park and so that would fit in with what we were saying so off the top of my head nationals would be a good choice something like that i don't want to go full yankees red sox put him on the best team but put him on a good team in a neutral to decent hitters park that with him would have been a regular in the playoffs and would have had some unforgettable moments and i think that would have been the best case scenario for baseball i wanted to say the a's but then he would have been i mean he is not snark he would

have probably been traded in year four or so and then he'd be right now he'd be on some other team and to be honest you know there's something nice about having only seen him in one uniform something about that it makes his career a little bit more aesthetically pleasing to me and a little bit uh cleaner narrative and so so i'm ruling them out i don't have a pick 2000 rockies park 2000 course field as the standard so he would have seasons of 394 and 397. He would have a career batting average of 372. He would have a year where he scored 206 runs, and he would have a year where he drove in 187.

These are all different years, by the way. So who else? Like the Pirates, you know, they may have traded him too, so maybe that falls under the same category as the A's. Isn't he into the Mariners, though? Oh, yeah. Well, I was thinking the Pirates' resurgence kind of coincided with Trout's arrival,

and they had that string of getting eliminated in wildcard games, so maybe Mike Trout gets to propel them into a division title and some playoff appearances, and he plays in PNC Park, and that would be nice. But, yeah, maybe the Mariners just to end the suffering of that team because they would have made the playoffs probably a couple more times or twice. Maybe they got close enough that you could put them with Trout into the

playoffs at least. Yeah. Well, that plus I feel like historically the Mariners have done maybe a better job of making their franchise players fun and now that franchise players get a lot of credit for that too um you know that griffey and randy johnson and felix are all not just historically great players but historically like fun players in their own ways but i sort of feel like uh we all when when seattle has a superstar we all generally love them yeah they tend to be very fun superstars not a great park for right-handed hitters better than it used to be but still not great we have a we have a time zone conflict here too because for you you're not going to want him playing in seattle any more than you would want him playing in la

for me that's uh west coast west coast stars are much better because that's kind of an emptier part of it. A lot of times you only have one or two games at night in the waning hours of night. And it's just a bummer when it's Padres, Diamondbacks, and neither team is really in it. And you don't really have a reason to watch either starting pitcher. And you're like, but this is what i got and a player like trout can single-handedly make a game a good game a turn it on game yeah but you do want him on the east coast if you want the most people watching him so i i don't i know you don't but but yeah i think i don't have a better answer than the nationals or what about the mets what about mike trout on the mets uh i don't have a better answer than the Nationals. What about the Mets? What about Mike Trout on the Mets?

I don't know. I thought about the Mets, and I don't know. Not a good hitter's park is the problem. But other than that, adding Mike Trout, I mean, on the one hand, maybe you don't want to subject Mike Trout to the mess that the Mets organization has been over this period. On the other hand, if you injected Mike Trout into that organization, then maybe it's not such a mess or doesn't seem like such a mess.

Yeah. And it's New York. Yeah. Not in love with that one. Okay. All right. I'm sticking with Nationals, I think, but there are some other good teams with good cases. I think that he'd be a nice fit for the Cubs too, especially because he would have gotten there before they won the World Series. That's true. Yes, he would have helped them do it. Yeah. Yeah, okay.

That's not a bad choice either. All right. Want to do your stat blast? Yeah. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Daystablast. Mindsat Blast, I did it, and then I thought,

ah, I'm going to write about this. And so then I wrote about it, and it's already been published. So I don't think you've read it, though. It just got published. So Charlie Blackmon homered yesterday against Clayton Kershaw. Charlie Blackmon's season splits now. Home road splits. Home, he is hitting, I'll start with road. They're extreme, but it's more fun to say the home one. Away, 236, 272, 382. Home, 461, 510, 984. 984 being the slugging percentage, not the OPS. He has an OPS of 1495. And incredibly, Ben, this is

incredible. Like I said, he homered yesterday at home. And while he did that, he homered yesterday at home. And his T-OPS, which is his split at home for that, his OPS for that split compared to his OPS overall, actually dropped. It dropped from 190 to 187. But the stat blast was I was going to look and see, well, where does Charlie Blackman rank in TOPS plus home splits historically? And if you set the minimum at 100 plate appearances for the home split, it is number two all time. He has the second most extreme home road splits in history.

The most extreme, this isn't going to go that far. We're going to talk about Charlie Blackmon in a minute, but the most extreme ever is a guy named 151, 156 for a 306 OPS. At home, he hit 341, 455, 512 for a 967 home OPS. And Eddie Miller, I wondered, I just glanced to see whether they figured out, like if there was a, you know, a lot of the questions that we get for this show are, Like if there was a, you know, a lot of the questions that we get for this show are, you know, if a player, you know, if a player hit, you know, every 2-1 pitch for a triple, how long would it be before teams would start him 3-0 so that they would never have a 2-1 count against him kind of a thing? How long until people noticed and believed it was real? And I look to see whether the St. Louis Cardinals believed this was real and they did not. He did not. Eddie Miller just kept losing playing time throughout the season, home and away. They did not start

stacking his bats at home and benching him on the road. He just kind of played a couple days every homestand and a couple days every roadstand. And then at the end of the year, they said, congratulations, you're retired. And that was the last we ever heard of eddie miller eddie miller i guess uh the most interesting thing about his his career besides having the highest tops plus in history uh for a home road split is that he one time in the off season he went to some speaking banquet and brutally trashed his own team. So then his team got really mad at him. And so then he spoke with his team and they made up. And then he went back to the same club and again trashed his team.

And then they let him go. He basically got fired from that team. And then he ended up with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1950. Had a crazy home road split. And then that was the last he ever played. All right. So Charlie Blackman though, while I was looking into Charlie Blackman's splits, I wondered what it was that was causing it. And so first I looked at all of his home road splits and, you know, generally speaking, there's a lot of reasons why it's a lot easier to hit at Coors Field. And there's an additional reason in addition to those, why a player might have extreme Coors Field. And there's an additional reason in addition to those why a

player might have extreme home run splits. And so those reasons are that, you know, it's the ball carries more. So you're more likely to hit a home run. Another reason is that the park is bigger to account for that. So if you put the ball in play, you're more likely to have it land somewhere and to maybe turn it into a double or a triple. Another reason is that pitches don't move as much. And so you are more likely to get a sort of a flat breaking ball or maybe a flat fastball too. I don't know about that last one. And another reason is that it's more tiring. It's more fatiguing to pitch at altitude. And so particularly maybe if you're a road pitcher who's not adjusted to it yet, they might be a little bit more fatigued throughout the game.

And really another one might be that because there's so much offense, you're probably more likely to get into the bullpen and to force the other team's bullpen to throw more innings than they have qualified relievers for over the course of a series. And then a sixth reason, that fifth one I'm kind of on the fence about. So let's just say that was four. And then the reason that your splits might be more extreme is that course field hitters also tend to have that hangover effect where they seem to do worse on the road than you would expect,

not just better at home than you would expect. All right, so I wondered, well, what about Charlie Blackman? And every single thing is ridiculous. The difference between him at home and on the road is ridiculous. So it is not just that the ball is carrying farther or that it is landing safely in these big outfield. But he's hitting the ball five miles an hour harder at home than he is on the road. He is chasing far fewer pitches out of the strike zone at home than he is on the road he is chasing far fewer pitches out of the strike zone at home than he is on the road he is making contact much more at home than he is on the road his

strike rate against him is much higher on the road than it is at home on breaking balls he is slugging almost 600 points higher on the road than at home but on fastballs he is slugging almost 600 points higher on the road than at home but on fastballs he is slugging almost 900 points higher at home on the road his expected wobah is 150 points higher at home than on the road his actual wobah is 320 points higher at home than on the road he is striking out 50% more at on the road than at home he is walking almost four times as often at home as he is on the road and so this is everything this is all the things all the ways and so if you just had Charlie Blackmon as your guide you would say Coors Field the effect is

strong all over the place he is better while I was looking at this though I noticed something which is I don't know if you were aware of this maybe you were maybe you've already written about it but this was the the gist of the article that I wrote and that has just published this morning Coors Field I don't know if you knew this but but it is back, baby. It is all the way back from pre-humidor days. So the humidor came into effect in 2002 and for about, offense instantly dipped there and then it kept dipping. And in the late 2000s, it kind of reached its low point. It had a park factor of just 107, which is pretty low. It was in the low 120s before the humidor. And even at its peak, I think 125 at baseball reverence.

And so since then, though, it has been sort of steadily climbing. And right now, Coors Field is arguably as extreme as it has ever been. Also, arguably, maybe not quite as extreme as it has ever been. Also, arguably maybe not quite as extreme as it was in the late 90s. Depends on how you want to do this. But the Rockies' TOPS plus as a team for hitters is the second highest it has ever been. And their TOPS plus for pitchers is the third highest that it's ever been. And I have an article of fun facts about Colorado splits this year, of which you can go read.

Some of them are hilariously small sampled and also hilarious. And some of them are a little bit more kind of convincingly not small sample, but there's a whole bunch of them. But what's interesting about that is that unlike the Charlie Blackmun phenomenon that I described, this is almost entirely concentrated on what happens after the ball has been put in play. So the strikeout

numbers are not significantly different. They're not nothing, but they're kind of comparable home and away. And the walk rates are comparable home and away and exit velocities largely speaking are the same home and away and what is different is what happens when the ball is put in play babbitts are crazy power is crazy you really get the sense that something about the way that the ball is carrying in 2019 is, I don't want to say definitively, is exacerbated by Coors Field, but has played very lively this year, extremely lively. And to give just one final point on that, if you look at Colorado's, so I'm going to, here's one of the fun facts, okay? Colorado's pitchers are fourth in the majors in road ERA this year, second in the National League. So you would think that's a pretty good pitching staff.

Their home ERA is the second worst in baseball history. And their ex-fips, though, are basically the same. Their ex-fips are within like a tenth of a run of each other. Interesting. Interesting, right? Yeah. So I'm putting that out there. Probably, I don't know, probably another article later in the summer trying to figure out why, or someone else can do that article first, or maybe it'll

regress first, but that's your stat blast. All right. Sounds like they need to turn up the humidor or something. Do you turn it up? Is that what you do with it? This one goes to 11. Is that what you do when this one goes to 11? It's just a ball in a pond. You fish it out like you bob for apples. So I have a step last two that was inspired by a question from listening. Wait, does a humidor dry it out or does a humidor moisten it? It moistens it, right? Yeah, it moistens it because it gets dried out from the high air.

So yeah, Bobbin for apples works. All right. Okay. So Eric says, I was just browsing the career war leaderboard on baseball reference and I noticed that Mike Trout is about to pass Miguel Cabrera for second among active players. Once Albert Pujols retires, it seems possible or likely that Trout will be tops among active players until he retires. That would be hopefully a long reign. And I was intrigued by this question. I got some help from Dan Hirsch of Baseball Reference to parse this out for me.

So we don't know day-by-day war for all baseball history, so you can't say this guy became the active war leader on July 2, 1937 or something. But we can look at the active war leaders at the end of each season. And so that's what Dan sent me, the active war leader at the end of every season, going back to the beginning of Major League Baseball. So back to 1871 before the NL, even when George Zetline had a really nice season, and he became the active war leader for a single year. So there have been, in all of baseball history, 33 active war leaders.

Pujols is the 33rd. That is going back to 1871. If we go back to, say, when Cy Young became the active war leader in 1902, there have been 26 of these guys. So it's a fairly exclusive group, as you would expect. fairly exclusive group as you would expect and mike trout has to do this for quite a few years if he wants to become the all-time longest reigning active war leader so we have a three-way tie at the top of this leaderboard cy young walter johnson and willie mays each of them was the active war leader for 10 years a a 10-year stretch. So that's how long Trout would have to do it to tie the record after Pujols retires,

or I guess after he overtakes Pujols, although I doubt he'll do that before Pujols retires. So as Dan says, if Pujols retires after 2021, assuming Trout hasn't passed it by then by then trout would have to play until his age 39 season to tie the record so he'd have to play until his age 40 season to break the record so that's a tall order but it is certainly that tall in order to play just to play that long yeah it's it's not out of the question at all. I mean, it's just a request, really. I mean, there is no way that Mike Trout will be unable to be on a major league roster when he is 40 years old. Now, you never know. I don't think you can say he's going to be. I don't think you can say he's going to hit 34 homers a year like my home run record pace thing.

But he will by 88 to 90 percent be able to be on a major league roster when he is 40 years old one would think yes i mean so you're saying that's a tall order premature premature aging could happen i mean he could be he could be dale murphy although even dale murphy who's like the the epitome of like not lasting very long your peak, he played until he was 37. He wasn't good, but he played. Albert Pujols turns 40 in six months. Right, and he hasn't been good for a while. Yes, exactly.

Although he did have a contract that maybe favored him playing for a while. Trouts runs out at like 38 or 39. Right, so he'd have to sign another. This current deal, would it take him through his 39 season 38 through his 38 it looks like to me so he would have to sign another contract after this one to do it but but yes i think the odds are in favor of him doing this and that would be a cool record i think so so cy young walter johnson willie mays they each did it for 10 years. Barry Bonds did it for eight years.

And then there were a bunch of guys at seven, Ricky Henderson, A-Rod, Babe Ruth, Al Spalding, Stan Musial, Ted Williams. They did it for seven. And then the only others who did it for more than five were Mel Ott, Tim Keefe, and Hannes Wagner. Trout will probably not pass Pujols before he retires, but it's really right on. I don't even know if I want to say that. He is 30.3 away right now. And yeah, he won't. Two and a half years, five, 11, 11 doesn't get him there.

All right. Probably not, unless Pujols loses a couple of war in that time, which he might, but probably still doesn't get him there all right probably not unless unless Pujols loses a couple war in that time which he might but yeah but probably a lot so I'm sorry did you say how long has has Pujols been the leader the active leader Pujols has been the active leader for three years now 2017 because A-Rod retired after 2016 right so that was when was when. Wow. All right. Yep. Okay. All right.

Good question. I like that one. Thanks to Dan for his help as always. All right. This is a question from Chris Long, who is the former Padres head stat person, has consulted for a bunch of other teams, consulted for us with the Stompers. He says,

let's talk knuckleballs. To this day, I refuse to believe a smart team couldn't manufacture knuckleompers. He says, let's talk knuckleballs. To this day, I refuse to believe a smart team couldn't manufacture knuckleballers. And this came up then on Twitter, and there was a thread, he added Travis Sochik as well. And Travis said, this has been tried in the past, but just fire up your Edgertronic camera and Rapsodo today, and you have a better chance than ever to build a knuckleballer. Yeah. Not only tried in the past, according to Travis, but discussed in the past on this podcast.

We talked about what would happen if a team were to crack the knuckleball code and we think it's possible and shouldn't it be easier? And we had a discussion about how it seems like it shouldn't be that hard. And so I have a question. I guess I am interested in your question since you know, edutronic in this question, you know, edutronic cameras quite well now, and it seems like it should be pretty easy to teach people. So, all right. We think of athletic ability primarily as being the ability to do something stronger and faster than most people can do it. But, you know, a huge skill in athletic ability is also the ability to repeat an action. in athletics, in traditional athletics, but also sometimes expressed in what we might consider non-traditional athletics or non-athletics at all, like calligraphy or esports or ballet or watchmaking, watch fixing, watch design, all sorts of things where this very precise ability to repeat one's motions very exactly is actually quite difficult,

that it is not necessarily a learned skill purely, but that it is something that some people are simply better at. And so in theory, it seems very easy to teach people knuckleballs because I don't want to say it seems easy to teach. It has not traditionally been easy to teach them knuckleballs, but it seems like almost everybody in the world has the physical ability to throw a knuckleball with the force required to throw a knuckleball. But now I wonder whether this is actually something that even with the edutronic cameras, which should be able to teach this with just incredible efficiency compared to just like no do it better coaching.

I wonder if it's still just something that only some people can do. Like only some people can juggle five balls. Only some people can put stacks of quarters on their elbow and then catch them like that episode of Happy Days. It might just be hard. And so given what you know about edutronic, do you think that this is a threat? And if it is a threat, I'm just going to say the second part of this conversation is me saying, how are they going to outlaw the knuckleball? Because I do not think that the sport would allow a knuckleball sport to develop. would allow a knuckleball sport to develop?

Well, I don't think really that a certain number of people can juggle five balls or whatever your examples were. I mean, there are some people who can't do that, but I think a much larger number of people could do that if they decided that they wanted to devote their lives to being able to do that. I think that's just a product of practice, And most people have the raw skill to do it if you practiced in an efficient way and you put the time in, which most people don't want to do because it would be hard. And the incentive to be able to juggle five balls or whatever is not that high in most cases. What about sleight of hand magic tricks? Yeah, I think that's probably the

same. You think everybody can do those, huh? I think you could do them. Yep. So I think, yeah, I think my, my working on this book made me believe that practice is more powerful than I had thought. And that most things can be a product of the right type of practice. So what about pickup sticks? Knuckleballs, in theory, they should fall into that category, I would think, because, I mean, you can't teach everyone Trevor Bauer's slider or whatever because, or at least you can't unless they have devoted their lives to pitching. And even then, there are certain people who just can't do that because you just don't have the arm speed or arm strength. And that's a big project. But with a knuckleball, you don't necessarily need to build up extraordinary arm strength and arm speed. You just need to figure out how to hold the ball a certain way and repeat that motion over and over and over again. And in theory, that should be something that is able to be enhanced quite well through practice. You know, it's like shooting free throws, I guess, which some people who are not great athletes can do and are maybe the best in the world at. It's probably harder than that, I think, at least judging by how few people have done it at a high level. But I think you could do it. And the problem with knuckleballs is that it's been sort of this mystical thing where it's like, how exactly do you hold it? And is this guy holding it in a different way? And so it's this tradition passed

down from knuckleballer to knuckleballer, but you can't really see exactly what each guy is doing, or at least you couldn't in the past. And in theory now, you should be able to see exactly how everyone is holding the ball. And you can see with these cameras, just in unprecedented detail, how the ball is coming out of their hands, how it's being held by their fingers. And so you should be able to replicate that. And you would be able to tell, is it spinning or not spinning, I guess, is what you want. You can tell that, although maybe you could tell that before, just kind of from eyeballing to see whether it spins or it doesn't so i do think it should be more possible now than it used to be and there should be a bigger group of potential knuckleballers out there than there's a group of potential really devastating slider

throwers the hang up i think in this plan in the past has been A, that it's hard. B, that you need the right group of guys who just whatever, they've washed out of regular pitching or they never wanted to be regular pitchers but they just decided to be knuckleballers from the start. Chris said in that Twitter thread it'd be crazy cheap, fail a hundred

times for every success and the math could still work. You would need like a knuckleball academy because i you don't want a bunch of these guys in your regular minor league games i don't think because then you have to worry about catchers having catchers who can catch it and it's sort of disruptive but in theory i think it should be more feasible more replicable now because we know that pitching is physics and you can figure out what the physics are and then you can copy them more easily than you could in the past so sure i i buy the premise all right now

what percentage of innings could be thrown by knuckleballers before the knuckleball would be outlawed or would it never be outlawed well there's some question i guess about whether the knuckleball is as effective as it is because guys never see it I don't know whether that's true or whether it really is just that the movement is unpredictable and the pitcher doesn't know which way it's going and the hitters doesn't know and so the more knuckleballs you see

doesn't make you better against knuckleballs because it remains just random which way it moves so I'm not sure I would think that there's some I mean, like knuckleballers have good effective fastballs, even though they throw like 82 mile per hour fastballs. If you look at like the pitch quality leaderboards at Fangraphs, you'll see like Tim Wakefield at the top of like fastball effectiveness, even though his fastball was terrible, but he was interspersing

it with knuckleball. So that made them good. So if you had a whole bunch of knuckleballers and you're facing them all at once, maybe it doesn't even – maybe it's a self-limiting thing where you just – knuckleballs are so effective because you're very rarely seeing them. I don't know. But in terms of like would the sport outlaw them when you reached a certain number of innings i i think it it probably i'm not saying when i'm not saying a team could only throw 100 innings of knuckleball or 500 i'm saying if if every team had seven knuckleballers my sense is it your sense my sense is that most people hate knuckleballs that they hate watching them that they that it's kind of a cute thing maybe to see once a year but that it's not a generally pleasing experience that it's kind of a cute thing maybe to see once a year, but that it's not a generally pleasing experience, that it's not really fun to generally see a knuckleball or lob pitches up there

that are moving in sort of ways that are hard to discern and that don't feel athletic. Am I making a joke? I don't particularly like them, but my sense is that most people don't particularly like them except as a very occasional thing. I think people do like them, but it's always been a very occasional thing. And so if I think people do like them, but it's always been a very occasional thing. I think even with that, though, there's not like

a lot of love for them. But yeah, I don't think they would be I don't think it would be a popular sport. I don't think it would be a popular trend. No, I feel like if they're willing to eliminate, if they're willing to discuss eliminating defensive positioning, they would definitely be willing to discuss something much more, it seems like, aesthetically disruptive like the knuckleball. And that probably they would get a lot of support for that from both hardcore and casual fans who kind of think like they don't want to see the sport overrun by kind of a gimmick pitch,

a little bit of a junk pitch. Yeah, you don't want a bunch of big leaguers to be just, you know, non-athletes who can throw this trick pitch and get by with it. I think when it's one at a time or, you know, there are two or three knuckleballers in baseball, then I think it's cute. And we like that. like that you can find this loophole and get around the requirement to be one of the best athletes in the world because you throw this silly pitch that somehow works. So I think, I would say there's a lot of love for knuckleballs and knuckleballers out there, but only because the supply has always been so limited. So once you get up to even like more than, I don't know, three or something, it might seem like too many knuckleballs.

So I'd bet, yeah, you'd get like, how would you limit it? Would you just say you're limited to one knuckleball per roster? Like only one guy can throw it. Would it be like a spitball where you outlaw the spitball and then guys who throw the spitball are grandfathered in for the rest of their careers, but you can't throw it anymore? Or would it be like a certain percentage of the team's pitches or something? I don't know how you'd do it. Yeah.

Yeah. And you'd have to define it. Yeah. I guess it would be easy to define probably because it's so different from every other pitch in terms of spin rate. You could just say like, you know, the pitch that spins less than this number of times per minute or whatever is a knuckleball. And that would probably just capture knuckleballs and nothing else pretty easily. So you're right, though. I think MLB would step in and say too many knuckleballers.

This is not fun anymore. And it reflects poorly on our sport that you can find this like backdoor route into baseball throwing this pitch so given that we don't think that this situation would be allowed should it if a team thought that it could develop knuckleballers very easily using entretronic cameras should they try it anyway knowing that um like you know take advantage of that yeah ugly aesthetically unpleasing loophole uh and then knowing that when like, you know, take advantage of that ugly, aesthetically unpleasing loophole. And then knowing that when teams ever caught up, oh, well, like, it'll go away. But for now, we can get these pitchers.

I think you should. Yeah, because if it's just one team that's doing it, too, for a while, that team would be able to do it. I think not until you had copycats and other teams doing it would MLB say we have to do something. So I think that team would get a solid few years there where it could just – and the costs probably wouldn't be that great. If you made a couple major leaguers, you could afford to do this without having a huge opportunity cost. So, yeah, I think a team should do it. All right. Okay.

So that will be that. so yeah I think a team should do it all right okay so that will be that enjoy your July 4th and your holidays and your fireworks and your barbecues and whatever else you're doing and we'll be back with another episode on the other end of that by the way it's a new month which means that Sam has a new article up at ESPN about the hall of famers that Mike Trout passed last month he passed eight of them including Tony Gwynn and Ryan Sandberg and Tim Raines. I will link to that article on the show page. Go check it out. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. If you enjoy it, please do me and Travis Sawcheck the favor of leaving us a positive review on Amazon

and Goodreads. It helps us out. You can also support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already pledged their support. James Bixby, Colin Ray, Jake Myers, Sean Hatch, and Matthew Niederer. Thanks to all of you. 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. You can join and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. And you can contact us via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or send us a message through the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a good holiday. We will be back on the other side of it with one more episode this week. We've got a special guest lined up and a bunch of banter, so we will talk to you then. Why am I crying on the 4th of July? Why am I crying on the 4th of July?