Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1484: Degrees of Sign-Stealing Sin

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the latest revelations about Red Sox sign-stealing, MLB’s impending punishment of the Astros, and long-term sign-stealing solutions, then answer listener emails about banning executives, the offseason coverage of the Cubs and White Sox and what it means to win the winter, why bench players aren’t displayed in box […]

You've schemed more than you have You've borrowed more than you know Better to steal the crumbs Makes it easier to go Paralyzed by conscience Looking for an opening apathy As your vocal cords cut out Hello and welcome to episode 1484 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast from Van Graffs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hey, Sam. Hey, Ben. Should we do a quick sign-stealing update before we get to emails? We're going to answer some emails for the first time in weeks. But there was another report from Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellick of The Athletic who broke the Astros' sign-stealing story.

Now they have broken the Red Sox' sign-stealing story, or I guess the newest Red Sox' sign-stealing story. So they write, before the 2018 season, after years of barely enforcing its broad rules regarding replay rooms, the league made it crystal clear replay rooms cannot be used to help steal signs. The newly clarified rules, in combination with the fines the league levied on the Red Sox and Yankees and warnings it issued in 2017, were intended to end the replay room chicanery for the Red Sox and possibly other clubs it did not. Three people who were with the Red Sox during their 108-win 2018 season told the

Athletic that during that regular season, at least some players visited the video replay room during games to learn the sign sequence opponents were using. The replay room is just steps from the home dugout at Fenway Park through the same doors that lead to the batting cage. Every team's replay staff travels to road games, making the system viable in other parks as well. So this is sort of a simpler, less pervasive system than the Astros were using. Wouldn't have been useful on every pitch necessarily. No trash can banging that we can all zero in on on the broadcast. This is essentially what you get when runners legitimately, legally pass signs to a batter, except that

those runners or batters would have been using the video replay room to crack the signs before getting on base and then relaying those sign sequences through the dugout to the batter and or runner so this is against the rules but different from what the astros were doing is it different at all ethically morally in your mind or not really hmm i feel like i maybe have missed the distinction here what's different about it Well, there's no special camera that was put in place by the team the way the Astros did, which maybe was a camera they were using for other things too. But this is the equipment that every team already has installed, the video replay room. So if that matters to you, that's a distinction. It's a known view.

you that's a distinction it's a known it's a known view yes it is and there was no relaying of signals in real time by someone banging a trash can it was like let's study this video feed to see what the signs are and then when we figure them out then we will pass them the old-fashioned way from a runner standing on second so maybe it's less efficient less effective because it doesn't work if there's no runner on second, and it's a little more old school. Right, and the signal itself is legal, right? Well, I guess there's nothing— No, it's not really, because I think you are technically prohibited

from using any technology during a game to aid you in science doing. The stealing is not legal, the the signal is legal uh the signal from second base is legal uh however i guess that's also technically true of a trash can thump uh so uh so noticing yeah i mean i think there's a uh yeah i think there's a pretty sizable distinction there i guess it's it's a matter of degree more than anything and so i maybe there shouldn't logically be a distinction there, but it feels like a pretty big distinction. You're just, you're kind of using a little technology to do the kind of cheating that everybody already does and or looks out for,

litigates. If you're signaling from second base to the batter, that is like within the established realm of something that you try to do and they try to catch you doing it and then they try to discourage you from doing it by being uh really mean to you yeah but that's legal because i mean it's legal to relay the signs because you're picking them up legally right no no i know i know i know i'm not saying that it's all the way the same as that but the core of it the core of the action is all taking place in the realm of establishment so then you're just using a tiny little extra thing to solve the signs faster but you're not using in a way your replay room video operator is part of your game team as it is like that person is already sort of that person is

already involved in you trying to win the game so you have not brought in an extra you've not brought in an extra person there's no there's no unknown spy lurking about i don't could can i make a a real reason for it to be different no but it feels dramatically different to me it is i mean it's different in the implementation it's different one would think in the effectiveness we don't know what the effectiveness of the astros scheme was but just theoretically if there's some advantage from sign stealing then the astros would be able to derive that advantage in many more situations than the Red Sox did. Maybe a hundred times as many situations because it would take a while. I mean, it might take a while to figure out which second base signals they're using anyway. Second base

signals might be changed quite conveniently. It's not hard to change your second base signals up every, you know, every couple batters since there's not players on second base all that often. And then once you've cracked them, you're only doing something that you might already be doing simply less effectively. So like you're not going necessarily from zero to 100 signs stolen, but maybe from like eight to 20. And so that's a lot. And those are just numbers thrown out out of nowhere. And so, yeah, it's a much smaller impact on top of, again, the infrastructure of an already established and accepted, in a way, accepted cheating journey.

Now, or sign relaying journey, I should say. Of course, the cheating comes into when you're using the technology. But again, the technology is already part of your game, part of the battle that you are engaged in, and you're merely using it in a wrong way. You're not inventing new technology, creating new technology, or skulking about with unknown technology. It all feels very much like the difference between looking at the test next to you, which is a, I think we all know that every person who has ever lived probably has felt some urge to look at the test next to them. And some have done it and some

have not done it and some do it constantly. And if you get caught, then you're in trouble. And so if you do it, you have to not get caught and all of that. The difference between that and breaking into the school at night and either stealing the test from your teacher's desk or hacking into the computer system or doing some like really high level, high effort thing that doesn't just show the urge to cheat that is innate in all human brains engaged in ambitious pursuits, but rather a sort of a more dedicated commitment to chicanery. Yeah, right. So what they were doing is against the rules.

They were specifically instructed, as were all teams, not to do this. They knew it was wrong or should have known it was wrong. And of course, it's the Red So sox so they had already been detected sign stealing with the apple watch scandal the previous season and and they had assured rob manfred that they wouldn't do that again now i don't know by the way what what happened after that what i forget what was the penalty for that they were fined and that was sort of when manfred said okay now we know this is happening so anyone who does this in the future, there will be very stiff penalties. And that was kind of laying down the law and saying, all right, you kind of got away with it with a fine this time,

but don't do it again because we'll really come down hard on you. And the Red Sox assured him that they wouldn't. I don't know what value that assurance really gives you because it's a different team every year. It's different players. And I don't think that ownership or management of the Red Sox was implicated in that Apple Watch scandal. So it's about the players on the team. And those are different players every year. And the new players aren't necessarily bound by the promise of the previous players. Anyway, it's against the rules, and now MLB says that it will be investigating this allegation with the same rigor that it has evidently been investigating the Astros' allegations.

It certainly seems like MLB kind of wants this to go away, like they kind of want to punish the Astros, and it sounds like we'll be finding out what the penalties will be sometime in the next week or two and then move on. I think they would like to move on and not have this be something that spreads like a brush fire from clubhouse to clubhouse, but it very easily could because this type of behavior, again, every team has a replay room and a replay monitor, and this is going back to 2018. So again, this may have already become more difficult to do like even in this story the red sox sources and granted they may not be motivated to completely tell the truth but they said that by the time the postseason rolled around a it was harder to do just because teams were on guard for this and they were switching up their signals and

so it was harder to steal the signs but b also mlb had stationed monitors in the clubhouse in the replay room whereas during the regular season it had just been unattended and you could kind of do this freely so things may have changed already and this might not be so rampant but if you asked me how many teams were doing something like this in 2018 i'm gonna guess it's not limited to one or two. And when Manfred said last month, I have no reason to believe it extends beyond the Astros at this point in time. I mean, that always seemed naive, not even naive, but just disingenuous because there was plenty of reason to think that it extended beyond. And these allegations evidently surfaced during the Astros investigation, which is not surprising because, again, these teams have Alex Cora in common. But MLB had not gone public with this until Rosenthal and Drellick did. And when they reported it, MLB said, yeah, we're investigating this too. But they don't seem motivated necessarily to put this all out in the open.

But it's, you know, once you start digging into what the Astros were doing and then maybe the people you're talking to are saying, well, we only did it because this other team was doing it. And then if you're dedicated to following it wherever it leads, then there's no telling how many places it's going to lead. Yeah, I think having uh heard more and more of the details here as we have gone i'm on vacation by the way i just want to make it clear that i have some excuse for learning this the other excuse i have is i've been stat lasting and you've had the flu yeah i'm all for it. I think the Red Sox did nothing wrong. It's just, again, I think that when you say that you think that the, what was the wording about how the Astros, they think that maybe the Astros were the extent of it and it wasn't a problem before that and you said that was naive. Yeah, I have no reason to believe it extends beyond the Astros. Yeah, I have no reason to believe it extends beyond the Astros.

Again, I think you need to draw a distinction between looking at the person's test next to you and breaking into the school. And if you think of the Astros as breaking into the school, when you catch one person breaking into the school, you don't assume that all students are breaking into the school. That doesn't mean that no cheating is going on. That doesn't mean that no cheating is going on. And I think that the Red Sox, what the Red Sox did as described here is probably something that one would quite reasonably assume their opponents are doing in with with virtually no. It is it is so like all, you know, sign stealing in other way. It is so similar to acceptable forms of sign stealing in its, you know, sign stealing in other ways. It is so similar to acceptable forms of sign stealing in its, you know, kind of basic format that you're not really inventing a new way of deceiving or, or, you know, competing against your opponent. And it is so poorly policed that, because every team has this video room. And if indeed they were not being monitored in that

situation, then you have to assume that many, if not almost all, of your opponents are doing it. And given that the, you know, morality of what happens in a baseball field are determined by the rules that are sort of established through gameplay, I think that it's fair to feel like there's nothing unethical really about it in that moment, and that it would be unilateral disarmament if you alone take some stand against video room cameras. So I think that there's again a big difference between taking what is given to you and that you assume your opponents probably are also taking and inventing a new way of cheating. Which I don't even know how I feel about that. I mean, with the Astros, I'm mostly frustrated that they didn't do better at home.

role to create a proportionate or maybe even disproportionate disincentive to do it so that teams can make a rational decision about whether this sort of behavior is worth their effort. I don't think that this is, as we said at the time, I don't think this is bad guy behavior on the level of other things that we have criticized the Astros and or other major league players and teams over the past few years for. So even them, I don't think that it's, I think it's all part of the, you know, the pro wrestling aspect of what we're watching. Like there's a certain amount of, we're just negotiating over the terms of, of what people can try to get away with, legally try to get away with and, and illegally try to get away with.

But with the Red Sox in particular, it just feels like extremely, it feels very small compared to the Astros attempts is all. Yeah, it's, it's certainly less elaborate. with but with the red sox in particular it just feels like extremely it feels very small compared to the astros attempts is all yeah it's certainly less elaborate i i think mlb's response to it has been identical and maybe mlb it doesn't feel the same about it but is obligated to do something because it is technically against the rules and so manfred said that we're going to investigate this with the same vigor and thoroughness that we did Houston. And I don't know whether the penalties, if it's confirmed that this was happening, maybe the penalties would reflect the difference in degree here.

I don't know. Maybe they'll be less severe. We'll see. Tom Verducci writes, Manfred telephoned Red Sox principal owner John Henry on Monday night to inform him of the investigation. I've got no choice here, the commissioner told Henry, which I don't know where Verducci got that. And I don't know whether that reflects his reluctance to pursue this because he doesn't want the sign stealing story to snowball or whether because he doesn't think what the Red Sox did was so serious. snowball or whether because he doesn't think what the Red Sox did was so serious. But, you know, if you're going to hold the Astros accountable and the Red Sox also violated the actual rules on the books, then I guess if you're Manfred, you have to do something. But it sounds like

he is hoping to get away from having to police these things in the future because Raducci reported, and this is kind of interesting because evidently MLB, in addition to punishing the teams that it discovers did something wrong, is also looking for a long-term solution, which I think is smart. That's something I've been saying from the start. Sign stealing goes back to the 19th century using whatever technology was available at the time. So you have to either say it's okay we're going to let you get away with anything or we're going to take away

your technology or we're going to fight technology with technology something has to change and Verducci writes according to sources Manfred is considering two different avenues to further guard against the illegal use of technology additional technology that would involve

electronic means of transferring yes that'll solve it or the elimination of all technology except the replay monitor video rooms for instance would be shut down once the first pitch is thrown so these are like diametrically opposed solutions just to more more gadgets, or let's go back to the days when there was no technology, which sounds difficult to do, I think, just to roll back that tide. Because just the movement of the world and baseball in general is more and more an increasingly sophisticated technology. To try to stem that tide, I think, is challenging. try to stem that tide I think is challenging and I do still believe that there are uncrackable methods that you could come up with that would be technology-based and I think I would probably pursue that other than just telling teams they can't use technology because I don't know the temptation would just constantly be there because technology is everywhere you can't really make it

go away it would be fascinating to see what baseball would be like if you took away the video room. Not the replay rooms, but the video rooms that hitters go back and watch their plate appearances. I wonder how much that matters. You could imagine that batting averages league-wide could drop 20 or 30 points. Maybe. Or that it would have almost no effect at all. points maybe or that it would have almost no effect at all and that that all that uh work all those trips they take back to study in between plate appearances turn out to be more uh therapeutic than actually useful they want to see if it was a strike or not well yeah and that too i mean i

certainly would not mind locking the uh locking the players up uh and having no cameras at all it i know this isn't quite what you talk about when you talk about why we don't want to have what we don't want to have coaches like radioing to the players because your your um argument is that we want to see the players decide right what's going on yeah positioning and all that we want to see the players decide and i don't know i can i sort of feel that way about wanting to see them play like once the game starts they just play baseball that yeah that they have to bring all their prep with them that you can't use modern tools beyond you know what you've prepared yourself for on the other hand it would make baseball players worse. And I don't know if I, I don't know if I would notice that or not. Um, I don't know if I would care or not.

I don't know if we, I don't know if we have an obligation to help them be as good as possible or not, but given that it would hurt hitters more than pitchers and that i think that we have i think there's more of a threat of a dead ball period than of you know too much offense home runs being the exception it's probably not the right time to think about doing that all right well i'm sure we'll be talking about science dealing again sometime soon when the astros sanctions are announced, Jeff Passan reported that it sounds like the punishments will be ownership and or maybe just management or coaches, managers, front office people, not players, evidently. And it sounds like it'll probably be in the realm of the sort of potential penalties we've discussed. So whenever that news comes out or some other news comes out, we will revisit this.

So anything before emails? Nope. All right, then let's get right to it. So this question comes, gosh, well, there's a sign stealing question from Maximiliano, a Patreon supporter who says, As an Astros fan, I've been doing a lot of thinking about potential punishments for the sign stealing affair. I've been doing a lot of thinking about potential punishments for the sign-stealing affair. I've heard the opinion that the severity of the punishment should be commensurate with how widespread this sort of cheating is. That led me to this question. Suppose MLB decides to be harsh and bans Jeff Luno from baseball for life. It comes to light sometime in the near future that several other teams were cheating at a level that would merit similar punishment. Do you think MLB would go with established precedent and issue many lifetime bans or rescind Luno's ban and find a different way of punishing this? Oh, wow. I think that that's maybe one reason that they would be really cautious about giving

a big penalty because I don't think they want to do either one. However, if it came to that, I think they would rescind or maybe just have him have an, I think they might just, his might stand because it's issued, but that sentencing basically guidelines would change. There's two reasons that you would give the Astros an extremely strong penalty. One is that you think that they're extreme outliers. And the other is that you think this is an extremely bad behavior that you want to eradicate from baseball. And so the latter is sort of like the PEDs model. And I don't think that that is the case.

I don't think that if it turned out that lots of teams were stealing signs at this level, I think that the solutions would not be to eliminate it through draconian penalties. I think they would be more along the lines of the solutions that you were talking about. They were, they, they would have to be more creative fixes involving access to technology or involving just, um, you know, a, a new discussion about what is permissible and maybe being more permissible and putting the onus on teams themselves to protect their signs in more novel ways. I don't think, though, that Major League Baseball would respond. If there were 12 teams doing this, I don't think Major League Baseball's preferred response

in any way or even natural response would be to say, all right, let's give 12 lifetime bans to people because this is everything that's wrong about baseball. It's not. It's part of baseball. this is everything that's wrong about baseball. It's not. It's part of baseball. It can be a problem and it's the league's role as the neutral body overseeing it all to manage it and to make it difficult. But it's not a crisis for baseball, even if a dozen teams are doing it. Even if 28 teams are doing it, it wouldn't be a crisis in any sort of significant way. So I think that probably in the hypothetical scenario where Luno got a extremely stiff penalty, then yeah, that would probably just be walked back. of that is that it's not just the offenses that the Braves committed, but maybe a lack of cooperation with the investigation that may have led to that very severe penalty. So I think they

would be wary of doing anything really dramatic in this case, because yes, it's possible that something else could come to light. So people have talked about vacating titles, that sort of thing, like, well, now are we going to vacate the past two titles because it's the Astros and the Red Sox and, you know, Yankees fans and Dodgers fans who are lamenting the fact that their team lost to these sign-stealing teams in back-to-back years. Well, don't be too confident that your team wasn't doing something similar, at least along the lines of what the Red Sox were doing. That could easily come to light at some point, too.

Like, you know, the Brewers, I think, at one point alleged that the Dodgers were stealing signs. And then, of course, people have alleged that the Brewers subsequently have been stealing signs. And the Red Sox responded to the Yankees' allegations about the Red Sox stealing signs by alleging that the Yankees were stealing signs. And the most important thing is that the Brewers are a collection of 25 people wearing Brewers clothes. And if you take any single one of them, even if they didn't do any stealing signs, if you take any one of them and put them in an Astros uniform, they would have gone along with it. And like nobody was, nobody was standing up at the time and stopping this when they were

on the Astros and no one was going to out of the 900 major leaguers, 750 major leaguers on active rosters, like maybe two would stand up and say something. And they're like not the good, they're not the, they're not the ones you want to be with at the party. So I think that like the, the, the attaching any of these behaviors to the team jerseys itself is already kind of arbitrary. It just so happened that Carlos Beltranran was on the astros right and yeah i mean unless we find out that there was like management level involvement where it was like a top-down thing but we haven't had any real confirmation of that yeah or strong indication of that. So the, the, somebody has to, somebody has to instigate it.

And that person is kind of different than the average player, right? Like the average player is not crafting or front office person is not crafting an elaborate system to steal every sign. So somebody is just more initiative. It takes more initiative is more, I don't know, proactive about looking for ways to do this. And I think that you could have a moral discussion about that person. I don't know where we would land. And then everybody else is just kind of like going along with the culture person. And given the low stakes involved in this, I think that it's probably fair to assume that they're almost all willing to go along with it if it's their team.

And that there's not really any distinction between the players that were on the Astros or the players that were on any of the other teams as far as their willingness to do that. And I don't think there needs to be that much moral discussion about that unless you want to have a a larger discussion about like moral rot in the game or something like that i mean this is like the the this is the mainstream behavior in major league baseball is to go along with your team when it's gotta cheat all right question from anthony another patreon supporter am i way off base here or is the way that free agency is covered in the non-sabermetric beat writer level of the baseball media extremely misleading to the general public? The reaction to the offseason seems to be based almost exclusively on the number of moves and not the overall state of the team making the moves. The White Sox are a fine and interesting team who might be a sneaky competitor in 2020,

but they're being treated like geniuses and clear offseason winners just because their team had a bunch of gaping holes that it could easily fill with low to mid-tier free agents. Meanwhile, people keep pointing out that the Cubs haven't signed any new major league contracts when the team is still projected to be better than most of the teams who are winning the offseason, quote unquote. I've been mulling over a thought experiment, and I'm almost 100% sure of the following. Imagine the Cubs had the exact same roster they do now, except that Hayward, Lester, and Darvish had all hit free agency again after last season. Then they start this offseason by re-signing them. I'm almost positive that in that universe, the Cubs would be considered one of the winners of the offseason so far. Instead, they're getting roasted in the media As one of the big losers Even though those are the exact same deals That the team currently has on its books They just signed them years ago Instead of in the last two months

Hmm, what do you think? Well, I think it depends The tenor of the coverage Certainly has been pro-White Sox Anti-Cubs Because the White Sox have been very aggressive And the Cubs have been protesting that they don't have the money to sign a single reliever, let's say. And I think many

people are tired of that sentiment. I don't know whether people are actually saying that the White Sox are better than the Cubs, though. I don't know whether anyone's really crossing over that line or whether we're just commending that type of behavior of going for it, as opposed to the Cubs, who seemingly have money to spend and keep protesting that they don't. But I think Anthony's point might be that they already have spent to some extent. Well, I think Anthony might not be necessarily saying that people think that the White Sox are a better team, but rather that we are praising the white socks approach to the off season and criticizing the cubs approach to the off season even though at the end of the day the cubs will have spent more and i i sort of get i sort of get where he's coming from and i have felt

i've debated this at times when mulling over what teams should be doing because i think one of the the changes of heart in over the last few years as we evaluate teams is that we no longer see the limits that teams place on their own payrolls as appropriate. That there is a limit somewhere, but because team payrolls broadly have not gone up with, say, the general, the industry wide revenue. And particularly because we have a little bit more of a nuanced and accurate sense of how much money owners ultimately make from owning teams through franchise value as well as other sources. And so the Cubs can say that their The Cubs can say that their payroll max is $200 million, and maybe 15 years ago, maybe $200 million or the equivalent would have been the right number.

But now we look at that, and we both say that's just simply too low. It hasn't been going up as much as it should. A bunch of you have created arbitrarily low maxes for your payroll, and that's not giving the fans of your team what they deserve. And then also, in a way that maybe we weren't commonly saying 15 years ago, you could spend more anyway. You are worth $3 billion. dollars. You should look at this as a fun hobby and a public utility instead of just another piece of private equity or whatever that you want to wring value out of. And so just go with it. Just have fun. Own the team like I would own the team or get out of the way and let someone else own the team that way. That's what would be good for the sport. And so, all right, so you take those two things together. And when the Cubs say our max is $200 million, we all roll our eyes and go, no, it's not. Come on, be real.

You could spend more than that. And don't hide behind the competitive balance tax, which is not nearly as onerous as you behave. All right, so just spend more money. $200 million is a fake limit. It's not the right limit. Spend more. Okay.

And then you have the White Sox who were spending like $80 million and go up to 140, I'm making these numbers up, and we go, ah, yes, they're moving in the right direction. But they are also not spending at or near the maximum that we know that they could afford to. And so I think what Anthony is saying is that there is an illusion of progress with a team like the White Sox when they are in fact no closer to what they could afford to spend than the Cubs are. So if we were going to criticize the Cubs for stopping at $200 million, we shouldn't be any less willing to criticize the White Sox for stopping at $140 million. And we certainly shouldn't be like applauding them because

they finally got around to getting closer, but not particularly close to what they should be spending. They were spending less than the Cubs were spending for the past year. So, yeah, right. Yeah. Well, I think there's obviously a tendency to cover the teams that are active. I mean, that happens every offseason. There's just not much to say about the Cubs because they haven't done anything and they keep insisting that they can't do anything. Whereas I think we're always more eager to talk about a team that hasn't been good in a while,

that hasn't been active in a while, and that hasn't really been all that interesting in a while, at least at the major league level, that is finally on the verge of breaking out. So we were all talking about the Padres last year at this time, and maybe we're still talking about the Padres. And now we're talking about the White Sox because they're getting to that point of being good again, or at least being very interesting again. So that's part of it. Yeah. I mean, I think it makes sense to talk about the team that is making the most news. But yes, if we're going to attribute some great aggressiveness to the White Sox, then I think it's fair to point out that the Cubs have been spending more than the

White Sox have. And as you say, maybe neither of them is spending as much as they theoretically could. Of course, I think you have to evaluate it on a case-by-case basis because maybe not every team has exactly the same financial resources. So these two teams are in the same city in this case. But, you know, the Cubs drew 3 million fans last year. They had one of the best attendances in baseball, and the White Sox did not. You could say that's because the White Sox weren't trying to contend. They weren't being aggressive last year, and so their fans didn't come see them.

But the Cubs maybe just have a greater capacity to spend than the white socks do i don't think anthony's argument depends on us drawing the appropriate payroll for both teams at exactly the same place i think that this could very easily be flipped if the cubs had gone from 120 to 200 and the white socks because they had maybe because they sold off everybody two years ago. And then maybe if the white socks had invested in Manny Machado and two other players last year, and we're already at 140 million and one 82 games and then said, well,

we're max out this off season. We can't do anything more. We would roll our eyes at that too. Like you could switch the details. I think that the point is that he's making is just that we're assessing based on kind of direction instead of absolute numbers. And also that I mean, it doesn't it's not like the White Sox, because now the White Sox spent more this year than next than last year, that they've committed to spending more next year than they did this year and more. Like the White Sox haven't just changed their fundamental relationship to money they just this happens to be the off season that they made their one big bunch of expenses that they're not like heroes or anything like

that right yeah and the white socks were getting criticized last year at this time for not really being in the market for the big free agents and not really putting a competitive offer out there for Machado and saying we want him but then not actually putting their money where their mouth was so there's that and I think there's frustration with the Cubs in general just because they seem like they're on the bubble they still have this young core of hitters this is like the moment when they should be going for it they should be trying to get better and they just missed the playoffs this past year so it's especially glaring that they have sort of sat on their hands whereas the white socks you know they're just coming out

of the time when they were bad and when maybe signing a big free agent wouldn't have made much of a difference to them at the major league level and now they're at that point where they really had to start supplementing their their homegrown core so it depends sort of where you are on the win cycle too i don't think anyone really realistically expects every team to max out their potential spending every season because there are certain seasons where there's you know essentially no point i mean you could argue that there's no point like what the marlins are doing this offseason is like what teams used to do when they were bad it seems to me like they actually have gone out and gotten recognizable players like they got jonathan vr and cory dickerson and some players you've heard of

like they got Jonathan Villar and Corey Dickerson and some players you've heard of, they're still going to be bad. I don't think they're really any closer to a playoff spot than they were before they signed those recognizable players. And I don't know that anyone's going to be buying tickets to go see Corey Dickerson either. But I feel like this is what teams used to do. Like, OK, we're going to be bad, but we don't want to be 55 win bad we want to be 65 or 70 win bad so we'll go out and sign some veterans and at least try to make it look respectable whereas now in the wake of the astros tanking it's like well why even bother to make it look respectable what's the actual difference between 55 and 65 or 60 and 70?

You're way out of the playoffs either way. So I think, you know, we've kind of become more accepting of that, or at least we had until fairly recently. All right. Snap Blast? Yeah, sure. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to DASTA+. So a couple weeks, months ago, we talked about Danny Santana and Danny Santana, the surprising breakout power hitting Texas Ranger this year. And in the middle of that discussion about him, I noted his unusual position line. So at baseball reference at the

right hand side of your player page, it lists the positions that you played that year in order of how much you played them. So if you're Nolan Arenado, it would probably say five and then maybe D for DH because maybe he played two games of DH. I don't know. And then maybe H for pinch hitter because maybe he pinch hit once. So it might say 5DH or maybe he played nothing but DH. He's David Ortiz and it just says D. All right. So Danny Santana, who was a kind of super utility player for the Rangers, who played a strange melange of positions while also being very good for them,

he played mostly first base, and then after that, mostly center field, and then after that, mostly second base, and he played every position behind the pitcher. So his position line says 3, 8, 4, 7, 9, 6, 5, and I commented at the time how unusual that combination was. And I said something like, I bet that's the first three, eight, four, seven, nine, six, five in baseball history. And so I started wondering what is the most common way for those seven numbers to line up? If you play all seven, if I, if you know that a player played all seven positions, what would you guess their most, you know, that, that those positions would be oriented as, and probably you would not think first base would be number one, because if you can handle short stop, you're probably not going to be at first base. Most of the time, if you can handle short

stop, even for a second, you're, you're probably more valuable as a second baseman or a third baseman. And, and if you can handle center field, you're probably more valuable as a second baseman or a third baseman. And if you can handle center field, you're probably more valuable as a center fielder and even an outfielder than you would be as a first baseman. Anyway, so I went looking for this answer. So I looked up everybody in major league history who played all seven positions. Now, I also, just for fun, looked at everybody who played all eight, which is the seven plus catcher. I also looked at everybody who played all nine. So there are 18 of those 18 players have played all eight and then 11 have played all nine, which is the eight plus pitcher. I'm not including DH for any of this yet. So these are not players who played eight positions,

including DH, but rather all eight. Okay. And maybe also DH. And then there are three who played all 10. So just to get that out of the way, the three who played all 10 are Jake Elmore in 2013, Andrew Romine in 2017, and Scott Sheldon in 2000. And one of the things that has really struck me, and I wrote this in my end of decade review with Brad, the thing about the Zobrist, the role of the Zobrist that is really significant is not that Ben Zobrist played a lot of positions. It's not even that he played a weird combination of positions a la Danny Santana.

It's that he did it while he was a star. He did it while he was one of the best players in baseball. Even if he had been playing nothing but second base, he would have been one of the best players in baseball for the first half of the decade. And you could say the same about Del Marte this year or Danny Santana this year. I mean, those are, those are, these are not utility players. By contrast, the three players I just named Jake Elmore, Andrew Romine, and Scott Sheldon, those are all just utility players. And in fact, they players and in fact they combined ironically they combined for negative 1.2 war so they were worse than replacement level but they

they were really good at being in the game so they were they were like the they were the the food is terrible in such small portions joke kind kind of sort of like recycled and spun around in a way. But of course, that's not true because they wouldn't have been playing if they weren't better than the alternative. So I don't mean to say that any of those three players should not have been playing, but it's just a funny contradiction between being worse than replacement level at every position such that you are somehow playing every position. Of the 18 players who played all eight positions,

so the seven plus catcher, none of them hit more than eight home runs. So those were all genuinely utility guys. That's been the model. However, since Ben Zobrist, the Zobrist has been often a player who's quite good. And so I looked at the players who've been in all seven positions in the

season. There are 138 of them in Major League history. And so now, Ben, I'm going to ask you to guess, what do you think is the most common way, the most common line, position line for those seven? Well, I would guess that probably it's more common to have more games at the premium positions and then sort of sprinkle in the less premium ones. Like, in other words, that there would be fewer people who were, say, primarily a left fielder and then also had a game at shortstop or something like that. Yeah, I would think, I don't know exactly what order it would be in, but my guess would be that you'd be mostly a harder position guy. And if you show that you can handle those, then you might fill in the odd game at an infield corner, outfield corner or something. That makes sense to me. I would think that maybe it wouldn't be the hardest position as well, because if you're your team's primary shortstop, then you're your team's primary shortstop then you're your team's primary

shortstop and there's probably not going to be a lot of appetite to have you playing a game in right field because then they have to fill shortstop they have to backfill shortstop and that's a hard one so it seems to me that maybe you'd be most likely to be like uh like a second baseman or yeah probably a center fielder, but like in a really dispersed range of games at each position so that maybe you're primarily a center fielder, but you only played like 38 games there. And it was because the main center fielder got injured.

And so you were never the A plan in center field. But okay, so all right. So that's like the broad prediction. I want your exact guess and we'll see how close you get. Oh boy. All right. that's like the broad prediction i want your exact guess and we'll see how close you get oh boy all right so uh i guess i'll go second third short stop center field first base left right okay interesting so you really see this player despite being being very utile and moved around a lot, you see this player being used primarily as an infielder. And the whole category of outfield is secondary to his role. So not bouncing out and in, bouncing left and right, and only going out and in sort of occasionally. Okay.

So that's a four, five, six, eight, three, seven, nine. And so I will first say that it was a trick question. There is in those 138, no duplicates. So my statement about Danny Santana's line being the first ever was not as profound as I had thought. In fact, there have- It's like a unique pitching line. There's so many of them.

Every one of them is unique, which surprises me because of the birthday paradox thing. Like there are 10,000 ways for these to orient, for them to line up, or maybe more. I did the math and then I forgot it because I didn't care.

But you would think that there would be, for one thing, that you would think there would be patterns like we said. And for another, once you have 130 of them, then the next one has 130 that they can land on. And then the next one has 131. So it's very easy for them to pair up. But there has never been a duplicate.

Every single one of these 138 is his own precious snowflake. And let's see what 45, five, six, eight, three, seven, nine has ever done. Four, five, six, eight, three, seven, nine has never happened. So you named what would be a first. The closest is four, five, six, eight. So you're good up to then. And then seven, nine, three. So instead of first base coming next uh first base was actually the rarest so it went both the corners and then first base at the end and that was harry howell in 1902 who did it for blah bla whatever bla stands for blah all right that said we have come close. So the closest we have come twice, there are two pairs that are exact until the final two. And so those two, one, you got extremely close to nailing. In fact, it is the ones I'm about to give you are the closest to the one you guessed, other than the Harry Howell one.

So you almost nailed it. And that's the 4-5-6-3-9-7-8, 4-5-6-3-9-8-7. And so in that case, Denny Hawking played more games at left than in center, and Jose Oquendo played more games in center than in left, but those are their those were their least played positions and everything else was identical um Hawking in 2003 Okendo in 1988 the other one that was that close is Andy Fox oh this is great This is a nice little bit of serendipity. Andy Fox and Possum Whitted. Oh, okay. Two little shrub animals.

Yeah. Andy Fox was a 6'5", 7'9", 4'3", 8". So again, mostly infield, but primary shortstop, 6'5", 7'9", 4'3", 8". Possum Whitted was 6'5", 7-9, 4-3-8. Possum-Witted was 6-5, 7-9, 4-8-3. And again, first base in both of those, I don't know if you noticed, but first base was at the end, was the rare position. First base was the rare position. So in fact, oh no, actually that's true of your guess, and it was true of Harry Howell. It's not true of Hawking and Okendo. That was true of your guess, and it was true of Harry Howell.

It's not true of Hawking and Okendo at the first baseman. However, first base is quite rare. Of the 138, 10 were primary first baseman. So that's a little bit lower than you would expect. It's about half of what you would expect if these were evenly distributed. Santana, specifically, the 3-8 combination at the beginning, which is mainly what we were responding to, the 3-8 combination at the beginning which is what mainly what we were responding to the 3-8 combination is very rare only two 3-8s in history so Danny Santana 3-8 4-7 9-6-5 and then Solly Hoffman in 1906 was 3-8-6 so shortstop instead of second base third, 386-9457.

So a few more details about this. Ben Zobrist is the best player on this list. He's the leader in war with 8.6. But Danny Santana is the champ in home runs. He's the only player who's ever hit 28 home runs while playing all seven positions. Danny Hawking and Joe McEwing are the champs of this. You know, I mentioned that no line has been repeated, but it's a fairly small group of players who are on this list.

A lot of duplicates, a lot of repeats, including Possum Whitted, who did it twice. Denny Hawking and Joe McEwing each did it six times. Dylan Moore of my minor league draft last year, he did it last year. Enrique Hernandez has done it the past three years, so he's got an active streak. Sean Rodriguez has done it five times, so he could match Hawking and McEwing. He's done it in the past four, so he's got an active streak. Two of these players actually were primary pitchers. However, to make these comparisons work i deleted all the ones d's and h's so they show up as as something else but two were primary pitchers and then lastly as you would expect

probably because you've written about how we're in the golden age of flexible player usage uh these are more common now than they used to be. However, A, not more common this decade than they were last decade, which surprised me. Slightly more common, but very slightly more common. 29 this decade, 26 last decade, 15 in the 90s, none in the 40s. And also there is a large spike in these now. There was another large spike in the 1890s and the 1900s when a lot of these came from. So I guess it either needs to be a pre-modern game where everybody's pretty much non-athletic. And if you're good at a position, I don't know, if you're good at a position, they just have you play everywhere like uh in softball or postmodern where we quit thinking

about positions uh but to put it in perspective there were seven last year there were two from 1930 to 1959 so much more common yeah and that team abbreviation bla blah that's the the orioles the baltimore orioles but only the 190101 to 1902 Orioles who are considered a separate franchise from what became the Yankees and also the current Orioles. And so it's just two years. It's blah instead of ball, I guess, on baseball reference. Okay. Bartash says, as a relatively new fan of baseball, I wanted to thank you for keeping me company in the first season of my baseball fandom. I really want to know why are members of the 25 soon to be 26 man rosters so hard to find for any given game? Coming from a whole different sports world in

Europe, one of the basic things displayed on almost any soccer match recap website or article are the bench players. Why is it different for baseball? In my opinion, the article are the bench players why is it different for baseball in my opinion the players on the bench are important too i i mean this is a great question and it's especially a great question because and i suspect for maybe the same reason that they're not listed there it's actually a lot harder to keep the bench players in baseball straight there's uh there's more of them there are more players generally in the league, and they go up and down because there's a minor league system. And so it actually really can be hard to know who's in the bullpen of a given day

unless you're a very close follower of the team. And if there's a transaction, you might not even know that. And ditto for the bench. So you will, if you're listening on the radio and the bench is likely to come into play, there's a pretty good chance that the broadcasters will give you a hand and tell you. But it's true. This is not broadly accessible information. And in fact, it's not even accessible really.

Like if you're following along on an online box score or a game day app app is the bench available then it does it say it might uh but it's not it's not like it's easy to find i i don't know that i don't know that the average fan could find out uh in 45 to 90 seconds if the person they were watching with said hey who who's on the bench to pinch hit and i i think it's simply a, as I put it, I think it might just be a graphic design challenge. There's just too many, too many, too many people to put on a TV screen or in a newspaper or, you know, on the graphic when they show the lineup. And it's just the numbers game. I mean, I guess you don't get the bench in football either, right? In American football, you have no idea. I don't even know who the backup quarterback I mean, I guess you don't get the bench in football either, right? In American football, you have no idea.

I don't even know who the backup quarterback is. And I guess the bench is used less often, but I mean, you know, when a football game starts and they do that thing where they like say like, you know, what their name is and what college they went to, you only get the starters, but players are cycling in and out of the game. And they never, those players don't ever even get the, the facing the camera introduction of themselves. So football does this too. And they have big rosters too. And it's data feed to sites like Fangraphs and Baseball Perspectives who was on the active roster for each team on each day. So that information is there, but it's difficult to query and it's not really displayed anywhere. And I don't know if I care or mind that much.

I think it's more useful while the game is going on, right, to know who could potentially be put into the game. Once the game is over and you know who was used, then do you necessarily need to know who wasn potentially be put into the game once the game is over and you know who was used then do you necessarily need to know who wasn't used i don't know i mean i guess because you can kind of piece together like who was on the active roster at any point if you look at who was used in surrounding games and recent transactions and that sort of thing but it's kind of a hassle to say, certainly for past years, that on this date, this team was this 25 players, and it seems like that information should be easier to find. But on the other hand, it's not often that I'm looking at a box score and I want to know, well, who wasn't used, who was left, unless, I guess if it's like a wild game that went to extra innings and a lot of players were used,

I might be curious to see, well, who was left? Was there anyone still in the bullpen or were they down to their last pitcher? Yeah, but you can count. I mean,

you don't have to know the name. that too. So it's something that I want to see during the game on a television broadcast. I want you to tell me who's on the bench and who's in the bullpen. But once the game is over, you know whatever can we though i i think it's not unfair to ask for and maybe that's a little demanding i think it's a

fine suggestion to say that the a television a television graphic can find room to at least every couple of innings flash how many players are on the bench and how many pitchers are on the bench, just so that you know, just so you know, like, oh, okay. So the Tigers have three pitchers left and the Cubs have four or the, you know, Tigers have two pinch hitters left and the Cubs have none. That seems like something that you could flash up there. Maybe you could find permanent space on it, like a series of dots, or maybe you can't. But that probably is information that could fit into the information feed that the fan gets. All right.

This one is more of a comment than a question. I guess he wants us to discuss it. Kieran says, MLB does a lot of things ham-handedly and incompetently, but it sure seems like they have absolutely nailed change management around the introduction of an automated strike zone. Over the past five years, say, the idea has been constantly in the conversation to the point where everyone accepted its eventuality regardless of support before they even started testing it in games. This has allowed them to monitor responses, collect feedback, and anticipate issues. They rolled it out outside of Affiliated Ball first. They're introducing it gradually in Affiliated Ball. They got the umps on board in their CBA. It just seems like such a well-executed plan from the league's perspective, which puts in even starker contrast many of the league's other actions and responses. Yeah, that seems like a

true and well-written paragraph. I think that there's, if there's anything they, they may be, I don't know if this is something that they should be criticized for or not, but there's a more of a kind of wearing, uh, I don't know, weariness of the accuracy of it that maybe they could have, maybe this all should have happened one year later, two years later when it was going to be a little more accurate, or maybe they haven't done a great job of reassuring the participants and the media and the people who are watching that, in fact, this is accurate and that this is not inconsistent, which is what we were hearing from the Atlantic League players when we talked to them. And so there is, I think there's less confidence now

than there has been in the past that this system is actually going to be accurate and reliable, which is perhaps good. I mean, that might be the honest position that might be good information that they couldn't have known necessarily ahead of time. And that might be, uh, might make it easier for us to all kind of bide our time for five years or not us all, but people who want to see it bide their time for a few years while the kinks get worked out. On the other hand, the closer it gets to implementation, the less faith there seems to be in it as a concept. And so that maybe you could argue is a little bit of a failure of,

of the rollout. But otherwise, I, yeah, I agree with this. Yeah, I wouldn't give them that much credit for the fact that it's being discussed a lot and that everyone has started to accept it as inevitable. I think that's a product of the technology and instant replay and having the pitch data and just everyone constantly analyzing whether umpires got the call right or not, which is something that I don't know that MLP is all that happy about, really, because, you know, they never used to want sites to write about specific umpires' accuracy rates, that sort of thing. It was kind of like this, well, we'll give you all the PitchFX data, but don't show up the umpires sort of thing. And them making the

PitchFX data available, I think initially was a mistake. They didn't intend to make it all available. And that changed everything. The fact that it was accessible, that it was not protected. And so analysts were able to get it. And then everyone got used to just having that data. So that may have been an unintentional thing that this has happened so i do give them credit for testing it out somewhere first and as we discovered on our atlantic league podcast that rollout didn't really go all that smoothly there so it's good that they got the kinks out there first but it's such a fundamental change to the game that i have a hard time imagining them just like saying okay we've got robot umps now night and day. It's such a huge difference. I mean, it's the strike zone. It is. That's everything in baseball. And so I think they really would have had to be wildly incompetent to just spring it on everyone and say, this is what we're doing now. Suddenly you show up to spring training and hey, everyone's got robot umps all of a sudden. show up to spring training and hey everyone's got robot umps all of a sudden so i do give them credit and i think it has been handled well but i think some prudence was very appropriate just given

how significant a change this will be for baseball yeah that's all true i think that the the the way that the the thing that i think this argument captures is that we got through the argument period fairly peacefully. And now there is just sort of an acceptance and awaiting from people who like it and people who don't like it. And it feels neither rushed nor too far away from now. And when it happens, I think most of the emotion, maybe not, maybe I'll find out that it's not, but it seems like most of the emotion has dissipated.

So they managed to get a lot of the emotion, kind of all the, a lot of the energy that we spent arguing burnt out before they came into it, which is kind of like, I mean, that was, that seems somewhat savvy to me. Yeah. Right.

Okay. Last one. This is from Rob. He says, one thing you mentioned recently was memorable items in a specific category over the past decade. Actually, I think the past season. And mentioned the goof or the blunder in the vein of Merkel's boner that would qualify. This is when we were talking about the most enduring memory of 2019. the most enduring memory of 2019.

And Rob says, I thought we pretty much had a Merkel's boner in this past postseason with Trent Grisham's misplay at the end of the 2019 NL wildcard play-in game. Think about the implications of him cutting off that ball. The Brewers surely give up a run, but not likely the lead. And we're talking about only needing three more outs from Hayter and they move on to the playoffs,

whereas the World Series champions don't win anything. The ramifications of that are pretty dramatic. Who knows if the Nationals feel they're on the right path enough to lay out the money to keep Strasburg. I believe Rendon is gone, but the team might be more likely to be cautious in spending and lean toward a rebuild or a reboot, and in doing so we would see a lot less of the free agency movement in their direction, etc., etc., considering the way the market has stalled behind Donaldson's decision, how much more stagnant does the market become if Rendon, who was either number two or three in this market, depending on your view, is in a similar position of holding out for better money and stalling other big position players behind him? If Grisham makes the play, are the Brewers so willing to give him up for Rios? If they keep him,

is there a need to sign Garcia? The domino effect of that play seems to have some rather far-reaching tentacles, but the blunder in the outfield just on its face seems Merkel or Snodgrass worthy, or maybe more appropriately, Freddie Lindstrom worthy. Those old New York Giants sure had a lot of crazy fielding mishap circumstances that cost them games, didn't they? I think that for one thing, I mean, Howie Kendrick was going to win it. He was on deck. Howie Kendrick. This is Howie Kendrick. Didn't we learn anything from the next four weeks? Howie Kendrick was going to win it. The game would have been tied. The game would have been blown. The Nationals would have been at home

with winning run on third. Yes, two outs. They might not have won it right there but the air did not flip it from losing to winning the hit flipped it from losing to tied and the air went from tied to winning and i think that that makes a difference i also though it doesn't look like a blooper it it looks like a mistake but he didn't do anything silly you know know, he charged in on it. Ball took a little bit of a funky hop on him. He wasn't as assertive as he needed to be in catching it, but it didn't bounce off his head. It's not what you would, you know, consider a, you know, a replayable goof. There was a weird bounce too, some strange spin on that ball.

Right, yeah. It sort of checked up and took an odd sort of veer. A veer maybe is a little bit more extreme than it should be described as but yeah again like it's not i just don't think that it is a play that you can easily kind of mock all that much it was just a mistake right and the bigger mistake was josh hater uh giving, four, five base runners in that inning. And so, you know, the Cubs, the equivalent, one of the examples of a blooper or of a failure that is going to be remembered for decades and decades in this exercise is the Bartman play. decades and decades in this exercise is the Bartman play.

And that is kind of the opposite where the Cubs going on to allow hit after hit and, you know, Alex Gonzalez there and you know, the, they blow this big lead where it can't all be tied to the one single play in the stands. And yet the one single play in the stands is what's remembered. I think this is the opposite where Grisham's there's just not enough intrigue or romance to the play itself and so it

in a sense kind of i think gets washed away in the larger sense of the hater meltdown yeah and i think we're more apt to forgive a physical mistake than a mental mistake i think that's part of the merkle's boner i mean one reason why we talk about the Merkel's boner. I mean, one reason why we talk about Merkel's boner is because it's called Merkel's boner and everyone wants to say Merkel's boner. But beyond that, like if there's a base running mistake, if someone just does something wrong, they're thinking about it wrong. I think that tends to live on in infamy more so than just, you know, not getting your glove down or something. I could be wrong about that, but there's something about just sort of thinking through a play wrong

as opposed to just, well, it's hard to catch a baseball or hit a baseball or whatever. So I think we're less forgiving of just a mental mistake. Like, you know, I don't know, Lonnie Smith is another example of just a base running mistake that's like, why did you do that? And you can watch it over and over again and say, why did you do that? I think also in Merkel's boners case, there is so much dispute about what actually happened. And there's still some mystery about what actually happened. And we'll never know what happened because there's no replay or everything.

It was 1908. So like the Wikipedia page, the end of the first paragraph says it has been described as the most controversial game in baseball history. Well, there's nothing controversial about the Trent Grisham play. He just, you know, he didn't make the drop ball that Rob mentions, that was just a dropped ball. So I guess this sort of thing can live on. Obviously, Bill Buckner could have testified to that. But I think really Merkel's boner, it's happened, which is not something that can really happen in baseball anymore because we know what happened. We've got cameras everywhere. I guess with Bartman, maybe there was some dispute, but not really even, right? Like we saw what happened. I think there's dispute about whether that was the thing that actually cost the Cubs or was it the subsequent plays. But like there's no Dispute about what actually Happened so you can't break it

Down like a Zapruder film or something And you know debate for Decades because there's nothing to Debate there Alright so I think we can End there. Alright I should Note by the way the White Sox and the Cubs Are not separated

by all that much in projected true talent right now, according to Fangraph's projected 2020 winning percentage, which I believe does not yet account for schedule. Cubs are at 518 and the White Sox are at 501. So the gap may not be big there. And who knows if the White Sox are done yet. A couple other things. You have probably seen the news and the replay of the brawl that happened in the Venezuelan Winter League when former major leaguer Alex Romero went all Juan Marichal on catcher Gabriel Lino. There's a pitch behind him and he swung the bat at the catcher. One might wonder why this happened in a 13-1 game, why were tensions so high, but this

was the product of earlier bad blood in the game. There had been hit-by-pitches and an earlier brawl, so this just boiled over again. But bat swinging, you never want to see that. I mention this because podcast hero Williams Estadio was a bit player in this saga. If you watch the replay, you can see him running in from first base to take part in the brawl. He was ejected in this game, so he didn't play a central role, but he was in the thick of it. He's just baseball zealig. Even when he's not doing anything himself, he still sort of finds the camera somehow. And last note, the Yankees signed pitcher Nick Tropiano, which gives us an occasion to mention the fact that in 2013, when he was with the Astros double-A team, he recorded a one-pitch strikeout. He got a called strike, and that was argued by the batter,

Vinny Catricalla, who stepped out of the batter's box to argue about that call and refused to re-enter the batter's box. So in accordance with the MLB rule that says you have to get back in the batter's box or else strikes will be called against you, the umpire called two strikes against him, and Tropiano recorded a one-pitch strikeout. so we talk about the minimum inning on this show which sam thinks should be the term for a three pitch inning and every time we talk about that people write in to say well couldn't you have a two pitch inning couldn't you in theory have a one pitch inning yes you could and tropiano actually did it so that is the true minimum inning you can support the podcast on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild

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