Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1490: Yeah Jeets

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller do a brief, spoiler-free followup on their Knives Out banter from the previous episode, then break down the elections of Derek Jeter and Larry Walker to the Hall of Fame, touching on the contrast between their voting trajectories, how and why Walker made it, the lone Jeter ballot holdout, the […]

BAME and FORGE fancy that Nothing but rabbits out of the hat To try to catch a falling star Crush it into dust And stuff it down a jar And throw it far away Malaport is back to front See through people, see through monuments Knowing the power

Hello and welcome to episode 1490 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Heyo. baseball podcast from fan graphs presented by our patreon supporters i am ben lindbergh of the ringer joined by sam miller of espn hello sam hey shall we follow up on our knives out discussion from the previous episode we got some info from a listener no spoilers here just a brief follow-up on the way that we started the previous episode which was you made a case for the ryan johnson movie knives out being a baseball movie based on the baseball that is in it and your interpretation of that baseball significance so we got an email

this is from joseph who says to help settle the baseball debate in knives out we can turn to the director's commentary johnson released while the movie is still in theaters at around 21 30 he speaks for about 30 seconds On the edition of the baseball I've attached a rough quotation below The whole thing with the baseball I needed a way to get Linda back to the office To see the note and I think it was in prep

I came up with it I like the idea of karmic justice That if it were not for Don's petty little act of aggression In chucking the baseball Linda would have never found the note Unfortunately it doesn't mention The obvious playing catch hook of a baseball That Sam hypothesized

And the commentary ensures that it is at most The third most important aspect Of the Balls Incorporation Just as importantly in a November interview The director made this statement Oh yeah, god, there are so many different types Of movies I love, I keep talking with My composer Nathan, that's Nathan Johnson, his cousin, about doing a musical.

I'd love to do a musical someday. I'm a big musical theater fan. I think that would be really fun. A Western would be really interesting to do. And I'd love to do a baseball movie someday. I love baseball. My wife has turned me into a huge baseball fan. That's Karina Longworth, the host of the excellent podcast, You Must Remember This,

and an effectively wild listener. She grew up a Dodgers fan, and now we follow the entire season, and it's a big part of our lives. And thus, Rian Johnson, it seems, officially does not consider Knives Out to be a baseball movie, although I guess he is using a different definition than we have historically. Yeah, no, it was good. Great work. Great sleuthing. I read both of these things with a lot of interest. Yeah. And of course, there can be hidden layers to something that perhaps a director doesn't even realize. Maybe it's subconscious. Maybe it's something that they didn't put in intentionally,

but other people can take out of the work. So that's what happened here yeah or or didn't happen here or are you just wildly misinterpreted everything it is definitely still a baseball in the movie that uh unless unless he comes out and says uh actually we didn't choose the set uh we just uh we inherited the set from a different movie i will still you know by the standards that i use somebody put that baseball there it is a baseball they knew it was a baseball anyway we can move on yeah so shall we spend a few minutes on hall of fame before we get to emails gonna do some emails but we had big

hall of fame developments if we do we're very likely to end up bringing in a very uh a very early stat blast because the stat blast is about the Hall of Fame. Fine with me. All right. So we got two players admitted via the BBWA vote to the Hall of Fame, Derek Jeter, of course, and Larry Walker, which was really in question up until the last second. Walker had actually tweeted on the day that the results were going to be announced that he thought he was going to fall a little bit short. And there's this whole cottage industry now of people on Twitter who project the Hall of Fame voting results just based on previous voting and based on Ryan Thibodeau's work with the ballot tracker. And it seemed like in the minutes and hours leading up

to the announcement that most people were thinking that Walker would fall just short, and people were already blaming certain people who had dropped Walker off their ballots or not included him. And as it turns out, there was a slightly smaller voting pool than most people were accounting for. And so as a percentage of that pool, Walker got 76.6, which was six votes more than he needed. And it was really nice. Everyone was happy about Walker getting in walker was happy about getting in there's nothing more wholesome really than the

hall of fame reaction video where you get to see the players surrounded by their friends and family getting the call that they got in and that's probably true for any player i don't know i didn't see a derrick cheater reaction video i'm not sure if there was one, whether he really would have been able to muster any surprise. But in Walker's case, of course, it was in doubt and he was in his 10th and final year of eligibility and he really seemed to care about it, which was nice. He said that he was following the tracker religiously. You're charmed that the baseball player wanted to make the Hall of Fame.

Well, I couldn't imagine some people saying it's an honor that other people bestow what the baseball writers even know about it. I had the career I had. I'm deserving. So whether they say I am or not, it's just an honor. I'm sure everyone wants to get in, obviously, but I would think that certain people maybe take it more or less seriously than others. And Walker was like all of us. He was out there refreshing the tracker, looking at the latest stats. And then he had this very endearing interview where he was wearing a SpongeBob shirt for some reason. And his Twitter handle is Canadian Moose Lips. And he's just a very easy guy to root for. So it was nice to see him get his wish come true. And a lot of people's wishes come true because Walker had become one of those guys who was kind of a cause and people were

rooting for him and advocating for him and arguing for him for years and felt some agency or some stake in whether he got in or not. So it was sort of a nice moment for all involved. got in or not. So it was sort of a nice moment for all involved. Such a fascinating curve in his results. I mean, you do sort of get used to this trajectory of a player who starts out with a crazy low vote total. You're sort of shocked by how close he might have even come to being knocked off the ballot entirely. And then as a few things happen, as votes lead to more votes, as people start writing about it, as the ultimatum of the final year of eligibility all start to come up, the vote totals start to go up until he either gets there or he doesn't. And so, you know, that's a pretty standard trajectory. Like I'm looking at Burt Blylevin, for instance, who started out at 17.5% in his first year and then dropped to 14.

But then every single year after that, he rose. I guess except one year he dropped from 53 to 48. But every other year he rose for 15 years until he eventually got over 75. And it's a slow and steady climb. until he eventually got over 75. And it's a slow and steady climb, 3% here, then 6% more, and then 5% more, and then 13% more, and then 8% more. And so that's like your classic climb. And Tim Rain's basically the same, 24 his first year,

and then a tiny little drop the second year. And then every year after that, again, except for one, he rose, and it's like 8% at a time, 9% at a time. And so Mike Messina, 20 to 25 to 43 to 52 to 64 to 77. It's not, it's not just that he rose every time. It's that he rose pretty, pretty steadily over time. And then, and then you get Larry Walker who starts at 20 and then goes to 23 and then goes to 22 and then, boom, drops down to 10. Like, it's just a collapse of support. And that was not long ago. That was five years ago. Yeah. Drops down to 10.

Seems impossible to imagine that in the next six years he would climb to 75%. And in fact, the the next year he only rises to 12 and so he's halfway through he's halfway through his eligibility he's only at 12 he's had five chances and his votes have declined sixth year only 15 so not even like who had 15 this year i bet people who had 15 this year are like jeff kent and uh well i'll just tell you 15 this year are like Jeff Kent and, well, I'll just tell you, 15% this year. Sammy Sosa had 14%. Andrew Jones had 19%. Andy Pett had 11%. Jeff Kent, 27%.

So imagine an average of those four. None of them are going to make it. We don't expect any of them to make it. We don't expect Manny Ramirez to all of a sudden catch fire. And he has twice 15%. So 15% and then 22%, which is still again like that's where andrew jones is this year basically and then it's 34 and then it's 55 34 to 55 and then 77 so basically in in three years he goes from no chance to in that is a very very rapid reconsideration of his career like he was

below billy wagner and gary sheffield until two and a half years ago right i mean the difference is at least one difference with walkers that of course he doesn't have the pd baggage that guys like manny and sosa have so when you don't have that weighing you down maybe there's a little more helium there and he just also just had a better I think, than some guys who are in that range, like Andy Pettit, let's say. So I think there was always the capacity for growth there. But yeah, it's really surprising. related backlog clearing off or the PED era backlog. So there was just more spots on the ballot to go around up for grabs. And then also it just goes to show kind of the power of the internet to change minds, I think, which has really grown. I mean, the Bly Levin thing, that was kind of the first one that I remember where the sabermetric community coalesced around this one person as a cause and really flogged that cause hard every year. And there were certain people

who were very associated with that, but that started even before social media, I think. And so now that you have that and you just have YouTube videos and you have Twitter people just making threads about it and it's constantly there and if you're a person who hasn't been voting for walker you're just constantly confronted by reasons to vote for walker and peer pressure to vote for walker so in that sense like there's almost a dangerous precedent i guess and that if there were some undeserving candidate who for some reason had that sort of support then maybe people would feel that pressure but thus far at least the people who've gotten that kind of drive have been people who

should have been in so Bly Levin and Raines and Walker I don't think Walker's case is quite as clear-cut as Bly Levin and Raines but I think he was this deserving candidate. So it's nice to see that greater access to information and people trying to convince other people can actually work. Yeah, I think he has more war than Raines, in fact. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah. So two things about that. So going to the peer pressure thing, this is kind of unrelated to that, but I'm just curious. It is a private ballot. You don't have to publish your ballot. BBWA a few years ago switched to public ballots for all the awards, but the Hall of Fame, it's still up to you. You can either submit it and publish it and

tell them that they can publish it, or you can keep it quiet. So let's say that you are a voter, Ben, and you feel very strongly that Derek Jeter shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame and you don't you're not trying to troll you're you've got a high standard your standard is maybe somewhere around 75 war you're a small hall guy you you look and you see Lou Whitaker's not in there and Bobby Gritch is not in there and when you compare you just don't see enough difference I'm I mean hypothetically all this is hypothetical I'm not making it. But you decide that, you know, until Gritch and Whitaker are in, Jeter doesn't have a place either. And so you, in good faith, decide you're not giving Jeter your vote.

And your vote's not going to be public. So you're fine. You're not going to be the— You suspect that you're going to be the only person or that you might be the only person. Maybe it's more likely that a couple people will think like you but you know it's very possible that he would be unanimous if not for you but you feel so strongly that you are still committed to wanting to not give him your vote how confident are you that your vote will never actually leak out how confident are you that you will make it to your death without either

somebody either the bbwa retroactively publishing everything or somebody leaking it somebody at bbwa somehow leaking it or someone hacking in to bbwa or someone hacking in to your email address or you dumbly telling one friend who then tells two friends and gets out. How confident are you that you could take this one to your grave? that they would leak it by accident or get hacked or something. But I guess the precedent is the Griffey non-voters. I think there were three people who did not vote for Ken Griffey Jr., and I believe none of them are known even today. So they have managed to stay secret. Of course, that could change at some point.

But yeah, I'd be a little worried about it. There's only one person out of the 397 voters who decided not to vote for Jeter. And the only valid reason that I can think of not to vote for Jeter is just that someone thought that there were 11 deserving candidates, which I don't on this current ballot, but I could see how someone would. And so if someone said, hey, Jeter's getting in with or without my vote, so I'm going to vote strategically and give a vote to someone who's in danger of falling off the ballot or really needs the vote, I wouldn't be upset about that if someone said that publicly. So that'd be fine. Well, it's bad logic, though, because even if you're saying, well, I only have 10 spots, I want to vote for 11. So I'm going to use my 10 votes for

maximum power, maximum effect. It's more likely that you're going to be the person that costs Jeter unanimity than that. Say Billy Wagner is your one of your 11 that Billy Wagner is going to make it or fall off like he is he and Vizcal and Roland, they're sort of safely in that 30 to 50% range where your vote's not going to push them in and the lack of your vote is not going to knock them out. And so, in fact, not voting for Jeter would be one of the costliest non-votes that you could make from a strategic voting perspective. That presupposes that unanimity matters, which I'm not sure it does, really. I mean, who cares? He got in.

Yeah, that's a good point. It it mattered once it mattered up until last year yeah i don't and now it no longer now i think it probably i think it's i well yeah or now does it matter now are we gonna so i wrote when rivera got in that it was perfect that rivera got in because as the first unanimous one because nobody is going to mistake Mariano Rivera for the greatest Hall of Famer ever it's never going to be like oh well there's only been one unanimous the true greatest of all time Mariano Rivera like he's obviously an inner circle Hall of Famer he's a great great great great great Hall of Famer. He's a great, great, great, great, great Hall of Famer, but he is not the greatest player in baseball history. And so the fact that he's the first unanimous person really makes it clear that the difference between getting unanimity and not getting unanimity

is not a clear ranking, right? There are many people who are better than mariano rivera who are not unanimous and there will probably continue to be some maybe and so he makes it safe in a sense to not be unanimous because mariano rivera like it like what are we talking about he's yeah so that said people care a lot of people care they do and as a voter, if you thought Derek Jeter should be in the Hall of Fame and you did not vote for him strategically thinking that it wouldn't matter to people whether or not he was Jeter, I don't think it would matter all that much to me. I mean, he's got a lot going on for him. I don't think he really needs that 397th vote. Again, there are better players in the past who have not been unanimous. So it's not really a snub.

It's not really saying, oh, he's not in the class of this Hall of Famer or that Hall of Famer. And it doesn't affect his induction. It doesn't affect his speech. It doesn't affect his speech. It doesn't affect the placement of his plaque. So ultimately it only bothers me in the sense that it's just illogical for people not to vote for someone if it's only based on, oh, I don't vote for anyone on a first ballot out of principle, which is just sort of silly and bothers me in a very low stakes way.

But other than that, I don't want the hassle of being the one person who gets lambasted for not voting for Derek Jeter, then I would understand why they wanted that privacy. If it's someone who wants the attention of trolling, then you would think they would do it publicly, obviously, to get that boost of traffic or attention or hatred or whatever. to get that boost of traffic or attention or hatred or whatever. If it's someone who just bears a grudge against Cheater for some reason, then that's wrong and they shouldn't do it for that reason. So we'll see. There will still be ballots that will be released publicly that haven't been yet, so it's possible that it will be one of those, but probably not. Anyway, it's sort of silly.

But Michael Bauman, among others, made the point, just kind of highlighting the contrast between the paths that Jeter and Walker took to induction, because these guys are not that far apart. I mean, if you just go by strict war, which maybe is not a completely fair way to evaluate these people, given Jeter's postseason record and everything. But I mean, by baseball reference were Jeter and Walker separated by 0.3 wins above replacement and Walker is actually above Jeter. And yet it took Walker 10 years and just barely scraped over the line. Whereas Jeter, of course, got in on the first try and there was never any question about

whether he would. So it's sort of strange. There are reasons why that's the case, of course. Just, you know, Cheater was much more famous for valid reasons and maybe some not so valid reasons. And that's reflected in the voting. But it is just kind of one of those weird things that if you were an alien who were comparing the wars and someone said, yeah, this is the best way to evaluate a baseball player. Look at the wars. comparing the wars and someone said, yeah, this is the best way to evaluate a baseball player. Look at the wars. And then you saw the disparity in the voting results. You would wonder what the heck was going on there. So every time one of the causes gets in, I assume this happened as well with Walker, but every time one of the causes gets in, then there's that discussion of like,

who should be the next, who should we champion next? And I assume it's just clear as day that it should be Scott Rowland. Is that what people? Yeah, I think so. And that's kind of one of the disparities that kind of blows your mind is looking at Rowland and Vizquel. And they both took some jumps this year. Rowland up to 35.3%. Vizquel up to 52.6%. 6%, which is that range where there are very few players who get to that point and don't eventually make it, especially on just their third year of eligibility.

So that's another case where you compare the wars and you think, how is Vizquel getting so much more support than Roland, which in a way might bolster Roland's case as the cause of the sabermetric community, because I think it's helpful when there's a foil. Not that any of the stat nerds like us wish Vizquel ill or anything. Vizquel seems to be a great guy, and I don't want to deprive him of a happy day, but just based on the careers, he certainly seems a lot less deserving to me than Scott Rowland. And so to be confronted by the increased support for Vizquel relative to Rowland, it just makes you want to advocate for Rowland even more to convince the people who are voting Vizquel that they're missing something with Rowland.

So I would think that Rowland will climb up and he has seven years left. So he's made some progress there. But it looks like we're in for something of a lull or a dry spell in the coming years because next year there's no first ballot guy. The best first ballot players are Tim Hudson and Mark Burley, I think. So next year it's looking like Curt Schilling may be the sole inductee because he got up to 70% this year and with no one else really to compete with next year, he'll probably get across that finish line in his second to last year of eligibility. And beyond that, people on the ballot right now like Clemens and Bonds are just not moving at all.

Like no one is changing their minds on Clemens and Bonds at this point. They go up a couple percentage points every year just based on new voters being added to the group, and most of them will vote for Clemens and Bonds. I will be eligible to vote for the first time on, I think, the last year that those two will be appearing on the ballot, and I expect to vote for them. I would vote for them now, despite my reservations about their characters and off-the-field behaviors. But still, just sort of how I look at the Hall of Fame, I would vote for them. But I don't think that the addition of some new people to the roles will And based on the historical makeup of veterans committees, I don't know that they would meet with a much warmer reception there. So I don't know if eventually there'll be some sort of PED revisitation reconciliation committee that might get them in someday. I don't know, but it doesn't look like they're going to get there

via this traditional method. One thing that's fun about the Hall of Fame now that I'm, you know, 40 is that the people who are coming up are people who, you know, like I existed for their whole careers. I was a fan during their careers. And it is fun to put myself in the mindset of how I felt during their careers to think, did I think of them as a Hall of Famer at the time? And to be in some cases sort of surprised, like I don't have any doubt that Scott Rowland should be in the Hall of Fame. I don't think I thought that at the time.

I don't think I felt that way at the time, although there were times where I thought that he was one of the very, very best players in the game. But for the most part, I just thought he was really good. And I didn't think that a really good defensive third baseman was probably going to make the Hall of Fame. And so now I look back at it and I revise. But on the other hand, like Larry Walker, I think I had no doubt. I think Larry Walker, to me, felt like a Hall of Famer from his Expos days, let alone

when he was hitting in the 370s with Colorado. days, let alone when he was hitting, you know, in the three seventies with, with Colorado. And so, uh, it's interesting to see that despite feeling, I think I always, when, when, when it was older players who were on the ballot, players whose career predated me and I would see results that I disagreed with. I think, uh, that Pete, that the, the people who were voting were, were being swayed too much by their subjective memories of memories of having watched the player. But I feel like Larry Walker, like the subjective memory of Larry Walker is that he was a Hall of Famer. And it took a really long time for that to come true to catch up. So even if it felt like it

during the career, sometimes the voting starts, and those five years just have like changed the memory of a player. They sort of have faded away for some reason that you're not quite clear on. I think Vlad getting in probably helped Walker too, just because if you compare those two, it just seems like Walker was the superior player. It's hard to make a case that Vlad was the superior player. So once... Well, and also qualitatively, they were very similar.

Like anything that you... Pretty much anything you can say about Vlad in terms of his tools or his variety of skills or how exciting and dynamic he was. All those things that made Vlad so special. Like if there's anybody who could compete on that pure athletic and like marvelous way, it would be Larry Walker, who was also extremely fast and who was also extremely good at putting the bat on the ball and who also had an extremely good arm. And so very similar in a lot of ways beyond just the value. Yeah. And maybe also Edgar getting in and even relievers getting in because one of the big knocks against Walker is the lack of playing time. And Edgar didn't have that many more plate appearances. And of course it was DHing. And then if you're going to compare playing time to

relievers, I don't know how many people make that direct comparison, but if you're going to complain about the time that Walker spent on the field, then you almost have to factor that in when you're talking about relievers who spend a lot less time on the field. But yeah, I think talking about how players were perceived at the time, that's another thing that mystifies me about Vizquel's support because he clearly was not perceived as one of the best players in baseball during his career. He got MVP votes one time.

One time he got MVP votes and he was 16th. So it's not like the baseball writers said, we're watching a Hall of Famer here. Exactly. No, exactly's it's really weird i mean it never never would have occurred to me that omar viskell was a hall of famer which you know a lot of the viskell cases the compiling and the longevity and the playing forever so i i get why you could say it's not totally inconsistent to say that he was not the best player in any individual year but was good over almost a quarter century fine but he just never was at that level in any individual year or for any stretch of

seasons and i kind of object when someone says that their standard for a player is that like he had to be the best player in his league at a certain time or he had to be even the best player at a position or something because you know that's arbitrary there's a different pool of players in a league and in a position and some guys are going up against the the best players of all time it's like mike messina was a contemporary of pedro and maddox and randy johnson and other people were pitching at times when there was no great dominant inner circle guy like that. So that always sort of bothers me, like evaluate the guy, not necessarily who his contemporaries were at that position. And one thing I hadn't realized until I read Jason Stark's article about the ballot breakdown is just

what a great run it's been for Hall of Famers and for no doubt Hall of Famers. This is seven straight years with at least one first ballot guy. That streak will come to an end next year, but that's the second longest streak. There was an eight-year run from 1988 to 1995, but the quantity of first ballot guys is unprecedented. There were 13 first ballot guys in these last seven years, and we've never seen anything like that. The most over any previous seven-year period was 10 guys. And not only were there a lot of almost unanimous guys, but there were a lot of 90% first ballot guys, which is fairly rare in itself. And so we're not going to see a whole lot of those no-doubters in the next few years because, what, next year I already covered, not any great new additions. And then

the year after that, there's Ortiz and A-Rod, right? And A-Rod, he's going to have to wait a while if he ever gets in via voting. And Ortiz, I assume Ortiz will be a first ballot guy, although not a unanimous guy. I mean, his statistical case isn't totally clear cut. And of course, he has the report about PD usage, but Ortiz just seems immune to all of that. Everyone loves Ortiz. I think a couple years after that And then Beltran in 2023 Who probably wouldn't have been A first pallet guy anyway But now certainly will not be In the wake of sign stealing And then after that I guess it's Ichiro

Would be the next person Who might have a shot At getting 100% But that's not until 2025 I think So it's going to be a little bit of a drought Not going to be quite as many inductees for the next few years. I'm considering trying to convince myself

that I think Andy Pettit should be a Hall of Famer. Yeah. And getting behind him. I mean, I'm not there yet. I'm not there. But I'm considering trying to talk myself into it and then getting there. Well, I grew up watching Andy Pettit and enjoying Andy Pettit,

but even for me, not quite. Yeah. This goes back to something I think I've mentioned before where there's like a 15-year gap in which no Hall of Fame pitcher was born unless Andy Pettit gets there. And I just don't know that I believe that that can happen yeah i don't if you're the best person born in 15 years at your position or you know at a whole half of the game i think maybe i think that you should be in the hall of fame and uh there's a there's a there's a case there it's it's not the strongest case but it's it's a pretty it's a it's a fine case yeah all right well uh kurt schilling will get in, right? So he must have been born around the same time. Probably, but maybe he might have been before.

I don't know. I don't remember. And if Schilling gets in next year and he's the only one, he's got the whole weekend to talk. Yeah, I know. That's the problem. The Hall of Fame speech. No other speeches. I know.

He's just going to look around and say, anybody else? Okay, I'll just keep going. Yeah. Schilling was born six years before Pettit. And so I think that there is, I think Pettit is squarely in the middle of that, like whatever 14 or 12 year run or whatever it is. All right. Okay.

And in other news, I think our off-season contracts draft is mercifully over now. No, no. It's Puig signs for $340 million. Yeah, all right, I've still got a shot. Yeah, because you had the under on Marcelo Zuna. So not only have you been beating me on all these overs you took and these big deals that I at least was not anticipating

for free agents this offseason, not only that, you took the under on Marcelo Zuna, and I forget what the MLB trade rumors projection for him was, but I think it was like a four-year thing, right? And instead, he signed for one year and $18 million with the Braves. So even more fake money for you. I've overstated this. So two pitchers from the 1970s are inducted and nobody else is likely to be from that. So two in a decade. And it is my position that there should be more than two in a decade. So I overstated. But I think that you need to make a choice, either Andy Pettit or Johan Santana. Either Pettit for the longevity and overall body of,

uh, you know, consistent excellence or Santana for the peak. You got to pick one or the other, I think, and, or both, but Santana is I think off the ballot.

So that leaves Pettit. So I might talk. Okay. Uh, yeah, it was Zuna 300 and some million dollar lead over you. And, uh,

I don't know. Have we ever had a contest go like this i don't think so this is the most lopsided draft or competition i think we've ever done i don't know what happened oh boy yeah ozuna i i certainly thought he would get more than that even with the qualifying offer attached and i guess it could work out for him if he has a decent season and goes back into the market next year without a qualifying offer attached but given that people were expecting a four-year deal or something for him and that he had to settle for this in this market where almost everyone else seems to be doing pretty well he's he's such a confounding player because

he's this guy who has this giant gap between his stat cast expected stats and his actual stats which are fine but except for that one year not really remarkable and he's even kind of confusing on defense because he used to be a great fielder and now it seems like he's a lousy fielder but there's still some disagreement depending on the defensive system. But the offense is really the most mystifying because he hits the ball so hard that he has like one of the highest expected weighted on base averages. And one of the biggest gaps, or I think literally the biggest gap in 2019 between the expected and the actual. And it seems like the theory on why that is,

is that he tends to hit the ball hard but not in the optimal direction like you would expect that maybe he'd be pounding the ball into the ground and that would be the problem that he'd be too much of a ground ball guy but that's not really it so it seems like he maybe just slices the ball a lot and that expected weighted on base, which mostly considers how hard you hit it and the vertical angle at which you hit it might be overestimating how good he is because he just hits the ball to a bad part of the ballpark. And so he crushes it, but doesn't get the sort of results that you would expect based on that. And it seems like a multi-season trend with him that he has kind of denied this so i don't know how many players there would be like that but he's almost like the the hitter equivalent of a fit

beating pitcher who just has like low babips except i guess in the other direction because he is underperforming relative to what you'd expect so it's's sort of strange. And I guess the market is not expecting him to be what his expected stats were. It's expected him to be what his actual stats were, which are okay, but nothing special. So the Braves sort of replaced Josh Donaldson's bat with him, but not to the degree that you would think if you look at certain numbers. but not to the degree that you would think if you look at certain numbers. Yeah, I haven't seen whether there's been updates on this, but I know as of a couple of years ago, it was somewhat mystifying,

or I don't know, it was surprising to me, counterintuitive, that Jonathan Judge had found a baseball prospectus that the expected stats don't actually predict very well. That while it seems like they should be more predictive than regular stats, they're not. And I don't know if that's true. That was just one article from a couple years ago, and maybe things have been refined or maybe the numbers washed out a different way since then

or maybe people have found an instance. But it seemed to be at the time that if you're a player who underperforms your expected stats, that's what you are. You're a player who underperforms your expected stats, that's what you are. You're a player who underperforms your expected stats. So it'll be interesting to see over the next decade or so whether that stays true, because obviously that's one of the great hopes of StatCast is that it will give us a lot higher confidence in projecting players' future performance because we're stripping away even more of the luck and getting closer and closer to their true toolsy talent levels, but maybe not.

All right. So there's been Nolan Arenado drama, but maybe I can discuss that with Meg next time we talk. Who is their runner-up Or one of their runner-ups before they hired Beltran Luis Rojas who was A minor league manager for years And had interviewed with them and was their Quality control coach which seems Like a perfectly reasonable

Replacement but I guess unless you have anything else Pressing on your mind you want to just go Straight to your stat blast Yeah it's about Larry Walker Okay They'll take a data set sorted go straight to your stat blast? Yeah, it's about Larry Walker. Okay. 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 daystep lost. I stumbled upon this by accident, and I'm sure that in articles and online, everybody has seen this fun fact a million times, but he is the first Colorado Rocky to play even a single game as a Rocky to make the Hall of Fame. Did you see that?

I didn't, but yeah, that makes sense. Does it? Well, I mean, it shouldn't, but it doesn't surprise me that much. Right. I mean, like he's obviously he's the first Rocky that's being inducted as a Rocky, but he's the first player to ever play a single game as a Rocky. They are the only team in baseball that did not have a Hall of Famer who played on their team at some point. And so that sort of blew my mind. And then I started wondering, well, how much should it blow my mind? And so I dug into that just a little bit. So

first things first, I went back to 1920. So in the last century, so anybody that was playing in the fake baseball years, I'm leaving those things out. So in the last century, the Dodgers have had the most Hall of Famers appear in their uniform, 38 of them. The Yankees are next at 36. So those two teams aren't surprising, although the order is slightly surprising. And then you've got all the teams, all the non-expansion teams. You just sort of go down the line. You've got the Giants third, the Braves fourth, the Red Sox fifth, tied with the Cubs. Actually, the Braves, the Red Sox, and the Cubs are all tied. And there's not a ton of difference between these franchises. So the Cubs, Braves, and Red Sox are all 30. Whereas like the all-time franchise over the past century is

the Yankees, and they only have 36. So it's all pretty tightly grouped. But the Rockies are the only team that had zero even though like the three other teams entered the league through expansion either alongside them or or or after them so the marlins who joined the league the same time the rockies did they have had five hall of famers appear on their team andre dawson trevor hoffman mike piazza tim raines and avon rodriguez and i mean yes those are not like we're not not talking all time Marlins there. Yvonne Rodriguez, I think played, played the one year Tim Raines played like next to nothing. Mike Piazza played five games, which is going to come up in a later part of this stat cast. Trevor Hoffman was there before he was a Padre and then Andre Dawson. Andre Dawson was

what on the expansion team, I think, and was part of part of them for a little bit. So they had five, the Diamondbacks have two, Roberto Alomar and Randy Johnson, not exactly equals in Diamondbacks lore. And then the Tampa Bay Rays, of course, famously had Wade Boggs. But the Rockies, it took them 27 years to have their first Hall of Famer, 27 years, maybe 28, depends how you count years. And so I looked at all the expansion teams since 1961 to see how many years it took before their first Hall of Famer to see if the Rockies are really that out of the ordinary. And they are somewhat out of the ordinary, but they are not the most extreme.

So the Rays are the fastest expansion team to get a Hall of Famer. Again, famously, Wade Boggs, who they essentially signed in order to be their first Hall of Famer. So he was inducted just seven years after the Rays were formed as a franchise. So they're the only team that had a Hall of Famer within a decade. The next is the Mets, who had Yogi Berra. Now we should stop there for a second. Yogi Berra was inducted 10 years after the Mets played their first game. So that's the second fastest. Yogi Berra is also in a little sub list that I have here, which is players who played fewer than five games with the team that I'm counting them as. So

Tim Raines played four games with the Orioles. Mike Piazza played five with the team that I'm counting them as. So Tim Raines played four games with the Orioles. Mike Piazza played five with the Marlins. Orlando Cepeda played three with the A's. Ray Schoch played two for the Giants. And then Yogi Berra, who played four games with the Mets at age 40. He was a coach basically for them. This was after his one year as the Yankees manager, after he'd retired. He very briefly played while he was one of their coaches at age 40. And so you could say that that doesn't really count for the Mets because Yogi Berra only played four games and went two for nine. On the other hand, he was their coach and their manager. So it's not like he was just passing through in that sense either. So anyway, the Mets, 10 years. And then the norm is about 13 to 17 years. So the Diamondbacks, 13 years.

The Marlins, 17 years. The Padres, 17 years. The Astros, 14 years. The Brewers, 13 years. The Mariners, 14 years. The Royals, 15 years. Those are all teams that were between 13 and 17 years. Then you have the Blue Jays took 20 years.

The Angels, 21. And then the Rockies, 27. But there are two teams that took even longer. The Washington Senators slash Texas Rangers took 30 years before their first Hall of Famer. And they actually had two inducted the same year. Fergie Jenkins and Gaylord Perry were both elected the same year, 30 years after the Rangers, after the Senators played their first game. And then the Expos actually took 31 years. Their first Hall of Famer was Tony Perez. So the Rockies, it's a long time, but it's not a freakishly long time. So that is probably, there's probably none of these details probably matter anymore because

Larry Walker made it. And so they're no longer on any sort of interesting chase. All right, cool. Well, I'm glad they broke their drought. Every franchise deserves a Hall of Famer, or at least to see one for a few games at some point. Yeah, you would think that, I mean, I said there was nothing particularly special about the Rockies 27 years is not a record or anything like that. On the other hand, you would think that there would be a, it would be a lot easier to get a first Hall of Famer in this day and age than it would have been in the 60s and 70s when the Senators and the Expos were beginning their play, just because there's more player movement.

And teams employ a lot more people these days as well. They roster more people throughout the course of the season. There's more turnover from season to season. And so I don't know, while the Rockies are not a notable expansion team by the standards of these 14 expansion teams, they might be, I don't know, maybe no expansion team in the future will ever go this long. They might be the last team to go this long, perhaps. All right. Let's take a few questions. team to go this long perhaps all right let's take a few questions this is from john patreon supporter given that the astros sign stealing scandal all started with mike fires going on record

is it crazy to imagine a player who is called in to be released or demoted threatening his bosses that he would expose the team's cheating scheme would it work and what would be the ramifications could a guy keep his roster spot with a cheating team by using blackmail well so you're gonna hear me probably mostly read an answer that you've probably already read not okay so in theory could it work if a bunch of things went right in theory maybe it could but the downside here for the player is just massive i mean you would be i told john i thought that if you did that if you get caught cheating you risk a suspension if you get caught blackmailing your team by weaponizing their cheating then i think you would probably quite possibly get banned from the game for life because in on the one hand as i

put it cheating needs to be policed and punished, but it falls within the distorted vision of a baseball player's competitive mission. Weaponizing cheating in order to force a team to make non-competitive personnel decisions, however, feels like something more akin to throwing a baseball game. It's essentially overturning the mission in order to benefit oneself personally. So I think that you could get banned for life for that. But I mean, even if you didn't get banned for life, you would not get another job in baseball ever again. And that's the thing that the club ultimately has.

Well, the league, the body of teams, the industry, ultimately has a lot of leverage over players because they're going to probably be working for the league for like 30 or 40 more years. Like there's a long line of jobs after you retire. And if you ever want to work in the game again, you're going to get to. The game is going to welcome you with a big old hug. And then they're going to pay you for 30 or 40 years to coach, to scout, to work in player development, to work in a front office, to be a broadcaster, to be an ambassador, to do whatever it takes to keep you part of the family. And if you do something like this, you would have none of that. You would be unemployed for the rest

of your life and you would do it all so that you could work for a team that you really weren't good enough to be on anyway. So it doesn't really seem like a player would think this through and consider it in his best interests besides it being scummy it'd also be a miserable situation in the short term if you could do it without notifying all your teammates that you were doing it like if you could go over their heads if you could just say this to the gm or the owner or something and and get them to apply pressure to the manager not to demote you then maybe it wouldn't be so bad but if the manager knew if the coaches knew and of course if your teammates knew then you would just be ostracized or worse and it would be a horrible situation to be in which i, I mean, maybe it would be worth the major league salary

and the job security if you thought that you were never going to be back in the big leagues, if you were like a fringe player who thinks this is my only chance. And maybe if I stay up here and I do well, then some other team will want me. Although even in that case, I wonder probably the well would be poisoned there because if some other team wanted to sign you, I wonder if your previous team would sort of tell that team, hey, this is a bad guy. They'd be wary because they wouldn't want to disclose that they were cheating, obviously, but they'd figure out a way to impugn your character reasonably in some ways. figure out a way to impugn your character reasonably in some ways. So you'd be blackballed or miserable, and it just probably wouldn't be worth the staying on the big league roster in the short term. Unless, I guess, you think it's your only chance at ever being in the big leagues again, and you have some other post-baseball plan where baseball just doesn't matter that much to you, or you just need to support yourself and your family in the short term

and that's your only concern. But not that many players in that very specific situation probably. Yeah, I'm reading this book right now called A House for Mr. Biswas and one of the characters is Mr. Biswas and he does not do something that his wife, his wife wants to like invite the family to like bless their new house and he fights not do something that his wife, his wife wants to like invite the family to like bless their new house and he fights with her.

He hates her family and so he says no and he thinks like, well, you know, he's in a very patriarchal society and so he has like in his mind, he has all the power to like say no to this. But his wife, I mean, he lives with his wife and so she just very very like easily kind of like deconstructs his sanity by blowing her nose every time he's about to drift off to sleep

and so like every time like he's about to fall asleep and she just blows her nose and she does that for like a few days and then finally he caves and all it takes if you're that close to somebody is uh finding a very exposed pressure point and my guess is that even if you're that close to somebody is finding a very exposed pressure point. And my guess is that even if you thought you got your boss, like you, you know, he's got to employ you because you're blackmailing him. My guess is he can make your life really, really, really, really miserable to the point that it would be invisible to any other outsider. You would have no like lawsuit or anything like that. And just it would be a series of humiliations until you wanted to flee and also that you can fail in front of

fans because you're not good enough to make the team probably yeah all right and you can't even feel morally superior to the team that you're threatening to rat out because you're just using that to your own advantage so we have really yeah like we we have really passionately advocated to this hypothetical player why he should not do it like we're really like we've been on this topic a while now we've made multiple arguments for a player who does not exist facing a decision that does not exist. Yeah. By all means, report it to someone, go public, but using it to your own advantage, it's probably not going to be to your own advantage in the long run.

All right. Anthony, also a Patreon supporter, says, not sure if you saw this, but a poll just popped up in the Facebook group about which is a bigger advantage, steroids or the banging scheme. I agree with most that the answer that seems like it should be right is the banging, but based on the numbers, it's almost certainly the steroids, right? I just looked back through a bunch of known steroid users' pages,

and almost across the board, their WRC pluses went up 30 to 50 points for the banging slash alleged buzzing scheme to have been more beneficial to the hitters than steroids. The Astros' roster must have been full of average or below average hitters. And I asked him just to clarify whose pages he looked at, and he mentioned Bonds and Sosa and McGuire. He also mentioned a couple other sort of suspected steroid seasons that aren't actually proved steroid seasons. But as he said, just Bonds alone and his career arc maybe is enough to make a case for steroids. But I know that you answered this one via Patreon as well.

Yes, I did. Shall I read that? I think I agree with you. I saw your answer to this, and I think it's pretty much in line with what I would say. So I guess you can read or crib from that. All right, I said that the evidence for steroids helping is generally cloudy or underwhelming, although the anecdotal evidence, though quite probably cherry-picked,

is overwhelming. The evidence for the banging schemes helping is non-existent and arguably provides only evidence that it hurts, and this includes the anecdotal evidence of participants who voluntarily quit doing it, if MLB investigations are accurate. Given all that, I would probably take the cloudy evidence and say that yes, what we've observed points to steroids helping more. However, like you, I would agree that the answer that seems like it should be right is the banging. Until there is good, clean, well-modeled research, I can't overrule my gut. I remain conflicted. So what I'm basically saying is that there's not a lot of evidence for either one being, not a lot of convincing evidence, a lot of evidence that I

would take to the bank for either one being as significant as I think that it would be. And in the absence of that evidence, I kind of just lean back. I go back to my priors and assume that the banging should be more helpful and probably is. And I would like, I would take,

it would take a lot of evidence for me to be convinced that the banging scheme didn't help. And while there's not any evidence that it did help, it would take a lot of evidence that it didn't help. And while there's not any evidence that it did help, it would take a lot of evidence that it didn't help before I really gave up on that. Yeah, Rob Arthur has shown some evidence

that maybe the Astor's ability to lay off pitches or swing at the right pitches improved somewhat significantly around the time that they started the banging scheme. The results didn't change so dramatically, and it's not inconceivable that that could have happened anyway. But that's something you could point to. Again, I mean, the Astros just seem really good regardless, and their 2019 offense was incredible when, as far as we know,

based on MLB's findings, they weren't cheating or weren't cheating in the same way. So it's true that there's no bonds-level evidence for the banging scheme being beneficial, but the steroid evidence is sort of murky too. And in many ways, this situation is analogous to the PED era and the PED backlash. And I think Jay Jaffe wrote about some of the parallels and differences there, but in the sense that this was something that was going on, that the league had some awareness of and didn't really take steps to stop as early as it could have, and then acted as if it's terrible when the news actually becomes

public and it becomes a black eye for baseball and then you start getting suspensions and everything but a with sign stealing you can't test someone there's no drug test you can administer to see if someone was stealing signs and uh you can't really give a lie detector test i guess you could but those don't seem very reliable anyway so it's a little different in that respect but it's also similar in the sense that everyone sort of assumes that it has a huge effect, but at least in some cases, it certainly doesn't seem to. And with the PED players, I think the evidence for PEDs and steroids helping, A, there are the singular guys who really seem to benefit at the same time that

they bulked up and and we know that they were doing this stuff and their aging curves are just so atypical that they got incredibly better at an age when players get worse that's really the most compelling evidence i think for the effect of steroids on the whole is that that whole era was really strange and an outlier in terms of the aging patterns of players and the fact that players aged more gracefully and were good at later ages during that PD era. That is probably the best evidence that it really was working in a big way. Of course, that's hitters we're talking about and pitchers were taking this stuff too. So it's hard to square that.

But I think that really stands out as, okay, this is the smoking gun, that this era was different because of that. Because you can't necessarily just look at the level of offense because there were other things going on at that time too. And maybe the ball had changed. And so it's hard to isolate the effects there. But yeah, you can't point to a single player as evidence of sign stealing's

effectiveness the way that you can with steroids and berry bonds, let's say. So in that sense, not as clear cut a case, but I agree, as you said, and as Alex Wood tweeted, that it seems like knowing what pitch is coming should be more advantageous, I guess, unless the way that you find out which pitch is coming is somehow more distracting than not knowing in the first place. three kind of assumptions that if you're trying to find the effect on the astros, you have three assumptions that you can make based on MLB's findings. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, I think these are all in MLB's findings. So we know when it started, right? We know that it did not start, it was not happening in 2016 or even the first month of 2017. So we know when it started. We basically know when it ended. We know if mlb's investigation is accurate that they weren't doing it in 2019 right and we know that the astros claim that they quit doing it on their own because it wasn't working right or because they felt like it wasn't working

which so those are three fairly powerful well in two cases, they give us the parameters. So it's very easy to study before and after. Oh, and I guess the fourth thing is that we know that the scheme, that the scheme as it was designed was only at home. Well, the banging scheme was only at home. The banging scheme was only at home. The replay room video monitor stuff was presumably everywhere. Although that would only be effective with a runner on second base, right?

So it's a less less elaborate and less all-encompassing sort of stealing yeah so and so that would not apply to most pitches and so you were you're talking about you know 10 times as many pitches at home as as on the road and so given all those the you know three of those give you you know kind of a control group not a pure control group but a before and after or a home versus away. And then the fourth one is just pretty powerful data. One of the things that you could always say about steroids, if you tried to argue that they weren't that, well, the research hasn't shown as much of an effect as you would think. Well, then why did all these players want to take it?

Were they just all dumb? Were they just all under this, like, you know, delusion? So in the same way, though, it's kind of powerful that the Astros would have stopped doing it when they didn't have to. It's powerful evidence that maybe they actually didn't feel as comfortable doing it. So anyway, the point being, though, that we don't know if any of those four things are true. point being though that we don't know if any of those four things are true we like what we're stuck in is this state of having like a lot of really good information but not actually knowing that we have all the accurate information maybe some of this stuff was lying maybe it was it was incompletely reported maybe that you know maybe mlb didn't really want to investigate much more than that and so we'll never really know whether we actually have

the right information about those things. And so even though it seems like we have these great assumptions, you can't really assume, you can't put too much weight on any of them. It's also possible that if they really did stop doing it because they thought it wasn't working as well anymore, which you have to take with a slight grain of salt there because that's sort of a self-serving explanation but even if that really was the reason it could be because other teams had adjusted and were obscuring their signs and so it just wasn't working as well anymore whereas with steroids pds there's nothing that another team really can do to counter that so that's possible too although there were other

players in that report who said that it was distracting and that's why they didn't think it was as effective as as you'd assume but again they would say that yeah they would they would martin yeah like i like i think maybe you and meg mentioned lots of people from the steroids era who also yeah did a lot of steroids uh would say for a decade that it didn't really help them. Yeah. Funny thing to say. Yeah. Yeah.

Like McGuire said that I guess what he said was that it didn't help him hit more home runs, but it seemed like he was saying that it didn't give him the ability to. saying that it didn't give him the ability to, but he took it for like health reasons and to stay on the field, which even if it were only that, it still helped you hit home runs because it helped you be in the lineup. So that's not completely consistent, but anyway. All right. One more here. This is from Jacob, also a Patreon supporter. When does baseball history end? I remember from college having conversations about when history ended, that is, how long in the relative past an event had to have happened for it to be a historical event and not a current event. I promise this is a real historiographical question. There are even articles about it, and he links us to one.

The point being that a certain amount of time needs to go by before the dust settles and the And he links us to one. In history to do a baseball thing We mean ever, not ever minus The last ten years, we generally don't Differentiate much between recent past and Ancient history, although I guess In your case you consider baseball History to have begun in 1988 Or real modern baseball history And Jacob continues I've had a couple things come up that have made me question that

Lately, first was Sam and Ben's Conversation about the Astro sign stealing And how it felt different than the White Sox story from the 80s because the 2017 World Series is less historical as the players involved are all still around. The team is largely intact and the dust hasn't settled. So how far back would we need to go for it to feel like a historical event? Would 2010 be long enough? 2005? Second has been the Hall of Fame voting because the Hall is baseball's loan allowance for historical epic making.

You can't get inducted until five years after playing, which is weird because baseball is otherwise so eager to end history yesterday. Is five years ago the time it takes to render something historical in baseball? If the Giants had cheated to beat the Royals in the 2014 World Series, how would we feel about learning that now? So when does baseball history end in your minds? Well, when does it end in your mind? Well, I've already seen your answer.

Yeah, you've seen mine. Which colors my opinion on this. So if I hadn't seen your answer, I don't know. I probably would have said something nebulous about if the team is still intact like if the players are still in the same place and that can vary but that would be much more recent than my answer my answer was yes essentially when all when all the players with with maybe an exception or two are are retired so they're they are no longer active they can no longer be running around

sprightly being elite athletes on a baseball field they have to be uh retired and and therefore of the past and so you can have an exception i think i so like albert pools for instance has been playing since 2001 and he's still playing but i set the date at i think i i think i've come down on in in the current moment 2005 is the the the most recent year of of actual history that the white socks winning that world series that world series those four starters all that to me that feels like uh history i'm i'm on the fence about the 2006 and 2007 seasons. I could go as late as 2007. I don't think, though, that 2008 is history. To me, 2008 is still current.

Yeah. Well, maybe there's a subjective personal element to this where, like, I remember Mike Peska talking on The Gist. He was interviewing a couple history professors, and he was saying how, to him, everything before he was born basically feels like history or ancient history, like there's no clear distinction in his mind between things that happened 200 years before he was active baseball fan or in our case, I guess, something that we covered or were aware of during the time that we were professionally writing and thinking about baseball. Maybe that affects your perception of when the cutoff for history is. So I think there's something to that. Like if I remember seeing it and it's still in, I don't know, color TV and it's HD and I was around in the world at the time, maybe that's something that would influence me to some extent.

But I think your rule of thumb is pretty good because, yeah, if I found out something about the 2005 World Series, I don't know. If I found out that that team was cheating, that to me, that's just it seems recent enough in my mind that that might still seem like a story to me. But I think like the Astros is different. I think like the Astros is different, like finding out about something that happened in 2017 in 2019. I think that's even different from finding about something that happened in say 2013 in 2019, just because like we know that next season we're going to be watching that team and those players and it's largely the same people. And there's something about that that I think is different from even if it had been just a few years earlier. But it's probably like a, it might just be kind of like a linear curve, right?

Where the amount of outrage and the degree to which it would feel like a scandal and drama would just kind of fall off slowly by year, right? Like, I doubt it would be like, oh, it was 12 years ago, ho-hum, whereas, oh, it was 11 years ago, this is something we care about, it might just sort of slowly tail off. So I don't know that anyone would think of it in these terms of that was history and this is not. But I like your if all the players are are gone then it seems like almost well there there's no victim who's still around to sort of pity or perpetrator to be angry at yeah i believe that brandon mccarthy was the final player from the 2005 white socks to retire and he is retired so i think that they are now in the past.

All right, then. I just read the relevant section of the commissioner's report, and so I had a misunderstanding here. So just to clarify, we don't know why they quit doing the banging scheme, or maybe we do, but it's not in the paragraph that I'm reading, and I don't know it, so I don't mean to have represented that we do know it. Prior to the 2018 season, okay, so now we're in 2018, the investigation uncovered no evidence that Astros players utilized the banging scheme in 2018.

However, the Astros replay review room staff continued for at least part of the 2018 season. At some point during the 2018 season, the Astros stopped using the replay review room to decode signs because the players no longer believed it was effective. And so they did not necessarily voluntarily quit doing the banging scheme. We don't know why they quit doing that. Maybe they thought they were going to get caught. Maybe it became technically impossible. They voluntarily, or at least according to the report, quit doing the replay review scheme,

which is a much, again, like a much smaller subset of pitches and quite possibly is not worth the trouble, especially because in order to relay the signs to the batter, you have to do something visible to everybody and on camera, which might not seem that different than banging a trash can that the whole stadium can hear, but does seem to be pretty, but does seem to be pretty, it's a little risky. And so to clarify that. Yeah. Is it clear in the report, just to clarify in my mind at least, whether they only did the banging scheme at home or whether they did some equivalent of that everywhere?

Yeah. So it's not that I see explicitly stated. The way that it is described is consistent with the way that it is described in the original reporting at The Athletic, which that reporting said that it was only used at home. However, the way that it's described doesn't make it clear that it was only used at home, and it doesn't make it clear that it couldn't have been used on the road. And so, yeah, I think that there's room here to say that it couldn't have been used on the road and so yeah it's i think that it's there's room here to to say that we don't know for sure right so they were using a feed from the centerfield camera and according to this the centerfield camera was primarily used for

player development purposes and was allowed under mlb rules at the time when used for that purpose it doesn't explicitly say that a visiting team wouldn't have access to that center field camera, although if it is something that was allowed for player development purposes, I'm not sure that they would. But the camera itself was okay. What was not okay was using it for sign stealing

and putting the monitor up in the tunnel to relay the signs in real time. So I don't know whether they would have been able to install a video monitor in the tunnel in a visiting clubhouse when they were just there for a single series or something. So I guess it's not conclusive. It sort of suggested that this was at home, but doesn't conclusively rule out the idea that they were doing something other than the video room monitor elsewhere.

Yeah. Okay. All right. I had one more question left on my sheet of questions to answer here, so I will do it solo. This is from Stephanie, our Patreon supporter. I have a question about baseball and politics. As you pointed out, one congressman called for congressional hearings on sign stealing,

and since then, the city of Los Angeles, my beloved crazy hometown, approved a unanimous resolution to strip the Astros and Red Sox of their titles and award them to the Dodgers. Rob Manfred, by the way, said, no, thanks. This got me thinking. It seems like politicians are more likely to wade into baseball than other sports. Is that true? If so, why? Why is baseball more appealing to politicians than, say, football or other popular U.S. Is that true? If so, why? Why is baseball more appealing to politicians than, say, football or other popular US sports? So first of all, I'll say I don't know if it's true. It does seem sort of true to me, but I follow baseball disproportionately, and so I would be much more aware of baseball stories like this than I would of other stories. So I'm not

going to completely corroborate this impression, but I will say that if it is true, I have a few theories for why that would be so. For one thing, baseball has a pretty old white audience, maybe even an old white male audience, and there are a lot of old white and old white male politicians. So just demographically speaking, they might be predisposed to be more interested in baseball than other sports. It's also true that older people vote at a higher rate, and so politicians might think their constituents are more interested in baseball than some other sports. There's also baseball's antitrust exemption, which is something that sets it apart from other sports and gives Congress an excuse to stick its nose into baseball's business.

And lastly, I would say that even though baseball is maybe not literally America's national pastime anymore, it is called the national pastime. It's sort of tied up with the country's history in unique ways, the expression as American as baseball and apple pie. And so because baseball is so closely associated with American history and American values, I think that makes it even easier for politicians to point out problems with baseball, sometimes sanctimoniously. But I think because of that connection, there is a sort of idealistic way of thinking about baseball that maybe isn't applied as often to other sports. It's also true that there's a lot of baseball language, a lot of baseball metaphors that are used by politicians.

I've mentioned a great Grantland article on that subject by Brian Curtis, which I will link to again on the show page today. So those are my theories. Hope that helps, Stephanie. I don't know enough to say whether there's been more public funding of baseball ballparks than there has of the minor leagues and how many minor league teams there are. And there's no exact equivalent of the minor leagues for other sports. And so baseball does directly impact more communities than other sports in this country do, I suppose you could say, at least on the professional level. So that could be another cause of some of the political interest. By the way, I meant to mention when Sam gave his facetious hypothetical earlier about a voter who would not vote for Derek Jeter out of protest because Bobby Grich isn't in or Lou Whitaker isn't in. If someone were to do that, I would not consider that a valid reason to withhold a vote for Jeter. Not really fair to punish Jeter for

voters' bad decisions about other candidates in the past. If someone were doing that as sort of a message non-vote, you'd think that they would have disclosed their ballot publicly so that they could make a cause of it. I could see some value in that in certain years. Again, if unanimity doesn't really matter that much, it's kind of a victimless crime and you just wanted to stump for Lou Whitaker and say, hey, this is a comparable player. He fell off the ballot. He's still not in the hall. You know you're going to get a ton of publicity if you're the one person who didn't vote for Jeter. And so it might actually be somewhat effective if you could lay out a strong case for why Whittaker and Jeter are similar or equivalent. And so you're just doing

it for the publicity. I could almost admire that in a way. I wonder if it would backfire and people would just be mad at Lou Whittaker for causing this unwittingly. But if someone didn't vote for Jeter just because they're so small-haul that Derek Jeter doesn't deserve induction in their minds, that's just an unreasonable standard that I don't think anyone should have. All right, so that will do it for today. I didn't get to explain any baseball internet news to Sam today. I've sort of enjoyed that. It's been like a reply all, yes, yes, no episode where I tell Sam who's on vacation what's going on on baseball Twitter

and try to translate that to him. But I think next time with Meg, we'll get into the Nolan Aranato drama, maybe the Felix Hernandez signing, if she has thoughts about that, and whatever else happens in the next day or two. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild.

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at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelyively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastvangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing

assistance, and we'll be back with one more episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. knitting assistance and we'll be back with one more episode a little later this week talk to you then you never know when your pet will go pet politics pet politics pet politics pet politics