Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1426: Fun or Foul

Episode Date: September 5, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller debate whether a fact about Michael Lorenzen’s multi-way play is fun, banter about Nelson Cruz’s unflagging offense, technology and the future of the knuckleball, and an ignominious achievement by Billy Hamilton, then answer listener emails about the lack of four-homer games, what would happen if foul balls caught in the […]

No fun, my babe, no fun No fun, my babe, no fun No fun to hang around Feeling that same old way No fun to hang around Freak out For another day Hello and welcome to episode 1426 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast from BandGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Dan Lindberg of The Ringer. He is Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hey, Ben. Doing an email show, but a bit of banter first. I just saw this fun fact repeated in the Facebook group. Wanted to get your thoughts on it. So this is about the Reds' Michael Renzin, who became the first player since Babe Ruth to win a game as the pitcher, play the field, and hit a homer all in the same game.

No? Three qualifiers, which is usually the death knell for fun facts. But it's kind of fun, right? Because I guess not judging by your reaction, but first since Babe Ruth. So Babe Ruth is good. And it's been a long time since Babe Ruth and also these are the three things that you can do in a baseball game you can

pitch you can field you can hit he did all those things well I know no not fun all it is is restating the fun fact that Michael Lorenzen set out this season to do which is be a two wayway player.

That's it. That's the only... All you've done is say that Michael Lorenzen plays both pitcher and a position in the same game. Whether he gets the win is inconsequential to the funness of that fact, the fact of his existence. Whether he gets a hit is also...

Well, I mean, he's got to get some hits or else there's some benefit but he's gonna he's gonna well right no no no no no i mean there's some benefit to being a useful enough baseball player that you can do this but presumably he does all you know the three things well enough to make this a project that the Reds were willing to do for a season. And if he were to say, for instance, have five hits in one game and a win in the next game, then that would mean that he does them well enough to serve that role. He doesn't have to do them both. Also, a hit is so much lower than, is that what it was? A hit or was it a home run?

Okay. A home run is much lower than the standard that he maintains as a hitter. And a win is much lower than the standard that he maintains as a pitcher. He is, you know, he's a, like there are position players who have wins this year. And there are pitchers who have home runs this year. The fact is that Michael Lorenzen is neither of those things. He is a real pitcher and a real hitter at the same time. Lorenzen is neither of those things. He is a real pitcher and a real hitter at the same time.

So if, for instance, he was the first person to ever say strikeout 15 and also hit three home runs in a game, then it would be a whole different thing. It'd be like, wow, are we maybe talking about the greatest athletic accomplishment that any baseball player has ever done? And it would be worth pointing out. Otherwise, this is all baked in we we already know that he can hit good enough to get a home run and we already know he can pitch good enough well enough i know that it's well enough pitch well enough to to get a win so nothing changed here this is just a a meaningless collaboration of two events happening that are routine for him okay but only routine for him and for no one else so we already knew this well you do this but how many people in the world even people who follow baseball know that michael renson does this who knows michael renson so isn't

there some value to boiling down what makes it cool that he can do these things into a single sentence and having him demonstrate that he can do them in one game. I think it's kind of a compact way of explaining what it is that he does and why it's unusual. He played the field, he pitched, and he hit, and he did at least two of those things very well in one game. And no one else does that. Even Shohei Otani doesn't do that, for goodness sake. So I think it's kind of cool.

Okay, so Ben. All right. So if, say, I don't know, name a baseball player, Marcus Semyon. If Marcus Semyon homered and then the game went 19 innings and he had to pitch and he came into the 19th inning and he gave up three runs, but then the game went 19 innings, and he had to pitch, and he came into the 19th inning, and he gave up three runs, but then the other team had to use, say, Caleb Joseph to pitch the bottom of the 19th, and the A's scored four runs, then Marcus Simeon would have done this,

and would you say, wow, Mike Lorenzen and Marcus Simeon are the same. This stat really conveys the accomplishment. Well, I know more about Mike Lorenzen and Marcus Simeon are the same. This stat really conveys the accomplishment. Well, I know more about Mike Lorenzen, and so it is more impressive to me because I know I have some built-in knowledge that this is a thing that he does on a somewhat regular basis, that he attempts to do these things regularly. regularly but the fact that there hasn't been a marcus simeon game that no one has been for a century that's something but if marcus simeon did it though then it would be a dumb fun fact it'd be like one of those pablo sandoval stole a bass homered and pitched in the same game fun facts where you wouldn't really take it seriously. It would just be a thing that does not capture his skill as a two-way player. It's just weird thing that happened in a weird baseball game.

So you have just imported weird baseball game event into genuine miracle Michael Lorenzen. And I mean, he is a, I don't know, he's's a two way player Who is both an above average Pitcher and an above average hitter That's enough Yeah okay I guess we can just say that But to have him demonstrate it In a single game is

Different from doing it in Multiple games I think or at least it's more Fun to see it happen all at Once in not a 19-inning game. So to me, this game is a good encapsulation of why it's fun and interesting that Michael Renson does these things. So maybe we don't need the fun fact because we know that he does these things already. And it is cooler because we know that Michael Lorenzen is actually capable of these things.

And it wasn't just some weird, unrepeatable circumstance that placed him in position to do them. It's that he actually set out to be someone who could do those things. And the Reds said, yeah, we think you can do it. We're going to let you. So in that sense, maybe that means that we don't need the fun fact because it's already cool just that he gets to do these things. But I still think there's some value in it. If you have to tell someone about what Michael Lorenzen has done this year in a single sentence, here's your single sentence.

You say, the Reds have a two-way player named Michael Lorenzen who has a higher OPS than Joey Votto, a lower ERA than Luis Castillo, and plays center field. Okay. That fun fact lies a little bit, I guess, because Joey Votto hasn't been good this year, but all fun facts lie. So, okay. You could also use Yasiel Puig.

You could have used Puig for that. Well, he's been bad too. Yours is using a win in a single game. Yours is using one game win as a marker for pitching quality. Yeah, okay. And you're saying I'm lying. I don't even know how he pitched. I assume he pitched well.

All I know is that he got the win. But for all I know, he could have pitched lousy and still gotten the win. Anyway, if we have a stat called the true win and we like the true win, this is a win where he played the field and hit a homer and is not regularly a pitcher. I don't know. Maybe I'm making too much of it, but I think you're making too little of it. Anyway, I didn't create the fun fact. I'm just relaying the fun fact, and i enjoyed it for the 10 seconds it took me to

absorb it he gave up a run but okay oh he blew the save so he's the he got a vulture he vultured the win he actually vultured the win uh-huh maybe even babe ruth didn't do that for all i know he's the first pitcher ever to get a blown save and a win and hit a homer and play the field in a single game. All right. All right. Agree to disagree slightly. Wanted to Good Nelson Cruz Has Been because I was kind of making the mental comparison that what Nelson Cruz has done this year is almost exactly what David Ortiz did in his final season. And that season was incredible, and we were making so much of it at the time, partly because it was Ortiz and because we knew it was his final season and no one goes out the way he did. And yes,

it was an age 40 season and what Nelson Cruz is doing is an age 39 season. But on the other hand, the stats are almost identical. Ortiz had a 163 WRC plus in his last season, 2016. Cruz has a 162 this year. And in the past three years, the game has moved more and more toward young players and old players being bad. So for Nelson Cruz to be doing what he is doing right now is kind of incredible. And I know that there's a significant percentage of the baseball watching population that has written off everything that Nelson Cruz has done since his steroid suspension, because that's it for them. It's not necessarily that you're dead to them, but everything you do after that is suspect. And we've talked before about whether someone who has been suspended for steroids who has tested positive is more or less likely to be taking

them after that suspension. And I think a lot of people just think, well, Nelson Cruz did this thing. He's the kind of person who did this thing. We don't know whether he beat the tests for a while and then got caught or whether he got caught immediately or what, but everything that he does is suspect. But for me, I don't really find that to be the case. It doesn't really affect my enjoyment and appreciation for what Nelson Cruz has continued to do.

And it's amazing that he has had this second half of his career. That's when we talked about it, when we were answering the question last week about second half of Hall of Fame careers and how he is having more than one, and he is showing no signs of declining at all in fact he seems to be getting better yeah i've got nothing to add to that okay i was just talking to someone today about how i am surprised that in fact i have not read people saying uh boy this guy with the uh incredible unprecedented late 30s power surge who has a PED suspension on his resume sure is suspicious. And I was surprised because it seemed like that would be the sort of thing that I would be reading about, not that I would be writing about,

but that I would be reading about. And the person I was talking to said, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. But you say that you have seen it. Well, I've seen it in previous seasons. I don't know whether anyone's saying it right now. And, uh, hopefully I just won't hear it. If people are saying it, I'm sure I, if I Twitter searched it, I would find it because you can find anyone saying anything on Twitter. Haven't seen like a columnist coming out and ranting about it or anything, but I just know from past seasons that that's something people think. You were right that you can find anything on Twitter. I was also talking to someone today about how the funniest story in baseball would be

if it turned out that Bryce Harper had been lying about his age this whole time, and that in fact, he was like 16 when he was 11 and that uh when he said he was 11 and that he actually graduated from high school like years late not years early and and that all of this is just like he's old and i you know i think it would be just like wildly funny uh and someone said that they have actually seen that conspiracy theory on twitter so said that they have actually seen that conspiracy theory on Twitter. So never mind. Yeah. We were talking, Meg and I, last week about some of the good and bad aspects of Twitter. And one of the things that I didn't mention, I mentioned how it's humbling in kind of a nice way that you constantly come across incredibly famous people with enormous followings on Twitter

who you've never heard of and you can't figure out what they do or who they are, even if you try to. And it's just a nice reminder that you are inconsequential and insignificant in the eyes of most people compared to many other people who are not really all that famous in the grand scheme of things. Another thing is that I think Twitter reinforces just how funny people are, just like the average Twitter person. Not the average, I guess, but the average person I follow, very funny. And also, if you search any joke on Twitter, it's been joked about before. And so that is a reminder that even though there are a lot of funny people on Twitter, we are not original.

And everything we think of has been thought of and tweeted previously. Yeah, yeah. It's true. I'm seeing the Bryce Harper age conspiracy. Well, this is actually referring to somebody else making this obviously ludicrous conspiracy theory. And the person is named Dank Aaron. It's a very Twitter bio bio i should say profile name yeah yeah i have had that experience many times and uh in fact the very day that you guys released that podcast i saw somebody who had 1.6 million followers

and i uh didn't know who this person was and then I clicked on the bio and I still could not tell who the person was. And then I Googled and I still could not tell who the person was. I don't know who the person is. It's even more impressive. It's such a power move when someone has a huge follower account and their bio doesn't even say anything about them. Yeah. And so, you know, people found them just organically like they actually sought them out were something or didn't care who they were because their tweets were so good they just had to follow them anyway they're everywhere so yeah yeah all right you got anything to banter about

i don't okay can i tell you a few things about knuckleballs yeah okay i know you're less of a knuckleball enthusiast than I am. You're not so enchanted by knuckleballs as I recall. No, I actually, I have a knuckleball article on my tickler file and I'm scared to read yours because I don't think they're related. I think that mine is still safe, but I'm a little bit nervous to read what you wrote. I did see that you wrote something. Yeah. Oh, good.

I don't have to write. I don't have to write whatever you just wrote, But there's one thing. Anyway, go ahead. Well, I wrote a little bit about the future of the knuckleball because the knuckleball is like baseball in miniature in that people are always saying that it's dying. And they're saying that it's dying for some of the same reasons. Baseball's audience is old. People who like baseball tend to be old and people who throw knuckleballs tend to be old. And so there's this constant question of, will the next generation like baseball and will the next generation learn to throw knuckleballs? And so people are constantly declaring that both of these things are extinct or about to be. And I went back and found lots of examples of articles

from the 80s and 90s and 2000s of people claiming that the knuckleball was on its last legs because people are claiming that again. And not without reason, there are fewer knuckleballs being thrown in the majors right now than in any year on record and maybe any year ever, at least since the knuckleball started being thrown. Certainly. Certainly. Yeah. It's not even close. It's definitely the fewest ever. Yeah, there have been about 200 knuckleballs thrown this season, and they've all, except for maybe a few pitches, classified as knuckleballs that position player pitchers through. They've all been thrown by Stephen Wright and Ryan Fairbend, and neither of them is really a knuckleball standard bearer

who you can be confident in pitching for many years. So there's no Wakefield, there's no Dickey, there's no Hoffer, Candiotti or Negro or anyone right now who you can envision being the torch carrier for the next decade or so. And so that's caused this recent round of knuckleball is dead doomsaying articles. And maybe they're right this time. Maybe they've been wrong all the other times. But if you keep saying it, you'll be right eventually. But I kind of doubt it. I think there will continue to be a place for the knuckleball.

And the thing that I focused on here is how technology could help preserve the pitch, this kind of weird, quirky pitch that in some ways defies analytics and quantification in ways that other pitches don't in that like you can't even track its spin like you know it's working when rapsodo or trackman doesn't even say what its spin is because those systems aren't capable of tracking it if they do register, then you're probably doing something wrong. But there are ways that pitchers today can use some technology to improve their knuckleball. So this Mets minor leaguer named Mickey Janis, who's been in AA for most of the season, he recently put himself on an Edgertronic high-speed camera, and he saw something he was

doing wrong with his knuckleball, and he made a subtle tweak because he saw something he was doing wrong with his knuckleball and he made a subtle tweak because he saw that he was imparting some spin that he didn't want to impart and he was able to change the way he was holding and releasing the pitch and suddenly he went on this incredible run where never in his minor league career to this point up until August had he ever struck out 10 hitters in a game. And then he did it in three of four games. And he's just been on a great run his last five starts or so of the AA season, which he attributes mostly to this adjustment that he made with the camera. And it can be a really valuable thing for a knuckleballer in particular because so many organizations don't have a knuckleball mentor

there's no coach who's really qualified to coach it or catcher who's caught it before and so janice who's been around the block for a while he's said that he's essentially been on his own since he really seriously started throwing the pitch and he's just kind of been self-taught and he has to course correct as he goes and so this camera that has revealed things that he couldn't see otherwise has been really valuable for him because he can't tell the difference really between a good knuckleball and a bad knuckleball. He can kind of tell maybe if the catcher has trouble catching it or something, but it's either rotating a tiny amount or it's rotating a little bit more, but not enough to actually be able to see it. And so there's less feedback than you get with a typical pitch. So that's the upshot of this, that there are a few pitchers who are still throwing us in the minors. In the minors, the pitch is about as common as it's been for the past few years or so, so there's not a significant downturn there.

And all of the ones I talked to have used these high-speed cameras and credited it for some improvement or another. The other thing that I talked about in the piece is that robot umps could be the big breakthrough for knuckleballers, potentially, because knuckleballers really get screwed over by human umpires more so than other pitchers and i talked to a bunch of knuckleballers

and they all said sort of the same thing that they felt like they get jobs because they have these pitches that are all over the place but then they settle into the strike zone and because catchers don't receive them cleanly and because they don't look like they're going to be strikes most of the way they don't get called strikes and the data backs that up very much the knuckleball is the off-speed pitch that is called most incorrectly and it's also the pitch of any type that is least often called a strike when it is taken in the strike zone and so Robot umps could be a big Boost to knuckleballers both because of that

Maybe they'd get more strikes if the Strike zone definition stays the same And also because catchers Won't really have to catch the Pitch cleanly anymore they'll still Have to block it if they're runners on base But otherwise they can Really do the popabuker thing

and just wait until it stops rolling to pick it up if they feel like it, or they can just kind of get in front of it, but not have to anticipate where it's going to end up, which the whole point of the knuckleball is that you can't do that. So I like the idea that technology could help bring back this pitch that kind of defies analysis in some ways but in other ways there are things that you can do with it even though it's easier with many other pitch types so i'm i'm cautiously optimistic that the knuckleball will be with us for a while so the strike zone is is three dimensions and when stat cast records the location of a pitch though it's not they i mean they have to pick a place right where they say that the pitch crossed the plate is that right

yeah i don't know what my question is exactly if the if there was a robo ump would it be three dimensions would you only have to catch the plate at some point along the plate? It's when it crosses the plane of the plate, isn't it? Or am I just imagining that? I think that that is how it's supposed to be. Yeah. As long as you catch some part of the plate at some point along the plate, then it's a strike.

But I don't know how the robot would work. I guess it would not be, well, as long as it's a strike but i don't know how i don't know how the robo would work i guess it would not be well as long as it's three dimensions as long as it has like sort of a range of places where it is allowed to be in the strike zone as long as it is like within the strike zone at some point in the foot plus that it has to travel to get over the plate, then it would be called a strike, presumably. Is that your presumption? Yeah, or you can calibrate it. I don't know how precisely you can calibrate it in that dimension, but presumably the system knows where the plate is, right? And so it would know when it crosses that plane. Okay. All right. It's off topic. Yeah. We'd have to ask someone who knows about the specifics of these things.

But yeah, I am kind of encouraged by all of that. When you are doing some article that includes research and you're talking to players about something, do you like it more when you can overturn the conventional wisdom or when you can confirm the conventional wisdom? Because I've done both. I've enjoyed both. But which gives you a greater thrill? turn the conventional wisdom or when you can confirm the conventional wisdom because i've done both i've enjoyed both but which gives you a greater thrill i'm trying to think of an example of either one like what is a for instance here well i don't know i mean i want it i like it when they confirm the thing that you want them to confirm like you wrote the article like you decided to generally speaking you don't set off going i'm just going to write about a topic you usually write about you know you have

a thesis about a topic and you're really you you're hoping that and usually the thesis comes from an observation or the collection of some data or something you've heard or something that you have a reasonable reason to believe is true and And so then you want that, that to be true. But I don't think that it's, I don't think I have a bias toward, I think if anything, I'm probably, if it's a, okay, here's my answer. If it is a topic that is well trod that lot that other people write about, and that I am maybe just adding to the full literature on that topic. I am hopeful that it will confirm. I am,

I am not a bold, courageous trailblazer when it comes to overturning conventional wisdom. I'm a little scared. And I would say, so in those cases, I, I like it when it upholds the conventional wisdom, but in a novel and newly persuasive way.

If it is a topic that I have all to myself, then I like it to overturn the conventional wisdom in as much as there is any conventional wisdom. So for instance, dropping the bat. There is no conventional wisdom about dropping a bat except you know most batters just no data either really right and so so yeah so in that okay so that's my answer well so you can get a whole article out of proving that something people think is not true that fills a slot for you that checks off a box. I have to write an article. Here's something that people are saying and people think is true. And I have the evidence to show that they're actually wrong and it will be surprising and maybe it will change people's

minds. And that can be fun and exciting. It happens probably less often these days than it used to when you could very regularly find people saying things that weren't true about baseball, which is a little less common today. But I also kind of like confirming something that players instinctively know without looking at the numbers. It can be kind of satisfying to say, hey, players had it wrong this whole time, and they've been playing for a century plus, and they thought this thing that somehow wasn't right, or at least that we currently think isn't right based on the information we have. But it's also kind of nice to have it confirmed that people who

do this for a living and are supposed to be the best in the world at it actually do know what they're talking about. I kind of like that too. So when I talk to knuckleballers and they say, yeah, we have fewer strikes called for us, part of me is thinking, well, of course they think that. Maybe slider pitchers think that. Maybe change-up pitchers think that. you more so than the ones that go for you. And everyone thinks that they're an above average driver and maybe every pitcher thinks that they have fewer calls go their way. So that was one hypothesis as I had, as I heard this from knuckleball after knuckleballer. But then when I saw that, nope, that's actually true, that was kind of heartening. I guess partly because it allowed me to make the case that robot umps will actually change things for knuckleballers in a meaningful way. But even so, I kind of liked having that conventional knuckleball wisdom confirmed. Yeah, that seems like...

So in that case, your question, you were happy that the data supported what the players were telling you? Yes. Okay, I definitely like it when the data confirm what the sources tell me uh-huh so regardless of what they tell me if they say something about anything the worst thing is when you get back to your desk and you find out that what they thought was true is not true because it usually does you very little good at that point like you're not just going to dunk on them usually i mean depending on what the topic is but usually now you just have a worthless interview. Turns out that they didn't happen.

And it can be, I guess, kind of fun to track it down and find that, no, it never happened. And this player is misremembering and the fallibility of human memory. And we invent these things. But it's also kind of nice when you are able to confirm it and say, yeah, this thing that this guy remembered from 50 years ago, it happened on this day in this inning against this pitcher. And it was real. So there's something to be said for both of those things i guess i just i like evidence i like proving or disproving things so i'm glad that baseball allows us to do that so well yeah all right all right let's answer some emails this one is not really a question but i wanted to mention it because it's kind of fun or unfun depending on your

perspective. Curtis wrote in to say, and this is still true, I was looking at Baseball Savant today and noticed that Billy Hamilton's max exit velocity this season is 99.9 miles per hour. I looked back through the years that are available since 2015 and noticed that no one with at least 100 batted ball events has not hit a ball over 100 miles per hour. He goes on to say that Ben, your dream of a fun Royals team has been realized. And this is the chase to watch for the rest of the season, except that, of course, Billy Hamilton is no longer on the Royals. So Royals still not that fun but this is kind of not fun in that i wish that billy hamilton were better at hitting baseballs because it would make him more fun as a player but on the other hand this is now something that i'm kind of paying attention to even though the baseball savant stat cast era is so short that it can only be so meaningful it still perfectly captures the kind of player that Billy Hamilton is. And it's 99.9? Yes.

Wow. Yeah. So he doesn't hit the ball hard. We knew that. But the point is that he never hits the ball hard. Not that he just doesn't do it regularly, but that he is physically incapable of doing it even one time. Do you want to guess what the hardest he's ever hit a ball is? Oh, I will say 104.

107. Oh, all right. Yeah. Ground out. Okay. As it goes. So he has it in him or he had it in him. Yeah.

Yeah. That was in 2016. Oh, okay. You want to guess how hard Dee Gordon has ever hit one? 108. 10? Wow. 106.9.

So the same, basically. All right, one more. You want to guess how hard Terrence Gore has ever hit one? Ooh, okay. Small sample, but I will say, I wonder if he's even, huh? I'll say 99. Yeah 99 yeah 99 99.3 all right then didn't we only have am i right that we only had one ball over 100 in the pacific association oh that we tracked which we didn't we only had i think that that may have been true, but that was hit FX, which was different from StatCast and had a lower baseline.

Now that I think about it, there was actually a report when the Braves picked up Hamilton that he was going to do the pre-2019 Terrence Gore thing for them and that he would only play the field and pinch run. But he has made 21 plate appearances for them so far. Still fewer chances to get that elusive triple digit exit speed. All right. This one is from Hoodie. It has the subject line. Nobody's hit four bombs in one game in 2019. And the email says it just seems odd that nobody has done this in 2019, the homeriest season ever. After looking at the 18 who have done it however they don't seem particularly clustered during times when home runs were more frequent so maybe it is a more randomly occurring event than not anyway just curious if i'm honest i thought somebody might

hit five this year and it is sort of strange if if all i knew was everything but this if i knew about the home run rate and the number of players who have hit two in a game and three in a game, I'd probably guess that someone had hit four in a game. That's without running the numbers and looking at the odds or anything. It just feels like someone should have done this by now. because if you look at the number of players who've hit two in a game, we are up to, entering Wednesday, 384 such games. The record is 396, so we're probably going to pass that this month. And the number of three-homer games is up to 20. The record is 22, so good shot at passing that as well. And yet we have not had the four homer game Which has happened twice in two seasons

2017, which of course was the previous high homerun rate year And 2002, which was a high homerun rate year But not as high as many of the surrounding seasons So nothing in particular about 2002 that would lend itself to that yeah well we were just talking about the reverse phenomenon of how because so many fun facts or records involve the clustering of somewhat rare events if you increase the likelihood of the event a little bit you increase the likelihood of a clustering of it a bit more, it seems like. And so it does seem like the chances of a four homer game in the abstract or in the theoretical would be like a lot higher, would be much higher. And it just must be that the odds of a four home run game, even in really good circumstances, are just really extremely long and so when it happens

that's in any other season that's way off the odds like maybe it should happen every 10 years and so when it happens in one season that's already like 10 times more often than it should have and maybe now it should happen say every three. And so the fact that it has not happened this year is only a little bit rarer than you would expect. Yeah, I think that's probably right. I'm going with that. season single player records as we've discussed has been broken and all of the clustering records have been broken and the consecutive games with two homers has been broken and consecutive games with three homers has been broken and no one's done the thing that scooter jeanette did so it is strange but also probably not that strange do you know if anybody has homered in four consecutive plate appearances this year? I don't know that.

So I guess there's still a chance that it could happen. I mean, obviously there's games to go, but September is a pretty homery month, right? Because you've got all the September pitchers coming up. And so I don't know might still happen i don't know how many of the four home run games have happened in september but if i had to guess i would guess slightly more than than the norm i'm gonna look it up while you talk about something else all right question from max in san francisco In episode 1422, you mentioned that under 1865 rules, all catches were outs, even ones in the stands. Let's say MLB still had this rule. What would be the ramifications?

Would fans have to try out for lower level seats? What would be the optimal spacing? Would the Yankees outspend everyone by employing ex-minor leaguers as fans? What about visiting fans fans what would baseball look like in a world where all catches are out slightly more than normal have come in september but only slightly we've been asked this question i think four times in the last six months and three times i have said that i refuse to answer it because i just didn't have it in me to talk about the darkness of, of people because it seems clear that what would happen is that a fan would drop a ball when he needed to catch it, that the other team would,

would hit a ball to him and in a big moment, and it would bounce off his hands. And then that player would go on to hit the game winning home run and say game six of the Nlcs and everybody would would hate him and he would have to have security guards take him out of the stadium and maybe even the security guards would hate him and maybe they'd pummel him outside the stadium and it would just be really really violent and and horrible and the first time i thought this through i just i realized what a gift it is that we as fans are not expected to do anything. That is the greatest gift of being a spectator is that they drew boundaries that you don't do anything to help it. All you can do is shout go team. And that doesn't really seem to do much.

And it feels like it'd be nice to have some agency, to have some influence, to have some power over this thing that you care so passionately about, so emotionally about. But in fact, what a blessing that you don't have that power. Not only because crowds are vicious and mean and strangers are unforgiving, but also because you would just be so unforgiving of yourself. You do not want to have the burden of having missed a crucial catch in a huge moment that could have saved your team on your conscience. You just don't, you don't ever want to be responsible for it. You're not qualified. None of us is qualified to do what the baseball players are doing and it is much better that they created rules uh that that free us that absolve us of any possible

influence other than the most extreme examples of reaching over into the field of play well you say it seems clear that a fan would be in that position of screwing up and being scapegoated by it you think they would just put fences around? You think they'd put nets everywhere? I don't know what would happen. You could imagine that there just wouldn't be fans, or at least there wouldn't be fans in certain sections of the ballpark, right? No, because the home team would get to set the layout of their park, and the home team would presumably have a huge advantage

because their fans, assuming their fans are not total doofuses right that's the problem to own well i don't think it would be i mean we we we do much more complicated things than only catch it when the the gray guys are batting right like we drive cars we we can handle only catch it in the bottom in the top half of the inning, don't you think? Now we would drop a lot of them. We would still, we wouldn't, I'm not so worried about a fan catching a ball that their own team hit.

I think that after, certainly after a few decades of this, but probably after a few games of this, we would all know pretty well which ones to catch. And I don't know if a visiting fan would have the guts even to try to catch one when the home team is batting. So I think in that case, the home team would have a real incentive to make it easy for the fans to catch the ball. Yeah. But I think that, you know, I just think that you'd get a can of corn and it's hard to catch it and you'd botch it and then you'd feel terrible but you don't think that the home team would just have a bunch of ringers in

the ballpark and and seal off the lower sections that's what you're saying they definitely do that right you'd have that's my question no i mean okay what you could be right so let's figure out the math here. It would be worth it, right? Because there aren't that many catchable foul balls, but there are a fair amount, especially in today's game where there are more foul balls hit than ever. So it would be worth it. Say three to six per game. So maybe five outs per game. You turn five average expectation enormously valuable

so ten million dollars a win so you have 50 000 50 000 fans so you could sell let's say let's say you average 80 per fan with tickets etc so that's uh four million dollars per per game so you could buy out the whole stadium for $4 million. And if that gets you even half a win, then you're right. I'm sorry for interrupting you. You were right all along. Oh, I interrupted you again. Go.

Keep going. You're blowing my mind. Except that part of that calculus that a win is worth X millions of dollars is that you're presuming that if you win more games, you're going to draw more fans. And so if you're taking that possibility out of play, because you don't even want fans, then you're not making money from attendance and from concession sales because you have stuffed the ballpark with people who are paid to catch foul balls. you have stuffed the ballpark with people who are paid to catch foul balls so you've already thought the next step through right which is that you sell you sell two-thirds of the park so right two-thirds of the park is basically out of foul territory yeah you figure out where the foul balls

and so then by actually you're costing yourself some money in ticket sales but by creating greater scarcity and also always you know well you wouldn't always have a winning team because you would have to do this just to keep up with all the other teams who are also doing this right so you're not going to build a super team you know the irony here is that if you're the say you're the orioles and you're rebuilding and you don't care if you win it you could as part of your rebuilding you wouldn't have to close off those seats yeah on the other hand no one wants to go to your games and you can't sell them anyway they're they're basically

like you know just printing out fake money anyway so that's the irony but yeah i think you could probably still sell 25 000 seats or something and sell them for a little bit higher price. Yeah. And so would there be a PR backlash if you roped off those sections and said fans can no longer have the best seats because we are going to pay former players or whatever to stand there and prepare to catch the balls? Except going further, would fans even want fans to be in those seats because they want to win the games? So fans, if these were the rules, then fans would want to maximize their team's chances of winning the game. And so fans, it would almost be like a duty for fans not to attend the game and sit in those seats, even if they were allowed to. not to attend the game and sit in those seats even if they were allowed to because they should know that they are costing their team a chance to win by sitting in that seat and so there'd be like a whole culture of fan shaming if if you were to sit in those seats if you were allowed to because what kind of fan are you are you a good fan if you're prioritizing your viewing experience over the team's chances of winning the game?

I don't believe there would be any seats. I think that if you really wanted to have the best chance. Yeah, you'd remove the seats so that the person could run around. You're not going to literally fill every seat with the next ball player. You're not going to to like hire 18 000 very skilled ball players for every game that would be counterproductive because they'd be getting in each other's way and then you can't you but you have to have them be able to cover ground you don't want them running up and down aisles of uh fold up seats and so you would remove all the seats probably and have like you know 15 people cover the whole lower section

and then you'd have to say then then the question is would there be rules about that yeah i mean what like could you could you actually put your own players into the stands your bench guys your bench guys yeah, let's say you couldn't. What caliber of ballplayer do you think you could recruit to do this job? And would there be an arms race where you would have the Yankees just outbidding the other teams so that the Yankees would have like, they'd be paying exorbitant salaries to have like, like active minor leaguers would retire to be the yankees foul ball catcher and that's all they would do 81 games a year would you just would it be like former college

players who are still pretty good because actual pros consider this demeaning or no it's not worth their while i think that you wouldn't range would not be an issue so like you don't need to have anybody who's remotely as good as a as a professional fielder because they don't have to worry about range you can have enough of them that everybody only has to cover 18 feet you know the 18 feet around them or so and so as long as they can catch a ball that's hit more or less right at them then you're good and i think that there's thousands of idle adults who could do that especially with a little practice and you know it's a it's it's something that like i probably would not be good enough but if i were i would happily do it for free for my favorite team i mean it would be quite the source of pride right that's the other thing it's kind of a prestigious

role it's like a you get to oh in a baseball game for a few hours. Oh, but now I'm doing it again, Ben. Now it's back to me. I don't want to do it. Well, yeah, you're not good enough. You can't do this. Thank goodness. Yeah. So you wouldn't have to pay people that much probably because they're at a baseball game and how bad is that? On the other hand, it's not like being at a baseball game under normal circumstances you'd be at work you'd be under pressure on every pitch you'd basically be in the game so it wouldn't be much fun especially because if you messed up you'd be the goat in the bad kind of goat i hate that goat is both the the bad thing and the good thing. It's kind of annoying when you say it, at least. But yeah, it would be a high-pressure job. And so, I don't know, you'd have to pay people something,

and then there would be an escalation, because I think there's a difference in sure-handedness between an average athletic person and a former professional player. So you'd want like prime age recently playing players with pedigree i think and you could probably pay people enough to do that job would it be against the unwritten rules and would it also be against any sort of law to send your own ringers in undercover because because it would be i mean the value added of a slightly better foul ball catcher is is pretty minimal like they they like like i said they i think

there are thousands of qualified baseball catchers that could basically do the job and and you could get better ones the yankees could recruit slightly ones, and that might be a couple of balls a year. But the value of someone who will intentionally drop a ball is greater. Yeah, that's true. So if you really wanted to put your money into this. Double agents. Right. Yes. If you were the Yankees, what you'd really want to do is flood Craigslist in 29 other ballparks.

Yeah. Huh. Yeah, you could really get people to throw the game. I mean, I guess maybe it would be you'd have foul ball catchers banned from baseball for life for throwing games in this way. It's sort of a fascinating social experiment, but very bad for baseball. Yeah. Terrible for baseball.

Yeah. I wonder how this worked in 1865 uh there were like probably just didn't matter right there were like 60 people at the game and nobody was keeping nobody was really keeping score being paid much if anything yeah okay well this would not transfer well to today's game yeah Yeah, yeah. No, it really wouldn't. It wouldn't. Although I do think that I feel like you thought this through a little better and you have at least eased my concern about mob violence. Yeah. All right.

Do you have a stat plus? I do. Oh. Let's go. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA minus or OBS plus So years to taste a bust. So this one comes from a question that Mike asked, and I liked it so much I wrote about it, and I think it'll be on ESPN on Thursday. So Mike says, I'm fascinated with the 2014 Tigers. They had so much talent on paper. They had Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Miguel Cabrera, David Price, Ian Kinsler, and Anibal Sanchez in their primes.

Joe Nathan, Victor Martinez, Torrey Hunter, and Joachim Soria passed their primes. And Eugenio Suarez, Rick Porcello, Robbie Ray, Nick Castellanos, and J.D was dedicated to winning baseball games in 2014. But in a sense, all those players, you know, they were their teammates for life. They're in the record books and the stature, uh, the collective stature of that team in a way is affected by what comes next. Like Eugenio Suarez was not doing much for the 2014 Tigers, but when Mike was listing these names and then he got to suarez i went oh yeah suarez and he's really good too now and so it continues to in a in a sort of weird way reflect glory upon the team the thing i kept thinking about was that that tumblr site i think it's

a tumblr site awesome people hanging out together do you know that one yeah and so like it's like you know freddie mercury and pope john paul and you're like dang that's a cool picture and in a way it it's cool when they're both at the height of their fame but it's also cool if it's like george clooney as a child hanging out with like gary cooper at like a grammys party or something like that and you you're like, wow, that too. And Eugenio Suarez in this is like young George Clooney. And so I asked Dan Hirsch to do this one because it's a tough one to query. And so of course the day-to-day roster changes

make it impossible to say like on any given day what the roster is. But we have, you know, the career war for each year of each team. And so he sent it to me. And so I'll just tell you the answer. The team with the most career war is definitely not the 2014 Tigers. The 2014 Tigers, incidentally, are 395th. They will continue to go up because Suarez and Martinez and Castellanos and Scherzer and Verlander and a few others are all still making war. But they're 395th, which is pretty good. The number one, and I think they have something like 500 career war. The number one team is the 1928 Philadelphia Athletics. So the Philadelphia Athletics, like there's a little bit of a flukiness to how their team came together.

of a flukiness to how their team came together. And there's a lot of it just being a serendipitous overlap between a lot of great players from the sort of previous run of Philadelphia A's bolstered by a couple of signings, and then also the arrival of the next group of A's all at the same time. So they had career war. They had 1,138 career war on that roster. The Tigers, by comparison, had 631. So there are 500 war ahead of the Tigers. And so they had, this is like pretty kind of bonkers if you think about it. In 1928, if you looked at the war, the career war leaderboards in 1928 if that had existed and you were looking at it the number one two and four players in history were all on the a's so they had the best second best and fourth best players who had ever lived at that point i mean technically babe ruth had lived and he was gonna pass and so maybe that's a misleading way of

putting it but first second and fourth because they had signed Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker before the 1927 and 1928 seasons. They signed Eddie Collins to sort of finish out his career before the 1927 season. So all three of those players were there. And so after Speaker joined in 1928 and Jimmyimmy fox debuted they had those four so jimmy fox would so if you look at the war leaderboard today cob and speaker are each in the top six and collins is uh i forget but he's also very he's like 11th or something like that jimmy fox is 25th al simmons is 77th he was on that team mickey cochran hall of fame catcher is 205th lefty grove sixth all-time

pitcher jack quinn 66th all-time pitcher they had seven other players who played at least 15 years in the majors and they had other players besides those seven others who were longtime major leaguers, named on all-star teams, earned MVP votes. And so they had this just absolutely incredible collection of baseball history. That is not the same as being the best team in baseball. They were not the best team in baseball that year.

The next, after that year, I think Cobb and Speaker, I think, retired. And then Collins retired not long after that. And the A's actually just kept getting better as a team in the moment. So they would, for the next three years after that, they would be one of the great teams of all time, like maybe one of the five greatest teams of all time. So I'm just wondering, Ben, if you had, let's say you had a time machine that could only go into the future, and you took that time machine to go somewhere in the future

where a time machine exists that can go to the past, and then you use that time machine to go to the past. And you could either see the 1928 Philadelphia Athletics, who had the greatest collection of great baseball players in in history, or to let's say the 1931 Philadelphia Athletics, who won 107 games in 154 games season and who were in a three-year run where they won two world series and lost a third and had a three-year run where they won more than 100 games each year more than 102 games each year in fact in that 154 game season so in one case they are maybe the best team of all time and in another case they're maybe the greatest in a sort of Hall of Fame kind of capital G great team of all time.

Which would you rather see? The latter, for sure. Which one? I'd rather 28. Yeah, the Cobb and Speaker. I want to see Cobb and Speaker. baseball history represented and be able to tell my grandkids or grandparents or whoever it is in this time travel scenario that I saw more of these legendary players. Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I think that that was a really special team. And there was something romantic about that idea of

having just so much history on the field. And in fact, I wrote this in the article, but like you could go to a single day, like there was not a game where everybody who I just named played. There was a day where everybody I named except Eddie Collins played. And so you could have gone on that day and seen all of that, like incredible.

It seems like just maybe the greatest day of baseball that you could go to in history and it was all there so that record the 1928 Philadelphia Athletics that record has held ever since I wrote a lot of what I wrote most of what I wrote was about looking at the teams that that are still quote unquote active in by this measure and that have a chance that that are kind of within range or could be within range but the the second best team well pretty much all the other best teams are the new york yankees it's just like all yankees all the way down like like half basically half of the top 100 are yankees teams and almost all of the top 25 are yankees teams but hundred are Yankees teams and almost all of the top 25 are Yankees teams, but Philadelphia A's worked their way in there. The let's see, the 2000 Yankees were the first team to ever clear

a thousand. So the A's were at 1138. As I said, it took until 2000 before another team even got to a thousand. And that was the 2000 Yankees with Roger Clemens and they got to 1017. So this Philadelphia A's team is really something. This is a record that is, I don't know, is it a record? I don't know. It's, as I wrote, it's a record that was set by a team long after it had ceased to be a team. So I don't know if you call it a record or you don't call it a record, but it has been very durable and maybe it will never be broken. I sort of tried to figure out whether i think that it's more likely or less likely that it would be broken now than in 1928 and it seems logically that the answer is that it would be more likely because rosters are bigger you have more team more players and

therefore kind of more career seasons theoretically more games and also more games but there are reasons that it would be harder one of the reasons that it would be harder is that it's uh now that players get paid uh what they're worth it's just a lot harder to hoard all the good players whereas uh in the old days there was no there was no restriction on that you you had to get the players you had to have a certain amount of talent to to acquire them all but there was no like hard cap on it in the way that like the real the realities of payroll kind of put a little bit of a hard cap on how many of the world's best players you can conceivably have at one time but i mean obviously i think that the answer is that it is in some ways harder in some ways easier but it's definitely possible that a

team could pass the uh the a's in the right circumstances uh because the closest competitors the closest challengers in history have been fairly recent and in fact the two closest challengers are actually still still active still still adding more so it could happen i think i think it probably will happen what are the closest challengers the closest so the 2005 yankees are the closest they're at 1103 so they're 35 war behind and the 2012 yankees are 102 war behind um and um and unsurprisingly the very recent years of the dodgers yanke, and maybe even Astros have kind of like a wide range of possible outcomes, but they have large collections of superstars as well. If I had to bet on a team that exists that has so far played, I would bet on the 2017 Dodgers to get

there. But probably I think that the team that does this most likely has not yet played. Yeah. It's funny that the A's were the team to do this because you were just saying that it was maybe a little easier to keep your talent together at that time because players weren't paid what they were worth. But the A's always had trouble paying their players even at that time. And they had one of the first massive fire sales with Connie Mack's team going from the 1914 A's to the 1915 A's. And he had to basically sell their vaunted $100,000 infield because he couldn't or wouldn't keep that team together. So kind of interesting that it was a Connie Mack team that did this. I had actually interpreted this question as asking which team had the most career war looking backward only at any one time. I think the fact that Eugenio Suarez is named in it. Yeah, whether or not

it was meant that way, I think your way is probably more interesting, but also it was maybe meant that way too. Dan actually answered both and I ignored the, I didn't even look at the other spreadsheet because it was not what I wanted to answer. But, in fact, the 2005 Yankees have already set that record. The 2005 Yankees that, dang it, I should have, could have put that in the article. The 1928 A's are only seventh if you simply go backwards the 2005 yankees with randy johnson alex rodriguez mike mucina kevin brown gary sheffield bernie williams derrick cheater jason giambi al lighter mariana rivera had um 864 of their eventual 1100 war already in that year i might send in an update all right this question is from Dario in Brisbane, Australia.

Some may remember Dario from not paying any attention to baseball over the past offseason and then finding out everything that his favorite team, the Mets, had done and that all teams had done on opening day, which we followed along with at the time. Now, Dario says, I think that MLB should commission The great baseball survey There are so many initiatives that are trying To draw more people to the game but there seems To be a dearth of data on what people

Really want I for one hate Nearly all of the changes that are proposed They could run a campaign like they do With all-star voting to garner responses Including quaint paper surveys at games What should the questions Be and like they do with all-star voting to garner responses, including quaint paper surveys at games. What should the questions be? And MLB probably does some of this because I know that Rob Manfred talks from time to time about how they have surveyed people and fans like Home Runs and he claims strikeouts.

So I assume that they've actually done some sort of polling or surveying. But I was talking to someone at MLB about this last week, actually, and that person was pointing out that the problem with a great survey to decide what baseball should look like is that the respondents to that survey are going to be people who are already watching baseball and probably the most committed baseball watchers. And if you run a survey like this, one of the questions you want to answer is how can we increase interest in the sport and how can we attract people who are not currently watching baseball? And those people are not going to answer the survey or not going to know how to answer the survey because they don't already watch baseball. So you have to figure out what questions you're trying to answer. Do you want the people who are already consuming your products to like that product even more? Or do you want people who don't watch baseball to start watching baseball? And those might be two very different questions

with two very different answers that could conflict in some cases. Not an expert on this, but it seems to me that there are enough people who watch baseball at a low enough frequency that you could probably safely do focus on increasing the frequency that they consume baseball, that you don't really at this point worry about the people who don't ever watch baseball. There are literally billions of people who don't ever watch baseball. And it's probably not worth trying to get a handle on why they don't. The reasons that people don't watch baseball are probably millions. So you just probably put those people aside for now, focus on the people who watch, say, some baseball, but not that much, and figure out what would make them watch a lot

more baseball. And probably if those people watched a lot more baseball, then a lot of the people who don't watch any baseball would then start watching more baseball because they'd be like, what's this thing that people are doing doing i keep hearing about baseball all of a sudden everyone's talking about baseball yeah i'm i mean i yeah i don't know my constant thing here is that like a lot of people watch because other people are watching yeah and so what you have to do is get more people to watch and if more people watch then then more people will watch and so in a sense as long as as long as you're not focusing too much on like me like the very very very hardcore the people who are you wouldn't want to survey our audience you wouldn't right because we're

we're not only are we already pretty much as saturated as as we're going to get. But probably a lot of us in a weird way value, like we want it to only be ours. Like we are territorial about it. We are probably somewhat elitist about it. We don't have a desire to have, I mean, in our heart of hearts, we probably don't have a desire to have a much more popular sport. We are content to have it be our thing that only we share. It's an inside joke that we

all share with each other and so in a sense probably it's not just that there's not a lot of benefit to going after us as that we are somewhat counterproductive to the aims of growing the game much larger true but i mean you know most people who watch baseball the the overwhelming majority of people who watch baseball are not like that and um i think you could survey them without i don't know the idea that like you can't survey baseball fans because they're already watching baseball feels a little weird to me there are millions of people who consume baseball in some form and in like dramatically different levels of engagement. And I would survey them.

I'd want to know what they want. I don't know. I don't really believe that surveys are probably that effective. I don't know. I have a hard time thinking that someone like, yeah, I mean, do you ever watch like family feud answers? the one benefit of asking say our audience or or us is that we think a lot about baseball and we could give you answers to questions that are very detailed and specific like it would be almost difficult to ask very casual fans what they want because how would you even frame some of the questions it It's like,

there are certain big things that you would want to know, I suppose, like, do people want a certain amount of scoring? Do they want a certain amount of action or a certain type of action? Do they care more about, say, scoring than they care about the length of games because those things are often in opposition and you increase scoring you also increase game time and so there's a trade-off to be made there at times but how do you even ask about that because you can't say like what do you want there to be 1.1 home runs to be hit per team per game or 1.4 home runs? How big do you want the bases to be? Yeah, you could ask me that and I would tell you, well, I think that, oh, I don't know,

you know, 1.15 home runs per team per game. I think that's a pretty good level. And to most people who are not looking at that baseball reference page that lists that obsessively they wouldn't really know what what that meant instinctively and so how do you frame it you could just be very broad in general and say do you like lots of dingers or not a lot of dingers or do you like lots of runs or not so many runs? Or how much do you care about game time? I guess you can just say, do you care more about this or that? And you can kind of get a sense of what the priorities are. I mean, I'm not an expert at designing surveys.

I'm sure there are ways that you could craft this so that you get at what you want to learn without asking in some extremely esoteric way that the respondents would just be baffled by what any of it meant. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I bet you a lot of people would reply to a survey that they think that there's too many steroid users. Yeah.

That it'd be that sort of... This is basically kind of what you're saying but like the the low engagement baseball fan probably has i don't know uh yeah like a not that helpful assessment of where the game is what you probably the most consequential question you could probably ask them is like what time are you most likely to watch a baseball game? And they probably already know that. It's probably already tailored to that. But how are you most likely to consume a game and what time are you most likely to consume a game?

And then make sure that there are games available to them. And I don't know what else you would really do. Yeah, it'd be hard. You couldn't, like if you just surveyed them on like what they think of each of the atlantic league rules this year or something like that i mean a you'd probably just get kind of a knee-jerk resistance to everything sometimes you need to expose people to something to show them that they like it and And so you'd probably get... Oh, Ben, I just realized how many people are going to answer

the players are paid too much. Well, yeah, right. Yeah, they're just... I mean, there's wisdom of crowds. Like, I don't want to discount the idea that the millions of people who are peripherally aware of baseball might have something to tell you because you want

those people to graduate from that group of, yeah, I'm kind of aware of baseball to our group or to a middle tier that is paying more attention to baseball and spending more money on baseball. So I don't want to say that those people have no way to help you but you'd you'd really have to think a lot about how they could help you because they just might not have kind of the the baseball vocabulary to be able to answer those questions in a way that that would be even reflective of what they themselves would think if the game looked like that maybe i'm being snobby and elitist here, but it just seems like it would be pretty tough to ask about specific rules

because have they thought through all the implications and so many rules that are probably a good thing for the game people wouldn't like just because they haven't been rules before. So you want experts in the field to be making that type of decision. But there are also times when those experts are so in the weeds that they can't even put themselves in the place of the massive audience that you're potentially turning off. The incredible business success that baseball has had over the last few decades is that they

have convinced millions of people many people the app i mean maybe even the median fan to sit and watch televised games every day it it didn't used to be that way you know you could be a an obsessive baseball fan and it didn't take very much of your dedicated time. Like you'd have it on the radio a lot and you'd talk about it with your friends and you'd maybe read about it in the newspaper and you could be an obsessive fan, but you didn't spend a lot of your time doing nothing but consuming the game unless you went to the game most games weren't on tv uh most games were on the radio and you know at first no no games were on tv obviously and then and then up until like the i think what mid 90s or so you'd have like maybe a

quarter of the games would be on tv in most markets and then they figured out that they could broadcast every game make literal billions of dollars on tv rights because they could they could deliver this huge audience this you know rather sizable audience of people who were willing to sit for three hours every day for six months. And they would watch your commercials for 500 hours a year, which is incredible, right? 500 hours a year is 1,000 episodes of Friends. Like that is so much, so many commercials. And they did that. Like that was not, that's like an incredible, I don't know what the verb is.

That's like an incredible, I don't know what the verb is. They turned their audience into a very dedicated and captive audience that they could sell to advertisers. And so in that sense, from a business perspective, I don't know that baseball would say that they could have done any better than that. It is making a lot more money right now than it ever did because of that. And the dedicated fan, the hardcore fan, is providing way more money to the league than it ever did before because now they can basically sell those eyeballs to cable carriers and advertisers. And so we are maybe, in in a sense trying to fix a problem or you know we are always trying to fix a problem that the league is like i mean you know we'll they pay lip service to the notion that you know maybe the game is has something that can be

fixed but really like i mean how thrilled they must be, right? The owners just must, if they ever step back and think about like what they've done over the last three decades, they just must pinch themselves. Yeah. Well, that's one of the things I'd actually be interested in asking or finding out if I could come up with the right way to ask it is, does any of this stuff that we talk about endlessly actually matter? Because every time you see that attendance is declining from its highest high, then someone will say, well,

it's because of the strikeouts and there aren't enough balls in play and there aren't enough stolen bases and it's a static game and all of that. And maybe, but I kind of doubt it. It's, it's a static game and all of that and maybe but i kind of doubt it it's it's possible we certainly obsess over all that stuff and i think you should try to make the game as compelling as possible but are there that many people who are staying home because the strikeout rate is 24 as opposed to 20 it's I doubt it. Maybe subconsciously if there is a little less

entertainment provided by this version of the game, then they're weighing that into their decision, but it's got to come down more to the price, the expense of going to a game, taking your family to a game, and just the amount of competing

entertainment options out there. Those seem like they would dwarf the impact of the style of play because if you like baseball, it still pretty much looks like baseball. Things have changed, obviously, in significant ways, but you would recognize this game as baseball if you went back 50 years. So I just have a hard time believing that that many people who would be going to games regularly have sworn off of those games because the strikeout rate's a little higher or the home run rate's high or there are too many pitching changes or whatever.

Maybe the pitching changes because that's time of game and that's something where it could come into conflict with your other obligations and desires. But that's one of the things I'd be most interested in answering is, does any of this really matter? Or is it just that we have this game, and the game's pretty good, and a lot of people like this game, and whether they like it or not comes down to the opportunity cost, essentially, more than it does the really intricate details of the game itself i'm reading your knuckleball article and uh i'm also listening to you very interesting stuff and uh i just noticed that you uh you you made a reference to my draft pick in the second draft the second effectively wild draft when i drafted phil necro looking old on baseball cards oh that's right yeah you linked to a blog post about phil necro looking like a grandfather on baseball cards i love that about baseball that's one of my favorite baseball things top six one of the best things about the knuckleball is that you can be a big leaguer without

looking at all like a big leaguer and you can pitch past the age where you should be able to do that and not look like an athlete so that's one of the reasons why i hope the knuckleball lives on so can we just sum up how bad the letting fans catch the ball situation would end up just just where it took us was that all the good seats would not be available to fans anymore. Yeah. Right? So that teams would, instead of having nine players, would have like 200 players, most of whom would only catch, you know, the other team's balls. balls and you would not get any of the benefit of getting to catch a ball which is the seemingly appealing thing but you would also not be relieved of any of the obligation to catch a ball because

you already don't have that obligation and it would all basically be for no real purpose yep okay good all right so let's uh not let's not do that no yeah i don't like that at all really because even occasionally you'd get a good catch you'd get someone catching a liner i assume that these players would have to catch with their bare hands like fans do except that fans can bring gloves if they want to yeah and in fact there no, there wouldn't even be a limit on the size of the glove. Like a fielder in the field has to have a glove that's like 12 or 13 or whatever inches, but there are no rules for fans.

And since these are theoretically nominally fans, they could bring butterfly nets if they wanted. Yeah. This would be very much like the early history of baseball where ostensibly everyone was an amateur, but the teams that really cared started paying players like under the table. And so they weren't really amateurs anymore. So these players would be kind of like that. They'd be fans, but in name only. And yeah, you'd get some cool catches, I guess, but you'd only be deprived of

action that would have happened in the game because usually the game would have continued and you'd just get to see the hitter keep hitting and maybe the fielder make a play eventually. Now it would just be this foul ball catcher making the catch instead. And it wouldn't be particularly fun because a lot of foul balls are just lazy pop-ups and it's not impressive to watch that at all it's kind of fun when you see like a a ball boy or ball girl make a catch that's like difficult but part of the appeal of that is that it's a non-professional young person making the catch and so if this is just ringers then you don't even get that and all to take money directly from the players because you'd have a lot less revenue in the game because all those seats would be not being sold.

Yeah. It's pretty terrible all around. Perfect. So we started this episode with a fun fact that I found in the Facebook group and failed to impress you with. So can we end on another that I also saw in there? Oh, yeah. I'm ready to be impressed. This one's going to go better. I know it. failed to impress you with so can we end on another that i also saw in there oh yeah i'm ready to be impressed this one's gonna go better i know it by the way this is what lorenzen said about the fun fact about him to me it's just a funny little stat like a baseball stat i'm not

too into the statistics like that but i know for a lot of people it means a lot it's cool for a lot of other people but not for mr sam miller i guess when he said to me it's just a funny little stat i guess he means it's a it's a fun fact i mean i'm i'm overwhelmed with admiration for michael lorenzen yeah he's starting in center field on thursday by the way yes pretty cool exactly the fun fact to me to admit now next one though this i'm i'm really excited to be okay overwhelmed here we go so i think this was on twitter i think christopher kamka from nbc sports chicago found it or at least that's where i see it so i don't know if you've seen it already but cody bellinger has hit 44 home runs this season, and he's hit them off of 44 different pitchers.

Oh, okay. And that's one that sounds interesting. It sounds impressive, but you need a little context, I think, to understand whether that's actually impressive. So it is a record, or it would be a record, if he does not hit a home run off a pitcher he's already homered off of this season the rest of the way. The record currently is 40. Albert Pujols hit 40 homers off of 40 different pitchers in 2015. So Bellinger would blow away this record. Ben, you know where this is.

You know I'm not going to like this one. For a little more context, Adam Ott in our Facebook group, he is a RetroSheet wizard, and he did some querying, and he determined that 7% of all 20-plus Homer seasons, 1% of all 30-plus Homer seasons, and 0.3% of 35-plus Homer seasons are entirely unique in that way. So I don't know if that helps at all. So if Cody Bellinger were to hit a home run

against a pitcher he'd already homered against, that would make his season less impressive. Well, that is the problem, I guess, is that it doesn't really tell you anything about Bellinger's talent or about the difficulty of doing this, I guess. Right. It's just improbable. It's random. I guess you could say that it's like, you know, there were 44 different pitchers who were not able to figure him out or keep him in the ballpark or something. Right. The who has homered against the most pitchers in a season i i would say would be impressive and just i think that the cody bellinger one is is fun in its way i i think that is a it is

a it is an admirable fun fact i would not group it in with other accomplishments there's nothing particularly uh intentional nor impressive about it. Homering off 44 pitchers is impressive. And if somebody had homered off more than that, that would be even more impressive regardless of how many times he had hit two, three, or four home runs off of some of those pitchers. Mark McGuire hit homers off 65 pitchers. I don't think that that season would have been more interesting

if he had only hit 65 home runs. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm glad I have heard this. It is not going to affect my MVP ballot. All right, I tried. Someone else in the Facebook group pointed out that it's kind of like the birthday paradox. Yes.

It seems sort of surprising. Yeah, yeah. It would be so rare to do this, and yet it is. It's not quite like that because it's not really random in the way that birthdates are distributed. You tend to face certain pictures more often than others, and that's why it's rare. But all right. more often than others, and that's why it's rare. But all right. I enjoyed it, but ultimately the significance, I suppose,

is not really there. Yeah, I enjoy it too. And in fact, as long as we're not, wow, Barry Bonds, when he hit 73 homers, he only homered off 58 pitchers. So Bellinger could catch him. As long as we're not, I mean, a lot of times, I don't, the insignificant fun fact is incredibly fun. It is my somewhat, I don't know, nervous nature to get aggrieved when people are making too much of something. And I have a hard,

so then I cease to enjoy it on its own merits. And so this Bellinger fun fact, I'm happy to enjoy on its own merits as long as you are also enjoying it on the same level that I am. Okay, I'll take it. All right. Wouldn't it be great if I just didn't have to worry about this at all? If I just didn't think this way, wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. You could just be one of those people who's impressed by every stat and just says, wow. Wow.

All right. By the way, following up on a question that Meg and I answered on last week's last episode, a listener asked about underutilized skills in baseball games. The premise was that some base stealers who have very high success rates, in theory, should be attempting steals more often because if they're that good at it, it would pay off for them to have a slightly lower success rate but steal more bases. We were trying to think of some comps for that. A couple good ones that listeners have suggested since then. A pitcher who has a very effective pitch but doesn't throw it as often as he should. And pitchers, of course,

across the league are getting better at throwing their pitches more often if they have good pitches, whether through their own initiative or recommendations from the team based on data. But that's something you still see to a certain extent and you used to see quite a lot because of the idea that you need to establish your fastball. That was kind of the baseball dogma. And so players who had great breaking balls wouldn't throw them as much as they should have. Another one, something that Sam and I talked about on the show years ago, is that some teams have very high success rates when it comes to challenging umpire calls and getting those calls overturned, but they don't challenge often. So for instance, you see the

Yankees typically don't challenge a lot. They save their challenges for times when they have a very good chance of getting those calls overturned, and so they have a great success rate, but they don't actually get that many calls overturned. Whereas the Rays, for instance, or the Cubs, I believe, they tend to challenge a lot. And so their success rate isn't so high, but they get a lot more calls going their way, which is a lot like the stolen base example, except that the penalty for an unsuccessful challenge is a lot lower than the penalty of a caught stealing you can support the podcast on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild the following five listeners have already signed up pledge some

small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks jaunty richardson dan wood adam crow nathan valentine and sean hatch thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild you can rate review and subscribe to the podcast on itunes we've gotten a few reviews in recent days which i appreciate you can send your questions and comments for me and sam and meg via email at podcast of fan graphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine,

How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Rick Renteria is reading it right now. You can read it too. And if you like it, please leave a positive review on Amazon and Goodreads. That will do it for today. We'll be back with one more episode a little later this week, so we will talk to you then. You're not fun You're not fun You're not fun You're not fun

You're not fun You're not fun You're not fun