Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1492: The Hidden Hall of Famer

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about umpire crew chiefs getting microphones for the 2020 season, the Reds signing Nick Castellanos and the small gaps between the top four teams in the NL Central, the Diamondbacks trading for Starling Marte and whether the Dodgers can be beaten in the NL West, and MLB getting sued […]

Mike Control starts today, unless you want to learn the hard way to get scarred way. This is not a game. We are not players. We do not play. Mike Control starts today, unless you want to learn the hard way to get scarred way. This is not a game. We are not players. We do not play. Hello and welcome to episode 1492 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 Los Angeles. Hello. So there's some news reported by your ESPN colleague, Pedro Gomez, about something that we probably talked about hundreds of episodes ago. I think we probably answered a listener email about it at some point.

But apparently, according to Pedro, this coming season, MLB umpires will be mic'd up, or at least the crew chiefs will be mic'd up, and they will tell the fans in the ballpark and everyone watching or listening at home if reviewed calls are upheld or overturned and if they need to explain why that happened or if there's some rule that they need to elucidate they will do that live which is uh something we talked about whether that was a good idea or not and i don't remember what we said but i think it's how could we not think it was a good idea i mean what's the argument it it does feel a little clunky that the only like that the best form of communication to to the crowd would be the umpire speaking into a microphone like it feels like in this day and age we ought to have i don't know i don't even know what it would be but there ought to be some kind of sleeker way of communicating

things like everybody just gets a text message alert or something like that but we're stuck with what we've got and uh what we've got is a need to communicate what's happening to the fans it's just it's crazy that you wouldn't tell the fans even if even if it weren't four and a half minutes of delay and inactivity where people are wondering what's going on even if all of this was resolved in one second you would still have to tell the fans like what had changed in the state of the game. I don't know. I don't know if this is on the same topic or not, but I remember doing an article for you back when you were my editor at Baseball Prospectus about box. And I watched, I think I watched every box during the season. And one of the things that is very funny that you notice when you watch 800 balks, literally 800 balks over the course of three days, is that there are a fair number of times when

the broadcast doesn't know that a balk has happened. So in some cases, they don't know why the runner has moved ahead. They think that, well, they might assume that it was a balk, or they might think that he stole on a delayed steal and just think that that happened. But sometimes they don't even notice that the runner has moved ahead. They will notice like four pitches later that the runner is on second base, and it creates a sort of a crisis in the broadcast booth. So that, just right there, you should probably have a little bit more

of a clear announcement that a balk has been made. But yeah, for a replay call when you're not sure what is being challenged, which part of the play is being reviewed or being contested or where it might be overturned, it makes perfect sense. I mean't know how often there's confusion when something is just overturned or upheld. I think at this point, people usually understand what's happening. They're watching the umpire with the headsets and everything, and then they come out and they signal safer out. And that part is usually pretty clear, and everyone knows what's being reviewed in general. It's just when there's some really confusing thing happening, like that play last year in the playoffs with the, you know, the appeal at first and the runner, was he out of the baseline or not? Something like that, which was not even a reviewable play, even though they got on the headsets anyway. I guess that would be good because I don't know that anyone in the ballpark really understood what was happening at that time. I don't know that anyone really understood anywhere what was happening. I'd be curious to hear how they would even explain that if they were to come out and do it, because it's not like in football where you have these hand motions, they're set hand signals, and then there are certain penalties, and you just say it was

this, and then it's a five-yard or a 15 yard penalty or whatever and in baseball you don't quite have that but i guess it's usually easy enough to just say safe route or overturned or upheld the only downsides i can think of are maybe it'll take a little more time not sure it will or not but it could and then i don't know joe west gets to talk now i guess is a potential downside and he could start singing one of his country songs. Who knows? No one could stop him. In my opinion, there's a very, very, very small detail.

But in my opinion, and maybe this isn't how they intend it, but what people are saying, what Pedro Gomez is saying is that the umpires will be mic'd up. And I don't think they should be mic'd up. I think that there should be a microphone near the replay headsets. And so you just go over and while you're waiting for Chelsea, you can pick up that microphone and you can explain what's going on. Or it could even be a little phone that goes to the scorekeeper or not the scorekeeper, the public address announcer, or maybe the scorekeeper and maybe he could be mic'd up or she could be mic'd up uh and then you relay it and it maybe it goes over the whatever but i don't know i think

that having microphones on the umpires 24 7 is probably a bit more microphone than is necessary for for this yeah well presumably they'd only speak at certain prescribed times yeah and so that's that's why it feels weird that you'd have to tape a microphone. Are you going to have to tape a microphone to their collarbone or wherever every time? Yeah, I don't know. Are you going to have to have a technician who arranges the microphone on you?

Is it a clip-on kind of a thing? It feels... And then to all four, just the crew chief or just the home plate. So I just think just put a little mic over by the headphones and then you use them when you need them. Yeah. And then there's also the either danger or the possibility of a hot mic during games so that you can get more ass in the jackpot style speeches that aren't even supposed to come out. That maybe be a good thing for us, but not what the umpires would want. So anyway, that'll be a little different.

Ben, I think that they should they should actually the umpires should want so anyway that'll be a little different ben i think that they should they should actually the umpires should just go over to the base microphone and then just like uh like uh lay down on the ground and speak into the base yeah i like that idea to get on all fours all right so uh as we continue to wait for a possible Mookie Betts trade, rumors continue to swirl of a Mookie Betts trade to San Diego, but nothing has happened as we speak. There were a couple of moves I just wanted to mention. One was a trade the Diamondbacks acquired Starling Marte, their second Marte from the Pirates, and the Reds signed Nick Castellanos, who was kind of like the last moderate free agent who was still actually out there. I think the only remaining free agents on Fangraph's top 50 from the beginning of the offseason are Yasiel Puig and Brock Holt, I believe. So pretty slim pickings out there now.

So the Reds signed Castellanos to a four-year $64 million deal. That is the Mike Moustakas contract Except that Castellanos gets Opt-outs after year one and Year two, so that's a Healthy deal for him, I think And it's kind of interesting because that Division right now, I'm looking at the

Fangraphs projections, which I Believe account for this signing And right now, the Cubs, Brewers, Reds, and Cardinals are all within a range of five projected wins going into 2020. It looks really close. They still have the Cubs on top, even though the Cubs have done almost nothing this offseason.

And then the Cardinals are actually the fourth of those teams. The Cardinals haven't done much, at least at the major league level either. And then the Brewers have lost some guys, I guess. They've lost Grandal, and the Reds have been quite active. And obviously the Pirates now having lost Marte, there's just not a whole lot left there, certainly in terms of payroll. I think they now have the lowest projected payroll for 2020, sub $60 million, and it's a tough time to be a Pirates fan. But the top four teams in that division, it looks like it's going to be a great race because of the Reds' activity and other teams' inactivity. Yeah, same as last year. went wrong for the Reds last year, at least run differential wise, they seem to be a better team than the record indicated. But yeah, there may be more moves to make here. I don't know. Cause if you look at their depth charts, it's just a big jumble now in the outfield. I don't know what they'll do. So, uh, so yeah, uh, last year there were five teams that were all within like seven

or eight games of each other and none of them projected particularly well. I'm sorry if you already said this, but I imagine that again, the top team is probably like around 84 to 86. Yeah. Yeah. The Cubs are like 84 right now, which, you know,

it's projections and it's conservative and someone will end up winning more than that. But yeah, it's a division without any great teams. And the Reds right now. So they have Castellanos, they have Jesse Winker, they have Shogo Akiyama, whom they signed this offseason.

They have Aristides Aquino. They have Nick Senzel, who... For now. Yeah, for now, they may trade him, or I guess they could try him in the infield again. But it's, yeah, it's really a... That's a deep depth chart there. That's a lot of outfielders.

So I don't know what that ends up looking like, but they should hit at least. I don't know if they can field because Castellanos and Winker, it could be a kind of a lousy defensive outfield. We'll see. But they've been fun, at least for a couple off seasons in a row.

They're trying. It's strange because like Marcelo Zuna just signed for one year and 18 million. And then Castellanos signed for $4.64 plus opt-outs. And I know that Osuna had the qualifying offer attached, but it doesn't seem like the difference between those players is nearly as big as the difference between the deals that they got. So I don't know.

Good job by the Braves, I guess, or maybe other teams just didn't like Ozuna very much. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, so you mentioned the outfield, but then of course also Moustakas at second base and Freddy Galvis at shortstop, who is no longer the sort of, well, I guess he was never really a defensive star, but is 30 years old and spent last year as a below average shortstop and or second baseman. And so they could be liabilities all over the field for them defensively. But that's a way to play for sure. And it's sort of nice to see some NL West teams really trying to get better too, even though the Dodgers seem to be pretty unbeatable in that division, at least in the short term.

It's hard to imagine any team supplanting them And yet you have the Padres Who have been somewhat busy And are trying to get bets And now you have the Diamondbacks Who added Marte And they should be good too So it seems like the upside for those teams

Is wildcard still Because even though the Dodgers have not been busy This offseason and people have been waiting for them to make some sort of major move and they just haven't but it also seems like they just don't really need to and yet the other teams are not just mailing it in or saying well we'll wait until the Dodgers get bad again because I guess you can't really wait for that because there's just no end in sight it's not like you can look at the dodgers and say their window will close this year or next year like they're just bringing along a whole host of new young talented players who could sustain them indefinitely so i

guess you just gotta try and hope that things break your way and i don't know things go wrong for the dodgers and you can actually contend in that division or you just get a wild card and you make your way beyond that. But they're trying. Yeah, we've kind of gotten used to things not going wrong for the super teams in the last few years. But the Dodgers, you know, they did win 92 games in 2018, despite having, I mean, they won 104 in 2017, 106 in 2019. They were essentially the same team in between. So, you know, there were 100 plus win talent, and they only managed to win 92.

And so there's always openings here and there. I really like the Diamondbacks as a team, as a deep team. The Reds, you mentioned the Reds, are another good example. But the Diamondbacks, I mean, that's like a real 25-man roster. I guess maybe it's not because the bullpen could be quite poor, but you Diamondbacks, I mean, that's like a real 25-man roster. I guess maybe it's not because the bullpen could be quite poor, but you never know with bullpens, but they have an above-average hitter at every position now except for shortstop, and even at shortstop, they have an above-average shortstop. They have a gold-glove shortstop who's also a pretty good

hitter, and then they have, I count, seven starting pitchers who had above average era pluses last year or better so they have a they have depth all around they don't have a weak spot other than potentially the bullpen but you could say that about almost every team in baseball regardless of who they have in their depth chart right now so the diamondbacks definitely feel like a team that could uh you know could could win 92 without requiring a lot to go to go righter than normal for them i think that's a solid team yeah and marty's i mean marty's just to me marty was like the diamondbacks were the perfect destination for him from the start of the offseason and um and so i was kind of expecting that we would hear a lot more Marte to the Diamondbacks rumors throughout the offseason.

And I feel validated that, sure enough, that's where he ended up being. Yeah, and he will move the other Marte to second base. So, yeah, good team. All right, and there's one other thing that I want to mention. I saw Mark Normandin tweeting about this. This is a story that was on a site called Law360.com And it's about A suit that someone filed so

I'll just read it here A fantasy baseball participant hit Major League Baseball the Houston Astros and the Boston Red Sox with a proposed class Action in New York Federal Court Claiming the recently uncovered pitching Sign stealing scandal has Undermined and corrupted fantasy baseball leagues.

In a 52-page complaint filed Thursday, Christopher R. Olson alleged that despite knowing teams were breaking MLB rules by using recording equipment to decipher pitching signs and signal batters, the league did not investigate or otherwise punish the offenders, but continued to promote fantasy leagues through DraftKings, which was not named as a defendant in the suit. And it goes on to say that if the sign stealing inflated the stats of the Astros and the Red Sox batters and maybe other teams and also hurt the stats of the pitchers that they faced, then this could have affected fantasy players who weren't aware of that. And it says in the suit throughout this period, MLB was well aware that its member teams were engaging in corrupt and fraudulent conduct

that rendered player performance statistic dishonest and undermined the validity of its fan wagers on DraftKings. MLB wholly failed to properly investigate, deter, remedy, or disclose its members' misconduct and purposefully continued to encourage fan participation in what it knew to be corrupted fantasy baseball competitions. And it also alleges here that MLB was told that at least eight teams besides the Astros were stealing signs.

I don't know what it cites as evidence for that. I haven't read the full thing, but this guy is seeking to represent everyone who played in these fantasy contests between April 2017 and October 2019 and is asking for damages. And so it's kind of an interesting thing. I have no idea how credible this is or whether it will go forward or be dismissed. And again, I haven't seen the full complaint, but it's kind of an interesting allegation. You've seen similar things, like I've seen some gambling sites that were talking about,

well, should they have to give the money back because these results weren't on the level? And I guess the idea is just that MLB knew enough to know that there was something going on here, which I think is true, right? Because Jeff Passan had reported, according to anonymous players and sources, that something was going on with the banging scheme. Didn't know the full banging scheme, but that there was a garbage can involved.

And clearly there were whispers and teams were trying to adjust on their own. And then MLB tightened the restrictions and regulations, which seemed to indicate that they knew something, even though they weren't going to blow it up into a full investigation until a player came forward and the athletic reports came out. So that's the idea, I guess, that MLB just wasn't on the level and that fans were defrauded in some way because MLB was not disclosing that this kind of behavior was going on, even though it may have known that it was. Sports Illustrated had a piece about a week ago from their legal analyst who answered a bunch of questions related to this. And two of the questions, one of them was, could someone who lost

a bet on a game successfully sue? And the answer, I'm going to read the answer. Okay. These bettors are justifiably annoyed. I would be too, but justifiable annoyance doesn't create a viable legal claim. Indeed, there's an inherent problem with the fact pattern in terms of suing. Bettors aren't in contract with MLB or any clubs. Their bet is made with a sports book or other gaming entity. Bettors, like other participants in the gambling industry, essentially free ride off of leagues and players.

Leagues and players take on the expense and risk of producing sports. Betters and books are merely spectators from the sidelines. They create a secondary market tied to outcomes in games, but that market isn't in contract with the games themselves. It's like watching a reality TV show or following a political election and betting on who will win. You don't have a case against the TV show or a candidate who may have broken rules. The free ride issue is one rationale offered by leagues when demanding sports betting right and integrity fees as part of state laws to legalize sports betting. These fees, which no state has yet to recognize, would compel betting operators and sportsbooks to pay a percentage of earnings to leagues, back to bettors being upset about the Astros.

Without a contractual nexus to the games, the bettors being upset about the Astros. Without a contractual nexus to the games, the bettors probably lack standing to raise a viable claim in court. A court would also note that sports bettors assume all sorts of risk in terms of games themselves. If one doesn't want those risks, they probably shouldn't bet. And then the follow-up question was, but aren't leagues increasingly trying to capture the wagering community? Yes, and that question sparks a couple of nuances to the analysis. A better could review his or her contract with the sportsbook to see if there are any remedies. Perhaps the sportsbook offers guarantees as to the integrity of the games.

Is that likely? No. In fact, the sportsbook probably disclaimed any liability related to the games. Second, MLB and other leagues should be mindful of the electronic sign stealing controversy. They have, to varying degrees, embraced sports betting after losing the U.S. Supreme Court decision Murphy versus NCAA in 2018. The more that leagues embrace sports betting and enter into contracts with casinos and other sports betting entities, the greater the chance that bettors obtain a sufficient contractual nexus to sue. All right. Well, I wanted to, I mentioned that I was going to consider talking myself into Andy Pettit as a Hall of Famer. And I put some thought into it and I wrote out, I organized my thoughts into the case that I would make if I were to make this case.

So I'm going to make that case now. Okay. You can feel free to interrupt whenever you want or don't. If you find something objectionable, just stop me. If you find something totally convincing, shout amen. Okay. Before I start, two things. One, I didn't know this.

I read this on Andy Pettit's Wikipedia page. Andy Pettit in class A short season ball, his catcher was Jorge Posada, and Pettit threw a knuckleball at the time, but Posada couldn't catch it. And so Pettit abandoned the pitch. So we could have had a totally different world where Andy Pettit came up as a knuckleballer, but Jorge Posada couldn't handle it, thus giving us, in my opinion, a Hall of Fame career. Wow, I wonder if that made him better or worse. You'd have to think that it probably made him better, right? Because he turned into an arguably

Hall of Fame caliber pitcher. Oh, yeah. I think for sure it made him better. Also, I'm trying to think, lefty knuckleballers pretty rare, right? Yeah, I'd say so. I mean, knuckleballers in general, fairly rare and lefties rarer still. So yeah. The other thing is that Andy Pettit, of course, was swept up in a PED controversy late in his career. And I'll acknowledge that fact here. And I might acknowledge it again

toward the end. But if you consider that, you know, a deal breaker on its own, then probably doesn't matter what Andy Pettit did. Right. What was it? He took HDA trade and he said he only did it once or something to get back on the field? Yeah, it was. Something like that. So the case against Andy Pettit, I think, is fairly simple, right? It's that we look at his career. He had 60 war. Generally speaking, 70 is kind of like the line where we go. That guy's a Hall of Famer. If it's in the 60s, then there's usually some debate. If it's over 70, then we think it's a no-brainer. But 60 is short of 70. So those 10 war are the difference. And if you look at the players that the internet has recently adopted,

they're all at about 70. So Tim Raines, 69. Edgar Martinez, 68. Larry Walker, 73. And then the new adoptee, Scott Rowland, is 70. So it's those 10. We're basically saying he's 10 war shy of the number that gets us really excited. Although at Fangraphs, he's at 68.

Is that right? Wow. Yeah, bolsters your case and you didn't even know it. It bolsters my case, except I think there's a real, everybody can have their choice about which war to use for pitchers. It's much more than with hitters. It's really a philosophical choice that you make, and different people will have different ideas about which is better. But I think for a career war,

I feel like most people would i think for a career war i feel like most people would say that for a career war a runs allowed war is probably better than a than a fip or a peripherals based one right because you figure it it washes out over the course of 20 years you're probably not getting lucky on batted balls or or on strand rates and if you continually are after 20 years we probably would say that that's a skill. So yeah, I guess. I don't know. Maybe if you happen to pitch in front of Derek Jeter for that entire career.

You could be, but that shows up in references as well. Yeah, I guess so. Because they have the defensive adjustments. Anyway, though, so 68. Wow. Interesting. I guess I might as well look at baseball perspectives, which will complicate this probably by having him at 38. No, it's also right at 60. It's like almost the same as well look at baseball perspectives, which will complicate this probably by having him at 38.

No, it's also right at 60. It's like almost the same as B-Ref. All right. So then the secondary case against him is that his career doesn't really jump out against his peers. He only made three All-Star games. He wasn't widely seen as the best pitcher in baseball or even, you know, necessarily one of the half dozen best pitchers in his league for much of his career. So just I think for those of us who lived through his career, it's a little shy on the eye test. I think this undersells him a little bit. He did have five top six Cy Young finishes, which is pretty good. It actually sort of surprises me. But yeah, his Cy Young shares in his career are right about where Mike Messina is tied with John Lester, who even though John Lester has less war, I feel like John Lester actually will be kind of a the great overlooked Hall of Famer in Bly Levin,

the great overrated Hall of Famer in Morris, and then one of the great overlooked non-Hall of Famers in Russell. All of them had fewer Cy Young support seasons than Pettit did. So all of that kind of suggests that he was one of the better pitchers, but I would say that granting by the eye test during his career, we didn't really think of him as a Hall of Famer, So that's all there. So I think these are two pretty convincing points because they do both counter the case that I'm going to try to make. And the case that I'm going to try to make is that Andy Pettit was pitching in what was a crushing era for pitchers. It made it

extremely difficult to succeed as a pitcher. And so he shouldn't be judged exclusively by historical Hall of Fame standards. But the two things that I just stated, his war and his lack of all-star games and other things, they do compare him to his peers. And so they suggest that he actually wasn't much better than his peers who were pitching in the same era. It complicates things. It makes it seem like what I'm going to say is already preemptively rebutted. However, I believe that that's all misleading. So here's my case. Andy Pettit pitched from 1995 to 2013. His contemporaries include Dennis Martinez and also Jose Fernandez, Lee Smith, and also Trevor Bauer, Jesse Orozco, and also Tywon Walker, which is to say he pitched a very long time.

He covered a very long period of time. His career covers a long period. But I think that it's more accurate to focus on three dates. The year he was born is 1972. The year he was drafted is 1990. And the year he debuted is 1995. So in particular, think about what baseball was like in 1995. It was the third year of the offensive explosion that happened in the 1990s. There were more runs scored in 1995

than there had been in any full season since 1938. In 1996, offense went up even higher. It went over five runs a game for the first time since 1936, and it didn't go down for a long time. So for Pettit's first seven years, the seasons when he was, you know, young, youngish, developing maybe, Major League Baseball was in the longest sustained offensive boom in its history. At the start of his career, there were eight seasons in a row with at least 4.75 runs per game. That had

never happened before in baseball's history, eight in a row. And in fact, there had only been one season at all over 4.75 since World War II. And as part of this, the league-wide on base percentage was also higher than it had been in a half a century. So what else was happening in that era? Velocity was going up, as you wrote about in your survey of the Reds scouting reports. There's evidence in the progression of the scouting reports that you analyzed that Velocity was definitely going up in the mid-90s, starting in the mid-90s and going on, you know, basically forever after that, but also that teams prioritized velocity starting in that period. So I'm going to quote you,

in addition to the fact that velocity increased over this time frame, some evidence suggests that Reds scouts also began to prioritize velocity to a greater degree. The correlation between max velocity and amateur overall future performance was strong throughout the year's overall future performance, by the way, scouting term for basically you're projecting how good they're going to be at their peak. So it's a scouting term for the scouts projection of how valuable you're going to be. So the correlation between velocity and OFP was strong throughout the years covered by the data, but it appeared to get stronger in the later years,

those later years being Andy Pettit's first years in the majors. Similarly, pro reports always showed a significant difference in average fastball velocity between players the Reds were interested in and those they weren't. As the years went on, though, their preference for velocity increased, with the average velocities of players their scouts wanted to acquire leaping from 90 to 91 in the early 90s to 93 by the early 2000s asked whether this finding jives with his understanding of the evolution in scouts preferences over that span marcos someone named

marcos i don't know who who that was frank marcos former head of the scouting bureau. He answers, absolutely. The seeds of today's strikeout explosion were planted long ago. In other words, during the period when Andy Pettit was a young pitcher, teams were prioritizing velocity more. They were probably trying to develop velocity more. There were more incentives for pitchers to throw harder, and there was probably more training specifically for throwing harder and encouragement to throw harder. Pitchers at this time were also trying to strike batters out more than they ever had before. The strikeout rate went over 6 per 9 for the first time in history in 1994,

just before Pettit debuted. For the many decades before that, strikeouts had gone up, but quite slowly and not reliably. Around the time Pettit debuted, they were going up in a sort of a more clearly one-direction way. So they went over six for the first time in history the year before he debuted. And in just the first three years of his career, the league-wide K rate would go up almost

another half a strikeout per nine in those three years to 6.61 per nine home runs were out of control 1994 the year before he debuted was only the second year in history with more than one home run per nine innings the league did that every year afterwards setting three new all-time records in Pettit's first six years. And by the time Pettit arrived, batters were more selective. They were seeing 3.7 pitches per plate appearance up from 3.58 five years earlier. So put all that together, and you have batters were seeing more pitches per plate appearances than they ever had. Teams were sending up more hitters per inning than they had in at least a half century. Every hitter was a threat to Homer, so pitchers had to

throw all those pitches with more caution and effort than they ever had to. And they were doing this all while throwing harder than pitchers ever had before for teams that were encouraging that velocity more than they ever had before. Now, though, this does go back to the first two arguments against Pettit. If pitching was so hard when he was active, then you would think the replacement level would be so low that his war would reflect it. And he would have a bunch of Cy Youngs because all the other pitchers would be terrible, too. But my hypothesis is that it was hard to pitch in those years, but it was extremely hard to be a young pitcher. So this is, I would say, the worst possible way to bring young pitchers into the major leagues. They were being asked to pitch at high effort for long, arduous innings

with men on base against a bunch of guys on steroids. So if you're a young pitcher in particular, this would be a very difficult league to debut in. Your stats would probably look a lot worse than what you thought good stats would look like, even if they were not bad relative to your peers. And if you're prone to injury, you're going to be pitching in a lot of really stressful situations with men on base against dangerous hitters while trying to strike everybody out. It would be very hard to stay healthy. So in my opinion, the pitchers to compare Pettit to aren't all the pitchers who were active during his career or even throughout the peak of that offensive era, but pitchers who had to do what he had to do, which was make it out of the minors during this era, debut in the mid-90s while they were in their early to mid-20s,

and survive their first half-dozen seasons in the middle of an offensive and velocity explosion. So those pitchers, the ones that were born in 1972 or thereabouts, drafted in 1990, debuting in 1995 or so, those are Pettit's true contemporaries, and against them he starts to look extremely good. So we noted this last week. Only two pitchers born in the entire 1970s have more career war than he did.

So over the course of a decade of births, he's the number three pitcher. But I think there are even better ways to look at that. So if we look at all the best pitchers born in each year, so not just the Hall of Fame caliber ones, but I broke it down to the top seven pitchers born every year since 1920. And then I looked at the top seven hitters born every year since 1920 as well. And compared, I looked at the ratio of the hitter's career success to the pitcher's career success. So as a baseline, on average, the elite hitters produce about 40% more war in their career than the elite pitchers do in their careers, 40%. So starting in 1969, the pitchers though fall much

further behind. In 1969, the top hitters born would go on to produce 70% more war than the pitchers born the same year. In 1970, the hitters were 66% higher. In 1971, the hitters were 61% higher. In 1972, they were 60% higher. In 1973, they were 75% higher. In 1974, they were 110% higher. And in 1975, they were 75% higher. In 1974, they were 110% higher. And in 1975, they were 128% higher. So way, way, way, way higher than the norm. If this had just been one year, you would brush it

off. Flukes like that happen throughout baseball history, but this is a sustained run and Andy Pettit was born right in the middle of it. If you were to look at five-year rolling averages instead of just one year, then you would basically say that the worst time in history to be born a pitcher would have been, for some reason, between 1930 and 1934. But the next worst time in history was 1971 to 1975, which Pettit is right in the middle of it. Now, part of the reason that pitchers' war was lower could be that pitcher roles were changing. They were throwing fewer innings, which meant they had fewer chances to rack up war, which would suggest that maybe pitchers simply shouldn't be held to as high a war standard as hitters. Maybe instead of 70, they should just be expected to

have 60. And I think that's actually a really good argument for the modern era i think 60 for a pitcher should probably be viewed as 70 for a hitter pitchers are half the players in the game and i think they should probably be half the hall of famers in the game and if you want to get to that point you pretty much have to lower the level down to 60 instead of 70 but but i think if the case for Pettit is that 60 is really good for a modern pitcher, then you would already have a pretty good counter argument against me at this moment, because the generation of pitchers born immediately before him were putting up crazy highest of all time career wars. So you had Greg Maddox and Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez. So to say well

how could you possibly have more than 60 wars a pitcher it's impossible and then i just point out that greg maddox and randy johnson and roger clemens were all over 100 pedro's less than a year older than andy pettit yes although it's also worth noting that pedro is the greatest pitcher of all time and he only ended up at 83 war So he might be part of this argument in favor of Pettit, the greatest of all time. The greatest of all time, in my opinion, 83 war. Not the greatest in terms of durability, but yes. Yeah. But the other thing is that the generation of pitchers born immediately after Andy Pettit, which includes Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, and Clayton Kershaw,

they're all also going to blow past 60 and get to maybe 80 or 90. And so it makes it hard to say that it was impossible for Pettit or people born in the early 70s to do better than Pettit did. So that's fair. We're going to take those two groups separately. The key thing for the first group is that even though they pitched in the same high offense era that Pettit did, they were not young during it. They were young in a pitcher-friendly era, the late 80s, the early 90s. They came up during that fragile period when it was a lot different. It was easier to be a pitcher. So they get through the fragile parts of their careers.

By the time everything gets dangerous, they're like mid-career. They're developed. They're past the injury nexus. And in fact, the lower replacement level at that point might really have benefited them because when they were at their peak, there were a whole bunch of scrub pitchers lowering the replacement level throughout baseball because of expansion, and they were facing a bunch of scrub hitters. And so for war purposes, that actually might have been a pretty good time for the Maddoxes and the Clemenses to be racking up war.

It might have actually helped them. Whereas – because you get what I'm saying. Like they didn't have to deal with the same sort of like developmental obstacles that Pettit did because they were already through development by the time things got crazy, right? Although – all right. Although, all right, so you're saying that because they didn't have to work as hard or something in their early years, it's daunting to come up in this environment where everyone's hitting better than anyone's ever hit. And so that's a lot to pile on a young pitcher and what it means facing more batters because teams are making more plate appearances and maybe that's more stress on their arms or something. Because you could make the case that, well, it's better to come up in that environment because at least you're used to it. And so if you come up in the late 80s, like Maddox and Johnson and Kurt Schilling did, for instance, then you get used to a certain type of baseball. And then once you are established and you are set in your ways, then suddenly baseball changes again.

And that, in theory, could be very disorienting. And maybe you're like, I don't know, the dinosaurs and suddenly the climate changes and you can't adapt to this new environment or something, right? Right. So like you're saying, basically, if everybody gets really good and you've been like making your living throwing high fastballs to scrubs who can't catch up to high fastballs and suddenly they can. Everyone can hit them out and now you're at an even greater disadvantage than someone who came up in those trying circumstances. It's true. That could be something that you would look at for pitchers who didn't survive this transition.

pitchers who didn't survive this transition. But I'm focused more on, yes, the first part of what you said, which is that a big part of making the jump from teenager to veteran is going through that process where you're learning to pitch against players who are more advanced than you, better than you, and your arm is prone to snap. Your arm is prone to be injured. And if you have a shoulder injury when you're 24, you might just never come back from that. And you're less likely to have a shoulder injury that does that when you're maybe when you're 32 and you're already in the later stages of your

career. That's my argument. Right. There's that old baseball prospectus concept of the injury nexus. Exactly. You're a certain young age and you're in this danger period where you're even more prone to potentially career ending or career altering injuries, especially if you're worked hard and then you get to, I forget what it is, 24 or 25 or something, and you're out of the injury nexus. I don't know if that holds up well. I don't know that anyone's revisited that, but that was a thing that sabermetric people used to say. Yes. And I hope that it holds up because that is a premise for why it was harder for pitchers born in 1972 to get through the 90s than it was for pitchers born in 1964 to get through the 90s. Because there were a lot of

good pitchers born in 1964 who made it through the 90s just fine. And yeah, that's my hypothesis. My hypothesis is that the hard part of the career is getting through those first few years through the injury nexus and that that's when you want it to be easy and that you want it to be hard when you're at your peak or when you're a little older because then it's easier for you to adjust to all that. Right. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. I'm true i'm gonna give you some well i guess i gave you some evidence but i have a little bit more all right so now so that's the maddox clemens glavin group they they sort of had it easy because they got to develop during an easy pitching time and then they got to rack up war during the expansion time when wars for a lot of the great players, hitters and pitchers, were really high because they were playing against a diluted league.

Now, as for the second group, Scherzer and Kershaw and Verlander, many of them were also brought up with the same dangers that we highlighted for pitchers born in the early 70s, right? So they also had to deal with longer at-bats and more emphasis on strikeouts and velocity and a relatively high offensive environment, not to mention having been raised pitching, you know, travel ball and showcase circuits and all that. So while all that might have been just as dangerous as it was for Pettit's cohort, my position is that by this point, the medical care had caught up. So they were dealing with just as many dangerous environmental factors, but the league's surgeons

were better. The medical community had better ways of treating shoulder injuries. Tommy John rehabs were much more effective and so on. And so I think of it like that old thing you often hear about war casualties casualties where the most deadly wars in history uh from like you know 100 years ago or whatever they weren't more deadly because weapons were necessarily deadlier but because everyone died from bad battlefield medical treatment you know you hear that hear that all the time right that's a thing everybody knows that by the time so by the time that the 1980s kids the scherzers verlanders etc kids were all pitching in major league baseball uh the surgeons now had like antibiotics and were

washing their hands and so for them even though it might have also been daunting they the medical world had caught up to them so a few years ago you remember another article that i wrote for you about tinstap right there is no such thing as a pitching prospect, which was coined by Gary Huckabay in the mid to late 1990s. And I looked at whether that concept of pitching prospects being extremely kind of like a bad gambles had remained equally true throughout the years. And in particular, I was struck by how the pitchers, the prospects that were coming up at the time that Huckabay came up with that, they really did bust at an incredible rate. Like they were just, you look at the top hundreds from the early and mid nineties, and it's just a wasteland of pitchers who didn't make it. And so what I found is that that was totally true at the time. And

over the years, though, pitching prospects had continually done better and better and better. So I think that the 1992 prospect class was the first one I looked at. And the average pitcher on the top 100 produced something like 1.8 war in their first six years. So it started going up steadily. And by 15 years later, maybe the 2006 class, I think, they were producing almost seven war per pitcher in their first six years. So there's real evidence that shows that I think that being a pitching prospect got easier over the years. And as cohorts, top pitching prospects really did do a lot better in the years that Verlander and Kershaw and them were all coming up. And they did a lot worse when Pettit was coming up. And so to me,

that's suggestive of my theory that it was hard to be a pitching prospect at the time. And I talked to Jim Callis, who was at Baseball America during those early prospect ranking years for one of these articles, and he said that, yeah, he thinks that's a big part of it, that pitchers at the time were not treated very well, that it was dangerous for them, and that this is not just a matter of the lists getting better, but in fact, pitching prospects actually benefiting from better conditions in later years. So all of that is to say that it's really hard to put Pettit's 60 war into perfect context. I would not argue that 60 war makes him like an inner circle, no doubt about it, Hall of Famer. But we're already talking about a competitive number, right? 60 is a fairly competitive number.

It's barely outside of Hall of Fame standards if you're not generous toward it. If you look at recent Hall of Famers who have been inducted, Craig Biggio was 66 war. Robbie Alomar was 67. Vlad and Piazza were 59 and 60. CeCe Sabathia, who I think is going to make it, was 63 war. So we're talking about 10. So we're talking about 10, maybe we're talking about 5 war. That's a very small number within the, I would say, within the margin of error where we don't really have a, we shouldn't be that confident that it's telling us anything

about the players. And that's if we don't adjust. If we adjust for Pettit's birth peers, then I think there's a really strong case for him, especially when you consider that he threw almost two seasons worth of postseason starts. Like he threw 300 innings in the postseason, and he was quite good in those innings. And he had a starring role on one of the all-time great baseball dynasties. I think that is to his credit for a Hall of Fame case. So to me, ultimately, the case that somebody other than Halladay and Pedro Martinez from the 1970s should be in, I think that ought to be relatively uncontroversial. I think the harder decision is whether it's Pettit. You basically have four options. You have four options in two lanes. The high ceiling pitchers are Johan Santana and Roy Oswalt. The durable high innings pitchers are Burley and Pettit.

Burley is on the ballot next year, and a lot of what I said about Pettit would apply to him as well. So I would not be sad if he gets some support next year. But compared to Pettit, he doesn't have the postseason resume, and he really essentially had zero Cy Young support. So I think his case is worse. Santana got 2% of the vote, and he dropped essentially had zero Cy Young support. So I think his case is worse. Santana got 2% of the vote and he dropped off the ballot. I think that's a shame. Roy Oswalt got 1% and he was dropped. I think Oswalt's got a worse case than Santana,

but I think that's also a shame. I think he deserved to be on the ballot long enough for us to really consider him. But even among this group of four pitchers, the other three, Oswalt, Burley, and Santana, they were all born at the tail end of the decade when the drought was already easing up a little bit. Pettit is the one pitcher who is in that quartet who was born squarely in the middle of the drought. There were about 2,000 days that separated Pedro's birth and Roy Halladay's birth, which is a really long time. And in that really long time, Andy Pettit is clearly the best pitcher that the world produced. And I mean, the best pitcher in the world over a 2,000 day period is, I think is worth, is worth remembering, is worth putting in a museum. I think ultimately it might actually come down to a different philosophical question,

which is, is the Hall of Fame designed, the Hall of Fame is designed to help future generations remember players who deserve to be remembered. And the question is, is the point to get the very best players in using the most modern analysis of them or is it supposed to be the a way for each generation to choose the players that they remember if that in fact it is about us laying down a record of our experience and if it the latter, then I think it's fair to say that we

didn't think Andy Pettit was a Hall of Famer when we were watching him. The whole point of the survey is to say, we're going to get a bunch of people who watched these players and ask them who they thought were Hall of Famers. And we accept their kind of flawed answers because it reflects the experience at the time. And so by that standard, Pettit maybe didn't feel like a Hall of Famer to us, and maybe he shouldn't be in it. But I think if the standard is to use more modern metrics to put players into context and really identify the best players of each era, then I think that he meets that bar for me,

in particular when you make the adjustments. And so I am now pro-Pettit. All right. Are you going to be the Pettit leader of the movement? You're going to be what Rich Lederer was to Burp Y. Levin, Sam Miller will be to Andy Pettit? You know, I have a really hard time writing two articles on the same topic so i might have one in me yeah but then i i just don't like to go back to things right so i don't know if i've got i've got that in me also i i mean blilevin you just like blilevin was such a satisfying person to champion because he like Bly Levin was like 90 some war. Like he was so far above the 96 war, so far above the standard.

And even by he had more wins than any pitcher who wasn't in the Hall of Fame. Like even by traditional stats, he was way overlooked. He had a higher ERA plus than Andy Pettit and threw 1,600 more innings than Andy Pettit. And the only reason that he wasn't in seems to be that he maybe like was on bad teams and so he lost a lot of games. So that was a slam dunk.

I don't know that anybody has been as convincing as Burt Blylevin was. So I don't know. I don't know that i'm fired up like letterer was yeah there's a there's a old i think it was a nate silver annual essay i want to say or research he did an annual that he found that like pitchers that came up with good defenses behind them developed better like something that would support your argument. Yes, thank you. The environment you come up in maybe influences your development in that.

I can't remember exactly what the specifics were. I don't know if you do, but it was something about like pitchers who come up and they're playing with good defenses behind them tend to turn out better and not just because they have good defensive support but just long term they have better careers which would suggest that maybe being in a low run environment as you were saying could be beneficial and thus you could assume that being in a big offense environment like the Andy Pettit environment that he was making his major league debut in maybe that could be harmful to your long-term prospects.

I don't remember the specifics, but that has lodged in my mind. Yeah, no, I would hypothesize that to be the case. I don't know. I don't remember whether I also read and stole this insight from Nate's piece or not. I've felt this way about the Rockies, and I feel like one of the reasons that they've had such a hard time is that despite everybody having to pitch in Colorado, it seems like it would just be so much harder to be a young pitcher in Colorado where you're just constantly dealing with,

you know, two men on base before you've even figured out the inning has started. And the challenge of dealing with failure as a young pitcher of continuously dealing with bad outings and bad innings and batters that you look up there and you feel like they've already got you beat would seem to be very psychologically scarring but but also just the health effects of of all those long innings and those high stress pitches seems like it would make it like an almost insurmountable obstacle for colorado to consistently develop pitching uh the way that other teams can. So yeah, those are all kind of twists on the same concept here. And I think that, I don't know, I don't know what you do with that. I mean, if you say that for five years, it was really hard to become a great pitcher, does that mean that Andy Pettit,

who's just shy of a really great pitcher, should be viewed as a great pitcher because compared to his peers in that subgroup, he was? Or does it mean that by definition, he wasn't a great pitcher? Ultimately, do you just say, oh, wow, what a bummer. That's a tough break for him and for everybody else. It's a tough break, not so much for him because he survived it. I don't think that Andy Pettit's career was worse because of all these things. I think that Andy Pettit looks better in comparison to everybody else because he survived it. But do you say, oh, well, it's a bummer for Mike Hampton or it's a bummer for, I don't know, James Baldwin. Those are the two names that I remember seeing on my journey through the 1970s birth records.

I remember seeing on my journey through the 1970s birth records. Like they're probably, I mean, this rationale, what it suggests is that there probably were five Hall of Fame caliber pitchers born in those years that flamed out because of these environmental effects. And does Pettit now become number one and you have to put him in the Hall of Fame? Or is he still merely number six of what should have been and doesn't rise to the standard? And that is tricky. I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, that's the question, I guess.

Is it possible for there to be a period where there are no great pitchers or no Hall of Fame pitchers. And I was just saying last week that I don't like the argument that so-and-so isn't a Hall of Famer because he wasn't the best player in his league at any time, or even he wasn't the best player at his position because those things can be cyclical. And maybe, you know, that can happen at certain positions that there just happens to be a bunch of really great players at that position at that time, or just no one. It's kind of a fallow period, and someone comes along who stands out and isn't that great compared to other eras. That can happen at individual position player positions, but can that happen for pitchers? It seems less likely that that would happen for pitchers, that there would just be a lull

where there just aren't any really great pitchers for a certain period of time. And so you're sort of threading that needle and saying that Pettit is in a different time, in a different era. There's a reason why there's no one from Pettit's birth period who has the war that pitchers do from other periods because of real obstacles that those pitchers faced, as opposed to, well, it just so happened that there were no really legendary pitchers for that short period or whatever. That, you know, Mike Messina being born in the late 60s, he had a different road ahead of him than Andy Pettit in the early 70s, I'd say. And so someone who came up in the early 90s different from coming up in 95 or something. So it's on the one hand, you're sort of slicing smaller and smaller and saying that it's this

specific period. It means something. It's not just a small sample random variation, but it's sort of compelling because you would think that there would always be great pitchers coming along and that maybe you'd go a year or two or three without Randy Johnson or Roger Clemens, but there's still going to be a Mike Messina or a Tom Glavin or a Greg Maddox along there. And so if there isn't, that must mean something. What was the earlier period you said that was it something in the 30s that was a bad time to be born for pitchers? 31 to 35. Basically, 32 and 33 were terrible years.

Uh-huh. So those pitchers would have been coming up in, what, around the late 50s or something like that. Yeah. I don't know if there's a comparable thing you can say that there was some obstacle at that time. I don't know. Nothing stands out in my mind. But, yeah, or it's like the argument. I mean, one of the reasons that Jack Morris ultimately got into the Hall of Fame is because he had the

most wins of any pitcher in the 80s. And he wasn't the best pitcher of the 80s, probably. But that was kind of a lull, at least compared to like the late 60s and 70s. Like those were courses who just had high innings totals and were really great and then in the 80s it's like well you've got uh i mean nolan ryan was pitching of course and bligh levin was pitching then but really then it's like morris and dave steve and you know fernando valenzuela i guess and dave steve probably a better pitcher than andy pettit but with fewer innings so he didn't quite get to the the war total that pettit has but with fewer innings, so he didn't quite get to the war total that Pettit has, but he's someone else who gets mentioned, and it's because of that same thing.

It's like, well, can there be no Hall of Fame pitchers, really, who were pitching at that time? It just doesn't really seem to make sense that such an important part of the game as pitching would be without a Hall of Famer for any extended stretch. So you're kind of like working backward from that, I guess, to figure out why it would mean something. But I think you made a pretty good case. I think the other thing is that, you know, once you get over 75 war, then no one's going to disagree. Like those players are automatic. Everybody sees it.

It's very hard to be, unless you're Bert Bly 11, it's very hard to quietly put up an 80 war career. So those are all pretty much uncontroversial. But then between like 60 and 75, we have a very wide range of reactions to players. And it's not always that the 70, the player who's at 70 is seen as the consensus Hall of Famer while the player at 60 is not. And for instance, Vlad, Vladimir Guerrero is a consensus Hall of Famer,

fairly uncontroversial, went in quite quickly at 60 war. And so I think that that's healthy. There isn't much difference between 60 and 65, or 65 and 70, and maybe not even between 60 and 70. 65 or 65 and 70, and maybe not even between 60 and 70. And once you get to 60, between 60 and 70, then I think it's a very healthy thing for us to really think these players through in a, not just by looking at their war, because they've met some minimum qualification, but by thinking about how we, you know, assess their career as a whole and, and yes, what it felt like and how it felt at the time and how much it was recognized and how historically significant it was and how much ultimately success there was. And, and, and also in the context of, of what they were doing and where and for whom. And so you could ultimately

conclude that by looking at Andy Pettit's career subjectively, that yes, he made the minimum to get into the conversation. That's all we're talking about. 60 gets you into the conversation. And everybody looks at that and says, okay, let's have the conversation. And at the end of the conversation, we decide that his career was not that significant, that he wasn't an ace that at the same level that he wasn't exciting the same way that hall of famers are supposed to be and that's fine i think though that that's where this argument that i've made kind of fits in that doesn't necessarily make him better it doesn't make his 60 war into 70 or 80 or 90 but subjectively just knowing that in a time when teams were having

a really hard time developing pitchers, where pitching was scarce, where it was dangerous, where you put your career on the line every time you threw a pitch, and that teams were kind of desperate for pitchers, especially after expansion. He had this incredible skill. He survived where none of his peers could, and that is a Hall of Fame-worthy skill. Yeah. Messina stands out as someone who he wasn't quite at Bly Levin's war totals, but he was in the 80s, comfortably in the 80s, and it still took him six ballots to get in. And his first ballot, he was at 20% and he had to work his way up, even though I think what Tom Glavin debuted on the same ballot that Mike Messina did,

and he got in on his first ballot with 92% of the vote, something like that. And meanwhile, Messina had to wait, and then Smoltz came along, and he got in on his first ballot in 2015. And meanwhile, Messina was waiting, and Messina was better than both of those guys, I think, certainly better than Smoltz. And yet he had to wait for maybe some of the same reasons that Pettit did. Like Messina's like better, comfortably better than Pettit, but he also had that rap of just like, well, he wasn't the best.

He wasn't a true ace or whatever. And in Messina's case, I think he was, or he had a certainly a much stronger case or claim to be than Pettit did. But there is something about just guys who have to wait a while not having that reputation for being really dominant at any time. And so I don't know. I think at this point, Pettit will stick around for a while. Like we could keep having this debate. You could keep writing that article if you wanted to, because he cleared the 5% threshold and he gained a little bit this year. He got up to 11%, which is way far away from where he would have to be to get in. But he probably

will stay on because at least over the next few years, as we discussed, there isn't going to be a big influx of compelling candidates. And so he may just slowly gain or at least stay around where he is. And that means he has eight more years of being on the ballot to get in. But you would think that with a pitcher like him, he's got the big market thing going for him. A lot of the voters saw him pitch for years he has the part of a dynasty thing whatever yankee aura is imparted to players who were on those teams and yet the support is still pretty weak which you know you would think that

whatever extra advantages that a player could have he had had them in terms of publicity, and yet he's still not swaying a lot of voters. Yeah, yeah. Bernie Williams, interestingly enough, another part of that same core. Pettit got 9 point something percent his first time on the ballot. Bernie got 9.6 percent his first time in the ballot, basically the same. And then Bernie fell off the next time. So it's a little bit interesting that while Bernie's, Bernie Williams' support immediately dried up and he was gone, that he had kind of one very, very quick bite at it that Pettit didn't. Pettit didn't shrink and then he grew a little bit. Yeah, may just be because of the competition, the crowded ballot.

And Pettit got the advantage of this year when almost everyone gained support. So it's quite possible. In fact, the year that Bernie was on the ballot, there were nine players who are now in the Hall of Fame on that ballot, plus Clemens and Bonds and Schilling. So that was a, you know, yeah, that was a lot harder. Yeah. All right. Well, I don't know if you've convinced me. So that was a lot harder Yeah, all right Well, I don't know if you've convinced me

I have a couple years to think about this If Pettit's still around But you've swayed me enough That I will not disparage anyone For voting for Andy Pettit I don't know that I would have anyway But I think it's reasonable Do we have to mention

Is there a place to mention Bartolo Colon here? Because you wrote an article, what, a couple of years ago about how he had a chance to be a Hall of Famer potentially if he kept pitching, which he didn't for much longer. And so I guess, right? Because he was born in 73, and he came up in 97, and was kind of a contemporary, and he's at not nearly the war. But if he had continued to pitch at his two war a year for a few more years, he might have had a shot. Yeah, a lot of this argument was brought over from the Bartolo-Cologne piece. It was a little different because with Pettit, I am arguing that I would not mind if he's in the Hall of Fame at all. With Cologne, it was that I thought that he belonged in the conversation, which I know that, I know we're not supposed to say in the conversation, but I wanted to just kind of frame him as a pitcher whose career needs to be actively

rejected by hall of fame voters instead of just ignored but it did at the time i think depend on a couple more years of of hanging around partly because sabathia has passed him i think on some career there was a chance it seemed that cologne could be the last pitcher ever born to win 200 and whatever games he won. But then Sabathia passed him. And so, so Colon almost immediately after that article that said he needed a couple more years, he retired or he quit pitching. So I don't, I don't think he quite get, he quite got there, but yeah, Colon is part of

that group too. He would probably be fifth or sixth in line of pitchers born in the seventies that I would include. Tim Hudson is probably just ahead of him and just behind pettit and burley yep all right well all right i made the case okay you can all make the call whether sam changed your mind that'll do it for today thank you for listening you can support the podcast on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and help keep the podcast going, and also get themselves access to some perks, Andrew Hawes, Cy Harrelson, Mark

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