Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1406: Taking a Stand

Episode Date: July 20, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the podcast’s seventh birthday, the end of an impressive streak by the Twins, what to think of Aaron Boone‘s tirade against rookie umpire Brennan Miller (and Brett Gardner’s odd dugout anger), Mike Trout and the FanGraphs Trade Value series, an Atlantic League player revolt, and five trends taking […]

A savage night at the opera, another savage night at the club. Let's face it, old souls like us have been born to die. It's not a war till someone loses an eye. Hello and welcome to episode 1406 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, and I am joined by Meg Rowley of Metagrass. Hello, Meg. Hello. Effectively Wild turned seven years old on Thursday. I know.

I realized that I did not wish you a happy birthday anniversary. Yeah, well, you're part of this now. It's your birthday too, retroactively. Fun. Which is, I did not not i don't know exactly

how many episodes i picked up listening to effectively wild and it was i i was not a day one listener but i was a fairly early adopter and so it was very cool and strange to be marking your anniversary with you on the program i now co-host with you. Yeah. I pity anyone who was a day one listener because day one, not so great. Those early days, they're still there. They're still on the internet. I haven't deleted them, although part of me would like to,

but there are people who actually go back and listen to all of them from the start, which is very dedicated. And I salute them. We all need reps is the thing. We all need reps and then we get better at stuff. It's great. Exactly.

All right. Well, here's to seven more years. I don't know. When I start thinking about that, it gets kind of depressing. How long is this podcast going to go? Podcasts end usually. Yeah. This one had many opportunities to end, and it just hasn't.

No, it hasn't. It's like a horror movie villain or a very kind pal, whichever interpretation you want to take. Bryce Harper will be like halfway through his deal with the Phillies when this gets to 14. Oh boy So we have a lot to talk about today I just figured I'd mention one thing One of our listeners, Ryan Morgan Has been tracking this for a while The Twins' refusal to lose Three games in a row Which lasted until this week

Finally the beast was slayed The Twins lost three games in a row And it was the Mets of all teams To put an end to that run Ryan sent a really long and rich And fact-filled email Lost three games in a row and it was the Mets of all teams to put an end to that run. Ryan sent a really long and rich and fact-filled email. It was one of my favorite kinds of listener email that sort of starts with a question, but then the listener just answers the question themselves and then offers a whole lot of other information at the end. It's just like, well, here's all this information. Do with it what you will.

here's all this information do with it what you will and i asked ryan to let us know when and if the twins finally did lose their third game in a row in season which you had to figure would happen at some point because as ryan's research showed only one team has ever made it through a full season without losing three games in a row and that team was the 1902 pirates which a it's 1902 Pirates, which A, it's 1902. Yeah, it doesn't even count as baseball, really. And B, that was 142-game season. So the only teams that have gotten further, he says that this was their 94th game when they lost on Wednesday to the Mets. And he says since 1900, only eight teams

had their first three-game losing streak later in the season. They are the 2001 Mariners, a team that I imagine you watched quite a bit of, and the 1904 Giants, the 1954 Yankees, the 1929 Athletics, the 2009 Dodgers, the 1928 Yankees, the 1929 Pirates, and now the 2019 Twins. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's very cool. That Twins team, they just keep the gap has narrowed in the Central,

which I guess, you know, it's a good thing. It's a good thing that the gap is narrowed because then, you know, it would suggest that another team might be playing Major League Baseball in the Central. That's exciting. But they're still real good. Still a real good team. It's pretty cool. That's exciting. But they're still real good. Still a real good team. It's pretty cool.

So the first of our topics, we have three or four topics today. We'll see what we get to. But the first one is the Aaron Boone blow up that has made the rounds this week and has really kind of been a reputation making moment for Aaron Boone. This is on T-shirts everywhere. And we don't usually curse on this podcast, but Aaron Boone. This is on t-shirts everywhere and we don't usually curse on this podcast but Aaron Boone cursed and we're just reporting the curses that he cursed. So Aaron Boone as everyone surely knows now was yelling at rookie umpire Brennan Miller whose calls he took issue with and he said my guys are fucking savages in that fucking box right and you're having a piece of shit start to this game.

He said, I feel bad for you, but fucking get better. And it continued. He said, tighten it up right now. Then he did the clapping thing at the end where he said, tighten this shit up with claps in between everyone. It was really a masterful rant. And I've kind of flip-flopped like five times on what I think of this. I have too. And of the public reaction to it, because in the moment, I enjoyed it. I

think the same way that I enjoyed the ass in the jackpot rant. And we rarely get to see these kind of behind the scenes interactions. This was a hot mic situation. And we hear all the time, obviously, about umpires yelling at managers and managers yelling at umpires. And you hear the stories. And I have enlisted the help of lip readers in the past to try to get some insight into what was said. But we don't usually get it with this kind of clarity. And so I don't know if all rants are like this, but I'm guessing not. I'm guessing that Aaron Boone just had a way with words in this moment. So he's someone who I think, you know, should have had a pretty solid reputation already as a manager because he's managed good teams thus

far in his couple seasons as a manager. I know that there were perhaps flaws in the ways that he managed in the playoffs last year, but the way that he has managed the Yankees to success this year, despite all the injuries that they have suffered, pretty impressive. But I don't know that he was beloved by Yankees fans or anyone particularly because, you know, he's kind of like a modern manager who doesn't really lose his cool, at least publicly, and he just always sort of says the political inoffensive thing, and that's maybe why they wanted him, because he gets along with people and players like him. And this is now his slogan. This is the moment when Aaron Boone just became a hero to Yankees fans, because, of course, they like seeing this sort of fire. On the other hand, he really was berating this rookie umpire. And when he said, I feel bad for you, that was like a kind of a condescending line.

Like he felt bad for how bad Brendan Miller was at his job. But I just legitimately felt bad for him because, again, I've gone around in circles about this many times. Again, I've gone around in circles about this many times because on the one hand, umpires know that they're in for this when they become umpires. I mean, this is one of the oldest traditions in the game. If anything, umpires put up with less abuse now than they used to, but it's still pretty bad. But you know that going in. So it's almost like, I don't know if you were like a wrestling heel or something and you were complaining about people yelling at you or booing you. It's like, that's the job.

On the other hand, maybe it shouldn't be the job. And when it gets to this point and when it's a rookie umpire, like other umpires probably would just not have put up with this and would have ejected him right away. Or maybe they would have escalated it and it could have gotten even worse. So in that sense, I admire how he handled it but like maybe this should not be how we interact with people in the workplace yeah i i get one risks being kind of a spoil sport right to everyone's fun to be like but shouldn't we think about the umpire here? But moments like this are a very stark reminder that baseball is a workplace. It's like an office. It's a super weird office and a really cool office. And, you know, like you said, I think umpires kind of know that they are in for some version

of this at some point in their umpiring career and you know i don't think that i don't know if it would make a difference i guess we can talk about that too he did not appear to be calling a particularly uh sterling strike zone you know when you look at the the brook street out of it it's like oh this is this isn't the very best i've ever seen it's not the best zone we've ever seen and i don't know if him actually being you know somewhat inconsistent in his zone makes it better or worse yeah uh because i guess it was deserved but also i don't know that we ever want this kind of behavior to like carry with it the the language of like well he he was in for it because he right called a bad zone i just it was it was a lot it was just a lot and i get why it's funny and i i

appreciate that not only to fans but i imagine to that clubhouse like this probably meant a great deal to a yankees team that was obviously frustrated. I mean, Rick Gardner was engaged in some interpretive dance with his bat in the dugout. Yeah, that's a whole other topic that we can talk about. Which, you know, he learned a lesson about throwing his helmet and it potentially ricocheting and hitting him in the face. And so he had some choreography to express his frustration this time around. What was that? I don't know.

Not to sidetrack us, but. It was. I think like Lindsay Adler tweeted that it was just so weird that that was his first inclination to like first like jam the bat repeatedly into the bat rack. And that was like the less weird part. That was the least weird part of the thing. was like the less weird part that was the least weird part of the thing then he started trying to literally raise the roof of the dugout with the bat as if he was like trying to get a bat out of the like the the attic or like get leaves off the gutter or something what was that i don't know it looked it looked unhinged and it may have been a bit. It was very strange. I don't even have a thing to compare it to. I can't. I've never seen anything like that. I've never seen anything all had bosses, we all have bosses. And it's nice when

your boss stands up for you and sort of has your back and defends you to, I don't know, in this case, an umpire. And I'm sure that it sent a very clear message to the Yankees players about how he wasn't going to take it anymore. And you don't have to either. And, you know, so players like it. Yeah, I love this sort of display, which in a in a sense like that's the manager's job to pump up his team and get his team motivated so right he was just doing what he's supposed to do in a way right so in that sense this is like a very good bit of of hr on the other hand it is a terrible way to treat another human being like a horrible hr violation right in another way if this were a regular company. here but another office guy does something goofy and he walks down the row of cubicles past the water cooler under the fluorescent lights and he starts yelling about how his guys

are just like the they're savages with a balance sheet which the way, would just sound insane, someone senior to him would pull him aside and say, hey, so we should talk about the litigious society that we live in and the way that we treat other human beings in the workplace. This is a counseling situation. Right. So it's a very strange, it's just a really weird thing. Like this umpire is a rookie. You know, the poor guy has to hear how

aaron boone who's about to have to leave his workplace for part of the day feels bad for him i just i've gone round and round on it also because i think it is not a way that we want to celebrate people treating other people but also it's very good tv yeah so i i i don't know i don't want to be overly fussy about these things but i also think that we probably you know should have a conversation about the kind of behavior that we you know incentivize versus not like it's a good thing that he's a level-headed guy and can have a conversation that doesn't escalate to swearing or a catchphrase that's going to go on a t-shirt. It's good that there are means of conflict resolution that don't come weighted with all

of that other stuff, which is so yucky and makes you feel bad. People are going's going to, like people are going to remember that about that guy. They're going to remember that. I don't even remember his name. You've already told me once and I don't remember it, but I'm going to remember this the next time I see him behind home plate. And that's terrible. So I don't think it's great, but it's also wonderful. I don't know.

Human beings are complicated. I'd feel better about it if it were like Joe West or someone in between Brendan Miller and Joe West in terms of experience. So, you know, sometimes someone with 20 years as an umpire, let's say, just someone who's been through this before and knows the score and

there isn't such an imbalance in terms of, I don't know, seniority. Like, I mean, I guess technically it's not a power imbalance but it kind of is. But it kind ofity. I mean, I guess technically it's not a power imbalance, but it kind of is. But it kind of is. I mean, umpires are- They're anonymous and Aaron Boone's a public figure, so. Right.

And I think they're acutely aware of their place in all of this. They understand they have a lot of power on the field and they exercise it. And sometimes they exercise it in ways that we think are sort of silly or arbitrary, but they, I think, are very acutely aware of sort of where they fall on the hierarchy of people who fans are there to see. And they are very low on that hierarchy. In fact, they are probably at the very bottom of that hierarchy. And I think that they are, and they don't all do this exceptionally well. Some of them are better at managing the inter-office politics than others, just like, you know,

there are managers who are better at that part than others. But I think that they know, like, you know, you got to kind of, you got to figure out a way to get along with your coworkers. And as a rookie in deference to the manager of the Yankees, he clearly didn't look like he felt he could say something or push back or scream at Boone in kind, maybe because he knew his own wasn't very good. So it felt particularly uncomfortable because you could tell he wasn't going to say anything

until Boone was done saying his piece. And then he was going to run him. But in the meantime, he was just going to have to sit there and listen to this guy berate him as he achieved his professional dreams. Which we should have a conversation about the kind of person who's like, I really want to be a professional umpire. Because that's the psychology I don't personally understand. Right. But isn't one that is necessarily uh deserving of a profanity laced tirade at work so yes yeah right he's so young looking how i mean

i don't know how old he is but he looks very fresh-faced and very fresh-faced and uh yeah like if if aaron boone were yelling at one of his players who had made a mistake, that would be condemned. That sort of thing has been done by many managers in the past. And that's, I think, maybe part of why the Yankees moved on from Joe Girardi. At least the perception was that he didn't get along that well with young players. And you hear old school players say that managers today are coddling players and you have to show them tough love and all of that. But there have definitely been cases where managers or veterans, it's almost like a hazing thing or it's just coming down so hard that you're not teaching. You're just demoralizing. Right.

I mean, in this situation, Brendan Miller was the one who had the power to kick Aaron Boone out of the game and eventually, belatedly, he did. But Aaron Boone is someone who's been in baseball his whole life. He was a player. He is a manager. He's like a third-generation player, and Brennan Miller's new to the game. And I think I've actually seen evidence that rookie umpires and call-up umpires are actually better than the others, than the veterans veterans the more senior ones when it comes to calling balls and strikes typically or they're more in line with the rulebook zone that's being

emphasized these days but yeah maybe not on this day but I don't know I mean it's an entertainment product baseball is and there are spectators and so I do understand that this has been something that people have enjoyed about baseball for as long as there's been baseball, seeing managerial rants. There's so many classic rants that we remember, and sometimes they're victimless and non-directed rants, but often there is an umpire at the other end of it or there is a reporter on the other end of it who is bearing the brunt of that and that is unpleasant so i don't know it just felt so personal it just felt so it felt so directed yeah you know he wasn't mad at you are bad at your job like i'm sorry that you're so bad at your job yeah so it just felt the first time i watched it i was like wow and then I watched it I was like oh no I don't think that we should be excited about this right I I also think that I'm sure that Aaron Boone did not expect this to get out and right expect this to be all over the internet and so maybe even he

feels bad about this being publicly aired on the the one hand, it seems to have done wonders for his reputation, so he may be conflicted about that, but he probably didn't want this to be a matter of public record, what he was saying to this empire at the time. So that changes things too. There's an expectation, I think, usually that it's a one-on-one private conversation, even if you're yelling and screaming in front of thousands of people. It usually stays between those people and the players within earshot. And so this is unusual. Right.

And I think that like we can probably, whatever we think of the particulars of this, the target audience for that rant was the dugout. It was not the rest of us. Like I doubt strongly that he, you know, he might feel he probably feels a little a little embarrassed today. You know, it's like when you're fighting with someone you care about and you get a really good zinger in, but then later you just feel kind of yucky about it because you're like, what am I doing? I know that's not the point of this. Right. that's not the point of this. Right. So, yeah, I think you're probably right that he maybe wishes that we had not been able to get such clear audio this time. Yeah. All right.

Well, complicated. I don't know. Are we overly hand-wringing? Are we not? I don't know. I enjoyed it in the moment, so I can't claim that I condemned this from the start or something, and I don't know that we should, but it's just things I've been thinking about as I've been processing my reaction and the reaction to it.

It's just a very weird workplace. It's a very, very strange workplace. Yes. Yeah. All right. So Fangraphs wrapped up its annual trade value rankings this week, done by Kylie McDaniel this year. And I imagine that you edited and oversaw this. And I have not had a chance to read it all myself yet.

But I wonder what you have gleaned from it or what surprised you. We'll link to it, of course, and we won't spoil the whole thing. But if there's anything that stood out let us know i think that i was surprised and so was kylie by the way that some executives around the game talked about mike trout so trout came in third in this exercise at various points uh over the last couple of years you know, for quite a long run, actually. Trout was easily the most valuable trade chip in baseball. He was surpassed this year by Fernando Tatis Jr. at two and Ronald Acuna at one. And, you know, I remember I think you and Sam talked about Trout's deal and sort of the difficulty even before that extension was reached of actually being able to trade for Trout.

And this has been a thing that Kylie and Dave before him have sort of grappled with over the course of this exercise, which is that on the one hand, yes, he is the most valuable trade chip in prior years in baseball, but he also feels impossible to actually trade for. And I think that we kind of knew that that existed as a continuing sort of conversation, but it's still Mike Trout and he's still the best player in baseball. And he's a tricky player to sort of project for because he really doesn't have any historical comps. He doesn't, he's sort of peerless in his development as a player so far.

So understanding what his aging curve is going to be is sort of open question, right? We don't really know. And I think that Kylie was surprised that there were executives, and this was not a universally held opinion by any means, but there were executives who sort of saw him as untradeable because no team would be willing to take on the $400 million contract and relinquish top prospects. And you can sort of see some of the logic behind that and the difficulty that one might have in giving up so much, but you still get Mike Trout at the other end of that if you were to trade for him. So I think we were kind of surprised by how resolute some executives were in their sort of understanding and handling of him, even as we acknowledge that he, like many, many players on

this list are effectively not movable pieces, right? Like there is likely to be a big trade at the deadline for any of these guys. So I think I was surprised by that. Wander Franco's placement on the list was maybe not surprising, but I think was one that both Kylie and the folks within baseball who he talked to had some difficulty sort of properly gauging. He's the only player on this list who has not yet debuted which is unsurprising but as a as an 18 year old whose prospect value i think is being thought of as sort of equaling or or potentially eclipsing vladimir guerrero jr you could argue for him being too low but also too high because he has not played a single inning of Major League Baseball

yet. So just how people were thinking about him, I think was interesting. I think executives generally thought that this year's list was deeper than some prior years had been both in terms of the quality on the top 50, but then on the sort of, you know, 51 through however deep you want to go of guys who arguably could have made their way up onto this list if we had sort of thought about it even a little bit differently. So I don't know. Those are the big takeaways. It's a funny exercise because I think it does help us to understand how people within the

game think about these things, even if these trades are very unlikely to actually take place. And that's always useful, I think, for us and for readers. But at the end of the day, not a lot of these guys are likely going to move if any of them end up moving. So it's just kind of a funny thing. I'm glad we do it. I think that people learn stuff from it,

but it is sort of an odd exercise when you think about it in those terms. It's like, how many of these guys, I guess we should go back and look. We should go back and look and see how many of them actually ended up moving. Yeah, right. I was saying that to you earlier this week. It's like a fun debate to have. It's always a popular feature, but I never know exactly what to make of it because it's subjective. I mean, you could do it in a purely objective sense, I guess, if you just did like future war projections and salaries and surplus values, perceived. But yes, most of these guys don't get traded, which is good. But we don't get any way to verify like, yep, this was right to rank this guy at 10th instead of 17th or something.

So it's a strange sort of exercise, but it's fun. Yeah, it's fun. We will, not long after we are done recording, Kylie and I recorded an episode of Fangraphs Audio where we went through this in some pretty great detail. So if folks are interested in hearing directly from Kylie about how he justified not ranking your favorite player who he hates personally, you should check that out. that Sam pointed out, is not stealing first base technically. I think it's actually scored as a walk, it looks like maybe, but it's really just a pass ball or a wild pitch, a ball that is not caught that the batter can decide to advance to first on if he wants to risk it. And we kind of, I don't know, we didn't say this is something MLB should do, but we were kind of interested in how it works out,

and there's a lot of strategy that's involved in deciding, do I want to run here? And there are implications for catchers who now have to pay close attention on every pitch, even if there aren't runners on base, even if it wouldn't be so costly in a normal situation to have a pass ball. Now you could potentially allow a base runner anytime you do it anyway in our discussion we just assumed that players would follow this rule that they would take advantage of it when they could and that did happen for the first time and i mentioned it in an outro to a recent episode and linked to the video there was a player i think on the blue crabs who did take first base on a ball that went all the way to the backstop and life continued on but there are other players evidently who are not

so pleased about this rule and who are actually taking a stand and standing still so there's another video that i will link to that we've watched and this was what was this the somerset patriots i think yeah so there was a batter who was in the box and there was a pass ball or wild pitch it went to the backstop and he just stood still he did not make a move toward first base even though it looked like he could have made it if he wanted to and the announcer mentioned that the entire Somerset team had come to the top step of the dugout and was applauding this batter for not running, for refusing to recognize this new rule. And so clearly this was not just a sentiment that this single batter felt. It's something that all or most of the team shared. And one would have to imagine that probably

a lot of the league one two bounced in the dirt and it gets away from gonzalez goes all the way to the backstop and darren ford is not taking off for first base and the patriots are applauding him in their dugout down the first baseline how about that well for Ford pointed to his chest and he must have said something along the lines of, I'm not going to do that. Oh, that's interesting. Patriots at the top step of their dugout, applauding Darren Ford. David Kubiak took off his hat and gave a hat tip towards Ford as the 2-2 is muscled its way into shallow center field and it drops in for a base hit. This is something that when I said to Sam that we should definitely have a round table at some point where we talk to some Atlantic League players about these rules, I was interested

in just hearing what they think the effects of the rules are. But also, this is something that we, I think, have touched on maybe, but the fact is these players are part of this laboratory experiment. They're kind of guinea pigs in this weird baseball testing ground, and they didn't ask to be part of this experiment. opted in. Maybe they knew about it before they signed, but many of them didn't. Many of them have been in this league for years and suddenly the ground is shifting under them. And clearly there are players who are upset about this and the inmates are revolting. I love this with my whole heart. A week or two ago, I had Eric Longeningen on FanGraphs Audio and we were talking about the Atlantic League All-Star Game, which you and I talked about. zone strike call that ended up being a called strike three and the batter kind of waited and the umpire waited and then you know he had to hear the entire ballpark going grumble grumble yeah and i posed the question to eric of how long you as an umpire if there was a

delay would wait before you just said screw this this. I'm an umpire. I know. I watched that pitch. I know if that's a ball or a strike. I'm just going to call it. I don't know what the procedure is for that sort of, now that is like actual rebellion, I think of a more profound type. I don't know if the rule requires them to take first. I imagine if it would, that he would have been sent there.

Yeah, you can decide if you want to go or not. But so it's a little bit different because he's not acting in violation of the rule. But I think it's great. I think it's great. I don't know that we can allow it to persist for too terribly long because I think that when the rules of baseball stop operating quite the way that they're supposed to, that we realize how much of it is just made up and then we get uncomfortable and then we don't want to watch it anymore.

So I think that for the sport to operate, like the rules are very, very important, not only for it playing the way it should, but for our confidence in the thing is like an enterprise and a thing we spend money on. But I just, I loved it. I loved the certainty in his stance standing in the box. like an enterprise and a thing we spend money on but i i just i loved it i loved the certainty in his stance standing in the box he was like i'm not moving you could tell it's like he had a little thought bubble saying like nope i'm gonna and he he singled so it you know same same it ended up being the same right um on the next pitch i think yeah but you know it did not strike me and i don't know this uh batter, so I might be underestimating him.

It did not strike me as the stance of a guy who's like, no, I have a strategy. It struck me as the stance of a guy who said, I have drawn a line in the sand about my understanding of baseball, and I will not cross it. Yeah. it. Yeah, which kind of brought me back to the Sonoma Stompers summer that Sam and I took over that team as we were working on the book, because this is something that we thought about a lot as we were trying to implement these changes and strategies and tactics and trying to get the team to do things. It was not, I mean, we had anticipated some resistance and pushback, and we figured that would be part of the story of the season, but I think it was stronger than we had anticipated and we were probably worse at navigating it than we had hoped. And so you ended up with this conflict and things that we wanted to do that we weren't able to do at least early in the season with the manager that we were working with at that time and this is sort of similar because you can't just come in and say that this is how it's going to be

and this is what you should do because the players are part of this and they feel some ownership of this and so when for instance when sam and i wanted to do certain shifts or something or try other strategies, we figured that if we couldn't persuade the players to do it and get them excited about doing it, then A, there would be work that well because they would kind of half-ass it or they just wouldn't do it. Or it wouldn't be a true test of whether these were good ideas or not because, you know, assuming that they're good strategies also presupposes that the players will be invested in them and will be doing their best at all times. And that's kind of the pitfall potentially of the Atlantic League experiment, is that we're trying to see whether these rule changes would be good or bad for baseball. But I guess that also takes for granted that players are going to go along with them. Although maybe this is something that you test these things to see if players will go along

with them. And clearly the answer is no or at least no for some of them and maybe it's because they they just did a whole bunch of stuff at once which was something that i was kind of critical of just because it seemed like they were just you know the whole bucket of ideas they were just overturning it and everything was changing at the same time and i said i think on the last episode like when you're asking players to like change how they do pick off moves or you know this running to first base thing like these are players who've been playing their whole lives and they're professionals and they're really good and then suddenly you're changing all these sort of fundamental rules it's a lot to keep track of

even if you are willing to and there's muscle memory involved and habits and everything but clearly these players are just like okay we've had enough you can you know give us the trackman strike zone if you want to you can change this change that but if we're going to be you know dictating where fielders stand and we're going to be dictating how pitchers are supposed to do pickoffs in a different way and also this thing and clearly some players are just like this is making a mockery of the game and i'm not going to go along with it so i don't know whether it's just that like hey i'm trying to do a job here and you are messing with my career because this could be affecting my performance if all this stuff is in my head like these guys are

in the atlantic league that's the highest level indie league. That's like, you know, AAA caliber baseball or something kind of close to that. There are many ex-major leaguers, some future major leaguers, and certainly minor leaguers. And so that's, you want to have this testing ground. I think it's a good thing to be able to do that. But on the other hand, you don't want to like sabotage anyone's career who's just trying to go about their business and suddenly they are part of this experiment that they didn't design. Well, and I suppose it was somewhat predictable that, you know, the one rule where there was a certain amount of discretion, which I imagine when the rule was being drafted was meant to be afforded to the team writ large, right? Not the individual batter. Like, I imagine that when they wrote this rule, they assumed that there would be a guy with a or gal or someone standing at the top of the dugout steps with a run expectancy table saying, okay, in this situation, it's to our benefit to like automatically have a guy on first but we'd rather you know chance it given the game situation and have you hit and see what we can get right like i imagine that was what they had in mind that someone would be employing some sort of sabermetric logic and deciding what what's what but i like very much that this guy was like, no, I have agency in this moment and it's been too much

and I'm going to make my stand here because this is the one place I can, right? There's not discretion in a lot of these other rules. They just have to go along with them. So I guess it's not terribly surprising that this would be the place where that would happen, but I do think it is probably a good lesson and one I wonder if will kind of make its way through all the other results that that major league baseball is looking at when it's looking at this as a laboratory setting of it being important to pace these things and to perhaps employ some amount of incrementalism to the way that we alter the game structure especially when they are changes that clearly at least from the player's perspective seem very fundamental to the way that we alter the game structure, especially when they are changes that clearly,

at least from the player's perspective, seem very fundamental to the way that they have previously played baseball. Some of these changes are not small. So I wonder if they'll learn that lesson. I'm a little nervous that they won't, but I wonder if they will. Yeah, right. I wonder whether they'll walk back any of the changes this season or next season, or I don't know how widespread this is.

I don't know whether other players have done this subsequently, whether they just needed a champion to show that it could be done and now everyone is emboldened to do it. On the other hand, what if you're trying to win the game? There must be some players who just really want to win and the people working for you're trying to win the game right there must be there must be some players who just really want to win and and the people working for that team want to win and so i mean at that level winning is not quite as important as it is with most of the baseball we watch but still people are competitors and if someone's given you a free base and you're entitled to take it then

maybe there will be players who will be annoyed if their teammates don't do it. I don't know. So there could be some disharmony in that sense, too. Right. Yeah, I mean, it's something that Sam and I found frustrating that summer when we wanted to change things, and players or our manager were like, no, just on the grounds that this is the way it's always been done, and who are you to tell us that we should try something different. We wanted to try to improve things or test things that might work a little bit better and

were disappointed at times when there was kind of a knee-jerk resistance to that. But we also were pretty careful about trying to introduce things very slowly and carefully. And this is kind of the opposite of that. This is just everything at once. And players have been in this league for years in many cases. And then suddenly they find that it looks different all of a sudden. So I understand that feeling, I suppose. Well, and I think that people are resistant to change because change makes us uncomfortable. I think the context in which change enters our

lives tends to have a pretty profound impact on our impression of it. So you guys faced some, some pushback and resistance, and you were trying to do a thing to like build a more winning baseball team, right? That is a collaborative sort of common purpose, one that everyone is there for, at least in part, even if people are individually also trying to advance their careers and maybe get out of IndieBall or what have you. And even there, it was tricky because humans are stubborn and we're skeptical of I think change being to our benefit. I think there's an assumption that change comes with loss sometimes. And these changes have a far less clear cut, we are here to help you win a baseball game or advance your career. And so it's not surprising to me that they would meet even more resistance and say,

your typical, you know, front office type coming down saying, hey, we've run the numbers. And in this, you know, in this situation, you should run. I get why that would be met with even greater resistance, because it isn't even, you know, a collaborative change of mindset in service of trying to win baseball games. You're trying to do something very different. In some cases, you're trying to make baseball shorter, which as a player, I could imagine sometimes you're like, yeah, you know, if you're on the Giants or the Mets today and you just played 16 innings last night, you're probably like, yeah, shorter is great. But generally, you're like, no, let's keep playing baseball because it's good when I play baseball. So I get why there would be a skepticism and a discomfort. And when you find a small window through which you can shout, no,

you're going to do it. You're going to shout, no. Right yeah it's it's very explicitly like these players are being used essentially to generate data so that other players or or leagues can benefit from that information so yeah they're not really getting anything out of it other than i guess the fact that there's more data on them which maybe can be shared with teams maybe would make them more attractive to teams in some cases but yeah for the most part it's purely it's kind of just extracting something from them and they for the most part didn't really opt into this so right yeah that that's a an important distinction i think yeah it's uh i don't think that anyone enjoys the idea of being experimented upon even if you are told in advance that it's going to happen. And I think that if I were a player in that situation, I'd be like, I don't need no stinking steal, not steal a first. I'd say it just like that, because I an old-timey news person, actually. That's who I really am.

Well, I will be fascinated to see if this revolt spreads, if they overturn the rules, if it gets to that point, or if it just becomes something that's technically on the books but it's just totally ignored because no one will do it. Whether it'll be like, are you a scab if you do do it? Are you breaking ranks? Right. Does this become a labor issue? I mean, I guess it is a labor issue already. It would if there was any union or anything here. That's why we need the Atlantic League, because these players are not in a union. You can just do this. but that's why mlb has come up with this solution but yeah this

is the sort of thing that that that collective representation protects you from right anyway it's it's a weird social experiment that we are seeing play out here do you think that we'll ever have if we have a robo zone do you think that you will ever have an umpire who goes rogue and just starts calling their own zone? I don't know how explicit the, I guess we have, you know, we have like game day, we have Brooks,

we have all sorts of things that would demonstrate to us what the, where a pitch was landing. So we could probably discern places where maybe, uh, an ump had, had gone off script, but I like, will they, will they come out and say, are we going to have an ump scandal? I'm very excited.

Yeah, there is. I mean, umpires have the right to dispute the calls from track men, at least in the Atlantic League right now. And I think in the first game that they used the track man zone, it went offline for half an inning. So the umpire then had to step in and make those calls. And then there was an ejection. The former pitcher, Frank Viola, was ejected for arguing balls and strikes, even though he was arguing with Trackman,

except technically he wasn't, really. He was arguing with the umpire for not overruling Trackman. He thought that the zone was miscalibrated or something, which maybe it was, but that's a tough situation to be in as an umpire. If on the one hand, you're being told that a machine is taking over this part of your job, you should defer to it. On the other hand, maybe the machine doesn't work so well sometimes. And so then it's also on you to step up in those times and decide

when the technology is miscalibrated, which is kind of a tough thing to do. It seems like a lot to ask of them. Yeah, especially if you're not in the mindset where I'm calling every pitch. And then suddenly the machine didn't work for a pitch or it was obviously way off on a pitch. But it's like at a certain point, you're just not going to be paying as close attention because you're not going to be expected to make that call. Even if you're telling yourself like, okay, stay in the game here because you never know,

maybe TrackMan will go haywire on this pitch and I'll have to make the call. If thousands of times you don't have to make the call and then suddenly one time you do, it's not like you're going to be really prepared to make that call as well as you would have. happened in the all-star game, the whole ballpark just booed. They were very upset. And it's not this guy's fault, either that the call was late or that the call was something that they didn't enjoy. And I watched it and I was like, God, we're going to be so mean to these guys. We're going to

be so mean. And it is not going to matter that they're not making a decision anymore. It just seems terrible. We're just setting them up to be yelled at with no authority at all it's awful well at least Aaron Boone wasn't yelling at this particular empire this is true this is very true all right so one last thing I think we should talk about I wrote about a few trends in the game probably some trends that we've talked about before on the show, but have now reached the point where they've crossed a certain threshold of frequency. half the time that used to be much rarer and you know it used to be unheard of or it used to be very much in the minority but now at least someone is doing it the majority of the time and therefore we can envision a future where everyone is doing it that often because that's often how things work in baseball someone does something and is the first to do it and maybe it

works or that team has success and then suddenly everyone's doing it and it can be very fast and sometimes it's just like you know the strikeout leaders in one season you break a record and the next season your record gets broken because that's just changing every year but sometimes it's like the opener which just fell out of the sky last season and now is kind of in a lot of places. So I wrote about the shift, first of all, because the shift has now gotten to the point where there are teams shifting on more than half of pitches, which is kind of incredible. At that point, it's not a shift. The standard positioning is the shift at that point.

It's like the standard alignment is now sometimes the non-standard alignment. So the Astros have crossed that 50% threshold and the Dodgers are right behind them. The Orioles who are now run by ex-Astros people, they're right there. The Twins are pretty close. are now run by ex-Astros people. They're right there. The twins are pretty close. So there are four teams now over 40% and the Astros are over 50%. And we've been talking about the increase in the shift for close to a decade now. And there was one year where we thought maybe the shift had peaked because teams didn't shift more. It was from 2016 to 2017, which is very curious because we thought that might be peak shift, but now the rate has really dramatically increased in the most recent couple

seasons. So I still don't know what the impact of the shift is exactly. It's really hard to say because I was talking to a few front office people on these teams that are shifting all the time and asking them, so why don't we see a change in the league-wide batting average on balls in play still? It used to be that it was still a minority of plays and you figured, well, maybe it just washes out or something. But league-wide now, it's a quarter of the pitches a team is shifting just like your your standard over shift in the infield and so you'd think that would be enough for it to manifest itself on the league-wide level and yet babbitt is i think 298 this year just never strays very far from 300 and now everyone i talked to in front offices was like well we're sure that

we're doing this right and our models are correct and we're implementing it right and it's saving us runs. And if you talk to sports info solutions, they say that there have been, what, I think 230 something runs saved or prevented from the shift this year. It's a lot of runs. And yet these league wide numbers that you would expect to be affected by this just have not been so everyone i spoke to in front office has just kind of shrugged and threw up their hands and said it's working for us but i don't really know why it's not having a bigger effect leak-wide which is a paradox yeah i i guess I like that there are still some mysteries, but it is deeply strange that it has somehow proven itself to be kind of immune from a growing sample size. This is not how this is supposed to work. definitely see the impact because like lefties on pulled grounders are doing worse than they've ever done they're down like 25 points of weighted on base average or something compared to 2008 when

there were very few shifts and lefties on opposite field grounders are doing way way better like the the opposite field grounder wobah for lefties this year is like 429 or something. It's up like 130 points from pre-shift, and that's just because that hole is opened up. And so if you do hit it over there, you're much more likely to get a single out of it. But there are many more pulled grounders than there are grounders hit the other way. And so it seems like that sort of evens out and we just tend up with 300 BABIP every year. So the best explanations I have is that maybe the BABIP would be a lot higher than it is if not for the shift. Maybe it's kind of camouflaging a change. Like, I don't know, hitters are getting stronger.

They're maybe hitting the ball harder. Maybe there are so many strikeouts now that maybe there's just less weak contact so if you make any kind of contact it's just hard contact so like maybe the bad bit would have increased if not for the shift and so it's sort of artificially suppressed and then it's also possible that they're just like changes in defenders or changes in the way that plate appearances are distributed maybe guys who are really hurt by the shift don't get as much playing time and so it doesn't reflect itself in that way or like maybe not as good defenders are used at those

positions because you figure you can compensate for the shift anyway so there are things like that that i think other changes could possibly account for this in a way that would be consistent with the shift working and yet also not changing these league-wide numbers, but it really is strange. Yeah. I think that I would probably be, in terms of what of that set of possible explanations makes the most intuitive sense, I think, although I just don't know if it would be enough padded balls for it to really matter. I guess the idea of there being worse defenders who are benefiting generally from sort of improved positioning, but still are prone to some goofiness in the field might be it.

That's the one that I would be the most sort of ready to be persuaded by, but it still strikes me as odd that that would be sufficient to explain it, right? Which likely means that it has to be a combination of the things that you're describing because any one of them on their own doesn't seem like it would be significant enough to really do the work we need it to, right? Yeah. And I talked to someone with the Orioles who said that they constantly look at whether it's working or not and that they have the most to lose if this is just a mistake that everyone is making. But he said he thinks it's very unlikely. And I think it's very unlikely, too, that all of these teams with all these smart

people who are studying this could be just wrong. I don't really buy it. I know that Russell Carlton wrote some things for BP about how maybe there's a factor that we don't account for, which is that pitchers don't throw as many strikes when the shift is on. But I think even he found that that effect had diminished in recent seasons. And again, we're just talking about balls in play here. So I do think that it's probably working. And so I talked about each of these trends, like A, will it take over? Will we see the rest of the league catch up to what the leader is doing right now? And I have to assume probably yes with the shift. It just keeps going up and up. And if the Astros and the Dodgers and the Orioles and the Twins are deciding that it makes sense to shift 40, 50% of the time, I'm guessing we're going to get there.

Like, not every team has the same incentive, too, and it depends on your defenders and your pitchers and everything, but only to a certain extent. And so I would think that this will keep going up and up as A, teams and players are exposed to this in the minors. They maybe have coaching staffs that are more willing to implement it. And you also see opponents doing it constantly, which makes it an easier sell. Like the Orioles told me, and they're shifting twice as often as they did last year, but they said, you know, we're in the division with the Rays and the Yankees and they shift a lot. And so our players see that happening and it's not like a foreign concept to them now in the way it was when the Astros started doing this much more, you know, six years ago. So you have to assume.

I'm resisting making a snarky joke about it being surprising that the Orioles care about Babbitt at all, considering how many home runs their pitching staff gives up. I guess I just snarked on it anyway. Sorry, Ori. Yeah. Well, that actually, that sort of speaks to the conclusion about whether this is good or bad for baseball, which is how I analyzed these things. And it's got to be bad in the sense that if it really is

depressing offense and taking away lots of singles and base runners and action and making it a more home run reliant game, I guess that's bad, or at least some people consider that bad. But it just, it seems like a secondary problem, A, because I think the bigger problem for hitters is just not being able to make contact at all because pitchers are so good. And then also it just seems like an overreaction to ban it or say that we need to do away with it just because there are still counters that can be made and you can bunt and you can hit the ball in the air and you can go the other way. And those things are easier said than done, but I haven't completely given up on hitters finding some way to adjust to this if it really is working so well.

Yeah. I think of the ones that you have highlighted here, the shift does not, I don't, I don't think that the shift bothers me because I think it is one, even though it is quite difficult, it is difficult to adjust to. So I do not mean to say that it is easy to adjust to, and it does imply a certain kind of offense over another. I do think it's one where we are likely to see some sort of adjustment made by hitters that sort of counteracts part of this. And as we've noted, the BABIP isn't actually that different. The bullpen stuff, I'm the most worried about. What are you the most concerned of with this list?

I know that people can read your should we be glad or sad, and they should do that. But what are these are you in terms of your personal enjoyment of baseball the most? Yeah, so the next one of baseball the most? Yeah. So the next one was about the bullpen workloads. And we have seen some teams now go 50% or more of their innings to relievers. Now, that is with openers and that sort of skews things somewhat. But it was the Rays doing that for the first time last year. They're still doing it.

And now the Angels this year are also more than 50% of their innings going to relievers. And the Rays have been very effective with the starters who are making starts for them. The Angels, not so much. And obviously, they've had injuries. And that was even before the loss of Tyler Skaggs. So this maybe wasn't so much the plan, although they've been using openers a lot too. But I talked to Billy Epler about this for the article and a couple other things. And he was saying they're just less rigid roles these days. And all that matters is,

can you get outs? And how many outs can you get? And that he thinks that these distinctions between starters and relievers will continue to blur. But as've written before and as i've said on the podcast i am anti this generally like pro this as a strategy that teams should probably be doing if they want to win but anti this for spectators and for fans because i do kind of like seeing starters go deep into games or not having to try to remember a million relievers on every team and each of them comes in and I have to figure out who this guy is now, as opposed to having the starting pitcher as that protagonist of the game who is just there the whole time. And you get to see him vary his repertoire as he goes through the lineup a couple times and

then pitch count matters and that's something to pay attention to and you see hitters adjust to him and he adjusts to hitters and just narratively I like that and miss that so it's sort of a problem I think like I think

that you know we did not talk about a thing that was very near and dear to my heart this week, which was that Chris Paddock was carrying a no-hitter. That's great. I just, it is an aesthetic that I enjoy very much. I think that it makes, like, the dominant reliever look even more, it helps you to the the sort of special skill set that that those individuals are bringing to the game it just allows for a greater range of stories and outcomes and styles that is really compelling and so yeah this is the one of your five that i'm bummed out by the most i don't know we'll see there are rules coming to kind of eliminate loogies and then

rules coming about how long pitchers have to stay down when they are optioned so maybe there'll be a little less shuffling and churn in bullpens which would be good but i don't see this going away i don't know that we'll get to 50 50 anytime soon but this has increased a lot lately so it's obviously a long-term trend toward relievers, but it's picked up a lot lately and it's probably not the best thing. And if you don't like strikeouts and velocity and everything, then this is part of that whole process. And that was one of the other things I identified is faster fastballs. And the increase in the way that fastballs have gotten faster every year, that has slowed, but it's still going slowly. So the average fastball this year for Seamer

is 93.7 miles per hour, which is just slightly up from last year. And now we've gotten to the point where there are teams that are throwing more than half of their four-seamers at 95 miles per hour or above, which is kind of amazing. I think the Yankees have done that. The Astros have done that and are doing that. The Mets this year have thrown more than 60% of their four-seamers 95 or faster. And that's with Jason Vargas not ever doing that. So that is kind of incredible because 95, that used to be like, whoa, hard thrower, mid-90s. Now for some teams, most fastballs or most four-seamers are that fast.

So at this point, if you don't touch triple digits, don't tweet at me. Don't even send me the gif. I'm not that impressed. And it's funny. Remember the article Sam wrote about flames on the Fox broadcast? Can I confess something that will make Sam feel embarrassed? I probably reread that piece like once every six months. Yeah, it's great.

It's great. So he showed how Fox broadcasts when a pitcher throws 95, they show the flame Icon to denote that this Is a fast pitch and as he Found they actually started at 96 And then they went back down to 95 Even though pitchers reach That regularly I checked there are still Flames on 95 mile per hour

Pitches on Fox baseball broadcasts Even though at this point it's like Not at all a rarity But you really have to adjust your mental understanding of what a fast fastball is at this point. And I don't know, I said this is maybe a thing to slightly be down on just because A, it's contributing to all the other trends that some people lament or we worry about. But I think it's fun when a guy comes along and challenges what we think of as the peak velocity. Like when Jordan Hicks came along and it was like, oh, are we going to get someone who tops Chapman here?

That was fun for a while until, of course, Hicks blew out his elbow, which may happen when you throw that fast. And so that's kind of the downside to all of this. But that Chapman record is still standing from when he, according to PitchFX, touched, what was it, 105.8, I think I want to say. That was way back in 2010. That's stood for a long time. So I don't know if we're going to get to a point where anyone beats that. I mean, I guess I'd bet on that happening someday, but not routinely. I think there are just some physical

limits that maybe we can't transcend or not without injury at least, but I would expect 95s to become more common and for the Jason Vargas's of the world to become even less common because we know there are a lot of people out there with that velocity and velocity isn't everything, but it's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Just don't want baseball to all look the same. Yeah. Well, the next trend that I identified was the fewer fastballs trend, which seems like a paradox because we're talking about fastballs being faster than ever and yet people are throwing fewer of them It's mostly sinkers that people are throwing fewer of

And this year, the Angels, again, they have broken that seal They've crossed that threshold They have had only 47.7% of their pitches this year have been fastballs Which is sort of amazing And that's lumping together four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters They They don't throw any cutters. I mean, off-speed pitches are supposed to be secondary pitches. That's what they're called. But for the Angels, they've been primary pitches. Fastballs have been secondaries. I talked to Epler about this too while I had him, and he said it's sort of an organizational emphasis. They figure that they should tell minor leaguers to work on their

other pitches because you're not going to develop those pitches as well if you're throwing 65 fastballs and only 17 sliders or something in a start. So if you want to get better at those pitches, maybe you should be throwing them more. And so it's kind of a player development initiative for them. initiative for them but then also at the major league level it's you know we know that sinkers just seem to be not that effective and other pitches are better at least in this environment and so we're seeing fewer and fewer fastballs and i don't know that we'll get to 50 50 but we're definitely getting away from that old dogma about fastball first establish your fastball everything works out the fastball so that's bad in the sense that you know more strikeouts same thing we're saying about everything but also breaking balls are kind of more fun yeah yeah more entertaining especially on tv yeah i i don't mind this one i

mean i don't know that i i i mind strikeouts insofar as they then they have a knock-on effect on other aspects of the game that i'm maybe a little less excited about. But I don't mind strikeouts all that much. I think that they're fun to watch. And, you know, a good breaking ball is just delightful, you know? Like, watching Jose Barrios, like, makes me feel stuff. Yeah. So I'm okay with this trend.

And I think that you could end up seeing some really cool, I don't know that this will necessarily resonate with sort of your casual fan, but, you know, as teams get smarter about how they like help guys to sequence their pitches and think about pitch distribution, you just like watching that strategy play out is I think engaging and interesting in its own right. Even if it is maybe not something that everyone is super keen on. So I don't mind this one. I don't think. Yeah. And the last thing was just first pitch swinging, which is happening a lot

more often these days, especially on pitches in the strike zone. It used to be that pitchers could kind of count on free strikes in certain situations. Everyone was sort of settling in and they would just, you know, want to see a pitch and not swing. And even if the pitcher just kind of laid one in there, he'd get a free strike often and hitters have sort of gotten wise to that. And also with the ball behaving the way it is, it pays off more often for hitters to swing. And so on 0-0 pitches, on 3-0 pitches, hitters are swinging more often than ever before, even relative to on the other counts.

And the one that kind of interests me the most is Sam has written before, and I think Jeff has also written about how the first pitch of every game is a fastball, like almost without fail. You can count on each pitcher just throwing a fastball first pitch of the game. And often those fastballs are strikes and yet hitters just don't swing those pitches for the the most part and now they are now they're swinging at least like a third of pitches in the strike zone first pitches of the game and it used to be a lot fewer than that within trackable memory and that's uh it's kind of interesting too it's it's always whenever you have some really predictable behavior in sports there's probably

some way to take advantage of that but like hitters are just kind of getting their bearings at that point too and maybe they don't feel ready to swing and yet if someone's just gonna throw a meatball there and you don't want to fall behind in the count these days because once you get to two strikes and all the weapons that pitchers have these days yeah so it makes sense do you think that the reason that they didn't swing historically was in part because they didn't want to make the first out of the game on the first pitch like with a ground ball or a fly out yeah that could be part of it too and there was in the past there was more of an emphasis on taking pitches and working pitchers and get to the bullpen now you're like i don't know if we want to do that.

Right. Stay away from them. Yeah. It seems like just passivity or patience or just taking pitches is probably less valuable than it used to be. And so now it's when you get a good pitch to hit, you might as well offer at it, even if it's in these situations where historically people haven't swung.

But anyway, that's generally a good thing, I guess. It means maybe more plate appearances will end faster and games will be quicker and there will be more action and less waiting around. So that doesn't seem like a bad thing. Yeah, you ended on a high note. I did. All right, I guess we can end this podcast that way too. Sure.

Okay, so we will talk next week. Sounds good. All right, that will do it Sure. Okay. So we will talk next week. Sounds good. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks to everyone for listening this week. By the way, after we spoke, Aaron Boone was suspended for one game by Major League Baseball and subjected to an undisclosed fine for his, quote, inappropriate actions, including contact with the home plate umpire.

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be back to talk to you early next week. And I'm not my way I'm on my way I'm on my way And I'm not running anymore